war | ukwatch.net

Armistice day and the 'glorious war'

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:28 +0000

George Bush and Tony Blair – leading architects of a war that has killed more than a million people in Iraq – appear side by side. Bush wears a stars-and-stripes lapel badge, a symbol of belligerent nationalism and the self-declared “war on terror”. Blair wears a poppy.

The poppy is the enduring symbol of the hypocrisy of our leaders who take us to war.

It goes back, of course, to the First World War, whose end is marked every year on Remembrance Sunday. The war produced an unprecedented wave of “remembrance”.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was set up in 1917, for instance, and it now manages the graves of 1.5 million British and Commonwealth dead from 90 years of war.

The missing of the First World War were many. Some men were simply sucked into the mud and drowned. Or they were buried alive when shells caused their dugouts to collapse. Or they just disappeared altogether, blown into thousands of tiny pieces and scattered.

The missing became the focus of great battlefield monuments after the war. The 1927 Menin Gate in Ypres lists the names of 55,000, the 1932 Thiepval Memorial on the Somme a further 72,000.

Remembrance Day itself was dedicated by king George V in 1919 – it recalls the moment when the guns fell silent on the Western Front on 11 November 1918.

Later, in 1921, the Earl Haig Fund, a charity for ex-servicemen, was launched, and the sale of poppies marked the build-up to Remembrance Day. It is named after Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander responsible for the mass slaughter at the battles of the Somme and the Passchendaele.

Official

Why did the British ruling class create this official industry of remembrance? The First World War was different in scale from anything that had happened before. It plunged the world into an abyss of barbarism, industrialised killing and destruction, waste, suffering, and grief beyond imagination.

The result was a tidal wave of revolt against world rulers. Poppies, cemeteries, and remembrance rituals were the official response to popular anti-war bitterness.

In 1914, men had marched to war with a chocolate box image of what it would be like. Heads were filled with dizzy notions of empire, nation, and glory. Enemies were demonised as militarists and baby-killers.

Many saw the war as a great adventure and an escape from lives of drudgery and poverty at home. Nothing prepared them for what was to come.

It was not that their leaders lied about the realities of modern war. They did not know either and were equally unprepared.

They imagined a quick campaign, a decisive battle, a rapid descent on the enemy capital. The Germans expected to capture Paris within six weeks of the start of the war.

What made it so different was that the First World War was a war of global empires and industrial mass production – a distinctive type of war characteristic of capitalist imperialism.

For 20 years, the global economy had been growing fast. At the time, people thought the great boom would go on forever. But beneath the surface of events, the mole of history was at work.

Under capitalism, growth meant intensified competition as the giant corporations of the global economy clashed in a struggle for markets, contracts, and profits.

Behind them stood the great powers – imperialist nation states whose armies and navies had been used to carve the world into rival empires in the interests of their own capitalists.

By the early 20th century, with most of the world divided up, the great powers increasingly confronted one another head-to-head.

Tension mounted, defensive alliances hardened into hostile blocs, and a competitive arms race took off.

The British Empire feared the growing industrial and military power of imperial Germany. The war that erupted in 1914 was a war to redivide the world.

But the First World War was not only an imperialist war on a global scale. It was also a war of modern industry.

Capitalism had created the corporations and empires whose collision caused the war – and also the mass industries that were to make modern war so violent and destructive.

Modern economies were able to equip, supply and transport conscript armies of millions. In 1870, the Prussians had defeated France with an army of 300,000.

In 1914, they invaded with an army of 1.5 million.

New technology transformed the killing power of weapons. Machine guns and heavy artillery dominated battlefields, creating a “storm of steel”.

The cost in lives exceeded all expectations. Between ten and 20 million people were killed. Millions more were maimed forever, returning home with bits blown off or minds deranged by horror and fear.

Millions of others wept for lost fathers, husbands, and sons.

The survivors faced a bleak world. The post-war economy collapsed, and the reward for many returning “heroes” was the poverty and hopelessness of unemployment.

Popular revulsion against the carnage fused with class anger against exploitation and privation at home. A wave of revolution swept across Europe.

This potential had flashed intermittently through the early years of conflict. Opposing soldiers had fraternised in no man’s land during Christmas 1914. Many soldiers had practised “live and let live” – tacit agreements not to fire on one another.

At home, as blockades and shortages cut into living standards while war profiteers pocketed millions, strikes and street protests erupted.

Mutinied

In 1917 it broke through into mass struggle. The French army mutinied on the Western Front in the spring. The Italian army broke and headed for home in the autumn. Both revolts were limited.

But in Russia, revolt turned into revolution and an end to war.

It started with mass strikes and protests in Petrograd and other industrial centres, but it quickly spread into the army. Soldiers refused to attack.

Gung-ho officers were shot.

Russians fraternised with Germans and Austrians across the line. Soon, following the example of the workers, the soldiers were forming democratic councils and taking control of the army from below.

The ferment of revolt culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and an end to the war on the Eastern Front early the following year.

As the “contagion” of revolution spread westwards, Germany’s war leaders launched a final desperate offensive on the Western Front. But they failed to break through – leaving the German army facing defeat while the German working class was in revolt at home.

The armistice of 1918 was a product of incipient revolution – Germany’s rulers surrendered for fear their army would mutiny and the state collapse.

Even the winners were scared. Britain, France, and Italy all experienced mass strikes, giant demonstrations, and a huge growth of the left.

Legacy

Because of this political upsurge, the legacy of the war was bitterly contested. Official remembrance rituals are one of the results.

Official remembrance looks two ways. It mourns the dead and regrets their loss. But at the same time it glorifies their “necessary sacrifice”. The war was terrible, the argument goes, but the price was worth paying. That is why Blair can wear a poppy.

We, too, mourn the dead. But our mourning is mixed with bitter anger against the rulers and the system that create such carnage.

The poppy is tainted by the hypocrisy of warmongers and imperialists. It is better to wear an anti-war badge, representing a struggle to end war by challenging the rulers and the system that cause it.

There is reason for hope. The First World War created modern industrialised war, with its murderous firepower, its aerial bombing, its starvation and ethnic cleansing.

But it also spawned a universal hatred of war and mass movements to end it. The anti-war movement of recent years has revived that tradition. And now the crisis of capitalism has reopened the argument for a socialist world that could abolish war forever.

Neil Faulkner is an archeologist and historian based at Bristol university.

Flipping the Script

tim — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:03:48 +0000

It’s been seven years since George Bush dubiously declared ‘War on Terror’. Since then, there have been an estimated 95 thousand civilian deaths (655 thousand by some accounts), 4,730 US military deaths, 288 British deaths and the toll still rises. In July, a Pentagon-commissioned study by Rand Corp admitted that the Bush administration strategy to defeat Al-Qaeda had been ‘unsuccessful’ and condemned the most unpopular foreign war since Vietnam as badly ‘off target’. Psychologically, the conflict has taken a heavy toll on the American people and contributed to a super sized dose of soul-searching, as evidenced by Hollywood’s recent output. When even the caped crusader, Batman, is forced to admit defeat against conductor of chaos, the Joker, it has been a dark night indeed.

So how has the art world responded to this legacy of disasters? Apart from the ICA’s Memorial to The War in Iraq commission last year, why haven’t we seen any major exhibitions tackle the subject? 9 Scripts from a Nation at War at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery (a modest space reserved for media art) attempts to do just that, by exploring the psychology of a nation in conflict. Transcripts, testimonies, interviews, notations and web logs form the ‘scripts’ for this quietly controversial ten-part video installation which interrogates contemporary warfare and citizenship through semantics and academic participatory games.

According to the script accompanying the Scripts, the curators Amy Dickson and Rachel Taylor and artists David Thorne, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes, Andrea Geyer and Katya Sander set out to ‘examine the ways in which war determines scripts and certain roles such as “citizen”, “veteran”, “detainee”, “correspondent”’ and to investigate how written and spoken language affects identity and is fundamental to defining and perpetuating the structures of power. The exhibition is the last in a series of four which set out to ‘explore citizenship through themes of economy, belief, the state and the individual’. All very worthy and public-spirited, it would appear, but this time, at least, the art transcends the blurb.

Not everyone who wanders into this show will recognise the trendy, postmodern techniques employed, such as re-enactment, but most will be familiar with the ubiquitous ‘workshop’ approach. In fact, at times it’s a bit like watching role play exercises at a group therapy or adult education session, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. These experiential techniques generate a healthy climate of debate and ensure the subject matter never gets didactic.

The show opener, Script: Citizen: 248 predictions about what I will do when democracy comes, is the most accessible, but also the weakest. Statements like ‘I will be a hotbed of insurgency’ and ‘I will ignore the dim whispers of the missing’ are chalked up on a blackboard by a group of performers and then immediately erased. The phrases are frustratingly flippant and oblique, but that’s most likely the point. As viewers, aka ‘Citizens’, this is an upfront challenge to reappraise our feelings about the conflicts and reactions to them.

In the main room, we are presented with a choice of listening booths. Dominating the show, in both size and content, is the triptych: Script: Detainee: Please tell me when it’s my turn to speak because I don’t know what’s going on here. This is a documentation of a five hour public reading of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which were conducted at Guantanamo Bay in 2004/5. There are 558 tribunal transcripts like this, each around 100 pages long, invisible to the public on account of the sheer volume of paperwork.

In the tradition of reenactment art (a form popularised by Rod Dickinson with The Milgram Experiment and Jeremy Deller’s Turner Prize-winning The Battle of Orgreave, where events of historical significance are restaged) the subject matter is suitably cryptic. The reconstruction of tribunals enables the participants (both the actors and the audience) to experience the conditions under which the terror suspects were condemned and to witness the injustice (i.e, the inbuilt inflexibility) of the Guantanamo tribunal procedure, where detainees were expected to represent themselves without foreknowledge of the evidence against them or being able to speak directly to witnesses. In the words of detainee, Ashraf Salim, a former schoolteacher:

I know my fate is predetermined by this tribunal. This tribunal is not real. My presence, one defending myself, or not defending myself is of no importance whatsoever…where is the justice here?

Does the fact that they are spoken by a middle-class, white woman make them more or less chilling to an art loving audience? Tate goers were invited to find out for themselves at a live reading which accompanied the exhibition.

Re-enactment is an appropriately ironic technique to use here, as the term ‘enactment’ is used in law to mean decree, edict or dictat and these were extra-legal proceedings. Re-enactment is also a traditional, popular form of learning which dates back to the pageant and the medieval Passion play. What the artists seem to be saying is that in order to understand recent history, we need to experience it emotionally and unfiltered, not as a minor item in an overcrowded news agenda.

The same technique creates a distancing effect in Script: Veteran: I am thinking I should put on my uniform. Here, two retired soldiers prepare a public speech (from a prerecorded interview where they talked about their experiences in Iraq and their subsequent return to civilian life) and then perform it to an empty auditorium. The re-representation of this highly personal material asks the serviceman to re-evaluate their function in this conflict, while at the same time allowing them to reclaim their experiences.

Private Mickiela Montoya gives a harrowing account of how she became pregnant while serving in the National Guard, only to be told she was going to Iraq and then treated as ‘some sort of criminal’ for trying to shirk duty. The stressful experience caused her to miscarry, after which she suffered chronic depression before her deployment in Iraq: one trauma supplanted by another. These are every day stories, not media sensations brought to an audience of millions, but they demonstrate how effectively the military machine erases human identity, dignity and individual experience. In the words of Veteran Corporal Jose Omar Portilla:

the hard fact is you’re just a number … you’re not in charge of yourself anymore … from the moment you wake up to when you eat, sleep or go to the rest room.

In another part of the room, actors perform fragments of texts by the same soldiers and others involved in the war. This dry, staged presentation where the actors attempt to define terms like ‘torture’ and ‘enemy combatant’, reflect how impossible it is to capture the experience of war in words, and how easily the horror can be concealed in paperwork using prescribed terminology. The Lacanian distinction between Speech and Language underpins much of this work. Language is a formal system of signifiers encoding meaning, whereas the act of speaking gives back identity and autonomy to the speakers. The critic is given a face and a voice.

In Script: Correspondent: But you have to tell it in a way that doesn’t lose you your credibility we are reminded that it’s not just the foot soldiers, but journalists who were strong-armed by the war machine. Here correspondents offer their views on the difficulty of maintaining neutrality when reporting from the front line. One Al Jazeera correspondent, Abderrahim Foukara, reflects on his discomfort when there was pressure from the US Defense department to call the invasion a ‘liberation’ or risk being labeled a radical or friend of terrorism. At no time do the journalists interviewed drop their professional, dispassionate demeanour.

Not all the Scripts are equally successful. The re-presentation of web blogs about Iraq by a quasi-teacher figure or the role play exercises of anthropology students talking about the impact of war in the classroom quickly became boring, perhaps because we’ve become immune to the endless flow of user-generated sludge which is peddled as ‘self-expression’.

However, there is a wealth of source material to get lost in here. As the different perspectives piled up – each offering a personal and no less valid version of the war – a horrifyingly holistic picture emerges: that of a nation (the US or the UK) so obsessed with analysis, as events unfold in real time or replay, with self-reflection and navel-gazing that we no longer know how to act. A democratic war is a sit-back spectacle.

The power of 9 Scripts… is that it is confrontational and thought provoking without presenting images of death, destruction, torture and viscera and it manages to avoid political tub-thumping. Similarly, with the ICA’s Memorial to the War in Iraq, the most successful memorial commissions in the earlier show were the ones which took a step back from the politics and looked at how the media dealt with the conflict. Work like Snapshots from Baghdad by the Slovakian artist Roman Ondák, for example: a disposable black camera on a white plinth, which was supposedly meant to contain pictures from a war zone which will never be developed, and, perhaps, should remain undeveloped.

By focusing on the Scripts – words and semantics which can justify, condemn or seal an individual or a nation’s fate – we are forced to interrogate our roles in this conflict and to reassess the position of the Citizen in relation to the State.

Divide and Conquer

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Anglo-American Imperial Project

Establishing an “Arc of Crisis”

Many would be skeptical that the Anglo-Americans would be behind terrorist acts in Iraq, such as with the British in Basra, when two British SAS soldiers were caught dressed as Arabs, with explosives and massive arsenal of weapons.[1] Why would the British be complicit in orchestrating terror in the very city in which they are to provide security? What would be the purpose behind this? That question leads us to an even more important question to ask, the question of why Iraq was occupied; what is the purpose of the war on Iraq? If the answer is, as we are often told with our daily dose of CNN, SkyNews and the statements of public officials, to spread democracy and freedom and rid the world of tyranny and terror, then it doesn’t make sense that the British or Americans would orchestrate terror.

However, if the answer to the question of why the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq occurred was not to spread democracy and freedom, but to spread fear and chaos, plunge the country into civil war, balkanize Iraq into several countries, and create an “arc of crisis” across the Middle East, enveloping neighboring countries, notably Iran, then terror is a very efficient and effective means to an end.

An Imperial Strategy

In 1982, Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist with links to the Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote an article for a publication of the World Zionist Organization in which he outlined a “strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” In this article, he stated, “The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front. Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.” He continued, “An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon.” He continues, “In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and Shiite areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”[2]

The Iran-Iraq War, which lasted until 1988, did not result in Oded Yinon’s desired break-up of Iraq into ethnically based provinces. Nor did the subsequent Gulf War of 1991 in which the US destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, as well as the following decade-plus of devastating sanctions and aerial bombardments by the Clinton administration. What did occur during these decades, however, were the deaths of millions of Iraqis and Iranians.

A Clean Break for a New American Century

In 1996, an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, issued a report under the think tank’s Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, entitled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” In this paper, which laid out recommendations for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they state that Israel can, “Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats,” as well as, “Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas,” and to, “Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West.”

The report recommended Israel to seize “the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon,” and to use “Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.” It also states, “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”[3]

The authors of the report include Douglas Feith, an ardent neoconservative who went on to become George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005; David Wurmser, who was appointed by Douglas Feith after 9/11 to be part of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and served as a Mideast Adviser to Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2007; and Meyrav Wurmser, David’s wife, who is now an official with the American think tank, the Hudson Institute.

Richard Perle headed the study, and worked on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004, and was Chairman of the Board from 2001 to 2004, where he played a key role in the lead-up to the Iraq war. He was also a member of several US think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century.

The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is an American neoconservative think tank, whose membership and affiliations included many people who were associated with the present Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Peter Rodman, Dov Zakheim and Robert B. Zoellick.

PNAC produced a report in September of 2000, entitled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” in which they outlined a blueprint for a Pax Americana, or American Empire. The report puts much focus on Iraq and Iran, stating, “Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests in the Gulf as Iraq has.”[4] Stating that, “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” the report suggests that, “the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,” however, “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime change of Saddam Hussein.”[5]

Engineer a Civil War for the “Three State Solution”

Shortly after the initial 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus and Board Member of the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, the most influential and powerful think tank in the United States. The op-ed, titled, “The Three State Solution,” published in November of 2003, stated that the “only viable strategy” for Iraq, “may be to correct the historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.” Citing the example of the break up of Yugoslavia, Gelb stated that the Americans and Europeans “gave the Bosnian Muslims and Croats the means to fight back, and the Serbs accepted separation.” Explaining the strategy, Gelb states that, “The first step would be to make the north and south into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines,” and to “require democratic elections within each region.” Further, “at the same time, draw down American troops in the Sunni Triangle and ask the United Nations to oversee the transition to self-government there.” Gelb then states that this policy “would be both difficult and dangerous. Washington would have to be very hard-headed, and hard-hearted, to engineer this breakup.”[6]

Following the example of Yugoslavia, as Gelb cited, would require an engineered civil war between the various ethnic groups. The US supported and funded Muslim forces in Bosnia in the early 1990s, under the leadership of the CIA-trained Afghan Mujahideen, infamous for their CIA-directed war against the Soviet Union from 1979-1989. In Bosnia, the Mujahideen were “accompanied by US Special Forces,” and Bill Clinton personally approved of collaboration with “several Islamic fundamentalist organisations including Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.” In Kosovo, years later, “Mujahideen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO’s war effort.” The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the British Secret Intelligence Services (MI6), British SAS soldiers and American and British private security companies had the job of arming and training the KLA. Further, “The U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden,” and as well as that, “the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Jihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict.”[7]

Could this be the same strategy being deployed in Iraq in order to break up the country for similar geopolitical reasons?

The Asia Times Online reported in 2005, that the plan of “balkanizing” Iraq into several smaller states, “is an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq – an essential part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East. Curiously, Henry Kissinger was selling the same idea even before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.” It continued, “this is classic divide and rule: the objective is the perpetuation of Arab disunity. Call it Iraqification; what it actually means is sectarian fever translated into civil war.”[8]

In 2006, an “independent commission set up by Congress with the approval of President George W Bush,” termed the “Baker Commission” after former Secretary of State, James Baker, “has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls ‘cutting and running’ or ‘staying the course’.”[9]

It was also reported in 2006 that, “Iraq’s federal future is already enshrined within its constitution, allowing regions to form, if not actually prescribing how this should happen,” and that, “the Iraqi parliament (dominated by Shi’a and Kurds) passed a bill earlier this month [October, 2006] allowing federal regions to form (by majority vote in the provinces seeking merger).” Further, “The law, which unsurprisingly failed to win Sunni support, will be reviewed over the next 18 months in a bid to bring its opponents round.” The article, however, stated that instead of a three state solution, “a system based upon five regions would seem to have more chance of succeeding. A five-region model could see two regions in the south, one based around Basra and one around the holy cities. Kurdistan and the Sunni region would remain, but Baghdad and its environs would form a fifth, metropolitan, region.”[10] The author of the article was Gareth Stansfield, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House think tank in London, which preceded, works with and is the British equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Ethnic Cleansing Works”

In 2006, the Armed Forces Journal published an article by retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, titled, “Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look.” In the article, Peters explains that the best plan for the Middle East would be to “readjust” the borders of the countries. “Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected.” He states that after the 2003 invasion, “Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately.” However, Iraq is not the only country to fall victim to “Balkanization” in Peters’ eyes, as, “Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan,” and “Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today’s Afghanistan.” Further, “What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in the east, as Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren.” Peters states that “correcting borders” may be impossible, “For now. But given time — and the inevitable attendant bloodshed — new and natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen more than once.” He further makes the astonishing statement that, “Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.”[11]

The map of the re-drawn Middle East, initially published alongside Peters’ article, but no longer present, “has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.”[12] Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed wrote of Peters’ proposal, that “the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale.”[13]

Federalism or Incremental Balkanization?

A month before Peters’ article was published, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Joseph Biden, a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, in which they stated, “America must get beyond the present false choice between “staying the course” and “bringing the troops home now” and choose a third way that would wind down our military presence responsibly while preventing chaos and preserving our key security goals.” What is this third option? “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.”

They describe a few aspects of this plan. “The first is to establish three largely autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad. The Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions would each be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security. The central government would control border defense, foreign affairs and oil revenues.” Then, “The second element would be to entice the Sunnis into joining the federal system with an offer they couldn’t refuse. To begin with, running their own region should be far preferable to the alternatives: being dominated by Kurds and Shiites in a central government or being the main victims of a civil war.”[14]

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, Leslie Gelb stated that his plan for “federalizing” Iraq, “would look like this: The central government would be based on the areas where there are genuine common interests among the different Iraqi parties. That is, foreign affairs, border defense, currency and, above all, oil and gas production and revenues.” And, “As for the regions, whether they be three or four or five, whatever it may be, it’s up to—all this is up to the Iraqis to decide, would be responsible for legislation, administration and internal security.”[15]

The Senate subsequently passed a nonbinding resolution supporting a federal system for Iraq, which has still yet to be enacted upon, because it stated that this resolution was something that had to be enacted upon by the Iraqis, so as not to be viewed as “something that the United States was going to force down their throats.” Further, “when Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he testified in favor of federalism. In his private conversations with senators, he also supported the idea,” yet, while in Baghdad, the Ambassador “blasted the resolution.”[16] Could this be a method of manipulation? If the American Embassy in Baghdad promotes a particular solution for Iraq, it would likely be viewed by Iraqis as a bad choice and in the interest of the Americans. So, if the Ambassador publicly bashes the resolution from Iraq, which he did, it conveys the idea that the current administration is not behind it, which could make Iraqis see it as a viable alternative, and perhaps in their interests. For Iraqi politicians, embracing the American view on major issues is political (and often actual) suicide. The American Embassy in Baghdad publicly denouncing a particular strategy gives Iraqi politicians public legitimacy to pursue it.

This resolution has still not gone through all the processes in Congress, and may, in fact, have been slipped into another bill, such as a Defense Authorization Act. However, the efforts behind this bill are larger than the increasingly irrelevant US Congress.

Also in 2007, another think tank called for the managed “break-up of Iraq into three separate states with their own governments and representatives to the United Nations, but continued economic cooperation in a larger entity modeled on the European Union.”[17] In a startling admission by former US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, stated in 2007 that the “United States has “no strategic interest” in a united Iraq,” and he also suggested “that the United States shouldn’t necessarily keep Iraq from splitting up.”[18]

Conclusion

Clearly, whatever the excuse, or whatever the means of dividing Iraq, it is without a doubt in the Anglo-American strategy for Iraq to balkanize the country. Saying that what is being proposed is not balkanization, but federalism, is a moot point. This is because reverting to a more federal system where provinces have greater autonomy would naturally separate the country along ethno-religious boundaries. The Kurds would be in the north, the Sunnis in the centre, and the Shi’ites in the south, with all the oil. The disproportionate provincial resources will create animosity between provinces, and the long-manipulated ethnic differences will spill from the streets into the political sphere. As tensions grow, as they undoubtedly would, between the provinces, there would be a natural slide to eventual separation. Disagreements over power sharing in the federal government would lead to its eventual collapse, and the strategy of balkanization would have been achieved with the appearance of no outside involvement.

NOTES

[1] Global Research, Iraqi MP accuses British Forces in Basra of “Terrorism”. Al Jazeera: September 20, 2005: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050920…

[2] Linda S. Heard, The Prophecy of Oded Yinon. Counter Punch: April 25, 2006: http://www.counterpunch.org/heard04252006.html

[3] Richard Perle, et. al., A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies: June 1996: http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

[4] PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Project for the New American Century: September 2000: Page 17

[5] PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Project for the New American Century: September 2000: Page 14

[6] Leslie Gelb, The Three State Solution. The New York Times: November 25, 2003:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/6559/threestate_solution.html?breadcrumb=...

[7] Michel Chossudovsky, “Osamagate.” Global Research: October 9, 2001:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html

[8] Pepe Escobar, Exit strategy: Civil war. Asia Times Online: June 10, 2005:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF10Ak03.html

[9] Sarah Baxter, America ponders cutting Iraq in three. The Times: October 8, 2006: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article664974.ece

[10] Gareth Stansfield, The only solution left for Iraq: a five-way split. The Telegraph: October 29, 2006: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/10/29/do…

[11] Ralph Peters, Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look. Armed Forces Journal: June 2006: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899

[12] Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”. Global Research: November 18, 2006: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3882

[13] Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Map

to Stave Off Looming Global Meltdown. Dissident Voice: September 1, 2006: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept06/Ahmed01.htm

[14] Leslie Gelb and Joseph Biden, Jr., Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq. The New York Times: May 1, 2006: http://www.cfr.org/publication/10569/unity_through_autonomy_in_iraq.html…

[15] Leslie Gelb, Leslie Gelb before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The CFR: January 23, 2007: http://www.cfr.org/publication/12489/leslie_gelb_before_the_senate_forei…

[16] Bernard Gwertzman, Gelb: Federalism Is Most Promising Way to End Civil War in Iraq. CFR: October 16, 2007: http://www.cfr.org/publication/14531/gelb.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F3325…

[17] Robin Wright, Nonpartisan Group Calls for Three-State Split in Iraq. The Washington Post: August 17, 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR200708…

[18] AP, French report: Former U.N. envoy Bolton says U.S. has ‘no strategic interest’ in united Iraq. International Herald Tribune: January 29, 2007: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/01/29/europe/EU-GEN-France-US-Iraq.p…

Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch

Ellie Keen — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:46:46 +0000

On 12 July, the London Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the “high drama” and “meticulously practised routine” of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, “saving a life took precedence over [their] security”. Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that “47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday”.

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no “enemy” nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another “precision” bomb. Inside were nine people – his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a “coalition” speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated – at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. “The most frequently used bombs,” the Air Force Times reports, “are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided . . .” Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America’s and Britain’s puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA’s payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush’s former spokesman Scott McClellan has called “complicit enablers” – journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a “good war”, the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power – because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, “bait-and-switch” Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that “when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush” demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton – and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, “ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’ . . . there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain . . .”

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

Some Matter More

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:13:59 +0000

When 47 victims are worth 43 words

Bad Form

In his classic work, Obedience to Authority, psychologist Stanley Milgram observed:

"There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identified with the ‘final solution’, it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings." (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.204)

The same "bad form" is very much discouraged in our own society. One would hardly guess from media reporting that Britain and America are responsible for killing anyone in Iraq and Afghanistan, where violence is typically blamed on "insurgents" and "sectarian conflict". International "coalition" forces are depicted as peacekeepers using minimum violence as a last resort.

In reporting the November 2005 Haditha massacre, in which 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered by US troops, Newsweek suggested that the scale of the tragedy "should not be exaggerated". Why?

"America still fields what is arguably the most disciplined, humane military force in history, a model of restraint compared with ancient armies that wallowed in the spoils of war or even more-modern armies that heedlessly killed civilians and prisoners." (Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson, ‘Probing Bloodbath,’ Newsweek, June 12, 2006; http://www.newsweek.com/id/52312/page/1)

The truth was revealed in a single moment of unthinking honesty by a senior US Army commander involved in planning the November 2004 Falluja offensive and convinced of its necessity. He visited the city afterward and declared:

"My God, what are the folks who live here going to say when they see this?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ weekinreview/04burns.html?fta=y&pagewanted=all)

The answer was provided by physician Mahammad J. Haded, director of an Iraqi refugee centre, who was in Falluja during the US onslaught:

"The city is today totally ruined. Falluja is our Dresden in Iraq… The population is full of rage." (http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-awad100305.htm)

In July 2005, the Independent commented on US actions in Iraq:

"The American army’s use of its massive fire-power is so unrestrained that all US military operations are in reality the collective punishment of whole districts, towns and cities." (Patrick Cockburn, ‘We must avoid the terrorist trap,’ The Independent, July 11, 2005)

In April 2004, the Daily Telegraph reported the disgust of senior British army commanders in Iraq with the "heavy-handed and disproportionate" military tactics used by US forces, who view Iraqis "as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life… their attitude toward the Iraqis is tragic, it is awful." (Sean Rayment, ‘US tactics condemned by British officers’, Defence Correspondent, Daily Telegraph, April 11, 2004)

Burying The Bride

The anonymous commanders’ comments generalise to both British and American media reporting.

In July, Afghan investigators in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, told the AFP news agency that they had been shown the "bloodied clothes of women and children" killed in a July 6 US air strike. The attack was reported to have killed 47 civilian members of a wedding party, including 39 women and children, with nine wounded. The head of the team, Burhanullah Shinwari, deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s senate, said: "They were all civilians and had no links with Taliban or Al-Qaeda." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5joXBRRzFwxSG_I-Ucf34VMr379hQ)

Around ten people were reported still missing, believed buried under rubble. It is now estimated that 52 people were killed – the same number that died in the London suicide attacks of July 7, 2005. Another member of the team, Mohammad Asif Shinwari, said there were only three men among the dead and the rest were women and children. Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire reports that eight of the victims were between 14 and 18 years of age. (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/ Anotherweddingpartymassacre_July62008.html). The US military initially claimed only "militants" involved in mortar attacks had been killed.

A separate investigation into a July 4 strike in the northeastern province of Nuristan found that 17 civilians had been killed there. The coalition claimed they had killed several militants who were fleeing after attacking a base. But an Afghan official again confirmed that the victims were "all civilians." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5joXBRRzFwxSG_I-Ucf34VMr379hQ) Afghan authorities said the dead included two doctors and two midwives who had been attempting to leave the area to escape military operations.

Air Force Times reports that allied warplanes are currently dropping a record number of bombs on Afghanistan. For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs – more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total. But this only hints at the true extent of the slaughter. The figures do not include cannon rounds shot by fighters or AC-130 gunships, Hellfire and other small rockets launched by warplanes and drones, and assaults by helicopters. Air Force Times comments:

"In close-quarter firefights where friendly soldiers could be wounded if bombs are used, cannon fire and missiles are often the preferred alternative." (Bruce Rolfsen, ‘Afghanistan hit by record number of bombs,’ Air Force Times, July 18, 2008;
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news /2008/07/airforce_bomb_oef_071708/)

The response of the UK press to these latest atrocities is a case study in censorship by omission.

On July 12, the Guardian devoted 307 words to the attack on the wedding party. The killing of 39 women and children was not considered front page news – the story was buried on page 30. (Mohammad Rafiq Jalalabad, ‘US air strike killed 47 civilians, says Afghan government,’ The Guardian, July 12, 2008)

On the same day, a 490-word article in the Times focused on the fate of nine British troops injured when a US helicopter accidentally targeted them in a "friendly fire" incident. Six of the nine soldiers have since returned to duty, with three still receiving medical treatment. While 447 words were devoted to this story, the article concluded with two sentences totalling 43 words on the killing of the Afghan civilians:

"However, 47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, an Afghan government investigation has concluded. The nine-man investigation team found that only civilians were hit during the airstrike." (Dominic Kennedy and Michael Evans, ‘Friendly fire inquiry to investigate messages from troops,’ The Times, July 12, 2008)

At time of writing there have been five mentions of the 47 deaths in UK national quality newspapers.

Media reports on Western victims of terrorist or insurgent attacks typically provide detailed information on the names, backgrounds and personal histories of the victims. When the first female British soldier, Sarah Bryant, was killed in Afghanistan on June 17, the media poured forth details about her life. The BBC website showed pictures of Bryant’s wedding and devoted an article to moving tributes from her husband, father, mother, commanding officer, unit commander, friends and colleagues. A friend of the family described Bryant: "A hundred per cent feminine, very pretty, very unassuming, a natural person, very happy – the sort of person that when she was in a room, it lit up." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/uk_news/7463470.stm)

Bryant, recall, was a combatant. The depth of focus changes for Iraqi and Afghan non-combatant victims of US-UK violence. In a BBC online article, Martin Patience reported the July 6 attack:

"Regional officials said the casualties were attending a wedding party and that the bride had been killed." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7502137.stm)

We wrote to Patience (July 14), noting that he had reported that the bride had been among the victims. We asked him why he had not mentioned that fully 39 of the victims were women and children. He responded:

"I accept your point about not mentioning women and children, although, in my defence, the story was linked to the new story and I didn’t necessarily want to repeat the details." (Email to Media Lens, July 14)

We wrote back:

"Thanks for your response, I appreciate it. But something doesn’t add up. How often did the media provide us with the personal details – name, gender, photo, education, work lives, loved ones, aspirations – of the victims of the July 7 bomb attacks in London? [See here: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/ uk/05/london_blasts/victims/default.stm] The July 6 atrocity in Afghanistan has been reported a tiny handful of times in the press. Why would you be concerned about repeating the fact that almost all of the victims were women and children?" (Email, July 14)

We received no further reply but, to its credit, the BBC did subsequently publish an excellent piece on the July 6 attack: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7504574.stm

Patience had earlier reported: "the latest claim of civilian casualties puts yet more pressure on the Afghan authorities and international forces to get it right when carrying out operations." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7492195.stm)

The reference to the need for "international forces" to "get it right" might sound like neutral language. But imagine if a journalist had commented in August 1990 that claims of civilian casualties had put "yet more pressure on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi forces to get it right when carrying out operations in Kuwait." The bias suddenly becomes very clear.

Militants And Mistakes

On July 12, Leonard Doyle of the Independent reported:

"The UN said last month that nearly 700 Afghan civilians had lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, about two-thirds in attacks by militants and about 255 in military operations." (Doyle, ‘US to investigate air strike that killed 47 Afghan civilians,’ The Independent, July 12, 2008)

From this, we were presumably to understand that the "militants" are not conducting "military operations", and Afghan government/"coalition" forces conducting "military operations" are not "militants".

The point being that "militant" is a pejorative term used by journalists to suggest illegitimacy. In June 1999, the BBC reported that "Kosovo Albanians have been welcoming the return of armed KLA soldiers." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/369239.stm) KLA insurgents fighting Serbian forces were supported by the West and were regularly described as "soldiers" rather than "militants" or "insurgents". The British media have similarly referred to the "Chechen resistance" fighting the Russian army. Ironically, British and American journalists also commonly referred to Afghan forces fighting the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as "resistance fighters" and "freedom fighters" (See our media alert: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/ 07/071120_invasion_a_comparison.php). The use of such terms is of course inconceivable in US-UK reporting of the current occupation.

On the rare occasions when US-UK atrocities are discussed, they are invariably described as blunders rather than crimes. On July 13, Alastair Leithead commented on the BBC’s evening news:

"It’s these mistakes that cost the US the support of the [Afghan] people."

In September 2004, the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell reported on BBC TV news from Baghdad:

"As is so often the case in this conflict it’s the Iraqi civilian population which suffers the greatest loss of life – either as a result of mistakes by the Americans, or, far more frequently, of course, as a result of the bombs and the bullets of the insurgents." (Witchell, BBC1, 18:00 News, September 30, 2004)

The bias could hardly be more transparent – we kill civilians only by "mistake", our enemies do not. Noam Chomsky comments:

"The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries." (Noam Chomsky, ‘Terrorists wanted the world over.’ February 26, 2008; http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174899)

As Chomsky notes we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. When Israel’s High Court authorised intense collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity, when Bill Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998 in Sudan supplying half the country’s drugs, and when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, the devastating consequences for civilians were predictable, but ignored.

Certainly it is reprehensible to kill with intent. But is it any better to kill without intent when the likely consequences for our victims are so irrelevant that they do not even enter our minds? The point being, as Chomsky writes, that Western elites really do appear to regard Third World peoples "much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration." (Ibid)

When we assemble the different pieces of the media jigsaw puzzle, clear patterns emerge. Western victims are presented as real, important people with names, families, hopes and dreams. Iraqi and Afghan victims of British and American violence are anonymous, nameless. They are depicted as distant shadowy figures without personalities, feelings or families.

The result is that Westerners are consistently humanised, while non-Westerners are portrayed as lesser versions of humanity.

SUGGESTED ACTION

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Talking Warheads

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:12:09 +0000

When Saddam Hussein’s forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990, the US led a massive coalition to oust them. Having assembled 600,000 troops and 1,000 planes from more than 30 countries, Operation Desert Storm started in January 1991 with a huge air assault that was confidently expected to force out the Iraqis.

Within 24 hours, however, things had begun to look very different. Iraqi Scud missiles started hitting Israel, leading to a sustained diversion of effort as the Americans and their coalition allies tried to defuse this new threat. To make matters worse, the Iraqis also aimed Scuds at Saudi Arabia, one of them hitting a Marines depot killing 28 people, the worst US loss of life in the war.

Eight years later, it was revealed that another Scud strike had very nearly been catastrophic, and might have affected the outcome of the entire war. It landed in the sea 300 yards from a US Navy aviation support ship and near the amphibious warfare ship USS Tarawa. Both were moored alongside a pier complex at the Saudi port of Jubayl, which included a large ammunition storage dump and a parking lot for petrol tankers. If the Scud had hit its target instead of landing harmlessly in the sea, it could have set off a huge chain of explosions and fires, killing thousands.

Uncomfortable lessons

The 1991 Iraq War was widely seen as a great victory for the West, but behind the scenes in military circles some serious lessons were being learnt. What was expected to be a new world order, in which the ending of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet bloc would lead on to international stability rooted in Western economic and military power, now looked much less certain.

One far-sighted American writer, a former submarine commander called Roger W Barnett, succinctly highlighted the impact of ‘high technology weapons and weapons of mass destruction on the ability – and thus the willingness – of the weak to take up arms against the strong’.

A most uncomfortable lesson of the 1991 war was that a middle-ranking state such as Iraq (previously a close ally of Washington) could use crude 1960s missile technology to probe weak points in the armed forces of the world’s most powerful country.

As a result, during the 1990s, missile defence got a new lease of life. Billions of dollars were poured into ‘theatre missile defence systems’, designed to protect US forces and their allies when they are engaged in military operations in regions such as the Middle East. But the missile ‘threat’ was just one part of a much wider predicament that has brought nuclear weapons right back into the frame for the West.

Nukes for peace

The core problem is that maintaining a world peace centred on Western interests must involve a willingness to use force when those interests are threatened, whether that be in the Middle East, South West Asia or elsewhere. The US may now spend more on its military than every other country in the world combined, and its forces may be pre-eminent in their capabilities, but that does not prevent their use being constrained by crude but powerful deterrents fielded by otherwise weaker states.

Iraq’s Scud missiles were early examples of this, but a much more worrying combination, from the Pentagon’s perspective, is the development of small nuclear arsenals by potentially hostile states such as Iran and North Korea. The Pentagon gets even more concerned when these uncontrolled weapons are combined with delivery systems such as ballistic missiles. The Scuds that hit Dhahran and narrowly missed Jubayl were armed with conventional warheads, but even crude nuclear devices would be far more potent deterrents against Western military interventions.

One response is to call for a nuclear free world in which, cynics might say, conventional military power would rule supreme again; but most strategists don’t buy this. They call instead for robust nuclear forces to be retained indefinitely. This does not mean that arsenals will be kept at anything like the stupefying Cold War levels, but it does mean that nuclear weapons will be with us far into the future.

Just don’t mention the warheads

Britain is a good example of this thinking. It plans to replace its current Trident system of nuclear missiles in a couple of decades with new weapons designed to see the country through to the second half of the 21st century. Alongside them, the UK is planning to build two giant new aircraft carriers, the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy. These will give Britain a warfare capability that will be second only to the United States, enabling it to continue to fight alongside its ally in what it sees as crucial regions such as the immensely oil-rich Persian Gulf.

But what is the use of such warships if regional opponents have their own nuclear arsenals, however small? A 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier and its surrounding flotilla could be destroyed by a single nuclear weapon, so there has to be a back-up. This is where nuclear forces come in useful.

Britain, like the US, France and Russia, has been very careful not to rule out using nuclear weapons to attack first rather than limit their use to self-defence. It has also developed small nuclear warheads whose destructive power falls far short of the feared global cataclysms of the Cold War.

Last year’s White Paper on the Trident replacement did its best to avoid admitting to such thinking, but also had to avoid lying. It therefore limited discussion of such considerations to a couple of short phrases in an otherwise lengthy and detailed document – but these two phrases allowed Britain to maintain the option of first-use of a nuclear weapon as well as the need to have small nuclear weapons, without engaging in an embarrassing public debate as to why.

Moreover, to avoid all talk of nuclear war-fighting, the term ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon was abandoned a decade ago, to be replaced by the more anodyne ‘sub-strategic’, but even that has now been banned from the nuclear lexicon. In polite circles it is simply not the done thing to talk about actually using nuclear weapons.

A slippery slope

These new nuclear realities make it much more difficult for activists to campaign against a world in which nuclear weapons still play a central role. During the Cold War there was a small risk of an all-out nuclear war that would have devastated the Northern hemisphere and much of the rest of the world. We were peering into a nuclear abyss and although the risks might have been relatively small, the consequences would have been utterly disastrous. Now it is more like a slippery slope – a slow descent in which the lead nuclear states refuse to countenance any end to their nuclear dominance.

The risk is that some time in the next couple of decades, a regional crisis will ‘go nuclear’, with two possible outcomes. One is that it might escalate to a global nuclear war. Even if we are down to a few thousand warheads instead of the tens of thousands of the Cold War era, just a fraction of them would cause utter devastation across much of the world.

The other outcome is that a nuclear war stays within a particular region, killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people but not escalating to a global catastrophe. Apart from the dreadful immediate consequences, that could mean that we become accustomed to using nuclear weapons as instruments of warfare. The taboo that has held since Nagasaki
will have been broken, leading to a formidably more insecure world.

For the Western military establishment, nuclear weapons must remain at the centre of their overall approach to security. From their perspective, the coming decades will be fraught with unplanned and uncontrolled developments in which terrorism, extremism, rogue states, mass migration and many other threats all have to be contained. With the ending of the Cold War we had ‘slain the dragon’ – but in the words of one former CIA Director, James Woolsey, we now live in ‘a jungle full of poisonous snakes’. That jungle has to be tamed and controlled. That means we must have the back-stop of nuclear forces for the indefinite future.

Changing the Cold War mindset

The alternative is to recognize that such an outlook is self-defeating. It is best described as ‘liddism’ – keeping the lid on things rather than acknowledging the underlying problems. The main security issues for most of the world’s people are matters such as the widening socio-economic divide, climate change and resource scarcity. If the world’s élites try to close the castle gates and preserve their lifestyles, they will simply end up with an embittered environment in which everyone becomes less secure.

The very fact that nuclear weapons retain their salience is evidence of an utter lack of new thinking by our political leaders. We are still stuck with Cold War attitudes that are at least two decades out of date. But changing this mindset and moving towards an outlook that addresses the real security threats facing the world will require not just the efforts of dedicated anti-nuclear campaigners but the combined work of development and environment activists, North and South.

Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

Nato's lost cause

Ellie Keen — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:44:13 +0000

In the latest clashes on the Pakistan-Afghan border, Nato troops have killed 11 Pakistani soldiers and injured many more, creating a serious crisis in the country and angering the Pakistan military high command, already split on the question.

US failure in Afghanistan is now evident and Nato desperation only too visible. Spreading the war to Pakistan would be a disaster for all sides. The Bush-Cheney era is drawing to a close, but it is unlikely that their replacements, despite the debacle in Iraq, will settle the American giant back to a digestive sleep.

The temporary cleavage that opened up between some EU states and Washington on Iraq was resolved after the occupation. They could all unite in Afghanistan and fight the good fight. This view has been strongly supported by every US presidential candidate in the run up to the 2008 elections, with Senator Barack Obama pressuring the White House to violate Pakistani sovereignty whenever necessary. He must be pleased.

That the “good war” has now turned bad is no longer disputed by a number of serious analysts in the US, even though there is no agreed prescription for dealing with the problems. Not least of which for some is the future of Nato, stranded far away from the Atlantic in a mountainous country, the majority of whose people, after offering a small window of opportunity to the occupiers, realised it was a mistake and became increasingly hostile.

The “neo-Taliban” control at least 20 districts in the Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan provinces where Nato troops replaced US soldiers. It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. As western intelligence agencies active in the country are fully aware, the situation is out of control. The model envisaged for the occupation was Panama. The then US secretary of State, Colin Powell, explained that: “The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means”. His knowledge of Afghanistan was limited.

Panama, populated by 3.5 million people, could not have been more different to Afghanistan, which has a population approaching 30 million and is geographically quite dissimilar. To even attempt a military occupation of the entire country would require a minimum of 200,000 troops.

A total of 8000 US troops were dispatched to seal the victory. The 4000 “peacekeepers” sent by other countries never left Kabul. The Germans concentrated on creating a police force that could run a police state and the Italians, without any sense of irony, were busy “training an Afghan judiciary” to deal with the drugs mafia. The British were in Helmand amidst the poppy fields. As for the new satellite states involved – Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, Estonians, Slovakians and Romanians – it was useful training for the future.

Five years later, in September 2006, an attempted bombing of the US embassy came close to hitting its target. A CIA assessment that same month painted a sombre picture, depicting Karzai and his regime as hopelessly corrupt and incapable of defending Afghanistan against the Taliban. Ronald E Neumann, the US Ambassador in Kabul supported this view and told an interviewer that the US faced “stark choices“ and defeat could only be avoided through
“multiple billions” over “multiple years”.

The repression, striking blindly, leaves people with no option but to back those trying to resist, especially in a part of the world where the culture of revenge is strong. When a whole community feels threatened it reinforces solidarity, regardless of the character or weakness of those who fight back.

Many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of Nato and the behaviour of its troops that they are hostile to the occupation. Nato itself has stopped pretending that its occupation has anything to do with the needs of the Afghan people and acknowledge it as an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Asia. As the Economist summarises, “Defeat would be a body blow not only to the Afghans, but” – and more importantly, of course – to the Nato alliance”. As ever, geopolitics prevail over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers.

The basing agreement signed by Washington with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of “democratisation and good governance” was made clear by Nato’s secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: the opportunity to site military facilities, and potentially nuclear missiles, in a country that borders China, Iran and Central Asia was too good to miss.

More strategically, Afghanistan has become a central theatre for uniting, and extending, the west’s power-political grip on the world order. On the one hand, it is argued, it provides an opportunity for the US to shrug off its failures in imposing its will in Iraq and persuading its allies to play a broader role there. In contrast, as one report (pdf) suggests, America and its allies “have greater unity of purpose in Afghanistan. The ultimate outcome of Nato’s effort to stabilise Afghanistan and US leadership of that effort may well affect the cohesiveness of the alliance and Washington’s ability to shape Nato’s future.”

There are at least two routes out of the Khyber impasse. The first and the worst would be to Balkanise the country. This appears to be the dominant pattern of imperial hegemony at the moment, but whereas the Kurds in Iraq and the Kosovans and others in the former Yugoslavia were willing client-nationalists, the likelihood of Tajiks or Hazaris playing this role effectively is more remote in Afghanistan.

The second alternative would require a withdrawal of all US/Nato forces, either preceded or followed by a regional pact to guarantee Afghan stability for the next ten years. Pakistan, Iran, India and Russia could guarantee and support a functioning national government, pledged to preserving the ethnic and religious diversity of Afghanistan and creating a space in which all its citizens can breathe, think and eat every day. It would need a serious social and economic plan to rebuild the country and provide the basic necessities for its people.

Nato’s failure cannot be simply blamed on the Pakistani government. It is a traditional colonial ploy to blame “outsiders” for internal problems. If anything, the war in Afghanistan has created a critical situation in two Pakistani frontier provinces and the use of the Pakistan army by Centcom has resulted in suicide terrorism in Lahore with the federal intelligence agency and a naval training college targeted by supporters of the Afghan insurgents.

The Pashtun majority in Afghanistan has always had close links to its fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan. The present border was an imposition by the British empire, but it has always remained porous. It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked 2500km border that separates the two countries. The solution is political, not military. And it should be sought in the region not in Washington or Brussels.

A pair of handcuffs for George Bush

Ellie Keen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:18:59 +0000

“Who’s the last visitor Gordon Brown needs at a time like this?” asks The Independent newspaper. “Step forward George Bush.” During his state visit on Sunday 15 June, Bush will be “entertained by the Queen at Windsor Castle” and “have dinner with Gordon Brown at Downing Street”.

He will also face a national demonstration organised by Stop the War Coalition and CND. As Andrew Murray, national chair of Stop the War told The Independent, “George Bush should be in The Hague facing war crimes charges over the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq since 2003, not being entertained in Downing Street. Gordon Brown doesn’t need a policy brief for this meeting, just a pair of handcuffs.”

The demonstration, which assembles in Parliament Square at 1pm, will include the delivery to Downing Street of numerous handcuffs, attached to which will be quotations from leading voices in the world of politics and the arts, giving their reasons why mass murderers like Bush are not welcome here (see below).

The United States’ government says George Bush’s visit is “to strengthen the transatlantic partnership and to celebrate the enduring friendship between our nations”. Our demonstration will represent the vast majority in this country who have always opposed the Iraq war and we will be
saying loud and clear that rather than welcoming George Bush, the British government should be denouncing his war crimes and Gordon Brown should be fulfilling his promise to develop an independent foreign policy by withdrawing British troops.

Please publicise the demonstration as widely as you can and encourage your friends, work colleagues, fellow students etc to join the demonstration on Sunday 15 June. Leaflets and posters are available from the Stop the War office (telephone 020 7278 6694).

GEORGE BUSH NOT WELCOME HERE
DEMONSTRATE SUNDAY 15 JUNE, 1.00PM
PARLIAMENT SQUARE, LONDON
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
Called by Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

THE SmashEDO Carnival Against the Arms Trade

Ellie Keen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:42:19 +0000

It’s not rocket science…

Nostrils still flaring from the stench of spray paint and pepper spray ….yer SchNEWS crew reports from the frontline of the anti-arms trade struggle, Brighton styleee. Yep its the event we’ve been relentlessly pushing for the last two months – the Carnival against the Arms Trade.

With red flags flying, three soundsystems, a cardboard tank and the inevitable samba band around 500 people were met by a surprisingly small number of police on the Level in Brighton. At around 1pm having confirmed the factory was open the march moved off towards EDO MBM, around a mile and a half away, chanting “Smash, Smash EDO.”

As soon as the crowd turned up the road leading to the weapons factory they were confronted with a pen constructed from crash barriers and a section 14 crowd control order. Police obviously planned to contain the demo well away from the site, but the masked up-for-it crowd of activists had other ideas. The cage was swiftly taken to bits and used to push against police lines. One soundsystem ended being used as a battering ram. One red bandanna sporting protester told SchNEWS “We came here to fight the arms trade – we’re not gonna be pushed into a playpen.”

As the police resorted to wild baton strikes to hold the crowd back they were outflanked and pushed down the road. The carnival then staged a noisy demo fully occupying the road outside the factory. Although it looked as if most of the workers had been sent home early – a few of the suits had hung around on the top floor perhaps to watch the action. Well they must have loved the bird’s eye view they got next…

Someone tugged at one of EDO’s massive steel gates which suddenly and miraculously opened. Half a dozen gobsmacked protesters waved the main crowd over. Flag wielding activists piled onto the factory’s forecourt and a few plucky individuals literally smashed EDO, putting in their windows. Anti-war slogans were sprayed on the building and MD Paul Hill’s SUV copped a few bricks. Police eventually forced people out with batons, pepper spray and dogs.

Eventually having made their point forcibly the crowd moved back into town before police re-reinforcements arrived. Ten arrests were made in total during the fighting, although many more were de-arrested in displays of crowd solidarity. Police violence hospitalised a number of others.

On the way back into town the scuffling continued with one motorbike cop getting his Chips as he was covered head to toe in white paint. In a pathetic display of childish temper tantrum one gang of riot police smashed the cardboard tank to pieces.

A Smash EDO spokesman said: “Overall the day was a victory for the campaign – in the face of police brutality we were able to show the massive disgust that exists at those who profit from death and misery. They might accuse us of being violent but anything that happened today pales in comparison to the damage inflicted by EDOs products in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Somalia. Congratulations to all who took part for their action and initiative and strength in refusing to be intimidated by the police aggression.”

THE COMPANY

EDO manufacture vital parts for “smart” bombs, used extensively in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Somalia, but they’re only as smart as the person in charge – ultimately the Commander in Chief, aka Dubya. EDO Corp were recently acquired by ITT in a multi-billion pound deal. ITT’s links to fascism go back to the 1930s. The founder Sosthenes Behn was the first foreign businessman received by Hitler after his seizure of power.

After the Iraq War (not that it’s mission accomplished) there has been a four year relentless campaign against EDO in Brighton. Despite an injunction under the Protection of Harassment Act (which failed) and over fifty arrests the campaign is still going strong. Their avowed aim is to expose EDO’s complicity in war crimes and shut them down. There are regular Wednesday afternoon demos when workers leave the factory.

For more info about the Smash EDO Campaign See www.smashedo.org.uk

* For more coverage of the Carnival Against The Arms Trade with photos see www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2008/edo

* Webpage for the Carnival www.smashedo.org.uk/carnival

* ON THE VERGE – The Smash EDO Campaign Film, produced by SchMOVIES, the film police tried to ban, is available to buy for £6 incl p&p (profits to Smash EDO) or download – see www.schnews.org.uk/schmovies/on-the-verge

The Bombs Didn't Work

Ellie Keen — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:12:41 +0000

The two big war and peace issues involving the UK since the founding of Scottish Left Review have been the Afghan and Iraq wars and the further entrenchment of Britain’s nuclear commitment with the decision to undertake the Trident renewal programme. The enthusiastic militarism of New Labour went further than most people on the left could have expected and, far from there being any interest in phasing out the Trident base, we had the decision to commit us to another fifty years of nuclear weapons (all of them now in Scotland).

SLR was far from being alone as a critic of these decisions. That went well beyond the traditional left and the peace organisations and involved much of civic Scotland. But we did produce a consistent critique since the Afghan war and have explored new approaches to international justice and peace issues. In the middle of the first phase of the Afghan war we said the implications were (January 2002):

1) The brutality threshold has been lowered. If you say you are engaged in an anti-terrorist campaign, you can do anything no matter how brutal and the NATO powers will give at least tacit support. You can destroy a whole city as in Chechnya or hundreds of Kurdish villages in Turkey and this will be ‘understood’.
2) Civil rights are disposable. If you say it is in the name of anti-terrorism, you can lock people up without trial or access any form of private communication.
3) The cowboys are in charge. International institutions and treaties are completely marginalised and the US will do what it wants, where it wants.
4) The UK is seen by the rest of the world as the European voice of America, just another client state.
5) Unless those with grievances are encouraged to develop non-violent resistance strategies, terrorism will be regarded as the only way to make an impact. The type of terrorism will become even more underground and difficult to track.
6) Good news for the arms industries. The message is that those with the most powerful modern weapons win. No-one may feel they can take on the US in a conventional military conflict but in relation to their own regional conflicts, the drive to acquire new weapons systems is set to increase.

A very accurate prediction except we have retrospectively to modify the last point. It was certainly good news for the arms industry and the security services industry but the ‘winning’ of this war and the later Iraq war was very short term.

There were many, including some on the left, who went along with the Afghan attack on the assumption that it would have a liberating effect from an oppressive regime, especially for women. Some simply thought it was inevitable that the US would have to find someone somewhere to bomb in revenge for 9/ll and that a ‘big bang’ success would be sufficient to satisfy the dented pride and prestige of the US. It might as well be the unpleasant Afghan regime as anywhere else and it was weak enough to be defeated quickly. Never mind the massive destruction of infrastructure and people in a poor country and the franchising of much of the fighting on the ground to brutal warlords. But even we underestimated how stupid and arrogant the Bush government would be in failing to focus on economic and social development for several years in Afghanistan before embarking on another major military adventure. While few can now defend the Iraq war, we are still subject to a stream of propaganda with the Labour Government, the Royals and the media spinning together a Boy’s Own tale of goodies, baddies and the prospect of victory, all of it just as deplorable and stupid as the initial war.

With the Iraq war we were in the mainstream and that mainstream has seldom been so right in its predictions. While opposition to the war brought Scotland’s largest demonstration for decades, it was one of the low points of the Scottish Labour Group at Holyrood that they refused to support a motion against the war that would have reflected the majority view of the Scottish public. In retrospect, it would have been opposition to this war and later to Trident renewal that could have given Scottish Labour a distinctive, non-Westminster identity but there was no vision or courage to offer that leadership.

The Iraq saga undermined most of what remained of Labour’s moral authority and, while there were individuals who honourably stood out against their leadership, the impact of the war diminished even further the numbers and conviction of the rank and file. On the other hand it encouraged alliance-building among all the others – the trade unions, the churches, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the SSP, the Greens, the Muslim community. This alliance was to continue around the other big war and peace issue – Trident – and was important, particularly for the SNP in helping it to gain acceptance among the left and civic activists.

In the third issue of SLR (February 2001), the late Tony Southall comprehensively outlined the case against Trident and the British nuclear role.

“When we take on Trident we should be clear that we’re taking on a critical part of the British capitalist state. Nuclear weapons were developed from 1946 when a state that had been getting economically weaker and politically less influential since the late 19th century tried to reassert itself by becoming the world’s third nuclear power and developing its own supposedly independent nuclear deterrent. Thus Britain was able to continue to justify a permanent position on the Security Council and its claim to sit at every table. The British bomb was one of the components in promoting the myth for its own population that Britons still ruled the waves. It took its place alongside the royal family, the supposedly democratic parliament, the legal system and a myriad of institutions that provided the kernel for the kind of flag-waving patriotism that’s a feature of English culture in particular……….It (the Blair Government) showed its manifesto commitment to pursuing worldwide nuclear disarmament was so much hot air as it voted against a UN resolution to set up a conference with exactly that aim.”

The only British nuclear weapons are now based at the Coulport/Faslane complex so the constitutional issue is closely interlinked with the disarmament issue. Were Scotland with full state powers to decide that Trident should go, it would be very difficult and expensive for Westminster to find a suitable site and build the necessary infrastructure. Campaigning against Trident had already accelerated over the past decade with the base blockades and hundreds of arrests so the announcement that the UK Government was proposing to spend billions on a new generation of nuclear weapons that would be operational for another fifty years was seen by many beyond the organised peace movement to be an outrageous decision and one that flew in the face of our commitments in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even before the vote was taken at Westminster, a massive and expensive project related to the new Trident programme was well under way at Aldermaston. This involved building the largest computer in Europe, a huge laser and other experimental design facilities and new bomb manufacturing development at Burghfield. The assumption was always that even if some Labour MPs rebelled, it would go through the Commons with Tory votes.

The reasons for taking what many, including some pro-nuclear sources, considered to be a premature decision was probably explained by technical developments in the US, the commercial interest of Lockheed Martin which runs Aldermaston, and the determination of Blair to commit to a long-term nuclear weapons strategy. It is to Brown’s shame that in the notorious Mansion House speech, he unequivocally said ‘Me Too’. This was a shock to many in Scotland who still believed that Brown would be different when he became Prime Minister. As with the Iraq war, opposition in Scotland covered a wide institutional range as well as a substantial popular majority.

But changes have taken place in Scotland over the last year. After the new Government came in last May, the Greens took the initiative to table a motion against Trident replacement. This time Labour abstained and the Liberal Democrats voted with the SNP and the Greens so the motion was passed with a substantial majority and is now official Holyrood policy. It has enabled the Scottish Government to convene a working group on Scotland Without Nuclear Weapons to examine what initiatives the Government could take within the devolution powers.

There is, of course, another dimension to the war and peace issues. What positive initiatives could we take in Scotland to promote peacemaking and global justice? Over the years in this magazine activists like Helen Stevens, Margaret Lynch, Judith Robertson, Liz Law have written about our need to develop alternatives to war and exploitation. Scotland needs to generate a new international vision. The Left has been right in its critique of militarism. It needs also to show that there are alternatives.

Isobel Lindsay is Vice Convener of Scottish CND

On the Importance of Peace Journalism

JamieSW — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:49:57 +0000

I have always been committed to peace journalism. In the early 1980s, for instance, I launched the group, Journalists Against Nuclear Extermination (JANE), to campaign for peace through the National Union of Journalists. And similar preoccupations have been ever-present in my journalism and academic writing and practice since then. My PhD (published as Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, The Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare by John Libbey in 1997) examined the press coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict. But it was essentially a protest (in appropriate academic prose) at the unnecessary massacres inflicted on defenceless Iraqis by the US-led coalition – and the way the mainstream media hid the reality of that horror behind the myth of heroic, precise warfare.

For me, it has always been clear that some of the most important responsibilities of the journalist are to promote peace, dialogue and understanding; to confront militarism in all its forms – and the stereotypes and lies on which it is based. And yet, while the mainstream media are awash in debates over citizen journalism and the impact of the internet on traditional routines and professional values, little is heard beyond a select group of activist reporters and academics about peace journalism.

One of the most original contributions to the debate over its practical and theoretical aspects appears in Peace Journalism by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick (Hawthorn Press, Stroud, 2005). Every journalist should be aware of it; every journalism education programme should include it in their reading lists. Most academic analysis of conflict reporting is quick to condemn. But this text is far more ambitious. It both highlights the media’s many failings and also offers convincing alternative strategies.

Lynch and McGoldrick, drawing on 30 years’ experience reporting for the BBC, ITV, Sky News, the London Independent and ABC Australia as well as teaching peace journalism at four universities, rightly call for a ‘journalistic revolution’. Drawing particularly on the peace research theories of Prof. Johan Galtung, they argue that most conflict coverage, thinking itself neutral and ‘objective’, is actually war journalism. It is violence and victory orientated, dehumanising the ‘enemy’, focusing on ‘our’ suffering, prioritising official sources and highlighting only the visible effects of violence (those killed and wounded and the material damage).

In contrast, peace journalism is solution-orientated, giving voice to the voiceless, humanising the ‘enemy’, exposing lies on all sides, highlighting peace initiatives and focusing on the invisible effects of violence (such as psychological trauma).

They then apply this theory to a series of case studies such as the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in February 1993, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the 2001 US attacks on Afghanistan, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, the terrorist attacks on Casablanca, the US/UK invasion of Iraq 2003. Dotted throughout the text are comments from practising journalists and advice from the authors. For instance, to resist war propaganda they advise journalists to be on the look out for shifting war aims, to avoid repeating claims which have not been independently verified, to avoid demonising a person or group and to remind their audience of when war propaganda turned out to be misleading.

The authors are also not afraid to tackle complex theory head-on. For instance, in a chapter titled ‘Why is the news the way it is?’ they leap confidently into the deep waters of Saussurean linguistics and Derrida’s concepts of deconstruction, logocentricism and the ‘transcendental signifier’. Perhaps it was wise to leave such difficult territory towards the end of the text.

There are some serious limitations to the text. For instance, the authors focus almost entirely on the mainstream media and thus fail to acknowledge the contribution of campaigning, alternative media (such as those linked to radical left, feminist, environmental, human rights causes) to the promotion of peace journalism. For instance, Peace News (currently edited by Milan Rai and Emily Johns) is an outstanding publication worth highlighting. Its international coverage is particularly impressive (see www.peacenews.info). So too are websites such as medialens (media monitoring), Indymedia (grassroots anti-war, environmental campaigns), counterpunch (investigative journalism site run by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair) and Dahrjamailiraq (showcasing the work of an outstanding freelance reporter in Iraq).

Lynch and McGoldrick also fail to acknowledge the important theoretical work of Chris Atton and Tony Harcup which have highlighted the ways in which alternative writers challenge dominant ideologies, journalistic routines and organisational structures and, in effect, promote peace journalism. Moreover, Lynch and McGoldrick lavish too much praise on the London Independent which they argue ‘more than any other newspaper’ fulfils the criteria of peace journalism. While the excellence of much of its reporting of the 2003 Iraq invasion (particularly by Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn) cannot be denied, critical research suggests that, in many respects, the newspaper reproduces many of the dominant news values of Fleet Street.

Ultimately, then, this text reminds us how crucial it is to look beyond the narrow confines of the mainstream media for inspirational models of peace journalism.

Links: