Elsewhere Today 440
Aljazeera:
US warned in 'Bin Laden video'
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2007
23:00 MECCA TIME, 20:00 GMT
A videotape purporting to show Osama bin Laden has been released in which the al-Qaeda leader warns George Bush that he is repeating the "mistakes of the former Soviet Union".
US officials were studying the tape, which, if proved to be genuine, would be the first message from bin Laden for nearly three years.
In the tape, bin Laden purportedly said that US Democrats had failed to stop the Iraq war because of the power of US corporations.
"The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush," says Bin Laden on the tape, in a reference to the former Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Reuters reported.
Bin Laden said that the war in Iraq was continuing for "the same reasons which led to the failure of former president [John F] Kennedy to stop the Vietnam war - those with real power and influence are those with the most capital", the Reuters news agency reported.
The tape, released on Friday, purportedly shows Bin Laden telling US citizens that they should join Islam if they want the war in Iraq to end, though it is said to contain no specific threats.
The videotape was issued just days before the 6th anniversary on the September 11 attacks on New York.
Commenting on the video, Bush said the tape was "a reminder about the dangerous world in which we live, and it is a reminder that we must pull together to protect our people against these extremists who murder the innocent in order to achieve their political objective."
Authenticity
In the video, bin Laden is shown with his beard much shorter and darker than in his last appearance, when it was streaked with grey.
A banner on the screen reads in English: "A message from Sheikh Osama bin Laden to the American people."
References in the video to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, are believed to suggest the video is only a few weeks old.
Bin Laden also appeared to refer to memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that took place barely a month ago, on August 6 and on August 9.
A US official said that this could mean the video was recorded later in August.
US officials have not confirmed the authenticity of the tape, but did say that it was being analysed.
Later Reuters reported an anonymous official as saying the US was "operating under the assumption that the tape is real".
Adel Darwish, political editor of Middle East magazine, told Al Jazeera that he had "doubts" about the authenticity of the tape.
"Any kid these days with an electronic kit can alter images and edit the way that he or she likes," he said.
"There is no close up on bin Laden, the beard is thick and black and then there are large segments where the image is a still."
Website shutdown
Soon after Washington announced it had the video, all the websites that usually carry statements from al-Qaeda went down and were inaccessible, in an unprecedented shutdown, according to the Associated Press news agency.
The reason for the shutdown was not immediately known.
Evan H Kohlmann, an expert at globalterroralert.com, said he suspected it was the work of al-Qaeda itself, trying to find how the video leaked to US officials.
Others suspected the US might be behind the shutdown.
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said: "Bin Laden is telling the Americans that he is still there and leading."
"It [the tape]underlines the strength of words in this new asymmetrical warfare in the 21st century between the US and al-Qaeda."
Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said the tape demonstrated that "terrorists are out there and they are actively trying to kill Americans and threaten our interests".
Bin Laden was last seen in a video statement shortly before the US presidential election in 2004.
Since then, he has issued a number of audio messages, the last in July 2006 when he vowed al-Qaeda would fight the US across the world.
Bin Laden tapes
October 6, 2001 - audio tape released, supposedly of bin Laden saying any US attack on Muslim world would be repaid "twofold".
November 12, 2001 - apparent video tape of bin Laden warning US allies against supporting "White House gang of butchers".
December 20, 2003 - audio tape, purportedly from bin Laden, accuses Arab governments responding to US calls for democracy of being "infidel" agents of US.
May 6, 2004 - audio recording, said to be from bin Laden, calls for a holy war against the US-led occupation of Iraq.
October 30, 2004 - Days before the US presidential election, bin Laden in a video tells Americans Bush has deceived them and that the US could face more strikes like September 11.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E2EDB797-31D0-4C50-9B18-9E7D00A65C9B.htm
AllAfrica:
Fighting Restricting Humanitarian Access in North Kivu
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
7 September 2007
Nairobi
Clashes between government forces and dissident General Laurent Nkunda's fighters in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are hampering efforts to deliver aid to thousands of civilians displaced from their homes by the violence, aid workers said.
"This is a worsening crisis," Claude Jibidar, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) country director in DRC, said on 7 September. "The fighting is uprooting more people every day and making it ever harder for WFP to reach them with the assistance they urgently need. We need at least US$12 million to buy more food in the region and move it in fast."
The latest outbreak of fighting pits the national army against fighters loyal to Nkunda. It has forced an estimated 40,000 people to flee their homes in recent days.
According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 refugees have spent two nights in Bunagana town in Uganda's western Kisoro province bordering the DRC. During the day, most of the men cross back into the DRC to check on their properties, leaving behind 12,000-15,000 women and children.
Thousands of the displaced had also moved towards Goma from the town of Sake, 20km west of the capital of North Kivu, according to local sources in the area. Nkunda claimed to have captured Sake on 6 September.
"We captured Sake at 11.45am local time," the rebel leader told IRIN. "We forced out the regular army, but I have ordered my forces to withdraw to prevent the local population from being targeted by army shelling."
The truce negotiated by the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) later took effect. "I really hope this fighting stops," Nkunda said. "From the beginning I have not asked for this war. Kinshasa is behind the fighting."
According to WFP, the fighting was restricting humanitarian access and food deliveries to areas beyond Goma. Roads were unsafe and on 6 September, a UN helicopter airlifting food to Masisi district had to turn back because of the conflict.
Civilians in cross-fire
Earlier, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes had met President Joseph Kabila to voice concern about the humanitarian situation in areas affected by the fighting.
"All armed groups should refrain from targeting civilians," Holmes told a news conference in Kinshasa on 5 September after his meeting with Kabila. "The government of the DRC must honour its commitment to protect the entire civilian population on its territory."
Local residents in Sake said some of the displaced were heading towards Mungunga. Rev Jean Balengele, contacted by telephone, said about 20,000 displaced people were moving towards the village.
"There is no shelter and we are sleeping in the open. We have nothing to eat because we didn't bring any food with us and no one here is giving us any," Balengele said.
UNHCR said there were several camps and makeshift sites in the Mugunga area hosting at least 35,000 displaced people. "The number continues to rise daily," the agency said in a statement on 7 September. "The conditions are desperate, with the displaced sheltering in flimsy huts made of leaves and sticks, in overcrowded school buildings and under the open sky."
Due to increasingly difficult and limited access in the region, UNHCR added, there were fears that the known displacement was only the tip of the iceberg. "Yesterday [6 September], we had no access to Mugunga as the security situation there deteriorated rapidly," the agency said. "Over the past days, UNHCR staff in Goma have witnessed the constant arrival of trucks loaded with IDPs [internally displaced persons] and their belongings."
Regional ramifications
In New York, MONUC commander Major-General Babacar Gaye said the conflict could have wider sub-regional implications.
"Nkunda considers himself a spokesman and protector of the Tutsi community, of whom one part are refugees in Rwanda, and the return of these refugees is the first thing he is demanding of the government," he said. The return, he added, must be predicated on a settlement of the situation in northern Kivu.
According to Gaye, the "weakness" of the Congolese state had made it difficult to extend authority to all parts of northern Kivu, leaving Nkunda to progressively fill the void.
MONUC, for its part, had for three months reinforced its North Kivu brigade with an additional battalion while increasing its mobile operations and providing "measured support" to the Congolese army.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709070836.html
AlterNet: The Iraq News Black-Out:
How the Press Spent its Summer Vacation
By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Posted on September 5, 2007
Reposted with permission from Media Matters. See original here.
News that Katie Couric would anchor the CBS Evening News from Baghdad this week created a major media splash. After earlier suggesting that type of assignment would be too treacherous for a single mother of two, Couric did an about-face. She stressed that as a journalist she wanted to get a better sense, a firsthand account, of how events were unfolding inside Iraq; to give the story more context.
It's ironic because if CBS had simply aired more reporting from Iraq this summer instead of joining so many other news outlets in walking away from the story, then perhaps Couric wouldn't have had to travel 8,000 miles to find out the facts on the ground.
Couric's high-profile assignment helps underscore the shocking disconnect that has opened up between American news consumers and the mainstream media. The chasm revolves around the fact that public polling indicates consumers are starved for news from Iraq, yet over the summer the mainstream media, and particularly television outlets such as CBS, steadfastly refused to deliver it. The press has walked away from what most Americans claim is the day's most important ongoing news event.
The media's coverage from Iraq has naturally ebbed and flowed over the four-and-a-half years since the invasion. And escalating security concerns in Iraq have made it both more difficult and more expensive for news organization to operate there.
But the pullback we've seen this summer, the chronic dearth of on-the-ground reporting, likely marks a new low of the entire campaign. It's gotten to the point where even monstrous acts of destruction cannot wake the press from its self-induced slumber. Just recall the events of August 14.
That's when witnesses to the four synchronized suicide truck bombs that detonated in northern Iraq on that day described the collective devastation unleashed to being like an earthquake, or even the site of a nuclear bomb explosion; the destruction of one bomb site measured half a mile wide. A U.S. Army spokesman, after surveying the mass carnage from an attack that targeted Yazidis, an ancient religious community, called the event genocidal. Indeed, more than 500 Iraqis were killed, more than 1,500 were wounded, and 400 buildings were destroyed.
The bombings in the towns of Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar marked the deadliest attack of the entire Iraq war. In fact, with a death toll topping 500, the mid-August bombing ranks as the second deadliest terror strike ever recorded in modern times. Only the coordinated attacks on 9-11 have claimed more innocent lives. Yet the press failed to put the story in context.
Early news dispatches about the attacks (which pegged the early death toll at a smaller, but still remarkable, 175) were posted around 6 p.m. ET on August 14. Yet that night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, the hour-long news program that airs at 10 p.m., the carnage from Iraq garnered just a brief report, and that was relegated to the "360 Bulletin," halfway through the program; a report on a playground catching on fire due to spontaneous combustion of decomposing wood chips was given slightly more airtime and, unlike the suicide bombings, prompted a reaction from host Cooper himself: "That's incredible. I never heard of that." Less surprising was the fact that a pro-Bush outlet such as The Drudge Report, as late as 10:30 p.m. that night, was ignoring the massive blast headline, or that Fox News gave the gruesome attack just three mentions all evening.
The next day, as noted by the Columbia Journalism Review, the story was placed on A6 in both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and Page 4 of USA Today. On that evening's NBC Nightly News, the historic massacre from Iraq was not even tapped as the day's most important story. (Ongoing mortgage woes led the broadcast that night.)
The media's tepid response to the cataclysmic event was telling. It simply underscored how Iraq fatigue afflicts American newsrooms - but not American households.
That Americans are obsessed about Iraq is no surprise. Polling has consistently shown they think the war is far and away the single most important issue facing the country. And it wasn't like there was no news happening in Iraq between June and August; the months formed the deadliest summer of the war for U.S. military men and women. To say nothing of the approximately 5,000 Iraqi civilians killed this summer.
Politically, the drastic news withdrawal from Iraq carries deep implications, with the debate about America's role in Iraq due to become even more heated next week as Gen. David H. Petraeus testifies before Congress and the White House produces its report on the status in Iraq. But how are Americans supposed to make informed decisions about this country's future role in Iraq if the mainstream media won't inform the public?
Also, no news from Iraq has usually meant good news for the Bush White House; whenever Iraq has faded from view in recent years, Bush and his policies often received a bump in the polls. For instance, in July, the results from a CBS/New York Times poll raised eyebrows when it found that support for the invasion of Iraq - which for years had been tumbling - suddenly experienced an uptick, from 35 to 42 percent.
What's telling is that during the month of July, much of the mainstream media effectively boycotted news from Iraq. Despite sky-high interest among news consumers, stories about the situation in Iraq represented just four percent of the mainstream media's reporting for the month, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index. The index catalogs how much time and space 48 major news outlets devote to various topics each week. The index is broken down by medium: radio, newspapers, online, cable, and network television. (Click here to the see the news outlets monitored by the Coverage Index.)
To put that miniscule 4 percent into perspective: For the month of July, coverage of the fledgling 2008 presidential campaign received nearly three times as much mainstream media news attention as did the unfolding war in Iraq that claimed 79 American lives in July.
In fact, in July Iraq itself rarely ranked among the week's five most-covered stories. And if it weren't for the more robust Iraq reporting that appeared in newspapers and online, events in Iraq probably wouldn't have even ranked among the 10 most-covered stories during the month of July. That's because network and cable television, by contrast, were virtually oblivious to the story.
For instance, over the last seven weeks ABC's Nightline, the network's signature, long-form news program, did not air a single substantive report about Iraq. Not one among the 100-plus news segments the program aired during the stretch was about the situation in Iraq. (That, according to a search of Nightline's transcripts via Nexis.) For instance, on the night after the mammoth suicide bomb blasts in Iraq on August 14, Nightline aired reports about a Mexican stem cell doctor, lullaby singer Lori McKenna, and soccer star David Beckham. That week, Nightline did two separate reports about the earthquake in Peru that killed approximately 500 civilians. But nothing that week from Nightline about the suicide blasts in Iraq that also killed approximately 500 civilians.
Instead of Iraq, here are some of the news stories Nightline staffers devoted time and energy to during that seven-week summer span:
* The popularity of organic pet food.
* The favorite songs of Pete Wentz, bassist for the pop/rock band Fall Out Boy.
* The folding of supermarket tabloid, The Weekly World News.
* The rise of urban McMansions.
* The death of the postcard.
* The commercial battle between Barbie and Bratz dolls.
* The nerd stars of the movie Superbad.
News consumers remained starved for reports from Iraq
The media's dramatic news withdrawal from Iraq might be justified, on some level, if evidence showed that Americans had grown bored of the war in Iraq. Journalism is a public service but it's also a business and editors and producers are always trying to find the right mix of news that consumers need and news they want to have. If Americans were zoning out Iraq, then why should news outlets try to force-feed updates to news consumers?
But the truth is Americans are borderline obsessed with news from Iraq. And it's the mainstream media that's abdicated their news gathering responsibility.
That stunning disconnect becomes obvious when comparing the PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press' weekly News Interest Index, a survey "aimed at gauging the public's interest in and reaction to major news events." Pew asks 1,000 adults which story in the news they are following "very closely" that week. The two weekly surveys simultaneously gage which stories news consumers are paying very close attention to and which stories news editors and producers are paying close attention to (i.e. which stories they're covering).
As I mentioned, the disconnect is absolutely shocking when it comes to the situation in Iraq, which as a news story consistently ranked near the top of the News Interest Index this summer, while simultaneously ranking near the bottom of the News Coverage Index.
For instance, at the outset of the summer for the work week of June 24-29, 32 percent of adults were following the situation in Iraq "very closely," but the story represented only 4 percent of that week's news hole - a 28-point gap.
That same trend played out all summer, with that gap often ballooning:
On average during the summer, 31 percent paid very close attention to the situation in Iraq, making it far and away the hottest news topic throughout the season. Yet on average, the situation in Iraq represented just 4.5 percent of the overall news coverage. No other story, as tracked by the News Interest Index and the News Coverage Index, produced such a consistently wide disparity between June and September.
In other words, week after week a clear plurality of Americans said the situation in Iraq was a story they followed very closely. Yet week after the week much of the mainstream press responded with a so-what shoulder shrug.
And nobody was shrugging their shoulders more often than television news producers, who all but gave up covering the war in Iraq this summer. For the week of August 5-10, for instance, when news consumer interest in Iraq peaked at 36 percent, the story didn't even represent 3 percent of cable television's news hole.
Or this: In the second quarter of 2007 (the most recent quarterly data available from PEJ), MSNBC devoted just 1.5 percent of its overall news coverage to documenting events in Iraq.
But hey, now that Katie Couric has rediscovered Iraq, perhaps the rest of the press will follow.
A footnote: For those who wade through the News Coverage Index data, you'll note a category dubbed "Iraq Policy" which has received lots of mainstream media attention this summer, often topping the News Coverage Index. But that's not to be confused with reporting about the Iraq war itself. Reports about the Beltway debate over Iraq policy are much different than reports about the situation in Iraq. The policy debate has mostly been covered as a horserace: Do Democrats have the votes to end the war? Can Bush still keep anxious Republicans in line? It's what the Beltway press loves to obsess over - who's up, who's down, and what the 2008 implications are. Americans, though, are more interested in a war, now in its 53rd month, being waged in the Persian Gulf that has claimed nearly 4,000 American lives and is costing the U.S. Treasury $1 billion each week to fight.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/61748/
Clarín: Los líderes del APEC
firman un compromiso sobre el cambio climático
La Declaración de Sydney, aprobada por los integrantes del Foro de Cooperación Económica de Asia-Pacífico, que incluye a China y EE.UU., reconoce "la necesidad de acordar objetivos para reducir las emisiones globales de gases contaminantes". Pero también contempla la importancia de medidas "para reducir la intensidad energética y aumentar la superficie boscosa".
Clarín.com
08.09.2007
Los líderes del Foro de Cooperación Económica de Asia-Pacífico (APEC) firmaron hoy en Australia un compromiso efectivo sobre el cambio climático, según anunció el primer ministro australiano y anfitrión de la cumbre, John Howard.
La "Declaración de Sydney", cuyo contenido fue difundido tras el anuncio, "reconoce la necesidad de acordar objetivos de ambición a largo plazo para reducir las emisiones globales de gases contaminantes para que guíen un acuerdo efectivo después de 2012 sobre cambio climático".
El acuerdo también contempla la adopción de "objetivos regionales para reducir la intensidad energética y aumentar la superficie boscosa con políticas que apoyen el crecimiento económico mediante la reducción de emisiones de gases contaminantes".
El documento, aprobado por unanimidad, se convierte en el primer pacto con la firma de Estados Unidos y de China que recoge un compromiso sobre el cambio climático, según destacó Howard durante una conferencia de prensa desde la Casa de la Opera, poco después de finalizar la primera jornada de la Cumbre de Líderes.
La Declaración, que fue aprobada también por los representantes de Australia, Brunei, Canadá, Chile, Corea del Sur, Filipinas, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japón, Malasia, México, Nueva Zelanda, Papúa Nueva Guinea, Perú, Rusia, Singapur, Tailandia, Taiwán y Vietnam, advierte que el marco para continuar el debate es la Conferencia de la ONU sobre Cambio Climático, que se celebrará en la isla indonesia de Bali en diciembre de este año.
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/09/08/um/m-01495122.htm
Diario della settimana:
Diario chiude e volta pagina
Undici anni, un po' di storia, molti ringraziamenti e progetti per il futuro
di Diario
Mercoledì 23 ottobre 1996, allegato al quotidiano L’Unità, usciva il primo numero di Diario della settimana, che si autodefiniva giornale dedicato alla «buona lettura», all’inchiesta e al reportage. Dopo un anno Diario se ne andò da solo nel perigliosissimo mare delle edicole. Questo giornale è durato 567 settimane, cercando di fornire nel corso di undici anni la buona lettura che aveva promesso e di non essere travolto dagli eventi. Alla buona lettura iniziale abbiamo aggiunto nel corso del tempo numeri speciali, libri, film.
Per quanto riguarda i «terribili eventi», l’ironia vuole che nascemmo in Italia con il governo Prodi e lì di nuovo siamo in solo apparente tedio e continuità. Ma quanta corrente è passata in mezzo! Berlusconi, Bush, l’11 settembre, bin Laden (la grande inchiesta su «Guantánamo e le procedure dell’indifferenza» che trovate in questo numero chiude le nostre pubblicazioni), Saddam Hussein, gli immigrati appesi alle reti per tonni e quelli che ce l’hanno fatta ad asciugarsi per venire prontamente a bagnare, molesti, il nostro parabrezza.
Tenere un diario in pubblico, settimana dopo settimana, è un’attività che in questi undici anni è cambiata molto. Il numero di siti web, di blog e in generale lo scambio di notizie è fortunatamente cresciuto a dismisura. La «buona lettura» è stata adottata da molti giornali. La possibilità di sedersi di fronte al proprio lap top e di consultare «in tempo reale» tutte le fonti di informazione del mondo è sempre più alla portata di tutti. Il mercato pubblicitario (l’unico a tenere in vita i giornali) è a noi praticamente precluso, per quella mancanza di do ut des che ci caratterizza e che dal mercato evidentemente è stato ben colto.
Di qui la necessità di fare un pausa. E di ripensarci su. Decisione triste, perché le cose buone (almeno così paiono a noi) dovrebbero essere tenute in vita il più possibile; decisione traumatica per tutti coloro che a Diario lavorano, e molti dalla sua fondazione. Ma, purtroppo, unica decisione possibile per poter pensare di fare qualcosa di nuovo, come è stato Diario alla sua uscita di undici anni fa.
Quindi, per riassumere:
• quello che avete tra le mani è l’ultimo numero di Diario della settimana. Insieme alla carta arriva il nostro ringraziamento a tutti i lettori, i collaboratori, i sostenitori che ne hanno fatto, ne siamo sicuri, una buona esperienza nel panorama del giornalismo e dell’editoria italiana.
• Oggi è martedì 4 settembre e domani non ci sarà la nostra settimanale riunione di redazione. Naturalmente siamo tutti tristi. Le e-mail comunque funzionano.
Certo che se domani una spontanea ribellione di siciliani attacca i poteri della mafia, ci sarà da mordersi le mani a non avere un giornale. Chiediamo ai siciliani di attendere: aspettateci, non siamo ancora pronti. E così a tutti gli altri. In fondo Diario è sempre stato un giornale ottimista.
Speriamo di farci vivi al più presto con un nuovo giornale. Ci stiamo pensando e pensando. Bisognerà fare un giornale (alla fine, a questo tipo di comunicazione siamo legati) che metta insieme le idee fondatrici – la libertà del giornalismo, la nostra frasetta che sta appesa qui in via Melzo 9: «Cercate la verità, nel dubbio un po’ a sinistra»), il gusto di andare sui posti a vedere persone e luoghi, il piacere della lettura, quello che parte dall’occipite e va giù lungo la schiena. Poi bisognerà fare un bell’oggetto, facile da leggere e bello da conservare. Poi bisognerà non smettere di credere che le parole possano dare un contributo, anche se piccolo, ma qualche volta (come è capitato anche a noi) grandissimo, nel cambiare le stupide cose che ci stanno intorno. Poi bisognerà guardare i signori della pubblicità negli occhi e dirgli: «Ce la facciamo da soli».
A tutte queste cose (e speriamo nelle vostre buone proposte) si prova a lavorare. Dovremmo farcela. E anche abbastanza presto. Di sicuro non ci perderemo di vista: ne abbiamo passate troppe insieme.
http://www.diario.it/home_diario.php?page=wl07090600
Guardian:
'I have impeached myself'
The Guardian and Observer are giving away a unique series of the best interviews of the last century. For two weeks, each day's paper comes with a free booklet containing some of the most famous encounters in journalism history, from David Frost's conversations about Watergate with Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe's last interview, Princess Diana's confessions to Martin Bashir and Bill Grundy's disastrous grilling of the Sex Pistols on live television.
Video: the interview
Edited transcript of David Frost's interview with Richard Nixon broadcast in May 1977
Friday September 7, 2007
David Frost: The wave of dissent in America, occasionally violent, which followed the incursion into Cambodia by US and Vietnamese forces in 1970, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him on the domestic front. To this end, the deputy White House counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings with representatives of the CIA, the FBI, and other police and intelligence agencies.
These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasised to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan. Five days later, after opposition from the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the president's approval was later to be listed in the articles of impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.
Would you say that there are certain situations - and the Huston Plan was one of them - where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?
Richard Nixon: Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.
By definition.
Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.
The point is: the dividing line is the president's judgment?
Yes, and, so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate. We also have to have in mind that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress. We have to have in mind, for example, that as far as the CIA's covert operations are concerned, as far as the FBI's covert operations are concerned, through the years, they have been disclosed on a very, very limited basis to trusted members of Congress.
Speaking of the presidency, you stated: "It's quite obvious that there are certain inherently government activities, which, if undertaken by the sovereign in protection of the interests of the nation's security, are lawful, but which if undertaken by private persons, are not." What, at root, did you have in mind there?
Well, what I had in mind I think was perhaps much better stated by Lincoln during the war between the States. Lincoln said, and I think I can remember the quote almost exactly: "Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the constitution and the nation."
Now that's the kind of action I'm referring to. Of course in Lincoln's case it was the survival of the Union in wartime, it's the defense of the nation and, who knows, perhaps the survival of the nation.
But there is no comparison, is there, between the situation you faced and the situation Lincoln faced?
This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the civil war tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president. Now it's true that we didn't have the north and the south ...
But when you said, as you said when we were talking about the Huston Plan, "If the president orders it, that makes it legal", is there anything in the constitution or the bill of rights that suggests the president is that much of a sovereign, that far above the law?
No, there isn't. There's nothing specific that the constitution contemplates. I haven't read every word, every jot and every tittle, but I do know that it has been argued that, as far as a president is concerned, that in wartime, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the constitution, which is essential for the rights we're all talking about.
My reading of the transcript of the tapes tells me, trying to read them in an open-minded way, that the writing, not just between the lines, but on so many of the lines, is very, very clear - that you were in fact, endorsing at least the short-term solution of paying this sum of money to buy time. That would be my reading of it. But the other point to be said is: here's [John] Dean [White House Counsel] talking about this hush money, for [one of the Watergate burglars, E Howard] Hunt, talking about blackmail and all of that. I would say that you endorsed or ratified it. But let's leave that on one side ...
I didn't endorse or ratify it.
Why didn't you stop it?
Because at that point I had no knowledge of the fact that it was going to be paid.
What I don't understand about March 21 is that I still don't know why you didn't pick up the phone and tell the cops. You had found out about the things that [HR "Bob"] Haldeman [White House Chief of Staff] and [John] Erlichman [Nixon's chief domestic advisor] had done but there is no evidence anywhere of a rebuke. But only of scenarios and excuses etc. Nowhere do you say we must get this information direct to whomever: the head of the justice department criminal investigation or whatever. And nowhere do you say to Haldeman and Erlichman "This is disgraceful conduct".
Well, could I take my time now to address that question. I think it will be very useful to you to know what I was going through. It wasn't a very easy time. Here was the situation I was faced with: Who's going to talk to these men [Erlichman and Haldeman]? What can we do about it? Well, first let me say that I didn't have anyone who could talk to them but me. It took me two weeks to work it out, tortuous long sessions, hours and hours of talks with them, which they resisted - we don't need to go through all that agony. And I remember the day at Camp David when they came up. Haldeman came in first. He said, "I disagree with your decision totally". He said, "I think it's going to eventually ... you're going to live to regret it, but I will." Erlichman then came in. I knew that Erlichman was bitter because he felt very strongly that he shouldn't resign. Although he had even indicated that perhaps Haldeman should go and he should stay.
I said, "You know, John [Erlichman], when I went to bed last night I hoped, I almost prayed, that I wouldn't wake up this morning." Well, it was an emotional moment; I think there were tears in our eyes, both of us. He said, "Don't say that." We went back in, and they agreed to leave. It was late, but I did it. I cut off one arm and then cut off the other.
Now, I can be faulted; I recognise it. Maybe I defended them too long, maybe I tried to help them too much, but I was concerned about them, I was concerned about their families. I felt that they, and their hearts felt that they, were not guilty. I felt they ought to have a chance at least to prove that they were not guilty. And I didn't want to be in the position of just sawing them off in that way.
And I suppose you could sum it all up the way one of your British prime ministers summed it up, Gladstone, when he said that the first requirement for a prime minister is to be a good butcher. Well, I think, as far as summary of Watergate is concerned, I did some of the big things rather well. I screwed up terribly on what was a little thing and became a big thing, but I will have to admit I wasn't a good butcher.
You have explained how you have got caught up in this thing, you've explained your motives: I don't want to quibble about any of that. But just coming to the substance: would you go further than "mistakes" - the word that seems not enough for people?
What word would you suggest?
My goodness, that's a ... I think that there are three things, since you asked me. I would like to hear you say ... I think the American people would like to hear you say ... One is: there was probably more than mistakes; there was wrongdoing, whether it was a crime or not; yes it may have been a crime too. Second: I did - and I'm saying this without questioning the motives - I did abuse the power I had as president, or not fulfil the totality of the oath of office. And third: I put the American people through two years of needless agony and I apologise for that. And I say that you've explained your motives, I think those are the categories. And I know how difficult it is for anyone, and most of all you, but I think that people need to hear it and I think unless you say it you are going to be haunted by it for the rest of your life.
I well remember when I let Haldeman and Erlichman know that they were to resign, that I had Ray Price [Nixon's speechwriter] bring in the final draft of the speech that I was to make the next night and I said to him, "Ray, if you think I ought to resign, put that in too, because I feel responsible." Even though I did not feel that I had engaged in these activities consciously in so far as the knowledge of, or participation in, the break-in, the approval of hush-money, the approval of clemency etc, there are various charges that have been made. Well, he didn't put it in, and I must say that at that time I seriously considered whether I shouldn't resign, but on the other hand I feel that I owe it to history, to point out that from that time on April 30, until I resigned on August 9, I did some things that were good for this country. We had the second and third summits. I think one of the major reasons I stayed in office, was my concern about keeping the China initiative, the Soviet initiative, the Vietnam fragile peace agreement and then an added dividend, the first breakthrough in moving toward - not love, but at least not war - in the Middle East. And, coming back to the whole point of whether I should have resigned then and how I feel now, let me say I didn't make mistakes in just this period; I think some of my mistakes that I regret most deeply came with the statements that I made afterwards. Some of those statements were misleading. I noticed, for example, the managing editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, wrote, a couple, three months ago, as far as his newspaper was concerned: "We don't print the truth; we print what we know, we print what people tell us and this means that we print lies."
I would say that the statements that I made afterwards were, on the big issues, true - that I was not involved in the matters that I have spoken about; not involved in the break in; that I did not engage in, and participate in, or approve the payment of money, or the authorisation of clemency, which of course were the essential elements of the cover-up - that was true. But, the statements were misleading in that enormous political attack I was under: it was a five-front war with a fifth column. I had a partisan senate committee staff, we had a partisan special prosecutors staff, we had a partisan media, we had a partisan judiciary committee staff, and a fifth column. Now under these circumstances, my reactions and some of these statements, from press conferences and so forth after that, I want to say right here and now, I said things that were not true. Most of them were fundamentally true on the big issues, but without going as far as I should have gone and saying perhaps that I had considered other things, but not done them. And for all those things I have a very deep regret.
You got caught up in something and it snowballed?
It snowballed, and it was my fault. I'm not blaming anybody else. I'm simply saying to you that as far as I'm concerned, I not only regret it. I indicated my own beliefs in this matter when I resigned. People didn't think it was enough to admit mistakes; fine. If they want me to get down and grovel on the floor; no, never. Because I don't believe I should. On the other hand there are some friends who say, "just face 'em down. There's a conspiracy to get you." There may have been. I don't know what the CIA had to do. Some of their shenanigans have yet to be told, according to a book I read recently. I don't know what was going on in some Republican, some Democratic circles as far as the so-called impeachment lobby was concerned. However, I don't go with the idea that there ... that what brought me down was a coup, a conspiracy etc. I brought myself down. I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same thing.
Could you just say, with conviction, I mean not because I want you to say it, that you did do some covering up. We're not talking legalistically now; I just want the facts. You did do some covering up. There was some time when you were overwhelmed by your loyalties or whatever else, you protected your friends, or maybe yourself. In fact you were, to put it at its most simple, part of a cover-up at times.
No, I again respectfully will not quibble with you about the use of the terms. However, before using the term I think it's very important for me to make clear what I did not do and what I did do and then I will answer your question quite directly. I did not in the first place commit the crime of obstruction of justice, because I did not have the motive required for the commission of that crime.
We disagree on that.
I did not commit, in my view, an impeachable offence. Now, the House has ruled overwhelmingly that I did. Of course, that was only an indictment, and it would have to be tried in the Senate. I might have won, I might have lost. But even if I had won in the Senate by a vote or two, I would have been crippled. And in any event, for six months the country couldn't afford having the president in the dock in the United States Senate. And there can never be an impeachment in the future in this country without a president voluntarily impeaching himself. I have impeached myself. That speaks for itself.
How do you mean "I have impeached myself"?
By resigning. That was a voluntary impeachment. Now, what does that mean in terms of whether I ... you're wanting me to say that I participated in an illegal cover-up. No. Now when you come to the period, and this is the critical period, when you come to the period of March 21 on, when Dean gave his legal opinion, that certain things, actions taken by, Haldeman, Erlichman, [attorney general John] Mitchell et cetera, and even by himself amounted to illegal coverups and so forth, then I was in a very different position. And during that period, I will admit, that I started acting as lawyer for their defence. I will admit, that acting as lawyer for their defence, I was not prosecuting the case. I will admit that during that period, rather than acting primarily in my role as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America, or at least with the responsibility of law enforcement, because the attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer, but as the one with the chief responsibility for seeing that the laws of the United States are enforced, that I did not meet that responsibility. And to the extent that I did not meet that responsibility, to the extent that within the law, and in some cases going right to the edge of the law in trying to advise Erlichman and Haldeman and all the rest in how best to present their cases, because I thought that they were legally innocent, that I came to the edge. And under the circumstances I would have to say that a reasonable person could call that a cover-up. I didn't think of it as a cover-up. I didn't intend it to cover-up.
Let me say, if I intended to cover-up, believe me, I'd have done it. You know how I could have done it so easy? I could have done it immediately after the election simply by giving clemency to everybody. And the whole thing would have gone away. I couldn't do that because I said clemency was wrong. But now we come down to the key point and let me answer it in my own way about how I feel about the American people. I mean about whether I should have resigned earlier or what I should say to them now. Well, that forces me to rationalise now and give you a carefully prepared and cropped statement. I didn't expect this question, frankly though, so I'm not going to give you that. But I can tell you this ...
Nor did I.
I can tell you this. I think I said it all in one of those moments that you're not thinking sometimes you say the things that are really in your heart. When you're thinking in advance and you say things that are, you know, tailored to the audience. I had a lot of difficult meetings in those last days and the most difficult one, the only one where I broke into tears, frankly except for that very brief session with Erlichman up at Camp David, that was the first time I cried since Eisenhower died. I met with all of my key supporters just the halfhour before going on television. For 25 minutes we all sat around the Oval Office, men that I had come to Congress with, Democrats and Republicans, about half and half. Wonderful men. And at the very end, after saying thank you for all your support during these tough years, thank you particularly for what you have done to help us end the draft, bring home the POWs, have a chance for building a generation of peace, which I could see the dream I had possibly being shattered, and thank you for your friendship, little acts of friendship over the years, you sort of remember with a birthday card and all the rest. Then suddenly you haven't got much more to say and half the people around the table were crying. And I just can't stand seeing somebody else cry. And that ended it for me. And I just, well, I must say I sort of cracked up. Started to cry, pushed my chair back.
And then I blurted it out. And I said, "I'm sorry. I just hope I haven't let you down." Well, when I said: "I just hope I haven't let you down," that said it all. I had: I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but will think it is all too corrupt and the rest. Most of all I let down an opportunity I would have had for two and a half more years to proceed on great projects and programmes for building a lasting peace. Which has been my dream, as you know since our first interview in 1968 before I had any, when I thought I might win that year. I didn't tell you I thought I might not win that year, but I wasn't sure. Yep, I let the American people down. And I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life. My political life is over. I will never yet, and never again, have an opportunity to serve in any official position. Maybe I can give a little advice from time to time. And so I can only say that in answer to your question that while technically I did not commit a crime, an impeachable offence - these are legalisms. As far as the handling of this matter is concerned, it was so botched up, I made so many bad judgments. The worst ones mistakes of the heart rather than mistakes of the head, as I pointed out, but let me say a man in that top judge job, he's got to have a heart, but his head must always rule his heart.
· Copyright Sir David Paradine Frost. Reproduced with permission.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatinterviews/story/0,,2155724,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Le score des islamistes
et le taux de participation, enjeux des législatives
MAROC - 7 septembre 2007 - par AFP
Plus de 15 millions d'électeurs marocains votaient vendredi pour désigner leurs 325 députés, dans un pays où l'abstention est généralement importante, alors que les islamistes affichent de grandes ambitions.
A 12H00 GMT, 1,5 million d'électeurs avaient fait leur devoir soit 10% des inscrits, a indiqué le minstère de l'Intérieur. Les bureaux de vote ouverts à 08H00 GMT fermeront à 19H00 GMT.
Les résultats du Parti islamiste justice et développement (PJD) et le taux de participation, qui était de seulement 52% en 2002, constituent les principaux enjeux du scrutin, le deuxième à se dérouler sous le règne du roi Mohammed VI depuis son accession au trône en juillet 1999.
Le PJD espère arriver en tête des 33 formations en lice mais des surprises pourraient venir des campagnes où est implanté le Mouvement populaire (MP, centre-droit) dans lequel ont fusionné trois anciennes formations recrutant notamment dans les régions berbérophones.
Trois partis d'extrême gauche, faute de fusion, se sont coalisés pour améliorer leurs chances. Ils ont mené campagne sous la bannière de "l'Alliance de Gauche", insistant sur l'urgence d'une réforme de l'actuelle Constitution jugée "non démocratique".
Pour la première fois, 52 observateurs étrangers supervisent les élections législatives. Ils publieront un rapport préliminaire samedi soir et une version définitive dans quelques semaines.
"C'est productif pour la démocratie d'avoir une mission internationale d'observation des élections (...) Ce type de mission aide le pays et la communauté internationale à renforcer la démocratie dans des pays comme le Maroc", a noté l'ex-chef d'Etat bolivien Jorge Fernando Quiroga Ramirez, qui dirige la mission.
Par ailleurs, près de 3.000 observateurs marocains du "Tissu associatif d'observation des élections" visitaient les bureaux de vote, a indiqué à l'AFP l'un de ses dirigeants Abdallah Mesdad.
Ce réseau de 800 ONG marocaines a indiqué avoir bénéficié d'une aide financière de l'Union européenne pour suivre le scrutin législatif.
La presse marocaine a lancé vendredi un ultime appel à la participation au scrutin législatif dans un pays où près d'un électeur sur deux ne se rend pas aux urnes, en soulignant que l'abstention fait le jeu des extrémistes.
Le vote se déroulera au scrutin direct de liste à la proportionnelle. Les électeurs choisiront 295 députés dans 95 circonscriptions et 30 députées dans une "liste nationale" séparée, pour assurer un quota de représentation aux femmes.
Les partis en lice sont répartis en trois grandes tendances: les islamistes dont le PJD, les partis de la coalition gouvernementale actuelle, et la gauche non gouvernementale.
Les résultats du scrutin seront annoncés dimanche. Le roi Mohamed VI devrait nommer à l'isue du scrutin un premier ministre de son choix. Ce dernier devrait ensuite mener des négociations avec les partis arivés en tête pour former une coalition gouvernementale.
Le mode de scrutin direct à la proportionnelle ne permet à aucun parti d'obtenir la majorité absolue.
Une éventuelle victoire des islamistes du PJD ne risque pas de remettre en cause les grands équilibres du système politique marocain dominé par la monarchie. Et, pour gouverner, ce parti modéré qui s'inspire de l'AKP islamiste turc, devrait nécessairement nouer des alliances avec des formations épousant d'autres idéologies.
Cependant, rien n'indique pour le moment que les partis de la coalition gouvernementale sortante veuillent s'unir avec le PJD.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP94017lescosevita0#
Mother Jones:
Soft Crimes Against Democracy
What ever happened to freedom of information?
Ruth Rosen
September 07 , 2007
Disgraceful, shameful, illegal, and yes, dangerous. These are words that come to mind every time the Bush administration makes yet another attempt to consolidate executive power, while wrapping itself in secrecy and deception.
And its officials never stop. In May, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group, filed a lawsuit seeking information from the White House Office of Administration about an estimated five million e-mail messages that mysteriously vanished from White House computer servers between March 2003 and October 2005. Congress wants to investigate whether these messages contain evidence about the firing of nine United States attorneys who may have refused to use their positions to help Republican candidates or harm Democratic ones.
The administration's first response to yet another scandal was to scrub the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request section from the White House Office website. One day it was there; the next day it had disappeared. Then, Bush-appointed lawyers from the Justice Department tried to convince a federal judge that the White House Office of Administration was not subject to scrutiny by the Freedom of Information Act because it wasn't an "agency." The newly labeled non-agency, in fact, had its own FOIA officer and had responded to 65 FOIA requests during the previous 12 months. Its own website had listed it as subject to FOIA requests.
For those who may have forgotten, Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 to hold government officials and agencies accountable to public scrutiny. It became our national sunshine law and has allowed us to know something of what our elected officials actually do, rather than what they say they do. Congress expressly excluded classified information from FOIA requests in order to protect national security.
Scorning accountability, the Bush administration quickly figured out how to circumvent the Act. On October 12, 2001, just one month after the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft took advantage of a traumatized nation to ensure that responses to FOIA requests would be glacially slowed down, if the requests were not simply rejected outright.
Most Americans were unaware of what happened - and probably still are. If so, I'd like to remind you how quickly democratic transparency vanished after 9/11 and why this most recent contorted rejection of our premier sunshine law is more than a passing matter; why it is, in fact, an essential aspect of this administration's continuing violation of our civil rights and liberties, the checks and balances of our system of government, and, yes, even our Constitution.
On Bended Knee
Lies and deception intended to expand executive power weren't hard to spot after 9/11, yet they tended to slip beneath the political and media radar screens; nor did you have to be an insider with special access to government officials or classified documents to know what was going on. At the time, I was an editorial writer and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. From my little cubicle at the paper, I read a memorandum sent by Attorney General John Ashcroft to all federal agencies. Short and to the point, it basically gave them permission to resist FOIA requests and assured them that the Justice Department would back up their refusals. "When you carefully consider FOIA requests," Ashcroft wrote, "and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decision unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records."
He then went on to explain, "Any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information."
And what, I wondered, did such constraints and lack of accountability have to do with finding and prosecuting terrorists? Why the new restrictions? Angered, I wrote an editorial for the Chronicle about the Justice Department's across-the-board attempt to censor freedom of information. ("All of us want to protect our nation from further acts of terrorism. But we must never allow the public's right to know, enshrined in the Freedom of Information Act, to be suppressed for the sake of official convenience.")
Naively and impatiently, I waited for other newspapers to react to such a flagrant attempt to make the administration unaccountable to the public. Not much happened. A handful of media outlets noted Ashcroft's memorandum, but where, I wondered, were the major national newspapers? The answer was: on bended knee, working as stenographers, instead of asking the tough questions. Ashcroft had correctly assessed the historical moment. With the administration launching its Global War on Terror, and the country still reeling from the September 11th attacks, he was able to order agencies to start building a wall of secrecy around the government.
In the wake of 9/11, both pundits and the press seemed to forget that, ever since 1966, the Freedom of Information Act had helped expose all kinds of official acts of skullduggery, many of which violated our laws. They also seemed to forget that all classified documents were already protected from FOIA requests and unavailable to the public. In other words, most agencies had no reason to reject public FOIA requests.
A few people, however, were paying attention. In February 2002, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to evaluate the "implementation of the FOIA." Ashcroft's new rules had reversed former Attorney General Janet Reno's policy, in effect since 1993. "The prior policy," Leahy reminded the GAO, "favored openness in government operation and encouraged a presumption of disclosure of agency records in response to FOIA requests unless the agency reasonably foresaw that disclosure would be harmful to an interest protected by a specific exemption."
And what was the impact of Ashcroft's little-noticed memorandum? Just what you'd expect from a presidency built on secrecy and deception - given a media then largely ignoring both. The Attorney General's new policy was a success. On August 8, 2007, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government issued "Still Waiting After All These Years," a damning report that documented the Ashcroft memorandum's impact on FOIA responses. Their analysis revealed that "the number of FOIA requests processed has fallen 20%, the number of FOIA personnel is down 10%, the backlog has tripled and the cost of handling a request is up 79%." During the same years, the Bush administration embarked on a major effort to label ever more government documents classified. They even worked at reclassifying documents that had long before been made public, ensuring that ever less information would be available through FOIA requests. And what material they did send out was often so heavily redacted as to be meaningless.
"Soft Crimes" Enable Violent Ones
Six years after Ashcroft instituted his policy, some of our legislators have finally begun to address what he accomplished in 2001. In April, 2007, the House of Representatives passed legislation to strengthen and expedite the Freedom of Information Act. On August 3, Senators Pat Leahy, once again chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and John Cornyn (R-TX) successfully shepherded the Open Government Act into law, despite strong opposition from administration outrider Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who had earlier placed a hold on the bill. Like the House bill, the legislation attempted to make it easier to gain access to government documents.
Will it make a difference? Probably not. The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government views the legislation as too weak and compromised to be effective against such an administration. Steven Aftergood, Director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists notes that the administration might well succeed in claiming that the White House Office of Administration is not an "agency." "It's obnoxious, and it's a gesture of defiance against the norms of open government," Aftergood told the Washington Post. "But it turns out that a White House body can be an agency one day and cease to be the next day, as absurd as it may seem."
It's not only absurd; it's dangerous. This is an administration that believes it has complete authority to ignore the law every time it mentions the supposedly inherent powers of a commander-in-chief presidency or wields the words "executive privilege." Its non-agency claim is but one more example of its arrogant defiance of laws passed by Congress.
Ashcroft's quashing of the FOIA, following on the heels of the Patriot Act, was just the beginning of a long series of efforts to expand executive power. In the name of fighting "the war on terror" and "national security," for instance, Bush issued an executive order on November 1, 2001 that sealed presidential records indefinitely, a clear violation of the 1978 Presidential Records Act in which Congress had ensured the public's right to view presidential records 12 years after a president leaves office.
And what did this have to do with preventing a potential terrorist attack? Absolutely nothing, of course. It just so happened that 12 years had passed since Ronald Reagan left the Oval Office. Many people believed, as I did, that locking down Reagan's papers was an effort to stop journalists and historians from reading documents that might have implicated Papa Bush (then Reagan's vice president) and others - who, by then, were staffing the younger Bush's administration - as active participants in the Iran-Contra scandal.
When the White House claimed that its administrative office was not subject to the FOIA, an August 24th editorial in the New York Times - now more alert to Bush's disregard for the rule of law - asked, "What exactly does the administration want to hide?" It rightly argued that the "administration's refusal to comply with open-government laws is ultimately more important than any single scandal. The Freedom of Information Act and other right-to-know laws were passed because government transparency is vital to a democracy."
How true. It's taken a long time for our paper of record to realize that "soft" crimes are actually hard assaults against our democracy. The restrictions on FOIA and an executive order to seal presidential records may seem tame when compared to the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo, not to mention warrantless surveillance, the extraordinary rendition of kidnapped terror suspects to the prisons of regimes that torture, and the imprisonment of so-called enemy combatants.
But don't be lulled into thinking that the act of censoring information, of shielding the American people from knowledge of the most basic workings of their own government, is any less dangerous to democracy than war crimes or acts of torture. In fact, it was the soft crimes of secrecy and deception that enabled the Bush administration's successful campaign to lure our country into war in Iraq - and so to commit war crimes and acts of torture.
You don't have to be a historian to know that "soft" crimes are what make hard crimes possible. They can also lead to an executive dictatorship and the elimination of our most cherished civil rights and liberties.
Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A newly updated edition of her book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America was published in January 2007.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2007/09/
soft-crimes-against-democracy.html
Página/12:
Saludito de Bin Laden por el 11-S
REAPARECIO EL LIDER DE AL QAIDA EN UN VIDEO: “EE.UU. ES DEBIL”
El video habría sido grabado en agosto. Bin Laden cuestiona el liderazgo de Estados Unidos, critica su política en Irak y elogia a los “mártires del 11-S”. No lanza ninguna amenaza directa, pero en Washington ya acusaron el impacto: el director de la CIA advirtió que otro ataque terrorista en territorio norteamericano es inminente.
Sábado, 08 de Septiembre de 2007
Osama bin Laden reapareció a pocos días del sexto aniversario del atentado contra las Torres Gemelas. Después de tres años de silencio, el líder de la red terrorista internacional Al Qaida se mostró en un video, difundido anoche en parte por la cadena qatarí Al Jazeera. “Estados Unidos es débil a pesar de su aparente poderío”, sentenció el hombre que sigue siendo el fugitivo número uno para el gobierno de Estados Unidos. Después de analizarlo durante varias horas, los servicios de inteligencia norteamericanos habrían confirmado la veracidad de la cinta. “Nuestra gente cree casi seguro que es su voz”, le dijo a la prensa local un funcionario que pidió permanecer en el anonimato.
Según esa misma fuente, el video habría sido grabado en agosto pasado, por la referencia que Bin Laden hace del 62º aniversario de la explosión de la bomba atómica estadounidense en la ciudad japonesa de Hiroshima, el 6 de agosto de 1945. Como en sus últimas apariciones, el jefe máximo de la red Al Qaida cuestiona el dominio mundial de Estados Unidos, aunque esta vez, según la cadena CNN, no habría formulado ninguna amenaza directa contra objetivos norteamericanos. “Pese a que Norteamérica tiene la mayor potencia económica, pese a que posee el arsenal mayor y más sofisticado, a que gasta para esta guerra y para su ejército más que el mundo entero gasta en sus ejércitos y pese a ser la gran potencia que influencia la política internacional, como si tuviese el monopolio del injusto derecho de veto, 19 jóvenes lograron, con la voluntad de Dios, hacerle perder el norte”, señaló Bin Laden, recordando los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001.
En el video se lo ve detrás de una mesa, muy flaco y con la barba totalmente negra, lo que contrasta con las imágenes anteriores en las que se la ve muy canosa, casi gris. Tampoco lleva su campera camuflada típica, sino el atuendo blanco tradicional del golfo Pérsico, cubierto con una camisa color beige. En un tono pausado y tranquilo, el líder terrorista se refirió a otras “debilidades” de la superpotencia. “Hablar de mujahidines forma ahora parte integrante del discurso de vuestro dirigente”, dijo triunfante, en referencia a las recurrentes menciones del presidente George Bush sobre los combatientes islámicos.
El otro tema inevitable era la dura resistencia que enfrentan las tropas norteamericanas en Irak. Confirmando que el video fue filmando recientemente, Bin Laden criticó los duros cuestionamientos que la Casa Blanca dirigió al primer ministro iraquí Nuri Al Maliki durante el último mes. “Bush dice que trabaja con Maliki y su gobierno para promover la libertad en Irak, pero en realidad trabaja con una sola secta contra otra secta, creyendo que eso hará girar rápidamente la guerra en su favor”, señaló. Irónicamente la crítica del líder terrorista coincide con la interpretación de varios analistas y periodistas de todo el mundo, que destacan que, desde la invasión en 2003, Estados Unidos se ha preocupado por ganar espacios enemistando a los diferentes grupos étnicos.
La última vez que apareció en un video, en 2004, Bin Laden amenazaba con lanzar un ataque contra Estados Unidos en los días previos a las elecciones presidenciales de ese año. Esta vez el lider terrorista parece haber adoptado un tono más moderado y evitó cualquier amenaza o advertencia directa. Sin embargo, casualmente cuando se conocía la existencia del video, la CIA informaba que Al Qaida estaba planeando una serie de ataques de “alto impacto” contra el país. “Nuestros analistas estiman, con alto nivel de confianza, que la dirección central de Al Qaida está planeando complots de alto impacto contra el territorio de Estados Unidos”, aseguró el director de la agencia de Inteligencia, Michael Hayden, en una conferencia ante el Consejo de Relaciones Internacionales en Nueva York.
El discurso de Hayden fue inusualmente alarmista. “Quiero ser lo más crudo posible acerca del peligro que tenemos por delante”, advirtió. “El peligro es más real que el que cualquiera de nuestros ciudadanos haya enfrentado desde nuestra guerra civil”, agregó. Luego de recordarles a todos los presentes en la crítica situación en la que se encuentra el país, el director de la CIA pasó a defender los métodos que, debido “al gran peligro que enfrentan”, deben utilizar. Uno de ellos, los famosos vuelos secretos. “Estos programas son focalizados y son selectivos. Están destinados únicamente para los terroristas más peligrosos y para aquellos que consideramos disponen de la información más valiosa, como por ejemplo el conocimiento de la planificación de un ataque”, explicó. Según reconoció, en los últimos cinco años al menos cien personas fueron trasladadas a prisiones manejadas por la CIA. A pesar de haber sido expuestas por la prensa, todavía no se sabe cuántas de ellas existen en el mundo ni dónde están.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-91033-2007-09-08.html
The Independent:
An urge to smash history into tiny pieces
Robert Fisk
Published: 08 September 2007
What is it about graven images? Why are we humanoids so prone to destroy our own faces, smash our own human history, erase the memory of language? I've covered the rape of Bosnian and Serb and Croatian culture in ex-Yugoslavia – the deliberate demolition of churches, libraries, graveyards, even the wonderful Ottoman Mostar Bridge – and I've heard the excuses. "There's no place for these old things," the Croat gunner reportedly said as he fired his artillery battery towards that graceful Ottoman arch over the Neretva. The videotape of its collapse was itself an image of cultural genocide – until the Taliban exploded the giant Buddhas of Bamian.
And yet there I was earlier this week, staring at another massive Buddha – this time in the Tajiki capital of Dushanbe, only a few hundred miles from the Afghan border. So gently was it sleeping, giant head on spread right hand, that I tiptoed down its almost 40ft length, talking in whispers in case I woke this creature with its Modigliani features, its firmly closed eyes and ski-slope nose. Saved from the ravages of iconoclasts, I thought, until I realised that this karma-inducing god had itself been assaulted.
The top of its head, eyes and nose are intact, but the lower half of its face has been subtly restored by a more modern hand, its long body, perhaps three-quarters new, where the undamaged left hand, palm on hip, lies gently on its upper left leg above the pleats of its original robes. So what happened to this Buddha? Surely the Taliban never reached Dushanbe.
A young curator at Dush-ambe's wonderful museum of antiquities explained in careful, bleak English. "When the Arabs came, they smashed all these things as idolatrous," she said. Ah yes, of course they did. The forces of Islam arrived in modern-day Tajikistan in around AD645 – the Taliban of their day, as bearded as their 20th-century successors, with no television sets to hang, but plenty of Buddhas to smash. How on earth did the Bamian Buddhas escape this original depredation?
The Buddhist temple at Vakhsh, east of Qurghonteppa was itself new (given a hundred years or two) when the Arabs arrived, and the museum contains the "work" of these idol-smashers in desperate, carefully preserved profusion. Buddha's throne appears to have been attacked with swords and the statue of Shiva and his wife Parvati (sixth to eighth centuries) has been so severely damaged by these ancient Talibans that only their feet and the sacred cow beneath them are left.
Originally discovered in 1969 30ft beneath the soil, the statue of "Buddha in Nirvana" was brought up to Dushanbe as a direct result of the destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan. Taliban excess, in other words, inspired post-Soviet preservation. If we can no longer gaze at the faces of those mighty deities in Bamian because the Department for the Suppression of Vice and Preservation of Virtue in Kabul deemed them worthy of annihilation, we can still look upon this divinity in the posture of the "sleeping lion" now that it has been freighted up to Dushanbe by the local inheritors of Stalin's monstrous empire. A sobering thought.
A certain B A Litvinsky was responsible for this first act of architectural mercy. Eventually the statue was brought to the Tajiki capital in 92 parts. Not that long ago, a fraternal Chinese delegation arrived and asked to take the sleeping Buddha home with them; they were told that they could only photograph this masterpiece – which may be the genesis of the "new" Buddha in the People's Republic.
Needless to say, there are many other fragments – animals, birds, demons – that made their way from the monastery to the museum. And I had to reflect that the Arabs behaved no worse than Henry VIII's lads when they set to work on the great abbeys of England. Did not even the little church of East Sutton above the Kentish Weald have a few graven images desecrated during the great age of English history? Are our cathedrals not filled with hacked faces, the remaining witness to our very own brand of Protestant Talibans?
Besides, the arrival of the Arabic script allowed a new Tajiki poetry to flourish – Ferdowsi was a Tajik and wrote Shanameh in Arabic – and in Dushanbe, you can see the most exquisite tomb-markers from the era of King Babar, Arabic verse carved with Koranic care into the smooth black surface of the stone. Yet when Stalin absorbed Tajikistan into the Soviet empire – cruelly handing the historic Tajiki cities of Tashkent and Samarkand to the new republic of Uzbekistan, just to keep ethnic hatreds alive – his commissars banned Arabic. All children would henceforth be taught Russian and, even if they were writing Tajiki, it must be in Cyrillic, not in Arabic.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was similarly "modernising" Turkey at this time by forcing Turks to move from Arabic to Latin script (which is one reason, I suspect, why modern Turkish scholars have such difficulty in studying vital Ottoman texts on the 1915 Armenian Holocaust). Get rid of the written language and history seems less dangerous. Didn't we try to do the same thing in Ireland, forcing the Catholic clergy to become hedge-preachers so that the Irish language would remain in spoken rather than written form?
And so the Tajiki couples and the children who come to look at their past in Dushanbe cannot read the Shahnameh as it was written – and cannot decipher the elegant Persian poetry carved on those extraordinary tomb-stones. So here is a tiny victory against iconoclasm, perhaps the first English translation of one of those ancient stones which few Tajiks can now understand:
"I heard that mighty Jamshed the King/ Carved on a stone near a spring of water these words:/ Many – like us – sat here by this spring/ And left this life in the blink of an eye./ We captured the whole world through our courage and strength,/ Yet could take nothing with us to our grave."
Beside that same East Sutton church in Kent, there still stands an English tombstone which I would read each time I panted past it in my Sutton Valence school running shorts on wintry Saturday afternoons. I don't remember whose body it immortalises, but I remember the carved verse above the name: "Remember me as you pass by,/ As you are now, so once was I./ As I am now, so you will be./ Remember Death will follow thee."
And I do recall, exhausted and frozen into my thin running clothes, that I came to hate this eternal message so much that sometimes I wanted to take a hammer and smash the whole bloody thing to pieces. Yes, somewhere in our dark hearts, perhaps we are all Talibans.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2941871.ece
The New Yorker:
Planning for Defeat
How should we withdraw from Iraq?
by George Packer
September 7, 2007
An Iraqi whom I will call Ahmed lives in Saidiya, an area in south Baghdad where, in the nineteen-eighties, the regime of Saddam Hussein built large houses for well-connected Army officers, most of them Sunnis. After the American invasion, in 2003, Saidiya became a base of Sunni resistance, but since last year vicious sectarian fighting has divided its streets between Sunni and Shia, with front lines crisscrossing the district; the highway separating Saidiya from the Shiite area of Bayya, to the northwest, now marks an impassable boundary. “It’s just like the Great Wall of China,” Ahmed said, during a recent phone conversation. A graduate of Baghdad University, with a degree in English literature, he worked before the war as a news translator for Iraqi state television.
Saidiya has one of the highest rates of sectarian killings in the city. Eighty-four unidentified corpses were found there between mid-June and mid-July, according to Zeyad Kasim, a researcher at IraqSlogger.com, a news-gathering Web site. Ahmed said that the number actually represents an improvement—earlier this year, he saw bodies lying in the streets even more frequently. The U.S. military “surge” launched this spring, in which thirty thousand additional American forces arrived in Baghdad, has helped to stabilize Saidiya’s sectarian borders. The Americans don’t often patrol Ahmed’s neighborhood, but, when Iraqi Army forces call in air support, Apache attack helicopters can reach Saidiya within minutes.
Ahmed has little faith in the Iraqi Army itself. He said that the soldiers behave unprofessionally, don’t respect the chain of command, and seem more concerned with their salaries than with their responsibilities. “Ninety per cent of my neighborhood think the Iraqi Army is hopeless,” he said.
There is no functioning government in Saidiya. The power supply has dropped to less than two hours a day, and for a month Ahmed—a thirty-seven-year-old father of two who suffers from diabetes and a heart condition—could obtain water only from a hole that he dug in his back yard. His neighborhood is under the control of a Shiite militia claiming allegiance to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical scion of a powerful clerical family, who has emerged as perhaps the most important political figure in Iraq. The militia employs the crippled and the poor to collect protection money, controls a black market for fuel, and forcibly recruits young men into its ranks as lookouts against the Americans. Its local “security” force consists of teen-agers brandishing AK-47s.
Ahmed, who has a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, considers himself a secular Shiite, and, in his view, the religious militias want to force people like him out of Baghdad. “Americans are the safe house for the whole situation in Iraq,” he said. “Once they say they are going to withdraw, the whole country will become a hell.” He went on, “I imagine that no Sunnis will be in Baghdad at all. Baghdad will be only for the Shiite man with the long beard and black imama—the turban. The Americans are representing the taboos, just like ‘Lord of the Flies.’ I imagine the Shiites will be just like that if the Americans have to withdraw. Who can fight will fight, who must leave will leave.” He added, “Those who are weak, who are trying to avoid the savagery, those who are at the edge of being eaten by the Shiite specifically—that will be the end point, that will be their doomsday. The plan, as we hear it, is to make Baghdad empty of Sunnis.”
This week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, will give their assessment of the surge to Congress—an event that, in Washington, has taken on the aura of a make-or-break moment for the Administration’s policy. But their testimony is likely to be unremarkable. Administration officials, military officers, and members of Congress described their expectations of it in strikingly similar terms, and a few said that they could write it in advance: military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.
The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.
The media have largely followed the Administration’s myopic approach to the war, and there is likely to be intense coverage of the congressional testimony. But the inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of Iraqis. Though the streets of Baghdad are marginally less lethal than they were during 2006, sixty thousand Iraqis a month continue to leave their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration, joining the two million who have become refugees and the two million others displaced inside Iraq. The militias, which have become less conspicuous as they wait out the surge, are nevertheless growing in strength, as they extend their control over neighborhoods like Ahmed’s. In the backstreets, the local markets, the university classrooms, and other realms beyond the reach of American observers or American troops, there is no rule of law, only the rule of the gun. The lives of most Iraqis are dominated by a complex array of militias and criminal gangs that are ruthlessly competing with one another, and whose motives for killing are more often economic or personal than religious or ideological. A recent report by the International Crisis Group urged the American and British governments to acknowledge that their “so-called Iraqi partners, far from building a new state, are tirelessly working to tear it down.”
After the string of bad decisions made by American leaders in the early years of the occupation, officials in Baghdad have made various technical corrections: training the new Iraqi Army in a more professional way, funding reconstruction projects that show faster results, and applying the methods of counter-insurgency to the war. But these improved approaches came much too late, and didn’t quell the profound sectarian hatreds that emerged after Saddam’s removal. A former Baghdad Embassy official told me, “If Iraqi leaders, in their own heart of hearts, don’t share a vision, there’s just not much you can do about it. I don’t think accommodation is going to happen.”
This political failure can’t be attributed to the Iraqis alone. Iraq’s leadership was originally installed, along sectarian lines, by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, and the chaos that followed the invasion drove Iraqis to seek safety in armed groups based on identity. The inability of Iraq’s communities to reconcile doesn’t absolve the United States of responsibility. Instead, it raises a new set of moral and strategic questions that are, in their way, more painful than at any other phase of the war. Facing these questions requires American leaders to do what they have not yet done—to look beyond the next three or six months, to the next two or three years. When America prepares, inevitably, to leave, what can we do to limit the damage that will follow our departure, not just for Iraq’s sake but for our own?
White House officials are determined to present the surge as a dramatic turn in the war—as if the war could still be won. In interviews with me, they blamed the public’s dissatisfaction on the Democrats, for “playing politics” with the war; on journalists, for being impervious to good news; and on the public, for having a short attention span. Peter Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush who left the White House last month, acknowledged that the Administration had made many mistakes in Iraq. But he insisted that victory was still possible. Bush, he said, “has the stiffest spine in the Administration,” and he described Petraeus as a man who could enter the military pantheon next to Grant, if only the American people would give him the chance. “What happens if, at the eleventh hour, we’re witnessing one of the most remarkable feats in American history on the part of a general?” he said. “If that’s the case, why do you want to give up now?”
Bush will likely use Petraeus’s testimony, and his military prestige, to claim authority for sustaining the largest possible American presence in Iraq through the end of his Presidency. But how large could that presence realistically be? Currently, there are a hundred and sixty thousand troops in Iraq. The natural life of the surge will end in 2008, when the brigades sent earlier this year will finish their fifteen-month tours and return home. After that, it will become virtually impossible to maintain current troop levels—at least, for an Administration that has shown no willingness to disturb the lives of large numbers of Americans in order to wage the war. Young officers are leaving the Army at alarming rates, and, if the deployments of troops who have already served two or three tours are extended from fifteen to eighteen months, the Pentagon fears that the ensuing attrition might wreck the Army for a generation. Activating the National Guard or the reserves for longer periods could cause the bottom to fall out of public support for the war. Beyond these measures, there are simply no more troops available.
Several years ago, at the beginning of the insurgency, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld decided that additional forces were not needed in Iraq, and he refused calls for a long-term expansion of the Army and the Marine Corps. With Rumsfeld gone and command in Iraq given to Petraeus—an innovative military thinker who oversaw the writing of the new counter-insurgency field manual—the Administration at last has a real strategy; but, having wasted four years, it now lacks the forces needed to sustain the gains made by the surge. According to a Pentagon consultant, a strategic-planning cell of colonels serving under the Army chief of staff, General George Casey, has estimated that the number of soldiers and marines who can be kept in Iraq into 2009 will be, at maximum, a hundred and thirty thousand. On Labor Day, at an airbase in western Iraq, Bush said, “If the kind of success we are now seeing here continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.” What he didn’t say was that some withdrawals will almost certainly have to come next year, regardless of the military’s “success.”
In the view of most Democrats, the inevitability of reduced troop numbers, the political stalemate in Baghdad, and the dwindling of public support in America require that a withdrawal begin soon. All the Democratic candidates for President have declared that they will end the war. And many Republicans in Congress have embraced the report issued last December by the Iraq Study Group, which called for regional diplomacy and for American combat units to be withdrawn; residual troops, likely numbering fifty to sixty thousand, would be limited to training and advising, counterterrorism, and force protection. The report did not impose a timeline, but others have tried to do so. In the Senate, two Democrats—Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, and Carl Levin, of Michigan—have introduced an amendment to a defense-appropriations bill which would require troop withdrawals to begin within four months of the bill’s passage, leaving behind only a “limited presence.” Among its co-sponsors are three Republican senators and three Democratic Presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden. In August, Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican, called for some troop withdrawals to begin before Christmas.
The Democratic congressional leadership has refused to bring up for a vote bipartisan compromise proposals that lack a timeline for withdrawal. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, co-sponsored one such bill, which is based on the Iraq Study Group report; he said that, if the Democratic leadership allowed his proposal to come to the floor, it could get enough votes to compel the President’s support. “You have the President being inflexible and the Democrats playing politics,” Alexander said. If the legislative deadlock continues until the end of Bush’s Presidency, the White House, by default, will get what it wants.
In Washington, the debate over the war is dominated by questions about troop numbers and timelines—that is, by immediate American political realities. The country seems trapped in an eternal present, paralyzed by its past mistakes. There is little or no discussion, on either side, of what America’s Iraq policy should be during the next five or ten years, or of what will be possible as resources dwindle and priorities shift. If there is any contingency planning in the government, it’s being done at such a secretive, or obscure, level that a repetition of the institutional disarray with which America entered Iraq seems bound to mark our departure.
Preparing a judicious withdrawal from Iraq will demand the integrated effort of the whole government, not just under this President but under the next one as well. “You just cannot pretend that the Iraq war never happened and everything can go back to how it was before,” the former Embassy official told me. “The status quo before 2003 no longer exists. We have introduced fundamental new disequilibriums into one of the most sensitive parts of the globe. How do you contain it?” He added, “People have to start thinking about these things—small study groups with military, State, and intelligence people sketching out what are the core interests on a regional level, and working back from that to discuss some options. If that’s been done, I don’t know about it.”
In June, a new center-left think tank, the Center for a New American Security, issued a report called “Phased Transition.” It envisions a gradual shift from the current strategy of taking the lead in counter-insurgency operations to a “support” role in Iraq. The report goes into more detail about this transition than the Iraq Study Group did, and it proposes a timeline. Troop levels would be reduced to sixty thousand by January, 2009, with a third of those remaining involved in a greatly expanded advisory effort—U.S. soldiers would embed with Iraqi forces, help them plan and conduct operations, and act as intelligence sources, identifying capable, corrupt, and sectarian Iraqi leaders. This process would continue for several years before a complete withdrawal would begin, around 2012. At the moment, there are only some six thousand Americans training and advising Iraqis; after four years of war, the Pentagon has not committed the resources to broaden this effort, even though counter-insurgency warfare depends on the emergence of a capable indigenous Army. (A military spokesman disputed this, saying, “The Pentagon is going above and beyond the requirements it has been tasked to fill.”)
Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown, contributed to the “Phased Transition” report. He warned that, in order for the plan to work, preparations would have to begin very soon. Advisory teams take considerable time to build. Officers and senior sergeants, culled from the limited number still available, would have to be assembled and trained months in advance of deployment; and skimming the cream of the Army and the Marine Corps for an advisory effort would reduce the efficacy of combat brigades. In other words, Kahl argued, President Bush needs to be forced to compromise now, or else the war will end in a precipitate, chaotic flight. Kahl told me, “If Bush keeps the pedal on the surge until the end of his Presidency, we will rocket off the cliff, and it guarantees that the next President will get elected on a pledge to get us out of Iraq now.”
American officials, including Bush, talk a lot these days about decentralizing the military’s efforts in Iraq—about building up local government and security forces, and pushing resources out of Baghdad. In the absence of a functioning national government, it’s the only way to begin stabilizing parts of the country. America has achieved some successes in the past few months—alliances have been made with tribal and municipal leaders in Anbar and other Sunni areas—but these are only temporary fixes. And, without a functioning state in Iraq, U.S. support of these Sunni forces could easily lead to renewed violence and warlordism. It isn’t clear that the tribal leaders behind the so-called “Sunni awakening,” which emerged in opposition to the brutality of Al Qaeda in Iraq, see their present allegiances as anything other than tactical steps toward an eventual showdown with the ultimate enemy: the Shiite-led government, and its Iranian backers. Recently, there has been talk among American officers of applying a similar formula in the south of Iraq, by allying with Shiite tribes that have begun to resist the extremist religious militias. But supporting sectarian factions without fuelling an even larger conflagration would require a deftness that the American military has seldom displayed thus far. “This could go wrong in seven thousand ways,” Kahl said of the new policy. “It’s the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ effect—we unleash forces we can’t control.”
Some leaders in Washington, such as Senator Biden, believe that the divisions between Iraq’s ethnic groups are so intractable that the only solution is to divide Iraq into three autonomous regions: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish. But the idea of partition can’t be imposed by outsiders and, so far, has no support from Iraqis. The past few years have made Iraqis deathly afraid of one another, but, apart from the Kurds, the war has not made most of them want to stop being Iraqis. A recent poll by academic researchers in Michigan found that the percentage of Baghdad residents identifying themselves as “Iraqis above all” more than doubled, across all groups, between 2004 and 2006. Civil war and sectarian rule have tarnished the prestige of religious parties and increased the appeal of a non-sectarian government. In August, the Shiite governors of two provinces in the south—a region that is almost entirely Shiite—were murdered, presumably by rival Shiite factions. This suggests that a partitioned Iraq would not be a peaceful or stable Iraq. Smaller civil wars would keep igniting, and the mixed cities would remain bloody, even if a way could be found to separate their populations. Nor is partition a formula for a quick American exit: to make it work, large numbers of troops would have to remain in Iraq, dividing and protecting the various factions and, in some cases, transporting people across sectarian lines. This, too, could go wrong in seven thousand ways. American troops could end up in a role similar to that of peacekeepers during the Bosnian civil war, supposedly guaranteeing safe passage to unarmed civilians who are targeted by their enemies for slaughter.
It’s easy to fall under the illusion that a perfectly framed ten-point proposal could allow for a painless withdrawal. But what if there is no such thing as a “responsible exit” from Iraq? This is the view of Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who spent the spring in Iraq, as part of a strategic-assessment team of military and civilian experts. He said, “When you look at the spectrum of policy approaches in Iraq right now, the extremes”—maintaining the largest force possible or pulling out immediately—“make more sense than the middle.” The “middle-ground policies,” he argued, “tend to dramatically reduce our ability to control the environment militarily, because they all involve withdrawing about half of the troops. It’s our combat activity that’s currently capping violence around the country, and almost everybody would cut that out—which means the violence is only going to increase. And yet they leave tens of thousands of Americans in the country, to act as targets. Continued U.S. casualties, continued deterioration of the situation all around them: within two or three years, that’s going to generate powerful pressure to go all the way to the zero option. Why not do it sooner, and save the seven to eight hundred lives you’re going to lose to walk through this drill in the meantime?”
A military officer with extensive experience in Iraq was less polite. “I just think it’s dishonest when people say we could go to advisory, get to fifty thousand troops, focus on training, still do the counterterrorism thing but not counter-insurgency,” he said. The reality of Iraq is bound to defeat the fantasies of Washington, the officer suggested. “What about the enemy, man?” he said. “Are we going to ask them to conform to our plan?”
David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency adviser who served on Petraeus’s staff in the first half of the year, said, “The real question is not withdrawal dates or troop numbers. The real question is: What do we want Iraq to look like once we don’t have a hundred and sixty thousand troops there? And is what we want achievable?” This spring, Kilcullen also served on the strategic-assessment team, which was led by Colonel H. R. McMaster, of the U.S. Army; David Pearce, of the State Department; and Colonel James Richardson, of the British Army. The assessment implicitly contradicted the Administration’s rhetoric by declaring the violence in Iraq to be driven by a communal power struggle in which the Iraqi government was one of the main actors. The goal that it set for the next two years was not a democratic Iraq but “sustainable security,” with Iraqis in the lead. One participant told me that a majority of the team believed that it was too late to achieve this goal.
In Kilcullen’s view, allowing the surge to run its course into next spring, while doing as much damage as possible to Al Qaeda in Iraq in the meantime, would make it likelier that a gradual withdrawal of troops would not leave behind the chaos of previous drawdowns—from Falluja and Mosul in 2004, from Tal Afar and Baquba in 2005, and from Baghdad in 2006. He said, “The longer you stay there doing police and counter-intelligence work, the more long-term stability there is once you leave.” He compared the surge to a course of antibiotics: “You keep taking it as long as possible, even after the symptoms are gone, to kill the underlying infection.”
While serving on the assessment team, Kilcullen drew up a list of core American interests in Iraq, which he later gave to senior officials at the White House and the State Department. In order of priority, the list contained the following items: maintain the flow of oil and gas in the region; prevent the establishment of an Al Qaeda safe haven in Iraq; contain Iranian influence; prevent a regional war; prevent a humanitarian catastrophe on the scale of Rwanda; and restore American credibility in the region and in the world (which Kilcullen called “the master interest,” and which doing all the others would go a long way toward achieving). Some interests, he acknowledged to me, might be incompatible: for example, undermining both Sunni-led Al Qaeda and Shiite Iran.
Most proposals for withdrawal emphasize at least three of the interests on Kilcullen’s list. One is counterterrorism. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, released a plan in June that calls for ending support for Iraq’s national-level security forces and removing all U.S. troops by the end of next year. It sets firm deadlines and abandons the effort to create a stronger central government and Army. This plan claims that it will actually be easier to fight Al Qaeda if American forces aren’t pinned down in Iraq—a recruiting poster for jihadists around the world. “Redeploying U.S. troops would make Iraq a quagmire for our terrorist enemies and rivals in the region,” the authors of the plan confidently assert. Pakistan, not Iraq, will likely remain the headquarters of international jihad, but the idea that a fragmented Iraq will be a hard place for terrorists to thrive willfully ignores the recent examples of Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Pakistan. And, without large numbers of American troops in Iraq, counterterrorism efforts will be limited to U.S. electronic surveillance and intelligence from Iraqi sources, with operations carried out by the Iraqis, whose interests and agendas constantly shift.
A second strategic interest is preventing a regional war. Every plan for withdrawal puts a strong emphasis on diplomacy in the Middle East. Talking to other countries in the region, including America’s enemies, is a lot more appealing than being targeted by them inside Iraq. Ambassador Crocker met his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad several times over the summer, but the talks thus far have been fruitless, with the Americans demanding an end to Iranian subversion in Iraq and the Iranians denying the charges. Unless the talks take place at the level of the Secretary of State, and broach the full range of antagonisms between the U.S. and Iran—nuclear weapons, regional security, Lebanon, Afghanistan—they stand little chance of succeeding.
The notion that Iraq and the Middle East will be more stable without an American occupation, as the Center for American Progress claims, misunderstands the role that America has come to play in Iraq: as a brake on the violent forces let loose by the war. America’s diplomatic leverage will be weakened by a withdrawal, and Iraq’s predatory neighbors will take advantage of the power vacuum to pursue their own interests. Even if regional interference doesn’t take the form of Saudi troops crossing the border to defend their Sunni brothers, Iranian Revolutionary Guards infiltrating Iraq to secure Shiite power, and Turkish forces entering Kurdistan to prevent it from becoming independent, the combined effect of proxy fights, irregular incursions, and increased refugee flows will likely roil the Middle East for years. Stephen Biddle, of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “The likelihood is that it doesn’t become a regional war, but there’s a roughly thirty-to-forty-per-cent chance that it’ll spread. During the Cold War, we spent trillions worrying about infinitesimally small risks. Thirty-to-forty-per-cent chance of a real, honest-to-goodness catastrophe is something that ought to factor into our policymaking now.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Ambassador to the United Nations, who spent almost two years as the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, trying in vain to bring about a political compact, sketched the possible fallout in stark terms. Without Americans present, he asked, “could it intensify into a terrible situation in which you get massacres, and that not only leads to escalation in Iraq but affects others? The losing side may ask for help from its brethren next door. We cannot stand aside and let these terrible things go on.”
Then there is the prospect of mass slaughter. Bush recently raised the spectre of genocide, in a speech suggesting that a withdrawal from Iraq could lead to killing on the level of Cambodia after the Vietnam War. Many Democrats were skeptical. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama said, “If that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have three hundred thousand troops in the Congo right now—where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife—which we haven’t done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done.” The argument is shallow: by Obama’s reasoning, America doesn’t have an obligation to prevent large-scale massacres in a country it invaded and occupied, but it does have an obligation not to be hypocritical about it.
“Genocide,” defined as an attempt to destroy a whole people on the basis of identity, has taken on the quality of a sacred category. It’s more useful to talk about slaughter, which doesn’t prompt the same amount of posturing. “Iraq’s violence is already quite deadly,” the Center for American Progress report says. “No single force will be able to truly gain an upper hand in the country.” The first proposition is true, the second arguably true. Together, they amount to a neat self-exculpation in the wake of an American departure: violence is already widespread, and it can’t get that much worse. Given the examples of Falluja and Baghdad—not to mention the unfortunate fates of Yazidis, Christians, Mandeans, and Gypsies in villages that America never occupied—the burden of proof lies on anyone who claims that Iraqis without Americans around won’t be substantially worse off, and might even fare better. Even Iraqis who want American troops out immediately acknowledge that the result will be more bloodshed. If America decides to leave Iraqis to their fate, they should at least be spared the parting thought that it’s for their own good.
Predictions that a departure will actually strengthen America’s position are not so different from the wishful thinking of the Bush Administration. They see only the benefits of withdrawal; they refuse to face the brutal trade-offs that either staying or leaving would impose. A more honest argument says that it’s simply not a core American interest to prevent Iraqis from being massacred: the result of a withdrawal may be a humanitarian tragedy but a strategic footnote. (Obama’s statement implied as much.) This viewpoint has recently brought together hard-nosed realists, antiwar progressives, and isolationist conservatives. Even in narrow strategic terms, though, American interests would be harmed by large-scale slaughter in Iraq. The spectacle, televised around the world, would deepen the feeling that America is indifferent to human, especially Muslim, life. It would brand the U.S. as untrustworthy to potential allies and feckless to potential enemies. And it would destroy what’s left of American prestige. Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary College of the University of London, who also served on the strategic-assessment team, told me, “What has defeated America in Iraq, apart from the failure of the state and its own incompetence, are a bunch of radicals with nothing more sophisticated than reëngineered artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades. That is a loss of cataclysmic proportions.”
Dodge comes out of the British left and vehemently opposed the war. But this summer, when we met at his London office, he spoke of withdrawal as a prelude to catastrophe. “What are the U.S. troops going to leave?” he said. “They’re going to leave behind a free-for-all where everyone will be fighting everyone else—a civil war that no one actor or organization will be strong enough to win. So that war will go on and on. What will result in the end is the solidification of pockets of geographical coherence. So if you and I were mad enough to jump in a car in Basra—pick a date, 2015—and we tried to drive to Mosul, what we’d be doing is hopping through islands of comparative stability dominated by warlords who, through their own organizational brilliance, or more likely through external support, have managed to set up fiefdoms. Those fiefdoms will be surrounded by ongoing violence and chaos. That looks a lot to me like Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban. Or Somalia. That’s where Iraq goes when Americans pull out.”
Dodge’s grim vision does not make an irrefutable case for staying in Iraq. But it’s a reminder that the illusions and naïve hopes with which America started the war shouldn’t accompany its end.
The dream of creating a democratic Iraq and transforming the Middle East lies in ruins. Any change in Iraq policy has to begin with the understanding that the original one failed, and that America’s remaining power can only be used to limit the damage. But Iraq still matters to the United States, whoever is in the White House, and it will for years to come.
One way in which Iraq and Vietnam—two wars doomed to be endlessly compared—are not the same is in the implications of America’s departure. Contrary to Bush’s recent claim, the American exit from Vietnam didn’t lead to the Cambodian genocide (U.S. actions during the war did), and, for all the bloodiness of the aftermath in Vietnam, it was not a strategic disaster. America’s prestige was damaged, but the dominoes did not fall, and the civil wars in Southeast Asia did not affect the larger history of the Cold War. But Iraq, sitting in the geographical heart of the Middle East, on top of all that oil and radicalism, is unlikely to become marginal. In 1966, Senator George Aiken gave Lyndon Johnson some memorable advice about what to do in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out. In contemplating a change in American policy on Iraq, one former Bush Administration official turned the advice around: “Declare defeat and stay in.”
This doesn’t mean keeping large numbers of troops in Iraq indefinitely; that has become impossible. David Kilcullen argued that next summer, when the surge is scheduled to end, American forces could be reduced to a level—say, eighty thousand—that might allow most of the core interests to be protected. Such a move would involve difficult calculations: as American commanders pull back from more stable areas—starting in the northwest, the west, and the south, where there are fewer sectarian divisions—they will risk a return to higher levels of violence. On the phone from Baghdad, General Petraeus said, “There’s an issue of what you might call ‘battlefield geometry.’ Where do you thin out and how do you do it? It’s not as simple as ‘Put in five brigades, one each month, take out five brigades, one each month.’ You might want to thin out in one place and not another. As you do that, you do want to modify your mission.” He added that “you may still be emphasizing protecting the population in one area,” while in more secure areas American forces might take on a role of supporting and advising Iraqi Army units. The changes in mission will come sector by sector and incrementally, with commanders hoping that today’s local ceasefire or the formation of a friendly Sunni militia in one town somehow holds and leads to long-term stability.
But, when the surge ends, there will have to be a strategic turn, away from Americans in the lead. An indefinite war in Iraq “costs us moral authority across the world,” Kilcullen said. The occupation of Iraq remains hugely unpopular with America’s democratic allies and throughout the Arab and Muslim world. “We need that moral authority as ammunition in the fight against Al Qaeda,” he added. “If we’re not down to fifty thousand troops in three to five years, we’ve lost the war on terror.”
At the same time, America will need a political strategy that consists of more than simply reiterating support for the Iraqi government or maneuvering to replace it with another. The political deadlock in Baghdad, which has brought the government of Nuri al-Maliki close to collapse, is often seen by Americans as a perverse failure on the part of Iraqi leaders to do the right thing. Senator Levin, explaining why his amendment insisted on a timetable, said, “As long as the Iraqi leaders believe that their future is in our hands instead of theirs, they will continue to dawdle while their country is torn by bloodshed.” This view fails to acknowledge the American role in empowering sectarian leaders, and it misunderstands the sources of Iraq’s divisions, which run deeper than individual stubbornness, to a fundamental clash of visions and interests.
Toby Dodge admitted that anyone arguing against immediate withdrawal has to face the “killer question: Why should American troops continue to die when the chances for success are so low?” He offered his answer “with an honest recognition that it doesn’t sound very plausible.” Dodge’s approach would bring the maximum pressure to bear on Iraqi politicians by persuading the region and the world—Iraq’s neighbors, the European Union, the United Nations—to come into the Green Zone, not as tools of American policy but as equal partners in an effort to force a political deal, not unlike the U.N.’s role in creating a government in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. This would imply an American confession of failure. Instead of pursuing more ambitious goals for democracy in the region, the U.S. would offer security guarantees to Iran and Syria in exchange for coöperation. “We then turn to the Iraqi government,” Dodge went on, “and say, ‘You’ve got to reform your government, make it more inclusive, less corrupt, more coherent, less sectarian.’ So the Iraqi government is reconstituted within a multilateral framework where the E.U., the U.N., and the U.S. are all singing from the same hymnbook.”
Ambassador Khalilzad recently set this proposal in motion when he introduced a resolution calling for the U.N. to return to Iraq. He told his colleagues that Iraq will be the world’s problem for a long time. Khalilzad was part of the neoconservative group, led by Paul Wolfowitz, but after years of working on Iraq he sounds chastened. “We’ve made mistakes,” he said at his New York office. “I have personally made mistakes. I grant you all that. Now, however, let’s look at Iraq, at the future of the region.” Until now, he said, the U.S. has “been like a five-hundred-pound gorilla, sucking the air out of getting any kind of coöperation, rather than giving others a chance.” It is late in the day to try to “internationalize” Iraq, and other countries could be forgiven for doubting America’s sincerity. But Khalilzad seemed to recognize that there’s no longer any choice, and the new government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy has recently suggested that it is ready to play a significant role.
For Dodge, the only reason to give this long-shot strategy a chance is the awfulness of the alternative. “I wouldn’t bet the house on it succeeding,” he said. “But I would bet my hopes and fears for Iraq on it.”
In the likely event that the Iraqi state continues to collapse and the withdrawal of American forces leads to further fragmentation and violence, the U.S. will have to adopt something like what the former Administration official called “a venture-capital strategy”: using the available resources to invest in numerous small-scale efforts around Iraq, with the knowledge that many, if not most, of them will fail. “We have to shift from the Grand Plan to many initiatives,” he said. “We’ve had enough of the grand strategy.” Most of these initiatives will not be able to depend on backing by military force, as so much of American policy in Iraq has until now.
As the U.S. plans for the gradual withdrawal of forces, it should start preparing now for what it can realistically leave behind. The focus of most discussion is on the military side, but America’s long-term influence in Iraq will more likely be political. In 2004, when the Coalition Provisional Authority transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi government, it shut down its offices in the provinces and opened four “regional embassy offices” around the country, effectively putting the U.S. out of the business of local development, even as Iraq became fragmented under the pressure of civil war and a collapsed central government. One of the less noticed aspects of the surge has been a belated effort to return American officials to the more obscure corners of the country in the form of “provincial reconstruction teams”: joint civil-military efforts that funnel technical help and money from the American and Iraqi governments into the provinces, where political and economic development seems more feasible and responsive to the local population. The recent formation of local police forces and town councils in Anbar Province has had nothing to do with the central government and has been far more successful than previous attempts. These teams should be expanded during the life of the surge, so that they reach the self-sustaining, self-protecting size of a hundred and fifty people; this approach roughly follows the model of Afghanistan, where provincial reconstruction teams first developed several years ago have been an important, if insufficient, tool for extending development to the countryside.
Since Iraq is going to remain in pieces for years, different strategies must be pursued for different regions. Provincial reconstruction teams can provide support to local officials who share the vision of a less sectarian, more democratic Iraq, and they can serve as American eyes and ears. (Without American brigades nearby, these teams will have to depend on the extremely uncertain ability of Iraqi security forces to maintain enough order for them to operate.) This political and intelligence work wouldn’t necessarily end if the teams have to be withdrawn, because they would have cultivated Iraqi allies in each province. Around the country, there are thousands of Iraqis who, in the past four years, have put themselves forward as candidates for local councils, city halls, government departments, and the Iraqi security forces. Many more Iraqis have formed organizations in support of issues like women’s rights, created labor unions, set up educational programs, and established one of the Arab world’s freest (and most endangered) presses.
Too many of these civic-minded citizens, though, have been killed by insurgents and militias who have led a brutal campaign to suppress the stirrings of civil society in Iraq. Lately, it has become virtually impossible for Americans to work with such Iraqis directly. The National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based democracy-promotion group affiliated with the Democratic Party, moved its operations and much of its Iraqi staff out of Baghdad after an American worker was killed in an ambush, last January. But several Iraqi staff members stayed behind to do similar work as a local, all-Iraqi organization, and the N.D.I. is providing technical help and money to get the new group up and running. The U.S. government and private groups should find ways to support Iraqi efforts like these, and, when possible, go back in to work directly with them. The years ahead will be exceedingly difficult for Iraqi democrats, but many of them will tell you that they have learned a great deal in the tumult of the past four years.
If, after a large-scale American withdrawal, Iraq becomes unlivable for such people, then it would be in America’s interest to evacuate those who request it, and contingency plans for mass airlifts and expatriation should be made before a crisis comes. This evacuation should go well beyond the current, sluggish process of resettling Iraqis here who worked directly for the U.S. in Iraq. It should be a much more ambitious effort to save the core of what perhaps someday could become a more decent society in Iraq, including military officers, local politicians, and the many thousands of other Iraqis (and their families) who have worked closely and well with Americans. U.S. officials and officers should begin making lists for evacuation. Most Iraqis would be settled in neighboring countries, but as many as a hundred thousand should be brought here, especially if Iraq begins to resemble Cambodia in 1975 or Rwanda in 1994. Beyond the humanitarian imperative, the United States would be salvaging what’s left of its enormous investment in Iraq and preserving the seeds of a better future.
When I asked Ahmed, the resident of Saidiya, how he saw Iraq’s and his own future beyond the occupation, he wrote back from an Internet café, because his home connection wasn’t working. “There might be something good in the future, but only after two decades,” he wrote. “It was really a dream to get rid of Saddam, but nowadays the most difficult and unachievable dream, or to put it in other words, the dream that will not come true within the next twenty years, is to have a secular government that separates between religion and politics. I think this long process will outlive us. . . . And, yes, there will be a life for me in another country, in the U.S. specifically. I can be a link that will play a relatively small but effective role in the whole process of creating modern Iraq. I have more to say about that, but I am hearing just now far shooting . . . it is better for me to leave.”
There are already at least two million Iraqi refugees in the Middle East. For a long time, the Administration’s policy was to pretend that they didn’t exist. When officials began to acknowledge the refugees, earlier this year, their statements gave the impression that these Iraqis were waiting out a bad spell and were ready to go back any day. Only recently has the Administration begun seriously to address what’s become one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. On August 28th, the State Department announced that thirty million dollars in aid will be given to help educate Iraqi refugee children in schools around the Middle East. This is a late and small start, but American policy on the refugees remains ad hoc and wishful: in the words of Ellen Sauerbrey, the Assistant Secretary of State for refugees, the answer to this immense and immediate problem is simple—“creating a safe and stable Iraq.” A major American-led effort to help provide education, health care, and jobs to Iraqi refugees probably would require us to give aid to the governments that are hosting them—even, through intermediaries, to Syria. Unless the U.S. recognizes that Iraqis won’t return home for years and are living precarious lives in Arab countries that are barely tolerating them, these refugees will become yet another radicalized population of homeless people in the Middle East, and one more strategic problem for the United States.
Radicalization is one of the dangers considered in “Things Fall Apart,” a short book by Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, published earlier this year by the Brookings Institution. (Pollack more recently co-wrote a controversial Times Op-Ed, called “A War We Just Might Win,” which declared definitively that the surge was a military success.) “Things Fall Apart” examines the history of recent civil wars around the world and concludes that they usually last a long time, spill over into other countries, and end only through the military victory of one side, or through massive external intervention. Pollack and Byman outline a strategy for containing an “all-out civil war” within Iraq’s borders. Their policy proposals include avoiding taking sides, keeping American troops out of urban warfare, and providing economic support and promoting political reform in the region to prevent it from being destabilized. Perhaps most questionably, they recommend setting up bases for American patrols along Iraq’s borders with its Arab neighbors and Kurdistan (but not Iran), to prevent foreign fighters from getting in and refugees from pouring out. American brigades and regiments would protect refugee collection points called “catch basins” on the borders. Since these would likely become miserable camps infiltrated by sectarian militias, with Americans as vulnerable camp guards, this proposal is notably risky, and has garnered scant support. But at least the authors didn’t simply wish the worst-case scenario away.
Last October, I was invited to sit in on a “war game” at the Brookings Institution, for which Pollack and Byman assembled a group of former Republican and Democratic officials to simulate the endgame in Iraq. As civil war drove American troops to the borders, the officials’ policy debates zeroed in on the short-term winner, Iran. Some officials wanted to arm Sunni groups, with the backing of other Arab states, to wage an insurgency against Iran and its proxies in Iraq. Since that war game, the “Sunni awakening” of tribes in western Iraq and the American decision to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, a Sunni country, have nudged the U.S. closer to the Sunni side. It may very well become American policy to keep Iraq’s Sunni Arabs strong enough to create a stalemate in the civil war and contain Iranian influence in the region. But, given that the war began in 2003 with the goal of bringing Iraq’s Shiite majority to power as the leading edge of a democratic transformation in the Middle East, this return to balance-of-power Realpolitik, with the Saudis as America’s most important allies, would represent the ultimate failure of the President’s project.
The war was born in the original sins of deceptive salesmanship, divisive politics, and wishful thinking about the aftermath. The bitterness of that history continues to undermine American interests in Iraq and the Middle East today. President Bush will have his victory at any cost, with one eye on his next Churchillian speech and the other on his place in history, leaving the implementation of his war policy to an Administration that works at cross purposes with itself, promising freedom and delivering rubble. The opposition is plainly eager to hang a defeat around his neck and move on from what it always regarded as Bush’s war. Before the U.S. can persuade the world to unite around a shared responsibility for Iraq, Americans will have to do it first. The problems created by the war will require solutions that don’t belong to a single political party or President: the rise of Iranian power, the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the radicalization of populations, the huge refugee crisis, the damage to a new generation of Iraqis who are growing up amid the unimaginable. Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won’t let it happen.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/17/070917fa_fact_packer
ZNet | Economy:
Why Capitalism Needs Terror: An Interview with Naomi Klein
by Naomi Klein and Kenneth Whyte;
Maclean's; September 08, 2007
There's a school of thought that free markets and democracy go hand in hand and together they make people free and prosperous. You're arguing that free-market ideology has triumphed around the world not because people have embraced the market but because the ideology has been imposed on them, often in moments of distress. Furthermore, these moments of distress have sometimes been created by governments as a pretext to bring in free-market policies. To top it all off, the policies haven't really worked. They've just enriched the people who introduced them. How's that for a summary?
That's pretty good. I would quibble with a few things. I don't know that there are examples of the governments themselves creating the crises.
Okay. Is violence inherent in capitalism or is that something that's recently mutated out of capitalism as it's been practised over the last several hundred years?
I think you can make that argument. But the book is really looking at a war between different kinds of capitalism. It's about a battle of ideas between Keynesianism - a mixed economy, which is what we have in this country - and what I describe as a fundamentalist strain of capitalism which has an objection to the very idea of mixed economy. When these sort of fundamentalist capitalists get their way what is constructed is not capitalism at all, it's actually corporatism, China being one example ...
Give me the attributes of fundamentalist capitalism.
They're almost the attributes of every fundamentalist: the desire for purity, a belief in a perfect balance, and every time there are problems identified they are attributed to perversions, distortions within what would otherwise be a perfect system. I think you see this from religious fundamentalists and from Marxist fundamentalists, and I would argue that [Austrian economist Friedrich] Hayek and [University of Chicago economist Milton] Friedman shared this dream of the pure system. These are brilliant mathematicians, in many cases, so it looks perfect in their modelling. But I think anyone who falls in love with a system is dangerous, because the world doesn't comply and then you get angry at the world.
So you have these economists advocating for this pure form of capitalism - what is the attraction of disasters to these people?
Well, disasters are moments where people are blasted out of the way, where they are in a state of shock, whether they're scattered - as after a hurricane hits in New Orleans - or just picking up the pieces after having been bombed, or their entire world view has just been shattered - as after Sept. 11. These are malleable political moments. And there is an awareness that disasters create these opportunities, so you have a whole movement - much of it standing at the ready within the think-tank infrastructure. I think of these think tanks as sort of idea-warmers - they keep the ideas ready for when the disaster hits. Milton Friedman said that only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change, and when that crisis hits, the change that occurs depends on the ideas that are lying around.
Let's talk about Chile. This is a country that ... when was it, about 1970, Allende was elected. He was a social democrat, socialist, comes into power but doesn't get along with the United States, is seen to be friendly to Castro and the Soviet Union, and successive American presidents are highly suspicious of him.
It was Nixon and Kissinger together. I end the book with a quote from a declassified letter from Kissinger to Nixon where he says that the threat of Allende was not about any of the things they were publicly saying at the time - that he was cozying up to the Soviet Union, that he was only pretending to be a democrat and that he was going to turn Chile into a totalitarian system. Kissinger writes the real threat is the problem of social democracy spreading. The Soviet Union was a convenient bogeyman. It was easy to hate Stalin, but what was always more of a threat was the idea of democratic socialism, a third way between totalitarian Communism and capitalism.
And you think they feared that more than they feared the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War?
Well, if you follow the coups, the overthrow of [Prime Minister] Mossadegh in Iran, [President] Arbenz in Guatemala - these are the first two CIA coups in the '50s - these were democratic nationalists, and it was always the same pattern of setting up this bogeyman of it's really a Soviet regime in disguise. So if we follow the coups, what we see is a desire to stomp out, systematically, this idea of a middle democratic ground. And they are a threat to U.S. foreign investment, there's no doubt.
So Allende's overthrown by Pinochet, Pinochet has a great deal of support from the United States and from the economists of the Chicago School, and is well-known to have engaged in mass murders and various forms of brutality against his opposition, and you see that as an integral part of the program, really, of installing this new economics in Chile?
The idea that you could turn Chile into a laboratory for extreme Chicago School economics is a little like thinking you could launch a revolution against capitalism in Beverly Hills. It was deeply inhospitable for these ideas. But in this collaboration between Pinochet and the economists who'd gone to the University of Chicago on grants from the U.S. State Department, Chile was a laboratory for all these ideas that to this day have not been implemented in the United States, like a flat tax - a 15 per cent flat tax - charter schools, labour laws that essentially made it illegal for unions to be involved in any political activity. Straight out of the handbook, you know? It was like they took Friedman's manifesto and just turned it into law. The idea that this could happen in Chile at this point in history when there was so much support for developmentalism of course required force.
You talk a lot about torture and brutality and the shock of massive change and what it does to populations, and you see it as part of the mindset of the economists, that that was the only way - to severely shock and disorient people - to get them to change their behaviour and accept a new ideology.
There was, and continues to be, an understanding that unless there is a massive crisis that makes the alternative look even worse, then people just don't give up things that make their lives better, whether it's unemployment insurance or public housing. I mean, look at New Orleans. People wouldn't have given up their homes if there hadn't been a natural disaster. Now, they didn't plan the natural disaster but I can tell you I was in New Orleans a week after the hurricane hit, while it was still half under water, and the newspapers were quoting a Republican congressman saying, "We couldn't clean out the housing projects but God did."
Let's go to China, which you see as another laboratory of the same sort. I'm the last one to want to apologize for China because I see it as a repressive state and not really an open economy, but that said, I do acknowledge there have been improvements in freedoms and living standards. They've gone from like an F to maybe an E or a D- or something. How do you see it?
The debate in China right now is not self-congratulatory. There's a new school of intellectuals in China - they call themselves China's new left - and they're criticizing the party. The government, the Communist party, is extremely worried about the levels of inequality that have opened up between the countryside and the city and between the hyper-rich and the hyper-poor living side-by-side. And it's responding in two ways. One is to do some redistribution, which is really outside of the Chicago model. You have major new investments in the countryside, you have a commitment to waive school fees for the first nine years for rural children, because there were 87,000 protests in China last year - an unbelievable statistic - so clearly someone's not happy with how things are going in China.
At the same time we're starting to see the extraordinary ways in which China is becoming a laboratory for new technologies to put people under a level of surveillance that would have been impossible under Mao. There was just an article in the New York Times about how Shenzhen - the port city where the export processing zone model was born - is now this testing ground for biometric identification cards that have everything from your landlord's phone number to your reproductive history to your credit history to your police record. They are leading the way in terms of networking CCTV cameras - there are 200,000 of them in one city - and all the police are equipped with GPS. I mean, it is totally sci-fi what is going on there. So, to say there's an opening up at the same time as you have this extraordinary level of surveillance with, interestingly, the full complicity of some of the largest technology companies in the world - this system was built by Microsoft ...
And everyone from Google to Yahoo! is playing along.
In 1989 the discourse of these big communications companies was that television - satellite television - was going to bring freedom and democracy to China. And now it's almost like that technology, with the full complicity of these same companies, has been flipped, and rather than being tools for communication and freedom, they are now tools for intense hyper-surveillance. So I don't think we've even begun to come to terms with what's going on in China, but it supports my thesis pretty strongly because what neither you nor I would contest is that China is an extraordinarily profitable country.
What I think China shows is this idea that there was a natural correlation between capitalism, between free markets and free people - it's simply not the case. China's either undergoing a very slow transition or they've skipped the democratic phase completely, just sidestepped it, and ended up with this thing that, I think, should be described as corporatism. But that is the trend not just in China but also in Russia, in the United States, in Chile under Pinochet. It was the same patterns of heavily indebted states, actually quite interventionist governments but intervening on behalf of corporations, against workers.
With reference to the United States, tell me what you see.
Well, what I see - if we bring it back to Friedman - is a very explicit political campaign against the New Deal. You know, he wrote that history took a wrong turn after the 1930s. There was a consensus, after the market crash, that what had gone wrong was that the market had been left to regulate itself and that was simply too brutal. The New Deal came to embody another kind of capitalism, which did much more redistribution. And it wasn't because people were nice; there was a battle of ideas between Communism and capitalism, and in the 1930s and '40s and '50s and '60s it was capitalism in a seductive phase. And so elements of socialism were inserted into this model so that a more radical version of socialism would be less attractive. I'm quoting FDR and Keynes. And that model actually was the period where you had the most rapid economic growth, but it was more fairly distributed. This was the period where the middle class really grew, not just in the United States but in countries like Chile and Argentina. And then kind of a class war was waged - a right-wing class war.
At what period?
In the U.S. it starts with Reagan. I've talked about the University of Chicago as an ideological and an intellectual movement but it wasn't purely an intellectual movement, it was very heavily funded by Wall Street. And the decision to wage what was a counter-revolution against Keynesianism was about the elites of the United States being sick and tired of sharing so much of the wealth with the workers of the United States. In 1980 the gap between CEOs and the workers who worked for them was 43:1 and now it's 422:1.
But there's also lots of evidence that the counter-revolutionaries haven't had much success. The United States is still very much a mixed economy, and if you look at spending on entitlement programs and Medicare and medicaid and government spending as a percentage of GDP, it's higher than it was at the start of the counter-revolution ...
But the money doesn't go to the people. The U.S. health care system gets the money to the HMOs. Look, I don't believe these guys are ideologues. Ideology serves as sort of a cover story to rationalize massive personal enrichment. If you look at what I call the disaster capitalism complex, the seventh most successful company on the Forbes list is an HMO that has gotten rich off treating traumatized soldiers coming back from Iraq, because Rumsfeld privatized health care for soldiers. Tamiflu - we're talking about harmonizing disaster response with the U.S. Well, that's a pretty scary idea because I consider the Bush administration to be an administration of disaster capitalists who make their money selling drugs for flu outbreaks and pandemics, AIDS drugs, hurricane response, like Bechtel and Halliburton. These are people who very directly become wealthy when things go really badly. I don't think Canadians should be working with them. Whether the counter-revolution has succeeded, I think it has succeeded in opening up this incredible inequality. The situation for workers is weaker than pre-New Deal.
No, in the U.S. the great mass of working-class people are better off than they were pre-New Deal. I don't think anyone would want to go back to the subsistence levels that they were at at the time.
Minimum wage in the U.S. doesn't even come close to meeting the poverty ...
I'm not saying it couldn't be higher, just on the whole. We're talking aggregates of working-class people.
Well, it is a story in inequality, so aggregates are misleading. Whenever we add it all together and divide it we end up with figures that gloss over the past 30 years, which is a story of an opening up of a gulf. And when you add to that the ideological campaign's successful attack on the public sphere then you have a situation like in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina where the state has been so decimated that the public transit doesn't work, the disaster response consists of handing out DVDs and telling people to run for their lives.
Do you see significant differences between how the Clinton administration behaved in these regards and the Bush administration?
There's something uniquely naked about the Bush administration. The Clinton administration did everything it could to advance this agenda. They lopped off the arms of the state and all that was left was the core, and the Bush administration has devoured the core and turned the government into an empty shell. They've privatized the army and given it to Blackwater! It's what we're seeing now with bridges collapsing and the can't-do state, as Paul Krugman calls it. You knock on the door of the Department of Homeland Security and the entire thing is outsourced.
Okay, let's talk about Iraq. You don't see U.S. involvement in Iraq as a misguided attempt to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, or even a wild goose chase for the weapons of mass destruction, you see it as a wholly illegitimate exercise to find new markets and new profits for corporatism.
I think it's complex, I think it was a combination of teaching the world a lesson - "This is what happens when you mess with the U.S." - wanting to re-fight the Gulf War, the fact that the military had been playing war games with Iraq for the previous 12 years. All of that contributed, and oil. I also think there are people who really did believe that they were going to build a model in the Middle East, but I have to tell you that I think that is the scariest rationale of them all. Sometimes this is described as idealistic, this idea that we could just turn Iraq into a model free-market democracy and it would spread throughout the region. That idea is manifest destiny, and the violence that has engulfed Iraq is inherent in the violence of that idea.
You acknowledge in the book that it's not unusual for new ideas - whether they be pro-market or anti-market or any other kind - to be opportunistic, to seize openings brought by disasters, or even promote disasters in order to make opportunities, and you see revolutionary Marxism as paving the way for this ...
I've always hated this idea. At leftie talks there's always somebody who goes up to the mike and says, "But don't things have to get worse before anything happens?" and I slam those people down because the values that I would hope we represent are human values, and that is such a profoundly anti-human idea - of desiring a descent so there can be some shock that will wake people up.
That's just how politics works, isn't it?
It may well. You know, I wrote the book because I think we should know our history a little better. I do think more disasters will come. All of the statistics would indicate we are going to be seeing more intense natural disasters, more category 5 hurricanes, more terrorist attacks. It brings me no joy to say this but we are in shocking times and I wrote the book because I want people to be more shock-resistant. I don't see it as a game, I actually think that when we know our history and know how these tactics work we are less exploitable, by the left or the right.
But why wouldn't you be ready? As somebody who believes in a different set of ideas why wouldn't you seize the opportunity?
We don't have to give everything up just because we get shocked. I'll use this phrase from Frederico Allodi, a founder of the Canadian Centre for the Victims of Torture. He says, "In Spain people have metabolized their history." Countries that have gone through this process of metabolizing their terror become more shock-resistant when the next shock hits. When Spain was hit with the terrorist attack you immediately had Aznar going on television blaming the Basques, saying this is why we're in Iraq, engaging in sort of fearmonger tactics, and he got voted out of office. People said, "It reminded us of something. It reminded us of how Franco used to keep us afraid." So, to me, it's less about whose ideas are going to win the next shock and more we don't actually have to give up our brains if we get hit by a terrorist attack. It doesn't have to be the excuse to let the Bush agenda come into Canada, for instance. Because people will be ready when that happens, and we can be resistant, we can be ready too, not to push through our dream world, because that is anti-democratic, but to just keep our heads.
Do you see no successes for capitalism in particular countries ... Ireland, for example? If you look at the human population over the last 10 or 20 years there are a lot fewer people living in extreme poverty than there were.
I disagree. Most of those statistics are about China and India, countries that are undergoing rapid urbanization, and what a dollar means if you're living on a farm and growing your own food and have access to water and what it now means in a slum on the outskirts of Delhi, is completely different. But of course there have been successes, and there are wonderful things about living in a capitalist country - I benefit from it, you benefit from it. We've been forced into believing we can't have the benefits of a market system unless we destroy the bridges that'll allow more people to have that access. And when we do things like, in this country, triple tuition fees over the course of the '90s, and privatize health care, and take out these bridges between classes, we have a very brutal economic law.
We haven't privatized health care.
No, but that is the agenda, and it's certainly been deeply eroded.
So would you be happy with a market economy if it distributed wealth better?
Absolutely
I've been trying to figure out your politics and I can't.
Look, I think there's going to be a lot of radical leftists who would be disappointed by how Keynesian this book is.
Are you a Keynesian advocate of a mixed economy?
I think I'm a realist.
Have you ever been active in politics?
No. I vote NDP.
But you are a leader to a lot of people, and you do believe in democracy and in elections, and it would seem a natural step.
Thanks for the career advice.
It's not advice, I was asking!
Maybe it's just selfishness, because I enjoy the research process so much - I love it - and politics is so different. But I'm not ... I think there could be a political moment where if there was sort of a political project that engaged me ...
Would you do it in Canada?
Yeah, that's the only place I would do it. But probably what I would do would be more on the sort of policy wonk side.
You mean get involved with the government?
Yeah, or like a ... I don't even think of it as a government, Ken, because I just think we'd lose! I won't get past the campaign!
http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi/interviews/why-capitalism-needs-terror
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=13725
posted by attilav at 16:58
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home