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Saturday, March 15th , 2008
Volume 7, No. 5
(Editor's note:
$1billion
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defense spending
$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war
$19.3 billion
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq
$25 billion
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war
$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush's Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again
$5 billion
Cost of 10 days' fighting in Iraq
$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war
3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa)
4 Articles 20 pages
1. Iraq War 'Caused Slowdown in the US'
2. Why Isn't Iraq in the 2008 Elections
3. Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison
1. IRAQ WAR 'CAUSED SLOWDOWN IN THE US'
BY
PETER WILSON
The Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003.
Australia also faced a real bill much greater than the $2.2billion in military spending reported last week by Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston, Professor Stiglitz said, pointing to higher oil prices and other indirect costs of the wars.
Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.
The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.
The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.
"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.
That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.
Professor Stiglitz, an academic at the Columbia Business School and a former economic adviser to president Bill Clinton, said a further $US500 billion was going to be spent on the fighting in the next two years and that could have been used more effectively to improve the security and quality of life of Americans and the rest of the world.
The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world, he said.
Just a few days' funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered, he said.
The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.
"When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion – and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.
"(Then defense secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said 'baloney', and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion.
"Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that."
Five years after the war, the US was still spending about $US50billion every three months on direct military costs, he said.
Professor Stiglitz and another Clinton administration economist, Linda Bilmes, have produced a book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, pulling together their research on the true cost of the war, which does not include the cost to Iraq.
One of the greatest discrepancies is that the official figures do not include the long-term healthcare and social benefits for injured servicemen, who are surviving previously fatal attacks because of improved body armour.
"The ratio of injuries to fatalities in a normal war is 2:1. In this war they admitted to 7:1 but a true number is (something) like 15:1."
Some 100,000 servicemen have been diagnosed with serious psychological problems and the soldiers doing the most tours of duty have not yet returned.
Professor Stiglitz attributed to the Iraq war $US5-$US10 of the almost $US80-a-barrel increase in oil prices since the start of the war, adding that it would have been reasonable to attribute more than $US35 of that rise to the war.
He said the British bill for its role in the war was about 20 times the pound stg. 1billion ($2.1 billion) that former prime minister Tony Blair estimated before the war.
The British Government was yesterday ordered to release details of its planning for the war, when the country's Information Commissioner backed a Freedom of Information request for the minutes of two cabinet meetings in the days before the war.
Commissioner Richard Thomas said that because of the importance of the decision to go to war, the public interest in disclosing the minutes outweighed the public interest in withholding the information.
2. WHY ISN'T IRAQ IN THE 2008 ELECTIONS?
(sponsored by Bikes Not Bombs.)
BY
NOAM CHOMSKY
Not very long ago, as you all recall, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the 2008 election, as it was in the midterm election two years ago. However, it's virtually disappeared off the radar screen, which has solicited some puzzlement among the punditry.
Actually, the reason is not very obscure. It was cogently explained forty years ago, when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was being bombed to shreds at triple the level of the bombing of the north and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina. However, the war was not going very well, so the former hawks were shifting towards doubts, among them the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, maybe the most distinguished historian of his generation, a Kennedy adviser, who -- when he and Kennedy, other Kennedy liberals were beginning to -- reluctantly beginning to shift from a dedication to victory to a more dovish position.
And Schlesinger explained the reasons. He explained that -- I'll quote him now -- "Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned," he said, "to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won't work, at an acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought."
Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And it is a land of wreck and ruin. You've already heard a few words; I don't have to review the facts. The highly regarded British polling agency, Oxford Research Bureau, has just updated its estimate of deaths. Their new estimate a couple of days ago is 1.3 million. That's excluding two of the most violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar. On the side, it's kind of intriguing to observe the ferocity of the debate over the actual number of deaths. There's an assumption on the part of the hawks that if we only killed a couple hundred thousand people, it would be OK, so we shouldn't accept the higher estimates. You can go along with that if you like.
Uncontroversially, there are over two million displaced within Iraq. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees who have fled the wreckage of Iraq aren't totally wiped out. That includes most of the professional classes. But that welcome is fading, because Jordan and Syria receive no support from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London, and therefore they cannot accept that huge burden for very long. It's going to leave those two-and-a-half million refugees who fled in even more desperate straits.
The sectarian warfare that was created by the invasion never -- nothing like that had ever existed before. That has devastated the country, as you know. Much of the country has been subjected to quite brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias. That's the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy that's developed by the revered "Lord Petraeus," I guess we should describe him, considering the way he's treated. He won his fame by pacifying Mosul a couple of years ago. It's now the scene of some of the most extreme violence in the country.
One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the ongoing tragedy, Nir Rosen, has just written an epitaph entitled "The Death of Iraq" in the very mainstream and quite important journal Current History. He writes that "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century," which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as well. "Only fools talk of 'solutions' now," he went on. "There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."
But Iraq is, in fact, the marginal issue, and the reasons are the traditional ones, the traditional reasoning and attitudes of the liberal doves who all pray now, as they did forty years ago, that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in this land of wreck and ruin. And they're either encouraged or silenced by the good news about Iraq.
And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq -- euphemistically it's called the Multi-National Force-Iraq, because they have, I think, three polls there somewhere -- that the occupying army carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. It's an important part of counterinsurgency or any form of domination. You want to know what your subjects are thinking. And it released a report last December. It was a study of focus groups, and it was uncharacteristically upbeat. The report concluded -- I'll quote it -- that the survey of focus groups "provides very strong evidence" that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to what's being claimed. The survey found that a sense of "optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis" from all over the country and all walks of life. This discovery of "shared beliefs" among Iraqis throughout the country is "good news, according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago.
Well, the "shared beliefs" are identified in the report. I'll quote de Young: "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the US military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of [what they call] 'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation." So those are the "shared beliefs." According to the Iraqis then, there's hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence and the other atrocities, if they withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis. That's pretty much the same as what's been found in earlier polls, so it's not all that surprising. Well, that's the good news: "shared beliefs."
The report didn't mention some other good news, so I'll add it. Iraqis, it appears, accept the highest values of Americans. That ought to be good news. Specifically, they accept the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced Nazi war criminals to hanging for such crimes as supporting aggression and preemptive war. It was the main charge against von Ribbentrop, for example, whose position-- in the Nazi regime was that of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The Tribunal defined aggression very straightforwardly: aggression, in its words, is the "invasion of its armed forces" by one state "of the territory of another state." That's simple. Obviously, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan are textbook examples of aggression. And the Tribunal, as I'm sure you know, went on to characterize aggression as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself all the accumulated evil of the whole." So everything that follows from the aggression is part of the evil of the aggression.
Well, the good news from the US military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders. I think they were not asked whether their acceptance of American values extends to the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at Nuremberg. He forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply the principles to ourselves.
Well, needless to say, US opinion, shared with the West generally, flatly rejects the lofty American values that were professed at Nuremberg, indeed regards them as bordering on obscene, as you could quickly discover if you try experimenting by suggesting that these values should be observed, as Iraqis insist. It's an interesting illustration of the reality, some of the reality, that lies behind the famous "clash of civilizations." Maybe not exactly the way we like to look at it.
There was a poll a few days ago, a really major poll, just released, which found that 75 percent of Americans believe that US foreign policy is driving the dissatisfaction with America abroad, and more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values and of the American people are also to blame. Dissatisfaction is a kind of an understatement. The United States has become increasingly the most feared and often hated country in the world. Well, that perception is in fact incorrect. It's fed by propaganda. There's very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction -- that is, the hatred and the anger -- they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they're rejected by the US government and by US elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.
There's other "good news" that's been reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that was during the extravaganza that was staged last September 11th. September 11th, you might ask why the timing? Well, a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. They can't come out and say it straight out, so therefore you sort of insinuate it by devices like this. It's intended to indicate, as they used to say outright but are now too embarrassed to say, except maybe Cheney, that by committing the supreme international crime, they were defending the world against terror, which, in fact, increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to a recent analysis by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.
Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to explain the good news. The figures they provided on September 11th showed that the Iraqi government was greatly accelerating spending on reconstruction, which is good news indeed and remained so until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth of what Petraeus and Crocker reported and, in fact, a 50 percent decline from the previous year.
Well, more good news is the decline in sectarian violence, that's attributable in part to the murderous ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion. The result of it is there are simply fewer people to kill, so sectarian violence declines. It's also attributable to the new counterinsurgency doctrine, Washington's decision to support the tribal groups that had already organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to the decision of the Sadr's Mahdi army to consolidate its gains to stop direct fighting. And politically, that's what the press calls "halting aggression" by the Mahdi army. Notice that only Iraqis can commit aggression in Iraq, or Iranians, of course, but no one else.
Well, it's possible that Petraeus' strategy may approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where -- I'll quote The New York Times a couple of weeks ago -- Chechnya, the fighting is now "limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom" after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack. Well, maybe some day Baghdad and Fallujah also will enjoy, to continue the quote, "electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new businesses opening and the city's main streets repaved," as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, in the light of the likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian violence, adding to the "accumulated evil" of the aggression. Well, if Russians share the beliefs and attitudes of elite liberal intellectuals in the West, then they must be praising Putin's "wisdom and statesmanship" for his achievements in Chechnya, formerly that they had turned into a land of wreck and ruin and are now rebuilding. Great achievement.
A few days ago, The New York Times -- the military and Iraq expert of The New York Times, Michael Gordon, wrote a comprehensive review, first-page comprehensive review, of the options for Iraq that are being faced by the candidates. And he went through them in detail, described the pluses and minuses and so on, interviewing political leaders, the candidates, experts, etc. There was one voice missing: Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected; rather, it's not mentioned. And it seems that there was no notice of that fact, which makes sense, because it's typical. It makes sense on the tacit assumption that underlies almost all discourse on international affairs. The tacit assumption, without which none of it makes any sense, is that we own the world. So, what does it matter what others think? They're "unpeople," nice term invented by British diplomatic historian [Mark] Curtis, based on a series of outstanding volumes on Britain's crimes of empire -- outstanding work, therefore deeply hidden. So there are the "unpeople" out there, and then there are the owners -- that's us -- and we don't have to listen to the "unpeople."
Last month, Panama declared a Day of Mourning to commemorate the US invasion -- that's under George Bush no. 1 -- that killed thousands of poor Panamanians when the US bombed the El Chorillo slums and other poor areas, so Panamanian human rights organizations claim. We don't actually know, because we never count our crimes. Victors don't do that; only the defeated. It aroused no interest here; there's barely a mention of the Day of Mourning. And there's also no interest in the fact that Bush 1's invasion of Panama was a clear case of aggression, to which the Nuremberg principles apply, and it was apparently more deadly, in fact possibly much more deadly, than Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, happened a few months later. But it makes sense that there would be no interest in that, because we own the world, and Saddam didn't, so the acts are quite different.
It's also of no interest that, at that time of the time of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the greatest fear in Washington was that Saddam would imitate what the United States had just done in Panama, namely install a client government and then leave. That's the main reason why Washington blocked diplomacy in quite interesting ways, with almost complete media cooperation. There's actually one exception in the US media. But none of this gets any commentary. However, it does merit a lead story a few days later, when the Panamanian National Assembly was opened by President Pedro Gonzalez, who's charged by Washington with killing two American soldiers during a protest against President Bush no.1, against his visit two years after the invasion. The charges were dismissed by Panamanian courts, but they're upheld by the owner of the world, so he can't travel, and that got a story.
Well, to take just one last illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino, veteran correspondent, writes that "Iran's intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." Well, the phrase "the rest of the world" is an interesting one. The rest of the world happens to exclude the vast majority of the world, namely the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran's right to enrich uranium in accordance with the rights granted by its being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But they're not part of the world, even though they're the large majority, because they don't reflexively accept US orders, and commentary like that is unremarkable and unnoticed. You're part of the world if you do what we say, obviously. Otherwise, you're "unpeople."
Well, we might, since we're on Iran, might tarry for a moment and ask whether there's any solution to the US-Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons, which is extremely dangerous. Here's one idea. First point, Iran should be permitted to develop nuclear energy, but not nuclear weapons, as the Non-Proliferation Treaty determines.
Second point is that there should be a nuclear weapons-free zone in the entire region, Iran to Israel, including any US forces that are present there. Actually, though it's never reported, the United States is committed to that position. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it appealed to a UN resolution, Resolution 687, which called upon Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction. That was the flimsy legal principle invoked to justify the invasion. And if you look at Resolution 687, you discover that one of its provisions is that the US and other powers must work to develop a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, including that entire region. So we're committed to it, and that's the second element of this proposal.
The third element of the proposal is that the United States should accept the Non-Proliferation Treaty, a position which happens to be supported by 82 percent of Americans, namely that it should accept the requirement, in fact the legal requirement, as the World Court determined, to move to make good-faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.
And a fourth proposal is that the US should turn to diplomacy, and it should end any threats against Iran. The threats are themselves crimes. They're in violation of the UN Charter, which bars the threat or use of force.
Well, of course, these four proposals -- again, Iran should have nuclear energy, but not nuclear weapons; there should be a weapons-free zone throughout the region; the US should accept the Non-Proliferation Treaty; there should be a turn to diplomacy and an end to threats -- these are almost unmentionable in the United States. Not a single candidate would endorse any part of them, and they're never discussed, and so on.
However, the proposals are not original. They happen to be the position of the overwhelming majority of the American population. And interestingly, that's also true in Iran; roughly the same overwhelming majority accepts all of these proposals. But that's -- the results come from the world's most prestigious polling agency, but not reported, as far as I could discover, and certainly not considered. If they were ever mentioned, they would be dismissed with the phrase "politically impossible," which is probably correct. It's only the position of the large majority of the population, kind of like national health care, but not of the people that count. So there are plenty of "unpeople" here, too -- in fact, the large majority. Americans share this property of being "unpeople" with most of the rest of the world. In fact, if the United States and Iran were functioning, not merely formal, democracies, then this dangerous crisis might be readily resolved by a functioning democracy -- I mean, one in which public opinion plays some role in determining policy, rather than being excluded -- in fact, unmentioned, because, after all, they're "unpeople."
Well, while we're on Iran, I guess I might as well turn to the third member of the famous Axis of Evil: North Korea. There is an official story -- read it right now -- is that the official story is this, that after having been compelled to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear weapons and the facilities, after having been compelled to agree to that, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its usual devious way. So The New York Times headline reads "The United States Sees Stalling by North Korea on Nuclear Pact." And the article then details the charges of how North Korea is not going through with its responsibility. It's not releasing information that it's promised to release. If you read the story to the last paragraph -- and that's always a good idea; that's where the interesting news usually is when you read a news story -- but if you manage to get to the last paragraph, you discover that it's the United States that has backed down on the pledges made in the agreement.
The US just refused to supply it. It's refused only -- it's supplied only 85 percent of the fuel that it promised, and it was supposed to improve diplomatic relations, of course not doing that. Well, that's quite normal.
If you want to find out what's going on in the US-North Korea nuclear standoff, it's better -- you have to go to the specialist literature, which is uniform on it, nothing hidden, and in fact sort of sneaks out into small print in the press reports, as I mentioned. What you find is that North -- I mean, North Korea may be the most hideous state in the world, but that's not the point here. Its position has been pretty pragmatic. It's kind of tit-for-tat. The United States gets more aggressive, they get more aggressive. The United States moves towards diplomacy and negotiations, they do the same.
So when President Bush came in, there was an agreement -- it was called the Framework Agreement that had been established in 1994 -- and neither the US nor North Korea was quite living up to it. But it was more or less functioning. At that time, North Korea, under the Framework Agreement, had stopped any testing of long-range missiles. It had maybe one or two bombs worth of plutonium, and it was verifiably not making more. Now, that was when George Bush entered the scene. And now it has eight to ten bombs, long-range missiles, and it's developing plutonium.
And there's a reason. The Bush regime immediately moved to a very aggressive stance. The Axis of Evil speech was one example. Intelligence was released claiming that North Korea was carrying out -- was cheating, had clandestine programs. It's rather interesting that these intelligence reports, five years later, have been quietly rescinded as probably inadequate. The reason presumably is that if an agreement is reached, there will be inspectors in North Korea, and they'll find that this intelligence had as much validity as the claims about Iraq, so they're being withdrawn. Well, North Korea responded to all of this by ratcheting up its missile and weapons development.
In September 2005, under pressure, the United States did agree to negotiations, and there was an outcome. September 2005, North Korea agreed to abandon -- quoting -- "all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs" and to allow international inspection. That would be in return for international aid, mainly from the United States, and a non-aggression pledge from the US and an agreement that the two sides -- I'm quoting -- would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations."
Well, the United States, the Bush administration, had an instant reaction. It instantly renewed the threat of force. It froze North Korean funds in foreign banks. It disbanded the consortium that was supposed meet to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor. So North Korea returned to its weapons and missile development, carried out a weapons test, and confrontation escalated. Well, again, under international pressure and with its foreign policy collapsing, Washington returned to negotiations. That led to an agreement, which Washington is now scuttling.
There's an earlier history, an interesting one. You recall a couple of weeks ago, there was a mysterious Israeli bombing in northern Syria, never explained, but it a sort of hinted that this had something to do with Syria building nuclear facilities with the help of North Korea. Pretty unlikely, but whether it's true or not, there's an interesting background, which wasn't mentioned. In 1993, Israel and North Korea were on the verge of an agreement, in which Israel would recognize North Korea and in return North Korea would agree to terminate any weapons-related -- missile, nuclear, other -- any weapons-related activity in the Middle East. That would have been an enormous boon to Israel's security. But the owner of the world stepped in. Clinton ordered them to refuse. Of course, you have to listen to the master's voice. So that ended that. And it may be that there are North Korean activities in the Middle East that we don't know about.
Well, let me finally return to the first member of the Axis of Evil: Iraq. Washington does have expectations, and they're explicit. There are outlined in a Declaration of Principles that was agreed upon, if you can call it that, between the United States and the US-backed, US-installed Iraqi government, a government under military occupation. The two of them issued the Declaration of Principles. It allows US forces to remain indefinitely in Iraq in order to "deter foreign aggression" -- well, the only aggression in sight is from the United States, but that's not aggression, by definition -- and also to facilitate and encourage "the flow of foreign investments [to] Iraq, especially American investments." I'm quoting. That's an unusually brazen expression of imperial will.
In fact, it was heightened a few days ago, when George Bush issued another one of his signing statements declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that forbids spending taxpayer money -- I'm quoting -- "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of [United States} Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise [United States] control of the oil resources of Iraq." OK? Shortly after, the New York Times reported that Washington "insists" -- if you own the world, you insist -- "insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations," a demand that "faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state." It's supposed to be more third world irrationality.
So, in brief, the United States is now insisting that Iraq must agree to allow permanent US military installations, provide the United -- grant the United States the right to conduct combat operations freely, and to guarantee US control over the oil resources of Iraq. OK? It's all very explicit, on the table. It's kind of interesting that these reports do not elicit any reflection on the reasons why the United States invaded Iraq. You've heard those reasons offered, but they were dismissed with ridicule. Now they're openly conceded to be accurate, but not eliciting any retraction or even any reflection.
3. RECORD-HIGH RATIO OF AMERICANS IN PRISON
(For First Time in US History, More Than 1 in Every 100 Americans Is Behind Bars)
BY
DAVID CRARY
For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America's rank as the world's No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.
Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it's more than any other nation.
The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.
The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," the report said.
Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are pressuring many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft on crime.
"We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets," she said in an interview. "They want to be tough on crime. They want to be a law-and-order state. But they also want to save money, and they want to be effective."
The report cited Kansas and Texas as states that have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. They are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.
"The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens," the report said.
While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.
"We need to be smarter," said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We're not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes. But we're also probably incarcerating people who don't need to be."
According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.
The largest percentage increase — 12 percent — was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.
The report was compiled by the Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.
"Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers," said the project's director, Adam Gelb.
According to the report, the average annual cost per prisoner was $23,876, with Rhode Island spending the most ($44,860) and Louisiana the least ($13,009). It said California — which faces a $16 billion budget shortfall — spent $8.8 billion on corrections last year, while Texas, which has slightly more inmates, was a distant second with spending of $3.3 billion.
On average, states spend 6.8 percent of their general fund dollars on corrections, the report said. Oregon had the highest spending rate, at 10.9 percent; Alabama the lowest at 2.6 percent.
Four states — Vermont, Michigan, Oregon and Connecticut — now spend more on corrections than they do on higher education, the report said.
"These sad facts reflect a very distorted set of national priorities," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, referring to the full report. "Perhaps, if we adequately invested in our children and in education, kids who now grow up to be criminals could become productive workers and taxpayers."
The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect an increase in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.
"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."
The racial disparity for women also is stark. One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group.
The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails. That's out of almost 230 million American adults.
The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10.
The U.S. also is among the world leaders in capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, its 53 executions in 2006 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.
by
Scott Ritter
Imad Mughniyeh is dead, killed in a Feb. 12 car bomb attack carried out by as yet unidentified assailants in a Damascus suburb. Mughniyeh, a Lebanese, had been the head of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, responsible for the external operations of that organization’s military wing. He was 48 years old. Since coming into prominence during the bloody years of Lebanon’s civil war (1976-79), Mughniyeh had built a résumé of operations that, depending on one’s perspective, established him as either one of the world’s foremost terrorists or freedom fighters. Few outside Lebanon, Syria and Iran will regard him as anything other than a terrorist. He is alleged to have carried out numerous attacks against the United States, killing hundreds, but for me, a former Marine, it is the loss of 241 of my fellow servicemen, the majority of them Marines, in an attack on a Beirut barracks attributed to Mughniyeh that will forever cement him in my mind as a mortal enemy.
That Mughniyeh deserved what he got is, in my opinion, not a matter up for debate. When one lives by the sword, he should expect to perish in the same fashion. Mughniyeh is alleged to be the mastermind of a number of horrific attacks that killed hundreds of people, military and civilian alike. Some of his actions have been acknowledged by those who support him, such as the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, which resulted in the murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem. Other alleged attacks, such as the bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and the bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina two years later, have been denied by Hezbollah. Most recently, Hezbollah acknowledged that Mughniyeh had played a significant role in the summer 2006 border war with Israel; that conflict was initiated by an attack that he probably masterminded, an attack in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two others were abducted. There is no doubt that Mughniyeh was personally responsible for any number of attacks, acknowledged or not. Today Mughniyeh lies dead and buried in a land which continues to be torn asunder, largely because of the actions of men like him.
And yet anyone who thinks Mughniyeh’s demise somehow improves the overall situation in the Middle East is sadly mistaken. Hezbollah has appointed his successor, and in light of Hezbollah’s extensive experience and depth, whoever has taken the reins from the slain Mughniyeh will no doubt possess similar nefarious tenacity and imagination. As will whoever replaces the successor when he perishes, and on and on. As with the killing of al-Qaida’s purported No. 3, Abu Laith al-Libi, in Pakistan on Jan. 29 by a missile-equipped CIA unmanned drone, the impact of taking out one individual is minimized when the entire structure of the organization the individual served remains intact, and the cause of the organization, in the eyes of those who support it, remains just.
Indeed, as was so in both the Mughniyeh and al-Libi operations, the violent removal of an individual in isolation often does more harm than good, since it inflames tensions and undermines any progress toward a lasting resolution of the underlying problem. In the case of al-Libi, the CIA attack was conducted unilaterally over Pakistani airspace, without permission of the Pakistani government. This blatant violation of sovereignty by the United States could have detrimental ramifications well beyond any short-term benefit gained by killing al-Libi. And Mughniyeh’s assassination has incensed Hezbollah during a time of increased tension, raising the possibility of renewed conflict with Israel, a conflict that could easily spin out of control and spark an even larger regional conflict. While many tout such targeted killings as a critical element of any larger war on terror, the fact is such actions rarely succeed in facilitating an easing of terrorism, but rather accelerate and exacerbate the conditions that spawn it.
Radical Islamic fundamentalism of the sort that produces an Imad Mughniyeh is a nebulous entity lacking a central theme, cause, creed or motivating factor, save one: the lure of “martyrdom.” In most organizations, the elimination of a top leader would signal a setback, but the martyrdom of Mughniyeh simply motivates those who follow to stay the course. Those who wage jihad, or holy war, tend to view martyrdom not only as a risk worth taking but as a noble and just end in itself. As such, operations that kill jihadists like Mughniyeh, when viewed in isolation, are self-defeating. And if a policy countering the work of jihadists consists of little more than stringing together targeted assassinations, it is a policy doomed to fail.
The key to winning the so-called global war on terror hinges not on our ability to kill terrorists but rather our ability to create conditions that stop producing terrorists. History will show that the assassination of Mughniyeh produced far more terrorists, and far more terrorism, than if he had been left to live. Left to live, however, does not mean left alone. Any policy direction that de-emphasizes violence must articulate some sort of counter to the lure of jihad. There must be a policy of jihad de-legitimization. Unfortunately, the policies of the United States and Israel, in reacting to terror, have done more to legitimize jihad and the resultant acts of terror than anything else. An assassination not only energizes the base of a terrorist organization but, in the case of Mughniyeh, rallies to the cause of Hezbollah the fractured constituencies of global terror, the nebulous mafia of “radical Islamic fundamentalism” ignorantly referred to in certain circles as Islamofascism, that otherwise would have remained neutral or even in opposition.
Contrary to the statements of President George W. Bush and members of his administration, there is no global nexus of radical Islamic terror. There is a growing number of Islamic groups and organizations whose actions have become increasingly radicalized in the past decades, some of which have assumed tactics and methods that can be classified as terrorism. There will be those who will point out that Mughniyeh was in Damascus ostensibly to meet with Hamas leaders about a coordinated strategy for dealing with Israel and say that this, in fact, proves that Hezbollah and Hamas are working the same agenda. These same people will note that past statements made by senior al-Qaida figures, including Osama bin Laden, have praised the work of Hamas, and will conclude that Hamas and al-Qaida are working the same agenda. And some will note that bin Laden himself at one time opened a training camp for Shiite jihadists, thereby theoretically bringing Hezbollah and its Iranian masters (both exclusively Shiite entities) into line with al-Qaida (an exclusively Sunni establishment). But to claim that Hezbollah is Hamas, that Hamas is al-Qaida, and that al-Qaida is Hezbollah is wrong.
Assessments of this sort put forth by the Bush administration and others fly in the face of reality and fact. Coordination between Sunni and Shiite is anathema for most Sunni fundamentalists, who view the Shiites as apostates; al-Qaida training literature places the Shiite as the second-greatest enemy of Islam, behind Sunni heretics, and ahead of Israel and the United States. Iran nearly fought a war with the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies in 1999, following the Taliban’s massacre of thousands of Shiite Hazara in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, along with several Iranian diplomats and their families. Many of the more extreme elements within al-Qaida are known as “taqfiris,” or those who believe in the repudiation and elimination from Islam of all impure elements. To them, the Shiites are among the most impure. The natural inclination between Shiite and Sunni, especially at the level of fundamentalists, is to oppose one another, more often than not violently. The concept of a “nexus of terror” naturally linking these two forces together is difficult to imagine, let alone document. It would take a compelling cause for any such linkage to be formed, directly or indirectly. Such a cause exists, and it can be defined by one word: Palestine.
The cause of Palestine is not a natural rallying point for most Sunni fundamentalists associated with al-Qaida. For all the language of global jihad, most Sunni fundamentalists are in fact quite parochial, focused primarily on “cleansing” Islam only insofar as it impacts them personally. Thus, an Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood is almost exclusively focused on ridding Egypt of “heretics” such as President Hosni Mubarak, and not supporting global jihad or the Palestinian cause. Similarly, Sunni fundamentalists in Afghanistan are more concerned with establishing Islamic purity in their respective areas than they are with exporting Islam abroad. While there are those elements of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism that do in fact espouse global jihad, they are very much in the minority and, more critically, isolated from any traditional foundation of support. Stateless, these extremists are prone to being isolated from the rest of Islam due to a combination of conditions-their inability to bond with the natural fabric of Islamic society (family, tribe and nation), and the violence of their actions, which are rejected by nearly the entire Islamic world. These stateless jihadists are in fact little more than parasites, and they require a host cause from which they can nourish. Palestine represents such a cause.
One of bin Laden’s overarching objectives was to get the United States to commit to a course of action that pitted it in a life-and-death struggle with Islam. The horrific attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were intended to accomplish this, but in fact backfired when the majority of Islam expressed revulsion at the murder of thousands of innocents. It took the invasion of Iraq by the United States to breathe life into bin Laden’s dream. Afghanistan today remains a remote battleground in the “global war on terror,” with American forces engaged in little more than a fruitless manhunt amid the backdrop of an internal struggle for power within Afghanistan and Pakistan. The American invasion of Iraq created the spectacle of a Christian nation invading and occupying, in brutal fashion, a Muslim people (albeit ruled by a secular dictator). But even this horrific blunder by the United States, left in isolation, was not enough to inspire a universal condemnation by the Islamic world, if for no other reason than that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was viewed by most Muslim nations as an embarrassment. The resistance to the American occupation of Iraq comes almost exclusively from Iraqi sources, with foreign jihadists comprising a distinct minority used more as disposable munitions (i.e., suicide bombers) than a philosophical center of gravity. But what the American invasion of Iraq did accomplish, coupled with the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan, was to create the impression of a larger struggle between the West and Islam that has come to be defined by a separate ongoing occupation, carried out by an American ally viewed by many in the Muslim world as more U.S. proxy than U.S. friend. The occupier in this case is Israel, with Palestine being the occupied territory. Since 9/11 didn’t capture the imagination of the Muslim world, and Afghanistan and Iraq couldn’t hold the attention of the Muslim world, bin Laden and his circle of followers have opportunistically picked up on Palestine as the issue of the moment. Unlike 9/11 and Iraq, it’s an issue that sticks.
Hamas rejects any effort to label its movement as extremist, and, though it is a religious organization, it has vociferously rebuffed all efforts undertaken by al-Qaida to piggyback the cause of global jihad onto the matter of a Palestinian homeland. Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal has repeatedly underscored that his group’s mission is to secure a Palestinian homeland and that its military struggle will never expand beyond confronting Israel inside Israel or in the occupied territories. While Hamas has no global agenda, it has attracted the attention of Islamist elements around the world beyond the parasitic opportunism of al-Qaida, including Hezbollah, the parent organization of Imad Mughniyeh.
Hezbollah began as a radical outgrowth of the Lebanese Shiite militia group known as Amal. In 1979, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, radical elements of the newly formed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command traveled to Lebanon in an effort to export the concept of Islamic revolution. Many of these Iranians took Lebanese wives and became an integral part of the Shiites of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. The call for Islamic revolution did not catch on, however, and many of the original cadres of Revolutionary Guards were transferred back to Iran when Iraq invaded. The Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982 dramatically altered the political landscape among the Shiites. The Iranians rushed reinforcements to Lebanon to support their Amal allies, until nearly 1,500 Revolutionary Guards were deployed. These forces helped fight the Israeli army to a standstill, and became a critical part of the resistance movement that grew inside Lebanon.
Mughniyeh came into prominence during this time, serving as a senior leader of a group known as Islamic Jihad. Under his direction, some 35 suicide attacks were launched against the forces of those nations seen as occupiers of Lebanon, including Israel and, later, the United States and France. By 1985, differences in the direction of resistance to the ongoing Israeli occupation had created a split within the Shiites of southern Lebanon, with the mainstream Amal militia taking a more moderate approach and a more radical wing of Amal, backed by the Revolutionary Guard, advocating a more aggressive stance. The radicals split from Amal in 1985 and created their own organization, known as the Party of God, or Hezbollah. Although Lebanese, Hezbollah, as a Shiite-based religious organization, recognized the supreme leader of Iran as its highest political authority and looked to Tehran for final approval of most major decisions. With the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Hezbollah increasingly assumed a more independent posture, although it remained strongly influenced by Iran. Hezbollah had an almost singular focus on achieving the liberation of Lebanon from Israeli occupation, a goal it was surprisingly able to achieve in 2000 through tenacity and the force of arms.
Links between Hezbollah and Hamas were for all intents and purposes nonexistent before 2002. When Israeli forces raided the West Bank and detained Marwan Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian figure, Hezbollah head Hasan Nasrullah expressed his support of Palestinian resistance to an Israeli occupation of Palestine, which he felt paralleled the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Barghouti headed a wing of the PLO known as Tanzim. Tanzim had become a very effective and violent movement resisting Israel and was gradually drifting away from embracing what it viewed as the more accommodating policies of the PLO and toward the more active resistance embraced by Hamas. When Israel assassinated the former head of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, in 2004, Nasrullah publicly declared the forces of Hezbollah to be at the disposal of Hamas.
But Hamas continues to maintain that it will limit its actions to the immediate theater of action in Israel and the occupied territories, and Hezbollah maintains that its military operations will be limited to protecting Lebanon from outside aggression and Israeli occupation. In 2004, the same year he promised support for Hamas, Nasrullah declared that any solution to the Palestinian problem that was acceptable to the Palestinians would be acceptable to Hezbollah. Far from embracing Osama bin Laden’s parasitic cry for global jihad in defense of Palestine, both Hamas and Hezbollah recognized the reality of Israel as a nation-state and were willing to deal with Israel within the context of the pre-1967 borders and respect for the rights of Palestinians. This posture seemed to be embraced by Hezbollah’s Iranian sponsors as well, insofar as a 2003 diplomatic outreach from Iran to the United States indicated both a willingness to respect Israel’s legitimate right to exist as a nation-state and a promise to help rein in the actions of Hezbollah and Hamas.
The rejection by the Bush administration of the 2003 Iranian initiative, Israel’s disastrous 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 and Israel’s virtual declaration of war against Hamas have combined to negatively influenced the situation vis-à-vis Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The policies of the Bush administration-from opposing a cease-fire in Lebanon in 2006 while a thousand Lebanese civilians were being bombed to death by Israel and over a hundred Israelis, mostly soldiers, were being killed by Hezbollah, to promoting a confrontational policy centered on regime change with Iran-have only exacerbated an already difficult situation. The assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, which, despite denials, might have been a direct action undertaken by the Israeli Mossad, threatens to turn a volatile situation into an explosive one. If Hezbollah carries out its promise of retaliation against Israel, the northern border of Israel could again explode in violence that, this time, might extend all the way to Iran, drawing in the U.S. military as well. The end result would be further radicalization of forces like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as Iran, and the creation of a casus belli for radical Islamic fundamentalists worldwide, many of whom will be drawn in by the opportunistic calls for jihad issued by bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders; in short, a victory for radical Islamic fundamentalism.
This is a fight that didn’t need to happen, and should never have been allowed to develop in this manner. Whatever Mughniyeh had done in the past, the fact is that for more than a decade this “world’s most dangerous man” had been contained by the passage of time. The events that created a Mughniyeh in Lebanon were no longer in play, and his role in the greater scheme of things had been significantly reduced. Simply put, Mughniyeh was no longer a key player for Hezbollah or any other group, and was fully subject to being contained by those elements that favored moderation and diplomacy over extremism and violence. Now he is dead, and there is the great possibility of even more violence being done in the name of a man who was, for the most part, a vestige of times gone by, and no longer relevant.
This is the Mughniyeh Enigma. Do we hold on to the events of the past, seeking to avenge all wrongs regardless of the consequences? Did Mughniyeh deserve to be brought to justice? Yes. Was justice served by assassinating him? No. The only thing accomplished was a simple act of revenge that no court of law would recognize as justice. If the issue of greater good, especially within the context of the “global war on terror,” is considered, it becomes clear that by far the greater good would have been served by letting Mughniyeh be and allowing his enemies to focus on the issue that exacerbates all efforts to quash radical Islamic extremism, whether it is derived from a parasitic organization like al-Qaida or from regional resistance-oriented groups like Hamas and Hezbollah: Palestine. Resolving the Palestinian issue would not cure all that ails the Middle East. But it would go a long way in restoring a sense of stability, a foundation of peace upon which any lasting agreement between Israel and its neighbors, or for that matter the United States and the Middle East, might be built.
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