[A-List] The Anti-Empire Report

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some things you need to know before the world ends

by William Blum

http://killinghope.org (May 03 2007)


If the United States leaves Iraq things will really get bad

This appears to be the last remaining, barely-breathing argument of that
vanishing species who still support the god-awful war. The argument implies a
deeply-felt concern about the welfare and safety of the Iraqi people. What else
could it mean? That the US military can't leave because it's needed to protect
the oil bonanza awaiting American oil companies as soon as the Iraqi parliament
approves the new written-in-Washington oil law? No, the Bush administration
loves the people of Iraq. How much more destruction, killing and torturing do
you need to be convinced of that? We can't leave because of the violence. 
We can't leave until we have assured that peace returns to our dear comrades 
in Iraq.

To better understand this argument, it helps to keep in mind the following about
the daily horror that is life in Iraq:

It did not exist before the US occupation.

The insurgency violence began as, and remains, a reaction to the occupation;
like almost all insurgencies in occupied countries - from the American
Revolution to the Vietcong - it's a fight directed toward getting foreign 
forces to leave.

The next phase was the violence of Iraqis against other Iraqis who worked for 
or sought employment with anything associated with the occupation regime.

Then came retaliatory attacks for these attacks.

Followed by retaliatory attacks for the retaliatory attacks.

Jihadists from many countries have flocked to Iraq because they see the war
against the American Satan occupiers as a holy war.

Before the occupation, many Sunnis and Shiites married each other; since the
occupation they have been caught up in a spiral of hating and killing each other.

And for these acts there of course has to be retaliation.

The occupation's abolishment of most jobs in the military and in Saddam
Hussein's government, and the chaos that is Iraqi society under the occupation,
have left many destitute; kidnapings for ransom and other acts of criminal
violence have become popular ways to make a living, or at least survive.

US-trained, financed, and armed Iraqi forces have killed large numbers of people
designated as "terrorists" by someone official, or perhaps someone unofficial,
or by someone unknown, or by chance.

The US military itself has been a main perpetrator of violence, killing
individually and en masse, killing any number, any day, for any reason, anyone,
any place, often in mindless retaliation against anyone nearby for an insurgent
attack.

The US military and its coalition allies have also been the main target of
violent attacks. A Department of Defense report of November 2006 stated:
"Coalition forces remained the target of the majority of attacks (68%)". {1}

And here is James Baker, establishment eminence, co-chair of the Iraq Study
Group, on CNN with Anderson Cooper:

Cooper: And is it possible that getting the US troops out will actually lessen
that violence, that it will at least take away the motivation of nationalist
insurgents?

Baker: Many people have argued that to us. Many people in Iraq made that case.

Cooper: Do you buy it?

Baker: Yes, I think there is some validity to it, absolutely. Then we are no
longer seen to be the occupiers. {2}

In spite of all of the above we are told that the presence of the United States
military has been and will continue to be a buffer against violence. Iraqis
themselves do not believe this. A poll published in September found that Iraqis
believe, by a margin of 78 to 21 percent, that the US military presence is
"provoking more conflict that it is preventing". {3}

Remember that we were warned a thousand times of a communist bloodbath in
Vietnam if American forces left. The American forces left. There was never 
any kind of bloodbath.

If the United States leaves - meaning all its troops and bases - it will remove
the very foundation, origin, and inspiration of most of the hate and violence.
Iraqis will have a chance to reclaim their land and their life. They have a
right to be given that opportunity. Let America's deadly "love" embrace of the
Iraqi people come to an end. Let the healing begin.

_____

Some people love guns. But why should the rest of us be targets?

The massacre at Virginia Tech is the kind of tragedy that invariably produces an
abundance of sociological and psychological speculation, comparisons to the
violence of American foreign policy, and many other cliches, platitudes, and
truisms; a lot of ground I prefer not to walk over again.   Except this one
thing, as knee-reflex as it is: We should ban all guns. It should be illegal to
possess any functioning firearm; those who already possess them should be
obliged to turn them in for a payment. No halfway measures here. We went beyond
halfway measures many massacres ago.

Last year in England and Wales (population 54 million), where there are tough
restrictions on gun ownership, there were fifty shooting deaths. In Washington,
DC (population half a million), there were 137 fatal shootings. {4}

Nearly twice as many people commit suicide in the fifteen US states with the
highest rates of gun ownership than in the six states with the lowest rates of
gun ownership, although the population of the two groups is about the same. Guns
are used in only five percent of suicide attempts, but more than ninety percent
of those attempts are fatal, whereas drugs account for nearly 75 percent of
suicide attempts, but the fatality rate in those attempts is less than three
percent. {5}

Those who question the correlation between ease of gun ownership and death by
gunfire should try to imagine what the Virginia Tech killer would have done if
he hadn't been able to purchase guns as easily as he had. What would he have
used? A club? A knife? He would have been jumped and disarmed after attacking
his first victim in the classroom.

The only exception to the gun ban should be for law enforcement. That doesn't
include the military. If the American military did not have any weapons this sad
old world would be a much safer and nicer place, for American soldiers as well
as their victims. So let's perform an act of euthanasia and pull the plug on 
the military's life-support machine. Let's convert the Pentagon into affordable
housing. We won't have to worry about anti-American terrorists because our
un-armed forces would not be going all over the world and creating them by the
thousands with bombings, invasions, overthrows of governments, occupations,
support of repressive regimes, and similar charming activities, all of which
require vast amounts of firearms and bombs. Yes, the bombs would become history
as well.

Oh, one more thing. Before the gun ban goes into effect, a posse should be
formed to go and shoot up the National Rifle Association's headquarters. 
The NRA loves to cite the Second Amendment to the Constitution: "A well
regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right 
of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". What militias, 
in the 21st century, are the NRA gun-lovers thinking of? And what state? I'd
guess that most NRA members are fervent libertarians who hold a lot of paranoia
and no love for any state. It's time for another constitutional amendment to
abolish the Second Amendment, like the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments
changed the Constitution to abolish slavery. {6}

Because of Virginia Tech's location and the fact that several of the victims
came from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where I live, the Washington
Post gave book-length coverage to the event. I found myself choking up, at times
with tears, repeatedly, each day as I read the stories of the stolen young lives.
Two days after the massacre, the Supreme Court issued a ruling making certain
abortions illegal. This led to statements from celebrating anti-abortion
activists about how the life of "unborn children" would be saved, and how the
fetus is fully a human being deserving of as much care and respect and legal
protection as any other human being. But does anyone know cases of parents
grieving over an aborted fetus the way the media has shown parents and friends
grieving over the slain Virginia Tech students? Of course not. If for no other
reason than the parents choose to have an abortion. Does anyone know of a case
of the parents of an aborted fetus tearfully remembering the fetus's first words,
or high school graduation or wedding or the camping trip they all took together?
Or the fetus's smile or the way it laughed? Of course not. Because - to those
who support abortion on demand - the fetus is not a human being in a
sufficiently meaningful physical, social, intellectual, and emotional sense. 
But the anti-abortion activists - often for reasons of sexual prudery,
anti-feminism, religion (the Supreme Court ruling derived from the five Catholic
members of the court), or other personal or political hangups - throw a halo
around the fetus, treat the needs and desires of the parents as nothingness, 
and damn all those who differ with them as child murderers. Unfortunately, with
many of these activists, their perfect love for human beings doesn't extend to
the human beings of Iraq or Afghanistan.

_____

A conservative's idea of a random act of kindness is cutting the capital gains
tax

Michael Scheuer is a former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin Laden
unit. He's also the author of Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden,
Radical Islam and the Future of America (Potomac Books, 2006), and Imperial
Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Potomac Books, 2005). In last
month's edition of this report, in my section on Washington's war on terrorism,
quoting from the Sydney Morning Herald I wrote that when Scheuer was told that
the largest group in Guanta'namo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We
absolutely got the wrong people". This sentiment is in keeping with the point I
was making, that a significant portion of "terrorists" held in US custody are no
such thing.

But then the editor of DissidentVoice.org, which reprints my report each month,
received a letter from Mr Scheuer, saying in part: "Regarding the quote
attributed to me in Mr Blum's column. I do not recall ever making such a
statement, and if I did make it, I spoke mistakenly. I have no reason to believe
that any one in the Guantanamo Bay facility does not deserve to be there. I have
objected to the facility only because it forces the United States to be subject
to the pacifist whinings of human rights advocates and EC (presumably European
Community) officials".

I replied to Scheuer, asking him if his remark - "I have no reason to believe
that any one in the Guantanamo Bay facility does not deserve to be there" -
referred only to "the present prisoners, those held as of the time of your
alleged remark in February 2006, or any and all of the prisoners who've been
held there the past five years? If the last, that would be quite a remarkable
statement to make given all that we know about the very faulty criteria employed
in deciding who to send to Guantanamo, a portion of which I discuss in my
article. Even if you're referring to the first or second time period, your
statement would still be most surprising. How could you possibly know that? 
Or even hazard a guess? As I mention, even the prison commanders didn't believe
that."

Scheuer has not yet replied. I had also wondered about his use of the term
"pacifist whinings". Then, in a review of former CIA Director George Tenet's new
book, Scheuer takes his former boss to task as well as Bill Clinton for not
attacking Afghanistan enough in the late 1990s to kill Osama bin Laden and his
followers, accusing the former president of "cowardly pacifism". Scheuer writes:
"I did not - and do not - care about collateral casualties in such situations,
as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's men had
brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. 'You can't kill everyone', he would
say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does
nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families
would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality
among the Clinton team." {7}

It should be noted that in 1993 Clinton ordered the firing of missiles into Iraq,
killing and injuring many, as retaliation for Iraqi involvement in a plot to
assassinate former president George H W Bush who was due to visit Kuwait. (Both
the plot and the Iraqi involvement in it should be filed away under "alleged".)
In 1998 the president ordered the firing of several missiles into Afghanistan
and Sudan in an attempt to take out suspected terrorists and their facilities,
instead hitting "collateral casualties". And the following year, Clinton,
wearing a NATO mask, dropped bombs on the people of Yugoslavia for 78
consecutive days.

But by Michael Scheuer's standards, Bill Clinton was a pacifist.

If it's difficult for you pacifists - of the whining, cowardly, or any other
variety - to appreciate or understand the mind or heart or soul of a Michael
Scheuer.　If you think he's out of touch with reality, amoral, and scary, take a
look at a recent get-together between George W and a group of neo-conservatives.
Compared to these guys, Scheuer should quickly seek out the nearest Friends
Meeting House. And the rest of us should seek out another country. Or planet.

Salon.org reported on the February 28 luncheon between Bush and the leading
lights of American neo-conservatism. You have to read the whole thing, but
here's a snippet: "The most critical priority [of the neo-cons] is to convince
the President to continue to ignore the will of the American people and to
maintain full-fledged loyalty to the neoconservative agenda, no matter how
unpopular it becomes. To do this, they have convinced the President that he 
has tapped into a much higher authority than the American people - namely,
God-mandated, objective morality - and as long as he adheres to that (which is
achieved by continuing his militaristic policies in the Middle East, whereby he
is fighting Evil and defending Good), God and history will vindicate him ...
Finally, the neoconservatives left Bush with the overarching instruction -
namely, the only thing that he should concern himself with, the only thing that
really matters, is Iran." {8}

Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world that it was
unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to
educate and liberate? And that it had God on its side?

Will America's immune system be able to rid itself of its raw-meat conservatives?

_____

The biggest lie of all is never mentioned

Bill Moyers' recent documentary "Buying the War" does an excellent job of
showing how the preeminent members of American mainstream journalism failed
woefully in their duty to the public and their profession by not properly
questioning the great falsehoods of the Bush administration in the leadup to the
invasion of Iraq. The media did not expose the fallacies of White House claims
that Saddam Hussein possessed all manner of weapons of mass destruction, that he
had close working ties to Osama bin Laden and/or al Qaeda, that an Iraqi agent
had met with Mohammad Atta, the reputed leader of the 9-11 hijackers, and other
stories put forth by the Bush-Cheney gang to create the belief that Saddam
Hussein was a threat to the United States.

But the biggest lie of all about the war in Iraq, one that I've discussed before
in this report, one that the mainstream media never pursue, one that Moyers
doesn't mention in his documentary, but one that has been clearly implied during
five years of news and discussions, is this: If in fact Saddam Hussein had
possessed all those terrible weapons he would have been a threat to use them
against the United States, even without provocation. This is so preposterous
that I doubt that even Bush or Cheney held such a belief. To attack the United
States, Hussein would have had to be imbued with nothing less than an
irresistible desire for mass national suicide. I do not know of any evidence
that he was insane.

Nor the leaders of Iran. But that counts for nought when the empire knows that
you are a non-believer in the empire.

Moreover, having exposed the administration's stated excuses for war as
fraudulent, the documentary inexplicably presents no discussion whatsoever 
as to what might have been the real reasons for the war, though the program
undoubtedly left many viewers wondering just that - "So why did they lie so much?
To cover up what?"   Most TV journalists tend to tread rather lightly in a field
full of mines labeled "oil" or "Israel" or "defense corporations". {9}

_____

Democracy Now!

I'm a fan of Amy Goodman and her morning radio program "Democracy Now". 
It consistently covers a wide range of issues of interest to the progressive
community and undoubtedly recruits many new members to the cause. But perhaps
their range is too wide to expect the Democracy Now! staff to have done all of
their homework on all of the issues. Cuba is one such issue where the program
tends to stumble. The latest example was on April 26. In the opening news report,
Amy informed us: "In Cuba, six dissidents have been released from prison nearly
two years after they were jailed. The Cuban government had drawn international
condemnation after the jailings in the summer of 2005."

That was it. CBS or NPR couldn't have followed the State Department script any
better. There must be many thousands in American prisons who could be called
"dissidents" for having at one time or another expressed serious disgust with
what the US was doing in some part of the world and who had taken part in a
protest; or done the same in regard to some vital economic, civil rights, or
civil liberties issue at home. "Oh", you declare, "but they were not imprisoned
because of their dissidence". Yes, that's true about almost all of them. 
But it's also true about almost all Cuban prisoners.

To grasp this, one must first understand the following: The United States is to
the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and
much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban
exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of
life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11 2001. 
Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and
financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana
through the American Embassy (the United States Interests Section). Would the US
government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or
engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the
United States? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a
great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al
Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents'
ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents.


NOTES

{1} http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2006/iraq-security-stability_nov2006.htm)

{2} CNN, December 6, 2006

{3} World Public Opinion Poll, conducted by the Program on International Policy
Attitudes, University of Maryland, "The Iraqi Public on the US Presence and the
Future of Iraq" (September 27 2006), page 5

{4} Washington Post (April 24 2007), page 18

{5} Study by Harvard School of Public Health, Associated Press (April 16 2007)

{6} The title of this section and some thoughts on the Constitution are taken
from an excellent article on the subject of gun control by Jonathan Safran Foer
in the Washington Post (April 22 2007), page B5

{7} Washington Post (April 29 2007), page B1

{8} Glenn Greenwald:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/14/roberts_luncheon/print.html),

{9} Transcript:  http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.html

_____

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)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at
http://www.killinghope.org and 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://killinghope.org/aer45.htm


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp