This Week:

Quote of the Week

Website of the Week: Iraq Relief Efforts

The U.S. and The Undermining of Democracy

Greetings,

This week I begin a process—which I expect will spread out into parts of several issues, maybe not consecutively—of assessing the recent Anglo-American Invasion of Iraq (AAII). There are so many under-reported aspects of that paroxysm of violence that need attention: depleted uranium, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the privatization of an entire country, humanitarian issues, the domestic political consequences, the ongoing strengthening of the Bush Doctrine, the costs, the costs, the costs! And so much more. Yet, as terrible as is the fate of the Iraqis and the future direct targets of U.S. power, they are certainly not the only ones on the receiving end of U.S. power. I think specifically of the Palestinians, Iranians, Colombians, Bolivians, and so many more. Not to mention the citizens of the U.S. itself, themselves victims of a home-grown “austerity program” of the sort typically visited upon the nations of the global South.

I am going out of town for a week or so, to attend the graduation of my nephew on the East Coast. So, Nygaard Notes #206 will come out several days early, on Tuesday—what a shocking departure from the norm! I hope it doesn’t cause anyone (besides myself) undue stress. I expect #207 to be out on Friday, as usual, barring travel complications. And, I’ll tell you right now, since I return on the evening before the deadline, #207 will likely be a reprint of some fascinating Nygaard Notes analysis that bears repeating.

Financial contributions continue to appear at the offices of the Notes in response to the recently-completed Pledge Drive. Thanks so much to each of you who have taken seriously your responsibility for supporting independent journalism!

‘Til next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Here are a couple of “quotes” from an article headlined “Get That Maple an Accountant!” in the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) of May 12th. The article was reporting on a project called the “Neighborhood Tree Survey,” in which New York City trees were studied and assigned a market value of $3,225 (on average). This “value” was based on a variety of factors, such as the amount they increase property values and the amount of pollutants they remove from the air, and so forth. The Times admitted that this tree-commodification project had “an ambitious goal some tree-huggers might consider crudely capitalistic.” Among many unbelievable comments in this article, here are my two favorites:

Fiona S. Watt, the NYC Parks Department's chief of forestry and horticulture, said:

“People always knew there was some vague benefit to trees, but you could never quantify it. But once you have the methodology to equate trees with dollars, now you're talking. It's no longer about hugging trees because they're good, but because you have hard data in a language more effective in the public dialogue.”

* and * Here is Deborah Gangloff, executive director of American Forests, a “Washington-based advocacy group:”

“A tree does more work for people in a city, so it's worth more in Manhattan.”

Website of the Week: Iraq Relief Efforts

The U.S. media’s coverage of the tragic Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was itself a tragedy in many ways. Perhaps the worst was the failure to convey the humanitarian costs of the attack on the people of Iraq. Reports are continually coming out on the ongoing costs of the war, but little of it gets into the corporate press in the United States. For those good-hearted people who are concerned about the aftermath of our nation’s first official “pre-emptive” attack, as well as those interested in knowing what you can do to help the people of Iraq, I recommend the website called ReliefWeb, found at http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf.

They cover the whole world, but if you click on the Iraq button you will find such things as a story from the Christian Science Monitor by Scott Peterson called “Remains of Toxic Bullets Litter Iraq” (about the U.S. legacy of depleted uranium used in that country), a couple of stories on the recently-documented outbreak of cholera in Iraq that threatens to become an epidemic, and summaries of the daily briefings offered by the World Health Organization.

In addition, an important UN report called “Donations In-kind for the Iraq Crisis: Guidance to Donors, May 2003” was just released this past Wednesday. Please take a look at this site. If you’re in a position to donate, please do. If you cannot, please urge your elected representatives to put pressure on the Bush administration contribute the necessary funds, in your name, to do what is right.

The U.S. and The Undermining of Democracy

What could be less controversial than to state that the United States of America supports democracy around the world? For those who read the mainstream, corporate press, this is the premise underlying almost all reporting on Iraq during the current period (indeed, almost all reporting of U.S. foreign policy anywhere). This idea is so deeply embedded as a self-evident truth that it is extremely rare to see someone even make the attempt to produce evidence that it is true.

In contrast, for those paying attention, the coverage of the recent Anglo-American invasion of Iraq offered quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, although I’m not sure how many people noticed. Let’s take a look at the media’s (often inadvertent) revelations in this regard.

Undermining Democracy in Turkey

Right around the end of February, Turkey was in the news a lot in this country, since the U.S. had been pressuring the Turkish government to give permission to use their country as a base to attack Iraq from the north. (Remember, of course, that at this time, in late February, the official line was that no decision had been made to attack Iraq.) On February 24th the Turkish government—that is, the cabinet of new Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan—endorsed a U.S. proposal to allow 62,000 troops into Turkey in exchange for a bribe (i.e. “foreign aid”) to Turkey on the order of $15 billion in grants and loans.

The fact that somewhere between 90 and 99 percent of the population of Turkey opposed this U.S. deployment was noted in the Western press. It was noted, however, in a very interesting manner, such as in the February 27th New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) which ran a story on the “political dilemma” posed by the conflict. Headlined.”Turkish Lawmakers Tugged By Their Public and The U.S.,” the article by Times reporter Dexter Filkins, spelled out the nature of the “dilemma facing Turkey’s leaders: Turkey’s most important ally, the United States, wants to bring 62,000 soldiers into the country for an invasion of Iraq, and the overwhelming majority of the Turkish people oppose it.”

In the Times’ version of events, “The result is near political paralysis, with Turkey’s lawmakers finding themselves caught between the two seemingly irresistible forces” (that is, the will of the U.S. government and the will of their own people). This, the Times reported, was forcing “men of principle in Ankara [to] wrestle with a seemingly insoluble political dilemma.”

Reporter Filkins, who seems to like the word “dilemma,” had reported a couple of days earlier that “many Turkish officials have said privately that Turkey is too dependent on Washington, particularly given its clout in international financial institutions, to reject its entreaties.”

And, sure enough, when the Turkish parliament a few days later—amazingly—defied the U.S. and rejected its war proposal, the U.S. immediately met this evidence of democracy with a demand that Turkey “reverse the vote” and agree to “cooperate swiftly in the war against Iraq,” according to reports in the Times and the Washington Post. We are now talking about March 1st, a date when the press was reporting that no decision had yet been made to go to war against Iraq.

The threat behind the demand was not subtle. The March 5th Times quoted a State Department official as saying that, if Turkey does not reverse the vote (that is, if it does not act in direct opposition to 90-plus percent of its population), the huge U.S. aid package to Turkey would be “off the table.” In a reference to the “clout” in the global financial system mentioned above, the Times reports that many Turks were not happy with “American insistence” that the new loans require “that Turkey adhere to its austerity program negotiated last year with the International Monetary Fund,” in which the U.S. has the dominant voice.

That “austerity plan” is the standard variety imposed by the IMF, including measures “cutting farm subsidies, curbing wage increases, laying workers off at state-owned enterprises, and cutting back on big and popular public works projects.” The Bush administration doesn’t mind pointing out that “Turkey has no choice but to adopt the austerity measures because the international markets demand them.” That’s the Times’ phrase. An unnamed Bush administration official put it a little more bluntly, saying, “The bottom line is that if the Turks don’t meet their financial targets, the markets will batter them.”

And batter them they will, with the beauty of it being that the U.S. can deny any hint of imperialist intent, since “the markets” will do their job without any overt orders from the administration. The world economic order enforces its own rules, which just happen to mesh very nicely with U.S. strategic interests. The business of America, in the end, is indeed Business.

U.S. officials, we are told, still have “a desire to see what might be possible” in terms of getting Turkish leaders to reverse their impudent vote. “But,” says the Times, “officials say they are not confident of success.” The obvious meaning of “success” in this case is understood to be the overruling by Turkish leaders of their population, in deference to the military needs of The World’s Only Superpower.

Undermining Democracy in Mexico

If Turkey had a “dilemma” in choosing between the wishes of its population and the wishes of the mightiest nation on the planet, then it should be no surprise that Mexico, faced with a similar divergence of desires in the same time period, would be reported to have a “quandary.” The headline in the New York Times of February 28th read “Antiwar Fever Puts Mexico In Quandary On Iraq Vote.” In the article, the Times reported that the Mexican population in February was “overwhelmingly opposed” to the war, with polls showing opposition of “between 70 and 83 percent...”

In Mexico’s case, it was not a matter of stationing troops in the country—after all, Mexico is no closer to Iraq than is the U.S. But Mexico has the good (or bad) fortune to be a member of the United Nations Security Council, from which the U.S. was seeking permission to attack Iraq at the time. (Even though, as I can’t stress enough, we must recall that no decision had been made by the United States to go to war.) Mexico held “one of the potentially decisive votes” in the Security Council, the Times told us.

The U.S. ultimately saw that this was a vote it could not win, so went to war without it, thus sparing Mexico the agonizing choice between representing its people and committing economic suicide by defying the colossus to the north. And suicide it would be. As reporters Ginger Thompson and Clifford Krauss put it, “Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement 10 years ago, perhaps no other country depends more on the United States for its economic well-being than Mexico.” Politely put but, again, the threat is not subtle. “After a telephone conversation with President Bush,” the Times reported, “Mr. Fox moved away from unequivocal calls for peace,” giving a hint as to how Mexico might have voted had it been forced to do so.

Undermining Democracy in the Philippines, Etc.

Not content to project U.S. power only in Iraq, on March 1st the Times reported on US “plans to send more than 1,700 American troops to fight Muslim extremists in the southern Philippines.” The Times reported that “Pentagon officials said it would be a combat operation.” This turned out to be a problem when someone noticed that “the Philippine constitution prohibits foreign troops from carrying out combat missions” in that country. Apparently there are some people in the Philippines who are not too wild about violating their constitution for the purpose of supporting the U.S. War Against Terrorism (the WAT?!). In the world of the Times this was understood to be “an embarrassing setback to the Pentagon.”

Negotiations are ongoing among “diplomats, generals, and policy makers from both nations.” They’d better hurry up, since “the Pentagon...last week...was already loading 1,000 Marines onto ships in Okinawa and preparing 350 Special Operations Forces for jungle combat” in the Philippines. The article pointed out that “just as with the Bush administration’s recent negotiations with another trusted ally, Turkey, over plans for war with Iraq, dealings with the Philippines have exposed...the need for Philippine leaders to show their public they can stand up to the American superpower.” So, back we come again, full circle, to Turkey and the 15-billion-dollar bribe-and-threat routine with which this article began.

In the end, of course, the U.S. assembled what it called a “coalition of the willing,” composed of nations the leaders of which all similarly acted in opposition to the wishes of their people. Poland, for example, committed 200 troops to Iraq despite 63% of its people being opposed. Australia likewise committed 2,000 troops, in the face of 71 percent opposition in that country. Spain’s leadership allied itself with the U.S. despite the opposition of 85 percent of its people. And even in England, where official support for the U.S. war was most vociferous, vehement, and violent, pre-war support for the attack ran at only about 29 percent.

Next week: How about democracy in Iraq itself?