Document leaks and Neo-Colonialism. . . .

There are already numerous condemnations of yesterday's leaks of documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, including one bizarre Liberal blogger calling for the death penalty. Of course how one feels about the leaks will largely reflect how one feels about the war. Only those with the most blind acceptance of the Western spin on the war could possibly talk about the death-penalty regarding such leaks. The Western spin is really pretty  simple and is very similar to the kinds of spin that the West has been using since the beginning of the era of colonialism with a few particulars for time and place. If you buy this story you essentially believe that the Western nations were essentially 'innocent' victims of a set of more or less crazy Muslim fundamentalists (the so-called Taliban) who, so the West would have us believe, were operating out of Afghanistan. According to this view, the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan were part of a concerted effort to undermine these Muslim organizations who have little more against Western nations than "hating our freedoms."

This view has as little to do with recent events than the "white-man's burden" of 'spreading religion and civilization to ignorant heathens' had to do with the real motivations of Western colonialism. First of all to accept the idea of an innocent West being the target or victim of an irrational radical Muslim movement is to ignore centuries of history. Whether one agrees with their reasons or not, one cannot ignore that Arabs and Muslims have much to be chagrined about when it comes to Western actions in various Muslim regions. If one payed close attention to the events immediately following the events of 911 you could discern the real political issues that were at stake. When Bin Laden was seen on video taking credit for the tragic events in NYC he gave three primary reasons for these events. These reasons were 1. the sanctions that the West used against Iraq in the 1990s which by all independent reports were responsible for literally hundreds of thousands of children. 2. The continued presence of Western military forces in Saudi Arabia, and 3. The brutality and hypocrisy with which the Palestinians have been treated by Western Nations. Regardless of one's political viewpoint, these are legitimate political concerns which, regardless of their source, need to be treated seriously. This does not justify the events of 911, but it does cast considerable doubt on the Western image of Bin Laden as nothing but a mad religious fanatic hell-bent on the destruction of the West simply because he hates modern social democracy. Furthermore, there were in fact few, or even no, genuine 'terrorist' camps in Afghanistan. Rural Pakistan was, and continues to be, the real location of most of the so-called 'terrorist' organizations about which the West professed to be concerned.

The Western nations later replaced their 'terrorist' camps arguments with talk of altruistic concerns about the people of Afghanistan. But if one takes a realistic political (that is to say 'real politik') viewpoint, one can hardly be fooled by all the spin concerning the Western motivations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if one had been paying attention in the nineties one would know that men like Dick Cheney had long made plans for consolidating US power and influence in the Middle East and other geo-politically sensitive areas. To buy into talk of altruism or a defense of justice and democracy on the part of the West seems to me to be hopelessly naive. Though the altruistic spin is still prevalent in the days of neo-colonialism as it once was with real colonialism, it is just as specious. As with most, if not all, wars Afghanistan and Iraq are about money and power. The war in Iraq is now the most expensive war ever waged and much of the money spent has been diverted to large Western corporations. Billions of dollars of average tax-payers' money has been gathered and diverted to arms makers and dealers as well as other kinds of corporations. Other monies have been spent (largely in untraceable cash) buying support from warlords (both in Afghanistan and Iraq)  for Western interests. This support is much wider than it once was but also as shallow as the stacks of cash which will eventually run out. And despite the talk of 7% more girls going to school in Afghanistan, all the Western efforts in that country have done is to prop up a dubious government which has little or no democratic legitimacy and which continues to sponsor laws such as the death-penalty for homosexuality. While propping up the Afghan dictatorship (run by Pro-Western politicians and self-interested war-lords) the West continues to support numerous other dictatorships in the region where women have few or no legal rights and where the governments don't even go through the motions of 'democracy.' The existence of a perpetual enemy (a la  1984) which justifies not only the extension of Western power and the diversion of government funds from average people to powerful corporations, are the real motivations of these wars. If the West had really been interested in peace and the living conditions of people in the region they would have used a small portion of the monies spent in those wars and constructed a viable and prosperous Palestinian State as well as bringing greater democracy to other close Western allies.

With these issues in mind, I see the recent document leaks as part of an effort to lay bare the actions of governments engaged in a neo-colonial effort to further dominate a region where oil plays a central role in nation building. Just as anti-colonialists like Gandhi and Franz Fanon were engaged in concerted efforts to expose the real motivations of Western Colonialism, people must now engage in an effort to expose the real motivations behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wars in the Middle East, imperialism part. . . . Oh I lost count.

It amazes me that there are still people out there who believe that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. The greatest irony of the war was, of course, the simple fact that the invasion, and the entire ‘Bush-Doctrine’ was a violation of the very international laws that the invaders claimed that they were enforcing in the first place. This should be enough to dissuade any rational person from supporting the war to begin with. However, despite their claims to the contrary, those who supported and continue to support the war have very little rationality on their side anyway.

Supporters of the war were of course forced to abandon their initial arguments for the war very soon after the actual invasion. The idea of WMDs went by the wayside very quickly. This fact should motivate any rational person to doubt the legitimacy of the invasion not just because there were no weapons but because it makes clear that the actual motivation for the invasion was contrary to the publically stated one. Now given the history of British and American imperialism, anyone who fails to understand that the invasion of Iraq was motivated by a continuation of this history must either a) tacitly support this history or b) be so wildly uninformed about American and British actions over the past 100 years or so that they really can’t understand this issue to begin with.

The invaders quickly found a new spin to put on their illegal action – so-called “regime change.” Now this is a strange one since they are the very ones who set up the regime in the first place and continued to support it through the worst of its abuses as long as it functioned as an ally in the region. George Bush senior even addressed a joint meeting of Congress begging them not to pull funding from Iraq after Hussein gassed the Kurds because though he had done some pretty nasty stuff, he was still an American ally and deserved financial and military support.

The Iraqi State going “rouge” didn’t mean it was a brutal dictatorship or that it killed its own people, in American parlance it meant that Iraq would no longer do the American bidding exactly the way they wanted it done. This is where we must question the long history of US and British support of every kind of terrible dictatorship. The Shah in Iran, Surharto in Indonesia, the so-called Malayan Emergency, countless dictatorships in Africa and Latin America, the list is too long to recite.

So the argument of ‘regime change’ begs the question, if the US and Britain were so concerned about the evils of the regime in Iraq why did they support it for so long and why do they continue to support dictatorships all over the world and undermine democratically elected leaders when they don’t conform to US and British globalization strategies? (By the way, the US and British support of the de facto dictatorships in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, two states that they use to launch attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq respectively, should be enough to make any rational person doubt the argument of regime change. )

The answer is, as it usually is, a combination of factors. One is that the US and Britain have proven time and again that they have no real interest in human rights or democracy except where they can manipulate them in order to further their overall strategy of the movement of Capital. The Iraqi regime had become a serious thorn in the side of this strategy particularly because of the movement of oil and the need to blindly support the State of Israel as the main military force in the Middle East. With dwindling justification for the military spending in the US in particular, a serious new motivation had become necessary for such expenditures. Dick Cheney had already made this argument in a frighteningly explicit way years before the invasion of Iraq. US military expenditure constitutes not only the largest in the world by far by also has been the most effective way for the US government to funnel huge amounts of tax money from average people to large corporations such as Lockheed – Martin, General Dynamic, and others. Beginning with the invasion of Iraq, this spending not only went on undeterred but actually increased with the formation of huge deficits spent almost solely on the purchasing, design, and use of new weaponry.

An overall justification for huge military expenditure was the primary motivation of the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Doctrine, the Cheney-doctrine (sometime referred to as the One Percent Solution) and the so-called ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ which has its origins in the 1990s, all add up to the necessity of finding a serious war that would be able to turn the attention of the US population (and hopefully the populations of other states like Britain) to a resurgence of the military-industrial complex which guarantees the supremacy of a Capitalist class which can continue their raping of not only their citizens but of the world’s resources.

“Regime Change” was just another neo-imperialist spin, not unlike the way the so-called ‘white man’s burden’ was the spin for the initial phase of British imperialism. A frighteningly obvious exposure of this fact is that the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be de facto dictatorships run by undue Western control. Now instead of children dying because of Western supported sanctions they die because of the use birth defects created from the use of radioactive and phosphorous weapons during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US and Britain continue to support dictatorships bordering on both Iraq and Afghanistan, and they continue to tacitly allow Israel to maintain an Apartheid-like situation in the occupied territories.

Every justification of the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq is either naïve or based on a fundamental lie about US and British neo-imperialist goals. Over the past few months, the situation in Afghanistan has become particularly blatant in its effrontery to reason as we have watched bogus elections and the increasing power of war-lords running the country. Countries like Canada who had normally not been engaged in these kind s of neo-imperialist adventures now find themselves in the position of supporting a non-elected government which imprisons its people indiscriminately, uses torture routinely, and punishes homosexuality with death. Meanwhile in Iraq, different forces jockey for position against the backdrop of continued death, destruction, and extreme want. Independent organizations like Amnesty continue to show that Iraq is a torture state while birth defects run rabid through the country.  Thousands of US troops continue to be in Iraq with no schedule for departure and any hint of democratic decisions that contravene US goals are quickly put down.

Regime change really meant no change at all because the more things change the more they stay the same.

For those still unconvinced let me make a simple analogy. Let's say a guy goes into a room full of Mafia Dons and he shoots one of them, justifying his act of murder with the claim that he did it because the gangster was involved in murder and organized crime. If the same man then drinks and socializes with many of the other Gangsters and publicly calls them his friends despite the fact that they are guilty of the very same crimes as the man he just murdered, then we can reasonably assume that his stated motivation for his act was a lie. If we then investigate the man and learn that not only has he supported this and many other Mafia leaders in the past but has been guilty of the very same crimes that he claimed to have motivated his act of murder, then we have learned that far from an altruistic act of charity, this was what they call in New York, a gangland slaying. Now we may not mourn the death of that particular Mafia leader we also cannot justify his murder by another criminal who has done so simply as part of the typical jockeying for position by Gangsters. 

Fact: The US, just like the murderer in our analogy, supported Hussein for years while he was guilty of the same crimes they later condemned. 

Fact: The US, just like the murderer in our analogy, continues to support (with financial and military aid) other dictators in the region who are guilty of the same crimes.

Fact: The US, just like the murderer in our analogy, is guilty of the very same crimes all over the world.

Fact: The US is the largest producer of weapons in the world, selling them to many dictatorships.

Fact: After the end of the Soviet Union the US lost its primary justification for the more than 50% of its national budget that it spends on the military-industrial complex.

Fact: At the end of George Bush Sr.'s reign as president Cheney and Wolfowitz wrote documents specifically saying that the US needed a major Military event to justify its continued military supremacy. 

Simple Conclusion: The US invaded Iraq (and in large part Afghanistan) to reinvigorate its military position and spending in a post cold-war world. 

 

Igantieff the Western Imperialist.

I guess I should be clear. Despite speaking out against the negative Conservative ads which I consider bigoted and out of line, I have no intention of defending Michael Ignatieff as an intellectual or a politician. I believe that Ignatieff is another in a long line of Western-centric, imperialistic, and even warmongering thinkers who use the intellectual constructs that emerged from the Enlightenment to wrap his ideas in rational respectability. Lest we forget that Mr.Ignatieff was one of the most avid intellectual defenders of Bush’s war in Iraq and he gave a ‘liberal’ respectability to what was obviously a neo-imperialist effort on the part of the US to gain greater control of the geo-politically  important oil-rich region. Of course when Ignatieff saw real political power in Canada as a genuine possibility, he attempted to distance himself from his support for the disastrous war.  In his article in the New York Times Ignatieff claimed that  he failed to ask himself the ‘hard questions.’ Imagine that, a man who generally portrays himself as a world-class intellectual failed at the very thing on which intellectuals should hang their credibility; asking the hard question. But Ignatieff’s failure is not based on any naivety or emotional hopefulness on his part as he might have us believe. Rather, Ignatieff’s words and actions make it clear that his support for the War in Iraq was part of an overriding Western tendency to believe that the powers of the West have the moral authority and credibility to take any measures to enforce their will. This point is clearly demonstrable when we read the soul ‘hard question’ that Ignatieff admits that he failed to ask concerning the War in Iraq; “I let emotions carry me past the hard questions,” Ignatieff claims, “like; can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror?” Instead of asking whether the Western powers have a right to invade a sovereign nation (a nation by the way that the Western powers made and supported in the first place), Ignatieff refers exclusively to whether the forces in Iraq are capable of living up to the Western standards. Of course Ignatieff fails to even mention that though not all the roots of the disputes between Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites are caused by Western interventions they have been badly exasperated in Iraq by years of Western support for dictatorships which either acted in the West’s interests or were kept busy among themselves, thus not acting against Western interests.

For an more eloquent and thorough exploration of this issue see this article from the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/06/intellectualwarmonger

Thus if anyone wants to attack Michael Ignatieff, why don’t they address issues of war and policy rather than personal geography?

 

 

 

Success in War

March30th 2008
It is remarkable that even the majority of people who speak out against the war in Iraq voice their opposition within what is essentially a Western, Militarist paradigm. There has been plenty of opposition to the war but most of what I hear addresses the misinformation leading up to the war, certain fundamental mistakes made during initial months of the war, and a general lack of knowledge on the part of the United States concerning the nature of Iraqi society in general. Within this paradigm is commonplace to say that the war was a mistake and a failure. However, the war in Iraq can only be seen to be a failure and a mistake if you follow what is basically an American and militarist analysis. But I contend that the war was in no way a mistake and has been largely a complete success. I say this because I believe that the United States did not invade Iraq for any of the reason which are stated publicly and accepted by the majority of people. The US was not concerned about weapons of mass-destruction (Hanz Blix, the very man sent by the UN to investigate the weapons was the most vocally sceptical about their existence). Democracy was certainly not a US concern (the US supported Hussan’s dictatorship for years and continues to support dictatorships throughout the region.) Battling Islamic radicalism was not the issue (Iraq was hardly a hotbed of Islamic radicalism and if the US was truly interesting in undermining the constituency of Radical Islam they would settle the Palestinian issue because that would surely have the greatest impact on the growth of this ideology). The reasons for the war in Iraq are the same motivations for almost every war in history: money and power. War is business. The rich and powerful execute wars for very simple reasons: to increase their wealth and power. Analysed within this paradigm the war in Iraq has in fact been a roaring success. The military/industrial complex was feeling the end of the cold-war more than most people are willing to admit. The invasion of the middle-east has renewed the power and profits of the military/industrial complex and made billions of dollars for men like George Bush and Dick Cheney. Furthermore, recent events have guarantied this power and these profits for decades to come. The war in Iraq has been an incredible success because the reasons for the war have played out exactly like the rich and powerful men who instigated it had hoped. The resistance that the US has met with is perfect for Haliburton and Lockheed-Martin. The Iraqi resistance keeps the corporations busy and keeps the dollars flowing. Just as has so often occurred in history, the rich and powerful started a war in their own interests and convinced the majority of people to wave the flag and support it. How sad and pathetic is this? If ever there was an example of false consciousness this is it. We must stop lamenting that the invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake and a woeful failure – and start talking about how sad it is that it has been a remarkable success.