If nothing is successfully being rebuilt, where is all the money going? Oh. Of course. When the tsunami disaster hit southeast Asia last December, I had a sad thought. That sad thought was that the survivors of that tragedy, all those people who had lived along the coast in small villages, would never be able to rebuild their homes there. This would not happen because of safety concerns: this would happen because the disaster was an opportunity for multi-national corporations to demand choice property in exchange for a little 'assistance' in relocating people away from prime tourist beaches.

I was cynical, but I was correct. I didn't make the logical extension to other 'rebuilding' projects around the world, but I should have. Naomi Klein has. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (thenation.com, 4/14/05):

Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that 'almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding.' The dispatch could easily have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all of Bechtel's allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in an endless litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently blasted 'corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable' foreign contractors for 'squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid.' Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. 'The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims,' he wrote. 'Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced.'

But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, 'It's not reconstruction at all--it's about reshaping everything.' If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in
before the local population knows what hit them.

(Bold emphasis mine.) Klein is making a POSIWID connection - what is the purpose of the rebuilding system? Is it to rebuild things for locals, or for large entities to pocket large sums of disaster aid?

This is probably the single best article I've read on the profits of destruction. Not since I read a construction magazine article gloating about the lucrative contracts won by American countries to rebuild schools and hospitals US forces had bombed in the former Yugoslavia (!!!) have I read something this direct in connecting what I read in the paper with names of the big beneficiaries of the spoils of war.

If you read just one article about war profiteering this month, choose this one.

Elections!?! No, not that... Well, if they must. Yaaay, elections! That is my excessively short summary of what happened in Iraq earlier this year. But Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has a much more detailed report, which is worth reading in its entirety. Defeated by Democracy (www.fair.org, May/June 2005 issue of Extra!) details how the Bush Administration fought tooth and nail against elections, but eventually gave in. Here is an excerpt:

From the very start, the administration was determined to install its handpicked favorites in positions of power in Baghdad and to exclude Iraqis with broader public support. For nearly a year, it watched helplessly as that strategy gradually came unglued. Only after its preferred game-plan decisively collapsed - in the face of an armed Sunni insurgency, the popular rejection of U.S.-supported Iraqi exiles, and crucially, the threat of a massive Shiite uprising - did the Bush administration reluctantly bow to pressure from Islamists and allow a free vote.

This article is made extra-creepy by the quotes from pundits who had opposed democracy in Iraq - which they knew was unlikely to lead to a government friendly to US interests - suddenly claiming great victory for Bush in his massive concession to popular Iraqi demand.

It's fascinating. It's great to have this retrospective in one place, even with the creepy quotes. Go read this now.

When governments won't act: The Final Session of The World Tribunal on Iraq Begins in Istanbul (SF Bay Area Indymedia 6/24/05) (indybay.org) reports on citizen's groups assembling to hear testimony and decide what should be done about the crimes of war performed in Iraq.

This is symbolic, but also a very intriguing idea. What if people around the world were permitted to pass judgment on the occupation of Tibet by China? Or on the Chechan demand for a separate nation? Or on any number of current situations in which bully nations get their way unlawfully, merely because they are large? This was the idea behind the United Nations, but with the Security Council filled only with the big nations, and with the big nations willing to 'look the other way' at each others' indiscretions toward weaker countries, the system is rigged against democracy.

This is an idea worth thinking about.

Intermissions: There have been big gaps in my messages here, because so little has really changed. Am I surprised that American forces are abducting and torturing people, just like the despot they replaced? No. Am I thrilled that two of the three Iraqi groups turned out to vote for pro-fundamentalist parties who want the US out ASAP and religious-based law? No. Can I bear to read the daily death tolls? No. Is it thrilling that Americans, happy to claim the election as their sole victory, are now eager to wash their hands of the country and leave it in ruins, with a few massive military bases in place (complete with bowling alleys, apartments, movie theaters, and other things for US personnel only)?? Guess.

There are headlines enough of 'more of the same,' and so I've just been tagging those that have interested me, rather than trying to link to ALL of the major stories.

I'm tired of looking at what the warmongers achieved: war, death, ruin, hate, and hopelessness. It hurts.

*

Speaking of hurting, I finally had a chance to see the film Hotel Rwanda, about the genocide there. European colonizers chose to divide their subjects along imaginary ethnic lines, sowing division and playing favorites and encouraging intergroup exploitation. When they left (and at the time the movie is set in), the masses were able to act out their hatreds. When waves of retribution killings began, the US and other nations chose to do nothing. Millions died.

Now, the same conflict has spilled over into neighboring countries, and the US... doesn't care. The US government has been too busy denying that genocide is occurring in the Sudan to pay much attention. The US is also still pretending to be really upset about massacres Saddam Hussein engaged in during the Reagan Administration, even though at the time the US was eager to appease Iraq, and in response to the massacres only signed a UN resolution from condemning chemical weapons attacks generally, refusing to name Iraq (gwu.edu) or the specific, cruel massacres that come up so often in rhetoric now.

Also, the US doesn't seem too upset about Turkey doing bad things to Kurds: only the former Iraqi government's crimes seem worth attending to.

Having no credibility on humanitarian grounds, I'd like the phrase "humanitarian grounds" to simply stop appearing in reports on Iraq, lest the reporting be perceived as sarcasm.