In Fraud We Trust?
June 25, 2009
Foreign Policy Journal
by Nima Shirazi
Douter de tout ou tout croire, ce sont deux solutions également commodes, qui l’une et l’autre nous dispensent de réfléchir.
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.
- Jules Henri Poincaré, La Science et l’Hypothèse (1901)
By now, we all know the story:
[…]
The turnout was a massive 85% by most estimates, resulting in almost forty million ballots cast by the eligible Iranian voting public.
Before the polls even closed, Mousavi had already claimed victory. “In line with the information we have received, I am the winner of this election by a substantial margin,” he said. “We expect to celebrate with people soon.”
And so it was. Ahmadinejad won. By a lot. Some said by too much.
It didn’t take long before accusations started flying, knee-jerk reactions were reported as expert analysis, and rumor became fact. As Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei congratulated Ahmadinejad on his landslide victory, calling it a “divine assessment,” the opposition candidates all cried foul. Mousavi called the results “treason to the votes of the people” and the election a “dangerous charade.” Karroubi described Ahmadinejad’s reelection as “illegitimate and unacceptable.”
The Western media immediately jumped on board, calling the election a “fraud,” “theft,” and “a crime scene” in both news reports and editorial commentary. Even so-called progressive analysts, from Juan Cole to Stephen Zunes to Dave Zirin to Amy Goodman to Trita Parsi to the New Yorker’s Laura Secor, opined on the illegitimacy of the results. They cited purported violations, dissident testimony from inside sources, leaked “real” results, and seeming inconsistencies, incongruities, and irregularities with Iran’s electoral history all with the intention of proving that the election was clumsily stolen from Mousavi by Ahmadinejad. These commentators all call the continuing groundswell of protest to the poll results an “unprecedented” show of courage, resistance, and people power, not seen in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
To me, the only thing unprecedented about what we’re seeing in Iran seems to be the constant media hysteria, righteous indignation, and hypocritical pseudo-solidarity of the West; a bogus, biased, and altogether presumptuous and uncritical reaction to hearsay and conjecture, almost totally decontextualized in order to promote sensational headlines and build international consensus for foreign intervention in Iran.
WSW
An unmistakable indicator of the real attitude of the Obama administration to the events in Honduras is the response of the US media. The media, led by the New York Times, immediately embraced the claims of the Iranian opposition that the election had been rigged and a coup had been carried out, without presenting any concrete evidence to support the allegations. It provided nonstop coverage of antigovernment demonstrations, and proclaimed the dissident faction of the clerical regime to be heading a “green revolution” for democracy.
In contrast, the US media has provided only minimal coverage of a real coup in Honduras. It has barely reported the police-state measures, arrests and beatings carried out by the Honduran military, and treated the anti-coup protests with utter indifference. On Monday evening, the events in Honduras were relegated to a mere mention on all three network news broadcasts, well behind the death of Michael Jackson.
What accounts for this stark contrast? The simple fact that the US government opposes the victor in the Iranian election and supports those who ousted Zelaya in Honduras.
The media, in particular the New York Times, which supported the 2002 coup attempt against Chavez, provides a further indication of US involvement in the Honduran coup. One month ago, as the political crisis in Honduras was heating up, the Times published a provocative article entitled “Chavez Seeks Tighter Grip on the Military.” The article retailed, without substantiation, claims of a massive crackdown by Chavez against dissidents within the Venezuelan military. This article, undoubtedly written on assignment from the CIA, was a certain indicator that the US was preparing subversion in the region.
From Wide Asleep in America
Lord Baltimore
Tehran | June 13, 2009
The Western press has clearly taken a side and has successfully managed to drag its uninformed audience along with it. News reports all refer to the continuing groundswell of protest to the election results as an "unprecedented" show of courage, resistance, and people power against the government not seen in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
But what we have seen this past week seems to have far more in common with the events of fifty-six years ago, rather than just thirty.
In 1953, [deleted rehash of 1053 coup]
So what have we been seeing in Iran this past week?
Whereas there is scant evidence of any actual voter fraud or ballot rigging in the recent reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the popular movement we've been seeing on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere is being treated by the American media as some sort of new revolution; an energized, grassroots, and spontaneous effort to overthrow the leaders of the Islamic Republic in favor of a secular, pro-Western "democracy."
[deleted …. Examples of US covert operations inside Iran]
Ken Timmerman, the executive director of the right-wing Foundation for Democracy in Iran, which is the Persian Service of Voice of America (VOA), "spilled the beans on activities of the other arm of US meddling overseas, the obscenely mis-named National Endowment for Democracy, in a piece written one day before the election," McAdams tells us. Timmerman apparently stated that “there’s the talk of a 'green revolution' in Tehran," prompting McAdams to "wonder where that 'talk' was coming from. Timmerman did not appear to be writing from Iran." McAdams continues,
Timmerman went on to write, with admirable candor and honesty, that:
“The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.
“Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”
Yes, you say, but what does a blow-hard propagandist like Timmerman know about such things? Well, he should know! His very spooky Foundation for Democracy in Iran has its own snout deep in the trough of NED’s “open covert actions” against the Iranian government.
How does the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” seek to “promote democracy” in Iran with our tax dollars? Foundation co-founder Joshua Muravchik gives us a hint in his subtly-titled LA Times piece, “Bomb Iran.”
Additionally, Weissman warns of Timmerman's devious sincerity: "Please note that this comes from a very involved right-wing critic who personally knows the expatriate Iranian community," he writes. "It is impossible to know how much government money went to these groups, since Congress has purposely exempted the National Endowment for Democracy from having to make public how it spends taxpayer money."
Even more recently, commentator Stephen Lendman reports that former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig told Pasto Radio on June 15 that "undisputed" intelligence proves CIA interference in the internal affairs of Iran. "The documents prove that the CIA spend $400 million inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election" and to incite regime change for a pro-Western government.
So, are we finally seeing that $400 million pay off in Iran this past week?
There are plenty of clues that reveal the Iranian street protests we're seeing daily in the news may not be all we're told they are. Indeed, the sheer numbers of protesters are impressive and anyone who feels that an injustice has occurred should certainly take to the streets - and not be subject to any sort of police brutality - but much of what we've seen and heard in the past two weeks shows signs of orchestration and bears fingerprints of foreign manipulation.
Many of the protesters we have seen are well-dressed westernized young people in Tehran who are carrying signs written in English, reading, “Where is My Vote?” and other such slogans in English. If the young voters of Iran were addressing their frustrations to their own government, why weren't they speaking the same language? Protesters seen in many YouTube videos and interviewed on American television also speak perfect English. An early message received through a social networking site after the election, sent to the National Iranian American Council and subsequently reported by the American media, came from (allegedly) an Iranian in Tehran. It read:
“I am in Tehran. Its 3:40 in the morning. I’ve connected with you [by hacking past the government filter]. It’s a big mess here. People are yelling from their houses – ‘death to the dictator.’ They are setting up a military government. No one dares to go out. No one has seen Mousavi today. Rumor has it that they have arrested him. I don’t have an email but I will contact you again.
Help us.”
The idea of an Iranian, aware of the long history of US interference in Iranian affairs, beseeching an audience in America for "help" is, to put it lightly, dubious.
(The same should definitely be said about a recent OpEd featured in the New York Times last Sunday which was supposedly written by "a student in Iran." The article, clearly hoping to galvanize the American readership into strongly supporting pro-Mousavi protesters against the Iranian government, was almost surreal. In it, the author - curiously named "Shane M." which is perhaps the least Iranian name ever - denies the accuracy of pre-election polling by writing, "let’s not cloud the results with numbers that were, like bagels, stale a week later." Later, he describes a scene from the widespread pre-election pro-Mousavi street parties in Tehran, including this observation: "A girl hung off the edge of a car window “Dukes of Hazzard” style." What possible young "Iranian student" would casually reference bagels and Dukes of Hazzard is beyond me, but I can probably think of a few CIA agents that may enjoy both.)
As for the widespread claim, published in nearly every major newspaper, that Mousavi had been disappeared, imprisoned, or put under house arrest, it obviously wasn't true considering that the very next day Mousavi was addressing a crowd of tens of thousands in the middle of Tehran from the roof of his car.
Furthermore, the chants we hear of “death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad” don't make much sense coming from Iranian citizens. As Paul Craig Roberts points out, "Every Iranian knows that the President of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him." Roberts goes on to say,
[….]
The Western media is certainly not helping matters. It should be remembered, first off, that both the BBC and New York Times played important roles in the 1953 overthrow. Bill Van Auken's The New York Times and Iran: Journalism as State Provocation tells us of the documentation of journalism as the media arm of the imperial state, including the direct military participation of one of its CIA-connected reporters in the coup against Mossadegh:
In 1953, [the New York Times] correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, was not only a willing conduit for CIA disinformation, but also acknowledged participating directly in the coup. He subsequently wrote of giving an Iranian Army tank column instructions to attack Mossadegh's house. Afterwards, the Times celebrated the coup and demanded unconditional support for the Shah’s regime.
The BBC is known to have spearheaded Britain's own propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word ("exactly") that launched the coup d'état itself. Even the rise and importance of new media has to be viewed critically - something Western journalists aren't very good at. CNN recently created a new disclaimer icon to account for all the "unverified" material they've been broadcasting 'round the clock in their effort to stand with protesters and against the Iranian government.
The Iranian "twitter boom" has, to a certain extent, been engineered by a small group of anti-Ahmadinejad advocates in the United States and Israel. Whereas media organizations excitedly report about young Iranians twittering away on the streets of Tehran, it's clear that most of the activity is simply Americans "tweeting" amongst themselves. Nevertheless, the US government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime for maintenance so that tweeting from Iran could go uninterrupted. But, of course, this isn't meddling. Additionally, Caroline McCarthy of CNET News reports that "Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity." While I'm not sure about "confusing" Iranian authorities, I am sure that actions like this serve to overhype the scope, reach, and importance of social networking and alternative media in Iranian politics and activism. The voices of the Iranian people should, of course, be heard and listened to - but the twittering mass of American, European, and Israeli support can hardly be said to speak on behalf of the Iranian public.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
News for Sale
July 2, 2009
Tomothy Carr with Josh Stearns at Huffington Post
Thursday morning, Politico reported that the Washington Post was offering lobbyists "off-the-record, non-confrontational" access to the paper's own reporters and editors for a whopping fee of $25,000 to $250,000.
According to Politico's Mike Allen, a promotional flier for the first "Washington Post Salon," focusing on health care, promised lobbyists an "exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done." In addition to access to reporters and editors, the paper promised to hand-deliver Obama administration officials and members of Congress to any lobbyist willing to pay for access.
But within moments after news of the promotion hit social networks and blogs, the Post canceled the plan.
Experiment Gone Awry
"This should never have happened," Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Post, said in an article on the paper's site. "The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."
The crisis in journalism has sparked unparalleled experimentation and innovation from new and old newsrooms alike. But this kind of "pay-for-access" model should be a non-starter in newsrooms, and it's good that some in leadership at the Post acted swiftly to shut down the ill-advised scheme.
With the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and an unprecedented drive to maximize profits at media conglomerates, we have seen too many examples of news organizations forgoing their independence in exchange for a place in the halls of power.
These Washington Post salons would have taken this one step further, auctioning off its access to corporate lobbyists.
If held, this kind of an event would have been an outrageous violation of journalistic standards.
Selling Integrity for Access
Journalism is in crisis around the country. The economic downturn has collided with fundamental technological, cultural and ideological changes, leaving the future of journalism in doubt.
But selling access to reporters and editors to the highest bidder should never be an option.
The backlash against the Post was swift, spread by outraged members of social networks -- whose anger was fueled in part by marketing materials that seemed blind to the inherent conflicts of interest in this model. The promotional flier for the salons said that these events "are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard."
In full damage control, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli took up the issue of journalistic ethics in the Post's follow-up, saying, "We do not offer access to the newsroom for money. We just are not in that business." He went on to say that the newsroom was never involved in this plan, nor would it have taken part in such an event.
Yet, the fact that this idea got as far as it did is another example of how Big Media tend to put corporate profits before the public interest. The notion of holding these events suggests that for the Post, the real stakeholders in the health care debate seemed to be lobbyists and the companies they represent, not the American people whom the Post is supposed to inform, educate and represent.
Comforting the Comfortable?
It's telling that throughout the flier, the Post reassures corporate representatives that the conversation will be non-confrontational -- there will be no afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted here.
The irony of this whole debacle is that journalists and policy makers ought to be getting in the same room more often. But we need them to be working together in search of policy solutions to the crisis in journalism and to ensure that our communities get the information they need -- not to trade influence and cash for their contacts.
__________________
See also:
Pajamas
Talking Points Memo
Progressive Pulse
Truthdig
Mother Jones
Daily Kos
Tomothy Carr with Josh Stearns at Huffington Post
Thursday morning, Politico reported that the Washington Post was offering lobbyists "off-the-record, non-confrontational" access to the paper's own reporters and editors for a whopping fee of $25,000 to $250,000.
According to Politico's Mike Allen, a promotional flier for the first "Washington Post Salon," focusing on health care, promised lobbyists an "exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done." In addition to access to reporters and editors, the paper promised to hand-deliver Obama administration officials and members of Congress to any lobbyist willing to pay for access.
But within moments after news of the promotion hit social networks and blogs, the Post canceled the plan.
Experiment Gone Awry
"This should never have happened," Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Post, said in an article on the paper's site. "The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."
The crisis in journalism has sparked unparalleled experimentation and innovation from new and old newsrooms alike. But this kind of "pay-for-access" model should be a non-starter in newsrooms, and it's good that some in leadership at the Post acted swiftly to shut down the ill-advised scheme.
With the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and an unprecedented drive to maximize profits at media conglomerates, we have seen too many examples of news organizations forgoing their independence in exchange for a place in the halls of power.
These Washington Post salons would have taken this one step further, auctioning off its access to corporate lobbyists.
If held, this kind of an event would have been an outrageous violation of journalistic standards.
Selling Integrity for Access
Journalism is in crisis around the country. The economic downturn has collided with fundamental technological, cultural and ideological changes, leaving the future of journalism in doubt.
But selling access to reporters and editors to the highest bidder should never be an option.
The backlash against the Post was swift, spread by outraged members of social networks -- whose anger was fueled in part by marketing materials that seemed blind to the inherent conflicts of interest in this model. The promotional flier for the salons said that these events "are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard."
In full damage control, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli took up the issue of journalistic ethics in the Post's follow-up, saying, "We do not offer access to the newsroom for money. We just are not in that business." He went on to say that the newsroom was never involved in this plan, nor would it have taken part in such an event.
Yet, the fact that this idea got as far as it did is another example of how Big Media tend to put corporate profits before the public interest. The notion of holding these events suggests that for the Post, the real stakeholders in the health care debate seemed to be lobbyists and the companies they represent, not the American people whom the Post is supposed to inform, educate and represent.
Comforting the Comfortable?
It's telling that throughout the flier, the Post reassures corporate representatives that the conversation will be non-confrontational -- there will be no afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted here.
The irony of this whole debacle is that journalists and policy makers ought to be getting in the same room more often. But we need them to be working together in search of policy solutions to the crisis in journalism and to ensure that our communities get the information they need -- not to trade influence and cash for their contacts.
__________________
See also:
Pajamas
Talking Points Memo
Progressive Pulse
Truthdig
Mother Jones
Daily Kos
Washington Post sells what's left of its integrity
WaPo cancels lobbyist event
By: Mike Allen and Michael Calderone
July 2, 2009 08:04 AM EST
Politico
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."
…….
The Post, which lost $19.5 million in the first quarter, sees bringing together Washington figures as a future revenue source. “We do believe that there is a viable way to expand our expertise into live conferences and events that simply enhances what we do - cover Washington for Washingtonians and those interested in Washington,” she said. “ And we will begin to do live events in ways that enhance our reputation and in no way call into question our integrity.”
…….
The first "Salon" was to be called "Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans? The reform and funding debate." More were anticipated, and the flier described the opportunities for participants: “Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. ... A Washington Post Salon ... July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m. ...
"Washington Post Salons are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard," the flier says. "At the core is a critical topic of our day. Dinner and a volley of ideas unfold in an evening of intelligent, news-driven and off-the-record conversation. ... By bringing together those powerful few in business and policy-making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues, Washington Post Salons give life to the debate. Be at this nexus of business and policy with your underwriting of Washington Post Salons."
By: Mike Allen and Michael Calderone
July 2, 2009 08:04 AM EST
Politico
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."
…….
The Post, which lost $19.5 million in the first quarter, sees bringing together Washington figures as a future revenue source. “We do believe that there is a viable way to expand our expertise into live conferences and events that simply enhances what we do - cover Washington for Washingtonians and those interested in Washington,” she said. “ And we will begin to do live events in ways that enhance our reputation and in no way call into question our integrity.”
…….
The first "Salon" was to be called "Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans? The reform and funding debate." More were anticipated, and the flier described the opportunities for participants: “Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. ... A Washington Post Salon ... July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m. ...
"Washington Post Salons are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard," the flier says. "At the core is a critical topic of our day. Dinner and a volley of ideas unfold in an evening of intelligent, news-driven and off-the-record conversation. ... By bringing together those powerful few in business and policy-making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues, Washington Post Salons give life to the debate. Be at this nexus of business and policy with your underwriting of Washington Post Salons."
Monday, June 29, 2009
US Heavy Meddle in Iran
US Heavy Meddle in Iran
By Lord Baltimore @ "Wide Asleep in America"
(see original article for hyperlinks).
June 28, 2009 --- The Western press has clearly taken a side and has successfully managed to drag its uninformed audience along with it. News reports all refer to the continuing groundswell of protest to the election results as an "unprecedented" show of courage, resistance, and people power against the government not seen in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
But what we have seen this past week seems to have far more in common with the events of fifty-six years ago, rather than just thirty.
In 1953, the United States government, at the behest of Britain, tasked CIA operatives Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. and Donald Wilber to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran, in order to put an end to the process of oil nationalization by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. This nationalism "outraged the British, who had 'bought' the exclusive right to exploit Iranian oil from a corrupt Shah, and the Americans, who feared that allowing nationalization in Iran would encourage leftists around the world." The coup d'etat, which took a mere three weeks to execute, was accomplished in a number of stages. First, members of the Iranian Parliament and leaders of political parties were bribed to oppose Mossadegh publicly, thereby making the government appear fragmented and not unified. Newspaper owners, editors, columnists and reporters were then paid off in order to spread lies and propaganda against the Prime Minister.
Furthermore, high-ranking clerics, influential businessmen, members of the police, security forces, and military were bribed, as well. Roosevelt hired the leaders of street gangs in Tehran, using them to help create the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in Iran and that the government had no control over its population. Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of All the Shah's Men, tells us that "at one point, [Roosevelt] hired a gang to run through the streets of Tehran, beating up any pedestrian they found, breaking shop windows, firing their guns into mosques, and yelling, 'We love Mossadegh and communism.' This would naturally turn any decent citizen against him." In a stroke of manipulative genius, Roosevelt then hired a second mob to attack the first mob, thereby giving the Iranian people the impression that there was no police presence and that civil society had devolved into complete chaos, with the government totally incapable of restoring order. Kinzer elaborates,
They rampaged through the streets by the tens of thousands. Many of them, I think, never even really understood they were being paid by the C.I.A. They just knew they had been given a good day’s wage to go out in the street and chant something. Many politicians whipped up the crowds during those days...They started storming government buildings. There were gunfights in front of important buildings.
After all was said and done, Prime Minister Mossadegh had been deposed and a military coup returned the monarchy to Iran by installing the pro-western Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the Peacock throne. The Shah's brutal, tyrannical dictatorship - established, supported, and funded by the United States - lasted 26 years. In 1979, the Iranian people returned the favor.
So what have we been seeing in Iran this past week?
Whereas there is scant evidence of any actual voter fraud or ballot rigging in the recent reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the popular movement we've been seeing on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere is being treated by the American media as some sort of new revolution; an energized, grassroots, and spontaneous effort to overthrow the leaders of the Islamic Republic in favor of a secular, pro-Western "democracy."
Yet, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, whereas there are surely thousands of sincere and committed activists and participants in the recent protests, what we are witnessing may very well be the culmination of years of American infiltration and manipulation of both the Iranian establishment and public.
Back in 2005, the United States government was already funding groups it designated as terrorist organizations to carry out violent attacks within Iran in order to destabilize the Iranian government. In 2007, ABC News reported that George W. Bush has signed a secret "Presidential finding" which authorized the CIA to "mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government." These operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, included "a coordinated campaign of propaganda broadcasts, placement of negative newspaper articles, and the manipulation of Iran's currency and international banking transactions."
In May of that same year, the London Telegraph reported that Bush administration zealot John Bolton revealed that an American military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.” Two weeks later, the Telegraph independently verified the ABC report, saying that, “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
Daniel McAdams tells us that, at the time, "the president met with the Congressional Star Chamber, the “gang of 8″ House and Senate leaders, and was granted the authorization to use some $400 million for among other things, as the Washington Post reported, “activities ranging from spying on Iran’s nuclear program to supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics…"
Then, in early May 2008, Counterpunch's Andrew Cockburn revealed that "Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents was 'unprecedented in its scope.'
"Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department's list of terrorist groups.
Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border - whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother-in-law's throat.
Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi Arabs of southwest Iran.
Of course, US officials denied any "direct funding" of Jundallah, but admitted regular contact since 2005 with its leader Abd el Malik Regi, who was widely reputed to be involved in heroin trafficking from Afghanistan. Funding has reportedly been funneled through Iranian exiles with connections in Europe and the Gulf States.
Furthermore, on June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker confirmed all of these reports, writing, “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and Congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” Among the activities Hersh cited were "gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program", "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions" and "trying to undermine the government through regime change [by] working with opposition groups and passing money."
But the US campaign against Iran didn't come to a halt with the ascension of President Obama. There is no evidence to conclude that the $400 million dollars Bush signed off on has been put to different use (like, say, funding public schools or healthcare.) In early June 2008, Justin Raimondo of Antiwar wrote, "Obama, with his peace overtures [to Iran], serves as the smiley-face mask for some pretty loathsome activities. The U.S. government claims to be fighting terrorism, yet is sponsoring groups that plant bombs in mosques, kidnap tourists as well as Iranian policemen, and fund their activities with drug-running in addition to covert subsidies courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers." He continues,
"What’s going on in Iran today – a sustained campaign of terrorism directed against civilians and government installations alike – is proof positive that nothing has really changed much in Washington, as far as U.S. policy toward Iran is concerned. We are on a collision course with Tehran, and both sides know it. Obama’s public "reaching out" to the Iranians is a fraud of epic proportions. While it’s true that our covert terrorist attacks on Iran were initiated under the Bush regime, under Obama we’re seeing no letup in these sorts of incidents; if anything, they’ve increased in frequency and severity."
Days before the Iranian election, a suicide-bomber killed at least 25 people, and wounded over 125 others, inside a prominent Shi'a mosque in the city of Zahedan, in the southeast province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The rebel Sunni group, Jundallah, which is linked to the US, claimed responsibility for the blast, which was immediately followed up by attacks on banks, water-treatment facilities, and other key installations in and around Zahedan, including a strike against the local campaign headquarters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Last year, Jundallah ( which is committed to establishing a Baluchi Islamic state in southeastern Iran and parts of Pakistan and one of whose founding members is allegedly the infamously waterboarded al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) kidnapped 16 Iranian policemen and videotaped their execution. There was also recently an attempted bombing of an Iranian airplane, which took off from the southwestern city of Ahvaz on the Iraqi border, which has a heavily Arab population. These recent events add up to what Raimondo refers to as "a small-scale insurgency" arising in Iran’s southern provinces.
Both the White House and State Department immediately denounced these attacks and denied any involvement in what they called "recent terrorist attacks inside Iran." Furthermore, there were reports that the Obama administration was considering adding Jundallah to the State's Department's list of terrorist organizations. However, analyst Steve Weissman notes, "the administration suddenly backed away from making the terrorist designation or from otherwise indicating that it would stop the destabilization campaign."
(Incidentally, one of the only two provinces in Iran that went for Mousavi last Friday was Sistan-Baluchistan and crowds of about 2,000 people have taken to the streets in Ahvaz since the election.)
Support for Jundallah - which in what could be the result of a savvy public relations suggestion by the Pentagon, recently changed its name to the Iranian People's Resistance Movement - is just one way the United States has worked to foment an anti-Iranian united front within the country on the verge of the Presidential elections. As such, we are told, "the U.S. is, in effect, conducting a secret war against Tehran, a covert campaign aimed at recruiting Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities – who make up the majority of the population in certain regions, such as in the southeast borderlands near Pakistan – into a movement to topple the government in Tehran, or, at least, to create so much instability that U.S. intervention to 'keep order' in the region is justified."
Ken Timmerman, the executive director of the right-wing Foundation for Democracy in Iran, which is the Persian Service of Voice of America (VOA), "spilled the beans on activities of the other arm of US meddling overseas, the obscenely mis-named National Endowment for Democracy, in a piece written one day before the election," McAdams tells us. Timmerman apparently stated that “there’s the talk of a 'green revolution' in Tehran," prompting McAdams to "wonder where that 'talk' was coming from. Timmerman did not appear to be writing from Iran." McAdams continues, Timmerman went on to write, with admirable candor and honesty, that:
“The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.
“Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”
Yes, you say, but what does a blow-hard propagandist like Timmerman know about such things? Well, he should know! His very spooky Foundation for Democracy in Iran has its own snout deep in the trough of NED’s “open covert actions” against the Iranian government.
How does the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” seek to “promote democracy” in Iran with our tax dollars? Foundation co-founder Joshua Muravchik gives us a hint in his subtly-titled LA Times piece, “Bomb Iran.”
Additionally, Weissman warns of Timmerman's devious sincerity: "Please note that this comes from a very involved right-wing critic who personally knows the expatriate Iranian community," he writes. "It is impossible to know how much government money went to these groups, since Congress has purposely exempted the National Endowment for Democracy from having to make public how it spends taxpayer money."
Even more recently, commentator Stephen Lendman reports that former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig told Pasto Radio on June 15 that "undisputed" intelligence proves CIA interference in the internal affairs of Iran. "The documents prove that the CIA spend $400 million inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election" and to incite regime change for a pro-Western government.
So, are we finally seeing that $400 million pay off in Iran this past week?
There are plenty of clues that reveal the Iranian street protests we're seeing daily in the news may not be all we're told they are. Indeed, the sheer numbers of protesters are impressive and anyone who feels that an injustice has occurred should certainly take to the streets - and not be subject to any sort of police brutality - but much of what we've seen and heard in the past two weeks shows signs of orchestration and bears fingerprints of foreign manipulation.
Many of the protesters we have seen are well-dressed westernized young people in Tehran who are carrying signs written in English, reading, “Where is My Vote?” and other such slogans in English. If the young voters of Iran were addressing their frustrations to their own government, why weren't they speaking the same language? Protesters seen in many YouTube videos and interviewed on American television also speak perfect English. An early message received through a social networking site after the election, sent to the National Iranian American Council and subsequently reported by the American media, came from (allegedly) an Iranian in Tehran. It read:
“I am in Tehran. Its 3:40 in the morning. I’ve connected with you [by hacking past the government filter]. It’s a big mess here. People are yelling from their houses – ‘death to the dictator.’ They are setting up a military government. No one dares to go out. No one has seen Mousavi today. Rumor has it that they have arrested him. I don’t have an email but I will contact you again. Help us."
The idea of an Iranian, aware of the long history of US interference in Iranian affairs, beseeching an audience in America for "help" is, to put it lightly, dubious.
(The same should definitely be said about a recent OpEd featured in the New York Times last Sunday which was supposedly written by "a student in Iran." The article, clearly hoping to galvanize the American readership into strongly supporting pro-Mousavi protesters against the Iranian government, was almost surreal. In it, the author - curiously named "Shane M." which is perhaps the least Iranian name ever - denies the accuracy of pre-election polling by writing, "let’s not cloud the results with numbers that were, like bagels, stale a week later." Later, he describes a scene from the widespread pre-election pro-Mousavi street parties in Tehran, including this observation: "A girl hung off the edge of a car window “Dukes of Hazzard” style." What possible young "Iranian student" would casually reference bagels and Dukes of Hazzard is beyond me, but I can probably think of a few CIA agents that may enjoy both.)
As for the widespread claim, published in nearly every major newspaper, that Mousavi had been disappeared, imprisoned, or put under house arrest, it obviously wasn't true considering that the very next day Mousavi was addressing a crowd of tens of thousands in the middle of Tehran from the roof of his car.
Furthermore, the chants we hear of “death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad” don't make much sense coming from Iranian citizens. As Paul Craig Roberts points out, "Every Iranian knows that the President of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him." Roberts goes on to say, The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.
Early reports of the Tehran rallies revealed that pro-Mousavi protesters were throwing rocks at Iranian police and security forces, as well as burning police motorcycles, city buses, and even private and government buildings. In contrast, we also heard of riot police beating protesters, gas and water cannons being used on crowds, and Basiji paramilitary groups opening fire on peaceful demonstrators. Even though Iranian officials have blamed recent street violence on Mousavi supporters and marchers point to pro-government gangs, accusing them of staging incidents in order to justify further "crackdown" of dissent, the truth may be even more sinister. As one pro-Mousavi protester, who has taken part in every single march so far this week, told Newsweek, "I think some small terrorist groups and criminal gangs are taking advantage of the situation." American money well-spent, perhaps.
According to the national intelligence services, a group of US-linked terrorists who had planned to set off twenty explosions in Tehran were discovered. Nevertheless a bomb still went off near the shrine of Iran's revolutionary founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing one and injuring two.
Despite the rise in violence in the past week, Khamenei has consistently differentiated between what he believes are rebel groups and non-political protesters and "the electoral fans and supporters" of Mousavi. He is quoted as saying that "those who devastate the public assets and private belongings of the people are carrying out the aggressive actions without any political purposes" and urged the defeated presidential candidates to utilize "legal venues" to voice their complaints. Khamenei stated, "the destiny of elections would be determined on the ballots, not on the palm of the streets."
Officials in the Iranian government are well-aware, and appropriately suspicious, of foreign meddling in their domestic affairs. Ali Larijani, the pragmatic, moderate conservative Speaker of Parliament and frequent Ahmadinejad opponent, said recently in a live televised speech, "those who under the mask of political fans of a certain movement or candidate impose damages to the public properties or paralyze the daily life of ordinary people are not among the protestors who want their votes to be virtuously preserved," adding that "the liberty of demonstrations should be respected, and those who are in charge of issuing certifications to legitimize the protesting rallies should cooperate and issue them constructively."
The Western media is certainly not helping matters. It should be remembered, first off, that both the BBC and New York Times played important roles in the 1953 overthrow. Bill Van Auken's The New York Times and Iran: Journalism as State Provocation tells us of the documentation of journalism as the media arm of the imperial state, including the direct military participation of one of its CIA-connected reporters in the coup against Mossadegh:
In 1953, [the New York Times] correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, was not only a willing conduit for CIA disinformation, but also acknowledged participating directly in the coup. He subsequently wrote of giving an Iranian Army tank column instructions to attack Mossadegh's house. Afterwards, the Times celebrated the coup and demanded unconditional support for the Shah’s regime.
The BBC is known to have spearheaded Britain's own propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word ("exactly") that launched the coup d'état itself. Even the rise and importance of new media has to be viewed critically - something Western journalists aren't very good at. CNN recently created a new disclaimer icon to account for all the "unverified" material they've been broadcasting 'round the clock in their effort to stand with protesters and against the Iranian government.
The Iranian "twitter boom" has, to a certain extent, been engineered by a small group of anti-Ahmadinejad advocates in the United States and Israel. Whereas media organizations excitedly report about young Iranians twittering away on the streets of Tehran, it's clear that most of the activity is simply Americans "tweeting" amongst themselves. Nevertheless, the US government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime for maintenance so that tweeting from Iran could go uninterrupted. But, of course, this isn't meddling. Additionally, Caroline McCarthy of CNET News reports that "Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity." While I'm not sure about "confusing" Iranian authorities, I am sure that actions like this serve to overhype the scope, reach, and importance of social networking and alternative media in Iranian politics and activism. The voices of the Iranian people should, of course, be heard and listened to - but the twittering mass of American, European, and Israeli support can hardly be said to speak on behalf of the Iranian public.
This disingenuous statement of President Obama may offer us some insight. In the early days of the post-election protests, he said, "It is not productive, given the history of US and Iranian relations to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections."
American meddling, Mr. Obama? Never! Especially not when our government is responsible for thirty years of sanctions, overt and covert operations designed to weaken one of the only countries that has ever successfully stood up to American imperialism in the face of aggressive efforts to foment dissent and promote regime change.
By Lord Baltimore @ "Wide Asleep in America"
(see original article for hyperlinks).
June 28, 2009 --- The Western press has clearly taken a side and has successfully managed to drag its uninformed audience along with it. News reports all refer to the continuing groundswell of protest to the election results as an "unprecedented" show of courage, resistance, and people power against the government not seen in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
But what we have seen this past week seems to have far more in common with the events of fifty-six years ago, rather than just thirty.
In 1953, the United States government, at the behest of Britain, tasked CIA operatives Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. and Donald Wilber to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran, in order to put an end to the process of oil nationalization by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. This nationalism "outraged the British, who had 'bought' the exclusive right to exploit Iranian oil from a corrupt Shah, and the Americans, who feared that allowing nationalization in Iran would encourage leftists around the world." The coup d'etat, which took a mere three weeks to execute, was accomplished in a number of stages. First, members of the Iranian Parliament and leaders of political parties were bribed to oppose Mossadegh publicly, thereby making the government appear fragmented and not unified. Newspaper owners, editors, columnists and reporters were then paid off in order to spread lies and propaganda against the Prime Minister.
Furthermore, high-ranking clerics, influential businessmen, members of the police, security forces, and military were bribed, as well. Roosevelt hired the leaders of street gangs in Tehran, using them to help create the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in Iran and that the government had no control over its population. Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of All the Shah's Men, tells us that "at one point, [Roosevelt] hired a gang to run through the streets of Tehran, beating up any pedestrian they found, breaking shop windows, firing their guns into mosques, and yelling, 'We love Mossadegh and communism.' This would naturally turn any decent citizen against him." In a stroke of manipulative genius, Roosevelt then hired a second mob to attack the first mob, thereby giving the Iranian people the impression that there was no police presence and that civil society had devolved into complete chaos, with the government totally incapable of restoring order. Kinzer elaborates,
They rampaged through the streets by the tens of thousands. Many of them, I think, never even really understood they were being paid by the C.I.A. They just knew they had been given a good day’s wage to go out in the street and chant something. Many politicians whipped up the crowds during those days...They started storming government buildings. There were gunfights in front of important buildings.
After all was said and done, Prime Minister Mossadegh had been deposed and a military coup returned the monarchy to Iran by installing the pro-western Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the Peacock throne. The Shah's brutal, tyrannical dictatorship - established, supported, and funded by the United States - lasted 26 years. In 1979, the Iranian people returned the favor.
So what have we been seeing in Iran this past week?
Whereas there is scant evidence of any actual voter fraud or ballot rigging in the recent reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the popular movement we've been seeing on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere is being treated by the American media as some sort of new revolution; an energized, grassroots, and spontaneous effort to overthrow the leaders of the Islamic Republic in favor of a secular, pro-Western "democracy."
Yet, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, whereas there are surely thousands of sincere and committed activists and participants in the recent protests, what we are witnessing may very well be the culmination of years of American infiltration and manipulation of both the Iranian establishment and public.
Back in 2005, the United States government was already funding groups it designated as terrorist organizations to carry out violent attacks within Iran in order to destabilize the Iranian government. In 2007, ABC News reported that George W. Bush has signed a secret "Presidential finding" which authorized the CIA to "mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government." These operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, included "a coordinated campaign of propaganda broadcasts, placement of negative newspaper articles, and the manipulation of Iran's currency and international banking transactions."
In May of that same year, the London Telegraph reported that Bush administration zealot John Bolton revealed that an American military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.” Two weeks later, the Telegraph independently verified the ABC report, saying that, “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
Daniel McAdams tells us that, at the time, "the president met with the Congressional Star Chamber, the “gang of 8″ House and Senate leaders, and was granted the authorization to use some $400 million for among other things, as the Washington Post reported, “activities ranging from spying on Iran’s nuclear program to supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics…"
Then, in early May 2008, Counterpunch's Andrew Cockburn revealed that "Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents was 'unprecedented in its scope.'
"Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department's list of terrorist groups.
Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border - whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother-in-law's throat.
Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi Arabs of southwest Iran.
Of course, US officials denied any "direct funding" of Jundallah, but admitted regular contact since 2005 with its leader Abd el Malik Regi, who was widely reputed to be involved in heroin trafficking from Afghanistan. Funding has reportedly been funneled through Iranian exiles with connections in Europe and the Gulf States.
Furthermore, on June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker confirmed all of these reports, writing, “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and Congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” Among the activities Hersh cited were "gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program", "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions" and "trying to undermine the government through regime change [by] working with opposition groups and passing money."
But the US campaign against Iran didn't come to a halt with the ascension of President Obama. There is no evidence to conclude that the $400 million dollars Bush signed off on has been put to different use (like, say, funding public schools or healthcare.) In early June 2008, Justin Raimondo of Antiwar wrote, "Obama, with his peace overtures [to Iran], serves as the smiley-face mask for some pretty loathsome activities. The U.S. government claims to be fighting terrorism, yet is sponsoring groups that plant bombs in mosques, kidnap tourists as well as Iranian policemen, and fund their activities with drug-running in addition to covert subsidies courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers." He continues,
"What’s going on in Iran today – a sustained campaign of terrorism directed against civilians and government installations alike – is proof positive that nothing has really changed much in Washington, as far as U.S. policy toward Iran is concerned. We are on a collision course with Tehran, and both sides know it. Obama’s public "reaching out" to the Iranians is a fraud of epic proportions. While it’s true that our covert terrorist attacks on Iran were initiated under the Bush regime, under Obama we’re seeing no letup in these sorts of incidents; if anything, they’ve increased in frequency and severity."
Days before the Iranian election, a suicide-bomber killed at least 25 people, and wounded over 125 others, inside a prominent Shi'a mosque in the city of Zahedan, in the southeast province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The rebel Sunni group, Jundallah, which is linked to the US, claimed responsibility for the blast, which was immediately followed up by attacks on banks, water-treatment facilities, and other key installations in and around Zahedan, including a strike against the local campaign headquarters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Last year, Jundallah ( which is committed to establishing a Baluchi Islamic state in southeastern Iran and parts of Pakistan and one of whose founding members is allegedly the infamously waterboarded al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) kidnapped 16 Iranian policemen and videotaped their execution. There was also recently an attempted bombing of an Iranian airplane, which took off from the southwestern city of Ahvaz on the Iraqi border, which has a heavily Arab population. These recent events add up to what Raimondo refers to as "a small-scale insurgency" arising in Iran’s southern provinces.
Both the White House and State Department immediately denounced these attacks and denied any involvement in what they called "recent terrorist attacks inside Iran." Furthermore, there were reports that the Obama administration was considering adding Jundallah to the State's Department's list of terrorist organizations. However, analyst Steve Weissman notes, "the administration suddenly backed away from making the terrorist designation or from otherwise indicating that it would stop the destabilization campaign."
(Incidentally, one of the only two provinces in Iran that went for Mousavi last Friday was Sistan-Baluchistan and crowds of about 2,000 people have taken to the streets in Ahvaz since the election.)
Support for Jundallah - which in what could be the result of a savvy public relations suggestion by the Pentagon, recently changed its name to the Iranian People's Resistance Movement - is just one way the United States has worked to foment an anti-Iranian united front within the country on the verge of the Presidential elections. As such, we are told, "the U.S. is, in effect, conducting a secret war against Tehran, a covert campaign aimed at recruiting Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities – who make up the majority of the population in certain regions, such as in the southeast borderlands near Pakistan – into a movement to topple the government in Tehran, or, at least, to create so much instability that U.S. intervention to 'keep order' in the region is justified."
Ken Timmerman, the executive director of the right-wing Foundation for Democracy in Iran, which is the Persian Service of Voice of America (VOA), "spilled the beans on activities of the other arm of US meddling overseas, the obscenely mis-named National Endowment for Democracy, in a piece written one day before the election," McAdams tells us. Timmerman apparently stated that “there’s the talk of a 'green revolution' in Tehran," prompting McAdams to "wonder where that 'talk' was coming from. Timmerman did not appear to be writing from Iran." McAdams continues, Timmerman went on to write, with admirable candor and honesty, that:
“The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.
“Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”
Yes, you say, but what does a blow-hard propagandist like Timmerman know about such things? Well, he should know! His very spooky Foundation for Democracy in Iran has its own snout deep in the trough of NED’s “open covert actions” against the Iranian government.
How does the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” seek to “promote democracy” in Iran with our tax dollars? Foundation co-founder Joshua Muravchik gives us a hint in his subtly-titled LA Times piece, “Bomb Iran.”
Additionally, Weissman warns of Timmerman's devious sincerity: "Please note that this comes from a very involved right-wing critic who personally knows the expatriate Iranian community," he writes. "It is impossible to know how much government money went to these groups, since Congress has purposely exempted the National Endowment for Democracy from having to make public how it spends taxpayer money."
Even more recently, commentator Stephen Lendman reports that former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig told Pasto Radio on June 15 that "undisputed" intelligence proves CIA interference in the internal affairs of Iran. "The documents prove that the CIA spend $400 million inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election" and to incite regime change for a pro-Western government.
So, are we finally seeing that $400 million pay off in Iran this past week?
There are plenty of clues that reveal the Iranian street protests we're seeing daily in the news may not be all we're told they are. Indeed, the sheer numbers of protesters are impressive and anyone who feels that an injustice has occurred should certainly take to the streets - and not be subject to any sort of police brutality - but much of what we've seen and heard in the past two weeks shows signs of orchestration and bears fingerprints of foreign manipulation.
Many of the protesters we have seen are well-dressed westernized young people in Tehran who are carrying signs written in English, reading, “Where is My Vote?” and other such slogans in English. If the young voters of Iran were addressing their frustrations to their own government, why weren't they speaking the same language? Protesters seen in many YouTube videos and interviewed on American television also speak perfect English. An early message received through a social networking site after the election, sent to the National Iranian American Council and subsequently reported by the American media, came from (allegedly) an Iranian in Tehran. It read:
“I am in Tehran. Its 3:40 in the morning. I’ve connected with you [by hacking past the government filter]. It’s a big mess here. People are yelling from their houses – ‘death to the dictator.’ They are setting up a military government. No one dares to go out. No one has seen Mousavi today. Rumor has it that they have arrested him. I don’t have an email but I will contact you again. Help us."
The idea of an Iranian, aware of the long history of US interference in Iranian affairs, beseeching an audience in America for "help" is, to put it lightly, dubious.
(The same should definitely be said about a recent OpEd featured in the New York Times last Sunday which was supposedly written by "a student in Iran." The article, clearly hoping to galvanize the American readership into strongly supporting pro-Mousavi protesters against the Iranian government, was almost surreal. In it, the author - curiously named "Shane M." which is perhaps the least Iranian name ever - denies the accuracy of pre-election polling by writing, "let’s not cloud the results with numbers that were, like bagels, stale a week later." Later, he describes a scene from the widespread pre-election pro-Mousavi street parties in Tehran, including this observation: "A girl hung off the edge of a car window “Dukes of Hazzard” style." What possible young "Iranian student" would casually reference bagels and Dukes of Hazzard is beyond me, but I can probably think of a few CIA agents that may enjoy both.)
As for the widespread claim, published in nearly every major newspaper, that Mousavi had been disappeared, imprisoned, or put under house arrest, it obviously wasn't true considering that the very next day Mousavi was addressing a crowd of tens of thousands in the middle of Tehran from the roof of his car.
Furthermore, the chants we hear of “death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad” don't make much sense coming from Iranian citizens. As Paul Craig Roberts points out, "Every Iranian knows that the President of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him." Roberts goes on to say, The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.
Early reports of the Tehran rallies revealed that pro-Mousavi protesters were throwing rocks at Iranian police and security forces, as well as burning police motorcycles, city buses, and even private and government buildings. In contrast, we also heard of riot police beating protesters, gas and water cannons being used on crowds, and Basiji paramilitary groups opening fire on peaceful demonstrators. Even though Iranian officials have blamed recent street violence on Mousavi supporters and marchers point to pro-government gangs, accusing them of staging incidents in order to justify further "crackdown" of dissent, the truth may be even more sinister. As one pro-Mousavi protester, who has taken part in every single march so far this week, told Newsweek, "I think some small terrorist groups and criminal gangs are taking advantage of the situation." American money well-spent, perhaps.
According to the national intelligence services, a group of US-linked terrorists who had planned to set off twenty explosions in Tehran were discovered. Nevertheless a bomb still went off near the shrine of Iran's revolutionary founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing one and injuring two.
Despite the rise in violence in the past week, Khamenei has consistently differentiated between what he believes are rebel groups and non-political protesters and "the electoral fans and supporters" of Mousavi. He is quoted as saying that "those who devastate the public assets and private belongings of the people are carrying out the aggressive actions without any political purposes" and urged the defeated presidential candidates to utilize "legal venues" to voice their complaints. Khamenei stated, "the destiny of elections would be determined on the ballots, not on the palm of the streets."
Officials in the Iranian government are well-aware, and appropriately suspicious, of foreign meddling in their domestic affairs. Ali Larijani, the pragmatic, moderate conservative Speaker of Parliament and frequent Ahmadinejad opponent, said recently in a live televised speech, "those who under the mask of political fans of a certain movement or candidate impose damages to the public properties or paralyze the daily life of ordinary people are not among the protestors who want their votes to be virtuously preserved," adding that "the liberty of demonstrations should be respected, and those who are in charge of issuing certifications to legitimize the protesting rallies should cooperate and issue them constructively."
The Western media is certainly not helping matters. It should be remembered, first off, that both the BBC and New York Times played important roles in the 1953 overthrow. Bill Van Auken's The New York Times and Iran: Journalism as State Provocation tells us of the documentation of journalism as the media arm of the imperial state, including the direct military participation of one of its CIA-connected reporters in the coup against Mossadegh:
In 1953, [the New York Times] correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, was not only a willing conduit for CIA disinformation, but also acknowledged participating directly in the coup. He subsequently wrote of giving an Iranian Army tank column instructions to attack Mossadegh's house. Afterwards, the Times celebrated the coup and demanded unconditional support for the Shah’s regime.
The BBC is known to have spearheaded Britain's own propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word ("exactly") that launched the coup d'état itself. Even the rise and importance of new media has to be viewed critically - something Western journalists aren't very good at. CNN recently created a new disclaimer icon to account for all the "unverified" material they've been broadcasting 'round the clock in their effort to stand with protesters and against the Iranian government.
The Iranian "twitter boom" has, to a certain extent, been engineered by a small group of anti-Ahmadinejad advocates in the United States and Israel. Whereas media organizations excitedly report about young Iranians twittering away on the streets of Tehran, it's clear that most of the activity is simply Americans "tweeting" amongst themselves. Nevertheless, the US government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime for maintenance so that tweeting from Iran could go uninterrupted. But, of course, this isn't meddling. Additionally, Caroline McCarthy of CNET News reports that "Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity." While I'm not sure about "confusing" Iranian authorities, I am sure that actions like this serve to overhype the scope, reach, and importance of social networking and alternative media in Iranian politics and activism. The voices of the Iranian people should, of course, be heard and listened to - but the twittering mass of American, European, and Israeli support can hardly be said to speak on behalf of the Iranian public.
This disingenuous statement of President Obama may offer us some insight. In the early days of the post-election protests, he said, "It is not productive, given the history of US and Iranian relations to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections."
American meddling, Mr. Obama? Never! Especially not when our government is responsible for thirty years of sanctions, overt and covert operations designed to weaken one of the only countries that has ever successfully stood up to American imperialism in the face of aggressive efforts to foment dissent and promote regime change.
Western Media Get it wrong on Iran
Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality
June 15, 2009 | 1745 GMT
Strarfor
By George Friedman
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.
Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.
Ahmadinejad’s Popularity
It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.
First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.
Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.
Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.
Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.
For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.
Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.
The Road Ahead: More of the Same
The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.
Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)
What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.
On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.
For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.
See also:
Has the U.S. Played a Role?
June 15, 2009 | 1745 GMT
Strarfor
By George Friedman
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.
Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.
Ahmadinejad’s Popularity
It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.
First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.
Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.
Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.
Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.
For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.
Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.
The Road Ahead: More of the Same
The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.
Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)
What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.
On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.
For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.
See also:
Has the U.S. Played a Role?
Friday, June 26, 2009
Nixon on Abortion
From the NYT
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
Thursday, May 07, 2009
More cause for Pakistan worries
Posted by James F. Smith
Boston Globe
May 7, 2009 01:30 PM
As if there weren't enough crises in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Harvard Kennedy School fellow and Pakistan expert Hassan Abbas is offering more cause for worry.
Abbas, a former Pakistan government official who is one of the leading scholars in the United States on security issues in his homeland, says in a new article that most attention has rightly focused on the threat from the Pakistani Taliban in the border tribal areas and the North-West Frontier Province. Those are the traditional Pashtun Taliban militants, who share that ethnic heritage with Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan (and who received US backing in the 1980s to fight the Soviets).
But in a new study in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Abbas describes a growing threat with potentially even greater consequences. He explains that the loosely organized Punjabi Taliban -- from Punjab Province, Pakistan's most populous area -- is gathering strength and momentum. The Punjab is Pakistan's heartland, home to some of Pakistan's largest cities and military installations.
It was these Punjabi Taliban, Abbas notes, who attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in March, among many notorious attacks. The Punjabi Taliban are working more closely with Pashtun Taliban. The Punjabis are often better-educated, and better-trained in the use of weaponry. Abbas, who is a fellow in the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says it is imperative to strengthen Pakistan's law enforcement capacity to counter this threat.
Note this reporting is in start contrast to the trip being published at the Washington Post by Pamela Constable who has been dusted off and reinstalled as their Pakistan "expert."
Boston Globe
May 7, 2009 01:30 PM
As if there weren't enough crises in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Harvard Kennedy School fellow and Pakistan expert Hassan Abbas is offering more cause for worry.
Abbas, a former Pakistan government official who is one of the leading scholars in the United States on security issues in his homeland, says in a new article that most attention has rightly focused on the threat from the Pakistani Taliban in the border tribal areas and the North-West Frontier Province. Those are the traditional Pashtun Taliban militants, who share that ethnic heritage with Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan (and who received US backing in the 1980s to fight the Soviets).
But in a new study in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Abbas describes a growing threat with potentially even greater consequences. He explains that the loosely organized Punjabi Taliban -- from Punjab Province, Pakistan's most populous area -- is gathering strength and momentum. The Punjab is Pakistan's heartland, home to some of Pakistan's largest cities and military installations.
It was these Punjabi Taliban, Abbas notes, who attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in March, among many notorious attacks. The Punjabi Taliban are working more closely with Pashtun Taliban. The Punjabis are often better-educated, and better-trained in the use of weaponry. Abbas, who is a fellow in the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says it is imperative to strengthen Pakistan's law enforcement capacity to counter this threat.
Note this reporting is in start contrast to the trip being published at the Washington Post by Pamela Constable who has been dusted off and reinstalled as their Pakistan "expert."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Somini Sengupta has discovered child malnutrition
Somini Sengupta has discovered child malnutrition in India.
From the New York Times March 12: "As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists"
“Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge” she writes, “even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.”
Apparently this is not a paradox in America, the worlds richest and most powerful country.
She compares India to China “China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent.”
She laments that “There are no simple explanations.” Then goes on to make the incredulous claims that “Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor.” And that “Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here.”
She acknowledges that India runs the largest child feeding program in the world but then eviserarates it by saying that “experts agree it is inadequately designed”.
She makes a trip to a slum in Delhi to make these journalistic observations:
“A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.
Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood. “
First of all khichdi – a traditional Indian dish all over the north is not “all strarch” as every Indian knows – the lentils are added to provide protein and it provides a nutritious meal if vegetables are thrown in for the vitamins.
So she deliberately misleads – its not porridge nor is it all starch.
She then provides more anecdotal evidence of how, horror or horrors, some the left over food is given to women.
Somini Sengupta then provides more recycled and some questionable statistics collected from the internet.
She observes there are beggars in Delhi: “A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.”
She also seems amazed that there are rats in slums, there are open drains and malaria. I guess if you move about the five star hotel circuit this could come as a shock.
Here she makes an observation that a more astute journalist would have followed through on: “Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.”
Yes, thanks to globalization, multinationals like Coke and Pepsi, and Indian companies too sell non-nutritious snacks and sugary water drinks. These are consumed by poor under-nourished slum dwellers as a luxury thanks to the constant advertising barrage. This further erodes their finances, which could be better used to buy fresh vegetables or meat.
But instead she moves blithely on ….
---------------
Many of the observations she makes are not new for example here is quote from a World Bank report on the subject:
The South Asian Enigma: Why is undernutrition in South Asia so much higher than in Sub Saharan Africa?
In 1997, Ramalingaswami et al. wrote, “In the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is Sub-Saharan Africa…but … the worst affected region is not Africa but South Asia”. These statements were met with incredulity. However, undernutrition rates in South Asia, including and especially in India, are nearly double those in Sub-Saharan Africa today. This is not an artifact of different measurement standards or differing growth potential among ethnic groups: several studies have repeatedly shown that given similar opportunities, children across most ethnic groups, including Indian children, can grow to the same levels, and that the same internationally recognized growth references can be used across countries to assess the prevalence of malnutrition. This phenomenon, referred to as the “South Asian Enigma”, is real.
The “South Asian Enigma” can be explained by three key differences between South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa:
- Low birth weight is the single largest predictor of undernutrition; and over 30% Indian babies are born with low birth weights, compared to approximately 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Women in South Asia tend to have lower status and less decision-making power than women in Sub-Saharan Africa. This limits women’s ability to access the resources needed for their own and their children’s health and nutrition, and has been shown to be strongly associated with low birth weight, as well as poor child feeding behaviors in the first twelve months of life
- Hygiene and sanitation standards in South Asia are well below those in Africa, and have a major role to play in causing the infections that lead to undernutrition in the first two years of life/
Ramalingaswami V, U. Jonson and J. Rohde. 1997 “The Asian Enigma”. In, The
Progress of Nations. New York: UNICEF.
--------------------
Here are some interesting comments to the NYT Article:
Comment 1 one of my favorites reporduced in full below
Comment 2
Comment 3
Comment 4
Comment 5
Comment 6
Comment 7
--- begin comment from nyt ----
240. March 13, 2009 3:22 pm
I will try to write this in the kindest least offensive manner. I worked five years in India (99-2004) managing Unicef's supply operation. Unicef is the UN childrens fund and has been working in India over 60 years; it was the first UN agency to startup in the then newly independent country. It has worked with governments, community groups, large ngo's, religious leaderships, universities, foriegn experts, you name it, anyone and everyone who wants to help nourish India's future, her beautiful children.
We (unicef) had some of the best nutrition and child development experts on our staff and advising us. Amartya Sen, nobel winner from his work on famine in Bangladesh; arguably the world leader in these issues regularly offered assistance. I am not a nutrition or development expert, I managed the spending of money, we spent about $130 million yearly, most of that went for vaccines, most of that for polio eradication. In nutrition unicef mostly offered training and meetings called 'advocacy' a nice way of saying, trying to convince people to nourish their children better. So my naive gleanings and reactions to comments here I've just read.
1. India has plenty of food, in fact large surpluses that are a financial/market stability problem; food is not lacking; its in the wrong spots at the wrong time. Teen girls & their babies need good food now.
2. India knows more about child feeding than most; they have received the world's most dedicated specialists in this area for many years.
3. 'Corruption' in government is not nearly the issue westerners blurt out whenever they use the word India. I worked with senior, middle and lower level officials, in tendering, ajudication and contracting of all sorts of local and international contracts for five years. I worked with government donor agencies, World Bank and well intended groups with money. I'm a typical middle class American male business fellow, with years in the US drug industry before Unicef. I've worked in Europe, Africa, Latin America, former Soviet, most south and east asian govt's managing contracts that spent your hard earned donations. India is no worse, and on balance better than some in the realm of corrupted contracting. They have corruption, but so do we (America)--it seems to be part of life. But, resistance to changing how things are always done is a bigger than the usual small time grifters trying to get over. India has active anti fraud teams, and a more agressive press than we do now in America.
4. 'Government' is not the problem. All comments seem to blame govt, but India's govt is a large complex group criticized from so many sides I wonder how they carry on. India is over six hundred districts, equivalent to US counties, only these have power. Nothing affects people through govt without the district. There are 600,000 towns & villages, each with elected vested interests--sound familiar? There are 26 states, each remarkably different; each zealous in its authorities. There are at least 10 powerful 'learned societies' of nutrition and child development in India, who field real experts in all subjects of child nutrition. They gather as often as someone will pay for their visit to Delhi or Mumbai and present learned papers. In my experience they disagree more over every aspect of nutrition than I thought was possible. In hindsight I found the gov't people trying to manage this 'nutrition' process to be powerless peons caught in the middle of angry partisans.
5. 'Caste', I love how westerners write about caste. In five years of very concentrated effort in all sorts of health programs with the smartest people I ever worked with, the word & concept of caste never entered the discussions. The only people who say things like 'untouchables' are westerners. Caste is a nice conception from watching films like Gandhi--who was high caste, but not part of the educated governance culture of the country. There is caste, it is illegal, there are exceptions who make it to the top, but caste is not causing this alone, and it is taboo to discuss--no one admits they have it.
6. Religion; to my surprise none of the comments I saw mentioned what is a measurable; muslim children and mothers in India suffer, and they are the largest 'minority' group. They are also the largest muslim population within a nation excepting Indonesia, over 100 million Indians are Muslim; most of them are poor hungry and fed up--call it a security risk, these teenage moms and babies need vitamins minerals and real food now.
'India's problem' in my view? It's similar to ours in America; selfishness. When we (the well off in America), and the same 'we' in India feel the pain of our poor, we will move forward. Thank you NYT for these opportunities, John Gilmartin
— John Gilmartin, Rhode Island, USA
--- end comment from nyt ----
From the New York Times March 12: "As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists"
“Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge” she writes, “even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.”
Apparently this is not a paradox in America, the worlds richest and most powerful country.
She compares India to China “China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent.”
She laments that “There are no simple explanations.” Then goes on to make the incredulous claims that “Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor.” And that “Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here.”
She acknowledges that India runs the largest child feeding program in the world but then eviserarates it by saying that “experts agree it is inadequately designed”.
She makes a trip to a slum in Delhi to make these journalistic observations:
“A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.
Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood. “
First of all khichdi – a traditional Indian dish all over the north is not “all strarch” as every Indian knows – the lentils are added to provide protein and it provides a nutritious meal if vegetables are thrown in for the vitamins.
So she deliberately misleads – its not porridge nor is it all starch.
She then provides more anecdotal evidence of how, horror or horrors, some the left over food is given to women.
Somini Sengupta then provides more recycled and some questionable statistics collected from the internet.
She observes there are beggars in Delhi: “A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.”
She also seems amazed that there are rats in slums, there are open drains and malaria. I guess if you move about the five star hotel circuit this could come as a shock.
Here she makes an observation that a more astute journalist would have followed through on: “Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.”
Yes, thanks to globalization, multinationals like Coke and Pepsi, and Indian companies too sell non-nutritious snacks and sugary water drinks. These are consumed by poor under-nourished slum dwellers as a luxury thanks to the constant advertising barrage. This further erodes their finances, which could be better used to buy fresh vegetables or meat.
But instead she moves blithely on ….
---------------
Many of the observations she makes are not new for example here is quote from a World Bank report on the subject:
The South Asian Enigma: Why is undernutrition in South Asia so much higher than in Sub Saharan Africa?
In 1997, Ramalingaswami et al. wrote, “In the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is Sub-Saharan Africa…but … the worst affected region is not Africa but South Asia”. These statements were met with incredulity. However, undernutrition rates in South Asia, including and especially in India, are nearly double those in Sub-Saharan Africa today. This is not an artifact of different measurement standards or differing growth potential among ethnic groups: several studies have repeatedly shown that given similar opportunities, children across most ethnic groups, including Indian children, can grow to the same levels, and that the same internationally recognized growth references can be used across countries to assess the prevalence of malnutrition. This phenomenon, referred to as the “South Asian Enigma”, is real.
The “South Asian Enigma” can be explained by three key differences between South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa:
- Low birth weight is the single largest predictor of undernutrition; and over 30% Indian babies are born with low birth weights, compared to approximately 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Women in South Asia tend to have lower status and less decision-making power than women in Sub-Saharan Africa. This limits women’s ability to access the resources needed for their own and their children’s health and nutrition, and has been shown to be strongly associated with low birth weight, as well as poor child feeding behaviors in the first twelve months of life
- Hygiene and sanitation standards in South Asia are well below those in Africa, and have a major role to play in causing the infections that lead to undernutrition in the first two years of life/
Ramalingaswami V, U. Jonson and J. Rohde. 1997 “The Asian Enigma”. In, The
Progress of Nations. New York: UNICEF.
--------------------
Here are some interesting comments to the NYT Article:
Comment 1 one of my favorites reporduced in full below
Comment 2
Comment 3
Comment 4
Comment 5
Comment 6
Comment 7
--- begin comment from nyt ----
240. March 13, 2009 3:22 pm
I will try to write this in the kindest least offensive manner. I worked five years in India (99-2004) managing Unicef's supply operation. Unicef is the UN childrens fund and has been working in India over 60 years; it was the first UN agency to startup in the then newly independent country. It has worked with governments, community groups, large ngo's, religious leaderships, universities, foriegn experts, you name it, anyone and everyone who wants to help nourish India's future, her beautiful children.
We (unicef) had some of the best nutrition and child development experts on our staff and advising us. Amartya Sen, nobel winner from his work on famine in Bangladesh; arguably the world leader in these issues regularly offered assistance. I am not a nutrition or development expert, I managed the spending of money, we spent about $130 million yearly, most of that went for vaccines, most of that for polio eradication. In nutrition unicef mostly offered training and meetings called 'advocacy' a nice way of saying, trying to convince people to nourish their children better. So my naive gleanings and reactions to comments here I've just read.
1. India has plenty of food, in fact large surpluses that are a financial/market stability problem; food is not lacking; its in the wrong spots at the wrong time. Teen girls & their babies need good food now.
2. India knows more about child feeding than most; they have received the world's most dedicated specialists in this area for many years.
3. 'Corruption' in government is not nearly the issue westerners blurt out whenever they use the word India. I worked with senior, middle and lower level officials, in tendering, ajudication and contracting of all sorts of local and international contracts for five years. I worked with government donor agencies, World Bank and well intended groups with money. I'm a typical middle class American male business fellow, with years in the US drug industry before Unicef. I've worked in Europe, Africa, Latin America, former Soviet, most south and east asian govt's managing contracts that spent your hard earned donations. India is no worse, and on balance better than some in the realm of corrupted contracting. They have corruption, but so do we (America)--it seems to be part of life. But, resistance to changing how things are always done is a bigger than the usual small time grifters trying to get over. India has active anti fraud teams, and a more agressive press than we do now in America.
4. 'Government' is not the problem. All comments seem to blame govt, but India's govt is a large complex group criticized from so many sides I wonder how they carry on. India is over six hundred districts, equivalent to US counties, only these have power. Nothing affects people through govt without the district. There are 600,000 towns & villages, each with elected vested interests--sound familiar? There are 26 states, each remarkably different; each zealous in its authorities. There are at least 10 powerful 'learned societies' of nutrition and child development in India, who field real experts in all subjects of child nutrition. They gather as often as someone will pay for their visit to Delhi or Mumbai and present learned papers. In my experience they disagree more over every aspect of nutrition than I thought was possible. In hindsight I found the gov't people trying to manage this 'nutrition' process to be powerless peons caught in the middle of angry partisans.
5. 'Caste', I love how westerners write about caste. In five years of very concentrated effort in all sorts of health programs with the smartest people I ever worked with, the word & concept of caste never entered the discussions. The only people who say things like 'untouchables' are westerners. Caste is a nice conception from watching films like Gandhi--who was high caste, but not part of the educated governance culture of the country. There is caste, it is illegal, there are exceptions who make it to the top, but caste is not causing this alone, and it is taboo to discuss--no one admits they have it.
6. Religion; to my surprise none of the comments I saw mentioned what is a measurable; muslim children and mothers in India suffer, and they are the largest 'minority' group. They are also the largest muslim population within a nation excepting Indonesia, over 100 million Indians are Muslim; most of them are poor hungry and fed up--call it a security risk, these teenage moms and babies need vitamins minerals and real food now.
'India's problem' in my view? It's similar to ours in America; selfishness. When we (the well off in America), and the same 'we' in India feel the pain of our poor, we will move forward. Thank you NYT for these opportunities, John Gilmartin
— John Gilmartin, Rhode Island, USA
--- end comment from nyt ----
Friday, February 06, 2009
What happened to the $20 laptop?
BBC
6 February 09
The only problem was that the "$20 laptop" turned out to be no such thing - it's not a laptop and it's not clear exactly what it is, when it will appear or what it wil cost. But the world's technology journalists fell for the story - along with the BBC - so how did that happen?
6 February 09
The only problem was that the "$20 laptop" turned out to be no such thing - it's not a laptop and it's not clear exactly what it is, when it will appear or what it wil cost. But the world's technology journalists fell for the story - along with the BBC - so how did that happen?
Another Quality Washington Post Reporter!
This goes a long way towards explaining the myopic view at the WP. Jay Mattews is typical of the ill informed, supremacist, reporter that the Washington Post employs.
In contrast to this blowhard there is Bob Compton.
The segment starts at 1:00 min.
In contrast to this blowhard there is Bob Compton.
The segment starts at 1:00 min.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West’s War on Zimbabwe
December 8, 2008
Race and History
By Gowans
The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits – to an inadequate level - the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.
In the West, state officials call for the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it’s never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai’s ascension to the presidency will make it go away.
The causal chain leading to the crisis can be diagrammed roughly as follows:
• In the late 90s, Mugabe’s government provokes the hostility of the West by: (1) intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, helping to thwart an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain; (2) it rejects a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program the IMF establishes as a condition for balance of payment support; (3) it accelerates land redistribution by seizing white-owned farms and thereby committing the ultimate affront against owners of productive property – expropriation without compensation. To governments whose foreign policy is based in large measure on protecting their nationals’ ownership rights to foreign productive assets, expropriation, and especially expropriation without compensation, is intolerable, and must be punished to deter others from doing the same.
• In response, the United States, as prime guarantor of the imperialist system, introduces the December 2001 Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The act instructs US representatives to international financial institutions “to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.”
• The act effectively deprives Zimbabwe of foreign currency required to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to upgrade its infrastructure. The central bank takes measures to mitigate the effects of the act, creating hyper-inflation as a by-product.
The cause of the crisis, then, can be traced directly to the West. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe, the US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods — not trade sanctions, but an act that had the same effect. To be sure, had the Mugabe government reversed its land reform program and abided by IMF demands, the crisis would have been averted. But the trigger was pulled in Washington, London and Brussels, and it is the West, therefore, that bears the blame.
Sanctions are effectively acts of war, with often equivalent, and sometimes more devastating, consequences. More than a million Iraqis died as a result of a decade-long sanctions regime championed by the US following the 1991 Gulf War. This prompted two political scientists, John and Karl Mueller, to coin the phrase “sanctions of mass destruction.” They noted that sanctions had “contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.”
The Western media refer to sanctions on Zimbabwe as targeted – limited only to high state officials and other individuals. This ignores the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act and conceals its devastating impact, thereby shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe from the US to Mugabe.
The cholera outbreak has a parallel in the outbreak of cholera in Iraq following the Gulf War. Thomas Nagy, a business professor at George Washington University, cited declassified documents in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine showing that the United States had deliberately bombed Iraq’s drinking water and sanitation facilities, recognizing that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding its water infrastructure and that epidemics of otherwise preventable diseases, cholera among them, would ensue. Washington, in other words, deliberately created a humanitarian catastrophe to achieve its goal of regime change. There is a direct parallel with Zimbabwe – the only difference is that the United States uses the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act – that is, sanctions of mass destruction – in place of bombing.
Harare’s land reform program is one of the principal reasons the United States has gone to war with Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has redistributed land previously owned by 4,000 white farmers to 300,000 previously landless families, descendants of black Africans whose land was stolen by white settlers. By contrast, South Africa’s ANC government has redistributed only four percent of the 87 percent of land forcibly seized from the indigenous population by Europeans.
In March, South Africa’s cabinet seemed ready to move ahead with a plan to accelerate agrarian reform. It would abandon the “willing seller, willing buyer” model insisted on by the West, following in the Mugabe government’s footsteps. Under the plan, thirty percent of farmland would be redistributed to black farmers by 2014. But the government has since backed away, its reluctance to move forward based on the following considerations.
1. Most black South Africans are generations removed from the land, and no longer have the skills and culture necessary to immediately farm at a high level. An accelerated land reform program would almost certainly lower production levels, as new farmers played catch up to acquire critical skills.
2. South Africa is no longer a net exporter of food. An accelerated land reform program would likely force the country, in the short term, to rely more heavily on agricultural imports, at a time food prices are rising globally.
3. There is a danger that fast-track land reform will create a crisis of capital flight.
4. The dangers of radical land reform in provoking a backlash from the West are richly evident in the example of Zimbabwe. South Africa would like to avoid becoming the next Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis is accompanied by a political crisis. Talks on forming a government of national unity are stalled. Failure to strike a deal pivots on a single ministry – home affairs. In the West, failure to consolidate a deal between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the two MDC factions is attributed to Mugabe’s intransigence in insisting that he control all key cabinet posts. It takes two to tango. Tsvangirai has shown little interest in striking an accord, preferring instead to raise objections to every solution to the impasse put forward by outside mediators, as Western ambassadors hover nearby. It’s as if, with the country teetering on the edge of collapse, he doesn’t want to do a deal, preferring instead to help hasten the collapse by throwing up obstacles to an accord, to clear the way for his ascension to the presidency. When the mediation of former South African president Thambo Mbeki failed, Tsvangirai asked the regional grouping, the SADC, to intervene. SADC ordered Zanu-PF and the MDC to share the home affairs ministry. Tsvangirai refused. Now he wants Mbeki replaced.
At the SADC meeting, Mugabe presented a report which alleges that MDC militias are being trained in Botswana by Britain, to be deployed to Zimbabwe early in 2009 to foment a civil war. The turmoil would be used as a pretext for outside military intervention. This would follow the model used to oust the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Already, British officials and clergymen are calling for intervention. British prime minister Gordon Brown says the cholera outbreak makes Zimbabwe’s crisis international, because disease can cross borders. Since an international crisis is within the purview of the “international community,” the path is clear for the West and its satellites to step in to set matters straight
Botswana is decidedly hostile. The country’s foreign minister, Phando Skelemani, says that Zimbabwe’s neighbors should impose an oil blockade to bring the Mugabe government down.
Meanwhile, representatives of the elders, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan and Graca Machel sought to enter Zimbabwe to assess the humanitarian situation. Inasmuch as an adequate assessment could not be made on the whistle-stop tour the trio had planned, Harare barred their entry, recognizing that the trip would simply be used as a platform to declaim on the necessity of regime change. The elders’ humanitarian concern, however, didn’t stop the trio from agreeing that stepped up sanctions – more misery for the population — would be useful.
The Mugabe government’s pursuit of land reform, rejection of neo-liberal restructuring, and movement to eclipse US imperialism in southern Africa, has put Zimbabwe on the receiving end of a Western attack based on punitive financial sanctions. The intention, as is true of all Western destabilization efforts, has been to make the target country ungovernable, forcing the government to step down, clearing the way for the ascension of the West’s local errand boys. Owing to the West’s attack, Zimbabwe’s government is struggling to provide the population with basic necessities. It can no longer provide basic sanitation and access to potable water at a sufficient level to prevent the outbreak of otherwise preventable diseases.
The replacement of the Mugabe government with one led by the Movement for Democratic Change, a party created and directed by Western governments, if it happens, will lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. This won’t come about because the MDC is more competent at governing, but because sanctions will be lifted and access to balance of payment support and development aid will be restored. Zimbabwe will once again be able to import adequate amounts of water purification chemicals. The improving humanitarian situation will be cited as proof the West was right all along in insisting on a change of government.
The downside is that measures to indigenize the economy – to place the country’s agricultural and mineral wealth in the hands of the black majority – will be reversed. Mugabe and key members of the state will be shipped off to The Hague – or attempts will be made to ship them off – to send a message to others about what befalls those who threaten the dominant mode of property relations and challenge Western domination. Cowed by the example of Zimbabwe, Africans in other countries will back away from their own land reform and economic indigenization demands, and the continent will settle more firmly into a pattern of neo-colonial subjugation.
_____________________________
Zimbabwe and hypocrisy - lessons from history
From Tony McGregor
So the sham election is over and Robert Gabriel Mugabe pronounced to be duly elected President of the Republic of Zimbabwe to a chorus of condemnation from the Western powers and a significant number of African leaders also.
The gleeful condemnation from the West, under the cheerleading of the horrible two-headed monster called Bush/Brown (hereinafter called BB) is loud, vociferous and incredibly hypocritical, not to mention a-historical.
Through the 60s, 70s and 80s the US and its allies maintained Mobutu Sese Seko, the ogre of Zaire, in power while he plundered his country, exploited its people and left it in a state of undemocratic shambles, impoverished and at war with itself.
Through the 70s, 80s and 90s the US and its allies urged on the vicious exploits of Jonas Savimbi against the elected government of Angola, in a wasteful, cruel and totally unnecessary civil war which cost millions of lives.
And now they turn on Mugabe, who has not done nearly as much damage, though the damage he has done is still immense, as Mobutu and Savimbi did, not to mention other “darlings” of the West like Daniel Arap Moi.
The West conveniently forgets, while condemning Mugabe with such breath-taking hypocrisy, that the land which is now called Zimbabwe was originally stolen by chicanery and violence from its people in the late 19th Century. Then the people were again insulted and denied their rights in their own land by Ian Smith’s attempted 1000-year reich, which mercifully only lasted a few decades.
An intelligence report by an official of the British South African Company (the company owned by Cecil John Rhodes and which was the instrument he used to rob the people of Zimbabwe of their land) in a report in February 1897 wrote that the people of Zimbabwe “mean to remain independent.”
This nameless official went on in his report: “Therefore what is required are strong lessons, which we have failed to give them from the very beginning of the war. And this failure only proved to the natives that with all our men and guns we have not even been able to get at them … All this shows that our mode of fighting is not the proper one for Mashonas; even the natives laugh at it…”
The official concluded the report with these words: “In conclusion, my advice would be to give to the natives of the district as severe a lesson as possible, surprising and burning their kraals when it is possible to do so, and, at all events throughout the district, to lay waste their crops.”
Thus the “civilizing” work of the colonists! And let’s not forget that the “natives of the district” were actually the rightful owners of the land and that the lesson they were to be taught was that they should give up their land to the white settlers.
This land was being wrested from them by a combination of trickery, deceit and firepower. The deceit was in the form of the Rudd Concession which an agent of Cecil John Rhodes, one Charles Rudd, had signed with the nDebele King Jando Lopengule (Lobengula) Kumalo.
By this agreement, Lobengula had been assured, only ten settlers would be allowed to mine in his kingdom and that all people there would be considered to be living in his kingdom.
So when hundreds of settlers arrived he was, unsurprisingly, somewhat peeved!
From that time on the indigenous people of Zimbabwe suffered one depredation after another. Their land was stolen, their rights to independence were stolen, their self-esteem was stolen.
In every constitutional arrangement from then on their rights were reduced.
It should be no surprise then that Mugabe rants on about Bush and Blair wanting to rob the Zimbabwean people of their birthright. On what basis should the Zimbabweans trust the West, and Britain in particular?
The final straw for the Black people of Zimbabwe was the unfortunate so-called independence (UDI) declared by Ian Smith on 11 November 1965. This triggered a long “bush” war, known by the people of Zimbabwe as the Second Chimurenga (War of Independence). The first Chimurenga was the struggle against the colonial theft in the 19th Century.
The Second Chimurenga lasted from UDI until the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 which led to elections and the installation of a government led by Mugabe as Prime Minister.
See also Zimbabwe Image
Race and History
By Gowans
The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits – to an inadequate level - the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.
In the West, state officials call for the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it’s never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai’s ascension to the presidency will make it go away.
The causal chain leading to the crisis can be diagrammed roughly as follows:
• In the late 90s, Mugabe’s government provokes the hostility of the West by: (1) intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, helping to thwart an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain; (2) it rejects a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program the IMF establishes as a condition for balance of payment support; (3) it accelerates land redistribution by seizing white-owned farms and thereby committing the ultimate affront against owners of productive property – expropriation without compensation. To governments whose foreign policy is based in large measure on protecting their nationals’ ownership rights to foreign productive assets, expropriation, and especially expropriation without compensation, is intolerable, and must be punished to deter others from doing the same.
• In response, the United States, as prime guarantor of the imperialist system, introduces the December 2001 Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The act instructs US representatives to international financial institutions “to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.”
• The act effectively deprives Zimbabwe of foreign currency required to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to upgrade its infrastructure. The central bank takes measures to mitigate the effects of the act, creating hyper-inflation as a by-product.
The cause of the crisis, then, can be traced directly to the West. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe, the US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods — not trade sanctions, but an act that had the same effect. To be sure, had the Mugabe government reversed its land reform program and abided by IMF demands, the crisis would have been averted. But the trigger was pulled in Washington, London and Brussels, and it is the West, therefore, that bears the blame.
Sanctions are effectively acts of war, with often equivalent, and sometimes more devastating, consequences. More than a million Iraqis died as a result of a decade-long sanctions regime championed by the US following the 1991 Gulf War. This prompted two political scientists, John and Karl Mueller, to coin the phrase “sanctions of mass destruction.” They noted that sanctions had “contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.”
The Western media refer to sanctions on Zimbabwe as targeted – limited only to high state officials and other individuals. This ignores the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act and conceals its devastating impact, thereby shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe from the US to Mugabe.
The cholera outbreak has a parallel in the outbreak of cholera in Iraq following the Gulf War. Thomas Nagy, a business professor at George Washington University, cited declassified documents in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine showing that the United States had deliberately bombed Iraq’s drinking water and sanitation facilities, recognizing that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding its water infrastructure and that epidemics of otherwise preventable diseases, cholera among them, would ensue. Washington, in other words, deliberately created a humanitarian catastrophe to achieve its goal of regime change. There is a direct parallel with Zimbabwe – the only difference is that the United States uses the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act – that is, sanctions of mass destruction – in place of bombing.
Harare’s land reform program is one of the principal reasons the United States has gone to war with Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has redistributed land previously owned by 4,000 white farmers to 300,000 previously landless families, descendants of black Africans whose land was stolen by white settlers. By contrast, South Africa’s ANC government has redistributed only four percent of the 87 percent of land forcibly seized from the indigenous population by Europeans.
In March, South Africa’s cabinet seemed ready to move ahead with a plan to accelerate agrarian reform. It would abandon the “willing seller, willing buyer” model insisted on by the West, following in the Mugabe government’s footsteps. Under the plan, thirty percent of farmland would be redistributed to black farmers by 2014. But the government has since backed away, its reluctance to move forward based on the following considerations.
1. Most black South Africans are generations removed from the land, and no longer have the skills and culture necessary to immediately farm at a high level. An accelerated land reform program would almost certainly lower production levels, as new farmers played catch up to acquire critical skills.
2. South Africa is no longer a net exporter of food. An accelerated land reform program would likely force the country, in the short term, to rely more heavily on agricultural imports, at a time food prices are rising globally.
3. There is a danger that fast-track land reform will create a crisis of capital flight.
4. The dangers of radical land reform in provoking a backlash from the West are richly evident in the example of Zimbabwe. South Africa would like to avoid becoming the next Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis is accompanied by a political crisis. Talks on forming a government of national unity are stalled. Failure to strike a deal pivots on a single ministry – home affairs. In the West, failure to consolidate a deal between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the two MDC factions is attributed to Mugabe’s intransigence in insisting that he control all key cabinet posts. It takes two to tango. Tsvangirai has shown little interest in striking an accord, preferring instead to raise objections to every solution to the impasse put forward by outside mediators, as Western ambassadors hover nearby. It’s as if, with the country teetering on the edge of collapse, he doesn’t want to do a deal, preferring instead to help hasten the collapse by throwing up obstacles to an accord, to clear the way for his ascension to the presidency. When the mediation of former South African president Thambo Mbeki failed, Tsvangirai asked the regional grouping, the SADC, to intervene. SADC ordered Zanu-PF and the MDC to share the home affairs ministry. Tsvangirai refused. Now he wants Mbeki replaced.
At the SADC meeting, Mugabe presented a report which alleges that MDC militias are being trained in Botswana by Britain, to be deployed to Zimbabwe early in 2009 to foment a civil war. The turmoil would be used as a pretext for outside military intervention. This would follow the model used to oust the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Already, British officials and clergymen are calling for intervention. British prime minister Gordon Brown says the cholera outbreak makes Zimbabwe’s crisis international, because disease can cross borders. Since an international crisis is within the purview of the “international community,” the path is clear for the West and its satellites to step in to set matters straight
Botswana is decidedly hostile. The country’s foreign minister, Phando Skelemani, says that Zimbabwe’s neighbors should impose an oil blockade to bring the Mugabe government down.
Meanwhile, representatives of the elders, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan and Graca Machel sought to enter Zimbabwe to assess the humanitarian situation. Inasmuch as an adequate assessment could not be made on the whistle-stop tour the trio had planned, Harare barred their entry, recognizing that the trip would simply be used as a platform to declaim on the necessity of regime change. The elders’ humanitarian concern, however, didn’t stop the trio from agreeing that stepped up sanctions – more misery for the population — would be useful.
The Mugabe government’s pursuit of land reform, rejection of neo-liberal restructuring, and movement to eclipse US imperialism in southern Africa, has put Zimbabwe on the receiving end of a Western attack based on punitive financial sanctions. The intention, as is true of all Western destabilization efforts, has been to make the target country ungovernable, forcing the government to step down, clearing the way for the ascension of the West’s local errand boys. Owing to the West’s attack, Zimbabwe’s government is struggling to provide the population with basic necessities. It can no longer provide basic sanitation and access to potable water at a sufficient level to prevent the outbreak of otherwise preventable diseases.
The replacement of the Mugabe government with one led by the Movement for Democratic Change, a party created and directed by Western governments, if it happens, will lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. This won’t come about because the MDC is more competent at governing, but because sanctions will be lifted and access to balance of payment support and development aid will be restored. Zimbabwe will once again be able to import adequate amounts of water purification chemicals. The improving humanitarian situation will be cited as proof the West was right all along in insisting on a change of government.
The downside is that measures to indigenize the economy – to place the country’s agricultural and mineral wealth in the hands of the black majority – will be reversed. Mugabe and key members of the state will be shipped off to The Hague – or attempts will be made to ship them off – to send a message to others about what befalls those who threaten the dominant mode of property relations and challenge Western domination. Cowed by the example of Zimbabwe, Africans in other countries will back away from their own land reform and economic indigenization demands, and the continent will settle more firmly into a pattern of neo-colonial subjugation.
_____________________________
Zimbabwe and hypocrisy - lessons from history
From Tony McGregor
So the sham election is over and Robert Gabriel Mugabe pronounced to be duly elected President of the Republic of Zimbabwe to a chorus of condemnation from the Western powers and a significant number of African leaders also.
The gleeful condemnation from the West, under the cheerleading of the horrible two-headed monster called Bush/Brown (hereinafter called BB) is loud, vociferous and incredibly hypocritical, not to mention a-historical.
Through the 60s, 70s and 80s the US and its allies maintained Mobutu Sese Seko, the ogre of Zaire, in power while he plundered his country, exploited its people and left it in a state of undemocratic shambles, impoverished and at war with itself.
Through the 70s, 80s and 90s the US and its allies urged on the vicious exploits of Jonas Savimbi against the elected government of Angola, in a wasteful, cruel and totally unnecessary civil war which cost millions of lives.
And now they turn on Mugabe, who has not done nearly as much damage, though the damage he has done is still immense, as Mobutu and Savimbi did, not to mention other “darlings” of the West like Daniel Arap Moi.
The West conveniently forgets, while condemning Mugabe with such breath-taking hypocrisy, that the land which is now called Zimbabwe was originally stolen by chicanery and violence from its people in the late 19th Century. Then the people were again insulted and denied their rights in their own land by Ian Smith’s attempted 1000-year reich, which mercifully only lasted a few decades.
An intelligence report by an official of the British South African Company (the company owned by Cecil John Rhodes and which was the instrument he used to rob the people of Zimbabwe of their land) in a report in February 1897 wrote that the people of Zimbabwe “mean to remain independent.”
This nameless official went on in his report: “Therefore what is required are strong lessons, which we have failed to give them from the very beginning of the war. And this failure only proved to the natives that with all our men and guns we have not even been able to get at them … All this shows that our mode of fighting is not the proper one for Mashonas; even the natives laugh at it…”
The official concluded the report with these words: “In conclusion, my advice would be to give to the natives of the district as severe a lesson as possible, surprising and burning their kraals when it is possible to do so, and, at all events throughout the district, to lay waste their crops.”
Thus the “civilizing” work of the colonists! And let’s not forget that the “natives of the district” were actually the rightful owners of the land and that the lesson they were to be taught was that they should give up their land to the white settlers.
This land was being wrested from them by a combination of trickery, deceit and firepower. The deceit was in the form of the Rudd Concession which an agent of Cecil John Rhodes, one Charles Rudd, had signed with the nDebele King Jando Lopengule (Lobengula) Kumalo.
By this agreement, Lobengula had been assured, only ten settlers would be allowed to mine in his kingdom and that all people there would be considered to be living in his kingdom.
So when hundreds of settlers arrived he was, unsurprisingly, somewhat peeved!
From that time on the indigenous people of Zimbabwe suffered one depredation after another. Their land was stolen, their rights to independence were stolen, their self-esteem was stolen.
In every constitutional arrangement from then on their rights were reduced.
It should be no surprise then that Mugabe rants on about Bush and Blair wanting to rob the Zimbabwean people of their birthright. On what basis should the Zimbabweans trust the West, and Britain in particular?
The final straw for the Black people of Zimbabwe was the unfortunate so-called independence (UDI) declared by Ian Smith on 11 November 1965. This triggered a long “bush” war, known by the people of Zimbabwe as the Second Chimurenga (War of Independence). The first Chimurenga was the struggle against the colonial theft in the 19th Century.
The Second Chimurenga lasted from UDI until the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 which led to elections and the installation of a government led by Mugabe as Prime Minister.
See also Zimbabwe Image
More Blood on West's Hands
Impact of Sanctions Downplayed in Zimbabwe Crisis
New American Media
Dec 29, 2008
NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) - John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, recently said sanctions imposed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union on Zimbabwe are a “side issue” and have nothing to do with the spreading cholera epidemic engulfing the small southern African nation.
Mr. Holmes, who is also the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, spoke at a Dec. 5 press conference here at the UN headquarters. By Dec. 12 there were 16,700 new cases of cholera recorded in Zimbabwe with nearly 800 deaths, mainly children and the elderly who are the most vulnerable. The World Health Organization reported an upward trend in new and suspected cases of the disease in the country.
“The degradation of the water supply and sanitation systems is one of the root causes of the cholera outbreak. There are not sufficient safe sources of drinking water,” observed Mr. Marcus Bachman, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ (Doctors Without Borders) emergency coordinator in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
The government of Zimbabwe has been unable to borrow money from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank since 2001. Because of this, it cannot upgrade its sanitation and sewerage infrastructure which is necessary to halt the spread of cholera.
The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, legislation enacted by the United States Congress, empowers the treasury secretary of the United States to “instruct the U.S. executive director of each international financial institution to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” The effect of this infanticidal and unconscionable piece of legislation, according to economists, is the refusal of all banks to extend credit and loans to the government to pay for the country’s medical and infrastructural needs.
“I don’t think that the sanctions which are essentially imposed on individuals and particular entities can be said to be a major contributory factor to the cholera epidemic. The cholera epidemic comes from basic things like the lack of clean water and the collapse of the health system. Any link between individual sanctions and the cholera epidemic is pretty remote,” Mr. Holmes declared.
According to observers, Mr. Holmes’ ignorance of the particulars of the U.S. sanctions legislation is startling. The sanctions are not “essentially imposed on individuals.” They are imposed on the entire country. When asked whether or not he was familiar with the U.S. sanctions legislation, he admitted that he was not familiar with the bill.
Even after being appraised of the specifics of the legislation, Mr. Holmes’ obsequence to the political agenda of the U.S. towards Zimbabwe was palpable. Without offering any evidence, the under secretary-general said that, “The government of Zimbabwe has had plenty of opportunities in different ways to access goods or lines of credit from different places in the world if it chose to do so.”
Some UN diplomats, requesting anonymity, observed that only an unabashed sycophant or a blissfully ignorant individual could make such a statement. They pointed out that banks shun any country that has been blacklisted by U.S. legislation. This is so because if they engage in any commercial transactions with such countries, they will be penalized both civilly and criminally, starting with exclusion from the U.S. banking system.
Mr. Holmes’ posture towards Zimbabwe is regrettable but understandable given his political pedigree. Prior to his appointment as UN Under Secretary-General in January 2007, Mr. Holmes was the private secretary of former UK prime minister, Tony Blair. It was during Mr. Blair’s administration that relations between the UK, U.S. and the EU deteriorated, culminating in the 2001 U.S. legislation cutting off Zimbabwe from the global financial markets.
What’s unsettling is that Mr. Holmes’ attitude vis-à-vis Zimbabwe is at stark variance with his public pronouncements relating to how other humanitarian crises in other parts of the world should be solved.
“Humanitarian relief is no substitute for political action and the active search for conflict prevention and resolution. Which is why as humanitarians we must go on pressing the politicians for more proactive searches for solutions,” Mr. Holmes asserted at a conference in Dubai earlier this year.
U.S. President George Bush ought to read the above. His response to the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe was to call on the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to resign. “Across the continent, African voices are bravely speaking out to say now is the time for him to step down,” Mr. Bush crowed.
Not so was the sharp response from the African Union. “Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the AU and other (African) regional actors, can restore peace and stability to that country,” said Salva Rweyemamu, spokesman for AU chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.
According to press reports, President Rweyemamu said sending peacekeeping troops or removing President Mugabe by force as proposed by South African Bishop Desmond Tutu and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who expressed personal opinions, were not options. “We have a serious humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. We have cholera. Do they think that we can eradicate cholera with guns?” he asked, incredulously.
UN diplomats say the “political action” the U.S. government must take to halt the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe is the rescinding of the sanctions legislation. The shibboleth of “bad governance” often attributed to Zimbabwe is nothing but political prestidigitation, they added.
When Iceland went bankrupt in November—the country couldn’t repay its external debts, the Icelandic currency, the krona, lost all of its value, the banking industry collapsed and businesses could no longer pay for imports—there was no call for Iceland’s president, Olafur Grimsson, to resign. There was no charge of bad governance attributed to the government of Iceland. Instead, the global community responded generously with loans totaling $10 billion. That’s about $33,000 for each of Iceland’s 300,000 citizens. Out of that $10 billion, $2.1 billion came from the IMF.
Unless it is the opinion of the UN that Iceland’s children are more worthy of being saved than the children of Zimbabwe, UN diplomats say Mr. Holmes needs to dispense with his obfuscation and call on the United States to rescind its inhumane sanctions legislation so that the children of Zimbabwe can live.
New American Media
Dec 29, 2008
NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) - John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, recently said sanctions imposed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union on Zimbabwe are a “side issue” and have nothing to do with the spreading cholera epidemic engulfing the small southern African nation.
Mr. Holmes, who is also the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, spoke at a Dec. 5 press conference here at the UN headquarters. By Dec. 12 there were 16,700 new cases of cholera recorded in Zimbabwe with nearly 800 deaths, mainly children and the elderly who are the most vulnerable. The World Health Organization reported an upward trend in new and suspected cases of the disease in the country.
“The degradation of the water supply and sanitation systems is one of the root causes of the cholera outbreak. There are not sufficient safe sources of drinking water,” observed Mr. Marcus Bachman, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ (Doctors Without Borders) emergency coordinator in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
The government of Zimbabwe has been unable to borrow money from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank since 2001. Because of this, it cannot upgrade its sanitation and sewerage infrastructure which is necessary to halt the spread of cholera.
The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, legislation enacted by the United States Congress, empowers the treasury secretary of the United States to “instruct the U.S. executive director of each international financial institution to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” The effect of this infanticidal and unconscionable piece of legislation, according to economists, is the refusal of all banks to extend credit and loans to the government to pay for the country’s medical and infrastructural needs.
“I don’t think that the sanctions which are essentially imposed on individuals and particular entities can be said to be a major contributory factor to the cholera epidemic. The cholera epidemic comes from basic things like the lack of clean water and the collapse of the health system. Any link between individual sanctions and the cholera epidemic is pretty remote,” Mr. Holmes declared.
According to observers, Mr. Holmes’ ignorance of the particulars of the U.S. sanctions legislation is startling. The sanctions are not “essentially imposed on individuals.” They are imposed on the entire country. When asked whether or not he was familiar with the U.S. sanctions legislation, he admitted that he was not familiar with the bill.
Even after being appraised of the specifics of the legislation, Mr. Holmes’ obsequence to the political agenda of the U.S. towards Zimbabwe was palpable. Without offering any evidence, the under secretary-general said that, “The government of Zimbabwe has had plenty of opportunities in different ways to access goods or lines of credit from different places in the world if it chose to do so.”
Some UN diplomats, requesting anonymity, observed that only an unabashed sycophant or a blissfully ignorant individual could make such a statement. They pointed out that banks shun any country that has been blacklisted by U.S. legislation. This is so because if they engage in any commercial transactions with such countries, they will be penalized both civilly and criminally, starting with exclusion from the U.S. banking system.
Mr. Holmes’ posture towards Zimbabwe is regrettable but understandable given his political pedigree. Prior to his appointment as UN Under Secretary-General in January 2007, Mr. Holmes was the private secretary of former UK prime minister, Tony Blair. It was during Mr. Blair’s administration that relations between the UK, U.S. and the EU deteriorated, culminating in the 2001 U.S. legislation cutting off Zimbabwe from the global financial markets.
What’s unsettling is that Mr. Holmes’ attitude vis-à-vis Zimbabwe is at stark variance with his public pronouncements relating to how other humanitarian crises in other parts of the world should be solved.
“Humanitarian relief is no substitute for political action and the active search for conflict prevention and resolution. Which is why as humanitarians we must go on pressing the politicians for more proactive searches for solutions,” Mr. Holmes asserted at a conference in Dubai earlier this year.
U.S. President George Bush ought to read the above. His response to the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe was to call on the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to resign. “Across the continent, African voices are bravely speaking out to say now is the time for him to step down,” Mr. Bush crowed.
Not so was the sharp response from the African Union. “Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the AU and other (African) regional actors, can restore peace and stability to that country,” said Salva Rweyemamu, spokesman for AU chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.
According to press reports, President Rweyemamu said sending peacekeeping troops or removing President Mugabe by force as proposed by South African Bishop Desmond Tutu and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who expressed personal opinions, were not options. “We have a serious humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. We have cholera. Do they think that we can eradicate cholera with guns?” he asked, incredulously.
UN diplomats say the “political action” the U.S. government must take to halt the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe is the rescinding of the sanctions legislation. The shibboleth of “bad governance” often attributed to Zimbabwe is nothing but political prestidigitation, they added.
When Iceland went bankrupt in November—the country couldn’t repay its external debts, the Icelandic currency, the krona, lost all of its value, the banking industry collapsed and businesses could no longer pay for imports—there was no call for Iceland’s president, Olafur Grimsson, to resign. There was no charge of bad governance attributed to the government of Iceland. Instead, the global community responded generously with loans totaling $10 billion. That’s about $33,000 for each of Iceland’s 300,000 citizens. Out of that $10 billion, $2.1 billion came from the IMF.
Unless it is the opinion of the UN that Iceland’s children are more worthy of being saved than the children of Zimbabwe, UN diplomats say Mr. Holmes needs to dispense with his obfuscation and call on the United States to rescind its inhumane sanctions legislation so that the children of Zimbabwe can live.
African Union urges scrapping of Zimbabwe sanctions
France24
01/02/2009
AFP - The African Union Saturday urged the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime as he prepares to share power with his opposition rival in a unity government.
The AU's executive council adopted a resolution ahead of of Sunday's summit here calling for "the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe to help ease the humanitarian situation in the country."
African Union head Jean Ping, when asked about sanctions levied by the United States and European Union, said: "I think that everybody today should help Zimbabwe to rebuild its economy, because an agreement has been reached.
Since disputed elections in March 2008, Zimbabwe's shattered economy has nosedived further. It has the world's highest inflation rate -- 231 million percent -- and is struggling with a cholera epidemic that has claimed some 3,000 lives.
Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai this week acceded to a decision by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc that a unity government be formed according to a strict timeline which would see him sworn in as prime minister on February 11.
The 53-nation AU asked members and partners "to solidly back the implementation of a comprehensive pact" to end the ruinous political and economic stalemate.
Mugabe's party, which had previously threatened to set up a unity government with or without Tsvangirai, has said it will accept the timetable.
Ping said: "Imagine that you don't help Zimbabwe, who will be blamed? Everybody is expecting that today, because Tsvangirai is going to lead the economy and everything, that the economy should recover. So if you don't do that who will be blamed by the population?
"Today SADC told us they have agreed on a solution, the two parties have agreed on that solution," Ping said, adding: "In politics nothing can be forever. We hope this solution can be a lasting one."
The 84-year-old Mugabe -- in power since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain in 1980 -- has long accused Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change party of being a tool of Britain and the United States, whose governments are opposed to his regime.
Both countries offered up restrained hope in response to the announcement Friday of a unity government being installed in February.
"I've seen the reports about this agreement, but as you can understand, we are a bit skeptical. These types of things have been announced before," US State Department acting spokesman Robert Wood said.
"The key is always implementation," he added.
An equally tempered reaction emerged from London, where British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he looked forward to seeing details of a deal that would hold Zimbabwean lawmakers accountable.
"The new government will be judged on its actions, above all by the people of Zimbabwe," he said.
EU foreign ministers on Monday tightened sanctions on Zimbabwe, freezing the assets of companies based in British tax havens for the first time and adding 26 more names of people close to the Mugabe regime or their families to a travel-ban list, bringing the number to 203.
The amount of companies whose assets in Europe must be frozen was increased sharply from four to 40 and for the first time European-based firms are included.
According to EU sources, all 18 of the European company names added are based on British territory, including tax havens Jersey, the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
01/02/2009
AFP - The African Union Saturday urged the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime as he prepares to share power with his opposition rival in a unity government.
The AU's executive council adopted a resolution ahead of of Sunday's summit here calling for "the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe to help ease the humanitarian situation in the country."
African Union head Jean Ping, when asked about sanctions levied by the United States and European Union, said: "I think that everybody today should help Zimbabwe to rebuild its economy, because an agreement has been reached.
Since disputed elections in March 2008, Zimbabwe's shattered economy has nosedived further. It has the world's highest inflation rate -- 231 million percent -- and is struggling with a cholera epidemic that has claimed some 3,000 lives.
Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai this week acceded to a decision by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc that a unity government be formed according to a strict timeline which would see him sworn in as prime minister on February 11.
The 53-nation AU asked members and partners "to solidly back the implementation of a comprehensive pact" to end the ruinous political and economic stalemate.
Mugabe's party, which had previously threatened to set up a unity government with or without Tsvangirai, has said it will accept the timetable.
Ping said: "Imagine that you don't help Zimbabwe, who will be blamed? Everybody is expecting that today, because Tsvangirai is going to lead the economy and everything, that the economy should recover. So if you don't do that who will be blamed by the population?
"Today SADC told us they have agreed on a solution, the two parties have agreed on that solution," Ping said, adding: "In politics nothing can be forever. We hope this solution can be a lasting one."
The 84-year-old Mugabe -- in power since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain in 1980 -- has long accused Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change party of being a tool of Britain and the United States, whose governments are opposed to his regime.
Both countries offered up restrained hope in response to the announcement Friday of a unity government being installed in February.
"I've seen the reports about this agreement, but as you can understand, we are a bit skeptical. These types of things have been announced before," US State Department acting spokesman Robert Wood said.
"The key is always implementation," he added.
An equally tempered reaction emerged from London, where British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he looked forward to seeing details of a deal that would hold Zimbabwean lawmakers accountable.
"The new government will be judged on its actions, above all by the people of Zimbabwe," he said.
EU foreign ministers on Monday tightened sanctions on Zimbabwe, freezing the assets of companies based in British tax havens for the first time and adding 26 more names of people close to the Mugabe regime or their families to a travel-ban list, bringing the number to 203.
The amount of companies whose assets in Europe must be frozen was increased sharply from four to 40 and for the first time European-based firms are included.
According to EU sources, all 18 of the European company names added are based on British territory, including tax havens Jersey, the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
Zimbabwe blames EU sanctions for cholera deaths
"The only reason I googled up those articles about Zimbabwe was a few horrifying seconds of BBC News I happened to catch in the car last week, on the public radio program "The World," about the United Nations World Food Program having to cut in half the already inadequate monthly rations it provides that country. It takes about 36 pounds of corn a month to keep an adult alive. But now, because of donor shortfalls (the United States and Europe are unwilling to lift sanctions, including famine aid, on Mugabe), the World Food Program is being forced to reduce its rations to 11 pounds of corn per person per month. They only way someone can survive on that is to scavenge enough wild fruit to stave off malnutrition and disease. Seven million people could die by April."
Zimbabwe blames EU sanctions for cholera deaths
December 7th, 2008 in Medicine & Health / Diseases
AFP
Zimbabwean state media on Sunday blamed the country's cholera outbreak, which has claimed nearly 600 lives, on European sanctions imposed on the regime of President Robert Mugabe.
"The cholera outbreak is a clear example of the effects of sanctions on innocent people," The Sunday Mail newspaper said in its editorial as the European Union prepared to tighten sanctions on the government.
"The people who are suffering most are not politicians they claim they want to punish, but poor people," the newspaper said.
"All the victims (of cholera) are as a result of the freezing of balance of payments support, depriving the country of foreign currency required to buy chemicals to treat our drinking water."
European Union foreign ministers are expected to adopt in Brussels on Monday a draft text tightening sanctions against Zimbabwe amid worries over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and political stalemate in the country.
They will add names to the EU's sanctions list of 168 members of the Zimbabwe regime, including Mugabe and his wife Grace, who are banned from entering EU nations and whose European assets have been frozen.
Meanwhile, a South African team will on Monday meet with stakeholders in Zimbabwe and assess how it can aid the nation stricken by a food crisis and cholera outbreak, a South African government spokesman said on Sunday.
"There is no change in our plans to send an official delegation to Zimbabwe tomorrow (Monday). It is going to be a one-day mission during which the team will meet all stakeholders," Themba Maseko told AFP.
He did not give further details.
Maseko had on Friday told reporters that the team would "assess the situation on the ground, determine the level of assistance required and consult with the representatives of the various stakeholders in Zimbabwe on how a multi-stakeholder distribution and monitoring mechanism could be set up."
The team would then brief South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and ministers who would decide on humanitarian aid to be provided by South Africa.
Mugabe has been under intense pressure over his country's collapse from both the West and his neighbours who have urged a stronger stance against the 84-year-old veteran leader.
© 2008 AFP
Zimbabwe blames EU sanctions for cholera deaths
December 7th, 2008 in Medicine & Health / Diseases
AFP
Zimbabwean state media on Sunday blamed the country's cholera outbreak, which has claimed nearly 600 lives, on European sanctions imposed on the regime of President Robert Mugabe.
"The cholera outbreak is a clear example of the effects of sanctions on innocent people," The Sunday Mail newspaper said in its editorial as the European Union prepared to tighten sanctions on the government.
"The people who are suffering most are not politicians they claim they want to punish, but poor people," the newspaper said.
"All the victims (of cholera) are as a result of the freezing of balance of payments support, depriving the country of foreign currency required to buy chemicals to treat our drinking water."
European Union foreign ministers are expected to adopt in Brussels on Monday a draft text tightening sanctions against Zimbabwe amid worries over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and political stalemate in the country.
They will add names to the EU's sanctions list of 168 members of the Zimbabwe regime, including Mugabe and his wife Grace, who are banned from entering EU nations and whose European assets have been frozen.
Meanwhile, a South African team will on Monday meet with stakeholders in Zimbabwe and assess how it can aid the nation stricken by a food crisis and cholera outbreak, a South African government spokesman said on Sunday.
"There is no change in our plans to send an official delegation to Zimbabwe tomorrow (Monday). It is going to be a one-day mission during which the team will meet all stakeholders," Themba Maseko told AFP.
He did not give further details.
Maseko had on Friday told reporters that the team would "assess the situation on the ground, determine the level of assistance required and consult with the representatives of the various stakeholders in Zimbabwe on how a multi-stakeholder distribution and monitoring mechanism could be set up."
The team would then brief South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and ministers who would decide on humanitarian aid to be provided by South Africa.
Mugabe has been under intense pressure over his country's collapse from both the West and his neighbours who have urged a stronger stance against the 84-year-old veteran leader.
© 2008 AFP
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