[Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.]

Some kind of quantity changing into quality point has been reached–suddenly the newspapers are full of "in-depth" reports on the global food crisis, a crisis that seems to have sprung up as suddenly as the credit crisis did a few months ago. I've been tracking this for a while and decided to think on the keyboard instead of out loud. I think it is important to try and understand this while it is a New Thing, before it becomes more background noise in world politics and our daily lives.  

1. Production shortages and inflation are two major factors in the crisis.  

What's causing the shortages?  

Global warming is widely regarded as a contributing factor in droughts which have stricken not only subsistence farmers in East Africa, but also major commodity grain producers in the Southern Hemisphere–Chile, Argentina, and especially Australia, with thousands of square miles in their eighth straight year with no rainfall to speak of.  

Growing Asian economies, especially in China and India, have made possible better and more diverse diets for hundreds of millions of people. This growing demand for food has additionally seen rising meat consumption by the middle class (echoing US consumption trends), and, as vegetarians are quick to point out, it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef.

The great ethanol scam has been US government's main answer to peak oil and to rising fuel and energy prices. Even favorable estimates suggest that producing a gallon of ethanol requires inputs of 70% of the energy it will eventually produce when burned. In the meantime, just under one third of the nation's entire corn crop is already being converted into ethanol.  

Enormously wasteful factory fishing has resulted in population collapse of many major species of food fish. Pollution has deepened the damage in coastal areas and in freshwater fisheries.  

Globally, inventories of staple foodstuffs have dwindled drastically. The IMF's neo-liberal policies penalized developing countries for national food policies which "interfered with market mechanisms," including maintaining stockpiles as a bulwark against shortages and famine. Even in the US, the government-sponsored wheat stockpile today is smaller than it's been since the late 1940s.  

Neo-liberal "free market" policies, spearheaded by the US and implemented through the World Bank and IMF, relentlessly pushed poor countries over the last 25 years to gear their agriculture for the export market and to open their domestic markets to Western agribusiness exports and investment. The combination severely undercut local producers of staple crops and national food independence. In addition, marketing boards for commodities like cocoa–agricultural OPECs which tried to have products released into the market in a coordinated, controlled roll-out to buffer against price swings from glut or bad harvests–were dismantled as "anti-competitive."  

The ongoing destruction of productive farmland is not limited to suburban sprawl in the US and the urbanization of coastal China. In the Philippines, for example, where mass struggles led by the Communist Party and the New People's Army have forced the ruling class to pass laws mandating some distribution of farmland to the people who work it, big landlords would rather convert agricultural land into golf courses, residential villages, and agro-industrial parks than take government offers for it.  

Why inflation, besides the obvious fact of supply shortages?  

Many Third World counties, including even a powerhouse like China, have their currencies pegged to the US dollar, which continues to fall like a rock. If they were paying in euros, the price rises would be nowhere near as steep.  

The cost of agricultural inputs has risen rapidly, especially petroleum, now at about $115 a barrel, which not only fuels farm machinery and transportation of crops to market, but is also is a basic feedstock for the manufacture of much fertilizer.  

Agriculture is not like manufacturing, where the cost of each additional unit tends to bring the price down, because the fixed capital (plant, machinery, etc.) is already there and is being used more fully. In farming, the best land (most fertile, best supplied with water and closest to transportation) is already being used. Bringing more into production means higher costs of production for each additional bushel of output, not less.  

Hoarding is an brutal fact of life in capitalist and semi-capitalist economies. Someone with a warehouse full of flour is not going to sell it today if he thinks that the price will be 20% higher next week–unless he thinks that he'll otherwise get dragged to jail or see his warehouse looted by desperate mobs.  

2. The food crisis may have erupted onto the scene very quickly, but it is very, very real.  

Haiti has been widely reported on in the US because of at least seven deaths during rioting in Port au Prince and elsewhere, and because popular anger forced the Prime Minister out. I'll bet you didn't read about the food riots in Cameroon in February in which at least 40 people died. Or the less deadly riots and protests this year in places like Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Yemen.  

This is becoming a desperate situation. As anyone who has seen Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin knows (watch the maggoty meat section here from about minute 5 to minute 17), food shortages can be the spark for a revolutionary upsurge. In Burkina Faso two weeks ago, the unions held a general strike protesting inadequate government concessions after February food riots there. In Egypt, the semi-legal opposition has made food prices a central theme of pro-democracy agitation against the Mubarak regime.  

But that's only one side of the contradiction. Widespread hunger can destroy the fabric of a society. In deep famines, people find it very difficult to maintain social solidarity and moral and ethical values. In prolonged periods of hunger, people sink into lethargy or move to where there is food. The Irish potato famine of 1845-52 didn't produce an immediate national rebellion against British colonialism, but rather a million deaths and the start of the wave of emigration which left the island's population in 1911, 4.5 million, at half what it had been before the famine began 65 years earlier!  

For poor folk in the US too, hunger is a growing problem. 28 million Americans are on food stamps. The value of food stamps has been cut by inflation to the point where they last only only about half the recipients past the 15th of the month. Then it's food bank time–except that across the country church volunteers and others who staff the food banks report that requests for help are way up and donations from supermarkets and other donors are down. Some have had to close up entirely. What will happen as the recession bites harder, layoffs climb and the end of the social safety net as we know it becomes manifest?  

3. The food crisis may change its form, but it won't be going away any time soon, and "waiting for the market" to solve it will prove catastrophic.  

There will not be an international free market in food. Period. The elites who rule nations are stupid if they don't protect their production, because they are courting instability and worse if they can't keep the population fed. Countries in which it's been tried, like Mexico where NAFTA drove millions of traditional maize growers under with cheap US corn which is suddenly extremely pricey, suffer. Right now Vietnam and India, the number two and three rice-producing countries in the world, have export bans in place. They are forgoing massive profits from selling into a soaring market, because the social and political cost of shortages at home would be too great.  

Even if there were a more open global market, agriculture responds slowly to market stimuli. Consider what the business press calls "Turf Wars"–the struggle to predict and beat the market in allocating land to production. In the US this year, wheat and soybean plantings are up, while corn, potatoes and rice plantings are down, all based on last year's crop prices. In the meantime, rice has skyrocketed by 145% since New Years Day. But with seed purchased, fields prepped and the harvest contracted for, few farmers are in a position to turn on a dime and put everything into rice.  

The other thing that comes with "free markets" is speculation.  Three major factors are at work in the recent spike in futures prices for agricultural commodities, from soybeans to orange juice. The first is that the rise of commodity hedge funds using fancy financial instruments have driven up the volume and volatility of commodity trades–as they did in mortgage and other credit markets. Second, since nobody is buying tranches of subprime mortgages anymore and other credit markets are sitting dead in the water, the money has to go someplace. Third, the evil little Wall Street ratbags in their $280 silk ties look around and say "Hey, people are rioting over food. Looks like a good place to make a buck."  

The big role played by hoarding and speculation means that the stunning increases reported in news headlines may reflect a market bubble. Certainly the massive ramp-up in prices we've seen across the board this year suggests that something more is going on than just the corner being turned on a Malthusian imbalance between population and food. Well, doesn't that mean that when the bubble pops, tons and tons of food will come flooding back into the market and prices will be forced back down to a stable affordable level?  

Nunh-unh. The underlying factors cited in point one are still operative, just intensified by speculation. And a collapsing commodity bubble could produce continued "contraction" of the broader credit markets, meaning banks will be too leveraged or too scared to lend. This could easily cut off credit to farmers, and agriculture is a business in which producers have to borrow at the start of every production cycle to buy seed, fertilizer, and/or machinery and to pay hands until the crop is in when they see if the price they get keeps their heads above water. Any sudden big drop in prices will hit small farmers, especially in the Third World, extremely hard, especially if they've invested in expanding or modernizing their operation. Like the credit crisis, there is no easy way out of this one, and the stakes are higher.  

And like that deepening crisis of the credit markets in the aftermath of the collapse of the housing bubble and sub-prime mortgage scam, the current food crisis makes crystal clear, one more time, that the neo-liberal ruling consensus that dominated the global economy for the last quarter century is a colossal failure which has resulted in poverty, hunger and insecurity for the many and almost inconceivable wealth for a few.

( – promoted by undercovercalico)

There is still no word regarding the whereabouts of Jamyang Kyi, the Tibetan journalist, singer and author who has been detained by Chinese authorities according to her husband:

Her husband, Lamao Jia, told The Associated Press she was first detained on April 1 and has not been seen since April 7. He said he didn’t know who had taken his wife into custody.

link: http://ap.google.com/article/A…

Described as “apolitical”, Jamyang Kyi focuses on the issues of Tibetan culture and women’s rights. This YouTube gives on a flavor of the type of creative work she produces:

Reporters Without Borders has issued a statement calling on the European Union to intercede on her behalf: http://www.rsf.org/article.php…

While Jamyang Kyi uses the language of song to try to build cultural understanding, Duke University student Grace Wang, from Qingdao, China, attempted to use the language of reconciliation and understanding to bridge the gap between pro-Tibet and pro-China groups on campus.

She is now the victim of a vicious online attack for speaking out.

In an essay published in Sunday’s Washington Post, Ms. Wang explains the events that lead to her trying to mediate between these two groups:

As I left the cafeteria planning to head to the library to study, I saw people holding Tibetan and Chinese flags facing each other in the middle of the quad. I hadn’t heard anything about a protest, so I was curious and went to have a look. I knew people in both groups, and I went back and forth between them, asking their views. It seemed silly to me that they were standing apart, not talking to each other. I know that this is often due to a language barrier, as many Chinese here are scientists and engineers and aren’t confident of their English.

I thought I’d try to get the two groups together and initiate some dialogue, try to get everybody thinking from a broader perspective. That’s what Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu and Confucius remind us to do. And I’d learned from my dad early on that disagreement is nothing to be afraid of. Unfortunately, there’s a strong Chinese view nowadays that critical thinking and dissidence create problems, so everyone should just keep quiet and maintain harmony.

A lot has been made of the fact that I wrote the words “Free Tibet” on the back of the American organizer of the protest, who was someone I knew. But I did this at his request, and only after making him promise that he would talk to the Chinese group. I never dreamed how the Chinese would seize on this innocent action. The leaders of the two groups did at one point try to communicate, but the attempt wasn’t very successful.

link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

Then, when things had heated up, the anger of some of the Chinese protesters vented itself against Ms. Wang:

At the height of the protest, a group of Chinese men surrounded me, pointed at me and, referring to the young woman who led the 1989 student democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, said, “Remember Chai Ling? All Chinese want to burn her in oil, and you look like her.” They said that I had mental problems and that I would go to hell. They asked me where I was from and what school I had attended. I told them. I had nothing to hide. But then it started to feel as though an angry mob was about to attack me. Finally, I left the protest with a police escort.

As a follow up after the crowds dispersed, Ms. Wang went back to her dorm room and attempted further peaceful dialogue online:

Back in my dorm room, I logged onto the Duke Chinese Students and Scholars Association (DCSSA) Web site and listserv to see what people were saying. Qian Fangzhou, an officer of DCSSA, was gloating, “We really showed them our colors!”

I posted a letter in response, explaining that I don’t support Tibetan independence, as some accused me of, but that I do support Tibetan freedom, as well as Chinese freedom. All people should be free and have their basic rights protected, just as the Chinese constitution says. I hoped that the letter would spark some substantive discussion. But people just criticized and ridiculed me more.

And that’s when the serious attacks – online and in the real world – started happening:

The next morning, a storm was raging online. Photographs of me had been posted on the Internet with the words “Traitor to her country!” printed across my forehead. Then I saw something really alarming: Both my parents’ citizen ID numbers had been posted. I was shocked, because this information could only have come from the Chinese police.

I saw detailed directions to my parents’ home in China, accompanied by calls for people to go there and teach “this shameless dog” a lesson. It was then that I realized how serious this had become. My phone rang with callers making threats against my life. It was ironic: What I had tried so hard to prevent was precisely what had come to pass. And I was the target.

Her parents in China have gone into hiding. Ms. Wang writes that she only exchanges short email communications with them, as her mother has instructed her not to use the telephone to try to reach them. She reports that a photo has been posted online of a bucket of feces which had been emptied on the doorstep of her parent’s apartment.

Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof had this observation:

But this kind of Internet bullying seems more common in China – there have been many such cases – than in most other countries, and it has shades of the Cultural Revolution in it: The mob of crazed students clinging blindly to an ideology, denouncing a cosmopolitan intellectual as a “stinking No. 9? and demanding that he or she repent to the crowd. This kind of nationalism is blinding, just as Maoism was in 1967, and it’s not good for China or for the world.

link: http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.c…

Now, before all of us start pointing fingers let me remind my fellow American progressive bloggers that even among us we’ve had our own challenges in being civil to each other online. Anyone who’s been following the candidate wars will recall Alegre’s diary on Daily Kos, mentioning that she was calling for a boycott of the site by Clinton supporters because – among other things – another pro-Obama blogger had suggested that their group do an “in the flesh” search to “out” the names and private information of the pro-Clinton bloggers on that site.

That blogger apologized, thankfully, and no such outting of the private information of pro-Clinton bloggers was ever done. But this is just an example of how inflamed passions can become online if we don’t strive to keep them in check.

As much as these group dynamics can take over reasonable discourse, making each side vilify the other and threaten action both online and offline, this only gets worse when the fires are stoked by a government propaganda machine. Recently recognizing this, the Chinese government has issued a statement praising the displays of nationalism but asking folks to tone it down a bit: http://afp.google.com/article/…

However, how seriously can someone take this request when, in Tibet, a new “education drive” is underway:

The campaign to “fight separatism, protect stability and promote development” would focus on “unifying the thinking and cohesive strength of officials and the masses, deepening the struggle against separatism, and counter-attacking the separatist plots of the Dalai clique,” said the paper.

Party members and officials would be assessed on their “performance” in the two-month drive, which will include television programmes and organised denunciation sessions.

link: http://www.reuters.com/article…

When the government itself has “organised denunciation sessions”, how, then, can it really ask its citizens to stop the online denunciations against those to appear to be speaking out against the Party line? When the government itself uses violence to quash dissent, how can it ask its citizens not to follow its example?

Please keep all sides of this conflict in your thoughts, prayers and meditations.  

Strings Semantic String Theory Letters are scrambled syllables sewn together words aligned into strings thoughts condense out of nothingness and are arranged into meaning Sometimes they vibrate with Truth –Robyn Elaine Serven –February 3, 2008

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

I know you have talent.  What sometimes is forgotten is that being practical is a talent.  I have a paucity for that sort of talent in many situations, though it turns out that I’m a pretty darn good cook.  🙂  

Let your talent bloom.  You can share it here.  Encourage others to let it bloom inside them as well.

Won’t you share your words or art, your sounds or visions, your thoughts scientific or philosophic, the comedy or tragedy of your days, the stories of doing and making?  And be excellent to one another!

For anyone born before 1970 or so, there are certain images that are come to mind whenever the name “Iran” is uttered: stern, bearded men in black robes, angry crowds, graphics depicting blindfolded American citizens with things like “Day 334” stamped over them, Ollie North bravely disgracing his uniform and perjuring himself, John McSame exploring the intersection of 1960s pop music and the idea of raining death from the skies.  In short, the past 30 years haven’t exactly been a model of how nations ought to think of one another.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a last look – a Parthian shot, if you will – at the recent history of Iran.  Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get past some of the more extreme caricatures the Traditional Media has been foisting upon us – and perhaps be able to start formulating a de-Bushified foreign policy that relies less on blustering incompetence and more on genuine historical understanding.

Life wasn’t easy for fundamentalist Shi’a Iranians in 1902, the year of Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini’s birth.  The Qajar dynasty was on its last legs, secularists were everywhere, and when the Pahlavis seized the reins of power in the 1920’s, things got even worse for the old-school Shiite power structure.

Portrait of an Ayatollah as a Young Man

Ruhollah Musawi was born on September 24, 1902 (a birthday shared by Muhammad’s wife Fatima), in the town of Khomein, about 120 km southwest of Qom.  He spent much of his life feeling powerless and oppressed, and not without some justification.  His father, a prominent Shi’a cleric, was killed before he turned a year old, and he lost both his mother and the aunt who had raised him when he was sixteen.  So it was that when he took up the cloth – his family background included many Islamic scholars, not to mention descent from Musa al-Kazim, the 7th Imam, so this wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise – he gravitated toward scholars whose views sought to explain the suffering of his early life. According to Ted Thornton’s History of the Middle East Database:

Ruhollah’s education reflected a strong Persian dualist outlook on the world:  a tendency to draw sharp boundaries between the worlds of light and darkness, between black and white, between haq (“truth”) and batel (“falsehood”).  This approach to the world, under girded by a traditional Iranian Shia conviction that the world is unsafe for Shiites, that neither the Prophet Muhammad, his family, nor any of the twelve Shia imams died a natural death (“We are either poisoned or killed.”), contributed to the construction within Khomeini of the uncompromising personality of one who feels relentlessly persecuted.

Khomeini took up teaching at the Dar al-Shafa school in Qom, lecturing and writing for most of the middle part of the 20th century in the areas of jurisprudence (i.e. Shari’a law), philosophy, and mysticism ( `Irfan, sometimes translated as “Islamic gnosis”).  He was profoundly impressed by the writings of Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi, both of whom espoused the idea of a “Perfect Man,” one destined to lead society into a golden age of religion-inspired unity.  Perhaps not surprisingly, by the end of his life, Khomeini was reasonably certain that he was that guy.

Khomeini maintained his vision of an Islamic state as his colleagues endured ever more depredations under the shah.  Eventually he found himself out in front of the reformers, and by the time he turned 60, his voiced carried great weight.  It was with the shah’s announcement of the White Revolution in 1963 that Khomeini entered national politics in a big way, publicly denouncing the program as entirely too Westernizing.  He was jailed for his opposition, but was gratified to learn that his arrest had sparked demonstrations in all of Iran’s religious centers.  Released in 1964, he quickly denounced the United States, too, for which he was exiled by a shah who, as we saw last week (in what I must say was a rather ill-attended historiorant – tsk, tsk), pretty much owed his spot on the Peacock Throne to the Central Intelligence Agency.  After a brief stint in Turkey, Khomeini set up shop in Najaf, Iraq, burial place of Ali, the 4th – and first Shi’a – Imam.  From Najaf, he would snipe at the shah’s government until 1978.

In that year, as the government of the shah was being increasingly destabilized by rioting – much of which was being orchestrated from Najaf – the Ayatollah pissed off the easy-to-piss-off Vice President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and was expelled by Iraqis in collusion with the Iranian government.  He wound up on the sofa circuit, finally landing at a supporter’s place in a suburb of Paris.  From there, Khomeini embarked on a very public organization and radicalization of his supporters back home, playing the world media in a way it had never been played before.  A Western world unfamiliar with even the most basic tenants of Islam (check out pre-Carter era high school textbooks, or any recent statement by Grampa McCain, if you don’t believe me) didn’t really understand what was going on, and tried to put the turmoil unfolding in the autumn of 1978 in terms it could understand.  A glossary of the times put together with input from Joe Sixpack might’ve looked something like this:

• Iran – “One of them oil countries in the desert.  Didn’t know it used to be called Persia.  Ain’t never heard of no Cyrus the Great – he like a Roman or something?”
• Iranians – “Seem different from the Saudis somehow.  At least they dress like normal American folks.  They demonstrate a lot; they’re like the South Koreans of the Mideast.”
• Shah – “A king, one of those dictator guys with snazzy uniforms, lots of medals, and a totally hot wife who just so happens to share the unusual name Farah with the current hottest pinup in the United States – hey, you seen that poster of her in the bathing suit?  I got it right next to the one of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.”
• Iranian government – “This shah guy probably runs things with an iron fist – those guys always do – so it’s no wonder his people are pissed at him.  If they want a religious nut running their government, that’s their business.”
• Khomeini – “Weird religious guy who looks kind of ominous but sorta sounds like he’s fighting for what at least some people in Iran want.  Don’t really know what a theocracy is.”
• Ayatollah – “Doesn’t that mean like ‘Muslim Pope’ or something?”
• Sunni, Shi’a, Ali, et al. – “I dunno, and this whole line of questioning is starting to cramp my style.  Wanna just do some blow and head out to the disco?”

Khomeini, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted, and expressed it quite clearly in 1979:

Your opponents, oppressed people, have never suffered. In the time of the taghut (idolatry; impurity), they never suffered because either they were in agreement with the regime and loyal to it, or they kept silent. Now you have spread the banquet of freedom in front of them and they have sat down to eat. Xenomaniacs, people infatuated with the West, empty people, people with no content! Come to your senses; do not try to westernize everything you have! Look at the West, and see who the people are in the West that present themselves as champions of human rights and what their aims are. Is it human rights they really care about, or the rights of the superpowers? What they really want to secure are the rights of the superpowers. Our jurists should not follow or imitate them. You should implement human rights as the working classes of our society understand them. Yes, they are the real Society for the Defense of Human Rights. They are the ones who secure the well-being of humanity; they work while you talk; for they are Muslims and Islam cares about humanity. You who have chosen a course other than Islam–you do nothing for humanity. All you do is write and speak in an effort to divert our movement from its course.

But as for those who want to divert our movement from its course, who have in mind treachery against Islam and the nation, who consider Islam incapable of running the affairs of our country despite its record of 1400 years—they have nothing at all to do with our people, and this must be made clear. How much you talk about the West, claiming that we must measure Islam in accordance with Western criteria! What an error! It was the mosques that created this Revolution, the mosques that brought this movement into being. The mihrab was a place not only for preaching, but also for war–war against both the devil within and the tyrannical powers without. So preserve your mosques, O people. Intellectuals, do not be Western-style intellectuals, imported intellectuals; do your share to preserve the mosques!

The Uprising of Khurdad 15, 1979

Glossary-Based Sidenote:  The word “Ayatollah” (“Sign of God”) is an honorific title bestowed upon Shi’a clerics by religious leaders and students; usually it is attested to by teachers after significant effort in the fields of jurisprudence, ethics, and/or philosophy.  One interesting feature of being deemed an “Ayatollah” is that the honoree takes on the name of their hometown or region; “Ayatollah Khomeini” would mean something akin to “The Sign of God from Khomein.”  People started applying the term, and the geography-based surname, to Ruhollah Musawi around 1930.

Happy Days are Here Again

In the Majles, pressure to initiate reforms built throughout 1978, and culminated with the appointment of Shapour Bakhtiar to the office of prime minister on January 3rd, 1979, to replace a general who supported the shah.  On January 16, the shah announced he would be taking a short trip overseas.  He would never set his royal butt on the Peacock Throne – nor royal foot in his homeland – again.

The Ayatollah would, though, and jubilant preparations were made for his return.  On February 1st, he arrived in Teheran, and by March 30-31, had orchestrated a successful referendum on the establishment of an Islamic republic.  If the election results are to be believed, 98% of Iranians favored exchanging monarchy for a theocratic state.

Khomeini and the boys were, of course, the big winners in that election and the subsequent plebiscites to ratify a new constitution and establish a means of electing a president (don’t worry: candidates were all screened by the newly-established Council of Guardians, which was made up of clerics – you don’t get their stamp of approval, you don’t get to run).   After Mehdi Bazargan served as prime minister under the provisional government, Khomeini got Abulhassan Banisadr as his presidential – Iran’s first president ever, btw – point man in February, 1980.  He also got himself named “Supreme Leader for Life” and was officially decreed the “Leader of the Revolution.”

The Ayatollah had a broad and unusually liberal sense of social utopianism, a trait he offset by governing through the harsh totalitarianism.  Rather than be accused of leading the reader to a particular conclusion, I’ll list a few of his domestic policies in no particular order, and let the reader reach his/her own conclusions – or perhaps embarkation points for a research trip around the net:

• He promised (though never delivered) free gasoline and utilities
• He rounded up, tortured, and killed dissenters
• He enforced a strict Islamic dress code, including a return to chadors for women
• He shattered traditional conservative views regarding the role of women in society: so long as she were properly attired, an Iranian woman was free to work outside the home (employment among women skyrocketed in the early days of the Ayatollah’s reign).  This was a marked change from the fashion-liberal/socially-paternalistic way of life of women under the shahs
• Shari’a law was imposed and the Quran became the founding document of the Iranian legal system
• He issued a fatwa proclaiming the right of those with hormonal imbalances to undergo gender reassignment surgery and therapy, and to change their birth certificates to reflect the new gender
• He supported programs leading to advanced degrees for women; however, he used his control of the state apparatus to channel educated women into fields like gynecology and pediatrics and away from things like civil engineering
• He supported organ transplants, family planning, and the distribution of contraceptives
• He issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for having written The Satanic Verses, a work of fiction which suggested that the Quran had not been properly preserved
• He burned books

Most other aspects of life changed, too, and many Iranians of means fled overseas as the Revolution’s grasp of the country became more complete.  Despite close ties with the United States under the Shah, worldly, westernized Iranians now found that door slammed shut by an event yet to be recounted (don’t worry, we’re almost there), and in Europe, as often as not, found themselves mistaken for the die-hard Khomeini supporters who burned themselves into the public consciousness through the news every night.

How to Humiliate a Superpower

Demonstrations outside the US Embassy in Teheran were common throughout 1979, and got worse when President Carter allowed the deposed Shah – now suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – into the United States for medical treatment.  The young supporters of Khomeini suddenly remembered the U.S.-backed coup that had toppled champion-of-the-people Muhammad Mossadeq back in the 50’s to put this very Shah in power; to them, the evidence of collusion for another coup was clear.  Eventually the Shah left the US, going first to Panama, then to Egypt, where he died on July 27th, 1980; he’s buried alongside Egypt’s last Mameluke king, Farouk, in Cairo.  In Iran, Khomeini played to his base and used the Shah’s flight to point fingers at the enemies of Islam.

By November 1st, he was calling the United States the “Great Satan” and urging demonstrations against US and Israeli interests.  In a move he later applauded (but maintained he didn’t plan or directly sanction) on November 4th, a mob estimated between 300 and 1200 hardcore supporters stormed the US Embassy and took 66 personnel hostage.  Thirteen of these were released on November 19-20, 1979, and another one on July 11, 1980; 52 were held through out the entire ordeal.

It went on for 444 days.  Nightly, images of bedraggled Americans – heads swaddled and faces obscured with broad strips of cloth, seemingly to showcase the inhumanity of the whole spectacle – were beamed into the living rooms of horrified, pissed-off, and thoroughly impotent citizens back home.

Historiorant/Note to Younger Kossacks  Hard as it may be to believe, there was a time, not so long ago in the greater scheme of things, when the media regularly aired reports and documentaries critical of the government.  This was seen by the people of that era as a necessary part of democracy, and the reporting was done by men and women with equal measures of balls and integrity.  To the eternal shame of the modern crop of typists who daily piss on the noblest credos of their profession in pursuit of ratings, market share, and circulation, these ideas are now regarded as quaint.

Carter tried a military option, and it failed.  I’ll not try to describe Operation EAGLE CLAW, nor adjudicate who or what is to blame for the failure – these are the things of another diary altogether – so I’ll just try’n give the bare bones of two versions of what happened at a landing strip in the Great Salt Desert near Tabas on the night of April 24-25, 1980:

1. The Carter administration rather tersely announced that a rescue had been attempted; a helicopter crashed into a C-130 transport plane, causing an explosion which killed eight and wounded several more; and that the mission was aborted.  It should be noted that the online version of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library is not particularly helpful in researching the crisis or attempts to resolve it.

2. The Iranians were waiting for the Americans to arrive, and greeted them with a fusillade of gunfire when they landed.  This would account for why five helicopters (some containing highly sensitive intel) were left behind.

3. Everything that could go wrong, did.  In this version, which seems to this historioranter to be the most likely one, the plan itself (at least on paper) was sound and operational security did not lead to leaks, but Murphy’s Law asserted itself with a vengeance.  According to this excellent article from Atlantic Online, the rescuers were obliged to play by ear – or seek presidential advice for how to deal with – situations ranging from unpredictable dust storms to civilian buses unexpectedly rumbling through the staging area.

No matter what caused the Desert One disaster, the failed rescue attempt had both long-term and short-term ramifications.  In the long term, the flaws in special ops logistics and command and control revealed by the mission would eventually result in the creation of the Special Operations Command, now one of the key players in the deployments in Iraq (ironically – or prophetically? – on Iran’s western border) and Afghanistan (on the eastern border).  In the short term, the images of burning American wreckage in the Iranian desert further demoralized the US, emboldened Iran, made our allies think twice about our competence, and aged Jimmy Carter an extra twelve years in the span of a couple of weeks.  Though he did plan an even zanier second rescue mission (in which cargo planes fitted with retro-firing jet engines would land and take off inside a soccer stadium), it was never carried out.

Khomeini grew more anxious to settle the crisis as 1980 wore on.  The Shah died on July 27, removing one bone of contention, and in September, Iraq, now being led by Saddam Hussein, launched an invasion.  The Ayatollah knew he had already destroyed Carter’s chances of re-election, and so resisted entering into mediated discussions with Washington until after the US voted in early November.  It is this climate which gave rise to the theories surrounding the ” October Surprise (beware, link-clickers: conspiracy theories ahead),” the idea that VP candidate/ex-CIA chief George Bush the Elder met with representatives of the Ayatollah’s government and made promises of military aid and the unfreezing of Iranian assets in US banks in exchange for a vow not to release the hostages until after the US election.  If true, this would mean that the current wave of Republican treason has origins further back than many of us thought to look.

Maybe there was a deal, or maybe Khomeini just really, really hated Jimmy Carter, but the hostages were released on January 20, 1980, twenty minutes after Ronnie Ray-gun finished up his inaugural address.  Does kinda make one go, “hmmmm.”

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

In the Algiers Accord of 1975, Iraq bribed Iran into cutting off support for Kurdish Iraqi rebels in exchange for 518 square kilometers of oil-soaked territory near Basra.  By 1980, a more antagonistic leader had seized control in Iraq, and he wanted this land back.

Historiorant:  Long-time Cave-dwellers know that even though I’m a ranting moonbat, I try to avoid using Hitler comparisons, which I find are usually hyperbolic and tend to degrade the nature of the discussion.  There are times, however, when just such a comparison is apt, because occasionally what the Nazis did, and whatever it is that whoever I happen to be babbling about did, are pretty damn similar.  Such was Saddam’s rationale for launching the Iran-Iraq War in September, 1980.

He played the Rhineland/Sudetenland/Polish Corridor gambit, only this time it was the beleaguered Arabs on the eastern banks of the Shatt al-Arab that needed rescuing from the alleged depredations of their traditional Persian Shi’a foe.  Saddam spat upon the Algiers Agreement like Hitler on the Treaty of Versailles, all in the name of reuniting brothers marooned by the weak will of predecessor governments.  For their part, the Iranians term the ensuing conflict “The Imposed War.”

Saddam enjoyed some initial success, but his forces were stopped at Abadan, an Iranian city at the northern end of the Persian Gulf.  At first disorganized and surprised, the Iranians recovered in good order, and by 1982, most of the fighting in what was turning into a war of attrition was occurring in Iraqi territory.  There is a school of thought that says this was a tactical ploy by Saddam – he gets to choose the battlefields, digs in on his own ground, and is able to use the presence of the enemy on Iraqi soil as a recruiting tool.

The world chose sides, and the politics of the region made for some interesting bedfellows.  The Soviet Union, China, France, and the United States (among others) provided support to both sides at different times in the war.  Most (but not all) of the Arab world, as well as those European countries which experienced totalitarianism in the 20th century – West Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Poland, among others – came out solidly for Iraq.  Iran’s list of allies was something of a who’s who of military dictatorships and questionable democracies of the 80s: South Korea, Libya, Algeria, Taiwan, Vietnam, Argentina, South Africa, and Greece, and a handful of others.

The battlefields of the Iran/Iraq frontier must have seemed like the perfect playground for weapons testing to those men who passed for military intellects among the nascent neocon movement, then festering in the bowels of the Reagan White House.  Iraq had bought most of its stuff from the Soviets, French (western arms merchant of last resort for many would-be deGaulles in the developing world), and Chinese.  The Ayatollah had inherited much of his arsenal of aging US equipment from the Shah, but since he’d purged most of the generals as potential sources of coups, he was stuck with mullahs making military decisions based on reasoning that this part of the world hadn’t seen in hundreds of years – human wave attacks became the order of the day.

Thus, an Iraqi Air Force flying MiG-21 and Dassault F1 Mirage fighters and Tu-16 Badger bombers would face off against Iranian F-4s, F-5s, and Cobra attack helicopters.  On the ground, both sides were weak in the self-propelled artillery department, which meant that infantry offensives could not be sustained.  Iraq had the more professional force, but Iran had numbers; stalemate was pretty much inevitable.

The situation was similar at sea, where Iranians fired Chinese Silkworm missiles at tankers headed into or out of Iraqi ports, and Iraqis shot French Exocets at tankers which dealt with Iran.  This “Tanker War”- and the mines it spawned – would eventually draw the US Navy into its largest surface engagement since the Second World War (Operation Praying Mantis, April 18, 1988), and would include such charming vignettes as a stray Iraqi fighter killing 37 Americans aboard the USS Stark (May 17, 1987) and the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian passenger jet with 290 aboard on July 3, 1988 (Happy Pickett’s Charge Day!).  

Historiorant:  Typical of military encounters between the US and Iran over the last 30 years, debate still rages as to whether this last was a catastrophic human error resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent noncombatants, or a set-up designed to make the US look bad.  Here’s conspiracy-tinged site that might serve as a good jumping-off point to the wilder theories surrounding the Vincennes.

Rummy, Ollie, and the rest of the Cronies get their hands dirty

As the Great Buffoonicator’s special envoy to the Middle East from November, 1983, to May, 1984, Donald Rumsfeld had occasion to meet Saddam and have a little chat, man to like-minded man.  They hammered out a deal in which the United States would hook Saddam up with “dual-use” (civilian and military) technologies – armored ambulances, mainframe computers, and the precursors to chemical weapons – in exchange for the US not providing Saddam with overt military aid (and providing the US with oil, of course – always the oil).

In the twisted, ratshit wasteland that is the neocon mind, selling the ability to make chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein was a way of getting Iran to do favors for the United States.  By prolonging the war and providing the means for Saddam to gas over 100,000 Iranians (which, incidentally, puts Iran second only to Japan in terms of most citizens lost to weapons of mass destruction), Rummy was not only helping to kill off the hated hostage-takers, but getting them to use up and wear out their American equipment at the same time.  So it was that when Ollie North betrayed this great nation and sold military hardware to the Iranians as part of the Iran/Contra series of lies, he wasn’t obligated to sell them the top-shelf stuff.  The Iranians in 1984 needed spare parts to keep their Vietnam-era F4s flying, and that – in addition to 1000 pretty advanced TOW (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles – is what Ollie and Ronnie gave them.

In exchange for dealing with the Americans – at first via the Israelis (the Ayatollah did have the capacity to recall the existence of Israel when it suited his purposes), then solo later on – Iran promised to get Hezbollah in Lebanon to release American hostages.  They never did deliver on their end of the bargain.  You might be asking “Where was our military to save these Americans?”  I’d have to answer that they were gone, because Reagan – the Liberator of Grenada – cut and ran after he got 241 Marines, soldiers, and sailors killed in a scatterbrained deployment in Lebanon in October, 1983.

The Ayatollah played Reagan and his lackeys just as he’d played Carter, but there was still the war to contend with, and this had gotten truly nasty with Saddam’s introduction of chemicals.  They started bombing each others’ cities, the Iraqis hitting Teheran with their Soviet-built strategic bombers, the Iranians lobbing Scuds into Baghdad (Saddam didn’t get Scuds of his own until 1988).  In October, 1986, the Iraqi Air Force heroically threw itself against the schools, passenger railcars, and landed civilian airliners of Iran, killing thousands in deliberate attacks against the softest of noncombatant targets.  Beginning in January, 1986, the “War of the Cities” claimed the lives of thousands as the Iraqis flew 226 sorties over a period of 42 days.

Iraq had sued for peace in 1982, but Khomeini, feeling that righteousness was on his side, demanded compensation for Iraq having started the war; his obstinacy in this regard would contribute significantly to the war dragging on as long as it did.  His and Iran’s indignation increased even more as most of the world turned a blind eye to Saddam’s overt use of weapons of mass destruction against both Iran and the Kurds within his own country.  Iran may have lost as many as 100,000 soldiers to chemical attack; to this day, thousands regularly seek medical attention and hundreds more remain permanently hospitalized.  By the time the conflict ended in August, 1988, Iran had lost between 300,000 and 1,000,000 people to the war; Iraq had suffered a similarly uncertain but grotesquely high number of casualties.

Passing the Theocratic Torch

Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989.  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pulled a move reminiscent of a Congressman-turned-lobbyist when he slid over from his role as President of the Republic to fill Khomeini’s considerable shoes as the nation’s religious leader.  The Speaker of the Majles, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani – another cleric – was elevated to the presidency shortly thereafter.  The new government had a slightly more secular approach to things than the Khomeini regime, and they quickly set about rebuilding Iran’s devastated infrastructure.

(Meanwhile, back in Iraq, Saddam was looking over his balance sheets.  Kuwait had loaned him $14,000,000,000 for the war effort, and the quickest way of wiping the debt away seemed to lay in conquering his tiny, oil-rich, ill-defended neighbor…)

Even as it tried to recover from a devastating earthquake – almost 40,000 killed – in 1990, Iran endured fallout from events in surrounding countries throughout the remainder of the decade.  While it joined in the international sanctions brought about by the First US-Iraq War, it allowed the fleeing Iraqi Air Force sanctuary (less than a decade after those same planes had performed strafing runs on Iranian elementary schools).  Iran also provided sanctuary for up to a million Kurds fleeing northern Iraq in the aftermath of the war, and continued to play host to three times that many Afghanis, who had crossed the border to get away from the fighting with the Soviets.  Rafsanjani was reelected in 1993, but ran into problems with Bill Clinton’s insistence that Iran not support terrorist groups and that it give up its nuclear weapons program.  In 1995, the US suspended all trade with Iran, which may or may not have led to the election in 1997 of the more moderate Muhammad Khatami.  

Regardless, the Europeans began to warm a little to the new and improved Iran during the late 90s, but that ole’ wishy-washy Bill Clinton stuck to his guns and maintained the embargo, even as the Republicans cravenly denied him the chance to govern for a couple of Monica-obsessed years.  Inside Iran, a rift was developing between the reformers who supported President Khatami and the conservatives who backed Ayatollah Khamenei.  In 1999, severe restrictions were placed on reformist newspapers and media outlets by theocratic decree, which led to pro-democracy demonstrations in Teheran (those fickle college students again) and fundamentalist counter-demonstrations.  The conservatives in the government were successful in silencing the reformist press altogether in 2000, despite the reformers having won two-thirds of the seats in that years’ parliamentary elections.  Even this new-found power was insufficient to overturn the press restrictions, however, and Khamenei and his clerical councils were able to retain power by appealing to a higher authority than a constitution.

Khatami’s last term in office was dominated by conflicts with the conservative Council of Guardians, which had the ability to bar any candidate it wished from running in elections, and with the western powers, who were busily invading Iraq and getting quite nosy about Iran’s nascent nuclear program.  Many in the Iranian government supported the Shiite militias in Iraq, though there were some signs of willingness to work with the international community on the nuclear thing under Khatami.

This spirit of glacial détente evaporated entirely with the parliamentary elections of 2004.  Not surprisingly, the emboldened Council of Guardians used its newly-minted authority to pick and choose candidates (calm down, George – it’s not an option here. yet), thus securing two-thirds of the Majles for themselves.  Also not surprisingly, the reformers protested that the election had been rigged – there were sitting members of parliament who were barred from running for reelection – and a messy electoral boycott by their disillusioned supporters wound up helping the conservatives, whose voters didn’t stay home.

The hard-liners pushed for a restart of the nuclear program in the summer of 2004, and in so doing rattled some international cages.  Issues regarding uranium enrichment in Iran now involve the governments of the United States and Russia (among many others), the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations, the UN Security Council, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and remain as dangerously unresolved today as it was two years ago.  The hard-liners solidified their control of the government in 2005, however, with the suspicious election of Teheran’s mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (link is to his blog), a fiery conservative veteran of the Imposed War – and quite possibly the Iran Hostage Crisis – whose speeches have proven so provocative that Khamenei in 2005 broadened the presidential oversight powers of the Expediency Council, which was headed by former president (and kinda-reformer) Ali Akbar Rafsanjani.

And since the rest is a little more BREAKING!!! than we historiorantologists generally like to report, the story continues in tomorrow’s newspaper.  😉

Historiorant:

Well, that’s it: What began with an idea to do a pair of 3-page stories on Persia turned into something like 40 pages of single-spaced stuff spread over seven diaries, and I wanted to give a shout out to all those who’ve supported me with comments, ratings, and recommends: Thanks to all those who found these diaries helpful, informative, or funny – it’s been my great pleasure to serve as your court historian on this long journey, and for the past 2+ years.  This was the series that started me on the blogging path – the next one, which began in April, 2006, was on the Crusades, and next week’s historiorant will pick up with a really cool (imho, anyway) update on the way that one’s going to be re-published.

Before we get to that, though, I’d like to mention a few things that I learned in completing both the original version of this series, and its modern update.  In doing the research for these pieces, I have come to know, albeit in a small way, a culture so ancient, so worthy of pride, that to use those very terms to describe it seems trite.  If one thing seems clear about the history of Iran, it is this: this is a land of passionate extremes, a land whose people carry an independence-minded streak that goes clear back to the satraps who followed Alexander’s successor Seleucus.  Today’s Iran is not the theocratic Shi’a reign of the early Safavids, but this is the country that gave us the Safavid dynasty.  It is also the land that provided the administrators of the Abbasid Empire and an economic system to the entire Islamic caliphate, and home of the horse archers that stopped the mighty Romans in a sky-darkening cloud of merciless arrows.  Its rulers have at times controlled vast swaths of the earth; its inhabitants have exerted a force on world culture that extends further still.

America tends not to do well when we attack nations with whose history we are unfamiliar.  In both Korea and Vietnam, and now in Iraq, those over whom we would rule found a wellspring of stubbornness in their long, fluctuating histories of golden ages, conquest, defeat, and development.  Those who would lead us into war with Iran – Persia, land of Cyrus the Great – would be well advised to remember that.

History for Kossacks: The Persia Series

History for Kossacks: Ancient Persia

History for Kossacks: Classical Persia

History for Kossacks: Islam Comes to Persia

History for Kossacks: Medieval Persia

History for Kossacks: Sufis, poets, a messiah, and a dead parrot – guest-rant from klizard

History for Kossacks: Persia and the Great Game

History for Kossacks: The Shahs of Iran

Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.

(10 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Take a look at this paragraph from page 4 of today’s blockbuster NYT article:

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein.

Hmm.  Why don’t we have some fun with google?  This goes some interesting places.

Going to Wikipedia, we find this:

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) was described as a “non-governmental organization” which described itself as a “distinguished group of Americans” who wanted to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein. In a news release announcing its formation, the group said its goal was to “promote regional peace, political freedom and international security through replacement of the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations.” It had close links to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), important shapers of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

The Washington Post reported in November 2002 that “the organization is modeled on a successful lobbying campaign to expand the NATO alliance. Members include former secretary of state George P. Shultz, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.). … While the Iraq committee is an independent entity, committee officers said they expect to work closely with the administration. They already have met with Hadley and Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Committee officers and a White House spokesman said Rice, Hadley and Cheney will soon meet with the group.”

Did you see John McCain in that list?  I knew you did!

Continuing . . .

With the successful removal of Saddam Hussein, the committee appears to have disbanded, and its once-prominent website no longer exists. However, its offices still remain on Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th Street.

The film Syriana portrays a similar group, using the same initials, but bearing the name ‘Committee for the Liberation of Iran’.

Well, I guess in a conspiracy movie like Syriana, you can get away with naming a group “Committee for the Liberation of Iran” after you just got done having a group called “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.”

But not in real life.  That would be to conspiratorial.  So how about we form a group and call it the “Iran Policy Committee”?

Wiki sez:

The Iran Policy Committee (IPC), formed in February, 2005, is a pressure group meant to influence US government policy towards Iran. IPC is made up of former White House, State Department, The Pentagon and CIA officials as well as scholars from think tanks and academia.

Okay.  Well, who is on this Iran Policy Committee?

James E. Akins

Bill Cowan (CEO of private military corp the WVC3 Group, Inc.)

Paul Leventhal

Neil Livingstone

R. Bruce McColm

Thomas McInerney

Charles T. Nash

Edward Rowny

Paul E. Vallely

Well that’s interesting!  A lot of those names appeared in today’s New York Times article, too!

Paul Vallely, Thomas McInerney, and Bill Cowan were specifically mentioned in the NYT article as media military analysts.  Charles T. Nash I don’t see in the NYT article but is a Fox News military pundit.

So it looks like we had a lot of the media analyst-type people in on the policy-making to invade Iraq and then, lo and behold, there’s four right there on this group to invade Iran.

So what kind of access does this Iran Policy Committee have to Capitol Hill?

The IPC demonstrated its strong ties on Capitol Hill in April 2005 when it convened a briefing at the invitation of the Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus of the House of Representatives. Co-chairs of this caucus are Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA)

Two congressmen – Bob Filner (Democrat, California) and Tom Tancredo (Republican, Colorado) – chaired a April 6 Capitol Hill meeting of a think-tank called the Iran Policy Committee, US Newswire reported. Filner described the meeting as an effort by the Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus of the House of Representatives to learn more about Iran and to consider ways to confront it. Tancredo called for an end to the State Department’s designation of the Mujahideen Khalq Organization (MKO) as a terrorist group.

Radio Farda reported that the Middle East sub-committee of the US House of Representatives discussed legislation relating to Iran on April 13 in Washington, DC. The Iran Freedom Support Act (HR 282) defines its purpose as, “To hold the current regime in Iran accountable for its threatening behavior and to support a transition to democracy in Iran.” The legislation calls on the White House to support pro-democracy forces that oppose the Iranian regime.

And here is a summary of the Iran Freedom Support Act:

Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2005 – States that: (1) U.S. sanctions, controls, and regulations relating to weapons of mass destruction with respect to Iran shall remain in effect until the President certifies to the appropriate congressional committees that Iran has permanently and verifiably dismantled its weapons of mass destruction programs and has committed to combating such weapons’ proliferation; and (2) such certification shall have no effect on other sanctions relating to Iranian support of international terrorism.

Amends the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 to: (1) eliminate mandatory sanction provisions respecting Libya; (2) impose mandatory sanctions on a person or entity that aids Iran acquire or develop weapons of mass destruction or destabilizing types and numbers of conventional weapons; (3) revise multilateral regime reporting requirements, including provisions respecting sanctions on individuals aiding Iranian petroleum development; (4) enlarge the scope of sanctionable entities; and (5) eliminate the sunset provision.

The Iran Freedom Support Act had 62 co-sponsors in the Senate.

To recap: The Iran Policy Committee has at least 4 TV military pundits on its board.  It meets with Congress.  Congress drafts a bill to put the squeeze on Iran.  The bill gets 62 co-sponsors in the Senate.

It never passed because the Congress ran out of time.  But that’s hardly the point.

All I’m doing here is following a fairly obvious google trail from hit to hit.

Now, consider these passages from the New York Times article.  I have a point I want to make later.  Page 2 of the article:

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Page 11 of the article:

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

Look.

We’re willing to believe that the CEOs of the telecoms were engaging in collusion with the government, but the we balk at the idea that the CEOs of media companies are doing the same thing?  Why?  

Isn’t it at least worth asking whether this is a bullshit line?

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts . . .

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts . . .

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists . . .

The New York Times casts this 11-page story as though it’s about the Pentagon duping the media with analysts who were bought off with contracts and access.  But that’s only about 1/4 of the story here.  The “analysts” are in fact just members of an overlapping group of circles of think-tanks, companies, and government officals who make policy for this country, and then go on TV to propogandize it.  It is simply missing the point to suggest that at least many of these people needed to be “convinced” or “bought” or “intimidated” into backing Cheney policy.  Cheney’s policy is their policy.

It is also worth asking, asking forcefully, the extent to which the powers-that-be at CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, and the newspapers knew about all of this, and let it go on, just as the powers-that-be of the telecoms let wiretapping go on.

Did I mention that John McCain, media darling, was on the Iraq Committee cited in the NYT article?

Perhaps I’m drawing connections too quickly here, and engaging in conspiracy mongering.  The details might be off.  But where is the line between conspiracy theory and everyday boring fact, anymore, in the Bush years?  All I did was a simple google search.

Syriana indeed.

I suppose we can entertain any number of reactions to the NYT article.  We can say “Wow!” or “Tell me something I don’t know” or “Finally the media is pointing out the obvious” or “It’s more deliberate than I thought.”  And I suppose each of those reactions is valid, and that there’s no reason to choose one as the “correct” one.  

But I want to point out that what the NYT article is actually doing is providing a window, however off-angle, however darkly, and however fleetingly, into a much larger conglemeration of power and influence than anything suggested by “manipulation of media analysts.”  And that is worth looking into.

Several Louisiana newspapers carried the Associated Press version of the Baton Rouge Advocate article on the Loren Scott & Associates study on the economic importance of the Port Fourchon energy complex.

In the style that has become expected of studies for hire, the report lays out the case for which it was produced, namely that getting more money to raise the road to the the port is a very important project. However, in making the case, it ignores the reason that the road must be raised – a sinking coast and rising sea levels.

Here are the opening paragraphs of The Advocate article:

Port Fourchon services 90 percent of the deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and even a brief interruption of services would cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, a study released Thursday shows.

The Greater Lafourche Port Commission, which commissioned the study, hopes the information will help convince Congress to fund upgrades and repairs to the area’s levee system and the $250 million shortfall for an elevated highway and bridge from Golden Meadow to Port Fourchon, port director Ted Falgout said.

It’s understandable that the Port Fourchon study would not mention the reasons the road must be raised are due, at least in part, to the significant energy industry contributions to the destruction of coastal marsh lands and the climate change producing the rising seas.

So, raising the road to Port Fouchon (and, probably, the levees around the port, as well) is something of a perpetual motion machine.

The port serves the energy industry that is drilling for oil and gas in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Those fuels add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as they are burned, thereby contributing to the warming of the earth, which speeds the rate at which sea levels rise. The rising sea levels (combined with the continued sinking of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands) will make it necessary to raise the road to the port and the levees around it.

What’s wrong with this picture? The energy industry wants the public to pay the price for mitigating the impact of processes to which their own work are prime contributors. Yet, the energy industry as a whole and  companies working – and profiting – from the operation of Port Fourchon (pdf) are some of the most ardent opponents of public policies that would slow the rate of climate change.

That is, because the wetlands are disappearing (thanks, in part, to the canals that they dug which cut the flow of fresh water to the marhses), the road to Port Fourchon is sinking. And, the seas are rising (thanks, in part, to climate change driven by the carbon dioxied released when the fuels produced by the energy industry are burned), so the levees at Port Fourchon must be raised.

And, oh, by the way, the energy industry wants taxpayers to cover the cost of all of this while they continue to deny any responsibility for climate change or the loss of wetlands.

Louisiana is quite literally on the front line of the climate change front. The impacts of climate change are being felt here first – sinking land, disappearing marshes, rising sea levels are each impacts of this larger process.

Like Shell Oil and other energy companies championing a tax-payer funded repair of the damage they inflicted on our coast, the plea to save Port Fourchon is a shameless cry for help from an industry that refuses to accept responsibility for its own actions.

So, yes, save Port Fourchon. But, at least require that the energy companies and the companies that support them implement policies that mitigate the contributions that they make to the processes that require the need to save the port to begin with.

Condition support for saving Port Fourchon on their support for policies that would wean our economy from carbon-based energy.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Cross-posted from EENR Blog

The Kyoto Treaty is not the only treating affecting human survival that Bush prefers let languish without the participation of the United States.  He also unsigned us from the Rome Treaty that established the International Criminal Court.

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ROME STATUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

PREAMBLE

The States Parties to this Statute,

Conscious that all peoples are united by common bonds, their cultures pieced together in a

shared heritage, and concerned that this delicate mosaic may be shattered at any time,

Mindful that during this century millions of children, women and men have been victims of

unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity,

Recognizing that such grave crimes threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world,

Affirming that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole

must not go unpunished and that their effective prosecution must be ensured by taking measures at

the national level and by enhancing international cooperation,

Determined to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes and thus to

contribute to the prevention of such crimes,

. . .

http://www.icc-cpi.int/library…

The Court already is a reality.  But if we join, it can be more effective.

Architectural animation

The Need for the Court

John Prendergast

Given that the world’s population and the nature of global interactions means that festering violence has more far-reaching consequences than ever, and if humanity is going to survive, we have to establish a way to eliminate or at least contain the insanity of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Our choices are stark: figure out a way for the world to live by a humane rule of law or face eventual annihilation.  

Conflicts become civil wars, which tumble into other countries and, before we know it, diverse nations have taken sides, hatred intensifies and hundereds of thousands and potentially millions die.  New generations learn to hate and hope is poisoned.

We need the International Criminal Court to work.  It is still in its infancy and needs the clout of the United States to fulfill its promise.  Also, by becoming active members of the ICC, we could regain some of our former moral authority by again championing human rights.

We were once known for our staunch defense of human rights.  We can be proud of our participation in the Nuremburg Tribunals and the tribunals set up for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.  But the time has come for a permanent international court, not tribunals dependent on the vagaries of any current international politics.  We helped form the Rome Treaty that Bush backed out of.  There are currently 105 member states to the treaty.  The United States should make it 106.  http://www.icc-cpi.int/about.html

Checks and Balances

For the Court to have jurisdiction, the crimes must be committed by a citizen of a treaty member or within the territory of a treaty member.  Also, jurisdiction can be referred to the Court by the UN Security Council (in lieu of setting up a new ad hoc tribunal).  The only referral so far is for Sudan.

The crimes that the Court investigates and prosecutes are limited to widespread crimes that take place as part of a policy: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.  In addition, the crimes are only pursued by the ICC if the country where the crimes take place have no court that is able or willing to prosecute the crimes.  Before an investigation can begin, it must be approved by a three judge panel.

The ICC has no army or police force to enforce its warrants for arrest.  It is dependent upon participating states to extradite to the Netherlands (where the Court is physically situated) anyone who has been indicted.  This particular check seems to me to be the greatest weakness of the Court.

This weakness undermines what could be its greatest asset, deterring bullies in the first place.  The kind of tyrants that instigate horrific crimes are basically bullies.  Bullies are also notorious for being cowards.  If they know they will be caught and face consequences, they are capable of restraining themselves.  An example of this is the garden variety abuser who will, even in a peak state of enragement, confine blows to parts of the victims body that won’t be easily visible.  The knowledge that an international institution is likely to come down on them will not prevent madmen (or madwomen) from acting destructively, but it can diminish the impact.

Surely we can design a small but exceptionally competent force made from many member nations and under tight rules for transparency and accountability.

Bush Rant

Which brings us back to Bush and his refusal to participate.  One of the reasons he gives for unsigning the US is that he is worried it will interfere with US sovereignty.  He likes unchecked power for peremptory invasions and a free reign in interrogations and imprisnoment.

Presidents enjoy incredible immunity for actions taken as executive or commander in chief.  About the only consequence for behaving badly is impeachment by the House and maybe a trial in the Senate.  And getting kicked out of the Oval Office.  He does not want to answer to some Court he can’t control.  He wants to be able to redefine torture and war crimes to whatever is convenient.

While I can understand that we don’t want our presidents to be afraid to make decisions because they might then be subject to politically motivated suits and prosecutions, I think the immunity was designed for mature individuals who have the country’s well being in mind.  It does not protect us when we have an arrogant imbecile as the decider.  Sorry, Bush induced rant is finished.  Really.

Sovereignty had its beginning in protecting kings.  We still believe it is more moral to invade a country, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, than it is to assassinate a mad ruler.  Thems the rules and we accept it.

Personally, I would rather we had done the unthinkable and assassinated Sadam Hussein outright than assassinate him under cover of war and kangaroo court.  But even better would have been to have him tried in a respectable court when he first started his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds.

More Information on the Court

There are many excellent videos on YouTube to help explain the complicated issues surrounding getting this Court going.  Just because it isn’t an issue discussed much in the US doesn’t mean it isn’t discussed at great length in other countries.  

A conference held in Vietnam in 2004 by the Vietnamese Professional Society provides lots of good arguments and information from Sean Butler and Michael Struett, who were trying to convince the Vietnamese to become signatories.   It can be found in four parts, the first of which is below:

The first part covers questions about how the Court can help alleviate manmade humanitarian crises and why the U.S. should support the Court.  Part 2 is on the future of the ICC given the limited enforcement mechanisms.  I found Part 3 to be the most interesting.  One question was whether human trafficking would be a crime the ICC would prosecute.  Then Butler and Struett take on the Bush rejection of the ICC treaty.  Their PowerPoint presentation for the conference can be downloaded.

YouGlobalSolutions has a series of 38 short videos, each addressing a separate question on the ICC.  

Judge Phillipe Kirsch

Most of us don’t hear much from our corporate media about the ICC, but news is out there detailing the critical formative years of the Court.  As you will see from the links in the  following overview, The New York Times has provided a steady stream of articles on the subject.  I’ve been furious with their coverage of our presidential elections at times, but they are a source for information on how the possibilities of the Court are panning out.

Congo

The first person to be tried by the ICC will be Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga.  

The Court will also try former general Germaine Katanga, who is imprisoned at the ICC for “large scale murder, rape and using boys as soldiers and girls as sex slaves for his militia group.”  

In February, the Congo “arrested army colonel and former militia leader Mathieu Ngudjolo and handed him over to the ICC.”  He will face charges of murder, sexual slavery and the forced conscription of children.  He is unique in that his arrest came while he was an active military member.

Darfur

After a twenty month investigation, the ICC issued arrest warrants nearly a year ago for two Sudanese men Ahmad Muhammad Harun and Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, aka Ali Kushayb, who is allegedly a former leader of the janjaweed militia.  They were the first to be charged with atrocities in Darfur in 2003 and 2004, where more than 200,000 people have died and millions displaced.  

Harun continued to oversee Darfur’s refugee camps despite complaints from aid agencies and he appeared at human rights conference in Egypt.

In September of 2007, The Sudanese government placed Harun in charge of hearing human rights complaints from Darfur victims.

Even though the United States has been unsigned from the ICC, the American Bar Association helped in the training of Sudanese lawyers in preparation for the trials.  The training was largely funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.  

Central African Republic

Known for “vast, lawless territory” this landlocked country is used as a staging ground for rebellions in other countries.  The ICC prosecutor is investigating human rights violations here in 2002 and 2003.  In particular, the ICC investigation will focus on the use of rape as a terror tool.  Rape incidents outnumber killings four to one: “mass rapes gang rapes, hundred of cases that took place within a few days.”  

The Supreme Court of the Central African Republic referred the rapes to the ICC because “it did not have the means to prosecute those responsible for the attacks on civilians.”  Those attacks apparently can be attributed to the government, led by Francois Bozize, president following the violent coup.

Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo will not be focusing the rapists themselves.  He is after “the person or people issuing the orders or organizing the campaign.  The ICC seeks to prosecute the leaders most responsible for grave human rights violations when national courts are unwilling or unable to do so at home.”

Uganda

The ICC apparently has already gained some clout.  It may have played a part in the formation of an agreement between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army on how to deal with war crimes there: and agreement on “reconciliation and accountability”.  The agreement is part of a five phase plan to end the decades long violence there.  There are still delays and waiting for the LRA leaders to follow through on promises, but there is at least hope of a completed agreement.

Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA, is wanted by the ICC and was afraid to leave his jungle hideout until the ICC dropped the indictments.  The agreement set out a framework for Uganda to deal with the war crimes: “The agreement is about putting mechanisms in place under national law. We can take it to the I.C.C. and say, ‘Look: we are dealing with accountability’  [said Martin Ojul, leader of the LRA delegation in Sudan]”  

The ICC has indicted four of the rebel leaders.  

Liberia/Sierra Leone

The ICC is also the venue for tribunals over which it has no jurisdiction.  In a controversial move, the United States brought a UN sanctioned Sierra Leone trial from that country to the premises of the ICC.  The move took the tribunal out of a volatile atmosphere in Sierra Leone, but added to the cost and confusion of the trial.

Former Liberian president and warlord Charles G. Taylor is “the first African head of state to be brought to trial before an international court, faces 11 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, committed during the Sierra Leone civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2002.”  The crimes he is accused of committing include conscripting children as soldiers with the use of drugs and indoctrination.  

The children “were taught to amputate limbs and gouge out eyes and were even ordered to kill their parents and to see the army as their new family.”  He is also accused of obtaining weapons by illegally selling timber and diamonds. Taylor is testing the authority of the tribunal with boycotts, procedural games and sham claims of indigency.  He was, nonetheless, sitting in a high security cell.  The cell is part of a new cellblock built in the Hague, Netherlands, for the ICC.

Not that the cell reflects the barbarity of Taylor’s crimes.  He has access to a computer, television (for which he demanded satellite service) and a DVD player.  There is a private space for conjugal visits with his wife.  He complained of the “Eurocentric food” and was provided with foods more suitable to his palate: “plantains, yams, corn flour, cassava, smoked fish and spices like ginger and peanut sauce.”  He has help preparing the foods from his cellmate, a fellow child enslaver from Congo, Thomas Lubanga.

Future Investigations

The Court may investigate charges against Hugo Chavez by Colombia.  Also, the violence and ethnic cleansing in Kenya is crying out for an investigation.

Reconciliation

Even if the Court succeeds in building a strong institution and is successful in its mission of bringing the worst criminals to justice, it will not be complete.  It needs another whole branch to deal with reconciliation.

An acknowledgement of this is seen in the Uganda approach, which expects “traditional reconciliation rituals” to go forward for crimes not specifically handled by the few ICC prosecutions.

The current goal of the Court focuses on the leaders responsible for widespread crimes, and that is the necessary first step.  However, given the nature of these crimes, this leaves a multitude of those guilty of implementing the crimes and a corresponding multitude of broken victims.  Both are in an unhealthy state of shock: even the human beings guilty of the atrocities are damaged.  If there is to be hope of a healthier future, there must be some closure.

I don’t think we can hope for real healing, restitution or even forgiveness.  But we can strive for at least a narrow reconciliation so that future conflicts are diminished.  A model for this was demonstrated in South Africa.  The basic parameters for this was immunity for those committing but confessing to the crimes and apologies.  It did not make everything right, but it did bring sufficient closure.

The greatest gift the United States could give the world, and its greatest legacy, would be to fulfill the commitment to human rights that we began as an infant republic.  We should protect, strengthen and guide the infant ICC.  We need to be there during the critical 2009 review.  A threshold question for all candidates this fall to any national office should be whether they are resolved to bringing the United States back on board the ICC.

UPDATE/correction.  The VPS conference was not held in Vietnam.  It was held at a Doubletree in Santa Ana, CA.