What happens when governments ignore peaceful protests: serious, timely example

I feel a little slow for failing to have made this connection before, but I hadn't followed the pre-violent phase of this conflict closely enough. This is painfully timely: It's time to bring Najaf back home, by Naomi Klein (guardian.co.uk, 08/27/04). A few entries ago I discussed Arundhati Roy's observation that governments who spurn peaceful overtures "privilege violence," leaving people with an understanding that peaceful methods don't work, leaving only violence as an option. Read this:

Before Sadr's supporters began their uprising, they made their demands for elections and an end to occupation through sermons, peaceful protests and newspaper articles. US forces responded by shutting down their newspapers, firing on their demonstrations and bombing their neighbourhoods. It was only then that Mr Sadr went to war against the occupation.

Sadr. "Radical Shiite Cleric Sadr." THAT Sadr. He tried peaceful methods and was rebuffed. Oh. Well, that makes the situation a bit more clear, doesn't it?

*

Here's a flashback to a reference to Sadr's newspaper from April:

What has changed is that many Iraqis have decided that the peaceful road to evict the occupiers is not leading anywhere. They didn't need Sadr to tell them this. They were told it loudly and brutally a few days ago by a US Abraham tank, one of many facing unarmed and peaceful demonstrators not far from the infamous Saddam statue that was toppled a year ago. The tank crushed to death two peaceful demonstrators protesting against the closure of a Sadr newspaper by Paul Bremer, the self-declared champion of free speech in Iraq. The tragic irony wasn't lost on Iraqis.

This is from an Iraqi political exile (exilee?) in his April 9, 2004 Guardian piece, Iraqis told them to go from day one: Resistance will continue to spread until the occupation ends, by Sami Ramadani.

Another flashback: In quotes: Moqtada Sadr's fiery rhetoric (bbc.com, 06/06/04):

The cleric has always shied away from an outright call to violence, but urged his supporters to consider "other methods" in place of peaceful protest following the closure of his newspaper Al-Hawzah last week.

The following is a selection of recent quotes by him and his newspaper Al-Hawza:

Terrorise your enemies as we cannot remain silent at their violations. Otherwise, we will reach a stage when the consequences will be serious... I am concerned about you because demonstrations are useless... Your enemy loves terrorism and scorns nations and all Arabs. It seeks to silence the opinions of others. I appeal to you not to resort to demonstrations because they have become useless. You should resort to other methods.

Quoted by Iraqi web site Sharja Al-Khalij, 5 Apr 04

If you do a search for "Sadr + newspaper," other references come up to Sadr's paper, closed down by U.S. authorities. (This one gets to use variations of 'radical Shia' several times: Ban lifted on radical Shia paper: ([photo caption:] Radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr)... The interim Iraqi government has lifted the ban on a newspaper belonging to radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr....")

He may be radical; he may have views on women and secularism that I consider regressive... But does that mean his newspaper needed to be shut down and his peaceful followers killed? No.

*

Klein also observes what other reporters have remarked, but in the specific context of the Republican convention in New York:

What surprises me is what isn't here: Najaf. It's nowhere to be found. Every day, US bombs and tanks move closer to the sacred Imam Ali shrine, reportedly damaging outer walls and sending shrapnel flying into the courtyard; every day children are killed in their homes as US soldiers inflict collective punishment on the holy city; every day, more bodies are disturbed as US marines stomp through the Valley of Peace cemetery, their boots slipping into graves as they use tombstones for cover.

Sure, the fighting in Najaf makes the news, but not in any way connected to the election. Instead it's relegated to the status of a faraway intractable ethnic conflict, like Afghanistan, Sudan or Palestine. Even within the antiwar movement, the events in Najaf are barely visible. The 'handover' has worked: Iraq is becoming somebody else's problem. It's true that war is at the centre of the election campaign - just not the one in Iraq. The talk is all of what happened on Swift boats 35 years ago, not what is being dropped out of US AC-130 gunships this week.

The obsession with Vietnam is too accurate: it's the butt of jokes in Get Your War On comic strips and the articles on how Bush's election team are attacking Kerry's strengths to hide Bush's weaknesses ("Why Bush's man is fighting dirty: Bush's campaign mastermind has a simple rule: attack your opponent's strengths. As the polls show, it works," from Paul Harris, guardian.co.uk, 09/05/04.)

But that tells you how bad this war is going: the Republicans are making a fuss about a war Bush didn't even attend at their national political convention, rather than one he supervised as Commander in Chief.

Also from the Guardian on the Beslan tragedy: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'Restraint must be encouraged': The world's press considers how Putin should respond to the tragedy (guardian.co.uk, 09/05/04). This is a compilation of world press commentary on the disaster. Joan Smith of the Independent provided a list of actions which could lead to a safer Russia:

The international community needs to make up for its years of neglect by insisting on an urgent criminal investigation into who financed and planned [the siege], a commitment from the president to allow human rights monitors into Chechnya and a UN peacekeeping force to protect the civilian population from reprisals. This is unlikely to happen unless world leaders put maximum pressure on Russia ...

The crisis in the republic has created the conditions in which terrorism can flourish. Chechens have watched for years as Russian forces descended on their cities and villages, raping and murdering with impunity. As the slogans say on the walls of Grozny: Welcome to Hell, part two.

How novel: the idea that terrorism can be prevented through action and the rule of law!

Upon the tragedy in Belsan, Russia, in which a school exploded during a hostage siege initiated by Chechen separatists demanding indepdence, we get this: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | It's too easy to blame bin Laden by Jason Burke (guardian.co.uk, 09/05/04). Burke provides a look at the way oppressive governments can now claim that any group that opposes their policies is actually Al Queda, which engenders sympathy and military aid from abroad, but which obscures the cause of their own conflicts:

The idea that bin Laden is a global terrorist mastermind, able to engender violence worldwide, flatters him and helps in the competition with other terrorist outfits for recruits and funds. The benefits of myth-making are also clear to the Russians (and the Uzbeks, Filipinos and Algerians, to name but three serial human-rights abusing governments who constantly claim, disingenuously, that the insurgents that they are fighting in their respective lands are linked to 'al-Qaeda')....

Last week's atrocity was not the work of 'al-Qaeda'. It is a result however of the spread of 'al-Qaeda-ism' and, in particular, the ability of the radical new discourse to 'plug into' existing insurgencies, many of which were nationalist or ethnic to start with but have become Islamicised. By misrepresenting the problem, we make the solution harder to find.

This is an interesting warning to leaders that using the same bogeyman as the cause of all their ills won't solve their actual problems.

Well, the Pakistanis who complained that they were pressured to turn over Osama bin Laden during the Democratic convention haven't been making any exciting press releases since their failure to do so. So instead we have this: U.S. Near Seizing Bin Laden, Official Says (news.yahoo.com, 09/05/04). Joseph Cofer Black, U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, says:

What I tell people, I would be surprised but not necessarily shocked if we wake up tomorrow and he's been caught along with all his lieutenants. That can happen because of the programs and infrastructure in place.

Which has been in place for how long, exactly?

The costs of rejecting peace

I attended a speech by author Arundhati Roy recently. One of many interesting things she said was that governments that ignore peaceful requests from their people then 'privilege violence.'

It makes sense. When governments tell you that your peaceful demands mean nothing, what is left?

I've been thinking about this quite a bit and reviewing possible examples. If you were a set of 13 British colonies and you wished for independence (or a variety of reforms including representation in government), and the government laughed at your request, what does that tell you? It tells you that war, economic sabotage, and other tactics remain, because your rulers don't respect your peaceful request. The 13 colonies which became the United States engaged in civil disobedience (Boston Tea Party) and terrorism (going to war without wearing matching uniforms; fighting the war from cover, rather than marching in organized lines facing the enemy; engaging in sabotage and spying) to gain its independence. Because the U.S. eventually won, none of those tactics are described as terrorism in U.S. history books. Which is interesting, but which doesn't change their nature. The U.S. 'did what it had to do' to win independence, retroactively justifying any act.

[Roy notes that the Indian independence movement was not completely non-violent, as much as we'd like to believe it was.]

Currently and recently, if you look at disputes around the world, you see that Roy's words are painfully accurate. People in Uzbekistan who asked politely for a just system of governance have been executed, leaving only radicals who have seen the government rule out non-violent action from their list of options. In Iran, the U.S. chased out an elected leader, and replaced him with a king, who then killed off moderate, peaceful opposition members. This left radicals and violent people to figure out how to be rid of him. The country is STILL suffering from the rule of the radicals. Iraq? Hussein killed off his moderate opposition over time. Those who find themselves in opposition to the temporary government remember what they learned under Hussein. Israel constantly ignored both peaceful requests and international courts which ruled its actions unjust. If Israel ignores the law and ignores the peaceful, the groups oppressed by the Israeli government stop listening to their peaceful leaders, and turn to other options.

Those of us who believe in peaceful solutions are constantly being undermined by groups and governments who do not listen to peaceful solutions. Every time an authority rejects a peaceful demand, those moderates arguing for peaceful methods lose credibility with everyone on their side. And the list of options for resolution, ranging from peaceful to violent, loses a peaceful option. The list gets shorter.

We don't benefit from this. Only the violent on both sides gain, and gain only justifications for violent actions.

If governments were serious about stopping violence, including terrorism, they would listen to peaceful demands and provide procedures for requested changes to be made and for grievances to be addressed. The methods by which groups gain independence from their current rulers, for example, invariably lead to either violence to win freedom or government violence to suppress the demand for freedom. If a non-violent, internationally sanctioned method to acquire independence was available, groups would choose it. If they are given little or no choice between receiving violent suppression and engaging violent rebellion, it becomes morally difficult to challenge their choice.

The war in Iraq has been reduced to a topic of candidate debates by the major U.S. media recently. No matter that people are suffering and dying: there are political HAIRSTYLES to report on!

[Thank you, corporate media, for keeping us so well informed.]

I understand the corporate media's reluctance to discuss the war in retrospect often: it makes them look like, just maybe, they weren't doing their jobs.

There is an interesting interview on the Daily Show in which Stewart asks guest Blitzer if the corporate media's relentless insistence on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was 'group think or retardation.' Blitzer chooses the former (cough), and notes that all the OFFICIAL sources were saying it, so...

Blitzer was a good sport in light of the critical tone of Stewart's questioning. For a stenographer...

Interesting time to burst forth with this idea: Yahoo! News - Bush Suggests War on Terror Cannot Be Won (news.yahoo.com, 08/30/04).

Asked "Can we win?" Bush said, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

This is something of a change of position, wouldn't you say?

Radical cleric 'calls Iraq truce' (bbc.com, 8/30/04). Sadr's spokesmen have made television announcements that all members of the "Mehdi Army" should cease fire, except for self-defense.

Oddly, a few other spokesmen weren't sure whether or not the cease fire had started, and a "British source" had doubts. (Who cares about the British source??!?)

But on the bright side, a very ugly conflict may be averted, if the cease fire holds, if the U.S. doesn't deny hearing of it and attack anyway, etc.

Legal history at Guantanamo Bay has some notes about the opening of military tribunals in Cuba. The reporter's predictions about how long it will take for most of the inmates to even have that half-baked day in court isn't very upbeat.

While our government is trying to spread "democracy" abroad, it is squelching it at home. Jim Hightower's "Bush Zones Go National" (thenation.com, 08/16/04 issue) discusses how "free speech zones," and illegal suppression of free speech by government officials is increasingly becoming the norm in our previously free country.

One of the creepiest statements, which I have heard once before, comes at the end:

After peaceful antiwar protesters in Oakland were gassed and shot by local police, [Mike] van Winkle [, a spokesperson for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center] [Hightower's Note: I do not make up these names] explained the prevailing thinking of America's new, vast network of antiterrorist forces:

You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act. I've heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people.

There are a number of problems with Mr. van Winkle's logic. The most obvious problems are (1) that people protesting against the Iraq war were not protesting a war against "terrorism," because Iraq wasn't a terrorist state, and (2) "terrorism" is not a group of people, but rather is a tactic which cannot have war waged against it. [There is also that little, inconvenient notion that war is a form of terrorism, and so a protest against terrorism in the form of a war against terrorism isn't supporting terrorism. But that involves a lot of words, and may not be comprehensible to Mr. van Winkle.]

Under van Winkle's framework, Bush could declare a war on poverty, kill poor people, and anyone who protested would be labeled "in favor of poverty."

You see the problem with this. It's a word game that attempts to obscure the real cause of the problem through mislabeling. People who oppose WAR can be blamed for any nonsensical thing that the war purports to be about, regardless of whether or not the war is even about that topic. Which is what has occurred here in the U.S., but which is beyond the grasp of our simple-minded, with-us-no-matter-how-stupid-we-are-OR-with-the-evildoers leadership stupor.

*

Also according to this fascinating quote, something as simple as a boycott of a restaurant like Hooters can be a terrorist act. Regardless of the reason. Like, say, unpleasant food. Or sexist service. Or, anything.

That's insane.

Almost all of the civil rights movement, like the bus boycott, or the lunch counter protests, would be deemed terrorism now.

Perhaps that is intentional.

*

The labeling is ridiculous. The bastardization of language permeates everything, and the label "terrorist" is constantly misused. Entire nations are accused of supporting terrorism if they're not doing what we want them to. The same actions combined cooperation with the current U.S. Administration and its business allies prevents the 'terrorism' label from sticking. Our government and press aren't honest enough to note that repressive regimes we support should be so labeled.

*

I may have mentioned before that South Africa's old Apartheid government used bait-and-switch labeling tactics to tarnish its opponents. The government defined anyone who opposed white-supremacist Apartheid as a "Communist." So all the people, like Nelson Mandela, who worked for democracy were thus "Communists." This approach, and the fact that the Apartheid government was an undeserving ally of the U.S., contributed to the U.S. listing Mandela as a terrorist for more than two decades. While the Apartheid government, which killed people for the color of their skin, were NOT considered to be terroristic.

Apparently, American government officials are very simple-minded when it comes to labels. Which would be funny, if it were happening to someone else's government, far away, without WMDs or a will to invade sovereign nations for oil...

Images of Saddam Hussein Statue being toppled: still staged

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, my favorite media critic, reports that the L.A. times admits/confirms that the image of the Saddam statue being pulled down by jubilant Iraqis was staged by the U.S. military. In their August issue of Extra! Update (not yet on-line), they write:

The statue pulldown is described in an internal Army study, the Times reported, as one of many psychological operations maneuvers employed by the military. It was a Marine colonel who decided to topple the statue, and 'it was a quick thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.'

FAIR goes on to note that the New York Times now describes the incident retrospectively as having been performed by American Marines, but quotes contemporaneous reports from multiple papers that fell for it.

The original L.A. Times article on the subject is available at charge here: THE NATION; Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue; by David Zucchino. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jul 3, 2004. pg. A.28. Yes, page A28. From the abstract:

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel -- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that ...

Of course, Information Clearing House got this story right the first time back in April, 2003 in its analysis of the photos, waaaaay back when the mainstream press was wallowing in the alleged glory the images provided. I posted this link to my site on April 12, 2003, so I feel a bit ahead of the L.A. Times on this one.

Fun from tinyrevolution.com: "We Know He Knew They Knew, And So On" on Rumsfeld:

It's like a compulsion with Rumsfeld, isn't it? I'm waiting for him to go on Face the Nation and say:

RUMSFELD: Look, Saddam Hussein regime's lied. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It invaded countries under false pretenses, pretending it had to for its own national security. Worst of all, its Secretary of Defense is a deceitful man named Donald Rumsfeld. Yet the media will let him go on shows and lie repeatedly without challenging him. In fact, he's on Face the Nation this very second.

See also "What 'Everyone' Knew", about the embarrassing ranting of speakers at the Brookings Institution prior to the war about how false Iraq's claims about not having WMDs must be.

The transcripts are lots of fun to read now. Pollack and Kay seem to be holding a contest to see who can say the thing that will look the most embarrassing in hindsight.

This is also a great read.

Freedom of the embedded press only, please

If you haven't seen cops shooting at unarmed, small business-owning women in heels with crowd control weapons lately, you should watch the Indymedia documentary, The Miami Model, about the impact of the FTAA on local communities and the police brutality and tactics used against peaceful protesters. The documentary discusses the division of Florida's nearby black communities with freeways, police brutality against unarmed black men, shows the protests, and discusses how the local media giant's financial investment in the FTAA talks guaranteed that reporting on the protests would be dishonest.

These are the same protests where Democracy Now! staffers were arrested and shot with rubber bullets. I hadn't realized until watching the film that the police "embedded" reporters for the protests, and would not 'guarantee the safety of any unembbeded reporters.' Sound familiar? That explains this comment from Ana Nogueira after she describes being attacked by the police while she and peaceful demonstrators were dispersing:

Eventually they arrested us one by one. Again, as I said, they didn't know what to do with me. One officer seemed uncertain as to whether he should arrest me or not until the other officers around him said she's not with us, she's not with us, and they immediately arrested me.

Get embedded or get abused and arrested! The documentary interviews reporters, both embedded and non-embedded on the topic.

The entire film is available for viewing in Quicktime at the Miami Model link above, and by internet/mail order on the same page.

Last month I mentioned that This Modern World and other blogs were reporting on the abuse of Juveniles at Abu Ghraib.. Inexplicably, very little has been reported on the topic since.

But now that the official source for how to think about the war if you're the American media - namely, the Pentagon - is about to release a report acknowledging the abuse, it's okay to discuss it. Suddenly. Now that the Pentagon is choosing to leak the information. Iraqi Teens Abused at Abu Ghraib, Report Finds (washingtonpost.com, 08/24/04):

Earlier reports and photographs from the prison have indicated that unmuzzled military police dogs were used to intimidate detainees at Abu Ghraib, something the dog handlers have told investigators was sanctioned by top military intelligence officers there. But the new report, according to Pentagon sources, will show that MPs were using their animals to make juveniles -- as young as 15 years old -- urinate on themselves as part of a competition.

As before, there is word that this was the work of a few bad apples, and not a permissive and dehumanizing environment in which entire peoples have been wrongly classified as evil.

We can pretend we believe this. But it's difficult.

The report also acknowledges that some prisoners were hidden from visiting humanitarian organizations. Which had been mentioned previously, but is now being "officially acknowledged," so you are now permitted to think about it.

'Interesting opinion piece in the Post on the dismal drop in attitudes about the U.S. in Egypt, and the oversimplified and defensive responses of Americans to the world's disapproval: An About-Face on America by Philip Kennicott (washingtonpost.com, 08/24/04):

And in the course of these discussions, a new subgenus of American political commentary -- the 'Why do they hate us?' essay -- has been born. The answers, on this side of the debate, have been myriad. But ask that question in Egypt, and you don't get long, complex divagations about clashes of civilization or income disparity or the strangulation of civil society under repressive regimes. For the most part, you get one answer, over and over again, and with little variation. They hate us because of our policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

'It's very simple,' says Rashwan, of the Al-Ahram Center. 'Why don't you change your policy? Enforce one U.N. resolution against Israel, and you would gain trust. It would give people hope.'

There is a very interesting closing to this article about attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as earlier discussions about how things Americans consider part of their culture are now global and no longer associated with one nation exclusively. It's not happy, but have a read anyway.

Interesting: the U.S. seems to be able to provide very specific information on how many "insurgents" it has killed, but can NEVER provide ANY information on how many civilians have died.

Such selective knowledge doesn't get remarked upon much in the press.

*

Najaf faces fresh US attack: Smoke rises near the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, Fighting continues near to the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf (bbc.com, 08/23/04). "Large plumes of thick, black smoke have been seen rising close to a holy Shia shrine in the city of Najaf where militia fighters are holed up...."

Talks have ended; U.S. forces have been attacking since last night.

*

Reports on Sadr's forces, the Mehdi Army (bbc.com, 08/11/04) describe many of the fighters as "young and desperate Shia in Iraq's urban slums" rather than as political radicals. This has gotten some interesting play, but usually as an aside.

The idea that not everyone has benefitted from the occupation hasn't really been examined in the mainstream press.

(The idea that all Iraqis are NOT treated equally by every ruling government, foreign or domestic, is never critically discussed, either. It would aid international understanding of why some people loved Saddam Hussein and others hated him, and of why U.S. forces weren't greeted with flowers when they moved into Hussein's old palaces. We could use some added understanding...)

*

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Shia Iraq violence: Your reaction has a lot of interesting commentary from around the world on the current situation. (Note that the question is framed about violence by Shias, not by the U.S. military.) There's a VERY wide range of opinions, which makes it appear that many of the writers are getting wildly different information from those immediately before or after. I'm unsure if it's the news media's slants in different regions, or very selective listening/reading.

It's interesting to see the range of thoughts. It varies from 'Sadr is a terrorist' to 'Sadr is standing up to the corrupt U.S. puppet regime,' from 'he's a thug' to 'he's a thug, but he's defending our home,' to 'I blame everything on the Iranians,' to the curious spectacle of people from democratic countries calling for summary executions without trial to help move forward democratic reforms (!!).

A response I liked:

The answer is that not all Iraqis are the same. America is a friend to some and an enemy to others. Sadr himself is a friend to some Iraqis and a mortal enemy to others. In the end this situation is about power, not morality. Sadr wants a future for Iraq as a theocracy, preferably with himself in charge. Bush wants a future for Iraq as a state both friendly to and heavily influenced (if not actually controlled) by America. Neither side is particularly concerned how many innocent Iraqis are killed in the process. -- Colin Wright, UK

I don't like this report merely because it takes some middle-moderate position: I like it because it doesn't categorize any broad category of people as evil.

Based on what I've read, I suspect Sadr _is_ a thug, who is fighting a puppet government sponsored by a self-interested U.S. Administration bent on controlling other people's oil. Both sides are using violence and patriotic rhetoric to support their positions. Both sides are doing wrong: the U.S. doesn't belong there, and Sadr shouldn't monopolize a public shrine that doesn't belong to him (though I understand the purposes of the tactic). So no one comes out smelling great in this scenario.

I tend to be more critical of the U.S., because the U.S. shouldn't be there - if the U.S. wasn't there, this entire scenario wouldn't be occurring. There's no reason to be an anti-occupation insurgent if there's no occupation. If Sadr's group didn't believe in the puppet government, and the puppet government didn't have the option to force its will on its people with U.S. firepower, it's more likely a compromise could be reached, since the relative power available to the groups would be more symmetrical. Or the government could take the time to establish itself and then deal with its opposition as an actual representative government, which would give it legitimacy it currently lacks.

It appears, from the events at the government meeting intended to establish the next step in government, that many are concerned about Najaf and want Sadr's (or his supporter's) participation in government, even though many object to his methods. THAT is a democratic, inclusive sentiment. Unfortunately, it appears that the issue will be resolved through overwhelming U.S. force, rather than debate and ballots.

*

The main reason that the U.S. claims to be there, as a stabilizing force, doesn't seem to be working out convincingly. Instead, it is buttressing those that sympathize with its particular method of establishing 'order,' and violently clashing with those that don't. It aids collaborators, and shuns others. This is a traditional and logical tactic used by occupying powers, but it creates divisions and erodes the long-term credibility of occupied allies.

I don't think the U.S. intention is to taint its allies, but it's happening.

The U.S. needs to get out.

Glimmer of hope in Najaf: Delegation Arrives in Najaf to Meet With Sadr (washingtonpost.com, 08/17/04). Iraqis sympathetic to the situation the people of Najaf find themselves in, and hoping to prevent a bloodbath, refocused the national conference on the siege of Najaf. They've drafted a document proposing amnesty for Sadr's militia, turning Sadr's group into a legitimate political party, and ending the standoff at the Imam Ali Mosque, returning it to common Iraqi use rather than the exclusive use of Sadr's group.

Contrast this with the interim figurehead Allawi's 'whatever the U.S. wants is fine' position.

I don't think I previously posted a link to this: IRAQI WAR CASUALTIES, 3/21 - 7/31/03. Raed Jarrar, Director of this survey, is the same Raed that Salam Pax, 'the Baghdad Blogger,' was writing to when he titled his blog "dearraed.blogspot.com." (Pax is on a "hiatus" to edit a film.)

The Baghdad Burning blog pointed me back to that link. River doesn't make the current situation sound any better than today's other reading has...

More news which suggests the U.S. isn't making much progress on winning over people by attacking Najaf: Aljazeera.Net - Iraqi 'human shields' flock to Najaf (english.aljazeera.net, 08/16/04): "Around 2000 Iraqi civilian 'volunteers' have formed a human shield around Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf as US-led forces beseige the city."

Aljazeera.Net - Najaf officials quit in protest (english.aljazeera.net, 08/13/04):

Sixteen of Najaf's 30-member provincial council resigned in protest at the US-led assault on [] Najaf.... The council's resignations came several hours after the deputy governor of Najaf resigned in protest against the US offensive on the city.... On Thursday evening, the director of tribal affairs at the Iraqi Interior ministry announced his resignation through Aljazeera and said he could no longer work with the interim government in good faith given the "carnage and barbaric aggression of the US-led forces in Najaf."

This doesn't bode well.

Understatement of the day, from Informed Comment : 08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004:

I think the Americans are gradually incurring feuds with all the major clans of Iraq, and this is undesirable.

Voices in the Wilderness is alarmed that the U.S. "has told civilians to leave Najaf, in what appears to be the creation of a free fire zone, where anyone who moves becomes a target." This is near the the Imam Ali Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam (both Shia and Sunni).

It sounds like something very bad is about to happen.

*

This audio file discusses the Imam Ali Mosque in more detail: NPR : Najaf's Holy Shiite Mosque and the 'Valley of Peace' (www.npr.org, 08/12/04). It is an interview with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan.

Professor Cole maintains an excellent blog called Informed Comment at juancole.com. Excerpt from his 08/16/04 entries:

Likewise, CNN appears to have been the victim of a second-hand psy-ops campaign, insofar as it is referring to the guerrillas as "anti-Iraqi forces." The idea of characterizing them not as anti-American or anti-regime but "anti-Iraq" was, according to journalist Nir Rosen, come up with by a PR company contracting in Iraq. Nir says that they were told that no Iraqis would fall for it. So apparently it has now been retailed to major American news programs, on the theory that the American public is congenitally stupid.

I liked that comment for obvious reasons, but this one is even better:

The Allawi government forced all independent journalists to leave Najaf on Sunday, so that the only reporting we will have on operations there will come from journalists embedded with the US forces.

This week I watched the documentary film Control Room, which was filmed during the Iraq war. It provides an inside view of Al Jazeera, the most popular satellite channel in the Arab world, as it broadcast from U.S. Central Command.

The Bush Administration LOATHES Al Jazeera. The documentary provides clip after clip of Donald Rumsfeld, ranting, including a rant about how Al Jazeera must be planting women and children in front of homes bombed by U.S. air strikes to actually imply that women and children live in such homes in Iraq. Really. He said that. There's video. It's just amazing.

So it's worthwhile to see how the war looked from the people who worked at and ran the station that Rumsfeld (not the most credible person in the Bush Administration) loves to hate.

News flash: Arab people work there! And they have opinions! This includes those people who consider themselves to be or to have been Iraqis! THAT, in and of itself, is almost completely lacking from American reporting: what Iraqis thought about the war. (Aside from Ahmed Chalabi. (wikipedia.org) And he doesn't really count.) One reporter, who has a 'western' wife and previously worked for the BBC, tries to spread comprehension, using his experience in 'western' and Islamic cultures to explain to a young, go-team military official what the actual perception of U.S. actions is in the Arab world.

A senior manager of Al Jazeera is interviewed extensively. He comes across as somewhat arrogant, but provides some very interesting commentary. He remarked, for example, that once the war is 'won,' the details of exactly how it was 'won' will be shunted aside. History will be reduced solely to the fact of victory, and everyone will rush on to the next topic.

*

My partner reminded me of my favorite John Madden quote, "Winning is the best deodorant." Madden meant it in a sport context, but it certainly applies here. Prior to the U.S. war in Vietnam (which the Vietnamese call 'the American War'), there was a generic assumption that all wars were won cleanly and fairly by the victor -- that famous truism about victors writing the history books notwithstanding. I've been waiting for the modern mass media, and especially the use of video, to change that.

I don't think I fully comprehended the nationalism of the available media outlets, however.

*

'Control Room' provides a valuable point of view, and is worth seeing.

While the previous TMW link provides a link to the Washington Post article that inspired it's excellent diatribe, I should provide a link as well:The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story by Howard Kurtz (washingtonpost.com, 08/12/04), along with my personal favorite quote:

'We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power,' DeYoung said. 'If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said.' And if contrary arguments are put 'in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far.'

Must read: This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow: August 08, 2004 - August 14, 2004 Archives entry entitled "No shit, Sherlock" on another media company's belated revelation that they shouldn't have been such zealous cheerleaders in the run up to the war based on untrue information.

There is strong language for well-deserved emphasis.

Favorite comment: " ...[the parrot-like media is] desperately afraid of being labeled 'unpatriotic' by a handful of fringe lunatics who not only don't deserve the attention they get, but in a sane world, would not deserve to be pissed upon if they were on fire."

It's intended as a sinister image, but I find it aesthetically pleasing: BBC's illustration for "US moves to crush Shia uprising". (bbc.com, 08/12/04).

The rocket propelled grenade gracefully echos the shape of the dome and minaret.

This Modern World (08/08/04): "Using the threat of terrorism to scare voters: all of September will be 'National Preparedness Month'":

It's three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.

And yes, let's ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?

Here's an excellent item that I failed to publish when it appeared back in mid-May: The Moral Case Against the Iraq War by Paul Savoy (thenation.com, 05/13/04), on the topic of belated rationalizations for the invasion of Iraq:

Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being 'better off' avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war. As the late Robert Nozick cautioned in his classic work on the moral basis of freedom, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, we should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.

(If you have an account with the Onion for "premium" services, see also "Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy", theonion.com, 03/26/03.)

When does a foreign government have the right to decided that YOUR death is an acceptable price for what it believes is the best interests of your fellow citizens in a sovereign nation? Never, obviously.

The article picks apart several of the pseudo-humanitarian war justifications belatedly asserted. It's worth a read.

Another excerpt from War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning on that last comment about history:

Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as lie. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the lie that led to it.

It's just a darned good book.

As if history was made to be forgotten, not learned from

Several years ago, I read a great book by historian Gerda Lerner called Why History Matters. One of the intriguing chapters dealt with the historical revisionism that the Nazis engaged in after their rise to power. The story they were trying to sell the German people, of their hidden greatness and their culture's sabotage by outside forces, didn't mesh with available historical information. So the Nazis had to revise all the school textbooks to take out all the foreigners and German Jewish citizens who had contributed to the greatness of their culture. Through such purges, they were able to sell people on their story more completely.

The story gave me flashbacks to architecture history, in which Egyptian kings of the later eras had the names of their predecessors carved out of the monuments documenting their accomplishments, and replaced them with their own. Or of the Spaniards reaching the new world and burning the written Codices of the locals, and then insisting that the locals had no culture or civilizations because they had no books, a "problem" which the Spaniards could fix... by supplying books about how great the Spaniards are, while depriving the locals of means to recall their independence with historical detail.

History gives you legitimacy. We are here! We have been here! Textbooks in the U.S. are a political battleground for legitimacy: the groups that are overrepresented don't want to give up the space they monopolize, because it might give too much legitimacy to other groups who share this country. I bet you can tell me lots of details about the individual wealthy early leaders of the country, but have no idea how many native persons were already on this land at about that time.

Shaping history for self-serving ends works. We're told what's important in all media. We believe it. Less well documented truths are fuzzy, not widely enough shared to be jointly discussed and recalled, and don't take hold in debates.

*

This seems like a long tangent, and it is. But it's also about the denial of history required to believe in war.

This morning I read Howard Zinn's essay, Artists in Times of War, about how people who often think independently and creatively often manage to resist the groupthink of wartime hysteria. This wartime hysteria requires a denial of history: toss out the bad and ambiguous parts and insist that one's home nation is the good victim of an evil villain, regardless of circumstances. As a good victim, our nation can engage in retributory actions which would only be evil if others so acted.

I've marveled several times at quotes from my fellow Americans which verged on completely senseless: comments about how other nations couldn't understand what we went through on September 11th, because no one else had ever suffered a serious terrorist attack. !?!?

Each time I've heard such opinions through the mainstream media, such comments are accepted completely, adding to the lack of connection to history. Plenty of other nations have suffered terrorism. Plenty of other nations have suffered, even at the hands of the U.S.! But the mass media plays into the new game, failing to provide context. They don't mention other attacks. They don't mention other nations, except as potential attackers. There is no history.

*

Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy, and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates from the Shah of Iran to the Congolese dictator Joseph Désiré Mobotu... We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.

-- Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Hedges, a war correspondent, reflects on how individuals and nations twist history to make themselves look better and justify evil acts. He does a depressing, persuasive job in arguing that the nationalism just beneath the surface of most citizens could bring us to commit atrocities against innocents at the drop of a hat. In a fit of emotion, we could believe anything good about ourselves and anything bad about others, high on a shallow unity of panic which will leave us feeling alone and desperate to forget how dirty our hands are the moment the conflict of the day ends. His comments on the textbooks of recently warring nations, and the twisted, self-serving versions of events that makes them conflict with each other, shouldn't be surprising, but it is.

It's a good, yet discouraging read.

Context

The U.S. is still facing credibility problems abroad that it doesn't suffer at home, in its statements about wishing to liberate the Iraqi people to bring them freedom and democracy. A lot of this credibility gap isn't based on wacky information that the rest of the world is getting: rather, the gap would be narrower on the domestic side if Americans had any idea of the United States' support of non-democratic, non-liberating regimes throughout recent history.

The BBC's brilliant feature "Iraq: Conflict in Context" provides fabulous links and articles on the region's history and U.S. involvement there. This history is not well known to most Americans.

BBC - History - Crusades and Jihads in Postcolonial Times, by Dr. S. Sayyid tells us this:

The United States has tried to exert control by using regional powers such as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as its proxies. By relying on these proxies the US has often become involved in the internal politics of these countries. US support has often increased the coercive resources available to the ruling elites of these countries while at the same time it has also tended to undermine the legitimacy of these regimes.

Thus, these regimes have to place a greater reliance on coercion - which further undermines the legitimacy of the ruling elites... It is this cycle of declining legitimacy and increasing repression that plagues the political order in the Middle East. Within this context political groups seek to close the gap between rulers and ruled by making rulers more accountable, and find themselves facing a repressive machinery that is often supported by western powers.

Those who have survived the U.S.' support for undemocratic regimes are unlikely to believe mere language invoking liberation. There just hasn't been enough evidence of it, and so the words are reduced to vague rhetoric. If freedom, liberty, and democracy are TRULY American values, our history in the region would have demonstrated this.

American actions have NOT demonstrated this.

The history of western powers demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to have democracy at home and exercise tyranny aboard. Both France and Britain maintained relatively free 'democratic' societies while exercising authoritarian control over their imperial possessions.

Americans, who experience significant freedom, assume inappropriately that their experience of American power is shared by others abroad. A conceptual gap exists in their experience.

Part of the reason the U.S. says one thing about freedom and democracy and does another, according to Dr. Sayyid, is that Americans cannot overcome our historical mythology that insists that we are the bearers of civilization, and that anyone else is barbaric. Many cultures suffer from this sort of egoism. But the United States is enforcing this belief with its military and intelligence services, deciding that the freedom of [barbaric] others is unimportant relative to U.S. interests. Our papers read this way daily, influencing the thoughts of ordinary citizens who might not come to such conclusions on their own.

This is a great article: I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism....

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

----Lt. General William Odom (Ret.), U.S. Army

This sensible quote is from Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9-11 by Nancy Snow. Snow's latest book, part of the Seven Stories Press Open Media Series of compact, concise books on vitally important topics, is a treasure. She cites voluminous source material to examine how propaganda has historically been used, and is currently being used by the corporate media in support of its owners' interests. The use of language to hide dissent and distort reality to create a docile populace during war is amazingly important right now, and we all need to be media-literate enough to know when we are being manipuated. Her dissection of commentary is graceful and sharp.

Her website is also an excellent and highly recommended resource for information on information manipulation.

You ARE reading the Thismodernworld.com blog every few days, aren't you? If you aren't, you must. It is ALWAYS full of intriguing news.

For example, this entry quotes from a Financial Times article which reports that Pakistani officials see no justification for the Orange Alert in the U.S. based on persons they have in custody, though the Pakistanis are being used as justification for the alerts.

Another recent entry cites The Secret File of Abu Ghraib: New classified documents implicate U.S. forces in rape and sodomy of Iraqi prisoners, by Osha Gray Davidson in Rolling Stone. While the title discusses more of the graphic abuses, day-to-day conditions were inhumane:

The prison was filled far beyond capacity. Some 7,000 prisoners were jammed into Abu Ghraib, a complex erected to hold no more than 4,000 detainees. Prisoners were held in canvas tents that became ovens in the summer heat and filled with rain in the cold winter. One report found that the compound "is covered with mud and many prisoner tents are close to being under water." ....

In a series of increasingly desperate e-mails sent to his higher-ups, Maj. David DiNenna of the 320th MP Battalion reported that food delivered by private contractors was often inedible. "At least three to four times a week, the food cannot be served because it has bugs," DiNenna reported. "Today an entire compound of 500 prisoners could not be fed due to bugs and dirt in the food." Four days later, DiNenna sent another e-mail marked "URGENT URGENT URGENT!!!!!!!!" He reported that "for the past two days prisoners have been vomiting after they eat."

The fact that this officer kept requesting assistance and had it ignored suggests that correcting the deplorable conditions were not a priority for anyone above him. Or, that these deplorable conditions were desirable and/or intentional. Which is worse.

And it's not just that the citations to other materials are great: TMW has great commentary of its own. See Bush manipulates the war for his own gain. Again.

Read it often! I had a link prior to my page formatting change: I'll (eventually) get this omission from the new format corrected.

[Week+ vacation interruption in posting. Posting will resume shortly.]

A Ted Rall comic points out that there are lots of people to feel sorry for.

Independent Media Center | www.indymedia.org | ((( i ))) "The Fightback Begins" has some reporting on the state of freedom here in the U.S. during the political conventions, which is a good indicator of the freedom and liberty our government always purports to be fighting for:

The summer is heating up as the Democratic National Convention(DNC) and the Republican National Convention(RNC) approach. Activists are being harassed in New York, Boston and the Midwest, but they continue to organize.

The police are doing their best to create a climate of fear in Boston, blanketing the city with surveillance cameras, preparing to arrest 2500 people, conducting random searches of passengers on public transportation and trying to make protesters gather in a "free-speech zone." The FBI is even claiming that a "domestic extremist group" is planning to attack news trucks. But local activists refuse to be cowed.

Anti-DNC action kicks off July 23 with the Boston Social Forum and continues with a "unwelcoming party", direct action and the "Really Really Democratic Bazaar."

Meanwhile, in New York, the NY Daily News ran an unsubstantiated front-pagestory claiming that "internet-using anarchists" are planning to cause chaos by fool bomb-sniffing dogs at Penn Station and major organizer United for Peace and Justice has been forced to hold their August 29 rally on the West Side Highway, instead of Central Park. But Still We Rise and the Poor People?s Economic Human Rights Campaign are still holding large demonstrations on August 30, the day of direct action is still (tenatively) planned for August 31 and various speaks-outs and conferences are still going ahead.

Live links and commentary (including lots of 'hey, you people, DO something!' and 'nothing can be done!' writing, which is always entertaining) at the link above.

Something that tickled me, which I forgot to post earlier: A Tiny Revolution: More Terrifying Funniness on the topic of the forged Niger uranium documents, which the CIA had to send to the State Department for Translation:

The documents are in French. So... does this mean the CIA doesn't have any translators who SPEAK FRENCH? I mean, I realize French is an incredibly exotic, traitorous language that's only taught in 90% of the high schools in America. And like everyone, I'm offended when foreigners insist on making those guttural, non-English sounds they call their 'language.' Nonetheless, it seems to me the CIA might take some of those tens of billions of dollars they spend every year and hire people who speak the languages used by the others who inhabit this planet. Just because it's like, you know, the very most basic part of their job.

I should link you to tinyrevolution.com more often - good stuff. A little humor makes our dire world situation a little easier to contemplate.

A Tiny Revolution: The Autonomous Republic of Charlie Brownistan has some good points to make about the U.S.'s treatment of the Kurds, the Bush Administration's favorite victims of Saddam Hussein when it's convenient, and an ignored group when they inconveniently want rights. "By my count, we're now working on our sixth betrayal of the Kurds since World War I...." Check out both this page, its cartoon, and the comments.

The always worthwhile column by Gomez at sfgate.com has some interesting quotes from the foreign press on the background of the interim leader of Iraq. WORLD VIEWS: Aussie journo alleges that new Iraqi prime minister shot prisoners down (sfgate.com, 07/22/04) deals with a report from Australia that the leader executed detained insurgents. Quotes about this man's past from sources selected by Gomez are intriguing. Samples:

"The immediate question is how did Allawi, who helped install Saddam Hussein, become the White House choice to lead this benighted country into freedom and democracy." [Greens leader Bob Brown of Australia]

"Allawi, a former hit man for the Saddam regime, has shown signs of flexing his power under the interim constitution to its limits and [of] breaking out of U.S. control.'"

Interesting, yes? There's more at wikipedia's biography page for Mr. Allawi, in which we learn that he was a member of the CIA-supported group that provided arguments that Iraq had WMDs, and of how he passed his time in exile:

Some have reported this as an exile, but some of Allawi's old counterparts have claimed that he continued to serve the Baath Party, and the Iraqi secret police, searching out enemies of the regime. During this time he was president of the Iraqi Student Union in Europe. Seymour Hersh quotes former CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro: "[...] Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London [...] he was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." A Middle Eastern diplomat confirmed that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that killed Baath Party dissenters in Europe. However, he resigned from the Baath party for undisclosed reasons in 1975.

Oh my. Read the entire entry, especially for the entertaining characterization of the "45 minute" WMD claim, which Allawi was involved in passing along.

Election Observers are only for despotic regimes! Oh, wait...

I know I made much of the article about postponing U.S. elections at the discretion of the Homeland Security team. There's other stuff I made much of to my friends, but failed to post here.

Introduction: Congresswoman Corrine Brown in Jacksonville after Censure (firstcoastnews.com)

The argument started during a debate over HR-4818. The bill would provide international monitoring of the November presidential election. Congress has been considering an outside monitor due to all the confusion over the last election, and the "hanging chads" in Florida.

Representative Brown said, "I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Over and over again after the election when you stole the election, you came back here and said get over it. No we're not going to get over it and we want verification from the world."

Those comments drew an immediate objection from Republican members of the House. Leaders moved to strike her comments from the record. The House also censured Brown which kept her from talking on the House floor for the rest of the day.

Related Story: This Modern World's "Unpopular juntas never like UN observers" from July 16, 2004, proves additional comments on events surrounding Representative Brown's censure. Her district had 27,000 ballots discounted in the 2000 election, and she doesn't want her constituents disenfranchised again.

The backstory: about a dozen members of Congress, including several leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, recently called for UN observers to verify American elections, given the hanky-panky we all know is coming.

The ruling junta, displaying their usual integrity, promptly produced a bill forbidding any such thing, shouted the Congresswoman down when she wouldn't just Go F*ck Herself™, censured her, and then had her comments stricken from the Congressional Record.

Nice "democracy" we got here.

And the bill: From the Library of Congress (if this link doesn't work, search thomas.loc.gov for HR-4818):

H.R.4818

Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2005 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)

---

PROHIBITION ON USE OF FUNDS TO REQUEST THE UNITED NATIONS TO ASSESS THE VALIDITY OF ELECTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

SEC. 579. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by any official of the United States Government to request the United Nations to assess the validity of elections in the United States.

In a country where we're supposed to allow the government to read our medical and library records because "we have nothing to hide," the government took time out from its business to pass a law saying that observers can't watch our allegedly fair and free elections?!? That bodes ill...

Name Calling Oh no, it's happening again. The New York Times article, 25 Rebels Are Killed in Daylong Firefight in Iraq, U.S. Says (nytimes.com, 7/22/04), uses the phrase "the hardline Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi."

Roll that over your tongue a few times. "the hardline Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi." The CITY is hardline? Everyone in the City? The municipal water system is hardline? The schools?

Have you ever heard any city in the U.S. described as "hardline" or "fundamentalist" or "radical?" After the tragic Oklahoma City federal building bombing, no one said that McVeigh was from "the hardline, separatist, militant state of Montana."

No one said that, because here in the U.S., we're all considered to be individuals. No matter how fringe some American like, say, Pat Robertson is, you'll never hear the mainstream press refer to him as "extreme Christian fundamentalist Robertson." (At least, you won't hear that kind of language about white guys, the dominant minority.) And you won't hear his town described by the same terms.

*

We dimly understand here that our cities, towns, states, and regions are populated by individuals. Even if we characterize them broadly ("red" states vs. "blue" states), the labels are general and imprecise.

[Note to non-US readers: in the last presidential election, states were labeled either "red" and "blue" depending on which party won the state's electoral votes in our indirect election system. Many of the states were won by single-digit electoral victories, but the whole state was still presented as having been just one color. We've just let oversimplified graphics dictate our reality in terms of thinking of the people in those states, which have never been purely 'red' or 'blue.']

But foreigners are treated as caricatures. They're all the same. They're good or evil -- there are no shades of gray. They all deserve the same fate. It's RIDICULOUS to think this way. But how else can you characterize the population of a major city in one swoop as "hardline?"

*

Not by our hearts
will we allow whole peoples
or countries to be deemed evil.
--Not in Our Name Pledge of Resistance

*

Compare your search engine results for "extremist Christian" (972 right now) to "radical Shiite cleric" (12,600 hits).

["Radical Christian" is a brand name and a positive term, so it's not comparable for searching purposes.]

Now matter how extreme we are, we're okay, and subject to nearly polite treatment in the press, unless our last name is Clinton or we're black and have been convicted of something. But everyone else is open to some very rude characterizations.

*

You're thinking, Yes, but these are special circumstances! The people being rudely characterized are SHOOTING Americans! I remember that rash of school massacres here in the U.S. They all turned out to be perpetrated by suburban white boys, but even in that circumstance the killers were bestowed with individualism. Which is why you didn't read headlines like "Radical Violent Caucasian Males Terrorize Suburban Schools Nationwide." They were still all treated as individuals - and they were killing Americans, mostly KIDS, many of them GIRLS.

Yeah, but that's us killing our own. That's different, you might say.

Not really. All of these things are political. Teenage gun toting killers really shouldn't be treated with so much more respect than foreign rebels who believe they're defending their homes and families. We shouldn't give outrageous labels to foreigners, while coddling our own domestic killers. It gives us a distorted perception of the world.

It's bad enough that I was almost ready to believe that certain rebel leaders in Iraq actually had the official title "radical Shiite cleric." I never heard their names without that phrase. Which is ridiculous.

There are a couple of odd parts in a discussion of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was given command of Iraq last June, and whose career was ruined by the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. The Military: The General Departs, With a Scandal to Ponder (nytimes.com, 07/22/04). This is the first odd part:

'One of my former commanders, a good friend, a mentor, instilled in me very early on that there's probably a minority of your soldiers - he used the number 10 percent- that can be criminals, that the only reason they manage to stay in line is because of the training and the discipline and the leadership that is provided by our institution,' he said.

'And if you don't provide them that, they'll walk away, and they'll revert back to that instinct of being criminals.'

I suppose he's saying that the 'few bad apples theory as applied to prison scandals' has some basis, but it also is a strange admission that the folks representing the U.S. in the occupation aren't all apple-pie serving ambassadors, as has been suggested zealously post-scandal.

The other odd comment:

But the general rejected any suggestion that he deserved sympathy. "I've never seen this as something that those kids did to me,'' he said, referring to the soldiers implicated in the abuse. "I have looked at those events as something that happened to my country, and to my Army, and it is going to be our country and our Army that has to recover.''

I'm pretty sure the Iraqis believe that the prison abuse is something that happened to THEIR country.

*

But, in respects which haven't been frequently discussed, Sanchez is right. This war is something that has "happened" to the U.S. (as a result of U.S. actions), and has had a huge negative domestic impact that is rarely mentioned.

The war was marketed to the American people as prevention of an imminent attack; then as an effort to remove weapons of mass destruction from a supporter of terrorism that we like less than other supporters of terrorism; then as an effort to rid the world of an evil dictator and to liberate the Iraqi people; and now as a nation-building effort, complete with massive funding and posh rebuilding contracts for Bush's political donors.

The focus shifted from 'what this war will do for us' to 'what we're claiming this altruistic war will do for others, which we might just happen to make some money on.' Which is a big change. And despite the shifts in rhetoric, the impact on the U.S. has been huge. Not as huge as the impact on Iraq, obviously.

Here at home, reservists and National Guardsmen have all been taken from their families and jobs; soldiers have had their tours of duties extended repeatedly; veterans and military families have had their benefits cut; our tax money is being diverted to defense contractors away from the services we pay for; the Bush Administration is protested in every city and country he visits, and requires security measures that shut the public out of entire neighborhoods; our traditional international allies loathe our policies; the abuse scandal has tarnished the country's reputation abroad; the war has divided communities; and to cope with the criticism, war supporters have radicalized even further into a state of isolation and denial.

I don't recall any of those items being in the ads leading up to this war. But it's a high domestic cost. And it's a cost that isn't being fully acknowledged.

UN 'to detail lack of Iraqi WMDs' (bbc.com, 07/20/04): Now that U.S.-friendly interim-government is in place in Iraq, it's okay to admit that there are no WMDs in the country, for financial reasons.

Mr ElBaradei [head of the International Atomic Energy Agency] told reporters in Cairo: 'The return of inspectors to Iraq is an absolute necessity, not to search for weapons of mass destruction, but to draft the final report on the absence of WMDs in Iraq so that the international community can lift the sanctions.'

I haven't seen much play in the commercial US media about this, but perhaps the absence of WMDs is now old hat.

US army reveals more jail abuse (bbc.com, 07/22/04) The U.S. military has documented 94 cass of abuse (confirmed or alleged) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report said the cases included theft, physical assault, sexual assault and death.

But it described them as unauthorised actions taken by individuals, in some cases combined with the failure of a few leaders to provide supervision and leadership.

This article notes that the Red Cross considers the abuse to be systemic.

Image: "PantsOnFire-Mobile" (sfgate.com).

It's not just me: BBC NEWS: Americas: Campaign column: Is no news good news?: "A curious thing is happening with Iraq. It is disappearing from the front pages in the United States." In recent days, when I open the web pages of the local and national commercial news media, I find... stories about baseball. Wildfires. Local politicians running for office. Chess champions in trouble.

The media in the U.S. is all about short term, domestic news. It's so hard to really look at the bigger picture, with this style of reporting. It's as if there are no problems in the Sudan right now. Or Iraq. Or anywhere beyond the new Will Smith movie, which gets front billing on the splash page of our local daily.

"Will Smith: more important than the Sudan or the economy."

The Scandal that Hasn't Broken: Women and Children Abused in Iraq

Back on July 8th, Bob Harris at thismodernworld.com linked to a German television report on children detained and abused by U.S. troops in Iraq. He provided a link to a machine-translation of a story summary (which isn't very successful in terms of smooth language), and to the video report provided by Report Mainz's July 5th feature, which provides firsthand witness accounts, including one of a child being abused to break his father's resistance to interrogation.

Harris was sure that, with this story breaking abroad and the rest of the world was beginning to express outrage, it would break big in the U.S. soon.

Have you heard of this story? No? Even though UNICEF, the International Committee for the Red Cross, and Amnesty International all provided information to the report, the mainstream U.S. press has been silent.

The story is available in English, but still in the foreign press. In Norway, Aftenposten's July 6th feature, "Norway protests child abuse in Iraq" (aftenposten.no) is one of the most detailed early translations of Norway's response to the revelations. The Norwegian government is demanding the release of all underage prisoners and an immediate end to the abuse. From Aftenposten:

In one case, a girl around age 15 was said to have been shoved up against a wall by a group of male soldiers who proceeded to manhandle her. They then started ripping off her clothes, and she was half-naked before military police broke in.

In another case, a boy aged 15 or 16 was stripped naked and sprayed with water before being placed in an open truck and driven around in the cold night air last winter. He then was covered with mud.

Information Clearinghouse now offers, "More Than 100 Children Imprisoned, Report Of Abuse By U.S. Soldiers," a translation of the July 4th 'der Spiegel' summary report. (informationclearinghouse.info)

Try a news search for this on one of the standard news search engines. I did so this morning, and got articles about Abu Ghraib is 'cleaning up its image,' and how different things are there now.

Next, try a search of the web. It's in the blogs. Individuals are doing research, and posting the links they find. Among the best: back on the 10th, The Leftcoaster asked "Will Our News Media Cover the Abu Ghraib Children's Story?" in a good, alarming summary of what was available as of that day, citing stories in English in the foreign press dating BACK TO MAY. Follow all of her links!

*

[I sent links to the talented Edward Gomez, World Views columnist. He translates press accounts from multiple languages, and can likely provide even better coverage. I planned to send a link to Jeff Morley, World Opinion Roundup columnist at the Washington Post, but a reader pushed him on it, and his editor has linked back to thismodernworld at the bottom of this discussion. We'll see if he follows up on it.]

*

I asked a similar question about the women abused by U.S. custody back on May 12th. The military's own internal investigation had come out May 4th, and mentioned soldiers having sex with female captives -- the soldiers had even taken photographs of such incidents.

Despite the source being the military itself, and the widespread dispersal of the report, I'm still waiting for mainstream coverage.

Focus shifts to jail abuse of women, by Luke Harding in Baghdad (guardian.co.uk, 05/12/04) has revelations which surely should have come out at about the same time as those about male prisoners.

Senior US military officers who escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib on Monday admitted that rape had taken place in the cellblock where 19 "high-value" male detainees are also being held.

Asked how it could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, who is now in charge of the prison's detention facilities, said: "I don't know. It's all about leadership. Apparently it wasn't there."

Journalists were forbidden from talking to the women, who are kept upstairs in windowless 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre cells. The women wailed and shouted.

They were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, Col Quantock said, with only a Koran.

The Other Prisoners by the same author, dated May 20, 2004 (and inexplicably reprinted under a different title and date, What About The Women Prisoners? at countercurrents.org) is more substantive and alarming.

Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. The Bush administration has refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although it has shown them to Congress) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further domestic embarrassment.

Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, "She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey."

This very worthwhile article continues to note that various women are being held illegally due to marriage or other relationships with men wanted for questioning, and that other detainees who had been raped can't speak about it outside the prison, since they will be killed by their families. The victim mentioned in Taguba's report is already believed to have been killed by her family, according to an Amnesty International spokesperson quoted.

[Yes, you should be reading the Guardian.)

I saw a pro-war poster stuck to the side of a dumpster on my way home today. It's a rare thing: pro-war folk tend not to be artsy.

It showed a skull-faced soldier toting heavy weaponry, and said something like, 'it takes more than tie dye and love beads to win the peace.'

At least, I think it was a pro-war poster. The image looked like it was from the Vietnam war. And we all know how well heavy weaponry brought about peace there.

*

Yahoo! News - A Look at U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq:

"As of Wednesday, July 14, 883 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq (news - web sites) in March 2003, according to the Defense Department. Of those, 653 died as a result of hostile action and 230 died of non-hostile causes."

Oh-oh. Maybe he was correct: Freedom (Harpers.org)

2002 Week of Feb 5: CNN aired a video of Osama bin Laden in which he gloated that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people and the West in general into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

A bigger pattern emerges, from Harpers.org:

[Reuters] Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of Iraq's new puppet government, signed a law giving him the power to declare martial law and ban seditious groups. Allawi hinted recently that national elections, which are scheduled for January 2005, might be delayed. [New York Times] President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was planning to delay parliamentary elections once again, and federal [New York Times] authorities in the United States were discussing the possibility of postponing the November elections in the event of a terrorist attack. [CNN] Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, warned that Al Qaeda might be planning an attack to disrupt the November elections, but he said that he was aware of no specific threat or details about the alleged plan. The color-coded threat level remained unchanged, and many observers suspected the announcement was made to distract attention from Senator John Kerry and his new running mate, Senator John Edwards, whom President Bush accused of being too inexperienced.

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't just read it: USATODAY.com - Counterterrorism officials look to postpone elections: "Newsweek said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, wants Ridge to ask Congress to pass legislation giving the government power to cancel or reschedule a federal election. " (usatoday.com)

Why? An unspecified threat of terrorism near the elections.

Which, if it's unspecified, doesn't mean that it wouldn't affect rescheduled elections, does it? No.

Democracy: messy, difficult, and not our best export. Perhaps you remember the quiz listing the countries we've bombed in the last 50 years which have failed to become democracies. I was reflecting on that and considering the state of our own democracy. We aren't the priciple's best spokesperson.

Have you seen how low voter turnout is? Have you seen the plentiful evidence of corruption in the current system? Have you read the scandals associated with people who have been financing our government officials and persuading them to pass laws in their own favor? The way democratically elected governments abroad have always been replaced my repressive, U.S.-friendly regimes with U.S. covert assistance? At the moment, the system we have is distant from the ideals upon which it was founded, and more people seem to stop believing and participating in it all the time.

All the while, there is the active attempt to undermine our democratic freedoms with big-invasive-government laws which should be anathema to our beliefs, but which are being promoted by both lawmakers and panicked citizens alike. (toledoblade.com) It seems like, in a moment of national crisis, it is democracy that we would cling to and defend, rather than attempt to disassemble.

Those who would surrender liberty for security deserve neither.
-- Ben Franklin

It doesn't jibe that we are "fighting for freedom" without intending to protect freedom.

After some reflection, I don't think that's actually what ordinary, non-profiteering war promoters are fighting for. I have a modest theory.

Many of the folks quoted in newspapers are demanding 100% obedience to our leaders, offering to sacrifice the freedoms on which our country was to operate, decrying the accurate reporting of news and of the occupation's lack of progress, and providing awkwardly self-contradictory expressions of fealty to the country, right or wrong. Especially wrong. But what makes our system different from a monarchy or totalitarian state if we demand such complete and unquestioning obedience? What can we hope to accomplish through blind loyalty?

I think the answer is: a complete lack of responsibility for world events, combined with the self-satisfaction of absolute "truth."

If you look at Americans, especially those with fundamentalist leanings, you see a demand for certainty: announcements that there is only one way to live life, that there is only one church that has the right god and right message, that there is only one way to be patriotic, that there is only one way to serve your country, that there is only one nation that enjoys the one god's protection, we're number one, we have the highest standard of living of anyone (well, with numerous exceptions), our way is the best and only way... They're looking for an absolute model. The ambiguity of the real world - lying Presidents, soldiers who commit atrocities, persecution of brown people - is too much for them. They want ONE answer, and reassurance that it is the ONLY answer.

A colleague who has proposed that the American public would be well suited by a return to a monarchy system isn't far wrong. Monarchies are much better with absolutes: chosen by the one god to rule, demanding loyalty on par with the one correct god, always divinely inspired, always correct. It's a great model of ONE way - and excuses citizens from having to do the hard work required to support a democracy.

Democracy IS hard work. You need to stay informed of the issues! Choose between many candidates! Consider running for office! Vote! Attend hearings! Chime in on key subjects to be sure your representatives know your view! Organize your community! It's so much work! Obedience, especially the unquestioning kind, is FAR easier. Just sit and know that higher powers have decided it all for you, and you just have to obey.

Obedience and faith in absent ideals provides a consistent compass. Facts need not apply. It's nicer to think we're the richest nation on earth than work to solve poverty in our neighborhoods. It's nicer to think other nations are just jealous when we wield power for undemocratic purposes, and they don't benefit. It's nicer to think that we've overwritten the 10 commandments as a reward for our inherent greatness than that we need to really consider our actions. Doubt can be painful. Doubt can be divisive. It's harder to be convinced that your nation is absolutely good when you know what your government is really doing in your name - such knowledge creates some responsibility to repair the system. Which requires effort. It is MUCH easier to deny that there are problems, and to claim that everything is fine. When bad news surfaces, plead ignorance.

("Death camps? We had no idea. But we know we're number 1!")

An emotional need for an absolute position explains the zeal and defensiveness with which people defend undemocratic (and even un-Christian) activities our nation has embarked upon, which they don't understand and can't explain. They're already in their absolute construct, which in some cases is modeled on fundamentalist (absolutist) beliefs. They're just waiting for the rest of us to join in, are mystified that we haven't, and are hoping that we'll be quiet soon.

Unnatural causes: the impact of Abu Ghraib on families. It looks like ALL of the deaths of all prisoners in US custody should be investigated by an impartial, non US military entity.

A Death at Abu Ghraib: Family: Iraqi Was Murdered in Prison; U.S. Cites Natural Causes (npr.org, 07/09/04) provides the story of a family which suffered the loss of their family patriarch.

Their story isn't unique: the US military raided their home at night and took the men away. ("A soldier told the family that a neighbor had turned them in as suspected insurgents, for a $500 reward.") They were abused. Ultimately, none of the men abducted and held for more than a month were charged with any crime. This story has been repeated ever since the end of the war, and is sadly familiar.

In this case, the tribal leader of the family was tortured, denied medical care, and then died. The military "investigated" without investigating, concluding that the (not released) autopsy report concluding that heart failure was the cause of death, therefore the circumstances surrounding the death aren't relevant, and so this man died of 'natural causes.'

Refusal to provide care isn't considered "natural." But this shouldn't come as a surprise. The U.S. prison system is rife with abuse, and the prison agencies are found guilty of denying care again and again. The same mentality that dehumanizes convicts here, justifying all manner of abuse, has been exported. Some of the prison guards in Iraq were prison guards in the U.S., and some were at prisons were abuse had occurred and created domestic scandals. (phillyimc.org)

TNR Online's "PAKISTAN FOR BUSH. July Surprise?" (tnr.com, 07/07/04) provides this update on the 'war on terror:'

According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt....

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs [High Value Targets] before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

I'd think that LAST YEAR or the YEAR BEFORE would have been better. But it appears that the early capture of bin Laden would not be "better" for everyone's purposes.

Comment from my source for this, Bob Harris of thismodernworld.com:

The article goes on to detail the carrot-and-stick measures used to crank up the pressure on Islamabad to deliver up Bin Laden in a timely fashion.

Which means they could have done this earlier....

We should rejoice at Osama's capture, whenever it happens. But if Bin Laden suddenly shows up as scheduled, this should be understood, in advance, as prima facie evidence George W. Bush has spent years -- years! -- not doing all in his power to bring the greatest mass murderer in our history to justice.

I'm back, and I haven't actually been avoiding all news about the mess in Iraq: I read Salam Pax's book about his experience during the war.

I really can't imagine seeing my hometown bombed by an unwelcome power, knowing that it would occupy my country and set up power to serve its own ends.

Pax (not his real name) describes himself as "pragmatic" - now that the war damage is done, he wants to focus on what happens NEXT - he isn't very patient with people wanting to rehash why they were so gung ho to bomb him. He provides an interesting and very educational read. I recommend both his book, and his very popular blog.

*

It's difficult to come back to all the bad news. More than 11,000 civilian casualties (iraqbodycount.net). U.S. military casualties topped 800 while I was away: five additional soldiers died yesterday. ("US troops die in Samarra attack," bbc.com, 07/08/04). The handover of "sovereignty" came early (Handover advanced but problems remain, bbc.com, 06/28/04), but had to be performed in secret because security is so poor and the country is so unstable. (The "handover" in Iraq: like the large fly crawling on the CNN reporter's cheek, thismodernworld.com, 06/28/04).

I'll go back to commenting on clippings now. But I think I can safely observe that the route taken hasn't led Iraq to where the U.S. wanted it to go.

You must comply with the secret list you're not permitted to see, journalists: this from Reporters Without Borders: United States - Annual Report 2004:

Swedish journalist Emil Nikkah was prevented in August from doing a report for the Swedish TV station Kanal 5 because of US delay in issuing him with a press visa. He was born in Iran, which is designated by the US as a country supporting terrorism. The US embassy in Paris said visa requests involving such countries had to be dealt with in Washington and could take up to eight weeks to process. The list of suspect countries is secret.

The report also lists all of the foreign journalists who were harassed, had their accreditation threatened, were forced to sign agreements not to document anything they saw at Guantanamo, etc. Even foreign journalists attending video game trade shows were harassed! This indicates the zeal and xenophobia of certain law enforcement officials in keeping us "free."

Free... of journalism about video game conventions? I'm reasonably sure that isn't what the Homeland Security effort is actually about.

So Much for Democracy - Iraqis Plan for Introduction of Martial Law (commondreams.org & Johannesburg Star, 07/08/04) by Robert Fisk introduces us to a new way to approach democracy: having an unelected government declare martial law.

Iraq has introduced legislation allowing the Iraqi authorities to impose martial law; curfews; a ban on demonstrations; the restriction of movement; phone-tapping; the opening of mail; and the freezing of bank accounts.

If that isn't a sign of the lack of progress in appealing to the Iraqi public, I'm not sure what is.

Oh, and the legislation reintroduces the death penalty.

A bad sign: Yahoo! News - Pentagon Reportedly Aimed to Hold Detainees in Secret, (news.yahoo.com/LAtimes.com, 07/09/04). Because the Pentagon doesn't look bad enough yet:

Pentagon officials tentatively agreed during a high-level meeting last month to deny that process to some detainees and to keep their existence secret "for intelligence reasons," senior defense officials said Thursday.