Pirates and Emperors

Civilizing the Brutes in Afghanistan

Ethiopian Troops Leave Mogadishu

A glimmer of good news amidst the carnage: Ethiopian troops are finally leaving the capital of Somalia. The Ethiopian occupation has been incredibly brutal, overthrowing the only stable government the country had seen in decades and causing more than a million Somali's to become refugees. Though there has been fighting between al-Shabaab, the main resistance group, and other groups fighting the occupation, al-Shabaab controls the entire country outside Mogadishu, and now that the Ethiopians have left will probably take that quickly as well.

Thomas Friedman is a Raging Fucktard

A raging, monumental fucktard. I first became acquainted with Friedman in my capacity as a shelver at a library where I worked. I liked to read reactionary books while on the clock, because I was less likely to lose the track of the argument if interrupted than with serious books. I remember reading one of his books (the World is Flat, maybe?) and coming across the phrase "I thought the Second Intifada was a dumb idea." I closed the book, secure in my knowledge that this man could not possibly have anything useful to say.

Yet here we are, years later, and his pie-hole still flaps. Once more, Friedman has turned his gaze to the Palestinians. As is his wont, he has employed an asinine metaphor to explain the situation to us.

The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?”

650 Palestinians are dead, and Friedman is playing Max Bialystock.

That is, Gaza is a mini-version of three great struggles that have been playing out since 1948: 1) Who is going to be the regional superpower — Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iran? 2) Should there be a Jewish state in the Middle East and, if so, on what Palestinian terms? And 3) Who is going to dominate Arab society — Islamists who are intolerant of other faiths and want to choke off modernity or modernists who want to embrace the future, with an Arab-Muslim face? Let’s look at each.

The great struggle for hegemony over the middle east hasn't been between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It's been between the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The 1956 Suez War? England, France, and Israel against the United States. 1967? The US vs. the Soviet Union. The struggle for national self-determination in mideastern countries has, in the twentieth centuries, been waged in the context of imperialism. Egypt's rise under Nasser was less about Egyptian hegemony than Arab nationalism and anticolonialism. Erasing the history of colonialism in the Middle East allows Friedman to construct a ridiculous mythology in the rest of the column.

WHO OWNS THIS HOTEL? The struggle for hegemony over the modern Arab world is as old as Nasser’s Egypt. But what is new today is that non-Arab Iran is now making a bid for primacy — challenging Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran has deftly used military aid to both Hamas and Hezbollah to create a rocket-armed force on Israel’s northern and western borders. This enables Tehran to stop and start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at will and to paint itself as the true protector of the Palestinians, as opposed to the weak Arab regimes.

This first sentence is a typical Friedmanism. It is either nonsensical or utterly banal. The struggle for control over "the modern Arab world" was going on long before Nasser arrived on the scene. What was the Balfour Declaration but a means by which the British sought to assert their dominance over the Levant? Dating the struggle to Nasser simply allows Friedman to forget that hegemony requires a hegemon. On the other hand, one could be charitable and say that Nasser signaled the rise of the modern Arab world. In this case, Friedman is simply being banal and saying that the struggle over the modern Arab world started when the modern Arab world did.

“The Gaza that Israel left in 2005 was bordering Egypt. The Gaza that Israel just came back to is now bordering Iran,” said Mamoun Fandy, director of Middle East programs at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. “Iran has become the ultimate confrontation state. I am not sure we can talk just about ‘Arab-Israeli peace’ or the ‘Arab peace initiative’ anymore. We may be looking at an ‘Iranian initiative.’ ” In short, the whole notion of Arab-Israeli peacemaking likely will have to change.

Another typically Friedmanesque attack on rational thought. The man can barely contain his boundless euphoria every time he is allowed to utter something to the effect that "everything has changed!!!!!" In this case, it's a rather bizarre assertion. Iran has pointedly remained quiet on Israel's slaughter in Gaza. In fact, Lebanese politicians are saying that Iran has pledged that Hezbollah will not interfere.

CAN THE JEWS HAVE A ROOM HERE? Hamas rejects any recognition of Israel. By contrast, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, has recognized Israel — and vice versa. If you believe, as I do, that the only stable solution is a two-state one, with the Palestinians getting all of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab sectors of East Jerusalem, then you have to hope for the weakening of Hamas.

"Hamas rejects any recognition of Israel." Or is it the other way around? After all, as Avi Shlaim reminds us, it was Israel that rejected recognition of a Hamas-Fatah unity government in March of 2007. Moreover, what does recognition actually mean? Jonathan Cook argued lucidly in 2006 that recognition is a trap. Israel refuses to determine its borders, so recognition of the Israeli state means recognizing the territorial claims of a nebulous entity bent on seizing control of as much of the West Bank as possible. It means, in effect, abandoning those parts of the West Bank currently under Israeli control. So while avoiding "recognition," Hamas has repeatedly signalled its willingness to agree to peace within the pre-1967 borders.

Why? Because nothing has damaged Palestinians more than the Hamas death-cult strategy of turning Palestinian youths into suicide bombers. Because nothing would set back a peace deal more than if Hamas’s call to replace Israel with an Islamic state became the Palestinian negotiating position. And because Hamas’s attacks on towns in southern Israel is destroying a two-state solution, even more than Israel’s disastrous and reckless West Bank settlements.

Here we have nothing more than a paragraph of mythology. Death cult? As lenin points out in his excellent book, when you construct a subject as totally irrational, it means you don't have to aim very high in your explanations of its actions. And if Israel really wanted to stop the rockets, all they would have to do is agree to another ceasefire.

Israel has proved that it can and will uproot settlements, as it did in Gaza. Hamas’s rocket attacks pose an irreversible threat. They say to Israel: “From Gaza, we can hit southern Israel. If we get the West Bank, we can rocket, and thereby close, Israel’s international airport — anytime, any day, from now to eternity.” How many Israelis will risk relinquishing the West Bank, given this new threat?

Hamas has proven that it can and will stop rocket attacks, even in the context of a ceasefire whose agreements Israel refuses to honor. This talk of the West Bank is also bizarre. Given that, in the context of a ceasefire, virtually no rockets were launched from Gaza (those that were launched came from groups like Islamic Jihad, which Hamas has tried to stop), a similar approach would seem to be apt for the West Bank.

SHOULDN’T WE BLOW UP THE BAR AND REPLACE IT WITH A MOSQUE? Hamas’s overthrow of the more secular Fatah organization in Gaza in 2007 is part of a regionwide civil war between Islamists and modernists. In the week that Israel has been slicing through Gaza, Islamist suicide bombers have killed almost 100 Iraqis — first, a group of tribal sheikhs in Yusufiya, who were working on reconciliation between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and, second, mostly women and children gathered at a Shiite shrine. These unprovoked mass murders have not stirred a single protest in Europe or the Middle East.

This last sentence is one of the worst Friedman has ever penned. What on God's green earth does he expect a European protest against suicide bombing would accomplish? Who is the target of such an action? Global protests against Israel's slaughter have clear targets; they encourage whatever country they are in to side with Palestinian self-determination in the "international community." Suicide bombers don't exactly look for legitimacy the way Israel does. Basically, Friedman is wagging his finger at Europeans and asking them why they are not as ineffectually self-righteous as he.

Gaza today is basically ground zero for all three of these struggles, said Martin Indyk, the former Clinton administration’s Middle East adviser whose incisive new book, “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Diplomacy in the Middle East,” was just published. “This tiny little piece of land, Gaza, has the potential to blow all of these issues wide open and present a huge problem for Barack Obama on Day 1.”

Just one thing here. The provenance of Indyk's book title is Mark Twain's 1869 travelogue "Innocents Abroad" (clearly Indyk is a very creative man). "Innocents" was a fairly typical American travelogue of the nineteenth century, when the "holy land" became an object of wild fascination among Americans. However, Twain would soon became a principled anti-imperialist, who wrote scathingly about American and European efforts to dominate the globe. That the work of a sterling anti-imperialist such as Twain can be appropriated by an imperialist like Indyk is just gross.

Obama’s great potential for America, noted Indyk, is also a great threat to Islamist radicals — because his narrative holds tremendous appeal for Arabs. For eight years Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda have been surfing on a wave of anti-U.S. anger generated by George W. Bush. And that wave has greatly expanded their base.

No doubt, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are hoping that they can use the Gaza conflict to turn Obama into Bush. They know Barack Hussein Obama must be (am)Bushed — to keep America and its Arab allies on the defensive. Obama has to keep his eye on the prize. His goal — America’s goal — has to be a settlement in Gaza that eliminates the threat of Hamas rockets and opens Gaza economically to the world, under credible international supervision. That’s what will serve U.S. interests, moderate the three great struggles and earn him respect.

Dear god, when will it end?! Here, thankfully. Friedman concludes his piece on the typical imperial liberal note that they brought this on themselves. Friedman's tone is different, however, in that he apparently believes that Arab leaders enjoy being bombed by bellicose Westerners, since it allows them to stoke anti-Western feelings among "the masses." It's worth noting, in passing, the perversity of Friedman blaming Bush for hatred of the West, when he was an enthusiastic cheerleader for virtually all of Bush's major initiatives in the region.

Friedman is a clown, a court jester in the imperial thrown room. He deserved this.

Gordon Brown Channels William Westmoreland

"The enemy achieved none of his offensive goals in Vietnam. Indiscriminate mortar and rocket attacks on populated centers and costly attacks on remote outposts were all he could show for his highly propagandized military efforts. The Tet offensive had the effect of a "Pearl Harbor"; the South Vietnamese government was intact and stronger; the armed forces were larger, more effective, and more confident; the people had rejected the idea of supporting a general uprising; and enemy forces, particularly those of the Viet Cong, were much weaker."
-General William C. Westmoreland, June 30th, 1968, "Report on the War in Vietnam."

"It's been a hard year for our soldiers but it's been a much harder year for our enemies, who found they cannot defeat us."
-Gordon Brown, 2008

What can one do but laugh in the face of such relentless delusion? Especially when it emanates from the mouths of imperial overlords such as these. I'm reminded of the US military's constant invocation of the metaphor "there's a light at the end of the tunnel" in the months leading up to Tet. After Tet, it was widely remarked that the light was an oncoming train. Let's hope Messrs. Brown and co. catch theirs soon.

Indeed, there are some salient points of comparison between Vietnam immediately post-Tet and Afghanistan today. The Tet Offensive left the National Liberation Front in control of almost the entire South Vietnamese countryside. Regaining control of the countryside had been one of the key goals of the Americanization of the war from 1965 onwards, and had actually achieved some success in allowing the puppet government of South Vietnam to extract taxes and rent from rural areas. After Tet this progress was entirely reversed. A State Department working paper from March 3 reported that "our control of the countryside and the defense of urban levels is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels."

The occupiers of Afghanistan today face a similar situation in some respects. While there has been no decisive push among the neo-Taliban, they now have a permanent presence in 72% of the country. As in South Vietnam, the central government has been reduced to running administrative functions in the capital city.

The recent spate of extremely successful attacks on the occupiers' convoys is also reminiscent of Vietnam. During Tet, the NLF claimed to have successfully destroyed 1,800 American and ARVN aircraft. One NLF spokesperson explained the impact of this destruction of matériel on American forces:

The result in lowered U.S military efficiency was immediately noticeable...in lack of coordination between American and Saigon forces; lack of coordination between their own ground units and between ground units and air support; and frequently a total absence of support for platoons and company-sized units caught in our ambushes.

Although the Taliban have not yet been able to to directly destroy the instruments of American warmaking in this fashion, their consistent attacks on supply convoys are going to result in "horrendous problems" for the occupiers, according to defense analyst Ikram Sehgal.

Though the similarities between the military weakness of the occupiers in both Vietnam and Afghanistan are striking, the political differences between the periods could not be starker. In the US, the antiwar movement is extremely weak at the moment, having been without national expression for over a year. While opposition to the war remains high, there is simply no organized expression of it.

This lack becomes crucial when we compare it with 1968, when a highly visible and confident antiwar movement was able to make significant inroads into the American military, so that by the 1970s one could not speak of one without the other. Today we are far from this position. While Iraq Veterans Against the War does brilliant and courageous work, it is not a substitute for a broad, visible movement against the war.

There's also an important political difference between the Taliban and National Liberation Front. Though the Taliban is certainly less homogeneous than American news media would have you think, its reactionary social program significantly diminishes its ability to forge a united resistance. To take but the most obvious example, women played an extremely important role in the Vietnamese resistance. Read Nguyen Thi Dinh's excellent "Founding of the National Liberation Front in Ben Tre" to get an idea of this role. The Taliban simply cannot inspire this kind of support among Afghan women, and even if they did, they would not allow women to play the kind of role Nguyen Thi Dinh did.

Finally, the comparison with post-Tet Vietnam should not encourage passivity among those seeking to rebuild an antiwar movement. The United States did not leave Vietnam until 1975, and in those seven years it wrought as much destruction on the country as it had in the previous decade. Instead, the military weakness of the occupiers should heighten our activity. Obama's plan to send more troops will undoubtedly intensify the slaughter, but the Empire's current weakness should be seized upon.

In Defense of Throwing Shoes at One's Oppressor

It is a sign of the raging dementia of American political culture that I have to write this. In a half-way sane or civilized country, the spectacle of a journalist throwing his shoe at the man who orchestrated the butchery or dislocation of five million of the former's fellow citizens would not prompt ponderous ruminations on "free speech." It would be seen as one small expression of the loathing felt for that butcher all around the world.

Sad as it is to say, the eructations on free speech are preferable to the flatulence emitted by the right wing press. Ever quick on the uptake, the right wingnutosphere has hastily assembled itself under the banner of "This Could Never Have Happened Under Saddam!" Don't you understand? This is a sign of the freedom Iraq now has! Freedom from their homes, from their possessions, from their family members killed, and most important of all, free to throw shoes.

That the latter is not worth the price of the former is stunningly obvious to all except the kind of people who read Michelle Malkin's blog and think "well, she has a point." Yet it is worth recounting once again, if only briefly, the price Iraqis have paid for the spurious freedom they now enjoy. In all liklihood, over a million Iraqis have died because of the war. Between four and five million are displaced, and 50% of those are under age 12. The Pentagon sponsored sectarian warfare between Shi'as and Sunnis, and when such warfare burned itself out it declared victory.

Let us proceed by analogy. Suppose some civilization more advanced than our own, say Greece, invaded the United States, in the process killing 12 million Americans and making some 60 million into refugees. Suppose also that the Greeks extended to us their health care system, social safety net, and labor laws. Undoubtedly these would be tremendous advancements over the rights America workers currently have in any of these areas. However, I for one would not spend my time celebrating my new ability to get all my shots on time. I'd probably be doing something like this.

The Americans have given Iraqis nothing resembling this. Instead, we have given them a 50% unemployment rate. This is one part of Zaidi's story that I think is being overlooked. This man is an employed journalist. A dangerous job, yes, but a significantly better one than those available to most Iraqis. If the right wing thinks this guy is ungrateful, they should try talking to those who've been without work for five years.

That's enough about the right. More important to dispel, I think, is the liberal nausea at this act of violence. "There are more effective ways to make your point." "Two wrongs don't make a right." "It was irresponsible."

Of course there are more effective ways to fight the occupation. To my knowledge, no one has come out and said Zaidi's shoes struck a decisive blow for Iraqi freedom. However, as a symbolic gesture, it's worth pointing out that the shoes have aroused considerable support from Iraqis. Protests occurred today in demanding Zaidi's release in Sadr City, Najaf, and Basra. Al-Jazeera (Arabic) has reported that up to 100 Arab lawyers have already volunteered to defend him. The Iraqi government can issue all the shamefaced apologies it wants, but Zaidi's gesture was an expression of the contempt felt by millions.

File Under "Really Bloody Interesting:" The Architecture of Occupation in Kabul

The Archipelago of Fear - Charles Montgomery

Crash Course on Afghanistan

Now that school is approaching its winter break, I suspect a good portion of my readers will have some extra time on their hands. Why not brush up on your Afghan history?

Begin with Jonathan Neale's The Afghan Tragedy, written shortly after the Soviet invasion. It's very comprehensive on the social roots of Afghanistan's political system, which was determined primarily by the contest between the landowners (khans) and the central government. Neale's Afghanistan - The Horse Changes Riders is your next stop. This article continues the history until the time of the Soviet defeat. Forgive Neale's penchant for using the same anecdotes over and over again. The Long Torment of Afghanistan covers the period from the Soviet defeat to the American invasion, and is very helpful for differentiating the Taliban from other elements of the mujahideen. Finally, Afghanistan: The Case Against the Good War looks at the American invasion and rise of resistance to it.

If you're tired of Jonathan Neale, check out Nir Rosen's incredible reporting from Afghanistan, which reveals the deadly faultlines between different sections of the "neo-Taliban." Finally, Anand Gopal has an excellent article in Socialist Worker on "Who Are the Taliban?"

Engels on Popular Resistance: Or, Why Decentists Haven't a Leg to Stand On

They [the Chinese] kidnap and kill every foreigner within their reach. The very coolies emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, and fight for its possession, and, rather than surrender, go down to the bottom with it, or perish in its flames. Even out of China, the Chinese colonists, the most submissive and meek of subjects hitherto, conspire and suddenly rise in nightly insurrection, as at Sarawak; or, as at Singapore, are held down by main force and vigilance only. The piratical policy of the British Government has caused this universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners, and marked it as a war of extermination.

What is an army to do against a people resorting to such means of warfare? Where, how far, is it to penetrate into the enemy's country, how to maintain itself there? Civilization-mongers who throw hot shells on a defenceless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matters it to the Chinese if it be only successful? Since the British treat them as barbarians, they cannot deny to them the full benefit of their barbarism. If their kidnappings, surprises, midnight massacres are what we call cowardly, the civilization-mongers should not forget that according to their own showing they could not stand against European means of destruction with their ordinary means of warfare.

In short, instead of moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese, as the chivalrous English press does, we had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis, a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war. And in a popular war the means used by the insurgent nation cannot be measured by the commonly recognized rules of regular warfare, nor by any other abstract standard, but by the degree of civilization only attained by that insurgent nation.

1857 Tribune Article

Winning Hearts and Minds: Or, WHAM!

Hearts and Minds was released in 1974, winning the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1975 (and today's academy can't even handle Michael Moore!). It is simply the best film made about Vietnam, and American culture during the 1970s in general.


For me, the most frightening scene in this movie is its ending. There's the spectacle of actual Vietnam Veterans, the American Serviceman's Union, being taunted and beaten by pro-war forces. Even more sinister, however, is the spectacle of the "victory" parade itself. It is truly horrifying to think that this tawdry theatre can provide an emotional logic for those who inflicted such brutality on Vietnam.

US-Backed Imperialism in Trouble in Somalia

From the World Socialist Website:

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has warned that he is prepared to withdraw his country’s troops from Somalia, where they are propping up the US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), even if the latter was not in control of the country.

His comments in an interview with the Financial Times at the end of August mark a significant shift in policy. He had previously indicated that Ethiopia would stay in Somalia until the TFG was in control of the country and well established.

He threatened that “technically we could bring them [the Ethiopian troops] back home tomorrow. We feel we have done what we planned to do in terms of preventing a total takeover of Somalia by a jihadist group.”

Probably not what the US ruling class needs to be hearing right now.

Ten National Security Myths

The Nation's lead article this week is "Ten National Security Myths," an effective debunking of both candidates' talking points on foreign policy. It's quite good, aside from the odd liberal nonsense about American leadership.

Why Obama Will Win

Whatever the US ruling class wants to gain out of this election, it sure as shit isn't this.

Two on Pakistan from Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali has two good articles on the US and Pakistan this week. The first is an interview on Democracy Now! where he describes just how little the the US cares about democracy in Pakistan. The second is an article from the Asia Times where he does an excellent job showing where US strategy in the region is heading.

No, Iraq is not all Seashells and Balloons

Article I wrote for SW about the state of Iraq:

It was with great fanfare this week that US officials announced the handover of security in Iraq’s al-Anbar province, home of Fallujah and once where the insurgency was at its fiercest, to the Iraqi army.

The New York Times’ Dexter Filkins (as obsequious a mouth piece as any the Bush regime could ask for) waxed delusional on the situation in Anbar, writing that “the arrangements in Anbar seem immune to those strains” which are threatening the peace in other parts of Iraq. He continues, “Perhaps because the province is almost entirely Sunni, there are no sectarian tensions to speak of.”

Filkins’ reporting is, unfortunately, utterly typical of a press which has (again!) swallowed the Bush administrations lies about what is going on Iraq. Every drop in violence is chalked up as a victory for the occupiers, regardless of its causes or implications. Indeed, if Bush hadn’t been burned once before when declaring ‘Mission Accomplished,” he would surely be tempted to do so now.

The administration’s propaganda surge has been successful in disorienting parts of the antiwar movement. If people don’t have an understanding the unimaginable destruction the US-led occupation is still subjecting Iraq to, protesting the war seems a lot less urgent.

The first thing to recognize about the post-surge Iraq is that, despite sunny news reports, people’s lives remain shattered by the occupation. A poll by a British news agency earlier this revealed that one in four residents of Iraq (45% in Baghdad) had a family member who had been murdered. Recent drops in sectarian fighting don’t take away the fact that the United States unleashed almost unimaginable levels of violence in Iraq.

The slowdown of ethnic strife also didn’t alleviate the judgment of the Iraqi Red Cross/Red Crescent earlier this year, when it declared that “The humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world," and that Iraq’s health care system is “now in worse shape than ever.”

Iraq’s 18 provinces average 15 hours of electricity a day, a potentially deadly situation for hospital patients.

Poverty also remains the norm for many Iraqis, with many families using up to a third of their monthly income to buy drinking water.

Though it’s true that sectarian violence has declined, the occupation forces remain a brutal presence in Iraqi’s lives, a fact highlighted by the US military’s “mistaken” killing of six Iraqi security personnel on Wednesday.

Four million Iraqis remain displaced, and contrary to administration stories of returning families, that number isn’t changing much. The highest number of internally displaced people (those forced to flee their homes but remaining in Iraq) was about 2.3 million a year ago. The Iraqi Red Crescent reported that as of the end of May 2008, that number had dropped to about 2.1 million – a drop of 5% over 8 months. At that rate it will only take 120 years for all of the internally displaced to return to their homes!

Internally displaced people only account for half of Iraqi refugees. The rest have been forced to flee the country altogether. In Lebanon, a country with a large population of Iraqi refugees, Human Rights Watch has just reported an epidemic of deaths among migrant domestic workers, with at least one dying every week from unnatural causes – a disturbing prospect for refugees trying to eke out a living.

There are also good reasons to believe that the administration is putting pressure on the Iraqi government to limit the information on instability in Iraq that reaches the media corps.

A recent article by Dahr Jamail and Ahmed Ali showed how, in the Diyala province, kidnappings of Sunni residents are going unreported by the local government. While one tribal leader told the reporters that at least ten people from his tribe have been kidnapped recently, the police were reporting no kidnappings in the last four months.

Government censorship has been of the more blatant variety as well. Just this Thursday the vice-governor of the Babil province banned journalists and media workers from covering a march by protesting municipal workers.

Iraq’s political situation is also showing signs of instability. Last month the Iraqi Parliament ended its session unable to reach a deal over the provincial elections originally scheduled to take place in October. The crucial issue behind the stalemate is the question of who will control Kirkuk, an oil-rich northern city which Iraqi Kurds are attempting to bring under their control. The ruling class Shi’a parties of Iraq, led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, are resisting this attempt.

The conflict between the ruling Shi’a parties and the Kurds is an ominous sign for Washington, as these two groups have been the twin pillars of Iraqi political support for the occupation.

Even more potentially explosive are the recent moves by the Iraqi government against the Sunni Awakening councils (which are essentially former insurgents who are now on the US payroll). While some have called for the complete merging of the councils into the Iraqi security forces, the government itself has declared that no more than 15% of the 100,000 former insurgents will be allowed to join. The few that are allowed will be forced to accept low-level positions as foot soldiers or police officers.

Beyond discriminating against the councils, there are also reports of Nuri al-Maliki’s government arresting Awakening council leaders and confiscating their weapons. Last month Battalion 36 of the Iraqi army, known as “the dirty group,” was involved in operations in many of the central Iraqi provinces in which prominent Sunni tribal leaders and Awakening council leaders were arrested. In several cases, these arrests led to violence between government troops and council members (both supposedly US allies).

Such clashes reveal the potential that still exists for open conflict between Sunni militants, who once formed the backbone of the insurgency, and the Iraqi government.

Beyond Iraq, the war is still having a devastating impact at home. Army officials announced yesterday that the suicide rate for veterans was set to pass last year’s record, as well as passing the rate for the general US population, a number it hasn’t approached since the Vietnam War.

The antiwar movement still has a case to make, and in a presidential election where both candidates agree that “victory” in Iraq is the goal, it’s more important than ever that activists put forward the argument that the US has only made the lives of Iraqis worse.

Highly Recommended: Stratfor on Kosovo and Georgia

Stratfor's George Friedman has a very helpful article detailing the history of Western-Russian relations since the conflicts in the Balkans. He goes through the details of the Balkan conflict, puncturing a number of NATO's myths from that period.

Mark Ames on Georgia

Mark Ames, one of my favorite writers, has good piece in the Nation last week on the invasion of South Ossetia. He does a good job of providing some of the crucial context that's missing from the media's ebullient celebrations of Georgian nationalism, such as the long history of South Ossetian oppression. He goes a bit overboard, however, in his attacks on McCain, which, while hilarious, ignore Obama's similar response to the fighting. He has, as the Chicago Sun-Times notes, stepped on board the "Blame Russia"* train along with the rest of the ruling class. Even more disturbing is this interview with Obama's main man on foreign policy,Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, in a daring simile never before attempted by a ruling class politician, compared his enemy to Hitler. Brzezinski is an old hat at Russia-bashing, going back to his days in the Carter administration when he helped engineer the bloodbath in Afghanistan in the eighties. Ultimately, while Obama may be immeasurably more well-spoken than his fossilized opponent, he is no less dangerous when it comes to projecting American power.

*To be sure, Russia has imperialist ambitions for Ossetia and ultimately Georgia, but that hardly means the United States does not.

*UPDATE*
Ames has a newer piece on the Nation that is equally valuable. I particularly like his description of Saakashvili:

While Bush and McCain speak of Saakashvili as if he's a combination of Thomas Jefferson and Nelson Mandela, he's seen by his own people as increasingly authoritarian and unbalanced. Last year, Saakashvili sent in his special forces to violently disperse opposition protesters in the capital city, followed by a declaration of martial law. He sacked the opposition television station (partly owned by Rupert Murdoch), exiled or jailed his political opponents, and stacked the courts with his own judges while removing neutral observers, leaving even onetime neocon cheerleaders like Bruce Jackson and Anne Applebaum feeling queasy. Hardly the image of the "small democratic nation" that everyone today touts.

A good antidote to the know-nothing delusions of that blonde ass-hat on CNN Glenn Beck.

Fallout for NATO in Georgia

As Georgian and Russian military leaders toss recriminations back and forth regarding who first violated the French-brokered ceasefire, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has taken a page from Karzai and Musharraf's book and petulantly blamed his imperial backers for his own misfortune. Saakashvili told CNN that Western leaders had "failed to analyze Russia's intentions" before it invaded Georgia and "are partly to blame" for the current situation. He continued ""The response has not been adequate. Not only those people who are committing all those atrocities are responsible, but those who don't react to that, I think they also share responsibility." This little display of snotty sub imperial whining has made me wonder what the fallout for NATO is going to be here. As StratFor argues, this war did not shift geopolitical relations; rather, it revealed the already established shift of US impotence and Russian ambitions. Given this, I wonder to what degree Saakashvili will try to turn this against his former allies. It seems he is quite interested in using the Americans' current situation to his advantage as much as possible, but how much room does he really have? DEBKAfile is promising an analysis of "Why Saakashvili stirred the Pot" that I'm very much looking forward to, as the future of the conflict in the Caucuses right now seems very unclear (at least to me).

NATO-Israeli involvement in the Georgian conflict

Here's a great article from Global Research that explains the rationale behind Israel, US, and Nato backing of Georgia in this conflict and provides a very helpful discussion of the geopolitics of energy at stake.

The Way Backwards for the Antiwar Movement

Justin Raimondo (like Max Dunbar), is not worth my time. But I'm a grad student and it's summer, so time isn't exactly a scarce commodity at this point. Lowest hanging fruit is sometimes the tastiest and all that.

Raimondo, a writer for antiwar.com, recently posted an article arguing that the Leninist notion of imperialism is a primary factor in the confusion and disorientation of the Left today. He makes a number of claims about the Left's analysis which deserve rebutting.

The central pivot point of his article is the following paragraph:

"This idea that the captains of industry – Big Oil, in particular – represent "the ruling class" is a myth, and a curiously old-fashioned one at that. Private industry has long played a subordinate role in the American power structure: far more powerful is the administrative-managerial class, which has had a firm grip on the levers of power since the New Deal and has only strengthened its hand since. "

First of all, the notion that US ruling class strategy is dominated by the interests of Big Oil is, at best, crudely Marxist. It's not an analysis put forward by any of the most reputable venues of Marxist analysis. You won't find it in International Socialist Review, International Socialism, the World Socialist Website, Socialistworker.org or Historical Materialism. In fact, most of those have polemicized against the view that the war can be attributed to a certain sector of the ruling class. That said, Big Oil has, of course, benefitted greatly from the war.

Oil is crucial to understanding the war, but not simply in the vulgar sense that the US wants to steal Iraqi oil or make its own energy corporations super-profitable. Oil is, quite simply, the most important commodity in the world today, and whoever controls oil has a great deal of power. If the US ruling class does succeed in controlling Iraqi oil and projecting US force over the entire region, it will have gained tremendous power (a word Raimondo apparently thinks is forbidden in the Marxist lexicon, as the opposition between it and profits structures his argument).

Raimondo's argument about who constitutes the American ruling class is equally mistaken. At the most basic level, he ignores the vast revolving door between "the captains of industry"and the "administrative managerial class." Condoleezza Rice was head of Chevron's committe on public policy, as well as on the boards of Carnegie, Hewlett Packard, and others. Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton. Stephen Johnson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was head of Covance, a billion dollar clinical testing company. George W. Bush himself was a senior partner or officer in a number of energy corporations before entering into public service. The Secretary of Commerce, Carl Miguel Gutierrez, is former chairman of the board and CEO of Kellogg's. Andrew Card, Bush's former chief of staff, was president and CEO of the American Automobile Manufacturer's Association. I realize this list is a bit gratuitous, but I think it's worth emphasizing the tremendous interpenetration of the state and the "captains of industry" that has always existed under capitalism.

Beyond this most surface level of influence, the state also has to respond to ruling class demands given the latter's control over the ideological means of production: the media. Newspaper owners are bona fide members of the ruling class, and they can control what news gets produced and who it favors. The press offensive against the Republicans in the fall of 2006 was no accident, but a calculated move to install a more competent party into power.

Finally, there's the historical role of the state, which has always been to organize violence on behalf of the ruling class.

Raimondo brings up a number of other points which are easily dispatched. He relies heavily on the hoary myth of the Israel lobby to explain why the US is in Iraq if the ruling class is so subordinate. Of the many demolitions of this myth out there, Allen Ruff and Sherry Wolf's are my favorites. He also insinuates that the Trotskyist youth of several prominent neocons is somehow relevant. Gary Leupp points out that Raimondo's own political history has some less savory characters.

Raimondo's whole polemic is directed against the idea that war with Iran is unlikely because it is against ruling class interests. Because ruling class interests don't dictate foreign policy ("power" does), you can't use them to predict foreign policy. QED. What Raimondo steadfastly ignores (besides, apparently, everything the left has ever written on imperialism), is how the entire US ruling class does want to tame Iran. Socialist Worker recently provided a good overview of the divisions between carrots and sticks in US-Iran policy. An abstract lust for power cannot explain what's going on in the world today.