Why would these people appear to be so joyful? Is it that brief illusion that some power has been regained, that they can finally begin to feel more at home, at home? Is it the relief that comes from believing that the worst has passed, since the worst have withdrawn to bases out of sight?
Apparently Iraq earned the right to celebrate one day of sovereignty this past Tuesday, 30 June, 2009, in what will be an annual holiday to mark the withdrawal of the American invaders and occupiers from major Iraqi cities. President Obama did not make a speech concerning the event, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki apparently “failed” to even mention the Americans in his speech to the nation. Others, however, did remember the Americans, such as those who killed four more U.S. troops on the eve of Sovereignty Day, no doubt giving them even more reason to celebrate. In the meantime, American media commentary ranged from sharp rhetorical questions (what sovereignty? whose sovereignty? freedom from external control?) to some good old fashioned, self-praising, self-absolving, imperialist arrogance (why did they forget to thank us?). In most cases, regardless of perspective, it was not treated as anything more than a minor symbolic victory for the Iraqi regime and a few of those that support it. Perhaps history has taught Iraqis not to take their own sovereignty seriously for too long, given that the colonial and imperial powers have regularly failed to do so as well. In this vein, Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times sounded a familiar dismissive note:
For Iraqis, claiming sovereignty is something of a national pastime, with various politicians celebrating different markers: 2004, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to the interim Iraqi government; 2006, when Iraq seated its first constitutionally elected Parliament; and Jan. 1, when the security agreement took effect.
Jeremy Scahill was dismissive as well, but from a very different point of view, noting that this first Sovereignty Day, with some events closed to the public because of security restrictions, was little more than U.S. Hallmark-style hype. Similarly, Paul Watson clearly saw where the real propaganda of the event was to be found: “only the most stupidly naive could ever believe that Iraq is now anything more than a subservient client state of the new world order empire.”
Iraqis had to wait over six years before seeing a day such as this, even though 130,000 U.S. troops continue to remain in Iraq, and some even in the same cities from which they supposedly withdrew (where they remain as “advisers”). At least 55 U.S. military bases remain in Iraq, some built as monster complexes on a permanent foundation. Iraqis get one more kick at that: a national referendum on 30 July, 2009, is widely expected to see a majority of Iraqis rejecting any American military presence in Iraq, which is likely to see the total withdrawal of U.S. forces next year, much sooner, and much larger than what the U.S. had planned (see here and here).
If some would argue that Iraq has not yet achieved even paper-thin sovereignty, I would add that even that remains unsettled. The outer symbols of Iraqi sovereignty remain unstable, provisional, and under construction. We can trace some of Iraq’s journey to reconstructed nationhood in its very flag, which keeps changing. Saddam Hussein added a religious dimension to the previously secular nationalist flag with three stars alone — adding the words for “God is Great” reportedly in his own handwriting. Then in 2004, a London-based artist who was a relative of a member of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, created that now infamous neo-Israeli stylistic atrocity, promptly burned by insurgents, with even the colour of the Islamic crescent transformed into Israeli blue (also see here). Later in 2004, the “old” flag was reinstated, but the physical trace of Saddam Hussein was purged, replacing his handwriting with Kufic script, yet retaining the symbols of what could be read as either Ba’ath Party principles (unity, freedom, socialism) or the old goal of a union between Iraq, Egypt and Syria. That flag remained present in 2008, when an “interim flag” was created, with parliament left to settle on a decision for a permanent flag roughly around now, following a national flag contest. In the meantime, different Iraqi flags continue to fly in different parts of Iraq. Perhaps the most bitterly honest version of the flag is that produced by Emad Hajjaj in Jordan, symbolizing the painful human cost of being Iraqi in a world dominated by the brutality of American military might:
Thank US!
As mentioned, some Americans, including commanders in Iraq, were “taken aback” by al-Maliki’s apparent dismissal of the role of U.S. forces in supposedly creating “security” (which itself dismissed the continuing violence that, once again, is rising). They were anxious to assure us readers that, really, the Iraqis are thankful: “Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of American troops in Iraq, brushed aside the dismissive tone of public remarks by the country’s leaders about the Americans, saying that Mr. Maliki personally thanked him Monday night and again Tuesday for the sacrifices the American troops had made” (source). Quite frankly, thanks were expressed, so it seems that the complaint is really that the Iraqis were not quite thankful enough, perhaps not sincerely passionate in their thanks. Otherwise, we witnessed the thanks from President Jalal Talabani: “While we celebrate this day, we express our thanks and gratitude to our friends in the coalition forces who faced risks and responsibilities and sustained casualties and damage while helping Iraq to get rid from the ugliest dictatorship and during the joint effort to impose security and stability” (source). Not to be outdone, the “Kurdistan Regional Government,” an entity that owes its very existence thanks to the U.S. invasion, sent out a press release: “The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is deeply grateful to the United States and the U.S. military for their role in liberating Iraq, and partnering with us as we build our federal democracy. Thanks to the sacrifices and valor of U.S. and coalition troops…” — well the rest does not matter, this is a statement delivered in Washington by a Washington-oriented regime, which ended its press release on a defiantly subservient note: “We implore the Obama Administration to uphold its commitment to a phased, responsible withdrawal from Iraq….It is our hope that the U.S. withdrawal will be no sooner than the resolution of these key political issues within Iraq.” Now where did the Kurds get the impression that the U.S. was in a rush to leave?
One writer, Ryan Witt, appropriately used Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” as a template for his analysis of the U.S. “withdrawal.” Let us take in some of the rich pomposity of a self-serving American view, blind to its own extremes of genocidal inhumanity:
Perhaps most fittingly, Kipling predicted that when occupying a country and trying to better rather than being thanked by the people you would instead engender “the blame of those ye better” and “the hate of those ye guard.” Sadly, in watching the celebrations in Iraq I do not see an Iraqi people thankful for the contributions and sacrificial blood of American soldiers. I see them simply happy to see U.S. soldiers leave. Doubtless many Iraqis blame the U.S. and our soldiers for the violence and chaos that has been part of Iraq the last six years.
Thank You For What?
To be frank, I never expected in my lifetime to encounter such short memories such as Witt’s, such willful blindness, such a grotesque sense of self-flattery from those who ghoulishly cheered shock and awe, and then piously mourned any mercenary who was rightly torched or beheaded. Thank you for what?
Is it necessary to recount how badly the U.S. has bludgeoned Iraq since 1991, with almost two decades now of warfare and sanctions that were just as deadly? Do people outside Iraq need to be reminded that in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, as many as 200,000 Iraqis were killed, then left to suffer the effects of depleted uranium, damaged civilian infrastructure, heightened poverty, and a sanctions regime that left about 500,000 Iraqi children dead, part of a total of 1.7 million Iraqis to die just from sanctions just between the two invasions? Do they need to be reminded that at least 100,000 Iraqis died from direct violence stemming from the second U.S. invasion? How about the internally displaced, and the refugees who streamed to other countries, in total numbering around 4 million? And all this in a country of about 31 million people, just a little over one-tenth of the population size of the U.S. When one recalls the streaming tears of Americans for the losses of 11 September 2001, one has to wonder if they ever add up what they did to Iraq, which amounts to a thousand 911’s to say the least? (sources: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11])
The question cannot be what do Iraqis have to thank the U.S. for, but when will they ever be able to say that they have made America pay enough for what it has done. Is it then any surprise that people, who in their massive numbers have overwhelmingly expressed their hatred for the American presence in any poll ever done since the 2003 invasion, demanding that all U.S. forces be withdrawn immediately, and demanding that year after year, should be reticent about saying, “Thanks America!”?
Who Will Decide?
The Financial Times ended its piece of non-euphoria with this bit of one-sided, unsolicited edification: “This is an important moment. But it is only the Iraqis who will decide whether they can summon the will to live together and put their nation and state back together” (emphasis added). Only the Iraqis who will decide — let us see who will decide to leave Iraqis alone for the first time in their modern history, and for long enough, to actually have a chance to decide for themselves. In the meantime, the real value of an annual “Sovereignty Day” is that it will stand as an ironic reminder of all that has not been achieved, all that belies the term, and what remains to be done.
Congruent Methodologies: Impactful Pre-invasion Imperialist Guerrilla Warfare Tactics in Iran
By James Lockridge
(This essay is a response to Maximilian Forte’s essay “Causation or Correlation, a Useful Crisis Notwithstanding: U.S. Democracy Promotion in Iran.”)
Are the current protests in Iran really 100% legitimate and “home grown” or primarily the direct result of outside agents i.e. CIA or corporate influence? Or are the protests 100% legitimate and being co-opted by outside agents? Does it matter? Maximilian’s chief assertion in the Causation or Correlation essay is that the “U.S. government has (not directly) created Iranian discontent and marshaled Iranian youths to risk their lives protesting during a brutal crackdown” is probably correct. What he fails to indicate is how foreign agents can have a more powerful, same, or very similar impact utilizing methods that are congruent to outright involvement. My position is that while the U.S. may not be outright extensively stage-managing the protests, they are never the less utilizing various Iranian political actors, propaganda and other instruments to influence public opinion and a have great impact without outright involvement. Therefore, foreign agents (CIA and oil corporations) have and continue to play a monumental role in the orchestration and current meddling in the events of Iran.
The basis for my rationale is primarily economic and ideological. Oil is a precious commodity that foreign interests must secure and that imperialist have gotten smarter due to past disasters of outright involvement and idiosyncratic factors in the Middle East in their timing and tactics when conducting regime change. Likewise the desire and the quest to spread U.S. style democracy around the world is pervasive.
I posit that the paradigm of “mass-involvement” i.e. on-site training, marshaling and other assistance of local resistance is not applicable in urban pre-war combat contexts. In countries that have not been outright invaded such as Iran, the paradigm of “specific-involvement” utilizing multi-layer human proxies and trusted cut-outs (intermediaries) better fits. Specific-involvement allows for both orchestration and involvement through human leverage.
True, the U.S. Government has not created the current discontent, but what does that matter when the U.S. and British governments have significantly influenced the chain of events, albeit some inadvertent since the 1940s that led to the current discontent. Again, as Maximilian noted the U.S. has not directly intervened, but that just means capital, arms and know-how will be directed through proxies. Recent and past examples in Iraq and Afghanistan showcase the utilization and success of specific-involvement propaganda and the control of meta data surrounding actual events as the favored strategy.
Utilizing specific-events allows foreign agents to blend in and conduct “attacks” and merge with the local population, essentially it is the updated imperialist version of hit-and-run. Historically, guerrilla tactics have had more success in the country sides, metaphorically being the “shadows” than in the cities, metaphorically being the “light.” Usually, it is a mistake for the guerrilla to operate in light. In the light, the guerrilla is surrounded by a thousand eyes and ears and the lack of resources and skills that make outright conflict possible. In Iran if fragmented proxies and cut-outs are utilized on the ground with the anonymity of technological devices to help drive the message domestically and abroad the power dynamic begins to shift in favor of the properly funded and highly skilled guerrilla in this case the U.S. government and oil corporations. The direct benefits of utilizing specific-involvement in urban pre-war contexts is that the relevant socio-cultural and psychological nerves can be agitated and allows foreign agents to win the “hearts and minds” of the local populace creating leverage. Leverage has the direct benefit of allowing outside agents to engage in the light and hide in plain sight and use fewer resources to accomplish objectives.
Likewise blending in is important for three primarily tactical reasons: The first is being an obvious target get’s one killed, so it’s less risky. Second the presence of outsiders particularly the U.S. is viewed as an assault on national and personal dignity, which shows that boundaries have been violated, borders crossed, and spaces invaded, thus hearts and minds can’t be won and leverage is not possible. Third, using proxies and cut-outs allows outside agents to disavow all knowledge about the proxy or the cut-out. Remember being directly involved pre-war creates a dangerous precedent.
A recent example of post-invasion specific-influence than can be applied pre-invasion is when the Marines created a propaganda moment during the early stages of the Iraq war. CNN in 2003 the Los Angeles Times in 2004 both reported that the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations unit staged-managed the infamous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003 and it was not a spontaneous reaction by Iraqis. According to both reports, a Marine colonel first decided to topple the statue, and an Army Psychological Operations unit turned the event into a propaganda moment. The Marines brought in cheering Iraqi children in order to make the scene appear authentic in what was the most staged military photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima. This same or similar tactic can be applied in Iran. Who is to say that Neda Salehi Agha Soltan was not killed by “friendly fire” like the former pro football player and U.S. army ranger Patrick Tillman killed in Afghanistan and the meta data surrounding his death changed to fit propaganda purposes? Tillman was vaulted to iconic status and branded as an “American hero” that was killed by terrorist in the line of duty, but he actually was “accidentally” killed by his comrades. The use of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980s and early 1990s against the Soviet Union showcases the use of human combat proxies.
Oil is the obvious end goal for the U.S. and others to interfere in Iran’s affairs like in 1953. Then like now control of the country’s oil through concessions and exploitation of Iran’s central geographic position in the Gulf is the play. Following the 1953 coup the United States enlisted the major U.S. oil companies in an international consortium to run Iran’s oil industry. Iran has estimated oil reserves of 136.2 billion barrels making it third behind Canada and Saudi Arabia. It is also the fourth largest exporter in the world. Also Iran’s location allows for the production and transport of oil to every door step in Europe. Oil was an integral part of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century, and its influence has shown no sign of diminishing in the twenty-first century. Oil is the lifeblood of the modern military machine and modern industrial society. Major foreign oil producers will need to increase their production capacity to meet growing demand in the coming decades. Likewise, Iran needs help expanding production to meet its domestic needs. Iran currently pumps 2.1 million barrels per day (bpd) well below the 6 million bpd before the 1979 Revolution. All the major postwar doctrines of U.S. foreign policy—the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Bush I & II and Reagan doctrines—relate, either directly or indirectly, to the Middle East and its oil. I think the same rule applies to the Obama administration.
In conclusion, the use of multiple and fragmented local proxies and cut-outs to conduct specific-involvement events that strike at socio-cultural and psychological nerves and meta data alteration are the preferred and updated tools of the imperialist guerrilla during urban pre-war involvement. The use of such methodologies in Iran allows for significant impact and involvement beyond initial instigation or simply the riding the discontent wave. I agree 100% with Maximilian about the exit options presented to the Iranian people are miserable. I think there is a real risk in the mid to long run of history repeating itself and their being another coup, followed by an Iran Revolution part II, which would further stoke the West’s Islamophobia and cause a future military incident on the scale of Iraq. This is one plausible and very real scenario.
James Lockridge
Causation or Correlation, a Useful Crisis Notwithstanding: U.S. Democracy Promotion in Iran
CAVEATS
Before proceeding, I should indicate what my own biases are regarding the Iranian election protests. First, I have no love for either of the major contenders, whether Mir Hosein Mousavi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or any Ayatollah. I also have no “hatred” for Ahmadinejad and I appreciate his tough stance against the U.S. and Israel. Second, I suspect that there might have been some electoral fraud, but there is no publicly available evidence yet for anything other than voting irregularities that in themselves do not amount to evidence of fraud. Third — and this pertains to the focus of the article below — I do not believe that the Iranian protests were either “instigated” or “orchestrated” by foreign interests, whether media, NGOs, or government agencies. I do not think that the Iranian people are mindless pawns ready to snap into suicidal anti-government actions because of the desires of a foreign power; if I believed otherwise, it would be granting foreign powers with nearly magical, super human qualities, and Iranians would be credited with the opposite. Likewise, I do not believe that one can defeat imperialism by devouring one’s own people and showing them merciless cruelty, while pronouncing that their own constitutionally protected rights to freedom of speech and assembly are “illegal” — assuming that I have even understood what has actually transpired in Iran these past weeks. Fourth, it is depressing to see a situation where the only options discussed seem to swing between authoritarian Islamic rule, Western ideas of socialism, or Western consumerist individualism — to the extent that these delineate the terrain of debate, and I am not sure that they do, then all sides would appear to be utterly hopeless. It can sometimes look like a clash between Eurocentrism and its inversions, at least from afar.
Cause or Correspondence?
To assert that foreign powers could engineer a local upheaval is usually far fetched, even when discussing so-called micro-states with all of their proclaimed external vulnerabilities. Among leftist Chilean scholars, there was considerable debate as to whether the CIA played a fundamental or an incidental role, with some proposing that the military coup of 11 September 1973 might have happened even without American support, and that there was genuine local opposition to the government of Salvador Allende, who had not won the majority of votes. In the case of Grenada in 1983, where the U.S. military invasion would leave no doubt about American interests, the fact remains that what opened the door to the invasion was factional strife within the ruling New Jewel Movement leading to a coup d’etat, the murder of the Prime Minister by his supposed comrades, and the imprisonment of key figures in the government. The U.S. did not orchestrate that schism. In some respects, Iran today mirrors elements of both of these cases, with deep cleavages in the ruling elite, and genuine local discontent.
However, to assert that foreign powers do not try to manipulate the course of events, do not try to spread misinformation, do not seek to curry favour with certain factions, and do not have an exploitative interest in the development and outcome of local political processes, is not only equally far fetched, it is patently false. In the cases above, in both Chile and Grenada, the U.S. played a fundamental role in shaping and influencing post-coup events. Nobody can argue that the United States, Israel, Britain, and Canada have a merely neutral and dispassionate stance to the unfolding events in Iran. Not wanting to credit them with possession of magical bullets that can fell any opponent does not entitle us to dismiss their actual interests and involvements. We have be to just as wary of overwrought and maybe naive leftist conspiracy theories (Petras) as we have to be wary of irresponsible, sometimes also leftist, theories of the primacy and exclusiveness of local dynamics (Zizek).
The left is divided as to the unit of analysis — the local state alone, or the local state and foreign states in combination — as well as to the direction of causality. The right is also divided, between interventionists and isolationists, between the usual hawks and doves. Indeed, the very usefulness of the notion of there being a “political spectrum” falls to ruin, as we see mirrors and refractions of every position in almost every other.
The point is not to confront confusion with nuanced ambiguity, but with clarity. One element of that needed clarity is to understand the nature and extent of foreign political interests in exploiting Iranian political processes, and in this I am aided by the words of some of the key actors themselves.
The government of Iran has recently accused foreign powers of “meddling” in Iranian affairs. On this point, I agree. Meddling is not orchestration. Meddling is seeking to influence local affairs in the hope of altering them to suit certain interests. In this case the Iranian regime is not displaying the power of the conspiratorial imagination; it is displaying the power of literacy.
U.S. “Democracy Promotion” in Iran
One actor at work in allegedly promoting democracy in Iran is Kenneth R. Timmerman (see here and here) a journalist, writer, and founder and current executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (also see here and here).
According to SourceWatch, the FDI received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit organization funded by the U.S. Congress. It was initially established by the Reagan administration in 1983, with the task of engaging in “private diplomacy” against foreign governments, also undertaking “cloak and ballot” operations. The NED has shown a consistent interest in “democracy promotion” in Iran. The NED also serves as the secretariat of the World Movement for Democracy which in 2000 admitted “Iran’s Pro-Democracy Student Movement” to its World Steering Committee (see page 2). While at this very moment the WMD is staying publicly silent on Iran, a quick search of its site also reveals its consistent interest in supporting students in Iran.
The FDI is one of the first, if not the first, source of the allegations that Hezbollah fighters have been imported by Iran to beat protesters — as “proof” it provides two photos under the 18 June 2009 entry on its site, showing a few unremarkable fellows standing in front of the camera, some against a backdrop consisting of a sign written in Farsi. That’s it. We do not know who they are, where they came from, whether or not they are actually Lebanese or even anywhere in the Middle East, the date of the photos, their location and, most importantly, we do not see them anywhere near any protesters. This has not stopped people from seeding Twitter in an attempt to misinform and alarm, presumably with a hope of generating a rift between Iranians and their nation’s allies, while furthering the cause of both Israel and the U.S. (this tweet takes us to this blog post, which uses the FDI photos and then adds allegations of Hamas involvement — courtesy of the Jerusalem Post of course — and from that blog we are taken to a presumably Iranian dissident blog that repeats the allegations. Note that while accompanied by visual materials, no photos of these mysterious Hezbollah and Hamas people engaged in anti-protest action are ever supplied, and corroborated).
On Mousavi’s Trail
The FDI’s Kenneth Timmerman in “State Department Backs ‘Reformists’ in Wild Iranian Election,” has been noted for writing about a “green revolution” before the elections were even held — “there’s the talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran, named for the omnipresent green scarves and banners that fill the air at Mousavi campaign events” — which may not be conclusive without further elaboration since “revolution” in this case might mean an expected landslide, and Timmerman is no admirer of Mousavi either. More interesting is Timmerman, writing as if he were an outside observer, about the role of the NED:
The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting “color” revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.
Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.
While some opposition parties in Iran called for a boycott of the elections, Mousavi did not. Instead, the U.S. government’s Voice of America banned those calling for a boycott from its airwaves. One Iranian opposition member commented to Timmerman, “it’s as if the State Department and Voice of America had become campaign advisers to Mousavi.”
Timmerman also tells us that “Saeed Behbehani, the owner of Mihan TV in suburban Washington, D.C., says he recently spoke with a well-known Iranian-American businessman who boasts of his ties to the State Department and who just returned from a trip to Dubai. The businessman said he met with Mousavi’s campaign manager, Mehdi Khazali.”
Mousavi himself is no stranger to making pacts with Iran’s devils, as Iran’s Prime Minister during the 1980s. According to an article in the Washington Post for 21 March 1987, Mousavi’s government purchased weapons through Israel, and considered opening a political dialogue with the West. Even then, according to an 8 November 1986 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mousavi was emroiled in leadership splits over the succession to Ayatollah Khomeini. Mousavi has a number of shadowy foreign connections as well, “including an expatriate Iranian arms supplier who lives on the French Riviera” who played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal, according to a 16 November 1986 article in the Chicago Tribune.
As mentioned before, Timmerman is no fan of Mousavi’s, going as far as to assert that Mousavi was one of the founding members of the Lebanese Hezbollah, in an article titled, “‘Reformist’ Iranian Candidate Founded Hezbollah.” Now this is odd: why would Hezbollah then agree to go to Iran to beat up Mousavi’s followers, as Timmerman’s FDI asserts? It makes no apparent sense, unless the aim is to confuse, cover tracks, and have multiple cakes and eat them too.
U.S. Operations in Iran
In Seymour Hersh’s July 2008 article in the New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves Against Iran,” the U.S. Congress agreed to provide up to $400 million for covert activities in Iran which would involve “support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations”. He also reveals that U.S. Special Operations Forces have conducted cross-border operations from southern Iraq into Iran since at least 2007 — but “the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded”. Personnel, material, and money have also been inserted into Iran from a base in western Afghanistan. The overall CIA mission is not to engage in assasinations, but rather it is “about gathering information, enlisting support”. Leading Democrats who agreed to the operations include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Would Obama’s election make any difference? A member of the House Appropriations Committee told Hersh that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control,” and that is assuming that there would be any change of plans under Obama which, so far, have not been reported.
Other news media have produced similar and related reports of U.S. funded operations in Iran, some of them involving acts of violence by armed elements of ethnic minorities. On 25 February 2007 the Telegraph published “US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran,” whose primary destabilization efforts were to put pressure on Iran to not seek nuclear weapons. However, that assumed goal changed when on 27 May 2007 the Telegraph published another article, “Bush sanctions ‘black ops’ against Iran,” that stated that CIA-directed “black operations” now had a more ambitious aim, that of bringing about “regime change” in Iran:
“Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilise, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs”.
Terrorist attacks within Iran, and directed specifically against Ahmadinejad’s campaign, spiked just prior to the recent elections.
In addition, the CIA would seek to use Iranian expatriates in the U.S. for their communication networks with friends and relatives back home. With greater relevance to current efforts by Iranian dissidents to communicate on the web with the outside world, the above article stated that the CIA was also allowed “to supply communications equipment which would enable opposition groups in Iran to work together and bypass internet censorship by the clerical regime”.
In many postings on Twitter, one frequently reads references to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., narrating, encouraging, and praising Iranian protesters. In “The American Hand in Iran,” in Asia Times on 5 July 2005, Trish Schuh tells us of an effort to send Bush’s message of “democratic revolution” from “Beirut to Tehran”. One actor seeking to send that message, and “winning hearts and minds,” is “Swift boat Veterans for Truth” member Jerome Corsi, whose NGO, the Iran Freedom Foundation (IFF), inaugurated a 12-day “Iran Freedom Walk” from Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell to Washington, DC in 2005:
Dipping two fingers in red paint, Corsi waved a peace sign in solidarity “with the blood of oppressed Iranians” and called on “the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King“. He declared, “I love the Iranian people. America does not hate the Persian people. We love the Persian people. We want peace and we love the Persian people.” Corsi’s voice then dropped to a whisper; “We stand here today and we pray in the name of the gods. I embrace Jesus Christ as my savior – and we also pray in the name of Allah, Zoroaster and the B’hai.”
This is a change of tune for Corsi, who previously likened Islam to cancer, a virus, a Satanic faith. (As a footnote, it should also be noted, to further corroborate Glenn Greenwald’s piece on how elements of the “bomb Iran” crowd are suddenly very outspoken in their concern for “the Iranian people,” that one of the very founders of the FDI itself, Joshua Muravchik, is the author of a 19 November 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times titled, “Bomb Iran,” whose lead sentence is: “WE MUST bomb Iran”.)
Speaking on a Farsi radio station in Los Angeles (”Tehrangeles”), Schuh tells us, Corsi revealed that he had previously worked for the U.S. government:
“When I was a young man I was an expert in antiterrorism and political violence. I had a top secret clearance when I was in universities and I worked to assist the State Department and the government.” Corsi’s publisher, Cumberland House, states in his biography that Corsi’s top secret clearance came from the government agency US Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID has often served as a conduit for American covert operations funding, under humanitarian auspices.
Corsi, according to Schuh, also aided Senator Rick Santorum in drafting the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would eventually provide up to $50 million to NGOs working to support democratic change along the lines of the various coloured revolutions of eastern Europe, a projection of “soft power” that has now become fashionable in Washington. In Section 402 of the Act, we read:
(1) IN GENERAL- The President is authorized to provide financial and political assistance (including the award of grants) to foreign and domestic individuals, organizations, and entities that support democracy and the promotion of democracy in Iran. Such assistance may include the award of grants to eligible independent pro-democracy radio and television broadcasting organizations that broadcast into Iran.
and
(e) (1) contacts should be expanded with opposition groups in Iran [that support democratic governance, equality of women, equal opportunity, freedom of the press, etc.]
The language is interesting: “contacts should be expanded,” suggesting the reality of already existing contacts.
The “soft power” strategy is well complemented by attempts to “genetically modify” youth movements and NGOs working for democratic causes, as Jack Bratich explains. Speaking of the State Department’s Jared Cohen, who figured in the recent Twitter protests, The New York Times stated in an article on 16 June 2009, “Washington Taps Into a Potent New Force in Diplomacy,” that Cohen “has been working with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for diplomatic initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere.” Bratich also speaks about the work of Jared Cohen and,
“his role as press contact for the Alliance of Youth Movements. Launched in late 2008 with a Summit in NYC, the AYM gathered together an ensemble of media corporations, Obama consultants, social network entrepreneurs, and youth organizations, under the auspices of the State Department. Representatives came from Media Old (MTV, NBC, CNN) and New (Google and especially Facebook). The AYM produced a Field Manual and a series of How-to videos (How to Create a Grassroots Movement Using Social-Networking Sites, How to Smart Mob, How to Circumvent an Internet Proxy). The goal was to have youth leaders from around the world learn, share and discuss how to build powerful grassroots movements.”
Bratich’s point about the metaphorical genetic modification of these movements, the way messages are seeded and diffused, is quite interesting for explaining the kinds of hybrids that can crop up, neither springing up entirely from below, nor simply the creation of exogenous sources. Instead, we are seeing a decentralized distribution of messages, a crowd sourcing of regime change, in what is perhaps the most sophisticated and novel form of intervention to date.
More from and about Jared Cohen is in this video from MSNBC:
Again, my contention is not that the CIA or any other branch of the U.S. government has created Iranian discontent and marshaled Iranian youths to risk their lives protesting during a brutal crackdown, but that it would be sheer folly, if one looks at the events with “national security” logic, for the U.S. and others to not want to influence events and not to have operatives in place. Brent Snowcroft recently summarized this same view in an interview with Al Jazeera:
President Obama, the master of calculated ambiguity in speech, perhaps put it best when he said, “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling – the U.S. president meddling in Iranian elections”. To not be seen is not disavowing interference, it is merely another way of saying that it is necessary to work covertly, and then he narrows it further: it’s most important for the U.S. president to not be seen as meddling. Do we see him meddling?
[Thanks to Daniel McAdams, "Who Put the 'Green' in the Green Revolution?" LRC Blog, 19 June 2009; and, Rebel Reports, "Brent Snowcroft: U.S. has Spies on the Ground in Iran," 24 June 2009 -- both were important sources of leads to resources used for this article.]
Source verification of digital information has risen to prominence with the Iranian election protests that have been ongoing since Saturday, 13 June, 2009. This does not just apply to alleged information distributed through social media, of course, as it also applies to mainstream media who, like the BBC, have been found to use doctored photos of protests showing a massive rally for Mir Hosein Mousavi that was actually a rally in support of the winning candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In an attempt to convince rapid readers who do not make time to fact check, or cannot check facts, it has become a habit for some who use Twitter to precede their tweet with the word, “CONFIRMED,” without any indication of how the information was confirmed, when, and by whom. “Citizen journalism” and civil society politics are both going to get damaged unless we take away some lessons from this conflict.
One of the recurring problems, having now spent some more time viewing YouTube and flickr streams for the Iranian protests, is that of verifying visual documentation. One can lie with images just as easily as one can lie with words and statistics, and there is no returning to the optimistic and naive positivism of the 19th Century when it comes to the then widely assumed veracity, accuracy, and verisimilitude of the mechanically produced image.
The latest example I have seen is of an apparently desperate effort to come up with some sort of evidence to support Mousavi’s still unproven claims of electoral fraud, now a week later. One YouTube video (below), which is usefully blurry and does not indicate time, location, or indicate who the person involved may be, tries to show a single person in a room marking some ballots, which could well have been facsimiles produced with a colour printer. This is supposed to show us that votes were fabricated, and, that the perpetrators were foolish enough to record themselves doing it and then even more foolish to lend their video to others. It does not show the ballots being stuffed in boxes, nor is their any evidence that this was recorded during the elections.
Keeping in mind that there is absolutely no fool proof mechanism for averting any doubts about the credibility of one’s video, especially when using digital media and some wonderful special effects packages that anyone can master — see this video…
there are some basic steps that any person can take to boost the credibility of a video, especially when the video is meant to document an event of critical importance with sharp disputation concerning the numbers of protesters, their location, and so forth. If too many doubts accumulate, then the authorities, and the mainstream media, can begin to poke holes into any claim of a mass movement taking shape on the streets. In that spirit, let me offer some suggestions for your consideration, and please feel free to add, detract, and amend, in your comments below.
1. AUTHENTICATE THE DATE/TIME OF YOUR PHOTO/VIDEO. Activist photo and video developed to document and support a protest movement does not need to be pretty or experimental — so do not be shy of having your video or photo camera impose its date stamp and time counter on the image. In video, leaving the time counter running is very important as it can be used as evidence of when a video was edited, and how much was left out. Date stamps can be altered in-camera of course, so I would also recommend that one learn a lesson from hostage takers and kidnappers: show a close up of the masthead, date, and main headline of a leading local newspaper, and then zoom out slowly to show the subject of your video — let’s say it is a protest march.
One of the main problems with the Tehran protest videos, and the mainstream media have been quick to point this out repeatedly, is that one does not know for certain on which day a video was taken, and the difference can between the events of one day and the next can be of critical importance. Some Middle Eastern journalists have been quick to analyze protest photographs and found in some cases that pre-election rally photographs were being recycled and used to show evidence of support for Mousavi’s post-election protests.
2. THE WEATHER. As has already been done with videos on YouTube, concerning the especially momentous events of this very day in Tehran, some have said “it is raining in Tehran, your video shows sunny skies”. To further authenticate the date that a video was taken, especially when the video is distributed online (which affords for additional documentary evidence), provide a link to a weather service that indicates the weather conditions for that location on that day.
3. THE SURROUNDINGS. A video showing people at eye level, rushing past, while panning the camera, obscures the location of the event being recorded. Slow down. Get an unusual or well known landmark that can be associated with that location, within the frame of your image. Even better is visual information on features of the surroundings that can be used to attest to time and place (garbage that has not yet been picked up, broken street lamps, etc.). You want people to know that your video was taken on X Street in Y City (on Z Day), so they cannot claim it is taken from somewhere else, perhaps more obscure and less politically relevant location.
4. TAKE IT EASY! The camera is not meant to be an extension of your flickering eye movements, accompanying your eyes in whichever direction they move. In other words, do not use your camera to look. Too many videos are out there that show a rapid sweeping from side to side, even up and down, blurring and obscuring everything, and revealing little to nothing. Pause and gain control. Keep the camera study, and do not think that your eye must remain glued to the viewfinder at all times.
5. GETTING A VIEW OF THE SIZE OF A DEMONSTRATION. One of the first things that will be disputed is how many people came out to protest, where the quantity can then be assigned with a qualitative assessment: “So few people, it must be that they are losing support or have lost credibility”. Being able to convincingly show how many people are at a protest march can involve incredible leg work. Here are a number of options, and the more of these that you can follow the better (and note that some apply to video only):
(a) Get to a high location, like the roof of a building, or the top of a hill. First, try to see if you can fit everyone within a single frame, the whole mass. Second, position your camera at the front of the march, hold it steady, and do not move until the end of the march passes by. This allows reporters and others to do a much more accurate headcount. Let others edit the footage for the purpose of fitting it into a news slot or whatever, but do not stop recording at any point, and do not edit the footage that you supply to news media.
(b) If using a video camera, at street level, get to either the very front or the very back of the march, and slowly walk the entire length of the march with your camera facing the protesters. I prefer to do things the harder way, which can be a real physical struggle, and that is to start from the back and walk to the front: that way only the backs of the heads of the protesters are recorded, which makes it more difficult for the authorities to identify people than when you get them full face. If using a photo camera, get segments of the march, and use those at the back of the segment in one photo for the front of the segment of the next photo, so that some sort of seamless continuity can be reconstructed. If using a cell phone video camera, you will likely not have enough storage space to follow this option, therefore try (a) above.
If anyone can think of other ideas to add, or would correct or amend what is presented above, or even argue that some of the options above should not be used, please provide feedback below.
Which Revolution?
If the headlines had spoken of a “Twitter revolution in Canada,” a North American society with very widespread broadband Internet access, and almost complete Internet penetration, and one of the highest rates of personal computer ownership, one would have still needed to be very skeptical: 74% of Canadians surveyed have never even heard of Twitter, and only 1.45% of Canadians actually use Twitter, most of those being young, professionals, or in universities — as an active Canadian Twitter user, I am part of a minuscule minority (”74% of Canadians unaware of Twitter: online survey,” CBC News, 11 June 2009). The only Twitter revolution there could be in such a context then, is for anyone beyond that minority to actually use it — let alone challenge or transform an entire political system based on its use. That is not just true of Canada either: according to a study done by the Harvard Business School, only 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of Twitter content (”10% of Twitter users generate over 90% of content, study finds,” CBC News, 5 June 2009). A real Twitter revolution would be one that transcends the hype and Twitter self-promotion and sees most users generating the content.
While some, like Clay Shirky, will proclaim regarding this so-called “Twitter revolution in Iran,” that “this is it, this is the big one” (thanks to Anthropology.net) the “it” and the “one” are what are most in doubt. Yet it is doubt that is most absent from the analyses that have been hastily proffered — and when skepticism is absent from analysis, what are we left with? Hype, promotional propaganda, wishful thinking — a rush to the headline-grabbing punchline. Shirky thinks the whole world is watching, and he may be right, but he is wrong about Twitter and other social media.
This is indeed a “revolution”…but it’s for Twitter, this entity whose very existence resembles the classic story of the start up from the last dot com bust of the late 1990s, a “Bubble 2.0″ firm operating in a recession no less, without ever producing a business plan, and yet getting $20 million here and $30 million there in financing (see this, this, this, and that). Twitter may be as irrelevant to Iran as it is good for the promotion of Twitter itself, and for the self-flattery of some ardent Twitter users who believe that their tweets and their green-tinted avatars will change the world, or at least Iran. The revolution will not only be tweeted, it will be fast and easy, and it will be led by Americans themselves, “for Iran”.
As part of my preparation for this article, I not only actively followed and participated in three of the Iranian election streams on Twitter, from 13 June (the day after Iran’s elections) to this morning, 17 June, I also collected a sample of 1,280 tweets, and skimmed all of the tweets about the Iranian election starting from 13 June. Among the statements praising Twitter, and the ways of using Twitter to “show support for the Iranian people”, I have collected these as representative examples:
- RT Huffington Post: “Iran’s Revolution Will Be Twittered (and Blogged and YouTubed and…)”
- The revolution will be tweeted
- WOW, Twitter is awesome!!!
- Yep Twitter Owns! #cnnfail #iranelection
- astounding what twitter has done with #iranelection
- thinks Twitter’s role in the #IranElection could be historical
- thankyou twitter
- We’re getting more news from social media than from traditional media. Social intelligence progress!
- facinating [sic] how twitter brings real time accounts of events
- It is pretty easy being green. Turn Your Twitter Avatar Green To Show Solidarity with People of Iran
- My Twitter photo has gone GREEN in support of the freedom revolution of #IranElection
None of the Twitter users who made those statements are among even the allegedly Iranian Twitter users, and all except for one locate themselves in the U.S., the other in Canada.
Whose Revolution?
Yet, some would have us believe that there is a “Twitter revolution” going on in Iran, when there is no such thing. Not only that, what is being boasted about the power of Twitter is almost entirely false. What there is instead is a rush to the finish line, a predetermined conclusion to immediately thank and praise Twitter in the context of Iran’s street protests.
How representative are Iran’s Twitter revolutionaries? In actual fact, the only allegedly Iranian Twitter users who have been identified by other Twitter users as tweeting about the Iranian protests, are fewer than 45 (see one list here), most of whose locations cannot be confirmed and almost all of whom post only in English. Yet, one can get as many as 2,500 updates in a single minute, on one stream alone (#iranelection), and most of that repetitive and uninformative material is not being posted by anyone except for a huge mass of American Twitter users. In total, only a third of Iranians even have Internet access (we saw in the Canadian case that Internet access does not translate into Twitter use) and, very interestingly, the youth who are most associated with the protests and with Twitter use, consist of 18-to-24-year-olds who in fact comprise “the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups” (poll).
The Associated Press has produced a similar analysis, noting that in Iran, “Internet usage is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the youth and city-dwellers — meaning Twitter and other networks are used mostly by the young and liberal — and may overemphasize their numbers while ignoring more-conservative political sentiments among the non-connected.” Those interviewed by AP say that the Twitter hype is creating an illusion that Tehran is witnessing another revolution, or that Twitter even matters for Iranians. (See “Tweeting Iran: Elex news in 140 characters or less,” by Rebecca Santana, Associated Press, 15 June 2009.)
So in this Twitter revolution, Twitter is not representative of Internet users, Internet use is not representative of a wider population, the youth are not representative of the youth, and the Iranians may not even be Iranian. Fantastic indeed, this power of “social media”.
What Are the “Revolutionaries” Saying?
“Where is my vote?” I am not sure where the votes of the disgruntled losers of the Iranian election are, but I doubt that they are in Twitter. Perhaps this view is mistaken, perhaps the way they recast their ballot is through Twitter, and one would think that the pretty young females with makeup and jewelry cast their real ballots when they held up signs in Tehran, in English, for foreign news photographers.
What is even less clear is whether they are saying anything much in Twitter. Some journalists think they see a “new stage in the evolution of social media,” in the form of the “use of Twitter in Iran” (largely mistaking Twitter for Iran with in Iran), and even claim that “information is flooding out of the country — on Twitter” (see “Tweets from Tehran: The use of Twitter in Iran is a new stage in the evolution of social media,” by Ashley Terry, Global NewsJune 15, 2009). The question we should ask ourselves is: what information and what is the nature of this “flood”?
Personally, I have seen very little in the way of actual events being reported, and when they are, they are retweeted (repeated) hundreds of times over for almost an entire day. There is enormous volume, and little content. Hanson Hosein, director of digital media at the University of Washington, wrote “I’m having a hard time filtering through #iranelection, beyond the re-tweets and second-hand information passed around by Twitterers outside the country….We can’t take [tweets] at face value. It can be quite dangerous. We should be doing as much fact-checking as possible” (source). Michael Crowley also wrote, “One thing that really bothers me about these twitters and first-hand accounts posted on blogs is that there’s no way to verify them; I’ve seen several that either seemed suspect or turned out to be false” (source). Similarly, another blogger observed that, “If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn’t, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn’t have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all” (source).
One of the most common retweets I read, over a two-day period, was this one, sometimes with minor modifications:
“RT From Iran: CONFIRMED!! Army moving into Tehran against protesters! PLZ RT! URGENT!”
In fact, there was no army “move against” the protesters, not at the time, not before it, not even right after it. Some of the tweets seemed designed to deliberately spread misinformation, such as:
military is rumoured to refusing orders to shoot
and
2 million in the streets
and
@VOA claims 5000 Lebanese Hezbollah Milita h/b brought down to Iran to help control the situation #iranelection [that particular Twitter account, remains entirely blank in actual fact]
and
students being thrown from university building by police
and
IRAN: CONFIRMING 10~15 dead at dorms last night! Floors are covered w/ blood!!! (http://twitter.com/sissyto4 location: USA)
and
I have heard here that there may be a national strike in Iran on Tuesday. (said a New York twitter user)
Not only does Twitter allow Americans to engage in participant voyeurism, it allows them to create the “news” about Iran for Iranians themselves, and apparently making it up as they go along. Indeed, anyone can be an Iranian in Twitter, and in fact all are being encouraged to “become” Iranian as in this other vastly over-repeated tweet:
RT help protect Iranian tweeters by changing your timezone to GMT+3:30 and location to Tehran
In addition, having urged all to do as above, there is a further effort to mask the identity of alleged Iranian Twitter users:
When re-tweeting sources from Iran please delete handler name. Type RT SOURCE from Iran #iranelection #gr88 VERY IMPORTANT!!!! Pls RT
The problem as we see is that when everybody is in Iran, nobody is in Iran.
Social Media Are Better Than…?
The last point raises the issue of how are we to value the “information” provided by this “Twitter revolt”. The first problem is to get over short attention spans — this is not the first “Twitter revolt” as some in Twitter suggest. The latest, previous revolt was in Moldova, and I personally followed very closely the Greek riots through Twitter and many other media. Indeed, the #griots stream is still active, and when it was especially active in December of 2008, it featured countless links to independent media, loaded with photographs and videos, and many if not most of the tweets were in Greek — it was a Greek event, generated for Greeks and to be consumed by Greeks. Thus previously I have not had the reason for criticizing Twitter as I do now.
There is virtually no accountability or transparency evident in this now almost mythical “Iranian Twitter Revolution,” as we do not know who is where and why they are saying what they do. It is not as easy to get away with truth-creation in the mainstream media, especially when reporting from conflict zones: as has happened many times in the past, untruthful reporters claiming to be filing stories from the war zone have been unmasked by others as being nowhere in sight, or, if there, as never leaving their hotels. We cannot do that with Twitter. One Twitter user pleaded, “don’t retweet anything until it’s confirmed, spreading rumors will do more harm than good #iranelection” — but then, how is it confirmed? Propaganda journalism often gets unmasked; in Twitter, propaganda gets retweeted and thus remasked.
Not only is Twitter “reporting” not more credible than the mainstream media, it is also vastly less informative. On a simple quantitative scale: add up everything that is actually reported as “news” in #iranelection, whether true or not, confirmed or not, and compare it side by side with any one article from the major wire services. I would venture that half of any one article for the day contains more information than all of the day’s tweets combined. As if to confirm the relationship, many of the tweets themselves link to mainstream media sources.
As for “social media” providing egalitarian access and voice for everyone, what is most immediately apparent from #iranelection in Twitter is the drive to silence some voices: “all users IGNORE all post except from reliable sources,” said one. How do you know a source is “reliable” in Twitter? “I’m really following this closely. Fascinating watching the protests unfold” — but you are not actually watching the protests. You are entertaining an illusion in your mind that is generated by the tweets.
A Revolution in the American Fantasy
It may be wrong to single out Americans here, since there is every likelihood, given the current geopolitical context, that Israeli Twitter users (among the heaviest Twitter users one can find) have a vested interest in manipulating the discussion to serve the ends of the Israeli state, as do many Americans. One thing to do is to try to foment a division between Iran and Hezbollah, thus one posted: “large number of armed forces are lebanese/arab hired to beat down the brave iranians” — completely without substance. Another Twitter user I spoke to chose to quote the Talmud to the Iranian protesters. Interestingly, the Jerusalem Post was immediately “aware” of three “Iranian” bloggers (who post only in English), almost as soon as they joined, claiming without support that their Twitter feeds were from Iran (see here and here).
That the U.S. government has an active interest in the unfolding of the “Twitter revolution” for Iran, is an established fact. The U.S. State Department intervened to ask Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance break so as to not interrupt tweets about Iran — “Ian Kelly, a state department spokesman, told reporters at a briefing that he had recognized over the weekend the importance of social media ‘as a vital tool for citizens’ empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out’. He said: ‘It was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy – spreading the word about what was going on’” (see “US urges Twitter to delay service break,” by Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, 17 June 2009, and “U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran,” Reuters, 16 June 2009). What the U.S. State Department is also doing, of course, is reinforcing the unproven claim that this is important to Iran, while careful not to specify whose citizens are being empowered, whose word is being spread, and “out” from where. At the same time, the Obama regime claims that it is not meddling in Iranian affaris.
As if to close the feedback loop, some Twitter users directed messages at Obama’s own Twitter account, urging him to wear a green tie “in solidarity with the Iranian people”. It is interesting solidarity, given that no one has been able to show that Ahmadinejad actually lost the election, given that the entire premise for the protest is that if he won, then it must be a fraud. Not exactly top-notch analysis. (See instead, “Ahmadinejad won. Get over it,” by Lynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Politico, 15 June 2009.)
To further close the loop between “independent” Twitter users and the American state and its foreign policy aims, instructions have been provided on how to conduct “cyberwar” against Iranian websites (source). Others try to forge an ideological link between the Iranian protesters and Twitter’s American Republicans: some American Twitter conservatives inserted their #tcot tag when addressing #iranelection. Others proclaim the following:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.-Thomas Jefferson #iranelection
Yes we care about people outside America. It’s just sometimes hard to show when the leaders of other countries keep us apart.
Yet none of these people cared about democracy when another of Egypt’s fraudulent elections took place, seeing the arrest and torture and sometimes the murder of opposition activists. In that case, a dictator favourable to American and Israeli interests is being propped up, and “we” dutifully remain indifferent. The same indifference is likely to be shown for the upcoming Afghan elections, when perhaps once again multiple voting will occur.
Glenn Greenwald put the situation best, and with far more discernment and perspicacity than any cheerleading Shirky, when he writes in “The ‘Bomb Iran’ contingent’s newfound concern for The Iranian People” (Salon, 16 June 2009:
Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country — actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz entitled “The Case for Bombing Iran,” and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he “hopes and prays” that the U.S. “bombs the Iranians.” John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol — with typical prescience — hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.
While May was one of the “quieter” months on this blog, with a much lower than usual number of posts, and a reduction in the number of visitors (slightly more than 17,000 for the month), it was nonetheless one of my overall favourite months in terms of what was actually posted. I will not do a “top ten posts” as in previous months, given that there were only 18 in total. The most viewed articles, not including those from email subscribers, were as follows:
1. Whitewashing a U.S. War Crime in Afghanistan: The Trial of Don Ayala, “Human Terrain” Mercenary (1,090 views)
2. Open Anthropology Cooperative (735 views)
3. No Time in Jail for a U.S. War Criminal: A Mercenary Gets Away with Murdering a Detainee in Afghanistan (643 views)
4. On the Militarization of Anthropology: Report #1 from the CASCA-AES Conference in Vancouver (533 views)
5. The War Criminals’ Roundup: Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Israel (489 views)
My personal favourites were quite different from those of viewers. They include:
Other sites have been presenting an excellent range of reports and other resources concerning the ongoing Amazonian indigenous conflict with the government of Peruvian President Alan García who has called for “order, energy, action” against the forces of “irrationality” that will bring Peru to a “backward, primitive state,” calling the indigenous protesters “pseudo-natives” and their representatives, “pseudo-leaders”. Now reports are emerging that as many as 250 Amazonian Indians have been killed by the Peruvian state in this conflict, in an apparent demonstration of the order, civility, and rationality of the progressive state. Eyewitnesses are also saying that, in an attempt to under report the number of those killed by the state, security forces have been dumping the bodies of dead Indians from helicopters into the Marañon and Utcubamba Rivers, while other bodies are showing up at morgues burned beyond recognition, and over 150 protesters continue to be detained, in some cases in unknown locations (see more here). On 09 May 2009 the Peruvian government imposed a state of siege on the Amazon provinces of Bagua and Utcubamba, suspending all constitutionally-protected liberties.
Q’orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in The New World, has also entered the fray, on the side of the indigenous protesters. She also spoke on Democracy Now! (here and here). (See Kilcher’s blog on the situation, and her interview in English on her arrival in Peru.) Kilcher has also agreed to serve as the foreign representative of Peru’s AIDESEP.
Otherwise, we should consider how the international media is now focusing on events in Iran, and totally ignoring what is happening in Peru, as if Peruvian “democracy” were more real than Iran’s and thus “safer”. Are Peru’s Amazonian Indians really less deserving than Iranians, inferior, not as important?
For more information, see the following sites:
- Amazon Watch
- Intercontinental Cry
- Flickr: Peru — Amazonian Indigenous Crisis (Ben Powless’ photo stream)
- NACLA: Blood at the Blockade – Peru’s Indigenous Uprising
- Peruanista blog
- Ray Beckerman’s Links: The Struggle of the Indigenous People of the Amazon Rainforest in Peru to preserve the precious rainforest and their way of life
Action resources:
I know I am not the only one who misses the verbal lashes of The Watchman (Wayne Hade of Trinidad, a former police constable) and I thank Guanaguanare very much for taking the time to produce a written transcription of this calypso, as follows below the video. Of course trinidesi also deserves many thanks for his salvage videography. I was living in Trinidad and watching this calypso during Dimanche Gras in 1992, and my memories of Watchman have not faded.
This calypso is so packed with ideas, insights, and historical themes, that it shows Watchman’s mastery for combining them together into one fist. More will follow at the very bottom of the post.
Don’t tell me ’bout no big ship or small boat
Or who sink or who float
‘Cause as man me eh really care
About no Pinta or Nina or if yuh grandfather
swim the Nile to reach over here.
Once we building a region
Dem things shouldn’t matter again
But if you want my opinion
No bones, let me tell yuh plain.
We, West Indians are often said to be
Our very own worst enemy
Though we have a common history
Yet everybody bad talks everybody
They say Trinidadians lazy and foolish
And Guyanese is thief and pickpocket
Yuh can’t talk sense with a Jamaican
And never ever bend in front a Bajan
And every little rock have its own dollar
But some not even good for toilet paper
So if we cannot integrate, well then I regret
That it is clear that none ah we ent arrive as yet.Don’t tell me ’bout no white man or Indian, Chinese or African
‘Cause as man those with eyes can see
All the races and cultures and mixtures of colours
That exist in everybody
Once we building a region
Dem things shouldn’t matter again
But if you want my opinion
No bones, let me tell yuh plain
Our people are seen as exotic
Just because of their ethnic mix
But ah hear that we in de region
Opposing any integration
They say that the Negroes, they have a plan
To impose douglarisation
So they start to lock their women indoors
And searching all dey cupboards and then dey ‘drawers’
Is alright to mix with Chinese or white
But too much ah black blood does make you blight
So if the colour of yuh skin make you a reject
Then it is clear that non ah we ent arrive as yet.Don’t tell me ’bout the raping of woman and the exploitation
‘Cause as man, it does get me vex
To hear ’bout planters and masters
And how we grandmothers were abused
When they wanted sex
Once we building a region
Dem things shouldn’t matter again
But if yuh want my opinion
No bones, let me tell yuh plain
Our women are always said to be
Our very most precious commodity
But when tourism not doing well
Is the women, the West Indian men does sell
Every little island has its sea and sand
So them tourist could get a lovely tan
But when a cruise ship land on we shores
The first thing the men ask,
“Where are the whores?”
I think that it’s high time we take a stand
When I say ‘take a stand’, don’t misunderstand
Once the women have a ‘For Sale’ sign on their neck
Then it is clear that non ah we ent arrive as yet.For the dependent people who can’t see that independence cannot come independently:
Don’t tell me bout no slaveship and bondage and no Middle Passage
‘Cause as man, I know my history
How the white French and Spanish and then the British
Exploit us since slavery
Once we building a region
Dem things shouldn’t matter again
But if you want my opinion
No bones, let me tell you plain
Our history will teach us that Haitians
Fought the French for their liberation
But now the blacks in their own army
Forcing them to turn refugee
And over in Jamaica they’ll criticise
Apartheid in South Africa
Yet they does shoot down one another
For two white men named Manley and Seaga
Stalin should stop begging oppressors
Bush and Reagan could never be our saviours
If we could only shake ourselves from their grasp
Is only then that all ah we will arrive at last.
Let me just list the themes I spot in this calypso, some of which are particular to the Caribbean colonization experience, and others which speak to more global themes of colonialism, decolonization, and resistance.
The first theme is really the title of the song itself, which satirically derives its local meaning from Trinidad’s annual “Arrival Day” celebrations that commemorate the arrival of indentured labourers from India, and is usually an occasion for protesting government discrimination in funding cultural events and media indifference to Indo-Trinidadian history. Other Caribbean nations have arrival days as well, such as Garifuna Arrival Day in Belize. Arrival has a way, for Watchman and others, of dislocating the Trinidadian, planting memory on a distant shore, providing little conscious articulation of a localized identity.
The second theme is not that history does not matter, but that West Indians should not feel trapped by that history, perennially forced to reenact it, imprisoned by the contours of the given.
The third theme is the struggle to achieve regional integration among the former colonies of the Caribbean, some of which actually collectively formed an independent federal nation for a short time (1958-1962), known as the Federation of the West Indies. Watchman decries the parochialism that substitutes for a localism that would see the Caribbean as a sea that unites, rather than divides, returning integration to an indigenous foundation. The problem, as he explains, is that there are too many chiefs and too much inter-island rivalry, also a product of colonial divide and rule. Arrival means reencountering one another.
The fourth theme has to do with another legacy of colonial divide and rule: racial division. Ironically, as he points out, all West Indians, divided among themselves, are collectively seen as Other from the outside, as exotic. The greatest racial stigma that survives, Watchman sings, is that of blackness — mixture with any other group is accepted except for that one. Here he makes a passing reference to Indo-Trinidadian ethnic politicians who complained about “douglarisation,” a supposed desire by the Afro-Trinidadian led ruling party to mix Africans and East Indians (a dougla is a mix of the two).
The fifth theme has to do with the control and objectification of women. He complains about stoking memories of what slavery did to women, only to conveniently forget it and market the region’s women as a sexual attraction to support the tourism industry. Incidentally, he is not at all far off on this: I still recall a prominent state tourism manager in Trinidad, appointed by an African-led ruling party, proclaiming the inescapable requirement to promote Trinidad as a place of sun, sand, and sex. That manager is a woman, incidentally. Watchman warns that tourism is like a return of slavery or the American bases, which saw the growth of a local prostitution industry, something that continued to be cultivated to entertain visiting American sailors right up to the late 1990s, and maybe now still.
The sixth theme is the openly anti-imperialist one, specifically aimed at wresting control of the region from U.S. domination. At the same time, as Watchman exhorts local leaders, while condemning oppression abroad do not practice it at home.
(This post comes thanks to some leads on the James Petras website and Petras’ own essay on the Minerva Research Initiative, “Procuring Academics for Empire: The Pentagon Minerva Research Initiative“.)
In late December of 2008 I posted about the news of the first recipients of the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, but until I saw the reference in Petras’ own essay above, I had missed the article by Jeffrey Mervis in Science (30 January 2009, Vol. 323, No. 5914, pp. 576-577 — the article is behind a pay wall), “DOD Funds New Views on Conflict With Its First Minerva Grants“. In that article, Mervis indicates some of the background and intended research of the Minerva researchers, and I had promised that any further information about them would be posted here.
In total, 211 letters of interest from potential grantees were received for the Minerva Research Initiative. That may be “good news” when one considers the fact that there are tens of thousands of social scientists in the U.S. alone (and Minerva offers funding to foreign academics as well), a tiny minority that was impressed by what Mervis calls “a banquet for a field accustomed to living on scraps”. Indeed, one of the awards, for Nazli Choucri, a political scientist at MIT, is for $10.4 million over five years, enough money to buy her the status of academic Pharaoh.
Militarized Academia and Military Academics
While numerous academic critics have been careful to elaborate the ethical, scholarly, and political flaws of social science in the service of the national security state (with the SSRC hosting some of those essays in its Minerva discussions — the site no longer promises more articles in the future), with the argument being that we will essentially see the Sovietization of knowledge production with the Pentagon funding essentially what it wants to hear, it turns out that the relationship between the Pentagon and some researchers is closer than one may have expected. Mervis himself reports,
Many of the Minerva grantees already have ties to the defense establishment. One such grantee is David Matsumoto, a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University in California. His team will study the role of emotion in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements. A longtime collaborator with psychologist Paul Ekman in his work on microexpressions, Masumoto has helped train airport screeners for the Transportation Security Administration and has worked with several DOD agencies over the years on what he calls “behavior-detection techniques.”
On the other end of the career continuum is Jacob Shapiro, an assistant professor of public affairs at Princeton University. A former U.S. naval officer who was on active duty from 1998 to 2002, he completed his postdoc only 1 year ago and is lead researcher on a project to understand the economics of counterinsurgency movements around the world. “I entered the academic community because I felt there were not enough veterans in the academy, and that is not a good thing,” he says. “The military represents all of society and so should the academy.”
While one of the Minerva recipients, Mark Woodward (professor of religious studies at Arizona State University) asserts to Mervis that, “We’re not in the business of providing DOD with information that is tactical or operational. This is basic social science research. It’s not telling the government what it wants to hear” — clearly some of the applicants were in an advantageous position of already knowing how to say what the Pentagon would want to hear, and if it funds the research, let’s not be so demurely prudish about it, it’s because the Pentagon wants to hear it.
Using what Mervis reveals, the following is a rough categorization of the research being done by the Minerva recipients. Note that not all of the Minerva recipients were willing to talk with Science (one can understand that phrasing in more ways than one) — James Lindsay of the University of Texas at Austin barked: “I don’t owe you an explanation, and I have nothing to say about the program.” Ironically, the Pentagon promises open disclosure about the research it funds, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates committed himself to “complete openness” when selling the Minerva idea to American universities a year ago.
Research that Violates International Law: Stolen Iraqi Documents
As previously established, one of the funded research streams under Minera invites academics to participate in the ongoing violation of international law, by making use of millions of documents that U.S. forces illegally seized and expatriated from Iraq. Dr. Saad Eskander, Director General of the Iraqi National Library and Archives has made an international campaign of the return of the documentary property of Iraq, challenging the colonial efforts of Americans to write Iraq’s past. Eskander himself said that this is “undeniable cultural imperialism,” that violates Iraqi self-determination, international law, and academic research ethics. He wrote: “This latest Pentagon initiative is not only a continuation of its previous negative attitudes, but it also constitutes an escalation in its violation of international conventions on the safeguarding of cultural heritage of occupied territories, and goes against the principles of rule of law, self-determination, and human rights that are supposed to govern the so-called Free World….Records are fundamental for the construction of any nation’s collective historical memory. This is why the protection of documentary heritage has been enshrined in international legislation, notably the 1954 Hague Convention“. Ethically, the “Iraqi Perspectives” project of Minerva, which excludes Iraqis from developing their own perspectives on their own past, is also an ethical toilet — Eskander wrote: “Providing access to sanctioned US universities, US research centers and US scholars is gross discrimination against the undeniable owners of the seized records, the Iraqi People, who are the main subject of the records. By taking this ill-conceived action, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence agencies have disregarded important considerations, including the right to privacy, the appreciation of cultural distinctions, respect for the social sensitivities of another nation, and respect for the rights of the victims”.
The Minerva recipient doing research using these stolen documents is Patricia Lewis, a nuclear physicist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, who “will lead a team analyzing materials captured in 2003 that many social scientists say do not even belong in U.S. hands”. Given that there is no disputing that this research is both unethical and against international law, it is incumbent upon publishers, academic journals, and academic societies not to aid in the circulation of her research and the promotion of her academic career on such a foundation.
Counterinsurgency Against Palestinians
Eli Berman, whose name was not announced in the Pentagon’s news release of Minerva recipients last December, is a labour economist at the University of California at San Diego — according to Mervis, Berman is working with Jacob Shapiro “to understand what it takes for communities to counteract grass-roots movements such as Hamas or the Tamil Tigers”. His strategy is to engage in global surveillance and unspecified “experiments”: “Instead of just a summer salary and a graduate student, I’ll be able to do surveys and experiments around the world, partner with additional organizations, and bring on postdocs as well as several graduate students”.
Cyberspace Surveillance
Nazli Choucri, already mentioned, instead proposes another kind of surveillance, using cyberspace. Her interest is “to examine cyber international relationships. The team includes foreign policy and national intelligence heavyweights such as Harvard University’s Ashton Carter and Joseph Nye, as well as Internet and artificial intelligence gurus such as MIT’s David Clark”. Choucri told Mervis: “Our current theories are inadequate, and what we know now is anecdotal. In the cyberworld, anybody can play. We need a fuller vocabulary to understand cyberspace as an environment, as well as the conceptual tools to couple the virtual and the real worlds”.
Monitoring Immigrant Muslims in Europe
Mark Woodward, already mentioned, “is working with Muhammad Sani Umar of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, an expert on Islam in western Africa, and David Jacobson, a professor of global studies at ASU, who’ll examine Islamic communities in France and Germany. The project will combine ethnographic fieldwork at each location with global survey data on public attitudes toward Muslims. It will also feature a Web component to track the flow of ideas across the various Islamic communities and analyze their influence on daily life”.
Mervis tells us more about Woodward at the outset of his article:
Currently a visiting professor at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Woodward recalls a recent visit to a mosque nearly destroyed by an earthquake. A Saudi Arabian foundation that was financing its reconstruction also wanted to provide a teacher who would disseminate Wahabi-style Islam. Village elders politely but firmly declined the instructional assistance, Woodward says. “This is Wahabi colonialism,” said one local leader. “We don’t need Arabs to teach us Islam.” That reaction is why Woodward believes that “the forces of locality” will prevail in a clash of ideologies. “I think that attempts to establish hegemonic Islam are going to fail, through very creative uses of traditional rituals and language,” he says.
Conclusion
The Pentagon was supposed to announce a new call for Minerva applications this spring, even if the site that is used to post the call for applications does not seem to have posted anything thus far.
One of the important points that comes out of this is that research that can be judged as unethical need not involve information collection by the researcher (the use of stolen Iraqi documents involves no collection on the academic’s part), it need not involve fieldwork, and it may simply be devoted to analysis. This realization seems to have gained new attention by the American Anthropological Association’s Ad Hoc Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC). In a recent post on the AAA blog, Dr. Robert Albro, analyzes the ethical implications of various forms of research done by “anthropologists as analysts” as distinct from anthropologists as fieldworkers (as in the Human Terrain System). Albro asks in his concluding paragraph:
As analysts who are familiar with anthropology’s debates will tell you, their work is not “providing specific information on particular informants.” Nor are an analyst’s products usually classified so much as are some of the “sources.” Analyst shops readily recognize the virtues of transparency, and a dialogue on what transparency means in that context is worth having. An important part of such a discussion would be to track the implications of the need to distinguish ethically between disciplinary concepts and ethnographic content, between data collection and analysis, as separate jobs. Do we have the ethical language, in short, to address the ubiquitous, if mundane, community of analysts?
The wider problem is indeed with “our” ethical language, which has been minimalist and contingent, and often reduced to very precise research procedures rather than relating to social positions, global inequalities in power, and the historical role of anthropology as a discipline institutionalized in the world-system’s core academies. Put simply, no, “we” do not have such language. Such language can be drawn, however, from a variety of wells, including decolonizing and Native research methodologies (see Brown & Strega, and Tuhiwai Smith), African critiques within anthropology of the Eurocentric and colonial nature of anthropology, and even what is readily at hand concerning Minerva, such as Saad Eskander’s critique linked above, and that of Priya Satia. In other words, the need is to move beyond the procedural and strictly methodological, and move into the social and political, concerning anthropology and academia’s wider responsibility to others, the vast majority of whom are not powerful and privileged others. Specifically, regarding Minerva, yes the AAA needs to move beyond HTS debates and redress its continued silence on some of the glaring ethical and legal breaches of the program.
James Petras, in an essay that is being widely reproduced across the web (as it will be here as well), articulates a series of critical points regarding the nature of the Peruvian regime, the political history of President Alan García (profile) and his APRA party (which continues to use grand revolutionary symbols), and its service to the local Euro-Peruvian elites and international capital. As a Latin Americanist with a research records that spans numerous decades, it is worth paying close attention to Dr. Petras’ analysis.
I initially read this essay on Canadian Dimension.
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Peru: Blood Flows in the Amazon
James Petras | June 12th 2009
In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands. Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.
Alan García is no stranger to government-sponsored massacres. In June 1986, he ordered the military to bomb and shell prisons in the capital holding many hundreds of political prisoners protesting prison conditions – resulting in over 400 known victims. Later obscure mass graves revealed dozens more. This notorious massacre took place while García was hosting a gathering of the so-called ‘Socialist’ International in Lima. His political party, APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) a member of the ‘International’, was embarrassed by the public display of its ‘national-socialist’ proclivities, before hundreds of European Social Democrat functionaries. Charged with misappropriation of government funds and leaving office with an inflation rate of almost 8,000% in 1990, he agreed to support Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori in exchange for amnesty. When Fujimori imposed a dictatorship in 1992, García went into self-imposed exile in Colombia and later, France. He returned in 2001 when the statute of limitations on his corruption charges had expired and Fujimori was forced to resign amidst charges of running death squads and spying on his critics. García won the 2006 Presidential elections in a run-off against the pro-Indian nationalist candidate and former Army officer, Ollanta Humala, thanks to financial and media backing by Lima’s rightwing, ethnic European oligarchs and US overseas ‘AID’ agencies.
Back in power, García left no doubt about his political and economic agenda. In October 2007 he announced his strategy of placing foreign multi-national mining companies at the center of his economic ‘development’ program, while justifying the brutal displacement of small producers from communal lands and indigenous villages in the name of ‘modernization’.
García pushed through congressional legislation in line with the US-promoted ‘Free Trade Agreement of the Americas’ or ALCA. Peru was one of only three Latin American nations to support the US proposal. He opened Peru to the unprecedented plunder of its resources, labor, land and markets by the multinationals. In late 2007, García began to award huge tracts of traditional indigenous lands in the Amazon region for exploitation by foreign mining and energy multinationals. This was in violation of a 1969 International Labor Organization-brokered agreement obligating the Peruvian government to consult and negotiate with the indigenous inhabitants over exploitation of their lands and rivers. Under his ‘open door’ policy, the mining sector of the economy expanded rapidly and made huge profits from the record-high world commodity prices and the growing Asian (Chinese) demand for raw materials. The multinational corporations were attracted by Peru’s low corporate taxes and royalty payments and virtually free access to water and cheap government-subsidized electricity rates. The enforcement of environmental regulations was suspended in these ecologically fragile regions, leading to wide-spread contamination of the rivers, ground water, air and soil in the surrounding indigenous communities. Poisons from mining operations led to massive fish kills and rendered the water unfit for drinking. The operations decimated the tropical forests, undermining the livelihood of tens of thousands of villagers engaged in traditional artisan work and subsistence forest gathering and agricultural activities.
The profits of the mining bonanza go primarily to the overseas companies. The García regime distributes state revenues to his supporters among the financial and real estate speculators, luxury goods importers and political cronies in Lima’s enclosed upscale, heavily guarded neighborhoods and exclusive country-clubs. As the profit margins of the multinationals reached an incredible 50% and government revenues exceeded $1 billion US dollars, the indigenous communities lacked paved roads, safe water, basic health services and schools. Worse still, they experienced a rapid deterioration of their everyday lives as the influx of mining capital led to increased prices for basic food and medicine. Even the World Bank in its Annual Report for 2008 and the editors of the Financial Times of London urged the García regime to address the growing discontent and crisis among the indigenous communities. Delegations from the indigenous communities had traveled to Lima to try to establish a dialogue with the President in order to address the degradation of their lands and communities. The delegates were met with closed doors. García maintained that ‘progress and modernity come from the big investments by the multinationals…,(rather than) the poor peasants who haven’t a centavo to invest.’ He interpreted the appeals for peaceful dialogue as a sign of weakness among the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon and increased his grants of exploitation concessions to foreign MNCs even deeper into the Amazon. He cut off virtually all possibility for dialogue and compromise with the Indian communities.
The Amazonian Indian communities responded by forming the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP). They held public protests for over 7 weeks culminating in the blocking of two transnational highways. This enraged García, who referred to the protestors as ‘savages and barbarians’ and sent police and military units to suppress the mass action. What García failed to consider was the fact that a significant proportion of indigenous men in these villages had served as rmy conscripts, who fought in the 1995 war against Ecuador while others had been trained in local self-defense community organizations. These combat veterans were not intimidated by state terror and their resistance to the initial police attacks resulted in both police and Indian casualties. García then declared ‘war on the savages’ sending a heavy military force with helicopters and armored troops with orders to ‘shoot to kill’. AIDESEP activists report over one hundred deaths among the indigenous protestors and their families: Indians were murdered in the streets, in their homes and workplaces. The remains of many victims are believed to have been dumped in the ravines and rivers.
Conclusion
The Obama regime has predictably not issued a single word of concern or protest in the face of one of the worst massacres of Peruvian civilians in this decade – perpetrated by one of America’s closest remaining allies in Latin America. García, taking his talking points from the US Ambassador, accused Venezuela and Bolivia of having instigated the Indian ‘uprising’, quoting a letter of support from Bolivia’s President Evo Morales sent to an intercontinental conference of Indian communities held in Lima in May as ‘proof’. Martial law was declared and the entire Amazon region of Peru is being militarized. Meetings are banned and family members are forbidden from searching for their missing relatives.
Throughout Latin America, all the major Indian organizations have expressed their solidarity with the Peruvian indigenous movements. Within Peru, mass social movements, trade unions and human rights groups have organized a general strike on June 11. Fearing the spread of mass protests, El Commercio, the conservative Lima daily, cautioned García to adopt some conciliatory measures to avoid a generalized urban uprising. A one-day truce was declared on June 10, but the Indian organizations refused to end their blockade of the highways unless the García Government rescinds its illegal land grant decrees.
In the meantime, a strange silence hangs over the White House. Our usually garrulous President Obama, so adept at reciting platitudes about diversity and tolerance and praising peace and justice, cannot find a single phrase in his prepared script condemning the massacre of scores of indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon. When egregious violations of human rights are committed in Latin America by a US backed client-President following Washington’s formula of ‘free trade’, deregulation of environmental protections and hostility toward anti-imperialist countries (Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador), Obama favors complicity over condemnation.
‘Peruvian Indians are being driven to desperate measures to try and save their lands which have been stolen from them for five centuries.‘Their protests signal that the colonial era has finally drawn to a close. No longer are Amazon Indians prepared to put up with the illegal and brutal treatment which has been routine. That’s finished. This is the Amazon’s Tiananmen. If it finishes the same way, it will also end Peru’s international reputation.
‘Oil companies operating in Peru should suspend their operations until calm is restored and the Indians’ communal land rights are properly respected – only then can they negotiate as equals.’ — Stephen Corry, Director, Survival International, 8 June 2009
The Government of Peru, under the presidency of APRA’s Alan García, has taken the dangerous step of backing up its intentions to allow oil companies to occupy and devastate indigenous lands with fierce violence. Over the past few days, heavily armed police, decked out as storm troopers (they look almost identical worldwide), have gone to the Amazon to forcibly remove thousands of protesting indigenous people from a blockade they had mounted to protest and impede encroaching oil and natural gas exploration, logging, and the threat of large-scale agriculture. The protesters come from many indigenous groups, including Achuar, Arabela, Asháninka, Awajún, Huambisa, Kichwa, Matsigenka, Shawi and Wampis.
The government of García, with the support of the national Congress, decreed new laws in compliance with a U.S.-Peru trade free trade agreement. According to an AP report, García, who as a previous president had challenged international financial institutions, is now “a free-market champion who is opening vast tracts of jungle to oil exploration by companies including France’s Perenco SA, Spain’s Repsol-YPF and U.S.-based ConocoPhillips.” Survival International adds to that list Canada’s Petrolifera and Brazil’s Petrobras. According to Survival International, already 70% of the Peruvian Amazon has been auctioned off to transnational oil corporations.
At least 30 indigenous protesters have been killed, and the videos below demonstrate some of the excessive force used by the police. Undaunted and fighting back, indigenous fighters killed some 23 policemen (see the news report sympathetic to the police at the very bottom of this post), some having been allegedly abducted, disarmed, speared, and in some cases their throats were slit. Appealing to long-established Latin American racist imagery, President García has accused the indigenous protesters of “savagery” and “barbarity”.
In addition, García has called for the arrest of Segundo Alberto Pizango Chota, the leader of AIDESEP, an organization representing 350,000 indigenous people of 57 native Amazonian nations, comprising 1,350 communities and 16 different language groups. AIDESEP is a constituent member of COICA, a trans-national Amazonian indigenous federation. Pizango has taken refuge in the Embassy of Nicaragua in Lima, which has agreed to grant him political asylum (see Survival International for more).
I personally would like to make it explicit that I fully support any actions that the indigenous protesters themselves deem to be appropriate in resisting internal colonization and further expropriation. They have every right to defend their land and their communities, and as in Canada, and other imperial states running various occupation regimes, the state’s use of violence is indefensible and must be countered by all means available.
To support Peru’s Indians, and for more news, see Survival International, and especially:
Indian leader forced into exile as President calls protesters ‘savages’ (10 June 2009)
Oil companies ‘should withdraw’ as Peru ‘faces its Tiananmen’ (8 June 2009)
‘Dalai Lama of the rainforest’ condemns Peruvian violence (8 June 2009)
‘27 dead’ as blockade broken up by authorities (5 June 2009)
Please be advised that the videos below sometimes show very graphic scenes of violence and in some cases dead bodies. The three Spanish language news videos are from Peruvian television, the first two from Punto Final.
Unless I have lost count, and I may have, this is John Stanton’s 17th article on the Human Terrain System, with his previous ones available here at: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16.
US Army’s Human Terrain System Like Swine Flu: Get Near it and You’re Infected
by John Stanton
Sunday, 07 June, 2009
The US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) it is arguably the most poorly managed and misguided US Army program since the early design and testing years of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
A year and 17 articles later it is clear that not much has changed in HTS. It is still the same troublesome program it was in June 2008 and, perhaps, has gotten worse. “It’s really reached absurd new levels”, said a source.
More commentary recently received from the field in Iraq indicates that it’s SNAFU. One can only imagine the situation in Afghanistan.
A source said that waste and mismanagement is still the norm program-wide.
“It will never get worse than HTS. Those of us who resigned look pretty smart but worry about the safety of our colleagues. HTS is crashing and it’s only a matter of time before US Army G-2 pulls the plug, but only after their names are firmly linked to the downfall. It has gone far beyond Steve Fondacaro (program manager) and Montgomery McFate (senior social scientist) now”.
Another source had much more to say.
“You wouldn’t believe how low morale has sunk. Everyone [here] maybe with the exception of [one] true believer is on the verge of quitting. It’s surreal. I mean, we start off our daily meetings with shit like, ‘And so I talked to Building 48 [HTS headquarters] and they’re going to send us DA civilian name tags. And we should have an RM by August. And, oh, by the way, enjoy your Saturdays and Sundays on the FOB since you won’t get paid for them, or for air travel on weekends, or for 2/3 of your time on missions.
“Does anyone in this [HTS] program think that there is going to be anyone here by August or July? It’s like they want to shut it down. It really feels like they just waited until everyone transitioned [from private contractors] and then went full-throttle into fucking us over”.
Proofreaders Wanted in Kabul: $15K a Month
“People who until a week ago were really dedicated to this program and its mission – including some who had already weathered several previous pay cuts…now spend all their free time (of which we now have a lot) sending out their resumes and looking for other jobs. And by this I don’t just mean career contractors and retired military—folks who have gotten used to high salaries—but mostly social scientists who stuck it out because they wanted to be here doing the job.
But you can only kick a dog so many times before it turns mean and turns on you. I would be hard pressed to think of any other employer so loathed by its employees. True, there are a handful of people who are sitting around with their eyes closed and their hands over their ears, still hopeful that, in the whimsical words of one unnamed social scientist: ‘They obviously do not want the program to go under so I’m sure they will get their shit together by the end of June. I think they will get it done but they will continue to stumble for a bit.’ I wish I lived in that universe. Anyway, assuming the people who were smart enough to jump ship earlier on haven’t taken all the other jobs–and perhaps even then–you are going to see a massive exodus. This time, unless [there are] bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, financially-unconcerned masses, I doubt the program can weather it.”
With no qualified personnel in the marketplace, perhaps one person—with a computer and communications link–can handle the workload of an entire Human Terrain Team (HTT). How about sending 1,000 one-man HTT’s all over Afghanistan? Treat them as a distributed sensor network that gathers tactical intelligence. But isn’t that the MO of the CIA and SOCOM?
So it Goes
“Hi, I’m your one-man HTT, ready to paint the cultural picture for the brigade, M-F, 0900-1745. If you are calling outside of normal business hours, please be assured that your pressing need for cultural knowledge will be addressed the following day, unless it is a weekend, in which case you’ll have to wait until Monday.
The ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] is hiring proof-readers in Kabul for $15,000 a month. A legitimate 9 to 5 job and you get to go home at night. Not much of a contribution to the war effort but so it goes…”
John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com
The political economy of academia is one of the long-standing, if often muted, interests of this project. An event of direct relevance to that took place in my Department with the presentation of Dr. Gilles Gagné, a Professor in Sociology at Université Laval in Québec City. Dr. Gagné’s recent publications include: Le Canada français. Son temps, sa nature, son héritage (Quebec, Éditons Nota Bene, 2006); L’anti-libéralisme au Québec au 20e siècle (Montréal, Éditons Nota Bene, 2003); and Sociologie et valeurs. Quatorze penseurs québécois du XXe siècle (Montréal, Presses de L’Université de Montréal, 2003), co-authored with Jean-Philippe Warren. Professor Gagné currently holds a three-year SSHRC research grant entitled “Les fondements sociaux de la nouvelle identité québécoise et de son expression idéologique; analyse de l’appui à la souveraineté depuis 40 ans”.
Gilles Gagné
The well attended presentation took place during the afternoon of 18 February 2009 and was titled: “The Funding of Universities in Quebec and the Corruption of Education“. The abstract presented for the presentation read as follows:
Do Quebec universities need more money? When one looks at the pipeline through which the money is delivered, one is not necessarily eager to answer in the affirmative. Laval University is a good example of the Quebec university system. A case study examining the evolution of this university’s funding over the course of the last 40 years can, therefore, be seen to have a representative value. Rather than examining the evolution of university funding by looking at the sources out of which the money comes, this presentation will consider what the money looks like on its point of arrival. To do so, the presentation will begin with a reflection on how higher learning is shaped by the “conditions” of its funding and will end with a discussion of the sorts of social and political preferences expressed in and through these conditions.
Les universités québécoises ont besoin de plus d’argent? A voir la tuyauterie par où il s’écoule, je suis loin d’être disposé à joindre cette chorale. L’Université Laval est un bon échantillon de l’ensemble du système universitaire québécois. Une étude de cas portant sur l’évolution de son financement depuis 40 ans a, pour cette raison, un caractère représentatif. Plutôt que d’examiner l’évolution du financement des universités à partir des nombreuses sources de l’argent, il est proposé ici une heuristique consistant à observer son allure à son point de chute. L’exposé partira donc de la question de l’orientation des universités par les «conditionnalités» de son financement et proposera une interprétation des préférences sociétales qui s’y expriment.
“The Funding of Universities in Quebec and the Corruption of Education,” by Gilles Gagné: Notes
Dr. Gagné began by reminding us that the current mass consensus in Quebec, among university students, university administrations, and various faculty unions, is that the state should commit itself to “reinvesting in education”. (A note to readers: there are no private universities in Canada; while the provincial governments are in charge of education, it is also a fact that the federal government funds most of the research — see my posts on SSHRC here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Dr. Gagné’s challenge to us was to suggest that this mass consensus is misplacing its sentiments and is misled about its goals. He did this by first introducing us to the historical context that has shaped research funding for and within universities.
Americanization, Modernization, and the Restructuring of the University
After the end of World War II, the United States became conscious of itself as the “victorious power,” whose victory in the war hinged to an important extent on scientific innovation directed toward producing technology used for the war effort. Science came to be seen as strategically valuable. Science had been declared “the Endless Frontier,” in a famous report bearing that title: “Science: The Endless Frontier,” A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945. The U.S. won the war with science, and so government should fund it.
Starting in the early 1960s, with the policy recommendations of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which in 1961 was superceded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), then later drawing on the impetus of the Washington Consensus, there was to be an overhaul of education that focused on supporting economic growth. The university was to become a site for schooling the middle-class, to train the middle-class for jobs that would sustain economic growth. From that point onwards, the university acquired new status, not as a place for an aristocratic elite to pursue knowledge as an end in itself as it might have been in private universities, now the pursuit of knowledge as a public good (our universities are public universities after all), but rather the mission of the university was now to lead the professionalization of middle-class cadres. From then we see a 300% to 400% increase in student enrollments. The OECD, which became a vehicle for the modernization of the university, emphasized that universities had to adapt to “what was coming”. The battle to change the university became a battle to control it, as indeed state funding imposed conditionalities. With more students, more funding was needed and provided, and a new technocratic class was created within the university, separated from the rest of the university yet within the university.
So while we often proclaim “we need more money,” the question that Dr. Gagné poses is: Where is the money leading us? Economic policies, university budgets, and research ideologies combine to direct the university in which we currently work.
In Canada, as elsewhere, an American Fund Accounting model was adopted, which sorted out university funds into three separate categories:
(1) Unrestricted Funds (also known as Operating Funds);
(2) Restricted Funds (money given for a specific purpose); and,
(3) Capital Funds (to support building and infrastructure).
The restructuring of the university taking place in Canada today essentially involves taking money from the first category and placing it into the second, with only certain uses being favoured.
The restructuring of the university can also be seen with the new governance laws being proposed in Quebec which would have universities governed not by academics, but by outside administrators who have no ties to any given university. This is part of a campaign of neo-liberalism applied to the university, of converting a public good into what is a de facto private resource, managed by technocrats who have no connections to universities.
Three Universities in One: The Structure of Inequality
In effect, each university in Canada has the equivalent of three universities within it, three separate, differentially funded and empowered structures. The three universities are in a sense represented by their respective funding bodies, the three main ones that make up the “tri-council”: SSHRC, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council; NSERC, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and, CIHR, Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In Canada, 68% of Bachelors students are in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). As the number of students in SSH has gone up, the number of professors in SSH has gone down. At Laval, where Dr. Gagné is based, 42% of Laval’s professors teach in SSH, teaching 62% of all of Laval’s students, while producing 71% of the graduate degrees. What we seen then is heightened productivity among professors in the humanities and social sciences, compared to those in the natural sciences, and yet less research funding and support. Indeed, the proportion of research grants goes in the contrary direction, that is, in favour of the natural sciences, and related areas. Overall, almost $400,000 is spent for each student in Health related areas, compared to $18,000 for students in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Universities in Canada are not “underfunded,” argued Dr. Gagné, rather they are unevenly funded within. Students are valued differently, depending on their program — what does not matter, in the official calculus, is that most students are in SSH. Campaigns for more money, that do nothing to address this structure of inequality, simply seek greater funding for the inequalities. The Social Sciences and Humanities have been effectively downsized.
The “Corruption” of the University
When Dr. Gagné says “corruption” he means that in the Aristotelian sense. The corruption of the university involves pulling faculty out of teaching and putting them into the production of intellectual property that can be sold, having them engaged in consulting and working on contracts with private industry. Yet, Gagné informed us, Statistics Canada has found that such commercial endeavours by universities represent a net loss for universities.
In addition, the corruption of the university involves the corruption of the status of knowledge. Knowledge, rather than being viewed as a public good, is now privatized. The new motto of the new university ought to be, Gagné suggested with sarcasm: privatize or perish.
The corruption of the university also comes in the form of teaching, emphasizing a pedagogy that is little more than the mere transmission of information, and even automatic transmission, i.e. through e-learning. Teaching itself is corrupted in another way: by emphasizing research, as if this were the most important activity for a university, teaching is rendered secondary, as if it were easy. The undervaluing of teaching sees the greater number of courses being taught by graduate students and by colleagues paid far less, as contract faculty working part time.
Finally, we also witness the corruption of the university as a normative institution. If the university was at one time concerned with such values as truth, beauty, and justice, the emphasis is instead now on profitability and efficiency. Dr. Gagné ended by calling for principles of cultivated judgment to be revalued, not beholden to the bucks, and against the idea of the intellectual turned into a “professional”.
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I was not able to stay for most of the discussion that followed the presentation. However, I am told that a number of faculty and students asked questions, for which later Dr. Gagné sent some follow ups by email. If you read French, you will find a lot of valuable insights in his responses to the last question he was asked at the seminar, to which he responds below:
En gros, cette dernière question était la suivante: «Vous faites un tel tapage contre la recherche que nous, les étudiants de 2e et 3e cycle qui nous attendons à (ou qui espérons) consacrer notre vie à la recherche, nous nous sentons mal de savoir que nous ne serons pas tous professeurs ». Vous pourrez dire à l’étudiante que je regrette d’avoir donné l’impression dont elle faisait état poliment, mais très certainement à juste titre, alors qu’en «fait» je crois le contraire. D’abord, et pour utiliser contre moi-même un argument ad hominem, j’ai parfois le sentiment de ne faire pratiquement que cela, de «la» recherche, allant des exportations des pays développés au financement de Laval en passant par l’origine de la pensée systémique et par une douzaine d’autres sujets; j’ai aussi le sentiment que c’est la même chose pour les 40 ou 50 étudiants de 2e et 3e cycle que j’ai dirigés, de même que pour la dizaine que je dirige actuellement; et que c’est encore la même chose pour les 8 ou 10 thèses ou mémoires que je «juge» à chaque année; et j’ai surtout le sentiment que c’est en gros de cette manière que les choses se passent à l’Université depuis au moins deux siècles. Je vous demande donc de dire à l’étudiante qu’en dépit de ce que j’ai l’air de dire je suis en réalité favorable à la recherche, puisque c’est de la recherche (de la sienne propre ou de celle des autres professeurs) que tout enseignement universitaire tire son inspiration, ses matériaux ou sa substance (notamment au 2e et 3e cycle).
J’ai cependant voulu montrer que c’est justement «la recherche» qui avait servi de justification et de moyen principal à l’effort de prendre le contrôle de l’Université, et cela: 1) en la réifiant à titre de pratique séparée commandant en retour une séparation de principe de l’Université (universités de recherche et universités d’enseignement); 2) en soustrayant aux institutions universitaires l’argent publique pouvant être consacré à la recherche et en le transférant aux individus; 3) en soumettant ces individus à des cibles, à des priorités, à des préférences et à des intimations contre lesquelles la résistance est difficile, même quand les objectifs imposés sont «visiblement» obscurantistes; 4) en laissant ainsi de côté un enseignement universitaire appauvri, instrumentalisé, subordonné de loin à des choix normatifs présentés dès lors comme étrangers à la nature même du savoir.
Mais tout cela laisse encore de côté une présupposition qui devrait être abordée pour elle-même: Pourquoi faudrait-il présumer, comme on le fait dans ce qui précède, que le contrôle de l’Université (que ce soit par la recherche, ou par la recherche subventionnée, ou par la recherche subventionnée orientée, ou par la recherche subventionnée orientée vers les innovations techniques, ou par tout autre impératif) soit une mauvaise chose? Autrement dit: Au nom de quoi devrions-nous redouter le contrôle des pratiques universitaires par des puissances de la société qui se présentent à nous armées de «nécessités supérieures»? Autrement dit encore: Quelles «nécessités supérieures» de notre invention pourrions-nous opposer aux nécessités supérieures réelles, celles qui ont les moyens de leur politique?
Peu de chose, à mon avis, si ce n’est une très petite «idée» philosophique et quelques enseignements disparates tirés de l’expérience.
L’idée philosophique est vieille comme la philosophie et elle touche à la contradiction performative: la connaissance, dont nous sociologiques disons qu’elle est un moment de la pratique, un aspect de la vie sociale, ne peut cependant garder son statut dans la pratique qu’en s’y montrant autonome et indépendante. L’Université, c’est-à-dire l’institutionnalisation de cette indépendance du savoir (qui est pourtant impossible sub specie aeternitatis, voir les sociologues), est donc une médiation, un intermédiaire, un filtre, un tampon, un délai, une temporisation dont la consistance réelle sert d’abri à un effort sans lequel l’indépendance de la connaissance serait impossible even under the point of view of our own time. L’Université ne peut donc pas assujettir aujourd’hui la recherche à des puissances qui lui seraient extérieures sans abolir du même coup la valeur dont elle se réclame et qui fonde l’intérêt qu’on lui porte (de même que le statut qu’on lui accorde): l’indépendance du savoir à l’égard des powers that be.
Quant aux enseignements de l’expérience, ils semblent allés dans le même sens : on enlève beaucoup de vigueur aux universités (et on les rend inutiles) lorsque l’on attend d’elles qu’elles préparent l’homme nouveau soviétique, qu’elles revitalisent le centre-ville dans le quartier de la grande bibliothèque, qu’elles réécrivent l’épopée de la race aryenne, qu’elles fournissent des moyens stratégique à la guerre contre le communisme, qu’elles produisent de la valeur ajoutée au profit de l’Axe Chaudière-Appalaches ou qu’elles décapitent les hérétiques. En 1980, les Américains ont pris de grands moyens pour entraîner les universités dans la «guerre des patentes» (en français on dit aussi «brevets») et le Canada a suivi 15 ans plus tard. Un groupe d’hommes d’affaires spécialisés dans l’économie du savoir a écrit alors la politique qui est la nôtre (Les investissements publics dans la recherche universitaire: comment les faire fructifier) en partant de l’hypothèse que les Canadiens ne pourraient tirer de bénéfices de la recherche universitaire que si cette dernière contribuait directement à la compétitivité des entreprises canadiennes par le transfert de «propriété intellectuelle».
Les résultats de cette stratégie de contrôle commencent à arriver. Un think-thank néolibéral (Bruegel) a voulu prouver récemment que la stratégie américaine était la bonne et que le contrôle de la recherche universitaire produisait effectivement de meilleures universités. En cours de route, les auteurs ont été obligés de montrer aussi que, compte tenu de leur population, la Suisse et la Suède (par exemple) obtenaient deux fois plus de bonnes universités parmi les 500 meilleures (selon Shanghai) sur les 7000 qui existent, et cela pour un fraction de ce qu’il en coûtait aux Américains (Philippe Aghion et André Sapir, Why Reform Europe’s Universities?, Bruegel Policy Brief, no. 4, septembre 2007). Que faites vous lorsqu’une «quotation» technocratique destinée à conforter vos opérations vous donne tort? Vous dites que ce qui compte vraiment, ce sont les 50 meilleures universités (et non les 500 meilleures) et que la domination américaine à ce chapitre prouve que «plus de brevets» et «plus de qualité Shanghai» vont ensemble. (Bref, on mesure mal la mauvaise chose pour prouver une connerie et on se plante quand même!) C’est pour cela que votre fille sera bientôt sourde comme un pot. et la nôtre aussi.
Is it a surprise any more, that Paula Loyd should be resurrected for one more promotional tour for the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System? I am referring here specifically to the piece by Amy Yee, in the June 2009 issue of The Progressive, conveniently titled “A Friend Falls in Afghanistan” (thanks to a commentator on the previous related post for the notice). It is important to analyze these articles, especially now that we are seeing the propaganda go through some fine tuning, little adjustments made here and there, but with the same slices against critics of the Human Terrain System, and ultimately against Afghanistan. What also remains is the intent to make the story of Paula Loyd’s death into what is ostensibly, but deceptively, simply a story about a great person — except that no article, Yee’s included, has ever restricted itself to that basic and simple narrative. I do not doubt for a moment that to her friends she was an excellent person, nor do I think that she or anyone else “deserves” to die, and certainly not to die such a death. The death was to be expected, and the only good news is that overall only a tiny minority of all HTS employees have met with death. The bad news is that, in death, points are being scored for a military program in their name, obviously without the consent of the dead who are turned into gruesome political sock puppets. Contrasted with Montgomery McFate, the “senior social scientist” of the HTS, Paula Loyd would make for a perfect poster girl, and HTS knows that. No one can speak ill of Loyd, because she was wonderful, and she is dead, so critics lose both ways.
Let us look first at what is different about Yee’s attempt. First, the article is published in The Progressive, the first indication that this will not be a jingoistic sales pitch from a right wing perspective that unquestioningly justifies outright, unbridled war against all who would stand in the way of American domination. (Montgomery McFate herself, on her “I Luv a Man in Uniform” blog, wrote: “I’m a Democrat for fuck’s sake!” — so we know this angle already.) It manifests more adaptive tactics, because Obama, the new war president and imperialist-in-chief, has fashioned a liberal narrative to justify the same ends: American dominance (a phrase that he himself uses).
That a liberal narrative is used as a promotional lubricant, suited to the realignments that have occurred in Washington, is also evidenced within the piece itself. Paula Loyd, working for a counterinsurgency program and accompanying a military patrol, wearing a U.S. military uniform that identified her as the right kind of target for insurgents, is instead cast as a civilian and humanitarian. We are told — and this is not a new trick — that she was “unarmed” and then reminded that she was a “woman”. The two are meant to go together so as to suck on the trope of helpless innocence and thus amplify the brutality of her attacker, if not his bestiality: who would kill an unarmed woman? The Taliban would — chalk up another point for American propaganda against the monster insurgents. Yes, she was unarmed — and in the company of an armed military patrol, under the ineffective protection of an additional mercenary, Don Ayala. She was as unarmed as a crime boss in the company of armed body guards can be said to be unarmed. At the very least, she was as unarmed as those that U.S. and NATO forces bomb to bits without blinking and who are promptly declared to have been “human shields”.
The critical paragraph is this one, in my view, for tactfully advancing Obama’s call for a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan, retroactively applying it to Loyd, and for using a liberal narrative to justify imperialism:
“She thought it was our responsibility to rebuild that country,” Isabella [Yee's and Loyd's mutual friend] replied. “She hoped her new role as a social scientist would reduce casualties”.
To rebuild the country — to rebuild suggests that the aim is to restore the country to what it was. To what it was…when? To what it was under the Soviet occupation? To what it was under the Taliban? Of course not, neither applies. To “rebuild” is meant to be understood as to build anew — to build a new country. In this case, the words put in Loyd’s mouth could have been scripted by none other than the crusader for counterinsurgency himself, Lt. Col. John Nagl: the aim of U.S. military operations should be “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies” (see Andrew Bacevich, “The Petraeus Doctrine,” The Atlantic, October 2008 — I thank Greg Feldman for underscoring the significance of this point and for highlighting how liberal discourse is used to justify HTS and counterinsurgency, so that all liberal critiques of such programs are immediately destined to founder.)
“Our responsibility”. Why is it up to an American to assume responsibility for someone else’s country? Would Americans tolerate hearing the citizens of a foreign power speak in the same way about the U.S., and would they call it anything other than imperial arrogance that provides shade for a grab for power? From where does this “responsibility” derive its sense of entitlement? Did Afghans forfeit the right to chart their own course?
“Her new role as a social scientist would reduce casualties”. Given the fact that she became one herself, and that yet another Afghan become one in revenge, is more than just ironic. It points to the fundamentally untenable position being advanced by such statements — the fact is that the program she served supports a mission of violence on many different levels, administered by the most lethal institution on earth, the Pentagon. Casualties in Afghanistan have dramatically risen, and that is since HTS was deployed there. Not only that, the number of innocent civilians killed by the U.S. and NATO forces now exceeds the number of those killed by the Taliban. In fact the number of civilians killed by the US/NATO has risen by 600% compared to this time last year, and that is the low estimate; the other estimate is that the number has risen by over 1000%. The numbers of civilians killed by the Taliban have dropped significantly, down by 30% compared to this time last year (source) — apparently the Taliban have a much better program for reducing casualties. So the “hope” may be that HTS will reduce casualties (yet, it is a land-based system, whereas the U.S. Air Force is the one that continues to drop gigantic bombs on villages), but the facts tell another story.
One certain way to reduce casualties is for high-minded scholars who want to see action, to take action as anti-war activists and call for the withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO forces. That will lead to zero deaths for those forces, and zero deaths that those forces might have otherwise caused in Afghanistan. This solution, however, is constantly removed from consideration, because the supporters of HTS, and their media sycophants, ultimately do want war, and HTS employees go to serve in war with the ultimate aim of defeating “the adversary” and seeing their nation’s policies triumph. Getting killed while doing that kind of work is merely par for the course.
Paula Loyd, Yee writes, was seeking to, “understand a dangerous, complex situation on the ground so that lives could be saved”. Perfect liberal interventionist discourse, and as Greg Feldman argued, a clever appropriation of the sales pitch usually made in Anthropology 101 classes: gaining a cross-cultural understanding will lead the world toward peace. What it tells us is that, not just that the narrative is sentimental tripe, but that we have to confront and tackle liberal discourse and our standard anthropological tools of naive self-promotion.
The second thing that is different about this article is that it offers a slight tip in the hat of the direction of re-humanizing Loyd’s attacker, Abdul Salam, acknowledging that the story told thus far has been unabashedly one-sided, a selective display of warm humane feelings for one party only, while demonizing and dehumanizing the other. Yee writes:
Why not write about Abdul Salam? Well, I did not know Salam, but I think if I did—if I really knew him—I would write about him and his tragedy, too. Somehow we need to understand how a person’s heart could turn so dark that he would believe setting an unarmed woman on fire would be a salve to his pain and anger.
Well done. Except for one thing that is forgotten as usual — there are two murderers in a story reduced to this small stage, the other of course being Don Ayala, a mercenary who committed a war crime. After all, it is thanks to his actions that Yee can never know Salam. Did Ayala’s heart turn any less dark that he would believe that blowing out the brains of an unarmed and subdued detainee would be a salve to his pain and anger? We do not know what Yee would say, because by that point in her article she has conveniently excluded Ayala from her little play. That silence speaks for her now.
What the article by Yee does no differently than any of the others we have seen, and is its ultimate goal, is to assimilate all that is good, wholesome, and holy about Paula Loyd to HTS. This is not an article about a friend, by a friend. This is an article about how a friend was employed, produced by a friend with an agenda. If the only point of the article was, as Yee dishonestly claims, to “respect” Loyd, then she could have restricted herself to merely commenting on her wonderful personal attributes. But no. Instead, as yet another act of zombification, what Yee does is to build a pyramid of charming and cheerful facts about Loyd, and tops it all off with her work for HTS. Her work with refugees is thus placed as a lead up to her employment with HTS. Loyd’s last act is used to redefine her whole life. Loyd was, “caring, concerned, intelligent, rational, humane, and impassioned,” and having joined HTS, these qualities transfer to it: HTS is where the caring, concerned, intelligent, rationale, humane, impassioned, go to work. Yee says she could have instead chosen the “sedate” route and entered a PhD program, but she was “unconventional” — like Indiana Jones is unconventional, and we all just love Indy, right? Besides, Loyd also made “honey walnut cream cheese,” so for crying out loud how could critics mutter anything “not nice” after they got a mouthful of that? Can we not imagine ourselves “eating waffles” with “Paula” in Boston, along with the other good white people of super privileged backgrounds? The army, well…the army simply offered Loyd “adventures and challenges” — not the army that the rest of the world knows to be a genocidal killing machine that is directly responsible for the murder of millions of innocent civilians since its inception.
Amy Yee succeedes in getting some extra frequent flyer miles for her zombie. Where she fails utterly is to take us to a new destination. You are right, Amy Yee, you are definitely not “glorifying” Paula Loyd. As for the corpse that is HTS, it does not matter how much deodorant you spray on it, it still stinks.
