Recent Western Occupations

Just like the suffering of Iraqis never happened. Robert Fisk, in his masterful The Great War for Civilization (Fourth Estate, London) remarks, “The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost 13 years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures … When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were ‘ghosted’ out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was freedom’.”….. Continue Reading →

The last hope for peace in Iraq was stomped to death this week. The victory of the Shiite religious coalition in the December 15 election hands power for the next four years to a fanatical band of fundamentalist Shiite parties backed by Iran, above all to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Quietly backed by His Malevolence, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sustained by a 20,000-strong paramilitary force called the Badr Brigade, and with both overt and covert support from Iran’s intelligence service and its Revolutionary Guard corps, SCIRI will create a theocratic bastion state in its southern Iraqi fiefdom and use its power in Baghdad to rule what’s left of the Iraqi state by force….. Continue Reading →

…..The answer is obvious to anyone who knows a thing or two about control mechanisms, especially colonialist ones. Permits of sorts were imposed by apartheid South Africa, by the Dutch in colonial Indonesia, and elsewhere. The colonizer’s gains are clear: divide-and-rule; destroying national coherence in favor of separate, conflicting local interests; making the colonized too busy with survival to oppose their oppression; and so on. The GSS have a more concrete motivation, well phrased in the sentence that so many Palestinians discretely hear when they apply for a permit: “We’ll help you, if you help us.” After all, collaborators – “stinkers” in Israeli army jargon, “helpers” as the official Israeli Newspeak terms them – are at the heart of every tyranny, and the occupation run by the Middle East’s only democracy is no exception….. Continue Reading →