Courtesy Vikram Dodd, crime correspondent, Guardian Unlimited

The government has been criticised by moderate Muslim groups for banning a controversial Muslim scholar from entering Britain and branding him an extremist.

The government confirmed to the Guardian that Yusuf al-Qaradawi had applied to come to the UK but had been refused.

The decision could hand the Tories a small political victory as the Conservative leader, David Cameron, last week called for his exclusion from the UK, saying Qaradawi was a “dangerous and divisive” preacher of hate.

But moderate British Muslim groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), are upset with the ban.

The Egyptian-born cleric wanted to come to the UK for medical treatment, his supporters say.

Qaradawi, who is banned from entering the United States, visited the UK in 2004 at the invitation of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, sparking protests from Jewish groups and gay people, who regard him as anti-Semitic and homophobic.

In the same year, the cleric defended suicide attacks on Israelis during a BBC interview, saying: “It’s not suicide, it is martyrdom in the name of God.”

Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary-general of the MCB, condemned the ban. He said the UK government had bowed to Zionist and neo-con pressure and pointed out that a Tory government had allowed Qaradawi to enter Britain several times.

Bari said Qaradawi was respected as a scholar throughout the Muslim world: “It is regrettable that the government has finally given way to these unreasonable demands spearheaded by the Tory leader whose government had, in fact, allowed Dr Qaradawi to visit the UK five times between 1995-97.

“I am afraid this decision will send the wrong message to Muslims everywhere about the state of British society and culture.

“Britain has had a long and established tradition of free speech, debate and intellectual pursuit. These principles are worth defending, especially if we would like to see them spread throughout the world.”

The Home Office said: “We can confirm that Al-Qaradawi has been refused a visa to visit the UK.

“The UK will not tolerate the presence of those who seek to justify any acts of terrorist violence or express views that could foster inter-community violence.”

10-8

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com
Looking Up: Normalizing air war from Guernica to Arab Jabour.

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. (“Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.”) Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:

“The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches. “In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad.”

And here’s paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:

“The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.’s.”

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up “an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq.”

Note that both pieces started with bombing news – in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days – those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad – simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration’s invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite, a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

For those who know something about the history of air power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at the heart of the American Way of War, that 100,000 figure might have rung a small bell.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10 miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 100,000-pound barrage has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as “al Qaeda,” so in situations like this it’s hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer’s first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined “The Tragedy of Guernica” and called the assault “unparalleled in military history.” (Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

The self-evident barbarism of the event – the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population – caused international horror. It was news across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Picasso’s Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of art.

As Ian Patterson writes in his book, Guernica and Total War:

“Many attacks since then, including the ones we have grown used to seeing in Iraq and the Middle East in recent years, have been on such a scale that Guernica’s fate seems almost insignificant by comparison. But it’s almost impossible to overestimate the outrage it caused in 1937. Accounts of the bombing were widely printed in the American press, and provoked a great deal of anger and indignation in most quarters.”

Those last two tag-on paragraphs in the Parker and Rasheed Los Angeles Times piece tell us much about the intervening 71 years, which included the German bombing of Rotterdam and the blitz of London as well as other English cities; the Japanese bombings of Shanghai and other Chinese cities; the Allied fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities; the U.S. atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold War era of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in which two superpowers threatened to use the ultimate in airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the massive, years-long U.S. bombing campaigns against North Korea and later North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the American air power “victories” of Gulf War I and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush administration’s shock-and-awe, air-and-cruise-missile assault on Baghdad in March 2003, which, though meant to “decapitate” the regime of Saddam Hussein, killed not a single Iraqi governmental or Baath Party figure, only Iraqi civilians. In those seven decades, the death toll and damage caused by war – on the ground and from the air – has increasingly been delivered to civilian populations, while the United States has come to rely on its Air Force to impose its will in war.

One hundred thousand pounds of explosives delivered from the air is now, historically speaking, a relatively modest figure. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a single air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf, did that sort of damage in less than a day and it was a figure that, as again last week, the military was proud to publicize without fear of international outrage or the possibility that “barbarism” might come to mind:

“From Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday the air wing flew 69 dedicated strike missions in Basra and in and around Baghdad, involving 27 F/A-18 Hornets and 12 Tomcats. They dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of ordnance, said Lt. Brook DeWalt, Kitty Hawk public affairs officer.”

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed there – in person or by satellite phone – to check out the damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it’s of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the “bombs” can be produced at approximately “the cost of a pizza,” (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just doesn’t have the ring of something that matters.

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon’s success in creating a dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. “Collateral damage” stands in for the civilian dead – even though in much of modern war, the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered “precisely” by “precision-guided” weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal. Army Col. Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference:

“The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons.”

Reports – often hard to assess for credibility – have nonetheless seeped out of the region indicating that there were civilian casualties, possibly significant numbers of them; that bridges and roads were “cut off” and undoubtedly damaged; that farms and farmlands were damaged or destroyed. According to Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press, for instance, Iraqi and American troops were said to have advanced into Arab Jabour, already much damaged from years of fighting, through “smoldering citrus groves.”

But how could there not be civilian casualties and property damage? After all, the official explanation for this small-scale version of a “shock-and-awe” campaign in a tiny rural region was that American troops and allied Iraqi forces had been strangers to the area for a while, and that the air-delivered explosives were meant to damage local infrastructure – by exploding roadside bombs and destroying weapons caches or booby traps inside existing structures. As that phrase “take out known threats before our ground troops move in” made clear, this was an attempt to minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi) troops by bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear in a situation in which local information was guaranteed to be sketchy at best. Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war in Iraq.

The ABCs of Air War in Iraq

So let’s focus, for a moment, on American air power in Iraq and gather together a little basic information you’re otherwise not likely to find in one place. In these last years, the Pentagon has invested billions of dollars in building up an air-power infrastructure in and around Iraq. As a start, it constructed one of its largest foreign bases anywhere on the planet about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. Balad Air Base has been described by Newsweek as a “15-square-mile mini-city of thousands of trailers and vehicle depots,” whose air fields handle 27,500 takeoffs and landings every month.

Reputedly “second only to London’s Heathrow Airport in traffic worldwide,” it is said to handle congestion similar to that of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. With about 140,000 tons a year of cargo moving through it, the base is “the busiest aerial port” in the global domains of the Department of Defense.

It is also simply massive, housing about 40,000 military personnel, private contractors of various sorts, and Pentagon civilian employees. It has its own bus routes, fast-food restaurants, sidewalks, and two PXs that are the size of K-Marts. It also has its own neighborhoods including, reported the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, “KBR-land” for civilian contractors and “CJSOTF” (Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force), “home to a special operations unit [that] is hidden by especially high walls.”

Radar traffic controllers at the base now commonly see “more than 550 aircraft operations in just one day.” To the tune of billions of dollars, Balad’s runways and other facilities have been, and continue to be, upgraded for years of further wear and tear. According to the military press, construction is to begin this month on a $30 million “state-of-the-art battlefield command and control system [at Balad] that will integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq.”

National Public Radio’s Defense Correspondent Guy Raz paid a visit to the base last year and termed it “a giant construction site. The sounds of construction and the hum of generators seem to follow visitors everywhere. Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base.”

This gargantuan feat of construction is designed for the military long haul. As Josh White of the Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in Iraq, there were five times as many U.S. air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started off with a literal bang from those 100,000 pounds of explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the 40,000 pounds of explosives, which got modest headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not the 16,500 pounds of explosives that White reports being used north of Baghdad in approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another 15,000 pounds of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour more recently. (And none of these numbers seem to include Marine Corps figures for Iraq, which have evidently not been released.)

Who could forget all the attention that went into the President’s surge strategy on the ground in the first half of last year? But which media outlet even noticed, until recently, what Bob Deans of Cox News Service has termed the “air surge” that accompanied those 30,000 surging troops into the Iraqi capital and environs? In that same period, air units were increasingly concentrated in and around Iraq. By mid-2007, for instance, the Associated Press was already reporting:

“[S]quadrons of attack planes have been added to the in-country fleet. The air reconnaissance arm has almost doubled since last year. The powerful B1-B bomber has been recalled to action over Iraq. Early this year, with little fanfare, the Air Force sent a squadron of A-10 ‘Warthog’ attack planes – a dozen or more aircraft – to be based at Al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq. At the same time it added a squadron of F-16C Fighting Falcons at Balad.”

Meanwhile, in the last year, aircraft-carrier battle groups have been stationed in greater numbers in the Persian Gulf and facilities at sites near Iraq like the huge al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar continue to be upgraded.

Even these increases do not tell the whole story of the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported recently that “the military’s reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq.” The use of such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfire-missile armed Predators, doubled in the first ten months of 2007 – with Predator air hours increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The Army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the same.

(American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for “hiding” behind civilian populations – in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting “collateral damage” on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for making civilians into “shields.” And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in our press. On the other hand, no one in our world considers drone warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed Reapers are generally “flown” by pilots stationed at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release their missiles against “anti-Iraqi forces” or the Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles from Nellis, put it:

“I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind yourself, ‘I’m not at the Nellis Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking to my bank, aren’t important anymore.'”

To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are not said to be “hiding” in distant deserts or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar’s Palace.)

Anyway, here’s the simple calculus that goes with all this: Militarily, overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the surge for much longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won’t be. Air Force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region. In Vietnam back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn, air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

From Barbarism to the Norm

The air war is simply not visible to most Americans who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is because American reporters, who have covered every other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look up.

It should be no surprise then that news of a future possible escalation of the air war was first raised by a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq and so couldn’t look up. In a December 2005 piece entitled “Up in the Air,” New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh suggested that “a key element of [any] drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”

After Hersh broke his story, the silence was deafening. Only one reporter, as far as I know, has even gone up in a plane – David S. Cloud of the New York Times, who flew in a B-1 from an unnamed “Middle Eastern airfield” on a mission over Afghanistan. Thomas Ricks traveled to Balad Air Base and did a superb report on it in 2006, but no reporter seems to have bothered to hang out with American pilots, nor have the results of bombing, missile-firing, or strafing been much recorded in our press. The air war is still largely relegated to passing mentions of air raids, based on Pentagon press releases or announcements, in summary pieces on the day’s news from Iraq.

Given American military history since 1941, this is all something of a mystery. A Marine patrol rampaging through an Iraqi village can, indeed, be news; but American bombs or missiles turning part of a city into rubble or helicopter gunships riddling part of a neighborhood is, at best, tag-on, inside-the-fold material – a paragraph or two, as in this AP report on the latest fighting in an undoubtedly well-populated part of the city of Mosul:

“An officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said three civilians were wounded and helicopters had bombarded buildings in the southeastern Sumar neighborhood, which has seen frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces that have led to a series of raids.”

The predictably devastating results of helicopters “bombarding” an urban neighborhood in a major Iraqi city, if reported at all, will be treated as just the normal “collateral damage” of war as we know it. In our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness (if, of course, you don’t happen to be an Iraqi or an Afghan on the receiving end), the stuff of largely ignored Air Force news releases. It is as unremarkable (and as American) as apple pie, and nothing worth writing home to mom and the kids about.

Maybe then, it’s time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those “precision” bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the “liberation” of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

In the meantime, brace yourself. Air war is on the way.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

[Note on Air-War Readings: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a study in December 2007 on the air war in Iraq, which can be read by clicking here (PDF file). Figures on the rising intensity of air power in that country can be found there – of a sort that the Washington Post only recently reported on. For some historical background on U.S. air power and the bombing of noncombatants, I suggest checking out Mark Selden’s “A Forgotten Holocaust.”

Those who, in these years, wanted to find out something substantive about the air war in Iraq had to look to independent sites on line. At Tomdispatch, I began writing on the air war in 2004. See, for instance, “Icarus (armed with Vipers) Over Iraq”; others have taken up the subject at this site since: See Dahr Jamail’s “Living Under the Bombs”; Nick Turse’s “Bombs Over Baghdad, The Pentagon’s Secret Air War in Iraq” and “Did the U.S. Lie about Cluster Bomb Use in Iraq” (both of which involved the sort of reporting, long distance, that American journalists should have been doing in Iraq); and Michael Schwartz’s “A Formula for Slaughter: The American Rules of Engagement from the Air,” among other pieces. On the air war in Afghanistan, see my “‘Accidents of War,’ The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power.”]

——-

10-7

Courtesy Juan Cole

The 2008 Republican race has left a bitter legacy of sloganeering against Muslims. It may well haunt the party this November.

For much of January, one might have thought that the Republican candidates for president were already competing against a single opponent. Not one called Hillary or Barack, but with a moniker even more chilling in the eyes of hard-line Republicans: Islamic fascism.

The American public, worried about mortgages, recession and a seemingly interminable war in Iraq, was unimpressed — those who fear-mongered the most about Muslim terrorists have faltered at the polls. Even the remaining front-runners, John McCain and Mitt Romney, have said bigoted things about Muslims and their religion. But Islamophobia as a campaign strategy has failed, and it may well come back to haunt the Republicans in the general election.

Back when the GOP presidential field was still flush with tough-talking right-wingers, no one was more outrageous in targeting Muslims than Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who suggested that Muslim terrorists inside America were plotting the imminent detonation of an atomic bomb on U.S. soil. How to prevent this Tom Clancy scenario? “If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo declared. “Because that’s the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do.”

That sort of wild-eyed bigotry only fuels the cycle of mistrust and vengeance. One can only imagine how much more difficulty Tancredo generated for U.S. diplomats attempting to explain to America’s Muslim allies why a presidential candidate was talking about nuking Islam’s holiest cities, the larger with a population nearly that of Houston.

But the failure of Islamophobia as a campaign strategy is no better illustrated than by the spectacular flame-out of Rudy Giuliani. Throughout his campaign (deep-sixed after his dismal showing in Tuesday’s Florida primary), the former New York mayor evoked the Sept. 11 attacks at an absurd rate. Giuliani and his advisors appeared to revel in demonizing Muslims. They also reveled in their own ignorance — never learning the difference between “Islamic” and “Muslim.”

“Islamic” has to do with the religion founded by the prophet Mohammed. We speak of Islamic ethics or Islamic art, as things that derive from the religion. “Muslim,” on the contrary, describes the believer. It would be perfectly all right to talk about Muslim terrorists, but calling them Islamic terrorists or Islamic fascists implies that the religion of Islam is somehow essentially connected to those extremist movements.

Giuliani complained that Democratic rivals “never mentioned the word ‘Islamic terrorist,’ ‘Islamic extremist,’ ‘Islamic fascist,’ ‘terrorist,’ whatever combination of those words you want to use, [the] words never came up.” He added, “I can’t imagine who you insult if you say ‘Islamic terrorist.’ You don’t insult anyone who is Islamic who isn’t a terrorist.”

But people are not “Islamic,” they are Muslim. And one most certainly does insult Muslims by tying their religion to movements such as terrorism or fascism. Muslims perceive a double standard in this regard: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would never be called “Christian terrorists” even though they were in close contact with the Christian Identity Movement. No one would speak of Christofascism or Judeofascism as the Republican candidates speak of Islamofascism. Muslims point out that persons of Christian heritage invented fascism, not Muslims, and deny that Muslim movements have any link to the mass politics of the 1930s in Europe.

Giuliani’s pledge to take the United States on an offensive against Islamic fascism, which he also said would be a long-term battle, failed to excite the imagination of voters. It may well have alarmed them in a way different from what Giuliani intended: If, by Giuliani’s logic, the United States is only on the “defensive” now, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what would being on the offensive look like? Would Giuliani have started four wars? Interestingly, Giuliani did especially poorly in Florida among retired and active-duty military personnel.

Giuliani was also hurt when the co-chair of his veterans’ campaign in New Hampshire, John Deady praised Giuliani for being able to stop “the rise of the Muslims,” an effort necessary to continue, he said, until “we defeat them or chase them back to their caves, or, in other words, get rid of them.” When asked if he was really condemning all members of the religion, Deady replied, “I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims.” Deady was forced to resign after a video of his remarks was put on the web by the Guardian. Other Giuliani advisors have had some bigoted things to say about Muslims as well. Rep. Peter King of New York complained that “unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country.” Daniel Pipes, a professional Islamophobe advising Giuliani, once said it would be dangerous to let American Muslims vote.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has done well among evangelicals but has had difficulty attracting votes from other segments of the Republican Party, had a revealing response to the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. “I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he said. He added, “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.” In fact, there are almost no Pakistani illegal aliens to speak of in the United States. Only 13 percent of the estimated 12 million persons in the United States illegally are estimated to be Asian, but almost all of them are East Asian. Pakistani and Indian immigrants, moreover, are among the wealthiest immigrants in the country.

Current GOP front-runner John McCain has been prone to hyperbole and has let some bigoted statements escape his lips as well. He has said that the threat from Islamic extremism is greater than the one presented by the Soviet Union. Recently, McCain proclaimed, “I’m not interested in trading with al-Qaida. All they want to trade is burqas… “ The senator seemed to be relating the Muslim custom of veiling to terrorism. The Detroit Free Press, whose city has one of the largest Muslim populations, reported on Jan. 12 that McCain’s remarks were hurtful to American Muslims. “Local Muslims say that criticizing al-Qaida is legitimate, but wonder why he would make a snide remark about a dress? The remark was especially bothersome, some said, considering that McCain’s adopted daughter, Bridget McCain, is from one of the biggest Muslim countries, Bangladesh.” One would think that raising a daughter from the Muslim world in the United States today would be difficult enough, even without the adoptive father’s denigrating the customs of the women from that culture.

On another occasion, asked whether a Muslim candidate for president would be acceptable, McCain replied, “I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles … personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn’t mean that I’m sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don’t say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would — I just feel that that’s an important part of our qualifications to lead.”

But according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Secularists and Jews joined American Muslims in condemning McCain’s assertion that the United States was founded on Christian principles, and that Christian faith could be a key determinate for taking the Oval Office.

McCain’s misconceptions about Muslims and perceived hostility toward them predates his 2008 presidential campaign. In 2005, he said on “The Charlie Rose Show” that a Muslim had killed the Indian political and spiritual figure Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, the assassin belonged to a radical Hindu organization, the RSS.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has, like his peers, regularly invoked the dangers of “Islamic fascism.” He allegedly told one Muslim-American he would not put a Muslim in his Cabinet, since there were not enough Muslim-Americans to justify it. (Romney later denied the charge).

Why might all this rhetoric targeting Muslims be unwise? For one thing, allowing the Christian conservative base to set an agenda that demonizes Muslims contains the danger of turning off more moderate segments of the GOP and American voters at large. McCain’s comment on the importance of a president’s being Christian appeared to have backfired on him in precisely that way.

Moreover, Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans are swing voters in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. While they tended to vote for George W. Bush in 2000, by 2004 these groups overwhelmingly supported John Kerry, and the heavy-handed and bigoted rhetoric of the Republican candidates may drive them away from the GOP altogether.

The candidates who played to fears of “Islamic fascism” the most — Tancredo, Huckabee and Giuliani — failed to light any fire under partisans in the party, and they have now faded from the scene. But the campaign has already left behind a bitter legacy of sloganeering against a single religious and ethnic community.

The Republicans have repeatedly asserted that Islam has been perverted by radicals; their rhetoric effectively reduced American Muslims to second-class citizens and branded them as suspicious. Perhaps most worrisome of all: If any of the remaining candidates does win the presidency, he is going to have to cultivate close relations with Middle Eastern regimes to even begin resolving the mess in that region. And that president will have to do so saddled from the start with a legacy of denigrating Islam and Muslims.

10-7

Opinion by Jay B. Adams, AMPEC Contributor

I want to add some points about the unfortunate attitude in the country regarding Barack Obama. I’ve never met Senator Obama and probably never will. But, as a black man trying to make a positive impact in my own community, I had to speak up for his behalf. He is not the first viable black candidate to run for president of the US, but he is an exceptional man that I believe would do a great job leading this country. Before George Washington became president under the constitution of the US, John Hanson (a black man) served as president of this country from 1781-1782 and he was the one who originated the Great Seal of the United States that George Washington used which is currently on the back of the $1 bill. There are tributes to his history in Washington, D.C., which are said to show him with European traits rather than that of a black man. Do blacks even know or care about this point of history?

I prefaced that paragraph to say if a black man was president of this country in 1781, why the hell are well-educated black Americans stating that America is not ready for a black president in 2008? Why are they calling Bill Clinton the first black president? What is that about? Why are the elders of the black community so avidly against a young accomplished black man serving as the leader of this country? Did the Willie Lynch letter along with modern media work so well to last into the 21st Century? Everyone was certain that General Colin Powell would have been an easy win for president some years ago. Because Barack Obama doesn’t come through the approval of an established elite class of people in Washington, he is rocking the boat and will get all of (us people) in trouble. HOW DARE PEOPLE ALLOW THEIR IGNORANCE, FEAR AND THE MEDIA TURN THIS INTO AN ISSUE OF A PERSON’S RACE!!! HOW DARE ELDERLY BLACK MEN AND WOMEN FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA CHASTISE A BLACK MAN FOR DOING WHAT THEY SUNG AND DREAMED OF ACCOMPLISHING WHILE IN THE STREETS GETTING HOSED AND BEATEN…’WE SHALL OVERCOME’!!

He (Obama) believes along with his magnificent wife that he can overcome the hoses of hatred, the attack dogs of the media and the tear gas of prejudice to lead what many call the greatest country in the world. If this is problem, why even keep the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday functional? Give me a break black America!

Black women are leading the country in the category of single parenting homes. No positive role model of a man in sight. Yet, they don’t want to show to their sons and daughters that black men are and can be of great integrity and leadership in spite of the current circumstance by uplifting Barack Obama. I’ve heard many say that a white woman has to do it first and then maybe they’ll allow a black person to do it. What the??? Bitterness and anger, amongst other issues have turned black women against black men in an alarming manner (in my opinion). It sickens me that every time a black man or woman takes on a great challenge they have to be called the first black anything. Last I checked, (for the record) our skin is brown, tan, or even cream and our hair is black – the same as many other ethnicities. For some sad reason, this country has to lead the way in keeping everyone separate in some category. However, no matter the skin color, I believe the people of this great country will no longer continue to be swayed by the ignorance of evil and prejudice as it once was. IOWA, Nevada and South Carolina have proven that thus far. There is so much I want to say about this, but I will end with a few facts to ponder. Since those persons filled with divisiveness want to make reference to situations of leadership ability, let’s take a look at only a few historical points.

Here’s what all that ‘white experience’ has lead us to (whites and blacks claim Obama has no experience, I say he doesn’t need any)! Under the presidential leadership of white men:

1. Slavery of Blacks, Indians and Asians (Legal public hangings and lynchings of non-white men and women).

2.There was a Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War and the now infamous Operation Iraqi Freedom. Kill Saddam Hussein, but the leader (alleged Osama Bin Laden) of the attack on our country still goes free. What’s that about?

3. The Great Depression and now another recession.

4. The only use of a Nuclear Bomb on human beings by any country in world history.

5. The creation of the Federal Reserve Bank (you do the research).

6. Women, rather white or black, had no real equal rights in the work place until the second half of the 19th century.

7. The Genocide of African Nations, American-Indian Colonies.

8. CEOs making more money in one day then their employees make all year long.

9. NAFTA (American companies have left hundreds of thousand American people jobless by moving their businesses to foreign countries for cheaper labor and still getting American tax breaks).

10. Social Security funds have been slmost doomed for future generations.

11. Millions of Americans still have no healthcare and cannot get treatment as a result.

12. Blacks are leading the country in Foreclosures, HIV-Aids, Heart Disease, Premature deaths in newborns, Prison Inmates, Highest school drop out rates.

13. Native Americans are living on Reservations because of the obliteration of their people who were here prior to anyone else arriving to this land. How did that happen?

14. Lastly, the borders of this country have been left unprotected by the most powerfully equipped military in the world. Our military is protecting borders for countries around the world and Congress has debates on whether or not to have military personnel protecting border states. Remember 9/11? We now have millions of illegal aliens living in our country with many unknown to their cause for being here.

YET, AMERICA IS NOT READY FOR BARACK OBAMA? I BEG TO DIFFER.

10-7

By Nilofar Suhrawardy, MMNS

NEW DELHI – Diplomatic ripples are undeniably being created by increasing proximity of India’s ties with United States and Israel. Ahead of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ maiden visit to India, scheduled for later this month, Indian government has approved the biggest-ever arms deal with United States. The approval by the Cabinet Committee on Security includes purchase of six large transport planes at an estimated cost of one billion dollar, according to Defense Minister A.K. Antony. This is India’s third major arms deal with the US. The earlier ones include its purchase of 45,000 ton displacement USS Trenton, a shiplanding dock, now rechristened INS Jalashva for about $500 million. India and US had concluded three years ago a deal for purchase of seven weapon locating radar ANTPQ-37.

Taking Indo-Israel ties literally to a new height, TecSAR satellite, fabricated and operated by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) was launched on January 21 from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center, utilizing an Indian-fabricated rocket. This satellite system is to provide Israeli defense officials, for the first time, with the ability to independently track changes on the ground in regard areas regardless of the time of day or climatic conditions.

On the importance of satellite imagery in Israel’s efforts to keep track of developments in neighboring states, Institute for National Security Studies Program Director Brigadier General Shmuel Brom (retired) said: “Syria, it is less important because Syria is closer to Israel and Israel has other ways to cover Syria effectively, whether it is through other kinds of intelligence or by taking aerial photos, etc. So the satellites are mostly important for distant states such as Iran or Libya.”

This also raises speculations about the possible impact India’s increasing proximity with Israel is having on its ties with Iran. It may be noted, petroleum ministers of India and Pakistan are to visit Tehran later this month (February 14 and 16) for talks on the multi-billion dollar tripartite gas pipeline project to transport Iranian gas to India via Pakistan. India has faced US pressure to pull out of the project to sanction Iran.

The strengthening of India’s defense and aerospace ties with Israel may serve as an irritant in development of Indo-Iranian relations.

Though the much-publicized India-US civilian nuclear deal is yet to be finalized, there is little doubt, it is viewed as opening of a new chapter in their bilateral ties. The present Indian ambassador to US, Ronen Sen, is also credited with having played a significant role in development of the deal. With his tenure ending on March 31, Sen has formally declined its extension. This has raised speculations on who could be his successor, with the seat being known as a “hot seat.” With his successor also expected to be a strong supporter of the India-US nuclear deal, among the strong contenders for this post is Shyam Saran, who is at present special envoy on the nuclear deal. Another person short listed for the post is high commissioner to Pakistan Satyabrata Pal.

Without doubt, multi-dimensional impact of the India-US nuclear deal, even though it has not yet been finalized, cannot be ignored. The latest developments are labeled as signs of Delhi swinging in favor of India-US-Israel alliance. Though India has not absolutely sacrificed its ties with Russia, there is little doubt that it has given greater importance to strengthening its relations with US as well as Israel.

Describing the Indo-US nuclear deal as strategically essential for India’s future growth, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said: “When computers were introduced, we faced opposition. Now the nuke deal is also being opposed. But we must remember that we are a part of this plant, we cannot live in isolation.” He was addressing 176th annual general meeting of Calcutta Chamber of Commerce in Kolkata (February 2).

Nevertheless, the Indian government has not been oblivious of the opposition of the Left parties to the Indo-US nuclear deal. India is, however, hopeful of winning the Left parties support by convincing them that Delhi is keen on nuclear cooperation with Washington as well as Beijing. It is to sell Indo-US nuclear deal to the Left that the Indian Congress has presented Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to China (January 13-15) as a sign of country’s independent foreign policy. “The Prime Minister’s successful visit to China has proved once again that India has evolved a strong and independent foreign policy. A policy that we are proud to espouse,” the Congress says in editorial note of the latest issue of party mouthpiece, “Congress Sandesh.” The note also says: “Those who accused the Prime Minister of following a pro-American policy and have made a huge issue of the Indo-US relationship encircling China should examine their postures in the light of China’s willingness to carry out civilian nuclear cooperation with India if we are able to put in place a nuclear agreement with the IAEA and the NSG.”

10-7

By Haroon Siddiqui, The Toronto Star

Blaming Pakistan for the mess in Afghanistan is to get the equation backwards.

Pakistan has problems galore, and they are getting worse by the day. The jihadist insurgency there, with mounting attacks on the army and suicide bombings against civilians, is a spillover from Afghanistan, not the other way around.

The problems of Afghanistan thus have to be resolved mostly in Afghanistan – just as the problems of invaded Iraq have to be resolved mostly in Iraq, not in Iran or Syria.

John Manley’s panel on our Afghan mission seems to understand, offering some nuanced observations.

“The crisis in Pakistan, which shares a lawless border with Afghanistan, adds new danger and confusion to Afghanistan’s future.”

It does. In fact, “Pakistan’s own political disarray magnifies the destabilizing threat of the insurgency both to Pakistan and Afghanistan.” (Emphasis mine).

“The conflict in Afghanistan is a continuation of almost three decades of war involving many of the same players, not all of which are Taliban.” Correct.

During the 1980-88 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Pakistan provided a haven to the mujahideen, who used the same porous border to drive out the Soviets. Al Qaeda, including its foreign recruits, and the Taliban are by-products of that enterprise, which was paid for by the U.S. and its allies.

Manley: “The (current Afghan) insurgency benefits from easy resort to safe havens in Pakistan, where it is refinanced, rearmed and replenished with new recruits, including those from other countries.”

Equally, “the insurgency receives external support and financial assistance from a number of global actors, including private sources in the Gulf states, as well as support from alienated local tribes, opium producers and other criminal elements within Afghanistan.”

Here, then, is the big picture:

The Taliban are Pushtuns who live on both sides of the border. Pakistan, therefore, is home to Taliban and Al Qaeda sympathizers.

Pakistan does not deny that the inaccessible border areas may have Taliban/Al Qaeda sanctuaries, and also be the hiding places of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

That leaves two main arguments.

Is Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistan army’s super-secret agency, aiding and abetting the Taliban and Al Qaeda officially or at the behest of rogue elements within?

There is no proof of either but there are accusations galore.

Another argument is over what, exactly, President Pervez Musharraf can do to control the border.

He committed 90,000 soldiers and lost 900. That’s more than double the contributions and sacrifices of all NATO nations combined.

That death toll prompted him to strike peace deals with the tribal leaders. But the deals backfired. The jihadists used the lull to intensify the insurgency.

Their quarrel with him is not that he’s a dictator but rather that he is doing America’s bidding in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At the other end of the Pakistani domestic political spectrum, Iftikhar Chaudhry, the fired chief justice, also excoriated him for, among other things, copying Bush’s tactics: holding terrorism suspects outside the purview of the law.

As for the notion of covert American action or open military intervention in Pakistani tribal areas – as hinted at by Stéphane Dion and clearly enunciated by Barack Obama – it’s a non-starter.

A poll by the U.S. Institute of Peace has found that 80 per cent of Pakistanis oppose the idea. And 84 per cent consider the U.S. military presence in the region a far greater threat to Pakistan than either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

So Musharraf knows whereof he speaks when he says: “I challenge anybody coming into our mountains. They would regret that day.”

None of this is to give him a pass for his increasingly autocratic ways, leading up to the Feb. 18 election. Rather it is to point to the futility of scapegoating Pakistan for the West’s failures in Afghanistan.

Here’s Manley’s main point: “Canada, in concert with key allies, should adopt a coherent diplomatic strategy that addresses regional risks and engages all the region’s actors, in particular Pakistan.”

Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca.

10-7

By Zeeshan Bakhsh

Ethnicity, sectarianism and economic instability are fundamental variables of internal security threats to Pakistan. The claim of religious extremism creates a poor image of Pakistan in the eyes of the rest of the world and has affected the country adversely. Also, inter-provincial grievances could cause serious damage to Pakistan. The biggest cause of these grievances is the need for resources in the provinces even though these resources are being produced in different areas of the country. Each province believes that their share is being given to others; causing conflict and hostility. The people of the different provinces then accuse each other and show violent behavior towards each other.

Despite recent economic recovery and sound macro economic policies, the absence of genuine socio-economic development has provided ethno-sectarian elements and regional forces grounds to exploit and weaken Pakistan internally. The Pakistani stock market has therefore crashed. We had a historical boom of our stock market last year and then due to security threats we saw the biggest fall. This stopped development and caused unemployment, poverty and inflation.

The Pakistani Government is claiming their foreign reserves have increased in the past years. Is this the reality or just the fudging of facts? What do Pakistani people think about it? Are they getting the basic needs at their door step or do they have to go to great lengths to find them? Do they feel secure in Pakistan or is there any element of insecurity among them especially after the current wave of suicidal attacks in the country? What are they planning for the future? Do they still want to stay here or want to leave at their earliest convenience?

Lahore, Punjab; also known as peace, liberty, sovereignty, freedom and harmony, also known as the land of saints and Oliya Karaam. The same place now presents the picture of terrorism, violence, intimidation, aggression, hostility, instability, and insecurity. This panic and chaos started from our Northern areas after 9/11 when we started helping the allied forces. Our tribal leaders refused to work in favor of the allied forces and they started a movement against them and in favor of the Taliban. Therefore, when our government started targeting tribal public along with their well wishers, they stood against the government as well. This was the start of suicidal attacks in Pakistan. This wave of fear came in Punjab after effecting tribal areas N.W.F.P, Karachi and then the Federal Capital Islamabad. But now Punjab is under the same threat especially after the suicide blast outside the Lahore High Court.

10th January, 2007 was a day of fear and panic for the people of Lahore who were not used to such things before. 25 people died and around 70 were injured in this suicide attack in front of the Lahore High Court. The objective of the attackers is still in question as to whether its target was law enforcement agencies or the lawyers. Moreover, this could have been done to create terror in the city.

There was a time when mothers proudly sent their sons to work but now days after seeing them off they sit on the prayer rug start praying for their safety. The shopkeepers used to keep their shops open until late hours but now they feel apprehensive to continue their businesses into the night; they prefer to lose significant business rather than their lives. At the time the customers feel anxious and avoid shopping until absolutely necessary because of the current security situation. For example Karachi is our industrial and economic hub from where we have earned huge foreign reserves. Unfortunately after the incidents of May 12th and October 18th, 2007 the karachittes have to think hard on how to make Karachi light up again.

If the situation remains the same the foreign investors will lose their interest and at the same time we will also lose the confidence of foreign donor agencies. As a cause of this fright our imports and exports are also decreasing rapidly. Another dilemma is strikes that have disturbed the whole economy of the country. Internal growth is also tripping over due to scarcity, inflation and idleness and these things cause inferiority complex among the people which they exhale in the form of violence. These are not the actual threats in the country but because of the lack of these we are facing security threats. The immediate requirement is to introduce political, economic and educational reforms and take bold initiatives to obviate present and future threats.

Government should make sure the implementation of the rule of law, Proper recovery of taxes also try to illuminate regional disparities.

10-7

Courtesy Chalmers Johnson

The military adventurers of the George W Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room”, the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neo-conservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous

expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries.

Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay – or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures – so-called “military Keynesianism”, which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call “opportunity costs”, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs – an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.

The current fiscal disaster
It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account Bush’s two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says, “A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it.”

Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defense budget is “black”, meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand – including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense and the military-industrial complex – but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense.

In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch somewhat closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalized either department for ignoring the law. The result is that all numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released to the press on February 7, 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4 billion for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment.

They also agree on a figure of $141.7 billion for the “supplemental” budget to fight the global “war on terror” – that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4 billion to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional “allowance” (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50 billion to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This comes to a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5 billion.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the American military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt, and Pakistan).

Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and reenlistment incentives for the overstretched US military itself, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50% of which goes for the long-term care of the grievously injured among the at least 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and another 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing as well from this compilation is $1.9 billion to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; $38.5 billion to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6 billion for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200 billion in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings US spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008), conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism
Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth.

Unfortunately, that statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU’s 2006 GDP (gross domestic product – all goods and services produced domestically) was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US However, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world’s fourth-richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we’re doing can be found among the “current accounts” of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income.

For example, for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88 billion per year trade surplus with the United States and enjoys the world’s second-highest current account balance. (China is number one.) The United States, by contrast, is number 163 – dead last on the list, worse than countries like Australia and the United Kingdom that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5 billion; second worst was Spain at $106.4 billion. This is what is unsustainable.

It’s not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On November 7, 2007, the US Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world.

The world’s top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:

1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
6. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
7. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
8. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
9. India (2005 est.), $19 billion
10. Saudi Arabia (2005 est.), $18 billion

World total military expenditures (2004 est.), $1,100 billion
World total (minus the United States), $500 billion.

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration’s policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology and have now become entrenched in our democratic political system where they are starting to wreak havoc. This ideology I call “military Keynesianism” – the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the Cold War. During the late 1940s, the US was haunted by economic anxieties. The Great Depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of World War II. With peace and demobilization, there was a pervasive fear that the Depression would return.

During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR’s European satellites, the US sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging Cold War. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated April 14, 1950, and signed by president Harry S Truman on September 30, 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the United States pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: “One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living.”

With this understanding, American strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment as well as ward off a possible return of the Depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what president Dwight D Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of February 6, 1961: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.” That is, the military-industrial complex.

By 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in American manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide.

On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the global forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. Needless to say, the US economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a baseline scenario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker concluded:

It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

Hollowing out the American economy
It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s, it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities.

Historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all American research talent was siphoned off into the military sector. It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used.

They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly skilled jobs within the American economy.

The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the American preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the Cold War. Melman wrote (pages. 2-3):

From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000 billion on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.

In an important exegesis on Melman’s relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes:

According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools – an industry on which Melman was an authority – are a particularly important symptom.

In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed (page 186) “that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in US industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States’ machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of World War II. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry.

Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment – from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world’s “lone superpower” has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written:

Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over … the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone.

Some of the damage done can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, just published in paperback. It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

(For those interested, click here to view a clip from a new film, Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony, in Cinema Libre Studios’ Speaking Freely series in which he discusses “military Keynesianism” and imperial bankruptcy.)

(Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch.)

Omar A. Khan, M.D., MHS, Receives 2007 Pfizer Teacher Development Award

Omar A. Khan, M.D., MHS, a member of Christiana Care’s Department of Family & Community Medicine and a faculty member of the Department’s Residency Program, received the American Academy of Family Physicians Foundation’s 2007 Pfizer Teacher Development Award for scholastic achievement, leadership qualities and dedication to family medicine.

The award each year recognizes a select group of community-based physicians who have chosen to teach family medicine on a part-time basis and provides funding for each recipient to attend a seminar, workshop or fellowship to further his or her development and teaching skills.

Dr. Khan received his BA and MA degrees in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania; his M.D. degree from the University of Vermont College of Medicine; and his MHS degree in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins University. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont Residency Program and is currently teaching at the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Christiana Care Health System.

Dr. Khan serves as faculty and led the Global Health education program for Family Medicine residents at the University of Vermont and as chair of the Publications Board for the American Public Health Association (APHA) and volunteers locally and globally. He is a volunteer emergency relief physician for the Delaware Medical Reserve Corps. As a member of Project Bangladesh, Dr. Khan is part of a group of U.S.-based physicians who volunteer their time to build the capacity of a primary care clinic in one of the larger slum areas of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Dr. Khan is a past recipient of APHA’s Executive Director’s Citation; The Gold Foundation’s Humanism in Medicine Award; and the Resident Teacher of the Year Award by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine.

The AAFP Foundation (AAFP/F), which administers the Pfizer Teacher Development Award, is the philanthropic arm of the 94,000-member American Academy of Family Physicians. The AAFP/F supports programs which benefit people’s health care delivery such as initiatives to raise immunization rates in children, opportunities for residents to promote mother/child relationships through the gift of a rocking chair, and research training opportunities for residents and medical students.

Cleveland Mosque struggles to find an Imam

CLEVELAND, OK –The Islamic Center of Cleveland is struggling to find a spiritual leader three months after a Nebraska imam bowed out under pressure from critics who accused him of anti-Semitism.

Leaders at the Parma mosque said there is a shortage of American-born imams who are Islamic scholars and fluent in Arabic.

“It’s very, very hard to find somebody like that,” said Ahmed Fellaque of the Council of Elders. “The ones who are good are not gettable.”

Zahid Siddiqi, mosque general secretary, said the center has interviewed a couple of candidates, but “so far, nothing has panned out.”

Pakistani-American group celebrates 10th anniversary

BILLERICA, MA–The Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America will mark its tenth anniversary this year.

The not-for-profit association with chapters in New England, Silicon Valley, Houston, Washington D.C. and New York is dedicated to supporting Pakistani professionals involved in technology, biotechnology, healthcare, finance and educational enterprises.

OPEN informally started in 1998 by seven Pakistani friends who found themselves always talking about the same things: business and politics.

“It started off as a networking group,” said Iftikhar Ahmad, the president of the board of the New England chapter. “Typically what happens in the South Asian communities are lots of social gatherings. When we first got together, it was nothing related to business or business issues, just friends talking about their own personal experiences. But the more we got to talking the more we thought, how do we help people with nowhere to go up? Everyone who started the organization was a senior manager, CEO or other higher-up who wanted to give back.”

Ahmad, who is the Senior Vice President of Viisage Technology, Inc. in Billerica, Mass., is originally from Karachi and attended the University of Karachi before moving to Massachusetts in 1983. He has over 25 years of experience in business and management fields, and has an extensive resume that includes working as an engineering and operations manager for the now-defunct Digital Equipment, as well as starting his own electronics assembly business where he was the engineering manager for four years.

Hardwork pays off for New York Muslims

NEW YORK, NY– After four long years of waiting, the first prayer service was held Friday at the Middletown Islamic Center’s new mosque, the Record Online reported.

Despite steady sleet and freezing rain outside, more than 100 people gathered in the new mosque on Ryerson Road. The men were downstairs in the prayer hall, with its high, airy ceiling, thick carpeting imported from Turkey and crystal chandeliers. The women gathered in a second-floor balcony overlooking them, with the same lush carpeting.

“It is a joyous and auspicious day for all of us. Our hearts are filled with joy that finally, we are here in this masjid,” said Imam Hafiz Fahim Mahmood. “It took a long time, a lot of money, hard work, a lot of sacrifice, labor pain. All of it, to build this masjid.”

He pointed out the beauty of the mosque’s furnishings, and reminded everyone that the mosque’s true beauty will be revealed by the good works that its members do.

“This masjid is for all races, all nationalities, all professions,” Mahmood said.

Dr. Quazi al-Tariq, the mosque’s chairman, thanked everyone who helped build: those who donated money or labor or materials and those who donated their time.

Khalil Gibran School gets new principal

NEW YORK, NY–New York city appointed a teacher well-versed in Arabic to lead its first Arabic language and culture academy on Tuesday, filling a void in the school’s leadership left by the forced resignation of the school’s founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, in August.

Holly Reichert, a lifelong student of the Arabic language long-time educator, will replace interim principal Danielle Salzberg, who was hastily chosen to serve as Almontaser’s temporary replacement despite her inability to speak Arabic.

In contrast, Reichert, 42 has a working knowledge of both modern Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic, having worked extensively in the Middle East. Most recently, she worked for the city, giving literacy support to 17 teachers at 11 schools.

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