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An appeal to people outside the United States to break US imperial power

February 6th, 2007

BY Stan Goff

NOTE: Please translate this into as many languages as possible, and distribute as widely as possible.

This series of suggestions is written because my country is on a path that will first destroy other societies — upon which we depend — and the biospheric basis of life itself; and this means eventually our own society. Our society now — an imperial society — is deeply alienated, desperately unhappy, and thoroughly indoctrinated into the acquisitive individualism that creates that alienation and unhappiness. We continue down this path because the weight of the system gives it such enormous inertia. We need you to do these things, not just to ensure your own futures… but for our own good.

The United States now exists as a parasite upon the rest of the world. In this system, this political entity called the United States of America is not only a parasite, but a parasite that is destroying its own host. There is only one outcome in the end for such a relationship; we will all perish together. With the help of the people of the world — and I will outline ten ways you can help us — we can all escape this fate. Each of us — with the destruction of US imperial power — will be in a better position to work for a sustainable and indpendent future for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

(1) If there is a US military base in your country, begin a concerted campaign to get rid of it. These bases are exercises of imperial power against your own sovereignty. They are creating base-economies of crime, corruption, and prostitution. They are environmental disasters. Wage a sharp political struggle to make them untenable.

(2) If there are US companies, be they factories, financial offices, or retail outlets, in your country, organize sustained boycotts of them.

(3) If you live in a country that owes an external debt to the US or the US-controlled International Monetary Fund, begin a fight to either default on that debt outright, or secure low-interest or no-interest loans from other countries to pay down the principle. Your nations’ debt is your peoples’ slavery.

(4) Boycott any American agricultural products being dumped on your national markets; and wage a political fight to stop them coming in. US industrial agricultural corporations are heavily-subsidized and predatory monstrosities that destroy the environment and are used as a weapon to destroy your local, traditional agriculture. Ending agriculture for export and supporting your own subsistence and local market agriculture is necessary to break your dependency upon and subjugation to the United States. Fight for you nations’ land; and do not let it become an export platform for dollar-crops in the US market.

(5) Boycott American cultural products. They are propaganda aimed at turning your children into mindless consumers and your nations into obedient colonies.

(6) Make these political issues at home. Fight politicians who are called “pro-American,” This means they are stooges for US-based transnational corporations or for the US state.

(7) Fight to nationalize your most valuable natural resources; and support politicians who will abrogate agreements that allow US finance capital unlimited access to your national markets.

(8) Try to close down any projects that are run out of the US Embassy by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). These projects are designed to drain talented local people away from national independence movements, and the USAID works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency.

(9) Expose and resist any political activity by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), also operating in concert with the US Embassy. This is a front organization for the purpose of engineering elections outcomes in your nation that are seen as favorable to US transnational corporations and the US state.

(10) Mount massive political efforts directed at US Embassies everywhere that oppose the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and demand not only withdrawal, but that no US bases be left behind.

NOTE: I have not called for violence in any of these suggestions. These are generic recommendations.

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¡A romper el poder imperial de USA!

Escribo esta serie de sugerencias porque mi país va por un camino que primero destruirá a otras sociedades – de las que dependemos – y la base biosférica de la vida misma; lo que significa que en última instancia destruirá a nuestra propia sociedad. Nuestra sociedad actual – una sociedad imperial – está profundamente enajenada, desesperadamente infeliz, e indoctrinada a fondo con un individualismo adquisitivo que crea esa enajenación e infelicidad. Seguimos por ese camino porque el peso del sistema le otorga una inercia tan inmensa. Es necesario que hagas estas cosas, no sólo para asegurar tu propio futuro… sino por tu propio bien.

USA existe actualmente como un parásito sobre el resto del mundo. En este sistema, esta entidad política llamada “Estados Unidos de América” no es sólo un parásito, sino un parásito que destruye a su propio hospedador. Hay sólo una salida al final en una tal relación; moriremos todos juntos. Con la ayuda de la gente del mundo – y menciono diez maneras de ayudarnos – podemos escapar a ese destino. Cada uno de nosotros – gracias a la destrucción del poder imperial de USA – estará en una posición mejor para trabajar por un futuro sustentable e independiente para nosotros mismos, nuestros hijos, y nuestros nietos.

(1) Si hay una base militar en tu país, inicia una campaña concertada para libraros de ella. Esas bases son ejercicios del poder imperial contra vuestra propia soberanía. Crean economías de base de crimen, corrupción y prostitución. Son desastres ecológicos. Mantiene una enérgica lucha política para lograr que se hagan insostenibles.

(2) Si existen compañías de USA, sean fábricas, oficinas financieras, o comercios minoristas en tu país, organiza boicots permanentes contra ellas.

(3) Si vives en un país que tiene una deuda externa con USA o con el Fondo Monetario Internacional controlado por USA, comienza una lucha para que no se pague directamente esa deuda, o por obtener préstamos a bajo interés o sin intereses de otros países, para pagar el capital principal. La deuda de vuestras naciones es la esclavitud de vuestros pueblos.

(4) Boicotea cualesquiera productos agrícolas USamericanos que sean vendidos a precios de dumping en tu mercado nacional; y lanza una lucha política para impedir que los importen. Las corporaciones de la agroindustria de USA son monstruosidades depredadoras fuertemente subvencionadas que destruyen el entorno y son utilizadas como armas para destruir vuestra agricultura tradicional local. Hay que terminar con la agricultura para la exportación y apoyar vuestra agricultura para la propia subsistencia y el mercado local para romper la dependencia de, y la subyugación por, USA. Lucha por la tierra de tu país, y no permitas que se convierta en una plataforma para la exportación de cultivos-por-dólares al mercado de USA.

(5) Boicotea los productos culturales USamericanos. Es una propaganda orientada a convertir a tus hijos en consumidores sin discernimiento y a tu patria en una colonia obediente.

(6) Convierte estos temas en políticas nacionales. Combate a los políticos que son calificados de “pro-USamericanos”. Esto significa que son secuaces de corporaciones transnacionales basadas en USA o de USA.

(7) Lucha por nacionalizar vuestros recursos naturales más valiosos; y apoya a los políticos que abroguen los acuerdos que permiten el acceso ilimitado del capital financiero de USA a vuestros mercados.

(8) Trata de clausurar todo proyecto que provenga de la Embajada de USA mediante la Agencia de Desarrollo Internacional de USA (USAID), Estos proyectos tienen el propósito de apartar a los talentos del país de los movimientos de independencia nacional, y USAID trabaja en estrecha cooperación con la Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA).

(9) Denuncia y oponte a toda actividad política de la Fundación Nacional por la Democracia (NED, por sus siglas en inglés), que también actúa en concierto con la Embajada de USA. Es una organización de fachada con el propósito de amañar resultados electorales en tu nación que sean considerados como favorables por las corporaciones transnacionales y el Estado de USA.

(10) Contribuye a crear por doquier masivos esfuerzos políticos dirigidos a las embajadas de USA que se opongan a la ocupación de Iraq y Afganistán por USA, y que exijan no sólo la retirada, sino que no dejen detrás bases de USA.

NOTA: Ninguna de estas sugerencias llama a la violencia. Son recomendaciones genéricas.

Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por Germán Leyens

***

Un appel aux personnes à l’extérieur pour briser le pouvoir impérial des US

Cette série de suggestions est écrite parce que mon pays est sur la voie qui d’abord détruira d’autres sociétés – dont nous dépendons – et la base bio sphérique de la vie elle-même ; et cela veut dire éventuellement notre propre société. Actuellement notre société – une société impériale – est profondément aliénée, désespérément malheureuse, et complètement endoctrinée par l’individualisme consumériste qui crée l’aliénation et le malheur. Nous nous maintenons dans cette voie parce que le système lui confère une inertie tellement énorme. Nous avons besoin de vous pour faire ces choses, pas seulement pour garantir votre propre futur… mais notre propre bonne volonté.

Les Etats-Unis existe actuellement comme un parasite sur le reste du monde. Dans ce système, l’entité politique appelée Etats-Unis d’Amérique est non seulement un parasite, mais un parasite qui détruit son propre hôte. Finalement, il n’y a qu’une seule issue pour une telle relation ; nous périrons tous ensemble. Avec l’aide des personnes dans le monde - - et je vais définir 10 façons de nous aider - - nous pouvons tous échapper à ce sort. Chacun de nous - - avec la destruction du pouvoir impérial US - - sera dans une meilleure position pour travailler à un futur durable et indépendant pour nous-mêmes, nos enfants et nos petits enfants.

1 – S’il y a une base militaire US dans votre pays, commencez une campagne concertée pour vous en débarrasser. Ces bases sont des exercices du pouvoir impérial contre votre propre souveraineté. Elles créent un système économique basé sur le crime, la corruption et la prostitution. Elles constituent des désastres environnementaux. Menez un combat politique intense pour les rendre indéfendables.

2 – S’il y a dans votre pays des sociétés américaines, des usines, des bureaux financiers, ou des points de vente, organisez en des boycotts prolongés.

3 – Si vous vivez dans un pays qui a une dette extérieure vis-à-vis des US ou du Fond Monétaire International contrôlé par les US, commencez à lutter pour, soit directement refuser de la payer, ou vous assurer de prêts sans intérêt ou a faible taux d’intérêt par d’autres pays pour payer le gros de cette dette. La dette de votre nation c’est l’esclavage de votre peuple.

4 – Boycottez les produits agricoles américains qui sont déversés sur vos marchés nationaux ; et menez un combat politique pour stopper leur entrée. Les multinationales agricoles des US reçoivent d’importantes subventions, sont des monstruosités prédatrices qui détruisent l’environnement et sont utilisées comme arme pour détruire votre agriculture locale traditionnelle. Mettre fin à l’agriculture pour l’exportation et soutenir vos moyens de subsistance et votre marché local de l’agriculture est nécessaire pour briser votre dépendance et votre subjugation aux US. Combattez pour votre terre nationale ; et ne la laisser pas devenir une plateforme d’exportation pour des dollars - semences dans le marché US.

5 – Boycottez les produits culturels américains. C’est de la propagande visant à transformer vos enfants en consommateurs écervelés et vos nations en colonies obéissantes.

6 – Faites en des problèmes politiques chez vous. Combattez les politiciens qu’on appelle « pro américain ». Cela veut dire que ce sont des larbins des multinationales basées aux US.

7 – Luttez pour nationaliser vos ressources naturelles les plus précieuses ; et soutenez les politiciens qui abrogeront les accords autorisant les capitaux de la finance US à accéder sans limite à vos marchés nationaux.

8 – Essayez de mettre fin à tous les projets qui sont gérés à partir de l’ambassade des US par l’USAID (Agence US pour le Développement International), ces projets sont conçus pour éloigner des personnes locales de talent des mouvements d’indépendances nationaux, et l’USAID travaille en rapproché avec la CIA.

9 – Exposez et résistez à toute activité politique de la Fondation pour la Démocratie Nationale (NED, National Endowment Democraty), qui opère également de concert avec l’ambassade américaine. C’est une organisation de façade dont le but est de fabriquer des résultats électoraux dans votre nation qui sont vues comme favorables aux multinationales US et au gouvernement des US.

10 – Organisez des initiatives politiques visant les ambassades US partout, s’opposant à l’occupation US de l’Irak et de l’Afghanistan, et demandez non seulement le retrait mais aussi qu’aucune base US ne soit laissée derrière.

Stan Goff Insurgent American 6 février 2007

Note : dans aucune de ces suggestions je n’ai appelé à la violence. Ce sont des recommandations génériques.

Traduction bénévole Mireille Delamarre

Arabic Translation here

Posted by stan in Analysis

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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Petraeus! Is Baghdad Burning?

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=11910

by Stan Goff

Truthdig.com January 21, 2007

"Jodl! Is Paris burning?" - Adolf Hitler, Aug. 25, 1944

Backstage

The United States makes up about 5 percent of the Earth's population, but as an aggregate we burn more than 25 percent of its fossil energy. That's roughly true of all three main forms of fossil energy - oil, natural gas and coal.

The coal we get mainly by having West Virginians surrender their mountains, where coal operators now lop the tops off those mountains to get at the seams of coal and dump the rubble into nearby watercourses. That's what we do for most of our electricity. Canada sells us most of the natural gas we use ... nearly 90 percent in fact.

The problem we have is that our nation's transportation fleet is almost completely dependent on that other store of ancient sunlight, petroleum. Neither natural gas nor coal can feasibly run fleets of tractor-trailer trucks, trains, airplanes and a quarter-billion passenger vehicles (around 98 million of which are SUVs and larger). Neither coal nor natural gas can run ships, tanks and attack helicopters either.

The other thing we need oil for is food ... more than people realize. In Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," he traces the U.S. food chain back to the oil fields through corn, which is now the basis of most of our other foods, then back to the oil field. It is widely known that each calorie of food consumed in the world today represents an expenditure of 10 calories of fossil energy, but Pollan's remarks while observing a cattle feed lot, where the beef-on-the-hoof was being force-fed corn produced by Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, are more to the point than any statistical review:

I don't have a sufficiently vivid imagination to look at my steer and see a barrel of oil, but petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat, and the Persian Gulf is surely a link in the food chain that passes through this (or any) feedlot. Steer 534 started his life part of a food chain that derived all of its energy from the sun, which nourished the grasses that nourished him and his mother. When 534 moved from ranch to feedlot, from grass to corn, he joined an industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel - and therefore defended by the U.S. military, another never counted cost of cheap food.

Empty gas tanks and empty bellies are not the basis of political stability, or profit, here in the United States of America, where the appropriation of immense amounts of time and space, using this store of ancient sunlight, is considered almost our birthright.

The Hydrocarbon Law

The reason I lead into a discussion of the Bush administration's military "surge" plan for Iraq by talking about fossil fuels is that neither the government nor the media seem inclined to talk about the subject. The desperation of the coming escalation of criminal lunacy is based not on some fantasy but on a real and coming competition between the U.S. and basically everyone else for these energy stores, even as most honest experts agree that world production of oil has now peaked and will begin an inexorable and irreversible decline. The reason for attempting to implant permanent U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf area and install compliant governments (the real reason for the war from the very beginning) has everything to do with securing control over the region.

The surge plan is a painfully twisted military option, but what is twisting it is not well understood. Stability in Iraq could be achieved relatively easily, even now, in conjunction with a precipitous redeployment of Anglo-American military forces. The strange attractor - strange mostly because the media never mention it - is Iraq's "first postwar draft hydrocarbon law," which would "set up a committee consisting of highly qualified experts to speed up the process of issuing tenders and signing contracts with international oil companies to develop Iraq's untapped oilfields." This law, which is tantamount to privatization with an Anglo-American franchise in perpetuity, is the bottom line for the U.S., as evidenced by the fact that this is the one, absolute, bottom-line point of agreement between the Bush administration and the so-called Iraq Study Group. The rhetorical scuffle between these two entities is not the what, but the how.

Before any assessment of the balance of forces in Iraq can be undertaken from a purely military perspective (never possible, since military success is always measured against political objectives), it is essential to survey the major Iraqi military and political actors on where they stand with regard to the proposed Iraqi "oil law." If the top priority is to salvage U.S. access to future hydrocarbon mining in Iraq, then the fundamental requirement is a comparatively "stable" Iraqi government that supports this access. The fundamental show-stopper is any leader or set of leaders who reject this plan.

The catch for the U.S. is that, as we shall see, the Iraqi leaders who support the hydrocarbon law have no legitimacy upon which to establish stability, and the leaders who have the popular legitimacy to establish stability support neither the occupation nor the hydrocarbon law.

When the situation is looked at in this way, we can bypass all the chatter from government and media mystigogues about regional stability for the sake of the people, democracy, terrorism, et cetera. These rhetorical smoke screens are concealing two inescapable facts: (1) The U.S. has lost the Iraq war and (2) the best retrenchment position possible now is to salvage the draft hydrocarbon law.

The Shiite "Government"

This explains, to a large degree, why the U.S. is harassing Iranian diplomats, even as it courts Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), as Dawa Party leader and putative Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's replacement. Hakim, after all, is practically an Iranian citizen. Why would the Bush administration court the most pro-Iranian leader among the diverse Shiite factions as successor in the event that Maliki fails to live up to U.S. expectations? Hakim has been a consistent and strong supporter of the hydrocarbon law.

The Shiite leader who has most vehemently opposed this law, and the U.S. occupation, has been Muqtada al-Sadr. The press has frequently portrayed Sadr as pro-Iranian, and nothing could be further from the truth. The SCIRI has been most aggressive in the demand to divide Iraq into a very loose federation and transform southeastern Iraq into an Iranian rump state. Sadr has called for Iraqi unification, left the door open to Sunnis for an anti-occupation alliance, denounced the hydrocarbon law, and modeled his political and military leadership on Hezbollah.

Here is where we come to the nub of The Surge, and why it is probably the political death knell of Nouri al-Maliki. The principle aim of The Surge is to break the power of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr not only has the seats in the Potemkin parliament of Iraq that put Maliki (a leader in a relatively small Shiite party, the Dawa) into power against the SCIRI (the largest parliamentary faction); he commands the ferocious loyalty of two and a half million people and has an 80,000-strong militia concentrated a stone's throw from the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad. Baghdad has about 6 million people; New York City has 8 million, just by way of comparison. The population of Sadr City, the "neighborhood" under the leadership of Sadr, is approximately that of Brooklyn.

To realize this helps in understanding the considerations that go into planning a military operation. We need some kind of comparative scale to really comprehend the dangerous lunacy of The Surge.

There is, in reality, no such thing as an Iraqi government now. There is this formation inside the Green Zone. Maliki cannot leave the Green Zone without an escort of armored vehicles and attack helicopters. If anyone can explain how this constitutes governance, I'm all ears.

Congressional and media accounts constantly refer to the Iraqi government as the entity that requires U.S. military assistance to become the guarantor of Iraqi security. But the Maliki government-or any other government that relies on U.S. military protection to survive for a week-commands the loyalty of only a fraction of the armed actors in Iraq, and it positions itself tactically against most other armed actors. The armed forces being trained for that "government" are themselves loyal to factions with agendas, and these forces are filled with opportunists and infiltrators. Consider these facts: Seventy percent of Iraqis now are asking for an end to the Anglo-American occupation (that number goes up dramatically when the Kurds are subtracted). And the Iraqis themselves are not merely Sunni or Shiite (as simplified accounts have it) but are identified with three major armed Shiite factions, two major Sunni armed factions, or a Kurdish militia of 100,000 that resides in the north and itself is divided into two camps. In light of those realities there is no possibility of one faction gaining the acquiescence of the whole Iraqi population and the various armed expressions of populations. The Bush surge plan is designed to eliminate Maliki's Shiite opposition inside Baghdad, i.e., Sadr and his Mahdi Army.

The Battleground

That Baghdad has become the concentrated focus of most U.S. military efforts in Iraq now is material evidence of the scale of the U.S. defeat there; it is also an indication of exactly how desperate the surge notion really is.

While the U.S. gross troop numbers are about 130,000 (with around 25,000 mercenaries as an augmentative force), the actual number of combat troops is about 70,000. Before we can begin to subdivide these forces for any possible operation to slaughter and raze Sadr City, we have to account for basic operations and force protection at nine major permanent U.S. bases across Iraq, at least five large contingency bases, and an unknown number of smaller forward operating bases. Camp Anaconda in Balad alone has at least 25,000 troops.

According to Globalsecurity.org:

The base is so large it has its own "neighborhoods". These include: "KBR-land" (a Halliburton subsidiary company); "CJSOTF" which is home to a special operations unit, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force and is surrounded by especially high walls that is, according to The Washington Post, so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside. There is a Subway sandwich shop, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges which sell an impressive array of goods, four mess halls, a miniature golf course and a hospital. The base has a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH.

The Surge would inject fewer troops than are required to maintain one "camp." If the entire surge figure of 21,400 troops is compared with the number of hostile residents in Sadr City, the ratio is about 112 hostiles for every American. This can mean only one thing: airstrikes, followed by a ruthless house-to-house slaughter. Sadr City is targeted to be the next Fallujah.

For those who are susceptible to the personification of war, that is, the reduction of whole populations to a single leader - as in, "we are going to take out Saddam" - I will remind readers that Sadr City is half men and half women, with 40 percent of the population under 14 years of age. A million children. Sadr City is approximately 33 million square feet. That is a population density of one child per 33 square feet - less than a 6-foot-by-6-foot room. The very smallest lethality radius from so-called precision weapons delivered by aircraft is about 20 meters. Even the humble infantry grenade launcher fires an M406, characterized this way in the manual:

The HE high-explosive round has an olive drab aluminum skirt with a steel projectile attached, gold markings, and a yellow tip. It arms between 14 and 27 meters, produces a ground burst that causes casualties within a 130-meter radius, and has a kill radius of 5 meters.

Do the math.

In Fallujah, a mass evacuation was organized before the general assault on the city. The mandatory mass evacuation went through checkpoints in the American cordon sanitaire. While women and children and very old people were allowed out, all "military-aged males" were turned back into the city, which, once the assault started, became a free-fire zone, and those men were dealt with like the Jews of Warsaw. Thousands of people refused to evacuate for a variety of reasons. They were subsequently caught up in the general slaughter. This is the likely operational template for Sadr City.

The Other Math

There is another calculation associated with these kinds of "surge" operations: the aftermath. Muqtada al-Sadr has been effectively demonized in the U.S., but he is wildly popular and influential in Iraq, especially in southeastern Iraq, which has heretofore shown the least resistance to the Anglo-American occupation. In an attack on Sadr City, according to powerful rumors, Kurdish peshmerga troops will be used to do some of the fighting, an insane political gambit. If the Americans proceed with what appears to be a cruel and mindless plan (surely emanating from Dick Cheney's lair) there will be a possibility of igniting the Mother of All Tactical Nightmares for the U.S.: a general armed Shiite uprising in the southeast.

Maliki, of course, knows this, and has objected strenuously - only to be blown off like a gnat by the Bush administration and its fresh coterie of compliant generals. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, author of yet another U.S. military manual on counterinsurgency (none of which has ever worked - ever), is the designated paladin for this disgraceful enterprise; he's getting his fourth star for this, making him a real general.

"Petraeus is being given a losing hand," notes former Gen. Barry McCaffrey. "I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the wrong direction. The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly intelligent and creative.... I'm sure he'll say to himself, 'I'm not going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone.' "

This is the most encouraging thing that can be said by a colleague?

McCaffrey's main concern, of course, lies with a number of other generals. The war in Iraq is lost, but the outcome of that loss has also been the severe degradation of U.S. ground forces in the Army and Marine Corps. The last Baghdad "surge" was in August, when 10,000 troops were re-positioned from elsewhere in Iraq to put the lid back on the city, and U.S. casualties increased. Troops there now are being extended, and troops on rest-and-refit cycles have been called up for early redeployment. Morale has been steadily ground down; divorce rates are up; National Guard troops have just been told that the president has overwritten their 24-month combat deployment limit; and material across the board is being used up or seriously overused.

Reps. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's Readiness Subcommittee, and Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas, chairman of the Air-Land Subcommittee, wrote on Dec. 17:

The military readiness crisis is far broader and deeper than the number of men and women in uniform. Simply increasing the size of the Army, which, by the way, was authorized by Congress several years ago but never carried out, is a necessary step. Yet, by itself, it does nothing to address the quality, level of training or equipment condition of the total force.

The impact of the war in Iraq on the Army and Marine Corps has been terribly and unnecessarily destructive. It began with military planning that allowed the invasion to be used as a test drive for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "transformational" force....

-- Two-thirds of Army units in the United States are not combat ready because of severe shortages in equipment, training and troops.

-- Not one brigade combat team in the United States is fully trained and equipped to meet all potential deployments.

-- The Army has had to extend combat deployments in Iraq just to maintain the current force level.

-- The Marine Corps had to call 2,500 reservists back to active duty so their units in Iraq could be fully manned. These were reservists who had already served on active duty and were trying to return to their civilian lives.

-- The Army has had to pay up to $40,000 re-enlistment bonuses to keep highly trained military personnel from walking away.

-- The Iraqi climate, marked by extreme temperatures and frequent sandstorms, causes abnormal wear on precision components, such as high-speed turbines in helicopter and tank engines. To complicate matters, when many units rotate back to the United States, they have to leave their equipment behind for the units rotating in. As a result, 40 percent of the Army's total ground equipment is now in Iraq or Afghanistan. That means even longer continuous use and less opportunity for maintenance and refit.

The Nihilists

I am not advocating increased readiness to attack more foreigners in the future; I do not think anyone poses a credible conventional military threat to the U.S.; and I believe the "global war on terrorism" is a dangerous sham. But these concerns by generals and politicians reflect a real situation. U.S. ground forces are being (no pun intended) ground down by a losing war in Iraq. The reason that neither the public nor many of the troops themselves see this defeat is that we have been indoctrinated to see defeat as synonymous with surrender. It is not. Defeat is failure to achieve the political objectives of a war. This happened long ago.

The surge is a criminal last stand that will cost the lives of soldiers on both sides of this occupation and the lives of countless civilians, and it very well could lead to scenes as humiliating as that at the Saigon Embassy in 1975.

On Aug. 25, 1944, crushed between the Red Army smashing across the Danube and the Free French, American and Senegalese troops marching through the Champs Elysee, Hitler knew the end of the Third Reich was approaching. He had given the order to Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, the German "governor" of Paris, to destroy Paris rather than let it fall into the hands of the Allies. As word of the Allied entry into Paris reached Hitler, he is reputed to have called his chief of staff, Gen. Alfred Jodl, and demanded: "Jodl! Is Paris burning?"

I can almost hear the echo now from Cheney's office, the curtains pulled, the malignant presence glowering in the dark, "Petraeus! Is Baghdad burning?"

Stan Goff is a retired veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces. During an active-duty career that spanned 1970 to 1996, he served with the elite Delta Force and Rangers, and in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti. He is a veteran of the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama and also taught military science at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Goff is the author of the books "Hideous Dream - A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti," "Full Spectrum Disorder - The Military in the New American Century" and "Sex & War."

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Stan Goff, an open letter to congress

http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2007/01/10/open-letter-to-congress-a-tactic/

The Bush-Maliki Plan, now called The Surge, to deploy an additional 20,000 US troops to Iraq is a last-ditch effort to prevent a decisive US political defeat in Iraq. The principle purpose of this "surge" is to destroy the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al Sadr , who broke his alliance with the Maliki government after Maliki met with George Bush to confirm Iraqi government submission to US forces two months ago. Sadr enjoys immense local support from almost 3 million Iraqis, and is a very popular figure through most of the Southern half of Iraq. Not only will the attempt to use this "surge" to destroy the Mehdi Army inflict massive civilian casualties in the tightly-packed warrens of Sadr City, it will ignite a popular rebellion among Shia, from Baghdad to Um Qasr, that will effectively destroy what is left of the legitimacy of the Maliki "government."

Opposing this "surge" is not only politically smart for Democrats; it is a moral imperative because of the civilian casualties that are certain to accrue. But it is also a maneuver to dodge the larger issue of the war itself, and of the 2006 election's implicit demand that the US withdraw from Iraq. Now is the time to put as much local pressure as possible on both parties' Senators and Representatives in order to accelerate the inevitable US withdrawal from Iraq at the least costing lives. It is in that spirit that this Open Letter to Members of the United States Congress is offered.

Please distribute this Open Letter to Members of the United States Congress as widely as possible, with the suggestions for using it.

Suggestion 1: Sign a copy and send it by email and paper mail to your own Congressperson.

Suggestion 2: Have a group from the same Congressional district sign it and send it to your Representatives and Senators.

Suggestion 3: Circulate the letter to as many people and organizations as possible in your city, county, or state, and send copies to both Senators and all Representatives.

Suggestion 4: Set up local web sites and lists to garner signatures, and publish the letter and signatories in the local liberal entertainment weekly. Then send copies of the paper to both Senators and all Congresspersons.

Suggestion 5: Come up with more creative suggestions. and implement them, now.

***

Open Letter to Members of the United States Congress

We the undersigned are opposed to the Bush administration's continuing war in Iraq, but we are also disappointed with much of Congress - Republican and Democrat - as well as with much of the media, for failing to explain the real situation in Iraq and refusing to take decisive steps to halt the US-led occupation.

Media and therefore Congressional representations of the situation in Iraq are not just over-simplified; they are deceptive.

(1) There is never any mention of oil in these accounts. Both the media and most members of Congress are pretending that the US government's preoccupation with Iraq has nothing to do with fossil energy reserves; but most people in the US know that were it not for oil, the US government would have little interest in the region or its people. We do not believe that continuing the US addiction to oil (five percent of the world's population consuming 25% of its oil) is a valid reason to bomb and invade other nations and engage in wars of aggression.

(2) Media and Congressional accounts of the war almost always suggest that the war in Iraq - however "flawed" - is part of something called the Global War on Terrorism. But there can be no such thing as a war on a tactic, so we have to ask ourselves if this is not just another one-size-fits-all pretext for future military adventures. Iraq is not now nor has it ever been a threat to the security of people in the United States.

(3) There is no such thing as an Iraqi government except inside the Green Zone. Congressional and the media accounts constantly refer to the Iraqi government as the entity that requires US military assistance to become the guarantor of Iraqi security. But the relationship of all Iraqi forces demonstrates that this is a dangerous fantasy. The Maliki government - or any other government that relies on US military protection to survive for a week - commands the loyalty of only a fraction of the armed actors in Iraq. The armed forces being trained for that "government" are themselves loyal to factions with agendas, and these forces are filled with opportunists and infiltrators. With 80% of Iraqis now asking for an end to the Anglo-American occupation, and the Iraqis themselves identified not merely as Sunni or Shia (as simplified accounts have it), but of three major armed Shia factions, two major Sunni armed factions, and a Kurdish militia of 100,000 that resides in the north itself is divided into two camps, there is no possibility of one faction gaining the acquiescence of the whole Iraqi population and the various armed expressions of populations. The Ma.liki-Bush "surge" plan is designed to eliminate Maliki's Shia and Sunni opposition inside Baghdad.

(4) The various sectors of the Iraqi population share one goal: they want stability to rebuild. This goal cannot be accomplished without negotiations between the various groups. With most Iraqis now supporting armed resistance to the Anglo-American occupation, no sector that is identified with the occupation can gain legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis. American support for any Iraqi "government" is not preventing so-called "sectarian" violence, it is incubating it. There may be some fighting in Iraq after a US withdrawal, but the balance of forces and their geographical dispersion are more likely to produce negotiations than protracted civil war. At any rate, it is not the role of the US government to shape the future of Iraq. What our government has already done to the future of Iraqis is quite enough, thank you. Iraqis are far more qualified to figure this out than the US Departments of State and Defense.

(5) An exit is not a strategy; it is a command. Elaborate plans about how to withdraw are the responsibility of the military commanders, not Congress. Most members of Congress wouldn't know how to run a rifle platoon for an hour, much less the en masse redeployment of 150,000 troops. Leaving is a technical and tactical exercise. What is required, and what requires the political will of Congress - by de-funding the war - is the order to withdraw. Your job is the what, not the how.

(6) Half-measures happen while people continue to die. Opposing a "surge" in troop levels, but failing to oppose the war, is a half-measure.

(7) It has been said that "cutting and running" would send the "wrong message" to the world about the US. as if being ground down in a humiliating series of daily defeats hasn't already accomplished this. That's what they are. Defeats. Speak plainly. Military success is not predicated on tactical outcomes; but on political outcomes. By this measure, the US has already lost the war in Iraq. We never should have gone there in the first place. If this is about preserving the "national masculinity," then we are saying every life lost in this effort is pure sin. This machismo is the ideology of gangsters.

(8) De-funding the war will not put troops in danger. Specific conditional allocations of funds can be made available for the sole purpose of conducting a re-deployment. Much of the money being used in Iraq is paying exorbitant prices to private contractors. The war is what is putting troops in danger, not cutting funds to continue an illegal and immoral war.

In November 2006, the majority of voting Americans expressed its opposition to the war by putting Democrats back in control of Congress. You must understand that this was a "vote against," not a "vote for." Many of us have been disappointed and even angered by Democratic complicity in this criminal war.

Quit reading the wind, and start reading the weather. Since this horror began, support for US aggression in Iraq has gone from 90% to 30%. Ask yourself what the pattern is here. Republicans are already breaking ranks with the war. Democratic equivocation is establishing the basis for a historical reversal on the political question of the war. Those who are reading the weather will succeed in 2008. Those who are merely reading today's winds will be caught in the storm.

We want out of Iraq. By 2008, the majority of voters will want out of Iraq, and want out immediately, as we do now. They will remember who had the courage to say this before it crossed the 50% tipping point. They will also remember those who had their eyes fixed on today's anemometer. You have one weapon to use against this administration - the power of the purse - and you must use it.

Not one more day; not one more dime; not one more life; not one more lie.

Cut the funds for the war, and bring the troops home now.

___________

THE 3,000 MILESTONE

http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2006/12/06/the-3000-milestone/#more-11

December 6th, 2006

The 3,000 Milestone is the most recent essay on the war by Stan Goff. It is written as US troop fatalities in Iraq have passed 2,950, and 3,000 will likely be reached by New Year’s Day or shortly after… before the Democrat-majority Congress is seated on January 20th. We want people to use it as they see fit throughout the alternative media to support and bolster the case for immediate and unilateral withdrawl of all US military forces from Iraq.

The 3,000 Milestone

by Stan Goff

As the grim milestone of the 3,000th American troop death approaches in Iraq, what can we say about the war that hasn’t been said before?

On September 7, 2005, I wrote a lengthy analysis-from-afar on political and military developments in Iraq, called The Danger of Iraqi Partition. On that same day, we were approaching the 2,000 US-dead-in-Iraq milestone, 1,892 to be exact. Just as today, in the United States these figures of US troop deaths garner the attention of the media, that still pretends the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, wounded, and displaced are a mere footnote.

It reminds one of the old Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, where the entire world exists as a background within which a white European male protagonist can have an adventure about which white males can fantasize. The media in the US is still completely the captive of the White Man’s Burden narrative, even though the term, “White Man,” has now been supplanted by “American.” This is evident in the reflexive valorization of American life over the lives of dark foreigners — which, admittedly, is necessary to sustain circulation and political clout in a culture of national chauvinism. It is also evident in the seeming inability to visualize any “solution” to the whirlwind reaped by US policy in Iraq that does not require the continued employment of US troops to occupy Iraq.

While this milestone will be used — as it should be in my opinion — to mobilize emotional support for the redeployment of US troops back to the United States and the end of the US military occupation of Iraq, I am going to take this opportunity — which it is — to introduce a more clinical account of what is happening with this war. It is fairly obvious now that most Americans want to be rid of this war. In a sense, then, the campaign to build opposition has achieved momentum in a direction that seems unlikely to be reversed. The question that arises now, and the one for which there is little satisfaction in mainstream commercialized or Democratic Party discourse, is what do “we” do? How do “we” get out?

The principal reason there have been no satisfactory answers to that question is that the majority of people rely on professional pundits and news models to acquire the baseline impressions of what is actually happening in Iraq. The account that is being propagated is one that is shallow, simplistic, largely inaccurate, and widely believed by the pundits themselves. They themselves are the captives of their own chauvinist assumptions and of the cosmic vacuums in their heads where the politics of war should be.

In the article cited from September 2005, I wrote:

I, and others, have said for some time now that Muqtada al Sadr is not merely a complicating peculiarity in Iraq, but that he may end up being the canniest of all the current well-known Iraqi leaders – politically and militarily.

Furthermore, I said:

The Bush administration’s principal preoccupation ever since April 2004 has been the question of Iran. If Iraq breaks up, the US will be faced with Southern Iraq – including a huge fraction of its oil – becoming a protectorate of Iran. Meanwhile, the US has attempted to build its bases – which were always the primary goal of the invasion – in Ba’athist strongholds. This was partly the result of tactical necessity as the Anbar, Nineva, and Saladin provinces were consolidated as centers of nationalist resistance to the occupation. The US base at Mosul, along the Tigris River, has become almost a city unto itself with a 65-kilometer security perimeter and a giant airfield.

This base exists in a sea of hostility, surrounded by an increasingly sophisticated guerrilla resistance, adjacent to Kirkuk where the Kurds are attempting to establish their future national capital through a de-Arabization campaign. The headquarters for this base, however, is located in the Green Zone – Baghdad, and the only seaport to the entire country is in Basra Province, which would become part of a post-breakup Iranian protectorate…

I went on to describe the physical infrastructure of the only hope for any group in Iraq for the development capital required to conduct future reconstruction — and satisfy the restive popular bases of the many ethno-geographic divisions: oil.

…The primary forces remaining in the Iraqi “government” are semi-puppets. On the one hand, they are dependent on American military power for the time being to maintain the current balance of forces in their favor. On the other hand, they clearly have an agenda that is designed to consolidate that long-term power through a pact of some sort with Iran.

This has created a polarization between current direct participants in the Iraqi government and the minority – strategically located and well-armed – Sunnis/nationalists in the north. That is not a cultural polarization but a political one that further entrenches the Faustian alliance between the government and the US occupiers each day, though there is no inhering reason among the general populations – who have for years seen inter-ethnic and inter-denominational marriage, etc. – for any pressure to partition the country.

The so-called Iraqi government does not in fact exercise real governance over any but a fraction of Iraq, and the “city-state” phenomenon throughout the country is setting the stage for a universally unacceptableBalkanization of Iraq, at the same time that it is developing the probable (and yet largely unknown) future local leadership of Iraq.

At some point in the future, most of these actors will have to deal with one another politically.

The Shia interim government and the US have maneuvered themselves into the same corner with antagonistic goals if and when they ever find their way out. The Sunnis and nationalists of the north have no stake in partition, and with the withdrawal of occupying forces would be freer to negotiate a political settlement with the south. This leaves one hugely influential local leader in the most flexible position in Iraq right now – Muqtada al Sadr.

He is the man to watch in Iraq for now.

Since this article was written we have seen the resignations of Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton, two of the bigger macho assholes of this administration (which is a tough distinction). The Republicans were swept out of the Congress on the issue of the war. And the putative Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, was just forced by Muqtada al Sadr to embarrass his patron Occupier-in-Chief, George W. Bush, by standing him up for a meeting for one day.

The point of reposting so much of this past article is not to exercise bragging rights about some mysterious prescience. It is to point out that this “prescience” is based on the rejection of those aforementioned mainstream assumptions that Iraq consists of three tidily demarcated ethnic groups who hate each other and need to be controlled by a poorly managed, but basically benevolent US occupation.

The reason it seems important now to take this clinical approach to a very sanguinary war is that the failure of the general US public to grasp the significance of what is unspoken in commercial and ruling class discourse is precisely what prevents that public from recognizing the perfidious current position of Democrats, their vulnerability between now and 2008, and the decisions that we have to extract from them, by force if necessary.

The establishment narrative is that Sadr is a pro-Iranian; he is not. The fact is his base is more like Hezbollah. Sadr has always endorsed Iraqi unification. Bush’s engagement beginning early December 2006 with Abdul Aziz al Hakim — practically an Iranian expatriate — who is the political commander of the former Badr Brigades, a 4-10,000 strong militia whose officers were trained in Iran, is an indication of how little the US understands about the real divisions inside Iraq. It is also an indication of the sense of desperation pervading the White House… and the US foreign policy establishment as a whole.

The balance of forces has changed dramatically in Iraq in favor of Sadr, whose popular base is approximately 3 million working class Iraqis living in a massive slum approximately three kilometers from the Green Zone, Iraq’s main US military installation, and the only safe haven for the so-called Iraq government of Maliki, the inheritor of the Prime Minster’s portfolio from fellow Da’waist Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Maliki serves at the pleasure of Sadr, because without Sadr’s support to make a thin parliamentary majority (Maliki is part of the Nasiriya-based Da’wa Party), Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) would control parliament as its largest faction. The Da’wa militia’s exact size is less than 2,000, and it is restricted to Nasiriya and is not populated or equipped to challenge either the SCIRI or Sadr’s Mehdi militia. Numbering 10-15,000 when its field leadership was bloodied in the fighting with the US in 2004, Sadr’s immense popularity since then is believed to have swelled the ranks of the Mehdi Army, though the various estimations are too broad to have any meaning. No one except the Mehdi commanders themselves knows.

While the pundits continually refer to Iraq’s “sectarian conflict” as a Sunni-Shia division, the most important divisions from the point of view of the US occupation forces and the US foreign policy establishment are inter-Shia. In November 2006, the decision was made to withdraw Marines from the highly nationalist and Sunni-majority Al Anbar Province, to reinforce Baghdad. What is seldom mentioned is what precisely they were reinforcing, and how.

Once we understand that one faction, led by one leader, who has consistently called for Iraqi national unity and the expulsion of the US military and US control over the development of Iraq’s post-occupation foreign affairs orientation… and that this same leader is harboring a militia that exceeds the size of the American occupation itself within the radius of Baghdad and environs… within a stone’s throw of the Green Zone… the answer to the question becomes blazingly clear.

Neither Hakim nor Maliki can afford to appear too cozy with the American occupation or the Bush regime, without risking wide scale abandonment by their respective popular bases. Stating that the American occupation is “unpopular” might be the understatement of the year. At the same time, neither Hakim nor Maliki has the power to control Baghdad, the symbolism and practical political value of which is inestimable, without the American occupation (They are, in fact, unable to do it with the occupation’s assistance.). SCIRI has its main offices located in Iraqi Kurdistan (in the north), with its popular base in the south along the Iranian border. Ayatollah al Hakim, then, does not even have a safe haven for his militias co-located with his zone of greatest geographic influence. The only thing they are co-located with are the American armed forces.

It is not surprising that the Badr Army (Hakim’s SCIRI militia), then, has largely operated jointly with Americans outside Shia areas (against Sunnis) often using the same modus operandias the former death squads of US proxies in Latin America. The facts on the ground, then, include that Muqtada al-Sadr now controls the only viably independent Iraqi armed force in Baghdad; and that force has popular support as well as massive home court advantages. It is, in a word, embedded.

What all Iraqi armed actors have in common is the relative inability to project their force far afield of their respective geographic bases. Sadr has no capacity to attack anyone in Samarra or Ramadi (though the Mehdi have ventured some distance from home in the south). The Da’wa has no capacity to leave the city limits of Nasiriya. SCIRI cannot move its troops without US escorts. The Sunni factions are limited to their areas of operations (and there are numerous reports that Sunni nationalists are engaged in occasional heavy fighting against a small but stubborn number of foreign Wahabbists). The only force in Iraq that has the mobility required to do more than defend ones own zones of influence and project very limited offensive operations beyond that… are the Anglo-American occupiers. The only way to move long distances across the country as an armed unit passing through multiple militia “jurisdictions,” is with helicopters, or heavily armed and armored convoys.

The current civil war is taking place not for Iraq, but for Baghdad, and the catalyst remains the US occupation.

Poor Maliki, called to an audience with his King George in Amman, is faced with Sadr’s threat to withdraw from the Parliamentary majority coalition with Da’wa if the meeting with the Occupier-in-Chief happens. The resistance is targeting Iraqi troops for collaboration, the Badr Army is fomenting a civil war with straightforward attacks on Sunnis and false flag operations against fellow Shias, and the US is demanding Iraqi troops assist them in attacking Sadr City.

One day, Maliki stands George Bush up to show his own people that he is not a puppet; the next, he has to go crawling back to Dubya, even as the infamous Hadley memo calling Maliki a dolt is released and replayed in the media again, and again, and again.

Seeing this as purely power politics, the mistake that got the administration to where they are now — disregarding the roles of the Iraqi masses themselves — Bush then turns to Hakim, thinking he has now split Sadr off from Maliki. Hakim himself is now trapped, faced with the same specter that haunts the Green Zone, possibly tens of thousands of combatants, embedded deeply in their own community near the heart of the second largest city in Southwest Asia, and the capital of Iraq… led by a leader whose popularity is increasing with the “Iraqi street” with each passing day.

That Bush would find himself turning to Iran’s strongest ally in Iraq in his hour of need, an ally who seeks the partition of Iraq against the wishes of the US, to subvert the growing power of the most powerful voice of Iraqi unification and independence outside of Anbar, alas, is a world class irony. Sadr has consistently held out one nationalist hand to the Sunni regions, be the resistance fighters secular or political-Islamists. A condominium between Sadr and the Sunni resistance — which has already tactically defeated the US occupation — would spell the end of Hakim’s power unless he joined the SCIRI with a generalized armed struggle to expel the Americans.

Those who posit conspiracy theories, by the way, about a US desire for civil war and partition, are the victims of their own compartmentalized thinking. Te very first thing that happens with partition is open war between Turkey and Kurdistan… an utter political disaster for the US. We hear little of this in the news or in official communiqués, but Turkey is already turning into the newest regional tinderbox of anti-Americanism, at a time when everything that could go wrong, as the irascible Murphy noted, has gone wrong… most significantly, the ascendancy of Iran.

None of the war’s planners, nor even those who sat nervously on the sidelines while the Feiths and Wolfowitzes fantasized, ever anticipated that they might transform Iran into the regional power.

US forces have already begun drawing down into Baghdad for their struggle with Sadr. As Baghdad becomes the Americans’ new Kabul — a one-city occupation in a vast country — Afghanistan promises to grow into a deadlier quagmire. This is the stillborn dream of George Bush’s mad mentors; and this is the power of Muqtada al Sadr.

In order to understand why Sadr is so dangerous to the US, and why there is consensus on this issue from Republican, Democrat, conservative, and liberal alike, as well as the capitalist media, cannot be understood properly without deconstructing two other tropes that define public discourse about the war: The Global War on Terror, and the protean “mission” of the invasion and occupation.

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is a quantum juridical leap on the international scene; and whether or not it will put down any roots remains to be seen. Its basis is a radical departure from the foundations of Post WWII international and national jurisprudence and the corresponding norms of diplomacy. It is not merely an open-ended war against an ill-formed taxonomy, like the War on Drugs. That “war” was still constrained by geography and manipulation of existing legal norms. The GWOT, which it must be said is a term accepted by both Republicans and Democrats, is based on a unilateral declaration by the United States that the entire planet has now become an indefinite battlefield. This creates the basis for over-riding civil standards of law and international treaties with the tempo-task loosening of norms that, in the past, has exclusively applied to antagonists engaged presently and directly in combat.

The putative existence of such a “war”– which is under vigorous legal challenge — has formed the juridical predicate of the invasion of Iraq against the UN Charter. The fact that the GWOT has been widely adopted and accepted, as both a “fact” and a universalized rhetorical premise, is going to make backing away from this abyss incredibly difficult, even for Democrats. They have participated into conjuring this notion into the public perception. What they had not anticipated, given the limited attention spans of elected officials, is how this prevarication has created a kind of one-way ideational valve that, having passed through it, one cannot go back. Once you acknowledge a Global War of any kind, accompanied by enemies that have been revalidated again and again in the public imagination, then there is the expectation that someone will fight it.

The problem for even those who oppose this transformation of legal norms is that the taxonomies of power applied to the military prior to 9-11were already obsolete. There may not be a way to return to the good old days of technocratic administration for international relations.

The neocons mounted challenges to the past order that were a profound escalation of conflict and American unilateralism, but the uncomfortable fact is that they did so based on very real changes in international reality. That their prescription has failed does not make some of their points — admittedly contained inside the logic of empire — less valid.

Mohammed Atta, they point out, engaged in a military attack against the United States. Until boarding the plane, however, he did not meet any of the criteria we normally apply to the definition of “enemy combatant.” Aside from a box cutter, he was unarmed, dressed like a businessman, and traveling legally inside the United States. Regardless of the provocative etiology of such attacks (US support for Israel and the House of Saud, for example), the isolated fact is that there are people who are organized in ways that transcend international boundaries, and who cannot be directly associated with an existing state, who have the will and capacity to mount military attacks against the US and its military-diplomatic allies. It is true that existing criminal statutes, national and international, are probably adequate to address this issue after the fact. Like any criminal conspiracy, the perpetrators can be sought out, captured, and put on trial. Atta was already in violation of a host of laws before he boarded. We cannot escape the fact, however, that military operations (which 9-11 clearly and unequivocally was) can and will be mounted against states and societies, and the scale of the consequences can only be equated to “criminal” through the exercise of shocking disingenuousness. Bank robbers do not kill nearly three thousand people, and they have no political motive.

The only way forward in mounting a critique of the neocons’ logic on this count is to go outside the boundaries of general acceptability, and become a partisan of curtailing US global power. This is, in my view, a completely correct approach. From a pragmatic standpoint, however, which is the standpoint that electoral politics invariably takes, this is a conundrum. Liberals find themselves forced to argue for conclusions that differ from their opposition, but refuse to depart from the opposition’s premises. It is not the neocons who have bankrupted liberalism — and it is bankrupt — but the bankruptcy of unacknowledged imperial power itself. The conservatives have come to embrace that power openly, and left the liberals in a position to deny the obvious and confirm their essential nature as world-class equivocators.

There is a logic to this equivocation that everyday folks may not be able to unravel intellectually yet, but it also has a smell. They may not be able to deconstruct it, but by 2008 they are likely to vote with their noses.

The only way past this for the people, unfortunately, is the long hard slog of public persuasion; and for all the reasons just stated, we have to make the difficult case that US power is instrumental and not moral, and that this power is malignant.

This slog begins by unmasking the mission of the invasion and occupation.

The mission of the occupation — even as its public face has changed to mask serial setbacks — has never deviated. There may not be any such thing as predestination, but in global politics, the US attempt to implant a permanent military presence in this region as part of its post-Cold War reshuffle is about as close as we’ll get.

The mission is to accomplish the post-Cold War re-disposition of US imperial forces. Given that the chief competition is likely to be for strategic resources (nothing new there), and given that US power now flows out of its debtor and not creditor status, the shift to a more military emphasis within US foreign policy is the only alternative to accepting a long, slow decline in US global power, similar to what the United Kingdom experienced. The prior disposition of US imperial forces was designed primarily to contain the Soviet Union, which abruptly vanished. The irony that the re-disposition has generated a fresh US-Russia conflict was among the unintended consequences. Oil is not only a key resource, the fact that the swing fraction is located in one geographic region makes it theoretically susceptible to military control, especially by sea. (That is the reason overland pipelines — about which we hear next to nothing in the media — are the basis of numerous backroom diplomatic wars right now.) Iraq was seen as the place where the US could build its new bases; and the purpose of the invasion was just that: bases. Big, permanent ones.

When the Bush administration threw the dice, the Democrats happily went along with the program. All of them recognize the necessity — from the imperial standpoint — to re-situate the pieces on the grand chessboard after the last checkmate. This looked as good as anything. So they hooked up with some “advisors,” the Rendon Group and their Iraq Liberation Salesman, Ahmad Chalabi, and started the engines of war.

Rumsfeld, whose resignation recently rocked the Department of Defense, fully expected to draw down to 35,000 troops by August 2003, a permanent and bucolic garrison residing in a peaceful kingdom of grateful Iraqis, presided over by Chalabi. This would be accomplished by a swift and overwhelming victory — shock and awe — that would serve the dual purpose of installing an acquiescent Iraqi government and demonstrating the futility of fighting Americans. The neocon advisors had predicted what they called a “democratic domino theory,” wherein the establishment of toy democracies within the Washington Consensus would begin in Iraq and then sweep through adjacent countries — where the grateful brown children would embrace their new rulers along with McDonald’s and The Gap. The target of their bizarre theory was none other than Saudi Arabia, though reality has driven the US again back into the arms of the despotic Royal Family.

As this is written, December 2006, there are at least 25,000 mercenaries — almost Rumsfeld’s original prediction of troop levels for August 2003 — augmenting a US force exceeding 140,000.

Rumsfeld’s recently “leaked” memo attempts to salvage his reputation as a fighter and shift the blame for the defeat in Iraq to politicos.

Not only did the whole US political establishment purchase this snake oil, they all made the same error. They made grotesquely ill-informed assumptions about the people of Iraq. The fact that they have replaced former misapprehensions with new ones does not auger well for them. This is the basis of their underestimation of Muqtada al-Sadr. It is the basis of their failure to see the emerging world historic defeat of US military power, and the approaching obsolescence of conventional military power. And it is the basis of the inability of the US military or diplomatic establishment to keep pace with the shape-shifting battlefield they themselves had a big hand in creating.

One place the battlefield has shifted is to Beirut.

Hassan Nasrallah and Muqtada al Sadr have two things in common: (1) They are both genuine grassroots leaders, and (2) they are both capable of playing weak hands into strength. Lending credibility to this thesis, there are numerous reports that Sadrist militiamen have visited Lebanon where they have received training from Hezbollah fighters who recently delivered Israel a stunning tactical defeat.

As this is written, Hezbollah has achieved popularity across Lebanon, well beyond its southern Lebanese Shia base, and has spearheaded a campaign to topple the US-puppet government of Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora. The actions of the Israelis — arguably the only country that has a stake in seeing a protracted Iraqi civil war — in destroying Lebanon during the conduct of their defeat at the hands of Hezbollah, has unified Lebanon beyond the dreams of any faction in the past. The gratuitous brutality of the Israelis valorizes anyone who successfully confronts them.

As always, the two-dimensional Bush administration analysis of everything led them to believe that anti-Syrian sentiment in Lebanon is as powerful as anti-Israeli sentiment — a wild miscalculation that has led to the definition of pro-American in Lebanon being “anti-Syrian.” Siniora followed his masters’ directives, appointing the majority of his cabinet based on enmity toward Syria, and summarily lost the support of a huge fraction of Lebanese Sunnis. He also sidelined Christians who seek continued ties with Damascus. (Oddly enough, Siniora served as Minister of Finance during the Syrian occupation.)

Siniora had shepherded through the resolutions to end the Syrian military presence in Beirut in 2005, in accordance with US desires, and had given assurances that this would increase Lebanon’s security. His American patrons, however, gladly supplied Israel with war materiel to shatter Lebanon in this summer’s horrific attacks across the whole country. Now it is the former anti-Hezbollah General Michel Aoun (a Christian) who is challenging Siniora for power, and he has clearly recognized Hezbollah’s clout, and welcomed cooperation with them in this task.

In early December’s anti-Siniora demonstrations in Beirut, numbering at times close to a million, it was not uncommon for women in Western garb with fully exposed hair to gleefully wave posters of political Islamist Hassan Nasrallah.

The only oil in great supply in Lebanon comes from olives. Yet it is now a crucial front in the Energy War of the United States, that same war to implant bases in Iraq as the key element in a post-Cold War imperial military re-disposition.

The country most nervously eyeing the ascendancy of Iran, via the Iraq occupation, and the increasing influence of Iranian ally Hezbollah on Israel’s doorstep, is Saudi Arabia, which as good reason to see these developments not only in geo-strategic terms, but in the simplified terms of Shia versus Sunni. Regionally, Saudi Arabia has always been the US Arab proxy, giving it tremendous leverage through the oil patch.

Internally, Saudi Arabia lives in perpetual fear of its own substantial and restive Shia population. They are only 5 percent of the overall population, but they are almost half a million strong, and concentrated in the oil-bloated Eastern Province.

The strengthened position of Iran and now Syria will force a more contrite American foreign policy establishment — after an appropriate period of macho bluster — to seek engagement with Tehran and Damascus. This will diminish Saudi influence, at a time when the Saudis’ domestic situation is growing daily more tense and their need of American favor has never been so great. For now, at least, the greatest overlap of Saudi-US interest is in Lebanon.

The expression of that linkage was the US-Saudi initiative to establish a tribunal to try the assassins of the anti-Syrian, former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. It was this tribunal, designed to go after Syria, which pushed Syria more decisively toward Iran, and mitigated toward Sunni-Shia alliance in the anti-Siniora campaign. Hezbollah, by the way, had also warned Siniora not to support the tribunal — which they see as an American political stunt (a fairly accurate account).

It is within this great-power struggle involving Washington, Tehran, and Riyahd that socially-embedded non-state actors like Nasrallah and Sadr — with their greater native agility, unencumbered by states of their own — are now positioning themselves to lead movements of their respective nations to chart a course independent of Washington in the future.

There is no sin, <>a href=”http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GJ07Ak01.html”>in the eyes of Washington, more mortal than independence.

That is the reason that US forces are now being concentrated to go after Sadr — who they accuse of being pro-Iranian — a preposterous bit of disinformation, which nonetheless is swallowed easily by a gullible US public unschooled in complexity. With the SCIRI (the genuinely Iranian-based movement) still dependent on the US occupation forces, and the Sunni provinces now being abandoned in a broad tactical retrenchment, the conquest of Sadr City, a slum with the population of Chicago, has become the latest strategic priority.

Sadr’s Mehdi militia was as bloodily ruthless as any actors in Iraq when they were attacked during the latest round of provocations, even occasionally fighting the SCIRI between bloodletting with the Sunnis. They have staked out their territory, and their defense of it will be furious and terrible. But Sadr is the lone voice among the Shia, and still the voice with the most popular appeal, calling between battles for a rapprochement… and for Iraqi unification against the occupation.

There is no single force among the Iraqis capable of conquering territory much beyond the city limits. Yet the infrastructure for the oil (and not just the wells) runs across the whole country. The Kurds and Shia sit atop the lakes of black gold, but the easements for the pipelines run across the borders between Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

The popular clamor once the occupation is ended, to all the leaders in all the city-states now emerging across Iraq, will be for reconstruction, and the oil is where the capital will come from. The Sunni will require a compact with a Shia unification advocate; and it seems likely that the Kurds will continue their cautious march to independence, yet remain dependent on southbound pipelines to get their product to market. Turkey is unlikely to assist the overland transport of independent Kurdish oil to the Istanbul Strait.

This resolution cannot begin, no matter how painful it may inevitably be for a period of time, until the US occupation ends. As long as the occupation force remains, some faction will be joined at the hip to it, and with them a popular base that will themselves become targets. We hear much about sectarian violence, but very little about collaboration violence. Yet collaboration with the occupation continues to exert a hugely distorting gravitational field in Iraqi politics, and is the ultimate source of inter-Iraqi violence.

At the end of the article cited (at the beginning of this one), I concluded that “the greatest impediment to a political solution to post-invasion Iraq is not some cauldron of inter-ethnic rivalry. It is the politico-military distortion produced by the American occupation.” I have no reason, more than a year later, to recant that conclusion.

I have good reason, unfortunately, to expect as much dissembling as possible by politicians of every hue, as well as the imperial US press, to cast about indefinitely for ever more elliptical reasons not to leave. The plain fact is, the stars of empire are inexorably aligning against the US; and there is no place left to go outside Southwest Asia to gain the leverage required to simultaneously employ the US military to geo-strategic advantage and support the US military-industrial-service contract economy that papers over the deep economic malaise that is settling in on the United States.

The other plain fact is that until 2009, there is no President who will stop the war, so the only established body that can stop it is Congress. That is the task before us, then, no matter how difficult it may seem. We have to begin now, at the milestone of 3,000 to see our mission as one of saving what lives we can, as quickly as we can, American and Iraqi, and doing so in the most instrumental terms. Denunciation and lamentation will get us nothing, and we don’t need more trips to the Washington DC mall for mass demonstrations. Every member of Congress has to be targeted, locally, in her or his own district; and the process is educate, recruit, and target that member of Congress for unrelenting and increasing pressure. How much? As much as we can.

The senseless report from the Iraq Study Group, that had the press and Congress (especially Democrats!) palpitating for the wisdom of bipartisan imperial saviors, did not even consider an immediate, unilateral withdrawal. That is why it was welcomed in such a bipartisan way. The ruling class in this country knows how serious the challenge presented by Iraqi resistance to American global power is.

Our job is to tell first our neighbors, then Congress, that we want to divest ourselves of that power, and reclaim our place in the whole human family.

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Introduction: Insurgent’s Handbook T.O.C

http://www.insurgentamerican.net/books/insurgents-handbook/introduction/

Insurgents Handbook by Stan Goff

No one should ever follow anyone who runs around saying “The sky is falling!” even if it is. Good leadership does not sow fear, but patience, realism, and Sisyphean determination. There are a lot of bad things in the world these days, and a bad system, and the people who run that system. When they are using naked brutality is the time to be least afraid of them. Their real power is based not on fear, which we can lose comparatively easily, but on dependency. The exercise of brutality is a sign of weakness, not strength, and from that revolutionaries should only take heart.

It’s easy enough for any of us to say, “Stop crying wolf, and do something.” But we need to have some idea what to do.

This handbook is for revolutionaries.

Revolution is defined here as a fundamental transformation of the power relations within a society.

A revolutionary is someone who is committed to this vision, and who actively works to bring it about.

in·sur·gent Pronunciation (n-sûrjnt) adj. 1. Rising in revolt against established authority, especially a government. 2. Rebelling against the leadership of a political party. n. One who is insurgent. [Latin nsurgns, nsurgent-, present participle of nsurgere, to rise up : in-, intensive pref.; see in-2 + surgere, to rise; see surge.]

Insurgents “intensively” “rise up.” Seems to me, at least, a good thing… if done effectively.

Recent uses of the word insurgent popularized in the media have been based on the US War Department’s characterization of anyone who opposes US military occupations abroad… or as a claim of status for locals killed by American bombs and bullets. Fifty Iraqis are killed, and the military reports that fifty insurgents are killed. The news media repeats these terms to appear “in the know,” which further popularizes and legitimates the terminology.

The technical use of the term by the US government began during the Vietnam occupation, and was incorporated into a specific military, then security (military and police) doctrine… called counterinsurgency. This is still a doctrine, and anyone who (1) opposes the government or (2) is known to be committed to the vision of transforming the fundamental relations of power in society, is considered to be an insurgent.

If we are called insurgents, and regarded as insurgents, and if the policies directed against our political vocation are counterinsurgency, then we’d better learn to become good insurgents. I worked inside the US government’s counterinsurgency apparatus for a very long time. That is why I am writing this handbook.

Any discussion of insurgency has to begin with Mao. Let me make a few preparatory comments to inoculate readers from the inevitable knee-jerk reactions.

(1) I am not a “Maoist.” I do not deify dead revolutionaries, or accept the transformation of contingent strategies and statements from the past into religious doctrines.

(2) Maoism was a theoretical perspective for national independence, not communism. This point is often missed, because the organization that developed what is called Maoism — in practice — was the Chinese Communist Party. They were the leading organization in a political struggle; but that struggle was not for communism, and they said so. It was for the more immediate goal of Chinese autarky.

(3) Maoism, the strategic theory, was developed for a specific time and place, China as a semi-feudal society, economically colonized, immersed in a cultural history of Confucianism, and militarily occupied by the Japanese. It is not universally transferable as a cookie-cutter principle for other places and times, cultures, or social systems. The minute anyone tries to sell me on “Marxism- Leninism-Mao Zedong-Thought,” s/he has already lost me. A bible-thumping, millenarian, Southern preacher will hold my attention more effectively; at least he is telling me something about the society that I live in.

(4) The specific approach of what has come to be called Maoism was developed in response to emerging situations during a protracted resistance, and tested in practice; it was not determined in someone’s head beforehand, then applied. It only became an Ism after the fact.

(5) Just because we cannot always generalize from specifics doesn’t mean no general principles ever emerge from specific circumstances. Hand washing is a generally good preventative medicine measure. Obviously, I believe that there are some more or less universal lessons that can be drawn from the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong, or I wouldn’t be going to all this trouble to disclaim about the “Maoist” religious cults and their hagiographies of Mao, that serve to put a ridiculous face on the Chinese Revolution and any lessons we might learn from it.

(6) Math matters. That’s why I say we have to begin a discussion of insurgency with Mao. The Chinese Revolution, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, did succeed in achieving political independence for the largest country in the world, and largely succeeded in protecting that independence from hostile encirclement.

That which has survived in terms of validity from the Maoist tradition, in this writer’s humble opinion, is the organizing principle called “mass line.” The shorthand is, to think of the masses as in three general groups, based on how well they understand the system or the problem at hand: Advanced, Intermediate, and Backward. This is not a strict taxonomy, but one that facilitates a general method.

The guiding maxim of “mass line” is to consolidate the advanced with organization and strategic orientation that can (1) isolate the backward, and (2) win over the next layer of the intermediate to the advanced. This, of course, raises a lot of questions about what constitutes “advanced” and so forth, but even that is contingent upon circumstances. In organizing against the war in Iraq, for example, there were two distinct axes along which to plot out this schema: one programmatic, and one philosophic.

Within the larger mass movement, the programmatic question was unilateral and immediate withdrawal. Those with whom I organized in that movement defined this as the advanced position. Out now was advanced, stay and kill Ay-rabs was the backward (generalizing here), and those who wanted out but had questions about the repercussions of immediate withdrawal were the intermediate. The vast majority of those who were politically engaged and wanted to understand the war better, those in the intermediate category who we targeted to win over to the advanced, were consolidated around their opposition to the Bush administration… in other words, mostly Democrats. Obviously, an approach that identified all Democrats as the enemy and anyone who voted for Democrats as idiots would have defeated any chance we had of reaching that next layer of the intermediate. And so we concentrated our public education efforts on being present, supportive, and visible at anti-Bush venues, expressing solidarity with those who shared our alarm and revulsion at aspects of the Bush administration’s actions and policies, then providing information about (1) the bipartisan history of imperialism (without all the lefty jargon that stimulates a post- McCarthy hiccup) that led to the current conjuncture, and (2) pointed out the underlying premise of white supremacy that underwrote almost every concern about a “bloodbath” that would inevitably ensue in the absence of Western troops in Iraq. Isolating the backward, in this case, was a fairly straightforward case of persistently attacking a couple of key lies, i.e., that Saddam did 9-11 or that the US is a beacon of democracy in the region.

Within the somewhat smaller pool of people who are potential activists in a more general politics of resistance, the mass line approach focused more on philosophical orientation. Advanced was taken to mean “anti-imperialist.” Backward is seen as plain, uncritical, white-male patriotism. Intermediate are those who fall in neither category, with the next logical layer targeted for the advanced being those who are showing an active interest in the larger questions of history and social systems. Outreach here is more focused on teach-ins, workshops, book clubs, dinner-and-a-movie potlucks at people’s homes, and recruitment into actual work for political actions.

This is mass line in both “mass work” and “political work,” as the tradition calls it. It is not based, when done correctly, on promoting a “line” to the masses. It is based on paying close attention to the real grievances and anxieties of the masses themselves, and developing a political line out of that. The term “line,” which has been much abused, does not mean imposing ideological conformity on everyone, even though this became its distorted meaning under the war- communism of Stalin. It originally referred to a brick mason’s line, the string stretched on-level to go back and re-evaluate the placement of the last and next brick. It is a strategic orientation, which is not the same as a concrete strategy. In fact, I am going to argue that strategy should never be anything except an orientation — written in pencil and not in ink, so to speak.

There is a reason I am taking readers through this Chinese museum.

The lessons of Maoism, and later of Che Guevara as well, as they relate to insurgency, were not just studied by the left around the world. Our own government has been studying them for decades, and its entire social policy — at one level — has been based on thinking of us as insurgents or potential insurgents. So in order to fully understand how the repressive apparatuses of the US state function, we have to understand that state’s organizing principles.

Saying that the US security state is becoming more repressive does not tell us much about it, nor does saying that the neo-cons are accelerating the pace of militarization of domestic and foreign policy. What specific military doctrines are being employed, based on what canon of military analysis?

The answer has been the same since Vietnam. The US-directed world system keeps (inevitably) throwing up resistance to an overwhelmingly superior technical military force, i.e., insurgency (or in the new vernacular, asymmetric warfare). Yet few of us actually study counter-insurgency doctrine to see what it is.

Like it or not, if we don’t go along with the dominant program, we are already insurgents. So we’d better be good at it.

Just as in the world-at-large, the claim that all political enemies are insurgents eventually creates the reality. An effective politics of resistance will require that we learn principles of insurgency that outmaneuver the operational principles of counter-insurgency, not by taking up arms (did you get that, guys?), but by exploiting the interstices of the system, amplifying grievances (while weeding out the “backward” contents of the populist impulse), setting up “bases” off the grid (with the Chinese, that was geographical, organizing in the countryside to eventually surround the cities), building strengths beyond the reach of the Panopticon, creating de facto alternative social systems, destroying the legitimacy of the existing order in the minds of the masses, and eventually taking political power for the express purpose of establishing popular sovereignty.

Booksinternationale.com

Stan Goff

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Petraeus! Is Baghdad Burning?

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THE 3,000 MILESTONE

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Introduction: Insurgent’s Handbook T.O.C

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