The empire tries its hand at military procurement

You can't make this stuff up.

A couple of days ago, when the U.S. military death toll in Iraq passed 4,000, the New York Times filled four full pages with photographs of each of the most recent 1,000 victims. It was an impressive, solemn tribute to the fallen.

Today, its cover story reported that the $300m worth of ammunition ordered by the US to supply the Afghan army is defective and mostly useless, manufactured over 40 years ago and covered with corrosion. The cartridges were supplied by AEY Inc., a ridiculously unqualified company run by a 22-year old with no background, no office, and only one employee. While he wasn't stalking or assaulting his ex-girlfriends, he bought the arms from the Albanian military through a network of shadowy middlemen. It seems the military has known about AEY's problems for some time but only suspended their contract two days ago when they learned the Times was about to publish the story.

"Put very simply, many of the people involved in smuggling arms to Africa are also exactly the same as those involved in Pentagon-supported deals, like AEY's shipments to Afghanistan and Iraq," said an arms trafficking researcher quoted in the Times article. "[A]n examination... suggests that Army contracting officials, under pressure to arm Afghan troops, allowed an immature company to enter the murky world of international arms dealing on the Pentagon's behalf -- and did so with minimal vetting and through a vaguely written contract with few restrictions," the Times authors carefully summarize.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice have been pounding the pavement in foreign capitals in the last few weeks, trying to drum up more countries to contribute troops to the "war against terror" in Afghanistan.

The Afghan soliders might wonder what message the U.S. is sending them by asking them to shoulder the fight against the Taliban with defective ammunition.

European countries such as Germany which are being entreated to join the war might wonder whether if they did, they would be joining a struggle led by a dysfunctional military.

And the families of the fallen U.S. soliders and U.S. taxpayers might wonder whether the struggle "against terror" for which they have sacrificed is instead really a cynical ploy to encourage the illicit international arms trade, corrupt regimes, destabilize nations, and ensure that only the U.S. has the military strength to provide "security".

Deconstructing Consent

Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and social critic, is justly renowned as a relentless left critic of empire. For decades he has systematically unmasked the hypocrisy of the worldview disseminated by the establishment media. Terrorism? The U.S. is the most terrorist of them all. Democracy? Only when the outcome is the one we want, only within narrow limits.

In a 1997 talk, "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", Chomsky lays out his method. "You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure....You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something." Chomsky's focus is always on the self-serving contradictions and illogic, the deceptions perpetrated by the ruling elites. "By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly."

Can the people escape the indoctrination and reduced democracy that have been constructed for them by the elite? In his most recent comprehensive statement, Hegemony or Survival (2003), Chomsky frames the problem: "Recognition that control of opinion is the foundation of government... is far more important in the more free societies, where obedience cannot be maintained by the lash... Problems of domestic control become particularly severe when the governing authorities carry out policies that are opposed by the general population."

Hope remains. "It would be a great error to conclude that the prospects are uniformly bleak. Far from it. One very promising development is the slow evolution of a human rights culture among the general population, a tendency that accelerated in the 1960s, when popular activism had a notable civilizing effect in many domains, extending significantly in the years that followed.... Over the course of modern history, there have beren significant gains in human rights and democratic control of some sectors of life. These... have typically been imposed on states and other power centers by popular struggle.... There has been at least a restraining influence on state violence."

Chomsky accurately locates popular progressive struggles as the path to survival in the future. But he does not explain how those movements overcome the ideological blinders so relentlessly disseminated by the ruling elite. He does not reveal their social base, look into which sectors are most or least subject to deception, or show why movements succeed or fail. In fact, these movements appear like a bolt from the blue after hundreds of pages of uninterrupted domination of lies and irrationality. While Chomsky identifies with them, he does not explain them, he does not show how to build them. Ultimately, they are an afterthought to a pessimistic analysis in which ideological manipulation reigns supreme in a closed system.

Scott Ritter and the Iran nuclear scare

The former chief UN inspector for Iraq, Scott Ritter, drew attention in the period leading up to the Iraq war for his forthright arguments that Iraq had no WMD. His latest book, Target Iran: The Truth about the White House's Plans for Regime Change, argues that the same is true with Iran - it does not have a nuclear weapons program.

The book is a detailed walk through the history of the Iran nuclear weapons scare. Helpfully explaining the rudiments of uranium enrichment and centrifuges, Ritter spends much of the book recounting each inspection tour, negotiation, and meeting between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran from 2001 through 2006. Uranium enrichment is required for both nuclear reactor fuel and nuclear weapons, but only low degree of enrichment is needed for reactor fuel, while high enrichment is needed for weapons. Picking apart the issues at each stage of the process, Ritter shows that the IAEA, the US, and Israel have never come up with any evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. He also suggests that Iran is still facing serious technical problems in its enrichment effort.

The Israeli/U.S. furor is based on a supposition that Iran would not need a peaceful nuclear energy program hence "must" be seeking nuclear weapons, and a drive for regime change based on strategic and political objectives. Iran has been put in the position of "proving a negative" - proving that it does not have a weapons program - which is against the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the U.S. has been able to manipulate the process, and successive Security Council resolutions since 2005 have demanded Iran halt enrichment activity based on no evidence.

An ex-Marine and a self-described conservative, Ritter argues that Israel is wrapped up in a konseptsia, or gut feeling that is not based on hard fact, that it faces a combination of many adversaries headed by Iran. In turn he believes Israel has kidnapped U.S. policy towards Iran and that the anti-Iran stance of the U.S. is not in U.S. interests. "Let there be no doubt: if there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else." In this belief that Israel drives the U.S.'s Mideast policy, Ritter agrees with Perry Anderson's view; my own is that the U.S. empire has sound geopolitical reasons for its strategy of Mideast domination, and that Israel is the U.S.'s tool in this game, not the other way around.

Ritter is critical of Europe, particularly the EU-3 (Britain, France, Germany) which have played a part ostensibly independent of the U.S., but which in fact have followed the U.S. line on the essentials. "Without a shred of evidence beyond the rhetoric of Washington, D.C., and the posturing of Tel Aviv, Europe has bought into the operating premise that Iran's nuclear ambitions are military in nature, and not civilian." Ritter similarly slams Russia and China, which knew the risks of letting the Iran matter be referred from the IAEA to the Security Council, but acquiesced for the sake of international unity.

The approach to the non-proliferation issue is narrow and legalistic. Ritter does not explain the issues surrounding the NPT, the way the U.S. has been able to use it to maintain its nuclear supermacy and particularly as a club to pummel its its chosen targets such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

The book is not footnoted, apparently because it includes information from people involved in intelligence and/or non-proliferation work.

Ritter's book, published by Nation Books and ignored by mainstream book reviewers, is a cry to prevent a U.S. war with Iran, which he assessed as almost inevitable in June 2007. The political situation has since changed with the publication of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate in December, whose statement that Iran stopped any nuclear weapons work in 2003 at least temporarily took the wind out of the sails of the U.S. war party.

Ritter's analysis skirts many questions which are neither identified nor addressed:

• Why does the U.S. want regime change in Iran so badly?
• Why is Israel subject to an irrational antagonism towards Iran instead of following a peaceful policy?
  
• Why is has Israel been able to hijack the U.S.'s Middle East policy (as he believes)?
  
• Why can Europe, Russia, and China not break from the U.S. war drive by developing a really independent Iran policy?
• What is the future of the NPT and the nuclear proliferation issue?
  

Ritter is an honest analyst who starts with what he knows best and keeps pulling on the string to unravel the knot. In doing so he has made a solid contribution to the analysis of the Iran war scare, and with his military background he brings different assumptions to the problem than do most anti-imperialists. But he needs to go much deeper into the political and social context to further unravel the forces at play. In a future post I'll discuss another of his recent books, in which he advises the U.S. peace movement on its strategy and organization.

The empire tries its hand at asymmetrical warfare

Those who support a continuing U.S. presence in Iraq claim that General Petraeus' counter-insurgency doctrine is winning hearts and minds by respecting the rights of civilians and fighting only against the insurgents, not the Iraqi people. For example, Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute argues in today's New York Times that "the most surprising phenomenon of the war has been the transformation of the United States military into the most discriminate and effective counterinsurgency force the world has ever seen, skillfully blending the most advanced technology with human interactions between soldiers and the Iraqi people.... Our forces went from imminent defeat to creating the prospect of success, using a great deal of firepower, killing and capturing many enemies, but binding the local population to us at the same time."

However, four days of testimony offered by Iraq war veterans in Washington, D.C. this weekend suggests that this is a fanciful view. Rather, it makes it clear clear that the U.S. military is having an extremely difficult time breaking from its institutionalized culture of racism and brutality despite five years of experience in Iraq and six in Afghanistan.

Held in Washington, D.C. over the past four days by the Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Winter Soldier hearings presented first-person testimony by dozens of veterans to the racism, disrespect, and brutality of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. I attended an event in Cambridge, MA at which an anti-war crowd of about 100 watched a live video stream of the event. The video archives are available for download and I encourge you to look at them.

I was struck by how young the panelists are. Most are barely out of their teens. Whether they joined through youthful idealism or because of economic necessity, few were prepared for the stark reality of what they encountered in Iraq, but all were thoughtful and had made a personal journey to participation in the antiwar movement. Following were some of the stories they told.

One soldier's unit ransacked hundreds of homes, never finding any weapons but alienating many people.

One vet remembered the military rampaging through the ruins of Babylon early in the occupation, with no respect for their cultural value.

U.S. Army medical doctors systematically refused to provide medical care to Iraqi civilians, including those wounded by American fire.

A sergeant used to shoot dogs for fun - pets of families living in a residential area. When his commander asked one day why he was firing, the sergeant explained he was just shooting dogs. His commander merely said to tell him ahead of time.

One vet said that he himself had inflicted murder and mayhem on Iraqi civilians although he knew it was wrong, and that his mind in some cases blanked out the details of what he had done.

An ex-Marine reported that the officers' watchword was "Kill babies", to desensitize the troops.

Hajis became a term of disrespect in the military, including generals, for all Iraqis, a slang which shows extreme disrespect for Islam -- a Haji is a person who deserves respect because he has made the pilgrimmage to Mecca.

The current U.S. strategy in Iraq focuses on an effort to split the Sunni community, paying off tens of thousands of Sunni men $300 a month apiece to join the "Awakening movement". However, the U.S. cannot afford to really tamp down the sectarian divide. If it did that, the Iraqi unity that resulted might well move in a nationalist direction. On the other hand, it appears from the Winter Soldier testimony that the U.S. military is much too blunt an instrument to enable the occupation planners to build a unified Iraqi state under their thumb, as Kagan and others still imagine. Not being able to go either forward or backward in Iraq, the U.S. is digging in to exploit the oil and divide the region over the long haul, while still trying to minimize the negative political consequences. Both the U.S. antiwar movement and the Iraqi resistance have a long road ahead of them.

Democracy and Imperialism: Cornel West

In Democracy Matters, Cornel West argues that democracy and imperialism have been intertwined throughout American history. Slave labor and subjugation of indigeous peoples were equally essential to the formation of America. The fusion of these two forms of oppression continue to form the basis of our society up to the present. (Amen, brother, but did you forget to indict capitalism?)

With imperialism now dominant, West calls on us to bring forward the American "deep democratic tradition" rooted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Baldwin, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison to overcome the nihilism of ruling elites. Socratic questioning, prophetic vision (rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition), and tragicomic hope (exemplified in blues and jazz) are the cultural wellsprings which the American people can draw on as they seek to restore democracy.

In a chapter on the Middle East, West's analysis of empire becomes seriously confused. He says that undemocratic Arab regimes are the primary barrier to peace, while acknowledging that Israel contributes problems as well. "Elites on both sides" are the issue. (To me, Israeli aggression is definitely the #1 problem in the Middle East.) He predicts the U.S. will abandon Israel for oil. (While I do not believe that to be the case, as Israel is too enmeshed in the U.S. military machine to be lightly discarded, I agree that Israel may soon have to compromise as it is joined by Arab regional gendarmes.) West identifies with "prophetic democratic" currents in Islam, especially the thought of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha of Sudan.

West posits a struggle between two strands of Christianity, which he terms Constantinian and prophetic. The Constantinian Christianity of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell serves the empire, while the prophetic Christianity of M.L. King and William Sloan Coffin seeks justice, but the prophetic strand is losing out in today's America.

West includes an account of his encounters with Lawrence Summers of Harvard which resulted in his departure to Princeton. He expresses his disappointment that the faculty did not support him and the media circus that obscured all the issues.

West is a keen cultural and political observer and this book amply illustrates why he ranks as an inspriational leader of the struggle for peace and justice. His analysis of empire, which is based on a Christian analysis of justice and oppression rather than in developments in the contemporary world, does not completely identify the potential sources of resistance. And West's religiously motivated identification with Israel seems to prevent him from seeing the Middle East situation objectively. However, despite these limitations West continues to inspire and enlighten, and to draw the lines of struggle.