Bruce Riedel: Al Qaeda Strikes Back
The May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs publishes an article on the actual state of Al Qaeda terrorism. The author, Bruce Riedel, surely knows what he’s talking about. He worked for 29 years with the CIA and was Special Assistant to the President from 1997 until 2002.
Al Qaeda is a more dangerous enemy today than it has ever been before. It has suffered some setbacks since September 11, 2001: losing its state within a state in Afghanistan, having several of its top operatives killed, failing in its attempts to overthrow the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But thanks largely to Washington’s eagerness to go into Iraq rather than concentrate on hunting down al Qaeda’s leaders, the organization now has a solid base of operations in the badlands of Pakistan and an effective franchise in western Iraq. Its reach has spread throughout the Muslim world, where it has developed a large cadre of operatives, and in Europe, where it can claim the support of some disenfranchised Muslim locals and members of the Arab and Asian diasporas. Osama bin Laden has mounted a successful propaganda campaign to make himself and his movement the primary symbols of Islamic resistance worldwide. His ideas now attract more followers than ever.
Riedel goes on to analyse the way the terrorist organisation uses the war in Iraq as a leverage to generate sympathy and support. The damage the US has done to its own image all over the (Islamic) world is huge and it will take decades to mend that. Moreover, thanks to acolytes like Blair and Aznar and countries like Poland and Romania — all too willing to help the CIA — the European image has suffered as well.
To vividly showcase its strength, al Qaeda records most of its operations and transmits the gruesome coverage to jihadi web sites all over the world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed were a boon to al Qaeda’s propaganda efforts, as they offered tangible evidence, al Qaeda’s leaders could argue, both that Washington had imperialist plans and that the jihad against U.S. forces was working.
Wasn’t Bush supposed to fight terrorism? Now he seems to have opened Pandora’s box.
[...] al Qaeda is well placed to threaten global security in the near future. Because it thrives on failed and failing states, it will have opportunities to set up new operations.
Noam Chomsky already argued that the U.S. were Failed States. It is bizarre to find the U.S. in the company of countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, constituting a breeding ground for al Qaeda.
Riedel concludes that “defeating al Qaeda is more complex today than it was in 2001.” But he has some advice to give and proposes some practical steps. But Washington will need “a grand strategy” to defeat them.
Grand strategy? Bush?
Vatican cardinal calls on Catholics to stop funding Amnesty
The Catholic Church has once again found the opportunity to show its ossified way of thinking. Now they are dissociating themselves from Amnesty International. An article in The Guardian quotes
Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace:
A senior Vatican cardinal said yesterday that Catholics should stop donating to human rights group Amnesty International because of its new policy advocating abortion rights for women if they had been raped, were a victim of incest or faced health risks.
So, even in these cases, the Church finds the unborn life more important than the living woman. This makes the woman into nothing more than a receptacle for a foetus (when is a foetus a ‘person’?). Stranger still, the church is much more interested in the unborn child than the living child, apart from baptizing it. I never heard them speak out loud against countries that maltreat children by not feeding them, by not providing proper health care, by not educating them, not to speak of child soldiers and child prostitution.
“The inevitable consequence of this decision, according to the cardinal, will be the suspension of any financing to Amnesty on the part of Catholic organisations and also individual Catholics,” said a statement from Cardinal Martino’s office yesterday.
But Amnesty did not receive funding from the Vatican or the Catholic church. Amnesty also declines support from governments and political parties. But Mr Pobbiati, Italy’s chairman for Amnesty, admitted that the fallout for funding could be serious if individual Catholics would follow Cardinal Martino’s advice.
“This could be a danger to donations and we are extremely upset about these statements,” he said.
The Catholic Church has this special gift to make lots of people feel bad about their own lifes, while doing nothing to improve living conditions. Of course, there’s always Heaven to sort things out.
Noam Chomsky: Failed States
This book by the reverend (not in the religious sence) Noam Chomsky looks like an exercise to present real life examples for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is all there: the superpower eternally at war with varying enemies, the cheating and lying by the government, the propaganda, the rewriting of history.
Chomsky argues that the USA have got all the characteristics of what is called a “failed state”. In his words:
[…] some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified. One is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious “democratic deficit” that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance. [p. 1]
He goes on to show with many examples how the USA government (and not the people of the USA — because there is huge gap between both) complies with the three major conditions of the “failed state”.
And as to the last one — to suffer from a serious “democratic deficit” — Chomsky argues that from the outset democracy has always tried to protect the interests of substantial people (the rich) and collectivist legal entities (corporations). And democracy promotion, abroad and at home, follows the “[…] operative principle that Carothers describes: democracy is a good thing if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests.” [p. 152]
Democracy abroad is fine as long as the client state complies with American corporate wishes. Hence the outrageous support for Israel, or the overthrowing of a democraticly chosen president in Chile…
In short, the “strong line of continuity” goes back a decade earlier, to the Reagan years. In fact, far beyond. Democracy promotion has always been proclaimed as a guiding vision. But it is not even controversial that the United States often overthrew democratic governments, often installing or supporting brutal tyrannies: Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and a long list of others. The Cold War pretexts regularly collapse under investigation. What we do find, however, is the operative principle that Carothers describes: democracy is a good thing if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests.
Putting aside doctrinal blinders, it is hard to disagree with Latin American scholar Charles Bergquist that “rather than promoting democracy” in Latin America, consistent and often brutal US opposition to struggles for reform of deeply unjust and undemocratic societies “has historically subverted [democracy], both at home and abroad ” while serving “the ’security interests’ of privileged elites in the hemisphere, who have benefited most from the social status quo.” Serious mainstream scholarship has long recognized that “while paying lip-service to the encouragement of representative democracy in Latin America, the United States has a strong interest in just the reverse,” apart from “procedural democracy, especially the holding of elections — which only too often have proved farcical.” Functioning democracy may respond to popular concerns, while “the United States has been concerned with fostering the most favourable conditions for her private overseas investment.” Accordingly there is “no serious question of [US] intervention in the case of the many right-wing military coups” — except, one may add, intervention to support or initiate them — but matters are different “when her own concept of democracy, closely identified with private, capitalistic enterprise, is threatened by communism,” commonly a cover term for the threat of independent development. The record is not fundamentally different outside of Latin America, as one would expect from the nature of the institutions that set the basic framework for policy choices. Nor is it surprising that policies continue today, reflecting the same “schizofrenia.” [p. 152]
But also at home, within the US, government policy is chasing its own goals, miles away of or even opposing public interests. Chomsky highlights popular expectations versus political decisions about Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Another sour point is
[…] the role of the media in undermining democratic politics, to the extent that by the year 2000 presidential elections had become a “travesty”, […] with a reciprocal effect on deterioration of media quality and service to the public interest. [p. 205]
I still recall Saddam Hussein — at that time still happily being Iraq’s dictator – offering to send observers to supervise the counting of the votes.
All in all, this is depressing reading, although necessary. The political marketing machinery continues to fabricate lies day after day. As we live in open and ‘free’ societies, it is possible to find some of the actual truths, but it takes an intelligent and dedicated researcher with private means to unearth them. We have to thank Noam Chomsky for his relentless attention to what really happens in these troubled times.
Not one more death
Another book on political lies. Mainly thanks to Bush this seems to become a new genre. I already wrote about Eliot Weinberger’s What I heard about Iraq, that treats political lying in a sublime way.
This small book consists of contributions by six authors:
- Brian Eno, the musician, writes about The Missionary Position, a very good text,
- Harold Pinter, playwright, with his lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature 2005: Art, Truth and Politics. You can read this text on the Nobel Prize site where you can also see Harold Pinter deliver his speech on a video.
- John le Carré, famous author (his latest novel is The Mission Song) writes despairingly: The US has gone mad
- Richard Dawkins, scientist, well-known for his groundbreaking The Selfish Gene, predicts Ben Laden’s Victory
- Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi-born novelist, writes about The Right to Rule Ourselves, and
- Michel Faber, novelist, writes Dreams in the Dumpster, Language down the Drain.
In almost every text you find the impotent question: why Blair? Bush may be obtuse, or mad, or evil, but why Blair? Why did Blair drag down the UK in the US’ folly?
And another thread through the texts is of course the enormous dismay for the unvarnished lying. Again and again, this makes me think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Eliot Weinberger: What I heard about Iraq
This is not a novel, this is not a documentary, this is poetry. Awful, dramatic poetry like the old saga’s, like Beowulf, where man’s life was very cheap.
Weinberger did no more than compile statements by Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, by colonels and generals, by Iraqi citizens. He interlards these utterances with facts gathered from newspapers or tv. We could all have done it; I already knew practically every sentence in this book.
But the way in which he lets these scraps speak for themselves, without even one word of personal comment, has a devastating effect. Once again, this vaudeville makes me think of George Orwell’s uncomparable novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. When this novel appeared for the first time in 1949 it was a huge success in the US because everyone read it as a portrait of communism under Stalin. But it really is a book about totalitarian regimes. And as the US want to be the biggest in everything… well, they are the biggest totalitarian state in history.
Life is cheap on both sides. It is obvious when you see how Iraqi people are treated. But also those simple American soldiers, who believed at the outset that they where fighting the Devil himself, will suffer the rest of their lives.
And what about Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice? Will they ever have to face a judge? And I don’t believe in the Last Judgement, I’d rather see this in my lifetime, here on Mother Earth. But this is dreaming, I’m afraid.
Marc Dugain: Une exécution ordinaire
Met deze roman bevestigt Marc Dugain dat hij een uitzonderlijk schrijver is. Een mogelijke kandidaat voor een Prix Goncourt wat mij betreft. Ik was vroeger reeds onder de indruk van zijn oorlogsroman De officierskamer. Hierin geeft hij een gezicht aan het lot van de tallozen die verminkt uit de loopgraven van de Eerste Wereldoorlog kwamen en met moeite hun weg terug in de maatschappij vonden. In een bondige, beeldende stijl wordt het verhaal verteld van drie officiers die behalve met de trauma’s van het oorlogsgeweld ook nog eens met hun maatschappelijke stigmatisering als mismaakte moeten leren leven.
Une exécution ordinaire vertelt het verhaal van de Kursk, de Russische atoomduikboot die op niet opgehelderde wijze verging in de Barentszee in 2000. De gebrekkige wijze waarop de legerleiding en Russische toppolitici — Poetin voorop — omgingen met dit incident en zeker de halfslachtige pogingen om een deel van de bemanning te redden, waren toen wereldnieuws.
Tegelijk is het een familieroman die over verschillende generaties heen een macaber portret tekent van de Russische maatschappij. Stalin komt er in voor, en vooral zijn bizarre redeneringen en zijn schaamteloos gebruik van terreur. Het verschrompelen van het communisme, Yeltsin, corruptie, naakt kapitalisme, Poetin. Het wordt allemaal op overtuigende wijze geëvoceerd zonder dat het een politiek pamflet wordt. Hij kijkt door de ogen van de mensen die dit allemaal ondergaan.
Dit is zo’n boek dat je wil dichtklappen na de laatste bladzijde en dan stil zijn, alleen zijn.
Of een vioolconcerto van Shostakovitsh opzetten.
