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Sunday, November 30th , 2008

Volume 7, No. 21

3 Articles, 26 Pages

(Editor's note: The whole present system of the officering and personnel of the army and navy of these states, and the spirit and letter of the trebly aristocratic rules and regulations is a monstrous exotic, a nuisance and results and belong here just as much as orders of nobility, or the Popes council of cardinals. I say if the present theory of our army and navy is sensible and true, then the rest of America is an unmitigated fraud. Walt Whitman)

1. "What Next?" The Elections, The Economy, And The World

2. This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for In Obama's White House

3. With Iran, Obama Needs More Carrot, Less Stick



1. "WHAT NEXT?" THE ELECTIONS, THE ECONOMY, AND THE WORLD

BY

NOAM CHOMSKY

(Editor's 2nd note: No attempt was made to correct the grammar or to supply missing words in the transcript)

Well known intellectual Noam Chomsky discussed the meaning of President-Elect Barack Obama’s victory and the possibilities ahead for real democratic change at a speech last week in Boston. It was his first public appearance since the election. Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of many influential books.




Well, let’s begin with the elections. The word that the rolls off of everyone’s tongue is historic. Historic election. And I agree with it. It was a historic election. To have a black family in the white house is a momentous achievement. In fact, it’s historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African-American and a woman. Both remarkable achievements. We go back say 40 years, it would have been unthinkable. So something’s happened to the country in 40 years. And what’s happened to the country- which is we’re not supposed to mention- is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s, which had an aftermath. So the feminist movement, mostly developed in the 70s-–the solidarity movements of the 80’s and on till today. And the activism did civilize the country. The country’s a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago and the historic achievements illustrate it. That’s also a lesson for what’s next.

What’s next will depend on whether the same thing happens. Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below. And the answer to what’s next depends on people like you. Nobody else can answer it. It’s not predictable. In some ways, the election—the election was surprising in some respects.

Going back to my bad prediction, If the financial crisis hadn’t taken place at the moment that it did, if it had been delayed a couple of months, I suspect that prediction would have been correct. But not speculating, one thing surprising about the election was that it wasn’t a landslide.
bq. By the usual criteria, you would expect the opposition party to win in a landslide under conditions like the ones that exist today. The incumbent president for eight years was so unpopular that his own party couldn’t mention his name and had to pretend to be opposing his policies. He presided over the worst record for ordinary people in post-war history, in terms of job growth, real wealth and so on. Just about everything the administration was touched just turned into a disaster. [The] country has reached the lowest level of standing in the world that it’s ever had. The economy was tanking. Several recessions are going on. Not just the ones on the front pages, the financial recession. There’s also a recession in the real economy. The productive economy, under circumstances and people know it. So 80% of the population say that the country’s going in the wrong direction. About 80% say the government doesn’t work to the benefit of the people, it works for the few and the special interests. A startling 94% complain that the government doesn’t pay any attention to the public will, and on like that. Under conditions like that, you would expect a landslide to a opposition almost whoever they are. And there wasn’t one.

So one might ask why wasn’t there a landslide? That goes off in an interesting direction. And other respects the outcome was pretty familiar. So once again, the election was essentially bought. 9 out of 10 of the victors outspent their opponents. Obama of course outspent McCain. If you look at the—and we don’t have final records yet from the final results, but they’re probably going to be pretty much like the preliminaries a couple of months ago. Which showed that both Obama and McCain were getting the bulk of their financing from the financial institutions and for Obama, law firms which means essentially lobbyists. That was about over a third a few months ago. But the final results will probably be the same. And there is a—the distribution of funding has over time been a pretty good predictor of what policies will be like for those of you who are interested, there’s very good scholarly work on this by Tom Ferguson in Umass Boston, what he calls the investment theory of politics. Which argues essentially that elections are moments when groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state and has quite the substantial predictive success. Gives some suggestion as to what’s likely to happen. So that part’s familiar. The—what the future is as I say, depends on people like you.

The response for the election was interesting and instructive. It kept pretty much to the soaring rhetoric, to borrow the cliché, that was the major theme of the election. The election was described as an extraordinary display of democracy, a miracle that could only happen in America and on and on. Much more extreme than Europe even than here. There’s some accuracy in that if we keep to the West. So if we keep to the West, yes, it’s probably true. That couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Europe was much more racist than the United States and you wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen.

On the other hand, if you look at the world, it’s not that remarkable. So let’s take the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti and Bolivia. In Haiti, there was an election in 1990 which really was an extraordinary display of democracy much more so than this.

In Haiti, there were grassroots movements, popular movements that developed in the slums and the hills, which nobody was paying any attention to. And they managed, even without any resources, to sweep into power their own candidate. A populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That’s a victory for democracy when popular movements can organize and set programs and pick their candidate and put them into office, which is not what happened here, of course.

I mean, Obama did organize a large number of people and many enthusiastic people in what’s called in the press, Obama’s Army. But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical. If the army keeps to that condition, nothing much will change. If it on the other hand goes away activists did in the sixties, a lot can change. That’s one of the choices that has to be made. That’s Haiti. Of course that didn’t last very long. A couple of months later, there was military coup, a period of terror, we won’t go through the whole record. Up the present, the traditional torturers of Haiti, France, and the United States have made sure that there won’t be a victory for democracy there. It’s a miserable story. Contrary to many illusions.

Take the second poorest country, Bolivia. They had an election in 2005 that’s almost unimaginable in the West. Certainly here, anywhere. The person elected into office was indigenous. That’s the most oppressed population in the hemisphere, those who survived. He’s is a poor peasant. How did he get in? Well, he got in because there were again, a mass popular movement, which elected their own representative. And they are the source of the programs, which are serious ones. There’s real issues, And people know them. Control over resources, cultural rights, social justice and so on.

Furthermore, the election was just an event that was particular stage in a long continuing struggle, a lot before and a lot after. There was day when people pushed the levers but that’s just an event in ongoing popular struggles, very serious ones. A couple of years ago, there was a major struggle over privatization of water. An effort which it would in effect deprive a good part of the population of water to drink. And it was a bitter struggle. A lot of people were killed, but they won it. Through international solidarity, in fact, which helped. And it continues. Now that’s a real election. Again, the plans, the programs are being developed, acted on constantly by mass popular movements, which then select their own representatives from their own ranks to carry out their programs. And that’s quite different from what happened here.

Actually what happened here is understood by elite elements. The public relations industry which runs elections here-quadrennial extravaganzas essentially- makes sure to keep issues in the margins and focus on personalities and character and so on–and-so forth. They do that for good reasons. They know- they look at public opinion studies and they know perfectly well that on a host of major issues both parties are well to the right of the population. That’s one good reason to keep issues off the table. And they recognize the success.

So, every year, the advertising industry gives a prize to, you know, to the best marketing campaign of the year. This year, Obama won the prize. Beat out Apple company. The best marketing campaign of 2008. Which is correct, it is essentially what happened. Now that’s quite different from what happens in a functioning democracy like say Bolivia or Haiti, except for the fact that it was crushed. And in the South, it’s not all that uncommon. Notice that each of these cases, there’s a much more extraordinary display of democracy in action than what we’ve seen–important as it was-here. And so the rhetoric, especially in Europe is correct if we maintain our own narrow racist perspective and say yeah, what happened was in the South didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. The only matters is what we do and by our standards, it was extraordinary miracle, but not by the standards of functioning democracy. In fact, there’s a distinction in democratic theory, which does separate say the United States from Bolivia or Haiti.

Question is what is a democracy supposed to be? That’s exactly a debate that goes back to the constitutional convention. But in recent years in the 20th century, it’s been pretty well articulated by important figures. So at the liberal end the progressive end, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century was Walter Lippman. A Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy progressive. And a lot of his work was on a democratic theory and he was pretty frank about it. If you took a position not all that different from James Madison’s. He said that in a democracy, the population has a function. Its function is to be spectators, not participants. He didn’t call it the population. He called it the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. The ignorant and meddlesome outsiders have a function and namely to watch what’s going on. And to push a lever every once in a while and then go home. But, the participants are us, us privileged, smart guys. Well that’s one conception of democracy. And you know essentially we’ve seen an episode of it. The population very often doesn’t accept this. As I mentioned, just very recent polls, people overwhelmingly oppose it. But they’re atomized, separated. Many of them feel hopeless, unorganized, and don’t feel they can do anything about it. So they dislike it. But that’s where it ends.

In a functioning democracy like say Bolivia or the United States in earlier stages, they did something about it. That’s why we have the New Deal measures, the Great Society measures. In fact just about any step, you know, women’s rights, end of slavery, go back as far as you like, it doesn’t happen as a gift. And it’s not going to happen in the future. The commentators are pretty well aware of this. They don’t put it the way I’m going to, but if you read the press, it does come out. So take our local newspaper at the liberal end of the spectrum, “Boston Globe,” you probably saw right after the election, a front page story, the lead front page story was on how Obama developed this wonderful grassroots army but he doesn’t have any debts. Which supposed to be a good thing. So he’s free to do what he likes. Because he has no debts, the normal democratic constituency, labor, women, minorities and so on, they didn’t bring him into office. So he owes them nothing


What he had was an army that he organized of people who got out the vote for Obama. For what the press calls, Brand Obama. They essentially agree with the advertisers, it’s brand Obama. That his army was mobilized to bring him to office. They regard that as a good thing, accepting the Lippman conception of democracy, the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders are supposed to do what they’re told and then go home. The Wall Street Journal, at the opposite end of the spectrum, also had an article about the same thing at roughly the same time. Talked about the tremendous grassroots army that has been developed, which is now waiting for instructions. What should they do next to press forward Obama’s agenda? Whatever that is. But whatever it is, the army’s supposed to be out there taking instructions, and press work. Los Angeles Times had similar articles, and there are others. What they don’t seem to realize is what they’re describing, the ideal of what they’re describing, is dictatorship, not democracy. Democracy, at least not in the Lippman sense, it proved- I pick him out because he’s so famous, but it’s a standard position. But in the sense of say, much of the south, where mass popular movements developed programs; organize to take part in elections but that’s one part of an ongoing process. And brings somebody from their own ranks to implement the programs that they develop, and if the person doesn’t they’re out. Ok, that’s another kind of democracy. So it’s up to us to choose which kind of democracy we want. And again, that will determine what comes next.

Well, what can we anticipate if the popular army, the grassroots army, decides to accept the function of spectators of action rather than participants? There’s two kinds of evidence. There’s rhetoric and there’s action. The rhetoric, you know, is very uplifting: change, hope, and so on. Change was kind of reflective any party manager this year who read the polls, including the ones I cited, would instantly conclude that our theme in the election has to be change. Because people hate what’s going on for good reasons. So the theme is change. In fact, both parties put both of them, the theme was change. So the theme is change. In fact both parties, both of them the theme was change. You know, break from the past, none of old politics, new things are going to happen. The Obama campaign did better so they won the marketing award, not the McCain campaign.

And notice incidentally on the side that the institutions that run the elections, public relations industry, advertisers, they have a role—their major role is commercial advertising. I mean, selling a candidate is kind of a side rule. In commercial advertising as everybody knows, everybody who has ever looked at a television program, the advertising is not intended to provide information about the product, all right? I don’t have to go on about that. It’s obvious. The point of the advertising is to delude people with the imagery and, you know, tales of a football player, sexy actress, who you know, drives to the moon in a car or something like that. But, that’s certainly not to inform people. In fact, it’s to keep people uninformed.

The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and to ensure, you know, to get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers, you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, and effective body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that’s the nature of an election when it’s run by the business world, and you’d expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there. And it should also turn out the elected candidate didn’t have any debts. So you can follow Brand Obama can be whatever they decide it to be, not what the population decides that it should be, as in the south, let’s say. I’m going to say on the side, this may be an actual instance of a familiar and unusually vacuous slogan about the clash of civilization. Maybe there really is one, but not the kind that’s usually touted.

So let’s go back to the evidence that we have, rhetoric and actions. Rhetoric we know, but what are the actions? So far the major actions are selections, in fact the only action, of personnel to implement Brand Obama. The first choice was the Vice President, Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq in the Senate, a long time Washington insider rarely deviates from the party vote. In cases where he does deviate they’re not very uplifting. He did break from the party and voting for a Senate resolution that prevented people from getting rid of their debts by, individuals, that is, from getting rid of their debts by going into bankruptcy. It’s a blow against poor people who’ve caught in this immense debt that’s a large part of the basis for the economy these days. But usually, he’s a, kind of, straight party-liner with the democrats on the sort of ultra naturalist side. The choice of Biden was a, must have been a conscious attempt to show contempt for the base of people who were voting for Obama, or organizing for him as an anti-war candidate.

Well, the first post-election appointment was for Chief of Staff, which is a crucial appointment; determines a large part of the president’s agenda. That was Rahm Emanuel, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq in the House. In fact, he was the only member of the Illinois delegation who voted for Bush’s effective declaration of war. And, again, a longtime Washington insider. Also, one of the leading recipients in congress of funding from the financial institutions hedge funds and so on. He himself was an investment banker. That’s his background. So, that’s the Chief of Staff.

The next group of appointments were the main problem, the primary issue that the governments’ going to have to face is what to do about the financial crisis. Obama’s choices to more or less run this were Robert Rubin and Larry Summers from the Clinton--Secretaries of Treasury under Clinton. They are among the people who are substantially responsible for the crisis. One leading economist, one of the few economists who has been right all along in predicting what’s happening, Dean Baker, pointed out that selecting them is like selecting Osama Bin Laden to run the war on terror.

Yeah, I’ll finish. This saves me the problem of what’s coming next, so I’ll finish with the elections. Let me make one final comment on this. There was meeting on November 7, I think of a group of couple, of a dozen advisers to deal with the financial crisis. Their careers were, records were reviewed in the business press, and Bloomberg News had an article reviewing their records and concluded that these people, most of these people shouldn’t be giving advice about the economy. They should be given subpoenas.

Because most of them were involved in one or other form of financial fraud, that includes Rahm Emanuel, for example. What reason is there to think that the people who brought this crisis about are some how going to fix it? Well, that’s a good indication of what’s likely to come next, at least if we look at actions. We couldn’t, but it won’t. You can bring this up. Ask what we expect to see in particular cases. And there’s evidence about that from statements from Obama’s website. I’ll mention just one thing about Obama’s website, which gives an indication of what’s happening. One of the major problems coming is Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s pretty serious. Take a look at Obama’s website under issues, foreign policy issues. The names don’t even appear. I mean, we’re supposed to be ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. We’re not supposed to know what Brand Obama is. So you can’t find out that way. The statements that you hear are pretty hawkish. And it doesn’t change much as you go through the list. I’ll wrap up here. So it’s up to you to continue



2. THIS IS CHANGE? 20 HAWKS,CLINTONITES AND NEOCONS TO WATCH FOR IN OBAMA'S WHITE HOUSE

BY

JEREMY SCAHILL

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:



-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"

-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;

-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;

-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.



As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. foreign policy for at least four years:

Joe Biden

There was no stronger sign that Obama's foreign policy would follow the hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been written on Biden's tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq "mistaken;" Biden was actually an important facilitator of the war.

In the summer of 2002, when the United States was "debating" a potential attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts whose testimony could challenge the case for war -- Iraq's alleged WMD possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida -- Biden's hearings treated the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.'s Iraq program.

Both men say they made it clear to Biden's office that they were ready and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq's WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of Iraq -- the so-called al-Qaida connection -- and could have testified that, rather than colluding with Saddam's regime, they were in a battle against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam," von Sponeck wrote in an Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest."

With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of informed opinions, Biden's committee whitewashed Bush's lies and helped lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration's false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring on the Senate floor, "[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons."

With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest Arab states in the world.

"He's a part of the old Democratic establishment," says retired Army Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has "had a long history with foreign affairs, [but] it's not the type of foreign affairs that I want."

Rahm Emanuel

Obama's appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel's "targeted assassination" policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war candidates. "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a position," he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel "advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization like Britain's MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25."



While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-à-vis Obama's stated foreign-policy goals.

Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."

"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"

Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," she declared. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy tactics in the past. Recalling her husband's weighing the decision of whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"

Madeleine Albright

While Obama's house is flush with Clintonian officials like former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, Director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning Greg Craig (who was officially named Obama's White House Counsel) and Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, perhaps most influential is Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State and U.N. ambassador. Albright recently served as a proxy for Obama, representing him at the G-20 summit earlier this month. Whether or not she is awarded an official role in the administration, Albright will be a major force in shaping Obama's foreign policy.

"It will take time to convince skeptics that the promotion of democracy is not a mask for imperialism or a recipe for the kind of chaos we have seen in the Persian Gulf," Albright recently wrote. "And it will take time to establish the right identity for America in a world that has grown suspicious of all who claim a monopoly on virtue and that has become reluctant to follow the lead of any one country."

Albright should know. She was one of the key architects in the dismantling of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the lead-up to the 1999 "Kosovo war," she oversaw the U.S. attempt to coerce the Yugoslav government to deny its own sovereignty in return for not being bombed. Albright demanded that the Yugoslav government sign a document that would have been unacceptable to any sovereign nation. Known as the Rambouillet Accord, it included a provision that would have guaranteed U.S. and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia -- not just Kosovo -- while also seeking to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]." Moreover, it would have granted the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years later, the Rambouillet Accord mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free-market principles."

When Yugoslavia refused to sign the document, Albright and others in the Clinton administration unleashed the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilian infrastructure. (Prior to the attack, Albright said the U.S. government felt "the Serbs need a little bombing.") She and the Clinton administration also supported the rise to power in Kosovo of a terrorist mafia that carried out its own ethnic-cleansing campaign against the province's minorities.

Perhaps Albright's most notorious moment came with her enthusiastic support of the economic war against the civilian population of Iraq. When confronted by Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes" that the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of "a half-million children … more children than died in Hiroshima," Albright responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." (While defending the policy, Albright later called her choice of words "a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.")

Richard Holbrooke

Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.

According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."

Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)

Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."

Dennis Ross

Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was one of the primary authors of Obama's aforementioned speech before AIPAC this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab nations under Clinton, Ross' team acted, in the words of one U.S. official who worked under him, as "Israel's lawyer."

"The 'no surprises' policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking," wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2005. "If we couldn't put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." After the Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.

Martin Indyk

Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton's ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli government and with PNAC.

"Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country," Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as "two of the most pro-Israel officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they're seen as lifelong advocates for Israeli positions."

Anthony Lake

Clinton's former National Security Advisor was an early supporter of Obama and one of the few top Clintonites to initially back the president-elect. Lake began his foreign policy work in the U.S. Foreign Service during Vietnam, working with Henry Kissinger on the "September Group," a secret team tasked with developing a military strategy to deliver a "savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam."

Decades later, after working for various administrations, Lake "was the main force behind the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years," according to veteran journalist Allan Nairn, whose groundbreaking reporting revealed U.S. support for Haitian death squads in the 1990s. "They brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians, and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti." Clinton nominated Lake as CIA Director, but he failed to win Senate confirmation.

Lee Hamilton

Hamilton is a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of both the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission. Robert Parry, who has covered Hamilton's career extensively, recently ran a piece on Consortium News that characterized him this way: "Whenever the Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. … Hamilton's carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man."

Susan Rice

Former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, who served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. "It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat," she said in 2002. "It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on." (After the invasion, discussing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, she said, "I don't think many informed people doubted that.")

Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with Anthony Lake, she wrote, "The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing."

John Brennan

A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama's intelligence transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as "an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity." While claiming to oppose water boarding, labeling it "inconsistent with American values" and "something that should be prohibited," Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by "enhanced interrogation" techniques. "There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists," Brennan said in a 2007 interview. "It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents."

Brennan has described the CIA's extraordinary rendition program -- the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton -- as an absolutely vital tool. "I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in," he said in a December 2005 interview. "And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives."

Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain's passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)

Jami Miscik

Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama's transitional team, was the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that backed it up.

"When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein's relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics (who were later vindicated) within the CIA's Mideast analytical directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts to 'stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,' " journalist Spencer Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. "It's hard to think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama's top intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in." What's more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

John Kerry and Bill Richardson

Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. "Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try?" Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. "According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents."

Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was more progressive and far-reaching than Obama's, served as Bill Clinton's ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton's December 1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. "We think this man is a threat to the international community, and he threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations there with anthrax and VX," Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.

While Clinton's Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and won a settlement against the U.S. government.

Robert Gates

Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to the Washington Post, in the interest of a "smooth transition," Gates "has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect Barack Obama's transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring office." The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton's Secretary of the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Ivo H. Daalder

Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Iraq and beyond.

Sarah Sewall

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton administration, Sewall served as a top advisor to Obama during the campaign and is almost certain to be selected for a post in his administration. In 2007, Sewall worked with the U.S. military and Army Gen. David Petraeus, writing the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. She was criticized for this collaboration by Tom Hayden, who wrote, "the Petraeus plan draws intellectual legitimacy from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, whose director, Sarah Sewall, proudly embraces an 'unprecedented collaboration [as] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces.'"

"Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose," she wrote in the introduction. "'The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words lack meaning."

Michele Flournoy

Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama's defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: "While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of 'conditional engagement' there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy's thinking." Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.

Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon

Currently employed at Madeline Albright's consulting firm, the Albright Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn't make it onto their official bios on Obama's change.gov Web site. "Donilon was Fannie's general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company was rocked by accounting problems," reports the Wall Street Journal.

While many of the figures at the center of Obama's foreign policy team are well-known, two of its most important members have never held national elected office or a high-profile government position. While they cannot be characterized as Clinton-era hawks, it will be important to watch Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, co-coordinators of the Obama foreign policy team. From 2000 to 2005, McDonough served as foreign policy advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and worked extensively on the use-of-force authorizations for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which Daschle supported. From 1996 to 1999, McDonough was a professional staff member of the House International Relations Committee during the debate over the bombing of Yugoslavia. More recently, he was at the Center for American Progress working under John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and the current head of the Obama transition.

Mark Lippert is a close personal friend of Obama's. He has worked for Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He is a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and spent a year in Iraq working intelligence for the Navy SEALs. "According to those who've worked closely with Lippert," Robert Dreyfus recently wrote in The Nation, "he is a conservative, cautious centrist who often pulled Obama to the right on Iraq, Iran and the Middle East and who has been a consistent advocate for increased military spending. 'Even before Obama announced for the presidency, Lippert wanted Obama to be seen as tough on Iran,' says a lobbyist who's worked the Iran issue on Capitol Hill, 'He's clearly more hawkish than the senator.' "

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. "I don't want to just end the war," he said early this year. "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." That is going to be very difficult if Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.

"Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war -- and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war -- are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions," observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy based on justice.

Obama does have a chance to change the mindset that got us into war. More significantly, he has a popular mandate to forcefully challenge the militaristic, hawkish tradition of modern U.S. foreign policy. But that work would begin by bringing on board people who would challenge this tradition, not those who have been complicit in creating it and are bound to continue advancing it.



3. WITH IRAN, OBAMA NEEDS MORE CARROT, LESS STICK
BY

SCOTT RITTER


The American people have spoken, and the next president of the United States will be Barack Obama. Running on a platform of change, the president-elect will be severely tested early in his administration by a host of challenges, be they economic, military, environmental or diplomatic in nature. How Obama handles these issues will define his tenure as America’s chief executive, and there will not—nor should there be—a honeymoon period. The challenges of these times do not permit such a luxury, something the president-elect had to know and comprehend when he chose to run for office. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, Obama’s defeated rivals, were both correct when they noted that the next president would need to be ready to govern on day one. Barack Obama has until the 20th of January to get his policies in order, because at one minute past noon on that day, he becomes the most powerful man in a volatile world. While the problems he will face are many, I will focus on what I believe are the four most critical issues that will need to be addressed in the first weeks and months of the Obama administration: Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Russia. This will be done in a series of articles, the first of which will deal with Iran.

Barack Obama, the candidate, said many things about Iran, some of which were inherently contradictory. In this he is not unique, since the reality of the rough-and-tumble world of American presidential politics requires any given candidate to show extreme flexibility in defining solutions to complex problems, oftentimes based not on the facts as they exist, but rather the fiction of domestic political imperative. Sometimes initial positions are staked out based upon fact-based analysis, only to be corrected as a given domestic constituency expresses unease and imposes its own fantasy-based worldview on the candidate. Nowhere is this process of the fictionalization of fact more prevalent than on the issue of Iran and its nuclear program. One year ago, in an interview with The New York Times, Obama demonstrated a level-headed approach toward Iran, expressing “serious concern” over the country’s nuclear program and its support for what he termed “terrorist organizations.” He grounded his comments in an appreciation for the cause-and-effect relationship between Iran’s involvement in Iraq and the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of that country. Obama also expressed the need for “aggressive diplomacy” with Iran at the highest levels and emphasized the importance of economic incentives and security assurances when it came to compelling Iran to change course on its nuclear program.

But many months on the campaign trail, fighting a determined Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, and a critical Republican Party, compelled the thoughtful Harvard-educated foreign policy neophyte to buckle under the pressure of needing to be seen as “strong” and “determined” in the face of continued Iranian intransigence. In July of 2008, following a series of Iranian ballistic missile tests, which included the Shahib-3 long-range missile, Obama seemed to retreat from diplomacy, noting aggressively that “Iran is a great threat.” Instead of trying to balance the Iranian decision to test its missiles with ongoing militaristic rhetoric from both the United States and Israel (including a large-scale Israeli air force exercise that simulated a strike on Iran), Obama undertook a single-dimension approach toward the problem and predictably came up with an equally simplistic solution: “We have to make sure we are working with our allies to apply tightened pressure on Iran,” including tighter economic sanctions. Obama noted that there was a “need for us to create a kind of policy that is putting the burden on Iran to change behavior, and frankly we just have not been able to do that over the last several years.” Gone was any notion of understanding the cause-and-effect relationships that may have influenced Iran’s actions, or the notion that wrongheaded American policy (such as continued economic sanctions) may in fact have contributed to Iran’s behavior.

If one was hoping that Obama’s sweeping electoral victory in the 2008 presidential election might have liberated him from the need to assume a “tough guy” pose, the recent press conference given by the president-elect set the record straight. “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon,” Obama stated, “ … is unacceptable. And we have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.” Perhaps Obama received some new insight into Iran from his recent access to top-secret CIA intelligence briefings that prompted him to unilaterally declare as fact the existence of an Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons. There is, of course, no substantive data to sustain such an assertion. As a critic of the U.S. intelligence failure concerning Iraq’s WMD programs in the lead-up to the invasion and occupation of that country, as well as the Bush administration’s politicization of intelligence for ideological motives, Obama would do well to take any intelligence briefing on Iran, void of incontrovertible evidence, with much-warranted skepticism.

The president-elect went on to state, “Iran’s support of terrorist organizations I think is something that has to cease.” It would be nice to know more about how he defines “terrorist organizations.” Is he speaking about Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine or Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq? The last time I looked, Hezbollah was democratically elected to Lebanon’s parliament, representing a significant percentage of the Shiite population of southern Lebanon. And Hamas became a significant player in Palestine’s budding democracy by appealing to the legitimate needs and desires of a growing number of Palestinians unimpressed by the corruption and undemocratic principles of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

If Obama wants to resolve the ongoing debacle that is Iraq, he would be well advised to recognize that Sadr controls more Iraqi citizens than does the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. In fact, if he’s serious about ending the violence and establishing long-term stability, Obama would do well to exploit Iran’s deep and meaningful contacts with these three organizations with an eye toward integrating them into the mainstream of their respective domestic political environments. Referring to these organizations as being “terrorist” in nature is not only factually simplistic, but also counterproductive when it comes to establishing and maintaining the kind of dialogue that can result in the diplomatic breakthroughs Barack Obama claims to be seeking. Perhaps the president-elect should take his own counsel: He went on to state, “Obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion. I think we’ve got to think it through.”

Thinking through the complexity of the Iranian issue is exactly what needs to be done. Developing policies based on American political pressure rather than the reality of the Iranian “problem” will solve nothing. Now that the presidential election has liberated Obama from the need to play to the fickle whim of domestic politics, he should consider more far-reaching policy options on Iran.

To begin with, Obama should return to a policy more in line with the original October 2003 “Tehran Declaration,” negotiated between the European Union and Iran, which permitted Iran to engage in uranium enrichment so long as an adequate safeguards inspection regime was in place. The original suspension, which Iran had agreed to and implemented, was intended to be temporary, in effect until the International Atomic Energy Agency could get an adequate inspection regime up and running. However, the United States pressured Europe to alter the terms of the declaration, insisting on a permanent suspension of uranium enrichment, something the Iranians refuse to do to this day. According to the IAEA’s director general, Mohamed el Baradei, the watchdog today has in place a safeguards inspection regime that is operating smoothly and in a manner that allows for not only an accounting of the totality of Iran’s nuclear material stockpile, but a full and comprehensive understanding of the scope and scale of Iran’s centrifuge-based enrichment effort as well. There is, therefore, no legitimate reason for continuing to deny Iran its right to enrich uranium in accordance with the terms of the nonproliferation treaty.

It would be ideal for a more intrusive inspection regime, based on what the IAEA calls an “additional protocol,” to be formalized and implemented. This should not be an insurmountable hurdle for progress. Iran has already indicated a willingness to engage in such an expanded inspection regime, contingent upon international recognition of its rights under Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium. Obama has spoken of a need for an effective global nonproliferation regime, but this can never happen if the United States shows disrespect for international law and past agreements. The United States’ hypocritical indifference toward the military nuclear programs of non-NPT nations such as Israel, India and Pakistan undermines the administration’s current stance concerning the NPT-compliant Iran.

Rather than focusing on Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts, Obama would do well to shift his attention to Iran’s long-range ballistic missile program, especially the Shahib-3, which has been cited as the principal delivery system for any nuclear weapon Iran might be developing, real or imagined. The Shahib-3 missile is also used by the United States to justify the installation of a ballistic missile defense shield in Europe (with a missile interceptor facility planned for Poland, and an associated radar facility planned for the Czech Republic), an activity that destabilizes arms control and the West’s already fragile relations with Russia. By focusing on any potential delivery system, the United States would de-escalate international concerns over Iran’s uranium enrichment program and increase the likelihood for a diplomatic resolution agreeable to all parties.

While the specifics of any ballistic missile-based negotiation would have to be worked out between the involved parties, a reasonable starting point would be a one-year moratorium on all ballistic missile tests of a given range (for instance, over 500 kilometers), in exchange for which the United States would support and sponsor a regional multilateral Middle Eastern disarmament conference, the goal of which would be a treaty for the elimination of all long-range ballistic missiles in the Middle East. This would be complicated, especially since such a treaty would by necessity need to include Israel. However, given the alternative (continued confrontation with Iran, and the global instability that would result), the difficulties associated with any such disarmament effort are far outweighed by the consequences of doing nothing. Furthermore, a Middle East ballistic missile disarmament effort could serve as the framework around which other regional disarmament efforts could be shaped, including those related to Pakistan and India, and even the United States, Russia and China. It would require the leadership of the United States to pull off any such effort. This should be the kind of leadership challenge an Obama administration should be seeking to embrace.

By minimizing, or eliminating, the problems associated with any potential nuclear weapons delivery system, such as the Shahib-3 missile, the Obama administration could then focus on resolving the standoff over Iran’s uranium enrichment activities. In this, Obama will be able to turn to a new initiative from a close American ally in the Persian Gulf region, the United Arab Emirates, for some “framework” around which new policies might be constructed. I recently attended a NATO conference held in Abu Dhabi, where the UAE government spoke in some detail about its new policy concerning the evaluation and potential development of nuclear energy. Three major items emerged from this policy announcement: first and foremost, the legitimacy of an oil- and natural gas-rich Middle Eastern nation requiring an alternative means of energy production to offset the demands placed on its energy exportation by increasing domestic demands for energy. The UAE decision was driven by economic analysis which showed a cumulative annual growth rate in energy consumption from 2007 through 2020 of some 9 percent, resulting in increased demands for upwards of 40,000 megawatts, which the UAE is not in a position to provide through traditional energy supplies. Iran, of course, made a similar analysis in the mid-1970s when it decided to embark on an ambitious nuclear energy program. Iran’s logic for pursuing nuclear energy has been derided by many who view Tehran’s ambitions as merely a front for a military program. The analysis of the UAE demonstrates the legitimacy of the Iranian nuclear energy need, and should lay to rest any logic-driven analysis that defines Iran’s nuclear ambition as being military in nature simply because Iran is deemed to be a nation “awash in a sea of oil,” to quote past and current Bush administration officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The UAE noted that it was committed to the “highest standards of nonproliferation” when it came to pursuing any potential nuclear energy program, renouncing any intention to develop domestic enrichment and reprocessing capability. On the surface, the UAE’s approach seems to stand as a contrast to the position taken by Iran, which has committed to an indigenous mastery of the entire nuclear fuel cycle, inclusive of enrichment and reprocessing. However, the UAE’s commitment to nonproliferation is contingent upon two pillars. The first is the ability of the UAE to source nuclear fuel from “reliable and responsible foreign suppliers.” The UAE has also expressed an interest in creating a regional nuclear fuel bank that would guarantee the program access to nuclear fuel in times of regional and/or global unrest and uncertainty. In reviewing the Iranian program, one finds the same need for a guaranteed source of nuclear fuel as the driving force behind Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The vagaries of economic embargoes and sanctions make any Iranian nuclear energy program linked to outside sources of supply futile indeed. The continued American insistence on using economic sanctions and threatening economic embargoes as a means to compel Iran to back down from its position on uranium enrichment is illogical and counterproductive given these realities. Instead, the United States should be seeking to combine Iran’s need for reliable sources of economic-sanction resistant nuclear fuel with that of the UAE (and, looking down the road, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Iraq), so that a regional nuclear fuel bank would indeed be just that—regional, inclusive of Iran and its Gulf Arab neighbors.

The second pillar of the UAE nonproliferation commitment was more reality-driven: The small size of any future UAE nuclear reactor program makes the expense of an indigenous uranium enrichment program infeasible. As such, the UAE is well positioned to take a high-minded stance when it comes to adhering to “concerns from the international community regarding spent fuel reprocessing and enrichment plants in developing countries, and the dual-use nature of components employed in fuel fabrication and processing.” Simply put, it can’t afford not to. Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t have that luxury. There is no comparison between the scope and scale of the UAE’s nascent nuclear program with that of Iran. Unlike the UAE, the Iranian program is of a size that could justify an indigenous uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing effort, just as the nuclear energy programs of France, Japan and Germany justify their national fuel-cycle programs.

Establishing a policy that accepts the right of Iran to pursue indigenous enrichment of uranium is actually the soundest approach toward getting Iran to back away from the hard-line position it has taken, because when push comes to shove, Iran cannot afford the uranium enrichment program it has embarked on. This, however, is a conclusion that Iran needs to make, free of international pressure. By respecting Iran’s legal right to enrich uranium, the Obama administration would liberate Iran to make reasoned, rational decisions about its economic future, decisions that would take into account the overall economic health of the country, void of the conservative, nationalistic inputs generated in response to outside pressure.

In the end, Iran will probably have three choices to consider: continue its indigenous enrichment program despite the severe economic burden; drop its uranium enrichment program in favor of a secure, reliable international source of nuclear fuel; or seek to integrate its uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing capabilities into a larger regional and global framework, one that not only provides economic relief for the Iranian effort, but also brings with it greater international scrutiny and inspection, adherence to international practices and procedures on the handling and accountability of nuclear material, and viability to any regional nuclear fuel bank that would incorporate the product of Iran’s enrichment programs. The integration of Iran more fully into the Persian Gulf economy is by far the best guarantor of long-term stability in that region. Iran’s nuclear program should be seen as an opportunity in this regard, not an obstacle.

As Iran heads toward a presidential election in the coming year, the United States—and the Obama administration—would achieve better and longer-lasting results by seeking solutions geared toward resolving the legitimate issues at play in the region, rather than creating short-term sound bites here at home. A clean break with the neoconservative policies of the Bush administration is a prerequisite for success, and achieving this requires great imagination and courage. President-elect Barack Obama has demonstrated the potential for both of those qualities. I hope that promise is realized.

The JvL Bi-Weekly for 111508

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Saturday, November 15th , 2008

Volume 7, No. 20

4 Articles, 21 Pages



1. America The Illiterate

2. Chomsky: "The Majority of The World Supports Iran"

3. The Almighty and U.S. Elections

4. The Problems of Latin America and the Caribbean



1. AMERICA THE ILLITERATE

BY

CHRIS HEDGES

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology.

Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.

Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.

The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.

The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000 debates George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.

In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a need for constant stimulus. News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain. Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable. Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality. They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills. They seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think. All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.

As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy. They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.

The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us.



2. CHOMSKY: "THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD SUPPORTS IRAN"

(In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview, Chomsky discusses the global politics of Iran's and India's attempts to become nuclear powers.)
BY

SUBRATA GHOSHROY

On Wednesday night, in a vote of 86 to 13, the U.S. Senate passed a historic nuclear deal that will allow the United States to trade with India in nuclear equipment and technology, and to supply India with nuclear fuel for its power reactors. The deal is considered hugely consequential by its supporters and opponents alike -- and a significant victory for the Bush administration.

Last month, Subrata Ghoshroy, a researcher in the Science, Technology and Global Security Working Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, met with Noam Chomsky in his office at MIT, where he is the institute professor of linguistics. "Before we started our discussion," Ghoshroy writes, "Professor Chomsky asked me to give him a little background information. I told him that I was researching missile defense, space weapons and the U.S.-India nuclear deal." Ghoshroy is a longtime critic of the U.S. missile defense program and a former analyst at the Government Accountability Office who in 2006 blew the whistle on the failure -- and attempted cover-up -- of a key component of the program: a $26 billion weapon system that was the "centerpiece" of the Bush administration's antimissile plan.

Ghoshroy and Chomsky discussed the then-pending nuclear deal, which would sanction trade hitherto prohibited by U.S. and international laws because of India's refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the nuclear tests it conducted in 1998. Ghoshroy has written several articles criticizing the U.S.-India deal as a triumph of the business lobby -- an assessment Chomsky agreed with. He said that Condoleezza Rice is actually on record admitting what is truly behind this deal, which he characterized as a "non-proliferation disaster."

Ghoshroy's subsequent conversation with Chomsky touched on a number of interweaving topics, including: India and the importance of the non-aligned movement; the myths of free trade and the so-called "success" of neoliberalism; Washington's historic opposition to promote new world economic and information orders; Latin America's growing independence; the West's hypocrisy over Iran's nuclear program -- and MIT's ironic role in it during the shah's regime; and, finally, U.S. elections and the prospects for change.

The result is a two-part interview, the second of which will run on AlterNet tomorrow. Part One begins with India, the Non-Aligned Movement, and why a "majority of the world supports Iran." (The Non-Aligned Movement, which consists of some 115 or more representatives of "developing countries," originated at the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, which was convened mainly by newly independent former colonies from Africa and Asia to develop joint policies in international relations. Jawaharlal Nehru, then India's prime minister, led the conference. There, "Third World" leaders shared their similar problems of resisting the pressures of the major powers, maintaining their independence and opposing colonialism and neo-colonialism, especially Western domination. India continued its vigorous participation and leadership role in NAM until the end of the Cold War. For further reading, visit the NAM Web site.)

Subrata Ghoshroy: (Comparing India) with the situation in Latin America, there is a lot more explicit stance (in Latin America) against imperialism and toward independence.

Noam Chomsky: It exists (in India), but I think that India should be in the lead, as it was in the l950s when it was in the lead in the non-aligned movement.

SG: This is the tension in the Indian situation. The Indian government, the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, they think NAM is anachronistic and a relic of the Cold War.

NC: I think that they are quite wrong. I think that it is a sign of the future. The positions of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the South Commission before it, and alongside of it, are pretty sound. A good indication of how sound they are is they are almost entirely suppressed in the West, which tells you a lot.

Take the question of Iranian enrichment. The U.S, of course, takes a militant position against it, which is kind of ironic because the same officials who are now having tantrums about it are the ones who supported the same programs under the shah. MIT is right at the center of that; I can remember in the l970s there was an internal crisis at MIT when the institute authorities pretty much sold the nuclear engineering department to the shah in a secret agreement. The agreement was that the Nuclear Engineering Department would bring in Iranian nuclear engineers, and in return, the shah would provide some unspecified -- but presumably large -- amount of money to MIT. When (this was) leaked, there was a lot of student protest and a student referendum -- something like 80 percent of students were opposed to it. There was so much turmoil, the faculty had to have a large meeting. Usually faculty meetings are pretty boring things; nobody wants to go. But this one, pretty much everybody came to it. There was a big discussion. It was quite interesting. There were a handful of people, of whom I was one, who opposed the agreement with the shah. But it passed overwhelmingly. It was quite striking that the faculty vote was the exact opposite of the student vote, which tells you something quite interesting, because the faculty are the students of yesterday, but the shift in institutional commitment had a major impact on their judgments -- a wrong impact, in my opinion. Anyway, it went through. Probably the people running the Iranian program today were trained at MIT. The strongest supporters of this U.S.-Iranian nuclear program were Henry Kissinger, Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

SG: This was right around Nixon?

NC: This was in the mid-'70s. Kissinger now says, "How can Iran be pursuing a peaceful program when they have so much oil -- they don't need nuclear energy." In 1975 he was saying the opposite. He was saying, "Of course Iran has to develop nuclear energy. It cannot rely upon its oil resources." Kissinger was asked by the Washington Post why he had completely changed his judgment on this issue. He was quite frank and honest. He said something like, "They were an ally then, so they needed nuclear energy. Now they are an enemy, so they don't need nuclear energy." OK, I appreciate honesty. It is ironic to see this developing right now.

When you read the media on this, say the New York Times, the coverage is uniform. "Iran is defying the world." "Iran is defying the international community."

The fact of the matter is that the majority of the world supports Iran. The non-aligned movement supports Iran. The majority of the world is part of the non-aligned movement. But they are not part of the world, from the U.S. point of view. It is a striking illustration of the strength and depth of the imperial mentality. If the majority of the world opposes Washington, they are not part of the world. Strikingly, the American population is not part of the world. A large majority of Americans -- something like 75 percent -- agree that Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy, if it is not for nuclear weapons. But they are not part of the world either. The world consists of Washington and whoever goes along with it. Everything else is not the world. Not the majority of Americans. Not the majority of countries of the world.

All of this illustrates many things, among them the importance of the non-aligned movement. Just as the South Commission was important, the same is true of NAM. But the commission's important positions were never quoted or mentioned; they were treated as insignificant. They are not insignificant.

The same is true of NAM. India should be in the lead of ensuring that the voice of what is euphemistically called "developing countries" should be heard, should be influential and should be powerful. Not just what comes out of Washington and London!

(In India), on one hand, there has been significant growth and development in the past 20 years or so. On the other hand, the internal problems are simply overwhelming. If you look at the human development index, for example, when the neoliberal reforms, so-called, began, India was 125th or so. Now it is 128th, the last time I looked. Meaning that the fundamental internal problems of India which are so overwhelming, when you just even walk the streets, have clearly not been addressed. If you go to places like Hyderabad or Bangalore, you see wonderful laboratories, high-tech industries, software and a few miles away a sharp increase in peasant suicides coming from the same source. The same social and economic policies are driving both processes.

In places like West Bengal, there has been serious internal strife over land rights and industrial development, and I don't think that the Left has worked out a way to come to terms with that constructively. On issues like the U.S.-India nuclear pact, from what I read of the Left's positions, I have found them quite disappointing. They seem to be opposing the pact on nationalist grounds, that India might be surrendering some element of sovereignty. But the real problem is quite different; it is a major step toward undermining the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- as India's refusal to join it and its secret bomb was in the first place. You know that India does have a tradition about disarmament and non-alignment and so on going back to Nehru, of pressing for nuclear disarmament, non-alignment and so on, and the U.S.-India pact is directly counter to that honorable tradition. And I would have expected the Left to be emphasizing this.

SG: And what you are saying is that this is where the Left should be much more vocal and active?

NC: To an extent, they are. It is very hard to break through Western propaganda. This was dramatically true in the l970s, in the early period of decolonization, when there were calls for a new international economic order, a new information order -- a restructuring of the world to give the voiceless some voice. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was an important institution at the time.

UNESCO was pressing for an international information order in which the Third World would have a voice. There was bitter opposition to that here. It was really brutal here; UNESCO was practically destroyed.

SG: And the U.S. left UNESCO for a while?

NC: First it practically destroyed UNESCO, and then it left it for a long time. Media and commentators were full of outright lies about how UNESCO was trying to destroy freedom of the press, and so on and so forth. What they were trying to do, very clearly, was to break the Western monopoly and to allow independent voices to appear. That is intolerable to Western intellectual communities. We have to have an absolute monopoly; otherwise it violates freedom.

There is quite a good book on this running through the details. It is called Hope and Folly, and it could never be reviewed, because of the devastating story that it tells about the efforts of the media and the intellectual community and so on to destroy UNESCO out of fear that it might open the international communications system to Third World voices. Take a look at the book -- it is very devastating, and what happened is incredible.

The same thing happened with the new international economic order. Instead of a new international economic order of the kind that UNCTAD was pressing for, which made a lot of sense, what happened was the opposite. That's when the West -- with U.S. and Britain in the lead -- rammed through neoliberal programs, which have been pretty much of a disaster. International economists often say it has been a great success, pointing to average growth rates and the rise out of poverty during the past 30 years. That is a scam. The rising growth rates and rise out of poverty are primarily from China. But China was not following neoliberal rules. They were pursuing a policy of export orientation with a state-directed economy. State-directed export orientation is not the Washington consensus. Muddling the two things together is real dishonesty.

SG: I see. Because of sheer numbers in China? A billion Chinese are growing …

NC: If you have a billion Chinese who are growing, the average growth rate increases. So you have an increase in average growth rate mainly through the efforts of countries that are not following the rules. The same is true of India. One of the reasons that India escaped the Asian financial crisis was that it maintained financial controls.



SG: Right, which would not be the case anymore.

NC: Not anymore. But in that period (it was the case). It escaped the disaster that took place. Take South Korea: It has had spectacular growth. It is heralded as a success of neoliberal principles. That is not even a bad joke. In South Korea, the controls over capital were so strict that a capital export could bring the death penalty. What does that have to do with neoliberalism? It was a state-directed economy, more or less on the Japanese model. Incidentally, just to make the irony even more extreme, one of the leading state-based economies in the world is the United States. Surely, everyone at MIT knows that. What pays their salaries? MIT is part of the funnel by which the taxpayer pays the costs and takes the risks of high-tech development, and the profits are ultimately privatized.

SG: Absolutely.

NC: That's where you get computers and Internet and the biotech. The entire high-tech economy almost derives from the dynamic state sector.



3. THE ALMIGHTY AND U.S. ELECTIONS

BY

P. SAINATH

Barack Obama made sure his eyes looked unblinking into the TV camera as he said: "I believe (in) -- Jesus Christ died for my sins, and that I am redeemed through him." Barely an hour later, John McCain said from the very same platform (into the same television cameras) that being a follower of Christ "means I'm saved and forgiven. We're talking about the world. Our faith encompasses not just the United States but the world." Whatever it means to Obama and McCain, it means God is alive and well and a frontrunner in US election campaigns.

Both Presidential candidates were confessing their faith to Pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church. This was in mid-August and their first major public appearance on the same platform - though not together but one immediately after the other. Both were reaching audiences of millions, but were basically aiming at a large religious constituency. Both knew what they had to say and how to say it. Neither had a problem with the idea that two potential presidents of the United States could submit themselves to interviews and (absolution?) on a religious platform of one faith.

It is of course legitimate for candidates to harbor religious beliefs. It is also true that this was probably the first among modern nations to have a written constitution making a strong and sharp separation of church and state. Among the founders of the United States were those who had seen religious persecution in Europe. Hence their wall between Church and State. It's precisely that separation that begins to erode in such public displays of faith.

Let's suppose this had happened in, say, Pakistan. Say Zardari and Sharif or whoever, had had their opening debate at the Grand Mosque. You'd never have heard the end of it in the US media. It would have been the 'aha' proof, if any were needed, of religious zealotry, bigotry, fundamentalism and the rest of it. Here though, the swamp of analysis in the mainstream media that followed the Saddleback event had no such conclusions to draw. Not even in mild, diluted terms.

The media not only fear (and sometimes suck up to) the religious right, they also factor in what they see as vital sensitivities of their audiences. For all its world leader status and excellence in scientific research, far more people in this country believe in the Devil than in Darwin, as one late 2007 poll put it. Belief in (literal) Hell and the Devil was firm amongst 62 per cent of those surveyed. Darwin, complete with evolution / 'natural selection' clocked in with a poor 42 per cent. (About the same as Obama's rating in his latest polls.)

Also noteworthy: 79 per cent believed in miracles, 75 per cent in heaven. Witches and UFOs draw roughly the same score, with about a third of the populace believing in them. The UFOs have it by a short head among the general population 35 per cent against 31 per cent for witches. But witches outclass UFOs amongst born again Christians - amongst whom Darwin fares worse than both, with a mere 16 per cent. (You've got to hand it to the Harris pollsters. Someday, someone must pull off this exercise at the level of the Indian political class with its godmen and tantriks.)

The religious (and spiritual-moral) motif in the US presidential race extends far beyond Saddleback, though. And not just in terms of prayers at the conventions of both Republicans and Democrats. The choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate had a lot to do with it, too. It was a move aimed at getting unhappy Evangelicals to board the McCain bandwagon. To that extent, it's even a move that has worked, apart from putting the Obama camp into confusion and despondency. The more so since the Democrats have tried hard to broaden their base amongst 'faith voters' for some time now.

This is partly based on the dangerous and fragile notion that the left-inclined, the anti-Bush voters, those angry over the economy will vote Democrat anyway. So let's target the 'faith voters' a bit more.

Religious writers and religious correspondents of the daily did spot this even before the Democrats held their convention in Denver. They pointed to the fact that the party had a new "faith caucus" and was throwing up themes like: "Faith in 2009. How an Obama Administration will Engage People of Faith." Of course, the religious events at their events were billed as "inter-faith" services, but their scope was more Christian than anything else. Of course, Jewish sentiments and votes are also an important factor in US elections.

Other religions have made disastrous forays into US Presidential races. None more humbling than the debacle of year 2000, when several Muslim leaders and bodies decided and declared that the best candidate for Muslims was a George W. Bush. As the San Francisco Chronicle's religion writer points out: " The decision was heavily influenced by Bush's public declaration to end the use of secret evidence in immigration cases, a form of racial profiling, that disproportionately affected Muslims. Muslim leaders touted the fact that the bloc vote delivered thousands of extra Bush votes in Florida, where Bush's margin was in the hundreds." The rest is history.

Demonizing Muslims and Islam has multiplied manifold since then. The Hillary Clinton campaign did not lag far behind the McCain one when it came to reminding people that Obama's middle name is Hussein. Even while being given a mudbath on that one, Obama faced flak from the media for his association with his - Christian - pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright holds what in the US media are "controversial" views -- like saying that 9/11 was a result of the USA's own terrorism elsewhere. Obama quickly distanced himself from his pastor. Now, the Democrats wait, hoping that Sarah Palin's church and pastor will do her some damage. They could be hoping in vain. True, a recent sermon there said that bomb blasts and suicide attacks directed at Israel were punishment for the Jews not converting to Christianity. But outrageous statements on the right get off more lightly than the mildest criticisms from elsewhere. God and the media favor the Big Battalions.

In India, we do have the Bharatiya Janata Party that has worked hard, consciously and pretty explicitly at suffusing every sphere of activity with religion - that is, their Brahmanical brand of Hinduism In government, in education - and even in and with the Army, it has spared no effort to whip up religiosity and carry God all the way to the voting booth. While it has made significant advances in all these efforts, it gets more complex at election time. Inflation will be a much bigger God in the next election and the BJP will seat him high up on their pantheon. Sickening amounts of blood has been spilt in the name of God. But God in this avatar always faces challenge and criticism. Other parties of the Hindu Right, like the Shiv Sena, would have a very poor base if their radical religious rhetoric were not also pinned on to issues of regional identity and fears of discrimination against "sons-of-the-soil" in jobs and positions of authority. There have been coalitions, even at the centre, with no major religious motif. And there have been several movements and parties, essentially atheistic, that have come to power in the states on non-religious platforms. Far more Muslims have voted to send communists to parliament than to seat candidates of the Muslim League there. And while drawing wide conclusions from it would be very wrong - you still do have an upper caste Hindu woman for President, a Sikh as Prime Minister, a Dalit as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and an atheist as Speaker of the nation's parliament. As complex and confusing as it gets, though perhaps logical when politics is seen as a mix of so many diverse streams.

Here in America, the first modern state to legally separate church and state, it's different. God moves in a strange way his wonders to perform. And sometimes, during elections, for instance, it really leaves you wondering.



4. THE PROBLEMS OF LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

(VIIth Social Summit for the Latin American and Caribbean Unity, Caracas)

BY

NOAM CHOMSKY



During the past decade, Latin America has become the most exciting region of the world. The dynamic has very largely flowed from right where you are meeting, in Caracas, with the election of a leftist president dedicated to using Venezuela's rich resources for the benefit of the population rather than for wealth and privilege at home and abroad, and to promote the regional integration that is so desperately needed as a prerequisite for independence, for democracy, and for meaningful development. The initiatives taken in Venezuela have had a significant impact throughout the subcontinent, what has now come to be called "the pink tide." The impact is revealed within the individual countries, most recently Paraguay, and in the regional institutions that are in the process of formation. Among these are the Banco del Sur, an initiative that was endorsed here in Caracas a year ago by Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz; and the ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean, which might prove to be a true dawn if its initial promise can be realized.



The ALBA is often described as an alternative to the US-sponsored "Free Trade Area of the Americas," though the terms are misleading. It should be understood to be an independent development, not an alternative. And, furthermore, the so-called "free trade agreements" have only a limited relation to free trade, or even to trade in any serious sense of that term; and they are certainly not agreements, at least if people are part of their countries. A more accurate term would be "investor-rights arrangements," designed by multinational corporations and banks and the powerful states that cater to their interests, established mostly in secret, without public participation or awareness. That is why the US executive regularly calls for "fast-track authority" for these agreements - essentially, Kremlin-style authority.



Another regional organization that is beginning to take shape is UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations. This continental bloc, modeled on the European Union, aims to establish a South American parliament in Cochabamba, a fitting site for the UNASUR parliament. Cochabamba was not well known internationally before the water wars of 2000. But in that year events in Cochabamba became an inspiration for people throughout the world who are concerned with freedom and justice, as a result of the courageous and successful struggle against privatization of water, which awakened international solidarity and was a fine and encouraging demonstration of what can be achieved by committed activism.



The aftermath has been even more remarkable. Inspired in part by developments in Venezuela, Bolivia has forged an impressive path to true democratization in the hemisphere, with large-scale popular initiatives and meaningful participation of the organized majority of the population in establishing a government and shaping its programs on issues of great importance and popular concern, an ideal that is rarely approached elsewhere, surely not in the Colossus of the North, despite much inflated rhetoric by doctrinal managers.



Much the same had been true 15 years earlier in Haiti, the only country in the hemisphere that surpasses Bolivia in poverty - and like Bolivia, was the source of much of the wealth of Europe, later the United States. In 1990, Haiti's first free election took place. It was taken for granted in the West that the US candidate, a former World Bank official who monopolized resources, would easily win. No one was paying attention to the extensive grass-roots organizing in the slums and hills, which swept into power the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Washington turned at once to undermining the feared and hated democratic government. It took only a few months for a US-backed military coup to reverse this stunning victory for democracy, and to place in power a regime that terrorized the population with the direct support of the US government, first under president Bush I, then Clinton. Washington finally permitted the elected president to return, but only on the condition that he adhere to harsh neoliberal rules that were guaranteed to crush what remained of the economy, as they did. And in 2004, the traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the US, joined to remove the elected president from office once again, launching a new regime of terror, though the people remain unvanquished, and the popular struggle continues despite extreme adversity.



All of this is familiar in Latin America, not least in Bolivia, the scene of today's most intense and dangerous confrontation between popular democracy and traditional US-backed elites. Archaeologists are now discovering that before the European conquest, Bolivia had a wealthy, sophisticated and complex society - to quote their words, "one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the face of the planet, with causeways and canals, spacious and formal towns and considerable wealth," creating a landscape that was "one of humankind's greatest works of art, a masterpiece." And of course Bolivia's vast mineral wealth enriched Spain and indirectly northern Europe, contributing massively to its economic and cultural development, including the industrial and scientific revolutions. Then followed a bitter history of imperial savagery with the crucial connivance of rapacious domestic elites, factors that are very much alive today.



Sixty years ago, US planners regarded Bolivia and Guatemala as the greatest threats to its domination of the hemisphere. In both cases, Washington succeeded in overthrowing the popular governments, but in different ways. In Guatemala, Washington resorted to the standard technique of violence, installing one of the world's most brutal and vicious regimes, which extended its criminality to virtual genocide in the highlands during Reagan's murderous terrorist wars of the 1980s - and we might bear in mind that these horrendous atrocities were carried out under the guise of a "war on terror," a war that was re-declared by George Bush in September 2001, not declared, a revealing distinction when we recall the implementation of Reagan's "war on terror" and its grim human consequences.



In Guatemala, the Eisenhower administration overcame the threat of democracy and independent development by violence. In Bolivia, it achieved much the same results by exploiting Bolivia's economic dependence on the US, particularly for processing Bolivia's tin exports. Latin America scholar Stephen Zunes points out that "At a critical point in the nation's effort to become more self-sufficient [in the early 1950s], the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts."



The economic policies forced on Bolivia in those years were a precursor of the structural adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal "Washington consensus," which has generally had disastrous effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where the curse of financial liberalization is bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and leading to massive state intervention in a desperate effort to rescue collapsing financial institutions.



We should note that this is a regular feature of contemporary state capitalism, though the scale today is unprecedented. A study by two well-known international economists 15 years ago found that at least twenty companies in the top Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses." Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries," they conclude from a detailed analysis. [Ruigrok and von Tulder]



We might also take note of the striking similarity between the structural adjustment programs imposed on the weak by the International Monetary Fund, and the huge financial bailout that is on the front pages today in the North. The US executive-director of the IMF, adopting an image from the Mafia, described the institution as "the credit community's enforcer." Under the rules of the Western-run international economy, investors make loans to third world tyrannies, and since the loans carry considerable risk, make enormous profits. Suppose the borrower defaults. In a capitalist economy, the lenders would incur the loss. But really existing capitalism functions quite differently. If the borrowers cannot pay the debts, then the IMF steps in to guarantee that lenders and investors are protected. The debt is transferred to the poor population of the debtor country, who never borrowed the money in the first place and gained little if anything from it. That is called "structural adjustment." And taxpayers in the rich country, who also gained nothing from the loans, sustain the IMF through their taxes. These doctrines do not derive from economic theory; they merely reflect the distribution of decision-making power.



The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism, and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies, the first and third worlds.



This wonderful anti-market system designed by self-proclaimed market enthusiasts is now being implemented in the United States, to deal with the very ominous crisis of financial markets. In general, markets have well-known inefficiencies. One is that transactions do not take into account the effect on others who are not party to the transaction. These so-called "externalities" can be huge. That is particularly so in the case of financial institutions. Their task is to take risks, and if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. To themselves. Under capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do. In economists' terms, risk is underpriced, because systemic risk is not priced into decisions. That leads to repeated crisis, naturally. At that point, we turn to the IMF solution. The costs are transferred to the public, which had nothing to do with the risky choices but is now compelled to pay the costs - in the US, perhaps mounting to about $1 trillion right now. And of course the public has no voice in determining these outcomes, any more than poor peasants have a voice in being subjected to cruel structural adjustment programs.



A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that cost and risk are socialized, while profit is privatized. That principle extends far beyond financial institutions. Much the same is true for the entire advanced economy, which relies extensively on the dynamic state sector for innovation, for basic research and development, for procurement when purchasers are unavailable, for direct bail-outs, and in numerous other ways. These mechanisms are the domestic counterpart of imperial and neocolonial hegemony, formalized in World Trade Organization rules and the misleadingly named "free trade agreements."



Financial liberalization has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy Free capital movement creates what some international economists have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who can closely monitor government programs and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power. They can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies, and other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the US and UK after World War II instituted capital controls and regulated currencies. The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, taking many forms, from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organization. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy, that is. John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement. In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the US Treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right," unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security, and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus," "preposterous," mere "myths."



In earlier years the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicized by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labor parties." Therefore the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population. But with the radicalization of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures." It is only necessary to add the obvious corollary: with the dismantling of the system from the 1970s, functioning democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalize the public in some fashion, processes that are particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the Public Relations industry is one illustration.



The primary victims of military terror and economic strangulation are the poor and weak, within the rich countries themselves and far more brutally in the South. But times are changing. In Venezuela, in Bolivia, and elsewhere there are promising efforts to bring about desperately needed structural and institutional changes. And not surprisingly, these efforts to promote democracy, social justice, and cultural rights are facing harsh challenges from the traditional rulers, at home and internationally.



For the first time in half a millennium, South America is beginning to take its fate into its own hands. There have been attempts before, but they have been crushed by outside force, as in the cases I just mentioned and other hideous ones too numerous and too familiar to review. But there are now significant departures from a long and shameful history. The departures are symbolized by the UNASUR crisis summit in Santiago just a few days ago. At the summit, the presidents of the South American countries issued a strong statement of support for the elected Morales government, which as you know is under attack by the traditional rulers: privileged Europeanized elites who bitterly oppose Bolivian democracy and social justice and, routinely, enjoy the firm backing of the master of the hemisphere. The South American leaders gathering at the UNASUR summit in Santiago declared "their full and firm support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales, whose mandate was ratified by a big majority" -- referring, of course, to his overwhelming victory in the recent referendum. Morales thanked UNASUR for its support, observing that "For the first time in South America's history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems, without the presence of the United States."



A matter of no slight significance.



The significance of the UNASUR support for democracy in Bolivia is underscored by the fact that the leading media in the US refused to report it, though editors and correspondents surely knew all about it. Ample information was available to them on wire services.



That has been a familiar pattern. To cite just one of many examples, the Cochabamba declaration of South American leaders in December 2006, calling for moves towards integration on the model of the European Union, was barred from the Free Press in the traditional ruler of the hemisphere. There are many other cases, all illustrating the same fear among the political class and economic centers in the US that the hemisphere is slipping from their control.



Current developments in South America are of historic significance for the continent and its people. It is well understood in Washington that these developments threaten not only its domination of the hemisphere, but also its global dominance. Control of Latin America was the earliest goal of US foreign policy, tracing back to the earliest days of the Republic. The United States is, I suppose, the only country that was founded as a "nascent empire," in George Washington's words. The most libertarian of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, predicted that the newly liberated colonies would drive the indigenous population "with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains," and the country will ultimately be "free of blot or mixture," red or black (with the return of slaves to Africa after eventual ending of slavery). And furthermore, it "will be the nest, from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled," displacing not only the red men but the Latin population of the South.



These aspirations were not achieved, but control of Latin America remains a central policy goal, partly for resources and markets, but also for broader ideological and geostrategic reasons. If the US cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world," Nixon's National Security Council concluded in 1971 while considering the paramount importance of destroying Chilean democracy. Historian David Schmitz observes that Allende "threatened American global interests by challenging the whole ideological basis of American Cold War policy. It was the threat of a successful socialist state in Chile that could provide a model for other nations that caused concern and led to American opposition," in fact direct participation in establishing and maintaining the terrorist dictatorship. Henry Kissinger warned that success for democratic socialism in Chile might have reverberations as far as southern Europe - not because Chilean hordes would descend on Madrid and Rome, but because success might inspire popular movements to achieve their goals by means of parliamentary democracy, which is upheld as an abstract value in the West, but with crucial reservations.



Even mainstream scholarship recognizes that Washington has supported democracy if and only if it contributes to strategic and economic interests, a policy that continues without change through all administrations, to the present.



These pervasive concerns are the rational form of the domino theory, sometimes more accurately called "the threat of a good example." For such reasons, even the tiniest departure from strict obedience is regarded as an existential threat that calls for a harsh response: peasant organizing in remote communities of northern Laos, fishing cooperatives in Grenada, and so on throughout the world. It is necessary to ensure that the "virus" of successful independent development does not "spread contagion" elsewhere, in the terminology of the highest level planners.



Such concerns have motivated US military intervention, terrorism, and economic warfare throughout the post-World War II era, in Latin America and throughout much of the world. These are leading features of the Cold War. The superpower confrontation regularly provided pretexts, mostly fraudulent, much as the junior partner in world control appealed to the threat of the West when it crushed popular uprisings in its much narrower Eastern European domains.



But times are changing. In Latin America, the source is primarily in moves towards integration, which has several dimensions. One dimension of integration is regional: moves to strengthen ties among the South American countries of the kind I mentioned. These are now just beginning to reach to Central America, which was so utterly devastated by Reagan's terror wars that it had mostly stayed on the sidelines since, but is now beginning to move. Of particular significance are recent developments in Honduras, the classic "banana republic" and Washington's major base for its terrorist wars in the region in the 1980s. Washington's Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, was one of the leading terrorist commanders of the period, and accordingly was appointed head of counter-terrorist operations by the Bush administration, a choice eliciting no comment. But here too times are changing. President Zelaya declared that US aid does not "make us vassals" or give Washington the right to humiliate the nation, and has improved ties with Venezuela, joining Petrocaribe, and in July, joining the Alba as well.



Regional integration of the kind that has been slowly proceeding for several years is a crucial prerequisite for independence, making it more difficult for the master of the hemisphere to pick off countries one by one. For that reason it is causing considerable distress in Washington, and is either ignored or regularly distorted in the media and other elite commentary.



A second form of integration is global: the establishment of South-South relations, and the diversification of markets and investment, with China a growing and particularly significant participant in hemispheric affairs. Again, these developments undercut Washington's ability to control what Secretary of War Henry Stimson called "our little region over here" at the end of World War II, when he was explaining that other regional systems must be dismantled, while our own must be strengthened.


The third and in many ways most vital form of integration is internal. Latin America is notorious for its extreme concentration of wealth and power, and the lack of responsibility of privileged elites for the welfare of the nation. It is instructive to compare Latin America with East Asia. Half a century ago, South Korea was at the level of a poor African country. Today it is an industrial powerhouse. And much the same is true throughout East Asia. The contrast to Latin America is dramatic, particularly so because Latin America has far superior natural advantages. The reasons for the dramatic contrast are not hard to identify. For 30 years Latin America has rigorously observed the rules of the Washington consensus, while East Asia has largely ignored them. Latin American elites separated themselves from the fate of their countries, while their East Asian counterparts were compelled to assume responsibilities. One measure is capital flight: in Latin America, it is on the scale of the crushing debt, while in South Korea it was so carefully controlled that it could bring the death penalty. More generally, East Asia adopted the modes of development that had enabled the wealthy countries to reach their current state, while Latin America adhered to the market principles that were imposed on the colonies and largely created the third world, blocking development.

Furthermore, needless to say, development of the East Asian style is hardly a model to which Latin America, or any other region, should aspire. The serious problems of developing truly democratic societies, based on popular control of all social, economic, political and cultural institutions, and overturning structures of hierarchy and domination in all aspects of life, are barely even on the horizon, posing formidable and essential tasks for the future.



These are huge problems within Latin America. They are beginning to be addressed, though haltingly, with many internal difficulties. And they are, of course, arousing bitter antagonism on the part of traditional sectors of power and privilege, again backed by the traditional master of "our little region over here." The struggle is particularly intense and significant right now in Bolivia, but in fact is constant in one or another form throughout the hemisphere.



The problems of Latin America and the Caribbean have global roots, and have to be addressed by regional and global solidarity along with internal struggle. The growth of the social forums, first in South America, now elsewhere, has been one of the most encouraging steps forward in recent years. These developments may bear the seeds of the first authentic international, heralding an era of true globalization - international integration in the interests of people, not investors and other concentrations of power. You are right at the heart of these dramatic developments, an exciting opportunity, a difficult challenge, a responsibility of historic proportions.