KLAUS ROHDE: SCIENCE, POLITICS AND ART

Sydney Morning Herald 8.2.08. Extracts from:

“America’s choice, our future“(full article here).

“But surely the disastrous misadventure in Iraq will deter future American commanders-in-chief from launching any new wars? Not at all. There are three points here.

First, America is a country that is comfortable with war. In the 230 years since the Declaration of Independence, the US has invaded other countries on more than 200 occasions, according to the Congressional Research Service. That is an average of one foreign incursion every 14 months in the nation’s history.
Second, the end of the Cold War was supposed to mean a standing-down of the US military machine. The opposite has happened. The Pentagon’s budget today, after adjusting for inflation, exceeds its Cold War average by one-eighth, though there is no longer any nation that could be called a peer competitor.
“The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider the question, ‘How much is enough?’ ” writes Professor Andrew Bacevich, a historian at Boston University and former US Army colonel in his book The New American Militarism.
The total defence budget is bigger than that of all other nations combined.
“During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale US military actions abroad totalled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events.” ”
Bacevich calls it “the normalisation of war“. He goes on: “Policymakers have increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool.”

The article compares the one Republican and the two Democratic candidates: McCain is a hero of the Vietnam war who has consistently supported the Iraq war, Clinton is an opportunist doing whatever seems popular at the time, and only Obama has consistently opposed the Iraq war and stated that he wants to change America’s attitudes away from militarism, which routinely sees the military option as the option of first choice.

Past wars were bad and killed many millions, wars may be far worse in the more crowded world of the future with its more destructive weapons. The United States, with its scientific, technological and economic power, could change the world for the better, and for the far worse, since it becomes more likely that the use of nuclear weapons will not be anathema in future wars (see here).

The report in the Sydney Morning Herald does not mention the numbers of casualties in the various military excursions. Are they of concern to McCain? Here are the latest figures for Iraq (higher figures have been given, and I don’t think that they include the casualties indirectly caused by the invasion, for example due to the almost complete breakdown of the medical system, such as baby mortality):
Although the most dangerous regions of Iraq could not be sampled, new estimates arrive at a death toll of 1 million Iraqis since the beginning of the invasion.

I have discussed the power of the Military – PR Industrial Complex in two previous posts. Relevant here is a recent article on the website of the Center of Public Integrity (full article there).

“False Pretenses
FOLLOWING 9/11, PRESIDENT BUSH AND SEVEN TOP OFFICIALS OF HIS ADMINISTRATION WAGED A CAREFULLY ORCHESTRATED CAMPAIGN OF MISINFORMATION ABOUT THE THREAT POSED BY SADDAM HUSSEIN’S IRAQ.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.
……….
President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews………
……. . In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.” In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.”…….

. On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement “probably is a hoax.”
………

……., a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly ” and in some cases vociferously” accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation’s allies on their way to war.
…….. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence ” not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. ……… Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.”

Much of this has been known for a long time, the importance of the report lies in the presentation of detailed quantitative data. What did the PR industry do all the time? Dissemination of false information would have been impossible without its compliance.

The Sydney Morning Herald (9.1.2008) contains three interesting articles which illuminate the power of the PR industry.

1) The Gulf of Tonkin incidence, according to which North Vietnam attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, was used by President Lyndon Johnson as a pretext to dramatically escalate US involvement in Vietnam. The then US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara declared to Congress that the evidence for the attack was “unimpeachable”. A new report shows that these claims were fabricated. The report was released by the National Security Agency responsible for much of the codebreaking by the US and eavesdropping work, in response to a “mandatory declassification” request, the Federation of American Scientists said yesterday. Review of classified documents clearly shows that “no attack” happened that night. But who cares, 45 years ago everybody believed in the attack as claimed by the US government, ably fed to the gullible public by the PR machine, without scrutiny of the evidence.

2) Widely reported in the press, five Iranian speedboats charged at three US Navy ships entering the Persian Gulf. The US President, now in the Near East (or on the way to the Near East) claimed this to be “provocative”, the Iranians, in contrast, said similar incidents in the narrow straits had happened before and had always been resolved when the two sides had identified themselves. Why should Iran, at this moment in time, want to provoke the US?

3) “Israel hiding settlement facts to protect image

The Israeli Government has told a court that it does not want to reveal the true extent of Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories because the information would damage its image abroad, a local newspaper has reported.” According to the International Court of Justice and accepted by most countries, such settlements are illegal, and the Israeli government is indeed correct in believing that revealing the extent of settlements would damage its image. It seems obvious that the international community is widely unaware of what is happening, largely due to the failure of the PR machine to provide the relevant information.

In a recent interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, the former US representative at the UN, John Bolton, declared that the publication of a report by the US secret service agencies, according to which Iran had discontinued any atomic weapons program in 2003, amounted to a “coup” of the secret service against the American president. Indeed, he is right if one assumes that the president had and has plans to attack Iran, because the report removed any pretext justifying such an attack. Likewise, it even removed the basis for sanctions imposed on that country.

But who believes that it will have a significant impact on US policy in the Near East, except perhaps for putting a greater burden on the vast PR industry, which has very effectively prepared the war against Iraq and has convinced many that Iran is a dangerous country because it is close to possessing atomic weapons. The former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower was quite right, when he stated in his farewell address in 1961 with regard to the military-industrial complex: “A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction…
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence ” economic, political, even spiritual ” is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

In those days it was the military-industrial complex which was the potential danger, although propaganda always played a significant role. Today, as the result of immense advances in communication technology and an ever increasing control of the PR industry by fewer and fewer interest groups, emphasis should shift to the military-PR industrial complex. It is obvious that the oil and other industries pumped vast sums into the campaigns of Bush, but it was used to influence public opinion through the PR industry.

Relevant here is a comparison of what is happening about Iran now with what happened to Iraq.

According to WHO estimates, the Gulf war followed by sanctions against Iraq prior to the invasion which included many pharmaceuticals, cost the lives of approximately half a million children, and two inspectors of the sanctions program resigned over what they thought was the illegality of the sanctions. But public opinion was hardly aware of it. What was reported were cases of some cases of corruption related to the sanctions. Accordingly, no changes in politics occurred (as far as I am aware). Highly unlikely that humanitarian considerations will have any effect this time, but let us wait and see. After all, what is said to count is American lives and not Iraqi or Iranian lives. In this context: According to the Sydney Morning Herald, January 8, 2008, ” Iraq is not a dirty word…in McCain campaign. ….But John McCain clearly believes the significant drop in US casualties has altered political dynamics….. As one of the points he spotlights is his longstanding support for increased US military involvement in Iraq…. at one point saying the changed policy has “saved America’s most precious resource”- the lives of soldiers.” Not a word about Iraqi lives in his campaign to win the nomination for president.

Also in this context: was the recent flight of a US bomber across the US loaded with atomic weapons really an “accident”? Click here. I hope it was and all this is sheer scare mongering.

Some people were stunned by the introduction of President Ahmadinejad of Iran by the President of Columbia University. Here we have an interpretation by Professor MarkLeVine, Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Irvine (from Al Jazeera, 3 October) (extracts, bold by me). For the full article click here

“Local papers, such as the Daily News and The New York Post, featured headlines announcing that “The Evil has Landed” and lambasting the “Mad Iran Prez” for his past denials of the Holocaust, refusal to unequivocally renounce a quest for nuclear weapons, and call to have Israel “wiped off the map” (an inaccurate translation of the Persian “bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad,” which is better – but less violently and therefore less usefully – rendered in English as “erased from the page of time” or “fate”). —————–Even Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, introduced him with an unprecedented – and to the minds of many academics, not to mention Iranians, uncouth – verbal attack, accusing him of being little more than a “petty dictator”.

In its critiques of Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia, the mainstream US press focused most of its attention on Ahmadinejad’s tendentious claim that “there are no homosexuals in Iran” (belied by an evening stroll through Tehran’s famous Daneshjoo Park), and his attempt to redefine his position on the Holocaust (it happened, but more research is needed to know its true extent).

Few commentators considered how Ahmadinejad’s words were heard outside of the US media circus. And those who did, such as Timothy Rutton of the LA Times, focused purely on the reaction in the Muslim world, arguing that, as a “totalitarian demagogue”, Ahmadinejad gained legitimacy because of the discourteous treatment by Columbia’s president.

It’s no wonder, then, that almost no one in the American media focused on the substantive claims of Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN.

He mentioned the continued disgraceful figures for infant mortality, schooling and related human development indicators in the developing world. Perhaps wanting to be courteous, Ahmadinejad blamed “certain big powers” for the plight of a large share of humanity – he might have added that according to UN estimates almost half the world lives on less than $2 per day. But he didn’t need to name names; most of the developing world, including the Muslim world, share his belief that their plight is linked to a world economic system whose goal, for more than half a millennium, has been to exploit the peoples and resources of the rest of the world for the benefit of the more advanced countries of the West.

That is precisely why so many people in the developing world remain opposed to Western-sponsored globalisation, which for most critics, including in the Arab/Muslim world, is little more than imperialism dressed up in the rhetoric of “free markets” and “liberal democracy”. It is this much wider audience, from the favelas of Rio De Janeiro and the shanty towns of Lagos as much as the slums of Casablanca, Sadr City or Cairo, to whom Ahmadinejad was speaking.

———

Iran and Venezuela possess the third- and seventh-largest oil reserves in the world, totaling well over 200 billion barrels – that’s not much less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.
The two countries will earn well over $80bn in revenues this year alone. As important, both countries possess non-oil sectors that are surprisingly robust, according to many estimates, for the majority of both Iran’s and Venezuela’s Gross Domestic Product. This provides both countries with billions of dollars to spend on foreign aid, as demonstrated by Ahmadinejad’s stopover in Bolivia, where he pledged $1bn in Iranian aid and development to the poverty stricken country. US policymakers’ view of the world through the “you’re either with us or against us” prism divides the globe into those who support the US and Europe (and the “West” more broadly), and those who support al-Qaeda and “Islamofascism”, a term which has been created precisely to ensure that Americans conflate Osama bin Laden with Ahmadinejad, and both with Hitler.

But few people outside of the West buy this comparison, or the larger black-and-white world-view it reflects. Instead, in Africa and Latin America, Ahmadenijad’s argument that “humanity has had a deep wound on its tired body caused by impious powers for centuries” resonates far more deeply than George Bush’s hollow-sounding calls for democracy and “ending tyranny”.

The West advises Africa to “get over” colonialism, but the pain of colonial rule is still felt by those suffering under the policies imposed by the IMF and/or the World Bank, or from the continued subsidisation of American and European agribusiness while their countries are flooded with below-market wheat, soy or corn. It is to those people whom Ahmadinejad promised – in language that strikingly mirrors US President Bush’s often religiously-hued speeches – that “the era of darkness will end” with the “dawn of the liberation of, and freedom for, all humans“. Americans may not like Ahmadinejad’s or Chavez’s internal politics, ideological orientations, or foreign policies,—-but for most of the third world, which is tired of centuries of domination by the West, the two leaders are a breath of fresh air, who are coming not as conquerors, but as comrades. They are free of the condescending “civilising mission” that, from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt to the US invasion of Iraq, always seem to include war, occupation, and the appropriation of strategic natural resources under foreign control as part of their mandate. And because of this, most of the citizens of the developing world, rightly or wrongly, couldn’t care less about Ahmadinejad’s positions on Israel, the Holocaust, and nuclear weapons, never mind homosexuals, none of which affect them directly. They care only that he is sticking-it-to their old colonial or Cold war masters, and offering “respect”, “friendship” and billions of dollars in aid with no strings attached. Americans, Europeans and Israelis can fret about it all they want, but it will not change this reality.
Only a reorientation of the world economy towards real sustainability and equality will dampen his appeal, and that’s not likely to happen soon. Which means that Americans will be hearing a lot more of Ahmadinejad and leaders like him in the future.

In support of what Ahmadinejad said, have a look at these two articles in The Guardian:

“Sold down the river” (The Guardian, 22 September 2007)

A brief extract:
“Bags of sugar and a few bars of soap – with these the rights to one of the greatest forests in the world change hands. And while foreign loggers rake in the profits, the local people now face losing everything.”

(The Guardian 3 October 2007):

A brief extract:
“The World Bank encouraged foreign companies to destructively log the world’s second largest forest, endangering the lives of thousands of Congolese Pygmies, according to a report on an internal investigation by senior bank staff and outside experts. The report by the independent inspection panel, seen by the Guardian, also accuses the bank of misleading Congo’s government about the value of its forests and of breaking its own rules.
Congo’s rainforests are the second largest in the world after the Amazon, locking nearly 8% of the planet’s carbon and having some of its richest biodiversity. Nearly 40 million people depend on the forests for medicines, shelter, timber and food.”

Who rules the world bank?

I have commented on the widespread use of private security contractors in Iraq in my post “Private Wars and the Christian Right”

Here is some relevant information (extracts) on this from BBC News:

“Iraq has cancelled the licence of the private security firm, Blackwater USA, after it was involved in a gunfight in which at least eight civilians died.
The Iraqi interior ministry said the contractor, based in North Carolina, was now banned from operating in Iraq.
The Blackwater workers, who were contracted by the US state department, apparently opened fire after coming under attack in Baghdad on Sunday.
Thousands of private security guards are employed in lawless Iraq.
They are often heavily armed, but critics say some are not properly trained and are not accountable except to their employers.

The interior ministry’s director of operations, Maj Gen Abdul Karim Khalaf, said authorities would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force.
“We have opened a criminal investigation against the group who committed the crime,” he told the AFP news agency.
All Blackwater personnel have been told to leave Iraq immediately, with the exception of the men involved in the incident on Sunday.
They will have to remain in the country and stand trial, the ministry said.

The Blackwater security guards “opened fire randomly at citizens” after mortars landed near their vehicles, killing eight people and wounding 13 others, interior ministry officials said.

Most of the dead and wounded were bystanders, the officials added. One of those killed was a policeman.

The company, whose personnel have no combat immunity under international law if they engage in hostilities, has so far refused to comment on the shootings.

Sunday’s violence followed the publication of a survey of Iraqis which suggested that up to 1.2m people might have died because of the conflict in Iraq.

A UK-based polling agency, Opinion Research Business (ORB), said it had extrapolated the figure by asking a random sample of 1,461 Iraqi adults how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.”

Will the contractors accept the request for leaving Iraq, considering that security must somehow be guaranteed, if not by private security guards, then by the American military?