The Carbon Credit Hoax

System Gaming the Planet
by ROB URIE

To rightwingers, the iconic Friedrich Hayek was the European counterpart of Milton Friedman. His extreme libertarian ideas about economics—which garnered him a Nobel price—were equally nefarious to the vast majority of people and the environment. Like Friedman, he remained a firm apologist for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet till the bitter end.

Rarely can a single story encapsulate so much of what is wrong with the economic system at work in the West as the one that follows. According to the New York Times (link), a group of industrial gas companies in India gamed the ‘carbon credit’ system to (1) increase the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted while (2) earning large ‘profits’ they wouldn’t otherwise have earned and in so doing (3) bought political influence to keep the practice going while (4) driving the price of their highly polluting product down so that (5) less polluting products couldn’t compete and (5) more of their highly polluting product was used. The purported intent of carbon credits is the exact opposite of all of this.

The basic story is that companies in India (and China) were producing a coolant gas that also produced a highly polluting waste by-product. Both the coolant and the by-product are potent greenhouse gases. Carbon credits were offered to induce the companies to destroy the by-product rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. But by paying the companies to both produce the gas and to destroy the waste the good capitalists running them quickly saw that the more gas and waste they produced the more money they made. In fact, it seems that the companies produced to the maximum limit of the carbon credits being offered, far more than they were previously producing, and then went home for the year.

The people running these companies knew that they were producing dangerous greenhouse gases and that their gain was the world’s loss. They were receiving carbon credits because their products were polluting. But what was economically rational to them, what maximized profits and paychecks, was to produce a much greater quantity of these products, and with them greenhouse gases, than they otherwise would have. They also understood that in a sane world they would be sent to prison for this behavior, or maybe even shot. So they took their ‘profits’ and bought political influence to see that this didn’t happen. The Koch Brothers couldn’t have done it any better.

Carbon credits were developed by neo-liberal economists to replace environmental regulations with ‘market-based’ incentives to reduce pollution. The premises behind them are that (1) industrial companies will pollute, (2) economic growth over time will mean that total pollution will increase over time, (3) regulations to restrict pollution are inefficient because industry knows better than regulators how to reduce it, (4) therefore providing financial incentives to individual firms to reduce pollution is the best way to get them to do so and (5) the best that can be done is to slow the growth of total pollution rather than reduce it.

The problem of pollution and other types of ‘cost shifting’ was recognized by capitalist economists decades ago. Pollution was at different times considered a form of economic totalitarianism—the unjust infliction of an economic harm (cost) on those who had not given their consent. (The economic benefit to the polluter is the lower cost of production than if the producer had had to keep the pollution from occurring). Even the radical Austrian (free-market) economist Friedrich Hayek held a similar view early in his career:

“There are, too, certain fields where the system of competition is impracticable. For example, the harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question. But the fact that we have to resort to direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.” — Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (link).

The path from Mr. Hayek’s views in 1940 to carbon credits required a number of theoretical ‘innovations.’ Before global warming was identified, pollution was considered a specific harm to specific people. In Mr. Hayek’s formulation, those harmed by factory pollution were those in the vicinity of the factories. Variations on this view ultimately led to a series of civil lawsuits in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that resulted in limited recompense to specific people, or classes of people, for specific harms from pollution.

(This ‘ambulance chasing’ is the great bogeyman of the industrial right and still finds voice in Congress today amongst the antique Illiterati who decry ‘trial lawyers’ as the assassins of free enterprise).

However, compensation for harm caused by pollution is after the fact—the harms have already been caused. By the 1970s the government effort in the U.S. turned to preventing these harms from occurring in the first place. Government agencies were created to study potential pollutants and companies were required to demonstrate that their practices didn’t cause harm. Regulations were developed to protect workers and citizens from the harms of pollution. And for a brief while a few of them were actually enforced. The result was that pollution was effectively reduced.

Later in Mr. Hayek’s life, when he was fully dependent for his living and physical well being (he was in poor health) on arch ideologue and polluting industrialist Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers and founding member of the John Birch Society, he had the revelation that capitalism was such a gift to humanity that market based solutions to ‘externalities’ like pollution were in almost all cases preferable to government regulation. This became the mantra for the radical right and industrial capitalists and a cottage industry of economic shills developing market-based schemes and contraptions was launched.

According to the Times article, the Indian government has no problem with their citizen-industrialists who gamed the credits because they (government) had been bought off with profits from the deals. It is European bureaucrats and the capitalist ideologues who conceived the credits that take issue with the way they were used. But what can be said when the premise behind the credits is that people are everywhere and always self-interested assholes who must be bribed to not kill the planet? These particular self-interested assholes took the bribes while increasing pollution and earning greater ‘profits’ than they would have had they ‘played by the rules.’ Under the premises at hand, this makes them good capitalists.

The question for proponents of schemes and contraptions like carbon credits is what they will do to prevent this type of outcome in the future? The possible answers illustrate the rank idiocy of the entire project. The first likely effort will be to write more comprehensive rules for use of the credits. But what this incident illustrates is that the rules writers didn’t anticipate even the initial outcome (increased production), let alone the extended (Nth order) effects like having more polluting products crowd out less polluting products because of the carbon credit subsidy.

Another way to say this is that rules makers must conceive of circumstances that don’t yet exist and write rules today to cover them. In the first case this isn’t possible and in the second, even if it were possible the volume of rules and cross rules required to be effective wouldn’t be effective because of the volume of rules and cross rules. Lawyers have jobs to argue paradox and ambiguity in rule based language. Ultimately, successful interpretation comes down to social power, not the specifics of language, no matter how tightly written. (Think of those forty page ‘disclaimers’ that credit card companies were sending out a few years back. No army of lawyers could agree on what the legalese actually means because the language contains paradox and ambiguity—in that case intentionally so).

The other question is one of enforcement. If profits can be used to buy government complicity in socially egregious behavior as the banks, insurance companies and the oil and gas industry etc. have done in the U.S. and Europe, who would make firms comply with the intent of incentives? The Indian government isn’t going to prosecute their industrialists for gaming the carbon credits because the credits have no basis in Indian law and the issuers of the credits have no power to enforce their intent in India.

Readers should consider that these same issues of system gaming and the purchase of state power with ill-gotten profits lie behind all capitalist enterprise. When Barack Obama proposed the ACA (Affordable Care Act) I read through the details to see where the Department of Making Insurance Companies Do What You (Obama) Say They Will Do would be located and where the $50 billion per annum (minimum) budget to fund said department had been signed off on by Congressional Republicans. True to form, Mr. Obama is using what could be called ‘insurance credits’ to induce insurance companies to actually provide health care. But they just spent the last thirty years figuring out how to take in premiums without paying out claims (link). Again, who is going to make them provide health care?

Global warming puts not just our health at risk, but continued life on this planet. With stakes this high, science needn’t prove that global warming ‘exists’ in the legalistic framework of the right for prudent action to be taken. What isn’t prudent is the game of cat and mouse (without the cat) behind carbon credit schemes and contraptions. With the entirety of the political establishment in the West in the pockets of greenhouse gas emitting industrialists and carbon trading profiteers, well-intentioned policy recommendations are unlikely to be heard. In a political system where money is power, those without it don’t have a voice.

I invite incrementalist readers to explain how their good ideas will be turned in to concrete actions? Otherwise, the choices are to shut up or start a revolution.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

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In the Grip of the Bourgeois Press

All on the Wrong Side, From Fox News to the New York Times
by ANDREW LEVINE

Bourgeois press? Nobody says “bourgeois” anymore; it’s so pre-1989 (or 1981 or mid-70s). Another problem is that, decades ago, the word suffered from Stalinist and then Maoist overuse. It designated any object of animosity, and therefore became essentially meaningless.

Nowadays, most media critics are too historically illiterate, and too tied into the political culture of the moment, to raise that objection; it is enough for them that the term seems hopelessly dated. “Press” seems archaic too; it suggests print media, a species said to be on its way to extinction.

However we do hear a lot about “mainstream media.” The term is now so mainstream that even Sarah Palin picked up on it, though only to exercise her wit. “Lamestream media” doesn’t exactly make sense — not much she says does — but we get the general idea. Not bad either for somebody who couldn’t even name a newspaper she read when Katie Couric, the lamestream media’s girl next door, fixed her in her withering gaze.

We also hear about “corporate media.” That term has the advantage of calling attention to how concentrated ownership of media outlets has become and to the connection between our media and the corporations that dominate the American (and world) economy. It also forces us to focus on an issue that might otherwise pass unnoticed: the interests media serve.

Still, in at least one respect, “mainstream media” is better; it speaks to how media deal with challenges to the status quo. Media validate and therefore legitimize; what they do not validate they cast into the margins, outside the mainstream.

What is marginalized is still out there; anybody can still say or write pretty much anything they want. But if their views are not validated, then, regardless of their merits, they have little chance of being taken seriously in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This works well for those who benefit from keeping things as they are. Overt repression is not only base and demeaning; it is also ineffective, at least in the long run. Better to let dissent out in dribs and drabs than to allow it to build to a point where it might explode the status quo.

But “mainstream media” says nothing about the conditions within which ideas are legitimated or marginalized, and it is mute on the question of underlying interests. “Corporate media” deals with these issues better.

It is worth noting that these terms don’t always designate the same thing. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) get corporate money but, strictly speaking, they are public, not corporate, media. Nevertheless, they are both painfully mainstream. Indeed, NPR is probably the best source out there for (articulate) conventional wisdom and pro-regime (as distinct from pro-government) propaganda; better even than The New York Times.

Still, for the most part, the two terms currently in use substantially overlap, and are rightly used interchangeably. How much better it would be, though, if there were a term that combines what is best in each of them, and that also explains the affinities linking commercial and public media. Better yet if it also connected media criticism with more general understandings of our social order and its possible futures.

We did have such an expression once – “bourgeois press.” It conveyed everything conveyed by the words media activists and social critics nowadays use, and more. The more that it conveys is precisely what we need to bring back on board.

Should we therefore revive the expression? Maybe, for want of a better alternative. But the old term is problematic too. Part of the problem, again, is that its constituent parts – “bourgeois” and “press” – seem dated. But we should not let changing fashions or technologies distract us. What “bourgeois press” forces critics to confront, and what the terms that have replaced it do not, is the connection between media and the class struggles that shape modern societies.

That a class perspective is indispensable for making sense of media today is not exactly news to anyone familiar with the core tenets of classical Marxism. But to appreciate the importance of the point, it is not necessary to think of human history as a history of class struggles or to construe today’s media as an element of a “superstructure” that reproduces existing class relations.

These positions accorded well with the lived experience of peoples in industrializing societies throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before capitalism changed in ways that render class divisions and struggles less salient, though no less fundamental, than they formerly were.

The general idea is therefore hardly unique to intellectual currents that draw on Marx’s account of “the laws of motion” of capitalist society. Indeed, it is only in recent decades that the point has passed out of general awareness. Before that, it was part of the common sense of our political and intellectual culture.

Great Britain was for a very long time home to the world’s leading capitalist economy. But it was in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France that the emerging capitalist order took on its most definitive political expressions.

There, the foundations of an old regime, organized by and for the benefit of a landed aristocracy and the Catholic Church, gave way to a new kind of society in which formerly subaltern urban-dwellers, a “bourgeoisie,” became the new leading class.

As the nineteenth century unfolded, the bourgeoisie consolidated its political role as a ruling class. More importantly, it established itself as a hegemonic class, a basis for a new form of civilization.

And so, in fits and starts, both state and society became “bourgeois.” This was by no means just a French phenomenon. It occurred throughout Europe, though, as in Great Britain, the ascendance of this newly empowered class in most countries was generally not as abrupt or complete.

From the beginning, the United States was organized along commercial and therefore incipiently capitalist lines, but the English colonies in North America had no feudal past and therefore no aristocracy against which merchants and farmers, and later, owners of manufacturing enterprises, could define a new identity.

Southern planters came closest to adopting aristocratic lifestyles, but their economic role was quite different from that of true aristocrats. Their plantations were not landed estates. They were commercial enterprises worked by slaves, not peasants or tenant farmers, and they were anything but self-sustaining in the way the manors of the Old Country were. Southern plantations were integrated into a market system linking the Americas with Europe and Africa. No matter how atypical they seem, they were, in other words, part of bourgeois society.

At most, then, we once had a quasi- or pseudo-aristocracy, and that only in the South, the least developed region of the country. That was well done with, in any case, long before America’s emergence as the world’s leading capitalist economy. The plantation system suffered an historic defeat in the War Between the States and never subsequently revived.

Just as we never had real aristocrats, neither did we have a real bourgeoisie. The adjective “bourgeois” has therefore never fit comfortably into the American context. But as a term of art for connecting our economic and social structure with that of other capitalist countries, and for laying bare the class character of the institutions that shape our lives, it is still the best available term.

The historical differences between the United States and the leading capitalist powers of Europe fed a longstanding, largely mythological, conceit: that ours is a classless society. Ironically, a similar view is characteristic of “bourgeois” social science and philosophy.

In this respect, our intellectual culture is indeed bourgeois. Not only do we go out of our way to deny the obvious, when the obvious suggests the centrality or even the relevance of class divisions and struggles; we go so far as to depoliticize issues that are plainly political in nature.

This happens across the “mainstream” spectrum; it is a particular affliction of the “left,” evident in the well-meaning disposition of those whom Hegel would have called “beautiful souls” to ethicize political questions.

This is why, all too often, debates about, say, abortion, focus on what personhood is and implies, or on the rights of fetuses, or the moral relevance of choice — or anything except what the issue is ultimately about: patriarchy and the subordination of women. Similarly, debates about punishment, capital and otherwise, typically have to do with everything but social control. To the extent that questions of political import are engaged, they are discussed mainly in ethical, not political, terms.

Ethical issues connected to real world politics can be intellectually engaging, and they can be of philosophical interest in their own right. But as dispositive treatments of issues of on-going concern, they miss the mark – in a way that reinforces existing practices and constraints.

Political philosophy nowadays is especially depoliticized.

When the bourgeoisie was a rising, even a revolutionary, class, some of the best minds in Europe and America devised justifying theories for the emerging capitalist order and for the kinds of institutions suitable for sustaining it.

John Locke (1632-1704) was only the best known of a group of thinkers whose accounts of (private) property and the right to accumulate it without limitation have returned, along with a panoply of related doctrines, in the form of contemporary libertarianism. In this guise, seventeenth and eighteenth century ideas have become the focus of some of the most trenchant philosophical discussions of the past several decades.

But unlike the original libertarianism (or classical liberalism) of Locke and his co-thinkers, the neo-Lockean variety is mum on the class interests it represents. What was once an aggressive ideology, a weapon in the bourgeoisie’s struggle against remnants of pre-capitalist modes of thought, has become a magnet for philosophical conundrums that, though rife with political implications, seem as timeless and ahistorical as any of the perennial problems of philosophy.

This is “bourgeois” through and through. It is the class struggle, waged at a theoretical level, but in a form that masks what it is ultimately about. This is why, no matter how fascinating some of its positions may be to practitioners of abstract thought, libertarianism reeks of inauthenticity, and why, no matter how politically otiose it may seem, it is an inherently conservative ideology with untoward consequences.

Our mainstream or corporate media are similarly “bourgeois.” NPR and Fox News, The New York Times and The New York Post seem worlds apart. Superficially they are, and the differences can be important. But in the final analysis, they are all of a piece – and all on the wrong side of the principal struggle of our time.

“Bourgeois press” may indeed be unsatisfactory, even if there is no better alternative at hand. But it’s the idea that counts, and even if the term is dated, the idea behind it is not. This is one of those many instances in which the more things change (or seem to change), the more they stay the same.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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Blum’s Anti-Empire Report [August 10th, 2012]

The Anti-Empire Report
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

The United States and its comrade-in-arms, Al Qaeda. And other tales of an empire gone mad.

Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s … Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s … Libya 2011 … Syria 2012 … In military conflicts in each of these countries the United States and al Qaeda (or one of its associates) have been on the same side. 1

What does this tell us about the United States’ “War On Terrorism”?

Regime change has been the American goal on each occasion: overthrowing communists (or “communists”), Serbians, Slobodan Milosevic, Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad … all heretics or infidels, all non-believers in the empire, all inconvenient to the empire.

Why, if the enemy is Islamic terrorism, has the United States invested so much blood and treasure against the PLO, Iraq, and Libya, and now Syria, all mideast secular governments?

Why are Washington’s closest Arab allies in the Middle East the Islamic governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain? Bahrain being the home of an American naval base; Saudi Arabia and Qatar being conduits to transfer arms to the Syrian rebels.

Why, if democracy means anything to the United States are these same close allies in the Middle East all monarchies?

Why, if the enemy is Islamic terrorism, did the United States shepherd Kosovo — 90% Islamist and perhaps the most gangsterish government in the world — to unilaterally declare independence from Serbia in 2008, an independence so illegitimate and artificial that the majority of the world’s nations still have not recognized it?

Why — since Kosovo’s ruling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) have been known for their trafficking in women, heroin, and human body parts (sic) — has the United States been pushing for Kosovo’s membership in NATO and the European Union? (Just what the EU needs: another economic basket case.) Between 1998 and 2002, the KLA appeared on the State Department terrorist list, remaining there until the United States decided to make them an ally, due in no small part to the existence of a major American military base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, well situated in relation to planned international oil and gas pipelines coming from the vast landlocked Caspian Sea area to Europe. In November 2005, following a visit to Bondsteel, Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of Europe, described the camp as a “smaller version of Guantánamo”. 2

Why, if the enemy is Islamic terrorism, did the United States pave the way to power for the Libyan Islamic rebels, who at this very moment are killing other Libyans in order to institute a more fundamentalist Islamic state?

Why do American officials speak endlessly about human rights, yet fully support the Libyan Islamic rebels despite the fact that Doctors Without Borders suspended its work in prisons in the Islamic-rebel city of Misurata because torture was so rampant that some detainees were brought for care only to make them fit for further interrogation? 3

Why is the United States supporting Islamic Terrorists in Libya and Syria who are persecuting Christians?

And why, if the enemy is Islamic terrorism, did US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice — who daily attacks the Syrian government on moral grounds — not condemn the assassination of four Syrian high officials on July 18, in all likelihood carried out by al Qaeda types? RT, the Russian television channel broadcast in various parts of the United States, noted her silence in this matter. Does anyone know of any American media that did the same?

So, if you want to understand this thing called United States foreign policy … forget about the War on Terrorism, forget about September 11, forget about democracy, forget about freedom, forget about human rights, forget about religion, forget about the people of Libya and Syria … keep your eyes on the prize … Whatever advances American global domination. Whatever suits their goals at the moment. There is no moral factor built into the DNA of US foreign policy.

Bring back the guillotine

In July, the Canadian corporation Enbridge, Inc. announced that one of its pipelines had leaked and spilled an estimated 1,200 barrels of crude oil in a field in Wisconsin. Two years ago, an Enbridge pipeline spilled more than 19,000 barrels in Michigan. The Michigan spill affected more than 50 kilometers of waterways and wetlands and about 320 people reported medical symptoms from crude oil exposure. The US National Transportation Safety Board said that at $800 million it was the costliest onshore spill cleanup in the nation’s history. The NTSB found that Enbridge knew of a defect in the pipeline five years before it burst. According to Enbridge’s own reports, the company had 800 spills between 1999 and 2010, releasing close to 7 million gallons of crude oil. 4

No executive or other employee of Enbridge has been charged with any kind of crime. How many environmental murderers of modern times have been punished?

During a period of a few years beginning around 2007, several thousand employees of stock brokers, banks, mortgage companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies, and other financial institutions, mainly in New York, had great fun getting obscenely rich while creating and playing with pieces of paper known by names like derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds, credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime mortgages, and other exotic terms, for which, it must be kept in mind, there had been no public need or demand. The result has been a severe depression, seriously hurting hundreds of millions of lives in the United States and abroad.

No employee of any of these companies has seen the inside of a prison cell for playing such games with our happiness.

For more than half a century members of the United States foreign policy and military establishments have compiled a record of war crimes and crimes against humanity that the infamous beasts and butchers of history could only envy.

Not a single one of these American officials has come any closer to a proper judgment than going to see the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg”.

Yet, we live in the United States of Punishment for countless other criminal types; more than two million presently rotting their lives away. No other society comes even close to this, no matter how the statistics are calculated. And many of those in American prisons are there for victimless crimes.

On the other hand, we see the Chinese sentencing their citizens to lengthy prison terms, even execution, for environmental crimes.

We have an Iranian court recently trying 39 people for a $2.6 billion bank loan embezzlement carried out by individuals close to the political elite or with their assent. Of the 39 people tried, four were sentenced to hang, two to life in prison, and others received terms of up to 25 years; in addition to prison time, some were sentenced to flogging, ordered to pay fines, and banned from government jobs. 5

And in Argentina in early July, in the latest of a long series of trials of former Argentine officials, former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted and sentenced to 50 years for a systematic plan to steal babies from women prisoners who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during the military junta’s war on leftist dissenters — the “dirty war” of 1976-83 that claimed 13,000 victims. Many of the women had “disappeared” shortly after giving birth. Argentina’s last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, was also convicted and got 15 years. Outside the courthouse a jubilant crowd watched on a big screen and cheered each sentence. 6

As an American, how I envy the Argentines. Get the big screen ready for The Mall in Washington. We’ll have showings of the trials of the Bushes and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Obama. And Henry Kissinger, a strong supporter of the Argentine junta among his many contributions to making the world a better place. And let’s not forget the executives of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Enbridge, Inc. Fining them just money is pointless. We have to fine them years, lots of them.

Without imprisoning these people, nothing will change. That’s become a cliché, but we very well see what continues to happen without imprisonment. And it’s steadily getting worse, financially and imperially.

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part VII
Bantustanning the aboriginals all over the world: The Indians in America, the aboriginals in Australia, the blacks in South Africa, and the Palestinians in Palestine.
From 1966 tape of President Lyndon Johnson: “I know we oughtn’t to be there [in Vietnam], but I can’t get out.” And he never did. And thousands more troops would die before Johnson left office. (Washington Post, March 12, 2006)
The Germans had Lebensraum. Americans had Manifest Destiny.
chinks, gooks, wogs, towelheads, ragheads — some of the charming terms used by American soldiers to describe their foes in Asia and the Middle East
In June, 2005, Cong. Duncan Hunter (Rep.-CA) held a news conference concerning Guantánamo. Displaying some tasty traditional meals, he said the government spends $12 a day for food for each prisoner. “So the point is that the inmates in Guantánamo have never eaten better, they’ve never been treated better, and they’ve never been more comfortable in their lives than in this situation.” (Scripps Howard News Service, June 28, 2005, Reg Henry column)
Vice President Dick Cheney: Guantánamo prisoners are well treated. “They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.” (CNN.com, June 23, 2005)
“[Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld said Guantánamo’s operations have been more open to scrutiny than any military detention facility in history.” (Associated Press, June 14, 2005)
“Their ‘coalition of the willing’ [in Iraq] meant the US, Britain, and the equivalent of a child’s imaginary friends.” Paul Loeb, Truthout, June 16, 2005
Nobody has ever suggested that Serbia attacked or was preparing to attack a member of NATO, and that is the only event which justifies a military reaction under the NATO treaty, such as the 1999 78-day bombing of Serbia.
Rumsfeld re Chinese military buildup: “Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment?” (New York Times, June 6, 2005
Rumsfeld re Venezuelan major weapons buildup: “I don’t know of anyone threatening Venezuela, anyone in this hemisphere.” (Washington Post, October 3, 2006) [Is it possible that the response to both points raised is the same? A country in North America bordering on Mexico?]
The failure of the United Nations — as an institution and its individual members — to unequivocally oppose and prevent the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 can well be called “appeasement”.
The Iraqi Kurds generally sided with Iran during the 1981-88 Iraq-Iran war; helped the United States before and during its bombing of Iraq in 2003 and during its occupation; and most Kurds don’t identify with being Iraqi according to polls.
One of the military judges at Guantánamo said: “I don’t care about international law. I don’t want to hear the words ‘international law’ again. We are not concerned with international law.” (Democracy Now, April 12, 2005)
George W. Bush, re al Qaeda types: “Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country. And we will help them rid Iraq of these killers.” (Baltimore Sun, May 6, 2004)
“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.” Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense and unindicted war criminal (Chicago Tribune, July 22, 2003)
Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran who bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people: “What occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time … The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel. … Many foreign nations and peoples hate Americans for the very reasons most Americans loathe me. Think about that.” (McVeigh’s letter to and interview with Rita Cosby, Fox News Correspondent, April 27 2001)
Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and unindicted war criminal: “Defense Department officials don’t lie to the public. … The Defense Department doesn’t do covert action, period.” (Washington Post, February 21, 2002)
The United States will “deal promptly and properly with the terrible abuses” of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers. “No country in the world upholds the Geneva Conventions on the laws of armed conflict more steadfastly than does the United States.” Douglas Feith, Boston Globe, May 5, 2004
“The State Department plans to delay the release of a human rights report that was due out today, partly because of sensitivities over the prison abuse scandal in Iraq, U.S. officials said. One official who asked not to be identified said the release of the report, which describes actions taken by the U.S. government to encourage respect for human rights by other nations, could ‘make us look hypocritical’.” (Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2004)
In the decades after 1945, as colonial possessions became independent states, it was widely believed that imperialism as a historical phenomenon was coming to an end. However, a new form of imperialism was in fact taking shape, an imperialism not defined by colonial rule but by the global capitalist market. From the outset, the dominant power in this imperialism without colonies was the United States.
Francis Boyle re the capture and public display of Saddam Hussein: “This is the 21st century equivalent of the Roman Emperor parading the defeated barbarian king before the assembled masses so that they might all shout in unison: Hail Caesar!”
The US-provided textbooks in Nicaragua after the US-instigated defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 carefully excluded all mention of Augustino Sandino as a national hero. (Z magazine, November, 1991)
“Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: ‘If you want your family released, turn yourself in.’ Such tactics are justified, he said, because, ‘It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.’ They would have been released in due course, he added later. The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.” (Washington Post, July 28, 2003) [This is illegal under international law; in ordinary parlance we’d call it a kidnapping with ransom; in war, it’s the collective punishment of civilians and is forbidden under the Geneva Convention]
“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Americans, who up until now had been so valued for their pragmatism, have become ideologues, ‘Bolsheviks’ of the Right, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit once described them.” (Jean-Marcel Bouguereau, concerning Iraq, Le Nouvel Observateur, September 8, 2003)
Six months after its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration defended its policy on the basis of schools and hospitals opening and strides made in providing water and electricity. (Washington Post, September 25, 2003) — These are all things 12 years of US bombing and sanctions had destroyed.

—————————–
Notes
Camp Bondsteel entry on Wikipedia ↩
Washington Post, January 27, 2012 ↩
Reuters, July 31, 2012 ↩
Associated Press, July 6, 2012 ↩
–

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

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The Pentagon Pathology

A CounterPunch Special Report on Military Spending
The Pentagon Pathology
by GABRIEL KOLKO

US Air Force
The allocation of money within the American military system is reflected in which weapons are chosen—and why. What is at stake are rivalries among military branches, which have influence and connections with arms producers, the Congress, and the entire complex matrix of factors that determine who wins and loses in the Pentagon budget process. The United States has, by far, the largest military budget of any nation on earth but it also loses wars, cannot procure everything the military services dream up, and ultimately it too must choose between weapons at the expense of the priorities and demands of other services.

In plain English, if the Air Force gets an ultra-modern aircraft which may cost many billions, even trillions, and takes years to iron out the technology (and may ultimately even never operate) there will be less money for the Army and Navy to attain its dreams—or visa versa.

Here some historical background is in order.

In April 1950 the U. S. National Security Council (NSC) produced a policy paper, which remained top secret until 1975, which discussed a wide range of crucial national security problems, and among many things led to the creation of H-bombs. One of its major conclusions was that the American and Western European economies faced the danger of a slowdown unless the governments spent more. The Congress still had members who wanted to balance the budget, and it and the public did not adequately appreciate that the Cold War would continue and require yet greater efforts. There are many contingencies at play, ranging from a roll-back of Communism in Eastern Europe to the need for the U.S. to be ready to negotiate with the Soviets under certain circumstances. There was an excessively simplistic view of what the U.S.S.R’s ultimate objectives were, an utterly inadequate view of the Sino-Soviet relationship, and the weaknesses in the Soviet system that ultimately led to the complete disappearance of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. The NSC report advocated “a substantial increase in expenditures for military purposes,” and up to $50 billion was later agreed upon. The original Pentagon budget for 1950 was $13 billion. The outbreak of the Korean War the following June reinforced the NSC’s worst assumptions about Soviet intentions, blaming it for the war but ignoring the extent to which the North Koreans, like Tito in Yugoslavia or the Chinese, were independent actors. The Pentagon’s budget became the backbone of the American economy in the late 1940s, and has been crucial ever since.

In this context, the controversy over the Air Force’s B-36 bomber broke out, pitting the Air Force against the Navy, which wanted the money the Air Force was getting for the B-36 to build super-carriers. The fight between the Air Force and Navy went public, with the Navy even arguing that the B-36, which carried nuclear weapons, was “morally reprehensible,” an argument that the Air Force called cynical, since super-carriers could also deliver nuclear weapons and even then the Navy was developing the Polaris submarine, which carried mainly strategic nuclear bombs. The Navy–with the help of some elements of the Air Force, who wanted the bomber money for tactical fighters, and competitive airframe producers–played too dirty for the Truman Administration. Some of its spokesmen pointed out that the contract for the B-36 airframe would go to Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company, which needed the contract to bail out its sinking economic fortunes. The Secretary of Defense at the time had once been a member of Vultee’s board of directors. Truman was eventually to fire at least one senior Naval officer over this affair.

Are the military officers merely fronts for competitive aerospace firms anxious to get contracts? Private corporations often take the initiative, investing their own funds in the process, for military innovations they then present to the services, which then underwrite the development of some of them. The B-36 eventually ended as scrap after billions were spent developing it. Closing its bases—any bases for that matter—had to confront the resistance of Congressmen from the districts the bases were located in. There were 225 military bases in the U.S. at the beginning of the 1960s, about a quarter of which the Department of Defense deemed useless. Resistance to closing them was intense; most have remained operational.

Right before September 11, 2001, China was slated to be the main problem facing the U.S., but after the attacks China became far less important than “terrorism,” a nebulous category that displace “Communism” from being the main American enemy. This move produced some confusion in the ranks. The Pentagon needs an enemy to justify its vast spending, and “terrorism” sufficed until the past few years, when the U.S. military declared it had won victories in Iraq and Afghanistan—which it, of course, did not—and began pulling out.

Only in 2012, when it was far more powerful and had much more economic as well as military might, was China revived as a potential enemy with President Obama’s “pivot” towards Asia. The very same people who conjured up the alleged Chinese menace for Rumsfeld did so for Obama. Many in the Pentagon. particularly in the Army and Marines, who fear the strategy being conjured up for a potential conflict with China will sidelined them, deplore it as one that would result in “incalculable human and economic destruction.” The Air Force and Navy see it as justification for their very expensive projects. Merely considering the concept of a contest with China is like playing with fire; but because it brings in money then the Navy and Air Force have promoted it. It is probable that a conflict elsewhere will make the assumptions underlying an Air-Sea Battle (which is war with China), a notion that becomes abstract, of lower priority. On the other hand, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments is run by Andrew Marshall, who was the leading hawk on China for Bush and now is advising the Obama Administration. Marshall has the power to allocate up to $19 million in study grants to assorted think tanks, who thereby have a huge financial incentive to tell him what he wants to hear and keep the money coming. Some of these outside “thinkers,” get enormous incomes.

War with China is a quixotic idea, and it could go nuclear. The Navy has a super-modern destroyer on the drawing boards, already in production but the technology in it is only partially developed (and like other technologically ultra-modern projects is likely to take years to perfect in some form or another), the DDG-1000, which is also very expensive (up to seven billion dollars each if research and development is included), and has already been cut from the 32 that originally were to be ordered to seven, and now only three are being built. Some defense experts think it’s a waste of money that could be better allocated elsewhere in the Navy. A senior Chinese Navy officer has already dismissed the DDG-1000 and outlined a way to sink it. But China I have predicted that the so-called Pacific pivot–which is supposed to take 10 years to complete–is simply talk and China is unlikely to be the U.S.’ main focus in 2022. The U.S. is now active in the Middle East, Africa, and many places besides the Pacific. Where will it be 10 years from now? No one knows, the Pentagon included. If a nation has global ambitions then it could become involved in a crisis anywhere.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought that a modern American military’s “shock and awe” capacity would prevail—but he was oblivious to the political aspects of all conflicts. And the political context of a war can be decisive. The U.S. always has superior military power, even if it pays far too much for it, but military superiority is irrelevant to inherited ethnic tensions in nations or with decentralized subsistence economies. The existence of threats, whether Communist or “terrorist” is essential to justify the Pentagon’s vast budgets. By now, that budget, however its divided, is an aspect of the basic American identity. It has too many well-connected basic interests supporting it, ranging from members of the House and Senate, companies dependent on military contracts and unions in arms factories.

The B-36 was supposed to be super-modern and do things that earlier bombers could not. For about a decade it was the backbone of the Strategic Air Command, when almost all of the 384 built were scrapped. The B-36 was conceived in early 1941, intended to bomb Nazi Germany, but after 1945 it was intended to bomb the U.S.S.R. Fortunately it never dropped any nuclear devices or did any of the things it was designed for. Some experts thought it “arguably obsolete from the outset.” The bomber had terrible accidents, including some crashes in which nuclear weapons were involved. It was a total waste of money but the Air Force would not admit it, so the B-36 stayed in service for 10 years. Until the intercontinental strategic missile was developed, it was the only means the Air Force had to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union.

The problem of super-modern planes—such as the F-35, also called the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), of which Lockheed-Martin is the principal contractor and cost from $197 to $238 million each (depending on the model)—is that they often incorporate technology that has yet to be developed or they have performance kinks which emerge that must be investigated. Some are resolved fairly quickly, but the F-35 remains plagued by problems. The Air Forces plans to buy about 2,400 jets for the U.S. alone, serving as the nations’ main tactical fighter until about 2040. It is also set to become NATO’s main tactical fighter. Over its 50-year lifetime, the U S alone will pay about one trillion dollars for all the F-35s, perhaps more.

There is a Pentagon study that the maintenance cost alone of the F-35 over its lifetime may be another one trillion dollars. Even the Pentagon would like to reduce this immense figure. It is an astonishing sum for a tactical fighter that cannot do much more than those the Air Force already has and may turn out to be completely useless. But the Air Force in this case reflects a pathology and culture that is expressed in spending more money regardless. All that is certain is that the F-35 will run up the U. S. debt.

The JSF has been criticized as too heavy, too expensive (its price is always rising), unable to cope with modern air defenses, and the like. Some have argued that the existing fleet of tactical aircraft is quite adequate. It has not been produced for actual use yet–late 2015 is the earliest date given for delivery—and that date is probably too optimistic.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in January 2011 depricated “the culture of endless money“ that the ever-more expensive JSF fighter reflected, and talked about the possibility of canceling the whole program. But Gates’ successor, Leon Panetta, thought the JSF2–the most disputed and technically sophisticated of the variations of the basic JSF –had made “sufficient progress.”

But the JSF project has been characterized by delays. The first jet rolled off the production line in February 2006. But like most sophisticated, complex technologies, the production runs and redesigns take many years to complete projects, during which time the world political-military context can change radically and render the assumptions used to procure a specific weapon outdated. Because of delays, a weapon that costs a fortune can be useless even before it is finished. The B-36 is a good example.

Predictably, serious cost overruns and delays have caused some nations who originally intended taking the JSF in some form to balk at the increased costs inherent in fighters that incorporate technology that still doesn’t exist, also revealing the disunity inherent in the U. S.’s strategic alliances.

It is an ingrained Air Force habit to innovate by relying on ultra-modern technologies, which have frequently yet to be made functional, and to spend money rather than being practical. The Pentagon looses major wars, politically if not militarily. It requires another mindset. But if the past is any precedent, it will certainly not find one.

The U.S. has imperial ambitions and illusions, which are used to justify spending money, but the service branches also have interests in getting weapons at each other’s expense. Ultimately, however, even Pentagon spending has it limits. These constraints foster inter-service rivalries. There is never enough money to satisfy all of their dreams, which often requires new technologies. There is a complexity about U.S. military policy, mainly caused by a combination of technological fetishism and American chauvinism, that befuddles anyone who tries to assess it and determine the real causes of actions—it often perplexes me too. The U. S. military has immense confidence in the prowess of advanced arms and its abilities, and its failures in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have not altered the Pentagon’s belief in its own superiority. But the U.S. military brass refuses to really internalize the fact that other nations are ahead of it in some of the most important aspects of modern warfare. China may already match or exceed it. For example, the U. S. has about 1,000 cyber-security experts but needs at least twenty times that number.

This complexity affects those who are critics of America’s policies but also produces fatal illusions among those who have power, illusions which often require a great deal of money. Determining what the Pentagon branches do that is self-serving or based on false premises—or even both—is very difficult. The only consequence for critics is that they may be inaccurate. People in power can load the system with more debts, false premises that lead to yet more mistaken decisions, military engagements, or even both—and have much more serious consequences.

In any case, priorities are determined by who has power, and here I want to show how this process leads to the neglect of obtaining weapons that are more functional than those the Pentagon actually buys. Priorities are often decided by forces–political, interests, arms lobbies, etc.–and who has the clout required for obtaining what they think important. Rationality is impossible when a system, in this case the Pentagon, makes crucial decisions because a service branch has influence in Congress, vested corporate interests and arms manufacturers who lobby and oppose budget cuts, and the like to back up its expensive fantasies. The result is that the United States still undertakes military engagements based on the naïve premise that its weapons superiority can overcome the political weaknesses that bedeviled it in Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Impossibility of Practicality

On the whole, the Army is the least able of the three major services to obtain the funding it wants or needs. It is the very nature of the services that the largest development funding goes to the Air Force and Navy, where technological innovations are more common. The U.S. Army’s ultimate function is to win wars, including killing those who get in its way or want to thwart it. Yet, it has not won a war since 1946. It fought to a draw in Korea and lost in Vietnam. Wars are very complex and conventional armies alone tend not to win them. The U.S. Army is very conventional,

The basic American weapon, the assault rifle, now the M-16 and its variants. is not a functional gun. The Army has spent less money than the Air Force and Navy on expensive weapons, but this is only relative. It still has invested vast sums in other ground weapons, but its basic combat weapon is poor. Those in the Defense Department who write about the M-16’s inadequacies have not been able to get the Army to adopt a better weapon or bullets—the M-16, according to a writer in an official Army publication, has become like the “Holy Grail,” not to be criticized even though the Soviet-built AK-47, is better suited to fight in the very diverse environments that exist in Third World nations, where the U.S. fights most of its wars.

The U. S. Army has altered the basic infantry M-16 rifle and bullet, and tried to improve it, but these changes have still been unable to match the Soviet-designed AK-47 or its improvements, and both in Vietnam and Afghanistan some American soldiers have resorted to using captured AK-47s to get around the M-16’s liabilities—which include a propensity to jam because of a basic design flaw.

All factors considered, including the fact that the AK-47 is much cheaper than the M-l6 and its variants, there are now around 100 million AK-47s and variants of it in the world and only about eight million M-16 and its variants. Each has assets and liabilities, but the M-16s has major jamming problems that have often been fatal to American troops. It is far more complex than the AK-47. Though inferior to the M-16 in certain regards, the AK-47 is far easier to use. It is produced in countless nations, from Bangladesh to Togo, and even in the U. S. it has over a dozen manufacturers. “Good enough” is the justification for the AK-47’s simplicity and reliability. It is ubiquitous and is the weapon of choice of the U.S.’s enemies or potential opponents. “We are clearly outgunned,” a Defense Department analyst concludes in a recent issue of the Army’s MILITARY REVIEW.

Why is this? One would think that a military that spends so much money would have the best weapon possible. Technical fetishism? A lack of intelligence or bureaucratic inertia? All of them? Perhaps something else, like a lack of a firm with a sufficient vested interest and political influence to see a better weapon produced? Some critics of the Army who are within the Pentagon say that good replacements for the standard battle weapon already exist. Rather than dwell on this conundrum it is sufficient to remark that at the same time the U.S. has super-modern weapons its basic weapon is not adequate for its very ambitious goals.

This fact is a bit fantastic, and hard to believe. The U. S. wants to police the world and is building super-modern weapons, many of which either don’t work or they have design flaws that neutralize their effectiveness. The Pentagon’s budget is helping to bankrupt America, but it lacks a good basic weapon for its soldiers.

Myths run throughout America’s leadership, many reinforced by Congressional hawks who insist the Pentagon spend money, especially on weapons built by companies within their districts. There are Pentagon hawks too who need no pushing. But often Congress is even more hawkish than the military leaders. For example, the idea that the U. S. should be able to fight two wars simultaneously is a cherished notion of hawkish Congressmen, but President George W. Bush was compelled to add the Reserves to fight in Iraq. The American military in Iraq and Afghanistan never attained victory. The theory that they should do so in the future remains just a theory, if not a fantasy.

The problem is dealing with nuance: sometimes the advocates of higher spending are the defense industry and their lobbyists, sometimes the Congress—House and Senate. The defense industry is opposed to cuts because they want to sell arms. Boeing is predicting disaster if the Congress cuts military spending by a tenth, and the top five arms firms increased their spending on lobbying 11.5 percent in the first quarter of 2012 over the first quarter of 2011. But if we are compelled to categorize President Obama, he too is a hawk. In his January 5, 2012 speech in the Pentagon’s briefing room he talked of saving $450 billion from their budget over the next decade but also maintaining the ability to cope with any challenge. To Obama, this means investing in intelligence, surveillance, counterterrorism, and prevailing in all domains, assuring that the U. S. has a military that is “…ready for the full range of contingencies.”

This strategy is largely dependent on finding new technologies and that means more long-term contracts for defense firms. Aside from taking an unpredictable amount of time to develop (the American defense industry usually requires much time to create sophisticated technology, which generally cost much more than originally predicted), it also assumes that those who the U.S. deems potential enemies have no ability to find effective measures to get around the new American devices–the principles of which have been well advertised in advance.

The enduring problem is that the U.S. has retained its overweening ambitions and learned nothing from its failures over the past decades. If this seems a bit surrealistic it is because it is.

GABRIEL KOLKO is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. He can be reached at: kolko@counterpunch.org.

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OpEds: The CIA proxy war in Syria and the pro-imperialist “left”

By Alex Lantier, WSWS.ORG

Unsavory types, like this fellow supplied by Blackwater to fight against Gaddafi, are now a major component in the volatile mix complicating the Syrian situation. Their Godfathers are in Washington, London, Paris and Ankara.

Reports that US intelligence is giving covert assistance to “rebel” militias in Syria mark the latest stage in an escalating US campaign for an out-and-out takeover of the country.

Yesterday, as videos emerged showing Syrian “rebels” carrying out mass executions of soldiers captured in Aleppo, it was reported that US President Barack Obama had signed an order earlier this year authorizing US intelligence to aid anti-Assad forces. Washington is also helping to distribute weapons and money donated by its right-wing Middle East allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

These powers are not waging a struggle for democracy as part of the “Arab Spring”—the wave of revolutionary working class uprisings that toppled US-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt last year and terrified Washington and its Middle East allies. They are fighting a reactionary war to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and install a pro-US puppet regime in Damascus.

Washington has set up a “nerve center” for the Syrian insurgency in Adana, Turkey, the site of Incirlik Air Base, a major US military and intelligence installation only 60 miles north of the Syrian border. This region of southern Turkey is now a key transit point for weapons and pro-US foreign fighters traveling to fight in Syria.

The Syrian “rebels” largely act on operational instructions from Washington. US forces communicate regularly through their allies with “rebel” forces inside Syria, providing them with reports on Syrian troop movements to guide them on the ground.

Islamist fighters are pouring in to join the fighting in Syria from around the Middle East, including US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and the Islamist US puppet regime in Libya, as well as Algeria, Chechnya and Pakistan. Former US Special Operations officials told the press that many arrive with help from Al Qaeda in Syria, which relies on the services of “traffickers—some ideologically aligned, some motivated by the money.”

In the Orwellian world of the American media, no attempt is made to reconcile Washington’s claims that it is occupying Afghanistan simply to wage a “war on terror” against Al Qaeda with its de facto alliance with Al Qaeda in Syria.

Obama’s reassurance that the US is providing only “non-lethal assistance” to anti-Assad forces is a cynical lie. The US is waging a brutal civil war by proxy that has already cost tens of thousands of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Its goal is to install a US puppet regime in Damascus to isolate and prepare for war against Iran, remove a potential enemy of Israel, and advance a broader agenda of complete dominance of the Middle East by US imperialism. This agenda—pursued in the course of a decade of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and intensified after last year’s mass uprisings in North Africa with wars in Libya and Syria—is deeply unpopular in the working class in the United States and internationally.

Washington’s covert backing for the Syrian “rebels” lays bare the role of pro-imperialist pseudo-left groups—like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the US, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France—which have promoted the war in Syria. Their “leftism” amounts to nothing more than giving “left” justifications for the crimes of American and European imperialism.

The ISO openly declares its support for intervention. In an article by Yusuf Khalil and Lee Sustar in its Socialist Worker publication, it writes: “The increasing role of the armed struggle raises the question whether to accept arms and support from the West … While many in the Syrian revolutionary movement are opposed to US and Western intervention, they will take whatever help they can get.”

Such arguments, which never analyze the forces referred to as “revolutionary,” are stunningly cynical. When did the CIA, Islamic fundamentalism and the Turkish army brass become forces for liberation? In writing this way, the ISO makes clear that it speaks for the pro-imperialist faction of the “left” petty-bourgeoisie.

Its attempts to posture as a left-wing organization descend into absurdity. The main concern it raises about US intervention in Syria is that “US support will be aimed at promoting their people and marginalizing others, even if it means fragmenting the revolutionary forces.”

What “revolutionary forces” is Sustar talking about? They are a collection of militias including the CIA’s “people,” as he calls them, various Al Qaeda operatives, and the flotsam and jetsam of Syrian society that these forces have attracted to themselves. In seeking to conceal the reactionary character of these forces under the mantle of revolution, Sustar functions simply as one of the State Department’s more left-talking operatives.

Sustar goes on to praise the ISO as “principled anti-imperialists who have managed to walk and chew gum at the same time—to support the revolutions in Libya and Syria against dictatorial regimes, while at the same time opposing intervention by the US and its imperialist allies.”

This foul comment goes to the heart of the politics of the ISO and the entire petty-bourgeois pseudo-left. For Sustar, the ISO can “walk and chew gum” because it knows how to support imperialist wars while at the same time posturing as “left.”

The class orientation of an organization always finds its clearest expression in its international policy. In Syria, the ISO and its international co-thinkers are nothing less than political agencies of imperialism.

Alex Lantier is a senior political analyst with WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization.

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