Oh, it’s on!! November 19, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Culture, Film and Television, media, Media and Journalism, United States, US Media.31 comments
In this week’s Heat magazine Ziggy is featured on the frontpage making his position clear in no uncertain terms with a frontpage story headlined: ZIGGY: WHY I DUMPED CHANELLE.
Not much room for doubt there and for many of us a sigh of relief as at last the record is set straight.
But what is this? The frontpage story in this week’s Star magazine says: CHANELLE: WHY I DUMPED ZIGGY. (Yes, word for word.) Well, well, well. The plot thickens.
And yet another new twist. In a statement out tonight Heat magazine revealed that next week’s edition, hitting the newsagents tomorrow, ‘tells Chanelle’s side of the story.’
For the blissfully unaware, Ziggy and Chanelle (pictured looking depressed), were contestants on Big Brother 2007 who fell ‘in love’ during the programme and continued to go out after it ended until their relationship ended earlier this month with allegations by Ziggy that Chanelle was violent towards him. Things have reached such a point that their web domain http://www.ziggyandchanelle.co.uk/ is for sale, which bodes poorly for chances of reconciliation.
A quick googlenews search finds the story covered on RTE, Sky News, The Scotsman, Daily Star, the Sun, Now Magazine, the Daily Mail and the Athlone Advertiser with Kerry Katona claiming in Now Magazine that the whole relationship was a sham staged to get media attention.
Every indication is that this fight is going to run and run. You better believe, boys and girls, that it’s on. Oh yes.
In a completely unrelated development, Project Censored has released its annual list of the most important stories you didn’t see or hear anything about. Hundreds of stories are submitted to Project Censored every year by journalists and academics, or tracked by the organisation’s media research group to identify stories that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored in the US but that are important and valuable.
Happily, we don’t need such an organisation here. After all, I already know that Ziggy claims Chanelle used to ask to be hit in the face during sex. What more could I need to know?
Wise, sad and very depressing. Patrick Cockburn’s “The Occupation, War and Resistance in Iraq”. November 2, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Iraq, United States, US Politics.19 comments
Sometime around 2000 or 2001 I borrowed Patrick and Leslie Cockburn’s book on Saddam Hussein and Iraq from the Central Library in Dublin. “Out of the Ashes” was quite an influential volume on my thinking. Very very influential indeed. I’d never been overly fond of Saddam or the regime. But the litany of data on the sheer awfulness of the regime persuaded me that it was one state where a judicious push or shove might work wonders.
I’m not in any sense blaming the Cockburn’s. It was difficult to read about the varying pockets of resistance to the regime without feeling at least some degree of empathy with them. And the enormous cynicism of Saddam and the Ba’ath Party was also difficult to take.
I read a bit more and came to the conclusion long before the Iraq War that there might be a moral imperative to go in. Indeed I found the policies exercised by the US, UK and UN – no-fly zones, sanctions and such like – to be fairly vile since they merely bottled up the prospect for internal resistance. It seemed to me that those entities were in a sense collaborating with the regime and sustaining it through their efforts.
So I moved to a position that by 2003 I thought, with some qualifications, that an invasion would be a positive development in the context of what the Iraqi’s had suffered in the previous two decades at the hands of Saddam, the atrociously botched Gulf War and the sanctions. Stupid me.
Within minutes of the preliminary airstrikes I realised that ‘shock and awe’ was an empty and callous rhetorical flourish, nothing more. Within hours of the taking of Baghdad it was clear that there was an appalling and willful misunderstanding of the nature of Iraqi society and a clear abrogation of responsbility on the part of the US. The image of the statue toppling with a Stars and Stripes across the face said far too much about the ‘ownership’ of the invasion.
As the situation worsened over the following months and years it became ever more evident that we had entered an Orwellian era where leading politicians thought that simply because the word was uttered the word was somehow manifest. Despite those realisations and the clarity regarding the delusional prosecution of the war it took a long time to face up to this because the counter-narrative, so familiar to those of us on the left who took the line, regarding Saddam and the regime had one clear virtue, that it was demonstrably true. But it was only part of a greater truth and served to conceal as much as reveal the power relationships at play, the motivations extant and the dismal path of a war which was arguably avoidable. I look at Nick Cohen and others – people who I had enormous admiration for, and retain at least some still – and wonder how it is that they cannot perceive the literal catastrophe that the war and subsequent invasion and occupation was. Not merely in its global impacts but in the way that it impinged upon the Iraqi people, the way that it further injured them.
So it is chastening to read Patrick Cockburn’s “The Occupation, War and Resistance in Iraq” some seven years later and find myself equally seduced, to a degree, by the writing. Only this time it is easier to see in the text the warnings that I missed or ignored in the original book.
Cockburn doesn’t mince his words. He points to the savage stupidity and futility of a Saddam regime which waged war with Iran for years to no effect. A regime which was ‘thuggish’ in the true horrifying sense of that word, which used its own population as the ultimate human shield across a decade and robbed them blind during the same period. As Cockburn notes that Saddam, while not a fool, was a man with such an exaggerated sense of his own importance that he could easily commit acts of folly. And this he did. Time and again.
But Saddam’s follies, and terror’s, were in retrospect but a hideously extended foretaste of the disasters that were to follow.
From the beginning the invasion was founded on bad faith. The fantasies of expatriate Iraqi’s were taken as credible and factual information (in fairness, as Cockburn points out, many of those were victims of the regime and it was distance that undermined their understanding of the situation). Incorrect or overblown intelligence about WMDs. A bizarre and counterproductive strategy as regards the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds where both were played off each other right up to the last moment, with the US expecting the Turkish government to provide them access to Iraq from the North. For the Iraqi Kurds this was tantamount to an invasion. Yet Washington was oblivious to this. As Cockburn relates just prior to the war…
“the US made chillingly clear that it needed Turkey a lot more than it needed the Kurds… a statement [said]: ‘It is important now for our Kurdish friends to work with us and our ally Turkey’. An angry Kurdish official immediately placed his finger on this passage, pointing out to me the distinction between ‘friends’ and ‘allies'”.
Remarkably, despite enormous pressure ‘in the first of many unpleasant surprises for the US during the Iraq conflict, Turkey refused to allow America to invade Iraq from its territory’, thereby denying the US assistance from its main, indeed arguably its only, regional ally of any consequence. But the pattern now established was one where all considerations were brushed aside.
The occupation, the lack of preparation, the establishment of a near-colonial or imperial presence in Baghdad, the inability to provide even the basics of life which the Saddam regime had done successfully, the slide from anarchy to an analog of civil war. Each stage is detailed in sparse prose. The way in which a resistance – and Cockburn is no cheerleader of that ‘resistance’ – developed, as much because the US high on a rhetoric of anti-statism and free markets allowed a gap to open up until it became a gaping void in Iraqi society with nothing more than ideology to fill it again, as because of religious or nationalist dynamics.
And Cockburn makes a crucial point. The comparisons with Germany and Japan are inappropriate, not merely because the scale of devastation was actually lesser in both cases, and the inability of the US to impose any order much greater in the case of Iraq, but also because those were countries which had broadly been supportive to a greater or lesser degree with the pre-existing regime and when that regime was toppled there was a willingness to accept US and allied oversight. In Iraq, by contrast, the people felt no identification with the regime, and US rule by diktat rapidly assumed colonial or imperial overtones, as if the people were themselves being punished for Saddams crimes. This was most clearly expressed by the way in which the Iraqi army was disbanded and elections put on the long finger. Whatever legitimacy the Iraqi’s were willing to afford the US, and Cockburn notes that the general feeling prior to the war was that a US intervention would be a positive development, rapidly dissipated.
But it is the small details that he records which really point up the pointlessness and criminal ineptness of the occupation. Cockburn notes that during the Paul Bremer period he went to visit ‘a pleasant and previously well informed non-American diplomat. He claimed that, going by figures he had just received, the gasoline shortage had at last been sorted out. I pointed out mildly that I was a little late for our appointment because there were enormous traffic jams throughout Baghdad caused by long lines of vehicles, sometimes several miles long, queuing for gasoline’.
And this amongst other issues led to a rapid disillusionment with the US (note as well that following the truncated interventions in the first Gulf War the bona fides of the US were already suspect). As Cockburn says, ‘Why were US civil and military officials incapable of restoring public services in Baghdad, as the Soviet Army had largely succeeded in doing in Berlin in 1945? One reason was that the US administrative apparatus was more incompetent, bureaucratic, corrupt and divided than most Iraqi’s imagined…Iraqi’s did not see it that way. They had an exaggerated idea of the power of the US…’.
And this power was exercised almost at will, but in such a way as to demonstrate its limitations. At the reopening of the Iraqi National Museum – where severe looting had taken place in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the regime – shots rang out followed by sustained gunfire. Shooting in the air at a nearby funeral was followed by returned fire from US troops thinking they were under attack. Then an RPG was fired at a US Humvee. The crew withdrew firing at a surrounding crowd and in the process killing one man.
Cockburn isn’t blind to the incredible pressures that the US military faced. His argument is very much with their political masters – or at least a faction in Washington.
It is a bleak tome, and one which as with all good writing offers the opportunity to examine the world in a different light. Consider for example a point which Cockburn implicitly makes.
At first sight, under Saddam Hussein [Iraq] looked like an East European autocracy during the zenith of Communism. A brutal state machine appeared to monopolize power – but this was never the case. It was not just the Kurds who had the means to resist the power of government. When US troops began to spread out into Iraq after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Most people were armed, often with high-powered modern weapons. Hussein was reduced to introducing a buy back scheme in the early 1990s to reduce the number of heavy weapons on the streets.
I wonder if the reason Cohen et al made such an egregious error is that they did not recognise Iraq for what it was, or rather identified it as something quite distinct to the reality.
So much more comforting, and delusory, to simply map European history, whether Communist or Nazi onto Iraq. The conflict became suitably manichaean, became necessarily existential.
For me to move from the positions I held to one where it is impossible to regard the US presence as anything other than an impediment to progress in Iraq is quite a journey. It is one I never expected to make. But it is one which, now, looks as if it was all but inevitable. As I think I’ve noted before smiffy, who contributes here, has said that the liberation of Iraq in the way in which it was sold was never a serious possibility, not with this US administration, not in the then existing circumstances.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is scrupulously lacking in an ideological thrust bar a basic humanism, and all the better for it, and at a concise 200 pages or so it manages to encapsulate the grim history of the conflict. It continues right up to and including the surge and has certain points to make about the continuing reality, and illusion, of what we see reported there. The outlook remains grim, and is in direct contrast to the rose tinted view of Bartle Bull in Prospect.
Let me finish with an anecdote about a protest Cockburn saw in Baghdad. In a way it symbolises the combination of incomprehension, brute force and ignorance that characterised the invasion and the gulf between invader and occupied.
The march was led by recently disbanded Iraqi Army Officers who, now without pensions, income or any prospect for the future shouted “…we did not fight for Saddam, but we will fight for our children”. There were rhetorical threats about suicide attacks on US soldiers (this was very early in the occupation).
Cockburn says:
“It was an angry but by no means vengeful demonstrations which posed no threat to armed US soldiers… but as I walked away I heard the sound of shots. A US convoy had driven up and demonstrators had banged on the side of vehicles. A spokesman claimed that stones were thrown and the military police had reacted by shooting two officers dead and wounding two others”.
US Army speeds up expansion October 12, 2007
Posted by franklittle in The War On Terror, United States, US Politics.2 comments
Interesting little piece from the AP wires I came across on Mother Jones. US military leaders have announced that they intend to increase the size of the US Army by 74,000 extra soldiers by 2010. This is two years ahead of the planned deadline of 2012. To put that figure in context, this would give the US a standing ‘active’ army of 547,000, so we’re talking about an increase of somewhere in the region of 15%.
One of the initiatives they plan to take to assist this plan is to give members of the National Guard $2,000 per recruit for every person they bring into the active duty Army. Sign up a friend, get a two grand bonus. What a deal. Worth noting that the US military has add to offer better and better deals to maintain recruitment figures. I seem to recall a figure of 80,000 recruits a year simply to maintain existing troop commitments, but I could be wrong on that.
Yet at the same time as this expansion is being speeded up, General Petraeus, in charge of the ‘surge’ in Iraq, is claiming they will soon be able to reduce US troop strength in Iraq.
Maybe he’s lieing, and maybe they figure they’re going to need those troops elsewhere.
Pr(yi=1|xi) = 1/(1 + exp(-xi ß)) The formula for a ‘successful’ war October 6, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Iraq, Other Stuff, Pseudo-Science, Science, The War On Terror, United States, US Media, US Politics.1 comment so far
Some people cherish the fond belief that many of the more confusing problems of this life can be reduced to mathematical forumlae and equations. One of these seems to be Patricia Sullivan, a professor at the University of Georgia in the US, who has devised a mathematical equation to predict the outcome of conflicts based on a detailed analysis of 122 military interventions involving the US, Britain, China, Russia and France since 1945.
She claims that the correct outcome is predicted in 78% of the conflicts run through it. The chances of success for the US in Vietnam for example, come out at 22%. The Soviets had a 7% chance of success in Afghanistan and the invasion and overthrow of Saddam started off with a 68% chance of working. The forumlae gives the objective of routing the insurgency and the creation of a democratic Iraq a success rate of 26% with an estimated duration of ten years.
While accepting that there is some truth in the accepted wisdom that the relatively poor success rate of the major powers in foreign military interventions is down to a combination of lack of resolve and poor decisionmaking, Sullivan argues that the key determinant in many conflicts has been the attitude of the civilian population. Without ‘target compliance’ the chances of success through the application of overwhelming use of blunt force are pitiful. Decades after Vietnam and the notion that hearts and minds must be won over still seems not to have caught on.
“We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to stop supporting the insurgents,” she said. Otherwise, every time we kill an insurgent or a terrorist, they’re going to be replaced by others.”
Strangely, despite a level of understanding of mathematics that has floored me in calculating the tip in a restaurant, I’d figured all that out by myself. Also interesting that the notion that foreign powers have a right to intervene isn’t questioned, merely the efficiency with which it is done and whether the target population is compliant enough. Key words there being ‘target’ and ‘compliant’.
More of an oddity I suppose than a newsy story for the blog but easing myself in again after an unavoidable absence. Also, would be curious to know what the chances of a successful armed revolutionary uprising in Ireland would be. If ‘y’ is the number of copies of Socialist Worker sold in the country and ‘xi’ is the number of capitalist running dogs, how many ‘Pr’ (left-wing blog posts) are necessary to push us over the top?
9/11 and after. Six years on and still taking stock… September 24, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in 9/11.3 comments
Reading Donagh recently on Dublin Opinion I couldn’t help to some degree agreeing with him as regards 9/11. He writes:
One of the reason it continues to have an impact is because of the way people like Amis fixate on it as being a sort of massive schism. I don’t want to suggest that 9/11 is without historical significance, but if ever there was an event that has been misused as a weapon of mass distortion it is this one.
Watching a remarkable and quite moving program a week or two ago on Channel 4 about the Cornish born head of Security in Merril-Lynch, Rick Rescorla [who had the basic sense to see the vulnerability of the WTC and planned for it so that most M-L employees made it out safely, although tragically not himself], it was difficult not to see how for a brief period the attacks could not be interpreted as epochal. Here were civilian airliners flown into one of the most prominent civilian buildings on the planet. The deaths of near 3000 people by that methodology in the space of a couple of hours was unprecedented in terms of pure terrorism.
Yet the physical irruption into the US that was 9/11 was thankfully relatively limited. The scale of the attack was considerable but open to disruption by counter-measures. This was a one-time tactic, not the ground work for a strategy. Civilian airliners would prove vastly more difficult to compromise after it and the scope for attacks on urban targets would become more limited. The murderous nature of the attack was something that could be combated by actually quite simple but increased security measures.
The psychological irruption into the US (and arguably the Western) psyche was, by contrast, much greater. At one fell swoop 9/11 provided the back story for an intransigent and unthinking global policy prosecuted by the US. It transformed a rather indolent and isolationist US administration (remember the US surveillance aircraft forced to land by the Chinese?) into an activist hegemon. Projects that had been left on the back burner, such as dealing with Iraq, suddenly assumed an importance out of all significance to their real or potential threat.
The nature of the discourse entered into by the US administration was one which was, over time, utterly counterproductive as regards their ultimate aims. The ‘War on Terror’ is a sound bite of such inherent self-limitation that it is difficult to believe that they thought it would be of any serious utility.
I say that because despite everything it is clear that the response immediately after 9/11 by the US was sufficient to break up or disrupt the Al Quaeda networks then extant. But the shift towards war with Iraq changed the nature of the conflict. Suddenly one “War on Terror” became subsumed in another, entirely different sort of war.
Eric Hobsbawm once noted, rather grimly, that the US could sustain many multiple attacks like 9/11. Of course no society would want to, and I wouldn’t wish it on any society either. But that ability to sustain remains a basic fact. And a crucial point is that AQ was, and one hopes, remains, in no position to mount such attacks. In fact it is hard to envisage any non-state organisation being able to do so. It took years of planning and large numbers of personnel to bring 9/11 to fruition. On the day the attacks were not entirely successful. Knowledge of what was happening was dispersed rapidly, so rapidly that it seems fairly safe to suggest that the fourth aircraft was prevented from carrying out it’s objective precisely because the passengers knew of their likely fate and worked to prevent that outcome.
But that narrative, not one of complacency – because AQ was and remains a threat – but instead one of a proportionate and clear-headed analysis of the situation was ignored. Rather as a British Labour aide considered 9/11 to be a good day to conceal bad news, so the US administration saw an opportunity to change the world ( Incidentally was there ever a more dishonest and self-serving thesis than that of Norman Podhoretz – quoted by Donagh – when he suggests that Saddam was supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Whatever else Saddam was, and he was a despicable near-genocidal dictator, he was not entirely stupid and the idea that he would hand out WMDs like candy to groups which he could have no control over is an absolute nonsense).
And that is an even more central point. 9/11 itself, for all it’s horror – and it was an horror – was limited. It’s historic significance considerably less than was thought at the time. It was a catalyst, but not one that led to an inevitable outcome. What was historic was the course determined by the US administration. That was the hinge upon which our contemporary history would swing for better or for worse.
War with an enemy that is broadly quiescent is frustrating. AQ itself subcontracted terrorist attacks to affiliates and emulators. There have been, and no doubt will be, attacks around the globe. But to date there has had the raw visceral power of 9/11. Madrid and Bali were also terrible crimes. But they lacked – and I am conscious of the need to be sensitive here – a visuality that 9/11 had. The scale and the backdrop of the latter was greater, more immediate, more novel. I was reminded of an article in Atlantic Monthly by Richard A. Clarke (national coordinator for security and counterterrorism for Clinton and Bush) who of all people should know something about these matters, written some years ago. In it he presented an alternative history from 2005 to 2012 which saw waves of attacks by AQ that took various forms, most of them remarkably simple. The upshot was a militarized US society, civil rights leaching away, locked down by massive security at transport, communication and economic hubs slowly losing power and influence. And the worrying aspect was that it was all too feasible. Clarke, no fan of the Iraq invasion saw it as the possible catalyst for much worse events. He pointed to a basic mistake, that in the intervention in Afghanistan – one supported by the UN – there was insufficient effort made to take Osama. But to return to the visceral power of 9/11, few of the attacks he writes about retain that sort of immediacy. A horror is no less a horror because it is difficult to see, but nevertheless the form it takes does shape responses to it.
That we have had no reprise, even in limited form, suggests to me that Al-Queda was always more limited in capability than was presented after the fact. And as noted above, while it remains a threat, it has been unable to operate at the level seen as plausible by Clarke.
9/11 was gestural terrorism. There was no clearly defined objective [By the way OBL’s latest screed is quite fascinating in that regard. He presents a sort of generalised, and then sometimes overly specific, complaint against a range of issues ranging from the banal to the extraordinary]. Indeed one might argue that it was entirely counterproductive on any rational political or military standard. Had Iraq not taken place the enormous global sympathy that followed in the aftermath might have been retained. Yet even with Iraq it is hard to see global attitudes to the US – as distinct this administration – as substantially worse than prior to that event.
And simply put the world hasn’t changed much either for better or for worse. I think that one might view it as largely similar to the assassination of JFK. Something that at the time was seemingly earth shaking, but as time moved on appears less so. The system reasserted itself. History was torn from its course for a period, but the broader historical, social and political dynamics continued to shape the future as they largely would have anyway. Vietnam would most likely still have happened. Ironically some social progress might have been more difficult to implement in the area of equal rights but they would have arrived eventually.
With 9/11 we can see, from this remove, as Clarke notes, that the single greatest shift was the Iraq War. Yet as we move towards the end game there the most likely outcome appears to be a situation where a regime of greater or lesser authoritarianism – perhaps politically not dissimilar to the authoritarianism we see in China will take power attempting to consolidate the state of Iraq as a single unitary entity. This is far from the outcome promised – it’s arguably as bad or worse, if one factors in the sectarian violence, than the Saddam regime. The waste of human life on all sides is prodigious and profligate and the awful pointlessness of the exercise is best exemplified by the latest round of ‘non-partisan’ ads spots on US television arguing that to withdraw now would make a mockery of the sacrifice of those who fell or were injured in the past four or five years. I’ve heard similar arguments from dissident Republicans as regards the Good Friday Agreement and I find them no more convincing. Whatever the individual sacrifice, and it has been considerable on the part of many, to argue more sacrifice is necessary because of past sacrifice seems to be a counsel of desperation. Unless the outcome is significantly better than the present there is little point in continuing. And after all the promises made, and broken, who would or could see the risk of progressing as worthwhile? Timothy Garton-Ash argued last week in the Guardian that to withdraw now would be folly, despite the original sin of the invasion. On the one hand I tend to agree, but then looking closely at the situation outside of a genuinely international effort I cannot see how the current players can operate in good faith, or more importantly be regarded as acting in good faith. Perhaps the situation will improve. That seems to be the thinking in Washington (while London gently steps away from the fray). Slim hopes upon which to construct a new and better world.
And it is a dispiriting example for the left, because it suggests that transformative projects are perhaps much more difficult than we like to imagine (indeed I need hardly reiterate the point about how former and current Trotskyites of various positions appear to loom large in the meta-history of the War). If the US couldn’t do it in a society crying out for stability and progress then what hope for the tiny groups that seek change in largely content societies? Realistically, for all the huffing and puffing of the past three or four years, the world has largely been a bystander, taken on journey which it has little or no control of – and the greatest irony of all is that the architects of the interventions subsequent to 9/11 despite their seeming omnipotence in the months afterwards are clearly also lack any capability to control this journey.
Robert Scheer on KCRW’s ‘Left, Right and Centre’ often uses the phrase ‘people must make their own history’. He believes that Iraqi’s should have been, and should continue to be, given the opportunity to shape their own society. When I first heard him use it it infuriated me, but as time has progressed I think I finally understand where he is coming from, and to a degree I think he is right – albeit with certain caveats. But it’s worth noting that in a fundamental way people are shaped by history. Sociopolitical dynamics feed into traditions and beliefs that direct behaviour. The inability to recognise how those dynamics would play out in Iraq is a part of the continuing tragedy of 9/11.
Quislings, Iraq, Neil Clark and Nick Cohen… and how decency isn’t the preserve of the “Decent Left”. August 17, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in 9/11, Iraq, The War On Terror.32 comments
Being otherwise preoccupied I missed this article by Neil Clark on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site (incidentally splinteredsunrise has a post on a similar issue and it’s well worth reading the link to Johann Hari, who while irritating provides at least some sort of analysis on the pro-war left). And in a way I’m glad I missed it first time around because I think the response to it is very revealing and demonstrates some aspects of the left that the “Decents” have tended to ignore in the past.
What does Clark suggest? Under the heading Keep these quislings out he proposes that:
A group of pro-war bloggers is playing a prominent role in a campaign to grant asylum to Iraqis who have been working as translators for the British forces in Iraq. Not all who back the campaign were in favour of the war, but some of its most strident supporters are.
It seems the Iraqis in question live in real fear of their lives in their newly “liberated” country. Surely, this can’t be right. Weren’t we told five years ago by the same pro-war bloggers that the Iraqi people were simply baying for a US/UK invasion, and that the “liberators” would be greeted with bouquets of flowers and cucumber sandwiches? Now the cakewalk brigade is telling us those who collaborate with – oops, sorry, work for – the liberators may not actually be the most popular guys and gals in town.
One has to love the ‘It seems’… and indeed the way in which the translators suddenly become meat to an argument.
Then there is the contention that:
If more Iraqis had followed the example of the interpreters and collaborated with British and American forces, it is likely that the cities of Iran and Syria would now be lying in rubble.
This, to my mind is just an inversion of the neo-con argument. Here a people is asked to assume superhuman attributes and qualities in order to fulfill a political objective. For the neo-cons that ran along the lines of ‘Iraqi’s will pay the price of invasion and occupation in order to establish democracy and forestall the spread of Islamism across the Middle East’. For Clark it runs along the lines of the Iraqi’s sacrificing themselves on the alter of the resistance in order to forestall the US from waging war across the Middle East. Both ask others to do the heavy lifting. Both ignore the human cost implicit in their viewpoint.
Still, if we want to get to the heart of the argument consider one of his parting shots:
Before you rush to condemn Iraqis who feel ill disposed towards the interpreters, ask yourself a simple question: how would you view fellow Britons who worked for the forces of a foreign occupier, if Britain were ever invaded? History tells us that down through history, Quislings have – surprise, surprise – not been well received, and the Iraqi people’s animosity towards those who collaborated with US and British forces is only to be expected.
Isn’t this the know-nothing school of political and historical analysis? The use of the word Quisling – is so specific as to render the point he makes meaningless. Is he seriously suggesting that an interpreter for the US or UK military is a Quisling, i.e. akin to a fascist who directly aided and abetted in the occupation of a democratic country by a National Socialist regime? Well actually he doesn’t exactly because he suggests that they are also “self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain”. Now Quislings may well have been mercenary, but the truly appalling aspect of them was that they were for the most part entirely sincere in their beliefs.
No mention of the fact that Iraq is effectively an imperialist creation in the first place, a crushing together a host of differing nationalities, at least one of which – the Kurds – has achieved something close to de facto nationhood. Are Kurds collaborators against ‘Iraq’ because they accepted US help against the Saddam regime throughout the 1990s? It’s a nonsensical proposition, particularly from a self-described ‘democratic socialist’. Then looking at the Sunni-Shia, we see how the phrase ‘Iraqi peoples’s’ loses all meaning. Iraq was a profoundly divided society, remains a profoundly divided society and in all likelihood is going to be a profoundly divided society into the foreseeable future. In that context, one of submerged civil war throughout much of it’s recent history the concepts of ‘Quisling’ and ‘collaborators’ become moot.
This is before we even examine the motivation of those who would work with the US and UK in this situation. No mention of the dictatorship prior to the invasion and how this might just conceivably colour the view of an Iraqi who sought a democratic future and mistakenly put his or her trust in the US. No mention of the host of personal, political and other reasons a person might decide to assist, perhaps even to ameliorate the Coalition presence.
It is this lack of balance, nuance or depth that makes me think that this is this simply rhetoric, some handy stick to beat Bush and Blair and beyond that is representative of a personalised conflict between Clark and pro-war bloggers. Because it is difficult not to see the hyperbole, the stretching or ignoring of fact as part of an argument which has little relation to actuality.
Which means that this is effectively a toytown political analysis, in other words an analysis produced simply to berate one’s political opponents ignoring the actuality of the impact such an analysis has. And Clark isn’t shy about the implications of his thesis:
If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.
For those of us who came up through parties with even the most tenuous connection to Republicanism and Socialism the glibness with which Clark makes such pronouncements are redolent of the certainties of another era. One of the worst periods of the conflict in the North was when the list of those who were viewed as legitimate targets was extended out to encompass cleaners, sub-contractors and others. The reason was obvious. The security forces were reasonably well protected, but these ancillary groups were not, so they provided a convenient proxy. But the North wasn’t Vichy France. The IRA wasn’t the Resistance. And many of those cleaners and sub-contractors belonged to a Unionist community which had a national identification with the British Army and the British state. To attack them was to de facto attack that community. That was a tactic almost nihilistic in it’s stupidity.
What Clark proposes is no better, perhaps even worse. Iraq isn’t Vichy, those fighting the US and UK and the Iraqi government aren’t the Resistance. And that government isn’t a Vichy government either. The situation is far too complex for a simplistic template drawn from the Second World War to be applied to this. Take the Mahdi Army. By Clark’s lights they must be effectively part of the Resistance since they fought the US some years back…but wait, they have allied MPs in Parliament and they haven’t fought the US since. Doesn’t that make them collaborators as well? Or what of the Sunni parties, some of whom have links to the insurgency. Collaborators or Resistance? Both or neither?
Where does he draw the line? Where could anyone?
And what of the left, of which he is nominally a member…
What of the Trade Unions who have fought the US backed oil law? Does not their engagement make them ‘collaborators’? Some in the ‘resistance’ appear to think so to judge by the continuing attacks on them. What of the Iraqi Communist Party which suffered grievously under Saddam and has engaged with but been entirely critical of the US and UK? They too have been under assault. What of ordinary Iraqi’s who voted in flawed democratic processes. Does not their engagement mark them down for the bullet or the sword?
I mentioned that the response was very interesting. Almost overwhelmingly it was negative, and this from those, as I would expect, who were against the war in the first place. The basic retort was that these are human beings, that the US and UK, whatever Clarks protestations have a duty of care even just as employers to people who they used and this must be upheld. Nick Cohen – who sadly has been something of an inverse of Clark, has argued that the left has lost its bearings. I see no sign of that. I see a left which is confused on the issue and unsure as to the best possible way forward. One that was bitterly conflicted over the war, and rightly so. But I also see a left which is innately decent and while not prepared to support the war is prepared to support those who are victims of it from whatever quarter.
Decency, and a common humanity isn’t the preserve of the “Decents”. Far from it. In some respects it is the aversion to epochal transformative projects which symbolises a more decent approach than that pursued by the keyboard warriors. Their view of all on the anti-war left as being appeasers or cheerleaders for the most revanchist elements of Islamist thinking is simply incorrect. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.
Cohen is wrong because he wants everyone to accept that there was no principled argument against the invasion and war. Everything he writes is a justification of that position, even as the war and its aftermath are now clearly a complete disaster. And it’s not that there were no principled arguments in favour, simply that cooler heads on the anti-war side were more broadly correct in their analysis. Clark is wrong because he wants to implicitly put all to the fire whose actions might suggest that the situation is more complex than just the result of an US/UK intervention. But Clark is representative of very very few people. Far far fewer than Cohen and others on the ‘decent’ left would like to suppose and also far far fewer than Clark might like to think.
WOLVERINES! August 1, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Cuba, Culture, media, Uncategorized, United States, US Media, US Politics.35 comments
“Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years… Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade… Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall… Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil… Mexico plunged into revolution… NATO dissolves. United States stands alone.”
One of the landmark films of American Cold War paranoia has just been released as a Collectors Edition DVD box set. Red Dawn was one of those 1980s teen films but anyone expecting a John Hughes like Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles would be sorely disappointed.
Described at the time as one of the most violent films ever made Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C Thomas Howell, Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson are a group of High School kids who band together to take on the Soviet-Cuban invasion force that has seized control of their Colorado town at the beginning of World War III. Grey and Swayze would be re-united for Dirty Dancing, a film worshipped by women of all ages, but very, very different.
The film opens, after the terrifying warning of the consequences of letting the Green party into power are laid out in the voiceover above, when Soviet paratroopers take over the high school displaying a fiendish ability to land tanks and armoured vehicles by parachute. Calling themselves ‘Wolverines’ after their High School sports team, a group of students hide out in the mountains emerging to wreak bloodthirsty havoc on the cruel occupation forces.
The film is actually quite brutal. The guerilla heroes are shown executing unarmed Soviet prisoners on a number of occasions and in one scene executing one of their own who was forced to turn informer. All but two of the kids are killed by the end of the film in ever more violent ways.
The film also serves as heavy-handed propaganda for the US Second amendment, with the point repeatedly, and none too subtly, made that without their guns the plucky young kids wouldn’t have been able to take on the Soviets. In one scene, US federal legislation requiring gun-owners to be registered is used by the dastardly Soviet-Cuban occupiers to track down patriots. The warning is clear. If you back gun control, you want Fidel and the Russkies in your town.
The film is to a large degree beyond parody, which has not prevented many from trying. But it iconic in the US right to such a degree that the codes for the operation that led to Saddam’s capture in Iraq were taken from the film. Amazon reviewers of the film, without a trace of irony, regularly refer to how balanced and realistic it is.
If you ever get a chance to see it on TV and it does occasionally crop up every now and again, take the opportunity. You can learn more about the American right by watching Red Dawn and understanding that millions of people take it seriously than you can from all the theoretical papers the left’s ever written. Wikipedia has a good piece on it here that also explains the political and theoretical background for how the Soviets and Cubans could pull off the invasion. Part of the plan was for Cuban Special Forces to infiltrate the US through the Mexican border as illegal immigrants. Oh, you don’t support tougher border controls? You just want to let the Cubans walk all over us again do you?
Outstanding stuff.
GO WOLVERINES!!!!!!
An All-American hero August 1, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Trade Unions, United States, US Politics.5 comments
Ninety years ago today six masked men broke into a boarding house in Butte, Montana. At the time miners for the Anaconda Copper Company in Butte were on strike following a fire in the mine that took place in June of that year that led to the loss of 168 lives in what is still the worst hard rock mining accident in US history.
Frank Little, a strike organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), was savagely assaulted in his room before being dragged outside. The gang tied Little to the rear of a car and dragged him for several miles out of the town to a nearby railway bridge where he was tortured and eventually hanged.
Little was born in 1879 and with Native American ancestry on one side of his family and Quaker on the other, often wryly observed that he was the only ‘real’ American in the IWW. He became a hard rock miner when he was 21 and joined the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) quickly becoming an organiser. While working in the mines he was involved in an accident and lost one of his eyes.
When the WFM helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 Little went on to spend the next 12 years organising workers in mining, forestry, transport and agricultural sectors. He was also to the fore in successful Free Speech Fights conducted by the IWW in Fresno, Missoula and Spokane. These followed decisions by an increasing number of City Councils in the US to ban public speaking or assembly in order to combat growing numbers of radical socialist and labour organisations.
To combat these laws, IWW activists used civil disobedience, exercising their right to free speech and being jailed as a result. As Little pointed out, “The best method of repealing a bad law is to make the officials enforce it.” Jails and prisons were quickly filled to such a point that in many cities, the Councils were forced to reverse their decisions but not before many activists, including Little, spent months in prison in harsh conditions. He was sentenced to 30 days hard labour in Spokane for reading the Declaration of Independence on a street-corner and to 28 days solitary confinement in Fresno with a diet of only bread and water for similar offences.
By 1914 Little was a member of the General Executive Board of the IWW and as such was a regular target of company violence. He was kidnapped on several occasions during which time he was beaten and threatened but never desisted in his work.
In 1917, along with much of the United States, the IWW was split on the issue of American involvement in World War One. Although adamantly opposed to the war, there was reluctance within the union to oppose the draft in a climate of fanatical jingoism. Little was passionately opposed to the war, arguing that it would mean the end of free speech, freedom of assembly and the slaughter of thousands of workers. Other IWW leaders argued that opposing the draft would invite such a level of government repression that the union would be destroyed and besides, organised labour in the US did not have the power to stop the war and should instead focus on organising workers in key areas of industry where strike action might impede the war effort. The union eventually agreed a compromise position using legal mechanisms of opposition to conscription.
During the debates, Little was involved in a labour dispute in Arizona and surprised the Governor who accused him of a lack of patriotism when he threatened to take strike action in the mines during wartime. Little, who was always the union’s most outspoken opponent of the war summed up his position in responding that “I don’t care what country your country is fighting. I am fighting for the solidarity of labour.”
Shortly afterwards, the IWW sent Little to Butte, Montana. He was in ill-health at the time suffering from a broken ankle inflicted during strike action in Arizona and a double rupture after a beating in El Paso. At the time, Butte provided 30% of the nation’s copper and 10% of the world’s. Due to the war in Europe it was working on a 24 hour basis with no increase in wages and atrocious conditions for workers.
When fire broke out in the Spectator Mine in June 1917, 168 men were trapped inside. Many bodies had their fingers ground down to the second knuckle clawing to escape through sealed escape hatches.
Little threw himself into the strike helping to raise money and organise workers claiming that through co-ordinated strike action workers could bring a halt to US involvement in the war.
“With 50,000 workers in the agricultural fields demanding their rights, with 46,000 men in the logging and lumber camps on strike, and with thousands of men in the copper mining camps of the US out, we will give the soldiers of this country so much to do at home in the next few months, they will have no chance to go to France.”
He was murdered less than two weeks later and no-one was ever arrested in connection with the crime. He was buried in Butte where his epitaph reads: ‘Slain by capitalist interests for organising and inspiring his fellow men’.
Despite his death, resistance by miners carried on sporadically until the Anaconda Road Massacre of 1920 when 15 strikes were shot, two fatally, by company agents. Shortly after, Federal troops were sent into the area and miners returned to work although all IWW members were blacklisted.
The labour struggle in the US, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is one that often seems to be better appreciated outside of America than in it. Certainly, standard US school textbooks tend to gloss over the struggle for an eight hour day, the Haymarket martyrs and Lawrence.
Little was one of the less well-known figures of the IWW period in part because in the Federal crackdown on union in 1917 his personal papers and effects were all destroyed. Part of the reason for this post is because most of the existing biographies of Little on the net are quite brief, including the one on the IWW’s own site though there’s a very good one here.
I had just read an article about Little in Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World when WBS invited me to start writing for the Cedar Lounge and so picked the name in recognition of a trade unionist who died for his beliefs and about whom little is remembered. On the 90th anniversary of his death, I thought some sort of post was fitting.
Failure of US surge poses questions for Irish left June 5, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Fianna Fáil, Greens, Iraq, Ireland, Irish Election 2007, Middle East, The War On Terror, United States, US Politics.add a comment
It was a bad weekend for US forces in Iraq. It was, as always, a worse weekend for the people of Iraq. Yet the deaths of 14 US soldiers in a couple of days in multiple attacks in different parts of the country is further proof that the ‘surge’ in US combat troops announced by Bush at the start if the year is failing.
According to figures from CNN last year, there were 814 fatalities among US troops serving in Iraq, averaging out at just almost 68 a month. In the first five months of 2007, there were 331 fatalities, 128 of them in May alone, an average of almost 92 a month.
According to a US military assessment of the situation in Baghdad, where the surge in US troops was to be initially focussed with the objective of taking control of the city before moving into other parts of the country, they control fewer than one third of the city’s neighbourhoods. In 311 of the 457 neighbourhoods, troops have either not begun operations or continue to meet ‘resistance’.
While there is yet another US combat brigade to deploy to Iraq, the surge has, as it’s opponents at the time pointed out, merely provided more and more targets for an increasingly militarily adept insurgency which does not seem to be dependent on individual leaders for it’s survival. High-profile insurgent leaders arrested or killed have seen little reduction in attacks.
So, what does this mean from our perspective? Firstly, increasing US casualties make a serious offensive against Iran more and more unlikely. As I pointed out here before, the US administration is finding it increasingly difficult to replace lost personnel and lost resources in Iraq, let alone open up a new front. This is not to eliminate the possibility of some sort of military action by the US against Iran through air-strikes or expanded raids, but the US does not have the capability to take on Iran at this point in time.
Secondly, the failure of the US surge brings into question Ireland’s complicity in it. Some of the hundreds of US troops killed in Iraq, and no doubt the thousands injured and maimed, must be among the 41,173 US troops that went through Shannon in the first four months of this year. While figures had been dropping throughout 2006, there was an increase of 5,000 troops in April (Sub-required) over the preceding month.
Shannon was, despite efforts by some, especially Roger Cole of PANA, to make the issue of Ireland’s involvement in the Iraqi occupation, not a feature of the recent election campaign though PANA did push a poll conducted for them by Lansdowne, which found 58% opposed the use of Shannon by the US military with only 19% in support.
Ahern, in his most recent statement (Sub-required) on the subject, ruled out categorically any change in the use of Shannon following the issue being raised by Independent TD Finian McGrath in terms of the post-election negotiations for government. While the Greens negotiate with Fianna Fáil, it is worth noting that none of the Green party TDs signed a letter organised by PANA during the election campaign giving a firm commitment not to participate in any government that allows Shannon to be used by US forces. Independents McGrath and Gregory signed it, as did four of the five Sinn Féin TDs, three of Labour’s and a number of unsuccessful Green candidates.
So, where are we now? The situation in Iraq is worsening. Casualties, among both Iraqis and US forces, are increasing steadily. Iraq Body Count said in March that on every available indicator the year March ’06 to March ’07 was the worst to date and indications are the fifth year of the war will give that claim a strong run for it’s money.
Irish complicity continues and, by facilitating the surge, arguably has increased. The election has made no impact on the ruling party’s determination to continue to support US forces in Iraq and the broad anti-war movement in Ireland is, as one might expect, split with the SWP’s Irish Anti War Movement on one side, Anti-War Ireland with more of an Anarchist flavouring on the other, and groups like PANA and the NGO Peace Alliance trying to keep in with everyone. Anti-war candidates and parties in the election either lost seats or made no gains.
So, what’s the next step?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 