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	Blood and money by John Pilger New Statesman United Kingdom   The real cost of Trident may be £76bn. Now it is more urgent than ever to raise our voices against Tony Blair''s mutant liberalism   On 17 October, President Bush signed a bill that legalised torture and kidnapping and in effect repealed the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus. The CIA can now legally abduct people and "render" them to secret prisons in countries where they are likely to be tortured. Evidence extracted under torture is now permissible in "military commissions"; people can be sentenced to death based on testimony beaten out of witnesses. You are now guilty until confirmed guilty. And you are a "terrorist" if you commit what George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, called "thoughtcrimes". Bush has revived the prerogatives of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs: the power of unrestricted lawlessness. "America can be proud," said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill''s promoters, who stood with other congressmen, clapping as Bush signed away the American constitution and the essence of American democracy.   The historic significance of this was barely acknowledged in Britain, the source of these abandoned ancient rights, no doubt because the same barbarians'' law is taking hold here. The great crime of Iraq is a moral tsunami that has left new Labour''s vassals floundering and shouting their hopeless inversions of the truth as they await rescue by Washington. "At a deeper ideological level," wrote the American historian Alfred McCoy, "[what is happening] is a contest of power versus justice . . . Viewed historically, it is a fight over fundamental principles reaching back nearly 400 years." Not long ago, I interviewed Dianna Ortiz, an American nun tortured in 1989 by a Guatemalan death squad whose leader she identified as a fellow American. This was the time of Ronald Reagan, who was as murderous in central America as Bush is in the Middle East. "You can''t claim to be a democracy if you practise or condone torture," she said. "It is the ultimate test."   The United States promised a democracy when the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year finally ended slavery. For the next decade, the civil-rights movement joined the great popular movement to end the slaughter in Vietnam, and Congress legislated to restrain the CIA''s secretive parallel power. It was a fleeting intermission. Under Reagan, the mythology of American democracy and "pride" was restored, perversely, when his corrupt executive ignited a lawless war in impoverished central America, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, which the United Nations called genocide. The United States became the only country ever to have been condemned by the International Court of Justice for terrorism (against Nicaragua). "Let''s drop the bullshit," a former senior CIA officer told me recently. "What matters is our national security interests, OK?"   "National security" is a euphemism for the forbidden word, imperialism, whose despotic power has accelerated under George W Bush. Secret presidential "signing decrees" that can overturn the rare opposition of an otherwise supine Congress are now normal practice, along with a Gulag of secret prisons, described approvingly by Bush as "the CIA programme". The United States today is an extension of the totalitarianism it has long sought to impose abroad. That unpalatable truth is unspoken, of course; in spite of his current "difficulties" over Iraq, corporate propaganda remains on Bush''s side. The search for an "exit strategy" may make "embarrassing" headlines, but the deliberate, systematic looting of billions of dollars of Iraq''s resources has been quietly achieved, with an estimated $20bn "missing". The same silence applies to the class and race war at home, as the Bush gang kicks away the ladder that once led to the American middle class. Last January, 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs at a Wal-Mart in Chicago.   Constitutional rights are formidable American myths. The American press is often put forward as constitutionally having the freest speech on earth; and it does, theoretically. Yet during every period of internal repression, the press and broadcast journalism have played a compliant, "Pravda" role, backing imperial wars, indulging the lies of the "red baiter" Joe McCarthy, promoting phoney debates about phoney threats (Cuba, Nicaragua, the nuclear arms race) and the supercult of "anti-communism". Bush''s lies about Iraq and Afghanistan were merely amplified and promoted. Seymour Hersh and a handful of others stand out as honourable exceptions.   In 1991, at the end of the one-sided slaughter known as the Gulf war, the celebrated American TV anchorman Dan Rather told his national audience, "There''s one thing we can all agree on. It''s the heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could live." In fact, a quarter of them had been killed by other Americans. Most of the British casualties were caused by the same "friendly fire". Moreover, official citations describing how Americans had died heroically in hand-to-hand combat were fake. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died during and in the aftermath of that "war" remain unmentionable - like hundreds of thousands who died as a result of the decade-long embargo; like the 655,000 Iraqi "excess deaths" since the invasion of 2003.   The war on democracy has been successfully exported. In Britain, and in other western countries, such as Australia, journalism and scholarship have been systematically appropriated as the new order''s management class, and democratic ideas have been emptied and refilled beyond all recognition. Unlike the 1930s, there is a silence of writers, with Harold Pinter almost the lone voice raised in Britain. The promoters of an extreme form of capitalism known as neo liberalism, the supercult responsible for the greatest inequalities in history, are described as "reformers" and "revolutionaries". The noble words "freedom" and "liberty" now refer to the divine right of this extremism to "prevail", the jargon for dominate and control. This vocabulary, which contaminates the news and the pronouncements of the state and its bureaucracy, is from the same lexicon as Arbeit macht frei - "Work makes you free" - the words over the gates at Auschwitz.   Fake democracy   For the British under Blair, the influence of this fake democracy has been catastrophic. Even if the convergence of the Labour Party and the Tories was historically inevitable, it was Tony Blair, the most extreme British political figure in living memory, who returned Britain to a full-time violent, imperial role, converting a fictional notion, "the clash of civilisations", into a possibility. Blair has destroyed the power of parliament and politicised those sections of the civil service and the security and intelligence services that saw themselves as impartial. He is Britain''s president, lacking only the accompanying strains of "Hail to the Chief". Last installed by little more than a fifth of the eligible population, he is the most undemocratically elected leader in British history. Poll after poll tells us he is also the most reviled.   Under President Blair, parliament has become like Congress under Bush: an ineffectual, craven talking shop that has debated Iraq only twice in two and a half years. With one important exception, regressive measure after measure has been waved through: from the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, with their mandatory sentences and house arrests ("control orders"). A "bill to abolish parliament", as the innocuous-sounding Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill 2006 might be known, removed parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation, giving ministers arbitrary powers and Downing Street the absolute power of decree. There was no public debate. How ironic that the bill stalled in the House of Lords, which, together with the judiciary, is now the loyal opposition.   In 2003, Blair worked the secretive royal prerogative - Orders in Council - to order an unprovoked, illegal attack on a defenceless country, Iraq. The following year, he used the same archaic powers to prevent the Chagos Islanders from returning to their homeland in the Indian Ocean, from which they were secretly expelled so that the Americans could build a huge military base there. Last May, the high court described the treatment of these British citizens as "repugnant, illegal and irrational".   On 16 October 2005, Bush claimed that al-Qaeda was seeking to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia". This deeply cynical, calculated exaggeration - reminiscent of Washington''s warning of "mushroom clouds" following 11 September 2001 - was repeated by Blair fresh from the embrace of Rupert Murdoch, the likely source of his future enrichment. This is the message of liberal warmongers who have sought to be Tonier-than-thou and who salvage their spent reputations by using big, specious words such as "Islamo fascism". They suppress the truth that al-Qaeda is minuscule compared with the state terrorism that kills and maims industrially, and whose cost distorts all our lives. British state terrorism in Iraq has cost more than £7bn. The real cost of Trident is said to be £76bn. The premises of the best of British life that survived Margaret Thatcher have no place in this accounting. The National Health Service and what was once the best postal service in the world are denied subsidies uncorrupted by a rigged "free market". Whether it is the accretions of the freeloading Blairs or the sale of 72 Eurofighters to the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia, complete with "commissions", or the government''s refusal to ban highly profitable cluster bombs, whose victims are mostly children - blood and money are the essence of Blairism and its mutant liberalism.   In their 1996 new Labour manual, The Blair Revolution: can new Labour deliver?, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle highlighted Britain''s "strengths" under a Blair regime. These were multinational corporations and "aerospace" (the arms industry) and the "pre-eminence of the City of London". Blood and money. Of course, as in any colonial era, blood spilled is invisible; one''s faraway victims are Untermenschen - that is to say, they are less than human and have no presence in our lives. On 11 June, the BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce announced that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were committing suicide. She asked, "How damaging is it to the Bush administration?" At the recent Labour party conference, a cringe-making presidential occasion, Blair, wrote Jon Snow, demonstrated "oratorical mastery and matey finesse". Indeed, he was "a leader for his time, in a time when Britain needed exactly such leadership".   Public morality   Those who have peeled back the façades of the Blair and Bush gangs ought not to be des pondent. The inspiring demonstration on 15 February 2003 may not have stopped an invasion, but the same universal power of public morality has, I believe, stalled attacks on Iran and North Korea, probably with "tactical" nuclear weapons. This moral force is undoubtedly stirring again all over the world, including the United States, and is feared by those who would contrive an "endless war". However, if I have learned nothing else from witnessing numerous bloody contrivances, it is never to underestimate the stamina of rampant, rapacious empire and the dishonesty of its "humanitarian interventions". Millions of us, who are the majority, need to raise our voices again, more urgently now than ever.
	Iraq: The Divided Nation by Borzou Daragahi & Louise Roug, Noam Chomsky Los Angeles Times / Khaleej Times   January 4, 2006   Iraq: The Divided Nation, by Borzou Daragahi & Louise Roug. (LA Times)   The myth of a unified Iraqi identity may have finally been laid to rest. More clearly than any other measurement since the United States-led invasion in 2003, preliminary results from last month"s parliamentary elections show Iraq as three lands with three distinct identities, divided by faith, goals, region, history and symbols.   Iraqis of all stripes say they are the descendants of Mesopotamia, the glorious great-grandchildren of the cradle of civilisation. Iraq, they point out, gave birth to law and the written word. And asked their faith, Iraqis often testily answer with the refrain: "There is no Sunni. There is no Shiite. We are all Iraqi."   But the preliminary election results, which have trickled out through a series of haphazard leaks and news conferences and remain disputed by all parties, show a nation starkly fragmented into ethnic and religious cantons with different aims and visions.   Nine out of 10 Iraqis in the Shiite Muslim provinces of the south voted for religious Shiite parties, according to the early results from the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. Nine out of 10 Iraqis in Sunni Muslim Arab areas of central and western Iraq voted for Sunni parties. Nine out of 10 Iraqis in the Kurdish provinces of the north voted for Kurdish candidates. Nationwide, only about 9 per cent voted for tickets that purported to represent all Iraqis.   The results were like a bracing splash of ice water for US officials, who had predicted that a secular, centrist Iraqi government would emerge after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Many longtime observers of Iraq had hoped the vote would foster national unity by bringing to power moderate politicians who might help draw down a minority Sunni Arab-led insurgency against a Government now controlled by the country"s majority Shiites, and stanch Kurds" secessionist tendencies.   Instead, more than 240 of the 275 legislators, who will decide the composition of the future government, will probably be Shiite Islamists, Sunni Arab sectarians or autonomy-minded Kurds. The Shiites, who make up about 60 per cent of the nation"s population, will hold by far the largest share.   Though Iraqis often speak lovingly of golden ages when they were one big happy family, Iraq has been a shaky proposition since its 1920s founding. Rather than sharing a history, the paths of Iraq"s Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds diverged from the beginning of the nation"s inception as a product of British colonialism.   Sunnis collaborated with the British, who supported the Sunni Arab monarchists. Shiite insurrectionists heeded the calls of their clergy and fought a jihad, or holy war, against the British, who crushed them and reaffirmed their second-class status. Kurdish nationalists unsuccessfully sought independence, first by diplomatic channels, later by the gun.   Iraq"s post-World War II order was no less divisive. Sunni Arab nationalists forced their pan-Arab ideology on the diverse country following Britain"s departure. Saddam"s Sunni-run government magnified discrimination to the point of mass killings, with Shiites and Kurds punished not so much for who they were but for refusing to accept the Baath Party"s version of Iraqi identity. Nonetheless, Saddam"s authoritarianism was the glue that held Iraq together for decades. Now that he is out of power, the nation"s troubled identity has again been cast into flux.   Does the nation continue to bow before the philosophy of Arab nationalism, or that of Shiite mysticism? Is Iraq"s national hero Saddam or the 7th century Shiite caliph Imam Ali? Or, for that matter, is it the late Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani?   A further erosion of Iraqi identity could pave the way for a partitioning of the country, with unpredictable results.   Kurds, already soured on the idea of Iraq, could bolt the union, taking the oil-rich city of Kirkuk with them and realising the worst fears of Turkey and Iran, each with sizeable and restless Kurdish minorities.   Shiites, too, unified by their religious iconography, have begun seriously talking about setting up a nine-province, oil-rich southern region. That would leave an angry and resentful Sunni Arab centre and west of the country determined to continue staging an insurgency that could inflame passions throughout the Middle East.   Many Sunni Arab nationalists and former Baath Party adherents blame Iran and the United States for interfering in Iraq"s internal affairs and whipping up sectarian and ethnic passions. The US, they say, started the troubles by doling out seats on the initial post-invasion Iraqi Governing Council according to ethnicity and sect rather than who was best qualified. Iran, they say, has flooded the country with religious imagery and propaganda, bolstering the fierce sectarianism of the country"s Shiite majority to achieve its own ends.   Regardless of the cause, the very idea of Iraq may be slowly fading, politicians and common Iraqis acknowledge, often sadly.   Even the Iraqi flag seems to appear only in the posters of politicians bankrolled by US-funded aid organisations. Government buildings such as the ministries of education and health are often festooned with posters of bearded and turbaned Shiite clerics instead of the red, white and black flag of Iraq.   In the Kurdish cities of Irbil and Dahuk, the Iraqi flag is nowhere in evidence, replaced by the red, white and green flag of the ill-fated Mahabad republic, the Kurdish state briefly established in northern Iran by rebellious Kurds aided by the Soviet army in the chaotic aftermath of World War II.   Many also blame politicians and clerics who have courted supporters with symbols of faith and ethnicity. Iraq remains a religious and tribal society where codes of honour and loyalty are deeply ingrained.   Some Iraq experts compare the situation with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. In times of crisis, they say, people tend to seek out their own kind and stick close to them, just as citizens of former communist countries sought refuge in religion and ethnicity, catalysts for wars in Chechnya, Yugoslavia and Tajikistan.   But Iraq"s situation is by no means hopeless. In some quarters, Iraqi national identity remains strong, said Juan Cole, a professor of history and a leading authority on Shiite Islam at the University of Michigan. He argues that with the collapse of Baathist-imposed Arab nationalism, Iraqis need to work out a new identity that includes all Iraqis, just as Canada managed to accommodate the Quebecois and Britain the Scots.   In the worst-case scenario, questions of Iraqi identity will be resolved on the streets by the AK-47s each Iraqi household seems to have stashed away. In the best-case scenario, Iraqi identity will be renegotiated passionately yet peacefully in courts, classrooms and legislative chambers..   January 6, 2006   "Beyond the Ballot", by Noam Chomsky. (Khaleej Times)   The US President Bush called last month’s Iraqi elections a "major milestone in the march to democracy." They are indeed a milestone — just not the kind that Washington would welcome. Disregarding the standard declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, let’s review the history. When Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, invaded Iraq, the pretext, insistently repeated, was a "single question": Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?   Within a few months this "single question" was answered the wrong way. Then, very quickly, the real reason for the invasion became Bush’s "messianic mission" to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East. Even apart from the timing, the democratisation bandwagon runs up against the fact that the United States has tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq.   Last January’s elections came about because of mass nonviolent resistance, for which the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani became a symbol. (The violent insurgency is another creature altogether from this popular movement.) Few competent observers would disagree with the editors of the Financial Times, who wrote last March that "the reason (the elections) took place was the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them."   Elections, if taken seriously, mean you pay some attention to the will of the population. The crucial question for an invading army is: "Do they want us to be here?"   There is no lack of information about the answer. One important source is a poll for the British Ministry of Defence this past August, carried out by Iraqi university researchers and leaked to the British Press. It found that 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops and less than 1 per cent believe they are responsible for any improvement in security.   Analysts of the Brookings Institution in Washington report that in November, 80 per cent of Iraqis favoured "near-term US troop withdrawal." Other sources generally concur. So the coalition forces should withdraw, as the population wants them to, instead of trying desperately to set up a client regime with military forces that they can control. But Bush and Blair still refuse to set a timetable for withdrawal, limiting themselves to token withdrawals as their goals are achieved.   There’s a good reason why the United States cannot tolerate a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. The issue can scarcely be raised because it conflicts with firmly established doctrine: We’re supposed to believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main export was pickles, not petroleum.   As is obvious to anyone not committed to the party line, taking control of Iraq will enormously strengthen US power over global energy resources, a crucial lever of world control. Suppose that Iraq were to become sovereign and democratic. Imagine the policies it would be likely to pursue. The Shia population in the South, where much of Iraq’s oil is, would have a predominant influence. They would prefer friendly relations with Shia Iran.   The relations are already close. The Badr brigade, the militia that mostly controls the south, was trained in Iran. The highly influential clerics also have long-standing relations with Iran, including Sistani, who grew up there. And the Shia-dominant interim government has already begun to establish economic and possibly military relations with Iran.   Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia is a substantial, bitter Shia population. Any move toward independence in Iraq is likely to increase efforts to gain a degree of autonomy and justice there, too. This also happens to be the region where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is. The outcome could be a loose Shia alliance comprising Iraq, Iran and the major oil regions of Saudi Arabia, independent of Washington and controlling large portions of the world’s oil reserves. It’s not unlikely that an independent bloc of this kind might follow Iran’s lead in developing major energy projects jointly with China and India.   Iran may give up on Western Europe, assuming that it will be unwilling to act independently of the United States. China, however, can’t be intimidated. That’s why the United States is so frightened by China.   China is already establishing relations with Iran - and even with Saudi Arabia, both military and economic. There is an Asian energy security grid, based on China and Russia, but probably bringing in India, Korea and others. If Iran moves in that direction, it can become the lynchpin of that power grid.   Such developments, including a sovereign Iraq and possibly even major Saudi energy resources, would be the ultimate nightmare for Washington. Also, a labour movement is forming in Iraq, a very important one. Washington insists on keeping Saddam Hussein’s bitter anti-labour laws, but the labour movement continues its organising work despite them.   Their activists are being killed. Nobody knows by whom, maybe by insurgents, maybe by former Baathists, maybe by somebody else. But they’re persisting. They constitute one of the major democratising forces that have deep roots in Iraqi history, and that might revitalise, also much to the horror of the occupying forces. One critical question is how Westerners will react. Will we be on the side of the occupying forces trying to prevent democracy and sovereignty? Or will we be on the side of the Iraqi people?   (Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Khaleej Times, is the No.1 English language daily newspaper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates).
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