Mollycoddling Mubarak, Mugging Mugabe

By Stephen Gowans

Led by the United States, Western countries spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on what they called democracy promotion. This usually involves promoting pro-private property, pro-free trade, and pro-foreign investment forces in foreign countries where these principles are not firmly implanted. Generous funding is showered upon media, human rights groups, and election monitors that oppose governments whose attachment is less than absolute to the three major freedoms of capitalist ideology (the 3Fs)– free-trade, free-enterprise, and free-markets. Pro-3F political parties, like the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, and in previous years, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, are provided with training, expert advice, strategic consulting and campaign funds to help them win elections (1). Experts on how to destabilize governments through civil disobedience are dispatched to train nonviolent pro-democracy activists to topple governments that have come to power in elections the West’s preferred 3F candidates have failed to win.

Democracy promotion is not the sole purview of the executive branches of Western governments. Parliaments and the US Congress are involved, as well as Western political parties, organized labor, business lobby organizations, foundations, think tanks and billionaire speculator, George Soros.

Most often, democracy promoters set their sights on countries that hold regular multi-party elections but elect people who fail to genuflect deeply enough to US domination, private property and free markets. Democracy does not, of course, mean private property, free trade and unfettered foreign investment, but in order to marshal public opinion for interventions abroad, democracy promoters implicitly equate capitalism, or anything that favors the unrestricted accumulation of profits by Western banks and corporations, with democracy. US officials often talk of democracy and free markets in the same breath, as if they’re more or less equal. This is far from true. Democracy in the close-to-the-original sense of rule by those who have no private ownership rights to productive property, is deeply inimical to the idea of an economic system that vests productive property in private hands. Even so, democracy promoters insist on treating capitalism and democracy as essentially equal, or if not equal, then complementary.

This explains why democracy promoters are often absent from countries that promote Western capitalist interests, but are not democratic. Saudi Arabia, an absolutist state ruled by a single family, is a good example. There is nothing democratic about Saudi Arabia. There are few civil liberties. Women are oppressed. There are no elections. And power rests in the hands of a tiny hereditary elite. Yet the oil-rich kingdom, whose petro-dollars are recycled through New York investment banks, is not on the democracy promoters’ radar screen.

Egypt is another example of an authoritarian country that is pretty much left alone by democracy promoters. Under the country’s president, Hosni Mubarak, some political parties are banned, bloggers have been detained by the police for criticizing the government (2), and the president has only ever run in a contested election once. Ayman Nour, Mubarak’s opponent, was detained before the election, and while he was eventually allowed to campaign, was quickly re-arrested after the election.

Mubarak’s son, Gamal, who “has never taken a bus, never stopped at a red light, never met anyone who wasn’t cleared by security services,” (3) is expected to step into the presidency when his father retires. Gamal is said to have the business class behind him. His father has the United States behind him. Under pere Mubarak, Egypt’s socialist-oriented reforms of the 1960s have been dismantled, and Egypt acts as one of Washington’s cops on the Middle Eastern beat. To fulfill that role, Washington has pumped almost $8 billion in aid into Egypt’s military over the last five years. (4)

If Mubarak is a virtual dictator who locks up critics, jails opponents, and bans political parties, why does US president Barack Obama call him a force for “good” and deny charges that Mubarak is “an authoritarian leader”? (5) Washington maintains sanctions on Zimbabwe because it says the country’s president, Robert Mugabe — who regularly runs in contested elections, hasn’t banned political parties, and hasn’t arranged a hereditary succession — is authoritarian, anti-democratic and has clung to power too long (he has been in power only one year longer than Mubarak.) Yet Mubarak, the anti-socialist, pro-imperialist point man for Washington, is praised by Obama and propped up with military aid, while Mugabe, the land reforming, anti-imperialist, is targeted for regime change.

Or how about the recently deceased Omar Bongo, who ruled Gabon for 41 years? While Western newspapers and politicians compete to see who can unleash the most vitriolic denunciation of Robert Mugabe for his 29 years in office, Bongo escaped their disapproving notice. And yet here was a man the democracy promoters would surely despise. He won overwhelming majorities in elections routinely denounced as fraudulent, was criticized for a poor human rights record that included limits on freedom of speech, torture and arbitrary arrest, and used his office to become immensely wealthy. Bongo lived extravagantly in a $500 million presidential palace while collecting sumptuous properties in and around Paris. And yet despite Bongo’s kleptocracy and disdain for democracy, he was “France’s point man in the region” and was long viewed as France’s “special partner.” Significantly, “France maintains a military base in the capital, Libreville, (and) has extensive oil interests in the country”, (6) which explains why Bongo was known as a “special partner” and “point man”, rather than a “thug,” “thief” and “dictator.” It also explains why the ultimate democracy promotion organization, the US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy, has dozens of programs in Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe and his Zimbabwe-first policies, but not one in Gabon to get rid of Bongo and his Western oil interests-first policies.

For a brief period, the Bush administration pushed Egypt to hold elections. Bush had announced his Freedom Agenda, a plan to promote democracy throughout the Middle East. As part of the agenda, elections were also to be held for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Democracy promotion funding pored into Egypt from Washington and “Mubarak initially responded by allowing an unprecedented degree of political freedom.” But when members of the Muslim Brotherhood (the same organization that produced Hamas) “did well at the polls, Egypt’s security apparatus cracked down. The Bush administration, concerned about pushing a key ally too far, responded meekly. And that, arguably, marked the inglorious end of the Freedom Agenda.” (7) The election of Hamas in January 2006 was no less an inglorious occasion for the Bush scheme. So ill-conceived was allowing electoral democracy to flourish in the Middle East, that Pentagon officials wondered “who the fuck recommended this?” (8)

The response to Hamas’s election was to immediately freeze the new government’s funding. If Palestinians refused to elect the right people, their vote would be negated. Hamas wouldn’t be allowed to govern. In Egypt, the White House eliminated American funding for democracy promotion and announced that neither military nor civilian funding would be conditional on democratic reforms. (9) The Obama administration has followed suit, paring back the funding Mubarak’s political opponents would have used to challenge Washington’s “point man” in Egypt. (10)

With the Bush administration’s brief dalliance with promoting democracy in the Middle East having gone terribly awry, Washington – with Obama now at the helm — has learned its lesson. And so democracy promotion returns to its accustomed paradigm. As always, fifth columns continue to be funded under the guise of promoting democracy, the goal to install new point men for Western economic elites where reliable ones don’t already exist. Elsewhere, the autocrats who are already point men are once again left in peace, untroubled by elections, democracy and freedom agendas.

1. Stephen Gowans, “US Government Report Undermines Zimbabwe Opposition’s Claim of Independence,” What’s Left, October 4, 2008, https://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/us-government-report-undermines-zimbabwe-opposition%e2%80%99s-claim-of-independence/
2. Jeffrey Fleishman, “In Egypt, a blogger tries to spread ‘culture of disobedience’ among youths,” The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2009.
3. Patrick Martin, “Who will be Mubarak’s heir?” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 23, 2009.
4. Andrew Albertson and Stephen McInerney, “Don’t give up on Egypt,” Foreignpolicy.com, June 2009.
5. Michael Slackman, “Arab states cool to Obama pleas for peace gesture,” The New York Times, June 3, 2009.
6. Adam Mossiter, “Omar Bongo, Gabon Leader, Dies at 73,” The New York Times, June 9, 2009.
7. James Traub, “Obama realism may not play well in Cairo streets,” The New York Times, May 31, 2009.
8. “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, April 2008.
9. James Traub, “Obama realism may not play well in Cairo streets, The New York Times, May 31, 2009.
10. Andrew Albertson and Stephen McInerney, “Don’t give up on Egypt,” Foreignpolicy.com, June 2009.

Washington seeks justification to return north Korea to terrorism list

By Stephen Gowans

The Bush administration removed north Korea last year from its list of states deemed to support international terrorism. Washington placed north Korea on the list in 1988, when it claimed the country’s “agents were implicated in the bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people.” (1) The US agreed to remove north Korea from the list as part of a deal that saw Pyongyang begin to dismantle its nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington will consider reinstating north Korea to the list “as the Obama administration looks for ways to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang after recent nuclear and missile tests.” (2)

“’We’re going to look at it’,” Clinton said on ABC’s ‘This Week’ when asked about a letter last week from Republican senators demanding that North Korea be put back on the list. ‘There’s a process for it. Obviously we would want to see recent evidence of their support for international terrorism.’” (3)

In other words, Washington has no evidence of north Korean support for international terrorism and no legitimate reason to restore north Korea to the list. But the Obama administration needs to find “ways to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang,” and re-listing north Korea seems to fit the bill.

But how much additional pressure will re-listing north Korea create?

Last summer, The Los Angeles Times noted that Washington’s removal of north Korea from the list would “have little practical effect…given the raft of economic sanctions currently in force against Pyongyang.” It went on to point out that then US president George W. Bush said the move would have “’little impact on North Korea’s financial and diplomatic isolation’ and that sanctions related to human rights violations, past nuclear testing and weapons proliferation would remain.” (4)

“North Korea is the most sanctioned nation in the world,” Bush said, “and will remain the most sanctioned nation in the world.” (5)

Bush’s promises made two things plain: (a) north Korea’s removal from the list was largely symbolic and (b) the US had no intention of normalizing its relations with north Korea, despite the deal it had struck with Pyongyang at the six party talks promising to do just that.

Indeed, it could be said that Washington agreed to remove north Korea from the list precisely because the move was symbolic and would not, therefore, weaken US efforts to topple the Communist government in Pyongyang. North Korea would remain the most sanctioned country on earth, whether it dismantled its nuclear capabilities or not.

So, if Washington’s removal of north Korea from the terrorism list was symbolic, then re-instating north Korea to the list must also be symbolic, and therefore hardly a means of ratcheting up real pressure.

Instead, the move seems to have everything to do with reinforcing the recent steps taken to return north Korea to its accustomed role as bogeyman of US foreign policy, a role it occupies rhetorically for reasons related to its supposed belligerence and in reality for its challenging US hegemony, interfering with US geopolitical aspirations, and denying the US a clear sphere of investment and export opportunity on the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Demonizing north Korea allows Washington to mobilize public opinion to support whatever non-symbolic measures it deems necessary to truly ratchet up pressure.

Clinton’s looking to see whether “there’s recent evidence of (north Korea’s) support for international terrorism” is the Obama administration’s equivalent of Dick Cheney looking to see whether there was evidence of Baghdad hiding weapons of mass destruction and forging ties to al Qaeda. The point is not to formulate foreign policy to accommodate the facts, but to accommodate the facts to a pre-determined foreign policy.

There can be little doubt that if Washington sets out to find “evidence” of north Korea supporting international terrorism, it will find something, no matter how flimsy, to satisfy its demand. Given Washington and the Western media’s transformation of north Korea into a looming threat from its reality as an impoverished country that has been beleaguered by embargo and continually harassed by the United States for over fifty years, there is little doubt that whatever contrived evidence Washington discovers will be seized upon as further evidence of the need to ratchet up the pressure.

1. Peter Finn, “US to weigh returning North Korea to terror list,” The Washington Post, June 9, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2008.
5. The New York Times, July 6, 2008.

North Korea’s nuclear test, reaction to danger of US foreign policy

By Stephen Gowans

Following are questions posed by Brasil de Fato and my answers to them.

Q. The corporate media say that Kim Jong Il is a crazy man who has the atomic bomb. What is the real purpose of North Korea’s atomic tests?

A. Kim Jong Il is portrayed as irrational and unpredictable, because that’s the only way north Korea can be made to appear to pose a threat. Depicting north Korea as a threat allows Washington to mobilize public opinion against north Korea and for US efforts to crush the Communist government in Pyongyang. North Korea, with a crude nuclear device, would never strike first, because it would be obliterated in seconds by countries that have far larger nuclear arsenals, and the means to deliver an annihilating nuclear blow. Depicting the north Korean leader as insane is a way of saying, “Look, Kim Jong Il won’t be deterred by the prospect of his own destruction. Be very afraid. And support the measures we implement to deal with the threat.”

Q. What is your opinion about the reaction of the West to these tests?

A. North Korea’s nuclear test isn’t an offensive threat. It’s a defensive threat. With a nuclear deterrent, the West is less able to bully north Korea. That’s why the West’s rhetorical reaction has been so strong. Washington needs to mobilize public opinion to support whatever measures are necessary to deal with north Korea. The rhetoric, consequently, is overheated to make a non-threat appear to be a major threat.

Q. There is an agreement between north Korea and the USA. But the US side of the agreement hasn’t been fulfilled. Is this the reason for the nuclear tests?

A. While north Korea dismantled 80 percent of its nuclear facilities by July of last year, and, as required under an agreement reached in the six party talks, made a full declaration of its nuclear program, the United States delayed fuel oil shipments and refused to normalize relations, as it had pledged to do. North Korea concluded correctly, I think, that the US has no real interest in arriving at a settlement, and is only interested in luring the country down the path of surrendering its nuclear weapons capability. Getting north Korea to give up its nuclear weapons capability may seem like a good thing if you believe north Korea is a threat, but it takes on an entirely different character when you recognize that US foreign policy is the real danger in the world, and that north Korea’s nuclear tests are simply reactions to the threats the US poses to the country’s security.

Q. What do you think about the way the Obama’s administration is dealing with this problem?

A. First, we should ask, who is this a problem for? It’s not a problem for north Korea. On the contrary, for the north Koreans, it’s a solution to a problem – that of securing some measure of security from US threats. It’s not a problem for you and me, because the chances of north Korea using its nuclear weapons in an offensive way are approximately zero. It is a problem for Washington, because Washington’s options in how it can pursue the goal of getting rid of the Communist government in Pyongyang have narrowed.

Without the US having destroyed every structure over one story in north Korea during the Korean War, without the US having targeted strategic nuclear missiles on north Korea in 1993, (before north Korea ever had nuclear weapons), without the US holding annual war games exercises on north Korea’s borders, north Korea wouldn’t have nuclear weapons. If we’re really concerned about north Korea’s nuclear weapons, we should examine the reasons why north Korea acquired them in the first place.

Regarding the Obama administration’s approach to north Korea: it is much the same as that of other administrations. The tactics may change, but the goal is always the same: the end of the Communist government in north Korea.

Q. Is this diplomatic crisis a consequence of the Korean War, as Kim Jong Il says?

A. The crisis is ultimately rooted in the United States’ determination to dominate the Korean peninsula, which led to the Korean War, so, in that sense, yes.

Q. Who provides (and why) the technology and material resources to “non-developed” countries that have nuclear weapons, like Pakistan, India and North Korea?

A. The source of the technology and know-how comes from different places, depending on the country. Israel, for example, received much of its nuclear technology and know-how from France in return for joining the Anglo-French war on Egypt in 1956, known as the Suez Canal Crisis. North Korea acquired an experimental reactor from the Soviet Union. This formed the basis of its current nuclear capabilities.

Q. Does north Korea’s nuclear test mean a real danger to the world? What are the consequences?

A. North Korea’s nuclear test is not a danger to the world. It is a danger to the US goal of dominating the Korean peninsula. The US, it should be recalled, literally flattened north Korea during the Korean War, targeted north Korea with strategic nuclear missiles after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Colin Powell talked of turning north Korea into a charcoal briquette, and George W. Bush listed north Korea as part of an axis of evil, which was more or less a hit list of countries the US was prepared to conquer militarily or at least wanted to intimidate. US foreign policy is the real danger to the world, not north Korea’s nuclear test. North Korea’s nuclear test is only a reaction to that danger.

Q. There are other countries with nuclear weapons, like France. Why is the reaction against the north Korean tests bigger than the reaction against France’s last nuclear tests under Jacques Chirac?

A. The reaction isn’t against the nuclear test per se, but against what it means. It means a reduction in US options to bully north Korea. Countries with nuclear weapons are the first to deplore proliferation, but behave in ways that guarantee it. If you target non-nuclear countries with nuclear weapons, they’ll build deterrents. If you launch aggressive wars, as the US and Britain have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, deterrents will be sought by other countries anxious to preserve their independence from Western attack. These aren’t belligerent and provocative acts, as the Western media describe them, but legitimate acts of self-defense.

It might be said, “Well, maybe the US targeted north Korea because it poses a threat.” That’s absurd. North Korea’s military budget is an infinitesimal fraction of the Pentagon’s, and is smaller than that of south Korea. A north Korean attack on south Korea would invite north Korea’s complete destruction. At best, the north Koreans can hope they’re strong enough to inflict a blow of sufficient strength to deter south Korea and its US patron from launching an attack, but they could never hope to take south Korea or survive a war without massive destruction. Pyongyang has approached Washington repeatedly about formally ending the Korean War, signing a peace treaty, and normalizing relations. On every occasion, it has been rebuffed. Washington will not tolerate anti-private property regimes and therefore will always be looking for a way to end the Communist government in north Korea. The only way it will arrive at a modus vivende with north Korea, is if it’s compelled to by the fact that it can’t push the country around with impunity. And even then, US attempts to destabilize north Korea will be unrelenting. That was the case with the Soviet Union.

There’s a principle at issue, here. Should countries be free from control and domination from outside? If so, should they be able to preserve their independence by building nuclear weapons as a deterrent, if necessary? If not, the implication is that preventing proliferation is a higher good than sovereignty, and that countries should submit to domination by outside forces to uphold the higher principle of non-proliferation. Powers that have the means to enforce their domination over other countries will, quite naturally, support this view and place great rhetorical emphasis on the need to prevent proliferation. So too will the citizens of these countries. The sovereignty of their country isn’t threatened; the military already has access to nuclear weapons; proliferation to them, therefore, seems to be the larger issue.

On the other hand, sovereignty and freedom from domination may be regarded by others (the north Koreans principal among them) as a higher good than non-proliferation, in which case, the struggles of independent countries to maintain their independence by any means, even by acquiring nuclear weapons, will be accepted as legitimate and defensible. Korea lost its sovereignty to Japan from 1910 to 1945, and lost its brief independence to the United States, in the south, in 1945, when US forces imposed a military government, and later recruited the truculently anti-Communist Syngman Rhee to head a US puppet government. Having been dominated by outside forces for a significant period of the 20th century, the Koreans who built north Korea prize their country’s sovereignty and are prepared to fiercely defend it. For them, sovereignty is more important than proliferation.

The way to achieve non-proliferation and sovereignty together is to stop the US and other nuclear-armed countries from behaving in ways that encourage other countries to build deterrent arsenals, which, as it turns out, is equivalent to stopping the same countries from threatening the sovereignty of other countries. The critical issue here is to understand why countries like the United States, Britain, France and others seek to dominate other countries. In my view, there are systemic imperatives that drive these countries to behave in aggressive ways, and that these systemic imperatives are ultimately rooted in the capitalist system. Western media, which are, of course, ardently pro-capitalist, direct attention away from these critical questions, and have a bias to seek explanations in the character of individuals alone, rather than in situational factors and material conditions, or in the interplay of the personal and situational. That’s one reason for the media’s emphasis on the personality of Kim Jong Il, rather than on the history of US attempts to dominate the Korean peninsula and the conditions that encouraged north Korea to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. If you believe that north Korea armed itself with nuclear weapons because Kim Jong Il is insane and power-mad and wants to continue a family dynasty, you’re two steps removed from thinking about what drives the US to behave in ways that forced the north Koreans to test a nuclear weapon. In other words, as a consequence of the media’s misdirection, you’re not even aware of what the problem is, and without awareness of the problem, you can’t even begin to glimpse the solution.

Turning the threatened into the aggressor: Media distortions in coverage of north Korea’s nuclear test

Colin Powell said we would…turn north Korea into a ‘charcoal briquette,’ I mean that’s the way we talk to north Korea, even though the mainstream media doesn’t pay attention to that kind of talk. A charcoal briquette. (1)

By Stephen Gowans

The following South Korean government statement appeared in the New York Times on May 28, 2009.

“If North Korea stages a provocation, we will respond resolutely. We advise our people to trust our military’s solid readiness and feel safe.”

Inclined to depict south Korea as provocative and belligerent, a headline writer may have written the following to introduce the story:

“South Korea threatens military strikes on North.”

Instead, The New York Times introduced the story this way:

“North Korea threatens military strikes on South.”

In covering north Korea’s latest nuclear test and missile launches, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other the Western media have presented a set of facts, without necessary context. Through critical omissions, north Korea has been portrayed as “provocative and belligerent,” following the official US account offered by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In this, as always, the US media have operated as an extension of the US state. That the US media mimic, amplify and justify official US foreign policy positions is an inevitable consequence of the interlocks between the mass media, business and government.

Rather than being provocative, belligerent, irrational and unpredictable, north Korea’s recent behavior has been, on the contrary, defensive, rational and completely predictable. It is not north Korea that has provoked and threatened war; it is the United States, and its client regimes in south Korea and Japan that have played the role of Mars. North Korea’s reactions, are sane, defensive and exactly what would be expected of a country that prizes its fiercely won independence and has no intention of surrendering it to international bullying.

The provocations and belligerence of the US and its allies are to be found in their rejection of north Korea’s overtures of peaceful coexistence. Where north Korea has sought to normalize relations with its neighbors and the West, the US and its allies have talked of getting tough and punishing north Korea for its “bad behavior.”

South Korean president Lee Myung-bak reversed the previous government’s policy of rapprochement. Rather than providing aid and collaborating on economic projects, Lee has emphasized a get-tough policy to bring north Korea to heel. From Pyongyang’s perspective, south Korea has “opted for confrontation” and denied “national reconciliation and cooperation.”

And all had seemed to be going well. North Korea had agreed to disable its nuclear facilities, provide a complete declaration of its nuclear programs, and reaffirm its commitment not to transfer nuclear materials, technology, and know-how.

Talks ground to a halt when the US, south Korea, Russia, China and Japan, either failed to honor their side of the bargain, or renounced it altogether. Japan opted out, refusing to deal with north Korea until it came clean on the kidnapping of Japanese citizens. While north Korea acknowledged the crime, Japan insisted all had not been disclosed. This galled the north Koreans, who bristled over Japan making a cause celebre out of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens whose numbers represent an infinitesimal fraction of the number of Koreans who had been transported against their will to Japan as laborers and “comfort women” over the course of a 35 year Japanese colonization of Korea. Whether the Japanese are taking a genuinely principled stand, or merely feigning principled outrage, it is clear Tokyo has placed the kidnapping issue far ahead of normalizing relations. As Korea specialist Bruce Cumings points out, “The Japanese seem to think eight people are more important than finding a solution to north Korea’s atomic bomb.” (2) For Japan, which had dominated, exploited and oppressed Korea, confrontation, not conciliation, is the main point of departure of its DPRK policy.

By July of last year, north Korea had dismantled 80 percent of its nuclear facilities. Pyongyang was keen to complete its end of the bargain. Doing so would relax its decades-long US imposed isolation. The country stands to benefit enormously from normalization of relations and north Koreans were eager to facilitate the process. The necessity of maintaining a permanent war footing to guard against the potential aggression of the United States (which had threatened to turn the country into a charcoal briquette) has meant severe distortions in north Korean society. A sizeable chunk of the country’s limited resources has had to be plowed into the military, denying the country resources for much needed productive investments. US sanctions block north Korean exports and limit access to credit and foreign investment, further stifling north Korea’s economic development. If north Korea’s economy is in trouble – and it is – it’s not so as a consequence of central planning and public ownership (a canard long favored by anti-Communists), but largely because it has been strangled economically by a hostile United States and forced to squander resources on military preparedness. Pyongyang has beseeched Washington repeatedly to formally end the Korean War and sign a lasting peace agreement, only to be rebuffed on every occasion. Talks held out hope – though slim — that north Korea would finally secure some measure of relief from US harassment.

By July of last year only 40 percent of the energy shipments promised by the US and other parties to the talks – intended to compensate for the loss of energy from closing the Yongbyon reactor — had been delivered. Disturbingly, this appeared to portend a repeat of the Clinton administration policy, worked out in connection with an earlier deal, of endless delay, counting on sanctions and embargoes to bring down the government in Pyongyang before US commitments had to be honored. The Clinton administration had promised north Korea fuel oil shipments and light-water reactors in return for Pyongyang shuttering its Yongbyon facilities. North Korea had used the reactor to produce fuel for a nuclear weapon, but only after the US announced it was re-targeting its strategic nuclear weapons on north Korea following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since north Korea had been flattened, literally, by the US Air Force during the Korean War, the north Koreans had reason not to take the threat lightly. Developing nuclear weapons seemed to be the best way to bring about a stalemate and preserve north Korea’s hard-won sovereignty.

On top of falling behind on fuel shipments, the Bush administration refused to honor its promise to remove the DPRK from its Trading with the Enemy Act. Bush assured anti-DPRK conservatives that despite the deal with north Korea a wide array of US sanctions would remain in place for a long time. Normalization was not in the cards.

Washington justified its failure to meet its obligations by adding a new demand, and then announcing it couldn’t move forward until Pyongyang complied with the new conditions. The conditions, however, were never talked about by US officials as if they were new; instead, Washington acted as if north Korea had agreed to them all along, and that it was Pyongyang, not Washington, that was reneging. Now, in addition to making a full declaration of its nuclear program, north Korea was expected to submit to a verification protocol that would allow US inspectors to go anywhere they wanted in north Korea, sizing up military installations and nosing about defensive positions. Pyongyang countered by demanding unfettered access to south Korea, to verify that the US no longer stored tactical nuclear weapons on Korean soil. Washington insists it doesn’t, but Pyongyang remains sceptical. The US refused, so the DPRK called an end to the talks, having no intention of sacrificing national security. By this point, the US, south Korea and Japan had made clear they had no real commitment to normalization. The talks were simply a way of luring north Korea down a path of surrendering the one thing that kept it from the fate of Ba’athist Iraq – its weapons of mass destruction.

Months later, north Korea would launch a satellite on top of a rocket. Inasmuch as this represented a step forward in the development of a rocket technology that could be used to launch a nuclear warhead, the US persuaded members of the UN Security Council to censure the DPRK. Pyongyang pointed out that it was perfectly within its rights to launch a satellite, and that whatever punitive measures were taken were unjustifiable.

North Korea has never taken military action outside the Korean peninsula. The danger of rocket and nuclear technology in north Korean hands is not one of aggressive war but of north Korea being able to defend itself against the US and Japan, countries with long and bloody histories of waging wars of aggression, on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere. As Bruce Cumings explains,

“The context, going back to the Korean War, for north Korea is that we have targetted north Korea with nuclear weapons since 1950. We are the only power to put nuclear weapons into the Korean Peninsula from 1958 to ’91. And when you look back at Don Rumsfeld’s antics in 2003, when he throught we had won the Iraq war around May or June of 2003, he was asking Congress for new bunker-buster nuclear weapons to go after Kim Jong-Il and the north Korean leadership.” (3)

North Korea’s development of nuclear and rocket technology creates two dangers for Washington and Tokyo: the danger of self-defense against Powell, Rumsfeld and their successors; and the danger of becoming an example to others if it can develop economically outside the strictures of capitalism and imperialism.

Reading about north Korea’s nuclear test in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other Western media, I have been struck by the similarities in coverage. What one newspaper says is pretty much what every other says, as if reporters read each others’ copy and simply repeat what the others have written. There are benefits to doing this. How can you be taken to task over what you’ve written, if what you’ve written agrees with what everyone else says? Of course, there has to be a starting point. The ideas that journalists swap and pass around and mimic have to come from somewhere. But where? The US State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations are two places journalists look for guidance on foreign policy matters. What officials of these two bodies say are regularly echoed in major media, and in train, by opinion leaders, including university professors. Jeremy Paltiel (4), a professor of political science at a university in the city in which I live, offers a serviceable summary of the ideas journalists have been bandying about on north Korea’s latest nuclear test. Let’s look at them.

Paltiel characterizes north Korea’s underground detonation as a “clear provocation” which tests “the resolve of the international community,” without saying how the detonation is a provocation or what he means by the international community. The world has tested 2,054 nuclear devices, only two of which were north Korean, and most of which belonged to the great powers – the countries which make up the permanent membership of the UN Security Council. These are the countries Paltiel implicitly refers to when he speaks of the “international community.” So, countries of the nuclear club are upset that another country has challenged their cozy monopoly.

“The stakes are high,” writes Paltiel, “not just because Pyongyang’s provocations undermine security in northeast Asia, but also because a crucial issue facing the United States is nuclear proliferation to Iran.” We might ask whose security in northeast Asia is being threatened, and how? The United States has targeted strategic nuclear weapons on north Korea – and did so before north Korea had a nuclear weapons capability. Indeed, it is because it has been targeted, that north Korea acquired a nuclear weapons capability in the first place, as a deterrent. The reality of US missiles trained on north Korea surely threatens north Korea’s security, but Paltiel doesn’t label this a provocation. Somehow, north Korea, with a rudimentary nuclear weapons capability, is provocative, while the United States, with hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at north Korea, 27,000 US troops on Korean soil and 40,000 in nearby Japan, is not. No one with an unprejudiced mind seriously believes that north Korea is an offensive threat to anyone. With south Korea and Japan under a US nuclear umbrella, the first strike use of a nuclear weapon by north Korea against its neighbours would guarantee its immediate annihilation. This truth is not lost on north Korea’s leadership.

As for nuclear proliferation to Iran, it’s not clear whether Paltiel is referring to Iran’s building of a civilian nuclear power industry, in which case it is incumbent on him to explain why Iran, a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, should be uniquely denied the benefits of nuclear power or forced to depend on the great powers for access to nuclear fuel (access they could turn off to extort Iranian concessions.) If he is treating as fact the unsubstantiated allegation that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, then he has ventured into the field of political fiction. Even the US intelligence community says Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. But if Iran did, could it be blamed for seeking a means to deter the frequent threats of war directed its way by Israel and the United States? Some will say, but these are threats of preventive attack, responses to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe Israel off the map. The problem is, this is a deliberate misinterpretation of what Ahmadinejad said. What he said was that Israel qua Zionist state would eventually disappear, in the same way South Africa qua apartheid state disappeared. There was no implication in Ahmadinejad’s words of nuclear attack or physical destruction. Besides, the US threatened an attack on Iran before Ahmadinejad uttered his misconstrued remarks, when the Bush administration listed Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” and then attacked the first country on the list, Iraq. It’s not Ahmadinejad that invites Washington’s hostility to Iran.

Paltiel carries on in this vein, arguing that it is a short hop, skimp and jump from north Korea being allowed to keep its nuclear weapons to the destruction of Israel. “Should [n]orth Korea acquire the status of nuclear-weapons state, any effort to prevent the nuclearization of Iran would lose validity,” he writes. It’s news to me that this effort had any validity to begin with. He continues: “And the prospect of a nuclear Iran would unravel U.S. Middle East policy, threatening the survival of Israel as well as the security of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf oil-exporting states.” All of this is very vague. It’s not clear how a nuclear Iran would unravel US Middle East policy, or how an unravelling US Middle East policy would lead to the destruction of Israel, unless Paltiel is suggesting that without US support, Israel qua colonial settler state, is dead. If so, this could hardly be something to dread; since it would represent the defeat of a racist ideology, it should, on the contrary, be welcomed as a gain for humanity.

Paltiel’s next step is to explain why north Korea detonated a nuclear device. His argument has been repeated in all major media, or, to put it another way, Paltiel repeats an argument all major media have made. That is that north Korea’s acquisition of a nuclear-weapons capability has nothing to do with the US’s, south Korea’s and Japan’s confrontational stance; nothing to do with the great powers stepping up sanctions on north Korea over the DPRK exercising its right to launch a satellite; nothing to do with US strategic nuclear weapons being targeted on north Korea; nothing to do with the provocative war games exercises the US and south Korea recently held on north Korea’s borders; nothing to do with the tens of thousands of US troops stationed nearby; nothing to do with the need to deter the US, a country which has demonstrated repeatedly that it is prepared to launch aggressive wars, and once did in Korea; in fact, none of these things Paltiel mentions, though they’re surely all highly relevant. Instead, Paltiel attributes north Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons to “the Kim family dynasty’s determination to secure its survival.” If ever there was a violation of Occam’s Razor, this is it. How does the acquisition of nuclear weapons secure the Kim family’s survival? I’m sure Paltiel could weave an elaborate tapestry of arguments to explain the connection between the DPRK’s nuclear test and the Kim family’s leadership aspirations, but why do so when a simple, compelling, explanation of why north Korea tested a nuclear device is close at hand? The reason why is because attribution of north Korea’s development of a nuclear deterrent to the personal qualities of its leadership, rather than to situational factors, deflects attention from the real reasons for north Korea’s behavior. This sets the stage to mobilize public opinion for action to “liberate” north Koreans from Kim’s “power-hungry” and “reckless rule.”

That Paltiel is about five steps removed from reality becomes plain when he frets about “US President Barack Obama’s dream of a nuclear-weapons-free future” evaporating “into a mushroom cloud.” Earth to Paltiel: Obama may dream of a nuclear-weapons-free future, but the chances of the US leading the way by relinquishing or even seriously reducing its nuclear arsenal are about as good as the chances of Kim Jong Il playing opposite Jennifer Aniston in a romantic comedy. Were Obama truly interested in a nuclear-weapons-free future, he would reverse his country’s targeting with nuclear weapons of non-nuclear states – the very reason for nuclear proliferation to north Korea – while renouncing the United States’ addiction to conquering weaker countries. If he did these things, the necessity for threatened countries of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability to protect themselves against US aggression would be eliminated. That’s the route to a nuclear-weapons-free future.

Paltiel’s article was written before south Korea announced it would join the Proliferation Security Initiative, a US-led program to intercept north Korean ships on the high seas, to inspect their cargo for so called contraband goods, the rockets north Korea sells to other countries to earn much needed foreign currency. Pyongyang pointed out correctly that this amounted to a declaration of war, since interfering with another country’s shipping is an act of war. Commit an act of war against us, warned the north Koreans reasonably, and we’ll retaliate. Paltiel, we can be assured, would have joined in the clamor that met north Korea’s warning, by characterizing the warning as a belligernet and provocative act against south Korea. The accustomed practice in journalistic circles has been to declare that north Korea threatened to attack the south, the journalists only later acknowledging that the DPRK did so only after the south threatened to commit an act of war against the north. Indeed, south Korea threatened north Korea, which then threatened to retaliate. Belligerent and provocative or self-defensive?

None of this is clear from the stories carried in Western newspapers, because these stories critically omit context and surrounding events. The facts are correct, but they’re organized within a framework that defines north Korea as provocative and belligerent. It is the purest political fiction, in which black becomes white, night becomes day, and self-defense becomes provocation. “If you’re not careful,” warned Malcolm X, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”…and believing the aggressors are the threatened.

1. Bruce Cumings, “Latest North Korean provocations stem from missed US opportunities for demilitarizaton,” Democracy Now!, May 29, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Jeremy Paltiel, “Chimerica must rise to Kim Jong Il’s challenge,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 25, 2009.

On Middle East, Obama tries a new tactic, but goal remains unchanged

By Stephen Gowans

The Obama administration’s recent get tough policy on Israel over expansion of West Bank settlements may seem to signal a welcome reversal in Washington’s Israel-first foreign policy, but it is anything but. On the contrary, it drives toward the same aims that have structured US Middle Eastern policy for decades: pacifying the Palestinians.

The program of quieting Palestinian resistance was set back when Hamas, an uncompromising opponent of the Zionist project of colonial settlement of historic Palestine, won Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006. Israel, which had warned it would not tolerate a Hamas government, whether democratically elected or not, garnered US and EU support for a blockade to destabilize the newly elected government.

A Palestinian civil war eventually split the population, with Hamas, disinclined to sacrifice fundamental goals to immediate gains, ruling in the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, willing to compromise on just about everything, ruling in the West Bank.

Israel and Egypt imposed a total blockade on Gaza. The blockade prohibits entry of all goods – including the building materials Gaza’s residents need to rebuild hospitals, homes and infrastructure destroyed by Israeli forces earlier this year. The only goods that make their way in are those which can be smuggled through tunnels and the food and medicine that Israel and Egypt allow in.

“The aim is to keep Gaza at subsistence and offer a contrast with the West Bank, which in theory benefits from foreign aid and economic and political development. Hamas supporters will then realize their mistake,” (1) withdraw their support of Hamas, and overthrow the government. In subsequent elections, Gazans will vote for Hamas’s rival, Fatah, fearing a return of the blockade if they repeat the mistake of voting for Hamas. Hosannas will be sung to the birth of democracy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and all — from the narrow perspective of the Western media – will be well.

The problem with this scenario – and the reason why the blockade hasn’t worked — is that it ignores the reasons Palestinians voted for Hamas in the first place. Under Fatah’s watch, poverty and misery got worse, while Fatah’s leaders lived lives of growing extravagance. By contrast, Hamas’s leaders continued to live modestly, side by side with ordinary Palestinians.

Equally vexing were Fatah’s conspicuous political failures. Fatah led Palestinians into the “peace process” but had nothing to show for it. Israel continued to expand its settlements, was adamant that it would never honor the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, and insisted Jerusalem would remain in Israeli hands – the eternal and permanent capital of a Jewish state. Fatah had presented the peace process as a way of making compromises to secure concrete gains. Compromises were made, but the promised gains never materialized.

Instead, Palestinians were presented with an increasingly collaborationist Fatah leadership, ever more willing to settle for a state comprised of an agglomeration of disconnected areas, making up a tiny fraction of the land Palestinians had been dispossessed of, its borders controlled by the Israeli military, without a capital, and with no adequate redress for refugees.

What’s more, Fatah’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, owes his allegiance more to Washington, which funds and trains his security force and keeps him in power in the West Bank, than to the goals of Palestinian national liberation and self-determination. Abbas recently appointed himself president of the Palestinian Authority (with the full support of the self-declared champion of democracy, the United States), and, as leader of the dominant party of the PLO, sole legitimate spokesman for the Palestinians. This, despite his electoral mandate having lapsed and despite his party having lost the last elections.

With Abbas unable to command much popular support, Washington is in the position of having to do something to make their man in Ramallah more appealing to Palestinians. The latest tactic is to demand Israel cease expansion of its settlements in the West Bank. Washington has made this demand countless times before, only everyone knew US officials didn’t mean it, and there were no consequences if Israel chose to ignore it (which it always did.) But this time Washington means it, or says it does. Not because it has leaned a tiny fraction toward the Palestinians and away from the Israelis, but because administration officials believe this stance “will bolster Mr. Abbas.” (2) If Abbas is going to dance to Washington’s tune, he had better get something – even a lagniappe – to show for it; otherwise his credibility with Palestinians will continue to falter.

We shouldn’t, therefore, think that the US administration’s latest moves represent a victory for the Palestinians or a shift in US foreign policy objectives. On the contrary, by coming down firmly on the side of Abbas, Washington is trying to strengthen the position of a leader favored for his willingness to compromise, capitulate and collaborate. The intended victor is Israel, who, if Washington is successful, will have a tractable and more attractive Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas and whatever fellow Quislings follow.

(1) Ethan Bronner, “Misery hands over Gaza despite pledges of help,” The New York Times, May 29, 2009.

(2) Helene Cooper, “Obama calls for swift move toward Mideast peace talks,” The New York times, May 29, 2009.

An Acceptable Dictator for Afghanistan?

Viceroy, Counsel-General, or CEO. Whatever he’s called, it appears that Afghan-born US foreign policy establishment figure Zalmay Khalilzad is being sized up for a new role: An “acceptable” dictator for Afghanistan.

By Stephen Gowans

From close to the end of the 19th century for twenty-five years, the real ruler of Egypt was Sir Evelyn Baring of the British banking establishment, Baring Brothers. Sir Evelyn ran Egypt’s affairs as Counsel-General, following the principle that the interests of British bondholders and those of the Egyptian people were identical. (1)

Was it Sir Evelyn that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had in mind when he prodded Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai to talk to the former US ambassador to occupied Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, about becoming the “chief executive officer” (that is, Counsel-General) of Afghanistan?

Or does Khalilzad, the Afghan-born member of the US foreign policy establishment, fit the bill as the “acceptable” dictator Washington and London have searched for, to strengthen their precarious hold over Afghanistan?

In a diplomatic cable leaked last autumn, then British ambassador Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, warned that,

“The current situation (in Afghanistan) is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust. The presence of the coalition, in particular, its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution. Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.” (2)

The only “realistic” path, reasoned the British ambassador, is for Afghanistan to be “governed by an acceptable dictator.”

A half year later, The New York Times (3) revealed that Khalilzad — who in Afghanistan had been “involved to a degree that is virtually unheard of for an ambassador” –- is being considered for a job that he and Karzai describe “as the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.” (4)

Washington denies ownership of the idea, but all the same, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative to the region, have signed off on it.

Washington is concerned “that any belief that the West was behind the plan would harm its chances inside Afghanistan,” which means, even if US officials are prodding Karzai to take on Khalilzad as CEO, they’re not going to admit it. This is to be seen as an idea Karzai had himself, possibly implanted by Brown, but in no way bearing a stamp marked Made in the USA.

Apart from his duties as ambassador to occupied Afghanistan, Khalilzad also served as US ambassador to occupied Iraq and the UN.

He is said to have considered challenging Karzai – who has increasingly fallen out of favor with his imperial masters in Washington — for the presidency in elections scheduled in August, but missed the May 8 deadline for filing and didn’t want to relinquish his US citizenship.

As an assistant professor at Columbia University, Khalilzad worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of the Carter administration policy of backing the Islamic resistance to the reforms introduced by the pro-Soviet revolutionary government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Brzezinski sought to draw the Soviet Union into (as he put it) its own Vietnam, by backing the reaction to the Afghan Revolution. The outcome was an end to a project of advancing Afghan literacy, education and women’s and economic rights, and the plunging of the country back into the darkness of warlordism and feudal backwardness.

Khalilzad later worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank which brings together CEOs, scholars, and government and military officials in discussion groups to formulate policy to reflect the interests of the corporations and hereditary capitalist families that provide its funding and furnish its directors. CFR policy papers are then submitted to the US State Department, to be turned into policy by the former CFR personnel who are routinely placed in senior State Department positions.

There is a continual migration of personnel between the CFR and the State Department, and Khalilzad, no less than other fixtures of the US foreign policy establishment, moved easily between the two organizations. He followed up his stint at the CFR by moving to the State Department, where he worked with Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become architect of the US war of conquest on Iraq, and acted as an advisor on US support for the feudal and religious reaction in Afghanistan.

His State Department duty was followed by a job at the RAND Corporation, a research organization set up by the US Air Force in 1948, to formulate policy on national security. There, Khalilzad founded its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and its journal Strategic Appraisal.

While at Rand, the future ambassador to Afghanistan acted as a liaison between UNOCAL (now Chevron), which was looking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan, and the Taliban, which, at the time, formed the government. Soon after, Khalilzad joined Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neo-conservatives in the Project for a New American Century, a think thank that promotes an overt military imperialism under the rubric of “promoting American global leadership.”

As ambassador to occupied Afghanistan, Khalilzad was accused of scheming behind the scenes to favor Karzai –- Washington’s favored candidate – over other candidates in presidential elections. Khalilzad’s influence as ambassador was so strong, that Afghans nicknamed him ‘the Viceroy,” likening him (accurately) to a colonial governor. (5)

With Afghans strongly opposed to US domination, their opposition expressed in armed resistance and growing anger over civilian deaths caused by US military operations, Washington is trying to pull a veil over the influence it wields in the country. As former British ambassador Cowper-Coles warned, the West needs an acceptable dictator, someone who can execute US foreign policy goals from within the country, while at the same time claiming independence from the US government.

Khalilzad, as a private citizen with no current formal connection to the US government, offers Washington the prospect of plausible deniability that it is running the show in Afghanistan. If Khalilzad steps in as CEO, Washington can claim that day-to-day decisions are being made by a private citizen with no formal ties to the US government.

Even if Washington isn’t orchestrating Khalilzad’s consideration as CEO, we can be sure, given his background, that his administration of Afghanistan’s affairs would rest on the same principal Sir Evelyn Baring used to govern Egypt: that the interests of foreign bond holders and those of the natives are identical.

1. A.L. Morton, A People’s History of England, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1938.
2. The New York Times, October 4, 2008.
3. The New York Times, May 19, 2009.
4. It is the practice in some circles to refer to countries as economies. Those of us who live in a G-8 country are advised to be proud of living in a G-8 economy. The idea of a chief executive officer of a country (as separate from the president, the chief of the executive of a republic) takes this idea one step further. A country now becomes, neither country nor economy, but a business.
5. The Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2004.

Cuba and the real battle for democracy

By Stephen Gowans

While Obama may have contrived to create the impression at the recent Summit of the Americas of extending an open hand to Cuba, it’s clear that his aims are no different from those of George W. Bush or any other of his presidential predecessors, all the way back to Kennedy. The point for the US state has always been to recover Cuba as a field for US investment, and the surest way to achieve this goal is to dismantle Cuba’s socialist system, or at least to severely limit it. So it is that after making the obligatory rhetorical references to Cuba needing to improve its human rights situation (see Netfa Freeman’s recent Black Agenda Report article on Cuba and US hypocrisy), Obama’s “aides outlined a series of steps that Cuba…could do to demonstrate a willingness to open its closed society.” The principle step was “allowing United States telecommunications companies to operate on the island.” (1) In other words, moves would be made toward lifting the US embargo, if Cuba first made moves toward opening its doors to US capital. Since the purpose of the blockade has always been to extort this concession, how could it be said that the Obama policy is any different from that of his predecessors?

That the prize is an “open society” in Cuba, which is to say, open to capitalist exploitation from abroad, was made plain when Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, remarked that, “If the objective is to see change in Cuba, it’s hard to see how a trade embargo would do anything other than keep the economic system closed.” (2) Harper opposes the blockade, not because he wants to see Cuba’s socialism thrive, but because he thinks lifting it is the best way to undermine Cuba’s socialist economy. Engage Cuba has always been the Canadian position. Eventually it will come around to our way of thinking.

Cuba’s socialist system offers a materially secure existence to all, with free health care and education through university. It does this despite limited resources and in the face of nearly 50 years of economic warfare by the United States. Imagine what it could accomplish if the United States wasn’t continually trying to undermine it.

Prying open Cuba’s economic system would profit Western banks and corporations. But would it benefit Cubans in the majority?

Not under conditions the US government would favour. The ideal situation from the point of view of the US state and the corporate interests it represents is the replacement of Cuban socialism with an open, multiparty electoral democracy – which to Westerners, even most leftists, is a political summum bonum.

To those with lots of money, and the need to find places to invest it, multiparty electoral democracy offers two advantages.

The first is that practically everyone is for it. Accordingly, marshalling support for measures to build democracy abroad is never difficult. The US government can act in whatever way the structural imperatives of the capitalist system demand without incurring too much opposition so long as it says it’s promoting “democracy”, implicitly understood as regular electoral contests between two or more parties (not the ancient’s rule by the rabble or Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat.)

The second advantage of a multiparty electoral democracy to the states and interlocked corporate interests that favour it, is that the entire process can be easily hijacked by the rich. Modern elections, popularity contests contested by ambitious exhibitionists who vie for the backing of wealthy patrons, are driven by money. Generous campaign financing – or lack of it – can make or break a campaign. Ambitious politicians know this, and make their peace with the reality, or are weeded out. Once in office, they know that if they play their cards right, there are perks and handsome opportunities awaiting them in their post-political lives. Easily circumvented electoral laws forbidding foreign donations fail to stop funding from foreign sources rolling into candidates prepared to sell their country’s sovereignty, natural resources and labor to the imperial center. It may be facile to put it this way, but the golden rule of multiparty electoral democracy is that those who have the gold, rule. And so democracy has travelled the path from rule by the plebs to the dictatorship of the proletariat to ambitious lawyers chasing after the patronage of the rich.

Not in Cuba. But if Obama and Harper had their way, the golden rule would prevail. And what would the consequences be? A minority of Cubans – those who facilitated the exploitation of their country by foreign business interests — would benefit. But the majority would find their lives becoming increasingly insecure, roiled by the vicissitudes of the market, and in turn, by decisions made in foreign boardrooms. Hollow promises would be solemnly made. Cuba needs foreign investment, and the way to get it is to turn Cuba into an investor-friendly environment. Do this, and Cubans will be lifted out of poverty. The deception is evidenced in the state of Cuba’s Caribbean neighbours, in Haiti, in Jamaica, where free trade and the open door and untrammelled foreign investment have piled up misery and poverty at one end, while vast riches are accumulated at the other, hundreds of miles away, to the north.

While lifting the trade embargo would be a welcome step, the act, by itself, would in no way represent a lessening of hostility to Cuban socialism, only a different tact in the unceasing campaign of corporate-dominated governments to recover Cuba as an open field for investment and cheap labor.

There are no changes Cuba needs to make to accommodate the US; the US has not been wronged. But it would be naïve to think that whatever concessions Washington makes, if any, will represent Washington taking the first step along the path to peaceful co-existence. So long as the United States remains a corporate-dominated (that is, a capitalist) society, and Cuba a socialist one, a structural compulsion will exist to shape US foreign policy toward unceasing efforts to remove whatever obstacles are in the way of profit-making. Since an egalitarian system which defines a materially secure existence for all as the summum bonum is the antithesis of one based on the incessant drive of the few to accumulate great wealth by exploiting the many, there shall never be peace between the two. The only hope for peace is the destruction of one by the other, and in these days of renewed economic crisis, it is clearer than usual which system it would be in the interests of the bulk of us to prevail.

It may be objected that whatever the advantages of Cuban socialism in offering a materially secure existence to all, it is still an existence at a lower level than enjoyed in advanced capitalist countries, and therefore, how can socialism be the preferred system?

To this could be replied, first, that to the bulk of humanity, which lives outside the advanced countries of the West, capitalism is hardly a system of consumer riches and abundance. It is instead a system of dearth, misery, and ceaseless toil. This too is true of tens of millions of poor people who live in the advanced capitalist world.

It is true that socialist countries have been poorer than advanced capitalist countries, but their lower material level has not (and in the case of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European people’s democracies had not) been caused by socialism; on the contrary, it had been largely overcome as a result of socialism. The socialist countries started out at a lower level compared to their advanced capitalist counterparts, building their productive assets without the benefits of the slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism advanced capitalist countries relied on to get rich.

In popular Western discourse, the division of the capitalist world between the affluent countries of the north and the underdeveloped countries of south is glossed over. Capitalism is equated with the West, and therefore with great affluence. Capitalism could just as readily be associated with the south, and therefore with great poverty, for the south is as thoroughly capitalist as the north. But it suits the purposes of spreading the capitalist doctrine to equate capitalism with a part of the world whose affluence is due to capitalist imperialism rather than capitalism itself, as if any country that embraced multiparty democracy and free markets would soon find itself a facsimile of the United States.

In 1983, Shirley Ceresto found that if you divided countries into poor, middle income and rich, the socialist countries occupied the middle range, even though most were poor before embarking on paths of socialist development. In terms of satisfying basic human needs, the socialist countries did better than all the capitalist countries combined, better than middle income capitalist countries, and as well as advanced capitalist countries. (3) (What socialist countries offered that advanced capitalist countries didn’t, was security of income, gender equality, and secure access to health care, education, housing and necessities.)

As the socialist countries were struggling to catch up to the West, they found they needed to safeguard their revolutions from the incessant threat of military intervention from a stalking capitalist world. This diverted a significant portion of their more limited resources to military spending and away from productive investments. Despite these handicaps, socialist countries did grow at a rapid pace, and were closing the gap with their capitalist adversaries. At the same time, the socialist community was becoming more egalitarian, both within and between countries, and an increasing portion of necessary goods were available to their populations for free or at highly subsidized prices. (4)

Nowhere is the incidental (and not causal) connection between socialism and poverty more evident than in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where the regression to capitalism has done nothing to close the gap with the former West Germany or make the lives of east Germans better. After experiencing two decades of a resurrected capitalism, half of east Germans want to return to what they had before. Reuters, hardly known for promoting socialism, revealed that a public opinion poll had found that 52 percent of east Germans had no confidence in capitalism, and most of them wanted to return to a socialist economy. Here’s what east Germans told Reuters’ (5).

Thomas Pivitt, a 46-year-old IT worker from east Berlin:

“We read about the ‘horrors of capitalism’ in school. They really got that right. Karl Marx was spot on. I had a pretty good life before the Wall fell. No one worried about money because money didn’t really matter. You had a job even if you didn’t want one. The communist idea wasn’t all that bad.”

Hermann Haibel, a 76-year old retired blacksmith:

“I thought communism was shit but capitalism is even worse. The free market is brutal. The capitalist wants to squeeze out more, more, more.”

Monika Weber, a 46-year-old city clerk:

“I don’t think capitalism is the right system for us. The distribution of wealth is unfair. We’re seeing that now. The little people like me are going to have to pay for this financial mess with higher taxes because of greedy bankers.”

Ralf Wulff:

“It took just a few weeks to realize what the free market economy was all about. It’s rampant materialism and exploitation. Human beings get lost. We didn’t have the material comforts but communism still had a lot going for it.”

The former socialist countries have not been transformed into the consumer paradises many of their citizens believed they would become. Instead, citizens of former socialist countries have been liberated of materially secure existences and are now dominated by decisions made in boardrooms, many located in foreign countries, and are governed by ambitious exhibitionists who cater to the interests of the wealthy by necessity (for if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have access to the resources they need to get elected.) The same retrograde fate is the desired future for Cuba of the Obama administration, and will remain the desired fate for Cuba of every succeeding administration, until such a time as corporate interests no longer dominate the US state and the few no longer exploit the many; that is, until the real battle for democracy is won. (6)

1. Ginger Thompson and Alexei Barrionuevo, “Rising expectations on Cuba follow Obama,” The New York Times, April 19, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. Shirley Ceresto, “Socialism, capitalism and inequality,” The Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. XI, No. 2, Sprint 1982.
4. Albert Szymanski, Is the Red Flag Still Flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today, Zed Press, 1983.
5. Reuters, October 16, 2008.
6. “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy,” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Democracy would be exercised through the dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class would use its state powers to repress its class enemies and prevent their return. Since dictatorship and democracy are today understood to be opposites, it’s difficult to grasp how a dictatorship could be thought of as democratic. The democracy Marx and Engels were thinking of was closer to the original definition of democracy than the current understanding based on universal suffrage, representative democracy and regular multiparty elections. Democracy from antiquity had always been a class affair, which is why anyone who mattered was against it. The Marxist view was that capitalist democracy couldn’t be democracy in the original sense, because it allowed the majority to be governed by the few, who use their money power to dominate elections and the state. In a democracy as Marx and Engels understood it, the state would be dominated by the working class, its policies aimed at the interests of the working class and hence encroaching upon those of the capitalists, who would ardently seek to recover their previous advantages. The only way to secure democracy against the counter-revolutionary designs of the capitalists would be to be dictatorial in a new way – against the capitalist class. To socialist countries, most of which had had no tradition of liberal democracy, this meant that elections needed to be dominated by the Communist Party, as the leader of the working class. What was clear was that no party committed to reversing the gains of the revolution could be allowed to operate freely. In Cuba, elections are not party-based, and the Communist Party has no role in them. Instead, individuals stand for election. It is understood that elections are carried out within the socialist system and that the reversal of socialism is not on the table.

The Politics of The New York Times

By Stephen Gowans

The New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s promotion of a chauvinist understanding of foreign policy is evidenced in their recent treatment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and their non-treatment of criminal proceedings in Spain against six senior Bush administration officials for torture.

Al-Bashir is sought by the ICC in connection with war crimes charges related to the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan. Like the United States and Israel, Sudan is not a signatory to the treaty establishing the court. Neither country is willing to submit to the ICC for fear, they say, that their officials will face politically-motivated prosecutions, a fear they unjustifiably suppose is unique to their own nationals. State officials of other countries are as likely to become targets of politically-motivated indictments, all the more so if they preside over land, labor and resources coveted by powerful countries able to exercise influence over the court through their permanent positions on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). But the refusal of the United States and Israel to sign the ICC treaty is more likely motivated by fear that their frequent resort to military campaigns will open their officials to the risk of prosecution for war crimes by an international tribunal. While Sudan has not agreed to be bound by the court, the UNSC — three of whose members refuse to recognize the court — ordered the ICC to investigate al-Bashir.

The New York Times: Propagating chauvinist politics behind a façade of independent analysis and journalistic neutrality.

Meanwhile, the Spanish counter-terrorism judge who prosecuted former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet has initiated an investigation of six Bush administration officials for their role in writing the US policy that justified the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay. The officials are: former White House counsel and attorney general Alberto Gonzales; former vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes; former US Justice Department senior advisers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; and Douglas Freith, who was undersecretary of defense.

The six are said to have,

“participated actively and decisively in the creation, approval and execution of a judicial framework that allowed for the deprivation of fundamental rights of a large number of prisoners, the implementation of new interrogation techniques including torture, the legal cover for the treatment of those prisoners, the protection of the people who participated in illegal tortures and, above all, the establishment of impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention center at Guantánamo”. (1)

If the Spanish judge decides to issue arrest warrants, the six US officials could be detained and extradited if they travel outside the United States. In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in Britain after the same Spanish judge issued a warrant for his arrest. The Observer, a British newspaper which covered the Spanish court’s investigation of the six former US officials, approached the story as a “political problem” for the Obama administration, rather than in the high moral tones reserved for the leaders of countries the United States opposes, like al-Bashir. Western newspapers can work themselves up into high moral dudgeon over Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s “thugs” allegedly torturing political opponents, while calmly deliberating on the political difficulties attempts to hold US officials accountable for torture present to the Obama administration. There is an implicit assumption in Western media coverage of US crimes that US officials won’t be prosecuted, and that anyone who thinks they ought to be has stepped outside the bounds of acceptable thought. Obama, as unctuous as any other ambitious, exhibitionist, lawyer whose charm, intelligence and acceptable politics recommends him to the role of ruling class political representative, covered all his bases. He denounced the former administration’s torture policies, while disguising his craven refusal to prosecute the perpetrators as an admirable focus on the future. “Obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices, and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” Obama said in January. “But my orientation’s going to be forward-looking.” (2)

Al-Bashir finds himself in the same situation Freith et al. could soon be in, running the risk when travelling abroad of detention and extradition. Despite this, the Sudanese president recently travelled to an Arab League summit in Qatar, in what The Washington Post denounced as a “brazen act of defiance.” (3) (If Gonzales and his band of torture advocates face arrest warrants from the Spanish court but travel abroad anyway, will The Washington Post comment in disapproving tones on their brazenly defiant act?) Rather than being arrested, al-Bashir was welcomed by the heads of Arab states, many of whom denounced the court for its double standards. The leaders pointed out that the warrant for al-Bashir’s arrest was issued soon after Israel brazenly defied the rules of war to carry out a massacre in the Gaza Strip. Despite the Zionist army’s amply documented use of disproportional force against Gazan resistance fighters, its indiscriminate use of white phosphorus in civilian areas, its bombing of civilian infrastructure and targets, and its use of human shields, no indictments of Israeli leaders or soldiers have been forthcoming, or ever will be under the current global order dominated by Israel’s patron, the United States. Israel isn’t a party to the ICC and, with the United States wielding a Security Council veto, the UNSC won’t order the court to investigate Israeli war crimes.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad denounced the court and its indictment against al-Bashir, saying that the ICC’s “weak pretexts about fabricated crimes committed by Sudan” should only be discussed after “those who committed the atrocities and massacres in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq,” face the judgment of the court. (4)

While it’s hard to argue with al-Assad’s point, The New York Times did, trying to discredit it by citing the critical comments of a representative of what the newspaper deceptively dubbed as an independent NGO, the Doha Center for Media Freedom. The group’s spokesperson branded al-Assad as a hypocrite for wanting Israel to be investigated while complaining about al-Bashir’s indictment. That’s not exactly what al-Assad said. He criticized the ICC for its double standards, suggesting that its operation has far more to do with politics, than the pursuit of justice.

While presented as independent by The New York Times, The Doha Center is no more independent than The New York Times itself is. In fact, they are both beholden to the same class interests. Mia Farrow sits on the center’s advisory council and Reporters sans Frontiers’ (RSF’s) Robert Menard runs it. Farrow is an outspoken proponent of Western intervention in Sudan, while Menard is well known for his pro-Western chauvinism and hostility to the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions.

The Doha Center is a regional satellite of RSF. RSF receives much of its funding from the French government, the US Congress (through the CIA offshoot, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)), the Soros Foundation (notorious for putting up the financial backing for color revolutions), and the Center for a Free Cuba. The Center for a Free Cuba, whose mission is to help overthrow Cuba’s socialist system, is run by Frank Calzon, who spent 11 years with the CIA-interlocked Freedom House. The Center relies on funding from the US State Department (through USAID) and the US Congress (through the NED.)

The New York Times use of the Doha Center to provide ostensibly independent commentary is emblematic of the Western media practice of drawing on experts offered up by ruling class think-tanks and foundation-funded-NGOs to propagate ruling class positions under the guise of providing independent analysis. This practice has been especially evident in Western media coverage of events in Zimbabwe, where news stories have relied heavily on interviews with opposition figures and so-called independent experts, all of whom are generously funded by Western governments and foundations interested in regime change. Having a stable of NGO representatives and opposition politicians the media can turn to for a ready quote, who sing from the same songbook, creates the impression of unanimity born of common experience, rather than a common source of funding.

Another practice of the US media is to ignore or minimize events that challenge the doctrinal view that the United States and its allies do not commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, or carry out gross violations of human rights. Abuses may be duly noted, but the basic tenet that the West’s intentions are well-meaning remains sacrosanct. There could hardly be a better example of this than an April 4, 2009 New York Times paean to Nato, an organization established well before the Warsaw Pact, and which arose as the successor to the anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan against the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union collapsed, (in which Nato pressure played no small role), and presumably now without a raison d’etre, the alliance launched an illegal and aggressive terror bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, deliberately disdaining to secure UN approval for its actions, knowing it would be turned down. This gave rise to a whole industry aimed at supplying Nato with a legal figleaf to justify its aggressions. The alliance has since been pressed into service in the attempted conquest of Afghanistan. Its incessant expansion up to the borders of Russia is viewed as a hostile act by the Russian government, spurring Moscow to initiate a defensive military build-up. And yet, despite its aggressive and hostile nature, The New York Times celebrates Nato as “an alliance that deterred the Soviet Union, opened the door to emerging democracies (and) battled ethnic cleansing.” (5) In this, threatening the Soviet Union becomes deterrence, building a ring of military bases around Russia becomes opening the door to emerging democracies, and state terrorism against Yugoslav civilians carried out in contempt of international law becomes battling ethnic cleansing. If Nato truly battled ethnic cleansing, it would be locked in battle with the Israeli military, whose 61-year long effort to cleanse historic Palestine of Arabs, marks it as an ethnic cleansing organization par excellence. Instead, Nato countries are putting up the money that allows Israel to bomb, bulldoze and terrorize Palestinians.

Another example of The New York Times’ implicit commitment to the view that US foreign policy is at root guided by admirable values, is the newspaper’s reaction to the Obama administration announcing it will seek a seat on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council because “it believed working from within was the most effective means of altering the council’s habit of ignoring poor human rights records of member states.” (6) Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention, and whose function isn’t to act as a public relations hack for the US government, will greet this with stunned amazement. After Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and the humanitarian catastrophes of immense scale sparked by the wars of conquest against Iraq and Afghanistan – and this on top of a blood-soaked history of military intervention, destabilization, and mass murder around the world – the United States has the gall to seek a seat on the Human Rights Council in order to rescue it from failing to admonish others more energetically over their human rights records. Rather than being gobsmacked by this stunning chutzpah, The New York Times blithely carries on as if Quasimodo hadn’t announced it’s time for everyone to sit up straight. We’re assured that “human rights organizations generally applauded the move,” including the “nonprofit organization Human Rights First,” inviting the question: What legitimate human rights organization could possibly welcome the equivalent of Nazi Germany seeking to join the anti-imperialist league to exercise a self-proclaimed anti-colonialist leadership?

In light of the above, we might expect Human Rights First to be a ruling class vehicle, lurking behind the disarming label “nonprofit.” And, indeed, it is. Previously known as The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Human Rights First is a corporate law firm-dominated organization funded by the Ford Foundation, Soros (again), arms manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, and Mitsubishi. The organization’s job is to attack US foreign policy betes noire over human rights abuses. According to its website, it acts to “strengthen systems of accountability in countries where human rights violations occur,” though a look at where the organization’s attentions are focussed would lead one to believe that Human Rights First regards human rights violations to occur only “in places like Guatemala, Russia, Northern Ireland, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia” but not in places under United States or Israeli control. The landing page of its website on April 4, 2009 featured reports on Russia, Colombia, Guatemala, hate crime laws, Cuba, and Thailand and a paper arguing that “terrorism” suspects should be prosecuted in federal courts, but nothing on Israel’s unending human rights violations or US abuses in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Small wonder then that an organization that believes all the big human rights problems occur under the purview of countries the United States opposes should applaud Washington’s intention to join the UN Human Rights Council.

Mainstream newspapers and the human rights organizations, NGOs and think-tanks they rely on for expert commentary, propagate ruling class positions under the guise of providing independent and neutral analyses. Their analyses implicitly accept certain values and assumptions: that the military strategy and foreign policies of the United States and its allies are guided by defensive and humanitarian considerations; that the countries and movements the United States opposes are hostile, threatening, despotic, contemptuous of human rights, and are best subordinated to US leadership and moral guidance; that tribunals, international courts and international law must be pressed into service to prosecute and punish others, but the United States must not be prevented by international law from exercising its moral authority and leadership. This doctrine has a political purpose: to engineer the consent of 9/10ths of humanity for their exploitation and oppression by a US state acting on behalf of the corporations and hereditary capitalist families that recruit and sponsor its personnel, formulate its policy through a network of think-tanks, and structure its decision-making.

1. Julian Borger and Dale Fuchs, “Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture,” The Observer (UK), March 29, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. Brian Murphy, “Sudan’s leader arrives in Qatar,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2009.
4. Michael Slackman and Robert F. Worth, “Often Split, Arab Leaders Unite for Sudan’s Chief, The New York Times, March 31, 2009.
5. Steven Erlanger and Thom Shanker, “Nato leaders debate Afghan strains at summit,” The New York Times, April 4, 2009.
6. Neil MacFarquhar, “In reversal, US seeks election to UN human rights council,” The New York Times, April 1, 2009.

Criminalizing self-defense, whitewashing aggression

By Stephen Gowans

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Washington replied by launching the Gulf War to reverse the invasion and punish Baghdad for its serial aggressions. Or so Washington said. Iraq was indeed a serial aggressor, having attacked and waged a long war with Iran in the 1980s, followed by an invasion of Kuwait. What Washington and the compliant US media minimized was that the US had prodded Iraq to attack Iran, soon after the country sloughed off US domination by toppling the Pahlavi regime through which US influence in the country was exercised. With prodding came military aid to Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction that Washington would later use as the basis for a murderous sanctions regime that killed over one million Iraqis, many of them children. In 1989, when Iraq sounded out the US ambassador, April Glaspie, about a possible invasion of Kuwait, she raised no objection. How odd it must have seemed to Iraq, then, that after fighting one war with US prodding, and launching another with what seemed like implicit US support, that Washington should point to Iraq’s serial aggressions as a pretext for launching its own string of anti-Iraq aggressions beginning in 1990 and lasting to the current day.

The US itself is no stranger to serial aggressions, having intervened militarily in countless countries, often without provocation and with the sole objective of enforcing US domination. Whereas the Nazi’s serial aggressions were limited to Europe (and direct military assistance to their Italian allies in northern Africa), those of the US have been carried out on a global scale. The tenth anniversary of one such US-inspired aggression, the 78-day Nato terror bombing of Yugoslavia, has recently passed, without the fanfare usually associated with the exercise of US military power. Where were the media retrospectives, the self-adulation commending the West for its humanitarian intervention? If any mainstream news organization ran a story on how much better off Serbia is 10 years after Nato’s humanitarian bombing, I haven’t seen it. Perhaps the absence is due to the reality that anyone setting foot in Belgrade today would be forced to confront what Serbia has become – a state dismembered from a multicultural federation whose once publically- and socially-owned assets have been sold off to investors and corporations from the same countries that sent their air forces to drop ordnance on schools, factories, bridges, a radio-TV building, the Chinese embassy, and civilians.

Perhaps it is because the US has woven a long string of aggressions into its history that its media are inclined to ignore the aggressions of Uncle Sam’s extension in the Middle East, Israel. When they’re not ignoring them, they’re excusing them. It is a matter of some astonishment that Israel can launch attack after attack outside its ceaselessly expanding and amorphous borders and it hardly registers on the consciousness of North Americans, whose media hide these aggressions in plain view.

Israeli warplanes violated Sudanese airspace in January, on a mission to destroy a convoy of trucks said to be carrying arms to be smuggled to resistance fighters in Gaza. While Iranian warplanes bombing a convoy of trucks in Iraq would be met by howls of outrage by the White House and State Department, Israel’s bombing raid in Sudan was sanitized, even celebrated, in The New York Times, as a “daring military operation,” and then quickly forgotten. Official enemies launch illegal attacks; allies carry out daring military operations.

The bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 was another of Israel’s vaunted military operations. This illegal act remains accepted in Western media discourse as a legitimate operation, justified as a preventive measure against Iraq acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to official doctrine, it was only a matter of time before Saddam Hussein acquired the means to send a nuclear warhead hurtling toward Tel Aviv. What makes this scenario implausible is that such a temerarious act would trigger an obliterating counter-strike by the United States. Unless you believe the Iraqi president was insane or had a death wish, neither of which propositions rest on the slightest evidence, this is pure political fantasy.

Iraq may indeed have intended to develop nuclear weapons, but its reasons for doing so probably (if indeed it was heading in this direction) had much to do with the reality that Israel, a country with no shortage of aggressive military operations under it belt, has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons, receives $3 billion annually in military aid from Uncle Sam, and has a penchant for sending its troops and warplanes into battle.

Let’s consider Israel’s serial aggressions, all of which have been motivated by the desire to acquire territory to expand the borders of the Jewish colonial state, or to defend itself against the backlash its expansionist aggressions provoke. We can begin with the 80 percent of Palestinian territory Zionist forces seized by force in 1948, after the UN allocated 56 percent to a Jewish state, a more than generous allotment, considering that Jews made up only one-third of the population, owned less than 10 percent of the land, and were favored by the UN with the fertile coastal areas. There was nothing fair or legitimate about the UN offer. It was carried out over the objections of the majority, but even this corruption of justice was not enough to satisfy the Zionist craving for other people’s land.

In 1956, Israel struck a deal with France and Britain to invade Egypt. France was irritated by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser’s support for the national liberation movement in Algeria, and Britain wanted the return of the recently nationalized Suez Canal to the hands of British capital. In exchange for marching on the Suez Canal, France would transfer nuclear technology to Israel, providing the Zionist state with the basis for its nuclear arsenal. The operation proved to be a contretemps, with the US ordering the conspirators to withdraw. But it did demonstrate to Washington that Israel could be a useful tool in enforcing US foreign policy in the region.

In 1967, Israel seized Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. Later, it launched a series of operations in Lebanon beginning with Operation Litani in 1978, aimed at driving the PLO north of the Litani River. This culminated in an occupation of southern Lebanon that lasted 18 years, from 1982 to 2000, followed by yet another attack in the summer of 2006. Lebanon today has the highest per capita debt in the world, largely thanks to the costs of rebuilding infrastructure Israel destroyed. (1)

Added to Israel’s aggressions are its amply documented violations of the laws of war. Israeli war crimes are a delicate matter in North America, where politicians and the media either steer clear of mentioning them, or step nimbly around them, seeking to avoid the inevitable backlash against anyone who suggests that Israel may not be the shining beacon of democracy in what’s calumniated as the otherwise benighted Middle East. The British press, The Guardian in particular, show fewer reservations. Condemnatory reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Israel’s January 2009 assault on Gaza barely received any attention in the North American media, in stark contrast to the high profile that similarly condemnatory reports receive when they’re aimed at official enemies. By comparison, The Guardian covered a February 23, 2009 Amnesty International report that called on the US to cut off military aid to Israel, because “as a major supplier of weapons to Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of the laws of war and human rights.” (2) Last week, The Guardian reported on a Human Rights Watch investigation that found that Israel had repeatedly and indiscriminately fired white phosphorus over crowded areas of Gaza, killing and injuring civilians, a war crime. White phosphorus burns through tissue and can’t be extinguished. It must burn itself out, a process that may take days. In a 71-page report, the rights group concluded that Israel’s “repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental.” (3) Significantly, Israel initially denied it had used white phosphorus. When the evidence became overwhelming, it admitted it had, but countered that its use was fully in accord with international law. When that was disproved, Israel announced it would launch its own investigation.

In a move that would be considered foolishly gutsy in the United States, The Guardian undertook its own investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, concluding that Israel violated the laws of war. (4) The conclusions drawn by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and The Guardian were corroborated by Israeli soldiers themselves. An Israeli squad commander said,

“What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.” (5)

Worse than being brutally indifferent to Palestinians, Israeli soldiers are completely morally calloused, wearing t-shirts bearing messages that evince absolute contempt for Arabs. “A shirt designed for the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion” depicted “a pregnant Palestinian women with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.’” (6)

While the utter brutality of Israeli troops was being laid bare in the pages of The Guardian, across the Atlantic, Israeli war crimes were being minimized in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record. Foreign correspondent Patrick Martin wrote that the failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians “is found in almost every military force (think Serbs in Bosnia, Americans at Abu Ghraib and Canadians in Somali) and has existed as long as there has been war.” (7) What Martin didn’t point out was that Serbs were prosecuted by Nato’s Hague Tribunal for failures to distinguish civilians from combatants, but that US and Canadian atrocities – including those in connection with the terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 — have gone unpunished. Martin also failed to mention the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Omar, too, is accused of war crimes, but unlike those committed by Americans, Canadians and Israelis, his have become the subject of prosecution by an international court, one that has yet to issue indictments against anyone but Africans. The court will never prosecute Americans, Russians, and Chinese, who have chosen not to be bound by the court and are able, by virtue of being permanent members of the UN Security Council, to veto any Security Council resolution ordering the court to undertake an inquiry. Likewise, these countries can veto court inquiries into crimes committed by nationals of allied countries, like Israel, which have also rejected the court’s authority. War crimes, it seems, are intolerable when committed by countries the West seeks a pretext to dominate, but when the same crimes are committed by Americans, Canadians and Israelis, the “everyone is doing it” defense applies.

Meanwhile, as nuclear-armed Israel adds to its string of outrages on the sovereignty of neighboring countries with its bombing raid into Sudan, the Western media spotlight shines on north Korea, the northern half of a peninsula whose division was imposed by outsiders, and has never attacked another country. While official doctrine holds that north Korea invaded south Korea in 1950, it’s hardly possible for Koreans to have invaded Korea. What’s more, the question of who started the war – both sides clashed on and off for up to a year before major hostilities broke out – remains murky. Deciding on what event precipitated the war is like deciding when a hill becomes a mountain. Any attempt to abstract a discrete event from a complex of richly interconnected events as the cause of the war is to play with arbitrariness. Even deciding when the war began and ended (has it ended?) involves an arbitrary demarcation. Hugh Deane argued that the war began in 1945, the moment the US army arrived and suppressed the national liberation People’s Committees. Conceived as a struggle to free the peninsula from foreign domination, the war has never ended, and has lasted 99 years.

Korea, it should be recalled, was colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945. No sooner had Koreans declared their independence, did US military forces arrive to establish a military government, shot through with former Japanese collaborators. While the Soviets, who agreed to the division of the peninsula, occupied the north, they withdrew their forces in 1948 and allowed the maximal guerrilla leader, Kim Il Sung, to rise to power, rather than imposing their own man, as the United States was to do in the south, when it brought the anti-communist Sygman Rhee, a long-time US resident, to Korea. US troops remain on Korean soil to this day.

The reason the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, (DPRK is the north’s official name), is receiving considerable Western media attention is because it plans to launch a satellite. The launching, it is said by US officials, and repeated uncritically by the US media, is a cover for testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear payload as far away as the shores of Alaska. In case north Korea’s launching a satellite strikes anyone as being far from belligerent – certainly not in the same league as flying bombers into another country to destroy its nuclear facilities (as Israel did in Iraq and threatens to do in Iran) the new US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, assures us that, appearances aside, the launching is “a provocative act.” This is duly reported, but nobody asks why. Why should the launching of a satellite, even if the rocket technology is dual-purpose (it can be used to launch satellites and warheads) be provocative? Doesn’t the United States have rockets, satellites and warheads in abundance? The cause for alarm certainly can’t be because the DPRK has launched aggressions against other countries. It hasn’t. On the other hand, the United States and Japan, both with notorious records of employing military force to violate other conutries’ sovereignty, are sounding the alarm. The real reason the DPRK’s satellite launching is depicted as provocative is the same reason its nuclear test was depicted as provocative. Having nuclear warheads and the technology to deliver them expresses the threat of potential self-defense.

So it is that the North American media, playing its accustomed role as private propagandist for US foreign policy, has striven to elevate north Korea’s satellite launching to the provocative act Clinton says it is. The launching of a satellite has become, in The New York Times’ headlines, a missile launching (8), inducing the Japanese to ready their missile interceptors. (9) The Washington Post does The New York Times one better by calling the launching a nuclear test. (10) Even if the DPRK is testing rocket technology that could be used to deploy a nuclear warhead, is this any more reason to be alarmed than the reality that Israel can annihilate its neighbors with nuclear weaponry in numbers and sophistication far greater than north Korea can ever hope to match? The idea that Israel is a responsible country committed to the stability of the Middle East is a fiction; Israel is the main source of instability in the Middle East and has been since 1948. Had Zionists not arrived in Palestine to displace an Arab majority that had lived peacefully with Jews and Christians for centuries, there never would have been an armed struggle waged by the PLO, or an Islamic Jihad and Hamas to carry it on once the PLO’s dominant party, Fatah, faltered with a series of capitulations. Nor would there have been an Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon aimed at destroying the PLO, and therefore no basis for the rise of Hezbollah. As for the idea that Israeli leaders are level headed, look at the carnage Israel visited upon Gaza, ostensibly to deter rocket attacks that have killed 20 people in the last eight years. (11) Or consider this:

“The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. ‘This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,’ a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. ‘His message was clear: ‘This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists.’ The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic.’” (12)

Lebensraum comes to mind.

While US officials may contrive to regard north Korea’s satellite launching as provocative, it pales in comparison to the provocation of the United States and south Korea holding annual war games exercises along north Korea’s borders, this year larger than ever, and after the new government in Seoul of Lee Myung Bak has departed from the conciliatory line of the previous government, adopting a decidedly hostile posture.

Lest anyone think that north Korea’s impending satellite launching amounts to even a slight threat, consider the testimony of US Navy Admiral Timothy J. Keating before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 19, 2009. Keating said he does not regard the planned north Korean launching as a threat. “’It is a normal notification process, which they didn’t do in 2006, when they attempted a launch from the same facility,’ Keating said. Keating added that U.S. intelligence cannot yet say whether the launch will be of a communications satellite, as North Korea has asserted, or of a missile with intercontinental range. But he and two other commanders said they think it will be a satellite launch because of the public announcements from Pyongyang, including coordinates of the ocean area where the booster rocket is likely to fall.” (13)

Nuclear armed Israel carries out a massacre in Gaza, backed by a rabbinate echoing the Nazi’s rationale for territorial expansion, while Israeli soldiers wear t-shirts depicting Palestinians as vermin to be exterminated, and Israeli warplanes violate the sovereign airspace of Sudan. Soon after, the hostile Lee Myung Bak government of south Korea, more interested in picking fights with the north than seeking peaceful reunification, escalates the country’s annual war games with the United States, aimed at intimidating the north. These aggressive and provocative acts are minimized by the North American media – either barely acknowledged, sanitized or celebrated. In the meantime, north Korea’s planned satellite launching is depicted as a provocation meriting stepped up sanctions and escalated efforts to bring down the government in Pyongyang. It can be hardly doubted that the North American media are an apparatus of public persuasion in the service of US foreign policy. In its hands black becomes white, the oppressed become oppressor, serial aggressors become keepers of the peace, and self-defense becomes provocation.

1. Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, Princeton University Press, 2007.
2. Rory McCarthy, “Amnesty calls on US to suspend arms sales to Israel,” The Guardian (UK), February 23, 2009.
3. Rory McCarthy, “Israel accused of indiscriminate phosphorus use in Gaza,” The Guardian (UK), March 25, 2009.
4. Clancy Chassay and Julian Borger, “Guardian investigation uncovers evidence of alleged Israel war crimes in Gaza,” The Guardian (UK), March 24, 2009.
5. Ethan Bronner, “Soldiers’ accounts of Gaza killings raise furor in Israel,” The New York Times, March 20, 2009.
6. Peter Beaumont, “Gaza war crime claims gather pace as more troops speak out,” The Observer (UK), March 22, 2009.
7. Patrick Martin, “Israel’s principle of purity of arms sacrificed in Gaza, soldiers say,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 20, 2009‏.
8. “N. Korean missile reportedly in place,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.
9. “Japan readies missile interceptor” New York Times, March 29, 2009.
10. “North Korean nuclear test a growing possibility,” The Washington Post, March 27, 2009.
11. Rory McCarthy, “Amid the ruins, a fragile truce and a fragile future for Gaza,” The Guardian (UK), January 18, 2009.
12. Richard Boudreaux, “Israeli army rabbis criticized for stance on Gaza assault,” The Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2009.
13. “US could hit N. Korean missile, says commander,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2009.

10th Anniversary of NATO Assualt on Yugoslavia

Zivadin Jovanovic, the last minister of Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia, interviewed in Belgrade by Vanessa Stojilkovic & Zoran Jevric for InvestigAction http://www.michelcollon.info

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH1Xf4zFilE

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