the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Nov 13, 2006
The election was a truly stunning defeat for Bush and the Republicans, ending their 12- year reign over the Congress. The Democrats won 24 of the 33 Senate seats at stake this year, rolling up seven million more votes than the Republicans. In the House, the Democrats took 28 seats away from the Republicans, while losing none of their own. In fact, in both House and Senate every seat lost came from the Republican side.
This surge continued over into state elections, with the Democrats holding on to all their governorships, while taking six from the Republicans. The Democrats picked up more than 275 seats in state legislatures, while losing only 21 seats. As a result, the Democrats gained complete control over 23 state legislatures, leaving only 10 state governments in Republican hands, with the upper and lower houses in each of the remaining state legislatures split between the two parties.
Certainly, there were issues other than Iraq which led people to vote against the Republicans: the lousy economy and job market, worsening health care and pensions. But overshadowing all this was the war in Iraq. This election gave the Democrats the mandate to change direction 180 degrees in Iraq.
So, what have they said since the election? A very few Democrats continue to say that U.S. policy toward the war should come down to four words, “Get out of Iraq.”
But most quickly rushed to position themselves like Michigan Congressman John Dingell did. When Dingell, the most senior member in the U.S. House of Representatives, was asked about the war, he said: “We want to bring this miserable war to a successful conclusion but I don’t know anyone who wants out now. I think what the President has to do is come up with a plan around which the country can rally.”
In other words, say the Democrats, wait on Bush to do something about the war.
This is the same Bush who made it crystal clear he has no intention of ending the war. The same Bush who said that U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for his entire presidency. The same Bush who has lied at every single step of the war.
When Bush announced Rumsfeld’s replacement, he inadvertently let slip that the U.S. now had over 151,000 troops in Iraq. That is about 10,000 more troops than the generals have admitted up until now.
They aren’t talking about getting out of Iraq–they are ramping up the war. Since July, the U.S. has literally been laying siege to Baghdad, especially the teeming slums of Sadr City, where 2.5 million people live. U.S. forces cordoned off the neighborhoods with barbed wire and concrete barriers and set up check points not unlike what the Israelis have done in the Palestinian occupied territories. U.S. troops then went door-to-door rounding up anyone they thought was suspicious–meaning any man between 15 and 65. And the U.S. has recently bombed some crowded urban neighborhoods, including in Baghdad.
The cities of Anbar province, the biggest province of the country, have become battlegrounds in which almost nothing is left standing. Much of the population of that province has already fled as part of a human flood out of Iraq that is estimated to number about 100,000 people per month.
With the ramping up of the U.S. war in Iraq has come a big increase in U.S. casualties. October was the bloodiest month for U.S. troops in over a year, and November promises to be the same or worse.
There is no let-up in sight–that is Bush’s “new plan.” And administration proposals for another supplemental increase in war spending in Iraq for this year prove it. The generals are asking for a whopping 160 billion dollars on top of the 94 billion Congress already appropriated for this year.
The U.S. is not preparing to leave, it is preparing to kill even more Iraqis, destroying even more of the country–with the blessings of the Democrats.
The elections gave the Democrats the power and authority to end all this. They could order Bush to immediately change course on Iraq, requiring him to withdraw all U.S. troops now. If he were to refuse, the Democrats have more than enough basis for impeaching him and Cheney both.
Is this what the Democrats propose? Not at all! The Democrats are doing just the opposite–going out of their way to say that impeachment is “not on the table.”
If we wait on the Democrats to end this abominable war, we will watch for two more years while the bodies pile up, and while they try to focus us on the 2008 presidential election.
Iraq can’t wait for that, U.S. troops can’t wait for that. None of us can!
U.S. out of Iraq NOW! That should be our watchword!
Nov 13, 2006
South Dakota voters defeated the state’s near total ban on abortion in last Tuesday’s election. In February 2006, the state legislature had passed a law banning abortions for any reason whatsoever except where the life of the mother was in danger. No exceptions were made for rape, incest or health problems. This law was just overturned by a popular referendum, 56 to 44%.
Almost as soon as the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973 threw out all state laws that banned abortion outright, state and federal laws started chipping away at the right to a legal abortion, imposing all kinds of legal, medical and financial restrictions. Not to mention the outright harassment–legal and extra legal–that has shut down women’s health clinics in large areas of the country eliminating access to abortion. In South Dakota itself, Planned Parenthood has only one clinic that provides abortions. The doctors doing the abortions are brought in from another state because the atmosphere in South Dakota has been so threatening against doctors who used to provide abortions.
South Dakota was chosen as the testing ground against women’s right to choose abortion because of its conservative tradition: voting for every Republican president since 1940 except for one election. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry by 20percentage points in South Dakota.
This February the South Dakota state legislators passed the anti-abortion law by two-thirds of both houses. Expecting that women’s groups would challenge their law in the courts, they hoped the case could make it to the Supreme Court. With two new conservatives on the Supreme Court, the anti-abortion forces thought they could finally find a way to overturn Roe v. Wade. So the issue was watched by supporters of women’s right to choose and opponents from around the country.
The pro-choice forces began their South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families in March, knocking on doors all over the state to get signatures for a referendum to go on the ballot this November. They needed 16,728 signatures. They collected over 38,000. So even though South Dakota is considered conservative, even though most of its economy is rural and military, the sentiment obviously exists to support a woman’s right to choose.
What happened with the ballot referendum shows that South Dakotans have opinions similar to every poll taken across the country on the abortion topic: a majority supports a woman’s right to abortion if that is her choice.
The possibility of keeping abortion legal and safe is increased when supporters don’t depend on the courts or state legislators. Obviously, even a ballot referendum can be turned against people. People who think that women should have the right to choose abortion must continue to mobilize to defend that right.
Nov 13, 2006
Senator Harry Reid, soon to be Majority Leader in the Senate, said, “Americans chose Democrats because, like them, we stand for change. We will move in a new direction.... From here on out, Haliburton is out. Hard working families are in. Special interests are out. People’s interests are in.”
Of course, it’s almost impossible to take seriously what a politician says after winning an election. But suppose the Democrats did want to make changes with their new majority?
There’s plenty of money available. The Bush tax cut has allowed the wealthy and the corporations to save about a TRILLION dollars in five years, which is more than 500 million dollars a day... yes, a day. The top one% of taxpayers saved about $50,000 in taxes each year, while the middle income taxpayer got an average of only $650 per year. So plenty of money is available. The Democrats could even increase the tax savings of middle and poorer taxpayers.
And there’s no lack of things to do with a trillion or so dollars: schools in all the big cities are falling apart; the roads and bridges are crumbling; 45 million of us have no health coverage, etc.
Yes, the Democrats could begin to do all that–if they meant what they said.
But President Bush would exercise his veto, right? Well, the Democrats have enough votes to bring him up on impeachment charges–for lying us into a war. Maybe they couldn’t win a conviction, but they could impeach–if they were so keen on getting rid of special interests.
So will they? Sure, right after pigs begin to fly!
Nov 13, 2006
Voters in Arizona passed four proposals attacking immigrant workers. The attacks are similar to those passed earlier in the state of Georgia, in the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and in at least five other U.S. towns.
The Arizona proposals say that illegal immigrants cannot be granted bail if charged with felonies. Illegal immigrants are denied the right to sue for any sort of punitive damages. They are not allowed into state-funded literacy classes or any other state-funded education or social service. A final symbolic proposal prevents state and local governments from using any language but English on official documents in the future.
The Georgia laws signed this past April allow the state to legally fine bosses who hire undocumented workers, to prevent companies with state contracts from hiring undocumented workers, and to deny such workers the right to unemployment or workers’ comp.
The Hazleton, Pennsylvania laws would fine landlords for renting to illegal immigrants. Licenses of bosses who hire these immigrants can be suspended. And English is declared to be the only lawful language for city affairs. Hazleton’s laws are not yet in effect because of a court injunction.
Attacks such as these serve several purposes for politicians and large corporate interests. The attacks are camouflaged as “helping” the ordinary worker who has trouble finding a job and trouble earning enough to pay for things like kids’ tuition, and who pays more and more taxes while seeing less and less benefit.
Corporations with money coming out of their ears cut hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs to boost their profits still higher. They reduce wages and eliminate benefits. They join with politicians to divert workers’ attention away from the enemy who has truly hurt them, onto the immigrant who is supposedly “taking their job.” It’s camouflage.
Immigrants or no, the bosses still won’t pay good wages to anyone who won’t stand up and fight for them. Immigrants or no, the bosses will continue to evade taxes and force workers to pay the difference.
Every law that represses one part of the working class is a roundabout way to attack every worker. Harsher laws against immigrants won’t create jobs. But harsher laws will force a larger number of immigrants to accept even lower wages and even worse conditions, just scratching to survive. Grinning, the bosses will say to everyone else, “See, I can get labor for less. You want a job or not?” When we let the bosses attack any part of the working class, we help them to attack all of us.
If someone works here, someone should have full legal rights. Absolutely no exceptions!
Demand that every boss pay full wages and respect the full legal rights of every worker. It’s the only way for us to protect all of our wages, jobs and working conditions.
Nov 13, 2006
Helped by a big infusion of advertising cash, corporate opponents of Michigan’s Proposal 5 were able to sway voters against it.
Proposal 5, also called the “K-16" proposal, was a proposal to increase school funding immediately across the board and to peg future increases to the inflation rate. In addition, it would equalize public school funding between districts in Michigan.
At first, polls showed broad support for the proposal; after all, it would benefit every child in school.
But then a big opposition campaign started up, funded by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the Michigan Association of Realtors, among other corporate backers. They blitzed the airwaves with many more ads than the supporters could afford, and the ads had their effect.
The first argument they made was a scare campaign asserting that most of the money would go to teachers’ pensions, pulling funds away from the classrooms and the students. It was an out-and-out lie. The proposal in fact would have kept funding in the schools, by requiring that deficiencies in the pension fund be covered from the general fund, not from local school budgets.
That’s what these companies were afraid of: that they might have to pay for some of this. Right now, there are NO corporate income taxes in the state of Michigan. If more money were mandated for the schools, who knows what would happen?
The second thing opponents of the schools said was that funding the proposal would require tax increases, or cuts in other public services like health care, police and fire departments.
Given the way things are organized in this capitalist society, that could be true. The same corporate interests that actively opposed this proposal would make sure that the politicians didn’t come back to them to pay for it, if it were to pass. They’d make sure that the money would come from OTHER programs that help ordinary working people, or raises in OUR taxes–not cuts in their huge tax breaks.
And the politicians proved the point. Most of them were against this proposal, including Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm and her Republican challenger, Dick DeVos. Make the corporations pay for the schools? Not them!
In fact, we can’t win if we depend on putting a spending proposal on the ballot. Those with deep pockets will pull out all the stops to defeat it. But, even if it passes, they control the politicians.
If we want resources to go to help our children, it will take a lot more than a ballot proposal. It will take a fight.
Nov 13, 2006
George Bush has nominated Robert Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. Who is he–this man who is being touted as the one to end the war in Iraq?
He is a product of the CIA. Gates was the second in command of the CIA in the mid-1980s, during the Iran-Contra “affair,” when the U.S. was secretly selling weapons to Iran in order to pay for its war in Nicaragua. That was the war carried out by thugs and mercenaries hired by the U.S. against the people of Nicaragua.
When Congress opened up an investigation and questioned Gates about this, he claimed that he didn’t know anything about it–which led one Congressman to declare that Gates was either a liar or an incompetent, since it was happening right under his nose.
At the same time, Gates was playing up the supposed Russian threat, literally finding a Russian under every rock, in order to justify Reagan’s big military build-up–which many CIA analysts didn’t like, since it made them look like they didn’t really know what was going on in Russia right before the Soviet Union collapsed. When Reagan named Gates to head the CIA, Congress rejected his nomination for lying to them. But when Bush’s father was president, he rewarded Gates by naming him head of the CIA again–and this time got Congress to go along with it by the narrowest of votes.
No wonder that after Gates was nominated to be secretary of defense, commentators remarked that he had been groomed for such a position for a long time and had been plucked from the Bush family stable. Gates, who today is being puffed up by the news media as the new savior of U.S. policy in Iraq, is nothing but a recycled face that is being pasted onto a barbaric war in order to lure people in this country into believing that there is going to be some kind of change in U.S. policy in Iraq, that the U.S. is getting ready to get out.
So why have the Democrats indicated they will accept his nomination?
Why else? They agree with Bush’s intention to pursue and increase the war.
Nov 13, 2006
The International Labor Organization (ILO) just published a report on what’s happening to youth employment in the world. By simply reporting numbers, it condemns the catastrophic situation of youth around the world. And the ILO is hardly a radical organization.
The study concerns youth ages 15 to 24, or more than a billion people. It reports that youth unemployment has increased from 74 million in 1995 to 85 million in 2005. This adds up to an unemployment rate of 13%, calculated by the ILO relative to the 650 million youth who are working or looking for work.
Among those working, more than 300 million live below the poverty level fixed by the ILO at $2 a day.
In the poor countries–in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe–the youth unemployment rate varies from 20% to 25%. In the richer countries, youth unemployment runs around 13%, although in the U.S. it is even higher.
The report gives other facts about youth employment. While the number of the world’s youth increased by 13.2% from 1995 to 2005, jobs for youth increased by only 3.8%. The young unemployed represent 44% of all the unemployed in the world, while youth make up only 25% of the world’s working age population.
This situation has been brought about by an economic system which is supposedly the best possible!
Nov 13, 2006
The following article is from the October 10 issue of Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs (Workers Power), the publication of the African Union of Internationalist Communist Workers (UATCI).
The first humanitarian organizations visiting the refugee camps along the 375-mile border between Chad and Sudan immediately launched an alert. If aid isn’t rapidly sent, thousands of men, woman and especially children risk dying of hunger and thirst. Organizations like Doctors Without Borders fear a catastrophe, such as an epidemic like cholera.
After the media picked up the news, the rich countries send emissaries. All of them declare there is imminent danger of a catastrophe. French President Chirac said at the United Nations that Darfur is “a crime against humanity” in the making. Bush spoke of “genocide.”
But refugees from Sudan continue to die each day from hunger and thirst, from malnutrition and diarrhea. They live miserably in shacks of straw and branches. Those who have survived can thank the population of Chad, which has furnished food and water.
The humanitarian organizations that come set up tents for the refugees. They bring water and food. But the needs are so great, this charity is only a drop in the bucket.
Why did these refugees flee their villages, abandon fields and crops, winding up in camps with miserable living conditions?
The crisis began in December 2003 in the Darfur region of Sudan. This region in the west of Sudan is itself made up of three parts: North, West and South Darfur. A rebellion that broke out in North Darfur extended to the entire region. It broke out at the same time that the Sudanese government was settling on an agreement in Washington with a rebel group from another part of Sudan. The two main Darfur groups leading the fight against the central government of Sudan are the Movement for the Liberation of Sudan and the Movement for Justice and Equality. The rebels criticize the central government for neglecting Darfur. They also demand 13% of the country’s oil revenue, as well as the departure of the government’s army from Darfur and autonomy to run the area.
The central government in the capital of Khartoum appeared to negotiate, while it was sending the army to attack the rebels. As in the majority of such cases, the civilian population pays the price. Refugees questioned by the press recount how they fled their villages, which were bombed by the Sudanese army, and then pillaged and destroyed by the Janjaweed (government militias on horseback). The Janjaweed chase people up to the refugee camps, inside Chadian territory. These camps have been moved 30 miles inside Chad to avoid such attacks. There are 200,000 to 300,000 dead in Darfur with more than two million people displaced or turned into refugees in Chad. This adds up to a third of the population of Darfur.
Since the failure of negotiations between the rebel movements and the Khartoum government in 2003, Darfur has been soaked in blood. The few attempts at reconciliation all failed. The African Union also sent in a peacekeeping army of 7,000 soldiers. Nonetheless, the Sudanese government continues to attack the rebels.
Behind this civil war there are several conflicts. There have always been quarrels between nomads and livestock raisers, especially over cattle grazing in the fields. With drought and the advance of the desert, these quarrels multiply. But the local conflicts were in general settled in a friendly manner, even if sometimes unfortunately they were ended by weapons.
But behind the current conflict there is oil, the true impulse of this war. This begins with the rebels themselves, who demand 13% of oil revenues. But above all are the giant U.S. oil companies who want this oil. Speaking of “genocide” the U.S. leaves open the possibility to intervene militarily in Darfur and in this way take the oil from the Chinese who exploit it today. The U.S. has pushed to have U.N. forces enter as a way to do the same thing.
In fact, last September 30th, the African intervention force in Darfur was supposed to leave and be replaced by a U.N. force of 20,000. But the mission of the African force was prolonged for three more months because the Sudanese government refused U.N. mediation. They spoke of a plot “with the goal of dismembering the country and pillaging its oil.”
The population of this region of Sudan has known only violence and misery. Even when there was no official war, armed bands confronted one another. The peasants can no longer cultivate their meager lands nor raise livestock without risking their lives. They can no longer live in their villages, which have become war zones. And when they flee to refuge camps, they face starvation and death.
Nov 13, 2006
On October 29, after weeks of hesitation, Mexican President Vicente Fox finally sent troops, backed up by armored vehicles and helicopters, into the city of Oaxaca. For months the population has been in rebellion against the governor of the state of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz.
Officially, Fox claimed to be restoring public order disturbed by ... the governor’s police. Fox decided to act when local plain-clothed police shot on demonstrators, killing at least three, including a young U.S. journalist. This threatened a still bigger outburst from the population. Up to that point, Fox had been perfectly willing to see the governor, head of a rival party, face these serious difficulties on his own.
The state of Oaxaca had long been under the control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which for decades was the only party that ran the country. In 2000, the PRI lost the national presidency to the National Action Party (PAN) of Vicente Fox. But local PRI power holders like Ruiz used their hold over local offices to maintain their grasp over part of the spoils.
The movement began last May 22, when Ruiz sent armed forces to attack a teachers’ demonstration that was demanding a wage increase and more funding for the schools. The attack on the teachers only inflamed discontent in the population. The 70,000 teachers in the state sought and got support from hundreds of thousands of poor people, most of whom are Indians.
In June, following the attack on the teachers’ demonstration, the population rose up, supported by independent unions and municipal associations, paralyzing the capital city, Oaxaca. Three hundred eighty organizations came together in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, hoping to substitute their authority for that of local administrations. Five national protest marches brought together hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Thirty local government offices were occupied, administrative buildings and courts were closed, and roads were blocked in an attempt to paralyze economic activity.
Starting in August, the city of Oaxaca was controlled by its population, which demanded the resignation of Governor Ruiz. Ruiz maintained himself in power only by surrounding himself with thugs and by using violence against the population. In five months, his thugs killed 15 militants of the movement.
When President Fox sent in troops, downtown merchants may have applauded, but the poor population didn’t agree. So now the situation is a kind of stand-off. The merchants hope that business resumes, and the governor hopes to maintain his position. But the population of Oaxaca, which has carried out months of struggle, hasn’t spoken its last word.
Nov 13, 2006
The following is a translation of an editorial published in the November 3rd issue of the newspaper Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), put out by the revolutionary workers organization of that name in France.
A fire set in a bus in Marseille France on October 28th seriously burned a girl. This act is a crime perpetrated by young people who have no class consciousness.
Apparently the bus driver refused to pull over for some youths who demanded to be picked up between two stops. The fire was their revenge–with an unfortunate girl as their victim. The week before, there had been eight other buses set afire, mainly in the poor suburbs around Paris. It was sheer luck that no one else was burnt or even killed.
This is an inexcusable crime, even if the youth who did this come from poor neighborhoods and even if some of them believe that their arson expresses their hatred of society. Those they risk killing are also poor like they are. Their victims could be their family members or their friends, or people from their neighborhoods.
Poverty is no excuse for human irresponsibility and still less for striking out against their own people. It’s true that the burning of buses in Grigny, Nanterre, Trappes and elsewhere didn’t kill or wound anyone. But, when bus drivers don’t dare serve these neighborhoods, the men and women who suffer from it are those who have to get to work, even if they must walk.
These youth who devote themselves to this type of activity make life still more difficult.
Unscrupulous criminals and imbeciles have always existed. But why are such events increasing?
In certain neighborhoods, unemployment is double or triple the already high national average, which is already intolerable. The youth there have no hope of finding work, since they were denied a decent education. They have no sense of belonging to the community. But few of them take such an irresponsible path as these youths did. But in such degraded social conditions, a lawless minority inevitably forms, a minority without respect for the people around them. The workers’ movement in the past called these people the "lumpen proletariat" (rabble proletariat). The workers’ movement at all times had to denounce and often fight this "lumpen proletariat." Not only do these marginalized elements poison workers’ existence, but often the bosses and the far right recruit them as their thugs.
So even if they come from poor neighborhoods, they don’t merit sympathy any more than terrorists who, in the name of either just or unjust causes, explode a car in the midst of a street full of people or in the middle of a market.
We can reject these people without forgetting the soil in which this "lumpen proletariat" grows. It’s important not to forget who is responsible for this situation. Those who dominate the economy, those who demand that workers sacrifice everything for profit, these are the people responsible for unemployment and increasing misery with all the harm this brings. Also responsible are the political leaders of whatever stripe, who through servility or spinelessness in front of the bosses let misery increase, allow social life to break down and allow poor neighborhoods to be transformed into violence-ridden jungles.
If workers’ neighborhoods are developing this way, it’s because the entire society, the entire economy is a jungle where the only things that count are the relation of forces, power and money. The young criminals are the product of an infinitely more criminal system. That doesn’t excuse them, but it’s necessary not to forget it either.
Nov 13, 2006
Two days before the midterm U.S. Congressional elections, the Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein announced the death sentence against him.
A last-ditch effort for George Bush to help out Republican candidates? The only people who denied it were Bush and a few close members of his administration. But while the timing of the verdict was tied to the election campaign, the verdict itself was part and parcel of U.S. policy in Iraq–one more attempt to hide reality.
In any event, Bush quickly declared the verdict “a milestone” in Iraq, and a “major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy and its constitutional government.”
Bush had celebrated many other “major achievements in Iraq” before, like the famous “end of major combat operations,” or Saddam’s capture, or the Iraqi constitution, or the elections and setting up of an Iraqi government.... And every time he did, things in Iraq only took another visible turn for the worse.
Today, even the U.S. government admits that the U.S. war on Iraq has claimed more than 150,000 Iraqi lives, that is, more than 50 times the toll of 9/11. The real number is likely to be at least four times as high, and this in a country whose population is only one-twelfth the size of the U.S. population.
Since 2003, even the most basic services such as electricity and running water have become a luxury for the vast majority of Iraqis. Unemployment, poverty and crime have reached catastrophic levels. Ethnic and religious militias allied with the U.S. have stepped up their fight for power, attacking the population and drawing the country more and more into a bloody chaos–which Iraqis have been trying to flee in despair.
According to the United Nations, 1.8 million Iraqis are living in neighboring countries today, and another 1.6 million are displaced internally. In other words, the U.S. war on Iraq has turned more than one in eight Iraqis into refugees. And that number is growing faster than ever–Syria alone counts the arrival of 2,000 new Iraqi refugees every day.
As for the anti-U.S. insurgency, it has been steadily growing stronger, causing more and more deaths and injuries among U.S. troops. With 105 killed, October registered one of the highest monthly U.S. death tolls, almost all of the deaths being officially listed as combat. In a recent poll, 60% of Iraqis said they supported violence against American soldiers.
Just as every previous announcement of “good news” from Iraq, this one only portends a more catastrophic situation.
Nov 13, 2006
Today, the U.S. has 20,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan and NATO has another 20,000 troops. Together, they have not been able to stop the Taliban from winning control over at least half of the country, and gaining. Whether this new opposition to the U.S. and NATO occupation of Afghanistan is actually the Taliban, or a combination of other forces, is not clear. But what is clear is that over the last year the war in Afghanistan has gotten much, much worse than even in 2001.
Barely five years ago, in October 2001, the U.S. military with the aid of the British and the Afghan Northern Alliance had gone to war, and within two months had routed the ruling Taliban Alliance. If the Taliban has recently gained so much ground back in Afghanistan, it is not because it is particularly popular among most of the population. When it ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban used religion as a justification to carry out the worst oppression and terror. Today the Taliban continues to threaten the most brutal violence against anyone who dares oppose them.
Yet more and more people are turning to the Taliban because what the U.S. has brought to Afghanistan is worse.
First of all, the U.S. military has brought Afghanistan death and destruction. In many regions of the country, the U.S. military has systematically bombed and destroyed whole villages, as it recently did with a village in Kandahar province, reportedly killing at least 60 civilians. U.S. and NATO troops also regularly invade peoples’ homes and round up the young men to send them to the notorious and secret U.S.-run prison system.
The U.S. operates at least 19 prisons in Afghanistan, with the biggest being at Bagram. According to John Sifton, the Human Rights Watch representative in Afghanistan, conditions in these prisons are worse than at Guantanamo Bay or the infamous Abu Ghraib in Iraq. “Detainees were severely beaten, exposed to cold and deprived of sleep and water,” says Sifton. Most never leave these prisons alive.
At the same time, impoverishment in Afghanistan is worse than ever.
After the U.S.-led forces kicked out the Taliban, the U.S. hosted a series of international conferences in which governments of countries big and small pledged tens of billions of dollars to supposedly provide the resources and assistance necessary for the country’s reconstruction and development needs. Needless to say, little of that money ever made it to Afghanistan, nor to the people who needed it most. Outside of the construction of a few roads that connect the bigger cities together, which was done for military reasons, there was no reconstruction nor development. Almost none of the people in the country have access to electricity, water, health care or education. And the country is dotted by refugee camps, to which people have fled to get away from the war. There is no international aid whatsoever.
The Afghan people are literally starving to death. By all indicators, poverty in Afghanistan is worse than almost anywhere else in the world, with the situation of women and children particularly grave. For women, the act of giving birth can be a “forecast of death.” According to the United Nations Development Programs Afghanistan Human Development Report, “one woman dies approximately every 30 minutes from pregnancy-related causes.” And one in four children born in Afghanistan cannot expect to live beyond the age of five. Almost no one lives longer than age 45.
This impoverishment is made worse by the U.S.-led drug eradication program. Poppy cultivation represents a survival strategy for millions of Afghans. Without the money they get from selling poppies, most families cannot feed their children. Of course, the U.S. could encourage farmers to grow other crops by giving them some aid. Instead, the U.S. carries out an eradication program, destroying crops, and literally adding to the starvation of the population.
Of course, no one should believe that the U.S. has stopped the cultivation of poppies. Afghanistan grows 90% of all the poppies that go into the production of illegal opium or heroin in the entire world. One important reason for this is that the U.S. allows the cultivation of poppies when it benefits its allies, such as many of the top officials of its puppet government, who are notoriously linked to the drug trade.
In other words, the U.S. uses drug eradication as one more weapon in its war, in order to reward its allies, while terrorizing everyone else.
After the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, the U.S. media almost completely stopped covering the war in Afghanistan. Their excuse has been that the war in Afghanistan has been eclipsed by the war in Iraq–which they have barely covered either. As late as 2003, President Bush could get away with declaring Afghanistan a major victory, and his generals regularly declared the Taliban to be “a force in decline” without being publicly challenged.
Even today, when they mention Afghanistan, most Republicans make it sound like the war in Afghanistan is the first stop in the war on terror, their big success story. As for the Democrats, particularly Senator Kerry and Bill Clinton, they talk about how the “real fight against terror is in Afghanistan.” Afghanistan, in other words, is supposed to be the “good fight,” as opposed to the highly unpopular war in Iraq.
This is pure propaganda. The war in Afghanistan is another imperialist war by the U.S. to impose its control–not just on oil–but on the entire region of the Middle East and Central Asia, with all of those resources and peoples. It is a war that is not opposed to terror, but instead is state-supported terror on a grand scale against the people of Afghanistan.
It is a disgusting, barbaric war that all workers should oppose.
Nov 13, 2006
The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling on the U.S. government to release Sami al-Haj, a journalist the U.S. has been holding at Guantanamo prison for the past five years.
In December 2001, shortly after the overthrow of the Taliban government by the U.S., al-Haj traveled to Afghanistan to cover the war. At the Afghan border, Pakistani intelligence officers arrested al-Haj, a Sudanese national, claiming that his papers were not in order. The Pakistanis turned al-Haj over to U.S. military authorities, who first held him in Afghanistan and then transferred him to Guantanamo.
U.S. officials claim that al-Haj was a courier for al-Qaeda. But they have provided no evidence for this accusation. Nor have they filed any charges against him.
This is not unusual–in fact, most of the over 500 prisoners at Guantanamo have been held without charges. What’s special about al-Haj, though, is that he worked for the Arab news network Al-Jazeera, a regular target of U.S. attacks. The U.S. military has bombed Al-Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Iraq several times in the past five years. The U.S. killed Al-Jazeera reporter Tariq Ayyoub during the bombing of the network’s Baghdad office in April 2003.
Al-Jazeera has tried to report about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq independently, instead of “embedding” itself with the U.S. military and acting as its mouthpiece, as all major U.S. news networks have done. This is the “crime” for which Al-Jazeera and its journalists have been punished.
U.S. officials claim to fight these wars in the name of “freedom.” Whatever freedom they are talking about, it certainly doesn’t include freedom of the press!
Nov 13, 2006
Recently WABC News in New York City sent students with hidden video cameras into 10 U.S. Army recruitment centers in the area.
What did the videos show?
One student asks a recruiter, “Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?” “No, we’re bringing people back,” he replies. “We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago,” another recruiter says.
Yet another recruiter even claimed that if you didn’t like the Army, you could just quit. “It’s called a ‘Failure to Adapt’ discharge,” the recruiter says. “It’s an entry level discharge, so it won’t affect anything on your record. It’ll just be like it never happened.”
Last year, a small scandal developed over the lies told by U.S. Army recruiters. The Army then announced it had retrained every one of them.
Apparently, they learned the bigger the lie, the better!
Nov 13, 2006
On Sunday, November 5, Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq, was condemned to death by a special tribunal in Baghdad for the assassination of 148 people in the village of Doujail in the year 1982.
Saddam Hussein, who began his career as a bounty hunter for the Baath party, then became head of the police on his rise to power. Finally, he exercised a personal dictatorship between 1979 to 2003. He ordered the execution of all opponents, justified the massacre of entire villages and populations and unleashed terror against the people of Iraq during 24 years. Under these circumstances, one wonders why this tribunal tried him for “only” 148 assassinations and not for the totality of his crimes–that is to say, those carried out during all of his political career.
But this tribunal, like the government and the entire Iraqi state apparatus, is the creation of the American occupation army. And the leaders of the United States, like those of the other imperialist powers, don’t want to recall the past.
Not only did the imperialist countries not do anything to stop Saddam Hussein from establishing his dictatorship, they sold him arms, they bought Iraqi oil, and they established fruitful commercial ties and friendly diplomatic exchanges with his regime.
Beginning in 1980, the United States, France and England supported Iraq in its war against Iran. Some 750 American companies were authorized by the U.S. government to sell arms to Hussein. These same companies are the ones that made still more money equipping the U.S. army in its two wars against and its occupation of Iraq.
The dictator who is condemned today served the interests of imperialism. He was given free rein to bear down upon his own people, even when this meant his hands were bathed in blood.
It was only later, with the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, that Saddam Hussein was declared to be public enemy #1. Even then, the U.S. government left him in place after the war so that he could maintain order in Iraq through additional massacres.
President Bush declared that the conviction of Saddam Hussein carries Iraq through the passage “from a tyrannical regime to a country of law.” But Iraq has never known a “rule of law” other than the law of the strongest. And the strongest, at least up through today, has always been imperialism, and particularly the oil companies and the arms merchants. Their rule has been imposed through the intermediary of Saddam Hussein when he was in power; or under the direct surveillance of the U.S. army now that he is in prison.