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The killing of Mr. Soleimani threatens to amount to a gift of God for Iranian hardliners who are now expected to win next month’s parliamentary election in Iran.
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The killing of Qassim Soleimani: The United States misreads the tea leaves
by Dr James M Dorsey
In a further indication of US misreading of the tea leaves, the killing of Mr. Soleimani threatens to amount to a gift of God
for Iranian hardliners who are now expected to win next month’s parliamentary election in Iran.
The killing of Iranian military leader Qassim Soleimani proves the point: The United States has perfected the art of strengthening Iranian hardliners fuelled by an apparently ingrained misreading of Iranian politics and strategy sustained over decades.
It also suggests that the Trump administration has walked into a trap in which spiralling tension between the United States and Iran is likely to be played out on Iranian rather than US terms.
Iran moved last year away from its initial strategic patience response to the US withdrawal from the 2015 international agreement that curbed the Islamic republic’s nuclear program and imposition of harsh economic sanctions to a strategy of gradual escalation.
Iran is banking on the assumption that taking the United States to the brink of yet another Middle Eastern war will ultimately persuade the Trump administration to return to the negotiating table. It’s a high-risk gamble that so far has produced results.
Last week’s killing of an American contractor on an Iraqi military base constituted Iran’s latest chess move.
It sparked a US military strike against an Iranian-backed militia, the subsequent killing of Mr. Soleimani and the leader of the militia, Abdul Mahdi al-Muhandis, and the targeting of a militia convoy.
The Iranian move led to the siege of the US embassy in Iraq that evoked images of the humiliating 1975 evacuation of the US mission in Saigon towards the end of the Vietnam war and the 444-day occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.
It also has put at risk the future of US forces in Iraq, seventeen years after US forces toppled Saddam Hussein and US$1 trillion later. Iraq’s parliament is about to discuss moves to remove foreign forces from the country.
“A humiliating departure for the US from Iraq now seems inevitable,” said International Crisis Group Iran expert Ali Vaez.
Pro-Iranian militias are counting on the fact that they are Iraqis with close ties to the Iraqi security establishment, which they expect will exclude them from the moves that would primarily target the United States.
Iraq’s influential Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has so far limited himself to calling for restraint in the wake of Mr. Soleimani’s killing. Yet, Mr. Al-Sistani could prove to be the player who definitively sways the pendulum.
“How long before Ayatollah Sistani issues a fatwa (religious opinion) asking US troops to leave?” Mr. Vaez asked.
In a similarly humbling development, Iraq, long a primary venue for an ongoing US-Iranian proxy war, has become in the wake of Mr. Soleimani’s death a no-go zone for Americans with the Trump administration urging US citizens to leave immediately to avoid becoming targets.
Earlier, an attack in September on two key Saudi oil facilities, widely believed to have been instigated by Iran, coupled with US president Donald J. Trump’s hesitant response to the assault and the earlier downing of a US drone by Iran, persuaded Saudi Arabia to tone down its rhetoric and explore ways of reducing tension with Iran.
The spectre of a Saudi Iranian rapprochement was put on hold with the eruption in recent months of anti-government protests in Lebanon and Iraq that threatened to throw a monkey wrench into Iran’s strategy of exerting regional influence through proxies.
While it is likely to remain on hold amid the escalating tension, it has not been taken off the table.
Earlier, the United Arab Emirates reached out to Iran after the Islamic republic was sought to have instigated attacks on tankers off the Emirati coast.
The “sequence of events shows that, thus far, the Iranian strategy of calculated counter-escalation is working… By escalating on its own, Iran forced a number of key players to change their cost-benefit calculus,” said Eldar Mamedov, an advisor to the social-democrats in the European parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
While that may be a positive development in and of itself, it also means that regional US allies, with the exception of Israel that wholeheartedly endorsed the killing of Mr. Soleimani, are likely to be more circumspect in their support of the US amid escalating tensions.
Already, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have called for restraint in the wake of Mr. Soleimani’s death.
Mr. Soleimani’s killing has widened the opening for a tit-for-tat war in which Iran has the advantage of being a master of asymmetric warfare and at playing in grey areas.
Amid massive speculation about how it will respond to the killing, Iran is likely to take its time and strike out of left field, potentially prompting an American response that again risks playing into Iranian hands.
““The Iranians will definitely respond, but not in a way that triggers an all-out war, which they know they would lose,” said Iran expert Dina Esfandiary.
In a further indication of US misreading of the tea leaves, the killing of Mr. Soleimani threatens to amount to a gift of God for Iranian hardliners who are now expected to win next month’s parliamentary election in Iran.
A hardline victory would spotlight the United States’ repeated shooting of an own goal by adopting policies that undermine its own long-standing aim of persuading Iran to moderate its policies and tone down its revolutionary rhetoric.
Rather than provide incentives, like with the 2015 nuclear accord, US policy has more often than not reinforced perceptions in Tehran that the United States’ real goal was regime change.
Mr. Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton reinforced those perceptions in response to Mr. Soleimani’s killing: “Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran,” he tweeted.
US policy prompted Iran to adopt a defense and security policy that compensated for the Islamic republic’s intrinsic weakness by emphasizing the very things the United States has long wanted to see change. These include Iran’s successful use of proxies across the Middle East.
At the bottom line, the strengthening of Iranian hardliners not only undermines US policy goals but also risks putting the United States in difficult, if not impossible and at times humiliating positions, and sucking it into a conflict for which it is ill-equipped.
Said political anthropologist Negar Razavi: “The US foreign policy establishment has collectively created a culture of expert impunity when it comes to Iran, which has contributed in no small part to the unstable and dangerous policy conditions we see under Trump today.”
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.
Attacks On Iran, Past And Present
by John Scales Avery
On Friday, 3 January, 2020, progressives in the United States and all peace-loving people throughout the world were horrified to learn that Donald Tromp had added to his long list of crimes and imbicilities by ordering the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, who is a hero in his own country, Iran. The murder, which was carried out by means of a drone strike on Friday, immediately and drastically increased the probability of a new large-scale war in the Middle East and elsewhere. Against this background, I would like to review the history of oil-motivated attacks on Iran.
The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani
On Friday, 3 January, 2020, progressives in the United States and all peace-loving people throughout the world were horrified to learn that Donald Tromp had added to his long list of crimes and imbicilities by ordering the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, who is a hero in his own country, Iran. The murder, which was carried out by means of a drone strike on Friday, immediately and drastically increased the probability of a new large-scale war in the Middle East and elsewhere. Against this background, I would like to review the history of oil-motivated attacks on Iran.
The desire to control Iran’s oil
Iran has an ancient and beautiful civilization, which dates back to 5,000 BC, when the city of Susa was founded. Some of the earliest writing that we know of, dating from from approximately 3,000 BC, was used by the Elamite civilization near to Susa. Today’s Iranians are highly intelligent and cultured, and famous for their hospitality, generosity and kindness to strangers. Over the centuries, Iranians have made many contributions to science, art and literature, and for hundreds of years they have not attacked any of their neighbors. Nevertheless, for the last 90 years, they have been the victims of foreign attacks and interventions, most of which have been closely related to Iran’s oil and gas resources. The first of these took place in the period 1921-1925, when a British-sponsored coup overthrew the Qajar dynasty and replaced it by Reza Shah.
Reza Shah (1878-1944) started his career as Reza Khan, an army officer. Because of his high intelligence he quickly rose to become commander of the Tabriz Brigade of the Persian Cossacks. In 1921, General Edmond Ironside, who commanded a British force of 6,000 men fighting against the Bolsheviks in northern Persia, masterminded a coup (financed by Britain) in which Reza Khan lead 15,000 Cossacks towards the capital. He overthrew the government, and became minister of war. The British government backed this coup because it believed that a strong leader was needed in Iran to resist the Bolsheviks. In 1923, Reza Khan overthrew the Qajar Dynasty, and in 1925 he was crowned as Reza Shah, adopting the name Pahlavi.
Reza Shah believed that he had a mission to modernize Iran, in much the same way that Kamil Ata Turk had modernized Turkey. During his 16 years of rule in Iran, many roads were built, the Trans-Iranian Railway was constructed, many Iranians were sent to study in the West, the University of Tehran was opened, and the first steps towards industrialization were taken. However, Reza Shahs methods were sometimes very harsh.
In 1941, while Germany invaded Russia, Iran remained neutral, perhaps leaning a little towards the side of Germany. However, Reza Shah was sufficiently critical of Hitler to offer safety in Iran to refugees from the Nazis. Fearing that the Germans would gain control of the Abadan oil fields, and wishing to use the Trans-Iranian Railway to bring supplies to Russia, Britain invaded Iran from the south on August 25, 1941. Simultaneously, a Russian force invaded the country from the north. Reza Shah appealed to Roosevelt for help, citing Iran’s neutrality, but to no avail. On September 17, 1941, he was forced into exile, and replaced by his son, Crown Prince Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Both Britain and Russia promised to withdraw from Iran as soon as the war was over. During the remainder of World War II, although the new Shah was nominally the ruler of Iran, the country was governed by the allied occupation forces.
Reza Shah, had a strong sense of mission, and felt that it was his duty to modernize Iran. He passed on this sense of mission to his son, the young Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi . The painful problem of poverty was everywhere apparent, and both Reza Shah and his son saw modernization of Iran as the only way to end poverty.
In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh became Prime Minister of Iran through democratic elections. He was from a highly-placed family and could trace his ancestry back to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty. Among the many reforms made by Mosaddegh was the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s possessions in Iran. Because of this, the AIOC (which later became British Petroleum), persuaded the British government to sponsor a secret coup that would overthrow Mosaddegh. The British asked US President Eisenhower and the CIA to join M16 in carrying out the coup claiming that Mosaddegh represented a communist threat (a ludicrous argument, considering Mosaddegh’s aristocratic background). Eisenhower agreed to help Britain in carrying out the coup, and it took place in 1953. The Shah thus obtained complete power over Iran.
The goal of modernizing Iran and ending poverty was adopted as an almost-sacred mission by the young Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and it was the motive behind his White Revolution in 1963, when much of the land belonging to the feudal landowners and the crown was distributed to landless villagers. However, the White Revolution angered both the traditional landowning class and the clergy, and it created fierce opposition. In dealing with this opposition, the Shahs methods were very harsh, just as his fathers had been. Because of alienation produced by his harsh methods, and because of the growing power of his opponents, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The revolution of 1979 was to some extent caused by the British-American coup of 1953.
One can also say that the westernization, at which both Shah Reza and his son aimed, produced an anti-western reaction among the conservative elements of Iranian society. Iran was “falling between two stools”, on the one hand western culture and on the other hand the country’s traditional culture. It seemed to be halfway between, belonging to neither. Finally in
1979 the Islamic clergy triumphed and Iran chose tradition. Meanwhile, in 1963, the US had secretly backed a military coup in Iraq that brought Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party to power. In 1979, when the western-backed Shah of Iran was overthrown, the United States regarded the fundamentalist Shiite regime that replaced him as a threat to supplies of oil from Saudi Arabia. Washington saw Saddam’s Iraq as a bulwark against the Shiite government of Iran that was thought to be threatening oil supplies from pro-American states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
In 1980, encouraged to do so by the fact that Iran had lost its US backing, Saddam Hussein’s government attacked Iran. This was the start of an extremely bloody and destructive war that lasted for eight years, inflicting almost a million casualties on the two nations. Iraq used both mustard gas
and the nerve gases Tabun and Sarin against Iran, in violation of the Geneva Protocol. Both the United States and Britain helped Saddam Hussein’s government to obtain chemical weapons.
The present attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States, both actual and threatened, have some similarity to the war against Iraq, which was launched by the United States in 2003. In 2003, the attack was nominally motivated by the threat that nuclear weapons would be developed, but the
real motive had more to do with a desire to control and exploit the petroleum resources of Iraq, and with Israel’s extreme nervousness at having a powerful and somewhat hostile neighbor. Similarly, hegemony over the huge oil and gas reserves of Iran can be seen as one the main reasons why the United States is presently demonizing Iran, and this is combined with Israel’s almost paranoid fear of a large and powerful Iran. Looking back on the “successful” 1953 coup against Mosaddegh, Israel and the United States perhaps feel that sanctions, threats, murders and other pressures can cause a regime change that will bring a more compliant government to power in Iran – a government that will accept US hegemony. But aggressive rhetoric, threats and provocations can escalate into full-scale war.
I do not wish to say that Iran’s present government is without serious faults. However, any use of violence against Iran would be both insane and criminal. Why insane? Because the present economy of the US and the world cannot support another large-scale conflict; because the Middle East is already a deeply troubled region; and because it is impossible to predict the extent of a war which, if once started, might develop into World War III, given the fact that Iran is closely allied with both Russia and China. Why criminal? Because such violence would violate both the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles. There is no hope at all for the future unless we work for a peaceful world, governed by international law, rather than a fearful world, where brutal power holds sway.
An attack on Iran could escalate
We recently passed the 100th anniversary World War I, and we should remember that this colossal disaster escalated uncontrollably from what was intended to be a minor conflict. There is a danger that an attack on Iran would escalate into a large-scale war in the Middle East, entirely destabilizing a region that is already deep in problems.
The unstable government of Pakistan might be overthrown, and the revolutionary Pakistani government might enter the war on the side of Iran, thus introducing nuclear weapons into the conflict. Russia and China, firm allies of Iran, might also be drawn into a general war in the Middle East.
In the dangerous situation that could potentially result from an attack on Iran, there is a risk that nuclear weapons would be used, either intentionally, or by accident or miscalculation. Recent research has shown that besides making large areas of the world uninhabitable through long-lasting radioactive contamination, a nuclear war would damage global agriculture to such a extent that a global famine of previously unknown proportions would result.
Thus, nuclear war is the ultimate ecological catastrophe. It could destroy human civilization and much of the biosphere. To risk such a war would be an unforgivable offense against the lives and future of all the peoples of the world, US citizens included.
Recent research has shown that thick clouds of smoke from firestorms in burning cities would rise to the stratosphere, where they would spread globally and remain for a decade, blocking the hydrological cycle, and destroying the ozone layer. A decade of greatly lowered temperatures would also follow. Global agriculture would be destroyed. Human, plant and animal populations would perish.
We must also consider the very long-lasting effects of radioactive contamination. One can gain a small idea of what it would be like by thinking of the radioactive contamation that has made large areas near to Chernobyl and Fukushima permanently uninhabitable, or the testing of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific in the 1950’s, which continues to cause leukemia and birth defects in the Marshall Islands more than half a century later. In the event of a thermonuclear war, the contamination would be enormously greater.
We have to remember that the total explosive power of the nuclear weapons in the world today is 500,000 times as great as the power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is threatened today is the complete breakdown of human civilization and the destruction of much of the biosphere.
The common human culture that we all share is a treasure to be carefully protected and handed down to our children and grandchildren. The beautiful earth, with its enormous richness of plant and animal life, is also a treasure, almost beyond our power to measure or express. What enormous arrogance and blasphemy it is for our leaders to think of risking these in a thermonuclear war!
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Since 1990 he has been the Chairman of the Danish National Group of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Between 2004 and 2015 he also served as Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy. He founded the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, and was for many years its Managing Editor. He also served as Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (19881997).
http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com. To know more about his works visit this link. http://eacpe.org/about-john-scales-avery/
http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com. To know more about his works visit this link. http://eacpe.org/about-john-scales-avery/
Effective climate mitigation: 2020 vision
by Bill Henderson
It’s the beginning of a new year and
decade. 2020 beckons. Life is good, better than the human condition has ever been, but climate change is happening, is accelerating and has become an existential danger to everyone on the planet, to most species on the planet. Climate mitigation is beyond necessary and yet we’ve failed again with yet another decade’s precious time wasted.
Neoliberalism has put the blinders on public imagination, hindering our ability to envision, and thus build, a world free from fossil fuels. Fremstad and Paul
It’s the beginning of a new year and decade. 2020 beckons. Life is good, better than the human condition has ever been, but climate change is happening, is accelerating and has become an existential danger to everyone on the planet, to most species on the planet. Climate mitigation is beyond necessary and yet we’ve failed again with yet another decade’s precious time wasted.
There is (hopefully) still time for effective mitigation. We can imagine a successful transition and a much better, safer socio-economy for our continuing future evolution. But if we stay in myopic, denial-infested political and economic BAU and don’t treat climate as the emergency it has so surly become, if we don’t unblock so that effective mitigation becomes possible, if we just continue to waste time instead of providing leadership – our bright beginning 2020 vision will get relentlessly bleaker. Burning fossil fuels now produces a potentially fatal toxin and we must undergo treatment urgently or accept that climate change will be terminal.
Back in the 90s when climate mitigation planning began in earnest, decarbonization was conceived as renewable energy capacity expanding and out competing fossil fuels in existing markets, aided by carbon pricing or governmental incentives for renewables or both. Today this is just pretend mitigation wasting more precious time. There is not enough carbon budget left; investment in fossil fuel expansion continues largely unchecked; fossil fuel use is predicted to continue at present levels till at least 2040; and the only mitigation policies and instruments allowed such as carbon pricing must not effect all important GDP by even minor percentage points. Needed systemic change (other than market induced innovation) is not allowed. Few nations have reduced emissions even to the inadequate levels pledged in international agreements.
Three decades later fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise with a commensurate rise in temperature globally as well as rapidly acidifying oceans. Tipping points to runaway warming – civilization if not humanity threatening – are as close as wasting another decade without effective emission reduction.
As we begin 2020 we must have a vision of humanity’s future, an understanding of the climate dangers and how and why mitigation has failed. To achieve effective mitigation we must escape myopia and denial with a clear eyed vision of what needs to happen. Climate change is now a serious threat to all of our futures. Listen to the children and catchup with the best climate science. Climate is an emergency now requiring urgent, deep systemic change to a global post-carbon socio-economy or we are all going to lose big, big time. Carbon lock-in, the Golden Straitjacket and the tragedy of the atmospheric commons must be recognized, addressed and conquered urgently so that effective mitigation becomes possible.
What is needed immediately is a switch of mitigation conception from the pretend, demand-side decarbonization orthodoxy to the addition of presently heretical supply-side regulation. Our last hope is a regulated managed decline of fossil fuel production and use begun by those national producers wealthy and stable enough to lead. Emissions must be cut with both arms of the scissors.
Canada and/or Australia must lead. Both are important global producers and exporters who are experiencing rapid and threatening warming; both have socio-economies stable, wealthy and technologically proficient enough to make the transition to a post-carbon economy. The only successful way out of the commons problem is for one or more countries in this position to do the right thing and lead by winding down production.
The only way that either of these governments will be able to initiate a regulated managed decline is to form emergency wartime-style coalition governments .
Emergency government must be agreed to by present powerful actors. Business will have to lead (in their own self interest) by rolling back their capture of government and the Golden Straitjacket: their insistence upon smaller government and deregulation in the expansion of the global economy. Political actors on the right and left will have to agree on the need for bi-partisan co-operation, on the need for pragmatic emergency action instead of pursuit of ideological victory.
Emergency government must be agreed to by present powerful actors. Business will have to lead (in their own self interest) by rolling back their capture of government and the Golden Straitjacket: their insistence upon smaller government and deregulation in the expansion of the global economy. Political actors on the right and left will have to agree on the need for bi-partisan co-operation, on the need for pragmatic emergency action instead of pursuit of ideological victory.
Reducing emissions by winding down fossil fuel production as fast as is possible without economic and political collapse will require strong governments but also fully functioning markets. Deep systemic change requires creative destruction with, crucially, continuing opportunity for growth in an economy stabilized as it was in Allied countries during World War 2. Proponents of both neolib orthodoxy and anti-capitalist revolution must bend to the realities of pragmatic mitigation, the rapid and deep real decarbonization now needed.
Emergency government is essential in disrupting carbon lock-in. Fossil fuels are phenomenal sources of energy. Over the past decade renewable capacity has grown exponentially but because of their great utility and wealth creation capacity fossil fuel use has still increased, has not been out competed. Like Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice we are trying but can’t stop the flow. Building renewable capacity isn’t the same thing as reducing GHG emissions.
But regulate a managed decline of fossil fuel production in fully functioning markets and the stage will be set for deep systemic change to a near future economy, safer and on a much solider footing for boundless human creativity. Get out of denial; roll back neoliberalism with a wartime-style emergency government; regulate the now deadly toxin; and construct (Green New Deal) a new post-carbon economy. (Finally, and hopefully in time.)
Bill Henderson is a climate activist
The “Silence” of Polite Company
by Romi Mahajan
In 2020 seek not polite company but noise, crude, active people. In 2020 raise your voice and scream until it cracks.
An eyewitness to the horrors of the US ‘forever wars’ speaks out
by Kathy Kelly
What are the lessons learned from the rampage, destruction and cruelty of U.S. wars? I believe the most important lessons are summed up in the quote on Cynthia Banas’s T-shirt as she delivered water to Marines in
Baghdad, in April, 2003: “War Is Not the Answer”; and in an updated version of the headline Ramzi Kysia wrote that same month: “Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The U.S. Military Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing” -in Iraq, Afghanistan or any of its “forever wars.”
The 2003 “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq had finally stopped. From the balcony of my room in Baghdad’s Al Fanar Hotel, I watched U.S. Marines moving between their jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees. They had occupied the street immediately in front of the small, family-owned hotel where our Iraq Peace Team had been living for the past six months. Looking upward, a U.S. Marine could see enlarged vinyl photos of beautiful Iraqi children strung across balconies of our fifth-floor rooms. We silently stood on those balconies when the U.S. Marines arrived in Baghdad, holding signs that said “War = Terror” and “Courage for Peace, Not for War.” When she first saw the Marine’s faces, Cynthia Banas commented on how young and tired they seemed. Wearing her “War Is Not the Answer” T-shirt, she headed down the stairs to offer them bottled water.
From my balcony, I saw Cathy Breen, also a member of the Iraq Peace Team, kneeling on a large canvas artwork entrusted to us by friends from South Korea. It depicts people suffering from war. Above the people, like a sinister cloud, is a massive heap of weapons. We unrolled it the day the Marines arrived and began to “occupy” this space. Marines carefully avoided driving vehicles over it. Sometimes they would converse with us. Below, Cathy read from a small booklet of daily Scripture passages. A U.S. Marine approached her, knelt down, and apparently asked to pray with her. He placed his hands in hers.
April Hurley, of our team, is a doctor. She was greatly needed in the emergency room of a nearby hospital during the bombing. Drivers would only take her there if she was accompanied by someone they had known for a long time, and so I generally accompanied her. I’d often sit on a bench outside the emergency room while traumatized civilians rushed in with wounded and maimed survivors of the terrifying U.S. aerial bombings. When possible, Cathy Breen and I would take notes at the bedsides of patients, including children, whose bodies had been ripped apart by U.S. bombs.
The ER scenes were gruesome, bloody and utterly tragic. Yet no less unbearable and incomprehensible were the eerily quiet wards we had visited during trips to Iraq from 1996 to 2003, when Voices in the Wilderness had organized 70 delegations to defy the economic sanctions by bringing medicines and medical relief supplies to hospitals in Iraq. Across the country, Iraqi doctors told us the economic war was far worse than even the 1991 Desert Storm bombing.
In pediatrics wards, we saw infants and toddlers whose bodies were wasted from gastrointestinal diseases, cancers, respiratory infections and starvation. Limp, miserable, sometimes gasping for breath, they lay in the arms of their sorrowful mothers, and seemingly no one could stop the U.S. from punishing them to death. “Why?” mothers murmured. Sanctions forbade Iraq to sell its oil. Without oil revenues, how could they purchase desperately needed goods? Iraq’s infrastructure continued to crumble; hospitals became surreal symbols of cruelty where doctors and nurses, bereft of medicines and supplies, couldn’t heal their patients or ease their agonies.
In 1995, UN officials estimated that economic sanctions had directly contributed to the deaths of at least a half-million Iraqi children, under age 5.
Kathy Kelly with children in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 2016 (Provided photo)
The economic war continued for nearly 13 harsh and horrible years.
Shortly after the Marines arrived outside of our hotel, we began hearing ominous reports of potential humanitarian crises developing in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. A woman who had been in charge of food distribution for her neighborhood, under the “Oil for Food” program, showed us her carefully maintained ledger books and angrily asked how all who had depended on the monthly food basket would now feed their families. Along with food shortages, we heard alarming reports about contaminated water and a possible outbreak of cholera in Basra and Hilla. For weeks, there had been no trash removal. Bombed electrical plants and sanitation facilities had yet to be restored. Iraqis who could help restore the broken infrastructure couldn’t make it through multiple check points to reach their offices; with communication centers bombed, they couldn’t contact colleagues. If the U.S. military hadn’t yet devised a plan for emergency relief, why not temporarily entrust projects to U.N. agencies with long experience of organizing food distribution and health care delivery?
Cathy, who is a nurse, Dr. April Hurley, and Ramzi Kysia, also a member of our group, arranged a meeting with the civil and military operations center, located in the Palestine Hotel, across the street from us. An official there dismissed them as people who didn’t belong there. Before telling them to leave, he did accept a list of our concerns, written on Voices in the Wilderness stationery.
The logo for our stationery reappeared a few hours later, at the entrance to the Palestine Hotel. It was taped to the flap of a cardboard box. Surrounding the logo were seven silver bullets. Written in ball-point pen on the cardboard was a message: “Keep Out.”
In response, Ramzi Kysia wrote a press release headlined: “Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The U.S. Military Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing In Iraq.”
Kathy Kelly holds Shoba at the Chamin-E-Babrak refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2014, a few days after the child had been saved from a burning tent, during a fire that destroyed much of the camp. (Abdulhai Darya)
In 2008, our group, renamed Voices for Creative Nonviolence, was beginning a walk from Chicago to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. We asked Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid to speak at a “send-off” event. He encouraged and blessed our “Witness Against War” walk but then surprised us by saying he had never heard us mention the war in Afghanistan, even though people there suffered terribly from aerial bombings, drone attacks, targeted assassinations, night raids and imprisonments. Returning from our walk, we began researching drone warfare, and then created an “Afghan Atrocities List,” on our website, carefully updating it each week with verifiable reports of U.S. attacks against Afghan civilians.
The following year, Joshua Brollier and I headed to Pakistan and then Afghanistan. In Kabul, Afghanistan, we were guests of a deeply respected non-governmental organization Emergency, which has a Surgical Centre for War Victims there.
Filippo, a sturdy young nurse from Italy who was close to completing three terms of service with Emergency, welcomed us. As he filled a huge backpack with medicines and supplies, he described how the hospital personnel managed to reach people in remote villages who have no access to clinics or hospitals. The trip was relatively safe since no one had ever attacked a vehicle marked with the Emergency logo. A driver would take him to one of Emergency’s 41 remote first aid clinics. From there, he would hike further up a mountainside and meet villagers awaiting him and the precious medicines he carried. In a previous visit, after he had completed a term in Afghanistan, he said people had walked four hours in the snow to come and say goodbye to him. “Yes,” he said, “I fell in love.”
How different Filippo’s report was from those compiled in our Afghan Atrocities List. The latter tells about U.S. special operations forces, some of the most highly trained warriors in the world, traveling to remote areas, bursting into homes in the middle of the night, and proceeding to lock the women in one room, handcuff or sometimes hogtie the men, rip apart closets, mattresses and furniture, and then take the men to prisons for interrogation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch filed chilling reports about torture of Afghan prisoners held by the U.S.
In 2010, two U.S. Veterans for Peace, Ann Wright and Mike Ferner, joined me in Kabul. We visited one of the city’s largest refugee camps. People faced appalling conditions. Over a dozen, including infants, had frozen to death, their families unable to purchase fuel or adequate blankets. When the rain, sleet and snow came, the tents and huts become mired in mud. Earlier, I had met with a young girl there whose arm had been cut off, her uncle told me, by a U.S. drone attack. Her brother, whose spine was injured, huddled under a blanket, inside their tent, visibly shaking.
Opposite the sprawling refugee camp is a huge U.S. military base. Ann and Mike felt outraged over the terrible contrast between the Afghan refugee camp with a soaring population of people displaced by war, and the U.S. base housing military personnel who had ample supplies of food, water, and fuel.
Most of the funds earmarked by the U.S. for reconstruction in Afghanistan have been used to train and equip Afghan Defense and Security forces. My young friends in the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV) were weary of war and didn’t want military training. Each of them had lost friends and family members because of the war.
In December 2015, I again visited Emergency’s Surgical Centre for War Victims in Kabul, joined by several Afghan Peace Volunteers. We donated blood and then visited with hospital personnel. “Are you still treating any victims of the U.S. bombing in Kunduz?” I asked Luca Radaelli, who coordinates Emergency’s Afghan facilities. He explained how their Kabul hospital was already full when 91 survivors of the U.S. attack on the Kunduz hospital operated by Médecins Sans Frontières were transported for five hours over rough roads to the closest place they could be treated, this surgical center. The Oct. 15 attack had killed at least 42 people, 14 of whom were hospital staff.
Kathy Kelly and Voices in the Wilderness delegation with Afghan Peace Volunteer friends in Bamyan, Afghanistan, in 2010 (Hakim Young)
Even though Kunduz hospital staff had immediately notified the U.S. military, the U.N., and the Afghan government that the U.S. was bombing their hospital, the warplane continued bombing the hospital’s ER and intensive care unit, in 15-minute intervals, for an hour and a half.
Luca introduced our small team to Khalid Ahmed, a former pharmacy student at the Kunduz hospital, who was still recovering. Khalid described the terrible night, his attempt to literally run for his life by sprinting toward the front gate, his agony when he was hit by shrapnel in his spine, and his efforts to reassemble his cell phone — guards had cautioned him to remove the batteries so that he wouldn’t be detected by aerial surveillance — so that he could give a last message to his family, as he began to lose consciousness. Fortunately, his call got through. His father’s relatives raced to the hospital’s front gate and found Khalid in a nearby ditch, unconscious but alive.
Telling his story, Khalid asked the Afghan Peace Volunteers about me. Learning I’m from the U.S., his eyes widened. “Why would your people want to do this to us?” he asks. “We were only trying to help people.”
Images of battered and destroyed hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of hospital personnel trying nevertheless to heal people and save lives, help me retain a basic truth about U.S. wars of choice: We don’t have to be this way.
Admittedly, it’s difficult to uproot entrenched systems, like the military-industrial-congressional-media-Washington, D.C., complex, which involves corporate profits and government jobs. Mainstream media seldom help us recognize ourselves as a menacing, warrior nation. Yet we must look in the mirror held up by historical circumstances if we’re ever to accomplish credible change.
The recently released “Afghanistan Papers” criticize U.S. military and elected officials for misleading the U.S. public by covering up disgraceful military failures in Afghanistan. Pentagon officials were quick to dismiss the critiques, assuring an easily distracted U.S. public that the documents won’t impact U.S. military and foreign policy. Two days later, UNICEF reported that more than 600 Afghan children had died in 2019, because of direct attacks in the war. From 2009 through 2018, almost 6,500 children lost their lives in this war.
Addressing the U.S. Senate and Congress during a visit to Washington, D.C., Pope Francis voiced a simple, conscientious question. “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?” Answering his own question, he said: “the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood.”
What are the lessons learned from the rampage, destruction and cruelty of U.S. wars? I believe the most important lessons are summed up in the quote on Cynthia Banas’s T-shirt as she delivered water to Marines in Baghdad, in April, 2003: “War Is Not the Answer”; and in an updated version of the headline Ramzi Kysia wrote that same month: “Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The U.S. Military Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing” -in Iraq, Afghanistan or any of its “forever wars.”
[Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. While in Kabul, she is a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.]
Originally published by National Catholic Reporter
Is the US a civilized nation?
by Ron Forthofer
This unnecessary and illegal killing by the US of untold numbers while devastating countries and populations that were not a threat to it were hardly acts of a civilized nation.
The title of this piece may seem stupid to many. They would respond that obviously the US is civilized. After all, we have a highly developed society and culture which is a definition of civilized. In addition, as a sign of our culture, they proudly point to our museums, theaters, and symphonies that, along with our colleges and universities, are among the best in the world.
Adjectives found in other definitions of civilized are humane, ethical and reasonable. Antonyms include barbaric, savage, and inhumane. Many of us would likely agree with the following sentence from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/civilized:
A civilized society or country has a well developed system of government, culture, and way of life and that treats the people who live there fairly.
Definitions or use of civilized thus allow room for interpretations. For example, I would certainly agree that the US has a highly developed society and culture. However, our highly developed system of government has been badly corrupted to benefit the wealthy and powerful. As a result of this corruption, our government and economic system unethically prioritize profit for the few over the interests of the many. Hence I would argue that having a highly developed society and culture does not necessarily imply fairness, and thus it isn’t necessarily evidence that the US is civilized. In addition, unlike much of Western Europe, the US has not implemented many of the human rights identified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For more evidence of our inhumane behavior, would a civilized society accept or allow:
the genocide of American Indians or slavery;
a large number of people, including families with children, to be homeless;
a judicial system that is terribly biased against minorities and the poor;
education to be so expensive that many students will be encumbered with huge debts often requiring decades to pay off;
health insurance and pharmaceutical industries to make the cost of health care so expensive that many people cannot afford it;
some employers to pay workers less than what is necessary to provide the basics for their families;
some citizens being kept from voting based on their race;
the horrific abuse of refugees and immigrants;
industry to pollute the air, water and soil, threatening the health of people living nearby; and
the future of coming generations to be seriously harmed through our government’s inaction or our continuing a lifestyle that leads to a climate catastrophe?
When Europeans came to the American continents, they viewed the indigenous people as being savages. However, consider two quotes from American Indians:
“We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can’t speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees.” ~ Qwatsinas, Nuxalk Nation
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten.” ~ Cree Prophecy
The indigenous understood that environmental protection was essential, that the lust for money was extremely dangerous, and that we had to consider how our actions would impact the future. We are finally beginning to appreciate these facts as the climate catastrophe becomes more obvious to all.
In addition, the immoral war crimes we have committed against other nations, including the American Indian nations, display a shameful level of savagery and barbarism. For example, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb), Secretary of War Henry Stimson struggled with the moral issues raised by WWII and expressed dismay at the “appalling” lack of conscience and compassion ushered in by the war. Stimson stated that he was disturbed by the “complacency, the indifference, and the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe, and, above all, Japan.”
Army General Omar Bradley, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated this point: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, criticized the use of the atomic bomb: “It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. … The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Unfortunately, we have continued with these savage and barbaric policies in, for example, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. We have also imposed sanctions on a number of nations such as North Korea, Venezuela and Iran that don’t comply with our policies, and these cruel and brutal sanctions are crimes against humanity. This unnecessary and illegal killing by the US of untold numbers while devastating countries and populations that were not a threat to it were hardly acts of a civilized nation.
Ron Forthofer, Ph.D. is a retired Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, Texas; former Green Party candidate for Congress and for Governor of Colorado
Jan 8 Strike: With 7.3 crore Jobless, It’s a Fight for Survival
by Subodh Varma
The strike has been called by 10 central trade unions and several independent federations. This is the fourth all-India strike by this joint platform since Narendra Modi first swept to power in 2014. Significantly, over 100 farmers’
organisations, under the umbrella platform called AIKSCC or All India Kisan Sangharsh Co-ordination Committee, have decided to join the January 8 strike and have called for a ‘Grameen Bandh’ (rural strike) on the same day.
The Searching Life and Enigmatic Death of Albert Camus
by Edward Curtin
Albert Camus’ search ended sixty years ago on January 4, 1960, the day he died. Although he had already written The Stranger, The Rebel, The Plague, and The Fall, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he felt his true work had barely begun. Alongside the car in which he died, his brief case lay in the mud. In it was the uncompleted, hand-written manuscript of his final quest, The FirstMan, an autobiographical novel written in a raw emotional and lyrical style that was liberating him from the prison of a classical form he felt compelled to escape. He was on his way to a new freedom, in
writing and in life,when he was cut down.
Why the award of the 2019 Physics Nobel hearkens back to Meghnad Saha
by Pitamber Kaushik
Mayor and Queloz’s astronomical discovery draws us to another discovery of astronomical proportions. Meghnad Saha developed the Saha Ionization Equation, which describes the physical and chemical conditions in Stars
Odisha: How Mission Shakti scheme is giving a new name to millions of rural women
by SN Surajbhan
The “Mission Shakti” programme is a timely effort in transforming the lives of the women in the rural areas which has a well-structured hierarchical setup for the SHGs but the administration needs to reach more grass-root level to achieve the goal with full fledge, opportunities need to be converted into
realities and training programme should be included in the process which would enlighten them with proper aspects of it and would show them the way to do it the right way.
The existential crisis of teachers in the age of technology!
by Abu Osama
We are living in a time when the higher education institutions are weakening due to the market driven ideas on education and neo-liberal penetrations all the way into universities and public institutions, the new tool is to have regulatory captures and control in all academic and executive affairs of a university.
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