Author: John V. Walsh

Friday brought another report of the civil war in Syria by Kelly McEvers of NPR’s Morning Edition.

The opening summary tells us that rebels “captured a third major border crossing between Syria and Turkey. The rebels are trying to restore services to a recently liberated town.” Let’s hold on right there. “Liberated town”? According to Merriam Webster’s online dictionary, the first definition of “liberate,” is to set at liberty: free.; specifically : to free (as a country) from domination by a foreign power.” (The phrase “domination by a foreign power” is more than a touch ironic, given the role of the U.S., Turkey, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council in bankrolling and supplying the rebels. ) One need not even probe into the connotations of “liberate” which by its very denotation tells us that liberation is the work of the “good guys.” Right there in a subtle, or not so subtle, way, National Pentagon Radio is taking sides. And it is not too far into the reportage before journalist ace Kelly McEvers repeats the formulation: “Inside the building, we sit down with Abu Azzam, one of the rebel commanders who helped liberate the border crossing (with Turkey, Jw) and the town beyond.”

So what kind of “liberation” has come to this town of about 20,000 people called Tal Abyad? As we get deeper into the story, the “liberation” becomes ever stranger. McEvers reports: “Once inside the town, the only civilians we see are a handful of people in a pickup truck, and they’re on their way out. The bakeries have reopened, but apparently just to make bread for the fighters. One of two functioning stores clearly caters to the rebels, too. Otherwise, the town is almost completely empty….Our guide, Abu Yazen, shows us the blackened, pockmarked government buildings that were taken by the rebels. We ask Abu Yazen why the town is so empty. He says it’s because 80 percent of the people in town actually sided with the government, not with the rebels (emphasis, jw)….What happens when those 80 percent of the people come back and they want their houses back? What’s going to happen to them?”….The guide Yazen replies and McEvers offers the translation, “Those who have blood on their hands will be tried, he says. The others will come back and help us build a new country.” Hardly a reassuring invitation to those who have fled from the “liberation” of their town.

McEvers hastily concludes her piece: “Someone rushes in to tell us they’ve spotted a column of trucks with mounted machine guns that belong to the regime’s army. (Soundbite of truck motor) We have to hurry out of town before we know the end of the story.” The operative term this time is “regime.” The routine usage on NPR is that official enemies have “regimes,” so both Iran and Syria routinely have regimes but Israel, for example, has a “government.” Here we must look at the connotation of the word; and as Wikipedia informs us under “modern usage,”: “While the word regime originates as a synomym for any form of government, modern usage often gives the term a negative connotation…” (There was a time when the antiwar movement referred to the “Bush regime,” but that usage has gone missing with the ascension of Obama, the candidate of the “progressive” Democrats.)

This sort of vocabulary is not trivial as George Orwell long ago pointed out. It is usage which, repeated endlessly, reinforces the idea of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Such propaganda molds opinions and is preparation for war and conflict.

This report by McEvers is just one droplet in the torrent of NPR’s shilling for the Pentagon and State Department.   We have all heard many other instances of the same thing.  If you have examples of such biased reports or discussions from NPR, please send them to me at John.Endwar@gmail.com . Besides Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Neal Conan’s Talk of the Nation, which reaches millions, appears to offer plenty of low hanging fruit. I am interested not only in bias based on word choice, but also outright falsification and coverage of only one side of an issue, often using two guests who in fact agree on basics which go unquestioned, a very effective form of propaganda. China bashing, Russia bashing, Iran bashing and Muslim bashing are especially worth being on the lookout for.

Let us see whether we can move NPR to change its ways.

(This piece was originally published on CounterPunch.com)

The wing of the U.S. human rights movement which targets foreign countries can wind up as a cruel business, aiding the ruthless and violent actions of the U.S. Empire, wittingly or not.   For the U.S. all too often uses human rights as a cover for taking action against countries that defy the Empire’s control.

Some weeks back, I decided to look into one such group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an organization I had long refrained from joining out of skepticism.  But perhaps, I thought, PHR had sidestepped the dangers inherent in this work.  So I joined to find out.

Some days later I received my first email from PHR.  I was floored by the heading, “Protect Syrian Citizens: Help Make Sanctions Tougher.”  The word “tougher” struck me.  The email read in part: “Help us impose tougher sanctions on Pres. Assad’s brutal regime. The Syria Sanctions Act of 2011, S. 1472, will target Syria’s energy and financial sectors. Contact your Senators today and urge them to back S. 1472.”  The sponsor of this bill was Kirsten Gillibrand, and among the 12 co-sponsors were two neocon leaders, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, the latter hardly a human rights stalwart when it comes to Palestinians.   Did that not ring alarm bells at PHR?

Sanctions target the Syrian people, bringing poverty and hunger.

PHR argues that the sanctions are “targeted” at the oil and financial sectors and therefore are of consequence only for the Syrian elite.  Since 25% of the revenue of the Syrian government comes from oil revenues (according to the text of the bill), expenditures providing needed relief to the population, for example the current price supports for food, will certainly be affected.  But it is not only the revenues of the Syrian government that are affected. The Financial Times reports: “The most significant sanctions are on the oil industry, estimated by the International Monetary Fund to have accounted for almost a fifth of gross domestic product in 2010. Analysts estimate that they helped contribute to a contraction of 2-10 per cent to Syria’s economy last year (2011).”

The results of the sanctions should be obvious with only a moment’s thought.  If the Assad regime is as nefarious as PHR claims, then certainly it will put itself way ahead of the common people as sanctions bite.  Such an attitude is the norm not the exception in the world today.  But even if the leaders of the human rights community could not figure this out, the impact of the sanctions on ordinary Syrians is hardly a secret, even in the mainstream press.  Thus in March the Washington Post ran an article entitled “Syria running out of cash as sanctions take toll, but Assad avoids economic pain.”  One did not even need to read beyond the headline to get the point.  The article reports as follows: “The financial hemorrhaging has forced Syrian officials to stop providing education, health care and other essential services in some parts of the country, and has prompted the government to seek more help from Iran to prop up the country’s sagging currency.… Revenue from Syrian oil, meanwhile, has almost dried up, with even China and India declining to accept the nation’s crude…..  At the same time, President Bashar al-Assad appears to have shielded himself and his inner circle from much of the pain of the sanctions and trade embargoes, which are driving up food and fuel prices for many of the country’s 20 million residents…” The Washington Post is not alone in this assessment.  The Financial Times tells us:  A  “murky broader picture (emerges) suggesting that while some sanctions are hurting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the president, and its alleged associates, they are also hurting ordinary Syrians … David Butter, a Middle East economic expert, said: ‘If it’s a scrap for limited resources, the regime is still in a position to get the first rights, whether fuel or cash or food. It [the sanctions regime] hurts them but to really cripple them is going to take a long time.’”

And the effect desired by the U.S. is quite clear.  Another article in the Washington Post with the headline “Amid Unrest, Syrians Struggle to Feed Their Families” reports that food prices have risen as the result of sanctions.  As a result the Assad government in March “introduced a system of price-fixing for essential foods that has stabilized the cost of bread, sugar and meat — although they remain much higher than they were a year ago.  ….. ‘ Despite efforts to mitigate the problem around half of Syrians may live in poverty, said Salman Shaikh of the Brookings Institute in Doha, who argued that this is increasing anti-government feeling.”  Regime change is the point.  And the pronouncements of Obama and Hillary make this abundantly clear.

The Empire in Desperation Pulls Out all the Stops to bring Syria to heel.

Since Russia and China drew a line in the sand to stop the overthrow of the Syrian regime by the West, the United States appears increasingly desperate.  That desperation has grown since the UN-brokered cease-fire has terminated much of the fighting and killing, however imperfectly.

But is not the Assad government to blame for the failures of the cease-fire?  If so, it is certainly not alone.   Recently the NYT reported: “An explosion killed at least three people in Aleppo, and two blasts hit a Damascus highway on Saturday in further signs that rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad are shifting tactics toward homemade explosives.  Syria’s state news agency said three people had been killed, one of them a child, and 21 had been wounded by a booby-trapped car in the northern city of Aleppo.  The Syrian Observatory for Humans Rights, an opposition group based in Britain that relies on information from Syrian activists, said the blast destroyed a carwash in Tal al-Zarazeer, a poor suburb, and killed five people.  A member of the rebel Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying that the carwash was used by members of a pro-Assad militia.”  A car wash is hardly a target that is focused on the military.   And today The Guardian and others reported that a Syrian military convoy protecting the UN observer mission was hit by a roadside explosion, injuring six Syrian soldiers, three badly.  When Russian officials accuse the Syrian opposition of “terrorist tactics,” it appears that they have a point.

PHR has certainly done some good things in the past, for example documenting human rights violations and medical abuses in Gaza and the West Bank – although this work is now solidly in the hands of the Israeli division of PHR, meaning, among other things, that it will get less attention in the U.S.  And at no point has PHR called for boycotts against Israel a regime that has killed untold thousands of Palestinians in what amounts to a long slow genocide.  In the eyes of PHR it would appear that official enemies of the U.S. Empire deserve sanctions, whereas allies who violate the most basic human rights get an investigation and a tongue lashing – at most.

In fact sanctions are the work of our imperial government; and when a “human rights” organization gets into the business of supporting them, it is de facto in the business of supporting the Empire and its drive for domination (1). Token ruminations about human rights violations by U.S. “allies” or clients do not alter this fact.  Such ruminations serve as little more than a cover for the real use of these groups to the Empire.  Whether the PHR policy makers understand this or not makes little difference.

So what was this PHR member to do in the face of such stance?  This writer called the Boston office, the home office, to complain about the decision to back the Sanctions bill.  I was given to understand by one staffer that I was not the only member to register dissatisfaction.   I inquired who made this decision and how it was made.  Initially I was told that such decisions were not made in the home office but at a smaller office in Washington, which works closely with Congress.  In a subsequent email I was told that “the policy and program decisions are made by our Executive Management team.”  Who is the “Executive Management Team”?  This member does not know and has not been told.  Furthermore the PHR web site does not contain any information about the Executive Management Team, as far as I can see.  Are personnel of the U.S. government consulted in such deliberations?  (The PHR membership clearly is not.) And should not such an important decision at least have some input from the members?

But PHR is not alone in providing cover for the designs of the Empire.  They are but one example. Other human rights organizations appear to be jumping on the bandwagon.  And of course the U.S. government is happy to have their support.  Syria is clearly the gateway to Iran – and both countries have refused to one degree or another to submit to the will of the U.S.  So regime change for both countries is high on the agenda of the West.  That is the way of Empire.

PHR started out at its founding in 1978 documenting the abuses of the Pinochet government, a client of the Empire.  Today it has descended into an instrument for justifying an attack on one of the official enemies of the U.S.  That is the danger of a “human rights” approach if uninformed by an understanding of the designs and ruthlessness of the Empire.

The core of the physicians’ credo is “First do no harm.”  Starving a people for the sake of  “human rights” as part of a campaign that serves imperial machinations for regime change hardly fits into that injunction.  And certainly PHR knows that diseases arising from privation and hunger fall most heavily on non-combatants, children and the elderly especially.  That is no secret either.  Perhaps PHR is echoing the judgment of Madeleine Albright on Iraq that the human carnage of the sanctions is “worth it.”  However, from an ethical viewpoint, that judgment does not belong to citizens of the Empire living in comfort far from the victims in Syria.

(1.)It is interesting to read what is necessary for such sanctions to be lifted once imposed.  The bill states the following:

“Termination will occur “on the date the President submits to Congress a certification that the government of Syria is democratically elected and representative of the people of Syria and a certification under the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 that the Syrian government has:

• ceased support for international terrorist groups;
• ended its occupation of Lebanon;
• ceased development and deployment of ballistic missiles and biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons and agreed to verification measures; and
• ceased all support for, and facilitation of, terrorist activities in Iraq.”

Given that one of the named “terrorist groups” is Hamas, which is the duly elected government in Gaza, and given the murkiness of the other requirements, this is a tall order indeed.

John  V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

In the age of Obomba, there is nary a peacenik to be found among the Democrats. They are eagerly following Obama into the dark and odious swamp of “humanitarian” imperialism. So what’s an anti-interventionist (and civil libertarian) to do in this electoral season? Not much choice but to head for the libertarian wing of the Grand Old Party.

And there this antiwarrior found himself last Saturday morning, at the Republican Caucus in Massachusetts Congressional District 5. In Massachusetts, delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) are chosen by vote in these District caucuses, three delegates in each CD. The delegates are bound by oath to vote for the winner of the state primary, Mitt Romney this year, but only on the first ballot for President. After the first ballot they are free to vote their conscience. And they are also free to vote as they see fit for the VP, the platform and sundry other matters, great and small. So the caucuses matter; potentially they matter a lot. Any registered Republican can vote, but attendance is usually slender partly because media coverage is slight.

The Paulites were out in force with their slate of delegates, the “Ronald Reagan, Liberty, Unity Slate,” a name which fooled no one. The establishment marshaled its forces for the Mitt Romney slate. It was not hard to tell who was who in the auditorium; the older part of the crowd was with Mitt and those with kids in strollers belonged to Ron Paul. When the votes were tallied, the Liberty slate won by a 2:1 margin! That scenario was repeated again and again in most of the 9 Congressional Districts, with the Liberty slate trouncing the Romney gang and winning 17 of 27 delegates chosen by the caucuses.

There is one glitch. 14 more delegates will be chosen by the party hierarchy, and so the anti-interventionist contingent might not be in the majority of the Mass delegation, although some in the establishment are having second thoughts about the Liberty faction. After delegates were chosen and the Liberty landslide was evident, the alternates were voted on. One Romney alternate arose to aver that, as he thought about it, he agreed with Ron Paul on about 80% of policies! It did him no good. The Romney alternate slate went down by a margin of 2:1 to the Paul slate. But the careerist pols were now paying attention.

In another CD caucus, the irrepressible Rich Aucoin, once upon a time candidate for Lieutenant Governor and now running on the Liberty slate, elicited a defense of Obomba from the Romney camp! Aucoin writes:
“My speech touched on Obama’s declaration that he has the power to assassinate us without trial…and I ended with a semi-joke:
Q: Why isn’t the TSA catching any terrorists? A: Because they’re not screening passengers on Air Force One!
I got a thunderous response. The next establishment candidate took umbrage at this and inserted into his speech a retort to me, saying something to the effect that it is irresponsible to call the POTUS a terrorist without proof! He received dead silence. I would love to give the guy a follow-up slap down for defending Barack Obama at a GOP caucus (!!!)….and will do so once I have his name.”

And so it went. The mainstream media in Mass. has not covered any of this. But Republican establishment bloggers have taken. Thus, one pro-Romney blogger wrote on the day after the caucuses:
“The establishment is understandably shaken by the turn of these events. With big names like Kerry Healey (former GOP gubernatorial candidate!) and Brad Jones not winning (i.e., losing as delegates to the convention!) in their home district caucuses. They shouldn’t be. They should embrace the energy of these “new” people and not turn them away. This wing of the party, if treated with respect, forms a dedicated grassroots army.”
Translation. Let us see if we can coopt them. But there is an interesting kernel of truth here. The GOP has withered significantly in many places, including Massachusetts; and in such places the Ron Paul people may already have the numbers to take it over. They certainly have the commitment.

This scenario has been repeated again and again throughout the US. Here is what Tim Pawlenty (Remember him?) has to say about the future of the GOP:
“We’ve got to be a party that’s about addition and not subtraction. In places like Minnesota, the Northeast, the West Coast, the Mountain States, the Upper Midwest, the Great Lakes, we don’t have a margin of error where we can afford to shrink the party. We want to be growing the party if we’re going to win elections and also have the opportunity to govern and make a difference for the country. So this is about expanding market share, not contracting it.”

Pawlenty has hit upon the crux of the matter here. The GOP, sucked into Christian Fundamentalism and the vilest designs of the neocons and the Israeli lobby, is an endangered species in the 21st Century. Only the young libertarians offer it a chance of survival.

The core of the libertarian activists see their present activity as one step in a long-term effort to take the GOP back to its anti-interventionist roots. Many feel that Ron Paul is unlikely to get the nomination by capturing caucus votes. But they also understand that they are learning an enormous amount in the battle to make at least one major party – the GOP in this case – into a genuine antiwar and pro-civil liberties Party. The Dems (including the pwogwessives whose candidate was and remains Obama) have failed to field an antiwar candidate. It appears, as a wise friend tells me, that for now the road to peace runs through the Right.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

Yesterday (3/14) NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a “discussion” about Syria and the U.S. All options were not on the table – at least not the anti-interventionist option.

Melissa Block hosted three guests seriatim: the aptly named Anne-Marie Slaughter, former “director of planning” at the State Department. Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the criminal war on Iraq and Daniel Serwer, a former U.S. “special envoy” and “coordinator” for the Bosnian Federation. How is that for a broad spectrum of views?

Going first, Slaughter suggested that “no-kill” zones be established but that plan quickly morphed into the need for a supporting air campaign by the U.S. and NATO and “defensive” arms to the pro-Western forces in Syria. When Melissa Block inquired about the nature of a “defensive” arms, Slaughter conceded that there was no way to prevent the arms from being used in other ways, “revenge attacks” and “offensive actions” in Block’s terms.

For Slaughter time is of the essence, because there is “brutality on an extraordinary scale” in Syria (There are indeed 7000 dead in Syria – thousands on each side of the civil war there.) Enter the second guest Paul Wolfowitz whose Iraq war has resulted in the deaths of 1.4 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million. That, however, is not to be considered “brutality on an extraordinary scale.” Of course the U.S. was not killing its own people in Iraq but other people – which seems to make it OK. Block and her editors apparently were clueless about the irony of this juxtaposition of Slaughter’s claim and Wolfowitz’s appearance.

What was Wolfowitz’s prescription for Syria? “Defensive weapons.” Where had I heard that before? But Wolfowitz wants more US control over the weapons saying: “Hamas, which used to be in bed with Assad, has now distanced itself from the Assad regime. I’m sure the bad guys are figuring out how they can help the opposition so that they can have a position later.” Hamas the democratically elected government of all Palestinians and still in control of Gaza, daily under an assault by Israel (backed by the U.S.) is of course one of the “bad guys,” the infantile designation for official enemies, at least weak ones. Block concluded by raising what lessons Iraq holds for the present situation in Syria. And Wolfowitz had the answer. The problem was that the US did not invade earlier, in 1991, rather than 2003. No challenge from Block on that one.

So far two guests – one opinion. Surely the third guest, Mr. Serwer must be an anti-interventionist. Early on he made his position quite clear: “I don’t believe that there is a military solution in Syria without a massive U.S. effort to defeat the air defenses, the artillery, the tanks of the Syrian army and I see no will in Washington to do that kind of thing at the moment.”

Serwer simply says he opposes military action because it must be big and costly and there is no will “at the moment” in Washington to do so. That lack of will is due to the fact that the average American is fed up with the endless wars in the Middle East. Serwer continues: “You know, if you take military action, I think you have to think about taking serious military action. And serious military action would be aimed at decapitating this regime. The problem is you don’t know what comes after because there is no really consolidated opposition political structure.” Like Wolfowitz Serwer is concerned about “the bad guys.” Again no opposition to intervention but there is concern that once the dogs of war are unleashed, the new rulers may be one of “the bad guys.”

Serwer tells us that regime change could be effected if only Russia and China would go along. But Russia and China saw what happened in Libya, with “humanitarian” cover used to plunge Libya into an orgy of death and destruction; they are unlikely to be fooled again. So Serwer advises the “opposition” to bang on pans in the middle of the night.

Three interventionists, with one, Serwer, opining that intervention is impractical now so that we have to hope we can effect regime change through diplomatic means. The idea that we have no right to intervene in Syria is not even discussed. The anti-interventionist view is not even considered. Humanitarian Imperialism holds sway in the corridors of NPR.

NPR is one of the main opinion shapers for the intelligentsia in the US, and hence a very valuable asset for the Empire. What is an anti-interventionist to do?   This writer has stopped contributing.  If I want to listen to the occasional decent show (Car Talk is the only thing that comes to mind.), then I take heart in the fact that my tax dollars more than cover that one hour a week.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

Rick Santorum has always seemed a little too good to be true. Michael Ledeen, for one, has fallen right into the trap, in his recent Wall St. Journal piece, “Santorum was right about Iran – When It was Unpopular.” But then one looks at Ledeen’s subtitle, “A grandfather who fled Mussolini taught him to prize freedom.”

That was enough to raise an eyebrow of this wary reader as I slogged through Ledeen’s tortuous prose. Who exactly was this grandfather, Pietro Santorum, the forebear whom Rick often praises on the campaign trail? I wondered. Why would he flee Mussolini anyway? What was he up to?  And exactly what does Ledeen mean by “freedom”?

And sure enough, my suspicions were confirmed. Pietro was a Commie! Rick is a closet Red Diaper offspring. Let us remember that grandfather Pietro is not just any member of the family but the one Rick relentlessly cites on the campaign trail as a humble coal miner who worked in the mines until the age of 72. Is harping on Grandad some sort of signal to other Commie operatives? Now disguised as campaign workers and “good Catholics” for Rick, will they stage a coup once Rick is in the White House and has sent our troops all over the world leaving us defenseless here? What is going on? Herb Philbrick, where are you when we need you.

I always thought Rick Santorum was just a little too good to be true.

The story was picked up by Barbie Latza Nadeau of the Daily Beast who found it in the Italian magazine Oggi. Writes Latza Nadeau:
“In the tiny town of Riva del Garda in northern Italy, 83-year-old-Maria Malacarne Santorum keeps her family’s secrets—including those of her late husband’s cousin, Rick. In an exclusive interview with the Italian weekly magazine Oggi, Mrs. Santorum recalls fondly when Rick visited her in 1985 during his law internship in Florence, and when he came back again in 1986 and 1989.
“But the elder Santorum matriarch doesn’t understand why he has diverged so far from the family’s longtime political stance. ‘In Riva del Garda his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” writes Oggi journalist Giuseppe Fumagalli, likening the family to ‘Peppone’ after a famous fictional Italian communist mayor who fought against an ultraconservative priest known as Don Cammillo and about which a popular television series is based. ‘But on the other side of the ocean, it’s like his family here doesn’t exist. Instead he draws crowds as the head of the ultraconservative faction of the Republican party, against divorce, gay marriage, abortion, and immigration.’
“Those politics don’t play well in Riva del Garda, a community of ultraliberals. On the campaign trail, Santorum often touts his grandfather’s flight from Italy ‘to escape fascism,’ but he has neglected to publicly mention their close ties with the Italian Communist Party. ‘Rick’s grandfather Pietro was a liberal man and he understood right away what was happening in Italy,” Mrs. Santorum told Oggi. ‘He was anti-fascist to the extreme, and the political climate in 1925 was stifling so he left for America. After a few years he returned to Italy with his wife and children, including Aldo, Rick’s father, who passed away late last year. It’s a shame he won’t have the joy to see his son’s success in his bid for the White House.’ She goes on to explain how the family then became pillars of the Communist Party in Italy.”

Et tu, Papa Aldo? What exactly did Rick learn at Papa’s knee?

Well Rick, the cat is out of the bag. Cousin Bruno was obviously talking about a little more than family fondness when he said, “When (Rick) wins, he will send the American presidential airplane and take all the Santorums to the White House.” And then Bruno and the rest of the Santorum reds will be running our lives. Rick your intent to deploy the troops to Iran and leave us defenseless upon your election stands exposed. And since Michael Ledeen is peddling your candidacy, we have to wonder about him also. He always seemed a little too good to be true.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com For those who have any doubts about this piece, the family history is true – but the part about the Manchurian candidacy is satire. To you I apologize since it must have taken you hours to read to this point.

A few days back I received an announcement from Rocky Anderson, announcing the platform of his newly formed Justice Party. Although social justice was mentioned prominently along with the desperate economic plight of many in the U.S., I was struck by the fact that the struggle against war was not prominently mentioned and the question of the U.S. Empire and overseas bases seemed to get no mention. “Human Rights,” an increasingly plastic category at least in the hands of the U.S. ruling elite, figures prominently in Anderson’s campaign literature and world view. I was further surprised that “High Road to Human Rights,” an organization founded by Anderson, counted on its board of advisers, Elie Wiesel, a defender of the Apartheid Israeli regime. On the other hand, Anderson was a staunch opponent of the war on Iraq and even the war on Libya, the latter because it lacked Congressional approval.
I wondered about Anderson’s commitment to anti-interventionism and his view on “humanitarian” interventions, something that should be crystal clear from someone who is trying to appeal to progressives. The following email exchange resulted:

From JW to RA:
Hello Rocky,
I wish that you would spell all this out a bit more clearly.
Are you for “humanitarian” interventions as in the Balkans? Have you read Jean Bricmont’s great (and short) book “Humanitarian Imperialism”?
Are you for getting rid of all our overseas bases and devoting a limited military to purely defensive purposes?
Many pwogs, for example Amy Goodman and CIA “consultant” Juan Cole, were cheerleaders for the Libyan intervention, despite Libya having had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa before NATO destroyed its infrastructure and reduced it to rubble in the name of human rights.
We have two versions of imperialism – the “tough guy” Dick Cheney brand and the “humanitarian” Susan Rice version. Both are the same in reality whatever the words attached to them. We must break with them both and cease viewing the world solely through the very arbitrary lens of “human rights,” a good sell among the pwogwessives. But what good are human rights to a starving illiterate woman in India, a category that Mao consigned to the dust heap of history in China?

From RA to JW:
Yes, so long as we are in compliance with the War Power Clause of the Constitution and the U.N. Charter, I favor the U.S. working with the international community in putting to an end massive atrocities. I strongly believe in living up to the promise of “Never Again.” Given all my work in this area (see www.highroadforhumanrights.org), I don’t know how you would have any doubt about my position. I don’t think political boundaries should control our moral obligations to our brothers and sisters elsewhere.
I recommend to you “A Problem From Hell,” by Samantha Power.
Your reference to Susan Rice was a curious one. She sat on her hands (as you apparently would have had her do) when she was with the NSC and failed to take any action to stop the genocide that led to the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days. According to an article in The Atlantic by Samantha Power, Susan Rice was apparently more concerned with the political implications in the mid-term elections in 1994 than she was about the horrendous fate of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Those who stood by when their action could have ended the atrocities are, in my view, complicit.

From JW to RA:
I think the Samantha Powers of the world are a big part of the problem.
I recommend that you read “Humanitarian Imperialism” by Jean Bricmont.

From RA to JW:
I think isolationist nationalists who don’t care about the suffering of other people who happen to be in other parts of the world are “the problem”. Sorry, John, we’re on completely different moral planets here.
I’ll try to read the book you referenced. Have you read “A Problem From Hell”? It’s heart-breaking — and a real indictment of the failure of the US to do what is required to stop the atrocities.

From JW to RA:
I cannot agree, Rocky. The “international community” is a euphemism for NATO and the US. The UN foolishly went along with the destruction of Libya – and we can now see that Russia and China are finally drawing a line in the sand at Syria.

You fail to see that the US is the most ruthless Empire in the history of humankind, and it will cover up its atrocities with appeals to “human rights.” It is the biggest lie of all. Would you favor military intervention to end apartheid in Israel? Will you take that position on the campaign trail?

For those of us living in the heart of Empire there is no alternative to being principled anti-interventionists. The Empire is incapable of waging a “good war,” whatever that may be. An anti-interventionist is not an “isolationist nationalist.” That is simply a smear.

Samantha Power has not written a heart rending account of what has been done to Iraq, I notice.

Finally, the Empire has always cloaked its wars in virtue, from the White Man’s burden to “human rights,” and it always will. The path to hell is paved with naiveté.

From RA to JW:
Samantha Power has not written that account of Iraq because we did not intervene on humanitarian grounds. It was an illegal war of aggression, at odds with the War Power Clause and with the UN Charter. You paint with a very misleading, broad brush. You can advocate abandoning people during genocides and other mass atrocities. I will always be on the other side. I share your anti-imperialistic views; I do not share your willingness to turn a blind eye to humanitarian disasters.

You will never convince me of what I perceive to be an extremely selfish, heartless isolationist position. I would always advocate doing what I would want the U.S. and international community to do if I were in the position of a victim of genocide. To advocate doing what is right is hardly naïve. And it is hardly countenancing wars of aggression. No one has a stronger record of opposition to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq than I.

From JW to RA:
You are well meaning as far as I can tell, but you hold very dangerous views IMHO.
If people want to help those in far off lands, let them form their Abraham Lincoln brigades, something the US Empire also opposed. Of course that means putting one’s body on the line, not someone else’s body.
First do no harm.

From RA to JW:
So you would advocate repeal of the Genocide Convention? We couldn’t be further apart in our views on this.

But, then, I recognize the concerns with US empire that drive your views on this. We need to strive to be better on all counts. That’s why I have worked so hard in all of these areas over the years — and a large part of why I’m doing what I am now.

From JW to RA.
I never said that I wanted to repeal the Genocide Convention. Why do you conclude that?
But what is being done to the Palestinians is a slow genocide. Do you advocate military action against Israel to get rid of the Apartheid regime there? You should be explicit about that.
Noam Chomsky points out that the slaughter in the Balkans, greatly exaggerated, took place AFTER NATO’s bombs started falling. And that was not really a genocide either.
Nor is Darfur a genocide either – a brutal war on both sides apparently but not a genocide. In fact only the US and that outrageous liar Susan Rice label it as such.
And then there is the slaughter in Libya a country that once had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa. The concrete reality is that the US is always up to no good and will kill and kill to get its way. We should not be in the business of providing cover for that.
I do not think that you really appreciate that the formerly colonized peoples of the world do not want Western interventions. They have had quite enough of the benefits of such neocolonial acts.

From RA to JW:
You are so incredibly wrong. The people (at least the Tutsis) of Rwanda, and of Kosovo, view the U.S. as heroically coming to their aid and stopping the massacres. You would have been content with sitting back after the massacre at Srebrenica. To me, that is the greatest moral cowardice.
And how can you maintain that you would not seek the repeal of the Genocide Convention? It creates a legal obligation to take action to stop genocides wherever they occur.
I cannot countenance the U.S. continuing to build its empire; neither can I countenance people — or our nation — turning a blind eye to mass atrocities when they can be stopped.
This will be my last email on this topic. I’m dismayed that any person can be so insensitive toward victims of genocide or other mass atrocities. (I’m curious. What have you done, if anything, to help stop wars of aggression or mass atrocities?)
Good luck –

At this point someone on the list of those cc’d to this exchange jumped in, J.A., an Israeli expat who as a young man was swept into the Yom Kippur war and saw many of his friends needlessly killed. He left Israel in part to save his son from future slaughters of this sort and has vowed never to return. He wrote.
From J.A. to RA and JW:
Rocky,
Humanitarian intervention is a slippery slope argument, and is being used for imperialistic ambitions (The latest example is Libya, and still Afghanistan – freeing the Afghan women. If remember well, Samantha Power supported this view.), and in general, being used to justify our military power. (Humanitarian aid via aircraft carriers, being the good policeman of the world, etc).
BTW, you wrote “illegal invasion”; is there a legal invasion?
Here is a question: Since you support “humanitarian” intervention, do you support attacking Israel and freeing the Palestinians from the Israeli harsh occupation? You must know about the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli Apartheid and the stealth genocide by Israel, so should we invade Israel?
(It is a rhetorical question to demonstrate how absurd is the “humanitarian” intervention view).
Joshua

From JW to RA:
You did not answer whether you would advocate in your campaign a military expeditionary force led by the US to end Israeli apartheid and the slow genocide of the Palestinians? Why can you not answer that?

And will you launch another expedition to restore the Tibetan theocracy? It will probably take a few million persons under arms and a return to the draft. Or how about an occupation of India where the most dire poverty continues and the farmers driven from their agriculture by agribusiness commit suicide in huge numbers? Or is that OK because “democracy” reigns?

And a second point. The greatest stimulus to nuclear proliferation is the huge conventional military force which the US has. That is the force that you need to preserve in order to save the world. The only protection for a small nation is nukes.

Long ago when the US was trying to take down the Chinese revolution and waging a war on Vietnam, Mao Zedong opined that US imperialism is the number one enemy of the peoples of the world. I am afraid that remains true.
I recommend again that you read Chomsky on the Balkans.

And you are proof positive that the progressive movement, so called, is no longer anti-interventionist or anti-Empire.
As they say, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
At least you admit it outright – and that amount of honesty deserves credit. I suggest that you openly proclaim the new humanitarian interventionism as part of your platform. Now if only other progressives would also do that, we could separate wheat from chaff more readily.
jw
p.s. As a medical student I learned that there are some things that are beyond one’s control and that when one tries to control them the only thing that results is harm – sometimes fatal harm. Using the US imperial military to save the world is like operating with an infected scalpel.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com .