Iraq: The Return of "Colonialism"

After the Second World War, colonial imperialism (formal colonies, military forces stationed in them, colonial administrators working formally or in many cases informally with local usually hereditary local rulers to maintain control) was largely destroyed as national liberation movements drove out colonial powers bankrupted by the war and the major powers of the "cold war world," the socialist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States were not colonial powers(although the U.S. supported the French colonial war in Vietnam after WWII as part of its larger cold war policy and then created a quasi colonial state, South Vietnam, when the French were defeated, leading to another, more devastating war in Vietnam for the Vietnamese).

The policy and much of the "debate" concerning the Iraq occupation today makes sense in terms of pre World War II colonialism. Just as the British colonialists in India, for example, the world's largest colony for a few centuries, worked with local hereditary rulers whom they funded and played Hindus against Muslims against each other and then claimed that they were in India to "protect" the "princely states" (hereditary rulers) and Hindu and Muslim communities, the U.S. is playing Shia and Sunni Muslim communities against one another and attempting to work with hereditary rulers (sheiks here as against maharajahs) in the name of peace and development (civilization and progress the British called it, "nation building and democracy" the U.S. is calling it). In reality the policy remains one to divide and rule, so that even if national independence/liberation is achieved, as it was in India, fall back positions (which for the British meant favoring and working with Muslim elites to establish a Muslim separatist state, Pakistan, that would continue to serve their imperialist regional interests) can be implemented.

For the Bush administration, an emerging fall back position seems to be dividing Iraq between Sunni, Shia religious and Kurdish ethnic populations (perhaps formally) and developing some sort of military
political alliance with one or more of these groups in order to sustain control over Iraqi oil and in all likelihood military bases and an indefinite military presence whose purpose would be to exploit the oil for U.S. and other transnational corporations.

At the moment, most of the Democratic candidates are debating Bush and the Republicans within the context of this colonialist discourse (Dennis Kucinich, who unfortunately does not at this time have the resources to be considered a major candidate is a crucial exception) advocating significantly smaller troop deployments, specific goals to be met, and concrete timetables for troop withdrawal, and developing counterinsurgency capacities among the Iraqis).

While this is certainly better than Bush and the Republicans in a lesser of two evils vein, the Democrats are not coming forward with a policy for the economic reconstruction of Iraq, with entails protection of its oil resources from U.S. and European corporate predators, and a policy to advance reconciliation between Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish communities, which both the previous pre WWII British colonial rule and Saddam Hussein's brutal, fascist (as Iraqi Communists have long called it) Baath party dictatorship built upon. Rather than implementing policies of reconciliation (which would make "nation building," which of course Iraqis can only do for themselves, into something more than a Big Lie) Bush administration policy has been to heighten conflict in order to sustain its de facto colonial position.

The old colonialism was destroyed after WWII thanks in large part to the advance of the socialist movement globally, the existence of the socialist Soviet Union which from its establishment had been the global center for anti-colonialism, and for that matter the U.S., which while it happily absorbed the assets of the old colonial powers the way John D. Rockefeller merged companies, wasn't interested in paying the overhead of colonial rule(the U.S. strategy, perfected in central America and the Caribbean, was indirect rule by supporting regimes like Somoza's in Nicaragua and sending in the marines to prop up such regimes on an ad hoc basis).

Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists and the Peoples Republic of China, an emerging great global power still led by Communists, is in no way playing the global anti-colonialist anti-imperialist role that the Soviet Union played in its history (I am not saying that to criticize the present course that China is on, its controversial attempt to develop socialism in the context of social market economy or accusing it of acting as an imperialist power, but merely stating what I consider to be a fact, that is, it is not in any significant way playing the anti-imperialist part that the Soviet Union played in world affairs for so long) the U.S. or any state following what is essentially a colonial policy as the Bush administration is in the 21st century can only lead to disaster as it did for the British, French, Italian German, and Japanese Empires among others in the 20th century. In the 2008 elections, we should fight to pressure the opposition to right Republicans not only to end the Iraq occupation but to come forward with anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist policies that will not only lead to reconstruction of and independence for a sovereign Iraq but prevent the next administration from establishing a colonial presence in new Iraq's.

Norman Markowitz

MoveOn.org Isn't the Problem, Bush's War Policy Is

Republicans are mad about MoveOn.org's ad questioning the Bush administration's politicization of General Petraeus' congressional testimony. Fine. But that diversion doesn't help us understand what was in Petraeus' testimony.

read more | digg story

Petraeus and Crocker: Good News, Bad News, No New Strategy

A combined "super-committee" hearing listened to testimony offered by General David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker today (9-10-07) for several hours.

read more | digg story

Breaking the Blockade of Cuba

In the past we had the US-Cuba Youth Exchange, but because of licensing problems and tighter restrictions by the Bush Administration, we were unable to continue that program.

read more | digg story

UN NGO Conference on Climate Change Concludes

By Marc Brodine

The UN NGO Climate Change Conference is over. There are some important features of a consensus developing at least in the non-governmental and scientific communities:

• that excessive heat is already leading to increased mortality rates and increased human suffering
• that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action
• that there are three basic responses to negative climate change--mitigation, adaptation, and suffering, and that the more mitigation and adaptation we do, the less human suffering
• that the impacts of climate change are unequal, usually matching already existing inequality, and that those facing the greatest impacts are different than the countries that have done most to create the problem--in other words, the US, Australia, and Western Europe have added the most carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the peoples and countries of Africa, South Asia, and island nations are going to face the most important and earliest impacts
• that the basic science is settled, climate change is happening, the causes are from human activity, and that humans have to change quickly
• that the longer we wait for major changes, the more difficult and costly it will be

These widely held propositions represent a major advance form where the debate was a few years ago. The science has gotten clearer, and politicians are being forced by public opinion to address the issue. Climate change touches almost all aspects of human life, environmental rights are human rights, and environmental rights requires other human rights.

Climate change will hurt (and already is hurting) food security, water security, increased violent conflict, soil degradation, increased desertification, and increasingly stresses our industrial, agricultural, transportation, and distribution systems.

We have to change. The necessary change involves individual lifestyle changes, social and political changes, changes in what we focus scientific research on, changes in what and how we produce food and industrial and consumer goods.

It is very significant that scientists and activists have come to these conclusions. It is even more significant that the general public, while less informed about the details, has come to similar conclusions and are forcing political changes already.

But climate change will force us to go farther, to draw more fundamental conclusions--that the market is not only not the solution it is a major part of the problem, that capitalism is incapable from fully addressing the basic change humanity's survival requires, that socialism is a neccesity for human survival.

We will not be silenced

To PA online readers,

I hope those who receive this message contact email Freemantle and inform them that we here in America will not be silenced in our support of the British workers whom they are treating so contemptuously.

Norman Markowitz

If you are having trouble viewing this message, please go to

http://labourstart.icontact.com/archives/inside/posts/we-will-not-be-silenced.html.

The campaign we launched a little more than a week ago in support of low-paid workers in care homes in north London has generated more support than any other campaign we have ever done.

Already, well over 8,100 messages have been sent to the employer. This is even bigger than our 2005 campaign in support of the Gate Gourmet workers, which was a much more widely publicized dispute in the mainstream media.

As we mentioned in this week's message, the employer reacted swiftly and brutally -- first threatening us with a libel action in the English courts and then sacking a union rep.

And then on Thursday, in an unprecedented move, the employer (Fremantle Trust) contacted our internet service provider and demanded that they shut down the campaign or else face a lawsuit themselves.

We were contacted by the legal department of the internet service provider and told that we had until noon on Friday to close down the campaign or else the entire LabourStart site would be shut down.

We worked very hard over those 24 hours to attempt to get our provider to back down, and had the full support of Unison (Britain's giant public sector union, whose members are at the center of the dispute) but were not successful in doing this before the noon deadline on Friday.

As a result, at 11:59 on Friday we were compelled to shut down the campaigns.

But -- we instantly revived the campaign in nine languages on a different server, in a different country, with a new name that reflects our feeling at this time.

The new site is called "We will not be silenced!" and is located, appropriately enough, at [http://www.wewillnotbesilenced.org] http://www.wewillnotbesilenced.org

If you have not yet sent off your message of protest to Fremantle, please do so from the new page.

Remember that you can use our system to send out your own message to the chief executive of Fremantle Trust -- and you can tell her, if you wish, what you think of this attempt to silence our campaign.

Please also inform all your lists and every trade unionist you know to use the [http://www.wewillnotbesilenced.org] new site to send a loud and clear message to this employer.

If Fremantle Trust were unhappy to receive 8,000 emails, how are they going to feel about getting thousands more in the next few days? Because that is exactly what is going to happen.

We will not be intimidated, we will not be bullied, and we will not be silenced. The campaign continues.

Enjoy your weekend.

Eric Lee

Guest Blog: Climate Change and the Global Class Divide

The 60th UN NGO Conference, this year focusing on Climate Change, has now concluded. The final session heard from the head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) who expressed his appreciation of the conference, its efforts to raise the visibility of the dangers of climate change and to encourage action by individuals, organizations, coalitions, governments at all levels from local to national to international. He explained the current scientific consensus on likely effects from climate change in the future, and gave examples of the increasing effects we are already experiencing. His clear message is that the sooner humanity takes decisive action, the less the costs and the less the suffering.

In an earlier blog (see also here), I overstated the number of participants. There were over 1,700 from 62 countries representing over 500 NGOs.

The effects on the world's climate already show that those who have contributed least to the creation of the problem are most at risk of suffering the greatest impacts, becoming victims twice over. Poor countries, poor people, people already living at the edge, are all at greatest risk to their homes, water supplies, useable land, and livelihoods. The industrialized countries must take the lead, having contibuted more to the creation of the problem, having more resources, and by having larger economies therefore having greater impact on lessening the problem. Some conference participants noted that within so-called "rich" countries, there are still huge disparities of income and power.

There are several ways of looking at the current and potential impact and the ways humanity has of dealing with those impacts, both real and potential. We can engage in mitigation, to keep the problem from getting worse. We can engage in adaptation, to adjust to the impacts. And we (some more than others) will suffer from the impacts--impacts such as more flooding, more drought, more desertification, more extreme weather events, more scarcity of potable water, to mention just some.

It is fascinating how much issues of climate change are linked to virtually all social, economic, and political issues and problems. It is perplexing how people who are ready to confront the most difficult scientific issues are reluctant to confront the most difficult economic issues. A Pollyannish view of the necessary economic changes and production changes is rampant, even among those who are skeptical of market solutions.

Tomorrow, I will summarize the conference, some lessons for radicals, and prospects for this issue to play a greater and greater role in electoral struggles as well as almost all other struggles.

Another Bad Day in the U.S. Economy and U.S. Politics

I checked out the news today and once more, I felt the burdens of history, or at least the burdens of being an historian who thinks that history has some relevance. The stock market is shooting down as reports spread that the loan crisis may lead to a recession, since 4,000 jobs were lost last month when they were expected to be. The economy over the last twenty-five years has hid its stagnation and decline and lack of effective purchasing power by producing more and more largely cheap labor jobs and extending more and more credit to trap people in debt. At the end of the 1920s, before the stock market crash, the economy hid its stagnation and lack of effective purchasing power through massive speculation. When the crash came, the high unemployment began to go, not all at once, but month after month, for three years, escalating from relatively small drops at the end of 1929 to 25% of the work force (by Hoover administration statistics) and 38% of the work force(by labor movement statistics) in early 1933.

Today the economists are talking about a possible "recession." But what is a recession? In 1930, the term depression was a public relations explanation for what had previously been called panics and crises, breakdowns and other bad things. Eventually, depression came to mean the general economic collapse that the early 1930s represented.

When there was a sharp downturn from the gains made in the first New Deal administration in 1937, the term recession was coined and economists later sought to give the term some meaning by contending that the difference between a depression and a recession was the number of months that the economy continued to decline before its business cycle "revival." But that distinction is artificial, in my opinion. The severity and intensity of the decline in jobs and real income and purchasing along with its longevity is the most import index and it is dynamic and open. The regulatory and social welfare wall of protection created initially in the 1930s under the New Deal government and strengthened in an uneven way until the 1970s has been undermined extensively since the 1980s. Can this crisis develop into what was called in the 1930s a depression? Frankly, given the forces in play, in the U.S. and globally, and the lack of understanding about the need to have balance in the economy, effective mass purchasing power connected to real incomes and employment not credit, and compensatory fiscal policies that do much more than just providing corporate/largely military based and related employers with contracts and massive profits out of habit (no one except a few whacked out right-wing Republicans believe today that that will trickle down into higher living standards for the people) there is in my opinion a real chance that we will see such a collapse on a global scale, a collapse connected most directly to the economic policies centered in the United States since the beginning of the Reagan era.

But what are the the politicians doing about it? Today the press is filled with discussions of Republicans. Fred Thompson is running for President and the press tells us that he is trying to portray himself as another Ronald Reagan, a Conservatives Conservative. Reagan and Thompson were/are both actors, although Reagan was a B movie leading man and Thompson, after serving as an aide to the Republican staff on the Watergate Committee and becoming a trial lawyer, became a very minor actor, got himself elected to the Senate, where he served two terms from Tennessee, and then went back to acting, where he currently plays a character named Arthur Branch, a conservative good ole boy who is the District Attorney of Manhattan on the long running Law and Order cops and prosecutors series on America's national past-time, television.

In reality, no one like Arthur Branch could ever get himself elected District Attorney of Manhattan and in fiction no one like Fred Thompson could ever get the Republican presidential nomination so who knows, he might have a chance. Most of the political commentary today about Thompson and everyone else is a combination of horse handicapping and advertising/propaganda analysis. I saw his spot on YouTube (the first thing I ever saw on YouTube).

It was silly more than anything else, something like one of those old commercials where a sleazy guy tried to sell you kitchen implements that would do everything. Thompson muttered something about conservatives winning the 1994 election because they stuck to real conservative values. That the majority of voters never heard of the Contract With America, that Clinton had divided his own party over NAFTA, and that the Republicans had their usual enormous financial advantage didn't register with Thompson. Thompson talked about federalism and opposition to big government this coming from a candidate from a party and an administration which has proclaimed since the September 11 attacks a virtual moratorium on separation of powers and built up the repressive power of the national government in unprecedented ways. Thompson spoke of his commitment to low taxes as the the basis of economic growth which is said over and over again even though it has and has had no relationship to reality (the greatest real growth in developed capitalist countries as against paper growth has come when high levels of progressive taxation and regulation largely funded such growth by providing subsidies to workers and consumers and reducing poverty and income gaps).

But why go on about Thompson. He isn't worse than the other Republican candidates and he could only win the nomination if there was a general crisis and collapse in the GOP like the one their policies may produce in the economy.

Rudolph Giuliani is worse than Thompson. He is running around portraying himself as tough on crime, tough on terrorists, tough, tough, tough, the man who brought law and order and peace and prosperity to New York.

I grew up in New York City, although I lived there off and on after 1966 and not at all after 1980. I live outside the city but I know it well. Giuliani was the worst Mayor that I can remember. As an historian, I consider him in his authoritarianism, harassment of everyone from poor peddlers to political protesters, continuation of policies launched by his predecessor Edward I. Koch of giving all he could to the landlords and the banks, as the worst Mayor the city has had since the infamous Fernando Wood, the pro confederate Civil War Mayor who wanted the city to secede from both the union and the state, become a "free city," and continue the cotton trade based on slave labor with the confederate states!

Many people though believe that Giuliani did make the city safer though and he plays on that, just as he plays on his 9/11 image, where many people think that he acted heroically, but known one can remember anything of consequence that he did.

I lived in New York during the 1ate 1970s when there were great crime scares and I know people who were denouncing crime during that period and were never robbed. When Giuliani was Mayor they told me the city was much safer even though they themselves were robbed! I guess perception is everything. Giuliani, like authoritarian leaders through the world, used force to push social problems under the rug, driving prostitutes and petty criminals out of tourist and big business central Manhattan areas and having a large visible police presence serve as a security blanket for people. That was the real Giuliani as Mayor in my opinion and the Republic cannot stand a Giuliani presidency.

Meanwhile, President Bush is running around Australia talking like Sylvester Stallone rather than John Wayne in his choice of words about the "military victories" being won in Iraq. He also seems to be very upset that North Korea is eliminating its nuclear program (how dare they! Don't they know they are part of the "axis of evil.") South Korea is interested in continuing its improvement of relations with North Korea and the South Korean Prime Minister called upon Bush to formally end the Korean War (which ended with an armed and largely unresolved truce in 1953) and Bush was angry at that. He said that it was the responsibility of the North Koreans to do that. When the South Korean Prime Minister didn't quite get that and asked Bush to be "a little more clear in your message" GW got huffy and said "I couldn't be any more clear" and "thank you" as his propagandists and an Australian professor tried to put the best face that they could on the situation. How dare the South Koreans want to end the Korean war officially and reconcile with the North Koreans? Who do they think they are? Koreans!

There is more bad news economically and politically. In Iraq, even the military industrial complex propagandists are calling the situation in regard to security "uneven." Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister of sorts, is accusing U.S. politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, who have criticized him and in the case of the Democrats called for his removal of aiding the terrorists, which is what those politicians usually say about anti-war activists who criticize their policies. That would be funny if the war wasn't so horrible.

Let me end this blog commentary on a positive note. As a Marxist historian, I know that the old anarchist and ultra-left slogan "the worse the better" in that the worse things are the nearer we are to revolution is never true, but, even though things are getting worse both here and abroad, the political balance of forces here is getting better, and the likelihood of removing through a decisive defeat the right-Republicans who have largely created the worst of what we face today is greater than it has been at any time since Ronald Reagan became president. If we can win such a political victory we can begin to undo the damage to the economy and to politics which we have seen since Ronald Reagan became president, address the larger damage that the labor movement and allied progressive movements faced from the beginnings of the cold war and move the people and the nation forward.

Norman Markowitz

Video: Bush and "Progress" in Iraq

Guest Blog: The Market and Climate Change

By Marc Brodine

The second day (see first post here) of the UN NGO Conference on Climate Change continued the style of good information, good discussion, and avoiding the hardest and most fundamental economic questions. The majority of panel presenters understand, and most even say, that the market is part of the problem, that the best ways to handle basic necessities like soil, food, water, are by some form of cooperative venture combined with social decision-making.

They understand that the market, and capitalist corporations, left to themselves, cannot solve the problems posed for humanity by climate change including global warming. But they don't take the next step of seeing that a fundamental reorganization of the economy through socialism is what is ultimately required.

And there are a minority of presenters who are almost enthusiastic about private enterprise tackling global warming, about how many CEOs now see some kind of action on global warming as part of their leadership and mission. And we have to find ways to work with such people and with corporations, because we can't just wait for socialism to take action--the longer we wait, the costlier and more difficult it will be to solve these serious environmental problems. Scientific reality requires an immediate start before things get any worse.

The presenters do understand that climate change is not a separate subject form other environmental challenges--degraded soil, water scarcity, other forms of pollution besides greenhouse gases, to mention some. These challenges require linked solutions, not oversimplified linear ones focused only on carbon dioxide emissions.

This conference shows the value, necessity of, and also the limitations of the UN and its agencies. The UN set up the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has brought together world scientists and over the last decade has finally convinced all but the most rigid skeptics that global warming is real and that action must be taken. However, such forms will not reach the most fundamental conclusions about the social and economic change required.

As noted in one workshop, water issues are not simple ones, and the ways of solving them cannot be single solutions, and cannot be left to the market. There are the basic water needs of every human, the water which is a human right. There is also water that contributes to improving the quality of human life--used for sanitation, agriculture, cleanliness. And lastly there is water used for industry and business. We can't successfully treat all these kinds of water needs the same, and especially the first two kinds cannot be handled by the market in ways that are best for humanity.

Democratic participation, local control, priorities by human need rather than profit, are all needed for human solutions, and markets only use money and profit as measures, resulting in profoundly anti-human consequences.

More later on the last day.