Roundup: Historians' Take
This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.
Eugene Volokh: The Founding Fathers agreed that the First Amendment protected 'symbolic expression.'
Tom Engelhardt: The volunteer military is at odds with a democratic country
Chalmers Johnson: How to Deal with America's Empire of Bases
Ivan Eland: Is Barack Obama’s Realism Better than George W. Bush’s Idealism?
Priya Satia: Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for an ‘invisible’ occupation
Abbas Milani: An intellectual history of the Green Wave (Re: Iran)
Lawrence S. Wittner: Nuclear Disarmament Activism in Asia and the Pacific, 1971-1996
Sean Wilentz: Lincoln, Obama and the myths liberals have fallen for
Mark Naison: America’s Crumbling Infrastructure and Forgotten Neigborhoods
Ira Chernus: Palestinian Violence Overstated, Jewish Violence Understated
Greg Grandin: The Collapse of America's Imperial Car Industry
Juan Cole: Washington and the Iran Protests ... Would they be Allowed in the US?
Eugene Volokh: The Founding Fathers agreed that the First Amendment protected 'symbolic expression.'
Source: WSJ (7-3-09)
[ Mr. Volokh is professor of law at UCLA. This op-ed is adapted from "Symbolic Expression and the Original Meaning of the First Amendment," published in the April 2009 issue of the Georgetown Law Journal. ]
Congress is once again considering a constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag. The proposal, introduced this spring in the Senate by David Vitter (R., La.), and cosponsored by 20 other Republicans and Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, probably won't get enough votes. Yet even if it doesn't, one longstanding misunderstanding about the First Amendment is likely to live on.
Advocates for flag amendments argue that activist Supreme Court Justices have twisted the original meaning of the First Amendment to protect symbolic acts such as flag burning. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) said in supporting the Vitter proposal, "if you read the debate in 1790 -- the First Amendment was not written to protect nonverbal speech . . . . [W]e want to make sure we get the Constitution back to its original intent before the Supreme Court screwed it up." Or, as Judge Robert Bork argued in his book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," flag burning "is not speech," and the court shouldn't have held "that an amendment protecting only the freedom of 'speech' somehow protects conduct if it is 'expressive.'"
Yet the best historical evidence suggests Messrs. Bork and Grassley are mistaken. The Framers fully understood "freedom of speech, or of the press" to include symbolic expression as well as verbal expression.
The Framers were working within a late 18th century common-law legal system that generally treated symbolic expression and verbal expression the same. Speech restrictions -- such as libel, slander, sedition, obscenity and blasphemy -- covered symbolic expression on the same terms as verbal expression.
Many cases and treatises, including Blackstone's "Commentaries" published in 1765 and often cited by the Framers' generation in America, said this about libel law. And early American court cases soon held the same about obscenity and blasphemy. Late 18th and early 19th century libel law cases and treatises gave many colorful examples: It could be libelous to burn a person in effigy, send him a wooden gun (implying cowardice), light a lantern outside his house (implying the house was a brothel), and engage in processions mocking him for his supposed misbehavior....
Greg Grandin: Democracy Derailed in Honduras
Source: Nation (6-30-09)
[Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, is the author, most recently, of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan).]
When Honduran president Manuel Zelaya--who was rousted out of his bed on Sunday morning by a detachment of armed soldiers and forced into exile still in his pajamas--took office in early 2006, unionists, peasant activists and reformers expected little of the center-right politician, a rancher and member of the establishment Liberal Party. Neither did the handful of elite Honduran families who, bankrolled by foreign finance, control their country's media, banking, agricultural, manufacturing and narcotics industries. "You are only temporary, while we are permanent," they told him soon after his inauguration, according one report, reminding Zelaya that he served at their pleasure.
But the realities of governing in a country as poor as Honduras--more than 60 percent of its population live in poverty, more than 50 percent in extreme poverty--tends to reinforce a left-wing slant. Perhaps it was the imperious and imperial behavior of George W. Bush's ambassador to Honduras, described by Zelaya as "barbarous." Or maybe it was the fact that the Central American Free Trade Agreement, rather than delivering promised development, worsened his country's trade deficit with the United States while driving low wages even lower, as Honduras competed with its equally impoverished neighbors for investment. Or perhaps it was the US Food and Drug Administration's unilateral ban of Honduran cantaloupes because they were supposedly tainted with salmonella, though the FDA offered no proof of the charge, a move Zelaya called "unjust."
Whatever the reason, Zelaya shifted course, and over the past two years he has adopted a progressive agenda. As a solution to the disastrous "war on drugs," which has turned Central America into a well-traversed trans-shipment corridor for narcotraficantes--profitable for some, deadly for many--he has proposed the legalization of some narcotics. Earlier this year at the Summit of the Americas, he took the lead in pushing Barack Obama to normalize relations with Cuba. And he has steered his country into both the Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas and Petrocaribe, two regional economic alliances backed by Venezuela meant to wean Latin America off its extreme dependence on the US market.
This left turn is less ideological than pragmatic. Honduras is so broke it "can't even build a road without getting a loan from the World Bank," Zelaya once complained. But that money comes in "dribbles, held up years by paperwork" and often accompanied by onerous terms. In contrast, he said, Petrocaribe financing for infrastructure investment came all at once, at extremely low interest, with no conditions, which helped free up other scarce funds for social services. Through Petrocaribe, Venezuela also provides Honduras with 20,000 barrels of crude oil per day, also on very generous terms.
For those who presume to rule behind the scenes, Zelaya took a step too far when he began to push for the convocation of a constituent assembly in order to democratize Honduras's notoriously exclusionary political system. Expectedly, these efforts were opposed by the national Congress and the Supreme Court, both of which are controlled by an inbred clique of career politicians and judges invested in keeping Honduran politics restricted--including members of Zelaya's Liberal Party. For its part, the US media seem intent on reporting on events in Honduras through the prism of its obsession with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. The New York Times, for instance, ran an op-ed by free-market ideologue Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who claimed that the most unfortunate aspect of the coup is not that it derailed Honduran democracy but--wait for it--that it has allowed Chávez to defend democracy and thus claim the "moral high ground." Vargas Llosa describes Zelaya as a man of privilege, an "heir to the family fortune" who had "devoted decades to his agriculture and forestry enterprises" and who had run for president on a conservative platform that included supporting CAFTA. Misleadingly, Vargas Llosa attributes Zelaya's political turn not to the absolute failure of CAFTA and the fiasco of the "war on drugs" but to Chávez's seductions. The US media have also falsely yet unanimously presented Zelaya's moves as a power grab, an effort to end term limits to allow him to run for re-election. But the referendum Zelaya was pushing--which prompted the coup--asked citizens only if there should be a vote on "whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political Constitution." In other words, Hondurans weren't being asked to vote on term limits or even on revising the Constitution. They were simply being asked to vote on whether or not to have a vote on revising the Constitution, with the terms of that revision being left to an elected assembly.
Latin America has demonstrated a remarkable degree of unanimity in condemning the coup and demanding Zelaya's return to power. "We cannot accept or recognize any new government other than President Zelaya," said Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Organization of American States has stated that it will refuse to make any concessions to the coup plotters and that it will be open only to dialogue that would facilitate the "return of President Zelaya to his legitimate position." Other Central American nations have recalled their ambassadors from Honduras and have taken steps to isolate the country until democracy is restored.
Barack Obama, too, has issued strong words against Zelaya's overthrow: "I think it would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition, rather than democratic elections," he said. "The region has made enormous progress over the past twenty years in establishing democratic traditions in Central America and Latin America. We don't want to go back to a dark past."
The State Department, though, has been more circumspect. At first it was reluctant to use the word "coup" to describe Zelaya's overthrow, since to do so would trigger automatic sanctions, including the suspension of foreign aid and the withdrawal of US troops. Honduras hosts Soto Cano Air Force Base, the main US military base in the region, and Washington is concerned with keeping that installation fully operational. Likewise, according to John Negroponte--who as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s was implicated in the cover-up of hundreds of death-squad executions--Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working to "preserve some leverage to try and get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum" and presumably from his other populist policies.
It seems like what the United States might be angling for in Honduras could be the "Haiti Option." In 1994 Bill Clinton worked to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide after he was deposed in a coup, but only on the condition that Aristide would support IMF and World Bank policies. The result was a disaster, leading to deepening poverty, escalating polarization and, in 2004, a second coup against Aristide, this one fully backed by the Bush White House.
Though there is no indication that the United States is considering using military force to restore Zelaya--as Clinton did for Aristide in 1994--Washington should follow the lead of the rest of the Americas and resist the temptation to attach conditions to its support for his return to office. Last week, during a meeting with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a reporter asked Obama if he would apologize for America's role in the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power (and led to the torture of Bachelet and her father, who died as a result). Obama demurred and said that he was "interested in going forward, not looking backward."
As Honduras teeters on the brink--as of this writing, the new regime has cracked down on the media and instituted a curfew, with reports of escalating repression by security forces against Zelaya supporters--one way to move forward would be to provide unconditional support for Zelaya's immediate return.
"This is a golden opportunity," Costa Rica's former vice president, Kevin Casas-Zamora, said , for Obama "to make a clear break with the past and show that he is unequivocally siding with democracy, even if [some in Washington] don't necessarily like the guy."
Woody Holton: On Money, a Founding Mother Knows Best
Source: WaPo (7-5-09)
[Woody Holton is the author of "Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution" and the forthcoming "Abigail Adams, A Life." He teaches at the University of Richmond.]
Thomas Jefferson died so deep in debt that his beloved estate, Monticello, had to be sold to satisfy his creditors. James Madison also left behind mounds of financial obligations. But John Adams, the man Jefferson turned out of the White House in 1801, died rich and debt-free -- despite sharing his predecessor's careless attitude toward money. What was his secret?
His wife.
Long famous for her political partnership with her husband and her advocacy for women's rights, Abigail Adams was also something of a financial wizard. Some of the first lady's investment choices were a tad unsavory, but all of them were prudent, and many of her strategies remain useful today. Adams understood the difference between panic and reasonable caution. She largely avoided exposure to the speculative bubbles of the 1790s that did so much damage to her son-in-law and two of her sons. Had she been alive in July 2008 and owned stock in Abigail Adams National Bancorp, I suspect she would have sold it. (That financial institution named for Adams hasn't done as well as she did: It lost two-thirds of its value in the past year and is now being sold.)
This weekend, as we look back on all that this country's founding families bequeathed us, why not ask for just a little more help? We could all use it. If you were to hire Abigail Adams as your financial adviser, here's the advice that the Massachusetts matriarch would offer.
Invest with your head, not your heart. For John Adams, land was a feel-good investment, since it bolstered his sense of personal independence. He wanted to invest all of his savings in real estate. But Abigail showed her husband that his farmland returned as little as 1 percent annually, while she could earn as much as 25 percent each year speculating in depreciated government securities. (These bonds had been disbursed to Continental Army soldiers and then inveigled from them at a fraction of their face value.) John continued to buy real estate, but he shifted a large chunk of his portfolio to bonds. ...
Tom Engelhardt: The volunteer military is at odds with a democratic country
Source: TomDispatch.com (6-30-09)
The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) exists for a reason captured in a study by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of the "definitive history of the Marine Corps," published in Armed Forces Journal in 1971. The U.S. military in Vietnam was at that moment at the edge of chaos. As Colonel Heinl put it, it was experiencing "widespread conditions... that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917."
In fact, statistics flowing back to Washington about the American war machine in Vietnam then pointed toward an unimaginable nightmare. Drug use was rampant; desertions stood at 70 per thousand, a modern high; small-scale mutinies or "combat refusals" were at critical, if untabulated, levels; incidents of racial conflict had soared; and strife between "lifers" and draftees was at unprecedented levels. Reported "fraggings" -- assassination attempts -- against unpopular officers or NCOs had risen from 126 in 1969 to 333 in 1971, despite declining troop strength in Vietnam. According to Colonel Heinl's figures, as many as 144 antiwar underground newspapers were being published by, or for, soldiers. And most threatening of all, active duty soldiers in relatively small numbers (as well as a swelling number of Vietnam veterans) were beginning to actively organize against the war.
When, in January 1973, before the war was even over, President Richard Nixon announced that an American draft army was at an end and an all-volunteer force would be created, this was why. The U.S. military was in the wilderness without a compass, having discovered one crucial thing: you couldn't fight an endless, unpopular counterinsurgency war with the kind of conscript army a democracy had to offer. What resulted, of course, was the AVF, a moniker that, as Andrew Bacevich has written in his book The New American Militarism, was but "a euphemism for what is, in fact, a professional army... [that] does not even remotely 'look like' democratic America." Citizenship and the obligation to serve were now officially severed and, from the 1980s on, most Americans would ever more vigorously cheer on the AVF from the sidelines, while it would be a force theoretically purged of possible Vietnam-style dissent and refusal.
In that sense, it could be considered a success. We've now been at war seven and a half years in Afghanistan and more than five in Iraq, two catastrophic counterinsurgency struggles, and yet a Vietnam-style movement has neither arisen in the military, nor for that matter in the streets of what's now called "the homeland." But as TomDispatch regular Dahr Jamail indicates below and in his new book, The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissent has proved irrepressible. With the generous support of the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund, Jamail has produced a report on the seeds of refusal and dissent in the military that may -- in a quagmire future in Afghanistan and possibly Iraq -- grow into something far larger.
Dilip Hiro: The Clash of Islam and Democracy in Iran
Source: TomDispatch.com (6-28-09)
[Dilip Hiro is the author of five books on Iran, the latest being The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and its Furies (Nation Books), as well as most recently Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources. His upcoming book After Empire: The Rise of a Multipolar World will be published by Nation Books later this year.]
By marshalling the regime's coercive instruments, Iran's 70-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, has, for now, succeeded in curbing the popular, peaceful challenge to the authenticity of Iran's fateful June 12th presidential election. But he has paid a heavy political price.
Before his June 19th hard-line speech at a Friday prayer congregation, Khamanei had the mystique of a just arbiter of authority, perched on a lofty platform far above the contentiousness of day-to-day politics. In his sermon, he asserted the validity of the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while the Guardian Council, the constitutional body charged with validating any national election, was still dealing with 646 complaints about possible election misbehavior and fraud. As a result, he damaged his status as a just ruler, a matter of grave importance since justice is a vital element in Islamic values.
Furthermore, by boycotting the June 19th congregation, former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami, as well as Mahdi Karrubi, former Speaker of the Iranian Parliament -- all of them respected mullahs -- exposed a deep rift in the ruling religious establishment. That bodes ill for the future of the Islamic Republic.
Khamanei has won the immediate battle, but the conflict between hard-liners and reformists is far from over. Taking a long-term view, Khamanei and his hard line cohorts face a superhuman task of countering an inexorably rising trend. Quite simply, the demographic make-up of Iran favors their reformist adversaries.
A glance at the republic's history bears this out.
Two Decades of Revolution
Between 1979, the year of the Islamic revolution, and 1999, Iran's population doubled to 65 million, two-thirds of them under 25 years of age. Those young Iranians had no direct experience or memory of the pre-Islamic regime of the Shah -- its inequities and injustices, and its subservient relationship with Washington. Therefore, their commitment to the Islamic regime was less than total. Moreover, the post-revolutionary educational system had proven inadequate when it came to socializing them the way the republic's religious leaders wanted.
During those two decades, Iran's student body increased almost threefold, to 19 million. The overall literacy rate jumped from 58% to 82%, with the figure for females -- 28% in 1979 -- tripling. There was a remarkable upsurge in the enrollment of women in universities. Nationally, their share of university student bodies shot up to 60%. At prestigious Tehran University, they were a majority in all faculties, including science and law.
The total of university graduates, which stood at 430,000 in 1979, grew nine-fold in those years. As elsewhere in the world, university students and graduates would become a vital engine for change.
Much to the disappointment of the mullahs, a study of university students in the late 1990s showed that whereas 83% of them watched television, only 5% watched religious programs. Of the 58% who read extracurricular books, barely 6% showed interest in religious literature.
In his book, A Study of Student Political Behavior in Today's Iran, Professor Majid Muhammadi divided university students into three categories: those born into largely Islamic working or traditional middle-class households (traders and craftsmen); those born to secular, or nominally Islamic, modern middle class parents (teachers and doctors); and those raised in an environment that mixed traditional Islam and secularism.
While the first category was loyal to the regime, and the second kept a low profile, shunning politics, it was the students in the last, and largest, category who felt deeply conflicted. While linked to Islam through tradition, they were attracted to modern, Westernized culture politically and socially. In attempting to resolve the conflict, most of them became politically active, and were transformed into a force for social and political change.
By and large, university students were interested in watching foreign television programs, finding the national channels unimaginative and propagandistic. A poorly enforced ban on satellite dishes meant they could easily get access to the BBC, CNN, and the Voice of America. In the post-1999 decade, the arrival of the Internet, e-mail, blogging, YouTube, Facebook, and most recently Twitter, opened up opportunities previously not available to their older peers.
Irrespective of their social backgrounds, what indisputably impinges on the daily lives of university students and other young Iranians are the restrictions the regime tries to impose on their social and personal freedoms, including going to mixed-sex parties, holding hands with someone other than a marriage partner, drinking alcoholic beverages, listening to modern Western music, watching foreign television channels via satellite, and having extramarital sex. While reformists recognize that restricting such activities is having the singular effect of alienating the young from the Islamic Republic, their conservative opponents consider these restrictions essential to uphold Islamic morality and culture.
Not surprisingly, politically conscious university students have been striving to enlarge the arena of personal freedoms as a means of countering social repression and administrative corruption, and making the Islamic system more transparent and accountable.
Politics in Command
It was against this background that, in 1997, a presidential election was conducted. Muhammad Khatami, a reformist outsider, unblemished by corruption, proceeded to trounce his rival, Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri -- the erstwhile Speaker of parliament favored by the religious establishment and perceived to be corrupt -- by a margin of almost three to one. In the next election, Khatami trumped his nearest rival by a five-to-one margin.
Notwithstanding periodic setbacks due to a dispersion of power among the office of president, the parliament, and the judiciary, Khatami created an environment in which the area of social, cultural, and political freedoms expanded.
Initially, for instance, the authorities were very strict about enforcing the wearing of the hijab (a head-covering scarf) and banning the use of make-up for women, nor did they allow young men and women to sit in the same classrooms in colleges and universities. By the time of Khatami's reelection in 2005, however, the authorities were tolerating young women who flouted the strict Islamic dress code of covering themselves fully, except for face and hands. They even allowed an occasional rock concert and they were giving more leeway to non-governmental organizations.
During the first year of Khatami's presidency, the country experienced an explosion of new publications. Following a landslide victory by the reformists in the first round of parliamentary elections in February 2000, a newly bullish pro-reform press even began publishing stories of corruption in the pre-Khatami period. These proved immensely popular.
Khatami's supporters viewed this as a sign of the growing maturity of the Islamic system and the evolution of democratic governance. Before the second round of the elections could take place in May, however, a conservative-minded parliament reacted speedily. Encouraged by Khamanei, it stiffened the Press Law in April, leading to the closure of dozens of publications by the judiciary.
In the 2005 presidential contest, leading reformists were barred from the race by the Guardian Council. Deprived of real choice, most reformist voters boycotted the election. This enabled the hard-line mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad -- a Khamanei favorite -- to trounce Rafsanjani, an affluent, pragmatic conservative blemished by a reputation for corruption.
During Ahmadinejad's presidency, university classes were re-segregated by gender. The law banning satellite dishes was enforced vigorously. The morality police resorted to patrolling the streets to ensure that women wore proper Islamic dress and unmarried couples refrained from holding hands. This was but a part of Ahmadinejad's drive to return society to the early years of the Islamic revolution.
Little wonder then that, in the run-up to the 2009 presidential election, young voters rallied behind Mir Hussein Mousavi, whose academic wife, the artist Zahra Rahnavard, spoke of the hijab becoming optional for women. Mousavi promised to disband the morality police and appoint women to important government jobs.
The Nature of the Iranian Revolution
In trying to recreate the environment of the early days of the Iranian revolution in the absence of the conditions that brought about the collapse of the old order of the Shah, the country's hard line leaders are defying both human nature and history.
They are ignoring the fact that most people tend to strive only to the extent that is necessary to survive, procreate, and lead a comfortable life. More important, human beings simply cannot continue functioning at a heightened level for decades on end. Revolutions are born out of periods of acute crisis and extraordinary fervor combined with high idealism. With time, red hot zeal cools, and so does a revolution. Idealism gives way to pragmatism -- and, of course, corruption.
No less than the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, bowed to inescapable reality when he accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, after endlessly exhorting Iranians to fight on for 20 years -- until victory.
Such softening is common to all revolutions.
Yet in the regional context, what happened in Iran in the late 1970s had been unique. Every previous post-World War II dramatic regime change in the Middle East had come about thanks to overnight military coups. The overthrow of the seemingly unassailable Shah of Iran in February 1979, on the other hand, was the culmination of a relentless two-year-long revolutionary movement.
Globally, too, the Iranian revolution stood apart. All the revolutions of the last century, starting with the Mexican revolution of 1910, were secular and focused on changing property and class relations. Not the one in Iran.
Its leader, Khomeini, made adroit use of Shiite history and Iranian nationalism to attract ever-increasing support. He managed to unite the disparate anti-Shah forces, both religious and secular -- including Marxists of various shades -- by his most radical demand: the deposition of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Although his revolutionary movement included secularists, only the religious segment was capable, via the mosque, of providing a national organizational network down to the village level.
Both as an institution and a place of congregation, the mosque proved critical. Since the state could not suppress the mosque in a country that was 98% Muslim, it offered a sanctuary to the revolutionary movement. That was why Khomeini instructed the clergy to base the Revolutionary Komitehs (Committees) coordinating the anti-Shah movement in those mosques.
It was in this way that the unprecedented upheaval, claiming an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 lives (largely unarmed Iranians killed by military gunfire), turned into the successful "Islamic revolution." It became a preamble to the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran. That term "republic" -- not "state" or "emirate" (as in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban) -- in the official title was, and remains, highly significant. Thirty years on, the partisans of Mousavi are now arguing that the recent electoral fraud undermines the founding principle of the post-Shah regime: that power lies with the public.
Overthrowing an established order is a hard, bloody affair, but making a revolution stick is even more demanding. In the case of Iran, the revolutionary regime became a target of aggression when Iraq's Saddam Hussein launched his invasion in September 1980. The subsequent eight-year war helped merge Iranian nationalism into the post-Shah regime, and stabilized it.
Following Khomeini's death in 1989, the transition to his successor Khamanei as the Supreme Leader, assisted by the popularly elected president Rafsanjani, was smooth. Initially, Khamanei took his cues from Rafsanjani, a wily politician. As he consolidated his hold over the military, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and its auxiliary, the Basij militia, however, he began operating independently and drifted away from Rafsanjani.
Now, both hard-liners and reformists are competing to show their loyalty to Shiite Islam. Its founder, Imam Hussein, the Great Martyr, leading a band of 72 retainers, died in 680 AD while battling a force of 4,000 to stake his rightful claim to the caliphate usurped by his rival. The moral of this episode, which lies at the heart of Shiite Islam, is that the true believer must not shirk from challenging the established order if it has become unjust and oppressive.
Competing Loyalties to Shiite Islam
In today's Shiite Iran, the partisans of Mousavi have adopted green, the color of Islam, as their brand. They shout "Allah-u Akbar" (God is Great) and "We want [Imam] Hussein" in the streets and from the rooftops, while their leader invokes the Quran to demand justice. They are not demanding regime change, only an overdue change in the regime.
For his part, Supreme Leader Khamanei sees the hand of God in the overwhelming victory of Ahmadinejad. The riot police and Basij militia regard him as their spiritual guide and consider any challenge to his word or deed as a challenge to Islam. Ignoring massive evidence to the contrary, Khamanei has ruled out an electoral fraud on the grounds that such a possibility is inconceivable in Iran's Islamic system.
While locked in a struggle, both sides claim to be pursuing the ideal of a just Islamic state. Each remains aware of the value of martyrdom.
The Iranian security forces' beatings, baton charges, and tear gassing of unarmed, peaceful protestors, as well as mass arrests, are deplorable. It is worth noting that most of the firing of live ammunition by the security personnel seems to have been in the air. That explains why the fatalities in the massive and repeated street protests in Tehran have remained relatively low, totaling 15, according to official sources, which also claim that eight Basij militiamen have been killed. Media reports generally have cited 17 deaths of protestors so far, though rumors of higher death tolls abound.
What matters most to the government, as well as its opponents, is the number of people killed, or "martyred."
The speed with which the authorities have tried to hijack the killing of 26-year-old Neda Aghan Soltan in Tehran by a bullet almost certainly fired by a uniformed member of the security forces is illustrative. They have declared her to be a Basiji martyr, allegedly killed by pro-Mousavi protestors, who, in response, rushed to circulate worldwide the shocking image of her dying in the street.
Given its Shiite underpinning, the government remains conscious that resorting to excessive violence could turn opponents into that most dangerous of symbols: martyrs.
Until the June 12th election -- despite evidence of modest tinkering with the first round of the 2005 presidential vote -- post-Shah Iran seemed to indicate that Islam and democracy could work in harmony. The upheaval since then has demonstrated that when strains between the two concepts develop, it is democracy that gets short shrift.
That is bad news for Muslims -- and non-Muslims -- worldwide.
Chalmers Johnson: How to Deal with America's Empire of Bases
Source: TomDispatch.com (7-2-09)
[Chalmers Johnson is the author of The Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis (2006), all published by Metropolitan Books. Check out a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson about the U.S. Empire of Bases by clicking here.]
The U.S. Empire of Bases -- at $102 billion a year already the world's costliest military enterprise -- just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new "embassy" in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don't occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.
Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase.
Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in our already bloated military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy -- a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. Instead these so-called embassies will actually be walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials, and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick get-aways.
While it may be comforting for State Department employees working in dangerous places to know that they have some physical protection, it must also be obvious to them, as well as the people in the countries where they serve, that they will now be visibly part of an in-your-face American imperial presence. We shouldn't be surprised when militants attacking the U.S. find one of our base-like embassies, however heavily guarded, an easier target than a large military base.
And what is being done about those military bases anyway -- now close to 800 of them dotted across the globe in other people's countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls, and other much needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.
Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23rd, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic which, back in February 2009, announced that it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan War), has been persuaded to let us stay. But here's the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners. All this because the Obama administration, having committed itself to a widening war in the region, is convinced it needs this base to store and trans-ship supplies to Afghanistan.
I suspect this development will not go unnoticed in other countries where Americans are also unpopular occupiers. For example, the Ecuadorians have told us to leave Manta Air Base by this November. Of course, they have their pride to consider, not to speak of the fact that they don't like American soldiers mucking about in Colombia and Peru. Nonetheless, they could probably use a spot more money.
And what about the Japanese who, for more than 57 years, have been paying big bucks to host American bases on their soil? Recently, they reached a deal with Washington to move some American Marines from bases on Okinawa to the U.S. territory of Guam. In the process, however, they were forced to shell out not only for the cost of the Marines' removal, but also to build new facilities on Guam for their arrival. Is it possible that they will now take a cue from the government of Kyrgyzstan and just tell the Americans to get out and pay for it themselves? Or might they at least stop funding the same American military personnel who regularly rape Japanese women (at the rate of about two per month) and make life miserable for whoever lives near the 38 U.S. bases on Okinawa. This is certainly what the Okinawans have been hoping and praying for ever since we arrived in 1945.
In fact, I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in now, before it's too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I'm convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country, and so -- on the analogy of a financial bubble or a pyramid scheme -- if you're an investor, it's better to get your money out while you still can.
This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they're cashing in quietly and slowly in order not to tank the dollar while they're still holding onto such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: whether we're being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire and all the bases that go with it will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.
Count on this, future generations of Americans traveling abroad decades from now won't find the landscape dotted with near-billion-dollar "embassies."
Ivan Eland: Is Barack Obama’s Realism Better than George W. Bush’s Idealism?
Source: Independent Institute website (6-29-09)
[Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University.]
Barack Obama’s reaction to the mass protests and violence in Iran shows he is following through on his pledge to be more like George H.W. Bush rather than his son, George W. Bush. Obama has admired the father’s realism and has criticized the idealistic neo-conservatism of the son. But is realism a better foreign policy for the United States?
The answer is a resounding “yes”! Obama has been reluctant to be goaded into meddling in the delicate situation in Iran by the likes of Republicans John McCain and Charles Grassley. They want him to harshly criticize the Iranian government, thus allowing it to portray the protesters as lackeys of an imperialist superpower. In contrast, realist Republicans—such as Henry Kissinger, Richard Lugar, Pat Buchanan, and George Will—have jumped to defend Obama’s cautious handling of the situation. George Will correctly pointed out that the Iranian protesters already know how the U.S. government feels about their government, even in the absence of inflammatory U.S. government pronouncements.
Obama has also demonstrated an orientation toward realism by stating publicly that the goal of transforming Iraq and Afghanistan into pro-Western democracies should no longer be the U.S. goal. George W. Bush was clearly committed to achieving this neo-conservative nirvana.
Obama, however, is not a pure realist. Obama seems willing enough to abandon the younger Bush’s nation-building quagmire in Iraq. But instead of doing the same in Afghanistan, withdrawing U.S. troops from that country, and using intelligence, law enforcement, and maybe an occasional Special Forces raid to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan, Obama has elected to escalate the military social work in Afghanistan. This strand of Obama’s thinking more resembles the idealistic muscular liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton.
And, of course, the liberal interventionism of Wilson and the neo-conservative overseas meddling of Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush are two birds of a feather. In the 1800s, they both originated in the idealism of American Christian missionaries trying to convert heathen peoples to believe in Jesus Christ. Today, the secular goal of converting countries to democracy has substituted the religious one.
But is the reality-based worldview of the hard-nosed realists superior to the messianic democratization of the liberal and neo-conservative interventionists? Yes, because when people feel that their way of living is superior to others, all opposed to that way of life become “the other,” who can be demonized, attacked, and either converted to the cause or slain.
To absolve realism of bad behavior, however, would be a mistake. The realism of Henry Kissinger gave us American carpet-bombing of North Vietnam and active U.S. assistance to the brutal Argentine government to commit human rights violations against dissidents. Overall, however, realists are usually more pragmatic than their idealistic counterparts on both ends of the political spectrum and are much less likely to go off on ideological crusades, such as George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In fact, even the “offensive realist” school practices a more restrained foreign policy than either the liberal or neo-conservative interventionists. And one strain of realist thought—the realist minimalists—laudably advocates taking military action only under rare circumstances—when U.S. vital interests are at stake.
Realism, however, tends to focus on the international balance of power and pragmatic U.S. strategic goals overseas and attempts to be value-free. But foreign policy is supposed to protect the domestic system and allow it to flourish, not warp the domestic system to further objectives overseas. Realism overseas is good up to a point, but the goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve, protect, and defend the republican form of government at home. The traditional foreign policy of the United States—practiced, with some exceptions, from the founding until the Cold War began—was inclined to avoid most overseas conflicts....
Priya Satia: Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for an ‘invisible’ occupation
Source: Financial Times (UK) (7-1-09)
[The writer is assistant professor of history at Stanford University and author of Spies in Arabia.]
W e are at the beginning of the end. On Tuesday, US troops left Iraq’s cities, and in two years they will leave the country. Or so the official story goes. In reality, most of the “withdrawing” forces are merely relocating to forward operating bases where they appear to be hunkering down for a long entr’acte offstage in expensive, built-to-last facilities.
Still, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, is touting this redistribution of American power as a “great victory” against foreign occupation, akin to the Iraqi rebellion against the British in 1920. The US media appear bemused at the comparison, as they continue to miss the point of the Iraqi insurgency. But Mr al-Maliki is more right than he knows about the historical echo: 1920 turned out to be a sad year for Iraq, as the brutal British suppression of that uprising inaugurated four decades of British rule, lasting until the 1958 Iraqi revolution.
Today, too, victory is tinged with fraud. And the Fallujah bombers – the “patriotic resistance” – know it. Mr al-Maliki may claim US participation in maintaining public order is “finished”, but everyone knows public order depends on Iraqi awareness of the offstage presence of US troops.
US operations will be suspended for a few days to promote the perception that Iraqi forces are actually in control; Ali al-Adeeb, a senior leader of Mr al-Maliki’s Dawa party, says the Americans will become “invisible”.
But Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for invisible occupation again; indeed, they never fell for it the first time. Tuesday’s withdrawals echo the cynical British grant of “independence” in 1932 more than Mr al-Maliki’s selective memory of 1920. Then, too, the foreign occupiers co-operated in the local government’s efforts to create an impression of sovereignty, while continuing to pull the strings of real authority behind the scenes. Then, too, Iraqis saw through the ruse. The celebrations of 1932 rang hollow as British aircraft continued to patrol overhead and British personnel were renamed advisors, trainers, liaisons – “the same individuals with new and supposedly thicker cloaks”, one British official confessed. Today, too, the thousands of troops that will remain in Iraq will be restyled as “trainers” and “advisers”; American aircraft will retain their free hand. Moreover, the Iraqi and US governments’ focus on appearances has increased their need for secrecy about the true number and nature of the withdrawals, compounding suspicions of foul play. ...
Andreas Umland: Averting a Post-Orange Disaster: Constitutional Reforms and Political Stability in Ukraine
Source: Harvard International Review (6-29-09)
[Andreas Umland is the general editor of the book series Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society and a co-editor of the German-Russian journal Forum for the Ideas and History of Contemporary Eastern Europe. He also administers the website Russian Nationalism, which contains extensive information on recent trends in Russian radical right-wing thought and politics.]
After several years of impressive economic growth and encouraging political change, Ukraine has recently entered troubled waters. The democracies west of Ukraine are institutionally consolidated and internationally embedded enough to circumscribe the political repercussions of their so far relatively mild economic contractions. While being hit almost as hard as Ukraine by the world financial crisis, Russia has managed to build considerable financial reserves thanks to the enormous cash inflow into her state budget during the years of rocketing energy prices, allowing her to soften the social repercussions of the economic downturn.
Ukraine, in contrast, has neither a consolidated political system nor significant financial reserves. During the first quarter of 2009, the Ukrainian economy seems to have contracted between 20-23 percent, and its industrial production might have fallen as much as 30 percent. Given the limited capacities of the Ukrainian government to deal with the social aftermath of these developments, the effects of the crisis on Ukrainian domestic politics and foreign relations are unpredictable. To be sure, Ukrainians have shown considerable maturity in earlier periods of political crisis, such as during the country's last contested presidential elections. It is often ignored, however, that 2004 was not only the moment of the Orange Revolution, but also a year of steep economic growth of almost 10 percent. In contrast, Ukraine's economy today is experiencing a depression that rivals the 1992-1994 plunge in industrial production.
As if this were not challenging enough, Ukraine is facing an increasingly assertive Russia on which it is economically dependent. Until recently, Ukraine's energy reliance on its Eastern neighbour was partly neutralized by Russia's heavy dependence on the Ukrainian gas pipeline system which delivers Russian gas to the European Union (EU) and on the Kremlin's stated interest in preserving the Sevastopol naval base for Russia's Black Sea fleet. Neither of these two balancing mechanisms is fully functional today. Out of parochial interests, the EU has been pressuring Ukraine to "internationalize" energy transportation. While understandable from a Central and West European view, “internationalization” is weakening Ukrainian control of perhaps the most important instrument of securing Ukrainian independence from Russia. Out of his familiar political myopia, President Viktor Yushchenko has prematurely declared that Ukraine, in any case, intends to close
Sevastopol for the Russian fleet when the current contract for the lease of the Crimean port expires in 2017. Whereas earlier, the Russian and Ukrainian governments had something to negotiate about, Kiev’s diplomatic leverage has diminished today. The Kremlin, aware of Ukraine's new weakness, on a daily basis, threatens via mass media to cut gas deliveries if Ukraine does not pay in time for them.
Moreover, in 2008, the Moscow leadership demonstrated in Georgia – not the least to Kiev - that it is prepared to use military force to defend vital interests in Russia's "near abroad." Many Russian politicians have let it be known, in public, that the Crimea’s majority Russian ethnic makeup places the peninsula within Moscow's natural sphere of influence. Some even see Crimea as a part of Russia's historic territory.
Worse, Ukraine's political system prescribes new presidential elections in January 2010, when a new standoff between Ukraine and Russia concerning gas deliveries and payments is likely to occur....
Abbas Milani: An intellectual history of the Green Wave (Re: Iran)
Source: New Republic (7-15-09)
[Abbas Milani is Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.]
What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism--a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century.
Shiism, like most religions, is no stranger to heated schisms. Shia and Sunnis split over the question of whether Muhammad had designated his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor (Shia believed he had). Some Shia, called Alawites, believe the only divinely designated successor was Ali, while another group, Zaydis, believe there were four imams. A large, intellectually vibrant third group is known as the Ismailis because it believes the line of imams ended with the seventh, Ismail. And the largest Shia sect is called the Ithna Ashari--or the Twelvers. Dominant in Iran, they believe in twelve imams and posit that the last imam went into hiding some 1,100 years ago. His return, bloody and vengeful, will mark the redemptive dawn of the age of justice.
It is within this branch that a further split took place beginning in the late nineteenth century--the moment when the Iranian elite began to confront the challenge of modernity. Ideas like rationalism, individualism, constitutionalism, rule of law, equality, democracy, secularism, privacy, and separation of powers began to find currency in Iran's political discourse. By 1905, these ideas, prevalent primarily among the intelligentsia, led to the Constitutional Revolution--the first of its kind in the Muslim world. The Shia clergy were faced with a historic challenge not unlike what the Catholic Church experienced with the advent of the Renaissance. How two rival ayatollahs reacted to that challenge would divide Iranian Shiism--and lay the groundwork for what is taking place today.
Over the years, many scholars, both in Iran and the West, have argued over the years that Shiism shares less with Islam than with pre-Islamic Persian ideas. They point to the fact that, while Iran became Muslim in the seventh century, it refused to accept Arabic as its language. Islam won the battle, these historians argue, but pre-Islamic ways and values won the war by surviving in a Shia veneer. As an example, they cite the Zoroastrian belief in messianic eschatology. The messianic role of the twelfth imam, they say, is essentially a Muslim version of the same Zoroastrian idea. Shiism, according to this view, is really a thinly disguised form of Iranian nationalism. And this helps explain why so much of Iran's political debate has over the years played out in the realm of theology....
Lawrence S. Wittner: Nuclear Disarmament Activism in Asia and the Pacific, 1971-1996
Source: Asia Pacific Journal (6-22-09)
[Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. This article is adapted for The Asia-Pacific Journal from his new book, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).]
Although the worldwide campaign against nuclear weapons was in the doldrums during the early 1970s, the antinuclear movement maintained a lively presence in the Pacific, largely in response to nuclear testing in that region. Spurning the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the French government continued atmospheric nuclear testing on Moruroa in the South Pacific, sending deadly radioactive clouds drifting across Pacific island nations. In response, New Zealand activists began defying the French government during 1972 by sailing small vessels into the test zone. Joining the fray, the New Zealand Federation of Labour pledged a strict ban on French goods and the Labour Party took a principled stand against continued nuclear testing, leading to its election victory that November. In Australia, thousands joined protest marches in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney; scientists issued statements demanding an end to the tests; unions refused to load French ships, service French planes, or carry French mail; and consumers boycotted French products. In Fiji, activists formed an Against Testing on Moruroa organization, which, in 1974, began planning a regional antinuclear conference.
Nuclear testing in the Pacific also triggered the establishment of Greenpeace. In 1971, Jim Bohlen and Irving Stowe, two antiwar Americans who had relocated to Vancouver, Canada during the Vietnam War, decided to sail a ship north to Amchitka Island, off Alaska to protest U.S. government plans to explode nuclear weapons there. En route, the crew read of a Cree grandmother's 200-year-old prophecy that there would come a time when all the races of the world would unite as Rainbow Warriors, going forth to end the destruction of the earth. Deeply moved, the crew enlisted in that cause. Although U.S. authorities arrested the crew members as they approached the nuclear test site, thousands of cheering supporters lined the docks in Vancouver upon their return. Bohlen and Stowe embarked on another voyage to Amchitka and, although they failed to reach it before the U.S. government exploded its nuclear bomb, a new movement had been born. In New Zealand, a former Canadian, David McTaggart, convinced Canada's Greenpeace group that he should sail his yacht into France's nuclear testing zone around Moruroa. When he arrived with a crew in June 1972, a French minesweeper, at the order of the French government, rammed and crippled the ship. But McTaggart returned with a new ship and crew the following year.
Government officials from nuclear nations viewed these ventures with alarm. Thoroughly contemptuous of those he derided as "peaceniks," U.S. President Richard Nixon stepped up FBI and CIA spying upon peace organizations and the disruption of their activities. By the early 1970s, the CIA's Operation Chaos had targeted over a thousand U.S. organizations and 200,000 individuals. Angered by the opposition of scientists to nuclear tests on Amchitka and to other administration programs, Nixon abolished the President's Science Advisory Committee. French officials, too, were quite hostile. When McTaggart and his crew returned to the international waters that the French government had staked out for its nuclear test zone, French sailors boarded their ship, beat them savagely with truncheons, and threw their cameras and other equipment overboard.
The agitation of the early 1970s did produce some results. New Zealand's new Labour government dispatched a stiff letter of protest to the French authorities, condemning their plans for nuclear testing. Moreover, joined by its Australian counterpart, it went to the International Court of Justice to seek an injunction against the French tests. When the French refused to accept the court's jurisdiction, the New Zealand government, following the trail blazed by antinuclear activists, dispatched two protest vessels to the French testing zone, one with a cabinet minister on board. Although the French government refused to halt its nuclear tests during 1973 and 1974, it grew increasingly rattled. Near the end of the latter year, it announced that it had finally abandoned atmospheric nuclear testing.
There were other concessions to activism, as well. In October, 1975, the governments of New Zealand, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea sponsored a proposal at the United Nations for a South Pacific Nuclear Weapon Free Zone, a plan endorsed by the world body that December. Countervailing pressure from the U.S. government, however, plus conservative election victories in New Zealand and Australia, undermined this project. Nevertheless, the tide was beginning to turn. Even the hostile Nixon administration, acting for what a U.S. government spokesperson called "political and other reasons," responded to the Greenpeace campaign by canceling the remaining U.S. nuclear tests on Amchitka. Eventually, it turned the island into a bird sanctuary.
During the latter part of the decade, antinuclear activism accelerated. In Australia, the disarmament campaign developed obliquely, thanks to the growth of widespread public opposition to uranium mining. In this uranium-rich country, critics of such mining pointed out that it caused radioactive contamination of the environment, encouraged the growth of dangerous nuclear reactors, and provided the raw material for the building of nuclear weapons. In 1979, activists formed the Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM), which drew the backing of both the Australian Congress of Trade Unions and the Labor Party. Campaigning against uranium mining, MAUM came around to championing nuclear disarmament, as well. Indeed, it joined disarmament groups in protesting French nuclear testing, calling for a nuclear-free Pacific, and sponsoring Hiroshima Day activities. In turn, disarmament groups endorsed MAUM's anti-uranium campaign. The two themes for the 1980 Hiroshima Day march and rally in Sydney were: "Keep uranium in the ground" and "No to nuclear war." Later that year, the Sydney city council officially proclaimed Sydney nuclear-free, an action similar to that taken by numerous other municipal councils throughout Australia.
In New Zealand, public protest developed over the visits of U.S. nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered warships. In late 1975, calling for nonviolent action to make New Zealand "an island of sanity in an ocean of peace," the Rev. George Armstrong, an Auckland peace activist and theologian, proposed the development of Peace Squadrons to block their entry.
As a result, when a U.S. nuclear warship, the Truxton, arrived at Wellington, it was met by a small Peace Squadron, as well as by a union ban on the waterfront, which prevented it from berthing. Similarly, in October 1976, when the U.S. nuclear cruiser Long Beach arrived at Auckland, a Peace Squadron of some 150 small yachts, dinghies, canoes, and kayaks obstructed its passage, as did individual surfboarders, flying the nuclear disarmament symbol. As the confrontations grew more intense, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and other groups joined the Peace Squadrons in seeking a court injunction to block future visits by nuclear warships. Joining the controversy, the leader of the Labour opposition fervently committed his party to the struggle for a nuclear-free Pacific. Meanwhile, the confrontations heightened. In 1979, when the Haddo, a U.S. nuclear submarine, rammed its way into Auckland's harbor, sinking a number of small protest craft, one activist—to the delight of the demonstrators—managed to board the nuclear behemoth. According to a news account: "Like Zorba the Greek he began a dance, half of defiance, half of joy on the very nose of the incoming sub." By 1980, nuclear disarmament groups were emerging throughout New Zealand.
In Japan, too, the movement was on the upswing. Sokka Gakkai, a peace-oriented Buddhist group, held antinuclear exhibitions in Japan's cities and gathered 10 million signatures on petitions calling for nuclear abolition. The most important factor behind Japan's antinuclear revival, however, was the shift toward greater unity in the divided nuclear disarmament movement, spurred on by the entreaties of non-political citizens' groups and by the approach of the 1978 U.N. Special Session on Disarmament. In May 1977, Gensuikyo and Gensuikin, the two mass anti-nuclear organizations, agreed to hold a united world conference against atomic and hydrogen bombs, and to establish a unified delegation for the U.N. gathering. Although organizational unity proved elusive, joint world conferences occurred in subsequent years and the joint delegation to the 1978 U.N. conclave brought with it a nuclear abolition petition containing 19 million Japanese signatures.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, a variety of nuclear hazards contributed to the growth of disarmament activism. In the Philippines, a lively, popular antinuclear campaign was organized in the late 1970s to protest the construction of a giant nuclear power plant on the slope of a live volcano in Morong, Bataan. Although constrained by martial law imposed by the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, the movement mobilized thousands of local Filipinos against the project and, gradually, began taking on nuclear weapons issues, as well. Furthermore, in 1979, in the Marshall Islands, some 500 people staged a nonviolent occupation of eight islands from which they had been forcibly evicted years before by the U.S. military to accommodate U.S. nuclear missile tests. That same year, in Palau—another small island trust territory, located in the Caroline Islands—92 percent of the voters in a U.N. referendum endorsed a constitution, drafted in preparation for independence, that would make the island nuclear-free. As U.S. officials had nuclear plans for the island, they declared the U.N. referendum unofficial, and sponsored a second ballot, this time on a constitution without the nuclear ban. Despite a massive U.S. public relations campaign, Palau's voters rejected this U.S.-imposed constitution and, then, proceeded to adopt yet another nuclear-free charter for the island.
These events added momentum to the emerging nuclear-free movement throughout the Pacific. In April 1975, representatives of dozens of antinuclear organizations, meeting in Suva, Fiji, launched the Nuclear Free Pacific Movement. Its People's Charter called for prohibiting: the tests of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles; the presence of such weapons, support systems, or bases; nuclear reactors and waste storage; and uranium mining. Three years later, the Nuclear Free Pacific Movement held a second conference at Ponape, in the Caroline Islands, and in 1980 it convened again, in Honolulu. Sponsored by over 50 organizations from 20 Pacific and Pacific rim nations, the Honolulu conference voted to enlist the help of doctors to examine the people of the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia for radiation-caused illness, to mobilize international support for Palau, to oppose nuclear exercises and nuclear tests in the Pacific, and to work for a nuclear-free Pacific treaty. Activists were particularly outraged at the dumping of nuclear waste in the Pacific by the great powers, which they perceived as yet another facet of colonialist exploitation. A popular Nuclear Free Pacific poster read: "If it's so safe, Dump it in Tokyo, Test it in Paris, Store it in Washington."
During the early 1980s, as hawkish governments in the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and elsewhere renewed the Cold War and threatened nuclear annihilation, the movement reached high tide.
In Japan, faced with the approach of the 1982 U.N. Special Session on Disarmament, Gensuikyo and Gensuikin, the major hibakusha organizations, labor federations, women's and youth associations, religious groups, and eminent individuals established the Japanese National Liaison Committee for Nuclear and General Disarmament. This set the stage for the greatest burst of antinuclear activism in Japanese history. Record numbers of people turned out for antinuclear rallies: 200,000 people in Hiroshima in March 1982 and 400,000 in Tokyo that May. Nuclear disarmament petitions were presented to the United Nations by the Liaison Committee (with 29 million signatures), by religious groups (with 36.7 million), and by political parties (with 16 million). Although the movement made little headway with the governing Liberal Democratic Party, other parties were far more responsive, and about two hundred local governments proclaimed themselves nuclear free. Furthermore, 76 percent of the public supported Japan's "three non-nuclear principles," (Japan shall neither possess nor manufacture nuclear weapons, nor shall it permit their introduction into Japanese territory) 86 percent wanted their government to promote abolition of nuclear weapons, and 58 percent opposed the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
Australia, like its counterparts elsewhere, experienced a phenomenal growth of nuclear disarmament activism. Antinuclear professional organizations sprang up, and hundreds of small, local antinuclear organizations appeared. Religious groups backed the campaign, as did women's groups, which established peace camps outside U.S. military bases and, in one case, staged a nonviolent invasion of a U.S. base and tore down its gates. Although the newly formed People for Nuclear Disarmament sought to coordinate activities at the state level and the Australian Coalition for Disarmament and Peace at the national one, the movement usually lacked central direction. Even so, the few united events illustrated its unprecedented popularity. On Palm Sunday 1982, an estimated 100,000 Australians took to the streets for antinuclear rallies in the nation's biggest cities. Growing year by year, the rallies drew 350,000 participants in 1985. For the most part, the movement focused on abolishing nuclear weapons, halting Australia's uranium mining and exports, removing foreign military bases from Australia's soil, and creating a nuclear-free Pacific. Surveys found that about half of Australians opposed uranium mining and exporting, as well as the visits of U.S. nuclear warships, that 72 percent thought the use of nuclear weapons could never be justified, and that 80 percent favored building a nuclear-free world.
In neighboring New Zealand, the movement attained even greater popularity. Older organizations like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were reinvigorated, while hundreds of newer ones were formed, including a crop of professional groups. Union, church, and Maori organizations joined the antinuclear campaign. In May 1983, 25,000 women participated in an antinuclear rally in Auckland—the largest public gathering of women in New Zealand's history. Continuing their program of resistance, Peace Squadrons sought to prevent visiting U.S. nuclear warships from entering their nation's harbors. In June 1982, when a U.S. cruiser tried to enter Wellington, maritime workers and seamen closed the port for three days through work stoppages, and 15,000 other workers halted labor for two hours to hold protest meetings. In August 1983, 50,000 people turned out for an anti-warship protest in Auckland. Meanwhile, a Nuclear Free Zone Committee pressed to have local governments proclaim their jurisdictions nuclear free. As a result, by 1984, 65 percent of New Zealanders lived in nuclear-free zones.
The New Zealand struggle reached a critical point during 1984-85. With the governing National Party (the conservatives) barely able to sustain an effective parliamentary majority against antinuclear resolutions, the prime minister scheduled an election for July 1984. Assuming that a warships ban (and the necessary revision of the Australia-New Zealand-United States alliance) would be unpopular, the Nationalists made the Labour party's antinuclear policy the centerpiece of their campaign. In turn, Labour and two minor parties spoke out vigorously for a nuclear-free New Zealand. On election day, 63 percent of the voters cast their ballots for the three antinuclear parties, catapulting Labour into power. Taking office as prime minister, David Lange announced a four-part program. It included barring nuclear weapons from New Zealand, halting French nuclear testing in the Pacific, blocking nuclear waste dumping in that ocean, and establishing the South Pacific as a nuclear-free zone. When the U.S. government requested entry for a nuclear-capable destroyer, Lange announced in January 1985 that the warship was banned from his country. Although U.S. officials and the opposition Nationalists bitterly condemned this action, it proved enormously popular. Between 1978 and early 1984, polls found that opposition to allowing nuclear armed ships into New Zealand's ports rose from 32 to 57 percent. And once Lange defied the United States, opposition soared to 76 percent. New Zealand had become a nuclear-free nation—and was proud of it.
Protest was rising elsewhere in Asia, as well. In the Philippines, the building of a giant nuclear power plant inspired growing opposition, as did U.S. military bases at Subic Bay and Clark Field, which housed nuclear-armed planes and warships. With the government's nominal lifting of martial law in 1981, representatives of church, labor, women's, student, and other groups organized the Nuclear Free Philippines Coalition, dedicated to halting construction of the power plant and closing down U.S. military bases. By early 1983, it claimed the support of 82 organizations. In South Korea, the presence of large numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons and the frightening promises of U.S. officials to employ them in a future war led to a growing public fear of nuclear disaster and protests by church groups. Furthermore, in India, a newly-formed Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy issued numerous public statements by prominent citizens warning against the activities of their nation's "nuclear bomb lobby" and pressed the government to reject nuclear weapons.
The antinuclear struggle reached a crescendo in the scattered island nations of the Pacific. Decades of western use of the region for thermonuclear explosions, nuclear missile tests, and nuclear warship ports, topped off by the latest great power nuclear confrontation, led to a surge of resistance among native peoples. In Fiji, church, union, and student organizations established the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group to work for the creation of a nuclear-free Pacific. In Tahiti, thousands of people marched through the streets protesting French nuclear tests and demanding independence from France. On Kwajalein atoll, some 1,000 Marshall Islanders—reacting to a U.S. government plan to extend its military rights by fifty years—escaped their crowded squalor on Ebeye Island by staging "Operation Homecoming," an illegal occupation of eleven islands they had left years before to accommodate U.S. nuclear missile tests. In Palau, the U.S. government, stymied by that nation's antinuclear constitution, sponsored new referenda to overturn its antinuclear provision. When the third and fourth referenda proved unsuccessful, U.S. officials waged a $500,000 campaign to sway the nation's 7,000 voters in a fifth referendum. But the people of Palau stubbornly voted yet again to keep their islands nuclear free. Deeply resenting their mistreatment by the nuclear powers, delegates to the 1983 Nuclear Free Pacific conference renamed their organization the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement. By 1985, it had 185 constituent organizations.
In response to this tidal wave of protest, public policy changed dramatically in the Pacific. In New Zealand, the new Labour government of Prime Minister Lange not only defied Washington by barring nuclear-armed warships, but became a leading proponent of a comprehensive test ban treaty and of a South Pacific nuclear weapons-free zone. In Australia, after the victory of the Labor Party in the 1983 elections, the new prime minister, Bob Hawke, appointed Australia's first minister for disarmament, instructed Australia's representative at the United Nations to support a Nuclear Freeze resolution, withdrew his earlier offer to have Australia test the MX missile, and made his country into a key force in world efforts to secure a comprehensive test ban treaty. Moreover, New Zealand and Australia joined the other eleven nations of the South Pacific in negotiating the Treaty of Rarotonga, designed to prohibit the testing, production, acquisition, or stationing of nuclear weapons in the region. Although nations lacking antinuclear movements, such as China and Pakistan, made progress on their nuclear weapons programs during these years, the Japanese government—beset by waves of protest—proved more cautious, and Japan's "three non-nuclear principles" remained officially enshrined.
Even though nuclear arms control agreements and the waning of the Cold War led to a decline of the antinuclear campaign after 1985, it remained a powerful presence. In Australia, the 1986 Palm Sunday antinuclear rallies drew 250,000 people. Two years later, Australian protest flotillas blockaded the arrival of foreign nuclear warships. In Melbourne, the seamen's union boycotted the warships and even the prostitutes went on strike, announcing that the nuclear behemoths could "take their money, ships, bombs, and diseases and go home." In New Zealand, the renamed national movement, Peace Movement Aotearoa, served as the umbrella organization for about 300 peace groups working on projects that ranged from halting French nuclear testing to getting their town or city councils to declare their jurisdictions nuclear-free. The hottest issue, however, remained the Labour government's ban on nuclear warships. In August 1987, the warship ban provided the central issue in nationwide elections, which Labour won handily—its first re-election victory since 1938. At the same time, antinuclear protest raged in Palau, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, and India. Despite a police state atmosphere in South Korea, antinuclear ferment grew among student, women's, and religious groups. In 1986, the National Council of Churches called for the removal of all nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula. Protest even emerged in China. Enraged by the government's nuclear weapons tests at Lop Nur, in Xinjiang province, local Uighur people staged antinuclear demonstrations in Beijing and other Chinese cities. Polls throughout Asia and the Pacific found strong support for nuclear disarmament.
Not all governments were fond of the antinuclear campaign. Although the new Soviet party secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, courted nuclear disarmament activists, officials from the other nuclear powers remained venomously hostile. The administrations of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were particularly irate at resistance to their nuclear weapons programs, and did their best to discredit and destroy the movement.
To head off anticipated protest activities against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, the French government had its agents blow up the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, killing a Greenpeace photographer in the process.
Nevertheless, the "nuclear allergy" was spreading. The new Treaty of Rarotonga, adopted in August 1985 by the thirteen members of the South Pacific Forum, established the South Pacific as a nuclear-free zone. Scuttling arrangements for the testing and development of India's nuclear weapons, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi offered his nation's "Action Plan for Ushering in a Nuclear-Weapon-Free and Non-Violent World Order." In the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino—strongly influenced by growing antinuclear sentiment—adopted a constitution stating that the nation would henceforth be nuclear-free.
Despite some erosion of its strength, the nuclear disarmament movement remained a significant political factor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Powerful Filipino nationalist forces—including the press, the lawyers' group, and the peasant group—citing the nuclear-free provision in their nation's new constitution, grew increasingly vocal in their demand for the closure of the Subic and Clark Field U.S. military bases. Although China remained as repressive as ever, the largest Uighur protest yet against Chinese nuclear testing occurred in May 1992, when some 10,000 people reportedly demonstrated at Kashgar. In Palau, the population—responding once more to pleas by activists—voted down the latest attempt by the U.S. government to override that island nation's nuclear-free constitution.
The antinuclear ferment throughout the region continued to weigh heavily on U.S. officials, and contributed to new and far-reaching action by the administration of U.S. President George H.W. Bush. On September 27, 1991, Bush announced that all U.S. ground-based tactical nuclear weapons would be destroyed, all seaborne tactical nuclear weapons would be removed from U.S. warships, all U.S. strategic bombers (and some land-based strategic missiles) would be taken off alert, and plans for mobile ICBMs and short-range attack missiles would be canceled. Although Bush's extraordinary measures largely reflected his desire to set an example for the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union, he was responding to the antinuclear movement, as well. According to Brent Scowcroft, his National Security Advisor, the weapons withdrawals resulted, in part, from pressures emanating from South Korea to remove U.S. nuclear weapons from its territory and from pressures by Japan and New Zealand to block the admission of nuclear warships to their ports.
These actions did not end the antinuclear turbulence. In India, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy joined with other concerned groups to urge the five declared nuclear powers to halt nuclear testing and move toward complete nuclear disarmament. In the Philippines, the popular clamor over nuclear weapons at U.S. military bases became so great that the Philippine legislature voted to close them down, thus ending nearly a century of U.S. military presence in that nation. As in previous decades, resistance to nuclear weapons was particularly widespread in Japan. Antinuclear activists in that nation circulated a new Appeal from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drawing nearly 50 million signatures by 1995. Out of 3,300 Japanese municipalities, 1964 proclaimed themselves nuclear-free zones by the end of that year. Meanwhile, Uighur protests against Chinese nuclear testing continued to erupt. In March 1993, when Chinese troops opened fire on a crowd of a thousand demonstrators outside the test site at Lop Nor, the enraged protesters stormed the complex—damaging equipment, setting fire to military vehicles and airplanes, and tearing down miles of electronic fencing.
A particularly dramatic wave of protest occurred in the mid-1990s, as the nuclear powers dithered over the movement's long-sought goal of a comprehensive test ban treaty. In June 1995, when France's new president, the conservative Jacques Chirac, announced that France was resuming nuclear testing in the Pacific that September, this proclamation unleashed what The Washington Post called a "Typhoon of Anger." Antinuclear rallies and protests sprang up around the world. Responding to appeals by disarmament groups, consumers boycotted French goods, irate citizens poured French wine into the gutters, and Australian unions refused to handle French cargo or French postal and telecommunication services. Sales of French wines and champagne plummeted in Australia and New Zealand, and polls in the latter nation found that public opposition to the resumption of French nuclear tests hit an astonishing 98 percent. In Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, 15,000 people turned out to welcome the arrival of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior II, then en route to another protest in Moruroa, and to call upon the French not to test. In France, thousands of Parisians demonstrated against their government's policy. In the United States, a coalition of 40 disarmament, religious, and environmental groups sparked a consumer boycott.
Confronted by this surge of antinuclear activism, the nuclear powers retreated. The French government abruptly cut short its test series and, abandoning its earlier insistence upon exempting low-yield nuclear tests from a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), suddenly announced that the future treaty should provide for "the banning of any nuclear weapon test." And this put the U.S. government on the spot. Impressed by the upsurge of public protest and no longer able to hide its own appetite for low-yield tests behind the stubbornness of the French, the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton announced that, henceforth, it would work to secure a total cutoff of nuclear testing.
Things remained largely on track thereafter. Making the test ban its top priority in 1996, Greenpeace organized demonstrations, confrontations, and even a protest voyage to China, whose government, bowing to international pressure, announced in July 1996 that it was joining the worldwide testing moratorium. True to its promises, the Clinton administration did bring the other declared nuclear powers into line behind a CTBT. When India and Iran refused to cooperate, the Geneva negotiations broke down. But the Australian government brought the test ban treaty directly to the United Nations for endorsement. Pro-test ban groups around the world feverishly pressed their governments to back the Australian resolution. And at a U.N. General Assembly session of September 10, 1996, the representatives approved it by a vote of 158 to 3, opening the way for the CTBT's signature and ratification. Addressing the world body shortly after the vote, Madeline Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declared: "This was a treaty sought by ordinary people everywhere, and today the power of that universal wish could not be denied."
Of course, this antinuclear campaign in Asia and the Pacific comprised only one component of a vast, worldwide nuclear disarmament movement during the years from 1971 to 1996. Nevertheless, it sparked a massive popular mobilization throughout the region—one that had an important impact on public policy.
The signing of the CTBT in 1996 proved to be the worldwide movement's last major victory. Thereafter, the antinuclear campaign ebbed, with many disarmament organizations losing momentum or disappearing. In this more favorable climate for realizing their nuclear ambitions, three new nations—all in Asia—emerged as nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, and North Korea. In the United States, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the CTBT, while the new president, George W. Bush, scrapped the ABM treaty, halted nuclear arms control and disarmament negotiations, and championed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons.
Today, some 26,000 nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the nine nuclear powers, with thousands on hair-trigger alert. Although U.S., Russian, and British nuclear arsenals are shrinking in size, those in the four Asian nuclear nations—China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea—are growing, in large part because of tensions among them. This Asian arms race also has possibilities of bringing Japan into the nuclear club.
And yet, there remain possibilities for reversing this situation and getting nations back on track toward nuclear disarmament. The rising nuclear danger has led to a modest revival of antinuclear activism, particularly in India and Pakistan. In the United States, an outcry against the Bush administration’s plans for new nuclear weapons led Congress to reject all of them. Moreover, a surprising number of former (and some current) members of national security elites in numerous nations have made outspoken calls for serious efforts to create a nuclear-free world. During Barack Obama's successful U.S. presidential election campaign, he spoke out repeatedly for nuclear abolition. Furthermore, after his election, he reiterated this goal in major policy addresses and, also, advocated ratification of the CTBT, a treaty making deep cutbacks in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and efforts to negotiate a halt to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. However, as indicated by the record of the mass nuclear disarmament movement and government response from 1971 to 1996, progress toward a nuclear-free world seems likely to require a very significant renaissance of antinuclear activism by the general public, particularly in Asia and the Pacific. As Frederick Douglass, a great leader of the U.S. antislavery campaign, once declared: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
Sean Wilentz: Lincoln, Obama and the myths liberals have fallen for
Source: New Republic (7-15-09)
[Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).]
... The adage that understanding history requires understanding the historian also applies to literary critics trying to write history. Despite their differences in methods and conclusions, much of the new wave of books on Lincoln reflects a common mood among a portion of the liberal intelligentsia, one that cannot be ascribed simply to Lincoln's bicentennial. The mood might seem political, but this is imprecise: it cares about politics only so as to demote it and repudiate it and transcend it. The mood to which I refer is in truth profoundly anti-political. It runs deeper than conventional election loyalties, touching what has become a ganglion of contemporary liberal hopes and dreams about America, about its past, its present, and its future.
One would have to be blind not to see all the connections that bind this mood and the new Lincoln boom to the rise of Barack Obama. President Obama hardly created the mood. Although he wrote admiringly about Lincoln before he ran for the presidency, all these new books on Lincoln were in the works long before Obama's presidential prospects were very plausible. Along the way, though, the idealizations of Obama and Lincoln became tightly entwined, in support of an almost cultish enthusiasm--humorously, but unironically, illustrated by the ubiquitous Photoshop image that blended portraits of the two men into a single Abe-bama. The excitement of the campaign certainly had something to do with the linkage, as did pointed references by Obama to Lincoln on the stump--but liberal intellectuals eagerly validated it. And some of the books written to coincide with Lincoln's bicentennial went to press just in time to lend the linkage additional credibility.
The Lincoln Anthology concludes with a long excerpt from Obama's announcement of his candidacy in 2007 in Springfield, and suggests that the speech marks the fulfillment of Lincoln's aspirations and achievements. Stauffer's book, which was published on Election Day last year, carries as its epigraph a passage from The Audacity of Hope, in which Obama praises Lincoln for his combination of humility and activism, and cites Douglass to the effect that power concedes nothing without a fight. Gates's introduction, which reached the printers just after the election, mentions Obama three times, ending with an evocation of the president as the black man who, nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, fulfilled Lincoln's legacy.
Like any group of able politicians, Obama and his strategists exploited the mood by hyping their Lincoln connections, real and imagined--right down to agreeing to have the new president sit down to a celebratory postinaugural lunch consisting of dishes that President Lincoln himself enjoyed. This is not a mystic chord of memory. It is branding. But the mood is bigger than the man, and Obama can be no more blamed for succumbing to it, or for trying to turn its symbolism to his own advantage, than Lincoln can be faulted for his own political maneuvering. Our president is hardly the innocent that he tries to appear to be, but it is precisely his intensely political character, the political cunning that lies behind all his "transcendence" of politics, that makes him Lincolnian; and it comes as a great relief from the un-Lincolnian sanctimony that surrounds his image.
Historically considered, the Obama phenomenon battened on the high-minded Mugwump disdain for "politics as usual" that has become such a central feature of contemporary left-liberalism--and which, in a twisted way, has become associated with the iconic Lincoln. Two of the major objects of enmity in this current of reformism are the political parties (with their dark hidden forces, the professional politicians) and the money-drenched system of campaigning (with its dark hidden forces, the corporate donors). If only the hammerlock of the two major parties--or, alternatively, that of the bosses within each party--can be broken, the true will of the rank and file, and ultimately of the people, will be unleashed, and principled government will be restored. And if the intrinsically corrupting (or so it is claimed) contributions of big money are ended, and something approximating public financing of elections installed in its place, then something closer to Lincolnian government of the people, by the people, and for the people will emerge. Right?
The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual and creating a new post-partisan era in Washington, and with its liturgical incantations of "change" and "hope," aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch. The above-politics talk also appears to have played a major role in winning Obama favor with the political press and the intellectuals, as well as with many more Americans (including not a few libertarian Republicans) for whom "politics" means "dirty politics." Some obvious ironies, though, have gone undiscussed. Obama ran up his early lead in the pledged delegate count during the primaries chiefly because of his victories in state party caucuses, a system of selection that is seriously skewed against working people and older voters, and that, with its viva voce voting and arcane rules, is singularly vulnerable to blatant manipulation. Obama then secured the nomination in June 2008 when he won over the party's so-called "super-delegates."
In the general election, Obama, although pledged to accept public campaign financing, changed his mind, having gained an enormous war chest by gathering small donations through the Internet, but also through more old-fashioned methods of big-money political fundraising. (About half his funds were accumulated in the old unimpeccable way.) All of this, including his maneuvering through the primaries, was fair and square--and, from the viewpoint of any professional politician, very impressive. But there was also something, well, rich about the candidate beloved by the good-government reformers relying on the party insiders to get nominated and rejecting public financing in order to get elected.
The intellectuals' rapture over Obama, their eagerness to align him with their beatified Lincoln, has grown out of a deep hunger for a liberal savior, the likes of which the nation has not seen since the death of Robert Kennedy in 1968. The eight years of George W. Bush's presidency only deepened the hunger; and last year it overtook a new generation of voters as well who, though born long after 1968, yearned for smart, articulate, principled liberal leadership. Along came Obama who, despite his inexperience--or, perhaps, because of it: he seemed so uncontaminated by the arts that he practiced--fit the bill, his African heritage doing more to help him by galvanizing white liberals and African Americans. Although Obama's supporters at times likened him to the two Kennedys, and at times to FDR, the comparisons always came back to Lincoln--with the tall, skinny, well-spoken Great Emancipator from Illinois serving as the spiritual forebear of the tall, skinny, well-spoken great liberal hope from Illinois.
The danger with the comparison does not have too much to do with the real Barack Obama, whose reputation will stand or fall on whether he succeeds or fails in the White House. The danger is with how we understand our politics, and our political history, and Abraham Lincoln. That the election of an African American to the presidency brings Lincoln to mind is only natural. But the hunger pangs of some liberals have caused them to hallucinate. Obama's legendary announcement in Springfield was the purest political stagecraft, but it was happily regarded as a kind of message from history. One hears that Obama, like Lincoln, is a self-made man--but Lincoln, unlike Obama, started out in life dirt poor, and lacked any opportunity to attend an elite private high school and then earn degrees at Columbia College and Harvard Law School. One hears that the rhetoric that carried Obama to the White House is Lincolnesque, which it most certainly is not, either in its imagery or its prosody. One hears even that Obama is not just an extremely talented and promising new president but, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, that he is "destined"--destined!--"to be thought of as Lincoln's direct heir."
Who does not wish Obama well? But such hallucinations make it difficult for historians to keep the intricacies of political history front and center, or to acknowledge Lincoln's peculiar gifts as a political leader and a political president. It would appear that those intricacies and those gifts need to be salvaged from the mythologizing and aestheticizing glorifications, from populist fantasies born of forty years of liberal frustration. Lincoln himself might have understood the problem, given his familiarity, inside the Whig Party of the 1830s and 1840s, with powerful anti-party and anti-political sentiments that foreshadowed the Mugwump mentality of the Gilded Age....
Jack Cohen: Will the "peace process" end in 2 states?
Source: Special to HNN (6-25-09)
[Visiting Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.]
There seems to be a common misperception that a "peace process" will end in "the two state solution," with a Palestinian State, that will then bring an end to the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs. This is pure pie in the sky, wishful thinking of the first order. For the Palestinians this will merely be a stage in their strategy to destroy the Jewish State. This is why PM Netanyahu is insisting that any such State be demilitarized and not be able to make pacts with other enemy states such as Iran and Syria.
In Kfar Etzion, one of the two Jewish settlements that were captured by the Arabs in 1948, they destroyed the whole place down to the foundations and even uprooted all the trees. This is the pattern of Palestinian reaction if it gets its hands on any Jewish/Israeli facility. Many people assumed that when Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005, that would usher in a period of peaceful coexistence.
A group of wealthy liberal American Jews, believing this nonsense, actually spent $14m to buy the facilities of the Jewish settlers in order to hand them over to the Palestinians so that they could have factories and jobs (after all the Jews managed to make a good living there). But, what happened, the Palestinians smashed everything in sight, including the glasshouses that could have been growing produce to feed themselves and sell exports. What a waste! I am not making this up, it is a matter of record, it is irrational and self-defeating, but they always manage to shoot themselves in the foot.
During WWI and WWII Britain had a blockade ofGermany, and in WWII the US had a blockade ofJapan, this is common in war. Yet, many liberals, Jews and non-Jews, think Israel should supplyGaza with essential goods (food, medicine, oil, etc.) even though Hamas considers itself at war with us. The only reason that the entry of supplies to Gaza is stopped is when they periodically attack our forces guarding the terminals that feed them. Except for now, when a group of private citizens formed a "Save Gilad Shalit" Committee, and are preventing trucks from entering the three main crossings into Gaza. And who is clearing the blockade, the IDF. Now isn't that illogical.
Other examples of anti-Israel violence are the joint industrial sites built between Gaza and Israel (Erez) and the West Bank and Israel (Kalandia), where Palestinians were employed. During the intifada they attacked and destroyed most of these facilities, and killed several of the Israelis working there. There is an inescapable conclusion that the Palestinians are motivated by an irrational hatred of Jews and Israel, and this has nothing to do with what the Israelis have done to them, or the so-called "occupation," witness the massacres of Jews in Hebron in 1929 and in Jerusalem in 1948.
One assumption of the "two state solution" is that the PA is led by "moderates" such as Pres Abbas, who are ready to make peace with Israel. Both Pres. Mubarak of Egypt and Quartet emissary Tony Blair last week stated optimistically that a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians could be signed "in a year (or two)." However, this is false optimism purely for political purposes. Pres. Abbas controls the Mukata Compound in Ramallah, and practically nothing beyond that. The US, UK and EU, with Israeli approval, is helping the PA to develop a police force to "pacify" the cities that are within the PA. But, in fact, the PA's control over these forces is nominal, they only operate during daytime and they have never come up against armed Hamas or even Fatah terrorist gangs. If they ever do they will desert or be decimated. It is illusory forIsrael to make any kind of agreement with Abbas, it would not be worth the paper it is printed on.
So whichever way you look at it, there will be no realpeace process and no agreement, not in one year and not in ten years, at least not until the hatred that the Palestinians have for the Jews is dissipated. There is no "end game" in sight.
Edwin Black: North Korea Missile Threat Against Hawaii and Alaska Has Been Expected for Ten Years—Iran Regime a Full Partner
Source: TheCuttingEdgeNews.com (6-22-09)
Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, Nazi Nexus and The Plan: How to Rescue Society the Day the Oil Stops—or the Day Before. He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com.
In a frantic race with high winds, bone-chilling ice storms and rattled political nerves, the American defense establishment has been rushing to meet the threat now faced by Hawaii, Guam, Alaska and possibly the West Coast of the United States mainland—an advanced North Korean Taepodong-2 missile. The now-contested regime of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been a full partner in the development.
Bellicose and prone to tantrums, North Korea’s bizarre strong man Kim Jong-Il has ordered a missile test of the new advanced Taepodong-2 missile, apparently in the direction of U.S. territory. Hawaii, Guam and Alaska are in the crosshairs. The defense establishment is convinced the decisive moment will once again come provocatively on America’s national holiday, July 4. This moment has been coming for more than a decade, and the Pentagon, North Korea and Iran have been preparing for it.
Alarm first sounded in 1999 when American defense officials realized that the Taepodong 1 missile, which doubled as an Iranian Shabab, was just the first phase of a decade-plus program by North Korea and Iran to develop an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Named for the Taepodong village where it is developed, the long-range Tae-pondong-1 was capable of 2,000 km, enough to threaten its neighbors. But the new Taepodong-2 could achieve double that range, more than 4,000 km—most of the way to Hawaii—and was, therefore, approaching the status of ICBM. With the right wind conditions, this newer missile when further developed could reach the outer territories of the United States. If armed with a reduced-weight payload, and favorable weather conditions, a properly guided TD-2 could reach the United States, perhaps far inland, American defense planners feared.
What changed that made defense planners nervous in 1999? In the spring of that year, U.S. satellites detected that the North Koreans had completed a years-long upgrade to its Taepodong-1 launch site. The expanded facilities could host the longer-range and taller-standing Taepodong-2. Specifically, the pad gantry umbilical tower (rising some 22 meters) was extended by about 10 meters to 33 meters tall to accommodate the taller missile. By late 1999, the firing installation had been almost fully retrofitted; but the new, more powerful missile had not been ferried to the launch pad for a test. That process takes two days of tedious testing and a small squadron of liquid fuel tanker trucks. Just mobilizing the tankers and the fuel supplies requires weeks of logistics. However, the entire program was stalled to a standstill when North Korea was bribed with incentives as part of the international reaction to its troublesome nuclear and rocketry projects.
While the North Korean dictator was enjoying the wages of his blackmail, the Pentagon embarked on the crash construction of an anti-missile defense system to be located on the near-barren Aleutian island known as Shemya. The flat, desolate 5.9-square-mile rock at the tip of the Aleutian Island chain off the Alaskan coastline is some 3,000 miles from Seattle, 1,500 miles from Anchorage, and 100 miles from the nearest Eskimo village. But it is even further west than the most westerly point of Hawaii.
For decades, Shemya had been a mid-Pacific refueling point. It sported a 10,000-foot runway left from previous wars. In World War II, special hangers were built to house B-29 bombers for devastating raids over Japan. During the Cold War, Shemya hosted pivotal spy flights over the Soviet Union. At one point, Northwest Airlines leased the long airstrip to refuel its trans-Pacific routes. Today, the several dozen employees on “The Rock,” as it is affectionately called, make up Eareckson Air Station.
Here, on this nearly-empty protrusion in the Pacific, just 97 feet above sea level, the Pentagon began the new century by rushing to build a forward X-Band radar facility designed as the world’s most powerful missile detector. The X-Band would work in tandem with the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor missile), seaborne Standard missiles and lower-level Patriot-3s. X-Band, in conjunction with satellites and certain ground radars and early-warning aircraft, would detect a launch the very moment it happened, and track the offensive rocket for a number of seconds, just long enough to determine its trajectory and target. Midcourse corrections would be constant. The stream of data would allow multiple interceptors at high and low altitude to destroy the intruder, using their own on-board lock-on mechanisms as the final guidance to a kinetic kill. That is the theory.
The race for the Pentagon in the year 2000 was to complete the forward X-Band site on Shemya before North Korea would undertake enough testing to launch a Taepodong-2 should its unpredictable ruler decide to abandon multilateral talks. North Korean missile testing was hamstrung by harsh winters in the area that only allowed the remote facility to undertake launches during certain months. But the Shemya construction project faced the similar weather challenges.
Shemya is one of the most inhospitable rocks on the planet. Winds of 40 to 80 mph regularly sweep the flat, featureless terrain. But constructing new structures demanded wind conditions of less than 30 mph for four-hour sessions. Moreover, the heavy cranes needed to hoist the radar dome components into place could not operate in winds exceeding 10 mph. Subdued winds on Shemya, less than 10-30 mph only occur during the summer months, June and July. More restrictive, the calmer 10 mph winds needed for cranes only apply during July.
In the summer of 2000, President Bill Clinton rushed approval for the Shemya project. Acting with comparatively tornadic speed for Washington, the government authorized a half billion dollars for the project. Any delay in that summer of 2000 would mean the installation could not be completed by 2003. Unless the X-Band was in place by 2003, and unless more than 2,200 miles of fiber optic cable was simultaneously embedded three feet under the sea floor to connect the Shemya installation to the Alaskan mainland, the interceptors could not be operational by 2005. The anticipated early date for vulnerability to a North Korean missile launch was 2005.
Waiting just a few months until late 2000 for action, would mean weather and the challenge of leasing fleets of barges would bow to North Korean missile advances. Indeed, the barges had to reach the Gulf of Alaska by May 2001 for construction crews to begin enjoying Mother Nature’s 60-day annual window of opportunity. By August, the construction window is over. The project was launched on time in 2000.
Construction crews labored 24/7 in 10-hour shifts during those precious summer months. Exhausted, the men were rotated every few weeks. During construction, the site was extremely vulnerable to attack by any adversary, from aerial bombardment to a lightly-manned commando raid. It was a risk the Pentagon took.
While North Korea sat back and collected financial and materiel inducements, its missile development program was hardly stalled. Here is where Iran comes in. The Islamic regime undertook the crucial testing of North Korea’s No-dong-A rocket engines, calling them “home-grown” Shabab missiles. North Korea’s Changgwang Sinyong Corp. was set up to export and trade the technology in 1999. Operating under some two dozen alter-egos, such as Changgwang Credit and Korean Mining and Industrial Development Corporation, the North Korean government company sent its rocket technology to the nuclear weapon labs of the notorious A. Q. Khan. Rocket engines were repeatedly provided to Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group located at Damavand Road 2 along the Abali Road industrial district in Tehran. Petrodollars from ordinary Americans continuously funded the project.
As many as a dozen engines reportedly arrived in Iran by the end of 1999, reportedly carried by an Iran Air Boeing 747 cargo jet that ferried them from an airfield 12 miles north of Pyongyang. It is thought that the booster Iran tested on September 21, 2000, which fell from the sky prematurely after just 105 seconds, may have been from this North Korean transfer. It was identified as a Shahab-3D/IRIS. But many intelligence sources believe Iran actually tested second and third stages of the Taepodong-2 ICBM also known in Iran as the Shahab-5.
By May 2004, Western intelligence sources had identified Teheran’s first so-called space satellite program as a mere cover for testing of the Taepodong-2 ICBM. Both the Korean and Iranian firms, Changgwang and Shahid Hemmat were sanctioned and blacklisted by Washington for weapons proliferation under Executive Order 13382 issued June 28, 2005. But the testing continued under the Ahmadinejad regime, again fueled by petrodollars from America and the world.
Iran continued to test Korean rockets during the years leading up to July 4 2006, when North Korean missile ban commitments terminated. It was the very next day, July 5, 2006, that North Korea shot off two long range missiles, startling vacationing Americans everywhere who learned of the news from widespread media reports.
Then, earlier this year, Iran’s so-called space satellite program stunned the world when Teheran successfully launched a multi-stage rocket into space on February 2, 2009. When Iran launched its so-called space satellite, the information and telemetry finally reassured North Koreans that their Taepodong-2 ICBM could work. That reassurance rang hollow when North Korea tested its own Taepodong-2 on April 5, 2009 with dismal results. It splashed down in the ocean far short of orbit. But the North Koreans are not after accuracy or even success as much as creating political sonic booms from their launches.
While the Iranians were co-developing the Taepodong-2 ICBM, and as construction crews worked around the clock to erect the Shemya X-Band, the Pentagon busily shipped more two dozen missile interceptors to Fort Greely, Alaska, near Fairbanks. But even 100 such interceptors could only be expected to defend against a few dozen such incoming warheads. It is not known how many Taepodong-2 or other shorter range missiles North Korea may shoot off, and how many will feature multiple warheads. The Pentagon has also continued to accelerate development of the forward X-Band. It stationed one battery at the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force’s Shariki base in Tsugaru. The Japanese facility became operational in December 2006. X-Band has also been rushed to Hawaii in recent weeks.
Pentagon planners hope that a decade of frantic efforts have erected a loose defense net of trackers that will include X-band stations in Japan, mainland Alaska, Shemya, and Hawaii working in tandem with satellites, and sea-based monitors. This tracking network would feed information to a thin line of barely-tested interceptor rockets stretching from the Sea of Japan across the expanses of the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and Alaska.
On the seas, the navy has recently updated its Standard anti-aircraft missile system to cope with a Taepodong-2 threat. The ship-based Standard Missile-3 now possesses a longer range of more than 500 kilometers and a maximum altitude of 160 kilometers. Each SM3 costs more than three million dollars. The four-stage SM3 interceptor relies upon the first three stages to synchronously boost the interceptor into the exosphere where it will encounter any threat. GPS readings are taken sequentially to correct course. The fourth and final stage deploys the killing vehicle, a 20-pound Lightweight Exo-Atmospheric Projectile (LEAP). LEAP uses infrared sensors to close on the target and simply ram it. Raytheon Corporation developed LEAP and while it has passed muster in thousands of simulations, it has never been field tested.
More likely, the Pentagon will deploy the high-altitude THAAD because it is specifically designed to work with the constantly-correcting X-Band. Each THAAD battery deploys 24 missiles ensconced in three launchers synched to its X-Band radar controlling complex. The batteries cost $310 million each. The 1,400-pound THAAD can soar 200 kilometers, achieving an altitude of up to 150 kilometers. THAAD silos were inspected by Secretary of Defense William Gates a few weeks ago on June 5, 2009.
The Pentagon has high hopes for THAAD—but it, too, has barely emerged from testing before being rushed to the field. As recently as March 17, 2009 it was still being tested. On that day, THAAD successfully intercepted a ballistic test missile target off the island of Kauai in Hawaii under the auspices of 6th Air Defense Artillery Brigade. On June 25, 2008, it successfully passed the 35th of some 43 interception test firings. But it is all theoretical.
No one knows what missile North Korea will launch, when it will launch it, toward what target—Guam, Hawaii, Alaska or some place in Asia, and most importantly no one can predict the weather or the weight of the payload. Even a North Korean rocket with empty warhead coming within 500 miles of American shores would be considered virtually an act of war.
Nor can anyone predict how North Korea’s co-developer-in-chief, the Ahmadinejad regime, will figure into the complex now that the streets are running red with the blood of democracy-demanding protestors. What could Iran do in a show of strength to prop its own regime? What could it do in a show of solidarity with its missile partner regime, the North Koreans? If Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, it will interrupt 40 percent of the world’s sea-borne oil 20 percent of the American supply. American stockpiles would expire after 57 days. Washington has no plan for an oil interruption and has stubbornly refused to even discuss it.
Many are watching the calendars, the clocks and the clouds as the rogue elements on the globe, powered by petrodollars, converge on this latest crisis. All that can be stated for certain now is that no one has the answers. But they may have them by July 5, 2009.
Richard Overy: We should be afraid of a British Berlusconi
Source: Times (5-26-09)
[Richard Overy is author of The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, (Allen Lane, £25).]
Is there always a political fallout from the effects of severe economic crises such as Britain is now experiencing? The answer must surely be yes.
In the 1930s the Depression broke the Macdonald Labour Party, divided the Liberals, ushered in an emergency National Government and led to the emergence of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Normal party politics was restored only 15 years later, in the campaign of 1945 when Labour rose triumphantly to power to build a New Jerusalem.
Not only did the recession reshape British politics in the 1930s, but the crisis also provoked a growing disillusionment with conventional party politics and the role of Parliament. The political elite that dominated the National Government was seen as self-interested and out of touch. There was little sleaze about in the 1930s - a great many MPs had private means - but there was a strong feeling among the more progressive forces in British society that MPs were a barrier to social change, economic reform and, above all, to a foreign policy that would really reflect the wide enthusiasm for the League of Nations and popular anti-war sentiment.
In 1935 there were two countrywide votes. One was the general election which the National Government won in the absence of a serious opposition. The second was the peace ballot organised by a number of voluntary associations under the direction of the peace campaigner, Lord Robert Cecil. Half a million volunteers tramped the streets knocking on doors to get voters to fill out a voting slip in favour of the league, disarmament, international control of aviation and so on. In the end 11.6 million people voted, almost all in favour. This was a remarkable expression of independent public opinion; the Government took no notice.
Voluntary effort to try to get across alternative, and more progressive, political solutions mushroomed in the 1930s. Above all the view took hold that Parliament no longer really represented what most people thought. Between 1936 and 1939 widespread efforts were made to create a people's front or popular front that would unite progressive opinion, independently of party allegiance. Sir Stafford Cripps, later Chancellor in the 1945 Government, was temporarily kicked out of the Labour Party in 1939 for making one last effort to create a united popular front to challenge Parliament. The National Government survived the people's front pressure but only at the cost of growing rejection of old-fashioned parliamentary politics, most marked among the chattering classes.
What did not happen was a shift to the political extremes, as in Germany when Hitler exploited economic disaster to make his the country's largest party. British fascism and communism remained fringe movements because much progressive opinion wanted liberal values and social progress, not an authoritarian new order. This is familiar ground today. The sense of disillusionment with conventional party politics, where the main parties seem the same and the new political class lines its own nest, opens the way to political extremism. The British National Party is waiting its turn; radical protest at the G20 summit filled the City with campaigners. Real politics, which will engage people's enthusiasm and mobilise their anxiety, may be about to move from Westminster and out on to the street, but it is unlikely to become a mass movement unless conditions deteriorate even more. ...
Mark Naison: America’s Crumbling Infrastructure and Forgotten Neigborhoods
Source: Email to HNN (6-25-09)
[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]
Early this week, I took Amtrak down to Washington to interview Frank Synder, Pensylvania State director of the AFL-CIO about labor’s campaign for Obama in Pennylvania in the 2008 Presidential election, which was one of the most important, grass roots efforts to confront the “race” issue head on in modern American history
Normally when taking Amtrak, I sleep or read, but because of the terrible crash on the Washington Metro late Monday afternoon, which took place when I was on the very same Metro Line only four stops away, I was too rattled to do either, so I found myself looking out the window the entire ride back to New York
What I saw filled me with sadness.
From Baltimore right through Newark, I saw the remnants of of America’s crumbling industrial infrastructure revealed right before my eyes, along with the damage done to once proud working class neighborhoods in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Camden, Trenton, Elizabeth and Newark
It was not just the hundreds ofabandoned factories I saw along the route, some of them a quarter of a mile wide, their windows broken or boarded up, their walls covered with graffiti, their yards filled with garbage and rusting trucks, it was the physical conditions, and atmosphere of the neighborhoods adjoining the factory that was equally depressing
Here, especially in Baltimore, Wilmington and North Philadelphia, I passed block after block of two story attached row houses with porches, a distinctive form of housing built for the local working class when these three cities buzzed with industry and enterprise. Once, these modest houses were regularly painted and spotlessly clean, the sidewalks in front of them swept daily by working class men and women proud that a job in a nearby factory allowed them to purchase their own home. Now, what houses were still left, many of them boarded up, or in advanced states of disrepair, stood on blocks where weed filled vacant lots took up as much place as the homes. These neighborhoods once had vital commercial districts, but the few stores left, their entrances protected by gates and their walls covered with graffiti, looked like they were under siege. At the speed we were traveling, which was 20-30 miles an hour ( there were stations in each of these cities and the train would slow down when approaching) I could only get a glimpse of the people on the streets, on porches or in backyards, but the one thing that leaped out at me was that the vast majority of the m were Black and Brown. These on ce pro ud working class communities, deprived of unionized, living wage jobs in steel mills, shipyards, metal fabricating works, chemical and electrical plants and truck and railroad depots, had become holding pens for poor people, many of them trapped in intergenerational poverty, whose labor was no longer valued or needed in a post industrial American economy.
Significantly, the one institution along the tracks that I didn’t see boarded up were the prisons. I passed at least six prison structures along the Amtrak route, easily identified by the windowless walls, their turret like towers ( if they were more than 40 years old) and the barbed wire fencing &nb sp;that surrounded them. I had seen this before in declining industrial cities. When I visited Youngstaown Ohio ten years ago, where a five mile stretch along the Mongahela River was filled with the remnants of once bustling steel mills, the only new bu i lding in the city was a s panking n ew federal prison.
But if anything, the sight of the prisons along the Amtrak route depressed me even more. Once scene in particular reminded me of the profound inequalities, both racial and economic, that deform the American social structure. Just before the train pulled into the station at Newark airport, when it was moving ten miles an hour, I got a glimpse of what had to be prison yard on the West side of the tracks. There I saw a group of forty or fifty black men, most of them in their twenties, playing basketball, or standing around talking, while in a corner two very tough looking fort y year old white men with cut off sleeves stood observing. This was not a scene from OZ, it was real life, but I doubt if anyone else on the train noticed. What made it all the more eerie was that the people getting off and boarding the train at Newark Airport, were predominantly white and middle class. Here you had two different Americas, side by side, as separate and unequal as anything we had du ring the d ays of legal segregation, only race alone was not the criteria. Now it was race AND class that separated those left in decaying stretches of industrial towns and cities, from those living in middle class suburbs and upscale and gentrifying urban neighborhoods
Even before this current economic crises, significant portions of the American population were living in Depression like conditions. Bruce Springsteen, who knows the world along Amtrak very well, tried to remind us of the tragic consequences of deindustrialization in songs like “Born In the USA,” but how many of us heard his message?
Down in the shadow=2 0of the penit entiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go
Forty years of union busting, factory closing and prison construction have taken a terrible toll, not only on the lives of tens of millions of people, but on American democracy as a political ideal and a lived reality. Unless we do something to empower the people an d revive the communities that adjoin Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor- and places like it all around the nation-, large portions of the American population will remain locked out of the American Dream.
Ira Chernus: Palestinian Violence Overstated, Jewish Violence Understated
Source: TomDispatch.com (6-25-09)
[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be reached at chernus@colorado.edu.]
The Israel Project hired pollster Stanley Greenberg to test American opinion on the Middle East conflict -- and got a big surprise. In September 2008, 69% of Americans called themselves pro-Israel. Now, it's only 49%. In September, the same 69% wanted the U.S. to side with Israel; now, only 44%.
How to explain this dramatic shift? Greenberg himself suggested the answer years ago when he pointed out that, in politics, "a narrative is the key to everything." Last year the old narrative about the Middle East conflict was still dominant: Israel is an innocent victim, doing only what it must do to defend itself against the Palestinians. Today, that narrative is beginning to lose its grip on Americans.
Well, to be more precise, the first part of the old narrative is eroding. Nearly half the American public seems unsure that Israel is still the good guy in the Middle East showdown. But the popular image of the Palestinians as the violent bad guy is apparently as potent as ever. The number of Americans who say they support Palestine remains unchanged from last September, a mere 7%. And only 5% want the U.S. government to take such a position.
Those numbers reflect the narrative that President Obama recited in Cairo on June 4th. He chided the Israelis for a few things they are doing wrong -- like expanding settlements and blockading Gaza. To the other side, though, his message was far blunter: "Palestinians must abandon violence." Of Israeli violence he said not a word.
The president's speech implicitly sanctioned the most up-to-date tale that dominates the American mass media and public opinion today: The Israelis ought to be reined in a bit, but it's hard to criticize them too much because, hey, what would you do if you had suicide bombers and rockets coming at you all the time?
That view is a political winner here. In the latest Pew poll, 62% of Americans say Obama is striking the right balance between Israel and Palestine; of those who disagree, three-quarters want to see him tougher on the Palestinians, not the Israelis. A Rasmussen poll finds even stronger support for a pro-Israel tilt.
There are, however, two things wrong with his narrative. First, though it's somewhat less one-sided than the story that prevailed during the George W. Bush years, it is far from impartial, which means the U.S. still cannot act as an even-handed broker for peace in the region. Since no one else is available to play that role, it's hard to see how, under the present circumstances, any version of a peace process can move forward.
The second problem is that the popular narrative just doesn't happen to match the facts. In reality, unjustified violence is initiated on both sides -- and if anyone insists on keeping score, Israel's violence, official and unofficial, outweighs the violence coming from the Palestinians.
Coming to Grips with Jewish Settler Violence
Israeli violence is often overlooked here because so much of it is done by official order of the state. Americans are quick to side with the man who wears the badge. Even when he lets loose the kind of violence that recently devastated parts of the Gaza Strip, the reigning assumption is that his gun is a force for law and order.
But what about the kind of violence Palestinians are so often accused of, the unauthorized civilian-on-civilian kind -- what the experts term "non-state-actor violence" and the rest of us simply call "terrorism"? Though you may not know this, much of it these days is done by Israeli Jews.
"Palestinian civilians bear brunt of settler violence," Agence France-Presse recently reported: "Nestled amid rolling hills and with an eagle eye's view to the Mediterranean coast, Nahla Ahmed's house has all the elements of Eden... if it weren't for the Molotov cocktail-throwing neighbours. 'We put bars on the windows after the first attack, three years ago,' says the 36-year-old mother of four. 'Now they come each week.'"
The attacks aren't always with Molotov cocktails; sometimes Jewish settlers throw tear gas canisters, simply spray a Star of David on a wall, or cut down trees owned by Palestinians. In other incidents, settlers have shot and killed a 16-year-old boy, fractured the skull of a 7-year-old girl with a rock, set a dog on a 12-year-old boy, and shot dead an Arab man but let his companion go when he identified himself as Jewish. These are not egregious, isolated cases of mayhem; they're just a few random examples of what's happening all too often on the West Bank. To see how depressingly common such violence is, just Google "West Bank settler violence" for yourself.
It's easy enough to see what the violence looks like too, since a lot of it has been captured on video. And this is just violence against people. The violence against property is far too common to begin to catalog.
Last December, Jewish settlers in Hebron went on a rampage, shooting at Palestinians, setting fire to homes, cars, and olive groves, defacing mosques and graves. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister at the time, said he was "ashamed" of this "pogrom."
Yet few such settler crimes are seriously prosecuted by the Israeli authorities. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din has documented this in an extensive report, which, the group carefully notes, is merely one more in a long line of similar reports:
"Since the 1980's many reports have been published on law enforcement upon Israelis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. All of the reports... warned against the failure of the authorities to enforce the law effectively upon Israelis... who committed offenses against Palestinian civilians... Yet the problem of attacks against Palestinian people and property by Israelis has only grown worse, becoming a daily occurrence."
Assessing Hamas Violence
Jewish settlers who commit violence claim just what the Israeli government claims when it directs state-sponsored violence at Palestinian areas: Self-defense -- it was nothing but self-defense. And it's certainly true that there are incidents of individual Palestinians venting their frustration violently. After all, they've been living under an arbitrary, demeaning, and sometimes brutal occupation for 42 years.
According to the common Israeli and American narratives, however, the real culprit and chief roadblock to peace is the constant violence -- suicide bombings and rocket attacks -- planned and carried out by a well-organized political party, Hamas. Again, as it happens, this popular version of events is simply not borne out by the facts.
Consider suicide bombings. In 2003 Israel's premier newspaper, Ha'aretz, reported that Hamas had decided "to stop terror against Israeli civilians if Israel stops killing Palestinian civilians." Though it's not clear that Israel did stop its own killings, Hamas soon halted its devastating suicide attacks. There were two in 2004 and not a single one in the nearly five years since then, according to the Jewish Virtual Library run by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (a source hardly sympathetic to Hamas).
The same source counts no "major attacks" on Israeli civilians by any Palestinians since 2006. Though there have been other attacks since then, their frequency has dropped dramatically, and none have been carried out by Hamas itself.
Israelis generally know what most Americans still don't: Suicide bombing, supposedly the trademark of "Palestinian terrorism," has virtually ceased. As a result, Israel's chief complaint has switched to Hamas rocket attacks. How can we let them have the West Bank, the argument goes? Look what happened when we pulled all our settlements out of Gaza and got nothing in return but thousands of rockets. That's why we had no choice but launch our full-scale assault on Gaza in December 2008: to put an end to them.
In fact, though, Hamas rocket attacks had ended in July 2008, when Israel agreed to the ceasefire Hamas had been asking for. That agreement held for four months until Israeli troops killed six Hamas operatives -- shortly before Hamas and Fatah were scheduled to create a unified government. It's a familiar Israeli tactic: block Palestinian unity and then complain of "no partner for peace."
Hamas was also moved by the plight of its people in Gaza, growing increasingly short of food, medical supplies, and other basic goods due to an ever-tightening Israeli blockade.
Yet all this is lost in the story that most Israelis tell, and most Americans believe, about why Hamas began shooting rockets (which, compared to the massive Israeli onslaught in response, did relatively little damage). Equally lost is Hamas's return to its moratorium on firing rockets after the recent Gaza war, formally confirmed by the party's leader, Khaled Meshal, in the New York Times.
Occasional rockets do fly out of Gaza, provoking the usual Israeli demand that Palestinian authorities must prevent every single incident of violence before there can be any talk of peace. That's something like holding the U.S. government responsible for the recent shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington or the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
A Mirror Image?
Still, the Palestinian governments in both Gaza and the West Bank could do more to control the private violence of their people, just as the Israeli government could do more to control Jewish settler violence. Yet none of these governments act vigorously because they risk alienating a small but significant portion of their political support.
As the Times's Ethan Bronner recently wrote: "There are striking parallels between the hard-core opponents of a peace deal on each side. They are generally driven by a belief in a law higher than any created by human legislatures; they are exceptionally motivated; and they are very well organized... Many Israeli governments have fallen over the issue."
For the risk of offending hard-core groups, neither side sees obvious countervailing political gain. While a minority on both sides condemns the violence of its compatriots, the majority seems to accept it as an excessive, unfortunate, but understandable response to provocations initiated by the enemy. So neither Hamas, nor Fatah, nor the Israeli government see any clear advantage in bending over backwards to stop attacks by non-state groups.
What's more, as Uri Avnery, the grand old man of the Israeli peace movement, explains: "On both sides, the overwhelming majority want an end to the conflict but do not believe that peace is possible -- and each side blames the other." Each side blames the other because so many on each side believe that those who perpetrate the violence represent the entirety of the other side. We could have peace, the universal complaint goes, if only "the Palestinians" or "the Israelis" would stop their violence.
The tragedy is that, on both sides, those who inflict violence gain little of practical value from it. Indeed the motives that keep the conflict boiling may have little to do with any hope of practical gain from it. When researchers asked nearly 4,000 Israelis and Palestinians what it would take to make peace, few focused on tangible benefits like gaining more land or resources. Most on both sides wanted see "their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures." They agreed that they would be willing to make concessions, but only if "the other side agreed to a symbolic sacrifice of one of its sacred values." The violence done by non-state actors is perversely satisfying, even if ultimately useless, because it's the most visible way to win little symbolic victories.
A New Narrative
Palestinians can argue, with good reason, that treating the two sides as mirror images creates a false equivalence. After all, one side is the occupier, constantly inflicting symbolic defeats through the use of state-sponsored violence that dwarfs the violence of its private citizens, or sometimes even more powerfully just by using its ability to re-organize the landscape. The other side is the occupied, a people with virtually no tools of state violence to wield even if they want to, struggling every day just to survive. In the U.S. and around the world there is growing pressure to reverse the traditional narrative of these last decades and turn the Israelis into the bad guys.
Given the tiny fraction of Americans who identify as pro-Palestinian, it's fruitless to think that a majority of us would ever adopt such a reversed narrative -- nor would it be very helpful, regardless of the facts. If the Obama administration really intends to be an even-handed broker, forcing the two sides to move towards genuine compromise at the negotiating table, it needs to represent a nation that tells an even-handed story.
Old narratives don't die out simply because they fail to fit the facts. They die out when a more appealing story comes along. The eroding support for Israeli policies in this country signals a growing appetite for a new, more even-handed narrative, one that says this:
The crucial conflict is not between Israel and Palestine. It's between peace and violence. Violence comes from both sides. But there's also the possibility of fostering a strong push for peace on both sides. Here in the U.S., we should urge our government to stop taking sides in the blame game, condemn all the violence -- including, for the first time, Israeli violence -- and support all forces of peace that exist or arise.
It is hard for many of my fellow Jews to accept the painful truth that we are as capable of violence as the Palestinians, or anyone else. But this new narrative is gaining ground rapidly in the American Jewish community, where groups like J Street and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom are making well-organized efforts to promote it and act upon it.
As non-Jewish Americans become aware of that change, they are likely to feel freer to adopt the even-handed narrative as their own, too. When enough of them do, the political winds in this country will change. Then the White House will feel safe enough to tell Israel, as well as Palestine, to stop both state and non-state violence. That's a necessary first step for an even-handed broker who hopes to open a path to peace.
Greg Grandin: The Collapse of America's Imperial Car Industry
Source: TomDispatch.com (6-23-09)
[Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and author of a number of books, most recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan 2009). Check out a TomDispatch audio interview with Grandin about Henry Ford's strange adventure in the Amazon by clicking here.]
The empire ends with a pull out. Not, as many supposed a few years ago, from Iraq. There, as well as in Afghanistan, we are mulishly staying the course, come what may, trapped in the biggest of all the "too-big-to-fail" boondoggles. But from Detroit.
Of course, the real evacuation of the Motor City began decades ago, when Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler started to move more and more of their operations out of the downtown area to harder to unionize rural areas and suburbs, and, finally, overseas. Even as the economy boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, 50 Detroit residents were already packing up and leaving their city every day. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Detroit could count tens of thousands of empty lots and over 15,000 abandoned homes. Stunning Beaux Arts and modernist buildings were left deserted to return to nature, their floors and roofs covered by switchgrass. They now serve as little more than ornate bird houses.
In mythological terms, however, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace of storied American capitalism. And looking back in the years to come, the sudden disintegration of the Big Three this year will surely be seen as a blow to American power comparable to the end of the Raj, Britain's loss of India, that jewel in the imperial crown, in 1948. Forget the possession of a colony or the bomb, in the second half of the twentieth century, the real marker of a world power was the ability to make a precision V-8.
There have been dissections aplenty of what went wrong with the U.S. auto industry, as well as fond reminiscences about Detroit's salad days, about outsized tailfins and double-barrel carburetors. Last year, the iconic Clint Eastwood even put the iconic white auto worker to rest in his movie Gran Torino. Few of these postmortems have conveyed, however, just how crucial Detroit was to U.S. foreign policy -- not just as the anchor of America's high-tech, high-profit export economy, but as a confirmation of our sense of ourselves as the world's premier power (although in linking Detroit's demise to the blowback from President Nixon's illegal war in Laos, Eastwood at least came closer than most).
Detroit not only supplied a continual stream of symbols of America's cultural power, but offered the organizational know-how necessary to run a vast industrial enterprise like a car company -- or an empire. Pundits love to quote GM President "Engine" Charlie Wilson, who once famously said that he thought what was good for America "was good for General Motors, and vice versa." It's rarely noted, however, that Wilson made his remark at his Senate confirmation hearings to be Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense. At the Pentagon, Wilson would impose GM's corporate bureaucratic model on the armed forces, modernizing them to fight the Cold War.
After GM, it was Ford's turn to take the reins, with John F. Kennedy tapping its CEO Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" to ready American troops for a "long twilight struggle, year in and year out." McNamara used Ford's integrated "systems management" approach to wage "mechanized, dehumanizing slaughter," as historian Gabriel Kolko once put it, from the skies over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Perhaps, then, we should think of the ruins of Detroit as our Roman Forum. Just as Rome's triumphal arches still remind us of its bygone imperial victories in Mesopotamia, Persia, and elsewhere, so Motown's dilapidated buildings today invoke America's fast slipping supremacy.
Among the most imposing is Henry Ford's Highland Park factory, shuttered since the late 1950s. Dubbed the Crystal Palace for its floor to ceiling glass walls, it was here that Ford perfected assembly-line production, building up to 9,000 Model Ts a day -- a million by 1915 -- catapulting the United States light-years ahead of industrial Europe.
It was also here that Ford first paid his workers five dollars a day, creating one of the fastest growing and most prosperous working-class neighborhoods in all of America, filled with fine arts-and-crafts style homes. Today, Highland Park looks like a war zone, its streets covered with shattered glass and lined with burnt-out houses. More than 30% of its population lives in poverty, and you don't want to know the unemployment numbers (more than 20%) or the median yearly income (less than $20,000).
There is one reminder that it wasn't always so. A small historical-register plaque outside the Ford factory reads: "Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th Century living."
America in the Amazon
To truly grasp how far America has fallen from the heights of its industrial grandeur -- and to understand how that grandeur led to stupendous acts of folly -- you should tour another set of ruins far from the Midwest rustbelt; they lie, in fact, deep (and nearly forgotten) in, of all places, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. There, overrun by tropical vines, sits Henry Ford's testament to the belief that the American Way of Life could easily be exported, even to one of the wildest places on the planet.
Ford owned forests in Michigan as well as mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, which gave him control over every natural resource needed to make a car -- save rubber. So in 1927, he obtained an Amazonian land grant the size of a small American state. Ford could have simply set up a purchasing office there, and bought rubber from local producers, leaving them to live their lives as they saw fit. That's what other rubber exporters did.
Ford, however, had more grandiose ideas. He felt compelled to cultivate not only "rubber but the rubber gatherers as well." So he set out to overlay Americana on Amazonia. He had his managers build Cape Cod-style shingled houses for the Brazilian work force he hired. He urged them to tend flower and vegetable gardens and eat whole wheat bread, unpolished rice, canned Michigan peaches, and oatmeal. He dubbed his jungle town, with suitable pride, Fordlandia.
It was the 1920s, of course, and so his managers enforced alcohol Prohibition, or at least tried to, though it wasn't a Brazilian law, as it was in the United States at the time. On weekends, the company organized square dances and recitations of the poetry of Henry Longfellow. The hospital Ford had built in the town offered free health care for workers and visitors alike. It was designed by Albert Kahn, the renowned architect who built a number of Detroit's most famous buildings, including the Crystal Palace. Fordlandia had a central square, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, manicured lawns, a movie theater, shoe stores, ice cream and perfume shops, swimming pools, tennis courts, a golf course, and, of course, Model Ts rolling down its paved streets.
The clash between Henry Ford -- the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions in order to produce a series of infinitely identical products, the first indistinguishable from the millionth -- and the Amazon, the world's most complex and diverse ecosystem, was Chaplinesque in its absurdity, producing a parade of mishaps straight out of a Hollywood movie. Think Modern Times meets Fitzcarraldo. Brazilian workers rebelled against Ford's Puritanism and nature rebelled against his industrial regimentation. Run by incompetent managers who knew little about rubber planting much less social engineering, Fordlandia in its early years was plagued by vice, knife fights, and riots. The place seemed less Our Town than Deadwood, as brothels and bars sprawled around its edges.
Ford did eventually manage to get control over his namesake fiefdom, but because he insisted that his managers plant rubber trees in tight rows -- back in his Detroit factories, Ford famously crowded machines close together to reduce movement -- he actually created the conditions for the explosive growth of the bugs and blight that feed off rubber, and these eventually laid waste to the plantation. Over the course of nearly two decades, Ford sank millions upon millions of dollars into trying to make his jungle utopia work the American way, yet not one drop of Fordlandia latex ever made its way into a Ford car.
The eeriest thing of all is this: Today, the ruins of Fordlandia look a lot like those in Highland Park, as well as in other rustbelt towns where neighborhoods that once hummed with life centered on a factory are now returned to weed. There is, in fact, an uncanny resemblance between Fordlandia's rusting water tower, broken-glassed sawmill, and empty power plant and the husks of the same structures in Iron Mountain, a depressed industrial city on Michigan's Upper Peninsula that also used to be a Ford town.
In the Amazon, Albert Kahn's hospital has collapsed, the jungle has reclaimed the golf course and tennis courts, and bats have taken up residence in houses where American managers once lived, covering their plaster walls with a glaze of guano. No commemorative plaque marks its place in history, but Fordlandia, no less than the wreck of Detroit, is a monument to the titans of American capital -- none more titanic than Ford -- who believed that the United States offered a universal, and universally acknowledged, model for the rest of humanity.
Errand into the Wilderness
It would be easy to read the story of Fordlandia as a parable of arrogance. With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seem all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination. The more the project failed on its own terms -- that is, to grow rubber -- the more Ford company officials defended it as a civilizational mission; think of it as a kind of distant preview of the ever expanding set of justifications for why the U.S. invaded Iraq six years ago. Yet Fordlandia cuts deeper into the marrow of the American experience than that.
Over 50 years ago, the Harvard historian Perry Miller gave a famous lecture which he titled "Errand into the Wilderness." In it, he tried to explain why English Puritans lit out for the New World to begin with, as opposed to, say, going to Holland. They went, Miller suggested, not just to escape the corruptions of the Church of England but to complete the Protestant reformation of Christendom that had stalled in Europe.
The Puritans did not flee to the New World, Miller said, but rather sought to give the faithful back in England a "working model" of a purer community. Put another way, central from the beginning to American expansion was "deep disquietude," a feeling that "something had gone wrong" at home. With the Massachusetts Bay Colony just a few decades old, a dissatisfied Cotton Mather began to learn Spanish, thinking that a better "New Jerusalem" could be raised in Mexico.
The founding of Fordlandia was driven by a similar restlessness, a chafing sense, even in the good times, the best of times, that "something had gone wrong" in America. When Ford embarked on his Amazon adventure, he had already spent the greater part of two decades, and a large part of his enormous fortune, trying to reform American society. His frustrations and discontents with domestic politics and culture were legion. War, unions, Wall Street, energy monopolies, Jews, modern dance, cow's milk, both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, cigarettes, and alcohol were among his many targets and complaints. Yet churning beneath all these imagined annoyances was the fact that the force of industrial capitalism he had helped unleash was undermining the world he hoped to restore.
Ford preached with a pastor's confidence his one true idea: ever increasing productivity combined with ever increasing pay would both relieve human drudgery and create prosperous working-class communities, with corporate profits dependent on the continual expansion of consumer demand. "High wages," as Ford put it, to create "large markets." By the late 1920s, Fordism -- as this idea came to be called -- was synonymous with Americanism, envied the world over for having apparently humanized industrial capitalism.
But Fordism contained within itself the seeds of its own undoing: the breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets. Goods could be made in one place and sold somewhere else, removing the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they made.
In Rome, the ruins came after the empire fell. In the United States, the destruction of Detroit happened even as the country was rising to new heights as a superpower.
Ford sensed this unraveling early on and responded to it, trying at least to slow it in ever more eccentric ways. He established throughout Michigan a series of decentralized "village-industries" designed to balance farm and factory work and rescue small-town America. Yet his pastoral communes were no match for the raw power of the changes he had played such a large part in engendering. So he turned to the Amazon to raise his City on a Hill, or in this case a city in a tropical river valley, pulling together all the many strains of his utopianism in one last, desperate bid for success.
Nearly a century ago, the journalist Walter Lippmann remarked that Henry Ford's drive to make the world anew represented a common strain of "primitive Americanism," reinforced by a confidence born of unparalleled achievement. He then followed with a question meant to be sarcastic but which was, in fact, all too prophetic: "Why shouldn't success in Detroit assure success in front of Baghdad?" We know the ruination that befell Detroit. Whither Baghdad? Whither America?
Daniel Pipes: A Call for American Boldness in Iran
In a striking coincidence, two very different expressions of Iranian dissent took place exactly simultaneously on two continents on Saturday, June 20. Between them, the Islamic Republic of Iran faces an unprecedented challenge.
 In a vast exhibition hall just north of Paris on June 20, about 20,000 people attended an event organized by the largest and best organized Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (or the People's Mujahedeen of Iran). |
The protestors and Mousavi have both shown bravery but the former seem more radical than the latter. Mousavi's website announces that he does not seek confrontation with the "brothers" in Iran's security forces nor does he wish to challenge the "sacred system" instituted by Ayatollah Khomeini. Rather, the website declares, "We are confronting deviations and lies. We seek to bring reform that returns us to the pure principals of the Islamic Republic."
This timidity stands in contrast to the bold stance of the street protestors who shout "Death to the dictator" and even "Death to Khamene'i," an echo of the regime's perpetual slogans "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," implying a wish not just to correct Khomeini's "sacred system" but an aspiration to terminate the regime dominated by mullahs (Iran's clerics).
The other protest took place in a vast exhibition hall just north of Paris, where the largest and best organized Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq or the People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MeK or PMOI) joined with smaller groups to hold their annual meeting. Tens of thousands attended it, including me.
The assembly's most emotional moment came when the anxious crowd learned that their peaceful counterparts marching in Iran had been killed or wounded. At that moment, freedom of assembly in France contrasted most starkly with its denial in Iran. Later that day came confirmation of the regime's obsessive fears of the MeK, when deputy police chief, Ahmad Reza Radan, blamed MeK "thugs" for his own government's violence against the peaceful demonstrators.
The MEK mounted an impressive display in France, as it did at the last meeting I attended, in 2007, with dignitaries, made-for-television pageantry, and a powerful speech by its leader, Maryam Rajavi. Like the street protestors, she also called for the demise of the Khomeinist regime. In a 4,000-word speech, she steered blessedly clear of attacks on the United States or Israel and excluded the conspiracy-theory mongering so common to Iranian political life. Instead, she:
- Ridiculed the regime for portraying the demonstrators as Western agents.
- Bitterly complained that corpses of demonstrators were "wrapped in American flags" and then trampled upon.
- Condemned the regime's "crimes" in Iraq and its "export of terrorism" to Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, and Afghanistan.
- Predicted that "the beginning of the end" of the Islamic Republic of Iran is underway.
- Critiqued the Obama administration for giving yet another chance to the regime, noting that the Bush administration had met its representatives 28 times to no avail.
Rajavi has rightly called for a stronger U.S. policy toward Tehran, explaining in a recent interview that "The West can stop the nuclear program if it stands up to the mullahs."
Sadly, standing up to the mullahs has never been American policy. Jimmy Carter meekly accepted their rule. Ronald Reagan sent them arms. To win their favor, Bill Clinton put the MEK on the terrorism list. George W. Bush did not foil their nuclear weapons project. And Barack Obama hopes to gain concessions from Tehran on the nuclear weapons issue by distancing himself from the dissidents.
Instead, flux in Iran should invite boldness and innovation. It is time, finally, for a robust U.S. policy that encourages those yelling "Death to Khamene'i" and that takes advantage of the hyperbolic fear the MeK arouses in Iran's ruling circles (first step: end the MeK's preposterous listing as a terrorist organization).
As Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Republican of Michigan) notes, regime change in Iran becomes the more urgent if the mullahs will soon deploy nuclear weapons. The vital and potentially victorious movement building both on the streets of Iran and in the halls of Europe better represents not only Western values but also Western interests.
Juan Cole: Washington and the Iran Protests ... Would they be Allowed in the US?
Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (6-24-09)
President Barack Obama had this to say about the Iran crisis on Tuesday:
' First, I'd like to say a few words about the situation in Iran. The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days.
I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.
I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran's affairs.
But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.
The Iranian people are trying to have a debate about their future. Some in Iran -- some in the Iranian government, in particular, are trying to avoid that debate by accusing the United States and others in the West of instigating protests over the elections.
These accusations are patently false. They're an obvious attempt to distract people from what is truly taking place within Iran's borders.
This tired strategy of using old tensions to scapegoat other countries won't work anymore in Iran. This is not about the United States or the West; this is about the people of Iran and the future that they -- and only they -- will choose.
The Iranian people can speak for themselves. That's precisely what's happened in the last few days. In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice. Despite the Iranian government's efforts to expel journalists and isolate itself, powerful images and poignant words have made their way to us through cell phones and computers. And so we've watched what the Iranian people are doing.
This is what we've witnessed. We've seen the timeless dignity of tens of thousands of Iranians marching in silence. We've seen people of all ages risk everything to insist that their votes are counted and that their voices are heard.
Above all, we've seen courageous women stand up to the brutality and threats, and we've experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets.
While this loss is raw and extraordinarily painful, we also know this: those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.
As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech.
If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people. It must govern through consent and not coercion.
That's what Iran's own people are calling for, and the Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. "
The thrust of these comments is to deplore the Iranian state's interference in the people's right of peaceable assembly and nonviolent protest, a right guaranteed in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is a good statement, insofar as it is phrased in terms that recognize an ongoing debate inside Iran and rejects US interference in Iranian domestic affairs.
But there are dangers here. Obama will likely be as helpless before a crackdown by the Iranian regime as Eisenhower was re: Hungary in 1956, Johnson was re: Prague in 1968, and Bush senior was re: Tiananmen Square in 1989. George W. Bush, it should be remembered, did nothing about Tehran's crackdown on student protesters in 2003 or about the crackdown on reformist candidates, which excluded them from running in the 2004 Iranian parliamentary elections, or about the probably fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in 2005. It is hard to see what he could have done, contrary to what his erstwhile supporters in Congress now seem to imply. As an oil state, the Iranian regime does not need the rest of the world and is not easy to pressure. So Obama needs to be careful about raising expectations of any sort of practical intervention by the US, which could not possibly succeed. (Despite the US media's determined ignoring the the Afghanistan War, it is rather a limiting factor on US options with regard to Iran.) Moreover, if the regime succeeds in quelling the protests, however odious it is, it will still be a chess piece on the board of international diplomacy and the US will have to deal with it just as it deals with post-Tiananmen China.
And, the more Obama speaks on the subject, even in these terms, the more he risks associating the Mousavi supporters with a CIA plot. Iranian media are already parading arrested protesters who are 'confessing' that 'Western media' led them astray. In nationalist and wounded Iran, if someone is successfully tagged as an agent of foreign interests, it is the political kiss of death.
The fact is that despite the bluster of the American Right that Something Must be Done, the United States is not a neutral or benevolent player in Iran. Washington overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 over oil nationalization, and installed the megalomaniac and oppressive Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who gradually so alienated all social classes in Iran that he was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1978-1979. The shah had a national system of domestic surveillance and tossed people in jail for the slightest dissidence, and was supported to the hilt by the United States government. So past American intervention has not been on the side of let us say human rights.
More recently, the US backed the creepy and cult-like Mojahedin-e Khalq (People's Holy Warriors or MEK), which originated in a mixture of communist Stalinism and fundamentalist Islam. The MEK is a terrorist organization and has blown things up inside Iran, so the Pentagon's ties with them are wrong in so many ways. The MEK, by the way, has a very substantial lobby in Washington DC and has some congressmen in its back pocket, and is supported by the less savory elements of the Israel lobbies such as Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson. I am not saying they should be investigated for material support of terrorism, since I am appalled by the unconstitutional breadth of that current DOJ tactic, but I am signalling that the US imperialist Right has been up to very sinister things in Iran for decades. A person who worked in the Pentagon once alleged to me that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was privately pushing for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. And Dick Cheney is so attached to launching war on Iran that he characterized attempts to deflect such plans as a "conspiracy." Given what the US did to Fallujah, it strikes me as unlikely that a military invasion of Iran would be good for that country's civic life. And there are rather disadvantages to being nuked, even by the kindliest of WASP gentlemen of Mr. Rumsfeld's ilk.
Moreover, very unfortunately, US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, 'protest zones' were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated 'protest zones' would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.
The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.
I applaud the Iranian public's protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a 'Homeland Security' national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word 'terrorist' around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.
American politicians should keep their hands off Iran and let the Iranians work this out. If the reformers have enough widespread public support, they will develop tactics that will change the situation. If they do not, then they will have to regroup and work toward future change. US covert operations and military interventions have caused enough bloodshed and chaos. If the US had left Mosaddegh alone in 1953, Iran might now be a flourishing democracy and no Green Movement would have been necessary.
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