[Peace] News notes 2006-03-12

[Carl Estabrook]

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	Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism,"
	for the March 12, 2006, meeting of AWARE, the
	"Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort" of Champaign-Urbana.
	(Sources provided on request; paragraphs followed
	by a bracketed source are substantially verbatim.)
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	"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional
	questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would
	place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." --Thomas Jefferson

[1] A day after returning to the U.S., after another long term as bureau
chief in Baghdad, John Burns of The New York Times said on Bill Maher's
Friday night HBO program that he now feels, for the first time, that the
American effort in Iraq will likely "fail." Asked if a civil war was
developing there, Burns said, "It's always been a civil war," adding that
it's just a matter of extent ... Burns said that he and others
underestimated this problem, feeling for a long time that toppling Saddam
Hussein would almost inevitably lead to something much better. [E&P]

[2] The death of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in his prison
cell near The Hague leads the corporate media in US to repeat the USG's
propaganda account of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.  NPR,
typically, headlined its coverage, "The Death of a War Criminal" -- IOW
they assumed the outcome of the trial by the U.N. international war crimes
tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.  The LAT says
that "Serbs are also denied the opportunity to move out from under their
former leader's tainted shadow."  (I wonder what we'll do about Clinton
and Bush's "tainted shadows"?)
	Milosevic was the *sixth* war crimes suspect from the Balkans to
die at The Hague. A week earlier, convicted Croatian Serb leader Milan
Babic died -- it was said by suicide -- in the same prison. He had been a
star prosecution witness against Milosevic. [AP] In a letter to his lawyer
last week, Milosevic claimed that he was being poisoned.

[3] The NYT describes a classified Army report showing that Saddam Hussein
was more concerned about potential coups and Shiite rebels than the U.S.
Army ... even after the U.S. had begun invading. [Slate]

[4] The WP says a "referral bonus program" has helped the Army National
Guard post its best recruiting numbers in 13 years.  A current member of
the National Guard gets $2,000 dollars for convincing a new recruit to
sign up: the National Guard says it will raise its membership by 14,000
this year. [Slate]

[5] Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called on the Senate to [censure]
President Bush for approving domestic wiretaps on American citizens
without first seeking a legally required court order. "This conduct is
right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors,"
said Feingold, D-Wis. ... Censure, essentially a public disapproval by the
Senate as a whole, has only been applied to one president, Andrew Jackson,
in a politically-charged move the Senate historian's office describes as
"unprecedented and never-repeated tactic." ... "We, as a Congress, have to
stand up to a president who acts like the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution were repealed on Sept 11, [2001]," Feingold said. [ABC]

[6] North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of stepping up
preparations to attack and said that justified the communist state's
nuclear weapons program.  North Korea's Minju Joson newspaper cited
planned drills with South Korea and other U.S. military activity in the
Asia-Pacific region as evidence Washington was preparing to invade. A day
earlier, the North put off Cabinet-level talks with the South to protest
the joint military exercises. The weeklong exercises later this month will
involve 20,000 American troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean
soldiers. [AP]

[7] Bush headlined the annual Gridiron Club [press dinner] Saturday night
... Bush said that while pundits speculate about whether Cheney or White
House political adviser Karl Rove run the government, it's another person
who actually pulls the strings. Cheney, Bush said, tells him what to do
but Cheney's wife, Lynne, tells the vice president what to do. "Lynne, I
think you're doing a heck of a job. Although I have to say you dropped the
ball big time on that Dubai deal," he said ... Lynne Cheney was the
Republican speaker and opened by saying that because she came late in the
program "the hunting jokes have been used." The Democratic speaker was
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama... [AP]

[8] [On Iraq] the President is scheduled to deliver a series of three
speeches this month that aim at persuasion, a departure from his usual
hallmark of repetition. Bush plans to describe U.S. efforts to develop new
defenses against insurgents' improvised explosive devices and give
town-by-town case studies of how his strategy for victory in Iraq is
playing out ... One Bush adviser sees political promise for the President
in a nuclear peril. "Certainly, there's going to be a serious showdown on
Iran," he said. "He's very relevant on that, and that may help his numbers
a little bit." [Newsweek's observation, after quoting this bit of cynical
scare-mongering for election purposes, is that] Through the challenges,
the President has kept his human touch. [Newsweek]

[9] According to an article by Farah Stockman in the Boston Globe, the US
is prepared for "a long struggle" against Iran. An Office of Iranian
Affairs was recently opened inside the State Department and an
"embassy-in-exile" was just opened in Dubai. The main purpose of the Dubai
installation will be to broadcast propaganda into Iran and to help
coordinate US-sponsored exile groups and black ops against Iran. [There is
a] the possibility of other countries like Russia or China heading off any
showdown between Tehran and Washington, [but] the US is now insisting that
the Iranian nuclear issue be brought to the UN Security Council without
delay... [MR]

[10] Iran's leaders have built a secret underground emergency command
centre in Teheran as they prepare for a confrontation with the West over
their illicit nuclear programme, the [right-wing UK newspaper] the Sunday
Telegraph [says]. The complex of rooms and offices beneath the Abbas Abad
district in the north of the capital is designed to serve as a bolthole
and headquarters for the country's rulers as military tensions mount.
[The source is sad to be the] National Council of Resistance of Iran
(NCRI) ... The same network [claimed] in 2002 that Iran had been operating
a secret nuclear programme for 18 years. [ST]

[11] The Bush administration's position on Iran is "all options are on the
table." A few days ago, DNC Chair Howard Dean, speaking at the annual
conference of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, responded by pushing
all the Democrats' chips into the middle of the table: "Under no
circumstances will a Democratic Administration ever allow Iran to become a
nuclear power."  Are either the Republicans or Democrats bluffing? My gut
feeling is that they are when it comes to a military response, but
definitely not when it comes to economic warfare which, as the Iraqi
people found out during the 90's, can be just as deadly as military
warfare.  We won't know for sure until the cards are turned over. But one
thing we do know. Those aren't chips they're playing for. They're human
lives. Hundreds, thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of Iranian lives,
and quite possibly the lives of Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, and who knows
who else. [lefti]

[12] Republicans gathered [in Memphis] this weekend [to listen] as a
parade of prospective presidential candidates wrestled with how much to
associate their campaigns with an increasingly unpopular sitting president
... John McCain [is] one of the clear front-runners for the 2008
nomination ... McCain's embrace of Mr. Bush was striking ... he condemned
the collapse of the port deal, saying that Congress had served Mr. Bush
poorly by not permitting a 45-day review of security concerns to proceed,
though he did not mention that the deal was sunk by fellow Republicans ...
McCain praised the president for his failed effort to rewrite the nation's
Social Security system, said he supported the decision to go into Iraq and
blistered critics who suggested the White House had fabricated or
exaggerated evidence of unconventional weapons in Iraq in order to justify
the invasion. "Anybody who says the president of the United States is
lying about weapons of mass destruction is lying," Mr. McCain said.
[atrios]

[13] Meanwhile, the previously undisclosed results from the study found
that cargo containers can be opened secretly during shipment to add or
remove items without alerting U.S. authorities. [americablog]

[14] The military is placing small teams of Special Operations troops in a
growing number of American embassies ... Senior Pentagon officials and
military officers say the effort is part of Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld's two-year drive to give the military a more active intelligence
role in the campaign against terrorism. But it has drawn opposition from
traditional intelligence agencies like the C.I.A., where some officials
have viewed it as a provocative expansion into what has been their turf.
Officials said small groups of Special Operations personnel, sometimes
just one or two at a time, have been sent to more than a dozen embassies
in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America ...Their assignment is to
gather information to assist in planning counterterrorism missions, and to
help local militaries conduct counterterrorism missions of their own,
officials said.  The new mission could become a major responsibility for
the military's fast-growing Special Operations Command, which was
authorized by President Bush in March 2004 ... The Special Operations
command reports to Mr. Rumsfeld, and falls outside the orbit controlled by
John D. Negroponte ... In Paraguay a year and a half ago, members of one
of the first of these "Military Liaison Elements" to be deployed were
pulled out of the country after killing a robber armed with a pistol and a
club who attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi ... the episode
embarrassed senior embassy officials, who had not been told the team was
operating in the country ... the soldiers were not operating out of the
embassy, but out of a hotel. Special Operations forces include the Army
Green Berets and Rangers, the Navy Seals, the Marines and special Air
Force crews that carry out the most specialized or secret military
missions ... Many current and former C.I.A. officials view the plans by
the Special Operations Command, or Socom, as overreaching... [NYT]

[15] The United States has signalled its apparent abandonment of the goal
of nuclear disarmament "for the foreseeable future" as it embarked on a
quest for a new generation of more reliable nuclear warheads. Although the
term "nuclear disarmament" quietly disappeared from the Bush
administration's vocabulary long ago, the statement by Linton Brooks, head
the National Nuclear Security Administration, marked the first time a top
government official publicly acknowledged a goal enshrined in key
international documents will no longer be pursued. "The United States
will, for the foreseeable future, need to retain both nuclear forces and
the capabilities to sustain and modernize those forces," Brooks stated
Friday as he addressed the East Tennessee Economic Council in the city of
Oak Ridge, which is home to a major nuclear weapons complex. [AFP]

[16] The administration of President George W. Bush is mounting an
unprecedented effort to crack down on leaks of government secrets, even as
it is vastly expanding the range of information deemed too sensitive to
share with the public. That twin effort has raised fears that the White
House may succeed in shutting off the flow of such information by
threatening to jail those who leak secrets and those who receive them ...
a novel interpretation of a 90-year-old espionage law [is] a test of
whether the administration can exercise new powers to shut off leaks that
have been severely embarrassing to the White House. In particular, the
Justice Department is aggressively trying to identify the sources for two
explosive news stories: the existence of secret Central Intelligence
Agency prisons in eastern Europe, and the National Security Agency's
domestic surveillance programme. [FT]

[17] Two Pace University students were questioned by Secret Service
officers after they heckled former President Clinton during a speech at
the school, a university spokesman said. The hecklers shouted "war
criminal" when Clinton answered a law student's question about the value
of working for peace ... The two students were asked to leave by local
police, then were questioned by the Secret Service... [AP]

[18] On March 1st in Annapolis at a hearing on [a] proposed constitutional
amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at
American University, was requested to testify. At the end of his
testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: "Mr. Raskin, my Bible
says marriage is only between a man and a woman.  What do you have to say
about that?" Raskin replied: "Senator, when you took your oath of office,
you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution.
You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the
Bible." The room erupted into applause.

[19] A reader writes: "Are you of the opinion that the occupation of Iraq
is all about oil? ... You seem to think it is about power and control of
the area, and not about oil per se ... You continually point out that the
US gets very little of its oil from the area."

Yes, I do think it's fundamentally about oil, but not just about oil.  I
like the remark that if Iraq's principal export were asparagus, we
wouldn't have the better part of the U.S. military there.

American foreign policy since the Second World War has been fundamentally
about oil.  U.S. insistence that it control Mideast energy resources is
the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, in Republican and Democratic
administrations alike.  But it's control, not access, that concerns any
USG.

You're right that the U.S. economy receives very little of its oil from
the Mideast -- about 10%.  U.S. domestic oil production supplies about 50%
of total U.S. consumption. Foreign sources provide the rest, primarily
Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, and several African countries.  The U.S.
imports more oil from west Africa than it does from Saudi Arabia.

But the Mideast has about two-thirds of world oil reserves.  If the U.S.
controls that, it controls its real economic rivals in the world -- Europe
and Northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, China).  The U.S. then has what
President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (it's a
bipartisan policy) called "critical leverage" over its competitors.  It's
been understood since the Second World War that if we have our hands on
that spigot the main source of the world's energy -- we have what early
planners called "veto power" over others. And of course U.S. planners want
the profits from that to go primarily to U.S.-based multinationals, and
back to the U.S. Treasury not to rivals.

But there were other reasons for invading Iraq, beyond the goal of
establishing permanent bases in the midst of the world's largest
oil-producing region.  First, Iraq was defenseless (unlike, say, North
Korea or Iran): contrary to to U.S. propaganda, Iraq was no danger to even
its nearest neighbors (as they recognized), much less to the U.S.
Second, it was a good place for U.S. planners to demonstrate the lengths
to which they would go to keep lesser states in line (as they did much
more murderously in Vietnam -- where no oil was at stake -- and even in
Serbia, on the edge of U.S. concerns).  And third, of course, 9/11 could
be used as an excuse, owing to the great government-media propaganda
machine, however irrational that was.  (Note that, while 72% of American
troops in Iraq think that the U.S. should get out within the year, 85%
said the U.S.  mission is mainly to retaliate for Saddam's role in the
9-11 attacks [sic] and 77% said they also believe the main or a major
reason for the war was to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.
Amazing.)

These points are developed a bit, particularly in regard to Israel, in a
comment that I wrote just before the invasion of Iraq:
www.counterpunch.org/estabrook02262003.html.

[20] Another reader, after seeing the foregoing, writes: "You mention
Vietnam by way of comparison.  I'm curious what you think was the REAL
reason why we went to war in Vietnam.  Do you think it was the stated
ideological reason (the 'domino theory'), or do you think there were other
factors?"

Vietnam was primarily a "demonstration war" -- i.e., the US wanted to make
it clear to states around the world that they were not to set up
governments without the American OK, especially if they wanted to use
their economic resources for the purposes of their own people and not
co-ordinate them with a world economy under general American control.
The propaganda cover was "fighting Communism" and the "domino theory" --
the notion that if one state fell to Communism, then others would, too.

Thus diplomatic historian Gerald Haines (also senior historian of the CIA)
introduces his study of the Americanization of Brazil by observing that
"Following World War II the United States assumed, out of self-interest,
responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system"  which does
not mean the welfare of the people of the system, as events were to prove,
not surprisingly.  The enemy was Communism. The reasons were outlined by a
prestigious study group of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National
Planning Association in a comprehensive 1955 study on the political
economy of U.S. foreign policy: the primary threat of Communism, the study
concluded, is the economic transformation of the Communist powers "in ways
that reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial
economies of the West." It makes good sense, then, that prospects of
independent development should be regarded as a serious danger, to be
pre-empted by violence if necessary.  That is particularly true if the
errant society shows signs of success in terms that might be meaningful to
others suffering from similar oppression and injustice.  In that case it
becomes a virus that might infect others, a rotten apple that might spoil
the barrel, in the terminology of top planners, describing the real domino
theory, not the version fabricated to frighten the domestic public into
obedience.

The previous paragraph is from Noam Chomsky, and it incidentally makes
clear that the US won the Vietnam War -- not indeed in the sense of
achieving its maximum war aims, but in the sense of forestalling what a
president of Amnesty International once called "the threat of a good
example."  After dropping several times the total ordnance used in World
War II on a peasant society and killing perhaps four million people, the
US was able to prevent any independent development in a formally liberated
Vietnam.  Today Vietnam begs for Nike factories.

The proximate cause for the war was the temerity of the South Vietnamese
in not accepting the government that we'd picked out for them after the
French withdrawal.  The Geneva Accords of 1954 provided for elections
throughout Vietnam in 1956, but the US prevented them -- because, as
President Eisenhower said, "Ho Chi Minh would have won."  The US set up in
the South the sort of government that it was then providing for states
around the world (e.g., Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954).  The rebellion against
this government grew to such proportions that in 1962 Kennedy launched a
full-scale invasion of the country.  Most of that vast tonnage of American
bombs was dropped on *South* Vietnam, our ostensible ally, because the war
was always against the people of Vietnam, who wouldn't follow our orders,
even as we made and un-made governments in Saigon.

When it became clear, after a decade, that the US couldn't impose a
quisling government, but that it had destroyed Southeast Asia beyond hope
of independent development, and the economic and political costs of the
war for the US were growing, the US could withdraw its troops.  The revolt
of the US expeditionary force in Vietnam was an unspoken cost that
required the Pentagon hastily to abandon the draft and institute a
"volunteer" military.

But note that Vietnam and Iraq are not much alike, despite the continuity
of American goals and policies: Iraq is not just a demonstration war,
although it is that, too.  Vietnam had no oil or other resources that the
US was determined to control, as Iraq does, so the US could withdraw from
Vietnam, its work of destruction done.  That's not possible for the US in
Iraq, where control of energy resources remains paramount.

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  C. G. Estabrook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
  ### <www.carlforcongress.org> <www.newsfromneptune.com> ###
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