Writings by Ed Kinane

FROM CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TO CIVIL DEFIANCE

Joshua Brollier — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:40:36 -0500

Short Information Teaser

By Ed Kinane

Excerpt

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves…[and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” — Howard Zinn

Body

Over the years I’ve been jailed numerous times. Each such event arose from what is loosely called“civil disobedience.”

The tactical value of arrest and ensuing “court witness” and “prison witness” is that they can generate news helping to bring vital, often neglected, issues to public notice. These mindful acts can boost solidarity and the grassroots campaigns in which they are embedded.

At a personal level, court and trial witness help us keep our “edge,” maintain our focus, clarify our values. Such public stands impede co-optation. Court witness provides the opportunity to craft trial statements articulating why one has taken part in a given direct action. These can be published, reaching well beyond the courtroom.

Those willing to go this route are often deeply affected. For privileged white folks, it’s eye-opening to expose ourselves to the “justice” system of this overly-incarcerating nation. Given the disproportionate numbers of people of color in every jail and prison, any conscious person can’t help but be impressed by this underside of the stark and systemic racism of our society.

Thanks in large part to court and prison witness, one grassroots organization I’ve long worked with has grown by leaps and bounds. Determined to expose and close the Pentagon’s School of the Americas – a.k.a. the “School of Assassins” – more than 200 SOA Watch activists over the years have willingly endured trial and incarceration. Inspired by them, each November thousands from all over the country converge on Ft. Benning, Georgia to protest the SOA there for fostering large-scale bloodshed and human rights abuse in Latin America. (In response to our persistent pressure the SOA has undergone a PR makeover: it has changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation/ WHINSEC.)

Most of us vote. However, merely voting is tokenistic. It’s getting a free ride, not paying our fare. It’s not doing our part to neutralize the toxic power structure impacting everyone the U.S. imperium touches, i.e. the entire planet. Democracy is far more than voting and elections; democracy must be struggled for. Each nonviolent direct action (“civil disobedience”) is a vote multiplied many times over. If more middle class citizens would risk arrest and incarceration for nonviolent acts of solidarity and conscience, ours might well be a better nation, a better world.

Many of us have valid reasons not to risk arrest. But some of us are in a position to take the plunge…or we’re in a position to make changes in our life style or circumstances so we can risk arrest and its consequences when that imperative calls. In any case we can actively support those nonviolently taking such risk. Bradley Manning, the young soldier who allegedly provided Wikileaks with secret files exposing – among much else — US military massacres of civilians in Iraq, is deeply at risk.For nearly a year Bradley – perhaps the premier patriot of our day — has languished in Abu Ghraib-like conditions in the Quantico Marine base brig. For his whistleblowing he faces possible execution.

***

The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt have much to teach us. These North Africans embody what Gandhi taught: when enough of us withdraw our cooperation from it, tyranny crumbles. Tyranny can’t be sustained if good people refuse to go along. To avoid or remove tyranny we need to cultivate the will to disobey, the will to defy.

“Civil disobedience” isn’t the best term for what’s been happening in Cairo and elsewhere throughout the Islamic world — and in Wisconsin. More apt and bracing is “civil defiance.” “Civil” because it involves citizens acting civilly, i.e. nonviolently. That Cairenes may ignore curfew and crowd control orders (i.e. they disobey) is less relevant than that they have collectively risked life and limb to oust Mubarak. And that they continue to do so in the face of his military successors.

“Civil defiance” is the term embraced by Harvard’s Gene Sharp. Sharp’s tally of 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action is reprinted in the appendix of his seminal 93-page From Dictatorship to Democracy, fourth U.S. edition, May 2010 (orig. 1993). This how-to manual has been translated into many languages – including Arabic —and is downloadable free from the Albert Einstein Institution website, www.aeinstein.org. Sharp isn’t just about the grassroots mobilizing to depose a tyrant; Sharp seeks to assure that the tyrant isn’t replaced by another tyrannical regime– a common fate of palace coups and violent revolution. Not to mention outside interventions.

Egyptian activists have likely read From Dictatorship. We also would do well to study it to understand not only the rise of people power throughout the Middle East…but to better see how together we too might counter any moves toward tyranny here.

Ed was recently arrested – along with over 30 others — at Quantico protesting – along with hundreds of others — Bradley Manning’s captivity. Reach him at .

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane

"STRATEGY" AIN'T ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE

Gerald — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 18:19:20 -0500

Short Information Teaser

Ed Kinane explores the use of language by the peace movement

Excerpt

Activists sometimes chide each other for not “thinking strategically” — by which I suppose we mean we’re not planning for three or five years down the pike. Or often “strategy” is an inflated way of referring to tactics — a more modest concept having to do with the near future and with limited goals .Within the movement, “strategy” enjoys a kind of cachet, a kind of borrowed glory. But I’m skeptical of its value or relevance. Let me explain.

Body

October 18, 2010

All warfare is based on deception. Hence when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe that we are away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder,and crush him.

Sun Szu, The Art of War

With deft brushstrokes Sun Szu, writing 500 years before Christ, distills the essence of strategy. His words appear on the first page of military historian B.H. Liddell Hart’s own summing up, Strategy (2nd edition, 1967). Both Sun Szu and Liddell Hart are required reading at West Point.

Confucius, Sun Szu’s contemporary, taught that to reform society we must reform our thinking — and to do so, we must reform our language. Therefore, Confucius taught, we need to call things by their real name.

The word comes from the Greek, strategos, the leader of an army. My American Heritage dictionary defines “strategy” as “the science or art of military command as applied to the overall planning and conduct of large-scale combat operations” [italics added].While one can consult other dictionaries and find other, vaguer, definitions of “strategy,” they all derive from the military.

“Strategy” is standard corporate jargon; it’s even become standard jargon in our movement. Often, losing sight of what the word essentially means and where it comes from, we use “strategy” as a synonym for such useful things as planning, goal-setting, coordinating and coalition building.

These activities are themselves perfectly valid. But why not call them what they are (“planning,” etc.). They don’t need to be prinked up as “strategy.” In these notes, I argue against such unmindful usage.

Let’s be wary when we find ourselves parroting military or business jargon. Let’s be wary when such terminology infiltrates our language. After all, language is not without its influence on thought…and action. The language of war and greed can hardly foster cooperation and social justice.

Let’s review that dictionary definition.

No need here, I hope, to say anything more about military or combat. So let’s consider command. Command calls for hierarchy, for centralized and top-down directives, for concentrating power. Is that really how we want our movement to operate?

Further, strategy is large-scale. Most grassroots activism is anything but large-scale. Given the sheer size of the Pentagon and the imperium, we might wish we were operating on a larger scale, but we aren’t. Let’s not forget the drawbacks of large-scale: de-personalization, lack of accountability, and lack of respect for sentient life. Small is beautiful, big is problematic.

Am I arguing against mass movements? Hell no. But I question whether such motors of history emerge through “strategy.”

Yet another element in the definition is overall planning. Overall planning (in contrast to mere planning) assumes that the planners have a grip on what’s coming next. In this fast moving, complex world, even Pentagon strategists — with the most spies, the world’s biggest computers, and best-funded think tanks — tend to be clueless about the future. The Pentagon certainly wasn’t able to predict what the US military was in for when it invaded such “weak” nations as Iraq…or Afghanistan…or Viet Nam. For all its glamour, strategy — at least the US version — has a dismal track record. It’s a failed tool.

For better or worse, much of the Pentagon’s strategic thinking involves deploying overwhelming force and throwing vast amounts of taxpayer money at preparing for every contingency. But that is a luxury few others, especially oppositional movements, can afford.

Strategy requires having some control over one’s field of operation. Activists don’t set the conditions, we respond to the conditions. And those conditions keep changing. Our work happens, not where we “call the shots,” but — so to speak — where we are being shot at.

Our work is mostly reactive, a response to the onslaughts and injustices of those far more powerful than ourselves. Sometimes we’re not reactive — for example, when we build alternative institutions or communities. But this proactive work calls for marrying values with planning. It’s not “strategy.”

Strategy requires resources. In its archetypic sense, it now demands immense resources. The Pentagon employs millions and spends billions, hundreds of billions. Our groups, by contrast, are understaffed; our few staff work overtime to generate their own salaries and rent. Although some of us bandy the word about, being “strategic” may well be a mode of operation beyond our wildest dreams.

And strategy should be beyond our wildest dreams. We have no business being strategic. There may even be something intrinsically co-opting about being in a position to strategize. Consider the Democratic Party. Once believed by some to be the party of the people, it’s big enough and rich enough and corrupt enough to be…strategic.

Strategy, it seems, seeks wealth and power.

Dorothy Day contrasted faithfulness and effectiveness. We can argue over which should get priority, or about what the ratio between them should be. About this, seasoned activists can properly differ.

Those of us committed to nonviolence, however, while valuing effectiveness, often favor faithfulness. If we are true to ourselves and to each other, effectiveness will emerge organically.

As Gandhi taught, nonviolence requires that means be consistent with ends. Strategy, insofar as it relies on hierarchy and force, is a stranger to consistent means and ends — at least when those ends are clothed, as they tend to be, in strategic deception (Bush’s “bringing democracy to the Middle East,” etc.).

So, let us not hanker for the tinsel fruit of strategy. Let us focus on democratic process and developing our consciousness and our humane values. Let us avoid Gandhi’s seven social sins.* Let us reduce our own addictions, distractions and co-optations. And in doing so, let us develop an ever-deepening empathy, an ever-broadening solidarity.

And if we can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel, still let us keep the flame of faithfulness burning bright.

Politics without principle
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice

[Young India, 22-10-1925]

Ed Kinane is an anti-war activist based in Syracuse. Reach him at .

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane

Who Is "Disorderly"?

Jeff Leys — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:47:18 -0500

Excerpt

May 9, 2008

Trial Statement, City Court, Syracuse, New York

Friends, members of the court, Judge Cecile,

As I am defending myself, my defense will be unencumbered with legal jargon and technicalities.

Given that the prosecution has failed to prove its case against me, at this juncture it might be appropriate to rest my case. But, quite frankly, my aim here goes beyond merely winning an acquittal.

Since intent is pivotal to the charge of “disorderly conduct,” I must explain why early on the afternoon of March 19 I was in one of Syracuse’s busiest streets, in one of Syracuse’s most public places – at a demonstration attended by hundreds, a demonstration featured on the front page – above the fold – of the March 20 Syracuse Post-Standard.

Body

May 9, 2008

Trial Statement, City Court, Syracuse, New York

Friends, members of the court, Judge Cecile,

As I am defending myself, my defense will be unencumbered with legal jargon and technicalities.

Given that the prosecution has failed to prove its case against me, at this juncture it might be appropriate to rest my case. But, quite frankly, my aim here goes beyond merely winning an acquittal.

I will show the irony of being charged with “disorderly conduct.”

And, more to the point, I’ll show the inappropriateness of being prosecuted for my action.

March 19, you’ll recall, was the beginning of yet another year of the illegal US invasion of Iraq.

[[Your honor, I’d like to introduce here exhibit A — a copy of a photo taken by Post-Standard photographer Mike Greenlar on March 19.]]

That’s me in the lower left corner covered by a “bloody” sheet as I lay facedown on the rain-washed pavement of Salina Street.

Role-playing an Iraqi corpse, for over an hour I didn’t open an eye, I didn’t utter a sound, I barely moved a muscle.

The entire time I was “mourned” by my partner in real life, Ann Tiffany, bending over me, silently, eyes downcast, shrouded in black.

Explaining this tableau, Ann had put an upright sign near my body; It said, “STREET SCENE IN BAGHDAD.”

Along with many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others around the country on March 19 we were using our bodies to assert that, as long as this vile war goes on, there should be “no business as usual.”

Twenty-two of us were arrested here that day. For failure to produce identification, I spent a long, cold, bedless night in the local jail.

Judge Cecile, at my April 14 appearance in your court, perhaps you wondered why I refused your offer of “time served.”

Besides forcing me to plead guilty, accepting time served would have denied me this opportunity to address your court, this opportunity to, in an extremely cursory way, put the Iraq War itself on trial.

There are numerous charges to be leveled against the war criminals who launched the illegal Iraq war.

Because the court’s time is precious I shall quickly enumerate those charges:

~ In direct violation of international law, the invasion of Iraq was unprovoked. ~ Premised on lies and perpetuated with disinformation, the war is dishonest. ~ In contempt of virtually every spiritual tradition, the war is immoral. ~ The war is brutal, even barbaric. ~ Killing mostly civilians, often from the air, the war is cowardly. ~ The war is thieving and imperialistic. ~ The protracted occupation has led to a feeding frenzy of war profiteering. ~ Each year this travesty swindles US taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars. ~ The war is reckless – reducing not only our standing, but our safety, in the world.

Further, the so-called War against Terror in Iraq is terroristic to the core.

I know first hand whereof I speak. As a human rights monitor I lived in Baghdad for five months in 2003. I was there before, during and after “shock and awe.” ~ I experienced the dread and terror of that naked aggression. ~ I visited bombed-out public markets. ~ I climbed over the rubble of pulverized homes. ~ In the hospitals I met civilian casualties of these US bombings. ~ With my own eyes I watched as much of Baghdad’s civilian infrastructure was destroyed. ~ On April 8, 2003 US forces shelled the hotel next door to ours, killing two international journalists, friends of friends of mine.

The criminality of the subsequent occupation also hit close to home. Shortly after I returned to the States ~ three friends were abducted in Baghdad; ~ my former housemate, Haythem Al-Jouburi, was detained in Abu Ghraib; ~ and my closest friend in Iraq, Ghareeb Ramadan, was killed in a crossfire while translating for an Italian journalist.

Thanks to “shock and awe” and thanks to over five years of US military occupation, ~ chaos and terror reign in Iraq; ~ the economy is a shambles; ~ ethnic and sectarian tensions have been inflamed; ~ several million Iraqis have become refugees both internally and externally; ~ much infrastructure – including health facilities – has been demolished; ~ the environment has been poisoned by the toxic and radioactive depleted uranium used in US weaponry; ~ US corporations are expropriating Iraq’s resources and devouring her now-privatized enterprises; these war profiteers make billions. ~ lastly, hundreds of thousands – mostly civilians, but also thousands of US soldiers and mercenaries – have been killed and maimed.

One more thing. So harrowing and so demoralizing is US military service in the Middle East that for every US soldier killed, several more commit suicide. [April 21, 2008, Associated Press] And those suicides will keep happening long after this heinous occupation ends and all our soldiers are back home.

Your honor, in closing I submit that my nation’s conduct in Iraq spawned and perpetuates Disorder – Disorder on an inconceivable scale.

In stark contrast, my thoughtful, disciplined and nonviolent effort to bring such Disorder to an end was the very opposite of “disorderly conduct.”

I now rest my case.

Judge James Cecile found Kinane guilty. Kinane was in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness. Reach Ed at .

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane

Beyond the Rhetoric of Withdrawal: Our Unknown Air War Over Iraq

voices — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:11:46 -0500

Short Information Teaser

There’s an air war over Iraq. It’s invisible (here). It’s deadly (there).

Excerpt

August 23, 2007

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower.

….

The American air war inside Iraq is perhaps the most significant – and underreported – aspect of the fight against the insurgency.

-– Seymour M. Hersh, “Up in the Air,” Nov. 29, 2005, New Yorker

There’s an air war over Iraq. It’s invisible (here). It’s deadly (there).

Body

August 23, 2007

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower.

….

The American air war inside Iraq is perhaps the most significant – and underreported – aspect of the fight against the insurgency.

-– Seymour M. Hersh, “Up in the Air,” Nov. 29, 2005, New Yorker

There’s an air war over Iraq. It’s invisible (here). It’s deadly (there).

The Iraq air war may be the longest such war in history. In one way or another it has been undermining Iraq’s sovereignty, destroying its infrastructure, and killing and maiming Iraqis for some 16 years.

Despite global pressure to withdraw, Bush Inc. – and indeed the broader US power structure – has no intention of giving up Iraq. The potential oil bonanza is too huge. And Iran – with its oil bonanza – is next door.

That air war is intensifying. The US dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of 2007 as it did in the first half of 2006. ¹

“When the troops are cut, we’ll still be bombing the hell out of the place.” ²

Terror from the Sky

The high tech mayhem of the First Gulf War and that of the 2003 “Shock and Awe” air attack got plenty of media play. Although bloody and intensely dramatic, these were fleeting episodes.

Since the beginning of the US occupation the media has largely ignored the airborne terror visited on Iraq. Besides “boots on the ground” stories, our corporate media feeds us a daily diet of horror. It features ghastly suicide bombings and the havoc of roadside explosive devices. It pumps us full of the atrocities others commit. The balance is wildly askew.

Because most US journalists in Iraq are embedded, they cover the war from the perspective of the US soldiers they accompany.

“Embeds” seldom accompany chopper or fixed-wing pilots and never accompany unmanned Predator drones – those robot planes that spew death with no risk to those guiding them from afar. So embeds can tell us little about such operations and their consequences.

As in most warfare in recent decades, most Iraq air war victims are civilians.

According to The Lancet medical journal study of Iraqi casualties, between March 2003 and June 2006 coalition air strikes caused over 78,000 violent deaths in Iraq. Coalition air strikes caused half of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under age 15. ³

The Pentagon cloaks its airborne missions and their ordnance in secrecy. We seldom hear of the terror the invader rains from the sky. We seldom hear about the civilian-shredding cluster bombs or – as in the leveling of Fallujah – the civilian-igniting white phosphorus. Nor do we hear about the toxic and radioactive depleted uranium shells.

A Shameful History

Seymour Hersh’s November 2005 New Yorker article, “Up in the Air,” led to a flurry of progressive Internet commentary trying (with little success) to wake us up. But it was Dr. Les Roberts and his colleagues’ two Lancet studies of Iraqi war casualties that revealed the scale of the air war. ⁴

This hecatomb isn’t unique in our history. From the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to Korea and South East Asia, to the first Gulf War and now to Iraq – the air war is the “signature” of US war making. ⁵

Such air war almost by definition is asymmetrical. In Iraq there’s no opposing air force and little or no anti-aircraft artillery. This pattern, this trend, shapes the world. It is the rogue elephant in our living room. Such is the denial, however, that we ignore its rampage.

The air war often targets residences or residential neighborhoods. From these areas the equally ruthless (though infinitely less armed and financed) resistance may or may not have staged an attack, and within them the resistance may or may not be seeking shelter.

Aerial bombardment is heinous and cowardly. Visiting wounded children in Baghdad hospitals in 2003 heightened my awareness of the air war. Those memories reinforce my resolve to live below taxable income: I don’t want to contribute a penny in federal taxes to the war machine – whether it kills and maims on land or from the air.

“Bring Them Home” Isn’t Enough

Recently some of us were doing weekly “outreach” – facing oncoming traffic with anti-war signs during rush hour at a busy Syracuse intersection. A passing driver, enraged at our perfidy, screamed that his son had been killed in Iraq.

I had no chance to explain to him our belief that the best way to support our troops is to bring them home. If the man’s son had never been sent to Iraq, he might well be alive today.

Since March 2003 US soldiers, many involuntarily, have been put through hell. Many US Americans have either empathy or some connection to one or more of those soldiers. So, “bring them home” is an apt message to put out there.

But that slogan is incomplete; it needs augmenting by other messages that raise consciousness and look beyond the eventual withdrawal of most US troops from Iraq. “Bring them home” must be accompanied by other messages that, among other things, expose the air war. Otherwise, when those soldiers seem out of harm’s way, people here may move on to other concerns – leaving the air war as robust and off the radar as ever.

“Bring them home” doesn’t address the criminality of the occupation nor the injustice done to the Iraqi people. It doesn’t begin to address reparations.

Nor does it acknowledge that as US forces downsize, many of the surviving soldiers won’t come home. Some will be kept in Iraq to train the Iraqi military to somehow suppress an extremely capable and committed resistance. Such “Iraqization” of the war recalls the feckless “Vietnamization” of an earlier era.

Reserve Cannon Fodder

With downsizing, many surviving soldiers will be deployed elsewhere in the Middle East. They may be out of harm’s way… temporarily. But they’ll be on stand-by: reserve cannon fodder in the perpetual resource war. Think Afghanistan… or Iran… or Pakistan….

Whether the soldiers are re-deployed in the region or rotate home, the phantom air war won’t go away. Given the current gaggle of candidates, this seems assured regardless of who next occupies the White House.

Here is not the place to review the candidates and their rhetoric. Suffice it to say that Hillary Clinton, a leader in the polls and supposedly part of the opposition, is a hawk.

Like other candidates, Hillary has ties to hawkish Israel. She also – in this most corporate-enriching war of all – has close corporate ties. Not to mention ties to Bill. Recall that it was Bill who presided over eight years of low intensity air war and genocidal sanctions on Iraq.

Enforcing the Empire

Apart from whether any of the candidates would end the war, consider the power structure’s frequently cited alternative strategy. It’s embodied in The Iraq Study Group Report. ⁶ Published last December, the Report sought to rectify neo-con excesses and strategic blunders.

The Report was compiled by beltway power brokers who fear the Iraq quagmire is breaking the US military machine. They fear the Empire will lose its enforcers.

The Report talks a good game: it calls on Mr. Bush to eventually withdraw most US ground forces. But the Report does not call for US troops to come home.

Rather the soldiers are to be re-deployed nearby. Equally ominous, the Report makes no call whatsoever for US forces to vacate Iraq skies. ⁷ The Report has gotten away with such an egregious lapse in part because few anti-war activists know it’s a problem. Locally and nationally we have yet to grapple with what the air war means for our work. We have yet to put it on the agenda.

Ed worked in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness before, during and after “Shock and Awe.” Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net.

Sources

Charles J. Hanley, “Air Force Quietly Building Iraq Presence,” July 14, 2007, Associated Press
Sydney Schanberg, “The Unseen War in Iraq,” Jan. 24, 2006, Village Voice
Nick Turse, “Our Shadowy Iraq Air War,” May 24, 2007, TomPaine.com
Les Roberts, et al, “Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey,” Oct. 29, 2004, The Lancet. Sequel: Les Roberts, et al, “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” Oct. 11, 2006, The Lancet.
Tom Engelhardt, “The Missing Air War in Iraq,” Dec. 15, 2005, TomDispatch.com
James A. Baker, III and Lee H. Hamilton et al, The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach, 2006, Vintage
See Ed Kinane, “Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs: A look at the Iraq Study Group Report,” Feb. 14, 2007 Uruknet.info; also reprinted at vcnv.org.

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane

Visiting Iran

Ed Kinane — Tue, 01 May 2007 23:13:05 -0500

Short Information Teaser

Ed Kinane writes of his recent visit to Iran

Excerpt

May 1, 2007

The Islamic Republic of Iran is really, really, really and again really very different from what you hear in the West.
—S. Rahim Mashaee, VP of Iran speaking to the delegation

A few weeks ago (February 28 to March 13) I had the rare opportunity of visiting Iran. I say “rare” because few US activists - and few policymakers - know that controversial and fascinating nation firsthand. Despite being urged to do so by key Republicans, Mr. Bush refuses even diplomatic relations with Iran.

Body

Ed visiting a mosque in Iran

May 1, 2007

The Islamic Republic of Iran is really, really, really and again really very different from what you hear in the West.
—S. Rahim Mashaee, VP of Iran speaking to the delegation

The Fellowship of Reconciliation [www.forusa.org] organized our 25-person “civilian diplomacy” delegation. Most of us were seasoned activists and internationalists. Accompanied by our Iranian guide/translator, we saw the cities of Tehran, Shiraz, Esfahan and Qom.

Though we sometimes met reserve, without exception we experienced courtesy. (This came as no surprise as that’s generally the case abroad - even in countries extremely wary of the US.)

One of the many asymmetries between our two countries is that few US-born Americans speak Farsi, Iran’s first language, but many Iranians spoke to us in English. Although Farsi is spoken by tens of millions in one of the world’s most strategic countries, my computer spellcheck doesn’t even recognize “Farsi.”

I can’t claim to have had in-depth, one-on-one conversations: that will have to wait until next time and for less formal encounters. I did however have lunch with R., a grad student at the University of Tehran who fully expected the US to attack Iran soon. It would by no means be the first time Iran suffered from US aggression. The US supported its then-ally Saddam Hussein in his 1980s war on Iran. So significant is this war for Iranians that our first morning in-country we spent at the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support [www.scwvs.org]; next we were taken to a rehab center to meet veterans with spinal injuries from that war.

In Iran I was moved by the sheer beauty of design and architecture. I’m thinking of carpets and crafts, but more of the mosques and squares and bazaars in Iran’s centuries - or millenia - old cities. I particularly liked the lovely parks and bridges with which Esfahan frames the river that runs through it. In Shiraz, we paid our respects at the tombs of Iran’s famed medieval poets, Hafez and Sa’di - in the US prominent monuments like these are usually reserved for presidents or illustrious generals.

Tour constraints are real - whether in some western industrial power or in states with high degrees of social control and surveillance. Even with far more than this slight exposure to the country, I wouldn’t presume to generalize about such an old and demographically complex land as Persia/Iran.

The Bush administration’s self-excommunication from the 70 million people of Iran is nuts. More, it’s dangerous. The danger, let me hasten to explain, doesn’t come from Iran; it comes from what the US - in its greed and ignorance - may do to Iran. And, as in the Iraq debacle, from the blowback that’s sure to follow.

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane

Nine Windows on Iran

voices — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:19:17 -0600

Short Information Teaser

Ed Kinane's reading list about the history, culture and people of Iran and US/Iran relations

Excerpt

January 24, 2007

Will the US attack Iran?

The question is obscene. But when the U.S. government is so bellicose and when its target sits on one of the world’s larger oil reserves, we need to prepare ourselves for the unthinkable. One way to do that is to be much better informed.

Bush, Inc. may know its weapon systems. But it seems oblivious to the history, culture and people of Iran (formerly Persia). It’s oblivious to the human factors that will likely upset its grandiose schemes.

Aware of my own vast ignorance, I’ve been reading up on Iran. In the following I want to mention some books that other Voices folks might also find fascinating. Each provides a unique window on Iran.

Body

January 24, 2007

Will the US attack Iran?

Historical Background

To put US/Iran relations in context, I began by reading Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Here in the US few recall the 1954 CIA coup against Iran’s populist and democratically-elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh. Trouble is, Iranian memories aren’t so short or so convenient.

Nor can Iranians forget the U.S.-owned regime that succeeded Mossadegh. Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs tells of the rise and fall of Reza Pahlavi — his imperial ambition; his squandering; his attempts to militarize, industrialize and secularize Iran; his brutal secret police, the SAVAK; his isolation from his people; his exile.

The Shah displaced Mossadegh; in turn, Ayatollah Khomeini and his mullahs displaced the Shah. Robin Wright has written widely on Iran. Her In the Name of God: the Khomeini Decade, for example, interprets that tumultuous era and the charismatic figure who inspired his people and made the western world tremble — at least with rage. Probably no US journalist knows more firsthand about Iran and its people than the intrepid Ms. Wright.

So far I’ve mentioned only western authors. But we need to hear Iranian voices. One such voice — a singular one — is that of Massoumeh Ebtekar. Dr. Ektekar is an immunologist, partly raised in the States. Her Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture, published in Canada, provides a perspective seldom heard in the US. Dr. Ebtekar, then an undergrad, was the on-site English-language media contact for those students who (more or less nonviolently) took over the Embassy and held its large staff captive for 444 days.

Thanks to the foregoing titles I could more critically read Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. Although Pollack has never been to Iran and can’t read Farsi, for seven years he was a CIA Persian Gulf military analyst. One of his earlier books made the case for invading Iraq. Nonetheless The Persian Puzzle, is a challenging, scholarly tome — valuable for seeing how some US military strategists think.

Iran’s majority: women

In the early eighties, egged on by the US, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The long war led to hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers. Today most Iranians (and most Iraqis) are women. Many have lived hardscrabble lives in isolated rural enclaves.

In Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village, anthropologist Erika Friedl provides 12 interconnecting narratives. The narratives are intimate but unsentimental. The harsh realities aren’t sugarcoated.

The women of Deh Koh probably can’t even imagine the affluent, westernized women of Tehran’s northern suburbs. Two such urban women have produced extraordinary literature, extraordinary mirrors of their privilege and of their secularized sensibilities.

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was a New York Times bestseller. It tells of Nafisi’s clandestine group of university women studying the forbidden novels of James, Austen, Nabokov, and Fitzgerald.

I devoured Reading Lolita, an engaging and literary page-turner…but it angered me. Nafisi portrays women of a particular sliver of society evading the ayatollahs’ patriarchal repression. But she glosses over the Shah’s regime — a regime whose patronage helped generate that sliver and whose arrogance provoked the Islamicist backlash.

Marjane Satrapi is also of the elite. But her eye is ironic, self-penetrating, and class conscious. Satrapi’s wry and elegant memoirs have been translated from Farsi into English. She conveys her edgy life in black and white comic book drawings accompanied by sparse text.

Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2 derive their titles from the ancient capital of Persia. They portray the artist as a young woman, a woman with a social conscience. She comes of age under oppression and within a family and society torn between east and west, between tradition and modernity.

Like Iraqis, Iranians are more complex, diverse and cultured than George W. ever dreamed of. Like Iraqis, Iranians will surely be formidable foes if the US attacks. Before we let our tax money be used to maim and kill these proud people, we might make their acquaintance.

Ed was in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team in March and April of 2003. In late February he’ll be joining the Fellowship of Reconciliation citizen diplomacy delegation to Iran. Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net

Book notes:

(in the order mentioned; all are in paperback)

Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men, Wiley, 2003, 258 pp.

Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, Vintage 1985 (orig. in Polish, 1982), 152 pp.

Wright, In the Name of God, Simon & Schuster, 1989, 286 pp.

Ebtekar, Takeover in Tehran, Talonbooks, 2000, 256 pp.

Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, Random House, 2004, 540 pp.

Friedl, Women of Deh Koh, Penguin, 1989, 237 pp.

Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Random House, 2003, 257 pp.

Satrapi, Persepolis, Pantheon, 2003, 154 pp.

Persepolis 2, Pantheon, 2004, 188 pp.

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane

Killing the Golden Goose: A Look at The Iraq Study Group Report

voices — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:43:52 -0600

Short Information Teaser

Jan 17 - Ed Kinane's look into The Iraq Study Group Report

Excerpt

January 17, 2007

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. With these terse yet understated words the Iraq Study Group begins its Report. The Group is a ten-person consensus committee headed by former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Its Report was released to the world on December 6.

The Report is a quick read — its 79 recommendations are introduced and presented in about 100 pages. If Mr. Bush were to read it, he’d find little new information about Iraq. Rather he would find a counter-assessment of the war — one he wouldn’t hear from the yes men and chickenhawks and ideologues with whom he surrounds himself. The Report would reveal the thinking and anxieties of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. It would reflect their disenchantment with the President’s Iraq “strategy.”

Body

January 17, 2007

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. With these terse yet understated words the Iraq Study Group begins its Report.¹ The Group is a ten-person consensus committee headed by former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Its Report was released to the world on December 6.

Although convened in June 2006 under the auspices of the United States Institute of Peace, the Iraq Study Group is no gaggle of pacifists or humanitarians; check out the 18 pages — about one sixth of the entire text — devoted to their respective curricula vitae. The Group, while on a different page than Mr. Bush, is in the same chapter: it perpetuates the denial and the imperial mindset behind the U.S. invasion and protracted occupation of Iraq.

If Mr. Bush were winning in Iraq — that is, if he somehow were imposing his will on that unruly region and handing over control of its vast oil reserves to U.S. corporations — this Group would feel no need to speak out.

The Group does acknowledge certain needs and realities. It notes the plight of Iraq’s millions of internal and external refugees. Departing from the Bush blackball, it calls for diplomatic relations with Syria and Iran. It emphasizes that the Iraq issue is “inextricably linked” to a range of other Middle East crises — including Israel/Palestine.

The Group recommends — though perfunctorily — that the President declare that the U.S. doesn’t covet Iraq’s oil and that the President also declare that the U.S. doesn’t seek permanent bases in Iraq. [p.61] While the Report’s maps do pinpoint oil fields, they neglect to show the many U.S. bases established in Iraq and throughout the region’s oil lands. Nor do its maps give us any idea of what Iraq territory the U.S. military, after nearly four years of squandering hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of U.S. lives, can claim to control.

The Group says, “U.S. forces seem to be caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end.” [p.12] While it provides no timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the Group does provide a table of timed “Milestones for Iraq” permitting, as they are achieved, some downsizing. [pp.62-63]

Although the Group looks into possible, if not likely, near futures, it has scant historical perspective. It notes Britain’s longtime involvement with Iraq in the days before Saddam Hussein, but the Group says nothing about British colonialism, its exploiting Iraqi oil, its role in cobbling together that artificial entity called Iraq, or its inability to quell nationalist resistance.

The Group says nothing about U.S. financial and military support for Saddam in the eighties, especially during his years-long war with Iran. It says nothing of the 13 years of U.S./UN sanctions preceding the 2003 invasion — sanctions that led to the premature death of, among others, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. These aren’t “merely” matters of justice and reparation; they bear directly on how Iraqis might view the U.S. and hence might help explain the Iraqis’ fierce resistance to having U.S. forces in their land.

The Group never cites international law, much less acknowledges that the invasion violated that law. It fails to acknowledge that the invasion and occupation have made a shambles of Iraq’s sovereignty. The Group barely mentions the false premises and false intelligence (9/11, al Qaeda, WMD) on which the invasion was sold. It treats Mr. Bush with kid gloves: it avoids recalling that Bush Inc. repeatedly and systematically lied to us all.

The Group’s grasp of the present is no more based in reality than its wishful forays into the future. The Group fails to acknowledge that the U.S. is occupying Iraq. The Group is so allergic to the “O” word that in those few places where it’s used, it’s in quotation marks. By glossing over that overriding reality, the Group can’t see that in resisting the invaders, Iraqis, whether Sunni or Shia, may see themselves as patriots defending their homeland. And, imagining how we might react if the U.S. were invaded, how can we say they aren ‘t patriots?

If there is no occupation, then the U.S. has no obligation — required of occupiers by the Geneva Conventions — to provide law and order and to provide for the welfare of the people. Not only does the Group not mention the Geneva Conventions and this obligation, it repeatedly faults the current and “sovereign” Iraqi government for not providing law and order.

As for welfare of the people, the Group could care less. Devotees of tough love, they describe the essential government food subsidies as a “burden.” [p.22] The health issues — products of the sanctions and the war — now plaguing the Iraqi people are ignored. There’s no mention of the carcinogenic and radioactive depleted uranium, used in U.S. weaponry that now contaminates Iraq’s soil and water.

When listing (on p. 3) the multiple sources of violence in Iraq, the Group specifies the “Sunni Arab insurgency, al Qaeda and affiliated jihadist groups, Shiite militias and death squads, and organized criminality.” Unaccountably excluded from this list is the U.S. Similarly, neighboring nations are cited for undercutting Iraq’s stability, but not the U.S. It is as if the U.S. had never invaded Iraq. It is as if the U.S. had never killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The Group never mentions the role of the thousands of armed U.S. mercenaries — the so-called “civilian contractors”; these rogue operators are accountable to no official chain of command. The phrase “war crime” is never mentioned. The Group — like most U.S. media — gives no hint of the untold numbers of Iraqis civilians who have been killed by the U.S. Air Force. In fact while “air support” is mentioned once, there is only a single oblique reference to the massive U.S. Air Force in the Middle East.

The Group keeps calling for the recently installed Iraq government to step up to the plate and do what the U.S. — with all its staggering might — has been unable to do: quell the Sunni insurgents and the Shia militias. In the unlikely event the Iraq government is able to impose order, the Group suggests U.S. ground forces could then withdraw. But here’s the rub: many of our soldiers wouldn’t come home. They’d be re-deployed nearby (especially to Afghanistan). Nor would the Air Force vacate Iraqi skies.

The Group proposes, as the way out for a U.S. military bogged down in an admittedly unwinnable guerilla war in Iraq, a strategy similar to the “Vietnamization” of another era. With its lack of historical perspective, the Report ignores the painful and costly lessons of “Vietnamization” — that spectacularly failed U.S. policy of the invaders recruiting and training locals as proxy cannon fodder.

The Group calls for U.S. trainers being “embedded” in Iraqi units on an ongoing basis. The Group refuses to face the implications of such units being heavily infiltrated by men hostile to their alien trainers. It forgets about the fragging — the killing of officers by soldiers under their charge — that flourished in Viet Nam.

The Group frequently invokes “terrorism” and “democracy.” Yet it never defines these spongy terms. (As the bumper sticker puts it, war is terrorism with a bigger budget.)

From its very first paragraph and often thereafter the Group invokes “our interests and values.” But it never spells these out. It assumes that of course its readers all understand the code…and share the imperialist dream.

Thanks to their Iraq war-related contracts, the industrial/military complex is laughing all the way to the bank. But the Study Group ignores the profiteering that helps perpetuate the occupation.

Its key message — its dominating anxiety — is that, with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, the U.S. lacks the wherewithal to impose its will elsewhere: “The American military has little reserve force to call on if it needs ground forces to respond to other crises around the world.” [p.7] Or again, “First, and most importantly, the United States faces other security dangers in the world, and a continuing Iraqi commitment of ground forces at present levels will leave no reserve available to meet other contingencies.” [p.73, italics added]

The Study Group, unlike Mr. Bush, grasps that the Iraq war is killing the golden goose, the imperial scheme. With the U.S. now stretched so thin, it can no longer intimidate rivals, other nationalists or anti-imperialists. It’s having a harder time extorting its customary highly profitable trade terms. This is true whether in Afghanistan, elsewhere in the Middle East…or in Latin America.

Hugo Chavez and the resurgent populists south of the Rio Grande are probably well aware they owe an enormous debt to the tireless resisters and the bloodied people of Iraq.

Ed is a long-time peace and justice activist based in Syracuse. He spent five months in Iraq in 2003 with Voices in the Wilderness. Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net.

Vintage, 2006, $10.95, paperback or download free at www.usip.org

VCNV Author

Ed Kinane