Hi. Whover is praying to the rain gods, please stop!
First, some good news to open the week's emails. Then, even
though Naomi Klein's topic is serious, she always carries a light
touch, as in 'a little drop of sugar makes the medicine go down.'
Surely, kids, you remember. (Mary Poppins, for the old folks)
Ed
From: Joan Sekler
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 12:29 AM
Subject: "Fahrenheit 9/11" Wins America's People's Choice Awards
Over 23 million people in the U.S. voted in the Peoples Choice Awards
and "Fahrenheit 9/11" won as best picture of the year, beating Shrek
2 and Spiderman. The award was presented by Martin Sheen and in his
acceptance speech, Michael Moore dedicated his award to the families
of soldiers in Iraq and called for bringing the troops home soon.
This is good news...there are millions of people in the U.S. opposed
to the war which will help us build a major anti-war movement in the
coming years.
***
LOOKOUT by Naomi Klein, the Nation!
You Break It, You Pay For It
So it turns out Pottery Barn doesn't even have a rule that says,
"You break it, you own it." According to a company spokesperson, "in the rare
instance that something is broken in the store, it's written off as a loss."
Yet the nonexistent policy of a store selling $80 corkscrews continues to wield
more influence in the United States than the Geneva Conventions and the US
Army's Law of Land Warfare combined. As Bob Woodward has noted, Colin Powell
invoked "the Pottery Barn rule" before the invasion, while John Kerry pledged
his allegiance to it during the first presidential debate. And the imaginary
rule is still the favored blunt instrument with which to whack anyone who dares
to suggest that the time has come to withdraw troops from Iraq: Sure the war is
a disaster, the argument goes, but we can't stop now--you break it, you own it.
Though not invoking the chain store by name, Nicholas Kristof laid out this
argument in a recent New York Times column. "Our mistaken invasion has left
millions of Iraqis desperately vulnerable, and it would be inhumane to abandon
them now. If we stay in Iraq, there is still some hope that Iraqis will come to
enjoy security and better lives, but if we pull out we will be condemning
Iraqis to anarchy, terrorism and starvation, costing the lives of hundreds of
thousands of children over the next decade."
Let's start with the idea that the United States is helping to provide
security. On the contrary, the presence of US troops is provoking violence on a
daily basis. The truth is that as long as the troops remain, the country's
entire security apparatus--occupation forces as well as Iraqi soldiers and
police officers--will be exclusively dedicated to fending off resistance
attacks, leaving a security vacuum when it comes to protecting regular Iraqis.
If the troops pulled out, Iraqis would still face insecurity, but they would be
able to devote their local security resources to regaining control over their
cities and neighborhoods.
As for preventing "anarchy," the US plan to bring elections to Iraq seems
designed to spark a civil war--the civil war needed to justify an ongoing
presence for US troops no matter who wins the elections. It was always clear
that the Shiite majority, which has been calling for immediate elections for
more than a year, was never going to accept any delay in the election
timetable. And it was equally clear that by destroying Falluja in the name of
preparing the city for elections, much of the Sunni leadership would be forced
to call for an election boycott.
When Kristof asserts that US forces should stay in Iraq to save "hundreds of
thousands of children" from starvation, it's hard to imagine what he has in
mind. Hunger in Iraq is not merely the humanitarian fallout of a war--it is the
direct result of the US decision to impose brutal "shock therapy" policies on a
country that was already sickened and weakened by twelve years of sanctions.
Paul Bremer's first act on the job was to lay off close to 500,000 Iraqis, and
his primary accomplishment--for which he was just awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom--was to oversee a "reconstruction" process that systematically
stole jobs from needy Iraqis and handed them to foreign firms, sending the
unemployment rate soaring to 67 percent. And the worst of the shocks are yet to
come. On November 21, the group of industrialized countries known as the Paris
Club finally unveiled its plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving
it outright, the Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80 percent,
contingent on Iraq's future governments adhering to a strict International
Monetary Fund austerity program. According to early drafts, that program
includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (read: privatization), a
plan that Iraq's Ministry of Industry predicts will require laying off an
additional 145,000 workers. In the name of "free-market reforms," the IMF also
wants to eliminate the program that provides each Iraqi family with a basket of
food--the only barrier to starvation for millions of citizens. There is
additional pressure to eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade
Organization, which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a
member--provided it adopts certain "reforms."
So let's be absolutely clear: The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in
the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its
people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less
flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions, followed by elections designed to
transfer as little power to Iraqis as possible. This is what famed Argentine
writer Rodolfo Walsh, writing before his 1977 assassination by the military
junta, described as "planned misery." And the longer the United States stays in
Iraq, the more misery it will plan.
But if staying in Iraq is not the solution, neither are easy bumper-sticker
calls to pull the troops out and spend the money on schools and hospitals at
home. Yes, the troops must leave, but that can be only one plank of a credible
and moral antiwar platform. What of the schools and hospitals in Iraq--the ones
that were supposed to be fixed by Bechtel but never were? Too often, antiwar
forces have shied away from speaking about what Americans owe Iraq. Rarely is
the word "compensation" spoken, let alone the more loaded "reparations."
Antiwar forces have also failed to offer concrete support for the political
demands coming out of Iraq. For instance, when the Iraqi National Assembly
forcefully condemned the Paris Club deal for forcing the Iraqi people to pay
Saddam's "odious" debts and robbing them of their economic sovereignty, the
antiwar movement was virtually silent, save the dogged but undersupported
Jubilee Iraq. And while US soldiers aren't protecting Iraqis from starvation,
the food rations certainly are--so why isn't safeguarding this desperately
needed program one of our central demands?
The failure to develop a credible platform beyond "troops out" may be one
reason the antiwar movement remains stalled, even as opposition to the war
deepens. Because the Pottery Barn rulers do have a point: Breaking a country
should have consequences for the breakers. Owning the broken country should not
be one of them, but how about paying for the repairs?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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