Iranian University Chancellors Ask Bollinger 10 Questions
September 26, 2007
Fars News Agency: Seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers, in a letter addressed to their counterpart in the US Colombia University, denounced Lee Bollinger’s insulting words against the Iranian nation and president and invited him to provide responses for 10 questions of the Iranian academicians and intellectuals.
The following is the full text of the letter.
* * * *
Mr. Lee Bollinger
Columbia University PresidentWe, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran , hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at Columbia University.
We would like to inform you that President Ahmadinejad was elected directly by the Iranian people through an enthusiastic two-round poll in which almost all of the country’s political parties and groups participated. To assess the quality and nature of these elections you may refer to US news reports on the poll dated June 2005.
Your insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with a population of 72 million and a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.
Your comments, filled with hate and disgust, may well have been influenced by extreme pressure from the media, but it is regrettable that media policy-makers can determine the stance a university president adopts in his speech.
Your remarks about our country included unsubstantiated accusations that were the product of guesswork as well as media propaganda. Some of your claims result from misunderstandings that can be clarified through dialogue and further research.
During his speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad answered a number of your questions and those of students. We are prepared to answer any remaining questions in a scientific, open and direct debate.
You asked the president approximately ten questions. Allow us to ask you ten of our own questions in the hope that your response will help clear the atmosphere of misunderstanding and distrust between our two countries and reveal the truth.
- Why did the US media put you under so much pressure to prevent Mr. Ahmadinejad from delivering his speech at Columbia University? And why have American TV networks been broadcasting hours of news reports insulting our president while refusing to allow him the opportunity to respond? Is this not against the principle of freedom of speech?
- Why, in 1953, did the US administration overthrow the Iran’s national government under Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh and go on to support the Shah’s dictatorship?
- Why did the US support the blood-thirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran, considering his reckless use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers defending their land and even against his own people?
- Why is the US putting pressure on the government elected by the majority of Palestinians in Gaza instead of officially recognizing it? And why does it oppose Iran ’s proposal to resolve the 60-year-old Palestinian issue through a general referendum?
- Why has the US military failed to find Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden even with all its advanced equipment? How do you justify the old friendship between the Bush and Bin Laden families and their cooperation on oil deals? How can you justify the Bush administration’s efforts to disrupt investigations concerning the September 11 attacks?
- Why does the US administration support the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) despite the fact that the group has officially and openly accepted the responsibility for numerous deadly bombings and massacres in Iran and Iraq? Why does the US refuse to allow Iran ’s current government to act against the MKO’s main base in Iraq?
- Was the US invasion of Iraq based on international consensus and did international institutions support it? What was the real purpose behind the invasion which has claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Where are the weapons of mass destruction that the US claimed were being stockpiled in Iraq?
- Why do America’s closest allies in the Middle East come from extremely undemocratic governments with absolutist monarchical regimes?
- Why did the US oppose the plan for a Middle East free of unconventional weapons in the recent session of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors despite the fact the move won the support of all members other than Israel?
- Why is the US displeased with Iran’s agreement with the IAEA and why does it openly oppose any progress in talks between Iran and the agency to resolve the nuclear issue under international law?
Finally, we would like to express our readiness to invite you and other scientific delegations to our country. A trip to Iran would allow you and your colleagues to speak directly with Iranians from all walks of life including intellectuals and university scholars. You could then assess the realities of Iranian society without media censorship before making judgments about the Iranian nation and government.
You can be assured that Iranians are very polite and hospitable toward their guests.
An Interview With Mearsheimer and Walt
September 26, 2007
An important interview with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy. I am reading the book at the moment which is a work of serious scholarship in which the authors marshal out mountains of evidence in support of their watertight argument. I’ll post a review once I finish.
Why Does Norman Podhoretz Hate America?
September 26, 2007
This neocon extremist was hired by Rudy Giuliani as his political adviser shortly after he wrote an article entitled ‘The Case for Bombing Iran’. Here CIA’s former head of the Bin Laden unit and author of Imperial Hubris, Michael Scheuer, subjects the book to scathing scrutiny.
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Norman Podhoretz, Doubleday, 2007, 240 pp.
Norman Podhoretz’s new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, is a hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order. Podhoretz hates every American who does not support the neoconservatives’ views, the foreign policy they have devised, and the military and national security disasters to which they are leading America. Patrick Buchanan, Andrew J. Bacevich, Sir John Keegan, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and many others are all targets of Podhoretz. These men are variously characterized as anti-Semites, isolationists, recanters from the true creed, or simply as small men who fear the neoconservative utopia is about to arrive, discredit their views, and cost them their jobs or prestige. Podhoretz is particularly vicious toward Buchanan because he knows that Buchanan sees through the neoconservative fantasy with the most unrelenting acuity. Buchanan’s frank voice and non-interventionism – not isolationism – are genuinely American characteristics, so Podhoretz must go all out to discredit Buchanan as an anti-Semite, lest Americans listen to Buchanan’s advice not to get their children killed fighting other peoples’ wars, be they wars for Israelis or Muslims or anyone else.
And who are the heroes of the story? Why, Podhoretz and the familiar roster of the only real Americans and Israel-firsters, of course: Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, Victor Davis Hanson, John R. Bolton, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, and a few others who have battled so long and hard to ensure that America fights an endless war against Muslims in Israel’s defense. Podhoretz and his chums are the men responsible for the lethal mess America now faces in the Muslim world, and they have also done more than any other group – Hamas and Hezbollah included – to undermine Israel’s long-term security. In short, the influence and arrogance of this gang has been an unmitigated and accelerating disaster for the two nations they claim to love most. I will leave it up to those who read the book to decide which country they obviously love best, but I bet you can guess before turning a page.
Podhoretz is big on pinning the Islamofascist label on our Islamist enemies. The phrase has nothing to do with reality, of course, as the Islamists are far from fascists, though they clearly are the most dangerous threat America now confronts. But Podhoretz does not care about understanding the enemy’s real motivation and attributes in order to annihilate him as quickly as possible. By using the term Islamofascist he seeks only to block any debate on the neoconservative agenda by ensuring that its critics are identified as pro-fascist, therefore anti-American, therefore pro-Nazi, and therefore anti-Semitic. Other notable men have described this tactic as the Big Lie, and it is a neocon specialty and trademark.
And if this Big Lie is not enough for you, try another of Podhoretz’s on for size. This one is so ahistorical and deliberately misleading that it is hard to even begin to comment on its mendacity. Podhoretz focuses on one of the terrorist Yasser Arafat’s rants damning the United States as “the murderers of humanity,” considering it divine revelation that Arafat did not mention Israel in the single paragraph quoted in the book. “The absence of even a word here about Israel,” lectures Podhoretz to Americans he obviously sees as mindless cattle who will believe any lie thrown their way, “showed that if the Jewish state had never come into existence, the United States would still have stood as the embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs considered evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel was in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism, rather than the reverse.” (91) How many major American military conflicts with Arabs can Podhoretz name that occurred prior to Israel’s establishment?
Clearly, Podhoretz and his heroic band want the Islamist enemy to stay in the field so that the war he and the Israel-firsters wanted and now have will go on and on and on. Like the sickest and most addled of bloodletting Wilsonian interventionists, Podhoretz quotes the puerile position of George W. Bush that U.S. security depends on building mirror images of America abroad: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know that the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.” (182) And what is the endgame of standing with those who stand for liberty? Quoting President Bush again, Podhoretz says U.S. military forces must “drain the swamps” of the Islamofascist world and replace incumbent regimes with elected governments that will “fulfill the hopes ‘of the Islamic nations [who] want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.’” (135) This effort, Podhoretz adds, is “marked by more than a touch of nobility.” (212)
In Podhoretz’s hateful prose we find the true crusader spirit bound up with the con-man’s willingness to distort history for political advantage. Again using the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Podhoretz argues “that history had called America to action and that it was both ‘our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.’” (215) Taken to its logical bottom line, this assertion means that American parents should be delighted to nobly spend the lives of their children so Iraqis and Afghans can vote and have parliaments. Implicit in this absurd argument is that somehow U.S. national security requires that other people – not all others, of course, only Muslims – vote, behave democratically, and become secular. This is truly analysis by assertion. Can anyone really imagine that American society is automatically safer because Mrs. Mohammed votes and wears mascara? Or, alternatively, that U.S. national security is threatened if the Pashtun tribal leaders of southeastern Afghanistan do not appoint precinct captains to get out the vote in parliamentary elections? Clearly, Podhoretz is running a con here, and the price will be paid not in cash but in the blood of American kids. Indeed, Podhoretz can only lecture the grieving parents of the young Americans who have already died in Iraq : “By any historical standard, our total losses were still, and would remain, amazingly low.” (110)
History also gets in the way of Podhoretz’s worldview, so we get another con. We are not, he argues, trying to impose democracy and neuter the religion of a 14-century-old Islamic civilization and 1.4 billion Muslims, but merely trying to repair a political order that was inappropriately arranged by the Western powers a hundred years ago. “But here again,” Podhoretz argues,
“[T]he so-called realist [view of U.S. foreign policy that opposed the Iraq war] ignored the reality, which was that the Middle East of today was not thousands of years old, and was not created in the seventh century by Allah or the Prophet Mohammed. … Instead, the states in question had all been conjured into existence less than one hundred years ago out of the ruins of the defeated Ottoman Empire in World War I. Their boundaries had been drawn by the victorious British and French with a stroke of an often arbitrary pen, and their hapless peoples were handed over in due course to one tyrant after another.” (144-145)
This is another absurd argument that again reduces to nonsense, to wit: The French and British tried to dictate the organization and political system of an ancient Islamic civilization and cocked it up, but we are much smarter – and implicitly purer – than they were, so we can build the perfect Muslim world. This smug attitude does capture in a nutshell, however, a good part of the basic un-Americanism of the neoconservatives; they are a foreign and, I think, malign influence in our body politic. America is a republic founded on the principles and insights derived from what Gertrude Himmelfarb has described in her brilliant work The Roads to Modernity as the American Enlightenment, fundamental to which is a profound belief in the utter imperfectability of man. Podhoretz and his all-knowing and stern-minded gang of neoconservative warmongers, on the other hand, are the heirs of the French Enlightenment’s faith in man’s perfectibility, the principles of which have brought the world the bloody horrors and mass murder conducted by the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and any number of others who attempted to create a perfect society. There is no sane reason to believe that neoconservative-led efforts to “perfect” Muslim society would yield less bloodshed, much less to imagine that it would increase security for the United States.
The other part of the fundamental un-Americanism of Podhoretz and his brothers lies in their use of the ideas and heroes of American history only if they further their “enlightened” foreign policy; all others they ignore or misrepresent. Picking and choosing from the words of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy, Podhoretz tries to infer that fighting a “world war” against the Islamofascists is identical to fighting world wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. This sounds good if you say it fast, but the selective use of our presidents’ words by Podhoretz is just another of his inaccurate assertions.
Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz’s lethal lie that the Islamists are “the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization” and are, “like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand.” (14-15) Actually, America’s war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by “our virtues as a free and prosperous country.” (102) To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America’s defeat.
Podhoretz’s final con comes at the expense of the late George Kennan. Podhoretz takes some of Kennan’s words and twists them in a way that makes him seem like a supporter of the neoconservatives’ endless overseas interventionism and war-for-perfection agenda. At the end of his book, Podhoretz quotes Kennan: “To avoid destruction the United States need only to measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.” (215) With this passage he leaves the reader to believe that Kennan would have supported the neoconservative crusade “to beat back the ‘implacable challenge’ of Islamofascism as the ‘greatest generation’ of World War II in taking on the Nazis and their fascist allies, and as its children and grandchildren ultimately managed to do in confronting the Soviet Union and its Communist empire in World War III.” (217)
This is an intolerable and deliberately misleading attempt to make Kennan appear to be an arch-interventionist. Toward the end of his long life, Kennan wrote something of a valedictory essay for his fellow citizens in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1995), “On American Principles.” In this essay Kennan praised John Quincy Adams’s noninterventionist foreign policy as a principle appropriate to America, and, more important, described how it was admirably applicable to the chaos and confusion of the post-Cold War world. The dangers inherent in U.S. interventionism after the Cold War, Kennan wrote, are roughly similar to those
“that clearly underlay John Quincy Adams’ response to similar problems so many years ago – his recognition that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example. Adams made this clear in the address cited above. One will recall his urging that the best response we could give to those appealing to us for support would be to give them what he called ‘the benign sympathy of our example.’ To go further, he warned, and try to give direct assistance would be to involve ourselves beyond the power of extrication ‘in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.’ Who, today, looking at our involvements of recent years, could maintain that the fears these words expressed were any less applicable in our time than in his?”
Does this sound like the warmongering of the neoconservative interventionists? I think not. It rather sounds like the words of a man who knows his country’s history and traditions and its peoples’ character far better than the obtuse Podhoretz and crew. At one point in his book Podhoretz quotes W.H. Auden’s description of the 1930s as “a low and dishonest decade.” (188) There is no better overall description for Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism than “low and dishonest.”
Ugly American and the ‘New Hitler’
September 26, 2007
US establishment could not have done itself a higher disservice than to appoint the comically pompous and inane Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, as the spokesman for ‘the civilized world’. Besides making an arse of himself with lengthy self-congratulation for upholding the principles of ‘free speech’, he conformed the stereotype of the Ugly American while at the same time undermining his own ‘achievement’ with gratuitous insults.
In “‘Hitler’ Does Iran“, Pepe Escobar takes a look at the comic spectacle of Western media caught off guard.
CBS reporter: But the American people, sir, believe that your country [Iran] is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans.President Mahmud Ahmadinejad: Well, I’m amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation? You are representing the media and you’re a reporter. The American nation
d, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Vladimir Putin will discuss what happens next – from technical aspects of Iran’s nuclear program to Bush’s warmongering impetus. s made up of 300 million people. There are different points of view over there.The new “Hitler”, at least for a while, has lodged in a prosaic midtown Manhattan hotel. Contrary to a plethora of demonizing myths, this Persian werewolf did not evade his abode to eat kids for breakfast in Central Park. Instead, he turned on a carefully calibrated public relations charm offensive. Whatever his polemical views, for a now-seasoned head of state like Ahmadinejad to turn astonishing US disinformation on Iran, the Middle East and US foreign policy for his own advantage ended up as a string of slam-dunks.
Articulate, evasive, manipulative, the Iranian president – even lost in translation – was especially skillful in turning US corporate media’s hysteria upside down consistently to paint those in the administration of President George W Bush as incorrigible warmongers. Both at the National Press Club, via video-conference, and live at Columbia University, Ahmadinejad even had the luxury of joking about fabled Western “freedom of information” – as so many are still “trying to prevent people from talking”.
He scored major points among the target audience that really matters: worldwide Muslim public opinion. Contrasting with a plethora of corrupt Arab leaders, Ahmadinejad has been carefully positioning himself as a Muslim folk hero capable of standing up to Western arrogance and defending the rights of the weak (the Palestinians). The way he deflected US ire on the enemy’s own turf will only add to his standing.
At the United Nations this week, a remix of 2002 couldn’t be more inevitable: it’s the same soundtrack of tortuous diplomacy with the bongos and congas and special effects of war beefing up the background. By going on preemptive public relations, Ahmadinejad was clever enough not to commit the same mistake of the previous, “invisible” Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
He was also clever in preempting ear-splitting rumors of a next war: “Talk about war is basically a propaganda tool.” One of his key points may not have made an impact in the US, but resonated widely around the world, and not only in the Muslim street: “We oppose the way the US government tries to rule the world”; there are “more humane methods of establishing peace”. He assured that no Iranian weapons are flowing into Iraq, adding that “regional countries in the Middle East don’t need outside interference”.
On uranium enrichment, he repeatedly stressed that it is Iran’s right, as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to conduct a “legal” and “peaceful” nuclear program. “Why should a nation depend on another?” But if the US would engage in peace talks, so would Iran: “International law is equal to everyone.” As for the US and France, they “are not the world” – a reference to both the Bush administration’s and the French saber-rattling. “France is a very cultured society, it would not support war.” Humanitarian imperialist French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was summarily brushed aside: he needs to attain “higher maturity”.
On Israel, Ahmadinejad said, “We do not recognize a regime based on discrimination, occupation and expansionism,” and he said that country “last week attacked Syria and last year attacked Lebanon”; pretty much what most of the Middle East agrees with. He may have granted that the Holocaust did take place, but the world needs “more research on it”. The Holocaust is not his main point: it always serves as an intro to one of his key themes – why should the Palestinians pay the price for something that happened in Europe? He said he wanted a “clear” answer. No one deigned to provide it.
To put in perspective the Iranian hostage crisis in the early days of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he said one would need to “go back to US intervention in Iran since 1953″. His hosts preferred to change the subject. Humming non-stop in the background noise was the “wipe Israel of the map” myth. No one had the intellectual decency to point out that what he really said, in Farsi, in a speech on October 2005 to an annual anti-Zionist conference in Iran, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. He was doing no more than quoting the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – hoping that an unfair (toward Palestine) regime would be replaced by another one more equitable; he was not threatening to nuke Israel. Warmongers anyway don’t bother to check the facts.
You’ve got to change your evil ways
US corporate media’s treatment of the new “Hitler” seemed to have been scripted by the same ghostwriter lodged in the same (White) House. On 60 Minutes, the Columbia BroadcastingSystem (CBS) was firing on all cylinders for a casus belli – from “There’s no doubt Iran is providing the IEDs” (improvised explosive devices, in Iraq) to “Why don’t you just stop denying that you’re building a nuclear bomb?” Ahmadinejad was bemused, to say the least. CNN for its part could not resist proclaiming, “His state even sponsors terrorism … in some cases even against US troops in Iraq.”
Ahmadinejad succinctly unveiled to the Associated Press the reasons for so much warmongering – in a way that even a kid would understand: “I believe that some of the talk in this regard arises first of all from anger. Secondly, it serves the electoral purposes domestically in this country. Third, it serves as a cover for policy failures over Iraq.”
An even more appalling measure of Western arrogance – also speaking volumes about “us” when confronted with the incomprehensible “other” – is the diatribe with which the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, chose to “greet” his guest, a head of state. Bollinger, supposedly an academic, spoke about confronting “the mind of evil”. His crass behavior got him 15 minutes of fame. Were President Bush to be greeted in the same manner in any university in the developing world – and motives would abound also to qualify him as a “cruel, petty dictator” – the Pentagon would have instantly switched to let’s-bomb-them-with-democracy mode.
Ahmadinejad, to his credit, played it cool. Stressing, in a quirky fashion, his “academic” credentials, he unleashed a poetic rant on “science as a divine gift” just to plunge once again into the Palestinian tragedy. He stressed how Iran “is friendly with the Jewish people” – which is a fact (at least 30,000 Jews live undisturbed in Iran). Then back to the key point: Why are the Palestinians paying the price for something they had nothing to do with? Iran has a “humanitarian proposal” to solve the problem – a referendum where Palestinians would choose their own political destiny.
In the absence of informed debate, Ahmadinejad stressed his points the way he wanted to. Iran does not need a nuclear bomb. Iran does not want to manufacture a nuclear bomb. But telling other countries what they can and cannot do is another matter entirely. He is more than aware that the nuclear dossier is “a political issue” – a question of “two or three powers who think they can monopolize science and knowledge”. It’s up to a sovereign Iran to decide whether it needs nuclear fuel. “Why should we need fuel from you? You don’t even give us spare parts for aircraft.”
He also stressed that Iran is a victim of terrorism – a reference to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a micro-terrorist group by any other name, formerly protected by Saddam, now supported by the Bush administration; but he was also referring to destabilizing black ops by US special forces in the strategically crucial provinces of Khuzestan and Balochistan.
Ahmadinejad was not questioned in detail on internal repression, intimidation of independent journalists, what his Interior Ministry is up to, from a crackdown on women not wearing the veil properly to more sinister, unsubstantiated “collaboration with America” charges. When executions were mentioned, he quipped, “Don’t you have capital punishment in the US?” – and defended them on the ground that these were drug smugglers.
Nobody questioned him on his disastrous economic policies, on the competence of his ministers, on an embryonic pact between Iran and Saudi Arabia to prevent another war in the Middle East, on the upcoming, pivotal summit of the Caspian littoral states in Tehran where Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Vladimir Putin will discuss what happens next – from technical aspects of Iran’s nuclear program to Bush’s warmongering impetus. Anyway, Ahmadinejad made it clear: Iran is “ready to negotiate with all countries”. The same could not be said about the Bush White House.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would have liked this UN General Assembly to discuss seriously climate change and the looming water wars. But nobody – not even diplomats – is really paying attention. It’s all about Bush against the “new Hitler”. Gaza is being collectively punished, and Tony “invade Iraq” Blair bleats platitudes about “peace”. About 100,000 brave monks are in the streets of Yangon defying Myanmar’s military junta – and the UN is not even listening (“Bring democracy to the Burmese people,” anyone?). It’s just war, war, war.
New Yorkers may have shown the new “Hitler” a very ugly face, but at least they should know the war remix’s hard sell is not dubbed in Farsi.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Bhutto’s Game
September 26, 2007
Benazir Bhutto is keen to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan once more. The liberal democrat that she is, she wants to make sure she has the support of people — in Washington! Guardian reports,
Benazir Bhutto, the exiled former leader of Pakistan, yesterday tried to persuade a Democratic-controlled Congress to support her return to power by arguing that she would be a more effective ally against al-Qaida than the country’s military leader.
The Bush administration’s partnership with the country’s president, Pervez Musharraf, in the war on terror was a “strategic miscalculation”, Ms Bhutto said.
She told an audience in a Senate committee room that General Musharraf had tried convincing the world that he was the only one standing in the way of an extremist takeover of nuclear armed Pakistan. “It appears to me that military dictatorship has fuelled extremism.”
Ms Bhutto’s pitch to Congress comes during a time of intense political activity in Pakistan ahead of next month’s presidential elections in which Gen Musharraf will seek to add to his five years in power.The country’s supreme court is expected to rule today on an opposition legal challenge arguing that the general should be barred from contesting presidential elections while serving as army chief.
Ms Bhutto, 54, has set her sights on parliamentary elections, which could be held early next year. She plans to return from self exile to her home town of Karachi on October 18 to launch her campaign to be the country’s prime minister, a post she has held twice before.
Ms Bhutto’s greatest rival, Nawaz Sharif, was promptly deported when he tried to return from exile in Saudi Arabia this month, and the Pakistani constitution bars prime ministers from serving more than two terms. But Ms Bhutto, who spent seven months trying to negotiate a return with Gen Musharraf, said yesterday she was in a stronger position than Mr Sharif. She had not been sentenced in any of the corruption charges again her, and as she had not sought refuge in a third country, as did Mr Sharif, did not think she could be “handed over.”
In her 20 years as a politician, Ms Bhutto has grown adept at cultivating influence in Washington. But the woman who, as a young Harvard and Oxford graduate, was seen as the embodiment of modernity and democratic aspirations for Pakistan, has fallen into deep disfavour with the Democratic party following her two stints in power that were marred by misrule and corruption charges.
Yesterday’s meetings with Joseph Biden, the Democrat who chairs the US Senate committee on foreign relations, was intended to try to salvage Ms Bhutto’s reputation in Washington by playing on suspicions that Gen Musharraf has been an unwilling or ineffective ally against a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and a growing al-Qaida presence along the Pakistani frontier.
In her speech yesterday Ms Bhutto said that Gen Musharraf’s rule had compromised the struggle against extremism in the border areas. She took the view that even serving Pakistani army officers now thought it was time to divorce politics from the military.
She claimed she would be able to pacify the tribal regions, which US intelligence officials say have become a haven for both al-Qaida and Taliban extremists.
Ms Bhutto also claimed, without offering evidence, that extremists had been unable to gain a foothold in Pakistan during her relatively brief terms as prime minister. She tried to disassociate herself from AQ Khan, the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Mr Khan confessed in 2004 to presiding over a clandestine network that spread nuclear technology from Pakistan to North Korea and Iran.
During her appearance yesterday, Ms Bhutto acknowledged that she could face trial or a jail sentence on her return. But she insisted she would be welcomed by Pakistani people. As for whether she would be able to stay in power if elected, she said: “The third time around and being over 50, I would like to be my own person because even if you do everything you can to try to last a long time you don’t really last long.”
No More War
September 25, 2007
Two time Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling discusses his petition against nuclear testing and calls for an end to war. (thanks Manfred)
Cindy Rages
September 25, 2007
Once again, Cindy Sheehan offers a corrective for the distorted lens of US mainstream discourse. He reminds them if they are looking for a ‘Petty and Cruel Dictator‘ they need not look farther than their own capital.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the president of Iran spoke at Columbia University today. I heard that he was invited there because the President of Columbia wanted to foster a “free exchange of ideas.” Even though I am not an Ahmadinejad supporter, I know he was elected in Iran in a knee-jerk and understandable response to the USA’s bloodily unnecessary invasion of Iraq, as many reactionery governments have been elected in that region and all over the world in response to the spreading US corporate and military empire.
Citing such human rights’ violations in the form of imprisonment and executions, the President of Columbia University, very boorishly said that Ahmadinejad appeared to be a “petty and cruel dictator.” First of all, how does one invite someone to your place for a “free exchange of ideas,” and be such a rude American? Did he only invite Ahmadinejad so he could publicly scold him or to become the darling of Fox News?
Secondly, what about our President who appears to be a “petty and cruel dictator?” George Bush presided over a stunning amount of executions when he was Governor of Texas and the US is operating torture prison camps, openly and secretly, all over the world. BushCo has fought the Supreme Court and Congress for the right to hold thousands of humans without their human rights of due process and they have also been strenuously committed to the strategy of torture—or “enhanced interrogation methods” as the Ministry of Truth likes to call it. A Reverend gets beaten down in the halls of Congress; nooses are being hung in the south; students are being tased on campuses and Congress is censuring Freedom of Speech…how much evidence do we need before we decide that something is profoundly wrong in present-day America?
In 2006, China, the leading practitioner of state sanctioned murder in the form of execution, killed 8000 people in this manner. However, the Premier of China is welcomed to the US by George Bush who is probably envious of President Hu Jintao’s record . We borrow vast sums from China to wage our wars and China is our major trading partner. Wal-Mart’s cheap and dangerous crap is manufactured by near slaves there, but somehow that is okay? Somehow it is okay to welcome Communist China with open arms, but demonize and disparage a Socialist like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? America has a very lucrative prison business and is the only country in the Americas that practices execution. A barbarian is a barbarian no matter what color, religion or nationality they are.
George Bush has added signing statements to almost 1000 bills that he has signed into law saying that he doesn’t have to obey those very same laws. We have the Nazi-ist sounding Department of Homeland Security which seems to be obsessed with keeping my un-zip-locked baggied lip-gloss off of flights. The un-Patriot Act and breaking of FISA laws and our 4 th Amendment right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure have turned the “Land of the Free” into the “Home of the Slaves.”
To put the cherry on the sundae of the crimes that BushCo have committed, they have sent hundreds of thousands of our own sons and daughters to occupy a country that was no threat to America or its neighbors. Thousands of Americans are dead, wounded or mentally screwed up and millions of Iraqis are dead, wounded, mentally screwed up or displaced from their homes.
Another boorish American, Scott Pelley (of 60 Minutes) hammered Ahmadinejad about sending weapons into Iraq without even once acknowledging the immoral tons of weapons that we rained on the citizens of Iraq during “shocking and awful;” the cluster bombs that look like toys that litter the killing fields of that country and have killed and maimed so many children; the mercenary killers that outnumber our troops and use the people of Iraq for target practice; the thousands of tons of weapons that the US let out of such weapons dumps as al-Qaqaa that were left unguarded while the oil ministry was heavily fortified. Not to mention that America supported Iraq in its eight year long war with Iran that killed an unbelievable amount of people on both sides of the border. The hypocrisy of our system is spectacular and deadly in both ignorance and arrogance.
We here in America are living in a fascist state that regularly puts corporate profits and an insatiable and evil thirst for power above people and their needs. Our supercilious leaders and media are so busy calling the kettle black, they don’t notice or care how dark our pot is. We are supporting Israel in their human rights violations against Palestine, illegally occupying two countries on our own and we have the nerve to claim any kind of moral superiority over anybody?
The fascist, near dictatorship of the Bush regime (a la Nazi Germany) has even intimidated universities to align with their hypocritical murderous rhetoric. Universities should feel free to invite anyone to speak to open much needed dialogue in our country and in the world. And if a person is invited, they should be treated by the person who invited them with a slight modicum of courtesy and then let the rocking and rolling begin with the “Q & A”…which would truly be a free exchange of ideas. I am surprised President Bollinger didn’t have President Ahmadinejad tased.
Peace is going to take all the nations working in cooperation to limit naked aggression and human rights’ violations, not just the ones which the US declare as evil. How many nukes do we have? How many does Pakistan have? How many does India, Israel, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union have? Should the rhetoric be about destroying all weapons of mass destruction and not just prohibiting Iran from obtaining one?
Many countries are committing human rights’ violations and sending arms and troops into many parts of the world. America’s biggest export is violence and we would do well to call for an end to all occupations and violence by beginning to end our own.
Let’s clean our own filthy house before we criticize someone else for theirs.
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother’s Child and Dear President Bush.
Rage for Cindy
September 25, 2007
Here is a chance for Californians to redeem themselves by electing this indefatigable voice of honest dissent. I am delighted to hear that Tom Morello is backing her. I only hope everyone else does the same. (Cindy Sheehan herself participates in the discussion below the Common Dreams article. I’d encourage all to lend her your support)
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is making celebrity endorsements a key facet of her long-shot bid to defeat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) next year.
In a recent interview with The Hill, Sheehan said she has been endorsed by actress Roseanne Barr, country crooner Willie Nelson and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
Sheehan added that White House hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) are also backing her.
“Celebrities bring a certain kind of – good or bad, it seems like our lives are centered around TV and movies – I think it does bring credibility,” Sheehan said.
Nelson is a friend of Sheehan’s and has offered to help her raise money for her campaign. “[Nelson and his wife] just have the exact correct politics and the exact compassion for the earth and humanity that I think attracts us as friends,” she said.
“I support Cindy Sheehan in everything she does,” Nelson wrote in an e-mail, “whether it’s running for Congress, or the president of the U.S. She’s a great American, not afraid to stand up for what she believes in.”
Sheehan, who is running as an independent, unaffiliated candidate, is counting on comedians such as Barr to lend some star power to the campaign. Several San Francisco-based comediennes are planning a campaign fundraiser for Sheehan, she said.
Spokesmen for Barr and Morello did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Kucinich praised Sheehan, but declined to confirm that he is formally backing her.
“I like Cindy,” Kucinich said. “She has been a very important spokesperson in challenging the war. She and I marched together against the war.”
He said he doesn’t comment on races waged against incumbents as a “matter of policy.”
Sheehan is backing Kucinich for the presidency.
Hip Hop Caucus President Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. said he will lend his support. “Cindy Sheehan is the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement and the race in San Francisco is fundamentally about organized people versus organized money,” he said.
Pelosi won her 2006 congressional campaign handily, taking 80 percent of the vote. She’s also had her share of celebrity support. Celebrities ranging from movie producer Francis Ford Coppola to comedian Robin Williams have given money to her campaigns.
Bruce Cain, a political science professor at the University of California Berkeley and the director of the D.C.-based Institute of Governmental Studies, said Sheehan’s chances of beating Pelosi are “slim to none.”
Sheehan is unlikely to get 10 to 15 percent of the vote because there aren’t enough “progressive, green, anarchist types” in the district to elect her, Cain said. Californians do not blame Pelosi for not getting troops out of Iraq, he added.
“The motivation to elect a Democrat is going to be stronger than the motivation to make a point,” Cain said.
Pelosi has already accumulated close to $1.3 million in her campaign coffers. A Pelosi spokesman refused to comment on Sheehan’s campaign.
In a recent e-mail on Iraq that was sent by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to potential donors, Pelosi pointed out that she has been a longtime activist: “Long before I was Speaker of the House, I was a political activist like you …”
Sheehan said hers will be a grassroots campaign. She doesn’t expect to come close to out-raising Pelosi.
“I’m not going to be competing with her on money or on the establishment,” she said, noting she won’t accept any corporate donations.
McKinney, an outspoken opponent of the war, expressed her support for Sheehan at a rally in August near one of the president’s vacation homes in Maine.“Our children deserve a better country and the world deserves a better partner. That’s why I’m happy to see Cindy Sheehan run for Congress. I want Cindy to win,” McKinney said.
Sheehan said she expects more celebrity endorsements to roll in as her campaign kicks into high gear, but she does not anticipate many of Pelosi’s colleagues will back her.
“If they support me it’s going to be difficult for them to get chairmanships or to get on a committee,” she said. “I totally understand if nobody comes out and supports me.”
She wasn’t shy about criticizing Democrats for funding the war.
“If I tell my children, ‘Don’t do drugs’ … and then one of my children asks, ‘Mom, can I have money for drugs?’ and I give them money for drugs, that’s showing them my approval,” she said. “[Congress is] giving [its] approval to President Bush to wage this occupation of Iraq.”
Part of Sheehan’s campaign will aim to enfranchise minorities and young people “who have felt disenfranchised by the power elite.”
She’s also getting educated on local issues important to California’s 8th district and house-hunting in the area. Sheehan lives in northern California, but plans to move into the district soon. She’s organizing her campaign team and hopes to begin campaign fundraisers and events in October.
Sheehan’s battle against the war began after her son Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in Baghdad. She began demonstrating outside of President Bush’s Texas ranch and founded Gold Star Families for Peace in August of 2005. In May, Sheehan announced that she was retiring from anti-war activism, only to return with a challenge to Pelosi: If Pelosi didn’t move to impeach Bush and Vice President Cheney, Sheehan would mount a congressional campaign against her. Sheehan subsequently announced her candidacy in August.
Sheehan called the first female Speaker of the House a “consummate politician” and emphasized that she and Pelosi agree on most issues, with the notable exceptions of Iraq and impeachment.
“In her heart she probably does care about the people of Iraq – but when they sit down to talk about Iraq they talk politics, not about the human cost of war,” she said, referring to Democrats.
Pelosi is vulnerable in liberal San Francisco, a district where the majority of people don’t support the Iraq war, Sheehan said. “People over there are dismayed,” she said. “Nancy is not holding Bush and Cheney accountable. She’s not ending the war in Iraq.”
Many Democrats, however, have defended Pelosi’s action. They say that Pelosi has worked feverishly to end the war, but does not have the votes to override the president’s veto pen.
Sheehan promised that she would not be known as a one-issue candidate, a label that hurt Ned Lamont in his general election bid to defeat Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).
Sheehan, who doesn’t have health insurance, said that making healthcare available to all Americans would be a priority.
“[The Iraq war] is an overriding issue. We can talk about universal healthcare, we can talk about the costs of a college education, we can talk about a lot of issues that affect every American. When we are spending money on Iraq, we cannot rebuild our infrastructure – we cannot do that in America when we are devoted to the war machine.”
She added, “I really think we’ve done the marches, we’ve done the disobedience and the next natural step is to challenge the establishment. This really isn’t me against Nancy Pelosi. This is me against the war machine.”
Missing the Point
September 25, 2007
What I have found interesting so far is how everyone seems to have picked up on Ahmadinejad’s comments denying the presence of gays in Iran as proof of his extremism. The content of the rest of his speech merely gets incidental mention. Well here is why no one is outraged at Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s views on gays: no one ever asked for them. (In fact, the same Lee Bollinger gave him a sycophantic welcome when he was invited to speak at Columbia.) Had the question been asked of any leader of a Muslim country, the answer would be rather similar, regardless of their personal views on the issue (Mush, for example, tends to be pretty liberal on social issues). This has more to do with a societal consensus than the views of an individual. Treating them as such is absurd.
So far the coverage, with the notable exceptions of Al Jazeera and Democracy Now, has been predictably poor. Democracy Now’s introduction is also uncharacteristically poor, however it more than makes up for it with two excellent guests. Ervand Abrahamian is one of the most erudite IrThe Fanonite › Edit — WordPressan experts, and Trita Parsi is a similarly astute analyst. As Abrahamian points out, the whole hullabaloo seems to have missed the point: more important questions of regional stability were subsumed under silly gender and identity politics.
[Update: Michael Barker has pointed out to me that Trita Parsi has links to National Iranian American Council (NIAC) which receives funding from the NED]
Following is Al Jazeera’s report on the event:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York city has stirred up a storm of controversy.
The Iranian president’s speech to an overflowing crowd at Columbia University and protests that greeted him overshadowed the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and even the UN chief’s push for action on climate change on Monday.
Ahmadinejad was subjected to blistering criticism of his country’s human rights record and foreign policy during his Columbia visit and was given a frosty reception by Lee Bollinger, the university’s president.
“Mr President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” he said.
He also challenged Ahmadinejad’s reported denial of the Holocaust. (Kristen Saloomey reports on Ahmedinejad’s speech)
“When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history.”
Ahmadinejad rose to applause, and after a religious invocation said Bollinger’s opening was “an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here”.
He blamed the university president’s “unfriendly treatment” on the influence of the US media and politicians ahead of his visit.
“Many parts of his speech were insults,” he said. “We actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgments.”
‘Evil has landed’
Excerpts from speech On the Holocaust:
Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?
On Holocaust deniers:
My question was simple: There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison? Why isn’t it open to all forms of research?
On Israel as a Jewish state:
We are friends of all the nations. We are also friends with the Jewish people. There are many Jews in Iran living peacefully with security … in our constitution and our laws and the parliamentary elections for every 150,000 people we get one representative in the parliament. For the Jewish community one-fifth of this number they still get one independent representative in the parliament… What we say is that to solve this 60-year problem, we must allow the Palestinian people to decide about its future for itself.
On nuclear research:
Some big powers create a monopoly over science and prevent other nations in achieving scientific development as well. This, too, is one of the surprises of our time. Some big powers do not want to see the progress of other societies and nations… Regretfully, they have not been trained to serve mankind.
On 9/11:
If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly – why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved – and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Before his trip and during his Columbia speech and comments to the media on Monday, Ahmadinejad appeared to be reaching out to the American public, giving a much more balanced view than the US media has often portrayed.
But even before his appearance at Columbia, the front page of New York’s Daily News already ran the headline “The evil has landed” while The New York Post called Ahmadinejad the “Madman Iran Prez”.
Thousands of people gathered outside the United Nations headquarters on Monday to protest against Ahmadinejad’s visit.The speakers, most of them politicians and officials from Jewish organisations, proclaimed their support for Israel and criticised the Iranian leader over remarks questioning the Holocaust.
“We’re here today to send a message that there is never a reason to give a hatemonger an open stage,” Christine Quinn, speaker of New York City’s council, said.
Outside the university lecture hall where Ahmadinejad was to speak, several hundred protesters raised their objections to the event. Some linked arms and sang traditional Jewish folk songs about peace and brotherhood.
Inside, many students were wearing T-shirts with the message “Stop Ahmadinejad’s Evil”.
Holocaust denial
Ahmadinejad rejected accusations that he has denied the Holocaust actually happened, but argued for more research to be conducted on the subject.
“I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all,” he said. “I said, granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?”
He used his 30-minute speech to repeat Tehran’s insistence that its nuclear programme was focused on meeting the country’s electricity needs.
Washington says Iran is seeking to produce nuclear weapons.
“We do not believe in nuclear weapons. Period. This goes against the whole grain of humanity,” Ahmadinejad said.
During the question-and-answer session he denied that homosexuals were persecuted in Iran.
“In Iran we do don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I do not know who has told you we have it,” he said, sparking laughter from the audience. Some, however, were not amused.
“This is a sick joke,” said Scott Long of Human Rights Watch, saying Iran tortures gays under a penal code that punishes homosexuality between men with the death penalty.
US targets Iran force
Separately, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, ratcheted up the pressure on Tehran, telling the Reuters news agency that the US was considering sanctions against the entire al-Quds force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Such a designation would enable Washington to target the force’s financing.
The US accuses the Quds force of inciting violence in Iraq and of training and equipping fighters who have attacked US troops. Iran has repeatedly denied this.
The US is increasing diplomatic pressure on Iran to stop uranium enrichment, which can produce nuclear weapons, and targeting the al-Quds force would be part of that strategy.
“Remember that the problem with the Quds force is that it has a network of activities in support of terrorism but it also, we believe, has a network of activities in support of proliferation,” Rice said.
‘Occupation and racism’
On Monday morning, Ahmadinejad met leaders of a movement called Neturei Karta International.
The Orthodox Jewish group believes that Jews are forbidden to have their own state until the coming of the Messiah and are therefore opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
Afterwards, in a video conference with reporters in Washington, Ahmadinejad accused Israel of occupation and racism.
“It constantly attacks its neighbours,” he said. “It kills people. It drives people from their homes.”
Ahmadinejad is due to address the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
