Bringing Baghdad Home
July 29, 2007
It was only a matter of time before the murderous impunity encouraged by the US military came to haunt citizens back at home. Chris Hedges, one of the finest journalists and author of one of my favorite books, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, who had only recently explored the horrors inflicted by the military on Iraqis, now presents the flip side of the story — how the returning soldiers are turning their guns on family and neighbours. (Adbusters is a superb publicaton. I encourage all who can to subscribe)
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations.”
In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.
The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war — one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. “This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun,” remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. “And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that’s a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.”
“And they briefed this to the general,” Millard said, “and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, ‘if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.’”
Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.
It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war’s death mask.
“And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq,” said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. “It’s the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you live here, I’m sorry this is a terrible situation, and I’m sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.
“The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you’re holding a duffle bag in each hand,” Millard remembered. “You’ve got your weapon slung. You’ve got a web sack on your back. You’re dying of heat. You’re tired. You’re jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then, you’re scared on top of that, because, you know, you’re in Kuwait, you’re not in the States anymore … so fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can’t trust any of these fucking Hadjis, because all these fucking Hadjis are going to kill you. And Hadji is always used as a term of disrespect and usually, with the ‘f’ word in front of it.”
War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power to the divine, the power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction — and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word — sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects — objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in air strikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they became sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another’s dignity or life.
“A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want,” said Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. “And you know, when 20 year old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg and we’re picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day to find a dirty weapon. But over here, it’s like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can — do you know what I mean? — we have this power that you can’t have. That’s really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food’s going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol and to stay alive.”
“It’s like you feel like, I don’t know, if you’re a caveman,” he added. “Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit.”
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth, to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative the essence of war which is death.
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be “shitting like dogs.” The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word “Hadji” swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way “gook” was used to debase the Vietnamese or “rag head” is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed “Hadji food,” “Hadji homes,” and “Hadji music.” Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. “I experienced horrible confusion,” Mejia remembers, “not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them.”
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to intervene, yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
“After we arrested drivers,” he recalled, “we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
“But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice,” he also notes.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, “this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.” Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. “It’s fun to shoot shit up,” a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, “collateral damage.”
“We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED,” Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. “This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road, and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics.”
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man’s body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
“The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us,” Mejia writes, “led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them.”
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
“Take a picture of me and this motherfucker,” one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia’s squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
“Damn, they really fucked you up, didn’t they!?” the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man’s brothers and cousins. Senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely saw combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia notes, “was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks.” This pattern meant that “very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong.” When the badges, bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath, were finally awarded, the commanders immediately brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
“This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front,” Mejia noted bitterly. “They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts.”
The war breeds gratuitous and constant acts of violence.
“I mean, if someone has a fan, they’re a white collar family,” said Phillip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. “So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they’re needed, and it’s also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we’d done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people, but I don’t really remember.
“And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area, they’re, like, built up into little courtyards,” he said. “So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then, they have like a storage shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn’t — mother fucker — he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog — and I’m a huge animal lover. I love animals — and this dog has like these eyes on it and he’s running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, the family is sitting right there with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I’m at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I’m like what the fuck are you doing.
“And so, the dog’s yelping. It’s crying out without a jaw. And I’m looking at the family, and they’re just scared. And so, I told them I was like fucking shoot it, you know. At least, kill it, because that can’t be fixed. It’s suffering. And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but — and I had tears then, too, — and I’m looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that’s what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I’m so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common. I don’t know if it’s rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one’s manliness traits. I don’t know. I had a big problem with that.
“Was a report ever filed about it?” he asked. “Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not. He was a sycophant down to the T.”
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits — few people in pulpits have much worth listening to — but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”
Was Pat Tillman Murdered
July 28, 2007
This poor fellow was taken in by the jingoistic frenzy whipped up by the Bush (read Cheney) administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks. He gave up a successful football career and joined the US military and went to fight the indigent of Afghanistan. Associated Press now reveals that he may have been done in by fellow grunts.
Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.
The doctors – whose names were blacked out – said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
Ultimately, the Pentagon did conduct a criminal investigation, and asked Tillman’s comrades whether he was disliked by his men and whether they had any reason to believe he was deliberately killed. The Pentagon eventually ruled that Tillman’s death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident.
The medical examiners’ suspicions were outlined in 2,300 pages of testimony released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Among other information contained in the documents:
- In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop “sniveling.”
- Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.
- The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman’s death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn’t recall details of his actions.
- No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene – no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.
The Pentagon and the Bush administration have been criticized in recent months for lying about the circumstances of Tillman’s death. The military initially told the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by enemy fire. Only weeks later did the Pentagon acknowledge he was gunned down by fellow Rangers.
With questions lingering about how high in the Bush administration the deception reached, Congress is preparing for yet another hearing next week.
The Pentagon is separately preparing a new round of punishments, including a stinging demotion of retired Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., 60, according to military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the punishments under consideration have not been made public.
In more than four hours of questioning by the Pentagon inspector general’s office in December 2006, Kensinger repeatedly contradicted other officers’ testimony, and sometimes his own. He said on some 70 occasions that he did not recall something.
At one point, he said: “You’ve got me really scared about my brain right now. I’m really having a problem.”
Tillman’s mother, Mary Tillman, who has long suggested that her son was deliberately killed by his comrades, said she is still looking for answers and looks forward to the congressional hearings next week.
“Nothing is going to bring Pat back. It’s about justice for Pat and justice for other soldiers. The nation has been deceived,” she said.
The documents show that a doctor who autopsied Tillman’s body was suspicious of the three gunshot wounds to the forehead. The doctor said he took the unusual step of calling the Army’s Human Resources Command and was rebuffed. He then asked an official at the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division if the CID would consider opening a criminal case.
“He said he talked to his higher headquarters and they had said no,” the doctor testified.
Also according to the documents, investigators pressed officers and soldiers on a question Mrs. Tillman has been asking all along.
“Have you, at any time since this incident occurred back on April 22, 2004, have you ever received any information even rumor that Cpl. Tillman was killed by anybody within his own unit intentionally?” an investigator asked then-Capt. Richard Scott.
Scott, and others who were asked, said they were certain the shooting was accidental.
Investigators also asked soldiers and commanders whether Tillman was disliked, whether anyone was jealous of his celebrity, or if he was considered arrogant. They said Tillman was respected, admired and well-liked.
Hollywood Wakes Up To Iraq
July 28, 2007
A couple of years back there were reports that a Hollywood production is in the works starring Harrison Ford that portrayed the battle of Fallujah from a sympathetic American perspective. Thankfully, we haven’t heard more from it. There is more promise in the following news on the other hand:
Not so long ago, Hollywood was famously shy of telling stories ripped straight from the headlines. The movies, after all, are a form of escapism, first and foremost. Who wants to go to the multiplex to get more of the same depressing images being broadcast on the evening news?
Film-makers and studio chiefs preferred to take a more oblique route to commenting on the pressing events of the moment, especially when it came to questions of war and peace. They transferred the conflict to an earlier time, or to another culture, or simply kept quiet until the conflict itself was long over. Robert Altman’s counter-cultural masterpiece M*A*S*H famously managed to send up the absurdities of the Vietnam war while purporting to be set 20 years earlier in Korea. More recently, Ridley Scott gave us an earful on the follies of imperialism in the Middle East by recreating the Crusades in Kingdom of Heaven.
Now, though, Hollywood seems to have lost its coyness. Perhaps it began with Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which turned anger at the Bush administration on the eve of the 2004 presidential election into an unlikely box-office hit. Perhaps the moment of truth came with last year’s United 93, Paul Greengrass’s harrowing recreation of the doomed fourth jetliner on 11 September 2001, whose passengers sacrificed themselves to avoid a greater atrocity in a major East Coast city.
The plain fact, though, is that we are about to be inundated with dramas set either in or around the Iraq war, and the tone of most, if not all, of them is hardly complimentary to George Bush’s military adventure in the Middle East.
The first of them is also the one with the highest profile, since it has been written and directed by Paul Haggis, the Canadian film-maker who wrote Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby, then walked away with the Best Picture Oscar for his directorial debut, Crash.
Haggis’s film is called In the Valley of Elah (the Valley of Elah being the place where David slew Goliath), and it follows the story of Army Specialist Richard Davis whose mysterious death near his home base at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2003 was covered up until Davis’s father took on the investigation and discovered he had been stabbed to death by members of his own platoon because he had witnessed atrocities they had committed in Iraq. The film, set for release in the United States in September, stars Tommy Lee Jones as the father and Susan Sarandon as the mother, and Charlize Theron as a (fictionalised) detective who helps the father’s investigation.
About a month later, US cinemas will start showing Grace Is Gone, a melodrama first screened at the Sundance Film Festival (to a mixed reception) in which John Cusack stars as a bereaved husband who has to tell his two daughters that their mother has been killed in action in Iraq.
Around the same time, Reese Witherspoon will be starring in Rendition, as an American woman whose Egyptian-born husband is suspected of involvement with international terrorism. Just before Christmas, Brian De Palma will be out with Redacted, about an Army squad that torments an Iraqi family.
The list goes on. Next year will see the release of Stop Loss, directed by Kimberly Peirce (who made Boys Don’t Cry), in which Ryan Philippe plays a soldier who defies an order to return to Iraq after his tour of duty is officially over. Greengrass, meanwhile, is adapting the non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City – which tells the story of what happened behind closed doors in Baghdad’s super-protected Green Zone – to provide us with what will presumably be a verité-style account of all the mistakes and mis-steps made by the US occupying forces from 2003 to the present. His film is unlikely to come out before 2009.
Several things about these projects come as a surprise. First, that they are being made at all while US service men and women are still fighting the war they concern themselves with. Second, that they all overwhelmingly focus on aspects of American failure – military, political, diplomatic and also spiritual failure. (A seminal image in In The Valley of Elah, we are told, is a Stars and Stripes flag hung upside down somewhere in heartland America.) And third, that they are so close to the sorts of issues that continue to exercise the news and opinion pages of the world’s newspapers.
This is not at all the standard pattern of war film-making over the past century or so. The very first war films ever made – and many, many more since – have essentially been adjuncts of the national propaganda machine, cheering on the troops and demonising the enemy. A 90-second short produced in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, depicted the (entirely fictitious) seizure of a Spanish government compound in Havana, the Cuban capital, the removal of the Spanish flag by US troops and its replacement by the American flag.
In the intervening years, Hollywood has happily pumped out (and later been somewhat embarrassed by) such titles as The Sands of Iwo Jima, a 1949 John Wayne vehicle in which the account of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War was sanitised and heavily distorted, or The Green Berets, another John Wayne project from 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, in which the Americans were shown to be winning the war in Vietnam at precisely the moment it was becoming clear that they were in fact losing.
The best, most powerful, most questioning war films have invariably been made once the fighting had stopped. All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the seminal films about the First World War, was not made until 1930. Other notable titles about that conflict were even longer in coming – Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, made in 1957, or Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981).
The same was true of the Second World War, not least because several high-profile Hollywood stars signed up for active duty and the industry as a whole had an interest in falling into lockstep behind the national project. Cinema screens in the early 1940s were dominated by tales of derring-do and stiff-upper-lip courage under fire – films like Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York, which told the story of a Tennessee farmer turned unlikely military hero from the First World War, or Yankee Doodle Dandy, an unabashedly patriotic musical starring James Cagney, of all people, or stirring, morale-boosting British imports like In Which We Serve or The Battle of Britain.
It wasn’t until 1946 that audiences started seeing more bittersweet stories like William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which looked at the traumatic effect of combat on a group of returning veterans.
That, though, was a conflict that most Americans – despite considerable initial scepticism – ended up supporting. In the case of Vietnam, where US public opinion went in the opposite direction, from support to doubt, Hollywood was extraordinarily cautious about saying anything too directly critical while the war was still on. M*A*S*H caused a furore with the conservative heartland, as did Jane Fonda’s decision, at the height of her Oscar-winning fame, to travel to Hanoi.
In a singularly poisonous political atmosphere, nobody dared make a film chronicling America’s failure in South-east Asia – with the possible exception of Francis Ford Coppola and friends, who seriously considered trying to shoot an early draft of Apocalypse Now in the midst of the real-life fighting in 1972. (They concluded that the risks were just too great.) So it wasn’t until the late 1970s, after the US withdrawal, that we saw the release of films like The Deerhunter, Coming Home and, later, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. By the time of their release, American revisionism of the conflict was in full swing, and soon gave fruit to movies like the Rambo series, in which the Vietnam war was essentially refought and won. The 2004 presidential campaign, in which John Kerry’s war record was questioned and distorted, proved that the issue remains incendiary in American political life.
Fast-forward to the current conflict in Iraq, and no such revisionism is in sight. Unlike any previous war, there simply hasn’t been a propaganda-style movie to chivvy on the home-front audience (unless you count Disney’s Hidalgo, released in 2004, which purports to be the true story of a champion American horse rider who tore up the Arabian desert to win a famous race a century ago – a story that turned out not to be true at all).
Diehard Bush supporters (a dwindling band, these past couple of years) would no doubt argue – as they have argued for the past five years – that Hollywood is simply an unpatriotic hotbed of liberal political correctness unable to set any political issue in its proper context. One prominent veteran, Dennis Griffee, of the Iraq War Veterans Organization, has refused to have anything to do with In The Valley Of Elah because it stars Susan Sarandon, one of Hollywood’s most outspoken anti-war voices.
That argument, though, ignores Hollywood’s history of happily playing any side of the political fence as long as it fulfils the primal need of the entertainment industry, which is to make money.
That, in the end, will be the acid test of the new crop of movies. If they are hits, we will see more of them.
If they are not, Hollywood will doubtless change the subject very quickly indeed. To Paris Hilton. Or something.
Conyers has Sheehan Arrested
July 27, 2007
I never thought much of congressional liberals, but I thought John Conyers had done a good thing or two in the past. My respect diminished however when he attacked Jimmy Carter over his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, even before the book was released. Remember that he is part of the same Black Caucus (Malcolm X would have called it the ‘House Negro’ Caucus), the majority of which did not have the guts to publicly protest and call for sanctions against Israel when it was breaking the anti-apartheid boycott and selling arms to South Africa. The respect that I never had has now turned to contempt, after the way Conyers had Cindy Sheehan arrested for a protest at his office demanding impeachment. Dave Lindorff reports: (Also check out this debate between Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern and a Democratic Party strategist)
Yesterday Conyers had 48 impeachment activists, including Gold Star Families for Peace founder Cindy Sheehan, Iraq Veteran Against the War activist Lennox Yearwood and Intelligence Veterans for Sanity founder Ray McGovern, arrested for conducting a sit-in in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. The three, together with several hundred other impeachment activists who packed the fourth floor hallway outside Rep. Conyers’ office, had come to press Conyers to take action on impeachment, and specifically to start action on H.Res. 333, the bill submitted nearly three months ago by Rep. Dennis Kucinich calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney…
This reporter subsequently called Conyers’ press office for an explanation of Conyers’ true position on impeachment. Only a few days earlier the congressman, at a San Diego meeting on health care reform, had told members of Progressive Democrats of America that it was time to “take these two guys (Bush and Cheney) out” and had promised that if just “a few more” members of the House signed on to the Kucinich bill (it already has 14 co-sponsors), he would move it forward for consideration in his Judiciary Committee. Asked how that statement squared with what he had told the group of activists in his office, the spokesman said Conyers’ “must have been misunderstood” in San Diego. He said that in view of Conyers’ statement to Sheehan and the others today, the Kucinich bill was “not going to go anywhere.”
As impeachment activist David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org has said, there “seem to be two John Conyers.” There’s the one who, in 2005 and early 2006, while Republicans controlled the House, was systematically making the case for impeaching the president and vice president. This Conyers had even submitted a bill, with 39 co-sponsors, which called for creation of a select committee to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the administration. And then there’s the Conyers who submits to the wishes of the new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and is keeping impeachment off the table. Occasionally the former Conyers breaks out, saying things such as that the president needs to be “taken out” or, as he put it at an anti-war rally last spring, that “we can fire him!” But then the other Conyers comes to the fore, and stands in the way of impeachment action.
Ray McGovern is more scathing in his critique: “John Conyers Is No Martin Luther King“
What do Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and President George W. Bush have in common? They both think they can dis Cindy Sheehan and count on gossip columnists like the Washington Post’s David Milbank to trivialize a historic moment.
I’ll give this to President Bush. He makes no pretence when he disses. He would not meet with Sheehan to define for her the “noble cause” for which
her son Casey died or tell her why he had said it was “worth it.”Conyers, on the other hand, was dripping with pretence as he met with Sheehan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood and me Monday in his office in the
Rayburn building. I have seldom been so disappointed with someone I had
previously held in high esteem. And before leaving, I told him so.Throwing salt in our wounds, he had us, and some 50 others in his
anteroom arrested and taken out of action as the Capitol Police
“processed” us for the next six hours.As we began our discussion with Conyers, it was as though he thought we
were “born yesterday,” as Harry Truman would put it. With feigned
enthusiasm he began, Let’s hold a Town Hall meeting in Detroit so we can
talk about impeachment. Get out my schedule; let’s see, we need to hear
from everyone about this.Been there, done that, I reminded the congressman.
On May 29, 2007, Col. Ann Wright and I were among those who flew to
Detroit for a highly advertised Town Hall meeting on impeachment,
because we were assured that John Conyers would be there.That Town Hall/panel discussion was arranged by the Michigan chapter of
the National Lawyers Guild less than two weeks after the Detroit City
Council passed a resolution, cosponsored by Conyers’ wife Monica
Conyers–calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney. We had hoped that Monica’s clear vision and courage might be
contagious.I had to remind the congressman that he did not show up for the Town
Hall.Apparently, that incident was of such little consequence to the
congressman that he had completely forgotten about it. Small wonder,
then, that he has apparently forgotten the oath he took to protect and
defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and
domestic.Selective Alzheimers? I don’t know. What was clear was that he had
forgotten a whole lot.When I raised James Madison’s role in crafting a Constitution that
mentions impeachment no fewer than six times, he replied: Madison did not
say Conyers has to impeach every one. Why, if I had to impeach everyone
for high crimes and misdemeanors, that’s all my committee would have
time to do.I learned in Rhetoric 101 the name of that technique: reductio ad absurdam.
How about just Bush and Cheney, we suggested.
Conyers protested that he would need 218 votes in the House and
complained that the votes are not there. His priorities showed through in
his loud lament that if he fell short of the 218 votes, the Republicans and Fox News would have a field day.There was no getting through to Conyers, who seemed astonished at the direct questions we were posing.
In reflecting on this later, the dictum of my father, also a lawyer, began to ring in my ears: “When you reach the age of `statutory senility,’ you do everyone a favor if you retire.”
He followed his own example, when he retired as Chancellor of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, long before senility–statutory, or otherwise–set in for him.
Septuagenarian Conyers (and, for that matter, 80-year-old Senator John Warner, R-Virginia, who has also forgotten his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution) would do well to heed that advice.
Toward the end of the meeting, Conyers showed uncommon chutzpah in
referring to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was too much for me.You’re no Martin Luther King, I found myself wanting to say. Instead, I
quoted a portion of Dr. King’s famous address at Riverside Church almost
40 years ago:“We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak….there is such a thing as being too
late….Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with
lost opportunity….Over the bleached bones of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words: `Too late.’”I used that quote in a letter I left with Conyers’ aides on Monday, in
which I tried to express why my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity feel it is URGENT to find some way to apply the
Constitution to restrain a run-away Executive.The text of that letter follows:
############
A Note to Congressman John Conyers: On Impeachment and the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Dear John,
We each have our favored crime for which President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached. Many of us have several.
But the real challenge is to look AHEAD. What are Bush/Cheney likely to do in the coming months if the impeachment process does NOT begin?
One often hears, Oh, they will do what they want anyway, impeachment process or not. Not true.
If we the people and our representatives in Congress choose the course given us by our Founders and impeachment proceedings begin, important swaths of our body politic AND military will be less likely to follow illegal orders from the White House.
These important constituencies will become sensitized to the peril into which this administration has brought us and to the extra-constitutional orders they may be asked to carry out.
NEW ELEMENT: Even the Scaife-owned newspapers have begun to question Bush’s MENTAL STABILITY.
What could be more important at this juncture?
We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been applying all of our analytical techniques to assess the Bush/Cheney administration. We have helped to establish the long record of abuses and usurpations of the past. What about the future?
Iraq is going to hell in a hand basket. A Tet-type incident becomes more and more likely. The Green Zone is being hit by mortar fire more frequently than before. It may be just a matter of time before the Resistance gets lucky and lobs a shell onto our spanking new $600-million embassy, killing a bunch of Americans in the process.
What then? Will Cheney tell the president the US military has found Iranian markings on the shell fragments and we need to retaliate…and, actually, while we’re at it, let’s implement Plan A and hit all Iranian nuclear-related facilities.
With Congress voting resolution after resolution against Iran, how would the president react to such a suggestion from Cheney?
Many of us intelligence analysts have found utility in relying, in part, on short studies applying psychoanalysis to develop profiles of foreign leaders. (This marriage of psychoanalysis and intelligence work actually goes back to the early 1940s, when the OSS commissioned such studies on Hitler.) We called them “at-a-distance personality
assessments.”Three years ago Justin Frank, M.D., a psychiatrist here in Washington, wrote a book “Bush on the Couch” in which he provided keen insights into the president’s mode of thinking–or not thinking.
Eager to use every tool at our disposal, VIPS recently asked Dr. Frank to update his observations, with a view to forecasting, to the extent possible, how Bush is likely to react to the building pressures of the coming weeks and months. We will issue, perhaps as early as this week, Dr. Frank’s latest analysis, fortified by our own input. But we already have his preliminary analysis; there is no other word for it: Scary.
In a quick note to us this morning [July 23], Dr. Frank noted we are “dealing with a potentially cornered man [who] could lash out, and it is possible that the best way would be to bomb Iran…. Whatever the root causes of Bush’s pathology, we have a dangerous man running
things…grandiose and unchecked.”Some snippets from the Memorandum that Dr. Frank is drafting for issuance under VIPS auspices:
“George W. Bush is without conscience…and destructive, willfully so. He has always likes to break things…most shocking is the way he is breaking our armed forces.
“He doesn’t care about others, is indifferent to their suffering…He is almost constitutionally missing the ability to sympathize or empathize…More indifferent to reality than out of touch with it, he makes up whatever story he wants.
“Ultimately, he is psychologically unstable…His goal is to destroy things [and he can do that] without experiencing anxiety or a sense of responsibility. An equally important goal is to protect himself from shame, from being wrong, from being found small and weak.”
So what do we do?
At a similarly critical juncture, Dr. King was typically direct: “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…. there is such a thing as being too late…. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity…. Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: `Too late.’”
There is today another Edmund Pettus Bridge to cross, John. And it has fallen to you to lead us across.
With respect,
RM
Sanctions Against Iran Not Working
July 25, 2007
Much was made of the protests when Iran started rationing fuel. Here Financial Times reports that sanctions are having quite the opposite effect:
When angry motorists torched petrol stations as Tehran introduced rationing last month, Iran’s opponents scented success. Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister, said it showed “economic sanctions are working increasingly well”.
But after three weeks of rationing, riots have given way to grumbling. Tehran’s streets are less congested, its air more breathable, and the government says it is on target to reduce a bill for imported petrol that was due to hit $7bn this year.
Meeting parliamentarians on Sunday, interior minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi claimed a “strategic, historic” decision had cut consumption by between 11m and 16m litres from a daily pre-ration figure of 75m litres.
Few analysts in Tehran doubt the action was prompted by a fear that importing about 40 per cent of its petrol made Iran vulnerable to international action as members of the UN Security Council consider a third round of sanctions over its nuclear programme.
Tehran’s response, analysts say, shows how sanctions do not undermine government policy but rather reinforce its tendency to choose state-led rather than market solutions. “These sanctions are like a flood that overcomes the private sector but also strengthens the state and all its network and agencies,” says Mohammad Tabibian, a prominent reform-minded economist.
“I would go as far to say Mr Ahmadi-Nejad welcomes sanctions,” says a second economist. “He says he believes in the private sector, but he doesn’t really, and the state is barely affected by these measures as long as it sells oil.”
The government opted to ration petrol rather than raise the price – among the lowest in the world – to a market level, as Mr Ahmadi-Nejad stuck to his promises to be “fair” to less affluent Iranians. “The president thinks of quantity rather than prices, of ‘social justice’ rather than markets,” says Heydar Pourian, editor of Iran Economics, a business monthly. Many private-sector companies face problems in attracting investment after the US pressed international banks to avoid dollar transactions with Iran.
But the bulk of Iran’s state-owned economy rolls on with record oil revenue that rose 13.6 per cent to $54bn in the Iranian year ending March 20.
Iranian officials and analysts dispute US officials’ suggestion that sanctions will spark unrest and undermine the government. “The people in the west who hope sanctions can lead to social unrest should know that no nation revolts when it’s hungry,” says Mr Tabibian. Not that Iranians are starving. They buy state-subsidised bread hot from bakeries.
At the macro level, the IMF predicts 5 per cent growth in 2007; overall international trade is growing as Tehran looks to the east.
Trade with Italy has fallen 20 per cent in six months. In 2006, Germany’s exports to Iran dropped 7 per cent and Japan’s fell 13 per cent.
But business with China is booming. Last year Beijing signed a $100bn deal to import Iranian natural gas and Chinese companies will be 50 per cent stakeholders in the Yadavaran oil field.
China has also become the second biggest market for Iran’s non-oil exports, taking $1.72bn in 2006-7, after the UAE with $2.5bn. Iran’s overall non-oil exports rose 47.2 percent to $16.3bn. “The situation over sanctions is a huge opportunity for China, former Soviet republics and regional countries,” says one Asian diplomat in Tehran.
The medium to long-term outlook may not be so rosy, he adds, if Iran cannot overcome problems in oil and gas production, where contracts often go to domestic companies with limited experience.
Some officials admit the energy sector faces difficulties. Akbar Torkan, managing director of the Pars Oil and Gas Company that oversees development of the South Pars gas field, said last month that more than $4bn was needed this year to develop the field, up from $2.7bn last year.
Iran faced “problems in attracting finance and foreign investment”, Mr Torkan said; a plan to sell $3.5bn bonds inside Iran, offering an 8-15 per cent return, had been sent to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad. But Iran has a poor record in raising capital by privatisation; it is doubtful bonds can replace investment offered by companies – including OMV of Austria, Spain’s Repsol and Royal Dutch Shell – which are hesitating over involvement in Iran’s energy sector.
The Growing Iraqi Refugee Crisis
July 25, 2007
My dear friend Dahr Jamail on Iraq’s refugee crisis:
Since 9/11, the U.S. Congress has appropriated $610 billion dollars in war-related money. With inflation figured in, that’s roughly the same amount spent over the full 16 years of the Vietnam War. The Iraq War alone has cost the U.S. $450 billion dollars.
And what about the cost to the Iraqi people? In addition to civilian casualties, since 2003 hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been forced to flee their war-torn country to nearby neighboring countries – countries that either don’t want them or can’t take care of them.
On this edition, correspondent Dahr Jamail takes us to the streets of Damascus, Syria where we hear from the Iraqi refugees themselves and the organizations trying to assist them.
Featuring:
Eman Abdul Rahid, Iraqi woman whose arm was broken in a car bomb; Adhem Mardini, UNHCR public information officer, Damascus office; Abu Noor, teacher; Omar Jassim, laborer; Rathman Shakr, former detainee and torture survivor; Adnan, ex-Army officer; Dr. Omar Al-Khattab, young Iraqi doctor; Sarrah, student of dentistry; Hummam al-Mukhtar, 17 year old Iraqi student; Hussam, 22 year old Iraqi student; Adel Al-Jabbah, Amir Alaby and Abdel Aziz, Syrian shop owners.
Senior Producer/Host: Tena Rubio
Contributing Freelance Producer: Dahr Jamail
Mixing Engineer: Phillip Babich
Interns: Samson Reiny and Puck LoRead more on the National Radio Project website
Broadcast Quality MP3 of “The Growing Iraqi Refugee Crisis” 26 megs
New York Times Does Fallujah — Again!
July 25, 2007
A short while back my friend Dahr was invited to London to appear on a panel discussion following a play based on events in Fallujah. The play was based on actual testimonies, and each line in the play was an actual quote. When the New York Times reported on it however, they dismissed it as being activist propaganda since it repeated the claims of the US military using chemical weapons during the siege. They even got Dahr’s nationality wrong. But after complaints that showed that the paper itself had confirmed in its earlier coverage the facts about the use of chemical weapons, the NYT did issue a correction — the corrected Dahr’s nationality!
Despite several exchanges, New York Times still remains in denail. Here is FAIR’s original action alert:
Reviewing the London-based anti-Iraq War play Fallujah, New York Times reporter Jane Perlez wrote (5/29/07), “The denunciations of the United States are severe, particularly in the scenes that deal with the use of napalm in Fallujah, an allegation made by left-wing critics of the war but never substantiated.”
She followed that complaint by reporting that the play’s writer and director, Jonathan Holmes, “makes no pretense of objectivity,” paraphrasing him as saying that he “strove for authority more than authenticity.”
Unfortunately for the Times, which does make a pretense of objectivity, the U.S. government did use the modern equivalent of napalm in Iraq. In a 2003 interview in the San Diego Union-Tribune (8/5/03), Marine Col. James Alles described the use of Mark 77 firebombs on targets in Iraq, saying, “We napalmed both those approaches.”
While the Pentagon makes a distinction between the Mark 77 and napalm–the chemical formulation is slightly different, being based on kerosene rather than gasoline–it acknowledged to the Union-Tribune that the new weapon is routinely referred to as napalm because “its effect upon the target is remarkably similar.”
“You can call it something other than napalm, but it’s napalm,” military analyst John Pike told the paper. In a column that appeared before his play premiered (London Guardian, 4/4/07), Fallujah playwright and director Jonathan Holmes referred to it as a “napalm derivative.”
But the major controversy over the use of incendiary weapons in Fallujah involved not napalm but white phosphorus. As with napalm, U.S. officials initially denied that white phosphorus had been used as a weapon there. In London, U.S. Ambassador Robert Tuttle told the Independent (11/15/05) that “U.S. forces do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons,” only “as obscurants or smoke screens and for target marking.”
After it was discovered that the military journal Field Artillery (3-4/05) had quoted veterans of the Fallujah campaign boasting that white phosphorus was such “an effective and versatile munition” that they “saved our WP for lethal missions,” however, the U.S. government was forced to backtrack. “Yes, it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants,” Col. Barry Venable told the BBC (11/15/05).
As Seth Ackerman documented (Extra!, 3-4/06), the New York Times had accepted the initial denials of the use of white phosphorus as a weapon. An article about U.S. intelligence monitoring the foreign press (11/13/05) cited such claims as examples of the flimsy anti-American charges in the overseas media, noting that “the mainstream American news media” had “largely ignored the claim,” since its “reporters had witnessed the fighting [in Fallujah] and apparently seen no evidence” of white phosphorus weaponry.
After the Pentagon admitted using white phosphorus, however, the Times ran a strong editorial (11/29/05) calling for a ban on its use. “All of us, including Americans, are safer in a world in which certain forms of conduct are regarded as too inhumane even for war. That is why…the United States should stop using white phosphorus.”
Independent correspondent Dahr Jamail, whose reporting from Fallujah inspired one of the play’s characters, wrote to the New York Times to take issue with Perlez’s dismissal of the play’s references to napalm. Jamail pointed out that the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah was an “‘allegation’…confirmed by the Pentagon itself nearly one year after it was initially reported by myself, as well as other outlets in the Middle East.”
Jamail also noted out that Perlez had incorrectly described him as Canadian, when he is actually a U.S. citizen. The Times ran a correction (6/7/07) on the nationality mistake, but declined to correct the more serious error of dismissing the U.S.’s incendiary weapons attacks as an “allegation” that was “never substantiated.”
If Perlez meant to say that the U.S. military had only confirmed the use of a napalm-like weapon elsewhere in Iraq, not in Fallujah, while the only incendiary weapon admitted to have been used in Fallujah was white phosphorus, then that’s a very slender technicality with which to call into question the “objectivity” and “authenticity” of a playwright.
It was good of the Times, in its November 2005 editorial, to condemn the use of inhumane weapons that burn their victims alive. But it’s too bad that its reporter didn’t recall that editorial when presenting the use of similar weaponry as an unsubstantiated left-wing charge.
And it’s especially unfortunate that, even when this lapse was pointed out to the paper, it couldn’t bring itself to correct the record, choosing to be fastidious only when it comes to secondary details like nationality.
Containing Russia: Back to the Future?
July 25, 2007
Recent events suggest that there is an attempt to revive that catchall rationale for colossal military boondoggles, neutralization of dissent, and interventions abroad — the cold war. In the wake of recent escalations, which were duly provided ideological cover in the most influential american establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov wrote a response. Except, the editors wanted to excise 40% of the essay. The editors ultimately rejected the essay when Lavrov refused to revise. Here I reproduce Lavrov’s essay in its entirety. Let me say however that this is not an endorsement of Lavrov’s views, it is merely an attempt to ensure diversity of opinion on matters as weighty as these (Courtesy of Voltaire Network).
Influential political forces on both sides of the Atlantic appear intent on starting a debate about whether or not to “contain” Russia. The mere posing of the question suggests that for some almost nothing has changed since the Cold War.
What is a return to containment meant to achieve at a time when Russia has abandoned ideology and imperial aspirations in favor of pragmatism and common sense? What is the purpose of containing a country that is successfully developing and thereby naturally strengthening its international position? What is the point of containing a country that aspires to things as basic as international trade?
It should be no surprise that Russia today is making use of its natural competitive advantages. It is also investing in its human resources, encouraging innovation, integrating into the global economy, and modernizing its legislation. Russia wants international stability to underpin its own development. Accordingly, it is working toward the establishment of a freer and more democratic international order.
The new advocacy of containment may stem from a substantial gap between Russian and U.S. aspirations. U.S. diplomacy seeks to transform what Washington considers “nondemocratic” govern-ments around the world, reordering entire regions in the process. Russia, with its experience with revolution and extremism, cannot subscribe to any such ideologically driven project, especially one that comes from abroad. The Cold War represented a step away from the Westphalian standard of state sovereignty, which placed values beyond the scope of intergovernmental relations. A return to Cold War theories such as containment will only lead to confrontation.
In contrast to the Soviet Union, Russia is an open country that does not erect walls, either physical or political. On the contrary, Russia calls for the removal of visa barriers and other artificial hurdles in international relations. It espouses democracy and market economics as the right bases for social and political order and economic life.
Although Russia has a long way to go, it has chosen a path of development that entails unprecedented, and at times painful, changes. Russian society has reached a broad consensus that these changes should be evolutionary and free of upheavals. Ultimately, a mature democracy, with a vibrant civil society and a well-structured party system, will emerge from a higher level of social and economic development. This requires a substantial middle class, which cannot come into being overnight. It was only Russian tycoons who emerged overnight in the early 1990s – and those times are definitely over.
Frictional Energy
Countries dependent on external sources of energy criticize Russia for assuming its naturally large role in the global energy sector. However, those countries should recognize that energy dependence is reciprocal, since hoarding is not a wise choice for an energy exporting country. That is why Russia has never failed to fulfill any of its hydrocarbon-supply contracts with importing countries. Russia does, however, consider energy to be a strategic sector that helps safeguard independence in its foreign relations. This is understandable given the negative external reactions to Russia’s strengthened economy and enlarged role in international affairs, in which Russia lawfully employs its newly gained freedom of action and speech. It should not be criticized by those who frown on a stronger Russia.
The Russian government’s energy policy reflects a global trend toward state control over natural resources. Ninety percent of the world’s proven hydrocarbon reserves are under some form of state control. Such state control of energy resources is offset, however, by the concentration of cutting-edge technology in the hands of private transnational corporations. Thus, there are incentives for cooperation between the parties, with each sharing the same objective of meeting the energy requirements of the world economy.
Russia is pursuing a foreign policy in striking contrast to the ideologically motivated internationalism of the Soviet Union. Today, Russia believes that multilateral diplomacy based on international law should manage regional and global relations. As globalization has extended beyond the West, competition has become truly global – nothing less than a paradigm shift. Competing states must now take into account differing values and development patterns. The challenge is to establish fairness in this complex competitive environment.
The logical approach is for countries to focus on their competitive advantages without imposing their values on others. U.S. attempts to do the latter have weakened the West’s competitive position. As Eberhard Sandschneider, director of the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy, has put it, U.S. policies in recent years have “damaged tremendously the image of the West” in Asia and Africa. He concludes that nothing, or almost nothing, has been done to make Western values attractive to Asian and African populations. Russia can hardly be held responsible for that.
In his speech in Munich earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated the obvious when he said that a “unipolar world” had failed to materialize. Recent experience shows as clearly as ever that no state or group of states possesses sufficient resources to impose its will on the world. Hierarchy might seem attractive to some in global affairs, but it is utterly unrealistic. It is one thing to respect American culture and civilization; it is another to embrace Americo-centrism.
The new international system has not one but several leading actors, and their collective leadership is needed to manage global relations. This multipolarity encourages network diplomacy as the best way for states to achieve shared objectives. In this system, the United Nations becomes pivotal, providing through its charter the means for collective discussion and action.
The Limits Of Force
In the twenty-first century, delay in solving accumulated problems carries devastating consequences for all nations. One sure lesson is that unilateral responses, consisting primarily of using force, result in stalemates and broken china everywhere. The current catalog of unresolved crises – Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Darfur, North Korea – is a testament to that. Genuine security will only be achieved through establishing normal relations and engaging in dialogue. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier hit the right note when he counseled that today’s world should be based on cooperation rather than military deterrence.
Complex problems require comprehensive approaches. In the case of Iran, resolving differences should lie in the normalization by all countries of their relations with Tehran. Normalization would also help preserve the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Regarding Kosovo, independence from Serbia would create a precedent that goes beyond the existing norms of international law. Our partners’ inclination to give way to the blackmail of violence and anarchy within Kosovo contrasts with the indifference shown to similar violence and anarchy in the Palestinian territories, where it has been tolerated for decades while a Palestinian state has yet to be established.
Eliminating the Cold War legacy in Europe, where the containment policy was dominant for too long, is especially pressing. Creating division in Europe encourages nationalist sentiments that threaten the unity of the continent. The current problems faced by the European Union, in particular, and European politics, in general, cannot be solved without Europe’s maintaining constructive and future-oriented relations with Russia – relations based on mutual trust and confidence. This ought to be seen as serving U.S. interests as well.
Instead, various attempts are being made to contain Russia, including through the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in violation of previous assurances given to Moscow. Today, supporters of NATO enlargement harp on the organization’s supposed role in the promotion of democracy. How is democracy furthered by a military-political alliance that is producing scenarios for the use of force?
Meanwhile, some are promoting the extension of NATO membership to the countries that comprise the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as some sort of pass providing admittance to the club of democratic states whether these countries meet the democratic test or not. One cannot help wondering whether this initiative is being pursued for the sake of moral satisfaction or again to contain Russia.
As far as the CIS is concerned, Russia has the capacity to maintain social, economic, and other forms of stability in the region. Moscow’s rejection of politicized trade and economic relations and its adoption of market-based principles testifies to its determination to have normalcy in interstate relations. Russia and the West can cooperate in this region but only by forsaking zero-sum power games.
The drive to place missile defenses in eastern Europe is evidence of the U.S. effort to contain Russia. It is hardly coincidental that this installation would fit into the U.S. global missile defense system that is deployed along Russia’s perimeter. Many Europeans are rightfully concerned that stationing elements of the U.S. missile defense system in Europe would undermine disarmament processes. For its part, Russia considers the initiative a strategic challenge that requires a strategic response.
President Putin’s offer to allow joint usage of the Gabala radar base in Azerbaijan, instead of those eastern European installations – as well as his proposal, made when meeting with President George W.Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, in July, to create a regional monitoring and early warning system – provides a brilliant opportunity to find a way out of the present situation with the dignity of all parties intact. As a starting point for a truly collective effort in this area, Russia is willing to take part, together with the United States and others, in a joint analysis of potential missile threats up to the year 2020.
The desire to contain Russia clearly manifests itself as well in the situation surrounding the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (or CFE Treaty). Russia complies with the treaty in good faith and insists only on the one thing that the treaty promises: equal security. However, the equal security principle was compromised with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact; meanwhile, NATO was left intact and then enlarged. In the meantime, attempts to correct the situation have come up against the refusal of NATO member countries to ratify the modernization of the treaty under various unrelated pretexts that have no legal justification and are entirely political. The lesson to be drawn from the CFE Treaty stalemate is that any element of global or European security architecture that is not based on the principles of equality and mutual benefit will not prove to be sustainable. After all, if we cannot adapt this old instrument to the new realities, is it not time to review the situation and start developing a new system of arms control and confidence-building measures, if we find that Europe needs one? Here again, frank discussion at Kennebunkport gave hope that there is way to move toward putting into force the adapted treaty.
Beyond The Cold War
It is time to bury the Cold War legacy and establish structures that meet the imperatives of this era – particularly since Russia and the West are no longer adversaries and do not wish to create the impression that war is still a possibility in Europe. The path to trust lies through candid dialogue and reasoned debate, as well as interactions based on the joint analysis of threats. At the moment, however, without reasonable grounds, Russia is excluded from such joint analysis. Instead, it is urged to believe in the analytic abilities and good intentions of its partners.
Russians do not suffer from a sense of exceptionalism, but neither do they consider their analytic abilities and ideas inferior to those of others. Russia will respond to safeguard its national security, and in doing so will be guided by the principle of “reasonable sufficiency.” Meanwhile, it will always keep the door open for positive joint action to safeguard common interests on the basis of equality. This is the only serious approach to national security concerns.
In his speech in Munich, President Putin invited all of Russia’s partners to start a serious and substantive discussion of the current status of international affairs, which is far from satisfactory. Russia is convinced that a friend/enemy attitude toward it should be a thing of the past. If efforts are being undertaken to “counter Russia’s negative behavior,” how can Russia be expected to cooperate in areas of interest to its partners? One has to choose between containment and cooperation. This is relevant to Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the Asian Development Bank and to the unwarranted continuance of the 1970s Jackson-Vanik amendment, which denies Russia permanent normal trading relations with the United States.
U.S.-Russian relations still enjoy the stabilizing benefits of a close and honest working relationship between President Putin and President Bush. Both countries and both peoples share the memory of their joint victory over fascism and their joint exit from the Cold War, which unites them in its own right. Should equal partnership prevail in U.S.-Russian relations, very little will be impossible for the two nations to achieve. The challenges are many – the struggle against international terrorism; organized crime and drug trafficking; the search for realistic climate protection; the development of nuclear energy while strengthening nonproliferation efforts; the pursuit of global energy security; and the exploration of outer space. Practical cooperation on these and other challenges should not be sacrificed on the altar of renewed containment.
At present, anti-Americanism is not as widespread in Russia as it is elsewhere. But a return to containment, and the bloc-based thinking that accompanies it, could trigger mutual alienation between Americans and Russians. The strains evident in the U.S.-Russian relationship call for a high-level working group charged with finding ways to further cooperation. The presidents of Russia and the United States support the idea of such a group, headed by the former statesmen Henry Kissinger and Yevgeny Primakov.
Both sides should demonstrate a broad-minded and unbiased vision, one that represents Russia and the United States as two branches of European civilization. Russia, the United States, and the European Union should work together to preserve the integrity of the Euro-Atlantic space in global politics. For as Jacques Delors has said, whenever this troika “is divided by differences, whenever each party plays its own game, the risk of global instability greatly increases.”
So why not stand together and act in the spirit of cooperation and fair competition on the basis of shared standards and a respect for international law? At the Kennebunkport meeting in July, President Putin and President Bush demonstrated what teamwork can achieve. They agreed to look for common approaches to missile defense and strategic arms reductions, and they launched new initiatives on nuclear energy and nonproliferation. Russia and the United States have nothing to divide them; along with other partners, they share responsibility for the future of the world. It is not Russia that needs to be contained; it is those who would deprive the world of the benefits that will come from a strong U.S.-Russian partnership.
Sergey V. Lavrov is Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation.
