Month: June 2007

Iraq’s war economy

Finally, here’s (part of) the story behind the news: The authors Christopher Parker and Pete W. Moore in the latest MERIP issue analyze Iraq’s war economy and see much of the motives behind the insurgency against the US-led occupation in decades-old gray economic structures that are challenged by the new guys in power.

Throughout the 1990s, most of Iraq’s oil was transported in relatively small tanker trucks—to Jordan and Turkey with dispensation from Washington and undercover to Syria and the Gulf. As the pipelines to Turkey and the Gulf were turned back on in 2003, most of these truckers—many of whom had close ties with, and indeed colleagues in, neighboring countries—were out of a job. Hence, it is not surprising to learn that pipeline attacks “are now orchestrated by [insurgents and criminal gangs] to force the government to import and distribute as much fuel as possible using thousands of tanker trucks.

The authors challenge the mainstream view (and thereby also the whole reconstruction ideology) that in pre-invasion Iraq the state still functioned as a regulatory agent and controlled much of the Iraqi economy.

Washing their hands of any responsibility for the violence that plagues Iraq, they present the insurgency as springing from a yearning for lost domination on the part of groups linked to the Saddam-era state. This is the statist narrative—the idea that Saddam’s regime controlled everything worth controlling before it was overthrown.

Highly interesting are the remarks on the links to Iraq’s neighbors, most notably Jordan:

The political and social histories of modern Iraq and Jordan are bound tightly together. The deep ties between families, tribes, political movements and economic actors across the borders of these two countries have a history that, by and large, has yet to be written.

From the article it also becomes clear that the 2003 invasion merely finished off what was left of the prosperous nation that Iraq was in 1980. The US got most of the job done by sponsoring Saddam in the 80s and engineering UN sanctions in the 90s.

Abunimah: It’s not just the occupation

The great Ali Abunimah has another excellent reflection on the debate around 1967 that cuts through the bullshit:

“Forty years ago today was the last day the citizens of Israel were a free people in their own land,” wrote Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar on June 4. “It was the last day we lived here without living other peoples’ lives.”

This sums up the cherished mythology of what is still called the Israeli left and much of the international peace process industry — that prior to the 1967 war, Israel was pure and on the right path. Had it not “become an occupier” the region would have had a happier history and Israel would be an accepted member of the international community rather than a pariah wearing the “apartheid” label.

The exclusive focus on the occupation serves increasingly to obscure that the conflict in Palestine is at its core a colonial struggle whose boundaries do not conveniently coincide with the lines of June 4, 1967.

I do not often agree with leaders of the settler movement, but they speak a truth Israeli and American liberals prefer to ignore when they point out that the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank built after 1967 are not morally different from towns and kibbutzim inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The Israel that was created in 1948 was established on land violently expropriated from ethnically-cleansed Palestinians. Israel has been maintained as a “Jewish state” only by the imposition of numerous laws that maintain the inferior status of its Palestinian citizens and forcibly exclude Palestinian refugees.

Even Israelis who condemn the occupation support these racist laws. There is an Israeli consensus that it is legitimate to defend the Jewish state against the so-called “demographic threat” from Palestinians who will be again, as they were prior to 1948, the majority population group in Palestine-Israel despite six decades of Israeli efforts to reduce their numbers with expulsions, massacres and administrative ethnic cleansing. It is the imperative to gerrymander an enclave with a Jewish majority rather than any recognition of Palestinian equality that underpins whatever limited rhetorical Israeli support exists for a Palestinian state.

I would add that’s it’s also not just about the Palestinians, but about the fundamentally destabilizing role of an uneven regional balance of power that US-Israeli regional hegemony has created over the last half-century.

CoE report documents rendition program

More fine reporting by Stephen Grey, who literally wrote the book on rendition, about the upcoming Council of Europe findings on the CIA flights in Europe:

Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council’s report, seen by the Guardian, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also details the prisons’ operations and the identities of some of the prisoners.

The council has also established that within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, Nato signed an agreement with the US that allowed civilian jets used by the CIA during its so-called extraordinary rendition programme to move across member states’ airspace. Its report states: “We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories.” The council’s investigators believe that agreement may have been illegal.

. . .

The 19-month inquiry by the council, which promotes human rights across Europe, was headed by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator and former state prosecutor. He said: “What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice.”

His report says there is “now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA [existed] in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania”.

Yet another reason I think the EU should have never expanded to include Eastern European countries.

Update: Also see HRW’s backgrounder on U.S. Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the “War on Terror”.

Shame on you, Tabsir

Without wanting to get into the recent decision by the British Academics’ Union to pass a motion encouraging a boycott of Israeli universities and academics (I fully support this show of solidarity which remains, after all, optional and provides a course of action for selective boycott of academics who are in bed with the Israeli security establishment), I was rather dismayed to see this critic of the boycott use a picture of Nazi persecution of Jews in the 1930s. It’s especially sad as this site, Tabsir, often has great posts on things Middle Eastern by well-known specialists in their fields. So what is that picture saying? That the majority of British academics who voted in favor of the boycott are Nazis? That they are anti-Semites? This is typical of the use of alleged anti-Semitism to deflect justified criticism of Israel, which after all has carried a brutal occupation for many decades. I expect it from Likudnik hacks like Abraham Foxman and the ADL, but not of Tabsir.

Tony Blair, the dictators’ sharmouta

Tony Blair on the recent allegations that Saudi Prince Bandar pocketed a $2 billion commission on an arms deal with BAe:

“This investigation, if it had it gone ahead, would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family,” Blair said at a meeting of the Group of Eight nations in Germany.

He added that, “My job is to give advice as to whether that is a sensible thing in circumstances where I don’t believe the investigation incidentally would have led anywhere except to the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship for our country. . . . Quite apart from the fact that we would have lost thousands, thousands of British jobs.”

This a week after Tony Blair heaps praise on the regime of Muammar Qadhafi in Libya as a major oil deal is signed with BP.

Corruption, the Arab world’s number one export. In fact when you think about it, between the Arabs’ petrodollars and the Israelis’ various mafias (diamonds, ecstasy, weapons, etc.), this region is probably the world’s nexus of sleaze.

Update: This story has more details on the Bandar-BAe-Blair scandal. And a note: sharmouta is Arabic slang for slut or whore.

MERIP roundtable on 1967

MERIP has a roundtable of Israeli and Palestinian views on 1967. I thought this point by Samera Esmeir was particularly worth highlighting:

1967 was a year of setback for the Palestinians not only because Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also because the new occupation effectively set the older one of 1948 in stone. As political attention quickly turned to the newly occupied areas, it became more difficult to mount challenges to the earlier stages of the occupation, or even to name them occupation. The “occupied Palestinian territories” became the name of the Palestinian areas occupied in 1967, not in 1948. While Israel, in many of its official narratives, refers to the events of 1948 as occupation, the reference to 1948 as occupation dropped from the international vocabulary, effectively naturalizing the existence of Israel and concealing the violence constitutive of its creation.

Since then, attempts constantly to “catch up” with new forms of Israeli subjugation shaped much of Palestinian politics, as Israel consistently raised the stakes on its dispossession of the Palestinians. If the settlements and green areas were the main vehicle for dispossessing Palestinians and confiscating their lands, soon the networks of highways and the separation wall became new mechanisms. But among many Palestinians, this “catching up” produced tragic politics characterized by amnesia. For, if the Palestinians were expected to respond systematically to the newly enacted empirical ends of the occupation, they had to suspend their responses to previous ends. The trouble was that new ends were always being introduced.

Chilling is the great Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani’s look at what we might be commemorating on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war:

June 5, 2007 may well be the last time we commemorate a further decade of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At the rate things are going — the accelerated colonization of West Bank territory most visibly represented by the wall that Israel is building, and unprecedented levels of international neglect/support for such policies — these are unlikely to remain occupied territories for much longer.

Prolonged military occupation lasting successive decades was an untenable proposition to begin with, and has been sustained only by international law, the refusal of the international community to formally recognize Israel’s territorial claims and, most pertinently, the presence and resistance of the Palestinians in the form of individual communities and, until recently, a coherent national movement.

By 2017 that is likely to change. How the international community seeks to accommodate Israel’s claims to strategic portions of the West Bank while maintaining effective control over the rest, and how the Palestinians and others in the region will respond, are interesting questions. The answers are likely to combine elements of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the colonialism and ethnic structures of the first, the formal adherence to independence of the second, and the belief of the third that advanced technology can resolve the political challenge resulting from the inherent contradictions of the first two.

Absent drastic changes, remaining doubts about the feasibility of a two-state settlement are also going to be removed in the coming years. Many believe the point of no return has already been passed. Most view it as imminent. The one certainty is that the two-state settlement paradigm is not going to be replaced by that of a secular democratic state — desirable as the latter may be. Rather, the more likely scenario is a regression toward existential conflict, on a more bloody scale than seen thus far and probably with a greater regional dimension than in recent decades.

As a generally pro-Oslo person in my student days in the 1990s, I increasingly believe that another regional war over Israel is not only likely but perhaps the only way to resolve the conflict. But because of the festering occupation and international irresponsibility towards Israel (from both the US and EU), it is probably going to be resolved in a bloodier and more radical way than any of the previous conflicts over that wretched piece of land.

Egyptian pilot remembers 1967

Interesting interview from the BBC of a former Egyptian pilot remember his dogfight with Israeli jets on 6 June 1967. Note that in terms of the technology used, it was basically Egyptians flying slower Soviet MiGs against Israelis in French Mystere and the newer Mirage jets. What comes across in this as in so many Egyptian testimonies is the inexcusable degree of unpreparedness for the attack, despite the high tensions at the time. No wonder the pilot has this to say:

The air force felt very angry and humiliated by this war. Once, during the war, two of my fellow officers had to stop me banging my head repeatedly against a pair of concrete pillars at our air base.

Another time, still during the war, I and some others were sent to stay in a hotel in Cairo, but the waiter in the hotel was too sympathetic and even placed his hand on my shoulder to comfort me.

This was so embarrassing, we asked to be taken back to the base.

Iraqi oil workers on strike

Between some of the most preposterously neo-liberal economic laws anywhere in the world and attempts to give oil companies some of the most generous formulas for production sharing, Iraq has suffered plenty at the hands of US-led efforts to remodel its economy. Now it’s the Maliki government that’s threatening to come down “with an iron fist” on striking oil workers:

WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) — On the third day of an oil strike in southern Iraq, the Iraqi military has surrounded oil workers and the prime minister has issued arrest warrants for the union leaders, sparking an outcry from supporters and international unions.

“This will not stop us because we are defending people’s rights,” said Hassan Jumaa Awad, president of IFOU. As of Wednesday morning, when United Press International spoke to Awad via mobile phone in Basra at the site of one of the strikes, no arrests had been made, “but regardless, the arrest warrant is still active.” He said the “Iraqi Security Forces,” who were present at the strike scenes, told him of the warrants and said they would be making any arrests.

The arrest warrant accuses the union leaders of “sabotaging the economy,” according a statement from British-based organization Naftana, and said Maliki warned his “iron fist” would be used against those who stopped the flow of oil.

IFOU called a strike early last month but put it on hold twice after overtures from the government. Awad said that at a May 16 meeting, Maliki agreed to set up a committee to address the unions’ demands.

The demands include union entry to negotiations over the oil law they fear will allow foreign oil companies too much access to Iraq’s oil, as well as a variety of improved working conditions.

“Apparently they promise but they never do anything,” Awad said, confirming reports the Iraqi Oil Ministry would send a delegation to Basra.

“One person from the Ministry of Oil accompanied by an Iraqi military figure came to negotiate the demands. Instead it was all about threats. It was all about trying to shut us up, to marginalize our actions,” Awad said. “The actions we are taking now are continuing with the strike until our demands are taken in concentration.”

While you might say Iraq has bigger problems than labor woes at the moment, and that keep the oil flowing should be a national priority. Fine. But then how about giving oil workers their fair dues and not resorting to the thuggish violence characteristic of the previous regime? Or is this about keeping them off the negotiating table for the already controversial oil law?