[A-List] The Anti-Empire Report

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some things you need to know before the world ends

by William Blum

http://www.killinghope.org (January 09 2006)


The Sign Has Been Put Out Front: "Iraq Is Open For Business".

We read about things done and said by the Iraqi president, or the Ministry of
this or the Ministry of that, and it's easy to get the impression that Iraq is
in the process of becoming a sovereign state, albeit not particularly secular
and employing torture, but still, a functioning, independent state. Then we read
about the IMF and the rest of the international financial mafia - with the US
playing its usual sine qua non role - making large loans to the country and
forgiving debts, with the customary strings attached, in the current instance
ending government subsidies for fuel and other petroleum products. And so the
government starts to reduce the subsidies for these products which affect almost
every important aspect of life, and the prices quickly quintuple, sparking wide
discontent and protests. {1} Who in this sovereign nation wanted to add more
suffering to the already beaten-down Iraqi people? But the international
financial mafia are concerned only with making countries meet certain criteria
sworn to be holy in Economics 101, like a balanced budget, privatization,
and deregulation and thus making themselves more appealing to international
investors.

In case the presence of 130,000 American soldiers, a growing number of sprawling
US military bases, and all the designed-in-Washington restrictive Coalition
Provisional Authority laws still in force aren't enough to keep the Iraqi
government in line, this will do it. Iraq will have to agree to allow their
economy to be run by the IMF for the next decade. The same IMF that Joseph
Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist
at the World Bank, describes as having "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina
and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake". {2}

On top of this comes the disclosure of the American occupation's massive
giveaway of the sovereign nation's most valuable commodity, oil. One should
read the new report, "Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq's Oil Wealth" by
the British NGO, Platform. Among its findings:

This report reveals how an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is
on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no
public debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority
of Iraq's oilfields - accounting for at least 64% of the country's oil reserves
- for development by multinational oil companies.

The estimated cost to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194
billion, compared with leaving oil development in public hands.

The contracts would guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates
of return of 42 to 162 percent. The kinds of contracts that will provide these
returns are known as production sharing agreements. PSAs have been heavily
promoted by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior
figures in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. However, PSAs last for 25-40 years, are
usually secret and prevent governments from later altering the terms of the
contract. {3}

"Crude Designs" author and lead researcher, Greg Muttitt, says: "The form of
contracts being promoted is the most expensive and undemocratic option available.
Iraq's oil should be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not foreign oil
companies." {4}

Noam Chomsky recently remarked: "We're supposed to believe that the US would've
invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were
pickles and lettuce. This is what we're supposed to believe." {5}



Reconstruction, Thy Name Is Not The United States

The Bush administration has announced that it does not intend to seek any new
funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in
February. When the last of the reconstruction budget is spent, US officials in
Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government
will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work
yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to
Iraq's 26 million people. {6}

It should be noted that these services, including sanitation systems, were
largely destroyed by US bombing - most of it rather deliberately - beginning in
the first Gulf War: forty days and nights the bombing went on, demolishing
everything that goes into the making of a modern society; followed by twelve
years of merciless economic sanctions, accompanied by twelve years of often
daily bombing supposedly to protect the so-called no-fly zones; finally the
bombing, invasion and widespread devastation beginning in March 2003 and
continuing even as you read this.

"The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq", Brigadier General William
McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters
at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This
was just supposed to be a jump-start". {7}

It's a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing
nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking
the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And
afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the damage.

On January 27 1973, in Paris, the United States signed the "Agreement on Ending
the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam". Among the principles to which the
United States agreed was that stated in Article 21: "In pursuance of its
traditional [sic] policy, the United States will contribute to healing the
wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina".

Five days later, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North
Vietnam in which he stipulated the following: (1) The Government of the United
States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam
without any political conditions. (2) Preliminary United States studies indicate
that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar
reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over five
years.

Nothing of the promised reconstruction aid was ever paid. Or ever will be.

During the same period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as
relentlessly as was Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were over, these nations,
too, qualified to become beneficiaries of America's "traditional policy" of zero
reconstruction.

Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There goes
our neighborhood. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled
Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to
the US Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for the damage caused by Operation
Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the American
invasion and bombing). They got just nothing, the same amount the people of
Grenada received.

In 1998, Washington, in its grand wisdom, fired more than a dozen cruise
missiles into a building in Sudan which it claimed was producing chemical
and biological weapons. The completely pulverized building was actually a
major pharmaceutical plant, vital to the Sudanese people. The United States
effectively admitted its mistake by releasing the assets of the plant's owner
it had frozen. Surely now it was compensation time. It appears that nothing has
ever been paid to the owner, who filed suit, or to those injured in the bombing.
{8}

The following year we had the case of Yugoslavia; 78 days of round-the-clock
bombing, transforming an advanced state into virtually a pre-industrial one; the
reconstruction needs were breathtaking. It's been 6 1/2 years since Yugoslavian
bridges fell into the Danube, the country's factories and homes leveled, its
roads made unusable, transportation torn apart. Yet the country has not received
any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the
bombing campaign, the United States.

The day after the above announcement about the US ending its reconstruction
efforts in Iraq, it was reported that the United States is phasing out its
commitment to reconstruction in Afghanistan as well. {9} This after several
years of the usual launching of bombs and missiles on towns and villages,
resulting in the usual wreckage and ruin.



Oh Those Quaint Tribal Customs

On December 7, the "All things considered" feature of National Public Radio
had a report about the "honor" killing of a young woman in Iraq who had been
kidnaped. She had to be killed by her family because of the mere possibility
of her having been raped by her captors; the family had to protect its honor;
a much loved and admired daughter she was, but still, her cousin shot her dead.
It had nothing to do with Islam, the story said, it was a "tribal custom".

This report was followed immediately by Colonel Gary Anderson, US Marines
retired, arguing that the United States has to stay the course in Iraq. He's
concerned that bin Laden et al will think the United States is "a quitter". He
says that leaving now would "dishonor" the Iraqis and he's apparently prepared
to continue killing any number of the very same Iraqi people to preserve their
honor. Anthropologists report that this seems to be some kind of "tribal custom"
in Anderson's country.

Presumably it doesn't bother the good colonel that a large majority of the
informed people of the world think the United States is a murderous imperialist
power - he's probably proud of that - but a "quitter"? Over his dead body. Or
someone's dead body.



Yankee Karma

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the
border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: How
to/should we block the flow into the country? granting amnesty, a guest-worker
program, whether the immigrants help the economy, immigrants collecting welfare,
policing employers who hire immigrants ... on and on, round and round it goes,
for decades. Once in a while someone opposed to immigration will question
whether the United States has any moral obligation to take in these Latino
immigrants. Here's one answer to that question: Yes, the United States has a
moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in
their homelands made hopeless by American interventions. In Guatemala and
Nicaragua Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely
committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador the US played a major role in
suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser
extent played such a role in Honduras.

The end result of these policies has been an army of desperate people heading
north in search of a better life, in the process of which they have added to
Mexico's poverty burden, inducing many Mexicans to join the trek to Yanquiland.

Although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the
years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to
Mexico's police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own
people's aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the
impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington's North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US corn into
Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land and into the immigration
stream north.



Hmmm, Perhaps We Really Are In Danger Of A Biological Attack ...
But Not From al Qaeda

A week after the massive anti-war demonstration in Washington on September 24,
it was revealed that deadly bacteria had been detected at several sites in
the city, including by the Lincoln Memorial, situated very close to the
demonstration. Biohazard monitors installed at various sites gave positive
readings on the 24th and 25th for the bacterium francisella tularensis, which
causes the infectious disease tularemia, a pneumonia-like ailment that can be
acquired by inhaling airborne bacteria and can be fatal. This biological agent
is on the "A list" of the Department of Homeland Security's biohazards, along
with anthrax, plague and smallpox. {10}

My first thought upon reading about this was: Those bastards, they'd love to
punish people who protest against the war. There's nothing I would put past them.

My second thought was: Oh stop being so paranoid. The news report cited federal
health officials saying that the tularemia bacterium can occur naturally in soil
and small animals.

My third thought came more than a month later, when I happened to be reading
about a US Army program of the 1960s which carried out numerous exercises
involving aircraft spraying of American warships with thousands of servicemen
aboard. A wide variety of chemical and biological warfare agents were used to
learn the vulnerabilities of these ships and personnel to such attacks and to
develop procedures to respond to them. Amongst the CBW agents used were
pasteurella tularensis (another name for francisella tularensis), which, said
the Department of Defense later, causes tularemia, can produce very serious
symptoms, and has a mortality rate of about six percent. {11}

These tests in effect used members of the armed forces as guinea pigs, without
their informed consent and without proper medical follow-up. This was a scenario
enacted on numerous occasions during the Cold War, and subsequently as well,
involving literally millions of service members, with frequent harmful effects,
including at least several deaths, military and civilian. It's a good bet that
on some future date we'll learn that similar tests are still going on as part of
the war on terrorism. I conclude from all this that if our glorious leaders are
not particularly concerned about the health and welfare of their own soldiers,
the wretched warriors they enlist to fight the empire's wars, how can we be
surprised if they don't care about the health and welfare of those of us
standing in opposition to the empire?



Civil Liberties Holds An Important Place In The Heart
Of The Bush Administration's Rhetoric.

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of
America and, I repeat, limited", said President Bush about the National Security
Agency's domestic spying on Americans without a court order. {12}

Let's give the devil his due. It's easy to put down the domestic spying program,
but the fact is that the president is right, it is indeed limited. It's limited
to those who are being spied upon. No one - I repeat, no one - who is not being
spied upon is being spied upon.

On the other hand, there have been legal scholars, such as former Supreme Court
Justice Lewis Brandeis, who have felt strongly that all wiretapping by the
government should be considered an unconstitutional search under the Fourth
Amendment, which, we should remember, states: "The right of the people to be
secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but
upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But, as
someone has pointed out, he was talking about citizens watching the government,
not the reverse.



Notes

{1} Los Angeles Times, December 28 2005, page 1; Agence France Presse,
December 23 2005

{2} Johann Hari, "Why Are We Inflicting This Discredited Market Fundamentalism
on Iraq?" The Independent (UK), December 22 2004; yes, 2004, this has been a
work carefully in progress for some time.

{3} http://www.crudedesigns.org/

{4} Interview with Institute for Public Accuracy (Washington, DC),
November 22 2005

{5} Interview by Andy Clark, Amsterdam Forum, December 18 2005, audio and text
at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11330.htm

{6} Washington Post, January 2 2006, page 1

{7} Ibid

{8} William Blum, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
(Common Courage Press, 2004), pages 134-8

{9} Washington Post, January 3 2006, page 1

{10} Washington Post, October 2 2005, page C13

11} Part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), Department of Defense
"Fact Sheets" released in 2001-2, "Shady Grove" test;
http://www.deploymentlink.osd.mil/current_issues/shad/shad_intro.shtml
See also Associated Press (October 9 2002), The New York Times (May 24 2002)
page 1

{12} Associated Press, January 2 2006



William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
(Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
(Common Courage Press, 2004)


Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6@xxxxxxx
with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but
that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate
it if the website were mentioned.

http://www.killinghope.org

Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/