Another socialist blog

Displaying its usual lack of appreciation for irony, the Bush regime has warned Iran against “any outside interference” in Iraq. Ari Fleischer, a bit of an outsider vis-a-vis Iraq himself, said the U.S. will use military force to prevent “infiltration of agents to destabilize the Shi’a population” of Iraq.

The sinister goal of these “agents” is, according to U.S. officials, to promote friendly Shiite clerics and possibly an Iranian model of Islamic government. This activity is ordinarily called political organizing.

The Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad has been looted while American soldiers 200 feet away watched and did nothing. The losses include, among other irreplaceable items, the earliest known calendar. Iraq is, after all, the place where civilization itself got started.

Meanwhile, “the Oil Ministry headquarters on Palestine Street has been ringed by more than 70 US troops and protected by up to a dozen or more armoured personnel carriers.”

But it’s not about the oil, really, we promise.

This time it’s Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyoming, who managed to suggest, on the floor of the House of Representatives, that all blacks use drugs. Then Republicans managed on a largely party-line vote to stand behind her on a vote about whether to strike her racist comment for the record.

Cubin apologized in the traditional, insincere manner of racists who got caught: she is sorry “if” she offended the “sensitivities” of her listeners.

Those who were paying attention in December, just four short months ago, will recall that after Trent Lott made racist remarks, the Republicans fell all over themselves to say that Republicans were not racists. I’ve tried in vain to find any news reports of Trent Lott commenting on the Cubin fiasco, but found only a great and eloquent silence.

Though American politicians are presently oversupplied with foreign enemies, Fidel Castro has obligingly given them another target: his crackdown on dissidents resulted in prison terms of up to 25 years for some of his political opponents. The House of Representatives has unanimously voted to condemn the repression. There were cries of outrage from Florida Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and New Jersey Reps Robert Menendez and Republican Chris Smith, in particular.

Each of these four hypocrites was among the 356 Representatives who voted for the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act without first reading it. That law provides for life imprisonment for terrorism offenses, which are defined so broadly as to include just the kind of free speech activities that landed the pro-democracy Cubans in prison.

Today’s news is full of “confirmed” reports that chemical weapons have been found in Iraq. We can expect the Bush administration to claim vindication for their invasion of Iraq, since Iraqi possession of chemical weapons was the pretext for the invasion. Sensible Americans should view these claims with suspicion.

Leaving aside the fact that several previous reports of chemical weapons evidence have been found to be false, there is very little reason to believe this latest report. The U.S. military has zero credibility. The alleged evidence is presented to us by the same people who started the war. It would be no exaggeration to say that the political fate of the President of the United States, and many of his cronies, depends on finding chemical weapons in Iraq. We don’t think he’s above planting the evidence.

Even if the reports are true, however, the presence of banned weapons in Iraq in no way vindicates the war. The war was never about Iraq posing a threat. First and foremost, George Bush needs a permanent foreign war to maintain his repressive political program at home. Constant terror alerts and constant war provide justification for unprecedented rollbacks in civil liberties. They also provide cover for a domestic economic policy that is all about helping the rich at the expense of the working class. Huge tax breaks for the rich are just the most conspicuous aspect of the Bush program. Subsidies for churches, increased work requirements for those on welfare, handouts to insurance and drug companies, deregulation of media ownership, and the outlawing of affirmative action are all in progress.

The war is also part of a broad plan to remake the world on behalf of American capitalists. Under the Bush doctrine, no country is allowed to defend itself, or even potentially defend itself, from the United States. Under the Bush doctrine, only the United States still enjoys sovereignty, and only countries other than the United States are subject to international law. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have been just the beginning of this imperial plan. The next war, against Iran or North Korea or perhaps Syria, is presumably in the planning stages already.

The so-called liberation of Afghanistan has already returned the countryside to the rule of the brutal warlords who ran the place before the Taliban. The “liberation” of Iraq will, if Bush has his way, be implemented as a military occupation and dictatorship.

So none of our criticisms of the war, or the war criminals who started it, are going away. Nor will we stop opposing the war, or the occupation of Iraq, when the shooting stops.

NPR’s Fresh Air did an interesting interview last week with Newsweek’s Middle Eastern Regional Editor Christopher Dickey in which he pointed out, among other things:

I think the important thing for people in the United States to understand is that this war has almost no credibility as far as the rest of the world is concerned, certainly not in the Arab world.

I’ve been talking to a lot [of Iraqi refugees]…. There has been no refugee flow out of Iraq whatsoever. All the flow has been back into Iraq by people who want to go be with their families, help defend their homes, and in some cases, many say they want to help defend Saddam Hussein.

You have to remember that a couple of weeks ago nobody would have given a plugged nickel for Saddam Hussein. People didn’t support him, they didn’t like him, they saw the horrors that he represented. They didn’t particularly like the idea of this war, in fact many, many were opposed to it, but they didn’t like him. Now, he emerges as a kind of a hero, standing up to the United States, holding fast against the American onslaught…. This is the superpower, the greatest power on earth, bringing an enormous amount of force to bear on a country of 24 million people, that has been under boycott and embargo for the last 12 years, and has had its army decimated in several wars. So to see the Iraqis standing up at this point [weeks into the war], to see Saddam standing up, is a source of inspiration and pride, and also growing anger, in the Arab and Muslim world. It is not really not improving the image of the United States.

Nobody in this part of the world uses the word “liberation.” President Bush can repeat that again and again as much as he wants, and so can Tony Blair. The fact is, nobody believes it. Everybody here sees this as an invasion and the beginning of an occupation of a sovereign Arab state.