Leftists Embroiled in Never-Ending War

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

During the Cold War the political left split in spectacular and rancorous fashion and like Humpty Dumpty they’ve never really put themselves back together again.

Back then, one side consisted of those who stayed blind to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, atrocities culminating in the Gulag prison camps and the Moscow Trials. They stayed in the Communist Party (CP) through it all, arguing that Stalinism was preferable to the victory of predatory capitalism, or that all these atrocities were a means to a better end ― that dangerous ideology so beautifully rendered by Arthur Koestler in “Darkness at Noon.” Eric Hobsbawm, the famous Marxist historian, was one case of someone who refused to leave the CP even as the atrocities were coming to light, especially under Leonid Brezhnev.

On the other extreme, leftists and liberals embraced the U.S. and their putative war against communism, even when it was destroying democratically elected governments all over the world. They argued that the Popperian “open society” was in danger and anything went, from Pinochet to Suharto. Here you could find erstwhile lefties like Sidney Hook.

Then there were the Trostkyists who sat somewhere in the middle. They argued against the crimes of Stalin, snidely calling Stalinism “state capitalism,” and holding that it would have all been different if Leon Trotsky had succeeded Lenin instead of that autocratic sadist, Stalin. Near to them were the New Left who boasted minds like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali. They tried to cut a course with a new program which railed against both superpowers.

These debates on the left all crumbled at the same time as the Berlin Wall. There was the “End of History,” the final victory of so-called “liberal” “capitalist” “democracy.” It was a lazy consensus on the left, with only a few thinkers on the marginalized wing still railing against so-called neoliberal economics (traditional liberal economics didn’t argue for a completely unfettered private sphere, so it’s a misnomer), but they were an ever-marginalized faction; on a grand scale we all took a breather.

The general feeling is that this happy leftie consensus ended on 9/11 and when the “war on terror” began, but the rancor started in earnest before then, as the bombing of Yugoslavia commenced in 1999. NATO (which was set up as a bulwark against the Soviet Union) flexed its muscle against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Well, first off, why did NATO still exist after the Cold War ended? If it was meant to solidify the military alliance against the Soviet Union, what was the purpose afterward? Mull over that.

Anyway, with the war on Yugoslavia by NATO came the gleaming centerpiece of a new movement called “humanitarian intervention” led by the poster kids of 1990s liberalism, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
In fact, it wasn’t that new: Every war through history has been fought for justice and altruism if you take the leaders of the countries that started them at their word. Anyway, the media went into overdrive with beautiful elegies to Western benevolence, the end of wars for economic or geopolitical objectives. Here we were coming to the aid of oppressed Kosovans against the brutal dictator (he was actually democratically elected) Slobodan Milosevic. Large parts of the left, from Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, to Paul Berman, the New York Renaissance man, cheered on this necessary war of altruism.

If you talk to your average Joe the Plumber on the street, or corporate journalist, they will tell you that we averted a holocaust there. In fact, the International War Crimes Tribunal came to a conclusion that 2,788 had been killed in Kosovo. That’s a serious crime, but compare that to contemporaneous crimes happening inside NATO, like Turkey’s atrocities against the Kurds, and you start to wonder what prompted Clinton and Blair into action.

The averting of genocide became an orthodoxy of the mainstream left and any demurral would be greeted with outbursts of hysteria about holocaust denial, etc. But in 2007 even the International Court of Justice found that the Serbian leadership was not guilty of genocide in Bosnia, where they carried out their most obscene atrocities, murdering 8,000 souls at Srebrenica.

But in the West, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a one-sided conflict as that is the uninterrupted presentation, but the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia have seen atrocities on all sides. In fact, the Kosovo Liberation Army, a violent fundamentalist Islamic group, were agents of the West when they were carrying out atrocities against Kosovan Serbs and Gypsies. Many believe they were used to illicit a response (which would come in the crackdown starting in 1998) that served as a pretext for a NATO intervention. In the Croatian War of Independence in 1995, their Operation Storm offensive to retake Serbian parts of Croatia resulted in pogroms and ethnic cleansing that rivals Serbian crimes for barbarity. Some of those involved have been on trial for war crimes.

Because it was such a small sample of principled individuals that dared to stand up to the propaganda, this split in the left was merely a blip on the radar; it was an orthodoxy with every bad connotation of that word. But this same mind-set didn’t die and was transported wholeheartedly into the new “war on terror” after 9/11. The war in Iraq ― which had nothing to do with 9/11, which had no weapons of mass destruction ― was now framed as a “humanitarian intervention” against the barbarism of Saddam Hussein who gassed his own people (with our support), used chemical warfare against the Iranians (with our support) and committed genocide against the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign (with our support). But this didn’t matter. Now, Paul Wolfowitz was the new Madeleine Albright, Saddam Hussein was Slobodan Milosevic, the Kurds were now the Kosovan Albanians and on we went, to a war supported by a significant portion of the intellectual “left.” A war by a Christian fundamentalist, far-right oil-industry Republican, to be fought for democracy. Yeah, right.

The “pro-war left” or the “anti-totalitarianism left” ballooned at this stage and took over the blogosphere in a huge way. From Harry’s Place to Nick Cohen to Oliver Kamm to Paul Berman, they were everywhere, talking about the democratic future for Iraq (with the minor detour of a bloody war). Tons of books followed, backing them up, from the compilation, “A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for the War in Iraq,” to “Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy,” “Terror and Liberalism,” blah, blah. When the war turned bad, when the U.S. used chemical weapons on a major Iraqi city, when they sold off all the oil, and built the biggest base in the world, they had to change the subject. So now they attacked the left that had been against the invasion of Iraq as “anti-Semites”, “fascists” and supporters of “Islamofascists.” This also gave birth to a load of books that lit up the media firmament but will soon be forgotten, from Nick Cohen’s dreary “What’s Left?”, to the recent “Left in Dark Times” from the ridiculous French poseur, Bernard-Henri Levi.

Until now, the part of the left that was principled and realistic about the war in Iraq has been reticent to fight back in book form. There was the prolix and dense offering from Scott Lucas early on, “The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century,” which didn’t really land the hefty punch it should have. But in recent weeks, we’ve had “The Liberal Defense of Murder” by blogger Richard Seymour, which charts the historical course of this so-called “humanitarian intervention” up to its current incarnation. And then there is Conor Foley, a former aid worker, who recently released “The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War,” which argues that humanitarian NGOs are becoming so powerful that they are affecting Western governments and pressuring them into military actions for which there is no legal basis in international law.

This is the latest stage in the long, stuttering fight-back of the anti-war left against the louder but cheap warmongering left. Let the battle commence.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

Journey to a Changed Afghanistan

By CRYSTAL PROENZA, Managing Editor

Jessica Wanke, a multimedia reporter who has worked for The Arizona Republic, National Public Radio and BBC News, met Dost Mohammad five years ago while volunteering for the Community Outreach & Advocacy for Refugees organization in Arizona. Through the program, she helped Dost and his family to settle in the U.S., where they came shortly after September 11, 2001, for refuge from conflict in Afghanistan and to seek medical treatment for Dost, who had just been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. This May, Dost and his family traveled back to Afghanistan for the first time since leaving in 2001, with Wanke in tow shooting a documentary about the experience. The busy journalist let Taking Back Politics pick her brain about the amazing adventure and what she hopes to take away from it.

TBP: Why were you drawn to this particular story of all of your experiences with the Community Outreach & Advocacy for Refugees organization?

Dost was one of the first people I met while I was volunteering with COAR. We met in 2003, right after he and his family were resettled in the U.S. My primary job was to work with his mother — Fahkra — practicing English, but generally I just really enjoyed spending time with the whole family. Dost hadn’t yet started his U.S. medical treatment and physical therapy when we first met, and he was basically bed-bound. I spent a lot of time at their apartment just sitting with him and he would tell me stories.

Dost’s English is extremely good; he developed it over the years he worked for the United Nations World Food Programme in Afghanistan. I heard about his adventures as a food-aid monitor with the U.N. in Taliban-controlled parts of the country and about what life was like under the Communists, the Mujahedeen. His stories were fascinating. He had a really incredible vantage throughout his years in Afghanistan, and has very well-articulated thoughts about what he saw. Actually, he’s a pretty prolific blog writer in Farsi and English. Anyway, I learned a lot from those conversations.

Ultimately, I thought it would be great to do a documentary project with Dost because I think a lot of people, like me, can learn from his observations and insights about Afghanistan. And since he was going back for the first time since 2001, it seemed like a great opportunity to do that.

TBP: Why was it important for Dost and his family to document their trip back to Afghanistan?

Dost has always watched the political shifts in Afghanistan closely, when he was living there and after he relocated to the U.S. He cares a lot about the country and feels that it’s important that Americans know what’s going on there, since the U.S. is so involved. That’s why he blogs in English. He wants Americans to know about the struggles and injustices that are happening.

He also wants people to know about the great things that have been achieved, which he is very proud of. His home city, Mazar-i-Sharif, has come a long way since he left. In fact, it’s a model city for Afghanistan. Dost left right after the Taliban fell. When he went back this summer, there was so much development he could hardly recognize parts of it. A lot of people there are very grateful to the West, and if anything, want more U.S. and Western support and involvement. I think he wants people here to see and understand that.

TBP: As you traveled with Dost and his family, what other changes did they see that had taken place in Afghanistan?

There are a ton of changes in Mazar. When Dost left in 2001, the only place to shop was the central bazaar, where cuts of lamb are sold from carts sitting all day under the sun and produce is brought straight from the fields in baskets. On our trip, we went with Dost to a new housewares store called Barakat, which is like an upscale IKEA. You can buy a Jacuzzi there with a plasma screen television attached. He was really blown away (and so were we).

The juxtaposition was strange, though. People are still very much holding on to traditions. I was a little taken aback to see that nearly every woman in Mazar, over the age of eight maybe, wears a burqa. The government certainly isn’t enforcing it anymore, but it’s still the social norm.

TBP: What was the most striking experience you had during your trip?

Oh wow. There were a lot of things. I was taken back by how beautiful the place is. The light there is amazing — they have these incredible sunsets and amazing landscapes. I was surprised also by how kind and welcoming the people we met were in the North. It was a very genuine hospitality. There is a lot of warmth and gratitude toward the West for getting rid of the Taliban.

However, there are also a lot of problems that have yet to be fixed, and people are starting to get frustrated that more help isn’t forthcoming. For one, the new Western-friendly leadership in Mazar worked to comply with demands from the West to eradicate the poppy fields cultivated under the Taliban. The poppy was being sold internationally, as part of the opium and heroin trade, and truth be told, was bringing in a lot of money to this very poor part of the world. Nevertheless, they destroyed the fields and the economy took a huge dive.

We met with Mohammad Farhad Azimi, president of the local provincial council. He’s a pretty pro-Western guy. He speaks perfect English — he was educated in the West. But he’s really angry at the West, especially the U.S., for not doing more to help the region build up new industries to replace that lost poppy income.

Now hashish is growing virtually unabated, because it’s another of the region’s leading cash crops. And as long as they don’t have anything else to fall back on, the local government seems to be turning a blind eye. We traveled out to a rural bazaar and saw stores selling enormous amounts of hash for pennies, basically out in the open. That was striking!

I also thought it was surprising how universally disliked President Karzai seems to be. We didn’t meet one person who had a nice thing to say about him. And these were some really pro-West people. The general perception is that his administration is very corrupt. One taxi driver took us off our route one day in Kabul to show us a neighborhood of gaudy, huge mansions. It was an astonishing contrast when you consider that many people in the area live in extremely modest earthen houses. He told us that this is the neighborhood where government ministers live on the public dime. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems to be a fairly widespread perception among Afghans.

Another thing that I found striking was the sense that there are two Afghanistans. The parts we traveled in the North are really on their way to being developed. They support collaboration with the West. They seem to have promise. But then you look at the regions in the South such as Kandahar and Helmand. In these places, where the Taliban is still very active, the picture is much, much different. It is hard to imagine these regions being reconciled and melded back together as one country.

TPB: How do you think this documentary will help Americans understand the Afghan experience during the time of the Taliban?

I think the experience under the Taliban is something that the American public is fairly familiar with by now. It was a horrible time. But what I think is not so well known is what has happened since the Taliban fell to Coalition Forces. That’s what we’re focusing on. Since Dost had been gone since 2001 —the year the Taliban fell — it makes a nice narrative arc. Since he has been away, a lot of work has been underway. Through our project you get to see that contrast — that change—through his eyes.

For more information about Jessica Wanke’s documentary visit her Web site at http://www.pulitzercenter.org/showproject.cfm?id=65

No Take-Backs is a forum for Taking Back Politics to get up close and personal with members of the media. If you are or know of a media professional who can provide insight and unique information to our readers please contact us at TakingBackPolitics@gmail.com.

Crystal Proenza can be reached at proenza@gmail.com.

A Case of Censorship by Omission

BY MATT KENNARD, Columnist

Over the months of December 2007 and January 2008 the London Sunday Times published some of the most revelatory and important stories to have graced the British newspapers for decades. Their investigative team dug deep into claims by a former FBI translator that Marc Grossman, a top State Department official, “was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the [nuclear] information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.” It emerged last week, through an interview with one of the journalists on the story, that the FBI was complaining to the Sunday Times about its propensity to take journalism seriously and interview a few of their formers. A quick digest of what the case involves and how it has been inexplicably blacked out by the U.S. media is a shocking tale of political corruption and media venality.

Thirty-eight-year-old Sibel Edmonds is the whistleblower, and her claims are stunning. Grossman, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997, and later Under Secretary of State, is accused by Edmonds of “aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

The nuclear secrets that he is alleged to have let seep out for his own personal aggrandizement were dribbled to agents from Pakistan and Turkey. It is assumed that they have since fallen into the hands of infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist and trader A.Q. Khan, who is known to have sold secret nuclear information to a host of rogue regimes from North Korea to Iran.

The FBI hired Edmonds nine days after 9/11. They fired her six months later. She has claimed that she was fired because she highlighted the criminality of her seniors and her principled stand was not to be tolerated. She took her claim to the courts and filed suit against the Department of Justice, the FBI and several high-level officials in July 2002. In October 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege—a politicized and often misused legal doctrine—to block the release of any of the material that Edmonds had in her possession because it endangered national security.

But in the Sunday Times she has rehashed these claims with more damning furnishings. The latest revelation is that Grossman “tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.” She came into possession of all this information as she translated hundred of hours of intercepted recordings made during a six-year FBI investigation focused on an international nuclear smuggling ring.

And it is not only Grossman who is implicated. On Edmonds’ website she also fingers Douglas J. Feith, Undersecretary of State for Policy from July 2001 to August 2005, and Richard N. Perle, Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, among a dozen others. And the FBI has been accused by the Sunday Times of lying blatantly when they denied the existence of a key case file detailing corruption in the FBI after a Freedom of Information Act request from a human rights group. The Sunday Times claims it knows the file exists.

But these earth-shattering revelations have, astonishingly, not appeared in one mainstream newspaper in the United States. A whistleblower highlighting criminality at the highest echelons of government, the FBI blatantly lying about a report in its possession: these scoops have been plastered across one of the most august journals in Britain, yet not one outlet deigns to print it here in the U.S. What is going on?

The reticence is worse than weird. It is genuinely conspiratorial. Why on earth would titles like the New York Times and the Washington Post deem this story not important enough to get even a few column inches in their newspapers? Why is there this sordid silence?

Harry Shearer, one of the voices behind the Simpsons, asks these same questions on his Huffington Post blog. “The theft of U.S. nuclear secrets, the diverting of them to Pakistan (and, according to Edmonds, Saudi Arabia), the involvement of Israel in the scheme,” he writes, “all of these would justify as jaw-droppingly newsworthy in a rational journalistic universe. Clearly, that’s not where we live.”

Daniel Ellsberg, the great CIA whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers (an internal CIA evaluation of the Vietnam War decision-making) in 1971 goes further. The release of the Pentagon Papers caused a national political storm and changed the trajectory of the war in Indochina. He says Edmonds’ revelations are potentially even more explosive, but laments the mute media. “It’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971,” he writes. “They printed them then. Would they today?” he asks.

“For the last two weeks—one could say, for years—the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds…. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.”

Various rumors and theories are ricocheting around the blogosphere. Various commentators are saying there is evidence that the powerful individuals being targeted by Edmonds are contacting media outlets and beseeching them not to print, and that the newspapers are being craven and supine under this duress. Others are cleaving towards the more prosaic explanation that the story ‘lacks legs’ and adds nothing new to Edmonds’ previous utterances since she was fired. I know which of the theories I believe.

Reams of comments have appeared under the Sunday Times articles, many coming from despairing American citizens railing against their impotent media. The latest installment—the third in the series—has Michael Monk, from Raleigh N.C. lamenting in the comments section: “You can be the free press we don’t have in the states.” Ron Curtis, of Cleburne, T.X., writes more pugnaciously, “The American ‘news’ media is a disgrace and nothing more than a modern-day Izvestia or Pravda of the Soviet era, spewing propaganda and brainwashing Joe Sixpack with images of Britney and nothing-else-matters-wall-to-wall election coverage.”

Is Mr. Curtis right? One of the most potent tools of thought control in an ostensibly democratic society is censorship by omission: it does not involve overt manipulation of reality, but the more insidious shielding of germane information from the populace. The American media need to show us, and show us soon, that they haven’t consciously imbibed this technique to keep the corrupt politicians happy and the people in the dark. Otherwise this transatlantic blockade of information is going to get more embarrassing and the silence increasingly hard to uphold.