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The New Assault on Sadr
The Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi had blocked the law that would allow for provincial elections this fall. A week ago, under alleged pressure from and negotiations with Cheney, the veto was lifted.
Mehdi is member of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) which had won the provincial elections in south Iraq in 2005, when its competitor, the Sadr movement, boycotted the election. New elections would likely be won by Sadr. But allowing the law to pass, does not mean that SIIC, the Iraqi government and the U.S. occupier will allow the Sadr movement to win.
If Sadr would win the southern provinces he, together with the Sunni tribal groups he is negotiating with, could set up a nationalist coalition against the government and the occupier.
Instead of holding up the election, the SIIC’s new plan seems to be to eliminate its competition by brute force. Dispite Sadr’s prolonging of his unilateral truce, there were recently several clashes between government troops and his people in Kut. In Baghdad U.S. troops started house to house searches in Sadr city and accidentally(?) killed a man and his three children in their car. Functionaries from his movement were arrested and allegedly killed by U.S. forces.
Sadr’s answer was a call for civil disobedience, "sit-ins" and peaceful protest against the government. But he also threatened a "civil revolt" if the raids continue.
Yesterday the government opened a new front against Sadr by attacking his movement in its stronghold Basra. With U.S. and British air support three brigades of the Iraqi army (certainly under control of U.S. ‘advisors’) are trying to ‘get control’ over Basra.
With such an allout onslaught against them, Sadr will not be able to hold his people back much longer. But if he now calls for, or allows, open warfare against the government and occupation troops, his movement might get outlawed and disqualified from taking part in the provincial elections.
If Sadr is smart, he will for now lay low and restrict his groups to deniable commando attacks and guerrilla fighting while continuing to assert social control over the people in the south. But if the provocations against him become unbearable, the Iraqi summer will again be very bloody.
the walls, the ghettoisation, the collective punishment, the disproprtionate force – these are all lessons straight out of the nazi occupation of the east or rotterdam for example – petraeus is their stroop
random morning thoughts…
I think it is an unbroken historical legacy, a continuous process of the industrialisation of warfare and extermination, a confluence of the ideas of “hygienic” chemistry and nationalist/militarist/masculinist obsessions. that continuity is obfuscated by our nationalist educational systems, which “take sides” and portray e.g. the Nazis as an ahistorical blip, a weird moment of pure Evil, rather than as participants in an historical continuum of refinement and “improvement” of the tools of occupation and control.
the Nazis studied the Boers and British methods in Africa; W Churchill recommended the use of the then-novel “poison gas” on African indigenes; the Nazis practised modern warfare on the Spanish revolutionaries (and the US and UK governments also backed the Franco regime); Guernica was a trial run for the Blitzkrieg theory and modern aerial bombardment, but bright minds on all sides were already thinking about the possibilities as soon as the first dirigibles flew. the poison gas of WWI trench warfare was based on insecticidal chemistry, and after the war the insecticides were ‘improved’ based on the vast profitable “experiment” of trench warfare; come the Nazi regime and the gas used to murder Jews en masse in the camps was a pesticide. like the revolving door of CEOs becoming senators and senators becoming CEOs, the technology used to slaughter “lower life forms” en masse rotates between deployment against invertebrates and deployment against despised human beings redefined as lower life forms. the basic idea of achieving cleanliness and closure by mass slaughter never changes. collective punishment, collateral damage — just another way of describing “bycatch” or “side effects” or “overspray.”
the victorious Allies grabbed and studied the notebooks of the Nazi merchants of horror, and gave special postwar protection to Nazi scientists who might be useful in further developing the tools of occupation and liquidation for “the good guys” (as if there were ever any good guys in this filthy business) — as Tom Lehrer noted in his Ballad of Werner von Braun. the Israelis studied apartheid S Africa as a textbook example of how a small Euro/White minority could control a larger colonised, indigneous nation… the ironies, the hypocrisies, the tragedies are endless. what goes ’round comes ’round, over and over.
the historical arc of industrial warfare is transnational, supranational. Krupp sold to all sides, as has every arms merchant before and since. the escalation (“arms race” is a classic games theory model) is endemic, structural, inevitable without strong intervention in deliberate, organised opposition to imperialism and profiteering. the walls, the ghettoisation, the collective punishment, the disproportionate force are the face of Taylorism and industrialism as applied to warfare and colonialism, the “improvement” of warfare for “increased efficiency” (and of course, greater profit).
along with this goes the industrial mindset which increasingly regards the entire biotic realm as a Problem to be exterminated and replaced with controlled, standardised artificial monocrop. when Israeli wingnut demagogues talk about the Palestinians as “cockroaches” or as a “disease” they are not merely echoing Nazi antisemitic rhetoric in a horrid historical travesty, but hewing to the long cultural tradition that springs from (among others) Pasteur and Liebig, of a hatred and loathing for “microbes” and for the working class, the peasantry, “the masses”. Pasteur — staunch royalist — spoke of the masses and of microbes in the same disgusted tone, and of revolutionary ideas as like the corruption in a wound that leads to gangrene and rots the body/social order, causing the death of the brain/soul (the King and royal caste).
there is a cultural continuity between the millions of acres of genetically identical monocultured cropland now disfiguring most of the world’s agricultural land, and the Aryan eugenicists’ ideal of reducing the human race to one blond, blue eyed archetype of standardised height, weight, and physical fitness. the urge to conformity, uniformity, microcontrol, predictability, repeatability, surely has been in us from the beginnings of militarism and hierarchy; but the industrial revolution was like mixing crack with the baccy. the success of industrial processes (which from the beginning were driven by military “needs” — the first mass produced assembly line techniques were used to make Remington rifles — Ford’s automobiles were the second wave; and the artificial soda process that jumpstarted industrial chemistry was invented in response to a military requirement for munitions materiel, not for soap making) lent the militarist/Taylorist cult of regimentation and uniformity a halo of divine right — if it succeeded so spectacularly at yielding working machines, temporary gluts of resources, “labour savings” and immense profits, how could it be wrong? and besides, it tweaked the human appetite for control and power.
and so the mania for standards, metrics, artificiality, control and conformity spreads and spreads, lending a new and bland acceptability to genocide and the destruction of nations. as one US grunt said of the Iraqis, they are sure backwards and poor, they don’t even have a McDonald’s or a Carl’s Jr. … and even as we speak, over the last few years, Proconsul Bremer’s fiat laws attempt to wipe out the diversity of Iraqi agriculture and force their farmers to grow GMO strains of patented corporate wheat from U agribiz — standardised monoculture, licensed and controlled, thousands of acres of undifferentiated monocrop binding the farmer to the new feudal order of intellectual property and privatisation of germline… world without end, the factory and the assembly line and the money economy remodelling every facet of human existence, the new totalitarianism of the market.
it is not possible to unravel the war economy w/o unravelling these memes — the myth that distance equals cleanliness (what we don’t see doesn’t concern us, aerial bombardment is “clean” warfare, emissions elsewhere mean “clean” vehicles, dumping our waste on the third world keeps our countries “clean”, dumping our sewage and toxic effluent in rivers keeps our homes “clean” and so on); the myth that “efficiency” is a virtuous end in its own right (efficient at what? to benefit whom?); the myth that money is more important than biotic reality; the myth that infinite growth is possible; the myths of race and nation, of taxonomic obsession that flies in the face of the grand symbiosis of biotic systems; and so on…
but I’m raving…
Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 27 2008 19:00 utc | 37
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