[Mb-civic] understanding history, U.S. power, occupation strategies...

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are (thanks again Ed) 2 very illuminating commentaries about U.S. 
power and strategy.  Read and be further enlightened...


Commentaries are sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet
To learn more, please consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-03/11landau.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Interview with Ricardo Alarcon** Part 2 April 10, 2005
By Saul Landau

 Ricardo Alarcon Quesada is Cuba's Vice President and
President of its National Assembly

Landau directs digital media at Cal Poly Pomona University,
and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.


Landau: How do you compare Bush's discourse with that of past presidents?
And how do you compare them with his deeds?

Alarcon: Words are not his strongest quality. I think that there are
discrepancies in his second inaugural address. He talked about carrying
the fire of freedom throughout the world. Without sounding rude, I'd say
this is, at the very least, an over statement. He isn't going to carry
anything much further. He's already having difficulty in maintaining this
fire in Iraq. If he wants to do that around the world he will not succeed.
Indeed, he's not succeeding in Iraq.

Cuba is one of the places mentioned, not by him but by [Secretary of State
Condoleezza] Rice the day before.  I advise them not to try. It will cost
a lot of lives if the Americans would attack us, more than those dying in
Iraq, because this is not a divided country or society that has been
suffering under a dictatorial regime. The opposite is true. You will find
here a free society, finally emancipated from half a century of oppression
and corruption imposed by the US. We attained our independence in 1959 --
from US domination. That is a fact of history. From an ethnic or cultural
point of view we are a unified country, an island on which a common
culture and common identity has evolved. We are prepared to make life
impossible for an invader.

But more important, what is the meaning of this policy? It is not just
irrational, a product of arrogance or impulse, not just the product of a
person that doesn't read many books. That explains only his strange
selection of words.

Consider Bush's simplistic view of the world; or better, take the more
analytical and conscious way the CIA views it. A CIA document published a
couple months ago and another in December 2000, forecasts based on
research and analysis, consider scenarios of war, peace, turmoil and
catastrophes. But there is a common denominator expressed in one sentence:
"US influence will continue to decline." By the way, the CIA does not call
for a change of policy, but simply states as a fact that US influence is
less today than 20 or 40 years ago.

The US is not going to rise above the rest of the world. It is the sole
superpower in cold war terms. But the US cannot exercise complete power
over the rest of the world. Russia continues to have nuclear weapons.
Economically, for example, China has emerged as a power. Recently the
Chinese president toured Latin America and discussed granting Argentina a
credit line of $20 billion. 40 years ago, at time of the Alliance for
Progress, Kennedy offered the entire continent $20 billion -- over ten
year period. Cuba criticized this modest offer at the time because it was
too little.

Remember, at that time this little island had established relations with
that big country China. The other countries in the Latin America followed
the US line and refused to recognize the existence of China. Now, 40 years
later, that once non-recognized country's head of state travels throughout
the region and offers much more than the US could when it was at its peak.
And the US must accept that China plays that role in the world. The Vice
President of China was doing a similar same thing in Africa.

Although the US remains the biggest military power, it has trouble
controlling a rather small country like Iraq, which it almost destroyed by
bombing and an economic embargo before the war. The reality is that US is
only the most powerful entity in one area: information and communication.

It was the only dominant force at end of the Second World War, the only
nuclear power. Nagasaki and Hiroshima, by the way, are the only cases in
which nuclear power has been used destructively. They were not employed by
a terrorist state, but by the US democracy - allegedly to defeat Japan. At
that time and later, during the Marshall Plan, the US was at the top.
Since then it has been declining. That does not mean it is a country in
disarray, but it is going downward.

To answer this downhill slide, in my opinion, came the neo-cons who
believe that by using the United States' comparatively limited economic
and large military resources, but especially by exploiting their advantage
in terms of communication technology and near monopoly of information
media, they can reverse the trend. That is impossible. The US cannot turn
the world back to 1945 and reappear as the only power in the world. The US
needs to learn to live in a diverse world with different players,
different ideologies and interests and not to pretend to be the owner of
the planet.

Those times are gone forever. That is the way history moves. But the new
conservative trend departs form traditional conservatism and tries to
reverse the world's movement by being interventionist, by sending troops
here and there. It is an irrational approach. It's obvious that they will
not succeed but their missionary and mythological approach could lead to
mistakes even more grave than Iraq.

Landau: In 1945, the US wrote the Nuremburg laws prohibiting aggressive
war and also drafted the UN and OAS charters that prohibit intervention.
How do you explain US behavior, initiating those laws and then violating
them?

Alarcon: The US wrote all those important documents that became the
foundation of the international order when it was the most important power
in the world. Now that the world has been undergoing change those
documents have become obstacles to US interests. At the same time, US
officials try to manipulate these documents, like the Human Rights
Covenants.  If you listen to US officials, they are fulfilling a mission
of spreading human rights throughout the world.

The ideas of freedom and democracy are in the UN charter, but together
with the principle of nonintervention, prohibition of war. The only thing
the UN Charter recognizes as a legitimate reason for war is self defense,
a nation subjected to external aggression. Even in those circumstances you
have to ask the UN to intervene. Nobody else can intervene. It's a
peaceful ideal. The Charter lacks some important points. It doesn't
mention colonialism, nor recognize the right of colonial people to
self-determination and independence.

But the UN was transformed because after WW II, no one could stop the
emancipation of those countries. People became independent and then UN
members. It was one of the factors that helped transform the world. How to
explain how the US changed its mind after essentially drafting these
documents?

Those exercising power were not happy with what happened. The reality
problem is a serious one. Psychiatrists help those who have trouble
dealing with reality. If you do not acknowledge reality you may be
suffering from a serious disturbance. I sometimes feel that some American
politicians need professional help to remember that they conceived the UN
and its structure. Some American politicians now refer to the UN as
something to ignore or despise. Do they forget that it was a US creation?
To weaken or break this organization, which is what Bush did, was a
terrible thing. The UN does not exist any more because of what happened in
Iraq. This is a very serious problem. It is not true that it will
reconstruct itself on new bases.

I don't want to sound rude, but that is exactly what Hitler did. He was
angry with the League of Nations, with reality, after WWI. During the
period between the two world wars, Germany became the European 
superpower,
economically, technologically, militarily.

When Hitler set the goal of conquering Europe in the mid 1930s, his dream
matched the reality of Europe more than when Bush seeks to conquer the
entire world with the current level of US power. Hitler's irrational dream
was more rational than the discourse you hear now from American leaders.
Hitler made a very big mistake, trying to conquer the USSR. Stalin
committed many crimes. He was a dictator, but the Soviet people stopped
Hitler. It was the same mistake that Napoleon made, to try to conquer the
East. If he had remained the master of western and central Europe maybe he
would have continued to hold power. But he overextended himself.

But fascism was rejected by most people. And resistance to Nazism arose in
many places. Our Yugoslav brothers and sisters offered heroic resistance
in that period. The Nazis never conquered that country. Later on it was
made to explode, not by the Nazis but by western democracies.

Landau: You use history as a guide.

Alarcon: History is important. Those who believe they can turn history
back should remember the origin of previous wars. The Germans didn't
accept Versailles and that was the origin of Fascism.

** Ricardo Alarcon Quesada is Cuba's Vice President and
President of its National Assembly

Landau directs digital media at Cal Poly Pomona University,
and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

***

Models of Occupation : Israel is the Key to Bush's Iraq Strategy

By NEVE GORDON
(Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is
currently a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Center and Center for
Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His book
>From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights
is scheduled to appear next month (Rowman and Littlefield). He can be
reached at neve_gordon at yahoo.com)

CounterPunch    April 8, 2005

Berkeley, California

Israel is the key to understanding President Bush's strategy in Iraq. Not
because it had any influence over the decision-making process leading to
the 2nd Gulf War, but because the current Administration has adopted the
"democratic occupation" model that Israel introduced in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.

After the eruption of the first Palestinian Intifada in December 1987,
Israel had to deploy a relatively large number of troops aided by tanks
and armored vehicles to sustain the occupation -- exactly as the US is now
doing in Iraq. This transformed the Israeli occupation from an
economically profitable enterprise into a financial liability, leading
Israel to come up with the ingenious idea of outsourcing the
responsibility for the population while continuing to control the natural
resources -- in this case land and water.

Following a series of negotiations, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was
established; an entity that willingly took on the role of managing the
daily lives of the inhabitants in the Occupied Territories, while Israel
maintained control of more than 80 percent of the land. Within a matter of
months the civil institutions needed to administer populations in modern
societies -- inter alia education, health and welfare -- were passed from
Israel to the hands of the fledgling authority, which was also given some
limited form of sovereignty. Thus, without renouncing its right to rule
the West Bank and Gaza, Israel transferred responsibility for the
residents to a subcontractor of sorts -- the PA -- and in this way
dramatically reduced the cost of the occupation.

The democratic elections that took place in the Occupied Territories in
January 1996 were crucial for bestowing upon the PA a degree of
legitimacy. To be sure, the PA did not end up executing all of Israel's
wishes, and in many ways became a recalcitrant entity, but this has little
to do with Israel's initial objectives.

Israel's occupation is crucial for understanding Iraq for two essential
reasons. First, like Israel, the U.S. has made a distinction between the
occupied inhabitants and their resources. The Bush Administration's idea
is to allow the Iraqis to manage themselves and in this way to cut the
cost of the occupation, while at the same time continuing to control the
rich oil fields. The important question now is which U.S. corporations
will profit most from the expected 200 percent increase in Iraqi oil
production -- from 2.1 to 6 million barrels a day.

Second, whereas Israel was certainly not the first country to stage
democratic elections in an occupied context, it was the first power to
reintroduce this practice in a post-colonial age so as to legitimize an
ongoing occupation. The Bush Administration found this strategy useful
because it fits extremely well with the narrative about "spreading
freedom" to the Middle East. Since one cannot promote freedom and install
a puppet government at the same time, Bush was adamant about holding
elections. The crux of the matter is that the goal of these elections is
not to transfer power and authority to the Iraqi people, but rather to
legitimize ongoing U.S. control in the region.

Therefore the current debate among liberals about whether the elections in
Iraq followed the minimum procedures informing a fair democratic process
is actually beside the point. Even if Jimmy Carter himself had approved
the elections, the Iraqis would still have no say, for example, about the
deployment of foreign troops in their country. When all is said and done,
the new "democratic government" in Iraq was created to manage the local
population so that the occupying power's economic elite can enjoy the
spoils.


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