French Minister: Syria War Planned Two Years Before “Arab Spring”

Gearóid Ó Colmáin
In an interview with the French TV station LCP, former French minister for Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas said:

“I’m going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I’m French, that doesn’t interest me.”

Dumas went on give the audience a quick lesson on the real reason for the war that has now claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people.

“This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned… in the region it is important to know that this Syrian regime has a very anti-Israeli stance. Consequently, everything that moves in the region- and I have this from the former Israeli prime minister who told me ‘we’ll try to get on with our neighbours but those who don’t agree with us will be destroyed. It’s a type of politics, a view of history, why not after all. But one should know about it.”

Dumas is a retired French foreign minister who is obliged to use discretion when revealing secrets which could affect French foreign policy. That is why he made the statement ‘I am French, that doesn’t interest me’.  He could not reveal France’s role in the British plan as he would be exposing himself to prosecution for revealing state secrets.

There have been many disinformation agents in the British and French press, many of them well known ‘leftist’ war correspondents and commentators, who have tried to pretend that Israel secretly supports Assad.  Those who make such arguments are either stupid, ignorant or deliberate disinformation agents of NATO and Israel.

Israel’s support for Al Qaeda militants in Syria has even been admitted by the mainstream press. For example, Germany’s Die Welt newspaper published a report on June 12^th on Israel’s medical treatment of the Al Qaeda fighters.

Israel planned this war of annihilation years ago in accordance with the Yinon Plan, which advocates balkanization of all states that pose a threat to Israel. The Zionist entity is using Britain and France to goad the reluctant Obama administration into sending more American troops to their death in Syria on behalf of Tel Aviv.

Of all the aggressor states against Syria, Israel has been the quietest from the start. That is because Laurent Fabius, Francois Holland, William Hague and David Cameron are doing their bidding by attempting to drag Israel’s American Leviathan into another ruinous war so that Israel can get control of the Middle East’s energy reserves, eventually replacing the United States as the ruling state in the world. It has also been necessary for Tel Aviv to remain silent so as not to expose their role in the ‘revolutions’, given the fact that the Jihadist fanatics don’t realize they are fighting for Israel.

This is the ideology of Zionism which cares no more for Jews than it does for its perceived enemies.   The Jewish colony is determined to become a ruling state in the Middle East in the insane delusion that this will enable it to replace the United States as a global hegemon, once the US collapses fighting Israel’s wars.

Israeli Prime Minister once told American talk show host Bill Maher that the reason why Israel always wins short conflicts, while the United States gets bogged down in endless wars. ‘’ The secret is that we have America’’, he said.

But Israel is itself slowly collapsing. If one excludes the enslaved Palestinian population, the Jewish state still has the highest level of poverty in the developed world with more and more Jews choosing to leave the ‘promised’ land, a garrison state led by mad men, an anti-Semitic entity threatening to engulf the world in war and destruction. Israel cares no more about its own working class Jews than any other ethnic community.

In fact, if the Likudnik crooks running the Israeli colony get their way, working class Israelis will be among the first to pay as they are conscripted to fight terrorists created by their own government. With orthodox Jews protesting in the streets of New York against Israel and Haredi Jewish minority opposing Israel’s rampant militarism, Zionism is coming under increased attack from Jewish religious authorities and non-Zionist Jews both inside and outside of the occupied territories.

This is not the first time that Roland Dumas has spoken out against wars of aggression waged by successive French regimes. In 2011 he revealed that he had been asked by the United States when he was foreign minister in the Mitterrand administration to organize the bombing of Libya. On that occasion the French refused to cooperate.  Dumas, a lawyer by profession, offered to defend Colonel Gaddafi, at the International Criminal Court in the event of his arrest by Nato.

Dumas was also vocal in condemning France’s brutal neo-colonial bombing of the Ivory Coast earlier in 2011, were death squads and terrorists similar to those later deployed in Libya and Syria were unleashed upon the Ivoirian population in order to install a IMF puppet dictator Alassane Quattara in power. Gbagbo was described as one of the greatest African leaders of the past 20 years by Jean Ziegler, sociologist and former member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.

Gbagbo had plans to nationalize banks and wrest control of the country’s currency from the colonial finance institutions in Paris. He also wanted to roll back many of the worst effects of IMF restructuring by nationalizing industries and creating a functioning, universal free health service. All of this threatened the interests of French corporations in the former French colony. So, the Parisian oligarchy went to work to find a suitable replacement as caretaker of their Ivoirian colony.

They sent in armed terrorist gangs, or ‘rebel’s in the doublespeak of imperialism, who murdered all before them while the French media blamed president Gbagbo for the violence that ensued. Gbagbo and Gaddafi had opposed Africom, the Pentagon’s plan to recolonize Africa. That was another reason for the  2011 bombing of their two African countries.

The formula is always the same. Imperialism backs ‘rebels’, whenever its interests are threatened by regimes that love their country more than foreign corporations.  One should not forgot that during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, General Franco and his cronies were also ‘rebels’ and they, like their counterparts in Libya in 2011, were bombed to power by foreign powers, replacing a progressive, republican administration with fascism.

There are pro-Israeli fanatics in France who have used the analogy of the Spanish Civil War as justification for intervention in Libya and Syria. The pseudo-philosopher Henry Bernard Levy is one of them.  Of course, the ignoramus Levy doesn’t realize that the reason France, England and the USA did not officially intervene in the Spanish Civil War is because they were covertly helping the ‘rebels’ from the start. They enabled arms shipments to the Francoist ‘rebels’ while preventing arms deliveries to the Spanish government, who, like Syria today, were helped by Moscow. Anyone who has studied the Spanish Civil War knows that all the imperialist countries wanted Franco as a bulwark against communism.

There is nothing imperialism loves more than a rebel without a cause. What imperialism hates, however, are revolutionaries. That is why the ‘rebels’ which imperialism sends into other countries to colonize them on behalf of foreign banks and corporations, have to be marketed as ‘revolutionaries’ in order to assure the support of the Monty Python brigade of petty-bourgeois, ‘ leftist’ dupes such as Democracy Now! and their ilk.

Dumas is not the only top French official to denounce the New World Order.  Former French ambassador to Syria Michel Raimbaud wrote a book in 2012  entitled ‘Le Soudan dans tous les états’, where he revealed how Israel planned and instigated a civil war in South Sudan in order to balkanize a country led by a pro-Palestinian government. He also exposed the pro-Israeli media groups and ‘human rights’ NGOS who created the ‘humanitarian’ narrative calling for military intervention by the United States in the conflict.

The subject was covered extensively by African investigative journalist Charles Onana in his 2009 book, Al-Bashir & Darfour LA CONTRE ENQUÊTE.

There are many more retired French officials who are speaking out about the ruinous policies of this French government, including the former head of French domestic intelligence Yves Bonnet. There have also been reports of dissent in the French armed forces and intelligence apparatus.

After the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi in October 2011, the former French ambassador to Libya Christian Graeff told French radio station France Culture that it was responsible for the diffusion of lies and war propaganda on behalf of Nato throughout the war.  Graeff also warned the broadcasters that such disinformation could only work on the minds of serfs but not in a country of free minds.

The power of the Israeli lobby in France is a subject rarely discussed in polite circles. In France there is a law against questioning or denial of the holocaust. However, denial of the Korean holocaust, Guatemalan holocaust, Palestinian holocaust, Indonesian holocaust and the dozens of other US/Israeli supported genocides is not only perfectly legal but is the respectable norm.

The same lobby which introduced the Loi Gayssot in 1990, effectively ending freedom of expression in France, would also like to ban any independent investigations of genocides whose narratives they have written, such as the Rwanda genocide, where Israel played a key role in supporting the ‘rebels’ led by Paul Kagame, who invaded Rwanda from Uganda from 1991 to 1994, leading to the genocide of both Tutus and Tutsis. Many serious scholars have written about the Rwandan genocide, which the Israel lobby repeatedly uses as a case study to justify ‘humanitarian’ intervention by Western powers.  The Zionist thought police would like to see such authors prosecuted for ‘negating’ imperialism’s disgusting lies on African conflicts.

Now, the Israeli Lobby is forcing the (their) French government to prosecute twitter messages which the lobby deems ‘anti-Semitic’. This is one further step towards the creation of a totalitarian state where any criticism of imperialism, foreign wars, racism, oppression, perhaps eventually capitalism itself could fall under the rubric of ‘anti-Semitism’.

These people are sick, and those who cow down to them are sicker. Perhaps the etymology of sickness, a word cognate with the German Sicherheit (security) according to dictionary.com, is not a coincidence. For what is particularly sick about our society is the cult of security,  endless surveillance, ubiquitous cameras, the cult of the all seeing eye, the prurient gaze as part of the incessant discourse on terrorism by those who specialize in the training of the very terrorists they claim to be protecting us from.  Whether or not the words security and sickness are linguistically related, they are certainly cognate in a philosophical sense.

Roland Dumas and others like him should be highly commended for having to guts to say what so many others are too morally corrupt, too weak and cowardly to admit.

As the French government and its media agencies drum up hysteria for war on Syria, Roland Dumas, now in the twilight of his years, is warning people of the consequences of not understanding where Israel is leading  the world. Will enough people heed the warning?

Fidel Castro: Avoid New Korean War

Fidel Castro Ruz

A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years ago.

A virtually infinite number of life forms exist. In the sophisticated work of the world’s most eminent scientists the idea has already been conceived of reproducing the sounds which followed the Big Bang, the great explosion which took place more than 13.7 billion years ago.

This introduction would be too extensive if it was not to explain the gravity of an event as unbelievable and absurd as the situation created in the Korean Peninsula, within a geographic area containing close to five billion of the seven billion persons currently inhabiting the planet.

This is about one of the most serious dangers of nuclear war since the October Crisis around Cuba in 1962, 50 years ago.

In 1950, a war was unleashed there [the Korean Peninsula] which cost millions of lives. It came barely five years after two atomic bombs were exploded over the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, in a matter of seconds, killed and irradiated hundreds of thousands of people.

General Douglas MacArthur wanted to utilize atomic weapons against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Not even Harry Truman allowed that.

It has been affirmed that the People’s Republic of China lost one million valiant soldiers in order to prevent the installation of an enemy army on that country’s border with its homeland. For its part, the Soviet army provided weapons, air support, technological and economic aid.

I had the honor of meeting Kim Il Sung, a historic figure, notably courageous and revolutionary.

If war breaks out there, the peoples of both parts of the Peninsula will be terribly sacrificed, without benefit to all or either of them. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba, as Cuba has always been and will continue to be with her.

Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific achievements, we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her great friends, and it would be unjust to forget that such a war would particularly affect more than 70% of the population of the planet.

If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.

Obama vs. Palestine & Syria

David Sole

President Barack Obama’s four-day visit to Israel, the first since his first election in 2008, began March 20. Worldwide media attention was focused on what the powerful U.S. leader would tell its client regime and settler state. Overall, reports indicated worse news for the beleaguered Palestinian people and for sovereign Syria.

Obama took the gravest step against Syria just before boarding his plane to fly to Jordan on March 22, when he met privately with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During that meeting Obama succeeded in pressuring Netanyahu to call Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and apologize for the 2010 Israeli attack on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara. In that raid Israeli troops killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish U.S. citizen who were trying to bring supplies to the blockaded people of Gaza.

Until his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu had strongly resisted any apology or compensation to Turkey. For its part Turkey had withdrawn its diplomats from Israel and brought criminal charges against four Israeli military officers involved in the action. Obama forced the Israeli apology to ensure continued Turkish-Israeli cooperation in the war against Syria’s government and people. The New York Times admitted this on March 23 when it wrote that it “would help a fragile region confront Syria’s civil war.”

Military aid to Israel

Right off the plane on March 20, Obama inspected a battery of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. This high-tech weaponry, designed to shoot down short-range missiles, was paid for by $1 billion from U.S. tax dollars. Recent reports by experts challenge Israel’s claims that the weaponry is 86 percent effective. An extensive report in the March 21 New York Times questions whether the actual figure is closer to 10 percent.

Obama also told the Israelis that he was open to a new 10-year military agreement. The U.S. has financed Israel to the tune of billions of dollars every year since the Zionist state’s creation in 1948.

On March 21, Obama spoke to Israeli students and then visited Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. In a sharp slap in the face to the Palestinian people, Obama “urged Palestinians to drop their demand for a freeze in Israeli settlement-building as a precondition for peace talks.” (bbc.com, March 23) Instead the U.S. president told the Palestinians to return to negotiations with the Israelis while more and more Palestinian land falls under Zionist control.

The Palestinian response was heard in several ways. Abbas refused to withdraw the demand for an end to new settlement construction in remarks to reporters with Obama standing next to him. When Obama spoke to a crowd of young Israelis, an Arab-Israeli student in the crowd shouted out for an end to occupation and for the liberation of Palestine, before being dragged out of the auditorium. Meanwhile, several rockets from Gaza exploded in the town of Sderot in southern Israel.

On March 22, his final day in Israel, Obama laid a wreath at the grave of Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of the Zionist movement. This action by Obama, as the leader of U.S. imperialism and modern neocolonialism, was appropriate since Herzl had spent years meeting with every colonial leader in his effort to get backing for his movement. Zionism was never envisioned as a progressive movement to fight anti-Semitism and racism. It was sold to colonial powers as a force that could help keep down oppressed colonized peoples.

Encouraged by Obama’s public support for Israeli oppression and occupation, WAFA, Palestine News & Information Agency, reported March 23, “Israeli settlers Saturday smashed windows of cars belonging to Palestinians travelling on roads near Nablus” on the West Bank.

Imperialist assault on Syria

On March 22, Obama moved on to visit Jordan’s King Abdullah II as part of strengthening the imperialist front in the war against the Syrian government. Jordan has taken in an estimated 460,000 Syrian refugees from the fighting, which has severely stressed the small nation’s economy. To keep this ally happy, Obama pledged to give Abdullah an additional $200 million in aid.

The U.S. has been training anti-Syrian rebels in a CIA training camp on the Jordanian side of the Syrian border. On March 14, a Reuters article published comments by a “senior” officer of the counterrevolutionaries that “most of the first contingent of Syrian rebels taught by U.S. army and intelligence officers in Jordan to use anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry have finished their training and are now returning to Syria to fight.”

Official U.S. policy — obviously constructed on lies — has been that it will not directly intervene in Syria. Following charges by the Syrian government that counterrevolutionary terrorists had used chemical weapons in fighting near Aleppo, Obama tried to turn the charges against the Damascus government. While in Israel on March 20, he hypocritically said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “game changer” and could provoke open U.S. intervention.

The U.S. had just succeeded in getting a Syrian-born, long-time U.S. citizen, Ghassan Hitto, named as the “rebel” coalition’s prime minister at a meeting in Istanbul on March 18. Far from cementing together the dozens of disparate contra fighters, many of whom are extremist terrorists who kill people based on religious affiliations, it provoked the resignation of coalition president Moaz Khatib on March 24.

In addition, the commanders of the killers in the so-called Free Syrian Army said they would not fight under Hitto.

The disarray among the contras makes it even more likely that the imperialists — the U.S. and some of the NATO military powers including Turkey and also Israel — will intervene directly.

Kerry’s Middle East Tour Prepares Endless War for Afghanistan, Syria

Alex Lantier

US Secretary of State John Kerry left Kabul for Paris yesterday, after a Middle Eastern tour to Jordan and Afghanistan to plan broader wars across the region. In Paris today, he is expected to discuss arming opposition forces fighting Washington’s proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with French officials.

During his unannounced two-day visit in Kabul, Kerry held a joint press conference with President Hamid Karzai, the leader of the American puppet regime in Afghanistan. He announced that US forces will remain in Afghanistan beyond the Obama administration’s 2014 withdrawal deadline.

Kerry and Karzai both called upon the Taliban to open an office in Doha, the capital of the US-allied Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, from which location they could negotiate with Karzai. To encourage the Taliban to accept the offer, Kerry stressed that the Taliban should not count on a US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Currently there are some 100,000 occupation troops in the country, including 66,000 US forces. American officials have reportedly discussed a lasting presence of roughly 12,000 US and European troops in Afghanistan.

Kerry also offered to hand over formal control of Bagram prison to the Karzai regime. This was apparently designed to allow Karzai to posture cynically before the Afghan people, claiming he is restoring Afghan sovereignty over the country. The US-controlled prison, notorious for the killings and torture of Afghan resistance fighters imprisoned there, has become a hated symbol of the NATO occupation.

This action was apparently aimed at smoothing US relations with Karzai, strained after the latter criticized Washington for “colluding” with the Taliban.

The handover of Bagram has nothing to do with ending US rule in Afghanistan, however. Karzai made clear that Washington would continue to effectively control detainees at the prison, promising that an Afghan review board would consider intelligence provided by US authorities before deciding to release prisoners. Afghan officials also reportedly gave “private assurances” that no “enduring security threats” would be released from Bagram.

By threatening to continue the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, Kerry is pushing the Taliban leadership to negotiate a political settlement with Karzai that would include a lasting US protectorate in Afghanistan. Washington’s control would rest upon US air superiority and a permanent occupation force stationed in the country. It would be based on collaboration between Washington, the warlords backing Karzai and the Islamic fundamentalist leadership of the Taliban to suppress resistance to foreign occupation by the Afghan people.

The American ruling class sees Afghanistan as a launching pad for US operations in Central Asia, such as the hundreds of drone strikes Washington has launched in Afghanistan and neighboring countries. The New York Times commented, “The Obama administration has made a priority of reaching an agreement on an American military presence here after 2014 that will allow the United States to keep tabs on Iran and Pakistan.”

Significantly, Kerry had hoped to visit Pakistan during his tour, but decided against it. There is deep anger in that country over US drone strikes and the collaboration of the Pakistani army and intelligence with Washington. (See also: “UN says US drone war in Pakistan violates international law”)

Instead, Kerry reportedly met privately with Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Sunday, before traveling to Afghanistan.

Washington’s neo-colonial war in Afghanistan—like its proxy war in Syria, Iran’s main Arab ally—aims at establishing US imperialist hegemony over the Middle East and Central Asia. This involves not only controlling and manipulating the conflicts in Pakistan and broadly across Asia unleashed by the Afghan war, but also organizing regime change in Iran, an oil-rich state that Washington sees as the main obstacle to its interests in the Middle East.

Kerry’s visits both to Amman and to Kabul were clearly bound up with Washington’s war drive against Iran and its regional allies. As the Secretary of State left Jordan for Afghanistan, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US is working in Jordan with Britain and France to train Syrian opposition fighters. These fighters then cross the border into southern Syria to carry out attacks.

The AP wrote that these forces were “secular” forces, apparently in an attempt to distinguish them from Al Qaeda-linked forces that provide the bulk of the Syrian opposition’s fighting forces. The wire service’s description of these forces made clear, however, that they are largely army deserters recruited on a religious or tribal basis.

It wrote, “The training has been conducted for several months now in an unspecified location, concentrating largely on Sunnis and tribal Bedouins who formerly served as members of the Syrian army, officials told the Associated Press. The forces aren’t members of the leading rebel group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which Washington and others fear may be increasingly coming under the saw of extremist militia groups, including some linked to Al Qaeda.”

The AP report came a day after the New York Times published an extensive report detailing how Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia helped finance and arm the Syrian opposition for over a year. This took place under CIA supervision and after General David Petraeus, the CIA director until last November, “prodded various countries” to arm the Syrian opposition. The White House was regularly briefed on these arms shipments. (See also: “The CIA war against Syria”)

On Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed that the US “has provided some logistical nonlethal support that has also come in handy for the Syrian rebels.”

With Kerry now headed to Paris to discuss stepping up the war in Syria, the Arab League also joined in the campaign against Assad yesterday, formally seating Syrian opposition officials as Syria’s representatives to the Arab League.

Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani officially welcomed Moaz al-Khatib, the former imam of Damascus’ Umayyad Mosque who recently stepped down as the Syrian opposition’s official leader, to represent Syria. Al-Khatib was replaced by Ghassan Hitto, a US-based information technology executive. This move apparently aimed to present the opposition as less Islamist and reliant on Al Qaeda-linked forces from Libya, Iraq and Chechnya.

Al-Khatib’s speech at the Arab League made no secret of the Syrian opposition’s continuing ties to far-right Islamist elements. Denouncing Assad and supporting Hitto, he defended the presence of foreign jihadist fighters among the anti-Assad militias—though he awkwardly tried to downplay this by suggesting that if Islamist fighters’ families needed them at home, they should return to their families.

Dying Iraq War Veteran Confronts Bush & Cheney

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Confronting the Lies About the Iraq Invasion

Brian Becker

This statement was originally published on the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) website.

Ten years ago, the United States and Britain invaded Iraq. The history of how this invasion came about has been largely falsified by both the right-wing supporters of the invasion and the liberal commentators who opposed the war.

The core argument of the professional liberal commentators and historians is that Bush hoodwinked the country and the general public, with the help of a supplicant media, by scaring people into thinking that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration had to invade to defend America and its people.

The fallacious handwringing liberal position was typified in the recent 10th-anniversary account of the war by Micah Sifry, published by the National Memo.

“But 10 years ago, it was not a good time to be a war skeptic in America. It rarely is. The vast majority of ‘smart’ and ‘serious’ people had convinced themselves that in the face of Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, the prudent thing to do was to go to war to remove him from power,” writes Sifry.

This is a fanciful and false account.

The “country” was not hoodwinked. There was no general feeling that the U.S. must strike first or be engulfed by Saddam Hussein’s military.

The opposite was true. The people of this country—and the world—mobilized in unprecedented numbers prior to a military conflict under the banner: “Stop the War Before it Starts.”

An unprecedented, massive anti-war movement

In the months prior to the invasion, I was the central organizer of the mass anti-war actions in Washington, D.C., that brought many hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of the capital in repeated demonstrations—on Oct. 26, 2002; Jan. 18, 2003; and March 15, 2003.

The Jan. 18, 2003, demonstration filled up a vast expanse of the Mall west of the Capitol building, which houses the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The Washington Post described the Jan. 18 demonstration as the largest anti-war protest since the end of the Vietnam War.

In addition to the Washington demonstrations, there were mass anti-war protests in cities throughout the United States, on both the east and west coasts and nearly everywhere in between.

Thousands of organizations and millions of individuals were participants and organizers in this grassroots global movement.

On Feb. 15, 2003, there were coinciding demonstrations in more than 1,000 cities in almost every country—including many hundreds of cities and towns in the United States.

The rise of a global anti-war movement of such magnitude—before the actual start of military hostilities—was without precedent in human history. Mass anti-war movements and even revolutions have occurred inside one or more of the warring countries at the time of their defeat or perceived defeat, but the Iraq anti-war movement of 2002-2003 was in anticipation of a war and before the gruesome impact of the slaughter could be seen and felt.

The depth of the movement was breathtaking for the organizers and the participants. Millions went into the streets over and over and over again. They knew that they were in a race against time. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were likewise racing to go to war, not because Iraq was getting stronger or closer to having weapons of mass destruction but because this global grassroots anti-war movement had the potential to shake the political status quo to its very foundations

In February 2003, The New York Times described the global anti-war movement as the world’s “second super-power.”

Why the race toward war?

It was under these circumstances that the “mass media” went into overdrive to promote the war. Anti-war voices on television were booted off the air. The airwaves were filled up with the obviously bogus imagery that Iraq in league with unspecified “Muslim terrorists” was about to engulf the United States in a nuclear mushroom cloud. The message was that war was inevitable and that protests were futile.

Bush rushed hundreds of thousands of troops to Kuwait in a race to launch the invasion that they knew was likely to destroy the Iraqi military in a few weeks.

The Democratic Party leaders in Congress had already acquiesced to Bush and Cheney’s war demands. Even though the calls and letters to Congress against the war were running 200 to 1, both the Senate and the House of Representatives, by lopsided margins, passed resolutions on Oct. 11, 2002, authorizing Bush to use the armed forces of the United States against Iraq.

The Iraq invasion was a criminal enterprise. Millions of Iraqis died, more than five million were forced into the miserable life of refugees, thousands of U.S. troops were killed and tens of thousands of others suffered life-changing physical and mental injuries.

Today, Bush and Cheney are writing books and collecting huge speaking fees. They are shielded from prosecution by the current Democratic-led government.

The war in Iraq was not simply a “mistake” nor was it the consequence of a hoodwinked public. It was rather a symptom of the primary reality of the modern-day political system in the U.S. This system is addicted to war. It relies on organized violence, or the threat of violence, to maintain the dominant position of the United States all over the world. The U.S. has invaded or bombed one country after another since the end of the so-called Cold War. It has military bases in 130 countries and spends more on lethal violence than all other countries combined. Yes, in the United States the adult population is encouraged to vote every two or four years for one of two ruling-class parties that enforce the global projection of U.S. empire with equal vigor when they take turns at the helm. And this is labeled the exercise of “democracy” and proof that the United States is indeed the land of the free.

The invasion of Iraq succeeded in creating mass human suffering and death. What Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld failed to anticipate was that the Iraqi people, like all people everywhere, would never willingly accept life under occupation. It was the unanticipated resistance of the Iraqi people that eventually forced the withdrawal of the occupation forces nine long years later.

Brian Becker was the lead organizer of the largest anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C., between Oct. 26, 2002, and the start of the Iraq invasion on March 19, 2003. The October demonstration drew 200,000 people. Less than two months later, on Jan. 18, 2003, approximately 500,000 demonstrated again in what the Washington Post called the “largest anti-war demonstration” in Washington, D.C., since the end of the Vietnam War. On Feb. 15, 2003, millions of people demonstrated in nearly 1,000 cities around the world, including several hundred cities and towns in the United States. On March 15, just four days before the start of the invasion, 100,000 demonstrated once gain in Washington, D.C.

Was Life for Iraqi Women Better Under Saddam?

Rania Khalek

In March 2004, President George W. Bush gave a speech to an audience of 250 women from around the world to commemorate International Women’s Day. His speech focused on the women of Iraq and Afghanistan who he proudly proclaimed were “learning the blessings of freedom” thanks to the United States. “Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed,” said Bush.

But on the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq—an illegal war that killed over one million Iraqis, created 4.5 million refugees, provoked sectarian strife that was for centuries virtually non-existent and empowered religious zealots—women are anything but “liberated.”

Iraq Before the Invasion

Contrary to popular imagination, Iraqi women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries. In fact, equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s Constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property. Today, these rights are all but absent under the U.S.-backed government of Nouri al-Maliki.

Prior to the devastating economic sanctions of the 1990s, Iraq’s education system was top notch and female literacy rates were the highest in the region, reaching 87 percent in 1985. Education was a major priority for Saddam Hussein’s regime, so much so that in 1982 Iraq received the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) award for eradicating illiteracy. But the education system crumbled from financial decay under the weight of the sanctions pushing over 20 percent of Iraqi children out of school by 2000 and reversing decades of literacy gains. Today, a quarter of Iraqi women are illiterate, more than double the rate for Iraqi men (11 percent). Female illiteracy in rural areas alone is as high as 50 percent.

Women were integral to Iraq’s economy and held high positions in both the private and public sectors, thanks in large part to labor and employment laws that guaranteed equal pay, six months fully paid maternity leave and protection from sexual harassment. In fact, it can be argued that some of the conditions enjoyed by working women in Iraq before the war rivaled those of working women in the United States.

It wasn’t until the 1991 Gulf War and U.S.-led economic sanctions against the regime that women’s rights in Iraq began to deteriorate. The sanctions in particular had devastating consequences for the one million Iraqi civilians who slowly starved to death, over half of them children.

As Human Rights Watch points out, “Women and girls were disproportionately affected by the economic consequences of the U.N. sanctions, and lacked access to food, health care, and education. These effects were compounded by changes in the law that restricted women’s mobility and access to the formal sector in an effort to ensure jobs to men and appease conservative religious and tribal groups.”

Then came the invasion.

What “Liberation” Looks Like

The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 exacerbated the desperation of Iraqi women and girls to unprecedented levels. It left them vulnerable to an underground sex industry and subject to severe methods of punishment by an increasingly religious post-invasion government.

A comprehensive examination into sex trafficking by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI)explains, “Ousting the government and all systems of security left Iraqi cities vulnerable in the following months to gangs of men who kidnapped women and girls and assaulted them sexually.”

Many of the kidnapped were sold to nearby countries, as demonstrated in 2004 when houses used to “store” girls before they were purchased were uncovered. Though it is difficult to determine exactly how many women have been victims of sex trafficking, OWFI estimates that in the first seven years after the invasion, 4,000 Iraqi women and girls went missing, twenty percent of whom were under the age of 18.

As the country’s leadership took a turn toward religious fundamentalism – several mass killings of prostitutes and suspected sex workers followed. As the occupying power at the time, the United States was legally responsible for protecting and upholding the human rights of Iraqi civilians. It failed miserably.

Widows and Orphans

The loss of husbands and fathers over the last decade has left 2 million Iraqi women widowed. Furthermore, estimates put the number of orphaned Iraqi children at 5 million, most of whom are growing up without an education. As a result, says OWFI, there are now “more than 3 million women and girls with no source of income or protection, thereby turning them into a helpless population” and making them vulnerable to “trafficking, sexual exploitation, polygamy, and religious pleasure marriages.”

OWFI’s President Yanar Mohammed told this writer that the greatest tragedy has been the impact on the youngest generation. “We’ve lived through two decades of war,” she said. “Eventually we reached a point where the young ones have no good memory of life in Iraq.”

Women’s Rights Set Back 70 Years

Unsurprisingly, most U.S. media outlets have failed to accurately cover the deterioration of women’s rights in Iraq. More often than not, they point to a post-invasion constitutional quota, which reserves 25 percent of Parliament seats for women, as proof that Iraq is on the path to gender equality. But, as Haifa Zangana put it in the Guardian, “this token statistic has repeatedly been trotted out to cover up the regime’s crimes against women.”

Nadje Al-Ali, author of the book “What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq” is also critical of the quota. She argues that the women who benefit from it are “the sisters, daughters and wives of the male conservative leaders” who vote just like them and do not represent ordinary Iraqi women.

Meanwhile, there is just one female minister serving in Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki’s government. Her name is Abtihal Alzidi and she is the Iraqi Minister for Women’s Affairs. But don’t let her gender fool you. Alzidi is an outspoken proponent of misogyny, once telling a local news outlet:

I am against the equality between men and women…If women are equal to men they are going to lose a lot. Up to now I am with the power of the man in society. If I go out of my house, I have to tell my husband where I am going. This does not mean diluting the role of woman in society but, on the contrary, it will bring more power to the woman as a mother who looks after their kids and brings up their children.

Al-Ali argues that the Iraq War set women’s rights back 70 years. Given the above statement, it’s impossible to disagree.

Saddam’s Rape Rooms Make a Comeback

Human Rights Watch (HRW) declared in a 2011 report that “life in Iraq is actually getting worse for women” and accused the U.S.-backed Iraqi government of “violating with impunity the rights of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees.”

According to HRW’s 2013 Iraq Report, the torture and rape of women detainees in pre-trial detention has continued with impunity under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, but the United States is partly responsible. “The failure of the US and UK to hold their troops accountable for abuses in detention and extra judicial killings during their presence in the country seems to have paved the way for the current government to make excuses for abuses, failure of law and order, and lack of accountability,” argues HRW.

Conclusion: the War is Not Over

As for the U.S. declaration that the occupation of Iraq is over, OWFI’s president strongly disagrees. “We know that poverty is here to stay, Islamist extremism is here to stay and women are the targets of this whole deal. There is absolutely no vision of when it will end and who will help us,” laments Mohammed, before adding some damning words in response to President Bush’s proclamation that he “liberated” the women of Iraq.

“[Bush] empowered the extreme religious parties to turn women into second-class citizens. Women are living in extreme poverty and are subject to Sharia law. The same powers that started 9/11 in the U.S., the same Islamists are now ruling in Iraq,” she said.

“This is his legacy.”

 

*Rania Khalek is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation, Salon and In These Times and elsewhere. Visit her blog Dispatches from the Underclass and follow her on Twitter @RaniaKhalek.

What You Won’t Hear About the #IraqWar in Establishment Media

Rania Khalek

As we mourn the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, the establishment media elite seem to agree that the Iraq war was a mistake. But that is about as far as they will go in their criticism.

Meanwhile, the mainstream rarely reports on the suffering of the Iraqi people or the U.S.-led pillaging of their resources and infrastructure. The press can’t even get the number of Iraqi deaths right despite knowing the exact amount of US soldier’s killed. And I have yet to see any establishment voices use the words “illegal” or “war crime” to describe the mass slaughter that was launched in 2003. In fact, much of the focus over last few days has been on whether or not the war was “worth it” for the United States.

So, for those interested in what the media isn’t saying about the Iraq war, I highly recommend checking out Muftah’s special Iraq war issue, featuring articles by some of my favorite writers.

Iraq: The Cradle of Civilization & Graveyard of Imperial Intentions by Roqayah Chamseddine 

Ten Years After Iraq, Media Advocates For War Are Still With Us by Murtaza Hussain

The Iraq War & the Desperation of Capitalism by J.A. Myerson

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Strategic Consequences for Iran by Muhammad Sahimi

Dances of Resistance from Iraq to Palestine by Bilal Ahmed

I also contributed a piece examining the deterioration of women’s rights under the US-backed post-invasion Iraqi government (spoiler alert: The US-backed regime makes Saddam Hussein look like a feminist!).

Was Life for Iraqi Women Better Under Saddam? by Rania Khalek

And, in case your interested, I created a Storify showing the sickening attitudes publicly expressed by the architects of the Iraq War. Ten years on, these war criminals have no regrets and would do it again if given the opportunity.  Can you imagine any other scenario where a violent criminal could get away with mass murder and then brag about it to the national press?

Hail Bradley Manning! Free Him Now!

Workers Vanguard

After enduring nearly three years of detention, at times under torturous conditions, on February 28 Army Private Bradley Manning confessed that he had provided WikiLeaks a trove of military and diplomatic documents that exposed U.S. imperialist schemes and wartime atrocities. Manning’s guilty plea on ten of 22 counts against him could land him in prison for 20 years. But this pound of flesh is not enough for the imperialist rulers, who not only seek vengeance but are also determined to silence anyone perceived as an obstacle to their designs for world domination. A day after Manning confessed, military prosecutors announced plans to try him on the remaining counts, including “aiding the enemy” and violating the Espionage Act. Trial is expected to begin in early June. If convicted on these charges, Manning faces life in prison.

In lifting a bit of the veil of secrecy and lies with which the capitalist rulers cover their depredations, Bradley Manning performed a great service to workers and oppressed around the world. All who oppose the imperialist barbarity and machinations revealed in the material he provided must join in demanding his immediate freedom. Also crucially important is the defense of Julian Assange against the vendetta by the U.S., Britain and their cohorts, who are attempting to railroad him to prison by one means or another for his role in running WikiLeaks.

In a 35-page statement he read to the military court after entering his plea, Manning told of his journey from nearly being rejected in basic training to becoming an army intelligence analyst. In that capacity he came across mountains of evidence of U.S. duplicity and war crimes. The materials he provided to WikiLeaks included military logs documenting 120,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and a formal military policy of covering up torture, rape and murder. A quarter-million diplomatic cables address all manner of lethal operations within U.S. client states, from the “drug war” in Mexico to drone strikes in Yemen. He also released files containing assessments of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These documents show that the government continued to hold many who, Manning stated, were believed or known to be innocent, as well as “low level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence.”

The Pentagon declared war against WikiLeaks following the release of a video, conveyed by Manning, of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter airstrike in Iraq that killed at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists. American forces are then shown firing on a van that pulled up to help the victims. Manning said he was most alarmed by the “bloodlust they appeared to have.” He described how instead of calling for medical attention for a seriously wounded individual trying to crawl to safety, an aerial crew team member “asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage.”

By January 2010, Manning said, he “began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year” and decided to make public many of the documents he had backed up as part of his work as an analyst. Manning first offered the materials to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Not getting anywhere with these pillars of the bourgeois press establishment, in February 2010 he made his first submission to WikiLeaks. He attached a note advising that “this is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.”

The charge of “aiding the enemy”—i.e., Al Qaeda—is especially ominous. This used to mean things like military sabotage and handing over information on troop movements to a battlefield enemy. In Manning’s case, the prosecution claims that the very act of publicizing U.S. military and diplomatic activities, some of which took place years before, amounted to “indirect” communication with Al Qaeda. Manning told the court that he believed that public access to the information “could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” He hoped that this “might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment everyday.” But by the lights of the imperialists’ war on terror, any exposure of their depredations can be construed as support to the “terrorist” enemy, whoever that might be.

The Pentagon intends to call no fewer than 141 witnesses in its show trial, including four people to testify anonymously. One of them, designated as “John Doe,” is believed to be a Navy SEAL who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “Doe” is alleged to have grabbed three disks from bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound on which was stored four files’ worth of the WikiLeaks material provided by Manning. Also reportedly retrieved from bin Laden’s hard drives was a trove of American porn videos. Are Obama & Co. planning to put the owners of Vivid Entertainment in the dock as well?

Nor do charges under the Espionage Act have to have anything to do with actual spying. The law was one of an array of measures adopted to criminalize antiwar activity after U.S. imperialism’s entry into the First World War. It mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Among its first and most prominent victims was Socialist Party spokesman Eugene V. Debs, who was jailed for a June 1918 speech at a workers’ rally in Canton, Ohio, where he denounced the war as capitalist slaughter and paid tribute to the leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Dozens of Industrial Workers of the World organizers were also thrown into prison. So broad was the law’s reach that Robert Goldstein, producer of the movie The Spirit of ’76, was convicted and originally sentenced to ten years on the grounds that the film’s depiction of the brutality of British soldiers during the American Revolution would undermine support for a U.S. wartime ally!

In the early 1970s, the Nixon government tried, unsuccessfully, to use this law to go after Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times shed light on the history of U.S. imperialism’s losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. Obama has happily picked up Nixon’s mantle. Manning’s prosecution will be the sixth time the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act against the source of an unauthorized leak of classified information—more than the combined total under all prior administrations since the law’s enactment in 1917. As we have repeatedly stressed, Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from liberals and the left, is simply carrying out his duties as Commander-in-Chief, stepping up attacks on democratic rights to pave the way for further imperialist depredations and attacks on the workers and oppressed at home.

Noting his initial uncertainty about releasing the diplomatic cables, Manning remarked that he had “once read and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other.” He added, “I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy.”

Behind the imperialists’ diplomatic skullduggery—conducted at times with and at times against one another—is their drive to exploit the world’s workers and oppressed in accord with their distinct interests. The Obama administration’s vicious retaliation against both Manning and Assange shows that nothing in this regard has changed since revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in November 1917 described secret diplomacy as “a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests.” Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, made this point in a statement he issued as Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the newly fledged Soviet workers state. Trotsky was announcing the publication and abrogation of secret treaties hatched by the prior tsarist regime as well as the bourgeois Provisional Government with their imperialist allies.

One of the first acts of the Soviet government was to issue a decree on peace removing Russia from the slaughter of interimperialist World War I and demanding of all belligerents a “just, democratic” peace without annexations or indemnities. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia soon began publication of treaties concluded during the war. Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party was driven by the perspective of world proletarian revolution. Indeed, the October Revolution was a beacon of liberation for the exploited and oppressed in the advanced capitalist countries and in the colonial and semicolonial world. Along with the Soviet government’s renunciation of predatory agreements reached by prior regimes, the publication of the treaties helped spark waves of struggle by those under the boot heel of the imperialists, whose dirty deals were now laid bare.

For proletarian revolutionaries, the materials provided by Manning are of real value in opening the eyes of the world’s working people to the systematic violence and lies that prop up capitalist rule. Opponents of imperialist occupations and war must be won to the understanding that it will require a series of socialist revolutions to put an end to the capitalist order. It is to provide the necessary leadership to the proletariat in this struggle that we are committed to forging Leninist-Trotskyist parties around the world. 

Pope Bergoglio and Argentina’s Military Junta

Binoy Kampmark

They were at it again – for the most part the gray brigade of male, in fancy dress (115 in total), deciding the fate on who would be God’s infallible messenger on earth.  More to the point, the candidates, a collective of stalwarts, reactionaries and minor moderates decided to make a decision after only two days, the white smoke signalling their decision.  Those who were favoured had found themselves celebrating mass with swelling congregations. It was a horserace on the divine – and the punters were turning up with their hopes in droves.  Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer of Sao Paolo, Brazil, was one such magnet.

In the final vote, it was that other giant of Latin America, Argentina, that got across the finishing line.  And Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio had been close in the previous elections that resulted in Benedict XVI’s victory, netting the second highest number before bowing out in the conclave.

The Church’s public relations unit has had its hands full, dealing with the brush fires of child abuse allegations and the problems of corruption.  It was time not so much for a change as a change of angle and emphasis, a person from outside Europe altogether, a conservative yes, but one with a sizeable resume on engaging the poor.

Pope Francis I is being given the brush of austerity for the press.  The drink he takes, and what he advises everyone else to take, is strong and seemingly uncompromising.  “Jesus teaches us another way: Go out.  Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask.  Become the Word in body as well as spirit.”  He is said to have been a self-denier of luxuries other cardinals enjoyed, certainly his predecessors in Buenos Aires.  He makes his own food, visits slums, takes public transport.  That, at least, was his previous incarnation.  Certainly, with that regime of “outreach” and engagement, priests will have a spike in work.

We certainly are not going to be getting much change on various traditional bogey subjects – gay marriage, the availability of free contraception, and artificial insemination.  Francis I had a beef with Argentinean President Christina Kirchner over her permissive policies.  The President has, in turned, regarded Bergoglio as something of a relic, a creature of “medieval times and the Inquisition.”

While that irked him considerably, nothing excused a priest’s refusal to baptise the children of single mothers “because they weren’t conceived in the sanctity of marriage.  These are today’s hypocrites.  Those who clericalise the Church.”  Out, he would seem to be suggesting, with the church that is divided, the falsely inclusive family.

All of this seems to the good.  But the past is a weight that has its own force, and no one who ever becomes a pontiff can claim to be free of decisions he might have either regretted or refused to reconsider.  During the years of the military dictatorship in Argentina, the clerics were conspicuously silent as the brutalities after 1976 unfolded.  Yes, Argentina has a large population of Roman Catholics (under seventy percent), but only ten percent of those attend mass on a regular basis. This is not a good record to be placing on your resume.

Bergoglio pressed Argentina’s bishops to come clean, issuing a collective apology in October 2012 for the church’s failure to protect its believers.  But such an apology could never single out the military regime itself as an exclusively violent force.  Blame also lay with its opponents, the leftist guerrillas.  The none-to-subtle suggestion was that those who had disappeared were also to blame for their beliefs.  Blood met blood.  All had to be condemned.

Human rights activists have seen this as a lazy and nasty confection.  The dimmer view to take here is that Bergoglio did little as 30,000 people were kidnapped and murdered between 1976 and 1983.  An even darker view is to refer to some specific examples of moral complicity that have been dug up.

One such account comes from journalist Horacio Verbitsky, whose The Silence describes the withdrawal of the Jesuit order’s protection of two priests who were secretly jailed by the military junta for their work in poor neighbourhoods, the very sort of work, it would seem, that Bergoglio lauds.  It was Bergoglio who initiated the withdrawal after the two men, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, refused to quit visiting the slums and teaching liberation theology (Reason, Mar 13).  Both men, one of whom gave the account to Verbitsky, were imprisoned for five months.  Such behaviour tended to put the noses of other Jesuits out of joint.  Yorio sniffed treachery; and Jalics went silent, refusing to discuss the account.

Bergoglio counters with his own white knight exploits, telling his biographer Sergio Rubin that he concealed people on church property during the junta’s rule, facilitating the escape across the border of one man using forged papers.  Not challenging the junta openly was simply done in the name of that empty term “pragmatism”.  Furthermore, he intervened on behalf of the very same priests he has publicly abandoned, pleading their case with the dictator Jorge Videla.

Fortunato Mallimacci, former dean of social science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, has little faith in the new pontiff taking issue with that very type of morally sundered pragmatism. “History condemns him. It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the Church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cozy with the military” (Reason, Mar 13).  Is this the same man that major presses claim modernised the Argentinean church?  Clearly we are talking chalk and cheese.

In appearing to address the crowd after the election, Francis I was decked out in sombre, white garb, the elaborate trimmings of Benedict XVI abandoned in favour of austere contemplation. True, he has been industrious in his pastoral work, a devotee of engagement over doctrine.  But such industry has its other reward: netting souls, healing reputations.  As a fisher of souls, Francis I will have much work to do.  Repairing a Church rented by scandal and accusation will be a tall order.  As he tries to do so, he may well have to confront the sorts of demons pragmatism brings.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email:bkampmark@gmail.com

Also see:
Pope Bergoglio, Reactionary Opponent of Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner