Asia and US Global Strategy

Sumanta Banerjee
EPW,October 12, 2002

To resist Washington's military and economic globalisation, it is essential to build up an equally globalised offensive. Terrorism that masquerades as anti-US war has to be ousted from the site of the contest and replaced with ideals of equality, democracy and social justice. For peace activists in Asia today it will obviously be a long haul.

Inaugurating the cold war era, the then US president Harry Truman in 1947 had declared: “The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system.” This was no idle rhetoric. It initiated a three-pronged strategy in the changed post-world war political arena. First, not only to ensure the survival, but to satisfy the growing appetite of US capitalism which had to depend on resources from outside, Washington sought to bring these resources under its economic control (as was evident in its interventionist policies in Iran from 1951 to 1953). Second, the fear that countries either producing these resources or occupying a crucial position in the US’s geopolitical strategy might fall under Soviet control or influence led Washington to pre-empt such a possibility through political and military interventions (as in the setting up of dictatorial banana republics in South America and satellite governments in south-east Asia). Third, to suppress the growth of public opinion in favour of socialism within the US (particularly in the wake of widespread sympathy and support for Soviet heroism during the world war), the administration inaugurated the notorious witch-hunt led by Joseph McCarthy, which whipped up a spy-mania against communists as well as liberal-minded intellectuals. The roles played by the CIA in thrusting the first two prongs and by the FBI in the last are by now well-documented by US historians themselves, whose works are easily available.

All these revelations should have disabused the liberal mindset, both in the West and India, of the illusion that past allegations of covert and overt interventions against the US were mere ‘Soviet propaganda’. They should have also helped this mindset to change itself and question the present US motives – given the disreputable role of the US in the past.

But illusions die hard – particularly among the political elite in Asia. This dawned upon me as I sat listening to the warnings delivered by peace activists from all over Asia who had gathered at a conference in the University of Philippines in Quezon City in August-September this year. They came from countries who are economically as far apart as an affluent Japan and an impoverished Kampuchea, neighbours who are militarily fighting each other like India and Pakistan, states who are territorially distant as Nepal in the north and Malaysia in the south. But they voiced a common concern – how the US is now requiring all states to restructure their coercive apparatus to fit America’s strategic concerns, to reinforce its earlier requirement that they restructure their economic apparatus to fit with Washington’s plans of neo liberal globalisation. As I listened to their narratives, I realised all of a sudden that the Truman Doctrine had come alive – and this time with a vengeance!

During Truman’s time, his doctrine failed to bring the entire world under the US system – primarily because of the countervailing impact of the alternative system represented by the Soviet-led socialist block, and the nationalist aspirations of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa which formed the non-aligned block. But with the collapse of the socialist block, and the popular frustrations with the economic policies of the corrupt regimes in the non-aligned block, the ideological and political vacuum created in the present global scenario has provided Washington with a sort of tabula rasa on which it can at its will imprint Truman’s unfinished strategy. The long-term US objective is to use the ‘war on terrorism’ as a stepping stone to encircle China – which according to Pentagon is expected to emerge as a regional economic and military power in the next 10 years.

Crucial to the success of this strategy is the integration of the entire Asian region – from Central Asia to South Asia, from Asia Pacific to South-east Asia – into the Washington-led global order and military operations. Afghanistan has already become a cog in the wheels of the American juggernaut that plans to march into the oilfields of central Asia. As for the other parts of Asia, the extent of US military presence can be gauged from the following facts: there are some 1,00,000 US troops based in the Asia Pacific region, with 60,000 in Japan, 37,000 in South Korea and the rest in Guam, afloat or on various attachments; the US air force and navy enjoy transit, docking and logistics facilities in Australia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The rest of Asia lies supine, ready to welcome the conqueror.

This was the pathetic picture that emerged, as one after another delegate from the Asian countries presented their country reports at the inaugural assembly of the Asian Peace Alliance in Quezon City from August 29 to September 1. It was obvious from the reports that the linchpin of the present US strategy in Asia is its military alliance with Japan. The 1997 Guidelines for US-Japan Cooperation allows Japan to play a more aggressive role in the guise of ‘peacekeeping missions’ and supporting role as the US’s junior military partner in areas outside Asia (such as in the Persian Gulf, Golan Heights, Central Europe, East Timor and of late in Afghanistan). These operations give Japan a military role that far exceeds the constitutional limitations that provide only for a self-defence force. In fact, the US government’s Armitage Report recommends the amendment of Japan’s Peace Constitution to allow the Japanese government to exert the right of collective defence (which is prohibited under the 9th clause of the Constitution that disallows any form of engagement in war by the Japanese army). Quite predictably, the Armitage report has encouraged the extreme nationalists of Japan to demand the independence of the army from the constraints of the Peace Constitution. As the Japanese delegates warned at the conference, the real threat to the Asian people is not North Korea, as made out to be by the US which demonises it, but the revival of Japanese military-nationalism under US aegis.

South-east Asia is the next region where Washington wants to restore the US military hegemony which it lost after its defeat in Vietnam. Soon after the September 11 events, the Bush administration sought to make this region the second front of its global war on terrorism. The excuse trotted out by it was that the region has the largest concentration of Muslims in the world with the majority (about 60 per cent) concentrated in Malaysia, over 200 million in Indonesia and significant numbers in Thailand and the Philippines, and therefore it was a potential host to Islamic terrorists. In the Philippines, for instance, the US military has found a convenient excuse for restoring its presence (after its troops were forced to vacate the Subic bay and Clark airfield bases there following an anti-US upsurge in 1991) by linking the Abu Sayyaf bandit group operating in the Mindanao region of southern Philippines with Al Quaida. Incidentally, the Abu Sayyaf group was spawned in the 1980s with covert CIA support for recruiting young Filipino Muslims to fight the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. With that military mission lost, the group has now turned to banditry in Mindanao. Here is yet another CIA-created Frankenstein, boomeranging like Osama bin Laden. But it has provided the US with the opportunity to induct some 4,000 troops, including Special Operations Forces to southern Philippines, purportedly to flush out the Al Quaida-cum-Abu Sayyaf bandits. On this plea, they are training Filipino soldiers in counter-guerrilla operations. Their targets are not a handful of bandits, but those who pose a real political threat to US hegemony in the Philippines – the Communist-led National People’s Army (NPA) which still wields power over large parts of the Philippines, and holds out the promise of a better future for the poor – however faded the dream of socialism might have become for the once-radical middle class groups in Asia. It is no wonder therefore that the Communist Party of the Philippines features high in the US list of terrorist groups.

In the Indian subcontinent, at the moment several continuing joint military exercises and deals are under way in Pakistan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, ostensibly to fight terrorism, but with the real objective of providing a permanent stay of US ground forces to complement US air and naval access privileges. In Sri Lanka, for instance, behind the euphoria generated by the peace talks with the LTTE, what has attracted little public and media attention is a new Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) between Washington and Colombo which offers the US access to military facilities in Sri Lanka. Its strategic location in a huge area of the Indian Ocean from the west Asia to south-east Asia, needless to say, is of vital importance to the US.

The increasing US military presence on the plea of fighting terrorism of course suits the leaders of these governments in Asia. They are all too willing to barter off independence in exchange of billions of dollars of US economic aid which will be siphoned off into the coffers of the elite, their touts and hangers-on, who will eventually develop stakes in the continuation of US domination over their country.

Moreover, the US-led global war on terrorism has provided them with a pretext to extend and intensify the use of national security laws to suppress movements for democracy and human rights. Almost all these laws and their operation – whether in South Korea or Pakistan, Nepal or Sri Lanka, Indonesia or the Philippines – bear uncanny similarity with our POTA and the manner of its implementation. The common features are: arbitrary detention without charge or trial; criminalisation of communities and organisations by labelling them terrorist; undermining of the due process of law; repressive practices by state authorities like torture; restriction on freedom of movement; intensification of all forms of racism and discrimination, including those based on caste, religion, and gender, and against refugees and minorities.

But it is no use blaming the US only for the present sorry state of affairs. The debauchery of the ideal of socialism by the Soviet leadership has offered the US on a platter the unique opportunity to establish capitalist hegemony on a global scale. It is not only the amoral cynicism among the general public typified by a high degree of depoliticisation, but also the well-oiled media propaganda that privileges consumerism, crass materialism and individual pursuit of money and trivialises political activity and civic values, which paralyse any attempt to resist this US hegemony. Let me quote as an example the observations made by a taxi-driver who drove me recently from Quezon to metro Manila. When I asked him how he felt about the return of the US troops to his country, he was all gaga over the prospects of the reopening of massage-parlours and brothels to which he could carry his American customers, whose tips would amount to more than his daily earnings. This attitude shared in common by the elite and the urban populace is not peculiar to the Philippines, or other parts of south-east Asia. The desire to accept the ‘American way of life’ – the term used by the US during Truman’s time – is prevalent among various sections of the people of the Indian subcontinent also, which provides a fertile soil for US hegemonistic designs.

It is obvious that it will be a long haul for peace activists in Asia today. To resist Washington’s military and economic globalisation, it is essential to build up an equally globalised offensive. But that requires the stiffening of the moral fibre of the resistance, and restoration of human values like self-respect and dignity among the people. Terrorism that masquerades as anti-US war has to be ousted from the site of the contest and replaced with ideals of equality, democracy and social justice. The setting up of the Asian Peace Alliance could be a major step in that direction.

A willing suspension of disbelief

Siddharth Varadarajan
The Hindu, 24 April

Forget about Iran, North Korea, and terrorism, the principal security challenge of our time is how to restrain the U.S. from pursuing policies that promote conflict and undermine international stability. Europe and India know this, yet do nothing about it.


WITH THE shadow of conflict in Iran looming large, Indian and Italian editors and commentators held a seminar last week in Venice to ask whether the "inverted priorities" the United States, Europe, and India seem to have on many international issues could be resolved in a positive way. To cut a long story short, both sides were pessimistic about Washington. The prevailing mood of gloom was best summed up by Giuliano Amato, Interior Minister and former Prime Minister of Italy. "If the U.S. is for disorder, then there will be no order in the world," he told the closing session. He added that there was little India or Europe could do to convince America not to take recourse to military means. "The Americans have to convince themselves. It has to be self-restraint."

The problem, of course, is that restraint is the last thing on anyone's mind in Washington. The good folks in Peoria may be sick of Iraq but that's not stopping Beltway zealots from planning their next military adventure. When Congress voted supplementary funds for the Iraq war in March, it agreed at the last minute to delete a key clause directing the President to seek prior Congressional approval for any attack on Iran. There could not be a more clear-cut sign that another disastrous war might soon be upon us. And yet the willing suspension of disbelief continues the world over.

New threats, old threats

As the bitter debate over the invasion of Iraq recedes into distant memory, American foreign policy ideologues have once again succeeded in constructing a picture of world order in which "new threats" like terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and pandemics are more dangerous than the doctrines of pre-emptive war and regime change.

In a major speech to the United Nations General Assembly on the occasion of the U.N.'s 60th anniversary in 2005, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claimed that the emergence of new threats had shifted "the very terrain of international politics ... beneath our feet." In the old world, which began in 1945 and presumably ended with the demise of the Soviet Union, "the most serious threats to peace and security emerged between states and were largely defined by their borders." Today, however, "the greatest threats we face emerge within states and melt through their borders — transnational threats like terrorism and weapons proliferation, pandemic disease and trafficking in human beings."

Depending on their own individual concerns, American scholars tend to add on to the list of new threats problems such as climate change, genocide, and human rights violations. For the American establishment, however, these are not core threats. As the world's biggest polluter, Washington tends to take a highly instrumental view of global warming. Rather than setting its own house in order, it prefers to turn domestic and international concerns about climate change into new business opportunities for American companies. As for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and human rights violations, the Bush administration's view on whether these constitute "threats" depends essentially on what is politically expedient at any moment in time.

Leaving aside the problem of what to include in the list, the discourse about "new threats" is problematic because it assumes the "old threats" to world order have either vanished or become less critical. In reality, the old threats have become more virulent and pose an even more fundamental challenge to the international system than their newer strains. Consider this list: The tendency for powerful countries to use force against smaller countries under one pretext or another; the nuclear arms race, which is now leading to the weaponisation of outer space as well as the search for smaller, "usable" nukes; the refusal to solve outstanding conflicts, especially in the Middle East, which is a major contributing factor to terrorism; the persistence of exclusion and poverty, which give rise to derivative "threats" like human trafficking and global pandemics.

Despite the ugly reality of Iraq, Dr. Rice declared in the same speech that the old threat of aggression was not the main cause of instability in the world. "In 1945, the fear was that strong, aggressive states — eager and able to expand their frontiers with force — would be the primary cause of international problems," she said. "Today, however, it is clear that weak and poorly governed states — unwilling or incapable of ruling their countries with justice — are the principal source of global crises — from civil war and genocide, to extreme poverty and humanitarian disaster."

This emphasis on "new threats," "weak states," and "rogue states" is an integral part of Washington's attempts to fashion new institutional arrangements at the global level that can more effectively deal with any present or future challenges to its hegemonic power. By selling its response to the 9/11 tragedy as part of a "Global War on Terrorism," the United States managed to receive unprecedented international backing for its projection of military power in the heartland of Asia. Of course, the U.S. suffered a setback when it invaded Iraq in open defiance of the international community and failed to find any weapons of mass destruction as a post facto fig leaf. The U.S. invasion was widely and rightly criticised at the time, but not always for the right reasons. In Europe, especially, critics decried the "unilateralism" of the Bush administration, as if Nato's "multilateral" aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 during the Clinton administration was somehow a qualitatively better thing. The significance of the distinction was not lost on Washington.

New `multilateralism'

That is why, since 2003, the U.S. has sought to recover some diplomatic ground by using the "new threats" discourse as the springboard for a new hegemonic multilateralism. From climate change to the promotion of "democracy," to curbing proliferation and terrorism, the emphasis is on remoulding the United Nations and also creating ad-hoc institutional arrangements that the U.S. leads but which have enough of a multilateralist facade to flatter the egos of Europe and even Russia, India, and China.

To be sure, the U.S. has not always been successful in this endeavour. It managed to push through the creation of the new Human Rights Council at the U.N. but has not been able to dictate its agenda as it had hoped. In the case of North Korea, Chinese stewardship of the Six-Party process has not allowed Washington a free hand. But where it has succeeded to a considerable extent is in Iran as well as on the question of Palestine.

Despite the Palestinian people exercising their democratic right to elect Hamas, the U.S. used the Quartet's demand that Israel's "right to exist" be recognised as a pretext to subvert the election verdict and starve the people of Palestine into submission. At no point have the Palestinians been shown the external frontiers of the Israel whose right to exist they are supposed to "recognise." And yet the Europeans allowed themselves to be press-ganged into the blockade that Washington and Tel Aviv mounted against the Palestinian Authority.

On Iran, the U.S. has been successful in first subverting the European mediation effort and then using Europe's failure as a stepping stone to take Tehran's Iran dossier to the U.N. Security Council. Against their better judgment, the Europeans today find themselves caught in an escalatory sanctions process that can only end in Washington's dreaded "military option."

In the Indo-Italian seminar, Mr. Amato cited the decline of the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain — whose pro-Iraq war stance has run foul of the prevailing national mood in the U.S. — as proof that the American electorate would help the world avert another conflict. "We have to rely more on democracy than on external constraints," he said.

Mr. Amato is right in hoping the American electorate disciplines its leaders but he is wrong to underestimate what Italy, Europe, India, and others can do towards the same end.

European opposition to the illegal "renditions" the CIA ran throughout Europe forced the U.S. to reroute its torture flights. If Italy were to insist that the U.S. extradite the CIA operatives who kidnapped Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr from a Milan street in 2003, it would certainly push the policy debate in the U.S. in the right direction. On Palestine, if Europe and India were to take a more forthright stand against Israel's illegal settlements and Apartheid Wall, that would surely make it more difficult for Tel Aviv to avoid reaching a just and honourable agreement with the Palestinians. On the proliferation front, India and Europe need to take the lead in opposing missile defence and space weaponisation, and pushing for a negotiated solution to the Iran crisis without preconditions. If only Europe and India would stop appeasing the Bush administration at every step, they would find there is plenty that they can do to push the U.S. towards more responsible international behaviour.

Blacksburg is not the sign of a sick society

Simon Jenkins

Such evil is incurable and we owe it to the victims not to inflate the problem by ascribing it to some greater malaise.

THE GLOBAL image of the American school was once of wholesome youths laden with books and cheerleader pompoms. More recently it has become one of over-armed and overweight policemen racing to take up firing positions while students run screaming with terror.

My first response to Monday's horror at Blacksburg, Virginia, was: please, let it not be an Arab. The particular would instantly have become general and a madman a terrorist. Such is the degradation of public response to violence these days that nothing is allowed to be what it probably is, the random act of a mind deranged. It must be a sign of war and subject to the language of war.

Even so, the response of many who wish America ill will have been gratuitous schadenfreude. They see a people who live by the gun also dying by it, be they marines in Anbar province or students in Virginia.

The rifle lobbyist who said on Monday that the college massacre would not have happened if all the students had been armed embodied the macho ethos George W. Bush is seen as willing on the world. How can U.S. soldiers disarm Iraqi families of their weapons in Baghdad yet claim the right to arm themselves to the teeth back home?

Britons whose links with America are long and close (and in my case familial) always find themselves pleading the same cause. First, we scrupulously proclaim the standing of America as a world exemplar of political freedom, though this has become a sort of Hail Mary, recited before yet another pro/anti-American argument. Then we beg Americans to step outside their continent and see themselves as others do.

At the moment of the Blacksburg massacre, a broadcast interview with the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, asked by what right America imposed its "values" by force on foreign states. Mr. Bolton did not even try to answer. He jeered, "Try and stop us." I am sure, like his neo-conservative confreres, he thought the reply smart and macho. Such people seem blind to the damage their arrogance does to America's image, interest, and, ultimately, security abroad. It feeds those who react to Blacksburg, as to 9/11, with "America had it coming."

Unpredictable

Whenever I see incidents such as Blacksburg I try to apply the doctrine of proportional response. They are exceptionally rare and unpredictable.

Britain's tough gun control did not prevent the massacres in the small towns of Hungerford or Dunblane, where a gunman killed a class of primary schoolchildren. More American children (some 3,000) may die by gunfire each year than the death toll on 9/11, far more than in any other developed country. This may be a function of a migratory society or an unstable community, though it is hard to dissociate it from lax gun laws. But it remains America's choice and America's business.

Meanwhile, Britain would do well to contemplate the soaring use of guns and knives on its streets. If the image of the American school is of armed policemen, that of Britain's inner cities is of grieving mothers and weeping girls laying wreaths on pavements. British policy on alcohol and drug abuse is more catastrophic in its consequences than in any other country, and is more lethal than America's gun laws. Barely a week passes without a report condemning the government's refusal to repeal the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, largely because of Tony Blair's fear of the press. His failure lies at the root of urban crime, social dislocation, and prison overcrowding. The unregulated drugs market is ruled by violence as ruthlessly on the streets of London as in the fields of Helmand. Yet all Mr. Blair can do is tell the British black community to "own up" to it.

The truth is, we are better at lecturing others than reforming ourselves.

The spectacle of both military occupiers of Iraq making such a hash of law and order in their own backyards plays into the hands of anti-western propaganda. Those seeking to radicalise Islam watch television. Their communities may have their problems, but they can fall back on a degree of piety and social cohesion that puts most westerners to shame. Most Islamic states may not have signed Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence, but that is their choice. Very few either seek or are remotely able to impose their values on the west. The west, in the shape of Britain and America, not only desires to impose its values on them but is doing so by force. It is no surprise they cheer when we get a bloody nose.

The result has created a dire moral equivalence. Mr. Blair's "values crusade" is depicted as paralleling Al-Qaeda's jihad. The suicide car bomb is "the poor man's F-16." A kidnapped journalist answers Guantanamo Bay. Britain's Trident nuclear missiles legitimises Iran's nuclear enrichment. It is no good analysts protesting that such parallels are trite. The one choice the strong cannot deny the weak is that of facile comparison. International relations since 9/11 have suffered a debased rhetoric drained of sensible meaning.

This week, U.K. Development Secretary Hilary Benn pleaded for linguistic arms reduction. In particular, he wants to ban the "war on terror" as elevating disparate gangs and giving them political credibility as part of some notional global movement. Mr. Benn, who comes late to this insight, might have turned his attention to home. Treating criminals as terrorists and mobsters as warriors flatters not just their egos but also those of Ministers. Modern government has been polluted by the language of war. In the U.K., Mr. Blair's Ministers have declared as many wars as his generals, against terrorism, drugs, truancy, knives, poverty, and homelessness. For the hard grind of social policy, Ministers can waffle about tsars, campaigns, trumpets and drums. Inflating the problem excuses the failure to solve it.
The tragedy at Blacksburg, like those in London and other cities assaulted by bomb, bullet, and knife, was apparently the manifestation of a distorted soul unable to live at peace with the world. Such evil is incurable, which is why such tragedies will continue to happen. The least we owe them and their victims is not to exaggerate their significance by implying that they are signs of a sick society or, worse, that they are wars against which armies can be mobilised.

The most present threat to the "homeland security" of urban Britons is specific. It is the collapse of discipline in their immediate neighbourhoods and the growth of gangs and drug-related violence worse than anywhere else in Europe. That does not mean war. As at Blacksburg, it means that when politicians lack courage, policy goes wrong and someone dies. It is as simple as that.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

IMF's plutocracy

George Monbiot
18 April

Loan conditions continue to condemn developing countries to a vicious cycle of misery.

THE DISEASE that afflicts all British Governments is an inability to let go. Unable to accept the end of empire, they cling to past glories.

However much they speak of modernity and democracy, they cannot help managing other people's lives, preserving foreigners — often at gunpoint — from the mistakes they would make if they were allowed to govern themselves.

I was going to call this an imperial delusion, but Britain has been remarkably successful at defending its powers. The United Kingdom Government has retained a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Its membership of the G8 is unchallenged. Most important, it has preserved its unwarranted share of the vote on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And it has no intention of giving this up.

In advance of the IMF's spring meeting (just concluded in Washington), France and Britain rejected any political reform to the organisation, which is charged with maintaining global financial stability. It is true that the Fund's proposals are feeble. It is true that even after far more ambitious reforms the IMF would remain the wrong body, constitutionally destined to fail. But this is not why the U.K. Government is holding out. It is resisting change because it wants to preserve its imperial rank.

Britain, with one per cent of the world's population, has five per cent of the IMF's votes. Sub-Saharan Africa, with 12 per cent of the population, has 4.6 per cent. Britain's share equals that of China and India put together. It is five times as big as that of Argentina, 19 times Bangladesh's, 35 times Kenya's, 124 times bigger than Malawi's. The G7 nations — Britain, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, and Italy — together possess 45 per cent of the vote. The other 177 members are left to squabble over the remainder.

Even these numbers tell only half the story. The five countries with the biggest quotas — the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany, and France — are each allowed to appoint their own executive director to the IMF's board.

The rest must submit their candidates for election. Because poor nations do not know what is good for them, they are assigned to the tutelage of richer ones. The votes of the English-speaking Caribbean countries are given to Canada. Mongolia is represented by Australia, Kazakhstan by Belgium. The reason that Britain and France are resisting even the most timid reforms is that these would tip them below the threshold for automatic election: like the other countries, they would be represented on the board as part of a bloc.

Unfair distribution

Power is distributed like this because the IMF is a plutocracy. A country's vote represents its "quota," which is allocated according to its gross domestic product. In theory, the quota reflects countries' financial contributions to the Fund. But this is no longer the case, as the IMF receives much of its income from loan repayments from poorer nations.

But the old formula has resisted 60 years of complaints. The result is that governments that are never made subject to the IMF's strictures control it, while those whose countries have been reduced to an IMF franchise have no say in the way it is run. The allocation of votes is a perfect inversion of democracy.

A new report by ActionAid gives us a glimpse of how this unfair distribution of power affects the poor. After years of protest by poor countries and their supporters in the rich world, the IMF and the World Bank at last permitted the provision of healthcare and education without charge. The rich nations also promised, in 2000, to ensure that by 2015 every child in the world would have primary education. It looked like a great victory for the global justice movement. But the IMF is ensuring that the promise won't be met. It has, in effect, forbidden the poorest nations to hire sufficient teachers.

No one disputes that public sector wage rises can contribute to inflation. No one denies that governments have to exercise some degree of restraint. But the paternalists who run the IMF — who are fixated on creating safe havens for foreign capital — cannot help micro-managing the economies of the poor nations, without reference to the needs of the people who live there. The limits they have imposed on the bill for public-sector pay ensure that schooling cannot be improved.

ActionAid studied three very poor countries with major education problems: Malawi, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone. After fees were abolished (and when the civil war ended in Sierra Leone), vast numbers of pupils enrolled. But a combination of the rich nations' failure to provide the foreign aid they had promised and the restrictions imposed by the IMF has prevented these countries meeting the new demand. As a result, the pupil to teacher ratio in Sierra Leone is 57:1; in Malawi 72:1, and in Mozambique 74:1. That is the average; in rural areas it can be much higher. Many of the teachers are untrained, and many give up because they cannot survive on their wages. In Malawi, the goods required for the most basic level of subsistence cost $107 a month. A trained teacher receives $55.

So crowds of pupils strain to hear a scarcely literate teacher somewhere in the middle distance seeking to instruct them without books, chalk, paper or pens. We should not be surprised to discover that 40 per cent of children fail to complete primary school in Sierra Leone and Mozambique, and 70 per cent in Malawi. Most of the dropouts are girls.
As a result, these countries are stuck in a vicious circle of misery. Until education improves, GDP remains low. Until GDP rises, there is little money for education. As one of the agencies charged with rescuing countries from poverty, the IMF should be seeking to break this circle.

But the conditions it attaches to its loans keep these countries in their place. In Malawi, the IMF sets the ceiling for public sector wages directly; in Sierra Leone and Mozambique the broader macro-economic rules it imposes have the same effect.

Unnecessary targets

ActionAid argues that these fiscal targets are outdated and unnecessary: all these countries have now achieved sufficient stability to start raising teachers' pay. But in no case did the IMF consult either the public or the state's own Ministry of Education before laying down the law. The amount of money a teacher in rural Malawi is paid is decided by the men in London and Washington. Except for the district commissioners in pith helmets, little has changed since the country was called Nyasaland.

Last year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged that the IMF "must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries." But he just cannot let go. The proposed reforms do nothing to democratise the IMF: by linking the quota to purchasing power parity rather than raw GDP, they simply turn it into a more sophisticated plutocracy.

But they could have the effect of very slightly empowering some middle-income countries while taking a few votes away from some of the rich ones. And even that is too much for the Emperor of Africa.

If the British Government wants to help the poor, it must first give up its power to tell them how to live. Until that happens, everything the Prime Minister says about "partnership" and "solidarity" with the world's oppressed is humbug.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

A bizarre turn in the war on terror

Praveen Swami
The Hindu, 17 April

Reports emerge that the United States is funding an Al-Qaeda linked terror group to attack Iran.

"OUR WAR on terror," American President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress in September, 2001, "begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."

Six years on, evidence has begun to emerge that President Bush's administration may be funding one of the terrorist groups it promised to defeat — a group, moreover, reported to have been once commanded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the architect of the September 11, 2001, bombings that sparked off the global war on terror.

Early this month, ABC News journalists Brian Ross and Christopher Isham broke the news that the U.S. was funding Islamist terror group Jundullah — or Allah's Brigade — to carry out strikes against Iran.

According to ABC News, U.S. support to Jundullah was being routed to its leader, Abdul Malik Regi, a shadowy former Taliban member also alleged to be involved in large-scale narcotics trafficking through Iranian exiles with connections in West Asia and Europe.

Both Pakistan and the U.S. have responded to the ABC News report with irate denials, but the Ross-Isham account corroborates what Iran has long been claiming. In February, Jundullah set off a bomb in the Iranian city of Zahedan, killing at least 11 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Soon afterwards, Iranian authorities secured a confession from an alleged perpetrator, Nasrollah Shamsi Zehi, who said he had trained at a secret camp in Pakistan. Iranian state television broadcast the confessions against a backdrop of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency logo, making clear just where it believed responsibility for the terror enterprise in fact lay.

Jundullah's beginnings

Relatively little is known about Jundullah's birth. According to Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, top Taliban leader Nek Mohammad set up the organisation in 2003 to target U.S. and United Kingdom assets in Pakistan, as well as that country's pro-western military leadership.

Mohammad's new group soon showed its teeth. In 2004, a Jundullah cell made a near-successful attempt on the life of Karachi corps commander, Lieutenant-General Aslam Saleem Hayat. Eleven persons died in the bombing, which is thought to have been organised by two of Mohammad's first recruits — Mohammad Attaur Rahman and Musaad Aruchi. Interestingly — and perhaps significantly for the Jundullah-Iran story — Aruchi was handed over by Pakistan to the U.S. soon after his 2004 arrest, and now figures in the Human Rights Watch list of "ghost-detainees" — a record of terror suspects held incommunicado without legal rights.

Several successful Jundullah attacks took place in the wake of the Karachi strike, notably a twin car-bomb attack outside the Pakistani-American Cultural Centre in Karachi, which left one person dead and 34 injured. Jundullah's growth was facilitated by its close links with the Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest of Pakistan's mainstream Islamist parties.

Karachi-based cardiologist Akmal Waheed and his orthopaedist brother Arshad Waheed, who were arrested in the course of a 2004 crackdown on Jundullah cadre, had both been active in the Jamaat-e-Islami-supported Pakistan Islamic Medical Association. Attaur Rahman, the Karachi University graduate who was among Jundullah's founders, had also been a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami's student wing, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba — an organisation that contributed hundreds of cadre for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir.

For reasons that remain unclear, Jundullah now turned its energies towards the Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan. Regi initiated this second campaign in June 2005. Jundullah kidnapped a team of Iranian security and intelligence officers. In a video-taped declaration delivered to al-Arabiya television, Jundullah said the attack had been carried out to avenge Iranian atrocities against the ethnic-Baloch minority. In a second video, released three weeks later, Jundullah released images of the execution of Iranian intelligence officer Shehab Malik.

Sunni-Shia conflict

What precise operational links, bar their common Al-Qaeda lineage, tie the Karachi Jundullah and Regi's Iranian operation is unclear. But both share a number of points of ideological affiliation. Jundullah literature on Iran is built around discourse characterising its operations as part of a larger Sunni resistance to the Shia Iranian state. Most ethnic Baloch in Iran are Sunni, and the Sistan-Balochistan province's backwardness has fuelled anger against real and imagined discrimination.

Karachi-based Islamists, likewise, have often executed murderous strikes on groups they believe to be heretics, a category that includes the Shia community as a whole and the Barelvi sect. On April 26, 2006, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — which, like Jundullah, is an offshoot of the south Waziristan-based Al-Qaeda — bombed a Barelvi gathering at Karachi's Nishtar Park, killing 47 people and injuring over 100.

None ought to be surprised if it turns out ABC News, or other journalists who have put out less-specific accounts over the last two years, are right. Like many other countries, the U.S. has a long record of backing terrorist groups to further its perceived strategic interests. Containing Iranian influence in West Asia is a major U.S. foreign policy objective, and there is increasing evidence that the covert war is growing in scale.

Media reports suggest the U.S. has been making use of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq — a far-right organisation complicit in the 1991 anti-Shia massacres in Iraq, and designated a global terrorist organisation in 1997 — for attacks inside Iran. U.S. covert support is also thought to exist for a Kurdish terrorist group that has executed strikes against Iran, the Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê, or Party of Free Life of Kurdistan.
The odds are the ABC News expose will do little to deter the Sunni Islamist-U.S. joint venture war against Iran. On April 13, Iran announced the arrest of 90 Jundullah cadre, who were reported to have created stockpiles of weapons and explosives. Iran's Intelligence Minister, Mohseni Ejeie, also pointed to the threat from the west, noting that "ten days ago, we arrested a group of seven people who wanted to carry out several bomb attacks." Iran's Khuzestan province, home to a substantial ethnic-Arab minority, has seen several bombings over the last two years, which have been blamed on terror groups backed by the U.K.

To the east, Iran's patience with Pakistan appears to be wearing thin. In the wake of the Zahedan bombing, Pakistan's Ambassador to Tehran was summoned to explain just how Jundullah terrorists trained on its soil, and there have been media reports of tensions along the border.

What could lie ahead? An escalating cycle of terror is one possibility. ABC News reported that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf discussed the covert war against Iran when they met in February. U.S. government officials Ross and Isham spoke to claimed that it was appropriate to deal with Jundullah because the Islamist terror group had, in return for support, proved helpful in tracking Al-Qaeda figures.

For Jundullah, too, the alliance — perhaps brokered through prisoners such as Aruchi — makes sense. It relieves the pressure imposed by western counter-terrorism operations and provides the terror group with a renewed stockpile of war material, at little cost other than selling out some of its one-time comrades: a time-honoured tradition in all covert warfare.

Iran may have little choice other than to step up the heat against the U.S. and the U.K. in Iraq — but to anyone with a memory that stretches longer than the previous night's television news, this is the least danger. Two decades ago, in pursuit of its Cold War objectives, the U.S. funded, armed, and trained the terrorist organisation that executed the September 11, 2001, terror strikes. Now, it seems to be doing the same thing again, presumably in the blithe hope that the results will be different this time around. Despite President Bush's fine words, it appears no lessons have been learned from history.

The Private Arm of the Law

Some Question the Granting of Police Power to Security Firms

Amy Goldstein

Washington Post
January 2

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio with wires sprouting out.

"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latino men he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.

A gang initiation, Watt thought.

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen's arrests.

Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces, including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina's Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for help. Moreover, private-sector security is expanding into spheres -- complex criminal investigations and patrols of downtown districts and residential neighborhoods -- that used to be the province of law enforcement agencies alone.

The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. The enormous Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and screens visitors to the Statue of Liberty.

"You can see the public police becoming like the public health system," said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a leading security consultant. "It's basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."

The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenants rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation's large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.

Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In Boston, tenants groups have complained that "special police," hired by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly, were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there for trespassing.

In 2005, three of the private officers were charged with assault after they approached a man talking on a cellphone outside his front door. They asked for identification and, when he refused, followed him inside and beat him in front of his wife and three children.

Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, said private police "are focusing on the priority of their employer, rather than the priority of public safety and individual rights." But Boston police Sgt. Raymond Mosher, who oversees licensing of special police, says such instances are rare.

Private police officers "do some tremendously good things," Mosher said, recalling one who chased down a teenager running with a loaded gun.

In Durham, after shootings on city buses, the transit authority hired Wackenhut Corp. police to work in the main terminal in tandem with city police officers stationed on buses.

"There is a limit to the amount of law enforcement you can expect taxpayers to support," said Ron Hodge, Durham's deputy police chief, who said some of his requests for additional officers have been turned down in recent years. Although, as in most cities, some Durham police work privately while they are off-duty, Hodge said the demand for off-duty police outstrips the supply.

In one of the country's most ambitious collaborations, the Minneapolis Police Department three years ago started a project called "SafeZone" with private security officers downtown, estimated to outnumber the police there 13 to 1. Target Corp. and other local companies paid for a wireless video camera system in downtown office buildings that is shared with the police. The police department created a shared radio frequency.

So far, the department has trained 600 security officers on elements of an arrest, how to write incident reports and how to testify in court.

When a bank was robbed in the fall, a police dispatcher broadcast the suspect's description over the radio. Within five minutes, a security officer spotted the man, bag of cash in hand, and helped arrest him.

Private police officers work across the Washington area, although their numbers have not been growing sharply. According to the D.C. police department, any private security employee who is armed must be licensed as a "special police" officer with arrest powers; the city has more than 4,000 of them, including at universities and some hospitals.

Maryland and Virginia, which have different criteria, each have several hundred private police, according to law enforcement and regulatory officials.

In Virginia, the Wintergreen Resort has a private police department with 11 sworn officers. They include an investigator who last year helped solve a string of break-ins along the Appalachian Trail, identifying the burglar with images from the department's video camera when he drove out of the resort with a stolen car.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is also trying to foster closer ties between security companies without police powers and the police and sheriff's departments. The agency has begun training and certifying "Private Crime Prevention Practitioners" and soon plans to send security companies e-mails with unclassified homeland security threats and crime alerts.

Maryland has no similar collaboration, according to the Maryland State Police, which licenses security officers. The District is strengthening its supervision of security and private police, with new requirements for training and background checks having been adopted by the D.C. Council.

Some of the most sophisticated private security operations have expanded in part because of shrinking local and federal resources. The nation's largest bank, Bank of America, hired Chris Swecker as its corporate security executive last year when he retired as assistant director of the FBI. Even as identity theft and other fraud schemes have been booming, Swecker said, fewer federal investigators are devoted to solving such crimes, and many U.S. attorney's offices will not prosecute them unless their value reaches $100,000.

As a result, he said, federal officials now ask the bank's own investigators to do the work, including a three-year probe that helped police and the FBI piece together an identity-theft ring that defrauded 800 bank customers of $11 million.

In North Carolina, the state Department of Justice requires company police to go through the same basic training as public officers. They have full police powers on the property they are hired to protect.

Capitol Special Police's owner, Roy G. Taylor, was chief of three small nearby police departments and held state law enforcement jobs before starting the company in 2002. As Hispanic gangs were increasing, he said, "I saw a niche." The company has eight officers, some of whom are part time while working for area police departments.

They have used batons and pepper spray but have not fired a service weapon, Taylor said. Once, in an apartment complex where they worked in nearby Carrboro, Capt. Nicole Howard, Taylor's wife, dressed in plain clothes to attract a convicted rapist who had been peering in windows and stalking women. Then she arrested him for trespassing.

Today, charging $35 per hour, the firm has contracts with four apartment complexes, a bowling alley, two shopping centers and a pair of private nightclubs. A few weeks ago, two of the Taylors' employees, Capt.
Kenny Mangum and Officer Matt Saylors, walked over to a car at the nightclub Black Tie to warn the men inside not to loiter in the parking lot.

Catching a whiff of marijuana, they found seven rocks of crack cocaine in the ashtray and two handguns under the seat of the driver, who was a convicted felon. They called the Raleigh police to handle the arrest.

Because they are part of a private company, Taylor and his officers are mindful that customers are billed for the time they spend testifying in court.

"I try to make arrests only when absolutely necessary," said Watt, the officer who stopped the six men with the open beer cans. The company's marked patrol cars, he said, do not have radios to call for backup help or computers to check immediately for outstanding warrants or criminal records.

After satisfying himself that the six young men, lined up nervously and shivering in the cold night air, had no drugs, Watt let them go.

Activists on the Left Applying Pressure to Democratic Leaders

Liberals Seek Bolder Approach to War, Spying

By Jonathan Weisman

Washington Post
January 3, 2007

Democratic leaders set to take control of Congress tomorrow are facing mounting pressure from liberal activists to chart a more confrontational course on Iraq and the issues of human rights and civil liberties, with some even calling for the impeachment of President Bush.

The carefully calibrated legislative blitz that Democrats have devised for the first 100 hours of power has left some activists worried the passion that swept the party to power in November is already dissipating. A cluster of protesters will greet the new congressional leaders at the Capitol tomorrow. They will not be disgruntled conservatives wary of Democratic control, but liberals demanding a ban on torture, an end to warrantless domestic spying and a restoration of curbed civil liberties.

The protest will be followed by an evening forum calling for the president's impeachment, led by the Center for Constitutional Rights, antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and a pro-impeachment group called World Can't Wait.

Those priorities will not be in evidence inside the Capitol, where the newly sworn-in Democratic Congress will immediately begin work on new ethics rules, the reinstitution of federal deficit controls and new policies designed to increase civility in House proceedings. In the coming weeks, Democrats plan to pass bills designed to raise the minimum wage, lower prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients and interest rates for student borrowers, bolster homeland security and boost alternative energy research.

Nowhere in the Democrats' consensus-driven agenda is legislation revisiting last year's establishment of military tribunals and suspending legal rights for suspected terrorists. Nor is there a revision of the civil liberties provisions of the USA Patriot Act, a measure curbing warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency or an aggressive confrontation of the president on his Iraq war policies.

To Democratic activists and some lawmakers, the agenda skirts the larger issues that damaged the president's approval ratings and torpedoed Republican control of Congress.

"We've been told for many years, 12 years now, 'Wait until we get in power. Then you'll see things change,' " said Debra Sweet, national director of World Can't Wait, a pro-impeachment group helping to organize the protest. "We'll give them a couple of months or a few weeks to see what they come up with, but if they don't do something very decisive around the war and these other issues, I think there will be trouble."

"If the first 100 hours is going to be characterized by an increase in the minimum wage and improved health and education benefits for Americans, that's fine," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a liberal firebrand who ran for president in 2004 and has announced for 2008.

"But then let's talk about the second hundred hours, because we cannot let this war be lost. We cannot abandon the troops in the field to temporizing."

To most Democratic lawmakers, such activism presents a quandary.

House Republican leaders spent years trying to placate their conservative base with agendas built around opposition to same-sex marriage, antiabortion votes and tax cuts, said Sen.-elect Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.). The partisan tone enraged Democrats and ultimately alienated moderates and independents, who swept the GOP from power in November after a dozen years in control.

"The Democrats have to be careful not to fall into these traps that I think paralyzed the Republicans," Cardin said.

But Democratic lawmakers -- especially the freshmen who capitalized on voter discontent -- said their core supporters' anger is real and must be acknowledged.

"Those people protesting on Thursday care deeply about their country," said Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire, an incoming House freshman who ran as an ardent opponent of Bush and the war. "I think we do need to pay attention. People are begging us to remember the Constitution, what made this country great."

One lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating such voters, said wherever he goes, he hears from activists calling for Bush's impeachment. Cutting off funding for the Iraq war comes in a close second.

"For most progressive activists, there is generally speaking, an open mind but also a real fear that the 110th [Congress] will not be as aggressive as many of us want it to be," said Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal People for the American Way. "On the other hand, there is a lot of pragmatism as we go into the 2008 election season. There's this high-wire act for everybody, not only for the House and Senate leadership but for the progressive community, too."

The high-wire act will be on display almost as soon as the new Congress is sworn in. The first motion from the House floor will be a parliamentary inquiry from Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) on the disputed election to replace retired Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.). In November's balloting, Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes.

But more than 18,000 ballots that day did not record a vote in the closely contested race, an "undervote" rate of nearly 15 percent, mainly from the Democrat's stronghold of Sarasota County. An academic study, commissioned by the company that made the electronic voting machines, found "that there is essentially a 100 percent chance that Jennings would have won" had Sarasota voters cast their votes with different machines and ballots.

Holt's inquiry will make clear that Buchanan's swearing-in tomorrow should not prejudice or compromise a House investigation or ongoing legal challenges to his election. But that falls well short of activist demands that the seat be left vacant, or even that the House simply seat Jennings.

Holt said he is willing to take the heat for that decision.

"There are some Democrats who say we should seize that seat any way we can," he acknowledged. "But if in a heavy-handed way, we just say we've got the votes and we're going to throw out Vern Buchanan, we would undermine the principle we say we are fighting for."

THE AMERICAN AUTUMN - Will the US plutocracy learn from Latin America?

Ashok Mitra
The Telegraph, 22 December

The nightmare that once visited John Foster Dulles is having a re-run, but not in Asia. The domino principle is actually at work in the Western hemisphere. Presidential candidates patronized by the American administration are going down to ignominious defeat, one after another, in Latin American countries. In Brazil, Lula da Silva has been re-elected with a thumping margin. The Sandinistas had to wait 16 long years; perseverance however has paid, Daniel Ortega is back to power in Nicaragua. The presidential election in Mexico three months ago was a touch and go affair. A vast number of Mexican citizens, aghast at some provisions in the North American Free Trade Treaty, which they consider to be grossly unfair to their country’s economic interests, gave vent to their discontent in the polls; the pro-America candidate squeezed through, but his margin of victory over the candidate representing the left forces was less than one-half of one per cent. Widespread speculation persists that the counting of votes was vitiated in the final stages by rigging and other forms of skulduggery.

Meanwhile, though, there have been further adverse tidings from Latin America for the policy-planning staff based in Foggy Bottom, Washington DC. A stridently anti-US candidate has triumphed in the presidential election in Ecuador too. Even worse, that pain in the neck, Hugo Chavez, has won re-elections in Venezuela, this time with a majority even greater than in the past two occasions. A formidable phalanx of Latin American nations are now, in some manner or other, aligned with Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the increasingly strident campaign against ‘Yanqui’ imperialism: Guiana, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador. The so-called Monro doctrine is obviously buried several fathoms deep; few bother to listen to Uncle Sam any more, the quaking in fear at the very mention of the possibility of American ire is, in any case, long over.

The turmoil in its backwater cannot but add a qualitatively new dimension to the format of international relations the United States of America had been accustomed to. The enormous accretion of strength on the part of the Soviet Union at the end of the World War II, and Mao’s Long March ending in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China had forced the Americans, nearly six decades ago, to adopt a policy of expansion and containment. It had a logic of its own. Once Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech furnished the ideological fervour, the Cold War ensued and was fought in grim earnest in both Europe and Asia. There were one or two lucky breaks. The social democrats came over to the American side. France was saved from going under in the nick of time.

The Pope’s active intervention was sought and readily accorded to thwart the ambitious plan of Palmiro Togliatti to take over Italy. Josef Boris Tito’s tiff with Stalin was a windfall. Berlin became the symbol of the determination of Western capitalism not to surrender an inch of further ground to the communists.

Latin America was the lapdog, western Europe was reasonably safe, with Nato mounting guard over it. It was only south-east Asia which was then causing sleepless nights to the US administration. Dulles, as Eisenhower’s secretary of state, put together, in great haste, the South-east Asia Treaty Organization to stem the tide of communist advance.

The insurgency in Malaya had already been ended by the British, mostly by their own efforts. In Indonesia, the Americans took direct charge, organizing an army coup to immobilize left-leaning president, Mohammed Soekarno, and actively collaborating with the military junta in a ruthless pogrom against the communist party.

That greatest headache, Vietnam, however sucked the Americans in. It turned out to be the costliest of misjudgments. What started as a limited war soon got transformed into savage butchery and devastation of that country. The Vietnamese could not however be conquered; they fought back with amazing tenacity. Massive resentment within the US caused enormous political damage to the ruling politicians. The world’s mightiest power finally had to admit defeat; it withdrew with its tail between its legs.

There were happier developments elsewhere though. Despite the daunting presence of China, the rest of Asia entered a phase of gentlemanly moderation. It has not been exactly a pan-American milieu, but nothing much in the air to worry about either. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, despite their internal bickerings — or, who knows, because of these bickerings — have been extraordinarily deferential to the US.

The only country with a question mark is land-locked Nepal; roughly one-half of the country is already under the effective control of the Maoists. Fortunately for the Americans, not all Maoists excite the admiration of Beijing. Besides, the American success in penetrating into the territories in central Asia that were in the past outposts of the Soviet Union is insurance enough against any attempt at a swift communist take-over of the whole of Nepal.

In west Asia, on the other hand, the Americans have stumbled badly. Vietnam has apparently taught successive US administrations no lessons.

The folly of Afghanistan has been followed by the much greater one in Iraq. In both countries, the victory the American military establishment initially claimed is proving to be of a phantom character. George W. Bush and his advisers are obviously at a loss to decide how to exit. To stay on is likely to be equally difficult: voters back home are getting into an increasingly foul mood because of mounting casualties and rising financial involvement. 9/11 and global terror are, as a result, fastly depreciating currencies.

Domestic developments facilitated the Americans to extricate themselves from Vietnam. A democratic administration had taken the Americans into Vietnam; once the mess reached the quality of hell, a Republican administration assumed office and arranged for a quiet retreat from the south-east Asian bog. The withdrawal was marked by discredit, but at least there was still a veneer of semi-dignity.

Perhaps hope lies in a similar arrangement, with a reversal of roles of the nation’s two principal political parties. The Democrats have already captured both houses of the Congress. The national catharsis however is only half complete. The Americans, so goes the general hypothesis, will have to wait till the presidential poll in 2008; a Democrat will, according to general expectation, then be ushered in as the new president who may find it a shade less awkward to terminate the crusade in west Asia.

What should follow is a season of introspection for the American nation. Such an introspection could even prod it to revert to a phase of isolationism. That would not be altogether easy either. A major stumbling block is bound to be the factor of globalization: for instance, the huge dollar reserves countries such as China have been accumulating could pose a threat to the American economy and, therefore, to American peace of mind.

Another factor which will clamour to be taken into account is the surcease of Latin America as a placid backyard. The retreat from west Asia would mean a major loss of control over oil; once the Latin American countries are able to diversify the direction of their exports, the extra discomfiture could be a denial of oil to the US by Venezuela. While scientists and technologists continue their research in US laboratories to develop an alternative source of fuel to substitute oil, the threat to a way of life the average American citizen was accustomed to might breed a species of discontent that could intensify with the years.

The town cynic could pitch in here: the American plutocracy did not learn from Iraq, what is the rationale for assuming that they would from Latin America either?

US / 'The Real America,' Redefined

By E. J. Dionne Jr.Tuesday,
Washington Post, 19 December

When a nation alters its philosophical direction and changes its assumptions, there is no press release to announce the shift, no news conference where The People declare that they have decided to move down a different path.

Yet 2006 is looking more and more like one of history's hinge years, a moment when old ideas are cast aside, new leaders emerge and old leaders decide to speak in new ways. The changes in politics and culture are visible in the many sudden and outright reversals of the conventional wisdom.

Nowhere is the evidence of change more striking than among the young, whose attitudes and behavior are usually leading indicators of social transformation.

In 1984 three exit polls pegged Ronald Reagan's share of the ballots cast by Americans under 30 at between 57 and 60 percent. Reagan-style conservatism seemed fresh, optimistic and innovative. In 2006 voters under 30 gave 60 percent of their votes to Democratic House candidates, according to the shared media exit poll. Conservatism now looks old, tired and ineffectual.

When the right seemed headed to dominance in the early 1990s, the hot political media trend was talk radio and the star was Rush Limbaugh, a smart entrepreneur who spawned imitators around the country and all across the AM dial.

Now the chic medium is televised political comedy and the cool commentators are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Their brilliant ridicule of the Bush administration and conservative bloviators satisfies a political craving at least as great as the one Limbaugh once fed. Stewart and Colbert speak especially to young Americans who rely on their sensible take on the madness that surrounds us. The young helped drive their popularity, and the Droll Duo in turn shaped a new, anti-conservative skepticism.

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America," which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled -- often looking ridiculous in the process -- to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.

Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn't it amazing how quickly the supposedly "real America" was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.

Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that accusing opponents of wanting to "cut and run" in Iraq would be enough to cast political enemies into an unpatriotic netherworld of wimps and "defeatocrats."

Now the burden of proof is on those who claim that fighting in Iraq was a good idea and that the situation can be turned around. The Iraq Study Group's grim description of what's going on is the accepted definition of reality. Polls show majorities embracing the report not, I suspect, because most Americans are conversant with its every detail but because they see its take as closer to the truth than the president's accounts over the past three years, and because it appears to point toward disengagement.

Since the 1970s, supply-side conservatives have been brilliantly successful in redefining economic thinking. They shifted the popular focus from workers to entrepreneurs, from incomes to wealth, from job creation to share-price increases, and from government policy innovation to private-sector autonomy.

Suddenly economic inequality is a problem even conservatives are taking seriously. Corporate America is looked upon, let us say, in less heroic terms. Economic security is no longer a dirty phrase, and staunch capitalists aren't quite so eager to preach the virtues of "creative destruction" to displaced industrial workers. Government -- with some wariness, to be sure -- is being invited back into the economic story to redress grievances and to right imbalances.

How durable are these changes? In both politics and culture, the side that thinks it's losing usually accommodates itself to the ascendant order. My hunch is that we will be seeing many new claims to moderation and social concern on the right and many fewer fake NASCAR fans on the left.

United States / Baker Commission calls for moving

Panel for direct American talks with Iran, Syria

WASHINGTON: The bipartisan commission on the war in Iraq on Wednesday recommended new and enhanced diplomacy so that U.S. combat forces can ‘‘begin to move out of Iraq’’ as soon as that can be done responsibly.

‘‘The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,’’ the 10-member Iraq Study Group, headed by co-chairmen James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, warned after an eightmonth review of the conflict.

Portions of the report were obtained by the Associated Press. The report warned that if the situation continues to deteriorate, there is a risk of a ‘‘slide toward chaos [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s Government and a humanitarian catastrophe.’’

Bush pledge

President George W. Bush received the report in an early morning meeting at the White House with commission members, and pledged to treat each proposal seriously and act in a ‘‘timely fashion.’’

The report painted a grim picture of Iraq more than three years after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein. ‘‘Violence is increasing in scope and lethality,’’ the commission warned.

That was a blunt rebuttal of claims of sustained progress that the administration had made until
recently.

Mr. Bush said he told the 10 commission members that his administration will take their report, called ‘‘The Way Forward,” very seriously. ‘‘This report gives a very tough assessment of the situation in Iraq,’’ Mr. Bush said. ‘‘It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion.’’

The report called for the administration to try to engage Syria and Iran in diplomacy as part of an effort to bring stability to Iraq — even though Mr. Bush has said previously he would not negotiate with either country.

It also said there must be a renewed commitment by the U.S. to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria and Mr. Bush’s commitment to a two-state solution for Israeland Palestine.

- AP

United States / US not winning the war in Iraq

Panel approves Robert Gates’ nomination

The man picked by President George Bush to run the Pentagon admitted on Tuesday that the U.S. was not winning the war in Iraq and warned that an attack on Iran could backfire with devastating consequences.

Robert M. Gates won unanimous approval from the Senate Armed Services Committee after testifying that the United States was not winning in Iraq and that American failure there could ignite ‘‘a regional conflagration’’ in West Asia.

Mr. Gates’s sombre and candid assessment stunned Congress, marking a sharp break with his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who played down the severity of any problems, was dismissive of criticism and took a much harder line against Iraq’s neighbours.

The change in tone came at a critical moment, with the U.S. at a crossroads following the Democratic election victory, the resignations of two leading administration hawks, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton, and at a time when Washington is in the midst of a fundamental rethink of military strategy.

Mr Gates made it clear that ‘‘all options are on the table’’. When asked if he believed the U.S. was winning, he replied flatly: ‘‘No, sir.’’

— Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006