To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of… well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia’s interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia’s de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.
Why hasn’t the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The “international community” needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week’s real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Russia
Johan Maurer: More about boldness
November 12, 2004
Johan has a great post about “Quaker evangelizing in Russia”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2004/11/more-about-boldness.htm that really applies to Quakers reaching out anywhere. My favorite paragraph:
bq. I personally have a hard time with hobbyist Quakerism, especially when defined in terms of ultrafinicky prescriptions of how “we” do things, “our” special procedures and folkways, or anything else that detracts from Jesus being in the center of our community life. How can we present something so stilted and crabby and culturally specific as an answer to spiritual bondage? It is just another form of bondage!
Manufactured terrorist threat
August 14, 2003
The big news this week has been the foiling of a plot to smuggle ground-to-air missile from Russia into the United States. ABC News claims there’s “less in missile plot than meets the eye”:abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html and goes so far as to call it a set-up. From start to finish, the plot was orchestrated as a sting operation by U.S. and Russian agents. The accused mastermind Hemant Lakhani had no Russian contacts and no history of arms smuggling. The ABC article paints him as a small-time black market importer down on his luck who thought this would be a good way of making easy money and paying off debts.
This doesn’t excuse his actions but it does change the way this we think about this whole plot. There was no arms seller. There was no terrorist user. No weapon made it by U.S. or Russian intelligence (for they were the ones who shipped it). What we do have is a two-bit middleman who talked trash abou the U.S. and offered to be a link of the arms trade. Like an idiot, Lakhani followed the bread crumbs of opportunity left for him by U.S. intelligence agencies. We now know there are people desparate enough to selll anything if the price is right (didn’t we already know that?) and that salesmen will talking trash about a potential buyer’s competitors to close a deal.
That there’s someone willing to sell missiles is indeed frightening, but it’s not worth this sort of media coverage. No terrorist was involved in all this and the only ones talking about using these weapons were U.S. agents! One has to to wonder if this is the latest “threat” all “cooked up by some White House insider”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000116.php. “Lets pose as Al Qaeda, wave lots of money in front of a desparate idiot, nail him when he grabs for it and declare it as a Al Quada plot foiled.”
The Real Phantom Menace is Us
May 27, 1999
Being the home to a couple of dozen peace groups, the Nonviolence Web has published a lot of press releases calling for an end to bombing in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. They’re all very fine but also all very predictable.
But as we write, the U.S. government continues pursuing a war that has no clear realistic goals, has led to even more killing in the region, and has seriously disrupted post Cold-War relationships with Russia and China (See George Lakey’s “Cold War Returning? — A Chilling Russian Visit”).
At home, Americans just watch the pictures on TV as they go about living a glorious Spring. We laugh, cry, work and play; we make trips to the shore for Memorial Day weekend; and we obediently flock to a movie called Phantom Menace that tells the story of the start of cinema’s most famous Evil Empire.
A new empire is being shaped here. The United States has been able to claim the title of “empire” for at least a hundred years. But something new is at work here ( see my own War Time Again). We’re witnessing the birth of a new American order which is starting a new wars every three months. New kinds of wars, which barely touch American lives, even those of the bombers waging them from 20,000 feet. The Pentagon and State Department’s planners are building on lessons learned at the start of the decade in the Gulf War. They’re refined their missiles for accuracy but they’ve learned how to spin the media
Now every new villain is presented to the media as the new Hitler. Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden. Milosvic. Everyone calling for peace is painted as a neo-isolationist, a contemporary Chamberlain appeasing a tyrant. Afterwards it’s easy to see how overly-dramatic the propaganda was and how ineffectual all the American bombs were. But still, here we are in Kosovo, in another Nineties war and next year we’ll be in yet another. Unless we stop the zest for these Clinton wars now.
What do we have to do to end this war? And what do we need to do to stop the U.S.‘s newfound zest for cruise missiles? How can peace and antiwar activists start acting beyond the press releases and isolated vigils to think creatively about linking folks together to bring new people and ideas into the peace movement?
I don’t pretend to know what exactly we need. All I know is that I’m personally bored of the standard issue peace actions we’ve been engaging in and want to see something new. Some of it might look like clichés from the 60s and some might look like rip-offs of McDonald’s latest ad campaign. But we need to build an antiwar culture that will intrude upon a sunny spring and remind people that a war is on. The real phantom menace this summer is an American Empire that is retooling it’s military and re-conditioning its citizens to think of war as a normal course of affairs.
American Spies and Blood for Oil
January 15, 1999
Saddam Hussein was right: the U.N. teams inspecting Iraq did contain U.S. spies. His expulsion of the teams was legitimate, and the U.S. bombing that followed was farce.
Karl Marx once wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” We’re seeing that today, with each successive military action by the U.S. against Iraq becoming ever more transparent and ridiculous.
Perhaps you haven’t heard the news. It was conveniently released the day before President Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial was to begin and the major American news networks didn’t give it much attention. They were too busy with segments on how the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice designed his own robes. With hooks like fashion and sex attending the impeachment trial, how could they be blamed for under-reporting more Iraq news.
But on January 7th, the New York Times confirmed rumors that United States planted spies on the United Nations: “United States officials said on Wednesday that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs.” The Washington Post and Boston Globe further reported that the operation was aimed at Saddam Hussein himself. NBC News reported that U.N. communication equipment was used by U.S. intelligence to pass along intercepted Iraqi messages.
This is exactly what Saddam Hussein has been charging the U.N. teams with. He has long claimed that the teams, run by the United Nations Special Commission or UNSCOM, were full of “American spies and agents.” It was for this reason that he denied the inspectors access to sensitive sites. And it was this refusal that prompted President Clinton to attack Iraq last month.
So what’s going on here? Senior U.S. officials told NBC News that the main targets of last month’s attack weren’t military but economic. The cruise missiles weren’t aimed at any alleged nuclear or biological weapons factories but instead at the oil fields. Specifically, one of the main targets was the Basra oil refining facilities in southern Iraq.
In a separate article, NBC quoted Fadhil Chalabi, an oil industry analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, as saying Iraq’s oil producing neightbors are “hoping that Iraq’s oil installations will be destroyed as a result of American air strikes. Then the [U.N.-mandated] oil-for food program would be paralyzed and the market would improve by the disappearance of Iraqi oil altogether.”
Since the start of the Gulf War, Iraq has produced relatively-little oil because of a combination of the U.N. sanctions and an infrastructure destroyed by years of war. A report by the United States Energy Information Administration back in the summer of 1997 stated Iraq’s per capital Gross National Product was at levels not seen since the 1940s.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have picked up this slack in production and made out like bandits. Before the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was only allowed to pump 5.4 millions barrels a day under it’s OPEC quota. Today it produces 8 million barrels a day, a fifty percent increase that translates into billions of dollars a year in profit. If the sanctions against Iraq were lifted, Saudi production would once more have to be limited and the Anglo-American oil companies running the fields would lose ten billion dollars a year in revenue.
t’s time to stop kidding ourselves. This is a war over money. The U.S. and Britain are getting rich off of Saudi Arabia’s increased oil production and don’t want anyone muscling in on their oil profits. It is in the economic interest of the U.S. and Britain to maintain Iraqi sanctions indefinitely and their foreign policy seems to be to set off periodic crises with Iraq. France and Russia meanwhile both stand to get lucrative oil contracts with a post-sanctions Iraq so they routinely denounce any bombing raids and just as routinely call for a lifting of sanctions.
Saddam Hussein is also making out in the current state of affairs. A economically-healthy Iraqi population wouldn’t put up with his tyranny. He currently rules Iraq like a mob boss, siphoning off what oil profits there are to pay for fancy cars and presidential palaces. He gets to look tough in front of the TV cameras and then retreats to safe underground bunkers when the bombs start falling on the Iraqi people.
It is time to stop all of the hypocrisy. It is estimated that over a million Iraqis have died as a results of the post-Gulf War sanctions. These oil profits are blood money and it is long past time that they end.
Hussein Backs off, Clinton Whines
November 14, 1998
Sddam Hussein has just backed off. He’s agreed to a diplomatic solution and has agreed to let United Nations weapon inspectors back in.
U.S. officials said that they were about to attack Saturday night, Nov. 14, when Hussein agreed to the inspections. One Pentagon official is quoted as saying “It was almost as if he knew,” which is a ridiculous statement considering that rumors of an imminent attack were circling the internet and news sites all weekend. Of course Hussein knew, we all did.
This should be cause for rejoicing. Blood won’t have to be shed, diplomacy (notably France and Russia’s) have saved the day again, and the U.N. teams can go back to work.
But U.S. administration officials are upset. They wanted a war. They’re double-guessing their timing, wishing they had bombed him earlier this week. They’re implying that they might bomb Baghdad anyway. They’re whining that now they have to once again work with the U.N. and with Iraqi officials.
Why is the Administration so upset? It’s because they have no real policy in the Gulf. Earlier this week they admitted that they didn’t know what they would do after the attack. Here they were sending warships and personnel into the Gulf and they had no long- or mid-term vision for what these people were going to do after the first hundred cruise missiles went off. U.S. policy is once more stuck in the same muddle its been in since mid-1991.
Clinton wishes Hussein would just disappear. That his military would launch a coup and drive him from power. That a cruise missile would hit and kill him. They wish that Iraqi military know-how would disappear. But none of this is likely to happen. In the real world, high-tech U.S. missiles can’t do very much. The real world requires diplomacy, negotiating with people you don’t trust, de-escalating rhetoric. These are skills that the Clinton Administration needs to develop.
It is time for the U.S. to stop whining when diplomacy works. And it is time for a U.S. to develop a realistic policy for building a lasting peace in the Gulf.
Stop the Zipper War Before It Starts
January 30, 1998
Why is President Clinton talking about a reprise of the 1991 Persian Gulf War?
We’re told it’s because U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq has hidden “weapons of mass destruction.” But of course so does the United States. And Britain, France, Russia, the Ukraine, China, India and Pakistan. Iraq doesn’t even hold a regional monopoly, as Israel certainly has atomic weapons atop U.S.-designed rockets aimed this very moment at Hussein’s Baghdad palaces.
Insanely-destructive weapons are a fact of life in the fin-de-Millennium. There’s already plenty of countries with atomic weapons and the missile systems to lob them into neighboring countries. Hussein probably doesn’t have them, and the weapons U.N. inspectors are worried about are chemical. This is the “poor man’s atomic bomb,” a way to play at the level of nuclear diplomacy without the expenses of a nuclear program.
Clinton seems oblivious to the irony of opposing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with our own. The aircraft carriers and battle fleets that have been sent into the Gulf in recent weeks are loaded with tactical nuclear missiles.
If the possession of weapons of mass destruction is wrong for Iraq, then it is wrong for everyone. It is time to abolish all weapons programs and to build real world peace along lines of cooperation.
He’s our Bully
Most Americans, on hearing a call to let Hussein be, will react with disbelief. Conditioned to think of him as our modern Hitler, anyone opposing a new Gulf War must be crazy, someone unfamiliar with the history of the appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II that allowed him to build his military to the frightening levels of 1939.
But Americans have alas not been told too much of more recent history. Saddam Hussein is our creation, he’s our bully. It started with Iran. Obsessed with global military control, the U.S. government started arming regional superpowers. We gave our chosen countries weapons and money to bully around their neighbors and we looked the other way at human rights abuses. We created and strengthened dictators around the world, including the Shah of Iran. A revolution finally threw him out of power and ushered in a government understandable hostile to the United States.
Rather than take this development to mean that the regional superpower concept was a bad idea, the U.S. just chose another regional superpower: Iraq. We looked the other way when the two got into a war, and started building up Iraq’s military arsenal, giving him the planes and military equipment we had given Iran. This was a bloody, crazy war, where huge casualties would be racked up only to move the front a few miles, an advance that would be nullified when the other army attacked with the same level of casualties. The United States supported that war. International human rights activists kept publicizing the abuses within Iraq, and denouncing him for use of chemical weapons. They got little media attention because it was not in U.S. political interests to fight Hussein.
Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.