Free Thought Manifesto

Aggression Born Of American 'Exceptionalism'

2012-02-03T02:00:00.009-05:00

By HIROAKI SATO
Monday, Jan. 30, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Japan Times"

NEW YORK — I thought American exceptionalism was debunked and dying. I was wrong.

Most recently, American exceptionalism jumped to the political fore at the start of this century. It did so with a swagger, ironically, because of the 9/11 attacks. In his speech that night, President George W. Bush put forward the United States as "the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."

That assertion was a bit odd in the circumstances, but no matter. He condemned those who carried out the attacks as "evil" and told the world that America, being goodness incarnate, would bring those responsible to justice, making no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored the terrorists.

As Bush pushed his intent to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with those "evil" acts, some advised that the U.S. assume the role that Britain played from the 19th to the early 20th century. The U.S. is powerful and enlightened enough, the argument went, to relegate those benighted, ne'er-do-well Middle Eastern countries back into colonial status and rule them as lord and master.

Even a plan was cooked up to send schoolteachers to Iraq after its "liberation." The story appeared in The Education Week — a periodical that constantly reports on the problems American education faces.

Behind all that lay the age-old belief that America is a country like no other. That high self-regard faltered as the Iraq War, like the war against Afghanistan that had started earlier, did. Then came the bursting of the financial bubble. The argument that American exceptionalism is a "myth" came to the fore.

Three years ago Godfrey Hodgson published the book "The Myth of American Exceptionalism" (Yale Univ. Press). The most cogent case against "the myth" I've read of late is Stephen M. Walt's article with the same title (Foreign Policy, November 2011). In it the Harvard professor dissects it from five angles to show it is fantasy based on ignorance and self-aggrandizement.

First, Walt points to the notion that "there is something exceptional about American exceptionalism." There simply isn't. Powers of any international standing at one time or another entertained similar ideas to justify their "missions."

Walt doesn't cite Japan among his examples, but Japan once projected itself as "the leading race" among the Asian nations. That self-appointed role included what may be called belligerent eschatology. Japan's exceptional mission required the country, some prominent men argued, to fight the U.S. even if that meant Japan's annihilation.

Walt's second point of rebuttal is the belief that the U.S. "behaves better than other nations." He cites expansionism and the accompanying slaughters. He doesn't mention it, but it was none other than Fortune magazine that plainly stated, in 1935, that the U.S. was second only to Great Britain in the total size of territories it had seized by then.

As for killings, it was in a website of President George W. Bush's secretive administration that I was surprised to see the simple statement: The population of American Indians had been reduced to just 5 percent of its original size by the early 20th century. "Ethnic cleansing" nonpareil.

In "The Elusive American Century" (Harper's, February 2012), Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich reminds us that it was Henry Luce, the creator of the publishing empire that included Fortune, that came up with the term "the American century." He did so in early 1941. What a "century" it has been so far, in large-scale, willful slaughters!

Walt's third point of refutation: "America's success is due to its special genius." Not really, he points out: America's success in becoming the envy of the world has to do not with its "uniquely American virtues" so much as with sheer luck that the new nation came with a vast land "lavishly endowed with natural resources and traversed by navigable rivers."

Walt's two other points for rebuttal — that the U.S. is "responsible for most of the good of the world" and that "God is on our side" — may be skipped, except for Otto von Bismarck's quip (which he quotes) that "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States."

God, as a matter of fact, is what Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in calling for a new American Century, invoked last fall when he spelled out his foreign policy were he to become president, as Bacevich ruefully noted in "America: With God on our side" (L.A. Times, Oct. 16, 2011).

"God did not create this country to be a nation of followers," Romney told the Citadel cadets. "America must lead the world." Without the "clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place," he declaimed.

You expect something like that from a presidential candidate. But then, from a different quarter, came a full-throated case for American exceptionalism. In "Terror on Trial" (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 7-8, 2012), British writer William Shawcross said the opposite of what you might first expect from the title of his article.

What first caught my eye was the discordant assemblage of photos that topped Shawcross' article: shots of Guantanamo detainees in the infamous scarlet prison garb huddling in a wire-fenced gravelly garden, with masks and gloves; the Nuremberg trial; Khalid Sheik Mohammed (apparently after torture?); three Pakistani women holding up a sign saying "Burning Pakistan / Bush Gifted / Obama Granted"; the drone MQ-9 Reaper; and Bush and Obama together.

And what did Shawcross say? His concluding paragraph sums it up: "Since the beginning of the 20th century, America's commitment and sacrifices have been essential to the world's ability to resist the forces of nihilistic aggression. That was certainly true in the war against fascism, and it is still true today."

So, the photos were to buttress that argument. The Guantanamo prison, torture and the use of drones to murder people with impunity are all right to fight today's terrorism. Shawcross cites Nuremberg not just because his father, Hartley, was Britain's chief prosecutor at the trial, but because Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the chief U.S. prosecutor.

Shawcross neglects to mention that Jackson enunciated lofty ideals and principles that his country has trampled on. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Shawcross that willful misconduct of the U.S. in subsequent decades provoked "the forces of nihilistic aggression." American exceptionalism of this brand comes with blowback, as the CIA uses the term.

Hiroaki Sato is a translator and essayist in New York.

Anonymous And The War Over The Internet

2012-02-02T21:00:00.000-05:00

Posted by Guest Blogger "Sayf Maslul"

By Saki Knafo
Posted: 1/30/12 12:20 PM ET
Updated: 1/30/12 02:35 PM ET
Courtesy of "The Huffington Post"

This article is the first in a two-part series tracing the development of the amorphous online community known as Anonymous, pranksters who have become a force in global affairs.

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice website vanished from the Internet. Anyone attempting to visit it to report a crime or submit a complaint received a message saying the site was unable to load. More websites disappeared in rapid succession. The Recording Industry Association of America. The Motion Picture Association of America. Universal Music. Warner Brothers. The FBI.

By nightfall, most of the sites had come back online, but the people responsible for the outages had made their point. They'd landed what they hailed as the biggest blow yet in an escalating war for control of the Internet, and in one of their online command centers, "Phoenix" and his associates were celebrating.

Phoenix, a college student, is a member of Anonymous, the loose coalition of hackers, pranksters and other creatures of the Internet who have made headlines over the last 13 months for attacks on the computer systems of a wide range of targets: MasterCard, Visa and PayPal; the San Francisco public transit system; a Texas think tank; Sony; a host of computer-security companies; authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt.

(Click here to view an infographic charting the evolution of 'Anonymous'.)

Phoenix wouldn't call himself a "member," of course. Much like Occupy Wall Street, a movement with which it has many ties, Anonymous technically has no official membership, hierarchy or specific agenda. Some "anons" do wield more influence than others and the resulting resentments have led to bitter internecine feuds, but its overall lack of an official power structure is essential to its identity and perhaps its survival. As Anonymous put it in a taunting statement to NATO, another recent object of its unfriendly attentions, "You can't cut off the head of a headless snake."

The snake seems to have a certain sense of direction, however, as the Jan. 19 attacks suggested. The inciting incident took place earlier that day in the hills outside Auckland, New Zealand, when local police landed two helicopters on the lawn of a man who calls himself Kim Dotcom and owns Megaupload, a hugely popular online service that enables people to share and store movies and other media for free.

Authorities shut down the site and arrested Dotcom and six colleagues, accusing them in a 72-page indictment of engaging in acts of "massive worldwide online piracy" that inflicted $500 million in damages on copyright holders while bringing in more than $175 million in profits.

The news spread quickly. A message went out on Anonymous Twitter accounts exhorting people to attack the Justice Department and several piracy-fighting trade groups. By clicking on a link, they could launch a page that asked them to identify a target. Thousands typed in the address of the Justice Department site and clicked enter, bombarding it with a fusillade of meaningless commands. Overwhelmed, the site froze and dropped offline.

In the chat network where Anonymous coordinated the attacks, the virtual warriors declared victory with a military phrase: "TANGO DOWN."

Part war, part game. Given the culture of the Internet, it's reasonable to assume that many of those who responded to Anonymous' call were teenagers. The software used to fire these Internet missiles was the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a name lifted from the video game "Command & Conquer." Yet the consequences of firing it were real -- a major law enforcement agency's web site was temporarily crippled, leaving the agency to observe that there had been a "degradation in service."

Last year, 14 anons were arrested in the United States for using the Ion Cannon to attack PayPal. Some now face the possibility of 15-year prison sentences.

Phoenix wasn't around when the Jan. 19 attack went down, but later that night, I found him in an Anonymous chat room and asked him to explain the motivations behind it.

"You've heard Anons say before that this is a war," he said. "A full scale information war. That's not mere propaganda, many regard that as a perfectly accurate description. And the stake at play is, simply, 'Who will control access to information? Everyone or a small subset?'"

In case it wasn't clear, he then labeled that subset: "The government."

THE WAR

This struggle for control of the Internet goes back years, but it reached a crescendo just the day before the attack on the Justice Department, when Wikipedia went dark in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the controversial anti-piracy bills that were working their way through Congress. Google collected 4.5 million signatures on a petition against the bills. Mozilla redirected traffic from its sites. And thousands of other protesters, from Tumblr and WordPress to Some Guy with a Blog, blacked out their sites, took to the streets and posted messages opposing the legislation, saying it would hurt their business and amounted to censorship.

Across the battle lines stood film studios, music labels, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses intent on defending their copyrighted property from illegal sharing at a time when the Internet has made it possible for, say, a digital copy of "V For Vendetta" -- an anon fave and the source of their iconic grinning Guy Fawkes masks -- to travel from an iPad in the United States to a piracy site in Brazil to another viewer's laptop in Korea.

These companies have faced a tricky problem: How do you sue a piracy site when it’s based in another country, especially one with looser intellectual-property laws? The bills' answer: You don't. You go after their enablers -- websites that drive traffic to the piracy sites by posting links to them, even if they only do so inadvertently. Critics argued that the cost of getting rid of these links would drive smaller sites out of business.

Two days after the protests, in the face of public outrage and lobbying efforts from the tech sector, Congress shelved SOPA indefinitely. But that doesn't mean the war is over. As one Anonymous tweet warned about SOPA: "It can be brought back anytime. The bill must be KILLED."

Like the web companies involved in the protests, anons tend to argue that anti-piracy legislation could send the Internet down an ever-tightening spiral of government control. Many anons go further, portraying such bills as deliberate assaults on the right to free speech. They say they oppose anti-piracy efforts on idealistic grounds, not that they don't enjoy a bit of pirated entertainment from time to time. In general, obeying the law isn't their priority. "The Internet is the Wild West," Phoenix said on the night of the attacks, "and Anonymous will fight against any attempt to tame it."

That conversation with Phoenix was not my first. All of our communications took place online, mostly in the networks of chat rooms where anons plan their attacks, and I had come to think of him a messenger from the Internet underworld: He had one foot in the world of "hax0rs" -- hacker-speak for hackers -- and one in the world of capital letters and correct spelling.

He was like a hacker Hermes, moving freely between the realms of the living and the dead, except that in this case the realm of the dead was a dominion of cyberspace in which the dead possessed an unusual degree of expertise in massively multiplayer online video games and porn.

Altogether, I spoke with more than 30 anons, and in some respects, their attitudes couldn't have been more different, but one thing seemed to hold them together. They saw the Internet as their homeland, their home. Among them were Phoenix, Xyzzy and Gregg Housh. Together, their stories roughly trace the rise of Anonymous and the battles leading up to what Phoenix calls the war.

THE ORIGINS: XYZZY

Xyzzy said he was in his early twenties, lived in the Boston area, and described himself as an out-of-work computer guy. He had been around Anonymous since its beginning about a decade ago, and as far as I could tell he spent all his time online. There was a two-week stretch in which I instant-messaged with him for hours every night, and I assumed he was going out of his way to talk to me until he told me he was simultaneously IMing with three other people and participating in a seven-person video chat on Skype.

Some anons talked about the Internet as their homeland. For Xyzzy, the Internet had literally given him a home. In 2008, he said, the Secret Service pulled him out of a classroom at school after he played a little joke on the government by spamming a .gov website with "KILL OBAMA" rants. ("Not a good idea," he reflected.) His parents kicked him out of the house, and some friends in Anonymous took him in. He considered one of them his "Internet mom" and said he thought of her as "kinda better" than his real mom.

He said he was about 12 or 13 when he discovered the Internet, and couldn’t really remember what life was like before that. "I wasn't anything," he wrote. "I was just a nerd who never really spoke up."

The Internet gave him balls. And a mouth. In the chat rooms where he hung out he learned how to mock people and later found he could use this skill "irl", where he went from "never talking in school to making fun of everyone who picked on me for being nerdy."

He also learned how to "socially engineer" people -- manipulate them. Often, he said, that meant calling an email provider and tricking the friendly lady who answered the phone into handing over a password to someone's account, enabling him to break in, steal the person's credit-card number and sell it.

And he learned how to "troll." At the time, if you didn't troll you weren't really an anon. Trolling is the art of deliberately irritating people until they flip out or otherwise react in a way that generates laughs, or "lulz." It is the bedrock of Anonymous culture, and in the early 2000s there were dozens of "trolling gangs" roaming the back alleys of the Internet.

Xyzzy wanted me to understand that they pretty much established the Anonymous mindset. He stressed that when Anonymous started, it was made up "jerks," and he meant this as a compliment. And he was especially insistent that I appreciate the historical significance of one group of jerks in particular, the Penis Pumpers For Lyfe.

The Penis Pumpers were "Anonymous before Anonymous was Anonymous," Xyzzy said. They were a band of tricksters who hung out in IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, a sort of underground city of the web that continues to dominate the Anonymous landscape.

If IRC is a city, then its "networks" are the buildings. Each network is comprised of chat rooms, or channels. The Pumpers had their own channels and would join, say, the NHL room and "bitch about hockey, something they had no clue about, just to piss people off." They'd take over other people's channels, ban the real owners, impersonate them and use the stolen personas to troll. "Whatever worked to mess with the intended target," said Xyzzy.

Sometimes the jokes went to harsh extremes, and that hasn't changed. In 2010, an 11-year-old girl nicknamed Jessi Slaughter issued a YouTube threat against "haters" who had started an Internet rumor about her. She said she'd "pop a Glock in your mouth and make a brain slushy." As a Gawker account put it, "Ha ha."

Unfortunately, as Gawker went on to note, the response went beyond "ha ha." People found her real name, address and phone number. They passed the information around. A bomb squad showed up to her school after a suspicious package arrived in the mail. Encyclopaedia Dramatica, a website that chronicles the lore and pranks of the Internet in the fuck-you-it's-funny style of the Internet itself, published an item on how to troll her. "Tell her dad that we are going to beat her up." "Tell her to kill herself."

Jessi responded with another video. In this one, she was seen crying and whimpering while her father crouched in the background, screaming at the camera and shaking his fist. His awkward threats would become memes. A year later, he was arrested for punching Jessi in the mouth, and six months after that, she posted a video saying she'd been institutionalized and was living in foster care. Last summer, her mother wrote on Facebook that the father had died of a massive heart attack. Someone posted a screenshot of the message on FunnyJunk.com.

Obviously there isn’t anything political about relentlessly picking on an 11-year-old, but Anonymous has used many of the same schoolyard tactics to pick on much more powerful adversaries. At its most basic level, trolling is about humiliating people who seem to take themselves too seriously or pretend to be something they're not: 11-year-old girls, corporate executives, whoever. The troll jabs at them until they jab back, exposing their vulnerabilities, then jabs at those weak spots until they do something rash and truly embarrass themselves.

Xyzzy told me he and another anon once trolled someone at an antiwar rally in Boston. In an indication of how much Anonymous has evolved since then, he said they attended the rally not to join the protest but to screw with the protesters. Xyzzy told his friend he bet he could "troll out" the first guy he saw who was obviously there just to pick up girls.

"So we got near the guy and the guy makes the first move," wrote Xyzzy. "He rants at us about peace and I tell him, 'Look, dude, I don't give a fuck.' He jumps on me about how I'm the problem with the world today."

"And I just turn it on him," Xyzzy continued. "How HE is the problem with the world today cause he can't leave people alone and needs to stick his retarded nose in other people's business. He clearly is upset so I keep at it saying how he doesn't know the first thing about what it means to stand up for what you believe in. And he responds with how he'll show me how he stands up for what he believes in."

At this point in the story, Xyzzy paused to note that while he is under 6 feet tall and "a fat kid," his target stood about 6-foot-4 and looked like he worked out. Xyzzy was not to be intimidated, however. On the Internet, he had learned he could use his wit to humiliate pretty much anyone. Years after the protest, the typical Anonymous trolling target would be the government-corporate matrix, not just some bro at a peace rally. Whatever. Xyzzy isn't picky. He's happy as long as he's having a laugh. By the time he'd finished with the bro at the peace rally, the bro was in police custody.

THE GODFATHER

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of anons: those who want to change the world and those who are in it only for the lulz. Xyzzy moved closer to the first group over time, but he remains a lulz man at heart. One of his friends, however, appeared to have transformed himself completely, leaving behind a trail of self-serving crimes. He was part of a group of anons whose elevated stature in the community had earned them the derisive label "leaderfags," and when Xyzzy met them they convened in their own private channel, from which they exerted a certain amount of influence over the rest of Anonymous. Exactly how much influence is debatable, but Xyzzy, for one, called them the "Illuminati of the Internet" and described his friend, with perhaps just a touch of hyperbole, as "the Godfather."

The "Godfather" is a 35-year-old computer engineer who lives in a blue-collar suburb of Boston. In November, I visited his home, a wood-frame house up the street from a convenience store and a laundromat. Parked in the driveway was a black Scion emblazoned with the words "Geek Choice" and a phone number: 1-800-GEEK-HELP. A small box of business cards was mounted to the side. I took one. "Computer problems?" it said. "We come to you."

A shy, pretty woman, the Godfather's girlfriend, led me to an upstairs bedroom where the Godfather was seated at an incredible array of computer monitors. He had a thin build, a bemused expression and a loud, direct voice. He said he needed food, so we hopped aboard the Geekmobile. I rested my feet on a pile of empty Pepsi bottles.

At a nearby restaurant, the Godfather ordered a chicken sandwich and told me that a would-be whistleblower had recently come to him with information that could potentially destroy the reputation of a certain international media mogul. He said he needed to figure out how to protect the whistleblower before pulling the trigger. "Before I'm dead," he said, "I want his empire to be in ruins."

The Godfather's name is Gregg Housh, and his sense of himself as someone capable of molding the world to his vision dates at least to 2008, when he played a key role in helping Anonymous organize a series of protests against the Church of Scientology. Following his involvement in these demonstrations, Scientologists uncovered his identity and took him to court, which had the unintended effect of putting him in a good position to talk to the press.

Housh, an excellent talker, became a de facto Anonymous spokesman. Confident and articulate, with a little gray in his hair, he started giving interviews to The New York Times, CNN and other outlets. (For his part, Housh rejects the label of spokesman, taking pains to stress that no one person can speak for Anonymous as a whole.)

As a protest organizer, he also made connections in the Boston Police Department, which came in handy earlier this year when demonstrators set up tents on a plot of green across the street from the city's Federal Reserve building. In the early weeks of the Occupy movement, Anonymous essentially served as a publicity arm, using its Internet fame to spread the word at a time when few traditional media outlets were paying attention. Housh worked his media connections, established a cellphone-to-cellphone rapport with the Boston police superintendent and cultivated relationships with political operatives. At one point he arranged for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to visit the camp, then led the governor on a guided tour. I watched him give a similar tour to the state treasurer and engage in some friendly ribbing with a city councilman, and it occurred to me that he'd make a pretty good politician himself.

Housh has not always been interested in politics. Far from it, he said he used to care only about "amassing as much stuff as I possibly could." When he was growing up in Dallas, his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother alone to care for him and his sister, who has cerebral palsy. Housh quickly came to appreciate the value of money. He also started thinking about ways to make it that didn't involve sweating over a fryer at McDonald’s.

At around age 10, he discovered a glitch in a video game at an arcade near his house: When he pressed a button at the right moment, the machine would spit out a token. He did this a few times, ambled over to the token machine and unloaded his spoils at a discount. Before long he had three friends working for him in two cities. He later realized this technically qualified as racketeering.

Cunning and rebellious, he might have ended up writing bad checks or ripping off insurance companies for a living, but when he was 14 his mother gave him his first computer. Within a half-hour, he says, "every part that could be separated or unplugged was sitting on the living room floor." By 16, he had dropped out of school and joined a software piracy gang. He drew on the combined skill set of the hacker and the con man, employing the techniques of "social engineering" to get people to fork over stolen software and access to Internet servers.

In 2001, the FBI caught up with him and he served three months in a federal prison. When he was released, he had a hard time finding himself. He was afraid to reenter the criminal underworld and unimpressed with what passed for fun outside of it. And then he found 4chan.

Founded in 2003 by a 15-year-old named Christopher Poole, 4chan was initially a collection of forums where people could discuss anime and Japanese comics. By the time Housh arrived in 2007, the website, particularly a section called "random," had devolved into a reeking cesspool of gore, porn and insanity. In attempts to capture its unique charms, reporters have likened it to a stall in a boy's bathroom, a locker crammed with fireworks and Hustlers and maybe a copy of "Mein Kampf," even the id.

There was only one rule -- no child porn. Reports suggest it was lightly enforced. A quick perusal of the first page of "random" on the evening of Dec. 19, 2011, yielded a picture of a woman's crotch, a picture of a woman's ass, a request for pictures of the feet of "pre-teen models/non-models," a poster recruiting people to flood a rival website with "filth and porn," two rape jokes, several racial slurs, a picture of someone vomiting and a picture of Kim Jong Il accompanied by the comment, "Good night, sweet prince."

Conversations with 4chan regulars made it clear that this was a quiet evening.

During the past five years, some of the lighter culture of 4chan has seeped into the mainstream: The pictures of cats with misspelled captions (lolcats), those links that trick you into playing that obnoxious music video (rickrolling). These are "memes" and they generate "lulz." In Housh’s day, the lulz abounded. If you wanted "epic lulz," you could hack into someone's emails and use the stolen information to troll. Or you could "d0x" someone (publish documentation of his identity). Or "DDoS" someone's website (flood it with traffic and knock it offline). Or "swat" someone (get an unsuspecting victim to turn on his webcam, then call the police and "lol" as a SWAT team kicks down the door).

All of these activities were "raids," and though people usually planned them in the IRC networks, they assembled their raiding parties on 4chan. One thing made them possible: the site allowed you to post stuff anonymously. People began calling themselves "Anonymous," which became a meme of its own. You began hearing phrases like "Expect us" and "We Are Legion," which have become enshrined in the culture's lexicon.

Housh's first adventure as an anon turned out to be a high watermark in 4chan history: a giant raid on the online multiplayer game "Habbo Hotel." At a predetermined hour on July 12, 2007, he and hundreds of other anons logged into the game and selected the same avatar from the character menu: a black guy with an Afro. Then they crowded around the virtual swimming pool, effectively blocking the other players from using it, while proclaiming that the pool had been closed "due to AIDS." Other anons gathered on the patio and arranged themselves into the shape of a swastika. This was called a "swastiget," Housh explained to me matter-of-factly. "You get a swastika on a website or a piece of software that people have to see."

Even in those days, one could have conceivably justified many of the 4chan pranks on moral grounds, and when he recounted the "Habbo" tale, Housh attempted to do so, sort of. He said that by creating a character that arguably looked like a racist white guy's idea of a black guy, the "Habbo" design team had done something "kind of racist, so we decided to go be racist to them." There was also a news story making the rounds about a hotel in Alabama that had banned someone with AIDS from the pool.

Or something. Mostly, the raid was just fun to do, Housh admitted. Anonymous was still all about the lulz.

Later that year, Anonymous brought down the website of a white-supremacist radio host and used the technique of "pedobaiting" to root out a child molester in Canada. Some anons were beginning to see themselves as a force for justice. The real transformation, though, happened in February 2008, with the birth of a movement that blended the ironic sensibility of the Internet with the earnestness of an antiwar rally. In homage to its 4chan origins, it was dubbed "Chanology."

"THE INTERNET IS HERE"

In "The Prince," Machiavelli warns the reader that "a violator of the property and women of his subjects" will be "hated above all things." In 16th-century Florence, an example of such property might have been a plot of farmland or an ox. In the Chanology War of 2008, the property in question was a video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology and "showing himself to be the insane person he is," said Housh.

Somehow the video had made its way from Scientology's offices to the Internet, where it had generated untold quantities of lulz. So when Scientology's lawyers pressured YouTube into taking it down, anons went into a frenzy. They found it laughable and outrageous that a religion founded by someone who claimed to believe in a galactic dictator called Xenu could exercise so much control over a source of information as important as the Internet.

During the next week, Housh and a few cohorts made two videos of their own. One declared war on Scientology. The other specified what that war would entail: protesting in front of Scientology centers around the world.

Housh says he thought maybe a few people would show up and act like jerks. "I thought it would be good for a couple weeks of trolling," he said. It turned out he had seriously underestimated people's love of the Internet or their contempt for Scientology or both.

On Feb. 10, 2008, thousands gathered outside Scientology centers in 142 cities around the world. They wore Guy Fawkes masks and blasted "Luma Luma" on boom boxes. They shouted Internet insults. They held up signs saying "OH FUCK: The Internet Is Here." More protests followed, and over time what started out as a prank turned into something more serious.

The movement attracted fervent Scientology critics, including a number of defectors. As Housh and other anons got to know those people, they gained more insight into the organization and refined their talking points to target what they saw as its weak spots. Tory Christman, a prominent ex-Scientologist, told me Anonymous helped alter the balance of power between the church and its critics. "Before Anonymous, there were literally about four or five of us who would talk to the interviewers," she said. "Now, there's tons."

A new idea took hold: As one anon told me, Chanology gave people the impression that "a thousand malcontent nerds can change the world by going out and yelling something."

For Housh, the turning point came when he heard that two anons had "kidnapped" a young woman from a Scientology center in Florida. She had approached them at a protest and handed them a business card with a desperate message scrawled on it: "Want out."

When I asked Xyzzy about Chanology, he said he initially snickered at the idea: "From what I gathered from the Internet it was just a hug box and people wanting to be important." In fact, many anons downright hated it. They mocked the protesters as "moralfags," and it wasn't the "fag" part that was meant to be derogatory. In Anonymous lingo, "fag" is basically the equivalent of "dude."

A conflict was brewing -- moralfags vs. lulzfags -- and over lunch one day in Boston I asked Housh which side had prevailed.

He interrupted his attack on an overdone steak and flashed a grin that suggested he hadn't entirely lost touch with his con-man side.

"It's a little of both," he said.

In part two, coming Tuesday, Anonymous expands its war on censorship, taking on the government.

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September 17, 2011 was the first day of protests in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, birthplace of the Occupy movement. But there was another protest in NY that day as well.

We Can Now See The True Cost Of Globalisation

2012-02-02T17:00:00.015-05:00

The Worldwide Public Realises There Is Something Deeply Wrong With Today's World Economic System

Posted by "CavalierZee"
Saturday 28 January 2012
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

When Karl Marx called for the workers of the world to unite, it seems unlikely he had in mind an iPhone boycott. But suggestions for just such a campaign in the US have thrown the spotlight on possible abuses at firms producing goods for hi-tech giant Apple, urging the public to think again about what happens at the other end of the production pipeline that leads to its swish, minimalist stores. Stung by the criticisms, Apple boss Tim Cook told his staff last week: "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain," and the company is now inspecting scores of factories, providing the latest evidence that the public is no longer willing to ignore the dark underbelly of world capitalism.

Before the Great Crash, critics of globalisation were isolated on the loony fringe: tear-gassed in Seattle and whacked with truncheons in Prague, as the west's leaders gathered to congratulate themselves on reaping the benefits of unfettered world trade.

When the Asian financial crises of the 1990s toppled governments and forced one desperate country after another into mass impoverishment and emergency bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, the west's leaders – even many on the left – explained it away as a result of shoddy governance or poor economic management, instead of a devastating side-effect of globalisation.

And even after the financial shock waves rippled out from the American housing market in 2007 and caused catastrophic collateral damage in countries across the globe, and the deepest world recession since the 1930s, many felt that a few tweaks to bank capital rules, and sharper teeth for financial regulators, would fix the system.

Yet two things have derailed world leaders' attempts to get back to business as usual. The first is that in many countries, more than four years on from the start of the credit crisis, millions of people still wait for economic recovery to take hold. Growth is sickly or non-existent; unemployment is rising; the only people who seem to escape are a tiny, super-rich elite.

And the second reason it is still not business as usual is that there has been a growing chorus of discontent from far beyond the corridors of power. From the Indignados in Spain, who have espoused the cause of the 50% of young Spaniards now out of a job, to the Occupy movements that have sprung up in New York, London and scores of other cities around the world, to the villagers in Guangdong, China, protesting against government land-grabs, many thousands of discontented citizens are making their anger felt about the way the system has failed them.

The demands of these inchoate groups may not be fully formed; but they have noisily identified the fact that there is something deeply wrong with today's world economic system, which puts unfathomable riches in the hands of an unaccountable elite, while millions are trapped in unemployment and poverty.

The focus on youth unemployment and inequality at the annual talkfest in Davos last week was a clear indication that the power-brokers in the global economy are finally realising that something has gone badly awry.

The truth is that the neo-liberal consensus, with its promise of economic "freedom", has failed to deliver. The opening-up of China and India over the past 20 years has lifted millions of people out of poverty. But inequality here and in other developing countries remains shameful, and shouldn't be left unchallenged.

At the same time, average workers in most of the major rich economies, including the UK, have seen the real value of their wages shrivel away, as they have found themselves in competition not just with their neighbours, but with workers many thousands of miles away.

Yet if the system fails the average worker in the west, it fails even in its own terms, because it undermines consumer demand, and chokes off economic growth. The rich elite who have been the big winners over the last 50 years may be big-spenders, but they still park much of their wealth in Switzerland.

A growing body of research suggests that yawning inequality isn't just a moral and political question – it's an economic one. The credit bubble of the past two decades helped consumers in the US and Europe to prop up their quality of life in the face of the relentless decline in real wages; but that conjuring trick only works for a while, and the resulting legacy of debt will now take many years to work off.

So as the plight of workers in faraway places reveals the true cost of cut-price consumer gadgets, it's also clear that workers everywhere have been losing out. It would be wrong to think that the answer is to retreat inwards, and return – even if we could – to a closed-border economy. But it must no longer be a taboo to question whether raw globalisation brings the benefits that were promised.

Domestically, a host of tax and benefit changes could help redress the balance for those who have lost out in the race towards an outsourced, privatised, winner-takes-all world economy. The OECD suggested heavier taxes on properties, pension contributions and mortgage interest payments for the rich as ways of reducing inequality while boosting growth by persuading the rich to invest their money wisely instead of parking it in Park Lane penthouses, for example. Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor and unlikely radical, has suggested that forcing rich investors like him to pay the same tax rate as his secretary might also help.

On an international scale, it should no longer be taboo to propose limits to foreign takeovers, or to the nonstop, unquestioned flow of capital around the world.

We should welcome the fact that China's workers themselves are becoming increasingly restive about their plight. Higher wages and better conditions for them might push up the price of an iPod in London or New York, but they would also help the Chinese economy towards Beijing's aim of a rising middle class and stronger consumer demand at home, instead of economic growth that depends too heavily on cheap exports.

Strong, sustainable Chinese growth, and rising labour standards, would be good for the west too: they should help to narrow Beijing's yawning trade surplus by opening up vast new markets. Apple's critics would once have been written off as naive idealists; but as we sift through the wreckage of the Great Recession, perhaps it's finally time to heed Marx's words, and stand up for workers everywhere.

Confessions Of A Recovering Weapons Addict

2012-02-02T12:00:00.008-05:00

By William J. Astore and Tom Engelhardt,
January 25, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

The 21st century hasn’t exactly been America’s greatest moment. Still, there remain winners, along with all the losers you might care to mention. If, in fact, you were to sum up the first decade-plus of the next “American Century” in manufacturing terms, you might say that — Steve Jobs aside — this country has mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night. Start with Hollywood. Its action and superhero films — the very definition of what goes boom in the night — continue to capture eyeballs and dominate global markets in ways that should impress and that have left national movie industries elsewhere in the proverbial dust. And then, of course, there’s that other group of winners, the arms-makers of the military-industrial-homeland-security complex. They’ve had the time of their lives these last boom years (so to speak), with national security budgets soaring annually beyond all imagination.

Even now, in the toughest of tough times and despite the headlines about gigantic Defense Department spending cuts, President Obama recently reassured arms-makers (and the rest of us) that the Pentagon budget would, in his words, “still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.” In response, his Republican opponents lambasted him as weak on defense for promising so little. Which tells you just who the winners of the last decade were and who the winners of the next one are likely to be.

Of course, in any situation there are always winners and losers, but it is striking that our losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven a gold mine for a small set of crony corporations and weapon-makers, producing a group of real winners at home with names like Lockheed Martin, KBR, and General Dynamics.

TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore points, for instance, to the end results of our debacle in Iraq: the new Iraqi government is planning to purchase $11 billion in American weapons (and training), including F-16 fighter jets. A little history of American dreams for the Iraqi Air Force might be in order. When the Bush administration launched its invasion in 2003, it imagined an American-garrisoned Iraq for decades to come and a reconstituted Iraqi military “lite,” a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed troops “without an air force,” who would patrol the borders of their part of an American-dominated Middle East. In those halcyon days, there were no plans to recreate an Iraqi Air Force (though Saddam Hussein’s had once been one of the biggest in the world). Or rather, U.S. planners saw no need to do so because the “Iraqi Air Force” already existed and was settling into Balad Air Base north of Baghdad. It was, of course, the U.S. Air Force.

Consider it now a sign of defeat that almost the last military link between Iraq and the U.S. military will be the delivery of those new weapons and the years of training and support that will go with them. We didn’t win in Iraq, but someone here did! Let Astore tell you all about it. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

Weapons ‘R’ Us

Making Warbirds Instead Of Thunderbirds

By William J. Astore

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.

If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider, or Britain’s Vickers.

Not that America didn’t have its own arms merchants. As the authors of Merchants of Death noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.” Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.” Even in those desperate Depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.

We are uneasy no more. Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number-one arms-exporting nation. A few statistics bear this out. From 2006 to 2010, the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race. Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53% of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales. Who says America isn’t number one anymore?

For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports. It reveals that, in 2010, the U.S. exported “major conventional weapons” to 62 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms ranging from F-15, F-16, and F-18 combat jets to M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes: AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs — a veritable alphabet soup of missile acronyms. Never mind their specific meaning: they’re all designed to blow things up; they’re all designed to kill.

Rarely debated in Congress or in U.S. media outlets is the wisdom or morality of these arms deals. During the quiet last days of December 2011, in separate announcements whose timing could not have been accidental, the Obama administration expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger, $60 billion arms package for the Saudis. Few in Congress oppose such arms deals since defense contractors provide jobs in their districts — and ready donations to congressional campaigns.

Let’s pause to consider what such a weapons deal implies for Iraq. Firstly, Iraq only “needs” advanced tanks and fighter jets because we destroyed their previous generation of the same, whether in 1991 during Desert Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Secondly, Iraq “needs” such powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation that followed. Thirdly, despite its “needs,” the Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without sustained training and logistical support provided by the U.S. military.

As one U.S. Air Force officer who served as an adviser to the fledgling Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:

Will the IqAF be able to refuel its own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer adequate force protection and security for its bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management services at its bases as they return to Iraqi control after eight years under US direction? Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able to develop and retain its airmen?… Only time will tell if we left [Iraq] too early; nevertheless, even without a renewed security agreement, the USAF can continue to stand alongside the IqAF.

Put bluntly: We doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly American-built F-16s, but we’re going to sell them to them anyway. And if past history is a guide, if the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us, we’ll blow them up or shoot them down — and then (hopefully) sell them some more.

Our Best Arms Customer

Let’s face it: the weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to the weapons we sell to ourselves. In the market for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer. Americans have a love affair with them, the more high-tech and expensive, the better. I should know. After all, I’m a recovering weapons addict.

Well into my teen years, I was fascinated by military hardware. I built models of what were then the latest U.S. warplanes: the A-10, the F-4, the F-14, -15, and -16, the B-1, and many others. I read Aviation Week and Space Technology at my local library to keep track of the newest developments in military technology. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in mechanical engineering in college and entered the Air Force as a developmental engineer.

Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books like James Fallows’s National Defense (1981), among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful Augustine’s Laws (1986) by Norman Augustine, later the CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. That and my own experience in the Air Force alerted me to the billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but questionable utility.

Perhaps the best example of the persistence of this phenomenon is the F-35 Lightning II. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor. But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches, and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the U.S. military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.) By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost U.S. taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run. Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.

The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.” But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.”

But let’s reason the need in purely military terms. These days, the Air Force is turning increasingly to unmanned drones. Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and serviceable “platforms” remain for attack and close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s in the Air Force and Navy to Apache helicopters in the Army. And while many of our existing combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe integrity, there’s nothing stopping the U.S. military from producing updated versions of the same. Heck, this is precisely what we’re hawking to the Saudis — updated versions of the F-15, developed in the 1970s.

Because of sheer cost, it’s likely we’ll buy fewer F-35s than our military wants but many more than we actually need. We’ll do so because Weapons ‘R’ Us. Because building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the few high-tech industries we haven’t exported (due to national security and secrecy concerns), and thus one of the few industries in the U.S. that still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with decent employee benefits. And who can argue with that?

The Ultimate Cost of Our Merchandise of Death

Clearly, the U.S. has grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade. When it comes to investing in militaries and weaponry, no country can match us. We are supreme. And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it will,according to President Obama, continue to grow, which means that in weapons terms the future remains bright. After all, Pentagon spending on research and development stands at $81.4 billion, accounting for an astonishing 55% of all federal spending on R&D and leaving plenty of opportunity to develop our next generation of wonder weapons.

But at what cost to ourselves and the rest of the world? We’ve become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet’s hotspots. And those weapons deliveries (and the training and support missions that go with them) tend to make those spots hotter still — as in hot lead.

As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.

Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Bob Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds. But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: what’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.

How far we’ve come since the 1950s!

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here. He welcomes reader comments atwjastore@gmail.com.

Blood On Whose Hands?

2012-02-02T07:00:00.015-05:00

By Chase Madar and Tom Engelhardt,
January 20, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called it “utterly deplorable.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was “deeply disturbed” that the actions in question would “erode the reputation of our joint force.” Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos declared them to be “wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history,” and Senator John McCain claimed they made him “so sad.”

Seldom have so many high officials in Washington lined up to denounce an event so quickly or emphatically. I’m talking, of course, about the video of four wisecracking U.S. Marines in Afghanistan pissing on what might be three dead Taliban or simply — since we may never know whose bodies those are — the corpses of three dead Afghans. (“Have a good day, buddy… Golden — like a shower, ” you hear them say, seemingly addressing the bodies.) The video went viral in the Muslim world, and the Obama administration moved fast to contain the damage. After all, no one wanted another Abu Ghraib.

On this subject Washington has been remarkably united (with the exception of Rick Perry, who offered a half-hearted defense of the Marines — “to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top”). Pardon me, though, if I find this chorus of condemnation to be too little, too late. It feels like a malign version of one of Casablanca’s famous final lines: “Round up the usual suspects.”

After all, these last years in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan have been utterly deplorable, totally dismaying, and deeply disturbing from start to finish. On occasion after occasion,U.S. troops, aka “America’s heroes,” as well as private contractors and others in Washington’s employ have run riot. There is no way to catalogue what’s been deplorable, dismaying, and deeply disturbing, but if you wanted to start, it really wouldn’t be that hard.

In fact, you wouldn’t have to go farther than this website. If, for instance, it was deeply disturbing pictures taken by our troops you were curious about, you could have read David Swanson’s 2006 piece "The Iraq War as a Trophy Photo," which focused on the“war porn” photos U.S. soldiers were already taking (or even setting up) and then proudly submitting to an actual porn website for posting (something, by the way, that’s still going on).

Or if checkpoint killings by U.S. soldiers in Iraq were what you were interested in, all you had to do was read Chris Hedges at TomDispatch in 2008, based on interviews he did with American soldiers for the book Collateral Damage: “Iraqi families,” he wrote, “were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son.” ("’It’s fun to shoot sh-t up,’ a soldier said.") And if his word wasn’t enough, you could turn to U.S. Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal who, in a moment of bluntness in April 2010, commented: “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”

Or consider something no one has yet denounced as deplorable, dismaying, or deeply disturbing: the obliteration of wedding parties. Over the years, TomDispatch has counted up at least six weddings in Iraq and Afghanistan that were wiped out in part or full by the U.S. Air Force. All of these, including the first in December 2001 in which a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, armed with precision weapons, killed 110 of 112 Afghan revelers, were reported individually. But next to no one in our world thought them dismaying or disturbing enough to write about them collectively or, for that matter, to deplore them. (Of a wedding in Western Iraq in which U.S. planes killed 40 people, including wedding musicians and children, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?")

The troves of documents leaked to the website WikiLeaks, for which Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been charged, certainly caused a stir, but the carnage in them was, in truth, easily available without access to a single secret document. Washington’s crocodile tears can’t wash away the stain of all this on American honor, as TomDispatch regular Chase Madar, author of the upcoming book The Passion of Bradley Manning, makes all too clear. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Madar discusses the coming trial of Bradley Manning, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

Bradley Manning, Washington, and The Blood Of Civilians

By Chase Madar
Who in their right mind wants to talk about, think about, or read a short essay about… civilian war casualties? What a bummer, this topic, especially since our Afghan, Iraq, and other ongoing wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy: wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, etc.
A couple hundred thousand dead civilians have a way of making such noble ideals seem like dollar-store tinsel. And so, throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on (and “dwelling on” = fleetingly mentioned) civilian casualties. Washington elites may squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our numerous wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà.
Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties — but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.

Pfc. Manning, you will remember, is the young soldier who is soon to be court-martialed for passing some 750,000 military and diplomatic documents, a large chunk of them classified, to the website WikiLeaks. Among those leaks, there was indeed some serious stuff about how Americans dealt with civilians in invaded countries. For instance, the documents revealed that the U.S. military, then the occupying force in Iraq, did little or nothing to prevent Iraqi authorities from torturing prisoners in a variety of gruesome ways, sometimes to death.
Then there was that gun-sight video – unclassified but buried in classified material — of an American Apache helicopter opening fire on a crowd on a Baghdad street, gunning down a dozen men, including two Reuters employees, and injuring more, including children. There were also those field reports about how jumpy American soldiers repeatedly shot down civilians at roadside checkpoints; about night raids gone wrong both in Iraq andAfghanistan; and a count of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a tally whose existence the U.S. military had previously denied possessing.
Together, these leaks and many others offered a composite portrait of military and political debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan whose grinding theme has been civilian casualties, a fact not much noted here in the U.S. A tiny number of low-ranking American soldiers have been held to account for rare instances of premeditated murder of civilians, but most of the troops who kill civilians in the midst of the chaos of war are not tried, much less convicted. We don’t talk about these cases a lot either. On the other hand, officials of all types make free with lusty condemnations of Bradley Manning, whose leaks are luridly credited with potential (though not actual) deaths.
Putting Lives In Danger
“[WikiLeaks] might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the release of the Afghan War Logs in July 2010. This was, of course, the same Admiral Mullen who hadendorsed a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan, which would lead to a tremendous “surge” in casualties among civilians and soldiers alike. Here are counts — undoubtedly undercounts, in fact — of real Afghan corpses that, at least in part, resulted from the policy he supported: 2,412 in 2009, 2,777 in 2010, 1,462 in the first half 2011, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan. As far as anyone knows, here are the corpses that resulted from the release of those WikiLeaks documents: 0. (And don’t forget, thestalemate war with the Taliban has not budged in the period since that surge.) Who, then, has blood on his hands, Pfc. Manning — or Admiral Mullen?
Of course the admiral is hardly alone. In fact, whole tabernacle choirs have joined in the condemnation of Manning and WikiLeaks for “causing” carnage, thanks to their disclosures.
Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, also spoke sternly of Manning’s leaks, accusinghim of “moral culpability.” He added, “And that’s where I think the verdict is ‘guilty’ on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences."
This was, of course, the same Robert Gates who pushed for escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 and, in March 2011, flew to the Kingdom of Bahrain to offer his own personal “reassurance of support” to a ruling monarchy already busy shooting and torturing nonviolent civilian protesters. So again, when it comes to blood and indifference to consequences, Bradley Manning — or Robert Gates?
Nor have such attitudes been confined to the military. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Manning’s (alleged) leak of 250,000 diplomatic cables of being “an attack on the international community” that “puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.”
As a senator, of course, she supported the invasion of Iraq in flagrant contravention of the U.N. Charter. She was subsequently aleading hawk when it came to escalating and expanding the Afghan War, and is now responsible for disbursing an annual $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt’s ruling junta whose forces have repeatedly opened fire on nonviolent civilian protesters. So who’s been attacking the international community and putting lives in danger, Bradley Manning — or Hillary Clinton?
Harold Koh, former Yale Law School dean, liberal lion, and currently the State Department’s top legal adviser, hasannounced that the same leaked diplomatic cables “could place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals — from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security.”
This is the same Harold Koh who, in March 2010, provided a tortured legal rationale for the Obama administration’s drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, despite the inevitable and well-documented civilian casualtiesthey cause. So who is risking the lives of countless innocent individuals, Bradley Manning — or Harold Koh?
Much of the media have clambered aboard the bandwagon, blaming WikiLeaks and Manning for damage done by wars they once energetically cheered on.
In early 2011, to pick just one example from the ranks of journalism, New Yorker writer George Packer professed his horror that WikiLeaks had released a memo marked “secret/noforn” listing spots throughout the world of vital strategic or economic interest to the United States. Asked by radio host Brian Lehrer whether this disclosure had crossed a new line by making a gratuitous gift to terrorists, Packer replied with an appalled yes.
Now, among the “secrets” contained in this document are the facts that the Strait of Gibraltar is a vital shipping lane and that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is rich in minerals. Have we Americans become so infantilized that factoids of basic geography must be considered state secrets? (Maybe best not to answer that question.) The “threat” of this document’s release has since been roundly debunked by various military intellectuals.
Nevertheless, Packer’s response was instructive. Here was a typical liberal hawk, who had can-canned to the post-9/11 drumbeat of war as a therapeutic wake-up call from “the bland comforts of peace,” now affronted by WikiLeaks’ supposed recklessness. Civilian casualties do not seem to have been on Packer’s mind when he supported the invasion of Iraq, nor has he written much about them since.
In an enthusiastic 2006 New Yorker essay on counterinsurgency warfare, for example, the very words “civilian casualties” never come up, despite theircentrality to COIN theory, practice, and history. It is a fact that, as Operation Enduring Freedom shifted to counterinsurgency tactics in 2009, civilian casualties in Afghanistan skyrocketed. So, for that matter, have American military casualties. (More than half of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan occurred in the past three years.)
Liberal hawks like Packer may consider WikiLeaks out of bounds, but really, who in these last years has been the most reckless, Bradley Manning — or George Packer and some of his pro-war colleagues at the New Yorkerlike Jeffrey Goldberg (who has since left for the Atlantic Monthly, where he’s been busily clearing a path for war with Iran) and editor David Remnick?
Centrist and liberal nonprofit think tanks have been no less selectively blind when it comes to civilian carnage. Liza Goitein, a lawyer at the liberal-minded Brennan Center at NYU Law School, has also taken out after Bradley Manning. In the midst of an otherwise deft diagnosis of Washington’s compulsive urge to over-classify everything — the federal governmentclassifies an amazing 77 million documents a year — she pauses just long enough to accuse Manning of “criminal recklessness” for putting civilians named in the Afghan War logs in peril — “a disclosure,” as she puts it, “that surely endangers their safety.”
It’s worth noting that, until the moment Goitein made this charge, not a single report or press release issued by the Brennan Center has ever so much as uttered a mention of civilian casualties caused by the U.S. military. The absence of civilian casualties is almost palpable in the work of the Brennan Center’s program in “Liberty and National Security.” For example, this program’s 2011 report “Rethinking Radicalization,” which explored effective, lawful ways to prevent American Muslims from turning terrorist, makes not a single reference to the tens of thousands of well-documented civilian casualties caused by American military force in the Muslim world, which according to many scholars is the prime mover of terrorist blowback. The report on how to combat the threat of Muslim terrorists, written by Pakistan-born Faiza Patel, does not, in fact, even contain the words “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “drone strike,” “Pakistan” or “civilian casualties.”
This is almost incredible, because terrorists themselves have freely confessed that what motivated their acts of wanton violence has been the damage done by foreign military occupation back home or simply in the Muslim world. Asked by a federal judge why he tried to blow up Times Square with a car bomb in May 2010, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad answered that he was motivated by the civilian carnage the U.S. had caused in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. How could any report about “rethinking radicalization” fail to mention this? Although the Brennan Center does much valuable work, Goitein’s selective finger-pointing on civilian casualties is emblematic of a blindness to war’s consequences widespread among American institutions.
American Military Whistleblowers
Knowledge may indeed have its risks, but how many civilian deaths can actually be traced to the WikiLeaks revelations? How many military deaths? To the best of anyone’s knowledge, not a single one. After much huffing and puffing, the Pentagon has quietly denied – and then denied again – that there is any evidence at all of the Taliban targeting the Afghan civilians named in the leaked war logs.
In the end, the “grave risks” involved in the publication of the War Logs and of those State Department documents have been wildly exaggerated. Embarrassment, yes. A look inside two grim wars and the workings of imperial diplomacy, yes. Blood, no.
On the other hand, the grave risks that were hidden in those leaked documents, as well as in all the other government distortions, cover-ups, and lies of the past decade, have been graphically illustrated in aortal red. The civilian carnage caused by our rush to war in Iraq and by our deeply entrenched stalemate of a war in Afghanistan (and the Pakistani tribal borderlands) is not speculative or theoretical but all-too real.
And yet no one anywhere has been held to much account: not in the political class, not in the military, not in the think tanks, not among the scholars, nor the media. Only one individual, it seems, will pay, even if he actually spilled none of the blood. Our foreign policy elites seem to think Bradley Manning is well-cast for the role of fall guy and scapegoat. This is an injustice.
Someday, it will be clearer to Americans that Pfc. Manning has joined the ranks of great American military whistleblowers like Dan Ellsberg (who was first in his class at Marine officer training school); Vietnam War infantrymanRon Ridenhour, who blew the whistle on the My Lai massacre; and the sailors and marines who, in 1777, reported the torture of British captives by their politically connected commanding officer. These servicemen, too, were vilified in their times. Today, we honor them, as someday Pfc. Manning will be honored.
Chase Madar is the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning, to be published by OR Books in February. He is an attorney in New York, a TomDispatch regular, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, American Conservative Magazine, and CounterPunch. (To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Madar discusses the coming trial of Bradley Manning, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) He tweets@ChMadar.
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Copyright 2012 Chase Madar

To Solitude

2012-02-02T03:00:00.017-05:00

Photo by Serhat Demiroglu

Posted by "CavalierZee"

O solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
Nature's observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. ”

[By John Keats]

Shamanic Dream

2012-02-01T23:00:00.008-05:00

Posted by Guest Blogger "Sayf Maslul"

Band "Betray My Secrets"
[1999]

I See Deserts On My Flight
I See Dragons In The Glowing Night
The Tigers Of Eternity
Universal As Light

I See
The Desert Queen
I Live
My Shamanic Dream

I Sail My Ship To Sunset Skies
Through The Red Feverous Night
I Leave Behind All Misery
On The Sinking Shore Called Past

I See
The Desert Queen
I Live
My Shamanic Dream

The Night Turns To Day
I See The Opening Morn
When I Awake
To Face Reality

Sinking The Petrodollar In The Persian Gulf

2012-02-01T19:00:00.017-05:00

By Pepe Escobar and Tom Engelhardt,
January 18, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry. In its place, they put an autocrat, the young shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police. He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf — until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs. While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring. In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oilwas at the bottom of things.

1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which — call it irony — is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program). Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the shah might use the “peaceful atom” as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands. “An aggressive successor to the shah,” went a 1974 Pentagon memo, “might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran’s complete military dominance of the region.” But that didn’t stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.

The shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran’s national “right” and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants. As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: “The shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world. Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country. He knows the oil is running out — and time with it.” In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.

September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington’s man, our “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf, and we offer him our hand — and also “detailed information” on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military. Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the “Iran-Contra Affair” and which almost brings down the president and his men. Success!

March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new“Hitler” who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities. So the Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to — in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz — “float on a sea of oil.” (Bush officials hope, in the wake of a “cakewalk” of a war to revive that country’s oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy OPEC, driving down the price of oil on world markets.) Nine years later, a Shi’ite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous U.S. occupation.

So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find. In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback. Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers — this time sanctions against Iran’s central bank meant to cripple the country’s oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.

And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong? Regime change in Iran? It’s bound to be a slam dunk, and if you don’t believe it, check out Pepe Escobar, that fabulous peripatetic reporter for Asia Times andTomDispatch regular. Tom

The Myth of “Isolated” Iran

Following The Money In The Iran Crisis
By Pepe Escobar

Let’s start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”

How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat. Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. intelligence community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

What if, however, there is no “red line,” but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.

Banking on Sanctions?

Let’s start here: In December 2011, impervious to dire consequences for the global economy, the U.S. Congress — under all the usual pressures from the Israel lobby (not that it needs them) — foisted a mandatory sanctions package on the Obama administration (100 to 0 in the Senate and with only 12 “no” votes in the House). Starting in June, the U.S. will have to sanction any third-country banks and companies dealing with Iran’s Central Bank, which is meant to cripple that country’s oil sales. (Congress did allow for some “exemptions.”)

The ultimate target? Regime change — what else? — in Tehran. The proverbial anonymous U.S. official admitted as much in the Washington Post, and that paper printed the comment. (“The goal of the U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, offering the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration is at least as intent on unseating Iran’s government as it is on engaging with it.”) But oops! The newspaper then had to revise the passage to eliminate that embarrassingly on-target quote. Undoubtedly, this “red line” came too close to the truth for comfort.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen believed that only a monster shock-and-awe-style event, totally humiliating the leadership in Tehran, would lead to genuine regime change — and he was hardly alone. Advocates of actions ranging from airstrikes to invasion (whether by the U.S., Israel, or some combination of the two) have been legion in neocon Washington. (See, for instance, the Brookings Institution’s 2009 report Which Path to Persia.)

Yet anyone remotely familiar with Iran knows that such an attack would rally the population behind Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. In those circumstances, the deep aversion of many Iranians to the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat would matter little.

Besides, even the Iranian opposition supports a peaceful nuclear program. It’s a matter of national pride.

Iranian intellectuals, far more familiar with Persian smoke and mirrors than ideologues in Washington, totally debunk any war scenarios. They stress that the Tehran regime, adept in the arts of Persian shadow play, has no intention of provoking an attack that could lead to its obliteration. On their part, whether correctly or not, Tehran strategists assume that Washington will prove unable to launch yet one more war in the Greater Middle East, especially one that could lead to staggering collateral damage for the world economy.

In the meantime, Washington’s expectations that a harsh sanctions regime might make the Iranians give ground, if not go down, may prove to be a chimera. Washington spin has been focused on the supposedly disastrous mega-devaluation of the Iranian currency, the rial, in the face of the new sanctions. Unfortunately for the fans of Iranian economic collapse, Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani has laid out in elaborate detail the long-term nature of this process, which Iranian economists have more than welcomed. After all, it will boost Iran’s non-oil exports and help local industry in competition with cheap Chinese imports. In sum: a devalued rial stands a reasonable chance of actually reducing unemployment in Iran.

More Connected Than Google

Though few in the U.S. have noticed, Iran is not exactly “isolated,” though Washington might wish it. Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani has become afrequent flyer to Tehran. And he’s a Johnny-come-lately compared to Russia’s national security chief, Nikolai Patrushev, who only recently warned the Israelis not to push the U.S. to attack Iran. Add in as well U.S. ally and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. At a loya jirga (grand council) in late 2011, in front of 2,000 tribal leaders, he stressed that Kabul was planning to get even closer to Tehran.

On that crucial Eurasian chessboard, Pipelineistan, the Iran-Pakistan (IP) natural gas pipeline — much to Washington’s distress — is now a go. Pakistan badly needs energy, and its leadership has clearly decided that it’s unwilling to wait forever and a day for Washington’s eternal pet project — the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline — to traverse Talibanistan.

Even Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently visited Tehran, though his country’s relationship with Iran has grown ever edgier. After all, energy overrules threats in the region. NATO member Turkey is already involved in covert ops in Syria, allied with hardcore fundamentalist Sunnis in Iraq, and — in a remarkable volte-face in the wake of the Arab Spring(s) — has traded in an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus axis for an Ankara-Riyadh-Doha one. It is even planning on hosting components of Washington’s long-planned missile defense system, targeted at Iran.

All this from a country with a Davutoglu-coined foreign policy of “zero problems with our neighbors.” Still, the needs of Pipelineistan do set the heart racing. Turkey is desperate for access to Iran’s energy resources, and if Iranian natural gas ever reaches Western Europe — something the Europeans are desperately eager for — Turkey will be the privileged transit country. Turkey’s leaders have already signaled their rejection of further U.S. sanctions against Iranian oil.

And speaking of connections, last week there was that spectacular diplomatic coup de théâtre, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Latin American tour. U.S. right-wingers may harp on a Tehran-Caracas axis of evil — supposedly promoting “terror” across Latin America as a springboard for future attacks on the northern superpower — but back in real life, another kind of truth lurks. All these years later, Washington is still unable to digest the idea that it has lost control of, or even influence in, those two regional powers over which it once exercised unmitigated imperial hegemony.

Add to this the wall of mistrust that has only solidified since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Mix in a new, mostly sovereign Latin America pushing for integration not only via left-wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador but through regional powers Brazil and Argentina. Stir and you get photo ops like Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saluting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Washington continues to push a vision of a world from which Iran has been radically disconnected. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is typical in saying recently, “Iran can remain in international isolation.” As it happens, though, she needs to get her facts straight.

“Isolated” Iran has $4 billion in joint projects with Venezuela, including, crucially, a bank (as with Ecuador, it has dozens of planned projects from building power plants to, once again, banking). That has led the Israel-first crowd in Washington to vociferously demand that sanctions be slapped on Venezuela. Only problem: How would the U.S. pay for its crucial Venezuelan oil imports then?

Much was made in the U.S. press of the fact that Ahmadinejad did not visit Brazil on this jaunt through Latin America, but diplomatically Tehran and Brasilia remain in sync. When it comes to the nuclear dossier in particular, Brazil’s history leaves its leaders sympathetic. After all, that country developed — and then dropped — a nuclear weapons program. In May 2010, Brazil and Turkey brokered a uranium-swap agreement for Iran that might have cleared the decks on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear imbroglio. It was, however, immediately sabotaged by Washington. A key member of the BRICS, the club of top emerging economies, Brasilia is completely opposed to the U.S. sanctions/embargo strategy.

So Iran may be “isolated” from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM (the 120 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement), it has the majority of the global South on its side. And then, of course, there are those staunch Washington allies, Japan and South Korea, now pleading for exemptions from the coming boycott/embargo of Iran’s Central Bank.

No wonder, because these unilateral U.S. sanctions are also aimed at Asia. After all, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, together, buy no less than 62% of Iran’s oil exports.

With trademark Asian politesse, Japan’s Finance Minister Jun Azumi let Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner know just what a problem Washington is creating for Tokyo, which relies on Iran for 10% of its oil needs. It is pledging to at least modestly “reduce” that share “as soon as possible” in order to get a Washington exemption from those sanctions, but don’t hold your breath. South Korea has already announced that it will buy 10% of its oil needs from Iran in 2012.

Silk Road Redux

Most important of all, “isolated” Iran happens to be a supreme matter of national security for China, which has already rejected the latest Washington sanctionswithout a blink. Westerners seem to forget that the Middle Kingdom and Persia have been doing business for almost two millennia. (Does “Silk Road” ring a bell?)

The Chinese have already clinched a juicy deal for the development of Iran’s largest oil field, Yadavaran. There’s also the matter of the delivery of Caspian Sea oil from Iran through a pipeline stretching from Kazakhstan to Western China. In fact, Iran already supplies no less than 15% of China’s oil and natural gas. It is now more crucialto China, energy-wise, than the House of Saud is to the U.S., which imports 11% of its oil from Saudi Arabia.

In fact, China may be the true winner from Washington’s new sanctions, because it is likely to get its oil and gas at a lower price as the Iranians grow ever more dependent on the China market. At this moment, in fact, the two countries are in the middle of acomplex negotiation on the pricing of Iranian oil, and the Chinese have actually been ratcheting up the pressure by slightly cutting back on energy purchases. But all this should be concluded by March, at least two months before the latest round of U.S. sanctions go into effect, according to experts in Beijing. In the end, the Chinese will certainly buy much more Iranian gas than oil, but Iran will still remain its third biggest oil supplier, right after Saudi Arabia and Angola.

As for other effects of the new sanctions on China, don’t count on them. Chinese businesses in Iran are building cars, fiber optics networks, and expanding the Tehran subway. Two-way trade is at $30 billion now and expected to hit $50 billion in 2015. Chinese businesses will find a way around the banking problems the new sanctions impose.

Russia is, of course, another key supporter of “isolated” Iran. It has opposed stronger sanctions either via the U.N. or through the Washington-approved package that targets Iran’s Central Bank. In fact, it favors a rollback of the existing U.N. sanctions and has also been at work on an alternative plan that could, at least theoretically, lead to a face-saving nuclear deal for everyone.

On the nuclear front, Tehran has expressed a willingness to compromise with Washington along the lines of the plan Brazil and Turkey suggested and Washington deep-sixed in 2010. Since it is now so much clearer that, for Washington — certainly for Congress — the nuclear issue is secondary to regime change, any new negotiations are bound to prove excruciatingly painful.

This is especially true now that the leaders of the European Union have managed to remove themselves from a future negotiating table by shooting themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet. In typical fashion, they have meekly followed Washington’s lead in implementing an Iranian oil embargo. As a senior EU official told National Iranian American Council President Trita Parsi, and as EU diplomats have assured me in no uncertain terms, they fear this might prove to be the last step short of outright war.

Meanwhile, a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors has just visitedIran. The IAEA is supervising all things nuclear in Iran, including its new uranium-enrichment plant at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, with full production starting in June. The IAEA is positive: no bomb-making is involved. Nonetheless, Washington (and the Israelis) continue to act as though it’s only a matter of time — and not much of it at that.

Follow the Money

That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles — a similar move to ones already made in its trade with China and Japan. As for India, an economic powerhouse in the neighborhood, its leaders also refuse to stop buying Iranian oil, a trade that, in the long run, is similarly unlikely to be conducted in dollars. India is already using the yuan with China, as Russia and China have been trading in rubles and yuan for more than a year, as Japan and China are promoting direct trading in yen and yuan. As for Iran and China, all new trade and joint investments will be settled in yuan and rial.

Translation, if any was needed: in the near future, with the Europeans out of the mix, virtually none of Iran’s oil will be traded in dollars.

Moreover, three BRICS members (Russia, India, and China) allied with Iran are major holders (and producers) of gold. Their complex trade ties won’t be affected by the whims of a U.S. Congress. In fact, when the developing world looks at theprofound crisis in the Atlanticist West, what they see is massive U.S. debt, the Fed printing money as if there’s no tomorrow, lots of “quantitative easing,” and of course the Eurozone shaking to its very foundations.

Follow the money. Leave aside, for the moment, the new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it’s the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.

It’s been spearheaded by Iran and it’s bound to translate into an anxious Washington, facing down not only a regional power, but its major strategic competitors China and Russia. No wonder all those carriers are heading for the Persian Gulf right now, though it’s the strangest of showdowns — a case of military power being deployed against economic power.

In this context, it’s worth remembering that in September 2000 Saddam Husseinabandoned the petrodollar as the currency of payment for Iraq’s oil, and moved to the euro. In March 2003, Iraq was invaded and the inevitable regime change occurred. Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi proposed a gold dinar both as Africa’s common currency and as the currency of payment for his country’s energy resources. Another intervention and another regime change followed.

Washington/NATO/Tel Aviv, however, offers a different narrative. Iran’s “threats” are at the heart of the present crisis, even if these are, in fact, that country’s reaction to non-stop U.S./Israeli covert war and now, of course, economic war as well. It’s those “threats,” so the story goes, that are leading to rising oil prices and so fueling the current recession, rather than Wall Street’s casino capitalism or massive U.S. and European debts. The cream of the 1% has nothing against high oil prices, not as long as Iran’s around to be the fall guy for popular anger.

As energy expert Michael Klare pointed out recently, we are now in a new geo-energy era certain to be extremely turbulent in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. But consider 2012 the start-up year as well for a possibly massive defection from the dollar as the global currency of choice. As perception is indeed reality, imagine the real world — mostly the global South — doing the necessary math and, little by little, beginning to do business in their own currencies and investing ever less of any surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds.

Of course, the U.S. can always count on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates — which I prefer to call the Gulf Counterrevolution Club (just look at their performances during the Arab Spring). For all practical geopolitical purposes, the Gulf monarchies are a U.S. satrapy. Their decades-old promise to use only the petrodollar translates into them being an appendage of Pentagon power projection across the Middle East. CENTCOM, after all, is based in Qatar; the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain. In fact, in the immensely energy-wealthy lands that we could label Greater Pipelineistan — and that the Pentagon used to call “the arc of instability” — extending through Iran all the way to Central Asia, the GCC remains key to a dwindling sense of U.S. hegemony.

If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly shredding the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Still, it’s the cog that Washington is now focused on. They have regime change on the brain. All that’s needed is a spark to start the fire (in — one hastens to add — all sorts of directions that are bound to catch Washington off guard).

Remember Operation Northwoods, that 1962 plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terror operations in the U.S. and blame them on Fidel Castro’s Cuba. (President Kennedy shot the idea down.) Or recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, used by President Lyndon Johnson as a justification for widening the Vietnam War. The U.S. accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of unprovoked attacks on U.S. ships. Later, it became clear that one of the attacks had never even happened and the president had lied about it.

It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore Full-Spectrum-Dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation). Consider as well the new U.S. military strategy just unveiled by President Obama in which the focus of Washington’s attention is to move from two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to China). Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the U.S. Navy.

So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call “Iran” may turn out to be as much about China and the U.S. dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran’s nonexistent bomb. The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, a TomDispatch regular, and a political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan(Nimble Books, 2009).