Slightly suspicious, isn’t it? Suddenly, after a decade of failure Osama Bin Laden is found conveniently in a compound in Pakistan, an American special forces team is flown in and manage to subdue Osama after a brief firefight, then executed him, dumping his body in the sea on their way back. It all seems tailor made for conspiracy theorists.
Which shouldn’t distract from the main question: why not take him alive and let him stand trial for his crimes? The stupider sort of American may believe this is justice, but it remains a revenge killing that shows how of little value America’s supposed ideals are when things get tough. This looks like a triumph for America but instead it is an act of fear — a truly strong country would find the strength to put its enemies on trial.
UPDATE: come to think of it, having Osama executed in this way makes Khadaffi’s accusations of NATO trying to kill him and his family that more plausible.
Yesterday The Guardian revealed it had recieved, via Wikileaks a massive collection of US military logfiles which showed the War on Afghanistan going even worse than we already knew about:
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The war logs also detail:
[...]
• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.
• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
Interesting material and I’ve seen people on Twitter refer to it as the Pentagon Papers volume II, but does it change anything significantly about our view of the war? The original Pentagon Papers had an impact because they were the first source to make fully clear the catastrophe the War on Vietnam was and how culpable the US military and government were in covering up the truth. With the current wars on Afghanistan and Iraq this was known or suspected from the start and too much shit has already come out to be too surprised by what’s in those logs.
But it is important as a cache of evidence, for historical purposes if nothing else, to show that once again those who were against the war from the start where right about it, that the reasons we opposed the war have been proven right. Not to brag, but as a warning for the next time our leaders want to sell us a humantarian intervention.
The raw logs are available as a torrent from the Piratebay, or downloadable in spreadsheet (.csv), database (.sql) or Google maps (.kml) format from Cryptogon. It’s only some 15 megabytes big, so easy enough to get.
All this happened in the run up to the senate elections in Haiti, for which all candidates of the Fanmi Lavalas were barred from standing. Fanmi Lavalas is the party led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted as president in 2004 by the UN backed coup against him. It is of course a popular leftwing party and if there’s one thing that cannot be tolerated in Haiti it is a popular leftwing party. As in Iran, ordinary people have been protesting in the streets against the unfair and dishonest elections, boycotting them in large numbers. As in Iran, people have been shot at. Unlike Iran, they’ve been shot at by UN troops and unlike Iran, this went largely unreported. The difference is that Iran is our official enemy, while what happens in Haiti (and Honduras) is happening with our blessing.
You see, it looks very much like a “color revolution” scenario: the US-favored candidate contests election results, claims victory, and his supporters riot till the government caves in. But then, couldn’t the incumbent actually steal the election knowing full well that he can paint the resulting opposition protests as a CIA/NED coup attempt, whether that is actually true or not?
Only a fool would rule out US meddling in Iran, but that does not remove the genuine grievances of the protestors. These protests would not have as much support as they do if there weren’t hundreds of thousands or even millions of people feeling that the elections were stolen, whether or not they were. Iranian elections may have been reasonably fair in the past, but there has been a history of government meddling in the past, through e.g. pre-election selection of “acceptable” candidates, that the idea of a much more blatant vote rigging is clearly not absurd to a large part of the Iranian electorate. That still doesn’t mean vote rigging has happened, no matter what Juan Cole believes, but it is a distinct possibility.
A colour revolution is a mock revolution, where the genuine wish for change on part of a given country’s population is channeled into a safe, US and EU approved direction. It works best against an autocratic but not dictatorial regime, which may be comfortable with busting heads and the occasional disappearance of an opposition member, but which still seeks the apparant approval of the population and which isn’t too bright or media savy. In contrast the opposition will be young and media friendly, aiming their campaign as much at western journalists as at their own people. They will have American money and American advisers to help the campaign and it will be put in media friendly terms, presented as a fight between reformists and conservatives, young vs old, Coke vs Pepsi. It’s fake, but driven by a genuine desire and although leftists should not be fooled by them, there’s still the need to engage that underlying wish. (In as far as we can do something, of course.)
On the one hand, you can’t just uncritically support the opposition as many liberals and conservatives are doing, as exchanging Ahmadinajad for Mousavi is like driving the devil out with Beelzebub. This is not a case of freedom versus oppression and anybody who believes it is will be disappointed, both in and outside Iran.
On the other hand, ignoring the situation won’t make it go away. A large part of the Iranian population wants more personal freedom, wants to have at least some of the things we take for granted in America or the EU, how horribly consumerist they and how horribly middleclass the protestors might be. We need to make sure that when we are critical of how our media reports about these events or about how liberal Mousavi actually is, that we don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. Iran is an oppresive regime and that needs changing and it’s the Iranian people that need to do it. We can only stand on the sidelines and argue our own (imperfect) understanding of the situation; we shouldn’t presume too much that we can actually give any meaningful advice.
But what we can do is push back against too triumphalistic a view of this revolution, the idea that this is a vindication for truth, justice and the American way, as long as we do it without denigrating the genuine desires of the Iranians themselves.
Can we treat the Republicans as a normal political party, a party that went off the rails during the last eight (actually sixteen) years but which can still be rescued from its more self destructive, hard right tendencies through engaging its more moderate elements. Is it possible to remake it, as Paul Krugman and other liberal commentators still seem to believe, into something on the level of the Tories or the various Christian Democratic parties in Europe; rightwing but nor reactionary? Not according to the Stiftung Leo Strauss, who explains just what the Republicans have turned into in the past three decades:
It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Republican Party as an independent actor and entity was able to keep the Movement within bounds. But after Reagan, and especially the Bush debacle in ‘92, the Movement learned to seize power on its own within and without the Republican Party. As a sign of their increased power, the Movement’s rage, paranoia, and conspiracy fever in 1993 seemed novel. By 1994 and certainly 2000. the Movement had completed its subversion of the Republican Party.
Wonder why after Obama the ferocity is turned up to 11? The answer is intrinsic to the Movement as functional social, cultural and political creature. It governed for 6 years and hung on for 2 more. Its Counter-Enlightenment, racial, authoritarian /hierarchical impulse was the official American government. With Obama’s victory its rejection is not only personal but for the first time, in 2006 and 2008, it as dominant political force (not as a minor coalition partner within the Republican Party) was rejected.
The Movement Is Not Playing For Liberal Democracy
For the Movement, as we said, politics is existential. And when survival is on the line, pluralistic compromise is for chumps. Democrats still are playing for political advantage within the confines of traditional two party politics. How to give a concrete example? When the other side’s world view is existential, then the stakes are higher than something so trite as the Constitution, etc. We saw this in part through Addington, Cheney et al. with their view on the Unitary Executive. As I wrote a while ago, during a lunch with John Ashcroft after his tenure as AG, he quite blithely said the President is entitled to ignore Congress and its laws — the only thing that matters is the plebiscite on a president because it is national. He then added if the president is re-elected that by definition means the country ratified everything he has done, even secret stuff the nation doesn’t know about.
Existential combat in ideological struggle for survival with a natural affinity for hierarchical organizations and militarized speech and thought patterns. Do you see now why to the Movement any criticism of Bush as Warlord was akin to treason? It’s not only mere warfare for any given news cycle, but deeply rooted in the non-liberal democratic, pre-Enlightenment agenda.
What the Stiftung is describing is immediately recognisable to anybody familiar with US foreign policy during the Cold War and how anti-communism was used to overrule any considerations of democracy and freedom. The normalisation of torture, election fraud, rightwing militias, political assassinations (what else would you call the murder of doctor Tiller), the mass hysteria whipped up over what Obama is going to do to the country and how this justifies anything that can stop it all of it has been used with great succes in South America and elsewhere to destroy governments and countries Washington does not like. It was only a matter of time before these techniques were re-imported into the US.
Killing Hope
William Blum
469 pages including index
published in 2003
William Blum is a veteran leftwing journalist, active since the 1960ties, who made his name leaking the name and addresses of 200 CIA employees back in 1969. Since then he has been working in relative obscurity until around the turn of the millennium when he wrote a bestselling book about the US’s foreign police: Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. It came at the right time to find its audience, just as interest in the subject soared due to the September 11 attacks. This succes is probably what got Killing Hope published, as it’s an updated version of one of Blum’s older books, originally published in 1986 as The CIA: A Forgotten History. It certainly has some of the hallmarks of a cash-in book, with the updating only going as far as the mid-nineties and the bulk of the book not noticably updated from the first edition. Many of the earlier chapters do not show much awareness of events and new revelations after 1986, if you see what I mean.
Killing Hope is the history of US military and covert interventions since World War II, with each chapter detailing a specific case. The chapters are in order of chronology, with several countries with a long history of US intervention having multiple chapters devoted to them. As Blum shows again and again in these chapters, the US talks a great deal about democracy and freedom, but the reality of its foreign policy at least since World War II is far different. With the excuse of “fighting communism” (or these days, “terrorism”) again and again the US has interfered on the side of dictatorships, nobbled democracies or fought liberation movements in order to safeguard its interests, be they strategic geopolitical ones or commercial ones. And Killing Hope is far from exhaustive, even in its original timeframe of 1945-1985 with Vietnam e.g. only having one short chapter devoted to it and little attention paid to other Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan or South Korea or even the UK.
