coluichedubita: February 2008

Aljazeera:
Musharraf vows not to resign

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2008
12:39 MECCA TIME, 9:39 GMT

Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, says he has no plans to resign despite a sweeping election victory by opposition parties.

When asked by The Wall Street Journal whether he would resign or retire, Musharraf said: "No, not yet. We have to move forward in a way that we bring about a stable democratic government to Pakistan."

The election result has been seen as a vote against Musharraf's actions as president.

Pakistan People's party (PPP), the party of Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former prime minister, said it would try to form a coalition goverment without the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q.

Asif Ali Zardari, the party's co-chairman, told a news conference in Islamabad on Tuesday: "We will form a government of national consensus which will take along every democratic force."

The PPP won the most seats in the national assembly in Monday's elections, while the PML-Q, which supports Pervez Musharraf, the president, trailed a distant third.

The PPP wants Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister Musharraf overthrew in 1999, to join the coalition along with an ethnic Pashtun party in the North West Frontier Province where fighters operate.

Taj Haider, a senior PPP member, said: "The dividing line is whether you were with the dictatorship or whether you were with those forces who were struggling for democracy."

Sharif, whose party ran a close second in Monday's poll, has made driving Musharraf from power his mission since returning from exile in Saudi Arabia in November.

Mushahid Hussein, secretary general of the PML-Q, told Al Jazeera that his party's election performance was "far below expectations".

"But we are democrats," he said. "And we have accepted our defeat with grace, which is a first in Pakistan's chequered political history.

"And we look forward to working with the future government in the parliament as a robust and vibrant opposition."

"We have a sizeable number. We are a major player ... We expect to play our rightful role in the opposition, and that is something new and different in Pakistan.

"We won't try to destablise the government. We would like to co-operate with the government in promoting a genuine national agenda which serves the interest of Pakistan and its people."

Support losses

Musharraf blamed his poor election performance on sympathy votes for Bhutto, who was killed during the election campaign, inflation, and a battle in the judiciary last year that led to Musharraf sacking the supreme court.

But he said the polls were fair.

"We have held free, fair, transparent and peaceful elections. This was my promise, which has been delivered," he said.

"How it is different is that there's a likely change of government. There will be a coalition government that will be coming in."

Despite mounting calls for him to step down, he has refused to leave office, saying he will work with whoever is named prime minister.

"I would like to function with any party and any coalition because that is in the interest of Pakistan," Musharraf said.

"We have to go for conciliatory politics and harmonious interaction within the government, between various parties and between the prime minister and the government. I will strive towards that end. On the other side, I can't say."

"I'm not heading a political party. Let the political parties meet with each other and form a coalition. If any one thinks I can facilitate in a positive way for Pakistan I would like to do it."

Pakistan vote: At a glance

- Pakistan has 81 million registered voters, out of a population of 160 million people.

- Voters choose 272 members of the National Assembly, or lower house of parliament, for a five-year term.

- Another 60 seats are reserved for women and 10 for religious minorities.

- There are 106 parties, 15 of which were represented in the last parliament.

- More than 60,000 polling stations were set up across the country.

- Key issues include restoration of a full civilian government, reinstatement of sacked judges, rising militancy, economy and high unemployment.

Source: Agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3DFA6871-9C23-4D30-9DCA-9A53257041B5.htm

AllAfrica:
Govt Warns Against Bush Visit Protests

By Boakai M Fofana, Monrovia
allAfrica.com NEWS
20 February 2008

Amid threats of major demonstrations when the American president arrives in Monrovia Thursday, police have warned that protests will be against the law.

Police Inspector-General Beatrice M. Sieh says no permit has been issued by the justice ministry for any protests during the visit of President George W. Bush.

Prominent among the groups wanting to stage what they say will be a peaceful demonstration is the Forum for the Establishment of a War Crimes Court in Liberia, which has been calling for a court since President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf assumed power in 2006.

The group's leader, Mulbah Morlu, argues that a number of people in Liberia have committed heinous atrocities and should not be allowed to get away with it. He says Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is not the best option for the country.

He has disregarded the police warning, saying on a local radio program on Wednesday morning that the forum had secured the consent of the U.S. Embassy and the justice ministry to the protest. He said it would be held at the University of Liberia, one of the stops on President Bush's visit.

The forum also made an attempt to demonstrate during a visit by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. During that visit, members of the group carried coffins to dramatize the deaths of those they say who died at the hands of alleged war criminals.

There are mixed opinions in Liberia about the group. Many believe they are being promoted by some politicians, while others think they have a case. Mr. Morlu is a former member of the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) of soccer legend George Weah.

Many other Liberians are preparing to welcome President Bush and his party. A music CD entitled "President Bush Welcome" was launched on Tuesday. The Federation of Liberian Youth (FLY), the umbrella organization for the country's youth groups, has called on young people to gather in their thousands to welcome the president.

The mood is festive, with Liberian and American flags being hoisted at street corners. The similarities in the flags – both are red, white and blue – and the historical ties between the two countries lead many Liberians to say we are sister nations, which has raised high expectations of the visit.

Copyright © 2008 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200802200687.html

AlterNet:
Michael Pollan Debunks Food Myths

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet
Posted on February 20, 2008

The human digestive tract has about the same number of neurons as the spinal column. What are they there for? The final word isn't in yet, but Michael Pollan thinks their existence suggests that digestion may be more than the rather mundane process of breaking down food into chemicals. And, keeping those numerous digestive neurons in mind, Pollan's new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto entreaties us to follow our knowledgeable guts when it comes to figuring out what to eat.

Nutrition science and the food industry have been changing their minds about what Americans should eat for years. Low fat, no fat, low carb, high protein. In In Defense of Food, Pollan argues that all of these fixations amount to a uniquely American disease: orthorexia - an unhealthy obsession with eating. And as statistics on diabetes and obesity can attest, obsessing doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. Pollan takes the reader on a journey through the science of food and reveals how it is that we've ignored our guts and followed the ever-changing tune of food science. At once a scathing indictment of the food industry, and a call for a return to real food, Pollan's latest book reveals how Americans have been dangerously misled into adopting "low fat" as a fundamental food mantra, and how most of the products on our supermarket shelves should be called "imitation."

Pollan recently sat down with AlterNet to explain why cooking from scratch has become a subversive act, and to tell us things our guts probably already knew.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: At the very beginning of the book, you indict your own field - journalism. You write, "The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutrition science, and - ahem - journalism ..."

Michael Pollan: The way journalists report on science contributes to the confusion about nutrition. We over-report the latest findings. Science is this process where hypotheses are advanced, and then they get knocked down. But you lose track of that when they run the big story on page 1: "Study of Low-Fat Diets Finds They Don't Really Work." That makes it sound like a consensus has formed. You look more closely and you realize, well, that's not really what that proved. It really proved that it's very hard to get people to go on a low-fat diet. The people in that study didn't really reduce their fat intake that much. We've tended to amplify a very uncertain science.

The larger issue is that the very nature of journalism and the nature of food don't make a good fit. Food is a really old story. The foods that we do best on are the ones we evolved eating over many thousands of years. But journalism needs a new story every week, and so we tend to play up novelty and surprise. The classic methods are to eat more fruits and vegetables. How are you going to interest an editor in that story? But in fact, that is the story. Nutritionists haven't changed their points of view nearly as much as you would gather from reading the journalism about them.

On the other hand, there is a very good fit between journalism and the food industry, which needs lots of change. The food industry needs to know that the blueberry is the food of the moment and that there's very exciting research showing that it's a "superfood" so they can put blueberries in all their products. That suits both journalism, which needs a new story every week, and the food industry, which puts out 15,000 new products every year.

OR: This constant influx of food products seems to be the result, in part, of this rise in the prominence of focusing on "nutrients." Can you explain how we became fixated on nutrients?

MP: In 1977, Sen. McGovern, who had convened this select committee on nutrition, was looking at why there was so much heart disease post-WWII. The thinking then was that people were eating too much animal protein. So his initial recommendation, quite plain-spoken, was to eat less red meat. Turns out the industry would not let the government say "eat less" of any particular food, so there was a firestorm of criticism. He was forced to compromise on that language. He changed it in a way that would prove quite fateful in many ways. He changed "eat less red meat" to "choose meats that will reduce your saturated fat intake."

There are a couple noteworthy things about that. One is it's a lot less clear and a lot of people aren't going to understand it, which certainly suits the food industry. The other is, it's affirmative. It's saying "choose meats." In other words, eat more of something that will have less of the bad nutrient - saturated fat. We're no longer talking about eating more or less of a particular food; we're saying eat more or less of a particular nutrient. That became the acceptable way for everyone to talk about food. It didn't offend the food industry because they could always change their products to have more of the good nutrient, less of the bad. And I think it was very confusing to people: Foods are not merely the sum of their nutrient parts.

OR: Can you explain how this focus on nutrients impacts medical studies as well?

MP: The focus on single nutrients, which is to say single variables, is necessary to science. This is part of the nature of reductive science and it's part of its power. But, it is not the way that the rest of us need to look at food. When a scientist learns from the epidemiology that diets high in vegetables, fruit and whole grains seems to confer some protection against cancer, the scientist needs to figure out what in that diet is responsible. So, he or she immediately is going to look for the "x" factor. Is it beta carotene, is it vitamin E? Then they break down the food into its component parts and study them all individually to see if they can find an effect.

As it turns out it's been very hard to do that and, often, when we isolate these nutrients, they don't seem to work the way they do in whole foods. Maybe they'll figure out what's going on. But the point is, for us eaters, it doesn't matter. All we need to know is that eating lots of fruits, vegetables and whole grains confers some protection against cancer. Who cares what the mechanism is. They want the mechanism because they're curious and it's the nature of science to satisfy curiosity, and the industry wants to know the mechanism because then they can make a supplement or they can fortify foods with that magic ingredient.

But, for now, stick with the foods. We know it works.

I'm not a Luddite; I'm not anti-science. I'm fascinated by nutritional science. But I've also acquired a healthy skepticism about how much and how little they know. It has only been around for about 175 years. Its history is of one overlooked nutrient after another. As I see it, nutrition science is kind of where surgery was in the year 1650, which is to say very interesting and promising, but do you really want to get on the table yet?

OR: You describe nutrition science as being, in some respects, "parking lot science." Can you explain this?

MP: You measure what you can see, and you inevitably decide that what you can see is what matters. Cholesterol is a classic example. It's the first factor related to heart disease that we could measure. So, the science got obsessed with cholesterol, and cholesterol became the cause of heart disease, and dietary cholesterol was what you had to eliminate. This is parking lot science. It's based on the parable of a man who loses his key in a parking lot at night. He spends all his time looking for it under the lights even though he knows that's not where he lost it, because that's where he can see best.

We have a science that often proceeds that way. But then new factors emerge. Now we know about triglycerides and C-reactive protein and homocysteine, and we're studying those as well. Scientists understand this about themselves better than the journalists who write about science do. They understand the limitations. They've come out and made recommendations that perhaps were less than helpful, such as get off animal fats and get onto margarine and trans fats, but on the other hand, they understand that what they're doing is still very provisional. It's the rest of us that have taken what are very partial, imperfect findings and tried to organize a food supply around them, such as when we took all the fat out of the foods.

OR: Everyone has heard about the low-fat diet. In the book, you talk about how little evidence there is that this diet - bolstered by the lipid hypothesis - is the magic bullet.

MP: I was very surprised when I started delving into that. The big message from nutrition science and public health since the 1970s has been that the great dietary evil is fat - saturated fat in particular. In the years since, this hypothesis has gradually melted away. There are still people who think that saturated fats are a problem because they do raise bad cholesterol, but they also raise good cholesterol. But there are very few people left who think that dietary cholesterol is a problem. There is a link between saturated fat and cholesterol in the blood. There is a link between cholesterol in the blood and heart disease. But the proof that saturated fat leads to heart disease in a causal way is very tenuous. In one review of the literature I read, only two studies suggested that, and a great many more failed to find that link. Yet the public is still operating on this basis that we shouldn't be eating cholesterol.

In fact, when the government decided to tell people to stop eating fat or cut down on saturated fat, the science was very thin then. But the net result of that public health campaign was to essentially get people off of saturated fat or try to get them onto trans fats, and we've since learned that that was really bad advice because the link between trans fats and heart disease is the strongest link we have of any fat to heart disease. They told us butter is evil and margarine is good, and it turned out to be the opposite.

You still see all these no cholesterol products and no saturated fat, and the American Heart Association is still bestowing its heart-healthy seal of approval to any products that get rid of fat no matter how many carbohydrates they contain. The science has moved on. The science now is much more curious about things like inflammation as a cause of heart disease and the fact that refined carbohydrates appear to increase inflammation and metabolic syndrome. These assaults on the insulin metabolism from refined carbohydrates are perhaps a culprit.

I was surprised at how few scientists would defend this lipid hypothesis as the great answer to the questions of diet and health. Nevertheless, they move on because scientists don't stop and come out and say, "You know, we were really all wrong about that." They just keep moving forward. That's the way science should work. But there should be a big disclaimer saying, "Wait till we figure this all out before you change the way you eat and before the government issues proclamations."

OR: You write that, "Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet." This is in a discussion of the "imitation food rule" - can you talk about his?

MP: That was another red-letter day in the rise of nutritionism. Basically, the Food and Drug Administration was started in 1938 with the Food and Drug Act and as part of that was this rule that basically held that there are certain traditional foods that everyone knows like bread and pasta and yogurt and sour cream and if you're going to fundamentally change their identity by substituting one nutrient for another, you had to call them imitations. If you look at the ingredients of something like no-fat sour cream, you will find all sorts of things that have nothing to do with sour cream. You will find carrageenan and guar gum. These are parts of seaweed and beans. These are all substitutes for the fat in sour cream. It is not sour cream, and the law used to require you to say as much, but in 1973, the FDA - without going to Congress - simply repealed the imitation rule.

They did it at the behest of organizations like the American Heart Association, who thought that this would be a good thing. That the imitation rule was standing in the way of reengineering the food supply to make it contain less fat. Because no one would buy products called "imitation sour cream." Would you buy imitation pasta? No. But "low-carb pasta" might sound more appealing.

Throwing out the imitation rule essentially allowed the food companies to do what they wanted with things like yogurt or sour cream - fundamentally change the identities of food without having to disclose it. We've moved from real foods like sour cream to edible food-like substances like low-fat sour cream that I refuse to call food. I think we should restore the imitation rule. We still have it for certain products.

So for example, if you want to sell chocolate, you have to use cocoa butter as the fat in the chocolate. But now there's a move to get that changed. The Hershey's Co. has petitioned the government to change the standard of identity of chocolate so that you could use corn oil or soy oil, which would be cheaper. Fortunately, Mars, Inc. is holding out to let chocolate be chocolate. But this is why I felt I needed to write a defense of food. Food is under assault by industry and nutrition science, who think they can improve on the foods we've had for hundreds of thousands of years. My contention is, they can't.

OR: It was interesting that the FDA, and not Congress, repealed this. What's the legality of that?

MP: I think they were acting without authority. This happens more than you may think. It happened with the organic rules. The original legislation in 1990 that began the process that led to organic certification said that you could use no synthetics in organic processed food. It was very clear-cut. But the industry, when they started writing these rules said, we need these synthetics, we can't possibly make all this wonderfully organic junk food without certain synthetic ingredients.

So the USDA's organic standards board just went ahead and created a list of the law of synthetics. This was completely extralegal. Then this blueberry farmer from Maine sued and he won. Then the industry went to Congress and got them to change the law. It would be wonderful if some enterprising public interest lawyer decided to sue to restore the imitation rule. My guess is Kraft, General Mills, Frito Lay and Pepsi-Cola would all go to Congress, and some very obscure provision would be attached to a very obscure spending bill, and we'd be back where we are today.

OR: You talk about how corn, soy, wheat and rice account for over two-thirds of the calories we eat and how these crops have taken the place of more diverse crops. What's ironic is that while we're seeing a shift to nutritionism - as we try to supplement foods with the supplements naturally found in foods - supplements in natural foods are declining.

MP: Over time the nutritional quality of many of our foodstuffs has gone down for a couple different reasons. One is we have been breeding for qualities other than nutrition. We've been breeding for yield, looks and ship-ability. Also, over time, our soils have been simplified by the use of chemical fertilizers. For plants to create all these interesting phytochemicals that nourish us, they need a complex soil. So crops that get lots of nitrogen fertilizer and little else tend to be less complex and less nutritious. In a way, this gives the advantage to the food scientists because they can add as much nutrients as they want to their processed foods. But on the other hand, there is this trend towards organic foods, which restore a lot of those nutrients partly by nourishing the soil with organic matter and party by using older varieties that are often more nutritious.

OR: You explain that weeds are actually some of the most nutritious plants because they haven't been cultivated and that the natural pesticides they develop can be converted into positive qualities once consumed.

MP: They don't even have to be converted. The defensive compounds that plants produce to deal with diseases and pests turn out to be some of the most nourishing things in them. That's what a lot of those phytochemicals are. They're plant pesticides, in effect. They happen to be very useful to us and our bodies. One theory is that since organic plants have to defend themselves, they produce more of those compounds. Whereas, if a plant is pampered and gets lots of pesticides, and the farmer takes care of the pests and the disease, the plant doesn't produce all these chemicals that are good for us. There is a theory that stressed vegetables in various ways are more tasty. If you stress a tomato and don't give it enough water and make it fend for itself, it will taste better, and those compounds that make plants taste good are also the same ones that we're talking about here. A certain level of stress in the plant kingdom is good for us.

OR: And maybe a little stress in our attempts to obtain the food makes it taste better to us?

MP: Well if you work hard to grow that tomato, it will taste better. So maybe there's something to that.

OR: In some ways, this book seemed to make the case for the "shock doctrine" of the food industry. There's this notion that what's bad for us is good for the industry.

MP: There is a disconnect between the economic imperatives of the food industry and the biological imperatives of the human eater. You make money in the food industry by processing food as much as possible. It's very hard to make money selling whole foods as they grow. They're too cheap and common; farmers are too productive. The price of commodities is always falling.

But if you process food, you then have a way to add value to it. For example, it's very hard to make money selling oats. Very simple grain, really good for you. I can buy organic oats for .79 cents a pound. That's a big bag of oats. But there's little money in it for anyone. If you turn those oats into Cheerios, there's a lot more money in it. Suddenly, you have your intellectual property, your little design, donut-shaped cereal, you have a convenience food, you just have to add milk, you don't have to cook it anymore and you can charge about four or five dollars for much less than a pound of oats. So that's a good business.

But in fact, over time, those Cheerios will turn into a commodity, too, and all the supermarkets will have their store brand and it will be hard to expand your market and grow. So what do you do? You go up the next level of processing, and you make honey nut Cheerios cereal bars. These new bars that have a layer of synthetic milk through the middle and the idea is that it's a bowl of cereal that you could eat dry in the school bus or in the car.

OR: You have a way of making that sound really unappealing.

MP: They really are. Look at the ingredients on the label - it will say "made with real milk." Check out what the real milk is. It's ten ingredients that include some powdered milk and a lot of other strange things. But then you're selling a few ounces of oats for a great many dollars. By the pound, you've taken that 79 cents, and my guess is you're up to 10 or 20 dollars a pound for your oats because you've added all of this excitement and novelty.

And then you go up another level: Now you have these cereal straws. You take that oat material, and you extrude it through some machine that turns it into a straw and then you line that with that fake milk product. Then your children sip milk through it and you feel virtuous because you're increasing their milk consumption. But at every step of the way, this food has gotten less nutritious. None of them are as healthy as that bowl of oatmeal, and the reason is, the more you process food, the less nutrients it has unless you add them back in. And even if you try to add them back in, you're only going to add in the stuff you know is missing. There are other things you don't know about because nutrition science doesn't see them yet.

So that's the capitalist imperative behind food. The fact is we would be better off with the oatmeal. The industry has many tricks to make sure we don't eat the oatmeal. One is to market the wonders of these processed products. The other is to convince us we're too busy to cook. And they're very good at that. If you look at the picture of American life, family life on view in food commercials for television, you would think it's this frenetic madhouse in every household in America, where the idea of cooking is absolutely inconceivable.

Yet, at the same time, there are images of people lounging in front of the television, doing their email and doing all sorts of other things, but there's simply no time to cook. I think we've been sold this bill of goods that cooking is this heroic thing that only happens on special occasions.

OR: The industry spin isn't especially vague or nuanced - you cite a trade magazine called the Packer, in which an author asserts that declining nutrients in foods is good news because it just means people will have to eat more food.

MP: You realize that they can spin anything. If the nutritional content of carrots has gone down, that just means that people are going to need to eat three carrots instead of one. I'm full of admiration for the ingenuity of capitalism. It can turn any mess it creates into a wonderful, new business.

OR: Your book draws on scientific studies and provides an incredible amount of information about nutrition science, but it's also a manifesto of sorts. You say that "in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts."

MP: It's funny to think of something as domestic as cooking and gardening as subversive, but it is. It is the beginning of taking back control from a system that would much rather do everything for you. The food industry wants to cook for you, shop for you, they want to do everything but digest for you and if they could figure out a way to do that profitably, they would. It's all about making money. They need to convince you that you can't do this stuff on your own. That gardening is hard, growing your own food is old-fashioned. Cooking is just so hard, we have to cook for you.

I think it's really an important thing to do. The fact is we've had 50 years of letting corporations cook our meals, and it appears now that they were not doing a very good job of it. The food they're cooking is making people sick. It is one of the reasons that we have the obesity and diabetes epidemics that we do. And it's not surprising because they do not take as much care of our health and welfare as our parents do when they cook for us.

If you're going to let industries decide how much salt, sugar and fat is in your food, they're going to put as much as they possibly can. Why? Because they want to sell as much of it as they possibly can and we are hard-wired to like sugar, fat and salt. They will push those buttons until we scream or die. That's in the nature of things. If you want to sell a lot of products, you make it as appealing as possible, but that's not the same as cooking with an eye toward our health. We have responsibility for our health. We shouldn't expect them to look out for us. And indeed, they don't.

OR: It seems like an incredible irony that we Americans are so obsessed with eating, and yet we're eating so poorly. I'm interested in your emphasis throughout the book on the importance of pleasure in food.

MP: I think we've lost track of just how peculiar our view of food has become. We think the only question is health. Historically, people have eaten for a great many other reasons: for pleasure, community, to express their identity, to commune with nature. There are so many equally good reasons to eat than to either improve or ruin your health. But we've narrowed it down to this one thing.

Paul Rozin is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and I call him the psychoanalyst of our eating disorder in America. He's done wonderfully creative experiments like conducting word/image association tests with different cultures. For example, he showed a picture of a slice of chocolate cake to an American audience and a French audience. The Americans look at it and their response is "guilt" or "calories," and that seems very understandable to us until you realize that there's another way to look at that. When he shows it to a French audience, their first response is "celebration." How much healthier is that?

We have this very narrow lens through which we're looking at our food, and I think it's robbing us of pleasure. Perhaps it would be worth looking at food in this guilt/health way if it actually made us healthier, but there is no evidence that worrying about your nutritional health makes you any healthier. In fact, we are the great food worriers of the world, and our nutritional health is really very poor. Why is that? I think a lot of our obsession with nutrients ends up becoming just another license for eating badly. When all those products became no-fat, people felt they could eat as much of them as possible, and we ended up getting very fat on that low-fat diet.

OR: I think you refer to a related phenomenon in our relationship with food - this Puritan bias that "bad things happen to people who eat bad things."

MP: We moralize our food choices. This as an example of how science is more influenced by ideology than perhaps we realize. We've tended to focus on the evil nutrients as the cause of our problems, but of course, it's just as possible that it's the lack of beneficial nutrients. In other words, it may be the problem with meat is not the saturated fat, i.e., the evil nutrient, but the fact that the meat is pushing other foods out of the diet, such as vegetables, fruit and whole grain. You see, that's the complexity of nutritional science: There's always a zero sum relationship. If you're eating more of something, you've got to be eating less of something else. Our tendency has been to focus on the bad nutrients, because we do assume if you get sick, you did something wrong by eating a bad thing, but in fact, maybe you just didn't eat enough good things.

OR: And there are many diets throughout the word that you address in the book - even diets based heavily on animal proteins - and nearly every single diet is better than the Western diet.

MP: Weston Price and the researchers from the early 20th century that I look at in this book found many examples of people who were eating almost exclusively animal protein diets and were actually very healthy. There is a great range of nutritional diets to which the human body appears to be very well adapted. You go from the Inuit in Greenland eating their seal blubber and lichens to the Masai in Africa, who eat cattle blood and milk, or the Central American corn and beans. Traditional diets have kept people healthy for a long time with whatever was at hand locally - as long as they were real foods.

The one diet to which we appear to be very poorly adapted on the evidence of how sick it make us is the Western diet of processed food, refined grain, not that many fruits and vegetables, and lots of meat. After thousands of years, we have invented the one diet that makes people sick and rejected the thousands of diets that make them healthy. How did that happen? Well, it's hard to make money on those traditional diets. We're programmed to like refined grain, sugars and fats. When technology could make them common, we weren't going to reject that. I think that's just the nature of things. We have this reward system in our brains, and if you can figure out a way to trip it with a drug, with a food, you're going to do it, and people are going to fall for it.

OR: In terms of guidelines on how we can eat better, you write that we should keep in mind that "you are what what you eat eats, too."

MP: I assure you that sentence is grammatical. Essentially, the idea is that we're part of the food chain, and in the food chain creatures eat other creatures, and so you can't just say, "This is beef." It's a very different food depending on what that cow or steer ate. A steer that was finished on grass is a completely different food than one that was finished on corn and industrial by-products in a feed lot. We don't pay enough attention to that. If you're eating from a grass-based food chain, you're getting a very different diet than if you're getting a corn-based diet.

If you're concerned about your health when you're eating beef, you should really look at grass-finished beef, because it's got very different kinds of fats. It has lots of omega-3 fatty acids, which are in short supply in the American diet, and it has a lot more minerals. Finally, it has a much happier story in terms of the animal's life. It's worth paying attention to not just where your food comes from, but what your food ate. If you've ever had eggs from chickens that got to eat grass in their life, it's a completely different food: The yolks are bright orange, they're much more flavorful, and as it turns out, they're more nutritious. They have more beta carotene and more omega-3 fatty acids.

OR: You also suggest focusing more on leaves rather than seeds.

MP: Leaves are very important to both our health and the health of animals. Even if you don't eat leaves yourself, and you eat lots of meat, well then eat some leaf eaters and you will be better off. We don't think of leaves as a place to get fats, but in fact you do get omega-3 fatty acids and you get lots of vitamins and antioxidants. Leaves are in the business of collecting solar energy, and that process produces oxygen. The plants need antioxidants to protect themselves from all that oxygen.

Over time, we have moved from a diet with lots of leaves to a diet that's based on seeds. Seeds are very nutritious: they're plant storage devices, so they're very rich and contain lots of stable fats that have a long shelf life. That's the omega-6 fatty acids. We need to correct the balance and get more leaves in our diets and less seeds. Basically, if you limit the seeds in your diet - and again, I'm not saying eliminate them - because they're very important and they're really tasty, but if you rebalance toward the leaf side, you're going to find that it will contribute to your health. You're going to get a lot of good nutrients that way. The antioxidants generally aren't in the seeds as much as they are in the leaves, because the seeds are not participating in photosynthesis.

OR: There has been a whole revolution in fake meat soy products. Reading the book definitely gave me a new perspective on soy in terms of how healthy it really is and how much of it are we eating in our diet without consciously being aware of it.

MP: I have a couple basic principles about food, and one is to diversify our diet. We are omnivores. We need to eat a great many different nutrients - between 50 and a hundred are the estimates that I've seen. Yet, we're really getting most of our calories from four plants, and soy is one of them. Twenty percent of the American diet comes from soy or soy oil. I think that that's putting all your eggs in one basket.

There are two ways to process soy products: There are traditional ways of processing, such as when you ferment and make tofu, and these have been proven to keep populations healthy and alive for a long time. But we have some very novel ways of processing soy. We're isolating the protein and using soy isoflavone as an additive. These are novel and untested, and there is science to suggest that you might not want to eat too much of that. I don't know that we've found real harms, but there are questions.

Soy isoflavones, and soy products in general, closely resemble estrogen in the body. It isn't really clear whether that's a good or bad thing. They may be fooling the estrogen receptors into thinking they're estrogen and blocking estrogen response, which might be a good thing, or they may be acting like estrogen and doing what estrogen does, which would be a bad thing because estrogen promotes certain cancers. There are way too many estrogen compounds already circulating in our bodies, because we get it from plastics and other things. So going crazy over soy might not be such a wonderful idea.

In general, I have more confidence in the traditional ways of processing soy than the new ways. Novelty in biology is guilty until proven innocent. Mutations are novelties, and every now and then there's a great mutation that confers an advantage on the creature. But 99 out of 100 mutations are disasters. So when we come up with a completely new way of using a food, combining a food or processing a food, I'd just as soon watch some other people eat it for a couple hundred years before I try it.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a San Francisco-based writer and editor. She has written for AlterNet, The American Prospect, Salon, Mother Jones, Truthdig, In These Times, Huffington Post and Women's eNews.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/77330/

Clarín: Alain Robbe-Grillet,
el escritor con ojo de cineasta

19.02.2008 | Literatura

Ensayista y narrador, fue uno de los padres del 'nouveau roman' francés en los 50 y dejó un legado que trascendió los límites de las letras y el celuloide.

Narraba desde la perplejidad y el distanciamiento, hombre que ganó fama entre los círculos intelectuales como comentarista filoso y abonado a la polémica. Había sido internado por una dolencia cardíaca en el Centro Hospitalario Universitario de Caen, al noroeste de Francia, durante el fin de semana. Falleció allí, de un infarto, en la madrugada del lunes.

Autor de novelas como El mirón (1955) o Proyecto para una revolución en Nueva York (1970), Robbe-Grillet tenía 85 años y había publicado su último trabajo, Una novela sentimental, en 2007. Desde 2001, contaba con un asiento en la Academia Francesa de la Lengua que nunca se decidió a ocupar. Aunque se formó como ingeniero agrónomo y en su juventud recorrió varios países haciendo investigaciones científicas, a principios de los 50 abandonó su profesión para dedicarse a escribir. Después de que varios editores rechazaran Un régicide (Un regicidio), su primera novela, publicó Las gomas (1953).

Sin embargo, no fue hasta El mirón —calificada por algunos críticos como "obscena" e "ilegible"—, de 1955, que su nombre comenzó a sonar en la escena literaria francesa. Su siguiente novela, La celosía (1957), fue traducida a treinta idiomas y lo consagró en el resto del mundo. Como cineasta, su trayectoria comenzó con el guión de Hace un año en Mariembad (1961), filme de Alain Resnais, y dirigió películas como La inmortal, en 1963.

Esa experiencia marcó su programa literario, plasmado en su libro de ensayos Por una nueva novela (1963). Allí proponía que el narrador, como el cineasta, se limite a captar hechos omitiendo el comentario o la penetración sicológica, que se mantenga en el terreno de la ambigüedad. Robbe-Grillet formó parte de una de las primeras generaciones de escritores a los que marcó profundamente la narrativa cinematográfica. Junto a Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute y Marguerite Duras, defendieron una 'nueva novela' apartada tanto del canon balzaquiano, emblema de la novela tradicional francesa, como de los planteos de Jean Paul Sartre, que veía en la prosa un medio para emitir un mensaje: Robbe-Grillet abogó por una novela que prescindía del desarrollo cronológico, la coherencia de los personajes o de las acciones.

Según contó en una entrevista con Ñ en 2004, para él la literatura no era "una expresión de un sentido sino la búsqueda de un sentido. El escritor verdadero no sabe lo que tiene que decir. La teoría según la cual la prosa está ahí para expresar un sentido prefabricado es un absurdo". El autor francés también dejó su marca en la Argentina. Influyó en la literatura de Juan José Saer, visitó varias veces el país —la última en 2004—, conoció a Borges y a Victoria Ocampo, cuya casona en San Isidro convirtió en un burdel de lujo en su novela La casa de citas (1965).

Tras veinte años de silencio literario, publicó en 2001 La reanudación, a la que siguió Novela sentimental (2007), una historia con tintes pedófilos que calificó irónicamente como "un cuento de hadas para adultos". Robbe Grillet, que contaba con una fuerte formación en literatura clásica, citó a Spinoza, un filósofo del siglo XVIII, para describir el inquieto espíritu literario que lo empujó hasta el final de su carrera: "El espíritu humano es tanto más capaz de ficción en la medida que percibe más y comprende menos. Dios, que comprende todo, es completamente incapaz de ficción".

Fuente: AFP Y DPA

Robbe-Grillet básico
Brest, Francia, 1920 2008. Escritor y cineasta.

Nació en un hogar de ingenieros y científicos. Por mandato familiar, se graduó como ingeniero agrónomo. Ejerció su profesión en Marruecos, las Antillas y la Guinea francesa. Pero su verdadera vocación fue la literatura. A los 33 años, publicó su primera novela, pero la que lo hizo célebre fue El mirón, de 1955. Es fundador de la "nouveau roman" (nueva novela), que omite toda "penetración" psicológica. El escritor narra obsesivamente, pero con distancia, los pasos de un personaje, los objetos que lo rodean, las minucias de la vida cotidiana. Su última novela, de 2007, fue Un roman sentimental. También fue ensayista y cineasta.

Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2008/02/19/01610789.html

Guardian: Smith outlines
new citizenship rules for immigrants

Hélène Mulholland
Wednesday February 20 2008

Migrants coming to Britain will be put on probation and be forced to earn their citizenship rights under a new deal outlined today by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith.

In a bid to allay public concerns about the impact of migration on public services, Smith said that the new scheme would ensure that the rights and responsibilities of British citizenship "are matched by the responsibilities and contributions we expect of newcomers to the UK".

Smith said that Britain was a "tolerant and fair country" but expressed the need for carefully managed migration.

She told MPs that migrants would be refused full access to benefits and public services until they had completed a "probationary citizenship phase".

Under the scheme, which Smith said formed part of a "new and crucial stage" in Britain's immigration system, all migrants coming to the UK would be admitted as temporary residents.

A limited number of migrant categories would be granted the status of probationary citizens for a time-limited period in which they would have to earn full citizenship or permanent residence.

Full access to benefits - such as jobseeker's allowance and income support – would no longer be granted to some migrant categories until after they had been in the UK for five years.

Applicants would instead have to wait until they had completed their probationary period.

Under the proposals, outlined in a green paper published today, migrants would have to meet certain requirements, such as abiding by the law, she said.

The prime minister defended the moves in a speech today in Camden, north London.

"Citizenship is not an abstract concept, or just access to a passport. I believe it is – and must be seen as – founded on shared values that define the character of our country," Gordon Brown said.

These values were founded on a vision of citizenship that entailed both responsibilities and rights and it was on this basis that the government was advancing the concept of "earned citizenship", he said.

"I stand for a British way of life where we, the people, are protected from crime, but in return we obey the law, and where we, the people, expect and receive services, but in return pay our fair share in taxes and have the obligation and gain the skills for work where we can," Brown said.

He added: "In the future, the aspiring citizen should know and subscribe to a clear statement of British values, proceeding toward a citizenship explicitly founded not just on what they receive from our society but what they owe to it."

Smith told MPs that the government proposed to defer full access to benefits and services until migrants had "successfully completed the probationary citizenship phase, so that they are expected to contribute economically and support themselves and their dependants until such time as they become British citizens or permanent residents".

Where human rights laws prevented someone with a criminal record from being removed from Britain, the individual would have to serve five years' probationary citizenship, according to the green paper.

"If people won't play by the rules in this country their journey to citizenship should be halted or slowed down," said Smith.

Minor offenders could have to serve three years' probationary citizenship, and extra time could also be imposed on applicants who had been convicted of violent, drug-related or sexual offences.

Parents whose children committed crime could be barred from citizenship or permanent residence in the UK, the document suggested.

A new fund financed by a surcharge on immigration applications will be set up to give cash to areas of the country which experience problems due to immigration - such as over-subscribed schools.

The fund is expected to raise tens of millions of pounds a year.

Higher levies will be imposed on groups such as children and elderly people who use more public services.

Smith said that there were new moves to review how European nationals in Britain were able to claim some benefits in the UK.

The government will set up a cross-departmental unit to look at access to benefits for European Economic Area nationals.

Tom Brake, the Liberal Democratss' home affairs spokesman, said that the proposals would make immigrants "scapegoats" for government failures.

"The government's chronic mismanagement of the immigration system has shattered public confidence and left public services in some parts of the country severely overstretched," he said.

"Their solution appears to be to heap further charges on working migrants, who already fund public services like everyone else through the taxes they pay. What kind of first step to citizenship is it to ask new people to pay more for public services in a country where we're all allegedly equal?"

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said that the imposition of a small premium on top of immigration fees would "barely scratch the surface" of the full cost to taxpayers. "It is, in short, a gimmick."

It was, he said, a "complicated and bureaucratic solution" when a simpler option would have been to put a limit on the number of immigrants allowed in to the UK.

A bill based on today's proposals is due this summer with full legislation expected in November.

Changes will apply to new arrivals after the new laws are passed, and not to foreigners already living in the UK, so reforms are only likely to affect migrants arriving from 2010.

In a comment that appeared to preempt the results of a consultation exercise being run by the Home Office, the prime minister said today that foreigners who planned to marry British citizens and settle in the UK would have to pass an English test.

"We will introduce a new English language requirement for those applying for a marriage visa and planning to settle in the UK - both as part of our determination that everyone who comes here to live should be able to speak English and to make sure that they cannot be exploited," Brown said.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/feb/20/immigrationpolicy.immigration

Jeune Afrique: La prix Nobel Wangari Maathai
dit avoir reçu des menaces de mort

KENYA - 20 février 2008 - par AFP

La militante écologiste kényane Wangari Maathai, prix Nobel de la paix 2004, a déclaré mercredi avoir reçu des menaces de mort émanant selon elle d'un gang criminel lié au milieu politique kényan, pour ses prises de position dans la crise kényane.

Mme Maathai a indiqué qu'elle et son assistante avaient reçu le même SMS, la prévenant qu'elle pourrait être tuée pour son opposition supposée au président kényan Mwai Kibaki, réélu lors d'une élection contestée le 27 décembre 2007.

"J'ai trouvé ce SMS qui disait +étant donné que vous vous opposez au gouvernement à tout propos, professeur Wangari Maathai, nous avons décidé de nous occuper de votre tête très bientôt. Chunga maisha yako" (Faites attention à vous, en kiswahili, langue nationale), a rapporté à la presse Mme Maathai.

"Les auteurs du message se sont identifiés comme (le gang) des Mungiki", a-t-elle dit.

Elle a précisé qu'elle avait fait une déposition auprès de la police.

Le Kenya est secoué depuis fin décembre par une des pires crises depuis son indépendance en 1963, née de la contestation par l'opposition de la réélection de M. Kibaki et qui a notamment fait plus de 1.000 morts.

Le 22 janvier, Mme Maathai avait accusé le gouvernement Kibaki d'avoir "échoué à protéger ses citoyens et leurs biens" et ainsi d'avoir "contribué aux affrontements tribaux".

Mungiki ("multitude" en kikuyu), secte interdite en 2002 et qui dit descendre des guerriers Mau Mau s'étant illustrés pendant la guerre d'indépendance, s'est muée ces dernières années en un gang mafieux pratiquant l'extorsion de fonds et des meurtres par décapitation. Elle avait été visée début 2007 par une répression musclée du gouvernement.

Selon des informations recueillies par l'AFP et auprès d'analystes, Mungiki a été réactivé récemment par de hauts responsables politiques kényans afin de "protéger" la communauté kikuyu du président Kibaki et punir des personnes accusées d'avoir "trahi" cette ethnie.

Le 30 janvier, Reporters sans frontières (RSF) et Amnesty International avaient dénoncé des menaces de mort à l'encontre de journalistes et militants de défense des droits de l'Homme kényans, exigeant du gouvernement qu'il en punisse les auteurs.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP75638lapritromed0

Mail & Guardian: Nigerian oil rebels
demand proof leader is alive

Estelle Shirbon | Laogs, Nigeria
20 February 2008

A rebel group from Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta demanded on Wednesday that lawyers, relatives and the Red Cross be allowed to see their detained leader, Henry Okah, to confirm he is alive.

The government denied late on Tuesday a report by the rebel Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) that Okah had been shot dead in detention in northern Nigeria. The president's spokesman said he was "alive and in safe custody".

Uncertainty over Okah's fate since he was handed over to Nigeria from Angola last Thursday has been raising tensions in the delta, home to Africa's biggest oil industry which produces 2,1-million barrels per day.

Mend's anger over what it sees as government persecution of Okah risks triggering a new round of violence and derailing tentative peace talks between the government and several delta militant groups.

"Following the weak denial by the Nigerian government spokesman over the killing of Comrade Henry Okah, the government must go a step further," the Mend said in an email to journalists.

"[It must allow] access to his legal representatives, family, pastor and the International Red Cross or similar body for an independent verification that he is alive and has never been tortured."

Government spokespersons were not immediately available for comment.

Mend is one of several armed groups who say they are campaigning to redress injustice in the impoverished delta, where five decades of oil extraction have brought pollution and corruption but few benefits for the poor majority of residents.

Militancy and crime are intertwined in the delta and the same groups that make demands for local control of oil resources or greater political autonomy also seek profits from kidnappings for ransom, smuggling stolen crude, and extortion rackets.

Okah's Mend rose to prominence in early 2006 when he led a wave of pipeline bombings and hostage takings of oil workers that forced the closure of a fifth of Nigerian oil output.

In May 2007, President Umaru Yar'Adua came to power promising peace talks with delta militants, and at first Okah's group was receptive. It declared a temporary ceasefire.

But in September, Okah was arrested in Angola on gun-running charges and his group resumed attacks and threats.

Last Friday, Mend and the Angolan state news agency reported Okah had been handed over to Nigeria but there was no comment from the Nigerian authorities until Tuesday night's denial that he had been shot dead in detention.

The leaders of other militant groups have returned to the negotiating table this month after a hiatus lasting a few weeks, but anger over the government's handling of Okah could again jeopardise progress.

Reuters

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?
area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=332784

New Statesman:
Made in Cuba

Cuba is already transforming and not towards a discredited neoliberal model - Fidel’s retirement is part of a home-grown model of transition, argues Pablo Navarrete

Pablo Navarrete
Published 20 February 2008

In the wake of Tuesday’s announcement by Cuban leader Fidel Castro that he will “neither aspire to nor accept” another term as the country’s president, much of the analysis in the mainstream media has concentrated on whether Fidel’s retirement will usher in a “transition” period for Cuba’s socialist revolution, now in its 50th year.

But while the transition being talked about by these analysts foresees a globalised, neoliberal economy, Cuba has in fact been engaged in its own distinct transition for the past year or so, when illness resulted in Fidel handing over power to his younger brother Raul in July 2006.

Under Raul Castro, the Cuban revolution’s leadership has initiated a series of far reaching debates within Cuban society about the type of socialism that it sought. Through various mechanisms Cubans have been actively participating in determining the future direction of the country’s revolution. During this period Fidel has largely remained in the background yet the widely predicted implosion of Cuba’s revolution has failed to materialise. Instead, the revolution has shown that it can both survive without Fidel at the helm and make the type of changes needed to renew the island’s socialist model.

It now seems that Fidel has reached the stage where he feels able to let go and let a new generation of revolutionaries lead the island’s political process. In his resignation letter Fidel said of these: "Some [in the new leadership] were very young, almost children, when they joined the fight in the mountains and later they filled the country with glory with their heroism and their internationalist missions. They have the authority and the experience to guarantee the replacement. There is also the intermediate generation which learned with us the basics of the complex and almost unattainable art of organising and leading a revolution."

So, rather than a chaotic turn to capitalism, as occurred with the demise of the Soviet Union – and which Fidel has sought to avoid at all costs in Cuba - the changes taking place in Cuba so far seem to be controlled by the leadership yet importantly also contain a significant degree of popular participation in moulding the model of society that Cubans aspire to.

Two inter-related factors have been critical in ensuring the survival of Cuba’s revolution and facilitating the transition currently underway in the face of continued U.S. opposition. The first is the rise to power of a number of left-wing governments in Latin America, the so-called “pink tide” sweeping the region.

In particular, the election of Hugo Chavez to the Venezuelan presidency in December 1998 has been of incalculable importance for Cuba. As well as providing invaluable economic support (especially access to Venezuelan oil), Chavez has spearheaded an ideological assault on the failed neoliberal policies that Washington has promoted in Latin America. With his fiery rhetoric Chavez has also reignited the anti-imperialist discourse that has characterised Fidel’s Cuban revolution and many of the social movements that are once again on the march in the region. By standing shoulder to shoulder with Cuba and daring to talk of “21st century socialism” Chavez has conferred a level of legitimacy on Cuba that many predicted would disappear with the crumbling of the Soviet bloc.

Indeed, Chavez’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’ – named after Simón Bolívar, who liberated Venezuela and much of South American from Spanish colonialism – has become a reference point for the left not only in Latin America but across the world. And the alliance that Cuba has formed with Chavez’s Venezuela and other governments such as those of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua has meant that Cuba feels more secure that at any point since the end of the cold war, when it was left without friends or support.

The second factor concerns the current US government’s inability to impose its agenda for transition in Cuba due to the severe weakness of its Latin American policy. The Bush administration’s fixation with the “war on terror” and its involvement in Iraq has meant that its policy of “regime change” in Cuba has failed to find public support in Latin America.

Such is the loss of the US political influence in Latin America that a statement released yesterday by the secretary general of the Organisation of America States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, said that the Cuban people should be allowed to determine their own future, free from foreign interference. The significance of this lies in the fact that Cuba was famously suspended from the OAS in 1962 at the behest of the US

In light of all of this, the announcement of Fidel’s retirement seems much less dramatic than what we have been led to expect. The fact is that Cuba is already changing, and rather than signalling the beginning of a move towards a discredited neoliberal model, Fidel’s retirement merely forms part of a home-grown model of transition.

Pablo Navarrete is Red Pepper’s Latin America editor

http://www.newstatesman.com/200802200005

Página/12:
Fidel Castro renuncia a la presidencia de Cuba

EL HOMBRE QUE LIDERO LA REVOLUCION DURANTE 50 AÑOS ANUNCIA UNA NUEVA ETAPA

El líder cubano no aspirará ni aceptará el cargo de presidente del Consejo de Estado ni de comandante en jefe debido a su frágil salud. “Mi deseo fue cumplir el deber hasta el último aliento”, dijo. Su decisión llega cinco días antes de que la nueva Asamblea Nacional se reúna para elegir al próximo jefe de Estado. Se prevé que sea para Raúl Castro.

Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

La Habana baila a su propio ritmo y ayer volvió a demostrarlo. Mientras el mundo entero hablaba de cambios históricos y transiciones, en la pequeña isla caribeña la vida seguía su curso, a pesar de la sorpresa. La noticia llegó bien temprano a la mañana. Los más madrugadores se enteraron por el diario del Partido Comunista Granma y el resto por la televisión y la radio. Las palabras de Fidel Castro resonaban a lo largo y a lo ancho de la isla: “No aspiraré ni aceptaré –repito–, no aspiraré ni aceptaré el cargo de presidente del Consejo de Estado y comandante en jefe”. Eso fue todo. No hubo comentarios del gobierno ni manifestaciones populares. En la calle reinaba un clima de aceptación, de naturalidad. Pero también de tristeza. “El hombre que lideró la Revolución durante 49 años dio un paso al costado. Eso, aunque no signifique grandes cambios, es histórico”, aseguró un joven cubano, que se colaba en un café para mirar el último boletín del noticiero oficial.

El anuncio del líder cubano llegó cinco días antes de que la nueva Asamblea Nacional se reúna para elegir al próximo presidente del país. Desde 1976, cuando se aprobó la Constitución Socialista, Castro era la opción obligada. Sus compañeros siempre apoyaron unánimemente su candidatura y, a pesar de su enfermedad, lo volvieron a hacer semanas atrás cuando el dirigente de 81 años ganó nuevamente una banca en la Asamblea Nacional. “Mi deseo fue siempre cumplir el deber hasta el último aliento”, se disculpó ayer Castro en su carta al pueblo cubano (ver aparte). El mandatario –a pesar de delegar el poder en 2006, sigue oficialmente en el cargo– explicó que su salud ya no le permite asumir todas las responsabilidades de un líder de una nación.

En sus últimos editoriales, Castro ya había reconocido que estaba muy débil para encabezar actos públicos o para hacer campaña, e incluso adelantaba su decisión de ayer. “Un verdadero revolucionario debe tener sentido del momento histórico”, había escrito hace unos meses el comandante. Ayer volvió a retomar esta idea en su mensaje y adelantó cuál será su lugar de ahora en más. “Deseo sólo combatir como un soldado de las ideas. Seguiré escribiendo bajo el título ‘Reflexiones del compañero Fidel’”, aseguró. “Tal vez mi voz se escuche. Seré cuidadoso”, agregó.

Las palabras de Castro trajeron tranquilidad y tristeza a gran parte de los cubanos. Hacía meses que esperaban una definición. Desde mediados de 2006, cuando Castro anunció al mundo que estaba enfermo y dejaba el poder en manos de su hermano Raúl, la isla ha vivido muchos momentos de incertidumbre. “Se esperaba ya, Fidel está enfermo. El pueblo estaba preparado para esto”, señaló Alejandro, un joven de 25 años que hacía cola para hacer las compras en el centro de La Habana.

Para los que se criaron con Fidel en el gobierno hacía tiempo que se sentía la despedida del líder de la Revolución. “Nos está faltando las reuniones mensuales en la plaza central con los ex combatientes o con los trabajadores. Esa era la forma de hacer política de Fidel, de hacer la Revolución en las calles”, dijo con nostalgia un joven de 30 años que ojeaba el diario Granma por tercera vez en el día. “Raúl es un hombre más mesurado, con menos protagonismo en la sociedad”, agregó.

Otros, en cambio, seguían con la esperanza de volver a los viejos tiempos. Manuel, un cubano de unos 50 años, no tenía vergüenza de reconocer su optimismo ciego ayer en el centro de La Habana. “No me lo esperaba”, dijo intentando contener la emoción. A su lado, Julio le envolvía las papas que había comprado y aprovechaba para colarse en la conversación. “Ha sido una sorpresa, se esperaba que iba a estar hasta la muerte”, señaló.

Pero la sorpresa de algunos no fue suficiente para interrumpir la cotidianeidad de la isla. Ayer millones de cubanos fueron a trabajar como todos los días, las oficinas públicas atendieron como lo hacen habitualmente, los medios hablaron de las elecciones en Pakistán y los records de producción local, y, en La Habana, la estampida de intelectuales que llegaron esta semana por la Feria del Libro acapararon los cafés y el tradicional Malecón. Uno de ellos, el teólogo brasileño de la Liberación y amigo personal de Castro, Frei Betto, les advirtió a los que festejaban en los callos de Florida. “Se ilusiona quien piensa que Cuba será capitalista”, dijo.

Pocas veces gobierno y oposición han coincidido en Cuba. Sin embargo, ayer las organizaciones opositoras de la isla tampoco pronosticaban cambios o, como suele decir el gobierno estadounidense, una transición. “Castro se retira de la posibilidad de ser nombrado de nuevo presidente, pero no ha dicho nada de dejar de seguir siendo primer secretario del Partido Comunista Cubano (PCC)”, señaló a los medios extranjeros la vocera de la opositora Asamblea para Promover la Sociedad Civil (APSC), Martha Beatriz Roque. “Y la Constitución cubana dice que la fuerza superior del Estado y el pueblo es el PCC”, agregó.

Pero, más allá de los formalidades de los cargos, los dirigentes de la oposición no auguran ningún cambio de fondo porque un Castro seguirá en el poder. Ayer nadie dudaba de que el próximo presidente de la isla será Raúl, el hermano menor de Fidel y el hombre que él designó para reemplazarlo cuando tuvo que dejar el poder para operarse. El próximo domingo, la recién elegida Asamblea Nacional deberá presentar candidaturas presidenciales y luego votarlas. Los analistas barajan varios nombres, entre ellos, el vicepresidente Carlos Lage, el canciller y referente del “cambio generacional” Felipe Pérez Roque y el presidente del Parlamento, Ricardo Alarcón.

Estos son los hombres que fueron designados por el mismo Castro para acompañar a su hermano Raúl en el gobierno colegiado interino, que lo sucedió hace 19 meses. “Afortunadamente nuestro proceso cuenta todavía con cuadros de la vieja guardia, junto a otros que eran muy jóvenes cuando se inició la primera etapa de la Revolución”, reafirmó ayer Castro en su mensaje. Pero a pesar de la experiencia de estos dirigentes y de la confianza que se ganaron entre los cubanos y el propio Fidel, ninguno de ellos parece ser el sucesor natural.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-99260-2008-02-20.html

Página/12:
La nave de la revolución sigue en curso

Por Atilio A. Borón *
Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

Si algo hacía falta para ratificar por enésima vez que Fidel es un personaje “histórico universal”, como diría Hegel, y por añadidura uno de los pocos estadistas que quedan en el mundo, lo prueba el fenomenal impacto que tuvo la difusión del mensaje en el cual el líder cubano anunciaba que ni aspiraría ni aceptaría ocupar nuevamente los cargos de presidente del Consejo de Estado y comandante en jefe. Al promediar la tarde, un sencillo recuento en el buscador Google en español e inglés revelaba que ya había cerca de medio millón de páginas referidas a la decisión del gobernante cubano, una cifra absolutamente inalcanzable por cualquier declaración formulada por la inmensa mayoría de los políticos y gobernantes del mundo entero. Por supuesto, esta conmoción mundial sirvió para excitar la imaginación de quienes vieron en este acto el inicio de un proceso de “apertura” en Cuba, vaguísima noción bajo la cual se oculta la precisa ambición de instaurar en la isla un régimen político calcado del modelo norteamericano. Es decir, un bipartidismo en donde quien recauda más fondos gana las elecciones para luego gobernar a favor de sus financistas; o como en Italia, donde gracias a ese modelo puede triunfar un producto del bajo fondo como Berlusconi, de quien la conservadora revista The Economist hace rato viene diciendo que debería estar en la cárcel; o como en España, donde puede hacerlo un político de la época de Torquemada como Rajoy, capaz de agitar los esperpentos mentales que aún hoy oprimen el alma de un amplio sector de la sociedad española sumida en los vapores de la Inquisición.

Entre los exaltados aperturistas figuran prominentemente los tres precandidatos de los Estados Unidos, en una desaforada carrera para ver quién mejor se congracia con los sórdidos personajes que manejan la clientela electoral de Miami. La “esperanza negra” de los progres de América latina y Europa, Barack Obama, dijo que “el día de hoy debería marcar el fin de una era tenebrosa en Cuba”. Y confirmando que en materia de política exterior las diferencias ya ni siquiera son de retórica, para no hablar de sustancia, Hillary Clinton celebró el fin de 58 años (¡sic!) de one-man rule en Cuba y en un alarde de sensatez aconsejó a los cubanos a que se inspiraran en las ejemplares “lecciones aportadas por las recientes elecciones en Pakistán y la declaración de la independencia (léase: secesión) de Kosovo”. John McCain, para no desentonar en esta grotesca cacofonía de disparates, declaró que “Estados Unidos puede y debe acelerar el encendido de la chispa de la libertad en Cuba”, seguramente como tan felizmente lo hiciera en Irak y Afganistán.

No sorprende, por lo tanto, que la nave de la Revolución Cubana siga su curso impertérrita ante tantos dislates; o que su institucionalidad le haya permitido absorber sin sobresalto alguno la salida de Fidel del gobierno y su reemplazo por Raúl y que aquél pueda regresar ahora para dedicarse, con el empeño que pone en todos sus actos y la sabiduría adquirida a lo largo de los años, a librar la crucial “batalla de ideas” que tanto necesita no sólo nuestra región sino también una humanidad cuya supervivencia, según Noam Chomsky, se encuentra seriamente amenazada por una catástrofe capaz de poner fin a toda forma de vida en nuestro planeta.

* Politólogo.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-99262-2008-02-20.html

Página/12:
Mensaje del líder cubano

Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

Queridos compatriotas:

Les prometí el pasado viernes 15 de febrero que en la próxima reflexión abordaría un tema de interés para muchos compatriotas. La misma adquiere esta vez forma de mensaje.

Ha llegado el momento de postular y elegir al Consejo de Estado, su presidente, vicepresidentes y secretario.

Desempeñé el honroso cargo de presidente a lo largo de muchos años. El 15 de febrero de 1976 se aprobó la Constitución Socialista por voto libre, directo y secreto de más del 95% de los ciudadanos con derecho a votar. La primera Asamblea Nacional se constituyó el 2 de diciembre de ese año y eligió el Consejo de Estado y su presidencia. Antes había ejercido el cargo de primer ministro durante casi 18 años. Siempre dispuse de las prerrogativas necesarias para llevar adelante la obra revolucionaria con el apoyo de la inmensa mayoría del pueblo.

Conociendo mi estado crítico de salud, muchos en el exterior pensaban que la renuncia provisional al cargo de presidente del Consejo de Estado el 31 de julio de 2006, que dejé en manos del primer vicepresidente, Raúl Castro Ruz, era definitiva. El propio Raúl, quien adicionalmente ocupa el cargo de ministro de las F.A.R. por méritos personales, y los demás compañeros de la dirección del partido y el Estado, fueron renuentes a considerarme apartado de mis cargos a pesar de mi estado precario de salud.

Era incómoda mi posición frente a un adversario que hizo todo lo imaginable por deshacerse de mí y en nada me agradaba complacerlo.

Más adelante pude alcanzar de nuevo el dominio total de mi mente, la posibilidad de leer y meditar mucho, obligado por el reposo. Me acompañaban las fuerzas físicas suficientes para escribir largas horas, las que compartía con la rehabilitación y los programas pertinentes de recuperación. Un elemental sentido común me indicaba que esa actividad estaba a mi alcance. Por otro lado me preocupó siempre, al hablar de mi salud, evitar ilusiones que, en el caso de un desenlace adverso, traerían noticias traumáticas a nuestro pueblo en medio de la batalla. Prepararlo para mi ausencia, sicológica y políticamente, era mi primera obligación después de tantos años de lucha. Nunca dejé de señalar que se trataba de una recuperación “no exenta de riesgos”.

Mi deseo fue siempre cumplir el deber hasta el último aliento. Es lo que puedo ofrecer.

A mis entrañables compatriotas, que me hicieron el inmenso honor de elegirme en días recientes como miembro del Parlamento, en cuyo seno se deben adoptar acuerdos importantes para el destino de nuestra Revolución, les comunico que no aspiraré ni aceptaré –repito–, no aspiraré ni aceptaré el cargo de presidente del Consejo de Estado y comandante en jefe.

En breves cartas dirigidas a Randy Alonso, director del programa Mesa Redonda de la Televisión Nacional, que a solicitud mía fueron divulgadas, se incluían discretamente elementos de este mensaje que hoy escribo, y ni siquiera el destinatario de las misivas conocía mi propósito. Tenía confianza en Randy porque lo conocí bien cuando era estudiante universitario de periodismo, y me reunía casi todas las semanas con los representantes principales de los estudiantes universitarios, de lo que ya era conocido como el interior del país, en la biblioteca de la amplia casa de Kohly, donde se albergaban. Hoy todo el país es una inmensa universidad.

–Párrafos seleccionados de la carta enviada a Randy el 17 de diciembre de 2007:

“Mi más profunda convicción es que las respuestas a los problemas actuales de la sociedad cubana, que posee un promedio educacional cercano a 12 grados, casi un millón de graduados universitarios y la posibilidad real de estudio para sus ciudadanos sin discriminación alguna, requieren más variantes de respuesta para cada problema concreto que las contenidas en un tablero de ajedrez. Ni un solo detalle se puede ignorar, y no se trata de un camino fácil, si es que la inteligencia del ser humano en una sociedad revolucionaria ha de prevalecer sobre sus instintos.

“Mi deber elemental no es aferrarme a cargos, ni mucho menos obstruir el paso a personas más jóvenes, sino aportar experiencias e ideas cuyo modesto valor proviene de la época excepcional que me tocó vivir.

“Pienso como Niemeyer que hay que ser consecuente hasta el final.”

Carta del 8 de enero de 2008:

“...Soy decidido partidario del voto unido (un principio que preserva el mérito ignorado). Fue lo que nos permitió evitar las tendencias a copiar lo que venía de los países del antiguo campo socialista, entre ellas el retrato de un candidato único, tan solitario como a la vez tan solidario con Cuba. Respeto mucho aquel primer intento de construir el socialismo, gracias al cual pudimos continuar el camino escogido.”

“Tenía muy presente que toda la gloria del mundo cabe en un grano de maíz”, reiteraba en aquella carta.

Traicionaría por tanto mi conciencia ocupar una responsabilidad que requiere movilidad y entrega total que no estoy en condiciones físicas de ofrecer. Lo explico sin dramatismo.

Afortunadamente nuestro proceso cuenta todavía con cuadros de la vieja guardia, junto a otros que eran muy jóvenes cuando se inició la primera etapa de la Revolución. Algunos casi niños se incorporaron a los combatientes de las montañas y después, con su heroísmo y sus misiones internacionalistas, llenaron de gloria al país. Cuentan con la autoridad y la experiencia para garantizar el reemplazo. Dispone igualmente nuestro proceso de la generación intermedia que aprendió junto a nosotros los elementos del complejo y casi inaccesible arte de organizar y dirigir una revolución.

El camino siempre será difícil y requerirá el esfuerzo inteligente de todos. Desconfío de las sendas aparentemente fáciles de la apologética, o la autoflagelación como antítesis. Prepararse siempre para la peor de las variantes. Ser tan prudentes en el éxito como firmes en la adversidad es un principio que no puede olvidarse. El adversario a derrotar es sumamente fuerte, pero lo hemos mantenido a raya durante medio siglo.

No me despido de ustedes. Deseo solo combatir como un soldado de las ideas. Seguiré escribiendo bajo el título “Reflexiones del compañero Fidel”. Será un arma más del arsenal con la cual se podrá contar. Tal vez mi voz se escuche. Seré cuidadoso.

Gracias

Publicado en el diario cubano Granma.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-99261-2008-02-20.html

Página/12:
Una ética inquebrantable

Por Néstor Kohan *
Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

Sentimos un poquito de tristeza, ¿por qué no admitirlo? Sin embargo, como alguna vez dijo Julio Antonio Mella, todo tiempo futuro tiene que ser mejor. Fidel está enfermo y renuncia. Decisión lúcida y sabia, como siempre. No huye en helicóptero, como el patético presidente argentino Fernando de la Rúa, derribado por su pueblo en rebelión en diciembre del 2001. No se tiene que ir acusado de corrupción, enriquecido y millonario pero escupido por el pueblo, como tantos otros. No termina escapando en lo oscuro de la noche como los dictadores latinoamericanos, protegidos por el Pentágono y la CIA, con el traje manchado de sangre y los bolsillos llenos de dólares.

Fidel no se rinde. No se arrodilla. No implora clemencia. No se degrada ni se deteriora. Simplemente toma la decisión de renunciar por limitaciones de salud, pero conservando intacto su prestigio político, el cariño y el consenso de su pueblo y la admiración de numerosos pueblos del mundo. Si tuviéramos que sintetizar el núcleo de su pensamiento político creemos no equivocarnos si lo ubicamos en la ética. El marxismo de Fidel –como el de su entrañable hermano argentino, Ernesto “Che” Guevara– ha sido y es un marxismo eticista y culturalista. La clave de la historia humana no está en el desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas sino en los valores y la cultura. En todo caso, las principales fuerzas productivas de la historia han sido las fuerzas morales. La Revolución Cubana no se derrumbó, aun sin comida, dinero ni petróleo, debido a los valores, la ética y la cultura.

La “batalla de las ideas” con la que insiste Fidel es otro nombre para lo que Antonio Gramsci ha denominado la lucha por la hegemonía. Todo el pensamiento político de Fidel, su práctica revolucionaria al frente de Cuba durante tanto tiempo, sus discursos y sus escritos han sido una prolongada y larga marcha por la hegemonía socialista.

En esa batalla de las ideas y los valores, la ética ha jugado un papel fundamental. Ya de jovencito, muchos años antes de iniciar la guerra revolucionaria en Cuba, el joven Fidel lo había resumido con una sentencia fenomenal: “el verdadero ser humano no pregunta de qué lado se vive mejor sino de qué lado está el deber”. Ese es, a nuestro juicio, el núcleo de fuego que ha recorrido como un hilo rojo todo el pensamiento de Fidel a lo largo de décadas.

¿Fue distinto el marxismo del Che? ¿Guevara no planteó que la mayor satisfacción posible para una persona revolucionaria no reside jamás en la búsqueda de dinero sino en sentirse pleno y feliz por haber cumplido con el deber social? ¿Quién influyó en quién? ¿El Che en Fidel o Fidel en el Che? Probablemente haya habido una influencia mutua y recíproca. Y en el medio de ambos, la ética de José Martí, el rechazo al “hombre mediocre” de José Ingenieros, el humanismo socialista, todos entretejidos en la perspectiva revolucionaria del viejo Carlitos Marx y su joven continuador, nuestro amigo Lenin. Eso ha sido Fidel. Ese es Fidel.

La mejor solidaridad con Cuba, con su pueblo, con el futuro del socialismo y con Fidel, sigue siendo la lucha popular. Una lucha contra el capitalismo y por el socialismo que no tiene fronteras. “El deber de todo revolucionario es hacer la revolución.” Esa es la enseñanza que nos deja Fidel con su ejemplo de vida. ¡Una vida entera dedicada a la revolución! Cuánta razón tenía también Fidel cuando nos dijo: “nuestro campo de batalla abarca todo el mundo”. ¡Qué impactante actualidad!

A la larga, esta noticia dejará de ocupar la atención. Lo que permanecerá, a largo plazo, son las enseñanzas de Fidel. Las banderas de su pensamiento político rebelde y su ética revolucionaria inquebrantable. Esa misma que le permitió mantenerse de pie, sin trastabillar, durante medio siglo frente a la potencia más poderosa de la Tierra y de la historia.

Continuar, hoy y en el futuro, las enseñanzas de Fidel y del Che. Ese es el gran desafío para las nuevas generaciones. Dentro de Cuba pero también en toda América latina.

* Coordinador de la cátedra “Che Guevara - Colectivo Amauta” de Argentina, docente e investigador de la UBA y autor del libro Fidel para principiantes.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-99224-2008-02-20.html

Página/12:
Cambios que empezaron en silencio

SEGUN LOS EXPERTOS, HAY UN ESPACIO PARA LA RENOVACION EN CUBA

Tres analistas coinciden en subrayar que EE.UU. se verá imposibilitado para realizar un movimiento dañiño contra la isla.

Por Mercedes López San Miguel
Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

Cuba sin Fidel fue una idea temida por unos y añorada por otros. Hoy la transición ya es un hecho, pero ésta comenzó a esbozarse luego de que el comandante de la revolución delegara el poder en su hermano Raúl Castro, en julio de 2006. Lo cierto es que los hombres que hacen la política en la isla no sólo pertenecen a la generación de los Castro: existe una renovación generacional en figuras como el vicepresidente Carlos Lage y el canciller Felipe Roque Pérez. En este escenario, los analistas consultados por Página/12 no prevén cambios abruptos en Cuba, pero sí graduales, y subrayan que Estados Unidos no está en condiciones geopolíticas de perjudicar aún más a ese país.

Nada excepcional ha ocurrido en este año y medio de traspaso de mando. Y, sin embargo, han habido señales de renovación. Para Julio Gambina, el sistema institucional cubano viene habilitando a la joven generación y subraya la presencia de estos actuantes en la gestión estatal. “Los hombres que están jugando hoy en la política cubana han renovado la economía, la política, la cultura: hay una cantidad de gente que tiene visibilidad hacia el interior de Cuba.” Gambina, presidente de la Fundación de Investigaciones Sociales y Políticas, subraya a este diario que Fidel quería generar una transición consensuada con su pueblo. “En diciembre escribió una carta sobre los grandes méritos de las nuevas generaciones. Ahora ratificó enfáticamente que no va aspirar ni aceptar la nominación a la presidencia porque no está en condiciones de entregarse al pueblo. Mi sensación es que ha logrado en este tiempo estabilidad y se ha abierto la política a nuevos políticos.”

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, autor del libro De Martí a Fidel. La Revolución Cubana y América Latina (Ed. Norma), coincide en señalar que la sucesión de Castro ya había empezado silenciosamente y nadie se dio cuenta. “El poder había pasado para una nueva generación de dirigentes. El comandante Raúl Castro, juntamente con Ricardo Alarcón (presidente de la Asamblea Nacional), Carlos Lage (vicepresidente) y Felipe Pérez Roque ya detienen el mando de Cuba hace mucho tiempo.”

Por su parte, el historiador Mario Rapoport agrega que a corto plazo no es esperable un cambio en La Habana y su mayor obstáculo, EE.UU., no está en situación de hacer un movimiento pernicioso. “Favorece que el gobierno de Estados Unidos esté en una situación de impasse y de crisis económica, por tanto no está en condiciones de intervenir.” Sin embargo, advierte que el panorama es más incierto a largo plazo. “Todo depende de cómo evolucionan el gobierno cubano y la situación internacional.” Gambina destaca que lo que seguramente Washington lea como “debilidad” es en verdad la fortaleza de Cuba. “Es de subrayar el consenso de la población cubana: Fidel esté liderando, pero no desde la primera magistratura y eso es una muestra de la solidez del sistema.”

Moniz Bandeira explica por qué el actual gobierno republicano no intervendrá en la isla. “No puede hacer ningún movimiento distinto al que hizo hasta ahora, sin resultado. La tradición nacionalista se ha desarrollado en Cuba, a lo largo de un siglo, y fue ampliado por la revolución de Castro. La ambición de escapar del tipo de tutela norteamericana impuesta por la Enmienda Platt de 1902, que permitía la intervención de Estados Unidos, marcó el espíritu del pueblo cubano.”

Gambina subraya que Cuba si no avanza más en los cambios económicos es debido al bloqueo norteamericano. “Está cambiando la economía. Con Venezuela viene impulsando el ALBA –contrapartida del ALCA– y ha modificado la política energética. En los últimos años, la economía cubana crece: primero consolidó logros como orientación de servicios sociales. Sin ser un país petrolero, ha avanzado en el camino del turismo, y la diversificación productiva y de servicios, en profunda renovación. No es la Cuba de hace veinte años.”

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-99226-2008-02-20.html

Página/12:
Todavía Líder Máximo

Por Gabriel Puricelli *
Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

Hay un título al que Fidel Castro Ruz no renunció ayer y es el de Líder Máximo. Cuando declinó ser confirmado por la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular para sus posiciones de presidente del Consejo de Estado (que ejerce desde 1976) y de comandante en jefe (desde 1959), el revolucionario convaleciente dio el segundo paso de una transición que una enfermedad inesperada le ha consentido dirigir hasta el momento. Porque así como se ha visto obligado a abandonar el día a día de la administración gubernamental, Castro ha logrado preservar el timón del largo plazo y la capacidad de modelar el futuro (así sea el más inmediato), indicando derroteros y ordenando un proceso de transición cuya estación de llegada (¿el gobierno colegiado?, ¿el fin del unipartidismo?) no se puede adivinar hoy y que tal vez sea la única incógnita en el diseño que el inminente ex jefe de Estado está desplegando, que él mismo no pueda despejar.

La renuncia del anciano ex guerrillero pone en escena una vez más la herida narcisista de la que no logran recuperarse los EE.UU. desde el derrocamiento de ese títere de la mafia que fue Fulgencio Batista y que la gran potencia terminó de asumir como propio, presa de la obsesión de los hermanos Kennedy por asesinar a Castro. En efecto, en medio de las primarias de los partidos estadounidenses, las noticias de La Habana obligaron a todos a pronunciarse, con uniforme y previsible anticastrismo, poniendo en el centro del debate público la situación de un país que dejó de constituir una amenaza a la seguridad nacional de ese país el día, hace 45 años, en que Nikita Khruschev detuvo la instalación de los misiles soviéticos. Los más obcecados partidarios estadounidenses del realismo en política internacional se toman un recreo freudiano para definir sus posiciones respecto de la cuestión cubana. Esos reflejos traducidos en comunicados de las campañas de Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton y John McCain no serán seguramente motivo de mayor preocupación para los hermanos Castro, que (repartiéndose en esta cuestión los roles de policía bueno y de policía malo) ven con aplomo cómo se alinean lentamente las fuerzas políticas y sociales que van a arrumbar más temprano que tarde el bloqueo irracional e ilegal que le han impuesto a Cuba con la Guerra Fría como mero pretexto.

Esa tendencia inexorable, traducida en los cada vez más frecuentes viajes a la isla de legisladores demócratas y republicanos y en el lobby cada vez más intenso de sectores empresarios de los EE.UU., es el telón de fondo de la cuidada coreografía que tuvo ayer un pico dramático. Estudiosos de la transición vietnamita, los hermanos Castro saben que si la dirección de Hanoi pudo empezar a resignar el monopolio del Partido Comunista es porque fue capaz de enmendar la relación de hermanos-enemigos que había desarrollado con China: para seguir teniendo legitimidad en condiciones de mayor competencia política era necesario dar un salto en el desarrollo económico que sólo se hacía posible aprovechando creativamente las nuevas coordenadas geopolíticas asiáticas. Parece haber una resonancia de esa música en esta partitura que, resignando todos los títulos menos uno, el Líder Máximo sigue dirigiendo.

* Consejero directivo, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-99227-2008-02-20.html

Página/12:
La tortura no funciona, como demuestra la historia

Por Robert Fisk *
Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008

“La tortura funciona”, alardeó un miembro de las fuerzas especiales estadounidenses, coronel obviamente, a un colega mío hace un par de años. Parece que la CIA y sus matones a sueldo en Afganistán e Irak todavía están convencidos de esto. No existe evidencia de que se haya dejado de entregar a prisioneros a quienes los golpean, los someten a ahogamientos simulados y les insertan tubos de metal, o que el caso de que un prisionero muera a consecuencia de la tortura haya terminado. ¿Por qué otra razón habría de admitir la CIA, en enero, que había destruido videos de prisioneros a los que casi habían ahogado con la técnica de waterboarding, antes de que éstas pudieran ser vistas por investigadores estadounidenses?

Con todo, hace unos días encontré un grabado medieval en el que un prisionero está atado a una silla de madera, con una manguera de cuero metida hasta la garganta cuyo otro extremo salía de una primitiva máquina de bombeo, que es operada por un torturador de horrenda y escasa vestimenta. Los ojos del prisionero están desorbitados por el terror mientras siente que se ahoga ante la vista de los inquisidores españoles que no muestran la más mínima compasión por él. ¿Quién dijo que el waterboarding es nuevo? Los estadounidenses sólo imitan a sus predecesores de la Inquisición.

Encontré otra imagen medieval en un periódico canadiense que muestra a un prisionero bajo interrogatorio, en lo que sospecho era la Alemania medieval. Estaba amarrado de espaldas al borde externo de una rueda. Dos encapuchados le administraban el tormento. Uno utiliza un fuelle para avivar el fuego que está bajo la rueda mientras el otro le da vueltas. La rueda gira de manera que los pies del prisionero pasan por entre las llamas regularmente.

Los ojos del pobre hombre, desnudo salvo por una tela que cubre la parte inferior de su cuerpo, están transidos de dolor. Dos curas están junto a él, uno de ellos cubierto con la capucha de su hábito, en tanto el otro utiliza una túnica sobre su suplicio y usa papel y pluma para escribir las palabras del prisionero.

Anthony Grafton, que trabaja en un libro sobre la magia durante el Renacimiento en Europa, dice que durante los siglos XVI y XVII se usaba sistemáticamente la tortura con todo sospechoso de brujería y que sus palabras eran anotadas por notarios calificados, el equivalente, supongo, de funcionarios y testigos de la CIA, que en esa época no se engañaban diciendo que no era tortura y hablaban abiertamente del “aliciente” que provenía de los muchachos encargados de darle vuelta a la rueda sobre el fuego.

Como recuerda Grafton, “el pionero en estudio de las usanzas medievales, Henry Charles Lea, escribió largamente sobre las formas en que los inquisidores usaron la tortura para conseguir que los prisioneros confesaran que practicaban la herejía, tanto en opinión como en acción. El, que era un hombre iluminado que escribía sobre lo que veía en una época iluminada, veía con horror estas prácticas bárbaras con una claridad que le envidiaría cualquiera que hoy lee comunicados públicos”.

En la Edad Media había personas entrenadas para usar el dolor como método de interrogatorio, así como último castigo antes de la muerte. A los hombres que iban a ser “colgados, desangrados y descuartizados” en la Londres medieval, por ejemplo, primero se les mostraban los “instrumentos” antes de que su sufrimiento comenzara, normalmente cuando eran eviscerados delante de una multitud de mirones.

La mayoría de los torturados por información en el medioevo, de todos modos eran ejecutados una vez que se obtenía de ellos la información que exigían sus interrogadores. Estas inquisiciones, con detalles sobre la tortura que las acompañó, eran hechas públicas y ampliamente diseminadas para que el público entendiera la amenaza que los prisioneros representaron y el poder que detentaban quienes los sometieron al tormento. No había destrucción de videos. Según Grafton, los hechos se promocionaban mediante panfletos ilustrados y canciones, entre otras cosas.

Ronnie Po-chia Hsia y los académicos italianos Diego Quaglioni y Anna Esposito han estudiado la Inquisición de Trento, Italia, en el siglo XV, cuyas víctimas fueron sobre todo judíos. En 1475, tres hogares judíos fueron acusados de asesinar a un niño cristiano (de dos años, N. de la T.) llamado Simón con el supuesto fin de llevar a cabo un “ritual” en que se utilizaba sangre para hacer matzo (pan). Esta “calumnia de sangre” era, desde luego, una total falsedad, pero en partes de Medio Oriente se cree aún que este ritual existe, lo cual es aterrador si se piensa que era una creencia arraigada en la Europa del siglo XV.

Como era usual, el podestá, alto funcionario de la ciudad, era el interrogador que aceptaba evidencia externa como pruebas de culpabilidad. Aun así, la ley de Roma exigía confesiones para dictar condena.

Grafton narra que cuando las respuestas de un prisionero no satisfacían al podestá, el torturador ataba sus manos detrás de la espalda y de ahí lo levantaba hacia el techo con una polea. “Luego, según las órdenes del podestá, el verdugo lo hacía ‘saltar’ o ‘bailar’ soltándolo y volviéndolo a jalar repetidamente, dislocándole los hombros y provocándole un dolor inimaginable.”

Cuando uno de los miembros de las familias judías de Trento, Samuel, preguntó al podestá dónde había escuchado que los judíos usaban sangre de cristianos, el funcionario respondió, mientras Samuel colgaba de la cuerda, que lo escuchó de otros judíos. Samuel dijo que estaba siendo torturado injustamente. “La verdad, la verdad”, gritó el podestá, y Samuel fue hecho “saltar” unos dos metros y medio y dijo a su interrogador: “Dios me socorra y la verdad me ayude”. Después de 40 minutos, el prisionero fue devuelto a prisión.

Una vez destrozados, por supuesto, los prisioneros judíos confesaron. Después de otra sesión de tortura, Samuel denunció a otro judío. Subsecuentes tormentos finalmente lo quebrantaron al grado de que describió el ritual asesino y la forma en que supuestamente lo llevaron a cabo, y culpó a otros dos de este crimen inexistente.

Dos mujeres torturadas lograron exonerar a los niños, pero de todas formas, según Grafton, “acusaron a sus seres queridos, amigos y miembros de otras comunidades judías”. Así, la tortura obligó a civiles inocentes a confesar crímenes fantásticos.

El historiador de Oxford, Lyndal Roper, encontró que los torturados llegaron a reconocer su culpabilidad.

La conclusión de Grafton no tiene respuesta. La tortura no sirve para obtener la verdad. Consigue que la gente más ordinaria diga lo que sea que el torturador le ordena. Los hombres que padecieron el waterboarding de la CIA bien pudieron haber confesado que podían volar y que eran cómplices del diablo. Y quién sabe si la CIA no acabaría creyéndoles.

* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-99236-2008-02-20.html

The Independent: Adios, Castro:
Fidel is a relic of a vanished age and fossilised revolution

By Rupert Cornwell
Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Undoubtedly Mr Castro would have liked nothing better, but physical frailty, it seems, has had the last word. But, as long as he lives, his shadow will fall over whoever succeeds him. And as long as Mr Castro draws breath, he will be a reminder of how little has changed in this corner of the world since Dwight Eisenhower – the 34th president and first on the Castro contemporaries list – bequeathed to his successor, John Kennedy, a secret plan to invade Cuba that resulted in the 1961 fiasco of the Bay of Pigs.

In his declining years Mr Castro has become, for better or worse, a listed global monument, a relic of the vanished age of Kennedy, Khrushchev and superpower brinkmanship, and of national liberation wars led by revolutionaries in dusty military fatigues. Nearly half a century on he is still wearing the fatigues, even though the revolution had fossilised into a regime sustained primarily by the economic siege imposed by Cuba's giant neighbour to the north.

In power since 1959, he has been the world's longest-serving ruler (although King Bhumibol Adulyade of Thailand, the head of state but not of government, has been around since 1946). The defining reality of the Castro era has been the regime's relations with the US, under leaders from Eisenhower to George Bush Jnr.

In fact, Mr Castro's first contact with an occupant of the White House was cordial enough, a letter the 13-year-old schoolboy sent to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, asking for a $10 bill. "Never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green American and I would like to have one of them," he wrote, signing off as "Your friend". In reply, Mr Castro received a pro-forma letter, but sadly no money – and for his ties with the US it was downhill all the way thereafter. Two decades later, his guerrilla army toppled the pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Cuba's undeclared war with Washington began.

Successive US administrations kept up the pressure, with the exception of Jimmy Carter. But that brief thaw ended with the Mariel boat lift of 1980, as Mr Castro encouraged a mass exodus by sea of 120,000 Cubans to the US (including many hardened criminals and people who were mentally ill) to cope with a domestic political crisis. Relations returned to a chill that not even the demise of the Soviet Union could lift. Under George Bush Jnr, who has further tightened travel and financial restrictions against the island, the climate has become frostier still.

The confrontation, however, leaves most rational outsiders baffled. What is it about Cuba, they wonder, that makes otherwise sane American leaders lose their own sense of reason?

After all, a country of 11 million people, with a GDP of $45bn dollars – equal to 0.3 per cent of that of the US – offers not the slightest conceivable security threat. To be sure, dilapidated Cuba is no benign socialist paradise. Thousands of opponents were executed in the early years of the revolution. Today, Mr Castro's regime holds large numbers of political prisoners, suppresses freedom of expression and otherwise tramples on human rights. But is it that much worse than other countries, from the Middle East to China, which Washington counts as allies? Yet Cuba alone is treated as a special enemy, a source of potential Communist contagion that endangers the hemisphere.

By one (admittedly sympathetic) calculation, Mr Castro has survived 638 assassination attempts by the CIA, by such devices as exploding cigars, poisoned food and an infected diving suit. Every year a farcical vote takes place in the United Nations General Assembly in which it declares its opposition to America's economic blockade of Cuba. The 2007 edition took place last October, when the resolution was upheld by 184 to four. Those voting against were the US, Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands. Oh yes, Micronesia abstained.

By any measure, the US embargo has been utterly counterproductive. Not only has it failed to hasten the demise of Mr Castro and the return of democracy. Most dispassionate observers believe the blockade has positively hindered those two goals, by hardening the sympathies of a strongly nationalistic people, and permitting Mr Castro to present himself as a victim of Yanqui imperialism. Quite possibly nothing would do more to undermine the regime than the lifting of all US sanctions.

There are other, wider consequences for the US, and no less adverse. Washington's bullying of Cuba has soured ties with many Latin American countries. It has also fuelled the growth of an anti-US bloc on the continent, spearheaded by Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, taunter of Washington and Mr Castro's most devoted foreign friend.

So will US policy now change? There is little immediate sign. Hopes were briefly raised when the Democrats regained control of Congress at the 2006 midterm elections, but those advocating a more liberal approach were disappointed. As for the Bush administration, it repeats the litany of the last quarter century: nothing will change until Cuba itself changes. The embargo, John Negroponte, the deputy Secretary of State, said yesterday, would not be lifted "anytime soon".

But President Bush, as noted, will not be around much longer, and among those vying to succeed him some intriguing policy differences have emerged. The standard wisdom has been that no candidate will stick his or her neck out over Cuba, for fear of upsetting Cuban-American voters, fiercely anti-Castro and concentrated in important states such as New Jersey and above all Florida, decisive in the 2000 presidential election.

But the political equation may be shifting. For one thing, the Cuban-American vote is less monolithic than before. For another, only the blind cannot see the absurdity of existing American policy. In a campaign where the lone superpower's attitude to countries it dislikes – most obviously, of course, Iran – is already being hotly debated, Cuba could yet feature large.

Predictably John McCain, the all-but-certain Republican nominee, is most resistant to a new departure. Mr Castro's resignation, he declared yesterday, was "an opportunity for Cuba" – in other words, only when Cuba has transformed itself should the US transform its policies.

Hillary Clinton adopted a similar, though more guarded, approach. But her rival, Barack Obama, is already on record in support of an easing of restrictions on travel and financial remittances to Cuba, insisting that the time for re-assessment has come. And maybe Mr Castro knows something the rest of us don't. As long ago as last August, he predicted that a Clinton-Obama ticket would be "apparently unbeatable".

I wish to fight on as a soldier of ideas

Dear compatriots,

I promised you on 15 February that in my next reflections I would touch on a subject of interest for many compatriots. This time that reflection takes the form of a message...

I held the honourable position of President for many years... I always exercised the necessary prerogatives to carry forward our revolutionary work with the support of the vast majority of the people.

Knowing about my critical state of health, many people overseas thought that my provisional resignation from the post of President of the Council of State on 31 July 2006, leaving it in the hands of the First Vice-President, Raul Castro, was definitive. Raul... and my other comrades in the party leadership and the state, were reluctant to think of me removed from my posts despite my precarious state of health...

Preparing the people for my psychological and political absence was my primary obligation... I never ceased to say we were dealing with a recuperation that was "not free from risk". My desire was always to carry out my duties until my final breath...

To my close compatriots... I tell you that I will not aspire to or accept... the post of President of the Council of State and commander-in-chief.

The path will always be difficult and will require the intelligent strength of all of us... "Be as prudent in success as you stand firm in adversity" is a principle that must not be forgotten. The adversary we must defeat is extremely strong, but we have kept him at bay for half a century.

I do not bid you farewell. My only wish is to fight as a soldier of ideas. I will continue to write under the title "Reflections of Comrade Fidel". It will be another weapon in the arsenal on which you will be able to count. Perhaps my voice will be heard. I will be careful.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/
adios-castro-fidel-is-a-relic-of-a-vanished-age-and-fossilised-revolution-784396.html

The Nation:
The History of Hope

by PETER DREIER

[posted online on February 19, 2008]

America seems to be holding its breath, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. The current presidential election may provide an answer.

Political campaigns don't ignite grassroots movements for change, but politicians, by their rhetoric and actions, can encourage or discourage people from joining crusades for social justice. They can give voice and lend credibility to people working for a better society.

In recent weeks, Hillary Clinton and some of her supporters have taken to criticizing Barack Obama for his charisma, his inspiring speeches and his campaign's boisterous rallies. "There's a big difference between us-speeches versus solutions," Clinton said February 14 in Ohio. "Talk versus action. You know, some people may think words are change. But you and I know better. Words are cheap."

The Clintonites say that Obama is peddling "false hopes." They suggest that the fervor of the crowds at his rallies is somehow "creepy," as though his followers are like a herd of sheep who would follow Obama off a cliff.

But Obama is clearly touching a nerve in America's body politic-a pent-up idealism that seeks not utopia but simply a more decent society. Obama can recite his list of policy prescriptions as well as, perhaps even better than, most politicians. But he also views this campaign as an opportunity to praise and promote the organizers and activists on the front lines of grassroots movements and to explain what it will take to bring about change. A onetime organizer himself, Obama knows that, if elected, his ability to reform healthcare, improve labor laws, tackle global warming and restore job security and living wages will depend, in large measure, on whether he can use his bully pulpit to mobilize public opinion and encourage Americans to battle powerful corporate interests and members of Congress who resist change.

Talking about the need to forge a new energy policy during a speech in Milwaukee on Saturday, Obama explained, "I know how hard it will be to bring about change. Exxon Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter. They don't want to give up their profits easily."

The dictionary defines "encourage" as "give hope to"-and that's an important role for a public official, including a President. In his 2002 book, A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future, New York University historian James Fraser examined the nation's history from the bottom up. He showed how ordinary people have achieved extraordinary things by mobilizing movements for change. But it is also true that at critical moments, a few Presidents-including Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson-embraced these movements and helped propel them forward.

Obama, who called his recent book The Audacity of Hope, understands this history. In his speech in Milwaukee, he challenged Clinton and others who accuse him of being what he termed a "hope-monger." His opponents, Obama said, think that "if you talk about hope, you must not have a clear view of reality."

Hope, Obama countered, is not "blind optimism" or "ignoring the challenges that stand in your way."

Obama explained that during his twenty years as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, state legislator and US senator, "I've won some good fights and I've also lost some fights because good intentions are not enough, when not fortified with political will and political power."

"Nothing in this country worthwhile has ever happened except when somebody somewhere was willing to hope," Obama insisted, reviewing the history of American movements for social justice, starting with the patriots who led the fight for independence from England.

"That is how workers won the right to organize against violence and intimidation. That's how women won the right to vote. That's how young people traveled south to march and to sit in and to be beaten, and some went to jail and some died for freedom's cause."

Change comes about, Obama said, by "imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, what did not seem possible before."

That's the lesson that Fraser recounts in A History of Hope. Starting with the revolutionaries of 1776, he shows how activists have built powerful rank-and-file movements through hard work and organization, guided by leaders who have combined empathy, political savvy and that elusive quality we call charisma.

Fraser examines the abolitionists who helped end slavery; the progressive housing and health reformers who fought slums, sweatshops and epidemic diseases in the early 1900s; the suffragists who battled to give women the vote; the labor unionists who fought for the eight- hour workday, better working conditions and living wages; the civil rights pioneers who helped dismantle Jim Crow; and the activists who since the 1960s have won hard-fought victories for environmental protection, women's equality, decent conditions for farmworkers and gay rights.

The activists who propelled these movements were a diverse group. They included middle-class reformers and upper-class do-gooders, working-class immigrants and family farmers, slaves and sharecroppers, clergy and journalists, Democrats and Republicans, socialists and socialites. What they shared was a strong belief that things should be better and that things could be better.

Abraham Lincoln was initially reluctant to divide the nation over the issue of slavery, but he eventually gave voice to the rising tide of abolitionism, a movement that had started decades earlier and was gaining momentum but could not succeed without an ally in the White House.

Woodrow Wilson was initially hostile to the women's suffrage movement. He was not happy at the sight of women picketing in front of the White House, a tactic designed to embarrass him. But eventually he changed his attitude, in part for political expedience and in part through a sincere change of heart, and spoke out in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in an address to the Senate. Women gained the right to vote in 1920 only after suffragists combined decades of dramatic protest (including hunger strikes and mass marches) with inside lobbying and appeals to the consciences of male legislators-some of whom were the husbands and fathers of the protesters.

In the 1930s, workers engaged in massive and illegal sit-down strikes in factories throughout the country. In Michigan-where workers had taken over a number of auto plants-a sympathetic governor, Democrat Frank Murphy, refused to allow the National Guard to eject the protesters even after they had defied an injunction to evacuate the factories. His mediating role helped end the strike on terms that provided a victory for the workers and their union.

President Franklin Roosevelt recognized that his ability to push New Deal legislation through Congress depended on the pressure generated by protesters. He once told a group of activists who sought his support for legislation, "You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it." As the protests escalated throughout the country, Roosevelt became more vocal, using his bully pulpit to lash out at big business and to promote workers' rights. Labor organizers felt confident in proclaiming, "FDR wants you to join the union." With Roosevelt setting the tone, and with allies like Senator Robert Wagner maneuvering in Congress, labor protests helped win legislation guaranteeing workers' right to organize, the minimum wage and the forty-hour week.

President John Kennedy was a hard-line cold warrior and ambivalent, at best, about the emerging civil rights movement. Despite this, his youth and his famous call to public service ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") inspired Americans, especially young people, to challenge the nation's racial status quo.

When Lyndon Johnson took office after JFK's assassination, few expected the Texan-a stalwart New Deal liberal but, like FDR and JFK, no civil rights crusader-to embrace the Rev. Martin Luther King and his followers. At the time, many Americans, including LBJ, viewed King as a dangerous radical. However, the willingness of activists to put their bodies on the line against fists and fire hoses tilted public opinion. The movement's civil disobedience, rallies and voter registration drives pricked Americans' conscience. These efforts were indispensable for changing how Americans viewed the plight of blacks and for putting the civil rights at the top of the nation's agenda. LBJ recognized that the nation's mood was changing. The civil rights activism transformed Johnson from a reluctant advocate to a powerful ally.

King and other civil rights leaders recognized that the movement needed Johnson to take up their cause, attract more attention and "close the deal" through legislation. King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the August 1963 March on Washington inspired the nation and symbolized the necessity of building a mass movement from the bottom up. LBJ's address to a joint session of Congress in March 1965-in which he used the phrase "We shall overcome" to urge support for the Voting Rights Act-put the President's stamp of approval on civil rights activism. Johnson said, "There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans-not as Democrats or Republicans. We are met here as Americans to solve that problem."

Not all Presidents rise to the occasion. Some straddle the fence, forgoing the opportunity to rally Americans around their better instincts. And some actively resist movements for justice, siding with the forces of bigotry and reaction.

Obama recognizes that some candidates and public officials engage in demagoguery: "I've seen how politicians can be used to make us afraid of each other. How fear can cloud our judgment. When suddenly we start scapegoating gay people, or immigrants, or people who don't look like us, or Muslims, because our own lives aren't going well."

And he clearly understands that as a candidate, and as President, he can give voice to those on the front lines of a grassroots movement trying to unite Americans around a common vision for positive change. "That's leadership," he told the enthusiastic crowd in Milwaukee last week.

Then Obama called on the crowd to "keep on marching, and organizing, and knocking on doors, and making phone calls." Yes, he was asking them to work on his campaign, but he was also encouraging them to see themselves as part of the long chain of change, the history of hope, that has often made the radical ideas of one generation the common sense of future generations.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/dreier

ZNet:
The Million Year War

By Tom Englehardt
Source: TomDispatch
February, 20 2008

Think of the top officials of the Bush administration as magicians when it comes to Iraq. Their top hats and tails may be worn and their act fraying, but it doesn't seem to matter. Their latest "abracadabra," the President's "surge strategy" of 2007, has still worked like a charm. They waved their magic wands, paid off and armed a bunch of former Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists (about 80,000 "concerned citizens," as the President likes to call them), and magically lowered "violence" in Iraq. Even more miraculously, they made a country that they had already turned into a cesspool and a slagheap - its capital now has a "lake" of sewage so large that it can be viewed "as a big black spot on Google Earth" - almost entirely disappear from view in the U.S.

Of course, what they needed to be effective was that classic adjunct to any magician's act, the perfect assistant. This has been a role long held, and still played with mysterious willingness, by the mainstream media. There are certainly many reporters in Iraq doing their jobs as best they can in difficult circumstances. When it comes to those who make the media decisions at home, however, they have practically clamored for the Bush administration to put them in a coffin-like box and saw it in half. Thanks to their news choices, Iraq has for months been whisked deep inside most papers and into the softest sections of network and cable news programs. Only one Iraq subject has gotten significant front-page attention: How much "success" has the President's surge strategy had?

Before confirmatory polls even arrived, the media had waved its own magic wand and declared that Americans had lost interest in Iraq. Certainly the media people had. The economy - with its subprime Hadithas and its market Abu Ghraibs - moved to center stage, yet links between the Bush administration's two trillion dollar war and a swooning economy were seldom considered. It mattered little that a recent Associated Press/Ipsos poll revealed a majority of Americans to be convinced that the most reasonable "stimulus" for the U.S. economy would be withdrawal from Iraq. A total of 68% of those polled believed such a move would help the economy.

Anyone tuning in to the nightly network news can now regularly go through a typical half-hour focused on Obamania, the faltering of the Clinton "machine," the Huckabee/McCain face-off on Republican Main Street, the latest nose-diving market, and the latest campus shooting without running across Iraq at all. Cable TV, radio news, newspapers - it makes little difference.

The News Coverage Index of the Project for Excellence in Journalism illustrates that point clearly. For the week of February 4-10, the category of "Iraq Homefront" barely squeaked into tenth place on its chart of the top-ten most heavily covered stories with 1% of the "newshole." First place went to "2008 Campaign" at 55%. "Events in Iraq" - that is, actual coverage of and from Iraq - didn't make it onto the list. (The week before, "Events in Iraq" managed to reach #6 with 2% of the newshole.)

True, you can go to Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, perhaps the best daily round-up of Iraqi mayhem and disaster on the Web, and you'll feel as if, like Alice, you had fallen down a rabbit hole into another universe. ("Two bombings shook Iraq Sunday morning. In the Misbah commercial center in the upscale Shiite Karrada district, a female suicide bomber detonated a belt bomb, killing 3 persons and wounding 10... About 100 members of the Awakening Council of Hilla Province have gone on strike to protest the killing of three of them by the U.S. military at Jurf al-Sakhr last Sunday, in what the Pentagon says was an accident... Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that officials in Baqubah are warning that as families are returning to the city, they could be forced right back out again, owing to sectarian tensions...") But how many Americans read Juan Cole every day... or any day?

On that media homefront, the Bush administration has been Houdini-esque. Left repeatedly locked in chains inside a booth full of water, George W. Bush continues to emerge to declare that things are going swimmingly in Iraq:

"...80,000 local citizens stepped up and said, we want to help patrol our own neighborhoods; we're sick and tired of violence and extremists. I'm not surprised that that happens. I believe Iraqi moms want the same thing that American moms want, and that is for their children to grow up in peace... The surge is working. I know some don't want to admit that, and I understand. But the terrorists understand the surge is working. Al Qaeda knows the surge is working..."

Having pulled the "surge" rabbit out of his hat - even stealing the very word out of the middle of "insurgent" - Bush then topped that trick by making Iraq go away for weeks, if not months, on end. Talk about success!

Forever and a Day

If you're wondering why in the world this matters - after all, won't the Democrats get us out of Iraq in 2009? - then you haven't come to grips with Bush's greatest magic trick of all. Though a lame-duck president sporting dismally low job-approval ratings, he continues to embed the U.S. in Iraq, while framing the issue of what to do there in such a way that any thought of a quick withdrawal has... Poof!... fled the scene.

Admittedly, somewhere between 57% and 64% of Americans, according to Rasmussen Reports, want all U.S. troops out of Iraq within a year. We're not talking here about just the "combat troops" which both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seem prepared to withdraw at a relatively stately pace. (Obama has suggested a 16-month schedule for removing them; Clinton has only indicated that she would start withdrawing some of them within 60 days of coming into office.) Combat troops, however, represent perhaps half of all U.S. military personnel in Iraq - and Republicans are already attacking even their withdrawal as cut-and-run-ism, if not outright treason.

Americans may not have noticed, but the policy that a large majority of them want is no longer part of polite discussion in Washington or on the campaign trail. The spectrum of opinion in the capital, among presidential candidates, and in the mainstream media ranges from Senator McCain's claim that even setting a date for withdrawal would be a sure recipe for "genocide" - and that's the responsible right - to those who want to depart, but not completely and not very quickly either. The party of "withdrawal" would still leave American troops behind for various activities. These would include the "training" of the Iraqi military. (No one ever asks why one side in Iraq needs endless years of "training" and "advice," while the other sides simply fight on fiercely.) In addition, troops might be left to guard our monstrous new embassy in Baghdad, or as an al-Qaeda-oriented strike force, or even to protect American security contractors like Blackwater.

Hard as it is for the audience to separate the mechanics of a magician's trickery from the illusion he creates, it's worth a try. Before the surge began in February 2007, as five combat brigades were dispatched mainly to Baghdad, there were perhaps 130,000 American forces in Iraq (as well as a large contingent of private security contractors - hired guns - running into the tens of thousands). The surge raised that military figure to more than 160,000.

The Bush administration's latest plans are to send home the five combat brigades, but not all the support troops that arrived with them, by the end of July. This will still leave troop levels above those of February 2007. At that point, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested only last week, the administration is likely to "pause" for at least one to three months to assess the situation. In other words, when Americans enter their polling places this November 4th, there will probably still be more troops in Iraq than at the beginning of 2007.

TIME Magazine typically put the matter this way:

"The pause, which could last up to several months, would be designed to ensure that the smaller U.S. footprint in Iraq doesn't embolden insurgents to reignite the civil war that ripped the country apart in 2006 and the first half of 2007."

That smaller footprint, however, will be marginally larger than the one that preceded the surge. So consider this a year-long draw-up, not a drawdown. In the meantime, though the mainstream media has hardly noticed, the Pentagon has been digging in. In the last year, it has continued to upgrade its massive bases in Iraq to the tune of billions of dollars. It has also brought in extra air power for an "air surge" that has barely been reported on here - and nobody in Washington or on the campaign trail, in the Oval Office or the Democratic Party, has been talking about drawing down that air surge, even though there has recently been a spate of incidents in which Iraqi civilians, and some of those "concerned citizens" backing American forces have died from U.S. air strikes.

The Bush administration is also quietly negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement with the weak Iraqi government inside Baghdad's Green Zone. It will legally entrench American forces on those mega-bases for years to come. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied that the administration was trying to bind a future president to Bush's Iraq policies. ("In short, nothing to be negotiated in the coming months will tie the hands of the next commander in chief, whomever he or she may be.") This, however, is obviously not the case. The agreement is also being carefully constructed to skirt the status of a "treaty," so that it will not have to be submitted to the Senate for ratification. All of this, in the grand tradition of Vice President Cheney, might be thought of as the Bush administration's embunkerment policy in Iraq.

In the surge year, when administration officials and top commanders speculated about withdrawal, they increasingly emphasized the Herculean task involved and the need to take the necessary time to carefully remove every last piece of military equipment in-country. "You're talking about not just U.S. soldiers, but millions of tons of contractor equipment that belongs to the United States government, and a variety of other things," Secretary of Defense Gates told Pentagon reporters last July. "This is a massive logistical undertaking whenever it takes place."

As TIME Magazine's Michael Duffy described it, included would be "a good portion of the entire U.S. inventory of tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, trucks and humvees... They are spread across 15 bases, 38 supply depots, 18 fuel-supply centers and 10 ammo dumps," not to speak of "dining halls, office buildings, vending machines, furniture, mobile latrines, computers, paper clips and acres of living quarters." Some top military commanders claimed that it would take up to 20 months just to get part of the American force out. More recently, it has been suggested that it would take "as many as 75 days" for each combat brigade and all its equipment to depart - and this would, of course, be done one brigade at a time.

When it comes to withdrawal, the highest priority now seems to be frugality in saving all U.S. property. In other words, as the Bush administration continues to dig in, each of its acts makes leaving ever more complicated.

If the subject at hand weren't so grim, this would be hilarious. An analogy might lie in an old joke: A boy murders his father and mother and then, arrested and brought to court, throws himself on the mercy of the judge as an orphan.

The administration that rashly invaded Iraq, used it as a laboratory for any cockamamie scheme that came to mind, and threw money away profligately in one of the more flagrantly corrupt enterprises in recent history, now wants us to believe that future planning for draw-downs or withdrawals must be based on the need to preserve whatever we brought - and are still bringing - into the country.

In the land the Bush administration "liberated," violence remains at a staggering daily level; electricity is a luxury; the national medical-care system has been largely destroyed; perhaps 4.5 million Iraqis have either fled the country or become internally displaced persons; approximately 70% lack access to clean water; and 4 million, according to the UN, don't know where their next meal is coming from. Yet, even with such a record before us, the logic of the moment in Washington and in the media remains clear: The last thing we should be doing is getting out of the country with any alacrity. After all, if we do, a disaster, a bloodbath, even genocide might happen.

Put another way, the most self-interested party in the "withdrawal" debate continues to set the terms of that debate. Imagine if, in football, the quarterback calling plays for his team also had the power to assess penalties, declare first downs, and decide whether a ball was caught in or out of bounds.

In the meantime, since the antiwar movement remains relatively moribund, there are no "out now" or "bring the troops home" chants ringing in the streets of our country. You have to look to the fringes for perfectly reasonable suggestions on getting out. Take Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, who wrote an essay, "Walking Away: The Least Bad Option," which you won't find in your local paper. To him, "walking away" would mean "a statement by the US government that it will withdraw all troops without exception and shut down all bases in Iraq within say six months of the date of announcement." He adds: "U.S. withdrawal would mark the first step on the long and difficult path to healing the United States of the sicknesses brought on by its imperial addiction, the first step in a painful effort to restore the good name of the United States in the world community."

Right now, however, any form of "walking away," itself a polite euphemism for retreat from a desperate stalemate or even a lost war, is off that "table" on which this administration has so often placed "all options." As a result, if either Clinton or Obama were to win the next election, enter office in January 2009, and follow his or her present plan - a relatively long period of drawdown not leading to full withdrawal - he or she would, within months, simply inherit the President's war. At that point, the present war supporters would turn on the new president with a ferocity the Democrats are incapable of mustering against the present one, attacking her or him as a cut-and-runner of the first order, even possibly even a traitor.

We Don't Do Permanent

Sen. John McCain made a small stir recently by saying that he doesn't care if American troops stay in Iraq "100 years" as long as "Americans are not being injured, harmed or killed." In fact, as Mother Jones' David Corn reported, the senator later elaborated on that statement, adding "a thousand years," "a million years." The President and various top administration officials have offered similar, if more restrained formulas, speaking vaguely of "years" in Iraq, or a "decade" or more in that country, or simply of the "Korea model," a reference to our garrisoning of the southern part of the Korean peninsula for well over half a century with no end yet in sight.

Of course, this administration has already built its state-of-the-art mega-bases in Iraq as well as a mega-embassy, the largest on the planet, to suit such dreams. Yet in April 2003, the month Baghdad fell to American forces, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first denied that the U.S. was seeking "permanent" bases in Iraq. Ever since then, administration officials have consistently denied that those increasingly permanent-looking mega-bases were "permanent."

Just the other day, the President again told Fox News, "We won't have permanent bases... [but] I do believe it is in our interests and the interests of the Iraqi people that we do enter into an agreement on how we are going to conduct ourselves over the next years." Dana Perino, White House press spokesperson, offered further clarification by indicating that we do not actually have permanent bases on Planet Earth, even in Korea more than half a century later. "I'm not aware," she said, "of any place in the world - where we have a base - that they are asking us to leave. And if they did, we would probably leave." (She made a singular exception for Guantanamo.)

Consider this a philosophic position. Evidently, we don't do permanent because all things are evanescent; everything must end. Where, after all, are the Seven Wonders of the World? Mostly gone, of course.

Such a position might be applied to far more than the permanency of bases. Let me offer two linked predictions based on impermanency:

As a start, the surge-followed-by-pause solution the Bush administration whipped up is a highly unstable, distinctly impermanent strategy. It was never meant to do much more than give Iraq enough of the look of quiescence that the President's war could be declared a modest "success" and passed on to the next president. It relies on a tenuous balancing of unstable, largely hostile forces in Iraq - of Sunni former insurgents and the Shiite followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, among others. It is unlikely to last even until the November presidential election.

And let's remember that those on the other side(s) are just as capable of reading drawdown - and election - schedules, of gauging weakness and strength, as we are. It's likely that by the fall the surge effect will have worn off - signs of this are already in the air - and Iraq will be creeping back onto front pages and to the top of the TV news.

Given that Senator McCain is so tightly linked to the surge's "success," as well as the war itself, he is likely to prove a far weaker Republican candidate than now generally imagined. Similarly, it may be far harder to Swift Boat the Democrats over Iraq by this fall - if, that is, the Democratic presidential candidate doesn't move so close to McCain on the war as to take the sting out of his situation. Already, as Gary Kamiya has written at Salon.com, the Democrats' "timid, Republican-lite approach to Iraq and the 'war on terror' has put the country to sleep... Indeed, polls show that the main reason the public has such a low opinion of Congress is that it failed to force Bush to change course in Iraq."

Iraq is a deeply alien land whose people were never going to accept being garrisoned by the military of a Western imperial power. It was always delusional to think that our situation there could be "enduring," no matter how many permanent-looking structures we built. It is no less delusional for Senator McCain to imagine a 100-year garrisoning - in fact, one of any length - in which Americans will not be "injured, harmed or killed."

The time for withdrawal from Iraq has long passed. In those endless years in which withdrawal didn't happen, the Bush administration definitively proved one thing: We are incapable of "solving" Iraq's problems, "building" a nation there, or preventing an endless string of horrific things from occurring. After all, it was under U.S. occupation and in the face of the overwhelming presence of American forces that Iraq devolved and massive ethnic cleansing occurred. It was during the months of the President's surge in 2007, with U.S. troops flooding the streets of the capital, that many of Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods were most definitively "cleansed."

It is a delusion to believe that the U.S. military is a force that stands between Iraqis and catastrophe. It is a significant part of the catastrophe and, as long as Washington is committed to any form of permanency (however euphemistically described), it cannot help but remain so.

Every day that passes, the Bush administration is digging us in further, even though surge commander General David Petraeus recently observed that "there is no light at the end of the tunnel that we're seeing." Every day that passes makes withdrawal that much harder and yet brings it ineradicably closer.

Getting out, when it comes, won't be elegant. That's a sure thing by now; but, honestly, you don't have to be a military specialist to know that, if we were determined to leave, it wouldn't take us forever and a day to do so. It isn't actually that hard to drive a combat brigade's equipment south to Kuwait. (And there's no reason to expect serious opposition from our Iraqis opponents, who overwhelmingly want us to depart.)

When withdrawal finally comes, the Iraqis will be the greatest losers. They will be left in a dismantled country. They deserve better. Perhaps an American administration determined to withdraw in all due haste could still muster the energy to offer better. But leave we must. All of us.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, where this article first appeared, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16570

coluichedubita

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Elsewhere Today 479

About Me

Links

Previous Posts

Archives