The long-forgotten US occupation of Korea

For 60 years the USA has held significant power over Korea; most Americans have no idea. They don't know about the American occupation of the South after World War II, they have only vague images of the Korean war, they don't know about the South Korean dictators the USA supported thruout the cold war, they don't know about the democracy movements that were repressed or massacred with US complicity, they don't know how those movements eventually triumphed.

They don't know how American cold war economic policies reluctantly gave South Korea's dictators room to industrialize and grow rich, they don't know about the sweatshops that followed, they don't know about the post-cold war market opening measures pushed by the US that culminated in economic disaster for South Korea in 1997.

All they "know" is that Kim Jongil, dictator of the North, is crazy.

But they should know more, starting with how American policies right after WWII returned the Japanese colonial elite to power and allowed them to dominate the government and economy for the next 50 years.

The New York Times recently ran an article on the South Korean movement to recognize that the postwar leadership was composed of the same people who had helped the Japanese to brutally dominate their countrymen. Yet curiously missing from the article was any mention of the American role.

Explaining how a discredited and widely-hated group of collaborators and landowners was able to cling to power without their Japanese patrons, the article says, "After the end of Japan's 35-year occupation in 1945, high-ranking Korean military officials and bureaucrats serving in the Japanese Imperial Army and administration were purged or imprisoned. But by 1949 they had been freed and rehabilitated by South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee [Yi Seungman]."

This is a major revision of history. In fact, the United States occupied South Korea immediately after the war, looked with horror at the countless popular local governing councils that sprang up to fill the power vacuum, and determined that only by bringing the colonial elites and security apparatus back to power could the "communist" scourge be suppressed. Widespread repression was necessary tho, since the group that the USA chose to govern South Korea was universally despised, and the hunger for land redistribution, unification with the North, and an end to foreign domination were great. It was not Yi Seungman who brought the collaborators back to power, but the USA who made a government of them and set Yi at the top of it.

Once it had crushed the popular nationalist forces and established a tiny elite within a police state, the USA prepared to leave. The civil war that followed, as the government of the North invaded the South and nearly overran it, taught the USA that only its continuing presence could maintain American power over Korea.

That presence continues to this day, as 37,000 American troops remain stationed in South Korea. In the intervening years the USA supported a succession of military dictators, who suppressed renewed calls for democracy with bloodshed. Eventually the efforts of students and workers forced democratic reforms, but parts of the governing elite and most of the economic elite are still descendants of those same Koreans who once helped Japan control and exploit the country.

After years of state indoctrination, propaganda, and anti-communist fearmongering, the South Korean people are finally starting to face the deep ambiguities of their history. When will Americans follow?

The liberal views inequality in China

I have no end of praise for The New York Times in its recent series of articles on social inequality in China, the first such sustained attempt by mainstream Western media at covering the most pressing issues in China. But the coverage has not escaped the media's characteristic concentration on individuals to the exclusion of attention to the structures that produce their plight. Thus we come away with only a vague understanding of why China's political economy is so relentlessly marginalizing and exploiting the vast majority of its citizens.

When we ignore how power is actually organized, we can offer nothing but moralizing about the problems and sloganeering about the need for democracy. Which is exactly what The Times editorial page does when looking back at these articles:

Instead of beginning to institute a workable rule of law, a freer press and a better system for allowing the underdog to be heard, Mr. Hu has busied himself consolidating his own power and trying to restore order and discipline within an unreformed Communist Party. ... Chinese farmers and factory workers routinely talk about corrupt local officials who siphon off relief money from Beijing or steal funds allocated to farmers who give up their land for other uses. ... A leadership that treats this unrest as a threat to its authority instead of a desperate cry for help threatens to negate much of the good that has come from China's economic upheaval - the opening to tourism, student exchanges and scientific cooperation; the ability for people to migrate; the creation of some independent farming; and a growing middle class whose cellphones can dial abroad.

This is the typically liberal approach to the problem of inequality. First is the appeal to authority: the attempt to use moral suasion to convince those in power to reform their ways so as serve the common good.

Any understanding of how power actually works makes such a strategy seem naive in the United States, much less in China. Hu Jintao hasn't struck at the authoritarian foundation of the state, it's true - but not because he is immoral (as implied by the "consolidating his own power" crack) or because he is confused about the meaning of protests in China. The reason he leaves the party-state unaccountable is that his own position rests on the continued existence of that state, and on the monopoly of power by bureaucrats and rising commercial interests that is given form in that state.

Let's remember Frederick Douglass's insight, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." Those who hold power only yield it when competing social groups are able to mobilize and force a change. The fact is that peasants and workers are too unconnected to each other - both organizationally and ideologically - to form an adequate social base for any but minor changes on the periphery of China's systematic corruption and inequality. Even if Hu Jintao overcame years of party indoctrination and suddenly converted to belief in a genuinely participatory society, the changes he might put in motion would be immediately diluted to nothingness by the dominant groups in society.

In this context, The Times's call for "a workable rule of law, a freer press and a better system for allowing the underdog to be heard", seems rather empty. In the USA, where all three steps were taken long ago, bureaucratic and commercial elites still dominate the society, and the majority is still highly exploited if not impoverished (that the relative wealth of the American majority has little to do with rule of law &c is an entirely different post).

The same refusal to see things structurally blinds The New York Times to more than just the nature of power in China. The writers say that if their arguments are ignored, China will lose "much of the good that has come from China's economic upheaval - the opening to tourism, student exchanges and scientific cooperation; the ability for people to migrate; the creation of some independent farming; and a growing middle class whose cellphones can dial abroad."

The first problem is that these developments are far more complicated than the obvious good The Times seems to see. As only a brief example, while the opening of links to the rest of the world has greatly expanded the vision of the Chinese, it has also often produced a national inferiority complex tending to support uncritical imitation of Western modes of industrial production, social organization, and ideology. Only one instance of this is the atrocious traffic I face every day in Beijing, the popular ignorance of what this is doing to the environment and people's health, and the dream of owning a car that Chinese are increasingly growing up with.

But an even bigger problem is the failure to understand that the "good" brought by China's economic reforms is necessarily accompanied by rising inequality, corruption, and exploitation. Over the last 25 years, China's rulers have slowly given up rigid social control, decentralized bureaucratic power, privatized much of the state, and switched to a market economy. These reforms produced greater freedom of movement and expression, but at the same time created many more opportunities for the well-connected to personally profit from liberalization, whether taking a cut from the sell-off of state properties, catering to the needs of the new rich while slashing the public services of everyone else, welcoming the labor of migrants from the countryside but providing nothing in return but the bare essentials. That liberalization increased inequality was not a misguided policy approach but the very reason for these policies. Those in power supported liberalizing policies because those policies bolstered their own position.

Mainstream Americans tend to view economic liberalization as inherently good, and cast the negatives that accompany it - unemployment, corruption, fewer social services, rising concentration of wealth, increasing poverty - as the result of flawed public policies. Seeing the process structurally allows us to understand that the social groups driving liberalization, especially the upper rungs of the bureaucracy and commercial elites, benefit from both sides of the coin, and will block policies that might dilute these effects. Moralizing about the bad results while ignoring their actual source won't get us any closer to a solution.

Seething but aimless discontent in China

Lately The New York Times has been running an unusual series of very good articles on social tensions in China. Long and detailed, they present case studies in rising tensions between the increasingly rich and the increasingly marginalized, poor, and exploited. It's unusual because the Western media typically focus on the persecution of a handful of highly educated intellectuals while ignoring the much more important problems of official corruption and abuse, unemployment and labor repression, and exploitation of migrant workers.

China's 'Haves' Stir the 'Have Nots' to Violence, 2004 December 31
This article captures exactly how much resentment against officials is felt by people, and how easily it can explode into riots (in the city featured here, for a few hours "the police were nobody and the people were in charge."). But it also shows how isolated the discontent is, with no national connections being made between the countless local protests, and no understanding of the systemic causes of official abuse and widening inequality, viz. government authoritarianism and market reforms. People all over the country hate the local officials that suck them dry with taxes, fees, and fines, but they don't question the legitimacy of the state itself.

Rural Exodus for Work Fractures Chinese Family, 2004 December 21
The story of a family from the rural interior, one among tens of millions of others, broken apart by the need of the parents to become migrant workers in rich eastern cities. The rural system of social services has been dismantled by market reforms, leaving families on their own in paying for their children's schooling and medical bills. In the cities they work in sweatshops, denied even the chance to return home for China's most important holiday, Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). Or they come to build the luxurious new apartment buildings and corporate headquarters, sleeping in unheated warehouses on plywood beds. These migrants are the cheap labor welcomed by city officials and prospering Chinese companies, building the rich new China but denied any share of its wealth except what will keep them alive.

Farmers being moved aside by China's real estate boom, 2004 December 8
A village in remote Shaanxi province's crop lands are taken by local officials and leased to developers for 50 times as much as the farmers are given. The village fights back, petitioning Beijing, but the central government merely refers the matter back to the local officials who were at fault in the first place. Their options exhausted, the villagers occupy the local government offices, until their occupation is brutally suppressed. The same story is recurring all over China as powerless rural farmers have their lands confiscated by officials seeking to cash in on the opportunities that economic liberalization has opened for those with good connections.

China Crushes Peasant Protest, Turning 3 Friends Into Enemies, 2004 October 13
Yet another tale of regular people fighting a highly localized battle against official corruption and ending up with nothing. One small section highlights a couple key points:

The government uses China's 800 million farmers to provide grain, labor and capital for urban development. State banks take deposits in rural areas but make loans almost exclusively to richer ones. The authorities pour resources into prestigious urban projects, like the $1.24 billion Shanghai spent to build a state-of-the-art Formula One racetrack and play host to the European event through 2010.

Villages rarely get such help. All farm families, regardless of income, pay land and agriculture taxes as well as fees for social services, often exceeding what wealthier urban residents pay.

This is suggestive of several important issues that even good news articles don't examine: the lasting historical patterns structuring developments in China, and the key role of the state in China's economic "miracle".

To take the latter first, we are reminded that - contrary to market dogmatists - China's extraordinary economic expansion is anything but a triumph of laissez faire doctrines. Today's economic growth would not have been possible without the decades of a state-controlled economy that built an industrial and infrastructure base. Nor can we ignore the key role the state continues to play even after giving up overall control of the economy to markets. It is the state that has chosen which areas to favor for investment and construction (urban areas, mostly on the east coast), and it is the state that has consciously dismantled social protections for all but privileged urban residents. The poverty and exploitation of those highlighted in these articles is not a "natural but regrettable" side effect of a developing economy, as many comfortable commentators believe, but a deliberate result of state policies.

And second, China's rulers have always viewed the peasantry as a resource to be exploited (the radical left faction of Communists during the years of Maoism has been the only exception, tho they often advanced catastrophically bad policies). Under the command economy, the produce of the peasants was extracted to industrialize the country; today the same kind of exploitation continues, only thru market mechanisms.

The subordination of the rural majority is likely to continue unless and until a new vision of a radically democratic and egalitarian China takes hold. The absolute lack of any such ideology amongst the billion or so people who fill the ranks of China's "losers" does not bode well.

Supermarkets and global inequality

An important article appeared in The New York Times today, "Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers". But this article gives us insight into much more than grocery shopping in Central America.

The nexus of agriculture and elite globalization is - along with the great migrations of industries and people that are part of the same process - the most important social development of our time. Its effects are everywhere: the way the global economy works, the globespanning power of multinational corporations from the rich world, the slums of Latin America, the factories of China, the steadily wasting environment, the cultural homogeneity spreading across the world.

The story told by reporter Celia W Dugger is rooted in Latin America. She writes

The transformation of Latin America's food retailing system began in the 1980's and accelerated in the 1990's as countries opened their economies, often to satisfy conditions for loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As foreign investment flooded in, multinational retailers bought up domestic chains or entered joint ventures with them.

We can see here the tremendous power of free trade doctrine to expand the control of the already powerful: corporations from America and Europe. One terrible effect as been heavily subsidized food exports from the rich countries flooding into the newly opened economies, driving Latin American farmers from their land into the constantly expanding slums of São Paulo, Bogotá, México, Caracas, Santiago (as well as Manila, Mumbai, Dhaka, Jakarta, Mombassa, Lagos, Johannesburg...).

But the article highlights a different transformation, the trend of expanding supermarkets which is reinforcing the impact of foreign agricultural imports. Taking advantage of their massive scale and huge resources, and appealing to consumers' desire to be more "modern", supermarkets have been steadily destroying their smaller competitors. The process affects not just smaller food markets, but also those who grow the food in the first place. Supermarkets demand a steadiness of supply and a homogeneity of produce that only large producers can meet, so smaller producers are finding themselves with fewer and fewer outlets for their goods.

The implications are huge. First is the nature of agriculture in Latin America. Cash crops (coffee, sugar, coca) have long been organized as plantations, with one landowner employing many waged workers and reaping most of the profits. Increasingly this model is being extended to food crops as well, as small producers are driven out of business and the refugees of the small farm end up under the glower of the field foreman, in the slums of the city, or as illegal immigrants to the United States.

And the deepening poverty is not being mitigated by the growth of sweatshop jobs as it is in China, since what export factories existed in Latin America are leaving for the even cheaper labor of China.

The environmental effects, not mentioned in the article, are also important. The American style of large monoculture crops, maintained by the heavy use of chemicals, will follow as its organizational form spreads - poisoning and draining the land as it has in the USA. Moreover, supermarkets' use of centralized food distribution is also a problem ("At La Fragua's immense distribution center in Guatemala City, trucks back into loading docks, where electric forklifts unload apples from Washington State, pineapples from Chile, potatoes from Idaho and avocados from Mexico.") The environmental impact of moving such large amounts of food over such vast distances is not to be ignored.

The trends captured in the article apply not just to Latin America but to the entire world. The massive centralization of economic power in a handful of corporations from the rich countries is the face of a coin whose other side is the concentration of wealth and power, both within countries and between them. What drives this growing gap is the freeing of markets. Markets are built on inequality, and left unregulated they will naturally increase it as the winners use their greater resources to institutionalize their power and privilege and demand even further concessions from the losers.

The phenomenon is well understood by its victims. As one small farmer from Guatemala, on the verge of losing his livelihood, says, large supermarkets exploit their size by playing their suppliers off against one another. "There are a lot of competitors here," he said, "a lot of small farmers trying to sell to them, so the prices are low."

The same methods have allowed a handful of corporations from the rich countries to dominate the world's commodity markets (copper, diamonds, coffee, cocoa, &c) as the many small producers are at the mercy of a few buyers. (The only important exception is oil, whose price has been kept low in a different way, viz. the political domination of the USA over the Middle East.) The rich world buys cheap to supply its factories, but maintains its domination over industry by relentlessly attacking economic nationalism - the only force that has ever industrialized a country - and by maintaining ownership over those factories it builds in the poor countries. Thus the rich world continues to dominate the global economy 50 years after being forced to yield political control over its colonies.

In Dugger's article we can see the human face of these abstract forces. The weakest members of society are driven to destitution as the relatively privileged engage in Western-style consumerism. Faceless Western corporations move inexorably into a controlling position over the economies of countries in the global South. Expanding wealth is used not to help everyone but to reinforce the position and privilege of those who already have too much of both.

Things have been moving in this direction for the last 20 years. How much longer can it continue?

Helping the Chinese kill Americans more effectively

The European Union's slow movement toward ending its arms embargo on China has generated an interesting reaction from the Pentagon. Out of the media spotlight, US officials have started applying serious pressure on the EU to keep the arms ban in place.

While the reasoning is publicly framed in terms of human rights and peace (to prevent China threatening Taiwan), the real concerns are captured in this unnamed Pentagon official's quote, "[The Europeans are] talking about helping the Chinese kill Americans more effectively." Or as The Washington Post puts it, (only after rehearsing the various iniquities of China), "[this is] a government that does not disguise its aim to assemble a force capable of challenging American ships in the Taiwan Strait."

While American leaders publicly maintain a friendly face toward China, the resistance to resuming EU arms exports is further evidence that national security officials in the USA view China as a near-term enemy. That human rights and peace have little to do with US criticism should be clear from the fact that 15 years ago American officials had no scruples about sending weapons to China, despite its similarly questionable Taiwan and human rights policies. The public outrage following the Tiananmen massacre forced the original arms embargoes in both Europe and the States, but the enthusiasm for maintaining them that has since developed within the US government is rooted firmly in Asia's changing geopolitical situation.

Barring some sort of economic collapse, Chinese diplomatic and economic power will continue to expand, and the threat to American hegemony over Asia will become ever more pressing. The USA may eventually feel the need to provoke a crisis and pull its allies firmly back to its side, which would make the international turmoil surrounding the Iraq invasion seem like a spring shower.

Death of the imperial dream in Iraq?

Is it too early to declare the failure of the USA in Iraq?

Not the failure of its stated goals of bringing democracy and prosperity. As the Lancet paper conclusively showed, things are worse now than before, and evidence that already-high levels of child malnutrition have actually doubled clinches it. The failure of those goals was conclusive long ago.

But these goals were always merely rhetoric. Is it too early to declare that the real goals - control of oil, permanent military bases, and domination of the economy - are now impossible?

The razing of Falluja marks a reascendance for the neoconservative tendency of rule thru naked power. Its aftermath - spreading Sunni rebellion and a likely mass Sunni boycott of the January 30 elections - is probably the dying gasp for the re-Baathification strategy adopted last summer. Putting the old power structure back in place is impossible in the face of complete Sunni alienation.

As the likelihood of a near-complete Sunni boycott increases, so too does the likelihood of a sweeping Shi'i victory. Al-Sistani is in the process of putting together a unified Shi'i slate of candidates which is sure to overwhelm the few Kurds who will be elected.

A Shia-dominated legislature would significantly or completely extinguish American power over Iraq. At the same time, it would set the lines for the coming civil war as the Shi'i state goes to work against the Sunni insurgency and perhaps begins the resubjugation of the Kurds.

The only alternative for the Americans is to "delay" (cancel) the elections, governing thru the continued martial law of puppet Allawi. But this would immediately create a general insurgency against the Americans as the Shia joined the Sunnis in a campaign to eject the USA.

It was entirely predictable before the war that communal civil war would follow. It was less obvious that American goals were impossible. We may have reached the point at which nothing can now be salvaged for America's imperial planners.

Has the Iraq invasion killed 100,000?

The best estimate yet of the death toll of the Iraq invasion was recently published in the British medical journal The Lancet. Using statistical sampling, the researchers concluded that 98,000 more Iraqis have died since the invasion than would have if death rates had remained the same as in the months before the invasion. This number includes deaths caused by American bombing and ground attacks, insurgent attacks, increased crime, and disruptions to the food, medical, and economic life of the country.

In other words, the already high death rate in Iraq (caused primarily by the USA-maintained sanctions) has increased catastrophically due to the war.

The study is not foolproof, and it may overestimate - or perhaps even underestimate - the total death toll (a thorough discussion by researcher Stephen Soldz is available here). But it's the best study that's been done thus far. If even a fraction as many have died, the humanitarian disaster this represents is absolutely stunning.

Call for a culture war

The election’s finally over, and there’s no denying it: Republicans won. They decisively won the presidency (Bush even got the most votes this time); they significantly strengthened their hold on the Senate; they preserved their majorities in the House and the governors’ mansions. They overwhelmingly won 11 state referenda banning gay marriage. And they did all this in the face of a huge increase in voter participation, the Democrats’ first major grassroots election drive in decades, and George Bush’s record of lies and incompetence in office.

How did they pull it off? Exit polls identify four major issues that were important to voters: “moral values” (22 percent), “terrorism” (19 percent), jobs and the economy (20 percent), and the war in Iraq (15 percent). Eighty percent of those choosing one of the first two as their top issue voted for Bush, a similar number picking one of the second two as their top issue voted for Kerry.

In other words, Republicans lost overwhelmingly on Iraq and the economy, but won overwhelmingly on terrorism and “values”. That means the Republican message of fear and aggression against foreigners (what they call the war on terrorism) and their assault against gay rights, abortion rights, and the separation of church and state are deeply attractive to most Americans.

The first step in dealing with popular support for a reactionary agenda is recognizing its foundation. Social conservatism is not merely “false consciousness” or a Republican trick to secure support for tax cuts. People who oppose gay rights have just as much a stake in preventing gay marriage as they do in protecting their job. Their cultural and gender identity rests on the continued repression of gays, and an end to that repression is deeply threatening - often threatening in a much more intimate way than losing a job could ever be. This is why the “values” platform can be so compelling.

Support for the administration’s anti-“terrorism” policies is perhaps even more perplexing to progressives who know about its record of security and intelligence incompetence and overseas brutality. But most Americans are rooted in an extremely strong culture of hostility to and fear of foreigners, and belief in America’s benign influence. The 9/11 attacks brought these latent feelings to the surface, and along with Bush’s lies and the media’s broad complicity have sustained strong support for the administration’s foreign policies. Together with the successful longterm effort of Republicans to brand Democrats as soft on foreign threats, “terrorism” became a major advantage for Bush.

Progressives have two options in response to Republicans’ strength on “values” and security issues. They can move to the right (as they steadily have on economic issues for the last 25 years) or they can start a culture war of their own.

Democratic politicians and operatives, motivated by a short-term desire to win, will probably move to the right. But trying to out-Republican the Republicans has more often than not been a losing strategy, and when it has worked (as under Clinton), it proved a hollow victory. A better course is to face the cultural intolerance of Americans head-on in a long-term attempt to neutralize the only advantages Republicans have.

What does this mean? For starters, it means making gay rights a leading part of the agenda. Not just the fight for gay marriage, but demanding absolute acceptance of all queer lifestyles from all Americans. Thirty years ago a similar cultural fight, demanding equality for women, was launched. Today that equality is not yet a reality, but few people still question the principle. Elections are no longer won demonizing man-hating feminists. If the Democrats turn right and forsake the gay rights agenda, it won’t just represent a defeat for the principle of equality. It will also mean conceding in perpetuity an election issue to the Republicans. Democrats will never be able to position themselves as more intolerant, but they might eventually be able to neutralize the issue.

We face a similar fight against Americans’ nationalism and the imperial culture at home that consistently supports U.S. domination abroad. We have to break down the myth of American benevolence, and challenge the privilege most Americans enjoy as residents of the global hegemon. Ending the fear and hatred of foreigners felt by most Americans is a key part of this battle.

These culture wars can’t be won at the polls. It’s time for progressives to stop spending so much energy on elections that are already rigged against them and concentrate on community organizing and identity politics. Not the fragmenting racial identity politics of the early ’90s, but a universal cultural politics demanding equality and acceptance for all cultural practices except those that violate these principles. Hatred of gays and foreigners is what won this election for the Republicans, and until we face this hatred squarely and force it into oblivion the Republicans are going to keep on winning.

At last, truly experiencing socialism

For those of my legions of loyal readers who did not know, I've just move to Beijing for a year. Posting will probably be sparse as I get settled in and overwhelmed with language class. I've been having trouble accessing my blog, but apparently not the posting mechanism. The Communist Party moves in mysterious ways.

And btw, the main feature of Chinese socialism I've experienced so far is an overabundance of billboards.

Remember the sanctions

In 1990, despite 8 years of devastating war with Iran, Iraq could boast some of the most advanced medical, commercial, and energy infrastructure in the Middle East. This was Saddam Hussein's way of buying off the population — keep quiet and you'll live a comfortable life. Along with security (purchased at a terrible human cost), high material living standards were about the only benefit of Hussein's dictatorship.

Ten years later that level of development had been utterly destroyed, and living standards in Iraq ranked among the most miserable in the world. What happened? Hussein's instincts as a dictator didn't change. Iraq still had oil, which paid for everything in the first place. The difference was American policy.

In the 1980s Hussein was a useful ally for the United States, but with the invasion of Kuwait he became a potential threat to American power over the Middle East. The USA reacted by first brutally attacking Iraq, devastating its sanitation and power infrastructure, its roads and bridges, with weeks of bombing, as well as massacring much of its army. Then, since Bush I was unwilling to conquer the country, he merely ensured that Iraq would be unable to rebuild. A crippled country would be easier to deal with.

Bush had an extremely effective weapon at his disposal. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the UN reacted by forbidding any trade whatsoever with Iraq. Since Iraq relied overwhelmingly on imports for its food, medicine, and machinery, the sanctions hit civilians hard. But things got much worse after the USA bombed much of the civilian infrastructure to rubble. Diseases swept the populace as sanitation systems broke down and medicine was unavailable. Food supplies ran short. Without spare parts, electricity generators and communication systems couldn't be rebuilt. In the immediate aftermath of the 1991 war, sanctions killed far more people than bombs or bullets.

And the sanctions went on, with Clinton continuing Bush I's "containment" of Iraq. The devastation they wrecked against civilians turned virtually the whole world against them. But the USA wielded a veto in the UN, and blocked any attempts to end them. In time the severity of the sanctions regime was slightly alleviated with the oil for food program, in which Iraq could buy food and medicine by selling limited amounts of oil to the UN. But oil for food only stabilized an intolerable situation. Vital civilian infrastructure could not be repaired, the Iraqi economy remained caught in depression; the suffering continued. As Iraq sank back into desperate poverty, its middle class was destroyed, its medical system suffered catastrophic decline, death rates shot up. Perhaps 1 million people died as a result of the sanctions. The United States had succeeded in taking from the Iraqi people the single unmitigated benefit they had enjoyed under Saddam Hussein.

There's a strong argument to be made that the sanctions met the legal definition of crimes against humanity. Some, including one of the two directors of the oil for food program who resigned in protest at the devastation of the sanctions, went so far as to label the sanctions genocide. But whatever the legal classification, there's no question that the sanctions were a policy of mass murder directed against the innocent of Iraq, used as a tool of American state policy.

Yet during the sanctions decade (actually over 12 years) there was virtually no debate about them in American civil society. The media didn't report on their effects, government leaders dismissed criticisms as pro-Hussein propaganda, discussion centered on whether to be more punitive. After the invasion there has been even less of a will to confront one of the worst atrocities ever committed by US policymakers. Ignorance of the sanctions is so deep that articles like this one can claim that infrastructure disrepair was caused by Saddam Hussein's insidious neglect, rather than the USA blocking spare parts imports.

One sanctions-related topic is up for discussion tho: corruption in the oil for food program. The New York Times is now writing long articles about allegations pushed by anti-UN forces in the USA that the oil for food program was illegally flexible in administering the exports and imports of Iraq.

I think it tells us something about public culture when this sort of flexibility — which probably saved a number of Iraqis' lives by making the sanctions slightly less harsh — should become controversial, while the policies that caused mass death have been wiped clean from historical memory.

The end of oil

Last month I wrote about the economic devastation and possibly even war that could follow a constriction in oil supplies, but I didn't really make the case that such a constriction is approaching. The current issue of Harper's Magazine features a concise and well-argued article explaining why cheap oil will soon be a thing of the past. I've posted it here. Take a look — within a decade or two this could be the most important issue the world faces.

The chance for peace with Iran further dissipates

The disposition of the Middle East after the Iraq war depends heavily on the relationships other countries establish with Iran. Will the USA seek to overthrow the government covertly or out in the open? Will Israel continue its belligerency up to the point of open hostilities? Will Iraq move toward friendliness or recreate the old enmities?

Recent indications are discouraging. As I wrote last week, a US policy to destabilize Iran may be coalescing. It now seems the "sovereign" Iraqi government is moving in the same direction. A couple weeks ago Defense Minister Hazim al-Shaalan made a series of anti-Iran comments, accusing it of fomenting terrorism in Iraq and threatening to retaliate militarily. Shaalan's views were immediately contradicted by other members of the government, including Prime Minister Allawi. But now Allawi is moving toward Shaalan, having cancelled a diplomatic visit to Iran in protest of Irani interference in Iraqi affairs.

Juan Cole comments:

Allawi's cozy relations with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and his snub of Iran, suggests an emerging pattern in the caretaker government. Secular, pro-American Shiites like Allawi and Shaalan are increasingly throwing their lot in with powerful Sunni Arab neighbors of Iraq, cementing their alliance with Sunni Iraqi politicians like President Yawar in the process. In contrast, the religious Shiite parties are not being given any significant role in the new government (al-Da`wa has a vice-presidency and SCIRI has the Finance Ministry, and that is about it; the Sadrists have nothing). They are the ones who would seek close relations with Iran if they could. The religious Shiite parties also appear to be being sidelined in the national congress. Are pro-American, secular Shiite leaders a trojan horse inside Shiite Iraq for restored Sunni power and diplomacy in Iraq and the Gulf?

As I wrote last month, the restoration of Sunni Baathist power seems to be the USA's goal in Iraq. Hostility to Iran is a key part of this program. From the time of the first USA-Iraq war to the runup to invasion in 2003, the biggest fear American planners had in overthrowing Hussein was that the Shi'i majority would ally with Iran once it was freed of Baathist tyranny. The neocons were convinced that the Shia would welcome them and accept American control, but more cautious types in State and the CIA worried that Iran would benefit and American power in the region be weakened.

Clearly the State/CIA fears were more grounded in reality than the neocon fantasies. But taking over Iran has always been at least as important to the neocons as taking over Iraq, just harder to do. Now that the Iraqi Shia have proved independent and the strategy in Iraq has been shifted to Baathist restoration, it has become an urgent priority for the Americans to contain the potential gains for Iran and prevent the emergence of a Shi'i regime in Iraq. These two aims are closely linked for both the Americans and those who head the government in Baghdad. As elections in Iraq approach, watch out for increasing attacks on Iran and Iraqi Shia as justification for containing the power of both.

Taking city politics seriously

Does it seem strange that people on the left don't talk about city politics? We know exactly what's going on in Iraq or Argentina, we know exactly which social forces are at work and what arguments to use against our opponents. But ask us how power is organized in Chicago or LA, what the key issues are, what social groups we can look to as allies, and we're completely lost.

At least I have been, and based on the lack of writing about it in progressive publications it seems like I'm not alone. Chicago is a city seemingly full of opportunities for the left. Huge inequalities of wealth, entire sections of the city (mostly populated by minorities) left to decay and violence, inadequate public transit, major environmental concerns, increasing business homogenization, loss of public space, low wages, exploitation of immigrants, &c, &c. Yet there's virtually no progressive civil society to speak of. Electoral politics is run by the Daley machine and there's basically no public debate over city policies. Hardly any local publications cover these issues, besides occasional good reporting in The Reader, The Chicago Reporter, and Chicago Indymedia. Community groups function here and there, but with almost no visibility or power. Cooperative businesses are nowhere to be found.

So this is a call for leftists to re'engage with city issues. It's not just that there are a lot of extremely important struggles that are being neglected, it's also an important strategic issue. The kinds of social movements we need to make any sort of national or global structural changes won't have any force without a strong base in communities and democratic businesses. We don't get that by ignoring what's going on where we live.

For my Chicago friends, this article is a good place to start. We need to understand how power works before we can confront it. In Chicago, Daley's machine Democrats work with developers, unions, businesses with city contracts, and international business interests in finance, law, and manufacturing to keep a stranglehold on politics and the economy. And they do it with virtually no dissent. That has to end.

Fun fact: China is big

New York
Los Angeles
Chicago
Houston
Philadelphia
Phoenix
San Diego
Dallas
San Antonio

Those are all 9 US cities with a population of 1 million or more.

上海/Shanghai
北京/Beijing
香港/Hongkong
天津/Tianjin
武汉/Wuhan
广州/Guangzhou
沈阳/Shenyang
重庆/Chongqing
南京/Nanjing

Those are the 9 largest cities in China with a population of 1 million or more — out of 166! And only 40 percent of Chinese live in cities.

Hope is on the way?!

Is MoveOn.org actually getting more annoying? I guess they were always wholly subordinate to the Democratic Party, but as the campaign progresses they become more and more shameless about it.

In an e-mail they sent out today, this is what they had to say:

When you watch John Kerry tonight, allow yourself to imagine a better future. Imagine an America which is respected throughout the world, and which strives to do right by all of the citizens of the world. Imagine living in a country where the values of community, respect, and empathy are held highest. Imagine having a President who, like President Roosevelt, believes that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

We'll have a lot of work to do on November 3rd when Kerry is our new President. But we'll wake up that morning able to dream big dreams for a country and a world that are once again headed in the right direction.

I know we're all taught as kids how important it is to exercise our imaginations, but to imagine a Democratic president leading the world in the "right direction" is asking far too much.

What we'd get with Kerry is what we had with Clinton: Policies meant to expand American global hegemony, but done under the guise of multilateralism — less aggressive, certainly, but perhaps more effective, especially in the current climate. Tepid support for progressive domestic measures to address social inequalities, with little to no policy follow-thru. Allowing corporate priorities to set the economic agenda at home and abroad.

Groups like MoveOn are far too quick to ignore how Democrats actually govern, and far too eager to amplify their campaign rhetoric. This is not how to build a progressive movement. Tricking people into having hope every four years doesn't do much good when those hopes are always cruelly disappointed. The outcome is apathy and cynicism.

I don't have a problem with people voting Democrat if that's what they want to do. But to do so naively is the worst possible course. Vote with your eyes open, and with the understanding that no matter how many times the Republicans are defeated, the Democrats will never eliminate fundamental global and domestic inequalities. For that to happen we must pursue the much harder work of organizing communities and building democratic businesses. Don't expect political elites to do the work for us.

Operation: Irani Freedom?

As if any more evidence was needed, the USA has once again proved that how it deals with terrorists has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with larger US strategic goals.

Everyone knows that the USA tries to destroy certain terrorist groups, mainly those that target US assets or Israel. And everyone who is reasonably well-informed and not blinded by American nationalism also knows that the US supports other terrorist groups and many kinds of state terrorism. But generally speaking, the USA doesn't actually include the terrorists it supports on its official list of terrorist groups.

The Irani group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is an exception. Until last year this organization periodically assassinated Irani leaders (including the president and premier in 1981), attacked Irani embassies, and launched mortars into Iran from their sanctuary in Iraq. Equipped by Saddam Hussein, the MEK helped crush the Shi'i and Kurdish revolts following the first American war against Iraq. In 1997 the USA, seeking to improve relations with Iran and seeing no loss in condemning an Hussein-allied group, added the MEK to the official list of terrorist organizations.

Things changed with the conquest of Iraq. Neoconservatives, looking ahead to the expected overthrow of the Irani regime, sought to protect MEK. But other forces in the administration pushed the other way. They hoped to improve relations with Iran and feared undermining American credibility with the unusually obvious hypocrisy proposed by the neocons.

It seems the neocons have won the argument. After the invasion, MEK members were confined to their camp outside Baghdad until the USA could decide what to do with them. Now the decision has come, and it seems to be the first step in signing up the MEK as a proxy army for aggression against Iran. After a 16-month review, the USA has reclassified them "protected persons", a classification under the laws of war that ensures members of the MEK will not face charges in Iraq or be extradited to Iran.

How could the USA protect people that America itself brands as terrorists? A senior American official explained the nuances, "A member of a terrorist organization is not necessarily a terrorist." In this case, apparently, none of the members of a terrorist organization are terrorists.

We could be seeing the opening moves in administration plans to destabilize or possibly even invade Iran. Middle East expert Juan Cole thinks so. In a post last week, he explained and debunked the latest allegations of Irani complicity with the 9/11 highjackers — the same sorts of insinuations and carefully-worded quarter-truths that launched us on the conquest of Iraq. Cole fears that a second Bush term will give us an invasion of Iran. That may be a little alarmist at this point, a covert destabilization campaign seems more likely (anyone remember 1953?). But let's not rule out some sort of crisis exploding over Iran's development of nuclear weapons, perhaps kicked off by an Israeli bombing of their facilities. In that situation, it might not matter who's in the White House.

Avoiding disaster while dealing with the China threat

Every so often a rash of articles appears warning about the dangerous rise of China. Increasingly tho — at least in more liberal publications — the rise of China is seen as inevitable and attention is focused on how to accomodate the new power rather than on the threat to American control.

One recent example is James Hoge writing in Foreign Affairs, "A Global Power Shift in the Making". He writes:

Major shifts of power between states, not to mention regions, occur infrequently and are rarely peaceful. In the early twentieth century, the imperial order and the aspiring states of Germany and Japan failed to adjust to each other. The conflict that resulted devastated large parts of the globe. Today, the transformation of the international system will be even bigger and will require the assimilation of markedly different political and cultural traditions. This time, the populous states of Asia are the aspirants seeking to play a greater role. Like Japan and Germany back then, these rising powers are nationalistic, seek redress of past grievances, and want to claim their place in the sun. Asia's growing economic power is translating into greater political and military power, thus increasing the potential damage of conflicts. Within the region, the flash points for hostilities — Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and divided Kashmir — have defied peaceful resolution. Any of them could explode into large-scale warfare that would make the current Middle East confrontations seem like police operations. In short, the stakes in Asia are huge and will challenge the West's adaptability.

And he's right. Even the worst horrors we've seen in the last ten years — the Rwandan genocide, the sanctions against Iraq, the Congo civil war — could pale next to war in East or South Asia. Of particular interest to Americans, there's no question that the USA would involve itself in any war over Taiwan or in Korea. Tho the chance of such wars is relatively low, the situations are volatile enough that even a minor incident could quickly escalate into a crisis.

The USA itself may set off such a crisis thru its belligerency against North Korea or by bringing into the open its support for de facto Taiwan independence and military containment of China. Starting under Clinton and accelerating rapidly after 9/11, the USA has quietly moved to hem in China with a ring of alliances (the most important being Japan, India, and Australia) and military bases and agreements (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, and soon Indonesia added to 60-year-old deployments in Japan and South Korea).

Hoge is the first mainstream commentator I've seen to acknowledge this, and he makes a strong case that we have to start thinking about more constructive ways to manage the transition to a China-centered Asia. But his suggestions for accomplishing this are, to say the least, inadequate to the task. His main ideas seem to be sending more staff to the US embassy in China and admitting China to the G8. (The Group of 8 is an organization of the rich countries plus Russia that holds an annual high-level meeting and doesn't do much else.)

In other words, Hoge isn't even beginning to confront the major divergence of interests between China and the USA that is already increasing tensions. The biggest issue is, as always, Taiwan. China claims the island as its own, and officially Washington agrees. But the USA also views Taiwan as an important strategic asset which, if China reaquired peacefully, would significantly expand Chinese geopolitical and economic power. Neither side is willing to back down, and some right-wing forces in the USA are even pushing for a "re-evaluation" of the official policy accepting Beijing's claim to Taiwan. Such a step would be disastrous.

Other potential points of contention include the USA's massive military presence surrounding China, American control of Asia's major shipping lanes, China's claim of sovereignty over the South China Sea, US support for Japanese remilitarization, and control over natural resources, especially oil.

If open conflict comes, it will be over these strategic issues. But the fundamental question is whether or not the USA can maintain its hegemony over Asia thru alliances with local elites in all the countries around China save North Korea and Myanmar. Will these alliances hold up, or will Asian elites begin to see realignment with China as better serving their interests? If they do, will the USA take destabilizing measures to wrench their allies back under American protection? If it comes to that, I fear for both Asia and America.

What to do about nationalism and electoralism

Justin Podur, a Canadian writer for ZNet, posted recently about two important topics for the left to think about: nationalism and electoralism.

I added my thoughts about nationalism in the comments to his post. The left has historically been internationalist in its rhetoric, but anti-imperialist movements and communist revolutions have almost always governed in distinctly nationalist ways when they came to power, generally to the great harm of their people. But would their success have been possible without nationalism to mobilize support? Do the gains they make outweigh the damage their nationalism does?

On electoralism I spelled out my thoughts in this article. While I'm ultimately opposed to representative "democracy", I also think electoral strength is an important means to a more progressive society. Yet the electoral system isn't much use to us as long as we remain weak in our ability to mobilize people or money. So the priority should be building social movements, community organizations, and democratic businesses. If that can be done thru electoral organizing, fine. But that should always be the focus, and mustn't be lost in the strange obsession many leftists have in figuring out who to vote for (as if one vote matters).

Radical thoughts on gay marriage

Today the Senate votes on a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Obviously this kind of ban would be totally unacceptable. But I have to admit being a bit conflicted on the issue.

First, I don't see why the institution of marriage is all that desirable in the first place. It might be better to eliminate marriage as a social norm altogether. Still, if people want to get married, that's their choice. Certainly there's no place for the state to interfere in consensual behavior.

But I don't think there's any place for the state to affirm marriage either. The basic set-up now is that the state recognizes marriages and provides financial benefits for people who get married. Why would we want or need state sanction for marriage? And why on earth would the unmarried subsidize those who are married?

Yet the movement for state-recognized gay marriage isn't only about eliminating discrimination between gay and straight marriages (which would be best addressed by removing state involvement altogether). It's also about using a hugely important symbol to push the dominant society into further acceptance of gay people.

Gay marriage does this in two ways:

• As a provocation, by challenging people's conceptions of one of their most closely-held ideals, it forces them to confront the existence of different sexualities and come to terms with otherwise submerged prejudices;
  
• As a move to normalize gays, making them less of a threat, by integrating them into the deeply conservative institution of marriage.

The first is useful, the second more questionable. But maybe acceptance of gay people needs to come before challenging more fundamental systems of gender and sexuality.

More on re-Baathification

Here's something interesting I hadn't heard before, which strengthens the point I was making in the last post:

As one of his final acts, [ex-proconsul of Iraq] Bremer revoked all [Coalition Provisional Authority] orders and directives relating to de-Baathification, the controversial process that banned all Baath Party members above a certain rank from posts in the occupation government. In April, Bremer announced that he would liberalize the law, which he said had been unfairly applied. On June 28, he went further, formally disbanding the Iraqi De-Baathification Council headed by former [Iraqi Governing Council] member Ahmad Chalabi.

Thus marking the end of a truly revolutionary experiment in colonialism, and acknowledging that a reconstituted Baath bureaucracy and military led by suitably loyal Iraqis will be necessary to achieve American goals in Iraq.