The United Nations Convention against Torture (CAT), adopted back in 1984, specifies that no person should be subjected to any kind of torture, cruel or degrading treatment. This convention follows on from the 1975 adoption of the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Article One of the United Nations Convention Against Torture defines it as the intentional infliction of physical and mental pain for the purpose of obtaining information from a person, or coercing them into confessing to a crime, or forcing them to incriminate a third party to confess to any alleged crime that person may have committed. Such pain and suffering is inflicted with the express knowledge or tacit consent of a person or group acting in a legal and official capacity. Article Two states that there are no exceptional circumstances that may be invoked by any party to justify the application of torture. States of emergency, civil unrest, warfare and so on cannot be used as pretexts to legitimise the use of torture.

Each government is required to provide training of their law enforcement officials to eliminate the use of torture, to identify any cases of torture and report them to the proper authorities. The survivors of torture can take legal action against their torturers, and shall be entitled to receive compensation for their pain and suffering. No confession extracted through torture shall have any legal merit or standing in a court of law. The last point is specified in Article 15 of the United Nation CAT. The main provisions of the CAT are summarised here.

Qadhafi regime and torture

One of the main charges against the former Libyan regime of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi was the latter’s use of torture against political opponents. That is undoubtedly true. Qadhafi had started his rule of Libya in 1969 as a pan-Arab, Nasserist socialist dedicated to developing his country’s resources, throwing off the influence of foreign corporations, and spreading pan-Arab nationalism to other Arab countries repressed by Western-supported dictatorships, particularly the royalist regimes of the Gulf monarchies. Starting in the early 1990s, Qadhafi embarked on a Sadat-style opening up of the economy to European oil corporations that he had formerly expelled. Qadhafi retreated from Arab nationalism and reoriented to a more pan-African strategy, promoting his version of ‘socialism’ throughout the sub-Saharan countries.

From 2001, Qadhafi joined the so-called ‘war on terror’, and opened up his country to the CIA rendition programme. This involves taking terrorism suspects from the hands of the western intelligence services and imprisoning them. Suspects arrested on the flimsiest pretext were rendered to third-party countries, like Egypt and Libya, where torture was known to have been used. The cooperation of the Qadhafi regime with western intelligence agencies surfaced a few years ago. While detainees were routinely tortured in Libyan prisons, the CIA and MI6 continued to cooperate with such a torture regime. Qadhafi’s army and police were committing their worst crimes while operating in close collaboration with the Western powers.

The people of Libya rose up in defiance of such a tyrannical regime, which had deteriorated from a pan-Arab, semi-socialist regime into a state-populist government with deep ties to the imperialist transnational corporations. Human rights were trampled in the interests of corporate profit. The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and other countries loudly condemned the violence of the Qadhafi regime and pledged their support for the rebels in their efforts to oust the Qadhafi government. While the armed militias of Misrata and Benghazi were fighting Qadhafi, they received logistical support and training from Britain’s elite SAS troops, and British military advisers provided the ‘boots on the ground’ to ensure that any rebel victory could be quickly channeled into a pro-Western direction. The Gulf emirate of Qatar was a key Arab player in organising the rebels militarily and providing them with political and diplomatic support. Qadhafi’s overthrow was said to herald a new era of democracy and freedom, according to Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel.

Torture Libyan style

The medical group Doctors Without Borders has announced it will stop work in Libya, particularly in Misrata, because detainees are being routinely tortured and denied adequate medical care. The group has stated that the current political leaders in Misrata only provide torture victims with medical care so that they can be revived and subjected to further torture and beatings.

Doctors Without Borders has documented prisoner abuse, treating victims of cigarette burns, electric shocks, and renal failure from successive beatings. The National Transitional Council (NTC) is either unwilling or unable to control the armed militias from operating as a law unto themselves. The British government has made some lukewarm, mild criticisms of the Misrata militias, stating that the NTC should live up to the high standards they have set themselves. Libya’s new National Army Security Service (NASS) is the main body responsible for carrying out the torture of detainees. Setting aside the particularly gruesome killing of Qadhafi himself by rebel troops which in itself constitutes a war crime, the former Libyan rebels, who condemned the torture crimes of the former regime, are now behaving no less savagely themselves.

Part of a pattern

The international intervention in Libya to overthrow Qadhafi was waged on the pretext of defeating a tyrannical government that tortured and abused its own people. The current mistreatment of prisoners in the new Libya may be dismissed as just a temporary aberration, an exaction of revenge for eight-long months of heavy and brutal fighting against a regime desperate to hang on to the last. However, evidence has been compiled by Arab human rights organisations that detail the war crimes and abuses carried out by NATO and its associated Libyan proxies during the 2011 war.

An independent civil society mission, composed of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the International Legal Assistance Consortium and the Arab Organisation for Human Rights, presented their findings in a report that details the casualties of NATO air strikes, the destruction of civilian targets, the coordination of NATO air strikes with rebel offensives on the ground, and the wholesale demolition of  the Qadhafi stronghold of Sirte and its attendant civilian casualties. The authors of the report carried out extensive field investigations throughout Libya’s cities and villages. The mission focused on the racially motivated attacks on the sub-Saharan African population, and documents the forcible mass expulsion of the African community of Tawherga. To add to the current woes of the National Transitional Council, the town of Bani Walid, the last major holdout of the Qadhafi regime, has been retaken by Qadhafi loyalists.

While the United Nations has expressed ‘alarm’ that the National Transitional Council has failed to stop torture in Libya’s prisons, it is doubtful whether the Western powers will do more than just issue banal platitudes about the use of torture in the ‘new’ Libya.  They have always condoned the practice of torture, particularly in developing countries, and the use of torture is now extending to the major capitalist countries. Last year, the Obama administration announced that those officials from the Bush-Cheney regime who ordered and approved the use of torture, would be granted full immunity from any investigation and criminal prosecution.

It is easy to attack the US Republicans, because they openly express their bigotry, hatred and their woeful incompetence is plain for all to see.  One of the previous frontrunners for the Republican party nomination, Herman Cain, demonstrated his terrible ineptness when attempting to answer a simple question about US policy towards Libya, an important issue given the Libyan uprising and subsequent NATO intervention in 2011. Add to that the expression of racist ignorance by Newt Gingrinch who contemptuously called the Palestinians an ‘invented people’, the ‘brain freeze’ of Rick Perry, and the homophobic rantings of Rick Santorum, and it is easy to see that the US Republicans are a pack of floundering buffoons. Sherry Wolf, socialist activist, public speaker and associate editor of the International Socialist Review, said it best when she wrote that this parade of ultra-reactionary Republican dinosaurs proves that in US politics “you could walk into any bar in Brooklyn and find 7 drunks more qualified to run the country.”

It is obvious to any political observer that the US Republicans will cut social expenditure, cut back education, health care and public transportation, all the while increasing funding for the US military-industrial complex. The current speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, Republican from Ohio, is in the pocket of the large tobacco companies, maintains close relations with big tobacco company executives, and has fought for the interests of the tobacco companies in Washington. In other words, the Republicans are backed by very wealthy supporters, and will use their money and connections to roll back any gains made by working people.

Obama and his supporters will highlight the ignorant, reactionary ravings of his opponents to garner support for his reelection campaign. The Obama Democrats will emphasize any difference, however minuscule, to co-opt the electorate and win a second term in office. What is harder to recognise is the role of the US Democrats, particularly under Barack Obama, in continuing the Bush-Cheney policies, whether it be on the issue of civil liberties, challenging the untrammeled greed and pervasive financial corruption of Wall Street, or on the big questions of US wars overseas.

Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony

Back in 1982, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder released a single called ‘Ebony and Ivory.’ It was a corny, superficial song, ostensibly meant to demonstrate that people of different skin colour can and should work together. Noble sentiments, even if it was expressed in a simplistic, juvenile touching sort of way. The lyrics speak of how people of all colours can all live and work together. Subsequent history has proven them to be correct – but not in the way the songwriters intended. The vicious, snarling ‘ivory’ of the Bush-Cheney cabal has been replaced by the smiling, touchy-feely ‘ebony’ Obama. The faces have changed, but the underlying course remains the same.

The Bush-Cheney regime was widely despised by the US working class (and governments overseas) as an administration ruling in the interests of the financial-industrial oligarchy. Its propaganda was exposed as war-mongering, and geared towards provoking confrontations with recalcitrant regimes in developing countries, intended to start expansionist wars and advance US imperial objectives. Growing opposition to these imperialist wars, and the steady erosion of civil liberties and democratic safeguards, prompted a change of tactics by the governing military-industrial-financial complex. Obama dutifully exploited the growing antiwar sentiment, and general revulsion against a narrow cabal that ruled to promote the interests of a super-rich elite to get elected. He made many promises to end wars, stop the indefinite detentions and renditions of suspects, and generally promote socially progressive economic policies domestically.

Now we can see that Obama posed as an antiwar candidate only to coopt the antiwar movement, and he quickly exposed his true colours soon after taking office. The election of Obama was a tactical shift by the US ruling class from open warfare to more covert forms of intervention, including Predator drone strikes, escalating anti-terrorism laws to lock up an ever increasing number of suspects, cracking down on insurgencies by using private security contractors (ie mercenaries), redesigning the Iraqi and Afghani occupations to make them less conspicuous but no less intrusive, and making cosmetic changes to the US economy while promoting the interests of the Wall Street elite. Not only has Obama started more imperialist wars overseas, he has nullified the Nuremberg laws by promoting the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’, a doctrine that was considered a war crime at the end of World War Two. He has refined the Bush-era doctrine of ‘regime change’, and he has promoted/coopted internal opposition groups to instigate covert regime change in the targeted countries. When that tactic fails, Obama has employed direct and lethal force.

Attack on civil liberties

Obama, the ‘yes we can’ president, promised a wave of changes after the Bush-Cheney regime was exposed as a corrupt, malignant, war-mongering administration.  Yet, since taking office after the 2008 elections, Obama has escalated the Bush-era attacks on civil liberties. The recently passed National Defence Authorisation Act, signed into law by President Obama in December 2011, contains clauses  1031 and 1032 that empower the US military to indefinitely detain any person – US citizens or otherwise – any person suspected of terrorism offences, or providing support for terrorist groups. This law repeals the fundamental human right of habeas corpus, and provides more scaffolding for an emerging police state structure in the United States. And this act also provides another $662 billion dollars for the US military to continue its predatory wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Obama has failed to close Guantanamo, and has overseen the construction of another Guantanamo-style secret prison in Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. The courageous journalist Anand Gopal investigated the existence of secret prisons, who stated that “there is a vast complex network of prisons across Afghanistan, mostly situated on US military bases.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, Obama repudiated the international law laid down at Nuremberg more than 60 years ago, by advocating preemptive war. The Nuremberg trials, held in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, established the precedent that heads of state who plan and execute aggressive wars of expansion are guilty of war crimes and crime against humanity. Senior government leaders were held accountable for their decisions that cost the lives of millions of people. The international community expressly repudiated ‘preventive’ war in the context of German imperialism’s drive to establish economic and political domination in Europe. The US ruling class, seeking to dominate vast areas of the globe, escalated its drive to achieve economic supremacy in the early 1990s with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Obama, the allegedly ‘liberal’ Democrat President, extended the policy of establishing US economic hegemony by invoking the outlawed policy of ‘preventive war’. In so many words, aggressive and predatory wars are now an official part of US foreign policy, as elaborated by the fictional ‘anti-war’ President Obama.

The assassination of people overseas – euphemistically called ‘targeted killings’ – is an innovation for which Obama deserves full credit. Killings by unmanned Predator drones have been a characteristic feature of Obama’s administration. Rather than capture Osama Bin Laden and put him on trial, thus demonstrating the evidence of his guilt for all the world to see, Obama deemed it more appropriate to kill him. Bin Laden, a nonentity rendered obsolete by the forward-currents of history in the words of Robert Fisk, was sheltered in Pakistan, a solid US client state. Killing Bin Laden ensured that whatever secrets he had, died with him. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni cleric was assassinated on Obama’s orders back in September 2011. His status as a US citizen, and all the constitutional protections afforded by that status, did not matter to the Obama administration.

Targeted killings were authorised by the Obama administration in February 2010 by then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C Blair (retired). Obama knew that Blair had ties to the Indonesian military, a force guilty of serious human rights abuses including mass murder, rape and torture during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1999, as the Indonesian forces went on a murderous rampage killing thousands of East Timorese, Blair as commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific, was ordered to convey to Indonesian general Wiranto to close down the pro-Indonesian militias. Blair meet with Wiranto, but offered further US military assistance to Indonesia. Wiranto continued to direct the militias that were murdering thousands of East Timorese.

The executive branch of government is now judge, jury and executioner. Awlaki was never convicted, or even charged, with any crime. He was accused by the corporate press as a hate-mongering preacher, and that seemed to be enough to condemn him.  Well, the US is renowned for producing hateful preachers – Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, John Hagee – but they are Christian hate-mongers so that is okay.

Yemen, Saudi Arabia and undermining democracy

The killing of Awlaki occurred in Yemen, soon after the return from temporary exile of the Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Yemen has been convulsed by a courageous, continuing uprising that began in January 2011. The dictator Saleh has been a solid ally of the United States since he took power in 1978. The anti-regime protests, like similar uprisings throughout the Arab world, have shaken the regime, and the US is seeking a way to engineer an outcome that protects its interests while mollifying the protesters with some concessions. While Saleh has safeguarded US interests in Yemen, and has cooperated wholeheartedly with that other US client regime Saudi Arabia, the US intends that any post-Saleh regime will not harm US interests. The Obama administration has worked to moderate the demands of the protesters, encouraging the Yemeni regime to make cosmetic changes while preserving the main repressive state and economic apparatus intact. Obama is no friend of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, and as if to underscore the point, Obama approved a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Rather than encourage democratisation and support the brave people who have risen up in the Middle East, Obama has sought to maintain the repressive status quo, make certain limited concessions, and direct any political change towards a social outcome friendly to US interests.

We saw the same realpolitik calculations applied by the United States in the case of the Libyan uprising. Qadhafi’s regime had started as a pan-Arab, semi-socialist project that considerably developed the country’s infrastructure and improved the education and health care of the population. In the 1970s and 1980s Qadhafi provided an Arab Nasserist model of development. From the early 1990s, he began a Sadat-style reversal, opening up the country to pockets of private investment. By the early 2000s, he joined the US ‘war on terror’ and his regime had deteriorated into a Western-friendly dictatorship with ties to big European capital. The uprising that began in early 2011 resembled the similar protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Qadhafi waged a brutal counterinsurgency war to stamp out the rebels. Initially, the US was tepid in its response to the uprising – it was essentially playing a waiting game to see if Qadhafi, whose weapons had been supplied by the West, could defeat the insurgents. After all, the Western powers’ intelligence agencies were cooperating with the Qadhafi regime, the latter a useful ally in the ‘war on terror’.

However, once it became clear that the Qadhafi loyalists could not comprehensively defeat the rebels, the Obama administration moved swiftly to support setting up a ‘no-fly zone’, on the excuse that it was motivated by humanitarian considerations in preventing a genocide of Libyan people. Qadhafi’s counterinsurgency was brutal and savage – no less brutal and savage than the countless counterinsurgency wars launched by the US and its proxies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries where the US has supported dictatorial regimes in suppressing popular uprisings. NATO intervention in that conflict has meant that any post-Qadhafi regime will be beholden to the interests and needs of big European and American capital. Tariq Ali described it as ‘selective vigilantism’, bombing Libya to install a pro-Western Transitional National Council, while shoring up the despots in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen. As the Socialist Worker magazine explained, the ‘noble aims’ of the West, ‘preventing massacres’ in Libya, is always exposed as a fraud by the greater crimes and atrocities of the imperial powers and their proxies, such as the NATO siege and obliteration of the town of Sirte, and the ethnic-cleansing of black African townships by the rebel forces which amount to crimes against humanity. Just to be clear about the real victors in Libya, the New York Times documented that while profit-making opportunities have receded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have opened up exponentially in post-Qadhafi Libya.

Fake withdrawal

At the end of 2011, Obama announced that all American combat troops have left Iraq, thus fulfilling a campaign promise of 2008 to end that conflict. But upon closer inspection, that withdrawal was just as fake as the Bush-era ‘Mission Accomplished” theatrics. Not only is the US leaving behind 50 000 residual troops in the country, the largest US embassy in the world happens to be in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands of private security contractors, ie. mercenaries, will continue to carry out counter-insurgency operations. Remaining American forces in Iraq will be rebranded as ‘advisors’ and ‘trainers’, obscuring their role as an occupying force. Obama exerted tremendous pressure on his proxy in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to provide legal immunity for all US troops in Iraq. Maliki and the Iraqi government did not provide such a blanket exemption, because that measure would have meant political suicide for the fragile coalition headed by Maliki. With the Iraqis refusing to grant blanket immunity from prosecution, the US had no choice but to stage a withdrawal for public consumption and hide the scale of the US debacle in that country.

Sectarian violence has been incited by the Bush and Obama administrations, in order to divide and rule. 40 000 thousand American troops are stationed at bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, supported by the US air force and navy aircraft carriers – all in close proximity to Iraq. As Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York Stony Brook, has commented, Obama has reduced the ambitious scope to transform Iraq into an aggressive ally of Israel (an objective inherited from the Bush-Cheney days), but he has redesigned the Iraqi occupation to make it less conspicuous and placate his critics, and pursue the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the country. The US occupation has destroyed a functioning society, ruined the health care, electricity, medical and educational services, and left sectarian enclaves under the control of a US-controlled dictatorship in Baghdad.

Embracing Wall Street

Obama has been accused by his Democrat supporters, like veteran journalist Robert Scheer, of abandoning his electoral base by failing to tackle the predatory criminality of the Wall Street financial elite. However, Obama has consistently advocated the cause of the Wall Street bankers and financial speculators whose corrupt practices led to the global financial crash of 2008. He has done nothing to bring those responsible for that financial ruin to account, and instead has opted to shift the cost of that crisis onto working people. While it is obvious that the US Republicans oppose regulations for the financial sector and intend on continuing the policies of reckless financial speculation, Obama packed his cabinet with Wall Street representatives and economists with strong connections to the Wall Street bankers. Back in 2008, Obama (with agreement from Republican John McCain) gave the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the authority to supply $700 billion from federal funds in order to bail out the big banks, buying up the worthless mortgage-supported securities thus acquiring the debts accumulated by the private sector. In other words, the private sector can rack up an enormous debt, but the public will be required to foot the bill. In 2008, Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schapiro is a long-term Wall Street insider, and a solid representative of the big investment banks and financial institutions. This demonstrates that Obama is a servant of the financial plutocracy, and is not going to confront the people responsible for the financial crisis.

In September 2010, Obama made it perfectly clear that his government was no enemy of big business. In a speech entitled ‘Investing in America’ given to a CNBC-organised event broadcast by that channel from Washington, Obama dropped all the rhetoric against ‘fat cats’ and openly praised the ‘free market’ as the answer to the country’s economic problems. He talked about ‘partnering with Wall Street’ to revive the economy, and declared that “”In every speech, every interview that I have made, I’ve constantly said what sets America apart, what has made us successful over long term, is we’ve got the most dynamic free-market economy in the world.” A clear statement of an entrepreneur’s fantasy-philosophy.

It is time to occupy wall street, and remove the pretense that the US Democrats represent some kind of labour-friendly alternative. The Occupy movement, having spread to Australia, focuses on the malignant influence of the corporate hierarchy in subverting political democracy. The defence of jobs, health care, education, social services and our democratic rights needs to focus on the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy. Socialists, activists, and all those concerned about the growing criminality of the US ruling class need to merge with and strengthen the Occupy movement, and reject the danger of falling into the trap of tailing the Democrat party.

Glenn Greenwald has stated that Obama is abandoning the basic principles of the Democrat party, leading the charge to cutback social security, health care, continuing to promote Bush-era policies on indefinite detention, torture of rendition suspects, assassinating US citizens (and others) without any regard for due process, and building secret prisons. It is time to bluntly state that  Obama is a mass murderer and war criminal, and belongs in the dock with Bush and Cheney.

There are rival armed militias, each with a propensity for violence against unarmed civilians, that control different portions of territory. They get word that a huge shipment of money is coming into their turf. The bags of money will be deposited at a location right in the middle of disputed territory. The haul will be transported in due course, so the gangs start fighting each other for influence, determined to oust their rivals and capture the lucrative prize destined for their city. Sounds like a scenario from the American Wild West around the 1880s? Actually, this is Libya in December 2011.

The Guardian reported on December 17 that rival armed gangs are battling for control over the runways at Tripoli airport? Why? Because the United Nations, having recently released £100 billion pounds worth of Libyan assets previously frozen in order to oust the Qadhafi regime, includes an immediate shipment of newly printed currency. Several billion dinars worth of new money is arriving on five cargo planes at Tripoli airport. Whoever seizes control of the airport will be able to impose huge fees to make the newly minted currency available to the National Transitional Council. While the airport at Tripoli is controlled by a militia from Zintan, a town that saw heavy fighting against the Qadhafi loyalist troops, the main rival and ostensibly national army of the National Transitional Council is determined to gain control. Previous attempts to take the airport by the ‘national’ army have been rebuffed, but this consignment of cash is a large, highly remunerative temptation too sweet to resist.

The future does not look promising for Libya; as the Guardian reports,

“the fight to control the airport is part of a far wider battle for political and economic dominance in the new Libya; one that pits the various factions who united to overthrow the Gaddafi regime against each other, as well as remnants of the dictator’s defeated military.”

The battle over the airport is only one aspect of a brewing political battle over the future direction of Libya’s new regime. The National Transitional Council faces mass protests across the country, and can hardly exert its control outside its own base in Benghazi. While there is a ‘national’ army in name, formed back in February 2011 in Benghazi, most of this army is composed of Qadhafi-era generals. The bulk of the Libyan army remained loyal to Qadhafi. The militias in Zintan, Misrata and other cities are able to continue their operations thanks to generous assistance and support from the NATO powers.

In a telling comment from the Guardian article, the National Transitional Council,

“refuses to say who its members are, or even how many there are. Although it appointed a cabinet last month, policy decisions are taken inside what amounts to a black box. Meetings are held in secret, voting records are not published, and decisions are announced by irregular television broadcasts.”

That sounds highly reminiscent of Mussolini’s Italy.

The entire ‘Libyan scramble’ article is well worth reading.

And just to add to the revelations about the character of the National Transitional Council and its rule in Libya; the NTC is now open to hiring mercenaries to enforce its rule over Tripoli and other parts of the country according to the UPI press. To make absolutely clear exactly whom will be protected by any mercenaries (euphemistically labeled security companies), here is the explanatory quote from the UPI article – “The main focus of the security companies is Libya’s oil industry.”

The Washington Post, the highly influential American newspaper, reported that the top US general in Afghanistan predicted that the Taliban would collapse as a viable fighting militia over the next several months, and eventually accept the offer of national reconciliation from the US-supported Afghan government. This confident prediction was backed up by a note of caution; the general warned that the Taliban could still strike. But he was optimistic about the ‘progress’ of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. There is just one thing to note about this report; this prediction was made in April 2005. This month marks ten years since the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and the Afghan war shows no signs of abating.

Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, remarked that after ten years of attacking impoverished Afghanistan, this war remains repulsive. Rather than making the world safe from terrorism, or crushing the terrorist training camps where the September 11 hijackers were supported (the stated reason for invading Afghanistan), the Afghan war has not only destabilised the region, it has embittered a new generation of young Afghanis against the United States, stoking the fires of anti-American hatred. The US has been fighting there not for the fake liberation of women, but to impose its exclusive military control over a region well-known for its petroleum and energy resources. Malalai Joya, a feminist activist and former parliamentarian in the Afghan National Assembly stated that Australia’s participation in this barbarous war is only making things worse in her country.

Afghanistan is rapidly becoming the host of a permanent US military garrison, with at least 700 US military bases in that country. This programme of building bases is rarely commented upon, but it is the platform on which the US occupation of Afghanistan depends. The base that is most heard about, if at all, is Bagram air field, the site where detainees are routinely tortured and brutalised by American soldiers. The Bagram airbase houses a secret prison, where suspected insurgents, and their families, and anyone unlucky enough to be arrested in the other decade long war, the ‘war on terror’ are detained and tortured. Some two-thirds of the prisoners held there have not been charged with any crime, and corruption in the Afghan police is rampant, the Truth-Out article documents. Bagram is becoming known as the ‘other Guantanamo’, the evil twin of the secret prison in Guantanamo Bay.

The United Nations has documented the systematic abuse and torture of detainees in Afghanistan’s prisons. The fledgling Afghan national army and police are being trained and mentored by US and Canadian troops, and the teachers are passing on their skills to the students. It is interesting to note that when the Soviets were in Afghanistan, propping up the socialist government of the 1980s, one of the main reasons the West cited for opposing the Soviet-backed regime was its (real or alleged) torture and imprisonment of political opponents by the Soviet-trained Afghan secret police.

The US war on Afghanistan, one of the main planks of the so-called ‘war on terror’ has aided the steady erosion of democratic safeguards and civil liberties over the last decade. Even basic legal principles, the right to a fair trial, habeas corpus, have all been violated by both the Bush and Obama administrations. The Bush regime declared that the doctrine of preemptive war would now apply – that means the US state has allocated to itself the right to plan and wage war on any nation or force that it deems hostile to its interests. This is a recipe for unrestricted warfare that was first advocated by the Hitler regime in World War Two; a doctrine outlawed by the subsequent Nuremberg trials. Obama has not only retained this doctrine of preemptive war, but expanded upon it. The ostensibly ‘anti-war’ politician of 2008 has escalated the militarisation of US foreign policy, and that is nowhere more evident than in Afghanistan. In his first two years of office. Obama has dramatically increased the number of unmanned drone strikes, the computerised warfare that is doing so much harm to Afghan civilians. Obama has authorised nearly four times the number of drone strikes in his first term of office than Bush sanctioned during his two terms in office. Obama the former law professor has become Obama the international war criminal and sponsor of state-approved terrorism.

Under this ‘war on terror’ title, Bush and Obama have created and vastly expanded the Department of Homeland Security, the hub of a police state apparatus. This police state structure and mentality is being used against anyone that the US regime deems a threat to its interests. The logical outcome of this martial-law ideology is the US-sanctioned assassination of its citizens abroad, and that is what happened to the American-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The extra-judicial murder of Awlaki, however repugnant his ideology, is the kind of behaviour that demonstrates to the people of the Middle East that the United States is a hypocritical power, professing liberty and respect for the rule of law, while violating liberty and carrying out acts of terrorism.

In 1985, after five or six years of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, Gorbachev began to ask serious questions about the viability of maintaining such a high level of Soviet presence in that country. By that year, the Afghan communist government was still fighting an anti-communist, Islamic fundamentalist insurgency. Rodric Braithwaite, author of the recent book Afgansty: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, documents the strident debates within the Soviet Communist party’s leadership about whether to continue militarily supporting the Afghan communist regime, or seek some sort of negotiated political solution with the Afghan jihadist insurgency. From the late 1970s, the American government, the CIA and the associated intelligence community, began financing and training Islamist militias, the former landlords and mullahs that had been dispossessed by the Afghan communist government to fight and expel the godless socialists. The Islamic militants, composed of an assortment of warlords, drug traffickers, reactionary mullahs and tribal chiefs, were opposed to the reforms initiated by the socialist government.

Michael Parenti, an American political scientist, elaborated on how the Afghan socialist government, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) undertook extensive reforms in the country, introducing schooling for girls, a literacy campaign, education for women, legalising labour unions and seizing the large landed estates from the minority landlord class and redistributing them among the poor peasants. The Soviets had been assisting the PDPA government in launching agricultural projects, establishing health care clinics, and providing a secular education system. It took repeated requests by the PDPA government to Moscow before the Soviet leadership finally agreed to send in troops in late 1979. These collectivist policies angered the elites in Washington, Islamabad and Riyadh.

There were factional disputes that plagued the PDPA government, and these divisions harmed their cause. There were human rights violations, and the PDPA regime did use force against its opponents. But it also provided a standard of living for its people that has been unmatched by any subsequent Afghan non-communist government. The US sensed the opportunity, and they organised an anti-socialist jihad through their proxies in Islamabad and Riyadh. As Parenti explains “The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself.  Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.”

When the PDPA government finally abandoned Kabul in 1992, the former mujahideen factions began a civil war, fighting among themselves and devastating Kabul and the major cities in the process. The civilian population was terrorised, cities looted and burned, raping and killing Afghan women and girls, and returning the population to a regime of misogyny and servitude. The Islamist guerrillas were from the majority Pashtun ethnic group, and they began a campaign of ethnic cleansing, targeting the minority communities, such as the Hazaras and Tajiks. Heroin production began to escalate soon after the arrival of the main mujahideen factions in Kabul. Out of this cauldron came the ideological progenitors of Al Qaeda. The current US-backed regime of Hamid Karzai, traces its ideological ancestry to the fanatical US-sponsored mujahideen militias of the 1980s. The assembled coalition of tribal chieftains, narco-traffickers, and fundamentalist warlords that comprise the bulk of the Karzai regime do not care one whit about democracy or women’s rights.

Mahmood Mamdani, professor of government at Columbia University and author of the fascinating book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the cold war and the roots of terror documents how the American military-industrial complex financed and supported an anticommunist jihad for political objectives. As the disparate Islamist groups fought each other for control of Afghanistan after 1992, they devastated the country and could not form a politically stable, unified political authority to run the country. The former paymasters in Washington and Islamabad began to cast around for another force that could stabilise the country and effectively govern. As Mamdani explains, the Taliban were born ‘from the agony and the ashes of the war against the Soviet Union.’ A ‘talib‘, or student, studying in a madrassah – a religious school – was a prime recruit for the new army to be raised by Washington and Islamabad for the fundamentalist cause. Throughout the madrassas of Pakistan, religious students were recruited and trained by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Many of them were refugees from Afghanistan, longing to return to their homeland. Promoting a Saudi-style purist, misogynist and ultra-reactionary ideology, the Taliban was born with a political mission and religious zeal.

In January 2011, Canadian activist Michael Skinner published a thoughtful article in the Socialist Worker that explains the strong financial and military motivations for the current US war in Afghanistan. After examining the history of foreign interventions in that country, Skinner explains that US policy planners recognise Afghanistan as a crucial bridgehead for confronting the main regional competitors for economic influence, Russia and China. Most of the economic development projects in Afghanistan are geared towards accommodating the influence and investments of private corporations, particularly energy companies. Rather than liberating Afghans, the purpose of this war is to liberate capital. As Skinner observes ‘If nothing else, the Global War on Terror opened Afghanistan for business.’ Back in November-December 2001, Lance Selfa, feature writer for the International Socialist Review, elaborated three basic goals of the US ruling class in Central Asia; projecting US military power into the area, undermining Russian and Chinese competition thus gaining greater access to the Caspian Sea’s vast oil and natural gas reserves, and increasing the US domination of the Middle East. These objectives remain the same until today. Afghanistan is geographically at the crossroads of a region that holds enormous energy resources. Establishing a secure pro-US regime in Afghanistan serves as the launching pad for further US incursions in Central Asia.

Ten years into this war, where are the American politicians with the same courage and foresight that Gorbachev had in his day? Are there American politicians asking the difficult and serious questions about the Afghan war? The one politician who has been asking pointed questions about the US debacle in Afghanistan, Dennis Kucinich, is a lonely voice in the US Congress. His plan to quickly withdraw foreign forces from Afghanistan was strongly rejected and voted down by the ideologically monolithic – ‘bipartisan’ is the euphemism – US congress.

Malalai Joya, the courageous and principled Afghan feminist, has written in her book Raising My Voice that all foreign troops must leave immediately. The warlords must be disarmed and their political rule ended. The US tactics in this war of night-raids, aerial bombardment and bribery of insurgent commanders to defect has only escalated the violence and created a climate of rampant corruption. All countries, the US, Russia, China and others, must cease peddling armaments to the various factions of warlords. It is this constant flow of arms that makes political life in Afghanistan a fatal enterprise. Empowering the democratic-minded and secular parties is the way to combat the influence of fundamentalism.

After ten years of escalating violence and destruction, and with Obama extending the war into Pakistan transforming this war into an ‘Af-Pak’ conflict, it is time to acknowledge that this is an unwinnable war. More than that, it has needlessly destroyed lives and caused untold misery to millions. It is time to mobilise political opposition to this war, and prosecute the war criminal politicians, like Obama, who are responsible for intensifying it.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known to stir controversy, and make provocative speeches to the United Nations. He did not disappoint last month, when he made a blistering attack on the United States government and the associated NATO countries. The delegations from several European Union (EU) countries stormed out of the UN forum, as well as the US and Israeli delegations. What does walking out of the United Nations achieve? Nothing – if anything, it only demonstrated that Ahmadinejad struck a raw nerve. You can read the full text of Ahmadinejad’s speech and decide for yourself.

Conspiracy-mongering

It is true that Ahmadinejad has dabbled with various conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11 attacks. He called those attacks ‘mysterious’. Ahmadinejad accused the western powers of hypocrisy and deceit, alleging that “They tolerate no question or criticism, and instead of presenting a reason for their violations, they always put themselves in the position of a claimant. By using their imperialistic media network which is under the influence of colonialism they threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military action.” But the main thrust of his rebuke was political – he criticized the use of September 11 by the United States as the pretext to launch wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are part of the larger US strategy to dominate the Middle East for financial and military advantage. A very legitimate criticism of a political superpower was met with a walkout by the US delegation.

It took the terrorist group al-Qaeda itself to respond decisively to Ahmadinejad’s conspiracy-mongering, telling the Iranian president to cease his ridiculous claims. Why did not the United States respond decisively, presenting the evidence of al-Qaeda’s guilt before the international community at the United Nations? In fact, why did the United States quietly murder the main perpetrator of the September 11 atrocities and dispose of the body so quickly?

There was another world leader who poignantly asked “I want to call on the governments of the world to reflect: since September 11th, 2001, a new and unprecedented imperialist war began, a permanent war, in perpetuity. We have to look directly at the terrifying reality of the world we live in. It is necessary to ask a series of questions on the basis of the risks and threats we face: Why is the United States the only country that scatters the planet with military bases? What is it afraid of to allocate such a staggering budget for increasing its military power? Why has it unleashed so many wars, violating the sovereignty of other nations which have the same rights on their own fates?” That world leader was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who also spoke at the United Nations. Chavez elaborated on the main danger to humanity today; “the absolute power of the military-financial leadership which is destroying the world in order to accumulate ever more profits; the military-financial leadership which is subordinated, de facto, to an increasingly larger group of States. Keep in mind that war is capital’s modus operandi: the war that ruins the majority and makes richer, up to the unthinkable, a few people.” Exactly.

Dabbling at the edges

Yes, Ahmadinejad has flirted at the edges of holocaust denial. He is too clever to deny the holocaust outright, but he gives credence to those who would deny its veracity. Ahmadinejad played host to a conference in 2006 which questioned the historicity of the holocaust. He hosted various anti-semites and holocaust deniers and provided them with a platform of respectability. The Iranian foreign minister at the time, Manochehr Mottaki, stated that the conference did not seek to deny the holocaust, but only to provide a forum in which a serious historical issue could be debated freely by historians. Well they are fine sentiments, because those were the exact points of view expressed by the foreign ministers of various European countries in 2005 and 2006 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the anti-Islamic, Muhammad-mocking cartoons which were purportedly intended to promote debate about important historical and social issues. Perhaps Ahmadinejad’s 2006 conference was his own, deliberately provocative response to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons affair and the controversy it generated.

In his 2011 speech to the United Nations, Ahmadinejad did not deny the holocaust – he lambasted the abuse of that terrible genocide by the Israeli and US governments to drum up political and financial support for the Zionist state. He stated that “If some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists, should it not be an obligation upon the slave masters or colonial powers to pay reparations to the affected nations?” Once again, he made a strident, pointed political criticism of today’s major powers. He made that comment in the context of attacking the huge military budgets of the NATO powers, while there is so much poverty, hunger and rising inequalities that condemn millions of people to a life of needless and avoidable suffering. Ahmadinejad said the following “Approximately, three billion people of the world live on less than 2.5 dollars a day, and over a billion people live without having even one sufficient meal on a daily basis. Forty-percent of the poorest world populations only share five percent of the global income, while twenty percent of the richest people share seventy-five percent of the total global income.” How is walking out of the United Nations going to address these criticisms?

Zionism, Palestine and religion

Unsurprisingly, Ahmadinejad criticised Zionism and the state of Israel. He castigated the ideology of Zionism, and made one passing reference to the Palestinian people. He completely ignored the main issue dominating the discussions at the United Nations – the quest by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for the recognition of Palestinian statehood. No mention of the illegal Israeli settlements, the ongoing blockade of Gaza (though partially lifted by Egypt), the Arab spring uprisings that have brought hope and morale to the long-suppressed Arab people. Hardly a stout defence of the Palestinians by the supposedly pro-Palestinian Iranian president. Ahmadinejad is worried by the example of the Arab spring; the courageous and ongoing uprisings by the Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis and so on against regimes that imprison and torture dissidents. The Iranian government has a long and notorious history of jailing labour activists and dissidents.

Ahmadinejad’s speech was infused with a religious world-view, and he made frequent invocations to a divine creator. The Iranian government is theocratic, and all aspects of state legislation are vetted by reactionary mullahs to ensure that political life remains strictly governed by religion. Secular people are attacked by the thugs of the ‘revolutionary’ militia, book stalls and publishing outlets advocating a secular humanist viewpoint are intimidated and shut down. The all-pervasive influence of religion in political and public life is hardly confined to Iran. There is one big country where religion (at least one version of it) exerts a profound influence on the political process, especially when selecting candidates to run for political office. That country is the United States, and this extremist rightwing political-religious movement seeks to impose its own brand of a Christian theocracy should it successfully place candidates in political office. It is not just politics that is under threat – education and public life would be subject to rampant and organised ignorance should the Christian fundamentalist movement gain ever-greater political clout.

Obama’s arrogant hypocrisy

Obama’s speech to the United Nations, full of empty bombast and arrogant pretensions, did nothing to address the substantive issues facing the international community. While referring to peace, he did not posit any concrete proposals for addressing the world’s problems. Instead, ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, he made vague statements about how ‘there are no shortcuts to peace’. Indeed, for the last twenty years (even longer), the Palestinians have been asking for statehood. He presented both the Israeli and Palestinian sides as equals, having ‘legitimate aspirations.’ Obama’s presentation of both sides as ‘equals’ reeks of hypocrisy and a kind of historical denial. Nowhere did he mention the continuing illegal settlements and land annexations, the displacement of millions of Palestinian refugees, the ongoing siege of Gaza and the deliberate immiseration of Palestinians living in Gaza.

Not only did Obama refuse to support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, he also failed to mention the 1967 borders, a reference that Obama made back in May this year which attracted heavy criticism from Israel and the American Republican party. Obama was in denial mode; denial that the Palestinians lived under occupation, that Israel has waged expansionist wars against the neighbouring Arab countries, that millions of Palestinians are still languishing in refugee camps. Just for good measure, he stated that the alliance with Israel is ‘unshakable.’ He spent the remainder of his time at the United Nations strong-arming other countries to drop their support for the Palestinian President’s bid for statehood.

Obama did make reference to the Arab Spring, and this measure demonstrates Obama’s rank hypocrisy. He paid ‘tribute’ to the people of Egypt and Tunisia, even though in both cases these regimes were armed to the teeth and supported by the United States until the final moments of their respective uprisings. No mention of the United States’ current measures to prop up the faltering dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen as the pro-democracy demonstrators are faced with American-made guns, tear gas and bullets. Obama’s reference to Libya and the NATO intervention there had the undertone of a threat – the ‘see what happened to Libya, we can do that to you’ connotation. No mention of the fact that the Qadhafi regime had become a solid ally of the US, Britain, France and western countries, opening up to foreign corporations, had cooperated with the CIA in the rendition of terrorism suspects, and had backed the US ‘war on terror’ since its inception in 2001. While declaring the Bahrain was a ‘close friend’ of the US, he made lukewarm remarks about seeking a negotiated solution for that country’s political problems.

Was there a walkout when Obama addressed the United Nations? No. Why this hypocritical, theatrical walkout when a right-wing, populistic demagogic despot like Ahmadinejad speaks, but only half-hearted but polite applause when the leader of the largest imperial power on earth makes a blustery speech, contemptuously dismissing the just demands of the international community? The walkout by EU member states, the delegates of the US and Israel while Ahmadinejad was speaking reeked of a contrived, hypocritical outrage. It was more about playing up to the cameras, much like in a bad soap-opera, rather than seriously addressing the issues that Ahmadinejad raised. Directly confronting his charges would have been the more political constructive, effective way to oppose the Iranian president’s remarks.

Obama’s meaningless posturing as a peacemaker only masks the deepening economic crisis facing the capitalist system, and he has no solutions to advocate. President Chavez took to the same podium, and spoke of the need for a multi-polar world, where no single power can impose its will on the rest. He spoke of the need for a new economic and social order, one that would place people’s needs before corporate profits. We would do well to heed his words.

News earlier this week that former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber prompted reactions ranging from shock and grief to resolution and determination. Rabbani was killed by a suicide bomber in his home, the bomber having hidden the explosives in his turban.Rabbani had been a major adviser to the Karzai regime, and had been involved in the purported peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership.

The media reactions to his killing emphasized his role as a peacemaker, a wise political leader and man of vision. However, we would do well to remember that Burhanuddin Rabbani was the political leader throughout the 1980s of the CIA-supported mujahideen militias that fought the socialist government and Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Rabbani represented the mullahs that wished to stop education for young girls, force women out of paid employment and return them to the home, impose a rigid ideological orthodoxy that tolerated no opposition, that sanctioned the murder and torture of secular-minded and socialist people, and restoring the privileges and wealth of the landlord class that had been ousted by the communist government. The socialist government had cancelled the debts of the poorest peasants, and established cheap, low-interest rate loans for agricultural workers which undercut the usurious practices of the richest landlords. All these measures were reversed by Rabbani when the latter came to power in 1992.

Here is Rabbani with one of his friends from the 1980s;

Rabbani was the first political leader into Kabul in 1992 after the Afghan socialist government abandoned power. The mujahideen militias then turned their guns on each other from 1992 until 1996 when they were driven out by the Taliban. During that time, women were forcibly velied, the archaeological treasures of Afghanistan were looted, the educational institutions deteriorated, medical and health systems collapsed and there was a mass exodus of refugees from Kabul and the major cities that had been relatively untouched through the 1980s Soviet period. Rabbani was a fanatical psychopath responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghans and the reversal of a relatively liberalised, secular society.

His murder was portrayed in the media as a blow to the peace process; however, the reality much more complex. As Stephen Grey of the Guardian newspaper points out, the vaunted peace process is actually more about lulling the Taliban into relaxing their guard, bribing their commanders to change sides, and generally stall for time as US and British forces continue hitting the Afghan population with night-time raids, unmanned drone strikes and carrying out this war of attrition against Taliban militants. Make no mistake, the Taliban are hurting; they are losing people, but they are responding with high-profile attacks and assassinations, the latest being the killing of Rabbani. The US and British forces in Afghanistan seem to have only one tactic for defeating the Taliban – encouraging defections through bribery.

The Taliban are most definitely a bunch of crazed, fanatical killers – there is no doubt about that. The suicide bombing of Rabbani is only the latest terrorist outrage carried out by the Taliban foot-soldiers. But sympathy for Rabbani is tempered when remembering the role he played in leading Afghanistan into its current deplorable situation. As we reach the tenth-anniversary of the current Afghan war, there is no end in sight to that conflict. The Obama administration has basically escalated that war, deepening America’s quagmire resulting in more deaths and new levels of violence. The Afghan war has nothing to do with liberating its people, but rather imposing US designs for military and economic dominance in the region.

Near where I live in Sydney, there is a war memorial commemorating all those people from the area that died serving the Australian armed forces in wars overseas. There are columns for each war Australians have participated in, followed by the names of those that never returned. For instance, there are columns for World War One (1914-1918), World War Two (1939-1945), the Korean War (1950-53), and also the International Campaign against Terrorism (2001 – ). You notice that last one? Unlike the others, the war on terror has no end date.

The horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 prompted justified outrage at the perpetrators and sympathy for their victims. Since then, there has been a continuous barrage of war crimes, an escalation of US wars in the Middle East, new offensives against Iraq and Afghanistan by the US imperial power, and a steady erosion of democratic civil liberties in the name of a ‘war on terror.’ In fact, the first decade of the 2000s can rightly be called the savage decade. The Bush/Cheney administration seized upon September 11 as an opportunity to implement imperial designs that long predate the actual terrorist attacks. As Anthony Arnove documents, senior national security staff were directed by Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser and later secretary of state, to capitalise on the opportunities for the US to reshape the world, implement regime change, and redesign significant portions of the globe for US imperial interests. The September 11 tragedy has become a blank cheque, a banner under which US war planners have justified their imperial interventions to a sceptical public.

The US has been carrying out war crimes in the name of September 11. It is a terrible, perverse usage of the tragedy to whip up public sentiment to commission crimes that have more in common with the doctrine motivating the perpetrators of September 11. As Robert Jensen, journalism professor at the University of Texas points out, there was no doubt that the Bush/Cheney administration was going to use 9/11 as an excuse to launch all-out wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. There was no illusion that the Bush/Cheney cabal were fanatical imperialists and racists, dedicated on demonstrating to the world that the US empire was on the war path. What is now becoming apparent is that the Obama administration is following practically the same course, although with a different disguise. Wait a minute, didn’t Obama declare an end to the war on terror in 2009? In a way, yes – he rebranded it as ‘overseas contingency operations.‘ A different name for exactly the same package – that’s rebranding you see.

Here in Australia, we are told that the world changed on September 11. Did it really? Yes and no. As Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, economics lecturer at Drake University says, certainly the 9/11 tragedy prompted calls for regime change, imperial retribution and preemptive strikes by the United States. The rendition program where torture is ‘outsourced’ to third countries under the supervision of CIA and MI6 officials, the imprisonment of terrorism suspects without charge or trial, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security provisions – these are all developments post 9/11. But the military-industrial-financial complex had plans for regime change, the economic outreach into more countries and extension of US military power years before 9/11, since the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. With the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, a significant restraint on US militarism was removed. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser under former President Jimmy Carter and main architect of the US-sponsored Islamic Mujahideen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, wrote in a 1997 book about the need for the US to confront Russia, China, India and others to remain the dominant economic and military power in Central Asia and the Middle East.

US war planners needed new enemies, and they came up with many – the clash of civilisations, rogue states, militant Islamism and so on. But 9/11 was the new mantra, and the beneficiaries of the giant military budget and security spending fixed onto a new ideological banner to disguise the agenda of imperial expansion. It is this broader context in which the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan (and now Libya) must be understood.

The National Priorities Project is an organisation dedicated to explaining, in terms as clear as possible, how the US federal budget is composed and how tax dollars are spent. They recently put together a report regarding the amount of money spent on national security since September 11, 2001. Since that day, the US ruling class has spent 8 trillion dollars on homeland security, the Pentagon’s military budget, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and all the associated spending on the US State Department and federal agencies. All this spending was supposedly prompted by nineteen hijackers armed with nothing more than box cutters? I think that Sheldon Richman is right – national security spending is a scam. As he points out in his article, opportunistic and cynical politicians have been using 9/11 to frighten people into accepting even more military spending.

Is the world actually safer because of the war on terror and all this military and national security spending? Well, according to the numerous security pundits, the world is safer because countless terrorist plots have been foiled, but they just cannot elaborate because of national security. It is the old ploy – “we could tell you, but if we did we would have to kill you” trick. Without adequate information it is hard to say, but I can make two observations. Firstly the war on terror has failed to thwart attacks on the European and Western countries. Secondly and even more importantly, the war on terror and the associated extraordinary renditions, torture and repression breeds resentments across the Islamic and Middle Eastern countries. When US forces and unmanned drones kill scores of civilians across Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq and other countries, don’t you think that some Muslim people will develop anti-American resentments and hatreds? The descent of the American military and political system into thoroughly detestable forms of behaviour – barbaric torture at Guantanamo and Bagram air base, the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the packs of unmanned Predator drones – all this behaviour leads to a massive buildup of discontent and sows the seeds for future terrorist attacks.

While the 9/11 fanatics were driven by a complex array of religious and political motives, there is no doubt that continued American support for Zionism, and the Arab dictators around the Middle East, was a major factor in their hatred of US imperial power. With the homicidal overreaction by the US empire, the terrorists kind of got what they wanted – an extension of American imperial criminality into costly and savage wars that are draining the US of its resources. The Afghanistan war is coming onto ten years, and thousands of American troops remain in that country. There is the ongoing occupation and insurgency in Iraq, and that conflict shows no signs of ending, even after Obama’s rebranding of that occupation and fake withdrawal of troops.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, former President Bush issued a new doctrine, a new national security strategy of ‘preemptive war’ to strike at terrorist groups and states that allegedly pose a threat, or are developing a credible threat, to the United States. This doctrine, continued by Obama, is basically a license to wage aggressive war. Was not this kind of behaviour outlawed and condemned by the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War Two? Obama explicitly endorsed the doctrine of preemptive war, ironically when giving a speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

I have to agree with Tom Engelhardt – when it comes to September 11, let’s cancel it. Let’s stop the commemorations, the gatherings of pompous politicians, the hoopla, the new towers, the waterfalls – let’s stop the lot. What is more important is stopping the abuse of the 9/11 horrific attacks to perpetrate even more terrorist crimes and imperial wars, while enveloping those wars with hypocritical reverential remembrance. Stop using the supposedly ‘hallowed’ ground zero to promote carnage and barbarism overseas. The 9/11 killings, while appalling and ghastly, are not a license for continuous war and descent into harrowing political conduct. Political life over the last decade is characterised by a continual assault on democratic rights; if you doubt that, just ask Omar Khadr, or Moazzam Begg. Let’s stop this endless war funding, as Engelhardt explains.

Anthony Arnove demonstrates that we in the western world have undergone a dramatic cultural shift, with the corporate-controlled media playing a huge role in promoting the war on terror hyperbole, legitimising the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and nourishing the racist Islamophobic campaign, targeting Arabs and Muslims in general as a potential fifth column in subverting ‘western values’, and bolstering public approval for war. Let us campaign for an alternative world, without imperialist wars and occupations, racism and soaring corporate profits. Let us regain the basic democratic and social rights that we have lost because of this undemocratic war on terror, and mobilise against the financial aristocracy and war profiteers to save our planet.

In September 2006, the day after the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist atrocities, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture in his former university city of Regensburg, in which he quoted from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. The latter had written commentaries about his debates with a Muslim interlocutor, discussing the differences and relative merits of Christianity and Islam. The Pope Benedict XVI chose to extract this quote from the Byzantine emperor’s writings: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

With this quote, Pope Benedict XVI thrust into the limelight not only the name of a previously obscure emperor, but also a long-neglected empire that had fought between the Islamic world, and the main Western Christian church, namely Roman Catholicism. That empire was Byzantium, and most people were asking – what is Byzantium? To answer that question, one should look no further than the marvelous book by Professor Judith Herrin called Byzantium: The surprising life of a medieval empire. I will address the Pope’s remarks a little later.

The title of this article comes from one of the chapters in Herrin’s book – a grand duke and admiral of the Byzantine emperor had made the statement ‘better the Turkish turban than the papal tiara’ back in the 1440s to summarise the crossroads that Byzantine civilisation occupied and the foreign policy dilemmas that confronted the Byzantine political leadership. This popular proverb stands in stark contrast to the sentiments quoted by the Pope above. But what Herrin’s book accomplishes is a sweeping and detailed examination of Byzantine civilisation – its art, architecture, law, economy and politics. Quite a wide-ranging scope in one volume.

Byzantium, the eastern half of the previously united Roman empire, grew from its ancient roots to become a cosmopolitan, medieval civilisation. The first portion of the book documents the transformation of what was the East Roman empire, with its new capital at Constantinople, into the sprawling inheritor of the Roman empire’s mantle, laws, paganism and traditions. But Byzantium then developed its own distinct Greek-speaking imprint on Roman customs, and its version of Orthodox Christianity. It is as a barrier against the spread of Islam that Byzantium is best-known. Apart from the stereotypes of exotic riches, endless political intrigues and interminable theological debates, Byzantium is recognised as the ‘eastern defender’ against Islamic armies. Indeed, Byzantium came close to being totally overrun by the Islamic Arab armies that came out of the Arabian plateau. The dual challenges of the Slavic peoples in the Balkans, and the Persian empire in the east, stretched the resources and fighting capacity of Byzantium to the limit.

But Byzantium survived the Islamic challenge, and ‘rescued’ Europe from the seemingly invincible Islamic conquerors. Herrin states that if Byzantium had fallen, most of Europe would have been conquered by the Islamic forces. In one sense, today’s Europe was only able to survive because of the intercession of the Byzantines. It is this aspect of Byzantine history which the Pope and his supporters would like to enlist for their political agenda during this era of fractious relations between the West and the Islamic communities. But Byzantium was more than just a ‘bulwark against Islam’ – which is the title of one of Herrin’s chapters. Byzantium also had a complex cultural life, with pagan, pre-Christian texts and authors being incorporated into the framework of Byzantine culture and philosophy. Byzantium was an eastern orthodox empire, but with partly pagan features and origins. Byzantium was definitely and stridently a Christian empire, but it also was shaped by the ancient Greek authors, the Roman thinkers and pagan customs which influenced its society. The burning of incense, the veneration of images of gods, the celebration of Christian holidays based on pagan, pre-Christian holy days – these all attest to the complex melding of pagan and Christian elements. The translation of pagan philosophers into Greek, the active debate and commentaries about science, mathematics, whether the world was created has always existed – these debates reflect an active cultural life in Byzantium.

While Byzantium fought to contain the Muslim armies, the empire can hardly be called a defender of Christianity. The great schism between Latin West Christendom and Easter Orthodox Christianity did not start with Byzantium, but it certainly worsened with the arrival of the Crusades. In the chapter ‘Fulcrum of the Crusades’, Herrin details how the Byzantines called upon their Latin Western Christian friends, namely the papacy and the west European Christians to help fend off the growing threat posed by the encroaching Seljuk Turkish empire. With this call, Byzantium and the Christian East opened up a cantankerous, fragile relationship military relationship with the Latin Christian West. While the object of the Crusades was to reconquer the holy lands from Muslim control, the relations between the Christian forces were marked by mutual suspicion and bitter recriminations. By the time of the Fourth Crusade, relations between the Latin crusaders and their Byzantine hosts had deteriorated so much that when the Byzantine side failed to fulfill the terms of their agreement, the crusaders abandoned their original objective of the holy lands and ransacked Constantinople itself. This mass sacking of Constantinople in 1204 not only poisoned relations between the eastern and western Christians, reinforcing the great schism between the Roman Catholic west and Eastern Orthodox East, but also reduced Byzantium to such a perilous state it was divided into a patchwork of Latin and Greek-speaking states. By April 1204, the greatest city in western Christendom was a mass of smouldering ruins, as Herrin states in her book. Anti-Latin sentiment ran high, and the prospects of recovery were bleak.

Yet by the 1260s, Byzantium recovered somewhat, with one of the Greek-speaking successor states, Nicaea, managing to recover Constantinople, holding off the Seljuk Turks and reestablishing a distinctly Byzantine empire, though in truncated form. With all these military fluctuations, it is a wonder that the many architectural achievements of Byzantium have survived – in particular the church of Hagia Sophia. A whole chapter in Herrin’s book is devoted to the construction, engineering feats, and survival of the church, which became a mosque in 1453 with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, and is today preserved as a museum. The scale of Hagia Sophia and its impressive dome suggests engineering skills that are exceptional. Most of the early Christian churches followed the template of a basilica, so to construct a dome was quite novel and daring for Byzantine times. The Hagia Sophia, as constructed by the emperor Justinian, has survived arson, riots and earthquakes throughout the years.

There is so much more to digest in Herrin’s book; I hope I have done justice to its contents with this short review. Byzantium persisted for another 250-odd years after the Fourth crusade. Herrin looks at the frequent challenges Byzantium had to face – wars with the Bulgarians, the transformation of an ancient economy into a medieval one, the continued toleration of a cosmopolitan society that included Jews, Varangians – Armenians found employment in the Byzantine armed forces. But one challenge proved overwhelming – the Ottoman Turks, who expanded from the Anatolian peninsula and finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.

The Byzantine empire was a complex, multifaceted state, with its own combination of Roman traditions and Christian practices. This brings me back to the Pope’s earlier quotation about Islam taken from Manuel II. Why did he choose to make this statement, rather than elaborate on all the scientific and cultural achievements of the Byzantines? I think the Pope’s use of that quotation was more than just misleading, as Herrin correctly notes. It poured petrol on an existing fire – the tension relationship between Islamic communities and the European West. I think Pope Benedict XVI promoted a stereotypical view of the Islamic world as uniquely irrational and incapable of rational change. Herrin’s volume goes a long way towards demolishing the highly inaccurate stereotypes about Byzantium as a tyrannical regime run by corrupt, effeminate cowardly men. We would do well to reexamine our own myths and stereotypes, rather than point an accusatory finger at other civilisations. Read Herin’s book if for no other reason than this one – Byzantium is absolutely fascinating.

Among the typical reactions I receive when stating that ancient history should be studied is “Why would you study ancient history?” and “Isn’t all about long-dead people and civilisations? What has that got to do with today?”. Well ancient history, besides being a boundlessly fascinating subject, has implications for what we do today and how we understand modern politics. Perhaps Australians do not appreciate ancient history because our own (white) history is only around two hundred years old. However, ancient history still has explosive consequences for today. Let me illustrate by using one example.

In the city of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, the government has erected a statue to Alexander the Great, the ancient Macedonian conquistador who is still celebrated today on both sides of the Greece-Macedonia border. This statue has reignited a long-simmering dispute between the Greek and Macedonian governments – was Alexander the Great (more correctly, Alexander III of Macedon) Macedonian or Greek? While this dispute may seem antiquated to us in Australia, it is the latest in a series of counterpunches between the two cultural antagonists. The current Macedonian government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski is leading the campaign to celebrate Macedonia’s classical heritage through a series of cultural and architectural projects throughout Skopje, commemorating Macedonia’s antiquity. The statue of Alexander the Great has been criticised by the Greek government, who claim that Alexander was rightly Hellenic, and any attempt by Macedonia to claim his mantle as part of their heritage is unjust, and masks Macedonia’s territorial ambitions to claim Greece’s historic province of Macedonia.

I am not going to take a ‘position’ on this debate; I think that Hajrudin Somun, Bosnia’s former ambassador to Turkey and lecturer at the International University in Sarajevo, has hit the nail on the head by stating that while Alexander belongs to the Hellenic tradition, modern Greece has no monopoly over everything Hellenic. There are numerous Hellenic historical sites located in Anatolia (modern-day Greece) and the Middle East, even going as far as Afghanistan. Do all these territories have to pay homage to Greece before commemorating their heritage? I think they have the perfect right to memorialise the Hellenic input into their history. As Somun states, Alexander belongs to both modern Greece and Macedonia. The establishment of Alexander the Great as a credential of nationhood began in the late nineteenth century, with the fight by Macedonia and Greece for independence from Ottoman Turkish rule.

Prime Minister Gruevski has ordered the construction of museums, scores of sculptures, philharmonic orchestra and the preservation of hundreds of archaeological sites to commemorate the period of Macedonia’s classical antiquity. This is a way of saying a big “up yours” to Greece, as the former foreign minister of Macedonia stated in an interview last year. An intended statue of Alexander’s father, Phillip of Macedon, is expected to be even bigger than the current sculpture. The classical period of Macedonia’s history (and Hellenic history) should be studied and remembered for its importance to our lives. Much of our political structures, scientific questions, cultural debates and social mores trace back to classical antiquity.

The title of Gruevski’s part is the Democratic party for Macedonian National Unity – Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (VMRO-DPMNE). Why such a long name? That name harks back to the time of Macedonia’s own struggle for independence from Ottoman Turkish rule. Gruevski hopes to acquire the historical legitimacy conferred by tracing the origins of his party’s political program to the Macedonian independence struggle. The VMRO-DPMNE is today a rightist, Christian Democrat party. Gruevski’s party is claiming that the fight for independence by the original VMRO-DPMNE should be respected and is the reason why Macedonia is still standing today. That is certainly the case, but then Gruevski’s government has a serious problem.

The monuments, museums and buildings commemorating the struggle by the Communist partisans to liberate Macedonia (and indeed Yugoslavia) from the tyranny of Nazi rule have been deliberately neglected since the VMRO-DPMNE assumed power in 2006. While Gruevski’s government is spending enormous sums of money to celebrate classical antiquity, the heroic struggle of those Macedonians who fought as partisans during World War Two is being studiously ignored, and the monuments to that struggle are victims of neglect. Macedonia is still standing today, and is named (somewhat clumsily) as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia because of the courage of the partisans and their vision of a united Yugoslavia. The main opposition party in Macedonia, the Social Democrats, state that they should be proud of their modern history and not neglect it like the VMRO-DPMNE government.

There are many Macedonians who are outraged that their capital is beginning to resemble a ‘mini-Las Vegas’, as one critic put it. It is interesting to note that in the same article, the academic Professor Blaze Ristovski, while hailing the campaign to celebrate Alexander the Great as a method of nation-building, admitted that during the communist era, churches and mosques were built in the republic. He was speaking from the communist-built Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, which still operates until today.

The current Macedonian government, facing a bleak economic situation and rising anger over the deterioration in living standards, is using a populist reading of history to whip up nationalist sentiment and divert people’s attention from the worsening economic situation. This month marks ten years since the Ohrid agreement, which ended the country’s civil war and held out a promise of a better future. Ten years on, Macedonia has not made any progress towards joining the European Union (EU) and the peace deal remains fragile. Athens blocks Macedonia’s entry into the EU as long as the latter continues to use its current name. The financial problems of Greece and the wider EU have assumed centre stage for now.

Ancient history frequently intersects with modern politics and economics. It is foolhardy to ignore or dismiss it.

Early in August, two major World War Two anniversaries were marked in Europe; August 1 saw the 67th anniversary of the heroic Warsaw uprising by the Polish underground resistance movement against Nazi German occupation forces; and August 6 witnessed the 66th anniversary of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred on August 9. I raise these anniversaries to highlight the importance of commemorating the courageous struggles by the peoples oppressed by the Nazi regime, and to underscore the importance of historical debate for comprehending the tremendous social forces that have shaped the world today. But my point today is not to just go over old historical ground, but to highlight a growing problem in our midst; Baltic ultranationalism which has mutated to outright neofascism.

Consider the following commemoration of World War Two, this time in Estonia; the Moscow government strongly condemned the criminal connivance of the Estonian authorities in allowing a march of Estonian SS veterans in late July. The gathering of veterans of the 20th Estonian SS division not only promoted neo-Nazi and anti-immigrant ideas in the young generation, but also whitewashes the criminal actions of the Baltic SS veterans and their culpability in the crimes of the Nazi regime, in particular the holocaust.

This cannot be dismissed as just a one-off march by a band of senescent curmudgeons reliving their glory days. Last year in Latvia, a rally and commemoration was held for the veterans and supporters of the Latvian legion that served in the SS. Latvia’s Fatherland and Freedom party has practiced a kind of Baltic revisionism of World War Two, obfuscating the culpability of the Baltic fascists in executing Jews, and simultaneously exaggerating and embellishing the Soviet period in the Baltic republics as equal to Nazi fascism. Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and holocaust historian, has spoken out against the menace of Baltic fanatic-nationalism, calling it a threat to European democracy, and highlighting that since independence in 1991, not a single Baltic Nazi war criminal has been prosecuted in a Baltic court of law.

Back in April 2007, just prior to the traditional May 9 commemorations of victory in Europe day, which are understandably serious and solemn occasions in Russia, a monument to the Soviet soliders who fell during World War Two was dismantled in Tallinn, the Estonian capital city. There were riots and ethnic clashes between rightwing Estonians and the Russian-speaking community, leading to arrests and at least one Russian dead. The Russian government tabled a resolution to the United Nations condemning the glorification of Nazism and demanding that desecrating World War Two monuments be outlawed. The motion was defeated and the United States voted against it. Marches by Waffen-SS veterans and their supporters, drawn from the extreme rightwing parties and anti-immigrant circles in which Anders Breivik circulated, are annual events in the Baltic states. Dismantling Soviet-era memorials dedicated to the commemoration of Soviet sacrifices during World War Two have become commonplace in the Baltic republics. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly urged the international community to reject any attempts to desecrate or profane the memory of the dead and remember that victory in WWII was achieved at tremendous cost by the Soviet Union. Let us also not forget the incredible sacrifices that the Chinese made in their decisive contribution to defeat an aggressive and militarist Japan.

But I think there is something more insidious going on here – equating red with brown, and obfuscating the guilt of the perpetrators of the holocaust. They are not my phrases, but the words of Dovid Katz, chief analyst at the Litvak Studies Institute and editor of the website Holocaustinthebaltics. In a couple of articles for the Guardian newspaper, Katz underscores two crucial themes. First is the ongoing attempt to equate Nazi and Soviet crimes. After all, if both are equally guilty then the Baltic ultranationalist agenda to revise history can proceed, portraying the Baltics as the innocent victims of two aggressive, cooperating predators. Did not Hitler and Stalin sign a pact in August 1939 which included in its provisions, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states? In the early 1990s, the newly-independent Baltic states set up state-organised committees to examine both Nazi and Soviet crimes. As Katz states, this project was a Baltic ultranationalist agenda to rewrite their participation in crimes against the Jews, and by promoting the ‘double-genocide’ interpretation, absolve the Baltic SS collaborators of their guilt, or at least to obscure their own responsibility for carrying out the genocide of the Jews. Secondly, by propounding the ‘double-genocide’ interpretation, and advocating an anti-Russian position, the Baltics further ingratiated themselves with the European powers and the United States. This reflected their political orientation after 1991. If Russia can be portrayed as a genocidal, homicidal equivalent of the Nazis, then the ‘Western democracies’ will firmly embrace the Baltic republics into the neoliberal, capitalist agenda of the major imperialist powers. Populist ultranationalism was used as an ideological battering ram to accompany the imposition of the IMF neoliberal austerity programme.

The Soviets committed terrible atrocities in the early 1940s when their troops and secret police moved into the Baltic states under the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. There were mass deportations of anti-Soviet sections of the ruling classes and intelligentsia; carrying out large-scale collectivisation of agriculture and heavy industrialisation caused massive dislocation. The Soviets invested heavily in large capital investment projects for the production of manufacturing and industrial commodities. This caused massive upheaval in a society that was largely agricultural and semi-rural.

As Dovid Katz points out, the only reason that the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians are still with us is because there was no genocide. However, the Baltic fanatic-nationalist motivation to label the Soviet period ‘genocide’ not only minimises Nazi criminality during the war, but plays up Soviet crimes in order to conceal Baltic accountability for antisemitic pogroms and massacres during WWII. It is interesting to note that with the capitalist economic crisis engulfing Europe, the once-hailed Baltic tigers are experiencing a severe economic downturn. One consequence of this has been the mass exodus of young Balts from their respective states, and the rate of exit is comparable to Stalin’s deportations of the 1940-41 period.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was unethical and immoral – Putin said as much in 2009 during a speech in Gdansk, Poland, to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII. He also went on to condemn the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the western powers, noting especially the infamous Munich pact, the Hitler-Chamberlain agreement that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany’s encroachments. Moscow’s overtures for a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France were repeatedly rebuffed. Russia faced a war on two fronts in 1939, being invaded by militarist Japan in that year. Now all this does not make the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact right, but it does indicate the selective condemnation of Moscow while ignoring the deep culpability of the western European powers in the appeasement of Nazism.

Seumas Milne states it plainly when he writes that with the resurgence of a xenophobic, ultranationalist right in Eastern Europe, some historians, particularly evident in the Baltics, are equating Nazism with Communism in order to dishonestly claim that WWII was caused not just by Nazi Germany, but also by the USSR. As Milne states in his article “But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar “enslavement” of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial.” It is virtually impossible to deny the holocaust in the Baltics, an area covered with the mass graves of its victims. So holocaust obfuscation is a cleverer, more cunning ruse to play. Baltic perpetrators of Nazi crimes gain acceptance, even honour, if they can portray their fight as a yearning for ‘independence’ from Soviet rule.

With unemployment growing, social services being cut back, and racist violence occurring across Europe, it is time to put an end to holocaust obfuscation and the poison of Baltic ultranationalism. Australia has sizable Baltic communities who brought with them not only their cuisine and culture, but their fanatic-nationalist agenda. Let us commemorate those who gave their lives fighting Nazism by stopping this revisionist deceit from spreading.