Empire Notes

February 21, 8:30 am EST. Democracy Now has rebroadcast John Kerry's 1971 speech (streaming video), along with video of operations in Vietnam. They also have short excerpts from the earlier Winter Soldier hearings, where soldiers talked about what they did in Vietnam. Watch the soldier talking about destroying houses as part of a game, to see who could destroy a hut in a "friendly" village with less use of artillery.

Although the occupation of Iraq has a much lower level of violence, atrocities are being committed there as well. There's a great need for returning soldiers to start speaking out about that. It hasn't happened yet to any noticeable degree.

February 21, 7:50 am EST. Check out this article in the Washington Post, Vietnam is a Double-Edged Issue. As expected, the press has finally caught up to Kerry's speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 where, among other things, he talks about testimony of veterans on the atrocities they committed:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

The article's comments on this are rather interesting. First it says,

Although many of the alleged atrocities have never been verified -- and some have been disproved -- Kerry told the Senate that such stories were not isolated occurrences but had happened "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Then it follows up with a historian, a former Marine professor at the Naval War College, and the great scholar Sean Hannity all saying that these claims are nonsense. There's not a single person quoted as saying that, in fact, they were understated. The historian acknowledges My Lai, as everyone has to, but there's no mention that My Lai was just a slightly bigger example of something that was normal operating procedure (for example, the massacre at My Khe in which 100 people were killed), no mention of the Phoenix Program, certainly no mention of Mark Baker's book Nam, in which veterans recount in gruesome detail -- check out the definition of "double veteran."

There are two interesting things about this extremely slanted article in the Post. First, there can't be too many veterans who saw combat in Vietnam who are unaware of the fact that atrocities like those of the infamous Bob Kerrey were all too routine. Second, the article implies that veterans themselves, recounting what they did, have routinely exaggerated the atrocities they were responsible for and painted themselves in the worst possible light. This is not generally consistent with what we know of human behavior.

You can email letters to the editor to letters@washpost.com.

February 20, 2:30 pm EST. Check out this transcript of Bush being interviewed on the new, U.S.-created, Middle East Television Network (I noticed this in an article in the Washington Post). A little excerpt:

Q If, hypothetically, people in the Middle East could vote, would the next four years be -- if you were to be elected -- would be good for them?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, absolutely.

Q Why would they vote for you?

THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely. Well, they'd vote for me because I am strong on the war on terror, for starters. I refuse to relent to terrorist groups. There's no negotiation with these people.

They'd vote for Bush because he knows there's no negotiation with "these people." A little detached from reality, you think?

If you read the whole thing, you'll see it's the kind of fawning, softball interview that Bush gets in the American media or that Saddam might have gotten on Iraqi State TV if he had had a smarter public relations strategy. How exactly this administration can think that broadcasting this kind of thing is going to reach out to the Arab world is beyond me.

February 19, 12:30 pm EST. A group of over 60 eminent scientists just put their name to a statement blasting the Bush administration's misuse and manipulation of science. They accuse the administration of "suppressing, distorting, and manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies." Wolfgang Panofsky, former president of the American Physical Society and a scientific advisor to the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Carter administrations, said "If an administration of whatever political persuasion ignores scientific reality, they do so at great risk to the country."

Among the things cited were censoring of a report on global warming, which I mentioned earlier, ignoring the advice of scientific experts about Iraq's aluminum tubes, establishing political litmus tests for scientific advisor boards (including one assessing the dangers of lead paint), and suppressing a microbiologist's findings about the dangers of factory farming of hogs.

The statement was assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and was issued along with a 46-page report on "Bush administration's misuse of science."

It's important to understand in this that the kind of people who signed this statement (12 of whom were Nobel laureates and 11 winners of the National Medal of Science) are, whether politically liberal or conservative, deeply conservative in a personal way. Steven Weinberg (who was the head of my group back when I was doing physics), Val Fitch, Leon Lederman, and the others are not the type to go out on a limb, they won't make public statements about science unless they are very sure of themselves, and they have all spent much of their lives in federally funded scientific endeavors where they were heavily dependent on the decisions of whatever administration was in power. Given all of that, this is a stunning indictment.

February 18, 10:30 pm EST. I'm about to hit the road, leaving Alpine, Texas (not far from the set of Giant, for film buffs), so just a quick post. Apparently, some Shi'a leaders are proposing a new plan whereby voting occurs in Shi'a and Kurdish areas, which are relatively more peaceful, and the Sunni Triangle gets some kind of tightly controlled caucus system. This is obviously a disastrous plan and American officials quoted in the New York Times article mention this (suddenly they've learned that appointed caucuses making decisions are not democracy?). At the same time, some signs of a rapprochement between Shi'a and Kurds.

A related idea: make the puppet Governing Council more "representative" (although still absolutely meaningless) by enlarging from 25 to 50 members. Of course, this doesn't even address the issues and can only be seen as a fairly pitiful attempt to buy off Sistani and possibly other emerging leaders who challenge the occupiers.

I'm very skeptical. I would not be surprised if both of these plans originated from Americans. Shi'a and Kurds have to know that a plan that singles out the Sunni Triangle in this manner exacerbates what is already one of the most common complaints in the area -- the deliberate ethnic/sectarian balkanization of politics and creation of a Lebanese-style confessional system.

Again, perhaps the answer is that the Americans feel that, in alliance with key political forces, the results of elections in the Shi'a south and the Kurdish north can be more easily controlled than in the Sunni Triangle.

February 17, 12:00 pm EST. On Saturday, the New York Times published an extremely important article, Chaos and War Leave Iraq's Hospitals in Ruins. The situation in Iraq's hospitals is catastrophic: 80% of patients at the Baghdad Central Teaching Hospital leave with iatrogenic infections, infant mortality is up since before the war, raw sewage covers the floors of operating theaters. Overall, unbelievable as it may seem, Iraq's hospitals are worse off than they were under the sanctions:

"It's definitely worse now than before the war," said Eman Asim, the Ministry of Health official who oversees the country's 185 public hospitals. "Even at the height of sanctions, when things were miserable, it wasn't as bad as this. At least then someone was in control."

This is the first article I've sen that documents this. All of what the article says is consistent with what I saw when I was there in January.

In Nomaan Hospital in Aadhamiya, we were told that the day we came they had run out of ampicillin and didn't expect any more any time soon. They said they were still running the hospital off of the pitiful stocks of medicine they had from the Saddam era. The hospital got power from the electric grid only six hours a day. In Kadhimiyya Teaching Hospital, we were told about sewage backing up on the floors. There was no heat; children with respiratory cases were forced to sleep in near-freezing rooms. Doctors estimated that they got far less than half (some said one-fifth) the level of supplies that they got under Saddam and the sanctions.

The problem is this: the sanctions didn't end, they were worsened. Before the war, Iraq's oil revenues went into a bank account in New York, to be overseen by the Sanctions Committee, a subcommittee of the Security Council. Any disbursements were dependent on concluding a contract with a foreign company (except in the three northern governorates, money could not be used for internal operations like paying government salaries or buying from local businesses) and then submitting an application to the Sanctions Committee, specifying not just what was to be bought but the exact path from import to end use of the commodities. In the Sanctions Committee, the United States could and did block well over 1000 contracts. The U.N. Office of the Iraq Program oversaw the process and issued reports.

Now, the money goes into the Iraq Development Fund, a bank account controlled entirely by the United States (and the "c oalition"). Disbursements go to Halliburton, which has no incentive to solve the problems but is happy to "study" them -- and, in fact, with cost-plus contracts where the "plus" is a percentage of the cost, has an incentive to drive up costs.

The real problem, however, is that before there was an Iraqi government that made plans to use the money to keep the country running -- not just for food and immediate needs, but for medicine for the hospitals, repair for the electrical and water power systems, industrial reconstruction, etc. (and also used money obtained by smuggling to build palaces and mosques, annoying almost everyone in Iraq). Now, the palaces and mosques are replaced by the bank accounts of Halliburton stockholders, but there's no government with authority and funds to keep the country running. I'll be writing a longer article on this shortly.

February 16, 9:36 am EST. From today's New York Times: U.S. Aides Hint Afghan Voting May Be Put Off. Lakhdar Brahimi, former U.N. coordinator in Afghanistan and current U.N. envoy to Iraq, says neither country is suitable for immediate elections. As Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin points out, "If you read all the statements the administration is applying to Iraq - that security and logistics do not allow for quick elections - you'll see that they apply also to Afghanistan."

And yet the administration is pushing for quick elections in Afghanistan and resisting them in Iraq. What's going on?

Ahmed Rashid's recent article in the New York Review of Books suggests that the push for elections in Afghanistan is all about the Bush administration's image:

Late in the summer of 2003, with American forces bogged down in Iraq and Saddam Hussein still at large, the Bush administration appeared to have what one senior US official in Kabul described to me as an epiphany . With no turning point in Iraq in sight, he said, no accomplishment that might help the President's approval rating as the country entered an election year, Bush's advisers decided that Afghanistan needed to be turned into a success story. ... For that to happen, more money was needed, reconstruction had to be accelerated, and the creation of new Afghan security forces speeded up. And, for the first time, the official said, the US began to recognize that to carry out these plans, the warlords had to be neutralized.

Could the explanation for this distinction perhaps be that the administration is confident it can control the results of elections in Afghanistan (where no one is likely to be able to challenge Karzai as president) but not in Iraq?

February 16, 5:00 am EST. Check out Amy Wilentz's new column, Haiti's Collapse, in The Nation. Purporting to be an overview of developments since 1990, it harshly criticizes Aristide, saying, for example, that he is "no Mandela." It leaves out a few things, however. Here's a quote:

No one can argue that Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidency has been in any way successful other than this: It exists. He was elected in 1990 with enormous hope by an overwhelming majority in a legitimate election--and quickly overthrown by the Haitian Army and its friends. In 1994 he was returned to power through the good will of the Clinton Administration, in the optimistic expectation that he would be able to turn Haiti around.

In that short space, she manages not to mention the fact that FRAPH, the paramilitary death squad that instituted a reign of terror under the military regime, had ties with the CIA, a fact first reported by Allan Nairn in The Nation; that the United States for many years harbored FRAPH's former leader, Emmanuel Constant, in defiance of Haitian extradition requests (he recently returned to Haiti with a Dominican death squad); or that Aristide's restoration to power had nothing to do with Clinton Administration "good will" but rather with his agreement to institute a raft of brutal neoliberal structural adjustment "reforms."

Worst of all, however, it says nothing about the fact that the United States has largely created the "Democratic Convergence" and the "Group of 184," the umbrella for the opposition, through the good offices of the International Republican Institute. The Democratic Convergence has never polled over 12%.

The activist group Haiti Action has put together a well-researched 16-page pamphlet called Hidden from the Headlines: The U.S. War Against Haiti. I wish it had footnotes, but double-checking most of the information is not difficult.

To write letters to The Nation, click here.

February 15, 1:20 pm EST. More in the Bush administration's continuing assault on truth. According to an op-ed in the LA Times, the National Academy of Sciences concluded a study two years ago that documented "widespread racial disparity in dispensing medical care." This is not a surprising result -- it was on the basis of strong evidence that Congress initially called for the study.

That report's findings were never published. Instead, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a rewrite that said claims of racial disparity were unproved. Tommy Thompson twice refused to approve versions of the report which mentioned the racial disparities.

Remember when they censored the EPA's environmental report, removing a long section on the perils of global warming?

This is the first truly postmodern administration in U.S. history. In one of his finest essays, Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell writes:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
…

The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.