war within a breath

Bombs Over Baghdad

09.06.07 - 09:40am

Nothing epitomises the disaster that is the invasion of Iraq more than the fact that, four years on, the US is not only still bombing the country daily but actually bombing densely populated urban Baghdad neighbourhoods.

According to early reports in the media this morning, an air strike on the Mansour area of Baghdad killed 14 people. The status of the 14 people killed is as yet unknown.

The BBC report of the strike describes Mansour as “mostly Sunni, but there is a pocket where there is strong support for Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia”.

But this kind of description does not really do justice to the fact that Mansour is first and foremost an urban area in the capital city of the nation the coalition continues to occupy, and as such is made up of civilian homes and full of innocent people.

And this kind of activity is supposed to be part of a strategy to defeat an insurgency?

I have discussed here before the insanity of claiming to be winning the hearts and minds of the people whose neighbourhoods you are attacking. Until those in charge of this occupation take such considerations on board chaos and violence will continue to reign in Iraq.

Meanwhile representatives of various Iraqi factions meeting in Finland have repeated that the occupation is an impediment to peace in Iraq. According to the story coming out of Helsinki today:

The representatives from Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni groups who held four-day talks in Finland last weekend pointed out that U.S. forces are an impediment to achieving peace in Iraq, Finnish daily “Helsingin Sanomat” reported on Wednesday.

The gathering was arranged by the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) of former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, and by the John W. McCormack Institution of the University of Massachusetts, which was represented in the talks by Professor Padraig O’Malley.

The Iraqi delegates taking part in the talks agreed on the need to get American forces out of the country as quickly as possible and they have set a “realistic timetable” for the withdrawal, Padraig O’Malley told “Helsingin Sanomat.”

According to Padraig O’Malley, who took part in the talks, all parties said that the earlier the occupation ends, the better.

The paradigm which still prevails in much of the mainstream discussion, especially in the States, holds that the occupying forces are needed for peace to eventually prevail, or at the very least are capable of imposing it.

Even the dovish end of mainstream opinion in America, and a significant part of it in the United Kingdom, holds that the occupation has to continue so as not to abandon the Iraqi people to the violent forces unleashed by the invasion.

It is time to face up to the fact that the occupation is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Category: Iraq | Tags: | 2 Comments »

The Corporate Welfare Scheme

09.04.07 - 09:28am

There is a splendid article by George Monbiot today, exposing the corporate welfare scheme that is the private finance initiative.

PFI, under which corporations build and run schools, hospitals, roads and prisons and rent them to the state, has largely kept itself below the radar as a political issue during the time of the Iron Chancellor. In actual fact, the Labour Party opposed PFI while in opposition then fell head over heels in love with it once the party achieved power, so the story is also a nice illustration of how, despite a change in Government, policies which keep public funds flowing into corporate coffers are insulated.

Monbiot relates the story of a hospital development in Coventry, where the local NHS wanted to refurbish the two existing hospitals at a cost of £30m. Unfortunately for the NHS, and of course the taxpayer, PFI regulations ruled out the obvious and best option. Monbiot takes up the story:

[Its] analysts realised that business would not be interested. The scheme was too small, and there was no scope for the financial innovation that could produce serious profits. As a confidential report by the local health authority showed in 1998, the health service redesigned its scheme to make it more attractive to private capital. Instead of refurbishing the two existing hospitals, it would ask private business to knock them down and build a new one - the University hospital. This would cost not £30m but £174m. The health experts who wrote the confidential report predicted that in order to find this money, the hospital trust would have to cut both beds and services. They have just been proved right.

Did I say £174m? I beg your pardon. By January 2002 the price had risen to £290m. A month later it reached £311m. By the end of that year it had grown to £330m. In 2003 it was estimated at £370m. In March 2007, the Birmingham Post reported that the final cost was £410m. This year the hospital trust must find £56m, covering repayments and service fees, to hand to the private consortium. The annual cost will rise in line with the retail price index for 30 years.

It is now pretty obvious that this fee is unpayable, if the hospital is to maintain a proper standard of care. Over the past few days the hospital trust has announced a £30m hole in its budget. Around £10m of the necessary cuts could be found by making staff redundant: it will lose perhaps 200 people, possibly 375.

A scheme that should have provided two upgraded hospitals at a cost of £30m has ballooned to £410m. And the reason the original plan was changed was purely to provide a profit-motive to entice corporations to get involved.

Unfortunately this case is by no means isolated. While most of the corporate media has been looking in the opposite direction Private Eye has been revealing similar cases for a long time now.

And the kicker is, of course, that PFI schemes are long term deals, locking the taxpayer into yearly payments while the British Labour/Conservative dichotomy continues to morph into two wings of a single business party, US-style, with neither the desire nor the will to do what is necessary to safeguard the public interest.

Category: capitalism | Tags: | 2 Comments »

Another Glorious Day in the British Empire

09.02.07 - 05:53pm

British military scientists tested mustard gas on Indian soldiers in the years leading up to the the Second World War, it has been revealed.

The soldiers were sent into gas chambers as part of experiments to measure the effects of the terrifying gas, according to newly discovered documents at the National Archives. The Indian soldiers were under the command of the British military at the time, with the nation subject to colonial rule.

The experiments were conducted by scientists from the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire, England, scientists who had been posted to the sub-continent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese.

According to the Guardian:

The Indian tests are a little-known part of Porton’s huge programme of chemical warfare testing on humans. More than 20,000 British soldiers were subjected to chemical warfare trials involving poison gases, such as nerve gas and mustard gas, at Porton between 1916 and 1989.

Many of these British soldiers have alleged that they were duped into taking part in the tests, which have damaged their health in the years after the trials.

The reports record that in some cases Indian soldiers were exposed to mustard gas protected only by a respirator. On one occasion the gas mask of an Indian sepoy (a private) slipped, leaving him with severe burns on his eyes and face.

The tests were used to determine how much gas was needed to produce a casualty on the battlefield.

Alan Care, a lawyer representing British troops tested at Porton, said:

“I would be astonished if these Indian subjects gave any meaningful consent to taking part in these tests, particularly as they were conducted during the days of Empire. No one would have agreed … if they knew beforehand what was going to happen.”

Porton Down’s squalid history also includes the outright killing  of a soldier in 1953 with liquid nerve gas and dosing soldiers with LSD without their knowledge or consent.

There is still a barely concealed nostalgia here in Britain for this nation’s inexcusable colonial past. Given revelations such as this, one wonders why.

Category: British Empire | Tags: | 18 Comments »

Friday Wisdom

08.31.07 - 12:56pm

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities.

-    Mark Twain

Category: Friday Wisdom | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Monument to Anti-Fascist Fighters Torn Down

08.31.07 - 11:00am

A monument to the British who died in one of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War fighting against fascism has been torn down by right wing extremists.

The plaque, naming the 90 Britons killed while fighting for the International Brigades at the Battle of Ebro, was removed from the site and the area covered with graffiti proclaiming that the right wing Falange Part was “still fighting”.

The Falange once provided the political support to Franco’s fascist-backed forces but is now fractured into several parties that play no significant role in Spanish politics.

Campaigners have already vowed to replace the monument.

Over 2,000 British volunteers joined the International Brigades after the civil war broke out in 1936. More than 500 were killed and many more injured during the failed attempt to stop the forces led by General Franco, with help from Hitler and Mussolini, from imposing a military dictatorship.

Following the almost 40 years of dictatorship and the re-establishment of democracy, former members of the International Brigades have been welcomed back to Spain, and given the right to take on Spanish nationality.

Category: Spain | Tags: | Be the First to Comment »

Police Agents Provocateurs Caught on Camera

08.30.07 - 08:43am

The ignoble art of the agent provocateur in disrupting and delegitimising public protest is as old as dissidence itself yet mention of such tactics usually elicits scorn and scoffing.

Of course, there are undoubtedly those who join demonstrations who do intend to initiate confrontation and may even have little interest in the issue at hand but those who work for peaceful resistance and peaceful change should not also have to contend with the very real underhand tactics from the authorities.

So I was interested to note the events unfolding in Canada following a demonstration last week, when three police officers were basically caught redhanded trying to disrupt protests at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Quebec.

A video which has found its way onto YouTube shows three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock. In a glorious irony, the video captures protest organizers ordering one agent provocateur to put the rock down, accusing the three men of being police instigators and trying unsuccessfully to unmask them. The three police officers were then, hilariously, put on the ground and arrested by their own, presumably unaware, colleagues for trying to get through a line of riot police to escape.

In another example of how the internet is changing the media dynamic, the video has even forced the issue into the mainstream media, which usually refuse to stray from the “hard core of troublemakers blah blah some accused police of being heavyhanded” narrative.

According to the report on Canada’s CBC news website:

Protest organizers on Wednesday played the video for the media at a news conference in Ottawa. One of the organizers, union leader Dave Coles, explained that one reason protesters knew the men’s true identities was because they were wearing the same boots as other police officers.

Coles said on Wednesday that the only thing he didn’t know was whether the men were Quebec police, RCMP or hired security officers.

“[Our union] believes that the security force at Montebello were ordered to infiltrate our peaceful assembly and provoke incidents,” said Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union.

Police said the three were told to monitor protesters who were not peacefully demonstrating to prevent any violent incidents, but they were called out as undercover agents when they refused to throw objects.

As Werner at Carnival of Anarchy pointed out:

The last item is the kind of lie told when someone is caught in the act and hasn’t got the brains to realise the jig is up.

Category: police, protest | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Screwing the Screws

08.29.07 - 02:25pm

The Government’s ongoing effort to silently screw public sector workers and force them to take pay cuts to keep a lid on inflation is threatening to cause an all out pay revolt.

Prison officers took ministers and the media completely by surprise this morning with a national lightning strike that had government lawyers scurrying to the courts to get the action declared illegal.

Illegal it may have been but the grievances which motivated it have considerable justification.

False moral panics about criminals and thugs getting of scott free notwithstanding, Britain is, alarmingly, locking up ever increasing numbers of offenders in already overcrowded and understaffed prisons. Then at the same time the Government keeps tightening the thumbscrews on those who staff these prisons with below inflation pay rises, 1.9% this year.

The Government’s message is all too clear: work harder, in deteriorating conditions, while we year on year cut your pay but try to withdraw your labour and we’ll force you back to work using the courts.

The situation is very similar to that of England’s nurses, set to vote next month on possible industrial action, a case I have already discussed here.

Prison officers are, in many ways, a much less sympathetic case than nurses, but the two stories share a common thread. Public sector workers are being stabbed in the back by the Treasury while city traders and corporate executives, the very people continually bleating about inflation, trouser pay increases and bonuses which eclipse the annual salary of the average nurse.

And this is supposed to be a Labour government?

Category: capitalism | Tags: | 2 Comments »