Category: Global affairs

I guess some JWN readers have already entered 2006, and the rest of us are being pulled along to midnight behind you as this heavy old planet of ours continues to spin its way through the ether. What a precious home we all have here on Mother Earth. May we look after her better in 2006: work on cutting back the greenhouse gases; stop producing and dumping toxic chemicals; gain a deeper understanding of our interdependency as humans and with all of creation.
May humanity be protected and start to flourish anew in 2006. I mean “humanity” in two senses: both our sense of all women and men being, at root, one connected family, and our sense of the decent respect that we owe each and every person on the globe.
I don’t see any way for humanity in those two senses to flourish without a deep recommitment to the concept and practice of human equality. We can’t reach that in 2006… reaching it will truly be the work of one or more generations. But we can continue working towards it.
Happy New Year to JWN readers, to all of humanity, and to the ideal of humanity itself!

Part 1: Pursuing “justice”:

No political leader in history ever rallied support for a project of  imperial
aggrandizement and war by declaring to his followers and the outside world
that he wanted to pursue an unjust cause.  On the contrary, every leader
who engages in war declares very loudly indeed that his cause is not only
just but also, beyond that, imperatively so.  (That is one of the many
problems with “just war” theory.  Every leader of a belligerent nation
is convinced that his cause is just: So why do wars happen at all then, if there is one single, self-evident definition of what justice is?)

George W. Bush’s present set of wars in the Global War on Terror is no
exception.  I’m sure JWN readers all remember the declaration he made, immediately after 9/11, that
“Either we’ll bring Osama Bin Laden to justice or–”  and this had a
peculiarly ominous ring to it– “we’ll bring justice to him.” How much better it would have been, though, if the US government had simply stuck to the version of “bringing OBL to justice” rather than trying to “bring justice to” him and countless other US foes around the world…

Over the past four years we’ve seen the Bush cabal pursue its campaign
of “bringing justice to” its opponents in a number of different ways, in a
number of different places.  In Afghanistan and Iraq it did so through
war, and in the case of Syria it has done so by the deployment of…
a UN-appointed “Special Prosecutor”.

The UN’s appointment of German national Detlev Mehlis to play exactly the
same investigative role in Lebanon and Syria that is played within the US
justice system by a Special Prosecutor had a couple of significant features
to it:

1. Particularity.  Activists and leaders in political opposition
   parties get assassinated regularly throughout the world, in a number of contexts.
    But never before the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in Lebanon last
   February has the UN Security Council responded by rushing to create this
   quite unprecedented form of a judicial investigating mechanism in response
   to such an  act.
2. The international politics of it.  “Containing” Syrian
   power had already, from August 2004 on, proven to be something that the
   Bushies and the French could agree strongly on.  After Hariri’s killing,
   upping the ante against Syria and its allies inside the Lebanese system  certainly
   looked like a campaign that could continue to help Washington and the bastions
   of “Old Europe” in France and Germany mend the fences that had earlier been
   badly torn by the Bushies’ reckless and unilateral rush to invade Iraq.

Please note that I am not arguing here that the full facts about
the killing of Hariri should not be sought out and made public, and those
reponsible tried in a court of law.  Indeed, I believe they should be.
 I am just noting some political facts about the context of the Mehlis
investigation that cannot be ignored.

Let me introduce a historical analogy…

Continue reading “Empire and the discourse of “justice””

The death toll from yesterday’s earthquake in eastern Pakistan already stands at “more than 20,000 people” and is expected to rise. This IRIN story says:

About 19,400 people were killed and more than 42,000 hurt in Pakistan, Reuters quoted interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, as saying, with the divided territory of Kashmir and its capital Muzaffarabad worst hit. But the communications minister for Pakistani Kashmir, Tariq Farooq, said the toll there alone could reach 30,000 as the focus so far had been only on the main towns, not mountain villages. At least another 600 people died in the Indian side of Kashmir, where many mud and stone houses were buried by landslides.

On Tuesday, torrential rains and mudslides hit Central America, leaving at least 640 people dead. With 338 people still listed as “missing” in Guatemala alone, it seems very likely the regionwide death toll there will rise above 1,000.
It seems clear to, from my 23 years living in the US, that the Gulf of Mexico storm systems have been getting fiercer in recent years. Central America already got hit very badly back in May… and then we had Katrina and Rita… In September 2004, and September 2003 there were previous bad hurricane systems in the Gulf of Mexico…
And it is less than a year since the South Asian tsunami…
Can’t we all ask our political leaders to, please, take a few deep breaths and then start focusing on protecting humankind from these kinds of disasters, and from the others like avian flu that might be “waiting in the wings”, instead of continuing to wage wars and foment tensions that may well lead to the waging of wars in the future?
Of course, some of the worse natural disasters will always continue to have significant death tolls. But the death tolls from all disasters can be greatly reduced by taking steps like using suitable building methods, enforcing of building codes, installation of early warning systems, planning and implementation of evacuation schemes– and also, steps like long-term ecological planning that could reverse the effects of decades of deforestation in a place like Central America, and could slow down and then hopefully also reverse the effects of global warming.
You could say that an event like the mud-slides that have killed so many this past week in Guatemala– or even, the ferocity of many of the storm-systems now coming out of the Gulf of Mexico– is a combination of a natural and a man-made disaster.
And how about the continuing (and largely avoidable) death toll from disease and malnourishment in vast swathes of Africa: is that the result of “natural” or “man-made” factors? Well, however you choose to describe these phenomena, there are known human actions that could be taken, that would massively reduce the numbers of those deaths… So in a sense, if the world– we, us, and primarily the well-resourced portion of humanity– does not take those steps, then we must bear some responsibility for the deaths of those children, women, and men.
Instead of which… There are George Bush and Tony Blair waging war and causing multiple new cascades of death and disaster in Iraq… there’s Vladimir Putin waging war in Chechnya, and the Chinese playing potentially escalatory war-games around Taiwan… Talk about man-made disasters!
Enough! Those four leaderships make up 80% of the “Permanent Five” who hold the fate of humankind in their hands. (And the French have done plenty of bad things in their time, too.)
So okay, the P-5, when are you going to get your collective act together, declare a moratorium on your own new arms acquisitions, on your transfers of arms to other parties, and on you continued pursuit of war? When are you going to declare a worldwide humanitarian ceasefire, and call the nations of the world together to discuss:

1. The resolution of all outstanding conflicts by nonviolent means, and
2. The mobilization of the resources of all the nations to end global poverty and strengthen the resilience of all communities worldwide to the ever-stalking ghosts of hunger, disease, ecological disaster, and war.

It so easily could be done. All it would take is a slight shift of mindset… “An injury to one is an injury to all”– but on a truly global scale.

About a month ago, JWN regular Dominic and I were doing some online work together looking at potential areas for comparison between the “total strategy” adopted by the SA apartheid regime in the 1970s and the “Global War on Terrorism” launched by the Bush administration after 9/11.
We’re still really only at the beginning of this work. But if you go to this early-April post you can see some of the exchanges we had– plus some helpful comments from JWN readers, too.
Okay, here’s a bit of an update. First, I have finally managed to scan an excerpt of the text of the TS, as compiled in “South African government documents on the

[T]he US appears to have fought a war for oil in the Middle East, and lost it. The consequences of that defeat are now plain for all to see.

Yes, indeed. I was totally gobsmacked when I filled up my mid-sized car yesterday and had to fork over more than $29 for the privilege. The prices seem to be climbing almost by the hour here in central Virginia.
That quote above, btw, above comes from a really excellent letter submitted to the Financial Times by Dr. Ian Rutledge, who describes himself as the author of a recently published book called Addicted to oil. (Memo to self: look for it. And hat-tip to Matt of Today in Iraq for the lead to Rutledge’s letter.)
In the letter, Rutledge argued that one of the Bush administration’s main motives in launching the invasion of Iraq had been to secure control of the Iraqi oil-fields and thus be able to start pumping an extra 2 million barrels of oil a day out of them to feed the world market (as well as, no doubt, the coffers of the US oil companies who’d be doing the pumping.)
But then,

in the words of another US oil company executive, “it all turned out a lot more complicated than anyone had expected”. Instead of the anticipated post-invasion rapid expansion of Iraqi production… the continuing violence of the insurgency has prevented Iraqi exports from even recovering to pre-invasion levels.

So now, the price-hike.
I’ve been thinking through who suffers most from this. One group that evidently doesn’t suffer are those who, like so many of George W. Bush’s friends, have major investments in the US oil industry. All kinds of previously “marginal” drilling operations are now become daily ever more and more viable. Profits will do very well, thank you.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the “big oil” folks stood to do very well indeed whether Bush’s big gamble in Iraq turned out well, or not? Nah, maybe not “ironic”, at all. More like, the way near-monopoly capitalism always works.
Inside the US, who suffers most, I think, are the rural poor— people who have zero access to public transportation and are absolutely forced to use their cars to pursue even the most basic activities of daily life. Lots of folks, including poor folks, inside US cities don’t have access to public transport either, because of the country’s extremely strong tilt toward automobilocracy.
Globally, though, the effects are far, far worse. Especially for the hundreds of millions of residents of the very poor parts of the world. How on earth can their trucking companies survive? How can their farmers get their goods to market? How can their infant industries survive, with gas prices expected to remain at or above their present levels?
If the people in power in the world truly thought of all of humankind as a single “human family”, then surely this is an issue we’d expect the whole “family” to come together to deal with right now.
Starting by dealing with the miscreant family member who thought he’d go out and smash up an oil-producing country in the Middle East from a mixture of personal motives, from recklessness, and almost as a “lark”.
This same family member, moreover, is one that has been hogging and wilfully wasting this vital global resource for many decades now.
… Well, I’m not going to sit around waiting for the “community of nations” to start calling Uncle Sam to account any day soon. But what everyone really does need to focus on is how to prevent the economic disaster now hitting the “very-low-income world” as a result of spiraling oil prices from causing even more privation, starvation, and human misery in those countries than their people are already suffering.
Ideas, anyone?

Addenda to yesterday’s post:
(1) Commenter Christiane pointed out (from Switzerland) that the shocking recent report from the UN’s Jean Ziegler on the near-doubling of child hunger in Iraq since the start of the US occupation should also be put into the general picture of US priorities. I completely agree.
(2) I had originally meant to make a reference in the post to the old saying that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem will look like a nail.” I forgot to do that. Okay: “If the only tool you have is a hypercharged military then every problem will look like….”
(3) I always love having Dominic’s inputs from South Africa that strengthen the parallel I have increasingly been identifying (and trying to allude to in my writings) between the US’s current position with regard to the rest of the world and that of the old apartheid regime in SA to the rest of the SA citizenry…
In his comment on yesterday’s post he said the Pentagon’s planned “Future Combat System” looks like the apartheid bosses’ old “Total Strategy”. I question that a bit, though. The “Total Strategy” was the intellectual framework (intended to be both justificatory and motivational) that the apartheid-era securocrats erected and used in their brutal and demented fight against all their perceived enemies. It wasn’t the hardware of the Casspirs, the fighter planes etc, that they actually used in the fight. I think the better analogy for the TS is the “Global War on Terror”– an “intellectual” construction that is also intended to be both justificatory and motivational.
If anyone can provide a hyperlink to some text that served as the seminal or otherwise authorittative expression of the “Total Strategy” it would be interesting to do a textual comparison between that and the September 2002 “National Security Strategy” document in which Prez Bush seminally articulated the intellectual framework of the “GWOT”.
Okay, I’m not necessarily volunteering to DO the textual comparion… But once we have URLs for the two texts, we can ask for volunteers.
By the way, I think the term “securocrats” was originally a South African coinage. It is one that we should certainly seek to “globalize” and use with regard to the authors and implementers of the GWOT these days!
The irony inherent in the term itself– from my perspective– is that though “security” is the announced justificatory be-all and end-all for the basket of policies in question, actually, these policies are extremely counter-productive and have the effect of majorly undermining the security not only of their immediate targets but also of the community that spawned and supported the so-called ‘securocrats’ in the first place.

What would you buy with $419.3 billion if you had the choice?
Well, one really good first idea might be to give about $69 to every woman, man, and child on God’s earth. If the taxpayers of the US were to do that, just imagine what a change that donation might make in the lives of the most impoverished of our fellow humans! In a mid-size village in Africa, people could pool their money together and get a good ways toward producing a safe drinking-water system for everyone. Or, every 20 families (= 100 people?) could club together and hire two pretty good additional teachers for their children.
Or… or… or… There must be thousands of fabulous ideas for how to spend such a sum of money!
Instead of which, the Bush administration is proposing sinking $419.3 billion into purely military goods and services in Fiscal Year 2006.
(That’s the figure for budgeted “Discretionary Budgetary Authority”… Of course, who knows how many “supplementals” they might also come up with along the way?)
So which of those two ways of spending this humungous gob of money would seem better to serve the national security of the US and its 285 million citizens and (a deeply intertwined concept, this) the human security of all the world’s 6.1 billion people?
By way of comparison, the amount the Bush administration is requesting for all non-military international work is $33.6 billion.
And then, there is this. Namely, an article in Monday’s NYT, in which Tim Weiner wrote about the massive additional spending that some people in the Pentagon want to engage in, to upgrade the technology in the hands of the military including thru a truly mega-buck program called Future Combat Systems.
Weiner wrote:

Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion…
That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond [the] first 15 brigades [out of about 45].
Now some of the military’s advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill.
“We’re dealing today with a train wreck,” Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a March 16 Congressional hearing on the cost and complexity of Future Combat Systems…
The Army sees Future Combat, the most expensive weapons program it has ever undertaken, as a seamless web of 18 different sets of networked weapons and military robots…
But the bridge to the future remains a blueprint. Army officials issued a stop-work order in January for the network that would link Future Combat weapons, citing its failure to progress. They said this month that they did not know if they could build a tank light enough to fly. [? — HC]
The Army is asking Congress to approve Future Combat while it is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose costs, according to the Congressional Research Service, now exceed $275 billion. Future Combat is one of the biggest items in the Pentagon’s plans to build more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of more than $1.3 trillion.
The Army has canceled two major weapons programs, the Crusader artillery system and the Comanche helicopter, “to protect funding for the Future Combat System,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee. “That is why we have to get the F.C.S. program right.”

I’d like to, er, humbly submit that maybe it’s not the “FCS” system that the US citizenry and our representatives in Congress “need to get right”… Maybe instead it’s our whole approach to the rest of the world?
I mean, why on earth should we think that a globalized “Manifest Destiny” mentality backed up simply by hard steel power that is also, um, “highly networked” or whatever the appropriate FCS jargon is– that this would do anything to strengthen the wellbeing of our communities or the security of our nation?
It didn’t work for the South African authors of apartheid… No reason at all it should work for us. So, please! Let’s focus all our efforts, and our spending, and our technological wizardry into getting back into right relationship with the rest of the world, instead… That way lies security. And that is the “seamless web” to which we should truly be paying attention.

It happened one year ago today, in Madrid. That evening I sat down, stunned, and blogged a short post about the attack. Early the next morning I found the following, extremely poignant comment on that comments board:

Dear Helena,
I steadily visit your page, and I was very pleased you have blogged something about the events in my country, in my city. In Madrid.
I feel sad, furious and shocked.
Yesterday I saw things on TV and the papers I would have never imagined I was to see in my country. Destroyed corps, blood, tears, anguish.
The people in those trains were workers, students, immigrants.
But I also saw solidarity. I saw people queing for hours to give blood. Sick people in hospitals left their rooms so the harmed ones could have more places. The security forces were quite surprised to see that things were pretty organised when they arrived at the stations: the survivors had not run away, they had stayed to help the others, healing wounds, saving people out of the twisted irons, cleaning. Neighbours run with blankets and water, people risked their lives without questioning for a second whether it was safe to do so.
I saw people gathering in the streets, asking for justice, not revenge. We don’t want another Guantanamo, we don’t want a war, just the terrorists to be taken to court with all the constitutional guarantees. Because we are a democracy.
All immigrants were invited to go to hospitals, to heal their wounds, to see their relatives… no one would ask them whether they were “legal”.
People in the Basque Country, in Catalonia, in Galicia, in Andalusia, in the entire country, chanted the same: “We were all in that train”
A lot of black ribbons, some flags as well but not too many. We don’t care that much about flags.
Most politicians were extremely cautious and responsible in their remarks. King Juan Carlos said we are a great nation.
I still don’t know whether this is the result of a (in my humble opinion) a very very wrong foreign policy, or simply the act of the same fascists we have been putting up with for more than two decades (the CNN, among other media, calls them “Basque separatists”). We will know sooner or later.
But the thing is that today, more than ever, I feel proud of my city, of my country, of my people. I feel proud of being Spanish.
Madrid, te quiero.
Maria

I have just re-read this wonderful comment, very carefully.
First of all, thank you once again, dear Maria, for your eloquent witness and the somber thoughtfulness that you and, it seems, the vast majority of your compatriots showed in reaction to that terrifying outrage.
Secondly, I bow my head pondering the tragedy of the lives summarily ended that day, and send my solidarity to all those survivors of the attacks, and those bereaved by them– people whose lives were changed forever by that heinous attempt to entangle the civilian population of Greater Madrid in somebody else’s battles for power, control, and domination.
Finally, I don’t want to load this post, today, with too much politicking. But I merely note the difference between the reactions Maria–and goodness knows how many other observers– noticed among the Spanish people to the attacks of that day, and the reactions of many people in Lebanon’s opposition movement to the more recent terror attack against Rafiq Hariri.
Read what she described:
I also saw solidarity… I saw people gathering in the streets, asking for justice, not revenge… All immigrants were invited to go to hospitals, to heal their wounds, to see their relatives… A lot of black ribbons, some flags as well but not too many. We don’t care that much about flags… Most politicians were extremely cautious and responsible in their remarks…

It seems to me that– quite counter to the terrorists’ intent– Spain emerged from the attacks much stronger as a nation, and confirmed in its people’s understanding of and adherence to the solid values of constitutional democracy.

A group of Iraqi exiles in the US has nominated Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s a brilliant nomination. I’ve written on this blog a number of times (1, 2, 3) about Sistani’s intentional use of the techniques of organized mass nonviolence.
Most crucially, last August, he succeeded in completely defusing the lethal confrontations between the US occupation forces and the Sadrists in Najaf and Kerbala– purely by organizing a massive, peaceful march of supporters to those cities… The Americans (more or less) held their fire… The Sadrist fighters melted into the large Shiite crowds… and the battle was ended with almost no further loss of life.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announces its awards annually, in around September (before formally awarding them on Dec. 10.) When I was writing this 2000 book on the Nobel peace prize winners, and the prize as an institution, I got to discuss the general criteria the Committee uses when it makes its awards, briefly, with Geir Lundestad, the Secretary to the Committee. From what he said and from the record of the prizes they’ve awarded, I would describe their recent and current criteria as these:

(1) Past record and performance of the individual or institution concerned,
(2) A desire to encourage and strengthen existing political/diplomatic processes that tend in a strongly pro-peace direction by making awards even where the “past record”– as in number 1– has not yet been the solid achievement of peace. (Q.v., the awards to Arafat, Rabin, and Peres in 1994).
(3) A commitment to do serious outside-the-box reframing and rethinking about the nature of peace and the identity and characteristics of “prize-worthy” people– e.g. by making sure that more non-whitefolks, more women, more grassroots leaders, and more people working on issues like human rights, the environment etc, rather than just the same-old same-old “diplomatists and statesmen” get the prize.

I would say on all three of these criteria, Sistani is a very serious candidate indeed.
I understand, of course, that the Committee is not open at all to lobbying. (Heaven forbid!)
It is really interesting to note, in addition, that the AP story linked to above made clear that the mainly-exiled Iraqis who presented the 7,000-signature petition to the Nobel Committee were Chaldean Christians. That’s right– Christians.
Excellent!