WW News Service Digest #370
1) D.C. News Conference: "No War Against Iraq!"
by wwnews
2) Behind U.S. Hostility Toward Iraq
by wwnews
3) Economic Crisis Grips Israel
by wwnews
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 17, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
WASHINGTON. D.C. NEWS CONFERENCE: "NO NEW WAR
AGAINST IRAQ!"
By Judi Cheng
Washington, D.C.
High-powered television cameras captured the voices of
dissent Jan. 2 and brought those voices into the living
rooms of families across the United States.
International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) had
called a Jan. 2 news conference at the National Press Club
in response to new Bush administration threats to expand the
current war into Iraq. Since 1991, U.S./United Nations-
imposed economic sanctions have caused more than 1.5 million
Iraqi deaths.
Referring to the U.S. war on Afghanistan, former U.S. Atty.
Gen. Ramsey Clark said, "Our glorification of violence has
never been greater, our lack of concern for the lives of
others has never been more total, and our willingness to use
technology against life has become almost absolute."
Media crews and reporters from C-SPAN, CNN, AP, Reuters, Al-
Jazeera, and others had gathered at the National Press Club
to cover statements from a distinguished panel of community
organizers, activists and religious leaders.
"The massive suffering of the Iraqi people of the last
decade as a result of the economic sanctions is a moral evil
of immeasurable proportions," said Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit.
"Since 1991, my country has been bombed every single day,
causing 200 civilian deaths a day, and over 1,000 deaths per
month," said Iraq-born Kadouri Al-Kaysi, representing the
Committee in Support of the Iraqi People.
"Those who have killed hundreds of thousands in Nicaragua,
Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, and continue to do
so today, cannot have the moral standing to call for a war
against terrorism," said Chuck Kaufman of the Nicaragua
Network.
"We are against all forms of terrorism, including our own
government's support for despotic regimes around the world
that carry out violence and atrocities against innocent
people," said Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace.
Marcina Cardenas of the Mexico Solidarity Network reminded
the audience that "The lives of many immigrants in the U.S.
have been transformed since September 11."
Peta Lindsay, National Student and Youth Coordinator of the
International Action Center, explained that on April 27
students will gather in Washington, D.C., for a mass
mobilization to say no to an expanded war, whether it be
against Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.
PROTEST THE U.S. PATRIOT ACT
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a civil rights attorney and co-
founder of Partnership for Civil Justice, encouraged her
listeners to "speak out, demonstrate, and defend their
rights, or else they simply won't exist." She was discussing
the U.S. Patriot Act, a new law that threatens the civil
rights and civil liberties of people here in the United
States.
Sarah Sloan, a national organizer with the International
Action Center, said "This war [in Afghanistan] is not about
defending the people in the U.S. against terrorism, but
about U.S. domination of strategic areas like the Middle
East for corporate interests."
Through the coverage on CSPAN-2, which aired the 100-minute
program several times during the days that followed, many
heard the conference. The result was hundreds of calls to
the International Action Center in support of anti-war
actions.
The Rev. Grayland Hagler, senior minister of Plymouth
Congregational Church in Washington, D.C., passionately
asked his audience, "Aren't American bombs and aggression as
terrorist as any other form of terrorism? Americans are
becoming the terrorist agents we claim to be against. Aren't
the deaths of others as important as the deaths of our own?"
Brian Becker, co-director of the International Action Center
characterized economic sanctions as "genocide against the
civilian population, it's a form of terrorism on a mass
scale, it's a weapon of mass destruction."
According to a 1996 World Health Organization report on
Iraq, sanctions had increased the mortality rate for
children under 5 by six times, and the majority of the
country's population was on a semi-starvation diet.
More than 1.8 million Iraqis have died as a direct
consequence of economic sanctions, with living conditions at
a level bordering on famine for at least 4 million people,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations. International law prohibits starvation of
civilians as a method of warfare.
Speakers pointed out that the blockade violates the Geneva
Convention, the UN Charter, the Constitution of the World
Health Organization, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of
States. According to U.S. Legal Code Title 18-2331, the
economic sanctions on the people of Iraq are also an act of
international terrorism.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (wwnews)
Date: torstai 10. tammikuu 2002 07:11
Subject: [WW] Behind U.S. Hostility Toward Iraq
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 17, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
ELEVEN YEARS AFTER THE GULF WAR: WHAT'S REALLY
BEHIND U.S. HOSTILITY TOWARD IRAQ?
By Richard Becker
What is really behind the intense U.S. hostility toward Iraq
and its government?
The call for a new, all-out war against Iraq has been
revived inside the national security apparatus, although the
timetable for an attack is still open. Since Sept. 11,
figures like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle of the Pentagon Review Board and former CIA
head James Woolsey have been leading the charge.
Other leading administration spokespeople like Secretary of
State Colin Powell reportedly believe that the time is not
ripe for a massive attack on Iraq. Powell is concerned about
the political repercussions in the Middle East and fears an
explosion of popular anger in the region.
Moreover, the U.S. has no proxy force similar to
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance in Iraq. Occupying Baghdad
and the oil regions of Iraq would require hundreds of
thousands of Pentagon troops and the possibility of large-
scale U.S. casualties.
Powell is not "soft on Iraq," as some of his critics charge.
It should be remembered that General Powell, head of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, oversaw the 1991 Gulf War
that destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and killed more than
200,000 Iraqis. Powell helped lead that high-tech war of
mass destruction from afar, one in which direct U.S.
casualties were kept to a minimum.
Minimizing GI casualties was seen as key to minimizing
political criticism of the war at home, and was the main
reason why U.S. ground forces did not march on Baghdad in
1991.
But while there are very real and significant tactical
differences within the imperialist establishment over how to
prosecute the struggle against Iraq, there is little
disagreement about the objective: to reduce Iraq to the
status of dependent neocolony and take control of its vast
oil resources.
Of course, saying so right out loud would seem a bit crass,
so U.S. government officials and their obedient mass media
propagandize the public here with other, more moral-sounding
reasons for why we should all hate and fear Iraq.
PURELY PROPAGANDA
Iraq could be developing "weapons of mass destruction--
WMD's," the keepers of the most massive array of nuclear,
chemical and conventional weapons in history tell us. In
reality Iraq is the most inspected country in history, and
even former weapons inspectors like U.S. Marine Capt. Scott
Ritter have repeatedly testified that Iraq poses no threat
to any other country.
Concerted efforts to link Iraq to the anthrax-infected
letters sent to members of Congress last fall fell flat. It
turned out that the anthrax strain involved was identical to
one used in U.S. Army laboratories, despite the fact that
the U.S. supposedly gave up biological warfare development
in 1969.
That the Pentagon "fears" Iraq's so-called WMD's is a truly
laughable concept. The Pentagon budget next year will be
more than 10 times Iraq's gross national product. During the
Gulf War, when Iraq was at the peak of its military power,
its air defenses were unable to shoot down U.S. warplanes.
In the past decade, U.S. military power has increased
vastly, while Iraq's has greatly declined.
The other main selling point of the Hate Iraq campaign is
the charge that Iraq and its ultra-demonized president
Saddam Hussein have violated human rights.
The two main U.S. allies bordering Iraq are Turkey to the
north and Saudi Arabia to the south. Turkey is ruled by a
semi-military dictatorship that has slaughtered tens of
thousands of Kurdish people--the same Kurdish people the
U.S. claims to be protecting if, and only if, they live in
Iraq. The Turkish military has bombed and burned more than
3,000 Kurdish villages in southeastern Turkey using U.S.-
supplied F-15s, bombs and tanks. (American Kurdish
Information Network)
The Turkish military also harshly represses unions,
students, women, journalists and other popular forces.
Saudi Arabia, the world's number-one oil producer, is a
family dictatorship run by the al-Sauds. To have any role in
decision-making you must be a prince of the Saud family.
There is no parliament, no voting, no rights for women or
workers. But there is a big secret police force, routine
torture and frequent beheadings for such "crimes" as
adultery by women or non-princely men.
No one in the world, however, has a worse human rights
record than the United States itself. U.S. wars and CIA
coups have left behind a trail of unmatched death and
destruction from Korea to Angola, from Indonesia to
Nicaragua, from Vietnam to Iran. Nor can it be forgotten
that U.S. capitalism was erected upon a foundation of
genocide against Native peoples and enslavement of millions
of African people.
And in Iraq itself, the greatest cause of death and
suffering is the U.S./UN sanctions blockade that remains in
place 11 years after the Gulf War. As former U.S. Atty. Gen.
Ramsey Clark said on the fifth anniversary of the war in
1996, "There is no greater violation of human rights
anywhere in the world in the last decade of this millennium
than the sanctions against Iraq."
The blockade of Iraq has taken the lives of more than 1.5
million Iraqis, half of them children under the age of five
years. As is universally acknowledged, the sanctions
blockade only remains in place due to the insistence of
Washington.
If the given reasons for the ongoing U.S. aggression against
Iraq are false, what is really behind the policy? To answer
this question requires looking back in history to 1958.
U.S. OBJECTIVE: DOMINATION
The 1950s were a time of sea change in the Middle East and
the world, with national liberation movements sweeping
across the colonized and semi-colonized countries of Asia,
Africa and Latin America.
In Washington, these movements were regarded as threatening
U.S. corporate and strategic interests.
U.S. domination of the Middle East had been a fixed
objective of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. The
Roosevelt and Truman administrations, representing the big
banking, oil and military-industrial interests, were
determined that U.S. capital would predominate in the
aftermath of the world war. Key to securing U.S. hegemony
was control of the world's critical resources, especially
oil.
In particular, Washington's sights were set on taking over
the oil fields of Iran and Iraq. Both Iran and Iraq, though
nominally independent, were then part of the British empire,
as was most of the Middle East--Egypt, Sudan, Palestine,
Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen.
But Britain's imperial sun was setting.
In the early 1950s anti-colonial revolutions in Egypt and
Syria led to the formation of the United Arab Republic, seen
by many as a first step toward uniting the Arab nation into
one country.
The U.S. and its by then junior partner Britain responded by
arranging the unification of two rotten monarchies, Jordan
and Iraq, into a short-lived reactionary alliance called the
Arab Union.
Washington had also set up the Baghdad Pact in 1955, which
included its client regimes in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and
Iraq, along with Britain. The Baghdad Pact, also known as
CENTO or Central Treaty Organization, had two purposes.
First, to oppose the rise of Arab and other liberation
movements in the Middle East and south Asia; and second, to
be another in a series of military alliances--NATO, SEATO
and ANZUS were the others--encircling the socialist camp of
the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, north Korea and
north Vietnam.
Iraq, the center of CENTO, was independent in name, but was
by now a joint U.S.-British neocolony. The British
maintained their military airfields in Iraq. While the
country was extremely rich in oil--10 percent of the world's
reserves--the people lived in extreme poverty and hunger.
Illiteracy was more than 80 percent. There were only 13
dentists in the entire country--one for every half million
people in Iraq. ("Iraq to 1963," Fran Hazelton: 1986) The
country was ruled by a corrupt monarchy under King Faisal II
and a coterie of feudal landowners and merchant capitalists.
Underlying Iraq's poverty was a simple fact: Iraq owned
exactly zero percent of its vast oil reserves. Four
countries--England, France, Netherlands and the United
States--had each been allocated 23.75 percent of the
country's oil when modern Iraq was created out of the former
Ottoman Empire as a British colony following World War I.
The other 5 percent was in the hands of oil billionaire
Cyrus Gulbenkian, the infamous "Mr. Five-Percent."
IRAQI REVOLUTION SHOCKED WASHINGTON
But on July 14, 1958, a powerful social explosion rocked
Iraq. A military rebellion turned into a countrywide
revolution. The king and his administration were suddenly
gone, the recipients of people's justice.
Washington and Wall Street were stunned. In the week that
followed, the New York Times, the U.S. "newspaper of
record," had virtually no stories in its first 10 pages
other than those on the Iraqi Revolution.
While another great revolution that took place just six
months later in Cuba is better remembered today, Washington
regarded the Iraqi upheaval as far more threatening to its
vital interest at the time.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "the gravest crisis
since the Korean War." The day after the Iraqi Revolution,
20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. The day after
that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped into Jordan.
This was what came to be known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine";
the U.S. would intervene directly--go to war--to prevent the
spread of revolution in the vital Middle East.
The U.S. and British expeditionary forces went in to save
the neocolonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan. Had they
not, the popular impulse from Iraq would have surely brought
down the rotten dependent regimes in Beirut and Amman.
But Eisenhower, his generals and his arch-imperialist
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, had something else in
mind, as well: invading Iraq, overturning the revolution and
installing a new puppet government in Baghdad.
Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan in
1958. The sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution. The
announcement by the United Arab Republic, which bordered
Iraq, that its forces would fight the imperialists if they
sought to invade. And the emphatic support of the People's
Republic of China and the Soviet Union for the revolution.
The USSR began a mobilization of troops in the southern
Soviet republics close to Iraq.
The combination of these factors forced the U.S. leaders to
accept the existence of the Iraqi Revolution. But Washington
never really reconciled itself to the loss of Iraq.
U.S. STRATEGY VS. IRAQ
Over the next three decades, the U.S. applied many tactics
designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent
country. At various times, such as after Iraq completed the
nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 and
signed a defense treaty with the USSR, the U.S. gave massive
military support to right-wing Kurdish elements fighting
Baghdad.
The U.S. supported the more rightist elements within the
post-revolution political structure against the communist
and left-nationalist forces. For example, the U.S. applauded
the suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party and left-led
trade unions by the Ba'ath Party government of Saddam
Hussein in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, the U.S. encouraged and helped to fund and arm
Iraq in its war against Iran. U.S. domination of the latter
had been ended by Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. In
reality, though, the U.S. aim in the Iran-Iraq War was to
weaken and destroy both countries.
Ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S.
attitude about the war: "I hope they kill each other."
The Pentagon provided Iraq's air force with satellite photos
of Iranian targets. At the same time, as the Iran-Contra
scandal revealed, the U.S. was sending anti-aircraft
missiles to Iran.
The Iran-Iraq War was a disaster, killing a million people
and weakening both countries.
COLLAPSE OF USSR AND THE GULF WAR
When the war finally ended in 1988, developments in the
Soviet Union were posing a new and even graver danger to
Iraq, which had a military and friendship treaty with the
USSR. In pursuit of "permanent détente" with the U.S., the
Gorbachev leadership in Moscow began to cut its support for
its allies in the developing world.
In 1989, Gorbachev went further and withdrew support for the
socialist governments in Eastern Europe, most of which then
collapsed. This sharp shift in the world relationship of
forces--culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union
itself two years later--constituted the greatest victory for
U.S. imperialism since World War II.
While proclaiming a new era of peace, Washington immediately
began preparing for new wars of aggression. At the top of
its list of targets was Iraq.
Now the U.S. leaders saw the opportunity to overturn their
stinging defeat of three decades earlier and to establish
unquestioned domination over what they regard as the most
strategic region: the Middle East and its critical oil
fields. These were the conditions that led to the Gulf War
of 1991 and the sanctions that have done such great
destruction to Iraq.
U.S. imperialism wants to turn back the clock, not only in
Iraq, but also in Cuba, Korea and around the world. But
despite all the unimaginable hardships they have been forced
to endure, the Iraqi people--like the Cubans, the Koreans,
the Palestinians--have not been defeated. Washington has not
been able to fully realize its dream.
Now, on the 11th anniversary of the Gulf War, it's time for
the anti-war and workers movement here in the heartland of
imperialism to redouble efforts to prevent a new war against
Iraq and to get the U.S. out of the Middle East.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (wwnews)
Date: torstai 10. tammikuu 2002 07:11
Subject: [WW] Economic Crisis Grips Israel
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 17, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
STOP U.S. AID TO SETTLER STATE: ECONOMIC CRISIS GRIPS
ISRAEL
By Michael Kramer
"The economic crisis gripping Israel today, if not swiftly
and effectively addressed by the new unity government, could
pose as serious a threat to the security of Israel as any
hostile neighbor in the region. ... Increased social
tensions are likely, along with rising unemployment and
emigration of young
Israelis, higher prices and labor unrest and decreased
productivity."
-- From "The Economic Crisis In Israel,"
a staff report prepared for the Committee on Foreign
Relations, United States Senate, November 1984.
The above statement is as true today as it was when it was
first written.
Some things have changed. The report talks about the
occupation of Lebanon. Today the world talks about the
Intifada and the occupation of Palestine. As the result of a
high level of political unity and a courageous and highly
disciplined armed struggle, the Lebanese people forced the
Israelis to retreat from all of Lebanon except for a small
area in the southern part of the country.
But more than 17 years have passed since this report was
issued and the Israeli settler state continues to be
enmeshed in one deep economic crisis after another, despite
receiving billions of dollars of U.S. aid every year.
The Jan. 4 issue of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reports "the
sharpest drop in economic activity since 1953. During the
last six months of the year, GDP shrunk by 5.3 percent, an
unprecedented figure in Israeli history."
In the 1990s, Israel hitched its economy to the high-tech
Silicon Valley model. But now, according to the Jan. 4
Jerusalem Post, "Between 500 and 600 start-ups, or 20
percent of all young technology companies, closed their
doors in 2001."
The economic crisis has been a disaster for Palestinian and
Israeli workers. Official unemployment figures--which should
be doubled to reflect true accuracy--reveal that 24 percent
of Palestinians living in Israel and 11.5 percent of
Israelis are out of work.
As in the U.S., soup kitchens are overflowing while welfare
rolls are being cut. Israel is following the "Wisconsin
Plan," used to force the poor off welfare in the United
States.
Two years ago the Damon Prison located near Haifa was closed
down when the Israelis themselves described it as "unfit for
human detention." It has since been re-opened and now houses
hundreds of Palestinians who have violated apartheid-like
pass laws in their increasingly desperate search for work.
None are jailed for so-called "security" reasons. Tariq
Nabil was sentenced to nine months for illegally washing
cars in Kafr Qasem. Yihya Odeh was arrested at the Umm al-
Fahm garbage dump and sentenced to six months.
The Israeli settler state could not exist for more than a
few weeks without the almost $15 million a day--some $5
billion a year--from the U.S. The aid has been used to
artificially prop up the standard of living for much of the
settler population so that they would not leave Palestine.
On the other hand, U.S. policy to arm the so-called Israeli
Defense Forces, the iron fist of the settlers, has resulted
in millions of Palestinians being prevented from living in
Palestine.
In February Israeli Finance Minister Silvan Shalom will head
a delegation to Washington for a meeting of the bilateral
Joint Economic Development Group. The JEDG will try to come
up with a plan to bail out the Israeli economy.
Guaranteed loans, grants and credits will be the topic of
the day. However, as the worldwide economic crisis
intensifies there will be less room for a bailout.
And as the resistance to the occupation of Palestine
intensifies through new stages of the Intifada, the economic
crisis in Israel can only worsen.
No U.S. aid to any apartheid state! No U.S. aid to Israel!
[Kramer served in the Israeli Defense Forces from 1972 to
1976.]
