[Thanks to David Honish, Veteran, who sent this in.]

LOUSY ODDS, AND GETTING WORSE:
GET THEM OUT NOW

[Thanks to Don Bacon, The Smedley Butler Society, who sent this in.]

September 21, 2006 Juan Cole, Informed Comment

The US Department of Defense has done some opinion polling that indicates that 3/4s of Iraqi Sunnis now support what the Pentagon calls the “insurgency”.

When the DoD started doing polling on the subject in 2003, they found that 14 percent of Sunni Arabs supported the insurgency.

If there are 5 million Sunni Arabs, let us say that 1.5 million are less than 15 years of age.

Of the 3.5 million left, half are women and less likely to actually engage in violence, though they might offer support for it.

So that is 1.75 million men.

At 75%, that is 1.3 million male supporters of the guerrilla movement.

Of the 147,000 US troops in Iraq, a very large number of which now seem to be in and around Baghdad itself, I don’t know exactly how many are fighters.

The traditional rule of thumb is 10%, but I read somewhere that the percentage is much higher in this war. A reader who served over there challenged the latter assertion and said that no, it is just 10%.

If we really just have 14,700 fighters facing 1.3 million Sunni guerrilla supporters, it isn’t any mystery why things in Iraq are as they are and why Gen. Casey openly admits that we are not there to win, just to keep a lid on.

I can’t imagine how they could hope even to keep a lid on.

Given the figures released today, I’d say it isn’t much of a lid (though remember that the death figures could easily be twice or ten times as bad.)

The other thing to remember is that the Sunni Arab areas have been under US military occupation for the past over 3 years, and that this vast increase in support for the guerrilla movement is therefore in some large part the fault of bad counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.

They were all reading that stupid, racist tract, Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, which says you can control Arabs by humiliating them.

What Patai didn’t tell them is that yes, you can for a short while, but then in order to recover his self-respect, the humiliated Arab has to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you, and so do his 5 brothers and 25 cousins.

There are probably also at least a couple million Shiite men who support guerrilla action to get the multinational forces out of their country.

Notes From A Lost War:
“The Road In Iraq Has Gotten Rockier Rather Suddenly”
“I Don’t Know How Long That Can Go On, A Senior Defense Official Said”
Command Panics:
“Guard Or Reserve Soldiers May Have To Be Recalled More Frequently”
“Extending The Iraq Deployments Of Other Units”
General Westmoreland, Oops, Abizaid Says More Troops May Be Have To Be Sent To Vietnam, Oops, Iraq

[Thanks to David Honish, Veteran; Clancy Sigal, and PB, who sent this in.]

9.21.06 Los Angeles Times & By LOLITA C. BALDOR, (AP)

WASHINGTON: The dimming outlook for significant U.S. troop cuts in Iraq means the Pentagon may soon face a difficult and politically sensitive decision: either make more frequent call-ups of some National Guard and Reserve troops or expand still further the size of the active-duty Army, defense officials say.

That choice, already under discussion but with no timetable for decision, is looming in light of the fact that the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have put the Army under enormous strain.

In particular, active-duty soldiers are not getting the desired minimum of two years at home between combat deployments.

Army officials had hoped for some troop relief in Iraq in this election year, but the surge in sectarian violence, the persistence of the insurgency and the slow pace of political progress in Baghdad have snuffed out those hopes.

Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces throughout the Middle East, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the military will likely maintain – or possibly even increase – force levels of more than 140,000 troops in Iraq through next spring. The current total is 145,000, up about 20,000 since June.

Late last year, military leaders had indicated they hoped to reduce troop levels to about 100,000 by the end of this year for an Iraq war that has become widely unpopular at home. But Abizaid said Tuesday that rising sectarian violence and slow political progress made that impossible.

The Army has been aiming to reorganize its combat forces in such a way as to increase the number of brigades available for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, but thus far it is six brigades short of its goal of 42. That is one reason why the Army was forced in 2004-05 to use more National Guard combat units in Iraq than normal; at one point there were seven Guard combat brigades there, compared with just one now.

But even now, active-duty Army brigades are cycling in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan at a faster pace than the goal of one year deployed for every two years at home. That puts a great deal of stress on the soldiers and their families.

“I don’t know how long” that can go on, a senior defense official said in an interview this week. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the problem, which is being discussed behind closed doors.

For the U.S. military, the road in Iraq has gotten rockier rather suddenly.

An indication of that was the decision to extend the yearlong tour of duty for the Army’s 172nd Stryker Brigade; some of the unit’s soldiers had already left Iraq – and families had already hung welcome home banners around the 172nd’s main base in Alaska – when the decision to extend their tour by four months was announced in late July.

The Army has committed itself to not mobilizing National Guard and Reserve soldiers for war duty more than one year out of five.

But in light of the possibility that troop requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan will remain high into 2007 and beyond, officials are already discussing whether in some cases Guard or Reserve soldiers may have to be recalled more frequently.

Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command, said military leaders would consider adding troops or extending the Iraq deployments of other units if needed.

Commanders warn that maintaining Iraq troops levels could cause lasting damage to the services unless an increase in forces is allowed.

Army and Marine commanders have been stepping up their warnings that the pace of troop deployments is increasingly straining the military and threatening to cause long-term damage.

IRAQ WAR REPORTS

Soldier Dies In Al Anbar

21 September 2006 Multi National Corps Iraq Public Affairs Office, Camp Victory RELEASE No. 20060921-03

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq: One Soldier assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division died today as a result of wounds sustained from enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province.

MND Baghdad Soldier Killed By Roadside Bomb

21 September 2006 Multi National Corps Iraq Public Affairs Office, Camp Victory RELEASE No. 20060921-02

BAGHDAD: A Multi-National Division Baghdad Soldier died at approximately 10:30 p.m. Wednesday after the vehicle he was traveling in was struck by an improvised-explosive device in northern Baghdad.

Kentucky National Guardsman Dies In Iraq

Sep 21, 2006 WLEX-TV

A Kentucky National Guardsman has died in Iraq from non combat-related injuries, according to a press release Thursday.

Though the name of the guardsman has not yet been released, his family has been notified. Maj. Gen. Donald C. Storm, Adjutant General for Kentucky, will hold a 12:30 p.m. press conference in Frankfort concerning the death.

Massachusetts Soldier Based At Fort Hood Dies In Iraq

09/21/06 AP

SWAMPSCOTT, Mass. A 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier from Massachusetts has been killed in Iraq.

The tank he was driving was hit by an improvised bomb.

The defense department says Jared Raymond of Swampscott, Massachusetts, died Tuesday in Taji, Iraq.

He was a member of the First Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, of the First Brigade Combat Team at Fort Hood.

Jaclyn Raymond says her son was motivated by the 2001 terrorist attacks to join the Army after graduating from Swampscott High School in 2004.

He deployed to Iraq in January.

Italian Soldier Dies In Accident

2006/09/21 BBC NEWS

An Italian soldier has been killed when the armoured vehicle in which he was travelling overturned near the Afghan capital, Kabul, a Nato statement said.

Two others travelling with the soldier were injured in the accident late on Wednesday, the statement said.

The soldiers were on a routine patrol when the vehicle overturned on a steep incline on the outskirts of Kabul.

REALLY BAD IDEA:
NO MISSION;
HOPELESS WAR:
BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW

U.S. soldiers patrol a road in central Baquba September 18, 2006. (Mohammed Ameen/Reuters)

AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS

Assorted Resistance Action

2006/09/21 BBC NEWS

Sept. 21 (Xinhua)

Militants destroyed an oil tanker in Shahj district and injured the driver on Wednesday, Noor Mohammad Paktin, the provincial police chief said.

The police found the body of an executed Turkish engineer in Gereshk district in the southern Helmand province of Afghanistan on Thursday, a local official said.

“We found the beheaded body of the Turkish engineer named Mustafa Asimi today,” Amanullah, the police chief of Gereshk, told Xinhua.

Taliban militants in Dilaram district of the neighboring Nimroz province abducted Asimi, who was working for a Turkish construction company, in late August.

The militants killed the engineer on Tuesday after the company, which the Taliban claimed works in the U.S. interests, refused to withdraw from this country as they had demanded.

TROOP NEWS

Anti-War Protesters Rally Outside U.N.
16 ARRESTED:
VETERAN SAYS “AN ENEMY IS SPEAKING IN OUR NAME AT THE UN TODAY”

“ The choice I have made as a mother and the choice that remains for all of us to make,” Elaine Brower states, “is to take it upon ourselves to stop this awful war and all the other atrocities we watch being committed.” [rogouski.com/gallery]

*********************************************

At the rally, David Cline, National President of Veterans for Peace, reminded the crowd that those serving in the armed forces have “sworn an oath to defend all enemies” of the Constitution, “both foreign and domestic. An enemy is speaking in our name at the UN today.”

September 19, 2006 World Can’t Wait & September 20, 2006 By Justin Rocket Silverman, amNew York Staff Writer & By United for Peace and Justice

Sixteen anti-Bush activists, organized by the Bush Crimes Commission and World Can’t Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime — including religious leaders, military families, Iraq veterans, students, humanists, and others – were arrested for attempting to serve the Bush Crimes Commission’s Verdict of guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity on President Bush while he was at the UN.

Several were assaulted by the police. They stated:

Participants arrested include:

Elaine Brower, mother of U.S. Marine stationed in Fallujah and a spokesperson for World Can’t Wait.

“The choice I have made as a mother and the choice that remains for all of us to make,” Elaine Brower states, “is to take it upon ourselves to stop this awful war and all the other atrocities we watch being committed.”

Ann Wright. one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in protest of the Iraq war

Rev. Luis Barrios of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

C. Clark Kissinger, convener of the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration (www.bushcommission.org)

Beth Lamont, the American Humanist Association’s UN representative

Aimara & Pete from the Not In Our Name Project

3 members of Grannies Against the War

“We have come to the United Nations today to engage in non-violent civil disobedience. We demand the war on Iraq end immediately. We oppose any attack on Iran.

“We declare to the world that President George W. Bush has been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He does not speak for us.”

As President Bush made his way to the U.N. today, at least 3,500 antiwar protestors took to New York City’s streets to call for an end to the Iraq war and no more wars.

Protestors marched north from Sixth Avenue and 37th Street, then east on 47th Street to a rally across from the U.N.

The sidewalk where demonstrators assembled on Sixth Avenue was so jammed with people that the New York Police Department opened a lane on Sixth Avenue, and then the entire street on 47th Street for the marchers.

At one point on 47th Street, the march stretched from Sixth Avenue to Lexington Avenue, almost 3/4 of a mile.

Among the participants were grandmothers, recent Iraq war veterans, older veterans, students, clergy, a contingent from Maine, parents, and members of the hospital and health care workers union, Local 1199 SEIU.

At the rally, David Cline, National President of Veterans for Peace, reminded the crowd that those serving in the armed forces have “sworn an oath to defend all enemies” of the Constitution, “both foreign and domestic.

“An enemy is speaking in our name at the UN today.”

The marchers held signs with the names of slain American soldiers and cartoon versions of the president accompanied by, “Bush lies, who dies?” as they made their way from Herald Square to the U.N.

MORE:

Veterans March To Defend Arrested Activists

September 20, 2006 MESSAGE FROM VETERANS FOR PEACE CHAPTER 21

To all who participated in the march and demonstration at the U.N. yesterday, may I extend our warmest thanks for your activism.

It was great to see the turn out we did have on such short notice and during a work day.

In addition to all metro area chapters being represented at this event, Bill Perry from Pennsylvania and members of the IVAW [Iraq Veterans Against The War] were also present.

After the march, several of us metro area VFP’s and VVAW’s [Vietnam Veterans Against The War] continued to march in support of the demonstrators who were being arrested for exercising their freedom of speech while Bush was inside the U.N. pimping his “Freedom Initiative”.

Among those arrested were Ann Wright who is a retired Army colonel & State Dept. official and VFP member and Elaine Brower who is a MFSO member and a regular at the Wednesday night vigil in Teaneck, N.J.

Once again, thank you for your sacrifice to this just cause.

Ken Dalton
President, VFP Chapter 21
New Jersey

MORE:

ANTI-BUSH PROTESTER ASSAULTED BY POLICE
FACES FELONY CHARGE

Photo from front page of El Diario

September 21, 2006 Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience & Worldcantwait.net

After being assaulted by police during a non-violent protest at the UN and then jailed overnight, Episcopal minister Fr. Luis Barrios of NYC has been charged with felony assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct.

Disabled Iraq war veteran Geoffrey Millard was also held overnight and charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

Both were released Wednesday morning. Funds are now needed to continue the struggle.

The two were part of a group of 16 arrested during a non-violent civil disobedience protest directly in front of the UN while Bush was speaking. The diverse group, which held signs and chanted, “Bush is a war criminal. Bush Step Down.”

Also arrested were members of Granny Peace Brigade, Peace Action of NY State, Not In Our Name Project, Jewish Students & Youth Against the War, and “We Will Not Be Silent” campaign.

You can demand the charges be dropped by calling or emailing:

Mayor Bloomberg: PHONE 311 (or 212-NEW-YORK outside NYC)/FAX (212) 788-2460; E-MAIL: www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html

Office of Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan District Attorney: (212) 335-9000

To wage the defense for “the UN 16" and to continue the promotion of the Bush Commission’s Final Verdict, your financial support is crucial.

Make your donation at www.nion.us/NSOC/sign.htm. Tax deductible donations can be made at www.ihcenter.org/groups/nion.html. Or mail your check made out to Not In Our Name, to NION, 305 West Broadway, #199, New York, NY 10013.

GI Resistance, Counter-Recruitment, And Getting Out Iraq

Thursday, Sep. 28, 7pm
Judson Memorial Church
239 Thompson Street (between Washington
Square South and West 3rd)
New York, NY

[Thanks to Frank M, who sent this in.]

Join leading anti-war writers and activists at New York City’s historic Judson Memorial Church as they discuss military recruiting and the growing resistance within the Armed
Forces.

Army veteran Jose Vasquez, who refused to participate in the Iraq war, will join Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (The New Press); Peter Laufer, author of Mission Rejected: US Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq (Chelsea Green); and Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, editor of 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military (The New Press.)

The event is sponsored by The Nation magazine, Code Pink, The New Press, Chelsea Green, Judson Memorial Church, Iraq Veterans Against the War, City Belt magazine and local chapters of Veterans for Peace, and New York Veterans Speak Out Against War.

For more info please contact elizabethwg@gmail.com.

Anthony Arnove is the editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, as well as the editor of Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War Terrorism and War.

Peter Laufer, a Vietnam War resister, is the author of several books about conflict and migration, including Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border. Laufer has won numerous journalism awards, among them an Edward R. Murrow Award from B’nai B’rth for his study of Vietnam War veterans suffering post- traumatic stress disorder.

Jose Vasquez, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, is a Staff Sergeant in the Army Reserve. Sergeant Vasquez’s conscientious objector application is still pending. Jose is working toward a PhD in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Elizabeth WeiIl-Greenberg is co-publisher and news editor of New Jersey’s only independent, progressive magazine, City Belt. She has worked as a news reporter for several publications, including the Washington Blade, the New York Amsterdam News and In These Times. Elizabeth’s book can be found online at l0reasonsbook.com.

Iraq Human Shield:
Report On My 9-11 Federal Appeals Court Appearance

Later the discussion turned to issues of due process. There is none in the Iraq sanctions law. The agency that brings the accusation against a person is the same one that determines their guilt.

The government’s attorney seemed half-hearted in his prosecution, and the three judges challenged his assertions continually.

September 21, 2006 By Judith Karpova; Iraq Human Shield – Report on my 9-11 Federal Appeals Court Appearance

Hello, Friends and Supporters

I have received many inquiries regarding “how things went” at US Federal Appeals Court back on Monday, September 11, regarding the attempt of the US Treasury Department to financially penalize me for traveling to Iraq prior to the 2003 war.

I thank you all for your concern, your support, your good wishes. Over a dozen people traveled down to Manhattan with me or met me there and I will never forget this.

When I first received the Treasury Department’s “Requirement to Furnish Information” in 2003 I was very candid about why I went: as a Human Shield to protect UN designated humanitarian infrastructure, which was bombed in contravention of the Geneva Conventions in 1991, as an Interfaith Minister, to bear witness, and as a journalist, to report back my experiences in Iraq, with the Iraqi people.

I wrote home to a number of newspapers, and they published my accounts.

When I went to Baghdad in February and March of 2003, I thought it was the most grand, beautiful city I had ever seen — worn and shabby in many places, because of the years of sanctions, but vital, lively, completely safe, and full of hospitable, resolute, dryly humorous people. I was able to visit hospitals, travel to Basra, live on-site at the local Al-Daura Oil Refinery and speak to its manager, Dather Khashab, an engineer educated in England and Scotland.

I went about alone a good deal, and without fear. In Basra our Iraqi hosts took us — a group from among the 400 international Human Shields — to a restaurant, to show off real Iraqi cuisine and hospitality. I went to the most beautiful mosque imaginable, and lingered for hours among the great columns supporting the stupendous minaret, looking at the patterns of light through the stained glass windows on the deep carpet, as if I were wandering through a great forest.

In the fifteen minutes that my attorney, Michael Sussman, was permitted to speak, how could he convey any of this? Yes, that is all that is allowed.

How could he convey what has been destroyed, and continues to be destroyed, with greater and greater ferocity?

But there were some things he was able to say to the panel of three judges comprising the Second District US Court of Appeals.

The Treasury Department is accusing me of breaking the sanctions by buying food in Iraq, and buying a small painting.

Michael pointed out that the law was created to prevent large corporations from profiteering, not to free-lance journalists who had to sustain themselves while in the country, and spending a few dollars on a piece of artwork to in some way represent efforts of artists in the country under the threat of war. To prosecute me for this, he said, is to twist the Sanctions law for political purposes.

They are accusing me of providing a service to Iraq. This was the saddest part of the hearing. How can she have provided a service, Michael asked, when she was not in the country when the bombing campaign started? Conflict may have been imminent, but imminent conflict is not conflict. She did not provide the service of protecting an infrastructure site.

The opposing lawyer, representing the Treasury Department, said, “Well, she certainly succeeded in publicizing them!”

She may have, the judges agreed, but there is no way to know whether those infrastructure sites were protected by her or not. She went to stop the war, the judges pointed out, and she did not stop it. She tried to bring more people to Iraq to stop the war, but she did not bring more people there. The war went forward.

I thought, as I listened to this, that I would accept any penalty from my government if I could be guilty of this accusation of having stopped the war by going to Iraq.

Well, it was a psychological service, then, the judges ventured. Look, Michael responded, that gets into the realm of the intangible, it stretches the law beyond making any sense. She told the world, and she told the people of Iraq by her presence, that not all US citizens support US policy. She went as a journalist and reported to the people of our own country that people in Iraq are just like us, they have families, and we should be careful before we kill them!

Later the discussion turned to issues of due process. There is none in the Iraq sanctions law. The agency that brings the accusation against a person is the same one that determines their guilt.

The government’s attorney seemed half-hearted in his prosecution, and the three judges challenged his assertions continually.

They seemed to me sympathetic to my case. Still, it was difficult for me to sit there and to hear that my defense against this fine is my failure to do any good, to provide any service to Iraq, to fail in my purpose.

Nevertheless, important things were said. And should the ruling be favorable, it would be a real victory.

But the question is still left hanging, can a person be prosecuted for traveling as a citizen to see the consequences of our country’s policy and talking about it? And what about the US citizens who remained during the bombing?

Is it a crime to protect an infrastructure site that it is a war crime to bomb? What about US citizens like Faith Fippinger, who assisted Iraqi doctors in hospitals during the bombing? Is it a crime to help them? Is it a crime to help parents, as she did, look through rows of bodies to try and find their children?

My case does not really challenge the heart of the Sanctions act. It is a small act of resistance. I feel I have been blessed, really, in being able to make it, and I will continue it to the greatest extent possible.

Again, I thank everyone for your continued concern and support. I am very grateful.
Judith Karpova

IRAQ RESISTANCE ROUNDUP

Assorted Resistance Action

21 September 2006 VOA News & Reuters

Insurgents killed six policemen and wounded two others when they attacked a police station in western Baghdad’s Sunni Amiriya district, police said.

Guerrillas killed three policemen after attacking their patrol in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad. Gunmen attacked a police patrol and killed two policemen and wounded two others in Baquba.

A bomb killed three policemen guarding a local power grid and wounded four in the southern Baghdad district of Doura, police said.

Guerrillas wounded a policeman and two civilians in western Baghdad.

Militants wounded three Iraqi employees for a Kuwaiti mobile phone firm when they attacked their car in southern Baghdad, police said.

The governor of Diyala province Raad Rasheed al-Timimi escaped an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb exploded near his motorcade in Baquba, police said.

A roadside bomb killed two Iraqi soldiers and wounded four in the southern city of Diwaniya, 180 km (112 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE RESISTANCE
END THE OCCUPATION

FORWARD OBSERVATIONS

“There Were Numerous Uprisings, Large And Small, Within The American Military”
“American Military Morale Had Bottomed Out, And The War Was No Longer Fightable, Let Alone Winnable”

2006/04/20 Andrew O’Hehir, Salon Magazine

We haven’t got space to do justice to David Zeiger’s important historical documentary “Sir! No Sir!” but suffice it to say that it will change your understanding of the Vietnam era, even if you were alive then. In the conventional history of that conflict — or at least the one inflicted upon us recently — American servicemen fought for a noble cause, were undermined at home by treasonous radicals and pot smokers, and were spat upon and reviled by hippie chicks when they returned to their beloved homeland.

Among the things Zeiger’s fascinating film demonstrates is that the spitting episodes almost certainly never happened.

Beyond that, he suggests that a great many soldiers, sailors and Marines in American uniform had turned against the war by 1969 or 1970, and that American disengagement in Vietnam largely occurred because American men were no longer willing to fight there.

There were “GI coffeehouses” — gathering places for antiwar soldiers — near every major military base in the country, even in patriotic heartland towns like Killeen, Texas (outside Fort Hood). There were literally hundreds of underground antiwar newspapers, distributed in every branch of the service.

There were numerous uprisings, large and small, within the American military.

Some took the form of units simply refusing to go into combat (during the short-lived Cambodia invasion, for example).

Some were more profoundly frightening to the power structure: black soldiers talking of racial and revolutionary solidarity with the Viet Cong, covert attacks against hated senior officers with fragmentation grenades (a practice known as “fragging”).

Left-wing celebrities like Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda (she is interviewed extensively, and her son, Troy Garity, narrates the film) staged USO-style infotainment tours for dissident servicemen all over the world.

If you weren’t alive in the early ‘70s, there’s no way to explain the tremendous instability of America, when economic and social collapse seemed like an ever present danger. The apex of “the ‘60s,” in many ways, arrived around 1974.

When Presidents Nixon and Ford withdrew from Vietnam, Zeiger says, it was because they had no choice. American military morale had bottomed out, and the war was no longer fightable, let alone winnable.

Does this have ramifications for the present military, and the present war?

Only time can answer that question.

But it is useful to be reminded that the men who actually fought America’s last misguided imperial conflict turned against it in large numbers, while the men who had “other priorities” at the time — like our current president and vice president — have tried to sell us a fictitious history of why we went there in the first place, and why we left.

Sir! No Sir!:
At A Theatre Near You!
To find it: www.sirnosir.com/

The Sir! No Sir! DVD is on sale now, exclusively at www.sirnosir.com.

Also available will be a Soundtrack CD (which includes the entire song from the FTA Show, “Soldier We Love You”), theatrical posters, tee shirts, and the DVD of “A Night of Ferocious Joy,” a film by me about the first hip-hop antiwar concert against the “War on Terror.”

Do you have a friend or relative in the service? Forward GI Special along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly. Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, at home and inside the armed services. Send requests to address up top.

Vale, Dave Harris
DAVE HARRIS, A PILLAR OF RESISTANCE IN THE ARMED FORCES AND FRIENDS OF RESISTANCE IN THE ARMED FORCES IN W. BERLIN FOR SCORES OF YEARS

From: Max Watts
To: GI Special
Sent: September 20, 2006
Subject: David Harris

[From Howard De Nike, September 14, 2006: I received word from Berlin yesterday that Dave Harris died this past weekend.]

[By Max Watts:]

A few thoughts, also about Dave (Harris).

I haven’t been in Berlin, then still frog (fed rep of Germany).

My memories are thus from another, but not forgotten, time.

Dave was for me always the publisher (editor) of Forward, perhaps the most successful GI PAPER in Germany, even in all of Europe.

Of course this was only one of his many “deeds”, activities, but for us, who worked with the GI’s, this was “Where it’s at:,

Not accidentally, “Where it’s at” was also one, the first ? GI papers in West Berlin, in early 1968.

It was succeeded by “Up Against The Wall” in 1970.

Both were important, but only short-lived, papers. Only Forward, and how much must we thank Dave for that ! could appear for many years.

Personally, I must thank Dave (and Dieter Bruenn) specially. They saved our “Files”, our Archives, with much trouble, from oblivion, from their sleep in Heidelberg.

I believe the voyage from Heidelberg to (West) Berlin was not quite easy, either.

Many have already, others will in the future, thank them (Dave, Dieter) for the continued life of this Archive !

Also greetings from Cora Leibowitz, who remembers that ‘Saving action’ of that time!

These good deeds will live on!

Vale, Dave Harris

“There Was No Shortage, Or Impending Shortage, Of Oil While The Invasion Of Iraq Was Being Planned”

[Part 2]

21 April 2005 London Review Of Books: Retort

This essay was written by Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, which deals with many aspects of post-September 11 global politics, is due from Verso this summer.

Retort, a ‘gathering of antagonists to capital and empire’, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

***********************************************************

However the argument is presented, Blood for Oil misdescribes what a single commodity – despite oil’s unique political weight – can actually represent in relation to larger structural imperatives.

This is not the same as saying that the Blood for Oil argument is crudely reductive.

It is true that there are almost too many other plausible ways of framing the Iraq invasion: as an exemplary instance of gunboat diplomacy in the interests of ‘free trade’; as a consequence of the seizure of power by the Project for the New American Century; as a demonstration of the price to be paid by any state opposing the vision of world order laid out in the National Security Strategy document of September 2002; as a road test for Donald Rumsfeld’s new model of the military; to permit the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia; to complete Bush Senior’s unfinished business; as a spectacular response to the events of 11 September 2001; even as a reaction to the lack of targets after thousands of bombing sorties in the 1990s (‘We’re down to the last outhouse,’ one US official told the Wall Street Journal in October 1999).

But all (or most) human situations are overdetermined; it does not follow that the best we can do is settle for a plurality of causes, or a resigned plea for complexity.

Some determinants are more important than others, and oil may be one of them.

The problem with the Blood for Oil hypothesis is not its choice of oil as a dominant force among a group of politico-economic forces, but that it has conspicuously failed to grasp that oil draws its power from a field of capitalist forces that must periodically reconstitute the conditions of its own profitability.

How, then, should the role of oil, and of the supermajors, in the Iraq invasion be understood?

We begin with two incontestable realities.

The first is the brutality of the historical record. Right from the start, commercial oil extraction has been accompanied by ruthless and undisguised imperial violence, by warfare and genocide, and by a cynical lawlessness characteristic of the corporate frontier. Iraq is the result (the deposit) of precisely these processes.

The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) – reconstituted in 1928 as a consortium of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Shell, the Compagnie Française des Pétroles and a group of five US companies spearheaded by Standard Oil – was co-extensive with the British client state. Granted as a mandate to the British in 1920, Iraq was a crucial front in Britain’s ambitious strategy, initiated by the British Controlled Oil Fields Group at the end of World War One, to dominate global oil acquisition.

Under pressure from the League of Nations Covenant to use its mandatory powers to develop representative institutions in Iraq through indirect rule, Britain adroitly cooked up bogus elections, installed a pliant constituent assembly and a freshly minted monarch, then successfully rigged a plebiscite with the assistance of the new high commissioner, Sir Percy Fox. In 1925, with a little help from the League of Nations, Britain struck a deal with the French to ensure that the oil-rich Mosul Province – ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace’ – was formally incorporated within Iraq.

In short order, a Principal Agreement was signed in March 1931 formally granting the IPC 32,000 square miles of Iraqi territory. A hastily convened Iraqi parliament rubber-stamped a deal endorsing the IPC demand that no taxes be levied, in return for a trifling one-time payment by the consortium.

Here was the concessionary economy at work.

A ramshackle dependency, whose sovereignty is largely a fiction, grants to an oil company an exclusive right to explore and develop oil over a vast territory for an extended – often indefinite – period of time.

The company, armed with full title to all oil resources, operates with impunity, offering nugatory payments (royalties, rents and taxes) to the host government. As a result of concessions like these, the Big Three cartel came to control 70 per cent of global oil output by the 1930s. By the end of the Depression, the foundations of the modern international oil system – corporate/state collusion, regulation of surplus, and scarcity manufactured by means of interlocking partnerships – had been laid.

The second reality is America’s special place in the story.

This turns on the accident of geological history that left the world’s largest economy, from the 1920s on, increasingly dependent on foreign oil. The Persian Gulf figured centrally in America’s strategic response.

In the wake of the anti-trust break-up of the Rockefeller oil empire, US firms looked to Mexico and Venezuela. The British, French and Russians, meanwhile, had excluded US interests from the Ottoman sphere (most dramatically in 1920 when the European powers blocked US concessions in Iraq). American firms pushed hard for an ‘open door’ policy and, under pressure, the British succumbed, largely as a result of war debts to the US. Jersey Standard and New York Standard were granted access to the old Ottoman lands (and membership of IPC) by Whitehall in 1922. By 1933, Standard Oil of California had acquired a massive concession from King Ibn Saud, extending from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. Within a decade, five US multinationals had invested $1 billion in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The new political cartography of oil had been drawn in full by the end of World War Two.

Roosevelt, returning from Yalta in February 1945, met the Saudi monarch and declared that his country was ‘more important to US diplomacy than virtually any other nation’. Soon, Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, were working directly with Big Oil for strategic assistance.

The oilmen would provision Europe and the armed forces in Asia (notably Japan and Korea); in return, the oil companies would be given the head of Mosadeq and a military base in Daharan (the centre of Aramco’s Saudi operations). The co-ordinates were clear: an inter-state coalition with the Gulf sheikhs, an alliance between the military, the CIA and Big Oil, and an international oil system superintended by American firms.

From the perspective of the US state’s political interests, it was a system and a strategy intended to shore up the Marshall Plan, to exercise ‘veto power’ over Japanese imports, and to help control the spread of Communism in Asia.

The oil system, unstable and rickety at best, needed constant fine-tuning. When in 1968 the British announced their intention to withdraw forces from the Gulf over the next few years, Henry Kissinger stepped in ‘to keep Iraq from achieving hegemony in the Persian Gulf’. Local forces were to be strengthened in the face of a possible Iraq-USSR alliance. (The Baathists had broken with the US in 1967 after the Six-Day War, signed a treaty with the Soviets soon after, and nationalised the IPC in 1972.)

Monarchical rule (Shah Pahlavi in Iran and, as ever, the Saudis) backed by massive military power became the twin pillars of US strategy.

But fine-tuning was not capable of dealing with insurgent petro-nationalism: concessions, and the operations of imperial oil, inevitably stoked a strong nationalist reaction.

By 1958, John Foster Dulles reluctantly acknowledged the limits of Big Oil geo-strategy, conceding that nationalism ‘made it more difficult for the oil companies to maintain a decent position’.

Mosadeq in Iran, Abdul Karim Qasim in Iraq, Pérez Alfonso in Venezuela and Abdullah Tariki in Saudi Arabia emerged as the standard-bearers of national resource control.

They cleverly turned to the spot market – the new locus of much international oil trading – with the result that pressures to lower oil prices intensified.

In a historic decision, Exxon (formerly Jersey Standard) unilaterally cut posted prices by 10 cents per barrel on 8 August 1960. Harold Snow, the president of British Petroleum, was reported to have wept at the news. He had good reason: OPEC was born a month later as a counter-cartel.

The meeting of the five core states in Baghdad seemed to confirm the worst American fears: insurgent nationalism had produced a trade union. Still, OPEC remained dormant for a decade. It was the confluence in 1973 of Libyan radicalism, assertive oil independents, and an Arab oil embargo precipitated by US support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, that finally detonated the old system. In a ten-month period in 1974, the price of a barrel of oil rose 228 per cent.

The OPEC revolution turned the oil-procurement system upside down. America was now obliged to fashion a new oil strategy from the ruins of the cartel, one in which the Saudi ‘special relationship’ loomed even larger, and had also to learn to live with the consequences of three massive oil price hikes over the succeeding decade. All of which turned out, unexpectedly, to be good news: for the companies’ profitability, for OPEC revenues, and for America’s geo-strategic interest in confronting its new economic competitors, Japan and Germany.

What does this brief history tell us with regard to the Blood for Oil argument?

First, that there was no shortage, or impending shortage, of oil while the invasion of Iraq was being planned.

Oil is an exhaustible resource. It is no surprise that the combination of strategic use and explosive rates of consumption have made the oil sector the object of much Malthusian speculation. Our view is that scarcity and price – the twin sisters of Malthusian pessimism – don’t provide a basis on which the Iraq war can or should be understood.

The history of oil in the 20th century is not a history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace – for the industry and the oil states – of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut.

By the late 1990s oil prices had collapsed, as a result of the Asian financial crisis and Clinton’s ‘dual containment’ policy. This policy largely denied Iraq and Iran permission to market oil, and allocated their quotas to the Saudis – who in effect were bankrolling the US military presence in the Gulf.

The Saudis leapt at the opportunity to increase their quota (indeed to exceed it) as a way of addressing their own economic crisis. By 1997 Saudi Arabia was pumping 8.5 million bpd (in 1985 the figure had been barely 3 million). However, as the Asian contagion spread and economic contraction followed, oil prices fell to $9 per barrel in 1998. A round of corporate mergers, accompanied by OPEC’s new internal discipline, resulted in prices rebounding to $30 a barrel, but in real terms this was small beer.

In response, Cheney’s Energy Task Force did no more than recapitulate an argument made by Jimmy Carter: demand is growing, oil is not scarce, but it is unevenly distributed. Carter had emphasised conservation, at least in the first instance, as a response to market dependency; Cheney stressed military preparedness, national security strategy and alternative sources of supply (West Africa, the Caspian).

The difficulty, again, was to design a system of organised scarcity capable of keeping the oil price low enough for capitalist growth (and, latterly, an SUV culture), and high enough for corporate profitability and OPEC’s Third World ‘high absorbers’ (countries such as Venezuela and Iraq, which are capable of deploying petro-dollars internally for development purposes, and so are much more likely to promote higher prices than surplus-producing ‘low absorbers’ such as UAE or Kuwait).

Repeated attempts to finalise and regularise these contradictory goals have all proved fruitless: in a sense, post-1945 US oil policy stands in tatters if one simply notes the correspondence between states with oil, political instability and anti-imperial resistance.

Yet oil prices have remained relatively stable (and cheap) in real terms for almost half a century.

The price hikes of 1973-74 and 1979-80 had nothing to do with oil scarcity, in the same way that the rapid increase in oil prices beginning in March 2004 (to well over $55 a barrel by October 2004) was entirely a matter of what NYMEX traders called ‘paper froth’. Speculators piled into the oil market because hedge funds had no alternatives, and punters wagered on the likelihood of a ‘supply-disruption premium’.

It is true that there has been an avalanche of ‘end of oil’ prophecies, connecting to a longer history of apocalyptic thinking about modernity’s wholesale dependence on a finite resource.

That oil is running out is incontestable; the question is when. The Malthusians feed on the opinion of certain hard-rock geologists, Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes chief among them, who believe that we have already reached maximum global production. A new think-tank (the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre) and a lobbying group (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) are devoted to establishing this fact.

Yet the vast resources of the new West African ‘Gulf States’, the deep-water fields now under exploitation in Mexico and Brazil, the Canadian tar sands, the emergence of Russia as an oil superpower, and the scramble, chaotic and violent, in the Caspian – all actively promoted by the Cheney Task Force – point to a rather different picture.

[To be continued.]

What do you think? Comments from service men and women, and veterans, are especially welcome. Send to contact@militaryproject.org. Name, I.D., withheld on request. Replies confidential.

OCCUPATION PALESTINE/LEBANON

Zionist Cluster Bombs In Lebanon:
The Gift That Keeps On Giving

[Thanks to JM, who sent this in.]

18 September 2006 By Patrick Cockburn in Nabatiyeh, The Independent

The war in Lebanon has not ended.

Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.

The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon’s farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.

In a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys. “I know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him,” said his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father’s bed in the hospital.

At least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent monitors.

Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon.

A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. “In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs,” he said. “What we did there was crazy and monstrous.”

What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years – often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish – waiting to explode when disturbed.

In Nabatiyeh, the modern 100-bed government hospital has received 19 victims of cluster bombs since the end of the war. As we arrived, a new patient, Ahmad Sabah, a laboratory technician at the hospital, was being rushed into the emergency room.

A burly man of 45, he was unconscious on a stretcher. Earlier in the morning, he had gone up to the flat roof of his house to check the water tank. While there, he must have touched a pile of logs he was keeping for winter fires. Unknown to him, a bomblet had fallen into the woodpile a month earlier. The logs shielded him from the full force of the blast, but when we saw him, doctors were still trying to find out the extent of his injuries.

“For us, the war is still going on, though there was a cease-fire on 14 August,” said Dr Hassan Wazni, the director of the hospital. “If the cluster bombs had all exploded at the time they landed, it would not be so bad, but they are still killing and maiming people.”

The bomblets may be small, but they explode with devastating force. On the morning of the ceasefire, Hadi Hatab, an 11-year old boy, was brought dying to the hospital. “He must have been holding the bomb close to him,” Dr Wazni said. “It took off his hands and legs and the lower part of his body.”

We went to Yohmor to find where Hussein Ali Ahmad had received his terrible wounds while pruning his orange tree. The village is at the end of a broken road, six miles south of Nabatiyeh, and is overlooked by the ruins of Beaufort Castle, a crusader fortress on a ridge above the deep valley along which the Litani river runs.

Israeli bombs and shells have turned about a third of the houses in Yohmor into concrete sandwiches, one floor falling on top of another under the impact of explosions. Some families camp in the ruins. Villagers said that they were most worried by the cluster bombs still infesting their gardens, roofs and fruit trees. In the village street, were the white vehicles of the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose teams are trying to clear the bomblets.

It is not an easy job.

Whenever members of one of the MAG teams finds and removes a bomblet, they put a stick, painted red on top and then yellow, in the ground. There are so many of these sticks that it looks as if some sinister plant had taken root and is flourishing in the village.

“The cluster bombs all landed in the last days of the war,” said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly cheerful 65-year-old woman. “There were 35 on the roof of our house and 200 in our garden so we can’t visit our olive trees.”

People in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should begin now before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. “My husband and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell,” Mrs Hejazi says. “Now we don’t know what to do.” The sheer number of the bomblets makes it almost impossible to remove them all.

Frederic Gras, a de-mining expert formerly in the French navy, who is leading the MAG teams in Yohmor, says: “In the area north of the Litani river, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs.

“The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they are fired so they become anti-personnel mines.”

Why did the Israeli army do it?

The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells.

One Israeli gunner said he had been told to “flood” the area at which they were firing but was given no specific targets.

M. Gras, who personally defuses 160 to 180 bomblets a day, says this is the first time he seen cluster bombs used against heavily populated villages.

An editorial in Haaretz said that the mass use of this weapon by the Israeli Defence Forces was a desperate last-minute attempt to stop Hizbollah’s rocket fire into northern Israel. [What lame bullshit. The objective was to produce exactly the result you read here in this article: slaughter as many Lebanese as possible for as long into the future as possible. For the Zionist master race, Lebanese are useless sub-humans to be exterminated. Guess where they learned that? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. T]

Whatever the reason for the bombardment, the villagers in south Lebanon will suffer death and injury from cluster bombs as they pick their olives and oranges for years to come.

[To check out what life is like under a murderous military occupation by foreign terrorists, go to: www.rafahtoday.org The occupied nation is Palestine. The foreign terrorists call themselves “Israeli.”]

DANGER: POLITICIANS AT WORK

[Thanks to David Honish, Veteran, who sent this in.]

Who? Us? Saying Maliki Is A Worthless, Incompetent Piece Of Shit That Can’t Find His Feet With Both Hands?

9.20.06 Wall Street Journal

The White House denied reports that American officials are beginning to question whether Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki can hold Iraq together and take the steps necessary to end the country’s sectarian violence.

CLASS WAR REPORTS

[Thanks to David Honish, Veteran, who sent this in.]

Received:

Yo

From: AH
Sent: September 21, 2006
To: GI Special
Subject: Yo

Yo cheney,

Do me a favor and deliver this one to your boss.

To el diablo bush:

Now you’ve done it! You’ve gone and made a laughing stock out of yourself in front of the whole world.

Did you hear how his Excellency, Hugo Chávez was making fun of you at the United Nations?

Did you hear all those heads of state applauding and laughing at what he said?

They were laughing at you!

This is what your stupidity has brought us to.

You better resign! If you call it quits now, we’ll all go a little easier on you. Your early retirement would probably give you more time to play golf.

That could be real relaxing until your court proceedings begin.

But you’re the president, so the choice is really yours.

If you and cheney do leave, please remember to take that ass-wipe rumsfeld with you too.

Thank you,

OCCUPATION ISN’T LIBERATION
BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

Telling the truth – about the occupation or the criminals running the government in Washington – is the first reason for Traveling Soldier. But we want to do more than tell the truth; we want to report on the resistance – whether it’s in the streets of Baghdad, New York, or inside the armed forces. Our goal is for Traveling Soldier to become the thread that ties working-class people inside the armed services together. We want this newsletter to be a weapon to help you organize resistance within the armed forces. If you like what you’ve read, we hope that you’ll join with us in building a network of active duty organizers.  www.traveling-soldier.org/  And join with Iraq War vets in the call to end the occupation and bring our troops home now! www.ivaw.net

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