if you get the chance, check out a really funny film of that name. it's in the mockumentary style, and has plenty of laughs. in any case, a few bits of wisdom from the great mickey z.
Here’s another fine example of the insanity we call humanity
This particular paragraph jumped out at me:
The toads bred rapidly, and their millions-strong population now threatens many local species across Australia. They spread diseases, such as salmonella, and produce highly toxic venom from glands in their skin that can kill would-be predators. The toads are also voracious eaters, chomping up insects, frogs, small reptiles and mammals — even birds.
Imagine that same graph, re-written as such:
The humans bred rapidly, and their billions-strong population now threatens many local species across the globe. They spread diseases and produce highly toxic products that can kill every living thing on earth. The humans are also voracious eaters, chomping up cows, chickens, fish, and various mammals — even buffaloes.
As for the actual toad slaughter, fear not...it was approved by the officially sanctioned good guys: "The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has applauded the effort, provided the toads are killed humanely."
If you’re not willing to fight back for yourselves, why not do it for the cane toads? Hey...it’s got to start somewhere.
"the insanity we call humanity." i like that. to be frank, i'll say it fromm here to eternity; the sane society ain't too sane, my friends.
Monday, March 30, 2009
According to the World Bank, it would cost $14.4 billion to rebuild the Iraqi public works and water system. In other words, about five weeks of the overall cost of the U.S. occupation.
Before one more cent is spent on bailing out corrupt corporations that destroyed the U.S. economy, Iraqis should have clean drinking water. After all, it was the illegal U.S. wars that took it from them in the first place.
jeremy scahill.
who speaks these truths? they were nowhere to be found on today's biology quiz that i helped to administer, nor in the globe, times, or post. the local news did not lead with this story, nor did grad classes in ivy league universities utter a word about it. obama is silent on the topic. the big o had 180 billion for aig, 21,000 more troops for afghanistan, and drones for pakistan, but no water for iraq. as many sectors of the left blab on about achieving a great victory.
a great debt is owed to the people of iraq. first, we must acknowledge this. we can't begin to pay the debt until we do. in fact, a great debt is owed to a great many people. the powerful of america have created a world of oppressed. if we are to begin to heal as a society, a simple apology would be a nice start.
oh yeah, that's right. obama has already said he doesn't think we have anything to apologize for.
well, in that case, i guess reparations will have to wait.
Before one more cent is spent on bailing out corrupt corporations that destroyed the U.S. economy, Iraqis should have clean drinking water. After all, it was the illegal U.S. wars that took it from them in the first place.
jeremy scahill.
who speaks these truths? they were nowhere to be found on today's biology quiz that i helped to administer, nor in the globe, times, or post. the local news did not lead with this story, nor did grad classes in ivy league universities utter a word about it. obama is silent on the topic. the big o had 180 billion for aig, 21,000 more troops for afghanistan, and drones for pakistan, but no water for iraq. as many sectors of the left blab on about achieving a great victory.
a great debt is owed to the people of iraq. first, we must acknowledge this. we can't begin to pay the debt until we do. in fact, a great debt is owed to a great many people. the powerful of america have created a world of oppressed. if we are to begin to heal as a society, a simple apology would be a nice start.
oh yeah, that's right. obama has already said he doesn't think we have anything to apologize for.
well, in that case, i guess reparations will have to wait.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
wageslave76, mumia strikes again
We are all taught, seemingly in the cradle, about the glorious Constitution, a document that lies at the very heart of America's civil religion.
Schoolchildren used to be taught to memorize broad swaths of its provisions (although it's extremely doubtful that this is done today, in the wake of the disastrous 'No Child Left Behind' policy), along with the national mythology of the Founding Fathers as latter-day Olympians handing down freedom from the heavens.
Of all our myths, those inculcated in early childhood are those the hardest to shatter, because they are often the foundations of our understanding.
But all nations have founding myths. The Greeks, for centuries, believed in a pantheon of capricious and often malevolent gods, like Zeus, Athena, Hera, and Ares, to explain the uncertainties and travails of life, death, wisdom and war.
The 'founding fathers', as taught to U.S. kids, is a modern American myth, for how can slave owners be bringers of freedom, unless they free their slaves? And almost all of them -- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson -- even Patrick Henry (he of 'Give me liberty,or give me death' fame) -- owned slaves, even as he uttered these words, and then wrote them.
MOVE supporter, I. Abdul Jon used to say, 'You only need to talk and write about freedom of speech, and freedom of religion and all other kinds of freedom if you ain't got it; 'cause if you got it, and ain't got no problem with nobody else havin' it -- and it's real, you ain't gotta write about, and talk about protectin' it, and whatnot....'
True enough.
In 1865, as the smoke was clearing from the U.S. Civil War, Congress passed the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, allegedly granting citizenship to millions of Black freemen, many of whom fought to preserve the Union. These constitutional amendments prohibited discriminations, and protected voting rights. On paper.
In fact, through white terrorism, racist courts and legislatures, those constitutional "rights" were ignored for 100 years, by both state and federal governments, until the rise of the modern civil rights movement at the middle of the 20th century.
And now, we have the rise of another myth, that of the freedoms brought by these movements, or granted by enlightened courts.
Truth is, new freedoms did emerge, for those who could afford them. By that I mean, a select class freedom was granted to the Black middle class, who could access it.
For the Black poor, the constitution has all of the relevance as that expressed by the writer, Anatole France, who quipped: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Where is the constitutional right to an education, to a home, to a job -- or to life?
As long as a piece of paper is worshipped, people will continue to suffer -- as others celebrate.
Schoolchildren used to be taught to memorize broad swaths of its provisions (although it's extremely doubtful that this is done today, in the wake of the disastrous 'No Child Left Behind' policy), along with the national mythology of the Founding Fathers as latter-day Olympians handing down freedom from the heavens.
Of all our myths, those inculcated in early childhood are those the hardest to shatter, because they are often the foundations of our understanding.
But all nations have founding myths. The Greeks, for centuries, believed in a pantheon of capricious and often malevolent gods, like Zeus, Athena, Hera, and Ares, to explain the uncertainties and travails of life, death, wisdom and war.
The 'founding fathers', as taught to U.S. kids, is a modern American myth, for how can slave owners be bringers of freedom, unless they free their slaves? And almost all of them -- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson -- even Patrick Henry (he of 'Give me liberty,or give me death' fame) -- owned slaves, even as he uttered these words, and then wrote them.
MOVE supporter, I. Abdul Jon used to say, 'You only need to talk and write about freedom of speech, and freedom of religion and all other kinds of freedom if you ain't got it; 'cause if you got it, and ain't got no problem with nobody else havin' it -- and it's real, you ain't gotta write about, and talk about protectin' it, and whatnot....'
True enough.
In 1865, as the smoke was clearing from the U.S. Civil War, Congress passed the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, allegedly granting citizenship to millions of Black freemen, many of whom fought to preserve the Union. These constitutional amendments prohibited discriminations, and protected voting rights. On paper.
In fact, through white terrorism, racist courts and legislatures, those constitutional "rights" were ignored for 100 years, by both state and federal governments, until the rise of the modern civil rights movement at the middle of the 20th century.
And now, we have the rise of another myth, that of the freedoms brought by these movements, or granted by enlightened courts.
Truth is, new freedoms did emerge, for those who could afford them. By that I mean, a select class freedom was granted to the Black middle class, who could access it.
For the Black poor, the constitution has all of the relevance as that expressed by the writer, Anatole France, who quipped: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Where is the constitutional right to an education, to a home, to a job -- or to life?
As long as a piece of paper is worshipped, people will continue to suffer -- as others celebrate.
so, what do you do?
We can easily do without and the planet will thank us for it. As Fight Club’s Tyler Durden sez: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.”
i don't like this anniversary
however, my parents will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary monday. that one i like. in any case, check out this piece. pretty good analysis here.
Not an anniversary to celebrate: Dahlia Wasfi on six years of the Iraq War
March 29, 2009 By Dahlia Wasfi
Source: Rabble.ca
Dahlia Wasfi's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi was born to a Jewish-American mother and a Muslim-Iraqi father. She has been educating people from all over the world about America's brutal occupation since visiting her family in Basrah and Baghdad in 2006.
One source of Dr. Wasfi's determination is the inspirational story of Rachel Corrie, whom she calls an "American Hero." Four days after Corrie's murder by the Israeli military America invaded Iraq under several false pretenses, including the claim that they would bring 'freedom' to the Iraqi people and protect the U.S. from the threat of nuclear weapons that Iraq never possessed.
The Israeli government has never apologized to the United States for Corrie's murder and the U.S. administration has yet to compensate the Iraqis for the brutal illegal war they have waged on their sovereign country.
On the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and coalition forces, Jasmin Ramsey interviewed Dr. Wasfi to discuss the war and continued occupation, now entering its seventh year.
Jasmin Ramsey: Half your family lives in Iraq. What kind of freedom do they have today? What affect has six years of occupation had on them?
Dahlia Wasfi: They have been freed from electricity, potable water and security! They do their best to maintain a positive outlook. My relatives from Baghdad are still displaced in Jordan and Syria as far as I know. I believe that they want what most families want -- the opportunity to live their lives and raise their children in their homeland and have self-determination -- not military occupation.
JR: The bulldozer that killed Rachel Corrie was paid for in part by the American people, who provide billions of dollars of 'aid' to Israel every year from their own pockets through tax dollars. In light of the current economic situation, wherein thousands of Americans are losing their jobs every month, do you think the American people will begin re-evaluating this 'special' relationship that the American administration has with Israel?
DW: I believe that most Americans are ignorant of the amount of money that goes to support Israel's army in violation of international and domestic law, like the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.
If Americans knew the truth about U.S. monies to Israel, as well as the connection between that "special" relationship and the U.S. occupation of Iraq (namely, the deposing of Saddam Hussein for Israeli national security) there would be outrage. That's why I often refer to the website by Alison Weir, www.ifamericansknew.org, which reports the facts on the ground in the illegal occupation of Palestine. I believe that the recent massacres in Gaza, beginning December 2008, have opened a lot of people's eyes to the realities of Israeli aggression and ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
JR: President Barack Obama announced the details of his "Withdrawal Plan" from Iraq at the end of February 2009. What do you make of his decision to leave behind a "residual force" which includes thousands of troops and permanent American bases? How has the antiwar movement in America responded to this?
DW: Barack Obama is referred to as the "antiwar" candidate, which is a farce; however, many people in the antiwar movement worked very hard to get him into office believing that his administration would bring about the change we -- and the world -- need.
The goal was to defeat McCain, who was identified as the candidate of "Bush's third term." In reality, the policies of the Obama administration aren't much different from what we saw under George W. Bush. However, the image of change has pacified many who struggled for justice. Many Obama supporters want to give the new president time to prove himself. I believe time will show that Obama is guided by the same interests that guided previous administrations. An African-American commander in chief bringing about the same death and destruction as Bush is not enough change for me.
JR: The number of people demonstrating against the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is dwindling as the years go by. Why do you think this is and what does this reveal about the anti-war movement?
DW: We have a short attention span in the U.S. Many Americans withdrew support for the occupation of Iraq not because of the illegality and massacres but because we weren't winning. The mainstream media has put Iraq not just on the backburner but behind the stove. And now as our economy is circling the drain, the focus is on our pocketbooks, with little connection made between the billions going to corporations of the occupations and our domestic finances.
I see the U.S. antiwar movement as continuing practices that we know don't end occupation -- meetings and marches and rallies on Saturdays. They are valuable efforts, but they do not achieve our ultimate goal. Cindy Sheehan's remarkable stand in Crawford, Texas in 2005 was a watershed moment for the antiwar movement. It's time for another one, but unfortunately, you cannot plan spontaneity.
JR: There has been a significant growth in the number of Americans who are now against the war on Iraq. On the other hand, many Americans still believe the war on Afghanistan is the "good war." Why do you think this is?
DW: Ignorance, misinformation, and a desire to feel good about ourselves. Western corporate media has failed at its job to be a watchdog of the government; rather, it has acted as its lapdog.
Few Americans understand the pipeline agenda that the U.S. administration had for Afghanistan, which the Taliban refused. Few Americans know that the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, both worked for the UNOCAL oil company. Few Americans know that the mujahedeen who drove back the Soviet invasion in the 1980s were armed and financed by the U.S.-through their CIA operative, Osama bin Laden.
American society is obsessed with winning. With the destruction of Iraq identified with Bush, and Obama emphasizing an opportunity to "win" in Afghanistan, I think many Americans see an opportunity for "redemption" in Afghanistan. But the goal is continued colonial occupation.
JR: Bush was elected twice by the American people. He is now known as one of the most notorious war criminals in the world. Do you think Americans have really learned a lesson from the Bush years?
DW: I don't think Bush was elected twice! I believe there is sufficient evidence to show that the U.S. Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were marred by corruption. Yet, that the American people -- and their representatives in Washington, D.C. -- would ultimately allow that to happen is very telling. We still live in the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that was developed in the last eight years. But that makes the negligible changes of a new administration pacifying. We will send more troops into Afghanistan instead of Iraq. Instead of extraordinary rendition, we'll resume just ordinary rendition. We will not torture; we will fully outsource torture. The Bush years are part of a continuum of Democratic and Republican administrations who serve corporate interests. So far, the Obama administration is serving the same, and there is little outcry.
JR: During his last appearance in Iraq Bush narrowly dodged the shoes of Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi who famously said: "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog." How do you think Obama will fare in the Iraqi national memory?
DW: I believe that Iraqis will resist occupation until they achieve self-determination, no matter who the commander-in-chief is.
Jasmin Ramsey is a Vancouver-based writer and photographer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not an anniversary to celebrate: Dahlia Wasfi on six years of the Iraq War
March 29, 2009 By Dahlia Wasfi
Source: Rabble.ca
Dahlia Wasfi's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi was born to a Jewish-American mother and a Muslim-Iraqi father. She has been educating people from all over the world about America's brutal occupation since visiting her family in Basrah and Baghdad in 2006.
One source of Dr. Wasfi's determination is the inspirational story of Rachel Corrie, whom she calls an "American Hero." Four days after Corrie's murder by the Israeli military America invaded Iraq under several false pretenses, including the claim that they would bring 'freedom' to the Iraqi people and protect the U.S. from the threat of nuclear weapons that Iraq never possessed.
The Israeli government has never apologized to the United States for Corrie's murder and the U.S. administration has yet to compensate the Iraqis for the brutal illegal war they have waged on their sovereign country.
On the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and coalition forces, Jasmin Ramsey interviewed Dr. Wasfi to discuss the war and continued occupation, now entering its seventh year.
Jasmin Ramsey: Half your family lives in Iraq. What kind of freedom do they have today? What affect has six years of occupation had on them?
Dahlia Wasfi: They have been freed from electricity, potable water and security! They do their best to maintain a positive outlook. My relatives from Baghdad are still displaced in Jordan and Syria as far as I know. I believe that they want what most families want -- the opportunity to live their lives and raise their children in their homeland and have self-determination -- not military occupation.
JR: The bulldozer that killed Rachel Corrie was paid for in part by the American people, who provide billions of dollars of 'aid' to Israel every year from their own pockets through tax dollars. In light of the current economic situation, wherein thousands of Americans are losing their jobs every month, do you think the American people will begin re-evaluating this 'special' relationship that the American administration has with Israel?
DW: I believe that most Americans are ignorant of the amount of money that goes to support Israel's army in violation of international and domestic law, like the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.
If Americans knew the truth about U.S. monies to Israel, as well as the connection between that "special" relationship and the U.S. occupation of Iraq (namely, the deposing of Saddam Hussein for Israeli national security) there would be outrage. That's why I often refer to the website by Alison Weir, www.ifamericansknew.org, which reports the facts on the ground in the illegal occupation of Palestine. I believe that the recent massacres in Gaza, beginning December 2008, have opened a lot of people's eyes to the realities of Israeli aggression and ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
JR: President Barack Obama announced the details of his "Withdrawal Plan" from Iraq at the end of February 2009. What do you make of his decision to leave behind a "residual force" which includes thousands of troops and permanent American bases? How has the antiwar movement in America responded to this?
DW: Barack Obama is referred to as the "antiwar" candidate, which is a farce; however, many people in the antiwar movement worked very hard to get him into office believing that his administration would bring about the change we -- and the world -- need.
The goal was to defeat McCain, who was identified as the candidate of "Bush's third term." In reality, the policies of the Obama administration aren't much different from what we saw under George W. Bush. However, the image of change has pacified many who struggled for justice. Many Obama supporters want to give the new president time to prove himself. I believe time will show that Obama is guided by the same interests that guided previous administrations. An African-American commander in chief bringing about the same death and destruction as Bush is not enough change for me.
JR: The number of people demonstrating against the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is dwindling as the years go by. Why do you think this is and what does this reveal about the anti-war movement?
DW: We have a short attention span in the U.S. Many Americans withdrew support for the occupation of Iraq not because of the illegality and massacres but because we weren't winning. The mainstream media has put Iraq not just on the backburner but behind the stove. And now as our economy is circling the drain, the focus is on our pocketbooks, with little connection made between the billions going to corporations of the occupations and our domestic finances.
I see the U.S. antiwar movement as continuing practices that we know don't end occupation -- meetings and marches and rallies on Saturdays. They are valuable efforts, but they do not achieve our ultimate goal. Cindy Sheehan's remarkable stand in Crawford, Texas in 2005 was a watershed moment for the antiwar movement. It's time for another one, but unfortunately, you cannot plan spontaneity.
JR: There has been a significant growth in the number of Americans who are now against the war on Iraq. On the other hand, many Americans still believe the war on Afghanistan is the "good war." Why do you think this is?
DW: Ignorance, misinformation, and a desire to feel good about ourselves. Western corporate media has failed at its job to be a watchdog of the government; rather, it has acted as its lapdog.
Few Americans understand the pipeline agenda that the U.S. administration had for Afghanistan, which the Taliban refused. Few Americans know that the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, both worked for the UNOCAL oil company. Few Americans know that the mujahedeen who drove back the Soviet invasion in the 1980s were armed and financed by the U.S.-through their CIA operative, Osama bin Laden.
American society is obsessed with winning. With the destruction of Iraq identified with Bush, and Obama emphasizing an opportunity to "win" in Afghanistan, I think many Americans see an opportunity for "redemption" in Afghanistan. But the goal is continued colonial occupation.
JR: Bush was elected twice by the American people. He is now known as one of the most notorious war criminals in the world. Do you think Americans have really learned a lesson from the Bush years?
DW: I don't think Bush was elected twice! I believe there is sufficient evidence to show that the U.S. Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were marred by corruption. Yet, that the American people -- and their representatives in Washington, D.C. -- would ultimately allow that to happen is very telling. We still live in the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that was developed in the last eight years. But that makes the negligible changes of a new administration pacifying. We will send more troops into Afghanistan instead of Iraq. Instead of extraordinary rendition, we'll resume just ordinary rendition. We will not torture; we will fully outsource torture. The Bush years are part of a continuum of Democratic and Republican administrations who serve corporate interests. So far, the Obama administration is serving the same, and there is little outcry.
JR: During his last appearance in Iraq Bush narrowly dodged the shoes of Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi who famously said: "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog." How do you think Obama will fare in the Iraqi national memory?
DW: I believe that Iraqis will resist occupation until they achieve self-determination, no matter who the commander-in-chief is.
Jasmin Ramsey is a Vancouver-based writer and photographer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
dear abbie
Remembering Abbie Hoffman
March 29, 2009 By Howard Lisnoff
Howard Lisnoff's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
It seems difficult to believe and comprehend that the twentieth anniversary of the death of Abbie Hoffman will arrive in just a few, short weeks (April 12). Abbie was one of the great heroes of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Smart, and fast with what seemed to be an unending supply of wit, he was perhaps the first peace activist who knew how to use the media. Eventually, I believe, that that proclivity would lead to his demise as he became a marginal figure in the 1980s despite having chalked up one the greatest records of left organizing in the environmental movement during that era. To date, Jonah Raskin's biography of Abbie, Revolution For the Hell Of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (1996), remains the definitive and most comprehensive commentary of Abbie's life.
I knew Abbie in only fleeting moments when our path's collided. We used the same legal practice on Broadway in New York, The Law Commune. I greeted him as he passed me while I waited for appointments in that office. In 1971, a friend and I from New York University sat at the same table at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., along with Abbie and Jerry Rubin, during a time out of the famous May Day actions against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. Abbie was in the middle of one of his infamous verbal tirades against a writer from The Daily News. Abbie demanded that the writer publish the truth about the Vietnam War. The last time I saw Abbie was during a talk he gave at the University of Rhode Island at the beginning of the decade of the 1980s. He had already launched his career as a full-blown environmental activist and was working to stop a government water project in upstate New York. The organization Abbie spearheaded in New York was known as Save the River. Though wanted by the FBI, he was successful in that environmental effort, and later moved on to Pennsylvania where he labored with similar environmental issues.
Abbie's attempts to galvanize a new generation of activists later in his life did not succeed. He could count on occasional issues such as getting CIA recruiters off of the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but those were small victories compared to his epic accomplishments during the antiwar movement in the 1960s.
Raskin observed in his biography of Abbie that Abbie's memorial service in Worcester, Massachusetts, a few days after his death, was the last mass gathering of the 60's generation. I attended, along with my daughter, and am unashamed to say that I cried often during the ceremony. Here was a great soul, warts and all, who was gone forever and who had motivated so many of the 60's generation. On the way from Abbie's childhood home, to the synagogue where the memorial service was held, the large crowd of marchers scattered the yellow-gold blossoms of the ubiquitous forsythia, one of the symbols of spring and regeneration of New England. I thought of Whitman's poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
Has it really been twenty years? And, has the world not moved one inch closer to sanity? The fight against war, inequality, and environmental destruction continues!
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer and remains an activist. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com.
March 29, 2009 By Howard Lisnoff
Howard Lisnoff's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
It seems difficult to believe and comprehend that the twentieth anniversary of the death of Abbie Hoffman will arrive in just a few, short weeks (April 12). Abbie was one of the great heroes of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Smart, and fast with what seemed to be an unending supply of wit, he was perhaps the first peace activist who knew how to use the media. Eventually, I believe, that that proclivity would lead to his demise as he became a marginal figure in the 1980s despite having chalked up one the greatest records of left organizing in the environmental movement during that era. To date, Jonah Raskin's biography of Abbie, Revolution For the Hell Of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (1996), remains the definitive and most comprehensive commentary of Abbie's life.
I knew Abbie in only fleeting moments when our path's collided. We used the same legal practice on Broadway in New York, The Law Commune. I greeted him as he passed me while I waited for appointments in that office. In 1971, a friend and I from New York University sat at the same table at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., along with Abbie and Jerry Rubin, during a time out of the famous May Day actions against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. Abbie was in the middle of one of his infamous verbal tirades against a writer from The Daily News. Abbie demanded that the writer publish the truth about the Vietnam War. The last time I saw Abbie was during a talk he gave at the University of Rhode Island at the beginning of the decade of the 1980s. He had already launched his career as a full-blown environmental activist and was working to stop a government water project in upstate New York. The organization Abbie spearheaded in New York was known as Save the River. Though wanted by the FBI, he was successful in that environmental effort, and later moved on to Pennsylvania where he labored with similar environmental issues.
Abbie's attempts to galvanize a new generation of activists later in his life did not succeed. He could count on occasional issues such as getting CIA recruiters off of the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but those were small victories compared to his epic accomplishments during the antiwar movement in the 1960s.
Raskin observed in his biography of Abbie that Abbie's memorial service in Worcester, Massachusetts, a few days after his death, was the last mass gathering of the 60's generation. I attended, along with my daughter, and am unashamed to say that I cried often during the ceremony. Here was a great soul, warts and all, who was gone forever and who had motivated so many of the 60's generation. On the way from Abbie's childhood home, to the synagogue where the memorial service was held, the large crowd of marchers scattered the yellow-gold blossoms of the ubiquitous forsythia, one of the symbols of spring and regeneration of New England. I thought of Whitman's poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
Has it really been twenty years? And, has the world not moved one inch closer to sanity? The fight against war, inequality, and environmental destruction continues!
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer and remains an activist. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
requiem for the man
he speaks often of the soldier as warrior and seldom of the soldier as war criminal, despite his opposition to the wars the soldiers fight. when he speaks of the brutalities committed by americans troops, somehow they become the victims, though they enlisted in the murderous endeavors. he tells us they were ignorant, and thought they were doing good. but didn't german, south african, salvadoran, and chilean soldiers feel the same? and many of them were forced to fight. they had no choice. nuremberg tells us that "i was just following orders" or "i was just doing my job" are not justifiable explanations for war crimes. and enough with this shit about how most soldiers are poor and need money for college and the sad tales about how there are no jobs. most drug dealers and street criminals are poor too, but no one seems to rush to their defense, even though their actions are far less criminal than invading and bombing other countries. if one can not turn to street crime as a response to difficult economic times, than why is turning to imperial plunder a viable career choice?
the man also rants about "draft dodgers." funny, but i prefer the term "war resisters." yes, several of our modern war criminals did refuse to fight in vietnam, but their modern foreign policy decisions would have been no better if they had fought in vietnam. in fact, not fighting in vietnam is probably the best thing that clinton, bush, etc, have ever done.
fuck the warrior. fuck the poor soldier who enlisted to learn a skill or because their were no jobs or because he was bored or because he needed money for college. who doesn't need a job? who does have money for college? who isn't bored?
to repeat, the modern american soldier chooses to enlist. no one forces him to go. there are plenty of books, info on the internet, magazines, and documentaries that clearly explain the brutality of american foreign policy. and yet, these fuck heads continue to join. ok, that's their choice. so, when they get their heads blown off, why do i need to shed a tear? are they bombing people or being bombed? are they more the oppressor or the oppressed? and this goes for whether they are gay, women, or people of color. dropping a bomb is dropping a bomb. it doesn't get better if dropped by a homosexual or an immigrant.
enough with the warrior shit. the warriors are those who resist u.s. imperialism, not those who do its bidding. if we are going to glorify the warrior, where are the films on the nlf? should we mourn the shot down b52 pilot, or celebrate the vietnamese peasant who fired the shot? of course, we can do a bit of both, but what should we do more of? especially if we are going to rant about warriors. yes, it is sad that young americans often join the military with no idea of what they are getting into, and yes, many of them do show courage. but, german soldiers showed courage too. should we watch films on their plight? should we glorify them as warriors? what of the death squads of latin america?
i guess i think a little differently now.
heroes change.
the man also rants about "draft dodgers." funny, but i prefer the term "war resisters." yes, several of our modern war criminals did refuse to fight in vietnam, but their modern foreign policy decisions would have been no better if they had fought in vietnam. in fact, not fighting in vietnam is probably the best thing that clinton, bush, etc, have ever done.
fuck the warrior. fuck the poor soldier who enlisted to learn a skill or because their were no jobs or because he was bored or because he needed money for college. who doesn't need a job? who does have money for college? who isn't bored?
to repeat, the modern american soldier chooses to enlist. no one forces him to go. there are plenty of books, info on the internet, magazines, and documentaries that clearly explain the brutality of american foreign policy. and yet, these fuck heads continue to join. ok, that's their choice. so, when they get their heads blown off, why do i need to shed a tear? are they bombing people or being bombed? are they more the oppressor or the oppressed? and this goes for whether they are gay, women, or people of color. dropping a bomb is dropping a bomb. it doesn't get better if dropped by a homosexual or an immigrant.
enough with the warrior shit. the warriors are those who resist u.s. imperialism, not those who do its bidding. if we are going to glorify the warrior, where are the films on the nlf? should we mourn the shot down b52 pilot, or celebrate the vietnamese peasant who fired the shot? of course, we can do a bit of both, but what should we do more of? especially if we are going to rant about warriors. yes, it is sad that young americans often join the military with no idea of what they are getting into, and yes, many of them do show courage. but, german soldiers showed courage too. should we watch films on their plight? should we glorify them as warriors? what of the death squads of latin america?
i guess i think a little differently now.
heroes change.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
long live the movement
Protest (American, definitely not a verb): Wait for UFPJ or ANSWER to stage a parade (I mean, demonstration) on a weekend afternoon so no one misses work or school or in any way disrupts the flow of commerce. Don’t make a sign; the organizers will make one for you. March in an orderly fashion, be polite to the occupying army (I mean, cops), and be sure to stay in designated free speech zones. Blame the Republicans. Wear costumes. Make puppets. Exclude anarchists. Hold a candlelight vigil. Sign a petition. Chant. Vote for a Democrat and hope for change. Need I continue?
With the stakes never higher than they are now, why aren’t activists ramping up the pressure and looking beyond tactics that are allowed by those in power?
Here are my five guesses:
1. We are trained to believe that nothing major is wrong. Global warming? Economic meltdown? Epidemics of preventable diseases? Slavery, genocide, ecocide? You name it and we’re ready to downplay it. We’re Americans, goddammit, we’ll figure out a way to fix it. When the going gets tough, we’ll call the experts.
2. We are trained to leave it to experts. Rather than worry our little heads over why more than 100 plant and animal species go extinct each day, we rely on experts. Instead of learning what a “collateralized-debt obligation” is and how it contributed to the current economic depression, just let the professionals handle the mess. Besides, such delegation frees up much more time to watch TV and update our Facebook pages.
3. We are trained to embrace non-violence. All the real heroes would never raise a fist in anger: Jesus, MLK, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, etc. Sure, the government and its corporate owners are taking away all our rights and all our money. They’re poisoning our air, water, and food while crafting laws that make prison a looming possibility, but the moment we contemplate anything more than a non-violent response, we become worse than any of them. Ain’t that right?
4. We feel too damn privileged to risk prison (or worse). The average Gaza resident doesn’t have the luxury of wondering if their resistance could result in arrest and thus perhaps ruin their reputation. The average American? Well, that’s a different story. I can’t defy insane laws designed to squash protest. I might get arrested and that means close proximity to all those scary criminals and it also means hurting my chances of landing a good job and maybe even losing all my respectable friends. I mean, I’m an activist and all but that’s asking way too much. Who do you think I am, Mandela?
5. We’re fuckin’ cowards. Our acquiescence in a disturbingly broad range of areas—access to health care, tolerance for voting irregularities, directly funding the Israeli war machine, stomaching the groupthink behind saluting a flag, etc. etc. etc.—appears to have no limits. Americans love to talk the talk about being fearless and tough but when ordered to remove our shoes before going through airport security, it’s “yes sir” all the way.
We know things have passed the proverbial tipping point and that immediate action is 100% needed and justified, but we’re far too spineless to do anything that might get us in trouble. Somehow, it’s more terrifying for any of us to face down a cop than it is to contemplate the total destruction of our earthly eco-system.
If it’s true that action expresses priorities, we American activists aren’t overly concerned about the future.
We now return to our regularly scheduled slate of left wing articles…
Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, Mickey Z. can be found on the Web here
With the stakes never higher than they are now, why aren’t activists ramping up the pressure and looking beyond tactics that are allowed by those in power?
Here are my five guesses:
1. We are trained to believe that nothing major is wrong. Global warming? Economic meltdown? Epidemics of preventable diseases? Slavery, genocide, ecocide? You name it and we’re ready to downplay it. We’re Americans, goddammit, we’ll figure out a way to fix it. When the going gets tough, we’ll call the experts.
2. We are trained to leave it to experts. Rather than worry our little heads over why more than 100 plant and animal species go extinct each day, we rely on experts. Instead of learning what a “collateralized-debt obligation” is and how it contributed to the current economic depression, just let the professionals handle the mess. Besides, such delegation frees up much more time to watch TV and update our Facebook pages.
3. We are trained to embrace non-violence. All the real heroes would never raise a fist in anger: Jesus, MLK, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, etc. Sure, the government and its corporate owners are taking away all our rights and all our money. They’re poisoning our air, water, and food while crafting laws that make prison a looming possibility, but the moment we contemplate anything more than a non-violent response, we become worse than any of them. Ain’t that right?
4. We feel too damn privileged to risk prison (or worse). The average Gaza resident doesn’t have the luxury of wondering if their resistance could result in arrest and thus perhaps ruin their reputation. The average American? Well, that’s a different story. I can’t defy insane laws designed to squash protest. I might get arrested and that means close proximity to all those scary criminals and it also means hurting my chances of landing a good job and maybe even losing all my respectable friends. I mean, I’m an activist and all but that’s asking way too much. Who do you think I am, Mandela?
5. We’re fuckin’ cowards. Our acquiescence in a disturbingly broad range of areas—access to health care, tolerance for voting irregularities, directly funding the Israeli war machine, stomaching the groupthink behind saluting a flag, etc. etc. etc.—appears to have no limits. Americans love to talk the talk about being fearless and tough but when ordered to remove our shoes before going through airport security, it’s “yes sir” all the way.
We know things have passed the proverbial tipping point and that immediate action is 100% needed and justified, but we’re far too spineless to do anything that might get us in trouble. Somehow, it’s more terrifying for any of us to face down a cop than it is to contemplate the total destruction of our earthly eco-system.
If it’s true that action expresses priorities, we American activists aren’t overly concerned about the future.
We now return to our regularly scheduled slate of left wing articles…
Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, Mickey Z. can be found on the Web here
happy 10th
or, democrats bomb the shit out of people too. yeah, remember that, you gutless liberals, you punks who now think all is well because your team is in power. i doubt it mattered to the serbs, or the vietnamese, or the koreans, or the japanese, and many more, that they were murdered by the dems. the bombing of yugoslavia was a massive war crime that used humanitarianism as a cover for the usual brutality of imperial invasion. it was a sick, inhumane action, comparable to bush's worst deeds. milosevic was railroaded in a bag job court, and when it became apparent that he was putting up a worthy defense, he mysteriously died, as did thousands of his people at the hands of american and various other "civilized" powers.
i remember the days well of 10 years ago. i went to rallies with pinko and the folks as others hedged, deciding they needed to speak to the albanian community before taking action. shortly after this statement was made, i never saw the speaker again, despite going to dozens of rallies since. i myself made a few speeches, and had the honor of hearing rk tell people to sample food not bombs, "especially the soup." later on, he would remind a fellow homo erectus that he was a "stupid man."
thousands of dead later, we march on in support of other nations, also under attack by our peace loving nation.
bombs for peace.
yugoslavia, we wronged you. very few of us got it right. most of us ignored your plight, or worse, justified it by demonizing you as the nazis of our day. instead, it was we who were the invaders, we who bombed you. in fact, we were the first nation since nazi germany to attack yugoslavia and kill your people. and yet, somehow, you were made out to be the fascists. the wonders of a free press.
in any case, let us remember the crimes of the recent past, even as we produce new crimes with each passing second. these earlier crimes, committed by a democrat who people now romanticize and lionize, may give us quite the clue as to what we should expect over the next 4 to 8 years.
it won't be pretty folks.
Statement on the 10th Anniversary of the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
March 24, 2009 By Global Balkans Network -- GBN
Global Balkans Network -- GBN's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Image by Vahida Ramujkic
On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For 78 days, bombs rained down on military targets and civilian infrastructure under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention.' Operation Allied Force precipitated the displacement of over one million people and directly resulted in the deaths of over 2000 civilians of a range nationalities (a number that gets much larger if we include indirect deaths as a result of the intervention and post-intervention period, as well as those killed in the resulting escalation of the military conflict between the Yugoslav army and the KLA). Ten years later, Kosovo's ‘independence' has resulted in a quasi-colonial entity of ‘ethnic' enclaves and an all-pervasive security apparatus, a new client state for the Western powers that led the bombing campaign. Meanwhile, Serbia and Montenegro remain stalled on a ‘transition' to neo-liberal democracy marked by a brutal mass privatization, increasing poverty, and the rapid dispossession and continued marginalization of workers, students, refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), Roma communities, and others casualties of economic restructuring.
Global Balkans is a small network of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists of diverse backgrounds in the ex-Yugoslav diaspora and allies. Many of us have witnessed and experienced first-hand the devastation that continues to be felt as a result of the events and ripple effects emanating from the NATO intervention of 1999. We have talked to and continue to dialogue with everyday people from many communities throughout the former Yugoslav Balkan region whose lives have been deeply and permanently turned upside down by the upheaval of the NATO bombing, the wars of the 1990s, and the neoliberal transition of Yugoslavia's various successor states.
Whether they be...
* workers massively laid off from factories that were first bombed and then later sold off at fire sale prices or questionable privatization deals to local tycoons or foreign investors;
* refugees and displaced people caught between the prospect of no return and a lack of resources and political and social will for local integration;
* the families and loved ones of the missing, those who disappeared and were never accounted for during and after the violent chaos of 1999;
* minorities trapped in enclaves in Kosovo who go to sleep every night in fear of attack and who have not seen the main town or city 10 km away for over 10 years;
* internally displaced people living in the shipping containers, makeshift shelters, and run down collective housing provided to them by international aid agencies ten years ago as a "temporary solution", for whom aid was cut off in 2004 and who live in them year round whether it is -15 or + 40°C;
* those communities facing strange illnesses or high cancer rates who are unable to get proper medical care or answers as to their causes in a system that seems bent on hushing up any talk of depleted uranium or the health effects of the bombing that would displease NATO countries;
* displaced people who are among the more than 100,000 who have been or are under threat of deportation back to Serbia from EU countries, many of them, particularly Roma, born abroad and unable to speak the language of the country they are dumped back into;
* the erased of Slovenia, non-Slovenian minorities from the ex-Yugoslav region who woke up one day to find that their citizenship had been erased by the state, and who have been fighting for status under extreme precarity ever since;
* women, Roma, ethnic and sexual minorities who have been disproportionately affected by mass layoffs, particularly in the former self-managing social property sector of the economy (where the majority were employed) that was the first to be privatized, and who face disproportionate violence in the toxic transitional climate of militarism and deprivation that produces social scape-goating;
* our own families, friends, and loved ones who bear many of the hidden and not so hidden marks and scars of those times;
...we have been inspired by their struggles and persistence against difficult odds in difficult conditions. They are the erased, the ignored, the missing and the forgotten of the NATO military campaign, the post-Yugoslav transition, and the intervention of the international community, and we name their situations and think of them today, and invite those who read this to join us in doing so.
Ten years later, we remember those ordinary people of all nationalities who senselessly lost their lives in the wars of the ‘90s, the NATO bombing, and the neoliberal transition. We refuse to reinscribe the nationalist lens through which these conflicts have been portrayed in the Western media as well as in the region, ones that only recognize or canonize the victims of a preferred side and refuse to see those whose lives have been destroyed on the "other" enemy side. We also reject the cynical pro-imperialist lens that legitimizes military intervention by NATO as a "humanitarian" necessity borne of goodwill and the need for benevolent imperial oversight. As if the millions of dollars in bombs (79,000 tons), cruise missiles (10,000 launched), radiation, and cluster bombs (35,000 bomblets) costing $30 billion USD in damage to the local economy and raining down death and ecological devastation on hospitals, schools, factories, bridges, and refineries are the same as teddy bears, food supplies, or medical aid. We stand in solidarity with all the victims of the many layers of violence that have and continue to be enacted in their complex and not so easily reducible manifestations in the region, the kind that the mainstream media is unable and unwilling to depict or recognize. We ask our companero/as and allies to aim for a more informed and complex perspective on the legacy of those times than that which much of the Western left has seemingly adopted from the simplistic reductions and easy victims/villains scenarios of the mainstream media.
Ten years later, we are working to support and actively extend our solidarity to the former Yugoslav region's slowly (re)emerging social movements fighting struggles of survival, persistence, and liberation and to our activist comrades who are tirelessly fighting to make these fragile and beleaguered, yet resolute and courageous movements still stronger, more visible, and even more effective. They are an inspiration. We also encourage the North American/Western left and other progressives to overcome the common cycle of momentary and opportunistic interest based on partial understandings followed by long periods of indifference to the conditions, constraints, and complexities faced by ordinary people and social movements in the region.
Ten years later, the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has been eclipsed on the global stage by a series of intensifying imperialist military interventions, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see each of these military adventures and the mass devastation they have wrought as of a piece, as part of a troubling and dangerous progression, one that will not be resolved by a Democratic president or a kinder, gentler imperialism. We understand and underline the extent to which the NATO bombing in 1999 set many dangerous precedents for these later imperialist wars, and ask those in anti-war movements to remember, talk about, and make those often neglected links. We also see the 1999 NATO intervention as inscribed in a lineage of earlier destructive political measures taken by the "international community", starting with the economic ‘shock therapy' program imposed on the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1990.
It remains to be seen how much of the world and the media will remember or mark this 10th anniversary of the NATO intervention. We expect there to be little recognition of this date that does not recapitulate the standard nationalist, pro-neoliberal and pro-NATO lenses we reject. We remember. We refuse to let it be ignored, glossed over or forgotten, and we stand strong with all those who are still daily living the effects and devastation of those 78 days in 1999 and their aftermath - living, struggling, persisting, fighting back and moving forward towards a different Balkans and a different world as well, one where none of this will be possible or even fathomable.
Global Balkans
March 24, 2009
Global Balkans is an activist research, media, and organizing network that works both locally and in solidarity with Balkan social movements to investigate, publicize and impact political, social and economic struggles in the former Yugoslav and wider Balkan region. We are working to build a transnational, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian network with a pan-Balkan and internationalist outlook (currently based in San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal). They can be reached at globalbalkans[at]gmail[dot]com
i remember the days well of 10 years ago. i went to rallies with pinko and the folks as others hedged, deciding they needed to speak to the albanian community before taking action. shortly after this statement was made, i never saw the speaker again, despite going to dozens of rallies since. i myself made a few speeches, and had the honor of hearing rk tell people to sample food not bombs, "especially the soup." later on, he would remind a fellow homo erectus that he was a "stupid man."
thousands of dead later, we march on in support of other nations, also under attack by our peace loving nation.
bombs for peace.
yugoslavia, we wronged you. very few of us got it right. most of us ignored your plight, or worse, justified it by demonizing you as the nazis of our day. instead, it was we who were the invaders, we who bombed you. in fact, we were the first nation since nazi germany to attack yugoslavia and kill your people. and yet, somehow, you were made out to be the fascists. the wonders of a free press.
in any case, let us remember the crimes of the recent past, even as we produce new crimes with each passing second. these earlier crimes, committed by a democrat who people now romanticize and lionize, may give us quite the clue as to what we should expect over the next 4 to 8 years.
it won't be pretty folks.
Statement on the 10th Anniversary of the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
March 24, 2009 By Global Balkans Network -- GBN
Global Balkans Network -- GBN's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Image by Vahida Ramujkic
On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For 78 days, bombs rained down on military targets and civilian infrastructure under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention.' Operation Allied Force precipitated the displacement of over one million people and directly resulted in the deaths of over 2000 civilians of a range nationalities (a number that gets much larger if we include indirect deaths as a result of the intervention and post-intervention period, as well as those killed in the resulting escalation of the military conflict between the Yugoslav army and the KLA). Ten years later, Kosovo's ‘independence' has resulted in a quasi-colonial entity of ‘ethnic' enclaves and an all-pervasive security apparatus, a new client state for the Western powers that led the bombing campaign. Meanwhile, Serbia and Montenegro remain stalled on a ‘transition' to neo-liberal democracy marked by a brutal mass privatization, increasing poverty, and the rapid dispossession and continued marginalization of workers, students, refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), Roma communities, and others casualties of economic restructuring.
Global Balkans is a small network of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists of diverse backgrounds in the ex-Yugoslav diaspora and allies. Many of us have witnessed and experienced first-hand the devastation that continues to be felt as a result of the events and ripple effects emanating from the NATO intervention of 1999. We have talked to and continue to dialogue with everyday people from many communities throughout the former Yugoslav Balkan region whose lives have been deeply and permanently turned upside down by the upheaval of the NATO bombing, the wars of the 1990s, and the neoliberal transition of Yugoslavia's various successor states.
Whether they be...
* workers massively laid off from factories that were first bombed and then later sold off at fire sale prices or questionable privatization deals to local tycoons or foreign investors;
* refugees and displaced people caught between the prospect of no return and a lack of resources and political and social will for local integration;
* the families and loved ones of the missing, those who disappeared and were never accounted for during and after the violent chaos of 1999;
* minorities trapped in enclaves in Kosovo who go to sleep every night in fear of attack and who have not seen the main town or city 10 km away for over 10 years;
* internally displaced people living in the shipping containers, makeshift shelters, and run down collective housing provided to them by international aid agencies ten years ago as a "temporary solution", for whom aid was cut off in 2004 and who live in them year round whether it is -15 or + 40°C;
* those communities facing strange illnesses or high cancer rates who are unable to get proper medical care or answers as to their causes in a system that seems bent on hushing up any talk of depleted uranium or the health effects of the bombing that would displease NATO countries;
* displaced people who are among the more than 100,000 who have been or are under threat of deportation back to Serbia from EU countries, many of them, particularly Roma, born abroad and unable to speak the language of the country they are dumped back into;
* the erased of Slovenia, non-Slovenian minorities from the ex-Yugoslav region who woke up one day to find that their citizenship had been erased by the state, and who have been fighting for status under extreme precarity ever since;
* women, Roma, ethnic and sexual minorities who have been disproportionately affected by mass layoffs, particularly in the former self-managing social property sector of the economy (where the majority were employed) that was the first to be privatized, and who face disproportionate violence in the toxic transitional climate of militarism and deprivation that produces social scape-goating;
* our own families, friends, and loved ones who bear many of the hidden and not so hidden marks and scars of those times;
...we have been inspired by their struggles and persistence against difficult odds in difficult conditions. They are the erased, the ignored, the missing and the forgotten of the NATO military campaign, the post-Yugoslav transition, and the intervention of the international community, and we name their situations and think of them today, and invite those who read this to join us in doing so.
Ten years later, we remember those ordinary people of all nationalities who senselessly lost their lives in the wars of the ‘90s, the NATO bombing, and the neoliberal transition. We refuse to reinscribe the nationalist lens through which these conflicts have been portrayed in the Western media as well as in the region, ones that only recognize or canonize the victims of a preferred side and refuse to see those whose lives have been destroyed on the "other" enemy side. We also reject the cynical pro-imperialist lens that legitimizes military intervention by NATO as a "humanitarian" necessity borne of goodwill and the need for benevolent imperial oversight. As if the millions of dollars in bombs (79,000 tons), cruise missiles (10,000 launched), radiation, and cluster bombs (35,000 bomblets) costing $30 billion USD in damage to the local economy and raining down death and ecological devastation on hospitals, schools, factories, bridges, and refineries are the same as teddy bears, food supplies, or medical aid. We stand in solidarity with all the victims of the many layers of violence that have and continue to be enacted in their complex and not so easily reducible manifestations in the region, the kind that the mainstream media is unable and unwilling to depict or recognize. We ask our companero/as and allies to aim for a more informed and complex perspective on the legacy of those times than that which much of the Western left has seemingly adopted from the simplistic reductions and easy victims/villains scenarios of the mainstream media.
Ten years later, we are working to support and actively extend our solidarity to the former Yugoslav region's slowly (re)emerging social movements fighting struggles of survival, persistence, and liberation and to our activist comrades who are tirelessly fighting to make these fragile and beleaguered, yet resolute and courageous movements still stronger, more visible, and even more effective. They are an inspiration. We also encourage the North American/Western left and other progressives to overcome the common cycle of momentary and opportunistic interest based on partial understandings followed by long periods of indifference to the conditions, constraints, and complexities faced by ordinary people and social movements in the region.
Ten years later, the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has been eclipsed on the global stage by a series of intensifying imperialist military interventions, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see each of these military adventures and the mass devastation they have wrought as of a piece, as part of a troubling and dangerous progression, one that will not be resolved by a Democratic president or a kinder, gentler imperialism. We understand and underline the extent to which the NATO bombing in 1999 set many dangerous precedents for these later imperialist wars, and ask those in anti-war movements to remember, talk about, and make those often neglected links. We also see the 1999 NATO intervention as inscribed in a lineage of earlier destructive political measures taken by the "international community", starting with the economic ‘shock therapy' program imposed on the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1990.
It remains to be seen how much of the world and the media will remember or mark this 10th anniversary of the NATO intervention. We expect there to be little recognition of this date that does not recapitulate the standard nationalist, pro-neoliberal and pro-NATO lenses we reject. We remember. We refuse to let it be ignored, glossed over or forgotten, and we stand strong with all those who are still daily living the effects and devastation of those 78 days in 1999 and their aftermath - living, struggling, persisting, fighting back and moving forward towards a different Balkans and a different world as well, one where none of this will be possible or even fathomable.
Global Balkans
March 24, 2009
Global Balkans is an activist research, media, and organizing network that works both locally and in solidarity with Balkan social movements to investigate, publicize and impact political, social and economic struggles in the former Yugoslav and wider Balkan region. We are working to build a transnational, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian network with a pan-Balkan and internationalist outlook (currently based in San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal). They can be reached at globalbalkans[at]gmail[dot]com
house of paine
As Tom Paine once opined on this subject: "When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive'--- when these things can be said then may that country boast of its constitution and its government." Folks, we gotta ways to go.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
if only this piece was off base
US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific
March 21, 2009 By Catherine Lutz
Source: Japan Focus
Catherine Lutz's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible but equally unprecedented is the global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is able and willing to attempt to control events in other regions militarily. The start of a new administration in Washington, and the possibility that world economic depression will give rise to new tensions and challenges, provides an important occasion to review the global structures of American power.
Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories.[1] There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion. These official numbers are quite misleading as to the scale of US overseas military basing, however, excluding as they do the massive buildup of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. $2 billion in military construction money has been expended in only three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter."
Deployed from those battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet corners of Curacao, Korea, and England, the US military domain consists of sprawling Army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers.[2] While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war making and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution.
The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supply, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been widespread and growing, however, and this essay provides an overview of both the worldwide network of U.S. military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions.
Military bases are "installations routinely used by military forces" (Blaker 1990:4). They represent a confluence of labor (soldiers, paramilitary workers, and civilians), land, and capital in the form of static facilities, supplies, and equipment. They should also include the eleven US aircraft carriers, often used to signal the possibility of US bombing and invasion as they are brought to "trouble spots" around the world. They were, for example, the primary base of US airpower during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US Navy refers to each carrier as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory." These moveable bases and their land-based counterparts are just the most visible part of the larger picture of US military presence overseas. This picture of military access includes (1) US military training of foreign forces, often in conjunction with the provision of US weaponry, (2) joint exercises meant to enhance US soldiers' exposure to a variety of operating environments from jungle to desert to urban terrain and interoperability across national militaries, and (3) legal arrangements made to gain overflight rights and other forms of ad hoc use of others' territory as well as to preposition military equipment there. In all of these realms, the US is in a class by itself, no adversary or ally maintaining anything comparable in terms of its scope, depth and global reach.
US forces train 100,000 soldiers annually in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help pursue U.S. interests in local conflicts and save the U.S. money, casualties, and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur.[3] Moreover, working with other militaries is important, strategists say, because "these low-tech militaries may well be U.S. partners or adversaries in future contingencies, [necessitating] becoming familiar with their capabilities and operating style and learning to operate with them" (Cliff & Shapiro 2003:102). The blowback effects are especially well known since September 11 (Johnson 2000). Less well known is that these training programs strengthen the power of military forces in relation to other sectors within those countries, sometimes with fragile democracies, and they may include explicit training in assassination and torture techniques. Fully 38 percent of those countries with US basing were cited in 2002 for their poor human rights record (Lumpe 2002:16).
The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime, and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape. These exercises have sometimes been provocative to other nations, and in some cases have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops; in recent years, for example, the US has run approximately 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil. This has meant a near continuous presence of US troops in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and continue to vigorously object to their reinsertion, and whose Constitution forbids the basing of foreign troops. In addition, these exercises ramp up even more than usual the number and social and environmental impact of daily jet landings and sailors on liberty around US bases (Lindsay Poland 2003).
Finally, US military and civilian personnel work to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access. They have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing, US nuclear weapons, and a more-than-defensive military in the service of US wars, in the case of Japan. "Military diplomacy" with local civil and military elites is conducted not only to influence such legislation but also to shape opinion in what are delicately called "host" countries. US military and civilian officials are joined in their efforts by intelligence agents passing as businessmen or diplomats; in 2005, the US Ambassador to the Philippines created a furor by mentioning that the US has 70 agents operating in Mindanao alone.
Much of U.S. weaponry, nuclear and otherwise, is stored at places like Camp Darby in Italy, Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, and the Naval Magazine on Guam, as well as in nuclear submarines and on the Navy's other floating bases.[4] The weapons, personnel, and fossil fuels involved in this US military presence cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers but an increasing number of billions from the citizens of the countries involved, particularly Japan. Elaborate bilateral negotiations exchange weapons, cash, and trade privileges for overflight and land use rights. Less explicitly, but no less importantly, rice import levels or immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange, for example in enlisting mercenaries from the islands of Oceania (Cooley 2008).
Bases are the literal and symbolic anchors, and the most visible centerpieces, of the U.S. military presence overseas. To understand where those bases are and how they are being used is essential for understanding the United States' relationship with the rest of the world, the role of coercion in it, and its political economic complexion. I ask why this empire of bases was established in the first place, how the bases are currently configured around the world and how that configuration is changing.
What Are Bases For?
Foreign military bases have been established throughout the history of expanding states and warfare. They proliferate where a state has imperial ambitions, either through direct control of territory or through indirect control over the political economy, laws, and foreign policy of other places. Whether or not it recognizes itself as such, a country can be called an empire when it projects substantial power with the aim of asserting and maintaining dominance over other regions. Those policies succeed when wealth is extracted from peripheral areas, and redistributed to the imperial center. Empires, then, have historically been associated with a growing gap between the wealth and welfare of the powerful center and the regions it dominates. Alongside and supporting these goals has often been elevated self-regard in the imperial power, or a sense of racial, cultural, or social superiority.
The descriptors empire and imperialism have been applied to the Romans, Incas, Mongols, Persians, Portuguese, Spanish, Ottomans, Dutch, British, Soviet Union, China, Japan, and the United States, among others. Despite the striking differences between each of these cases, each used military bases to maintain some forms of rule over regions far from their center. The bases eroded the sovereignty of allied states on which they were established by treaty; the Roman Empire was accomplished not only by conquest, but also "by taking her weaker [but still sovereign] neighbors under her wing and protecting them against her and their stronger neighbors... The most that Rome asked of them in terms of territory was the cessation, here and there, of a patch of ground for the plantation of a Roman fortress" (Magdoff et al. 2002).
What have military bases accomplished for these empires through history? Bases are usually presented, above all, as having rational, strategic purposes; the empire claims that they provide forward defense for the homeland, supply other nations with security, and facilitate the control of trade routes and resources. They have been used to protect non-economic actors and their agendas as well -- missionaries, political operatives, and aid workers among them. In the 16th century, the Portuguese, for example, seized profitable ports along the route to India and used demonstration bombardment, fortification, and naval patrols to institute a semi-monopoly in the spice trade. They militarily coerced safe passage payments and duties from local traders via key fortified ports. More recently as well, bases have been used to control the political and economic life of the host nation: US bases in Korea, for example, have been key parts of the continuing control that the US military exercises over Korean forces, and Korean foreign policy more generally, extracting important political and military support, for example, for its wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Politically, bases serve to encourage other governments' endorsement of US military and other foreign policy. Moreover, bases have not simply been planned in keeping with strategic and political goals, but are the result of institutionalized bureaucratic and political economic imperatives, that is, corporations and the military itself as an organization have a powerful stake in bases' continued existence regardless of their strategic value (Johnson 2004).
Alongside their military and economic functions, bases have symbolic and psychological dimensions. They are highly visible expressions of a nation's will to status and power. Strategic elites have built bases as a visible sign of the nation's standing, much as they have constructed monuments and battleships. So, too, contemporary US politicians and the public have treated the number of their bases as indicators of the nation's hyperstatus and hyperpower. More darkly, overseas military bases can also be seen as symptoms of irrational or untethered fears, even paranoia, as they are built with the long-term goal of taming a world perceived to be out of control. Empires frequently misperceive the world as rife with threats and themselves as objects of violent hostility from others. Militaries' interest in organizational survival has also contributed to the amplification of this fear and imperial basing structures as the solution as they "sell themselves" to their populace by exaggerating threats, underestimating the costs of basing and war itself, as well as understating the obstacles facing preemption and belligerence (Van Evera 2001).
As the world economy and its technological substructures have changed, so have the roles of foreign bases. By 1500, new sailing technologies allowed much longer distance voyages, even circumnavigational ones, and so empires could aspire to long networks of coastal naval bases to facilitate the control of sea lanes and trade. They were established at distances that would allow provisioning the ship, taking on fresh fruit that would protect sailors from scurvy, and so on. By the 21st century, technological advances have at least theoretically eliminated many of the reasons for foreign bases, given the possibilities of in transit refueling of jets and aircraft carriers, the nuclear powering of submarines and battleships, and other advances in sea and airlift of military personnel and equipment. Bases have, nevertheless, continued their ineluctable expansion.
States that invest their people's wealth in overseas bases have paid direct as well as opportunity costs, whose consequences in the long run have usually been collapse of the empire. In The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Kennedy notes that previous empires which established and tenaciously held onto overseas bases inevitably saw their wealth and power decay. He finds that history
". . . demonstrates that military 'security' alone is never enough. It may, over the shorter term, deter or defeat rival states....[b]ut if, by such victories, the nation over-extends itself geographically and strategically; if, even at a less imperial level, it chooses to devote a large proportion of its total income to 'protection,' leaving less for 'productive investment,' it is likely to find its economic output slowing down, with dire implications for its long-term capacity to maintain both its citizens' consumption demands and its international position" (Kennedy 1987:539).[5]
Nonetheless, U.S. defense officials and scholars have continued to argue that bases lead to "enhanced national security and successful foreign policy" because they provide "a credible capacity to move, employ, and sustain military forces abroad," (Blaker 1990:3) and the ability "to impose the will of the United States and its coalition partners on any adversaries."[6] This belief helps sustain the US basing structure, which far exceeds any the world has seen: this is so in terms of its global reach, depth, and cost, as well as its impact on geopolitics in all regions of the world, particularly the Asia-Pacific.
A Short History of US Bases
In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years and 55 million World War II deaths later (of which a small fraction -- 400,000 -- were US citizens), the United States had an astounding 30,000 installations large and small in approximately 100 countries. While this number was projected to contract to 2,000 by 1948, the global scale of US military basing would remain a major legacy of the Second World War, and with it, providing the sinews for the rise to global hegemony of the United States (Blaker 1990:22).
After consolidation of continental dominance, there were three periods of expansive global ambition in US history beginning in 1898, 1945, and 2001. Each is associated with the acquisition of significant numbers of new overseas military bases. The Spanish-American war resulted in the acquisition of a number of colonies, many of which have remained under US control in the century since. Nonetheless, by 1920, popular support for international expansion in the US had been diminished by the Russian Revolution, by growing domestic labor militancy, and by a rising nationalism, culminating in the US Senate's rejection of the League of Nations (Smith 2003). So it was that as late as 1938, the US basing system was far smaller than that of its political and economic peers including many European nations as well as Japan. US soldiers were stationed in just 14 bases, some quite small, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, the Philippines, Shanghai, two in the Aleutians, American Samoa, and Johnston Island (Harkavy 1982). This small number was the result in part of a strong anti-statist and anti-militarist strain in US political culture (Sherry 1995). From the perspective of many in the US through the inter-war period, to build bases would be to risk unwarranted entanglement in others' conflicts. Bases nevertheless positioned the US in both Latin America and the Asia-Pacific.
Many of the most important and strategic international bases of this era were those of rival empires, with by far the largest number belonging to the British Empire. In order of magnitude, the other colonial powers with basing included France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan, and, only then, the US. Conversely, some countries with large militaries and even some with expansive ambitions had relatively few overseas bases; Germany and the Soviet Union had almost none. But the attempt to acquire such bases would be a contributing cause of World War II (Harkavy 1989:5).
The bulk of the US basing system was established during World War II, beginning with a deal cut with Great Britain for the long-term lease of base facilities in six British colonies in the Caribbean in 1941 in exchange for some decrepit US destroyers. The same year, the US assumed control of formerly Danish bases in Greenland and Iceland (Harkavy 1982:68). The rationale for building bases in the Western Hemisphere was in part to discourage or prevent the Germans from doing so; at the same time, the US did not, before Pearl Harbor, expand or build new bases in the Asia-Pacific on the assumption that they might be indefensible and that they could even provoke Japanese attack.
By the end of the war in 1945, the United States had 30,000 installations spread throughout the world, as already mentioned. The Soviet Union had bases in Eastern Europe, but virtually no others until the 1970s, when they expanded rapidly, especially in Africa and the Indian Ocean area (Harkavy 1982). While Truman was intent on maintaining bases the US had taken or created in the war, many were closed by 1949 (Blaker 1990:30). Pressure came from Australia, France, and England, as well as from Panama, Denmark and Iceland, for return of bases in their own territory or colonies, and domestically to demobilize the twelve million man military (a larger military would have been needed to maintain the vast basing system). More important than the shrinking number of bases, however, was the codification of US military access rights around the world in a comprehensive set of legal documents. These established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and South Asia (CENTO), and Southeast Asia (SEATO), and they included bilateral arrangements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. These alliances assumed a common security interest between the United States and other countries and were the charter for US basing in each place. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do; these usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage created. These agreements and subsequent base operations have usually been shrouded in secrecy.
In the United States, the National Security Act of 1947, along with a variety of executive orders, instituted what can be called a second, secret government or the "national security state", which created the National Security Agency, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency and gave the US president expansive new imperial powers. From this point on, domestic and especially foreign military activities and bases were to be heavily masked from public oversight (Lens 1987). Begun as part of the Manhattan Project, the black budget is a source of defense funds secret even to Congress, and one that became permanent with the creation of the CIA. Under the Reagan administration, it came to be relied on more and more for a variety of military and intelligence projects and by one estimate was $36 billion in 1989 (Blaker 1990:101, Weiner 1990:4). Many of those unaccountable funds then and now go into use overseas, flowing out of US embassies and military bases. There they have helped the US to work vigorously to undermine and change local laws that restrict its military plans; it has interfered for years in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, including attempts to influence votes on and change anti-nuclear and anti-war provisions in the Constitutions of the Pacific nation of Belau and of Japan.
The number of US bases was to rise again during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, reaching back to 1947 levels by the year 1967 (Blaker 1990:33). The presumption was established that bases captured or created during wartime would be permanently retained. Certain ideas about basing and what it accomplished were to be retained from World War II as well, including the belief that "its extensive overseas basing system was a legitimate and necessary instrument of U.S. power, morally justified and a rightful symbol of the U.S. role in the world" (Blaker 1990:28).
Nonetheless, over the second half of the 20th century, the United States was either evicted or voluntarily left bases in dozens of countries.[7] Between 1947 and 1990, the US was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece, and Turkey in the 1980s enabled those governments to negotiate significantly more compensation from the United States. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores, unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies, a demand with which the US complied.[8] In the 1990s and later, the US was sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques, and Uzbekistan (see McCaffery, this volume).
At the same time, US bases were newly built after 1947 in remarkable numbers (241) in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as in Italy, Britain, and Japan (Blaker 1990:45). The defeated Axis powers continued to host the most significant numbers of US bases: at its height, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations.
As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the bases in East Asia acquired in the Spanish American War and in World War II, such as Guam, Okinawa and the Philippines, became the primary sites from which the United States waged war on Vietnam. Without them, the costs and logistical obstacles for the US would have been immense. The number of bombing runs over North and South Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded, for example, at the Naval Station in Guam, stored at the Naval Magazine in the southern area of the island, and then shipped up to be loaded onto B-52s at Anderson Air Force Base every day during years of the war. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R & R at bases throughout East and Southeast Asia which would allow them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting (Baker 2004:76). In addition to the bases' role in fighting these large and overt wars, they facilitated the movement of military assets to accomplish the over 200 military interventions the US waged in the Cold War period (Blum 1995).
While speed of deployment is framed as an important continued reason for forward basing, troops could be deployed anywhere in the world from US bases without having to touch down en route. In fact, US soldiers are being increasingly billeted on US territory, including such far-flung areas as Guam, which is presently slated for a larger buildup, for this reason as well as to avoid the political and other costs of foreign deployment.
With the will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, the US over time, and especially in the 1990s, established a large number of new military bases to facilitate the strategic use of communications and space technologies. Military R&D (the Pentagon spent over $52 billion in 2005 and employed over 90,000 scientists) and corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, space tracking telescopes and laser sources, satellite control, downwind air sampling monitors, and research facilities for everything from weapons testing to meteorology. Missile defense systems and network centric warfare increasingly rely on satellite technology and drones with associated requirements for ground facilities. These facilities have often been established in violation of arms control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty meant to limit the militarization of space.
The assumption that US bases served local interests in a shared ideological and security project dominated into the 1960s: allowing base access showed a commitment to fight Communism and gratitude for US military assistance. But with decolonization and the US war in Vietnam, such arguments began to lose their power, and the number of US overseas bases declined from an early 1960s peak. Where access was once automatic, many countries now had increased leverage over what the US had to give in exchange for basing rights, and those rights could be restricted in a variety of important ways, including through environmental and other regulations. The bargaining chips used by the US were increasingly sophisticated weapons, as well as rent payments for the land on which bases were established.[9] These exchanges were often become linked with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as access to oil and other raw materials and investment opportunities (Harkavy 1982:337). They also, particularly when advanced weaponry is the medium of exchange, have had destabilizing effects on regional arms balances. From the earlier ideological rationale for the bases, global post-war recovery and decreasing inequality between the US and countries -- mostly in the global North -- that housed the majority of US bases, led to a more pragmatic or economic grounding to basing negotiations, albeit often thinly veiled by the language of friendship and common ideological bent. The 1980s saw countries whose populations and governments had strongly opposed US military presence, such as Greece, agree to US bases on their soil only because they were in need of the cash, and Burma, a neutral but very poor state, entered negotiations with the US over basing troops there (Harkavy 1989:4-5).
The third period of accelerated imperial ambition began in 2000, with the election of George Bush and the ascendancy of a group of leaders committed to a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power, their ability to do so radically precipitated and allowed by the attacks of 9/11. They wanted "a network of 'deployment bases' or 'forward operating bases' to increase the reach of current and future forces" and focused on the need for bases in Iraq: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." This plan for expanded US military presence around the world has been put into action, particularly in the Middle East, the Russian perimeter, and, now, Africa.
Pentagon transformation plans design US military bases to operate even more uniformly as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. Where bases in Korea, for example, were once meant centrally to defend South Korea from attack from the north, they are now, like bases everywhere, meant primarily to project power in any number of directions and serve as stepping stones to battles far from themselves. The Global Defense Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from Cold War locations, but on grounding imperial ambitions through remaking legal arrangements that support expanded military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries to be able to "surge" military force quickly, anywhere.
The Department of Defense currently distinguishes between three types of military facilities. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often including family housing, such as Kadena Air Base in Japan and Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited U.S. military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment," such as Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras (US Defense Department 2004:10). Finally, "cooperative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, which are maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads." In Thailand, for example, U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield has been used extensively for US combat runs over Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are now cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, as in Dakar, Senegal where facilities and use rights have been newly established.
Critical observers of US foreign policy, Chalmers Johnson foremost among them, have thoroughly dissected and dismantled several of the arguments that have been made for maintaining a global military basing system (Johnson 2004). They have shown that the system has often failed in its own terms, that is, it has not provided more safety for the US or its allies. Johnson shows that the US base presence has often created more attacks rather than fewer, as in Saudi Arabia or in Iraq. They have made the communities around the base a key target of Russia's or other nation's missiles, and local people recognize this. So on the island of Belau in the Pacific, site of sharp resistance to US attempts to install a submarine base and jungle training center, people describe their experience of military basing in World War II: "When soldiers come, war comes." Likewise, on Guam, a common joke has it that few people other than nuclear targeters in the Kremlin know where their island is. Finally, US military actions have often produced violence in the form of blowback rather than squelched it, undermining their own stated realist objectives (Johnson 2000).
Gaining and maintaining access for US bases has often involved close collaboration with despotic governments. This has been the case especially in the Middle East and Asia. The US long worked closely with the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, to maintain the Philippines bases, with various autocratic or military Korean rulers from 1960 through the 1980s, and successive Thai dictators until 1973, to give just a few examples.
Conclusion: The World Responds
Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, with some of the earliest and most active in the Asia Pacific region, particularly the Philippines, Okinawa, and Korea, and, recently, Guam.[10] In defining the problem they face, some groups have focused on the base itself, its sheer presence as out of place in a world of nation states, that is, they see the problem as one of affronts to sovereignty and national pride.
Others focus on the purposes the bases serve, which is to stand ready to and sometimes wage war, and see the bases as implicating them in the violence projected from them. Most also focus on the noxious effects of the bases' daily operations involving highly toxic, noisy, and violent operations that employ large numbers of young males. For years, the movements have criticized confiscation of land, the health effects from military jet noise and air and water pollution, soldiers' crimes, especially rapes, other assaults, murders, and car crashes, and the impunity they have usually enjoyed, the inequality of the nation to nation relationship often undergirded by racism and other forms of disrespect. Above all, there is the culture of militarism that infiltrates local societies and its consequences, including death and injury to local youth, and the use of the bases for prisoner extradition and torture.[11] In a few cases, such as Japan and Korea, the bases entail costs to local treasuries in payments to the US for support of the bases or for cleanup of former base areas.
The sense that US bases impose massive burdens on local communities and the nation is common in the countries where US bases are most ubiquitous and of longest-standing. These are places where people have been able to observe military practice and relations with the US up close over a long period of time. In Okinawa, most polls show that 70 to 80 percent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the Marines, to leave: they want base land back and they want an end to aviation crash risks, an end to prostitution, and drug trafficking, and sexual assault and other crimes by US soldiers (see Kozue and Takazato, this volume; Sturdevant & Stoltzfus 1993).[12] One family built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the fence to Futenma Air Base, with a stairway to the roof which allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.
In Korea, many feel that a reduction in US presence would increase national security.[13] As interest grew since 2000 in reconciliation with North Korea, many came to the view that nuclear and other deterrence against North Korean attack associated with the US military presence, have prevented reunification. As well, the US military is seen as disrespectful of Koreans. In recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers brought out vast candlelight vigils and other protest across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967-1973 by the British on behalf of the US, have organized a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British Government (see Vine 2009). There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations balked at US attempts at military basing access (Hallinan 2007). In Eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favor of taking the bases in pursuit of solidifying ties with NATO and the European Union, and despite economic benefits of the bases, vigorous protests including hunger strikes have emerged (see Heller and Lammerant, this volume).[14]
In South Korea, bloody battles between civilian protesters and the Korean military were waged in 2006 in response to US plans to relocate the troops there. In 2004, the Korean government agreed to US plans to expand Camp Humphries near Pyongtaek, currently 3,700 acres, by an additional 2,900 acres.
The surrounding area, including the towns of Doduri and Daechuri, was home to some 1,372 people, many elderly farmers. In 2005, residents and activists began a peace camp at the village of Daechuri. The Korean government eventually forcibly evicted all from their homes and demolished the Daechuri primary school, which had been an organizing center for the resisting farmers.
The US has responded to anti-base organizing, on the other hand, by a renewed emphasis on "force protection," in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people onto base property. The Department of Defense has also engaged in the time-honored practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defense staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. The regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements," not "status of forces agreements" or remain entirely secret. While major reorganization of bases is underway for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to derail or prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of Vieques and the Philippine bases. The US attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US (see Engelhardt, this volume). The likelihood that a change of US administration will make for significant dismantling of those bases is highly unlikely, however, for all the reasons this brief history of US bases and empire suggests.
March 21, 2009 By Catherine Lutz
Source: Japan Focus
Catherine Lutz's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible but equally unprecedented is the global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is able and willing to attempt to control events in other regions militarily. The start of a new administration in Washington, and the possibility that world economic depression will give rise to new tensions and challenges, provides an important occasion to review the global structures of American power.
Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories.[1] There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion. These official numbers are quite misleading as to the scale of US overseas military basing, however, excluding as they do the massive buildup of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. $2 billion in military construction money has been expended in only three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter."
Deployed from those battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet corners of Curacao, Korea, and England, the US military domain consists of sprawling Army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers.[2] While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war making and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution.
The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supply, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been widespread and growing, however, and this essay provides an overview of both the worldwide network of U.S. military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions.
Military bases are "installations routinely used by military forces" (Blaker 1990:4). They represent a confluence of labor (soldiers, paramilitary workers, and civilians), land, and capital in the form of static facilities, supplies, and equipment. They should also include the eleven US aircraft carriers, often used to signal the possibility of US bombing and invasion as they are brought to "trouble spots" around the world. They were, for example, the primary base of US airpower during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US Navy refers to each carrier as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory." These moveable bases and their land-based counterparts are just the most visible part of the larger picture of US military presence overseas. This picture of military access includes (1) US military training of foreign forces, often in conjunction with the provision of US weaponry, (2) joint exercises meant to enhance US soldiers' exposure to a variety of operating environments from jungle to desert to urban terrain and interoperability across national militaries, and (3) legal arrangements made to gain overflight rights and other forms of ad hoc use of others' territory as well as to preposition military equipment there. In all of these realms, the US is in a class by itself, no adversary or ally maintaining anything comparable in terms of its scope, depth and global reach.
US forces train 100,000 soldiers annually in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help pursue U.S. interests in local conflicts and save the U.S. money, casualties, and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur.[3] Moreover, working with other militaries is important, strategists say, because "these low-tech militaries may well be U.S. partners or adversaries in future contingencies, [necessitating] becoming familiar with their capabilities and operating style and learning to operate with them" (Cliff & Shapiro 2003:102). The blowback effects are especially well known since September 11 (Johnson 2000). Less well known is that these training programs strengthen the power of military forces in relation to other sectors within those countries, sometimes with fragile democracies, and they may include explicit training in assassination and torture techniques. Fully 38 percent of those countries with US basing were cited in 2002 for their poor human rights record (Lumpe 2002:16).
The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime, and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape. These exercises have sometimes been provocative to other nations, and in some cases have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops; in recent years, for example, the US has run approximately 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil. This has meant a near continuous presence of US troops in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and continue to vigorously object to their reinsertion, and whose Constitution forbids the basing of foreign troops. In addition, these exercises ramp up even more than usual the number and social and environmental impact of daily jet landings and sailors on liberty around US bases (Lindsay Poland 2003).
Finally, US military and civilian personnel work to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access. They have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing, US nuclear weapons, and a more-than-defensive military in the service of US wars, in the case of Japan. "Military diplomacy" with local civil and military elites is conducted not only to influence such legislation but also to shape opinion in what are delicately called "host" countries. US military and civilian officials are joined in their efforts by intelligence agents passing as businessmen or diplomats; in 2005, the US Ambassador to the Philippines created a furor by mentioning that the US has 70 agents operating in Mindanao alone.
Much of U.S. weaponry, nuclear and otherwise, is stored at places like Camp Darby in Italy, Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, and the Naval Magazine on Guam, as well as in nuclear submarines and on the Navy's other floating bases.[4] The weapons, personnel, and fossil fuels involved in this US military presence cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers but an increasing number of billions from the citizens of the countries involved, particularly Japan. Elaborate bilateral negotiations exchange weapons, cash, and trade privileges for overflight and land use rights. Less explicitly, but no less importantly, rice import levels or immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange, for example in enlisting mercenaries from the islands of Oceania (Cooley 2008).
Bases are the literal and symbolic anchors, and the most visible centerpieces, of the U.S. military presence overseas. To understand where those bases are and how they are being used is essential for understanding the United States' relationship with the rest of the world, the role of coercion in it, and its political economic complexion. I ask why this empire of bases was established in the first place, how the bases are currently configured around the world and how that configuration is changing.
What Are Bases For?
Foreign military bases have been established throughout the history of expanding states and warfare. They proliferate where a state has imperial ambitions, either through direct control of territory or through indirect control over the political economy, laws, and foreign policy of other places. Whether or not it recognizes itself as such, a country can be called an empire when it projects substantial power with the aim of asserting and maintaining dominance over other regions. Those policies succeed when wealth is extracted from peripheral areas, and redistributed to the imperial center. Empires, then, have historically been associated with a growing gap between the wealth and welfare of the powerful center and the regions it dominates. Alongside and supporting these goals has often been elevated self-regard in the imperial power, or a sense of racial, cultural, or social superiority.
The descriptors empire and imperialism have been applied to the Romans, Incas, Mongols, Persians, Portuguese, Spanish, Ottomans, Dutch, British, Soviet Union, China, Japan, and the United States, among others. Despite the striking differences between each of these cases, each used military bases to maintain some forms of rule over regions far from their center. The bases eroded the sovereignty of allied states on which they were established by treaty; the Roman Empire was accomplished not only by conquest, but also "by taking her weaker [but still sovereign] neighbors under her wing and protecting them against her and their stronger neighbors... The most that Rome asked of them in terms of territory was the cessation, here and there, of a patch of ground for the plantation of a Roman fortress" (Magdoff et al. 2002).
What have military bases accomplished for these empires through history? Bases are usually presented, above all, as having rational, strategic purposes; the empire claims that they provide forward defense for the homeland, supply other nations with security, and facilitate the control of trade routes and resources. They have been used to protect non-economic actors and their agendas as well -- missionaries, political operatives, and aid workers among them. In the 16th century, the Portuguese, for example, seized profitable ports along the route to India and used demonstration bombardment, fortification, and naval patrols to institute a semi-monopoly in the spice trade. They militarily coerced safe passage payments and duties from local traders via key fortified ports. More recently as well, bases have been used to control the political and economic life of the host nation: US bases in Korea, for example, have been key parts of the continuing control that the US military exercises over Korean forces, and Korean foreign policy more generally, extracting important political and military support, for example, for its wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Politically, bases serve to encourage other governments' endorsement of US military and other foreign policy. Moreover, bases have not simply been planned in keeping with strategic and political goals, but are the result of institutionalized bureaucratic and political economic imperatives, that is, corporations and the military itself as an organization have a powerful stake in bases' continued existence regardless of their strategic value (Johnson 2004).
Alongside their military and economic functions, bases have symbolic and psychological dimensions. They are highly visible expressions of a nation's will to status and power. Strategic elites have built bases as a visible sign of the nation's standing, much as they have constructed monuments and battleships. So, too, contemporary US politicians and the public have treated the number of their bases as indicators of the nation's hyperstatus and hyperpower. More darkly, overseas military bases can also be seen as symptoms of irrational or untethered fears, even paranoia, as they are built with the long-term goal of taming a world perceived to be out of control. Empires frequently misperceive the world as rife with threats and themselves as objects of violent hostility from others. Militaries' interest in organizational survival has also contributed to the amplification of this fear and imperial basing structures as the solution as they "sell themselves" to their populace by exaggerating threats, underestimating the costs of basing and war itself, as well as understating the obstacles facing preemption and belligerence (Van Evera 2001).
As the world economy and its technological substructures have changed, so have the roles of foreign bases. By 1500, new sailing technologies allowed much longer distance voyages, even circumnavigational ones, and so empires could aspire to long networks of coastal naval bases to facilitate the control of sea lanes and trade. They were established at distances that would allow provisioning the ship, taking on fresh fruit that would protect sailors from scurvy, and so on. By the 21st century, technological advances have at least theoretically eliminated many of the reasons for foreign bases, given the possibilities of in transit refueling of jets and aircraft carriers, the nuclear powering of submarines and battleships, and other advances in sea and airlift of military personnel and equipment. Bases have, nevertheless, continued their ineluctable expansion.
States that invest their people's wealth in overseas bases have paid direct as well as opportunity costs, whose consequences in the long run have usually been collapse of the empire. In The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Kennedy notes that previous empires which established and tenaciously held onto overseas bases inevitably saw their wealth and power decay. He finds that history
". . . demonstrates that military 'security' alone is never enough. It may, over the shorter term, deter or defeat rival states....[b]ut if, by such victories, the nation over-extends itself geographically and strategically; if, even at a less imperial level, it chooses to devote a large proportion of its total income to 'protection,' leaving less for 'productive investment,' it is likely to find its economic output slowing down, with dire implications for its long-term capacity to maintain both its citizens' consumption demands and its international position" (Kennedy 1987:539).[5]
Nonetheless, U.S. defense officials and scholars have continued to argue that bases lead to "enhanced national security and successful foreign policy" because they provide "a credible capacity to move, employ, and sustain military forces abroad," (Blaker 1990:3) and the ability "to impose the will of the United States and its coalition partners on any adversaries."[6] This belief helps sustain the US basing structure, which far exceeds any the world has seen: this is so in terms of its global reach, depth, and cost, as well as its impact on geopolitics in all regions of the world, particularly the Asia-Pacific.
A Short History of US Bases
In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years and 55 million World War II deaths later (of which a small fraction -- 400,000 -- were US citizens), the United States had an astounding 30,000 installations large and small in approximately 100 countries. While this number was projected to contract to 2,000 by 1948, the global scale of US military basing would remain a major legacy of the Second World War, and with it, providing the sinews for the rise to global hegemony of the United States (Blaker 1990:22).
After consolidation of continental dominance, there were three periods of expansive global ambition in US history beginning in 1898, 1945, and 2001. Each is associated with the acquisition of significant numbers of new overseas military bases. The Spanish-American war resulted in the acquisition of a number of colonies, many of which have remained under US control in the century since. Nonetheless, by 1920, popular support for international expansion in the US had been diminished by the Russian Revolution, by growing domestic labor militancy, and by a rising nationalism, culminating in the US Senate's rejection of the League of Nations (Smith 2003). So it was that as late as 1938, the US basing system was far smaller than that of its political and economic peers including many European nations as well as Japan. US soldiers were stationed in just 14 bases, some quite small, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, the Philippines, Shanghai, two in the Aleutians, American Samoa, and Johnston Island (Harkavy 1982). This small number was the result in part of a strong anti-statist and anti-militarist strain in US political culture (Sherry 1995). From the perspective of many in the US through the inter-war period, to build bases would be to risk unwarranted entanglement in others' conflicts. Bases nevertheless positioned the US in both Latin America and the Asia-Pacific.
Many of the most important and strategic international bases of this era were those of rival empires, with by far the largest number belonging to the British Empire. In order of magnitude, the other colonial powers with basing included France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan, and, only then, the US. Conversely, some countries with large militaries and even some with expansive ambitions had relatively few overseas bases; Germany and the Soviet Union had almost none. But the attempt to acquire such bases would be a contributing cause of World War II (Harkavy 1989:5).
The bulk of the US basing system was established during World War II, beginning with a deal cut with Great Britain for the long-term lease of base facilities in six British colonies in the Caribbean in 1941 in exchange for some decrepit US destroyers. The same year, the US assumed control of formerly Danish bases in Greenland and Iceland (Harkavy 1982:68). The rationale for building bases in the Western Hemisphere was in part to discourage or prevent the Germans from doing so; at the same time, the US did not, before Pearl Harbor, expand or build new bases in the Asia-Pacific on the assumption that they might be indefensible and that they could even provoke Japanese attack.
By the end of the war in 1945, the United States had 30,000 installations spread throughout the world, as already mentioned. The Soviet Union had bases in Eastern Europe, but virtually no others until the 1970s, when they expanded rapidly, especially in Africa and the Indian Ocean area (Harkavy 1982). While Truman was intent on maintaining bases the US had taken or created in the war, many were closed by 1949 (Blaker 1990:30). Pressure came from Australia, France, and England, as well as from Panama, Denmark and Iceland, for return of bases in their own territory or colonies, and domestically to demobilize the twelve million man military (a larger military would have been needed to maintain the vast basing system). More important than the shrinking number of bases, however, was the codification of US military access rights around the world in a comprehensive set of legal documents. These established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and South Asia (CENTO), and Southeast Asia (SEATO), and they included bilateral arrangements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. These alliances assumed a common security interest between the United States and other countries and were the charter for US basing in each place. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do; these usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage created. These agreements and subsequent base operations have usually been shrouded in secrecy.
In the United States, the National Security Act of 1947, along with a variety of executive orders, instituted what can be called a second, secret government or the "national security state", which created the National Security Agency, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency and gave the US president expansive new imperial powers. From this point on, domestic and especially foreign military activities and bases were to be heavily masked from public oversight (Lens 1987). Begun as part of the Manhattan Project, the black budget is a source of defense funds secret even to Congress, and one that became permanent with the creation of the CIA. Under the Reagan administration, it came to be relied on more and more for a variety of military and intelligence projects and by one estimate was $36 billion in 1989 (Blaker 1990:101, Weiner 1990:4). Many of those unaccountable funds then and now go into use overseas, flowing out of US embassies and military bases. There they have helped the US to work vigorously to undermine and change local laws that restrict its military plans; it has interfered for years in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, including attempts to influence votes on and change anti-nuclear and anti-war provisions in the Constitutions of the Pacific nation of Belau and of Japan.
The number of US bases was to rise again during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, reaching back to 1947 levels by the year 1967 (Blaker 1990:33). The presumption was established that bases captured or created during wartime would be permanently retained. Certain ideas about basing and what it accomplished were to be retained from World War II as well, including the belief that "its extensive overseas basing system was a legitimate and necessary instrument of U.S. power, morally justified and a rightful symbol of the U.S. role in the world" (Blaker 1990:28).
Nonetheless, over the second half of the 20th century, the United States was either evicted or voluntarily left bases in dozens of countries.[7] Between 1947 and 1990, the US was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece, and Turkey in the 1980s enabled those governments to negotiate significantly more compensation from the United States. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores, unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies, a demand with which the US complied.[8] In the 1990s and later, the US was sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques, and Uzbekistan (see McCaffery, this volume).
At the same time, US bases were newly built after 1947 in remarkable numbers (241) in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as in Italy, Britain, and Japan (Blaker 1990:45). The defeated Axis powers continued to host the most significant numbers of US bases: at its height, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations.
As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the bases in East Asia acquired in the Spanish American War and in World War II, such as Guam, Okinawa and the Philippines, became the primary sites from which the United States waged war on Vietnam. Without them, the costs and logistical obstacles for the US would have been immense. The number of bombing runs over North and South Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded, for example, at the Naval Station in Guam, stored at the Naval Magazine in the southern area of the island, and then shipped up to be loaded onto B-52s at Anderson Air Force Base every day during years of the war. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R & R at bases throughout East and Southeast Asia which would allow them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting (Baker 2004:76). In addition to the bases' role in fighting these large and overt wars, they facilitated the movement of military assets to accomplish the over 200 military interventions the US waged in the Cold War period (Blum 1995).
While speed of deployment is framed as an important continued reason for forward basing, troops could be deployed anywhere in the world from US bases without having to touch down en route. In fact, US soldiers are being increasingly billeted on US territory, including such far-flung areas as Guam, which is presently slated for a larger buildup, for this reason as well as to avoid the political and other costs of foreign deployment.
With the will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, the US over time, and especially in the 1990s, established a large number of new military bases to facilitate the strategic use of communications and space technologies. Military R&D (the Pentagon spent over $52 billion in 2005 and employed over 90,000 scientists) and corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, space tracking telescopes and laser sources, satellite control, downwind air sampling monitors, and research facilities for everything from weapons testing to meteorology. Missile defense systems and network centric warfare increasingly rely on satellite technology and drones with associated requirements for ground facilities. These facilities have often been established in violation of arms control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty meant to limit the militarization of space.
The assumption that US bases served local interests in a shared ideological and security project dominated into the 1960s: allowing base access showed a commitment to fight Communism and gratitude for US military assistance. But with decolonization and the US war in Vietnam, such arguments began to lose their power, and the number of US overseas bases declined from an early 1960s peak. Where access was once automatic, many countries now had increased leverage over what the US had to give in exchange for basing rights, and those rights could be restricted in a variety of important ways, including through environmental and other regulations. The bargaining chips used by the US were increasingly sophisticated weapons, as well as rent payments for the land on which bases were established.[9] These exchanges were often become linked with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as access to oil and other raw materials and investment opportunities (Harkavy 1982:337). They also, particularly when advanced weaponry is the medium of exchange, have had destabilizing effects on regional arms balances. From the earlier ideological rationale for the bases, global post-war recovery and decreasing inequality between the US and countries -- mostly in the global North -- that housed the majority of US bases, led to a more pragmatic or economic grounding to basing negotiations, albeit often thinly veiled by the language of friendship and common ideological bent. The 1980s saw countries whose populations and governments had strongly opposed US military presence, such as Greece, agree to US bases on their soil only because they were in need of the cash, and Burma, a neutral but very poor state, entered negotiations with the US over basing troops there (Harkavy 1989:4-5).
The third period of accelerated imperial ambition began in 2000, with the election of George Bush and the ascendancy of a group of leaders committed to a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power, their ability to do so radically precipitated and allowed by the attacks of 9/11. They wanted "a network of 'deployment bases' or 'forward operating bases' to increase the reach of current and future forces" and focused on the need for bases in Iraq: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." This plan for expanded US military presence around the world has been put into action, particularly in the Middle East, the Russian perimeter, and, now, Africa.
Pentagon transformation plans design US military bases to operate even more uniformly as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. Where bases in Korea, for example, were once meant centrally to defend South Korea from attack from the north, they are now, like bases everywhere, meant primarily to project power in any number of directions and serve as stepping stones to battles far from themselves. The Global Defense Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from Cold War locations, but on grounding imperial ambitions through remaking legal arrangements that support expanded military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries to be able to "surge" military force quickly, anywhere.
The Department of Defense currently distinguishes between three types of military facilities. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often including family housing, such as Kadena Air Base in Japan and Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited U.S. military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment," such as Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras (US Defense Department 2004:10). Finally, "cooperative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, which are maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads." In Thailand, for example, U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield has been used extensively for US combat runs over Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are now cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, as in Dakar, Senegal where facilities and use rights have been newly established.
Critical observers of US foreign policy, Chalmers Johnson foremost among them, have thoroughly dissected and dismantled several of the arguments that have been made for maintaining a global military basing system (Johnson 2004). They have shown that the system has often failed in its own terms, that is, it has not provided more safety for the US or its allies. Johnson shows that the US base presence has often created more attacks rather than fewer, as in Saudi Arabia or in Iraq. They have made the communities around the base a key target of Russia's or other nation's missiles, and local people recognize this. So on the island of Belau in the Pacific, site of sharp resistance to US attempts to install a submarine base and jungle training center, people describe their experience of military basing in World War II: "When soldiers come, war comes." Likewise, on Guam, a common joke has it that few people other than nuclear targeters in the Kremlin know where their island is. Finally, US military actions have often produced violence in the form of blowback rather than squelched it, undermining their own stated realist objectives (Johnson 2000).
Gaining and maintaining access for US bases has often involved close collaboration with despotic governments. This has been the case especially in the Middle East and Asia. The US long worked closely with the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, to maintain the Philippines bases, with various autocratic or military Korean rulers from 1960 through the 1980s, and successive Thai dictators until 1973, to give just a few examples.
Conclusion: The World Responds
Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, with some of the earliest and most active in the Asia Pacific region, particularly the Philippines, Okinawa, and Korea, and, recently, Guam.[10] In defining the problem they face, some groups have focused on the base itself, its sheer presence as out of place in a world of nation states, that is, they see the problem as one of affronts to sovereignty and national pride.
Others focus on the purposes the bases serve, which is to stand ready to and sometimes wage war, and see the bases as implicating them in the violence projected from them. Most also focus on the noxious effects of the bases' daily operations involving highly toxic, noisy, and violent operations that employ large numbers of young males. For years, the movements have criticized confiscation of land, the health effects from military jet noise and air and water pollution, soldiers' crimes, especially rapes, other assaults, murders, and car crashes, and the impunity they have usually enjoyed, the inequality of the nation to nation relationship often undergirded by racism and other forms of disrespect. Above all, there is the culture of militarism that infiltrates local societies and its consequences, including death and injury to local youth, and the use of the bases for prisoner extradition and torture.[11] In a few cases, such as Japan and Korea, the bases entail costs to local treasuries in payments to the US for support of the bases or for cleanup of former base areas.
The sense that US bases impose massive burdens on local communities and the nation is common in the countries where US bases are most ubiquitous and of longest-standing. These are places where people have been able to observe military practice and relations with the US up close over a long period of time. In Okinawa, most polls show that 70 to 80 percent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the Marines, to leave: they want base land back and they want an end to aviation crash risks, an end to prostitution, and drug trafficking, and sexual assault and other crimes by US soldiers (see Kozue and Takazato, this volume; Sturdevant & Stoltzfus 1993).[12] One family built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the fence to Futenma Air Base, with a stairway to the roof which allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.
In Korea, many feel that a reduction in US presence would increase national security.[13] As interest grew since 2000 in reconciliation with North Korea, many came to the view that nuclear and other deterrence against North Korean attack associated with the US military presence, have prevented reunification. As well, the US military is seen as disrespectful of Koreans. In recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers brought out vast candlelight vigils and other protest across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967-1973 by the British on behalf of the US, have organized a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British Government (see Vine 2009). There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations balked at US attempts at military basing access (Hallinan 2007). In Eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favor of taking the bases in pursuit of solidifying ties with NATO and the European Union, and despite economic benefits of the bases, vigorous protests including hunger strikes have emerged (see Heller and Lammerant, this volume).[14]
In South Korea, bloody battles between civilian protesters and the Korean military were waged in 2006 in response to US plans to relocate the troops there. In 2004, the Korean government agreed to US plans to expand Camp Humphries near Pyongtaek, currently 3,700 acres, by an additional 2,900 acres.
The surrounding area, including the towns of Doduri and Daechuri, was home to some 1,372 people, many elderly farmers. In 2005, residents and activists began a peace camp at the village of Daechuri. The Korean government eventually forcibly evicted all from their homes and demolished the Daechuri primary school, which had been an organizing center for the resisting farmers.
The US has responded to anti-base organizing, on the other hand, by a renewed emphasis on "force protection," in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people onto base property. The Department of Defense has also engaged in the time-honored practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defense staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. The regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements," not "status of forces agreements" or remain entirely secret. While major reorganization of bases is underway for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to derail or prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of Vieques and the Philippine bases. The US attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US (see Engelhardt, this volume). The likelihood that a change of US administration will make for significant dismantling of those bases is highly unlikely, however, for all the reasons this brief history of US bases and empire suggests.
Friday, March 20, 2009
canada: no place of peace
i just read that four canadian troops were recently killed in afghanistan. to be honest, i never really thought of canada being there, although it makes sense that they are. for years now, canada has been in on various imperial adventures. canadian policies are a far cry from the vietnam days, when they took in thousands of war resisters. in fact, there are 2,500 canadian troops currently in afghanistan, and 116 of them have died there since 2002. the number of people these troops have killed or injured will likely never be known, but is surely far higher than 116.
the problem with the world is not simply america. it is also that too many nations go along, sending their own troops, electing their own imperial leaders, living their own version of consumerism and anti-environmental life styles. the guilt can be spread wide, and surely includes canada.
even if they do give their people health care.
the problem with the world is not simply america. it is also that too many nations go along, sending their own troops, electing their own imperial leaders, living their own version of consumerism and anti-environmental life styles. the guilt can be spread wide, and surely includes canada.
even if they do give their people health care.
they were tryin to get their hands on grant like horace
What Really Happened the Morning of January 1, 2009
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant
By REIKO REDMONDE and LARRY EVEREST
Early New Year’s morning phones in Hayward and Oakland were ringing: “Wake up, wake up. Something’s happened to the boys.” Calls were going back and forth between the families of 22-year-old Oscar Grant and his friends—families so close all the women were called “aunties.” The youth had gone to San Francisco to celebrate. “What the hell had happened?”
The hellish, heart-tearing news soon came. Oscar, their lifelong friend, the one they had played baseball with, gone camping and swimming with, was dead. Shot in the back by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle.
The police murder, caught on cell phone videos, has shocked people. In its wake, the system—the police, their lawyers, the District Attorney, the City of Oakland, BART, and the media—have spun all kinds of explanations: the killer-cop was a poorly trained rookie; he meant to go for his taser; he was scared; he’s a lone racist; it was a terrible, unexplainable mistake.
But the events of January 1 show that these “explanations” are lies designed to cover up the truth: the killing of Oscar Grant was not a mistake or an accident, it was cold-blooded murder. It wasn’t an isolated act by one rogue cop; it was the culmination of an orgy of brutality by a whole gang of police against a crew of Black youth that included racial profiling and slurs, threats with tasers, assaults, and illegal detention.
The system didn’t treat the cops’ actions on January 1 as intolerable exceptions to what they’re supposed to do; instead, the system’s institutions moved to cover up and legitimize this violence and let all the cops but one go free. All this—and the whole nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder—point to the cold truth that brutalizing, terrorizing, and yes murdering oppressed people—especially Black people—is what the police are supposed to do—not to “protect and serve,” but to keep people down.
New Year’s Eve—Gearing Up for Suppression
At about 2 am, the BART train operator supposedly radioed that there was a fight on the train. She didn’t see any individual involved, and many would question how bad a fight it could have been: no “victims” ever came forward and no fighters were ever identified by any witness. Some said there had been a short shoving match which was quickly broken up. Everyone agrees: the atmosphere inside the train packed with revelers was calm when it pulled into the Fruitvale station, located in a mainly Black and Latino proletarian neighborhood in Oakland.
BART cop Tony Pirone, an ex-Marine, was on the platform and he immediately began targeting Black and Latino youth—although he had no description of anyone in the reported “fight.” When four of Oscar’s friends get off, Pirone let three of them leave but grabbed one. Then, yelling and cursing, Pirone banged on the train window and pointed his taser at two young Black men—Oscar and his friend Michael—and ordered them off the train.
As soon as Michael and Oscar stepped off the train, they were hammered. Pirone lunged at Michael, grabbed him by his dreadlocks, and slammed his head, face down, on the concrete, leaving a large cut on the bridge of his nose. Michael’s friends started to yell, “why are you doing that?” “What did we do?” Then Pirone grabbed Oscar and hustled him to a wall. Soon other cops came and threatened more youth with their tasers, yelling the “N” word at the young men, calling them “motherfuckers.”
When three of Oscar’s other friends got off the train they too were held against the side of the train by Officer Marysol Domenici who thrust a taser at each one, tapping one between the eyes with it.
Another video clip, not shown on TV until weeks after the murder, shows Pirone suddenly stride by Michael, who was handcuffed and lying on the cement, across the platform toward Oscar, hitting him hard in the face, causing his head to snap back.
Oscar fell to a sitting position and put his hands up in submission gesture. One video shows that Pirone then aimed his taser at all three youth in front of him. Although no media has reported it, the video then shows Mehserle striking the youth seated next to Oscar about three times and then handcuffing him. Oscar rises to his knees, protesting.
Pirone then pushed Oscar’s face to the pavement, still threatening to tase him. Mehserle straddled Oscar’s back, pulling his arms back. Pirone dug his knee into Oscar’s neck. People on the train started to shout, “that’s fucked up. Let him go!” Witnesses heard Oscar cry out in pain and tell Pirone, “I have a four-year-old daughter, don’t tase me.”
Oscar and his friends were fully in “police control,” not resisting. The video shows Oscar lying face down on the ground with both hands behind his back, barely moving, if at all.
But Pirone and Mehserle didn’t stop, they escalated. Pirone claims he heard Mehserle say to him “Tony, get away. Back up,” a chilling statement pointing to a cold, calculated decision. With Pirone still on Oscar, Mehserle wrenches his gun from its holster and shoots Oscar Grant at close range—in the back.
Cold-Blooded Murder, Cold-Blooded Cover-Up
Mehserle’s attorneys suggest he was going for his taser and made a horrible mistake, while some media “experts” have speculated about how stressed Mehserle must have been. This is absurd. The X26 taser issued to BART cops is plastic and weighs seven ounces. The Sig Sauer that killed Grant is metal and weighs 30 ounces unloaded—more than four times as much as the taser, and feels completely different.
Videos also show that neither Mehserle nor any of the other six police were “stressed out,” horrified, or regretful about having murdered Oscar. As Oscar’s friends, still handcuffed, yelled for the police to help Oscar, the cops told them to “shut the fuck up” and said if they weren’t silent, they wouldn’t call an ambulance. No cop moved to administer first aid. Instead a video clip shows them flipping Oscar over, jerking him up and down, handcuffing him, and leaving him to bleed out on the platform.
The cops weren’t in shock or disarray: they immediately began a cover up. No cop radioed that a shooting had occurred. Pirone ordered the train operator to leave the BART station, taking all the witnesses away (instead of getting their names). As the train departed, Domenici ran after people, threatening them and trying to grab their phone cameras.
After the shooting, five of Oscar’s friends were detained in the BART police station for more than five hours. Sources close to the families say that the youth heard BART police laughing, saying, “We got a good one tonight.”
All this points to the reality that such brutality is ROUTINE for these pigs, including trying to cover it up afterward, and that murdering one of the people can be a cause for laughter and celebration.
What about the “higher-ups,” BART officials, the City of Oakland, the courts? BART officials express sorrow for the killing, yet their own “investigation” made no recommendations, they’ve reprimanded none of their police, and they claim there’s no BART surveillance video showing what happened, despite the fact that BART trains and stations all have cameras in them. BART’s Police Chief Gee wrote a memo to his troops, explaining how to send money to Mehserle while he was in jail.
Oakland’s DA didn’t arrest Mehserle for nearly two weeks (and then only because people rebelled); Pirone—who initiated the brutality that led to murder and could have been charged with felony murder—has not even been arrested. Nor have any of the other cops. And in its first “prosecution” brief, the DA reiterates the police’s version of events, including repeating Pirone’s claim that Mehserle thought Oscar was going for his waistband (and possibly a gun). Oscar Grant was unarmed.
All the police violence leading to Oscar’s murder has been treated as normal, “no big deal,” by the authorities and media. And in this system, police violence IS routine and systemic. Take Oscar and his friends: “These youth are used to being accosted by the police” said one of the aunties, “it’s been going on since they were 13 years old.” (Another mother showed Revolution pictures of the wounds her son received after a beating by Hayward Police several years ago, which broke teeth: he had to be treated in the hospital, including for severe taser burns on his back.)
This system is showing that it will do everything it can to protect the ability of its police to brutalize, terrorize and murder the people. Enough is enough!
There is a real need for continued and increased protest, and independent journalistic investigation into the murder and its cover-up. We cannot allow this kind of blatant murder to be “routinized,” excused, or tolerated.
On March 22, Revolution Books and the Bay Area Revolution Club are holding a People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Oscar Grant and the Nationwide Epidemic of Police Brutality that will indict Oscar Grant’s killer and “the whole damn system.”
The next day, March 23, is Mehserle’s preliminary hearing.
Both are key junctures in this battle, and big outpourings of people are needed at both.
[Links to videos of the events leading up to, and the murder of Oscar Grant are available at http://www.ktvu.com/news/18426590/detail.html]
Reiko Redmonde and Larry Everest are part of a Revolution newspaper team in the Bay Area. They can be reached at rredmonde@gmail.com and larryeverest@hotmail.com
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant
By REIKO REDMONDE and LARRY EVEREST
Early New Year’s morning phones in Hayward and Oakland were ringing: “Wake up, wake up. Something’s happened to the boys.” Calls were going back and forth between the families of 22-year-old Oscar Grant and his friends—families so close all the women were called “aunties.” The youth had gone to San Francisco to celebrate. “What the hell had happened?”
The hellish, heart-tearing news soon came. Oscar, their lifelong friend, the one they had played baseball with, gone camping and swimming with, was dead. Shot in the back by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle.
The police murder, caught on cell phone videos, has shocked people. In its wake, the system—the police, their lawyers, the District Attorney, the City of Oakland, BART, and the media—have spun all kinds of explanations: the killer-cop was a poorly trained rookie; he meant to go for his taser; he was scared; he’s a lone racist; it was a terrible, unexplainable mistake.
But the events of January 1 show that these “explanations” are lies designed to cover up the truth: the killing of Oscar Grant was not a mistake or an accident, it was cold-blooded murder. It wasn’t an isolated act by one rogue cop; it was the culmination of an orgy of brutality by a whole gang of police against a crew of Black youth that included racial profiling and slurs, threats with tasers, assaults, and illegal detention.
The system didn’t treat the cops’ actions on January 1 as intolerable exceptions to what they’re supposed to do; instead, the system’s institutions moved to cover up and legitimize this violence and let all the cops but one go free. All this—and the whole nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder—point to the cold truth that brutalizing, terrorizing, and yes murdering oppressed people—especially Black people—is what the police are supposed to do—not to “protect and serve,” but to keep people down.
New Year’s Eve—Gearing Up for Suppression
At about 2 am, the BART train operator supposedly radioed that there was a fight on the train. She didn’t see any individual involved, and many would question how bad a fight it could have been: no “victims” ever came forward and no fighters were ever identified by any witness. Some said there had been a short shoving match which was quickly broken up. Everyone agrees: the atmosphere inside the train packed with revelers was calm when it pulled into the Fruitvale station, located in a mainly Black and Latino proletarian neighborhood in Oakland.
BART cop Tony Pirone, an ex-Marine, was on the platform and he immediately began targeting Black and Latino youth—although he had no description of anyone in the reported “fight.” When four of Oscar’s friends get off, Pirone let three of them leave but grabbed one. Then, yelling and cursing, Pirone banged on the train window and pointed his taser at two young Black men—Oscar and his friend Michael—and ordered them off the train.
As soon as Michael and Oscar stepped off the train, they were hammered. Pirone lunged at Michael, grabbed him by his dreadlocks, and slammed his head, face down, on the concrete, leaving a large cut on the bridge of his nose. Michael’s friends started to yell, “why are you doing that?” “What did we do?” Then Pirone grabbed Oscar and hustled him to a wall. Soon other cops came and threatened more youth with their tasers, yelling the “N” word at the young men, calling them “motherfuckers.”
When three of Oscar’s other friends got off the train they too were held against the side of the train by Officer Marysol Domenici who thrust a taser at each one, tapping one between the eyes with it.
Another video clip, not shown on TV until weeks after the murder, shows Pirone suddenly stride by Michael, who was handcuffed and lying on the cement, across the platform toward Oscar, hitting him hard in the face, causing his head to snap back.
Oscar fell to a sitting position and put his hands up in submission gesture. One video shows that Pirone then aimed his taser at all three youth in front of him. Although no media has reported it, the video then shows Mehserle striking the youth seated next to Oscar about three times and then handcuffing him. Oscar rises to his knees, protesting.
Pirone then pushed Oscar’s face to the pavement, still threatening to tase him. Mehserle straddled Oscar’s back, pulling his arms back. Pirone dug his knee into Oscar’s neck. People on the train started to shout, “that’s fucked up. Let him go!” Witnesses heard Oscar cry out in pain and tell Pirone, “I have a four-year-old daughter, don’t tase me.”
Oscar and his friends were fully in “police control,” not resisting. The video shows Oscar lying face down on the ground with both hands behind his back, barely moving, if at all.
But Pirone and Mehserle didn’t stop, they escalated. Pirone claims he heard Mehserle say to him “Tony, get away. Back up,” a chilling statement pointing to a cold, calculated decision. With Pirone still on Oscar, Mehserle wrenches his gun from its holster and shoots Oscar Grant at close range—in the back.
Cold-Blooded Murder, Cold-Blooded Cover-Up
Mehserle’s attorneys suggest he was going for his taser and made a horrible mistake, while some media “experts” have speculated about how stressed Mehserle must have been. This is absurd. The X26 taser issued to BART cops is plastic and weighs seven ounces. The Sig Sauer that killed Grant is metal and weighs 30 ounces unloaded—more than four times as much as the taser, and feels completely different.
Videos also show that neither Mehserle nor any of the other six police were “stressed out,” horrified, or regretful about having murdered Oscar. As Oscar’s friends, still handcuffed, yelled for the police to help Oscar, the cops told them to “shut the fuck up” and said if they weren’t silent, they wouldn’t call an ambulance. No cop moved to administer first aid. Instead a video clip shows them flipping Oscar over, jerking him up and down, handcuffing him, and leaving him to bleed out on the platform.
The cops weren’t in shock or disarray: they immediately began a cover up. No cop radioed that a shooting had occurred. Pirone ordered the train operator to leave the BART station, taking all the witnesses away (instead of getting their names). As the train departed, Domenici ran after people, threatening them and trying to grab their phone cameras.
After the shooting, five of Oscar’s friends were detained in the BART police station for more than five hours. Sources close to the families say that the youth heard BART police laughing, saying, “We got a good one tonight.”
All this points to the reality that such brutality is ROUTINE for these pigs, including trying to cover it up afterward, and that murdering one of the people can be a cause for laughter and celebration.
What about the “higher-ups,” BART officials, the City of Oakland, the courts? BART officials express sorrow for the killing, yet their own “investigation” made no recommendations, they’ve reprimanded none of their police, and they claim there’s no BART surveillance video showing what happened, despite the fact that BART trains and stations all have cameras in them. BART’s Police Chief Gee wrote a memo to his troops, explaining how to send money to Mehserle while he was in jail.
Oakland’s DA didn’t arrest Mehserle for nearly two weeks (and then only because people rebelled); Pirone—who initiated the brutality that led to murder and could have been charged with felony murder—has not even been arrested. Nor have any of the other cops. And in its first “prosecution” brief, the DA reiterates the police’s version of events, including repeating Pirone’s claim that Mehserle thought Oscar was going for his waistband (and possibly a gun). Oscar Grant was unarmed.
All the police violence leading to Oscar’s murder has been treated as normal, “no big deal,” by the authorities and media. And in this system, police violence IS routine and systemic. Take Oscar and his friends: “These youth are used to being accosted by the police” said one of the aunties, “it’s been going on since they were 13 years old.” (Another mother showed Revolution pictures of the wounds her son received after a beating by Hayward Police several years ago, which broke teeth: he had to be treated in the hospital, including for severe taser burns on his back.)
This system is showing that it will do everything it can to protect the ability of its police to brutalize, terrorize and murder the people. Enough is enough!
There is a real need for continued and increased protest, and independent journalistic investigation into the murder and its cover-up. We cannot allow this kind of blatant murder to be “routinized,” excused, or tolerated.
On March 22, Revolution Books and the Bay Area Revolution Club are holding a People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Oscar Grant and the Nationwide Epidemic of Police Brutality that will indict Oscar Grant’s killer and “the whole damn system.”
The next day, March 23, is Mehserle’s preliminary hearing.
Both are key junctures in this battle, and big outpourings of people are needed at both.
[Links to videos of the events leading up to, and the murder of Oscar Grant are available at http://www.ktvu.com/news/18426590/detail.html]
Reiko Redmonde and Larry Everest are part of a Revolution newspaper team in the Bay Area. They can be reached at rredmonde@gmail.com and larryeverest@hotmail.com
the logic of withdrawal
Moved on From the Struggle
March 20, 2009 By Anthony Arnove
Source: SW
Anthony Arnove's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
ON MARCH 2, the liberal organization MoveOn.org--known for mobilizing opposition to the Bush administration through the Internet--sent an e-mail to its membership that declared the U.S. war on Iraq effectively over:
Dear MoveOn member,
I'm sure you've heard about President Obama's plan to finally bring an end to the disastrous war in Iraq. It will bring most of our troops home by August of next year--and by the end of 2011 there won't be any more troops left in Iraq. This is a major turning point in the fight to end the war.
We wanted to take a moment to reflect on the work that you've done over the last six, dark years...to thank you, sincerely, for all you have done...
This war is coming to an end in part because of the work you did.
While the letter acknowledges that "our troops aren't home yet. Hundreds of thousands of them are still in harm's way, and will continue to be for longer than any of us would like," it says the bottom line is that "now there's a date certain for them to come home."
Reading this, I was reminded of the final line of Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
But MoveOn is not alone. Much of the antiwar movement has folded its tents. The Iraq war has more or less dropped out of popular consciousness altogether. And the media report less and less about the ongoing problems there.
So it's no surprise that the fine print of President Barack Obama's plan in Iraq has gone largely unexamined.
Rather than pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months, as most Obama voters understood his campaign pledge, the redeployment of forces from Iraq will proceed over a 19-month period and will be back-loaded to take place after December 2009. As the New York Times reported:
The plan would maintain relatively high troop levels through Iraq's parliamentary elections, to be held in December, before beginning in earnest to meet the August 2010 target for removing combat forces, the officials said. Even after August 2010, as many as 50,000 of the 142,000 troops now in Iraq would remain, including some combat units reassigned as "Advisory Training Brigades" or "Advisory Assistance Brigades," the administration and Pentagon officials said.
Obama's plan says nothing about the private contractors and mercenaries that are an essential part of the occupation of Iraq, and whose numbers may even be increased to cover functions previously provided by active-duty troops. And it will leave in place the world's largest foreign embassy, as well as the largest CIA foreign station, in Baghdad.
Obama calls the troops who will stay in Iraq through the end of 2011 "residual forces" and non-combat troops, but this is just doublespeak. Combat troops are simply being renamed non-combat troops through a verbal sleight of hand, but will certainly be able to use lethal force and will find themselves in combat situations.
And in accepting the logic of the Bush administration for not withdrawing the troops immediately--that they are needed to fight al-Qaeda, engage in "counter-insurgency operations," and continue the "war on terror"--Obama has opened the door to keeping them in Iraq beyond 2011.
Indeed, in his speech about the Iraq "withdrawal" plan at the end of February, Obama retroactively endorsed the Bush administration's stated reasons for invading Iraq in the first place, as the Wall Street Journal gleefully noted.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WE KNOW that Iraq will remain under occupation until at least the end of 2011, but there is very good reason to believe that between now and then, the Iraqi government, which owes its survival to Washington, will cut a deal to allow U.S. forces to remain longer. Such an agreement would also likely give the U.S. long-term access to military bases and access to Iraqi air space.
The fact remains that Iraq is a fulcrum of geopolitics and a vital front for U.S. military strategy in the Middle East. Washington's goals for Iraq and the region may be less ambitious than when the Bush administration launched its 2003 invasion, but no one is reversing the fundamental policies driving U.S. policy: the goal of controlling the region's vast energy resources and being the hegemonic foreign power there.
MoveOn should be letting its members know this--and urging far more than to "keep watching Washington" to be sure they do bring the troops home. But to do this, the group would have to take on the Obama administration more forcefully on Iraq--and on the occupation of Afghanistan, which is intimately related.
Obama has said all along that he sees Afghanistan as the "central front" in the "war on terror," and that he would commit more troops to the war there. But Justin Ruben, MoveOn's new executive director, told Nation correspondent Ari Melber that the organization did not intend to oppose Obama's plan to send more troops to Afghanistan.
The message being sent to the antiwar movement is: It's over. We can "move on." Leave it to the generals to wind it down. But if we do that, we will find ourselves without the forces we need to challenge Obama and Congress.
The year 2011 is already too late to end the occupation of Iraq, which should never have started in the first place. And shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan is not ending the war.
Without an antiwar movement that is loud, active, in the streets and raising its own independent demands beyond the limits set by the Democratic Party, U.S. troops will not be coming home.
The empire has not folded up its tent, and neither should we.
March 20, 2009 By Anthony Arnove
Source: SW
Anthony Arnove's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
ON MARCH 2, the liberal organization MoveOn.org--known for mobilizing opposition to the Bush administration through the Internet--sent an e-mail to its membership that declared the U.S. war on Iraq effectively over:
Dear MoveOn member,
I'm sure you've heard about President Obama's plan to finally bring an end to the disastrous war in Iraq. It will bring most of our troops home by August of next year--and by the end of 2011 there won't be any more troops left in Iraq. This is a major turning point in the fight to end the war.
We wanted to take a moment to reflect on the work that you've done over the last six, dark years...to thank you, sincerely, for all you have done...
This war is coming to an end in part because of the work you did.
While the letter acknowledges that "our troops aren't home yet. Hundreds of thousands of them are still in harm's way, and will continue to be for longer than any of us would like," it says the bottom line is that "now there's a date certain for them to come home."
Reading this, I was reminded of the final line of Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
But MoveOn is not alone. Much of the antiwar movement has folded its tents. The Iraq war has more or less dropped out of popular consciousness altogether. And the media report less and less about the ongoing problems there.
So it's no surprise that the fine print of President Barack Obama's plan in Iraq has gone largely unexamined.
Rather than pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months, as most Obama voters understood his campaign pledge, the redeployment of forces from Iraq will proceed over a 19-month period and will be back-loaded to take place after December 2009. As the New York Times reported:
The plan would maintain relatively high troop levels through Iraq's parliamentary elections, to be held in December, before beginning in earnest to meet the August 2010 target for removing combat forces, the officials said. Even after August 2010, as many as 50,000 of the 142,000 troops now in Iraq would remain, including some combat units reassigned as "Advisory Training Brigades" or "Advisory Assistance Brigades," the administration and Pentagon officials said.
Obama's plan says nothing about the private contractors and mercenaries that are an essential part of the occupation of Iraq, and whose numbers may even be increased to cover functions previously provided by active-duty troops. And it will leave in place the world's largest foreign embassy, as well as the largest CIA foreign station, in Baghdad.
Obama calls the troops who will stay in Iraq through the end of 2011 "residual forces" and non-combat troops, but this is just doublespeak. Combat troops are simply being renamed non-combat troops through a verbal sleight of hand, but will certainly be able to use lethal force and will find themselves in combat situations.
And in accepting the logic of the Bush administration for not withdrawing the troops immediately--that they are needed to fight al-Qaeda, engage in "counter-insurgency operations," and continue the "war on terror"--Obama has opened the door to keeping them in Iraq beyond 2011.
Indeed, in his speech about the Iraq "withdrawal" plan at the end of February, Obama retroactively endorsed the Bush administration's stated reasons for invading Iraq in the first place, as the Wall Street Journal gleefully noted.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WE KNOW that Iraq will remain under occupation until at least the end of 2011, but there is very good reason to believe that between now and then, the Iraqi government, which owes its survival to Washington, will cut a deal to allow U.S. forces to remain longer. Such an agreement would also likely give the U.S. long-term access to military bases and access to Iraqi air space.
The fact remains that Iraq is a fulcrum of geopolitics and a vital front for U.S. military strategy in the Middle East. Washington's goals for Iraq and the region may be less ambitious than when the Bush administration launched its 2003 invasion, but no one is reversing the fundamental policies driving U.S. policy: the goal of controlling the region's vast energy resources and being the hegemonic foreign power there.
MoveOn should be letting its members know this--and urging far more than to "keep watching Washington" to be sure they do bring the troops home. But to do this, the group would have to take on the Obama administration more forcefully on Iraq--and on the occupation of Afghanistan, which is intimately related.
Obama has said all along that he sees Afghanistan as the "central front" in the "war on terror," and that he would commit more troops to the war there. But Justin Ruben, MoveOn's new executive director, told Nation correspondent Ari Melber that the organization did not intend to oppose Obama's plan to send more troops to Afghanistan.
The message being sent to the antiwar movement is: It's over. We can "move on." Leave it to the generals to wind it down. But if we do that, we will find ourselves without the forces we need to challenge Obama and Congress.
The year 2011 is already too late to end the occupation of Iraq, which should never have started in the first place. And shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan is not ending the war.
Without an antiwar movement that is loud, active, in the streets and raising its own independent demands beyond the limits set by the Democratic Party, U.S. troops will not be coming home.
The empire has not folded up its tent, and neither should we.
three years?
for throwing shoes? how about for dropping bombs? how many years will "our boys" get for doing that? no, for we are too busy on the left complaining that they don't get treated for ptsd to charge them with war crimes. so, a man who throws shoes at bush gets three years, while bush, a man who started two wars that killed millions, remains free. since when did throwing shoes become such a heinous offense? i threw computers, trash cans, and desks in high school, and haven't served one second in hail. or jail for that matter. well, the h is right next to the j, so i figured i'd make like the great jazz players and not do another take for one little mistake.
seriously, this is an outrage that clearly demonstrates that the wrong people are often behind bars, while the real criminals run the show. i won't say any more, as i feel this interview hits it on the head, which perhaps explains this bruise i've recently developed.
"enjoy."
Muntadar al-Zaidi Should Be Pardoned
by Medea Benjamin
On March 12, just one week before the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoe at George W. Bush. CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin talked about the incident with Hero Anwar Brzw, a Kurdish Iraqi woman who is getting her master's degree in conflict transformation at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
MB: Al-Zaidi's action spawned a lively debate, even within the peace movement, over whether throwing shoes is a violent act. As an Iraqi and a student of non-violence, what is your opinion?
AB: I have thought about this a lot and have concluded that his action was not a violent one. Al-Zaidi was simply trying to express the humiliation and anguish that Iraqis have experienced since the start of the occupation. He wanted to insult Bush in a symbolic way. He did not want to kill or injure the president. There are plenty of other ways to inflict harm, if that were his intention. As al-Zaidi said in his trial, "What made me do it was the humiliation Iraq has been subjected to due to the U.S. occupation and the murder of innocent people. I wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons.
Dr. Gene Sharp, a famous American writer on non-violent struggles, says that insulting someone in power is a legitimate form of non-violent resistance. One of his writings, called "Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential," is a collection of 198 methods of non-violent action. He groups these into several categories, the first being non-violent protest and persuasion. The methods in the first group are the kinds of things you can do if you have little power or resources, because they are simple and easy. Number 32 is called "taunting officials (mocking or insulting them)." That is precisely what al-Zaidi did.
What if al-Zaidi had actually hit Bush with the shoe?
Even if the shoe hit Bush in the head, I would still consider it a non-violent action. It wouldn't have really hurt; at most Bush would have gotten a bump on his head. Remember, al-Zaidi's intention was to insult, not hurt.
And of course, the harm that could be inflicted by a shoe cannot be compared with harm inflicted by an unwarranted occupation that has resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions of Iraqis. US foreign policy is about killing, maiming, leaving orphans and widows, destroying infrastructure. Throwing shoe is violent, you say? No. War and occupation is violent.
So you consider this action non-violent, but was it appropriate, especially for a journalist who is supposed to be objective?
I have worked for an Iraqi NGO on peace-building. I, too, have felt the effects of the occupation -- the violence that the invasion unleashed, the daily humiliations of being second-class citizens in our own country. Iraqi journalists have felt this as well. They have seen firsthand the terrible destruction caused by U.S. soldiers. Many Iraqi journalists have died in the violence and many have been imprisoned and terribly abused by U.S. soldiers.
So it is normal that we would want to express our anger. Some Iraqis express their anger through violent means, but that puts them on the same level as the occupiers.
In general, journalists and NGO workers don't believe in violence. But we also don't have to be passive or conform to the oppressors.
In Kathleen Fischer's book "Transforming Anger," she says "True nonviolent resistance is not possible until we have learned to acknowledge and express anger in healthy ways. Nonviolence is not the same as suppressing an emotion because of fear, intimidation, or censorship. We do not choose nonviolence because we are afraid to fight."
We can and should continue resisting -- as al-Zaidi did. And I think it takes more courage to resist oppression through non-violent actions than picking up a gun.
There were many Americans who don't like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.
If someone threw a shoe at Hitler, would people say it was rude? If someone threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein, would someone say it was rude? If New Yorkers were able to confront the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, I don't think they would throw shoes at them; they would probably kill them with their bare hands. And Osama Bin Laden killed a lot less people than George Bush.
Would the American people prefer that we express our anger by killing American soldiers? Would that be less rude? I don't think so. But people in the United States should acknowledge that we are human beings and we need a way to express our anger.
For other people, especially in the Arab world, al-Zaidi immediately became a folk hero. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed millions of times. The company that made the shoes became wealthy overnight. And al-Zaidi has received everything from job offers to marriage proposals. Do you consider al-Zaidi a hero?
There are people all over the world who consider him a hero, especially because his act countered the powerlessness that many Arabs feel. I wouldn't call him a hero, though. I call him a non-violence resister; I call him brave. And I certainly understand his anger, for I am angry, too. President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes because he wanted to become famous.
That's ridiculous. He was prepared to die, if he had to. Instead of attributing dishonest motives to al-Zaidi, Bush should ask himself why someone would dare insult the leader of the most powerful country in the world, knowing how serious the consequences could be.
Bush was a symbol for US foreign policy. We Iraqis have been the victims of these policies for too many years, and we are fed up. The American government supported Saddam in the 1980s during Iraq-Iran war; it encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait but then turned against him and "liberated" Kuwait. Then the U.S. government imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially children. Today, American troops have become the owners and we Iraqis are treated like illegal intruders in our own country.
People in the United States have no idea what Iraqis have been enduring, how much we have suffered from this invasion. That's why al-Zaidi, when he threw his shoes, cried out: "This is for the widows, the orphans and all those who have died in Iraq." He was doing it for his people, not to become famous.
Bush said that thanks to the U.S. intervention, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone and Iraq is a free country. And of course, the Kurds were particularly brutalized by Saddam. As a Kurd, aren't you grateful to George Bush for overthrowing Saddam?
The U.S. government has told too many lies to the American people and the international community. Saying that the Kurdish people have been happy with US occupation is one of those lies.
I agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator and yes, we Kurds were victims of his brutality. I always dreamed about freeing ourselves from his rule. We were happy to get rid of Saddam and many trusted the United States and thought it would bring democracy. But then we saw our country go from a dictatorship to an occupied nation.
Why should the cost of getting rid of Saddam be a US invasion and occupation? Is that our only alternative? How can we accept the presence of armed foreigners in the streets of our country? For years they have been ordering us around us at checkpoints, breaking down our doors in midnight raids, imprisoning our loved ones without cause and torturing them. Should we thank Bush and the US government for that?
Besides, it was not the role of the United States to get rid of Saddam. That was for us, the Iraqis. Many people around the world didn't like Bush. But would Americans have wanted a foreign military to invade their country to get rid of him? Would that be acceptable to Americans? I don't think so.
What do you suggest that people do to support al-Zaidi?
It is absurd that al-Zaidi will spend three years in prison while George Bush walks free. It is Bush who should be in prison for war crimes.
I also fear for al-Zaidi's life if he remains in prison. He was already tortured while the world spotlight was on him; imagine what might happen when people have forgotten him. He could easily be killed by government agents.
If Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki believed in democracy and human rights, he would consider al-Zaidi's act an expression of free speech and pardon him. If there is enough public pressure, that could happen. People should sign petitions, and call the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Iraqi Mission to the UN. It is only through public pressure that he can be released.
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org).
seriously, this is an outrage that clearly demonstrates that the wrong people are often behind bars, while the real criminals run the show. i won't say any more, as i feel this interview hits it on the head, which perhaps explains this bruise i've recently developed.
"enjoy."
Muntadar al-Zaidi Should Be Pardoned
by Medea Benjamin
On March 12, just one week before the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoe at George W. Bush. CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin talked about the incident with Hero Anwar Brzw, a Kurdish Iraqi woman who is getting her master's degree in conflict transformation at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
MB: Al-Zaidi's action spawned a lively debate, even within the peace movement, over whether throwing shoes is a violent act. As an Iraqi and a student of non-violence, what is your opinion?
AB: I have thought about this a lot and have concluded that his action was not a violent one. Al-Zaidi was simply trying to express the humiliation and anguish that Iraqis have experienced since the start of the occupation. He wanted to insult Bush in a symbolic way. He did not want to kill or injure the president. There are plenty of other ways to inflict harm, if that were his intention. As al-Zaidi said in his trial, "What made me do it was the humiliation Iraq has been subjected to due to the U.S. occupation and the murder of innocent people. I wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons.
Dr. Gene Sharp, a famous American writer on non-violent struggles, says that insulting someone in power is a legitimate form of non-violent resistance. One of his writings, called "Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential," is a collection of 198 methods of non-violent action. He groups these into several categories, the first being non-violent protest and persuasion. The methods in the first group are the kinds of things you can do if you have little power or resources, because they are simple and easy. Number 32 is called "taunting officials (mocking or insulting them)." That is precisely what al-Zaidi did.
What if al-Zaidi had actually hit Bush with the shoe?
Even if the shoe hit Bush in the head, I would still consider it a non-violent action. It wouldn't have really hurt; at most Bush would have gotten a bump on his head. Remember, al-Zaidi's intention was to insult, not hurt.
And of course, the harm that could be inflicted by a shoe cannot be compared with harm inflicted by an unwarranted occupation that has resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions of Iraqis. US foreign policy is about killing, maiming, leaving orphans and widows, destroying infrastructure. Throwing shoe is violent, you say? No. War and occupation is violent.
So you consider this action non-violent, but was it appropriate, especially for a journalist who is supposed to be objective?
I have worked for an Iraqi NGO on peace-building. I, too, have felt the effects of the occupation -- the violence that the invasion unleashed, the daily humiliations of being second-class citizens in our own country. Iraqi journalists have felt this as well. They have seen firsthand the terrible destruction caused by U.S. soldiers. Many Iraqi journalists have died in the violence and many have been imprisoned and terribly abused by U.S. soldiers.
So it is normal that we would want to express our anger. Some Iraqis express their anger through violent means, but that puts them on the same level as the occupiers.
In general, journalists and NGO workers don't believe in violence. But we also don't have to be passive or conform to the oppressors.
In Kathleen Fischer's book "Transforming Anger," she says "True nonviolent resistance is not possible until we have learned to acknowledge and express anger in healthy ways. Nonviolence is not the same as suppressing an emotion because of fear, intimidation, or censorship. We do not choose nonviolence because we are afraid to fight."
We can and should continue resisting -- as al-Zaidi did. And I think it takes more courage to resist oppression through non-violent actions than picking up a gun.
There were many Americans who don't like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.
If someone threw a shoe at Hitler, would people say it was rude? If someone threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein, would someone say it was rude? If New Yorkers were able to confront the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, I don't think they would throw shoes at them; they would probably kill them with their bare hands. And Osama Bin Laden killed a lot less people than George Bush.
Would the American people prefer that we express our anger by killing American soldiers? Would that be less rude? I don't think so. But people in the United States should acknowledge that we are human beings and we need a way to express our anger.
For other people, especially in the Arab world, al-Zaidi immediately became a folk hero. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed millions of times. The company that made the shoes became wealthy overnight. And al-Zaidi has received everything from job offers to marriage proposals. Do you consider al-Zaidi a hero?
There are people all over the world who consider him a hero, especially because his act countered the powerlessness that many Arabs feel. I wouldn't call him a hero, though. I call him a non-violence resister; I call him brave. And I certainly understand his anger, for I am angry, too. President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes because he wanted to become famous.
That's ridiculous. He was prepared to die, if he had to. Instead of attributing dishonest motives to al-Zaidi, Bush should ask himself why someone would dare insult the leader of the most powerful country in the world, knowing how serious the consequences could be.
Bush was a symbol for US foreign policy. We Iraqis have been the victims of these policies for too many years, and we are fed up. The American government supported Saddam in the 1980s during Iraq-Iran war; it encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait but then turned against him and "liberated" Kuwait. Then the U.S. government imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially children. Today, American troops have become the owners and we Iraqis are treated like illegal intruders in our own country.
People in the United States have no idea what Iraqis have been enduring, how much we have suffered from this invasion. That's why al-Zaidi, when he threw his shoes, cried out: "This is for the widows, the orphans and all those who have died in Iraq." He was doing it for his people, not to become famous.
Bush said that thanks to the U.S. intervention, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone and Iraq is a free country. And of course, the Kurds were particularly brutalized by Saddam. As a Kurd, aren't you grateful to George Bush for overthrowing Saddam?
The U.S. government has told too many lies to the American people and the international community. Saying that the Kurdish people have been happy with US occupation is one of those lies.
I agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator and yes, we Kurds were victims of his brutality. I always dreamed about freeing ourselves from his rule. We were happy to get rid of Saddam and many trusted the United States and thought it would bring democracy. But then we saw our country go from a dictatorship to an occupied nation.
Why should the cost of getting rid of Saddam be a US invasion and occupation? Is that our only alternative? How can we accept the presence of armed foreigners in the streets of our country? For years they have been ordering us around us at checkpoints, breaking down our doors in midnight raids, imprisoning our loved ones without cause and torturing them. Should we thank Bush and the US government for that?
Besides, it was not the role of the United States to get rid of Saddam. That was for us, the Iraqis. Many people around the world didn't like Bush. But would Americans have wanted a foreign military to invade their country to get rid of him? Would that be acceptable to Americans? I don't think so.
What do you suggest that people do to support al-Zaidi?
It is absurd that al-Zaidi will spend three years in prison while George Bush walks free. It is Bush who should be in prison for war crimes.
I also fear for al-Zaidi's life if he remains in prison. He was already tortured while the world spotlight was on him; imagine what might happen when people have forgotten him. He could easily be killed by government agents.
If Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki believed in democracy and human rights, he would consider al-Zaidi's act an expression of free speech and pardon him. If there is enough public pressure, that could happen. People should sign petitions, and call the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Iraqi Mission to the UN. It is only through public pressure that he can be released.
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
