Duel in the Sun: America's Iraqi Clients Play the Al Qaeda Card on Syria

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD

MONDAY, 31 AUGUST 2009 14:34

The American client government in Iraq has embarked on a remarkable campaign of diplomatic hostilities with its neighbor, Syria, accusing Damascus of, among other things, the modern-day blood libel that immediate consigns a nation to diplomatic hell, and makes it a target for what George W. Bush used to call "the path of action": supporting al Qaeda. As Jason Ditz reports, America's Baghdad satrapy has been broadcasting confessions "obtained" (via "strenuous" but no doubt justified and right-minded interrogation) from captives blamed for the recent bombing attacks that have shaken the PR image of a calmer, surge-soothed Iraq. The bombings also pointed up the vast failures of the client regime to provide security or bring together the warring factions inside the country. These goals are of course impossible for a regime installed and maintained in power by foreign invasion; even so, they represent the Green Zoners' sole claim to "legitimacy." Thus any threat to the PR image undermines the regime's hopes to survive the partial reduction of American occupation forces (erroneously termed a "withdrawal" in the obfuscating argot of imperial message management). And so the client state led by sectarian extremist Nouri al-Maliki has turned to the time-honored tactic used by governments since time immemorial to divert attention from its own manifest failures: blaming foreign devils. Naturally, the Maliki regime cannot blame its foreign masters in Washington for unleashing, arming, abetting and exacerbating the murderous chaos in the conquered land. Nor can they blame their long-time mentors and supporters in Iran. So that leaves Syria. With the televised confessions, the Maliki regime has moved swiftly from blaming Baathist diehards who have been hiding amongst the multitude of Iraqi refugees to accusing the Damascus regime of openly directing the attackers -- and now, in the latest show-trial spectacle, of supporting al-Qaeda training camps on Syrian soil. This is heavy stuff indeed. For as we all know, the presence of al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan was the sole, purported reason for the American invasion in 2001; and preventing the re-establishment of such camps is still one of the primary excuses for continuing the slaughter there. The presence (or threat) of al-Qaeda camps is also proffered as justification for extending the Terror War into Pakistan and Somalia. What's more, the continual -- and blatantly false -- trumpeting of a "connection" between al Qaeda and Iraq was, in the end, the principal reason why the Iraq invasion garnered so much initial public support; the act of unprovoked aggression was seen as "payback for 9/11," as so many U.S. soldiers put it in those heady early days. The "al Qaeda" card trumps everything else. It justifies any action: invasion, torture, drone attack, rendition, death squads, covert ops, war profiteering, draconian power -- "the dark side, if you will," as one great American statesman put it. By openly accusing the Syrian government of sponsoring al Qaeda and directing terrorist attacks inside Iraq, the Maliki regime is laying the groundwork for any action their Washington masters might want to take against Damascus at any time. The regime is also giving one more reason to delay and dilute the American drawdown (which is also a cherished goal of the American militarists): are you going to pull out troops from Iraq when al Qaeda is getting state protection on Iraq's borders and launching terrorist attacks? Iraq's extraordinary accusations against Syria -- which have already led to a mutual withdrawal of ambassadors -- have thus far garnered little attention amongst the scribes who attend upon the imperial court. And who knows? At a nod from Caesar, the Iraqis might kiss and make up with Damascus tomorrow, if that is deemed more suitable for the immediate needs of imperial policy. But one should always remember that Syria has long been -- and still remains -- a prime target of that faction of American militarists known loosely as neo-cons. Indeed, at one point, it was a toss-up as to which "recalcitrant tribe" of Arabs they wanted the American war machine to hit first: Iraq or Syria? As I noted way back in caveman times -- April 2003, to be exact -- the neo-cons had been putting Syria in the crosshairs for years: A few months before PNAC's prophetic 2000 report [which longed for "a new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" the American people into supporting a vast and profitable militarist agenda], an allied group with an overlapping membership published a similar document outlining steps to be taken against Syria: first "tightening the screws" with denunciations and economic sanctions, then escalating to military action, as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press Agency reports. The architects of this document included Elliot Abrams, the convicted perjurer now running Bush's Middle East policy; Douglas Feith, one of Shifty's top aides; Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary to Colin Powell, and influential Pentagon advisors such as David Wurmser, Michael Leeden and everyone's sweetheart, Richard "Influence-Peddler" Perle. The report sprang largely from the loins of the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon, a curious grouping of right-wing American Christians, right-wing American Jews, and a sprinkling of Lebanese exiles. They object -- rightly -- to the fact that Syria has maintained "long-term access to major military bases" in Lebanon, using this minatory presence to exercise undue sway over Lebanon's political and economic life. Of course, some cynics would say this situation is remarkably akin to Israel's own 18-year occupation of, er, Lebanon, or the United States' decades-long -- and still-continuing -- military presence in Japan, Korea, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Panama, etc. But you know what cynics are like. The USCFL also provides highly insightful and very nearly literate analyses of vital regional issues, such as its seminal paper, "Even Arabs Don't Like Arabs." But the mindset of the group -- whose members now stalk the corridors of power in Imperial Washington -- is perhaps best displayed in its thoughtful 2001 treatise, "A Petition Demanding War Against Governments That Sponsor Terrorism" (Except, of course, for governments who enforce their will by the ever-present threat and use of violence -- i.e. terrorism -- but are run by nice white men educated at Yale and Oxford.) Here, the proto-Bushist group demands that six "rogue nations" -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and Sudan -- "turn over their governments to the United States" on pain of massive military response. The United States will then "occupy these territories until proper governments" -- ones that allow "long-term access" to major military bases, no doubt -- "can be established." And just how massive should that threatened U.S. military response be? The USCFL is, as always, admirably -- and brutally -- forthright: "America must set a clear example-identical to that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you tread on me, I will wipe you off the face of the earth." In the end, of course, Iraq represented too glittering a prize for all the various militarist factions to pass up on the first course. But you must never underestimate the appetite -- and persistence -- of our militarists. The latest accusations of the Iraqi client regime will be used to stoke the never-ending fires of militarist warmongering; they won't rest until every knee bows to their god of American Dominance.

The Big Lie of Afghanistan

nquiries into the 954 deaths in police custody since 1990 have all proved fruitless – and then this historic case comes along

By Malalai Joya

July 26, 2009 "The Guardian" -- July 25, 2009 -- In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.

On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during thecivil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops.

In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, "the same donkey with a new saddle".

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

What's more, I don't believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.

The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination. We want a helping hand through international solidarity, but we know that values like human rights must be fought for and won by Afghans themselves.

I know there are millions of British people who want to see an end to this conflict as soon as possible. Together we can raise our voice for peace and justice.

An American 'foreign legion' emerges

By William Astore 

A leaner, meaner, higher tech force - that was what president George W Bush and his secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld promised to transform the American military into. Instead, they came close to turning it into a foreign legion. Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks. 

Now would be a good time for President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to begin to reclaim that military for its proper purpose: to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, the US's troops are fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan. 

A few fortnights and forever ago, in the Bush years, the US's "expeditionary" military came remarkably close to resembling an updated version of the French Foreign Legion in the ways it was conceived and used by those in power - and even, to some extent, in its makeup. 

For the metropolitan French elite of an earlier era, the Foreign Legion - best known to Americans from countless old action films - was an assemblage of military adventurers and rootless romantics, volunteers willing to man an army fighting colonial wars in far-flung places. Those wars served the narrow interests of people who weren't particularly concerned about the fate of the legion itself. 

It's easy enough to imagine one of them saying, a la Rumsfeld, "You go to war with the legion you have, not the legion you might want or wish to have." Such a blithe statement would have been uncontroversial back then, since the French Foreign Legion was - well - so foreign. Its members, recruited worldwide, but especially from French colonial possessions, were considered expendable, a fate captured in its grim, sardonic motto: "You joined the Legion to die. The Legion will send you where you can die!" 

Looking back on the past eight years, what's remarkable is the degree to which Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration treated the US military in a similarly dismissive manner. Bullying his generals and ignoring their concerns, the secretary of defense even dismissed the vulnerability of the troops in Iraq, who, in the early years, motored about in inadequately armored Humvees and other thin-skinned vehicles. 

Last year, vice president Dick Cheney offered another Legionnaire-worthy version of such dismissiveness. Informed that most Americans no longer supported the war in Iraq, he infamously and succinctly countered, "So?" - as if the US military weren't the American people's instrument, but his own private army, fed and supplied by private contractor KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary whose former chief executive officer was the very same Cheney. 

Fond of posing in flight suits, leather jackets and related pseudo-military gear, Bush might, on the other hand, have seemed overly invested in the military. Certainly, his tough war talk resonated within conservative circles, and he visibly relished speaking before masses of hooah-ing soldiers. Too often, however, Bush simply used them as patriotic props, while his administration did its best to hide their deaths from public view. 

In that way, he and his top officials made US troops into foreigners, in part by making their ultimate sacrifice, their deaths, as foreign to the American people as was humanly possible. Put another way, his administration made the very idea of national "sacrifice" - by anyone but US troops - foreign to most Americans. 
In response to the September 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were, as the president famously suggested only 16 days after the attacks, to show their grit by visiting Disney World and shopping until they dropped. Military service instills (and thrives on) an ethic of sacrifice that was, for more than seven years, consciously disavowed domestically. 

As the Obama administration begins to deploy US troops back to the Iraq or Afghan war zones for their fourth or fifth tours of duty, I remain amazed at the silent complicity of my country. Why have we been so quiet? Is it because the Bush administration was, in fact, successful in sending our military down the path to foreign legion-hood? Is the fate of our troops no longer of much importance to most Americans? 

Even the military's recruitment and demographics are increasingly alien to much of the country. Troops are now regularly recruited in "foreign" places like south central Los Angeles and Appalachia that more affluent Americans wouldn't be caught dead visiting. In some cases, those new recruits are quite literally "foreign" - non-US citizens allowed to seek a fast-track to citizenship by volunteering for frontline, war-zone duty in the army or marines. And when, in these last years, the military has fallen short of its recruitment goals - less likely today thanks to the ongoing economic meltdown - mercenaries have simply been hired at inflated prices from civilian contractors with names like Triple Canopy or Blackwater redolent of foreign adventures. 

With respect to demographics, it'll take more than the sons of Vice President Joe Biden and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to redress inequities in burden-sharing. With startlingly few exceptions, America's sons and daughters dodging bullets remain the progeny of rural America, of immigrant America, of the working and lower middle classes. As long as our so-called best and brightest continue to be absent without leave when it comes to serving among the rank-and-file, count on our foreign adventurism to continue to surge. 

Diversity is now our societal byword. But how about more class diversity in our military? How about a combat regiment of rich young volunteers from uptown Manhattan? (After all, some of their great-grandfathers probably fought with New York's famed "Silk Stocking" regiment in World War I.) How about more Ivy League recruits like George H W Bush and John F Kennedy, who respectively piloted a dive bomber and a PT boat in World War II? Heck, why not a few prominent Hollywood actors like Jimmy Stewart, who piloted heavy bombers in the flak-filled skies of Europe in that same war? 

Instead of collective patriotic sacrifice, however, it's clear that the military will now be running the equivalent of a poverty and recession "draft" to fill the "all-volunteer" military. Those without jobs or down on their luck in terrible times will have the singular honor of fighting our future wars. Who would deny that drawing such recruits from dead-end situations in the hinterlands or central cities is strikingly Foreign Legion-esque? 

Caught in the shock and awe of September 11, we allowed our military to be transformed into a neo-conservative imperial police force. Now, approaching our eighth year in Afghanistan and sixth year in Iraq, what exactly is that force defending? 

Before Obama acts to double the number of American boots-on-the-ground in Afghanistan - before even more of our troops are sucked deeper into yet another quagmire - shouldn't we ask this question with renewed urgency? Shouldn't we wonder just why, despite all the reverent words about "our troops" we really seem to care so little about sending them back into the wilderness again and again? 

Where indeed is the outcry? 

The French Foreign Legionnaires knew better than to expect such an outcry: The elites for whom they fought didn't give a damn about what happened to them. Our military may not yet be a foreign legion - but don't fool yourself, it's getting there. 

William J Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught for six years at the Air Force Academy. He currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author ofHindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005), among other works. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu. 

(Copyright 2009 William Astore.) 

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)

Understanding the Crisis in Zimbabwe

Cynicism as a substitute for scholarship

by Stephen Gowans

Mahmood Mamdani’s largely sympathetic analysis of the Mugabe government, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” published in the December 4, 2008 London Review of Books, has been met with a spate of replies from progressive scholars who are incensed at the Ugandan academic throwing out the rule book to present an argument based on rigor and analysis, rather than on the accustomed elaboration of comfortable slogans and prejudices that has marked much progressive scholarship on Zimbabwe.  Their criticism of Mamdani has been characterized by ad hominem assaults, arguments that either lack substance or sense, and the substitution of cynicism for scholarship.

At the heart of what might be called the anti-Mugabe ideology lays the idea that the Zimbabwean leadership clings to power through crude anti-imperialist rhetoric used to divert blame for problems of its own making.  This is an elaboration of elite theory -- the idea that a small group seeks power for power’s sake, and manipulates the public through lies and rhetoric to stay on top.  For example, one group of progressive scholars [1] complains about “Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimization,” while Horace Campbell argues that,

”The Zimbabwe government is very aware of the anti-imperialist and anti-racist sentiments among oppressed peoples and thus has deployed a range of propagandists inside and outside the country in a bid to link every problem in Zimbabwe to international sanctions by the EU and USA.” [2]

Contrary to the empty rhetoric school of thought, Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric is not unattended by anti-imperialist action, but in some extreme versions of anti-Mugabe thought, (for example, that put forward by Patrick Bond), Mugabe is an errand boy for Western capital. [3] The Zimbabwean leader’s anti-imperialist reputation is, according to this view, smoke and mirrors, an illusion conjured by a deft magician.

The Mugabe government’s anti-imperialist and anti-neo-colonial credentials rest on the following:

o    In the late 1990s, intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, to counter an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain.

o    Rejecting a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program established by the IMF as a condition for balance of payment support (after initially accepting it.)

o    Expropriating farms owned by settlers of European origin as part of a program of land redistribution aimed at benefiting the historically disadvantaged African population.

o    Establishing foreign investment controls and other measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership of the country’s natural resources and enterprises.

(read full article)