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Battle Cry of Freedom: A Review of Taking Liberties

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How many Americans take their rights for granted? Last month an impressive number of antiwar demonstrators converged on San Francisco and New York in chartered buses. Similarly, more than 30 years ago, various protest organizers chartered buses to bring anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators to Washington. After that peace demonstration, the largest of that war, FBI agents secretly asked private banks to open their proprietary records to identify the people who had signed the checks to pay for the buses. “We found out when a bank clerk called to alert us,” writes Aryeh Neier, who was then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “which allowed us to rush into federal court to halt the practice.”

Born in Nazi Germany to Jewish parents, Aryeh Neier is America’s foremost rights advocate. Today, at 65, he runs the Open Society Institute funded by the philanthropist financier George Soros. Neier previously founded and led Human Rights Watch, a once-small organization that has surpassed even Amnesty International as the world’s most authoritative voice on international human rights. Before that, Neier successfully guided the ACLU through some of its most challenging years, including the recovery of its prestige after the revelation that some previous leaders had secretly collaborated with the FBI during and after America’s “Red scare.”

Anyone looking to learn much more about Aryeh Neier himself will only be disappointed by this book. Instead of being a revealing personal memoir, Taking Liberties, as its subtitle suggests, reads more like an intellectual history of the rights movement in the United States and abroad, as told by a perhaps self-serving but no doubt highly effective protagonist.

Neier was executive director of the New York ACLU before he was elected to run the national organization, and the first issue he confronted was brutality by New York City police officers, including the practice of forced confessions. While at the ACLU, he also exposed abuses in prisons and mental-health asylums, and he was a pioneer in challenging the then-illegality of abortion. But his defense of the right of neo-Nazis to march through a Skokie, Ill., neighborhood whose residents included Holocaust survivors was even more controversial. Although many ACLU members resigned, as widely reported at the time, the drop was only short-lived, and the organization rebounded in the 1980s during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office.

By then, Neier had already left the ACLU to join with others, most notably Robert L. Bernstein, then chairman and chief executive officer of Random House, to form the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee “to protest repression against dissenters in the Soviet Union.” Neier writes that “as one who had followed closely accounts of resistance to Soviet repression since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 . . . I welcomed Bob Bernstein’s call.” Soon the founders of Helsinki Watch added America’s Watch, which battled President Ronald Reagan’s administration over the facts of human-rights cases, first in El Salvador and later elsewhere.

Taking Liberties reminds readers that defenders of rights are ironically indebted to the Reagan administration. Officials such as Elliott Abrams (White House director of Middle East policy today) erroneously argued that only communist regimes committed the worst offenses. When the Watch committees proved him and others wrong, together they established the tenet that human rights deserve a central place in U.S. foreign policy.

Along the way, Neier’s sometimes uncompromising style provoked more than a few internecine conflicts. In Taking Liberties, he avoids reopening old wounds over different strategic approaches. But the book does take some swings at, among others, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his allies on the Supreme Court, who Neier maintains have only eroded our rights.

Today, as director of the well-funded Open Society Institute, Neier has even more latitude to defend rights at home and abroad. He chronicles his own lead role in promoting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. He laments the loss of his friend Fred Cuny, who volunteered to go to Chechnya to help provide health and reconstruction services. “Every day,” writes Neier, “[I] rue my part in [his disappearance].”

But there is one area that this otherwise intrepid activist steps over. Watchdogs such as Human Rights Watch under Neier’s leadership sharply criticized U.S. military aid to many human-rights-abusing countries, but after the Cold War, Human Rights Watch, still under Neier, began to lobby for international military intervention to stop similar abuses by other non-U.S.-backed parties and regimes. Unfortunately, he papers over what he fails to mention was a watershed dispute among human-rights advocates over whether to back U.S. intervention in Somalia. (The last Bush administration began the intervention that the Clinton administration continued.) Aryeh Neier was among those hoping to use the African Horn intervention as a springboard to stopping both alleged and many already proven acts of genocide and other crimes throughout the 1990s in Bosnia and later in Rwanda and Kosovo.

Neier deserves credit for his lead role in helping establish the notion that the same standards that apply to international war crimes also apply to civil conflicts. In the early 1980s, he began promoting accountability for disappearances and other political crimes in Argentina. Two decades later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s ex-president Slobodan Milosevic was indicted at the Hague for humanitarian crimes he had allegedly ordered in his own nation’s southern province of Kosovo.

Taking Liberties tells us more about where we came from than where we are going. But it is a timely story told by one American who never took any right anywhere for granted. *

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has collaborated with many human-rights organizations. He is writing a book about the 1991 uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Iraq: Telling the Left from the Right

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How many Americans who oppose the looming war know the left from the right when it comes to Iraq? The only two players on the field are not George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. For inside and outside the borders of Iraq there is a political opposition to Saddam — and while some of those opponents are now aligned with the White House, others remain on the political left.

But don’t expect to read or hear much about any Iraqi leftist groups in the mainstream or even the “alternative” press.

In past U.S. foreign-policy conflicts, American activists frequently expressed their solidarity with and support of embattled leftists, whether in Chile, Nicaragua or El Salvador. But in this standoff with Iraq, American leftists seem woefully ignorant of their Iraqi counterparts and, consequently, of their views on the present conflict. And for these Iraqi leftists the current crisis transcends the prevailing American leftist view, which reduces the matter simply to either war or peace.

Today, Iraqi leftists play an important oppositional role against Saddam. Foremost among them is the Iraqi Communist Party, which at one time was that country’s biggest and broadest leftist mass movement, touching the lives of literally millions. Even before Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Communist Party was organizing trade unions and other civic groups.

The leftist party has also long been Iraq’s most diverse political movement, cutting across traditional population lines to incorporate many disenfranchised majority Shias and minority Kurds. Even though tens of thousands of Communists and other leftists have perished in Saddam’s gulags and are still actively targeted by the ruling Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi CP today maintains a clandestine network across Iraq that experts deem to be of significant scale and political potential.

That network provides some of the best and most detailed reporting on armed resistance and government repression within Iraq. Indeed, human-rights activists, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, rely heavily on the detailed reporting that comes out of Iraq via this network. “[T]he bodies of tens of people from the city of Basra, who were executed by firing squads of the dictatorial regime in late March 1999, are buried in a mass grave in the Burjesiyya district near the town of Zubair, about 20 km southeast of Basra,” reads the Iraqi Communist Party Web site in an article about a brief anti-Saddam uprising three years ago in the Shi’a-dominated, southernmost city. “Some of the victims fell into the hands of security forces after being wounded, or when their ammunition had finished. But most of the arrests took place during the following days when the authorities . . . unleashed an unprecedented campaign of police raids, house searches and detentions.” The report concludes that 400 to 600 people died in this massacre. “The massacre culminated with security men firing their handguns at the [h]eads of their victims,” says the report. “The horrific scene ended with throwing the bodies of victims in a deep pit dug with a bulldozer which was used later to cover up the site in an attempt to hide the traces of the crime.”

Today, Iraqi Communists, and most Iraqi leftists, firmly oppose the Bush administration’s war plans — but not necessarily war itself. Unlike many of their American counterparts, Iraqi leftists offer a policy alternative other than a vague call for “peace.” Instead of a unilateral U.S. invasion, Iraqi leftists want the international community to back an Iraqi-led military uprising against Saddam.

Short of that, Iraqi leftists would most likely support a multilateral military intervention that would not only overthrow Saddam but also hand him over to an international tribunal that would try him on charges of crimes against humanity.

Iraqi leftist groups also favor other positions routinely ignored by most American leftists, including vigorous U.N. human-rights monitoring inside Iraq. Most American anti-war activists also downplay another issue that Iraqi leftists are most worried about. What might a post-Saddam Iraq look like? The Communist Party and other Iraqi leftist groups refused to join the recent U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition meeting in London, pointing out that Washington has only been planning to replace Saddam’s regime with another minority dictatorship. The Iraqis closest to Washington remain deposed aristocrats, although the Bush administration finally dumped the plan, backed by the Pentagon alone, to restore exiled former supporters of the Kingdom of Iraq, which prevailed for [37] years, to power as the Iraqi National Congress.

Instead of the U.S.-backed return of the old ruling class, the Communist Party and Shi’a and Kurdish opposition groups want U.N.-monitored elections inside a post-Saddam Iraq leading to a federal representative government. This is an ongoing struggle yet to be adequately reported, unfortunately, in any U.S. publication, and the issue represents a genuinely democratic frontline with, so far, few if any so-called American progressives on it.

American and Iraqi leftists also differ over whom to blame for any coming war. The Iraqi CP blames not only the Bush administration, but also the Iraqi government. In this regard, the Iraqi Communist Party ironically joins the Bush administration in unequivocally demanding that Saddam fully cooperate with U.N. inspections to prevent his regime from developing more weapons of mass destruction. “The rulers” of “the dictatorial regime in Iraq,” reads an Iraqi CP declaration, put “their selfish interest above the people’s national interest, refusing to allow the [work] of U.N. weapons inspectors, and thus preventing action to spare our people and country looming dangers.”

Any U.S. leftist who even remotely thinks that Saddam’s regime is — beside its heavy-handedness — some sort of socialist alternative had better think again. No matter how much Saddam relies on the Stalinist model for his security services, the Iraqi dictator has never held anything but contempt for Iraqi leftists.

At 22, Saddam Hussein carried out his first assassination plot, against a Communist-backed leader in Baghdad who was the first president of Iraq. In fact, the young man from Tirkit was not accepted into the Ba’ath party until after he and others shot at President Abdel-Karim Qassem, who was backed by the Iraqi Communist Party and many trade unions. President Qassem survived, while Saddam was wounded in the leg.

Instead of leftist principles, Saddam’s ruling Ba’athist ideology unabashedly champions ethnic nationalism in order to build a greater nation based on ethnicity. [The name of h]is Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath party explicitly excludes the one in every five Iraqis who are ethnic Kurds. Moreover, the Ba’athists’ Pan-Arab message is shaped mainly by Arabs of the Sunni Muslim faith like Saddam, and their form of Arab nationalism has little appeal for Arab Muslims of the Shia faith, who constitute three out of five Iraqis. Rather than empower either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or its Kurdish minority, the Ba’ath party merely replaced Iraq’s old rulers, who were Sunni Arab-led monarchists based in Baghdad, with new Sunni Arab-led rulers like Saddam from rural regions north of the capital.

“A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba’ath party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus,” writes Faleh A. Jabar, a University of London scholar and former Iraqi Communist Party newspaper editor, in a recent issue of the U.S. monthly The Progressive. “You had either to be with the Ba’ath or you were against it.”

Today most of Kurdish-speaking Iraq, in the north, enjoys U.S.-enforced autonomy from Saddam’s regime, while Shias, in the south, still actively resist rule from Baghdad. Take Basra, where Saddam’s officials routinely bring visiting U.S. peace activists. “We were welcomed warmly into the home of Abu Haider, the father of a young boy who was killed three years ago by a U.S. Tomaha[w]k missile shot from a ship in the Gulf,” reads a pre-Christmas report from Pax Christi, a faith-based group. Pax Christi’s newsletter today says that this U.S. missile attack occurred in Basra in 1998. Undoubtedly true. But missing from that newsletter is that in that same year Saddam’s regime interred dozens of anti-Saddam rebels and others in secret graves in that same city, according to Iraqi Communist sources.

Opposing American imperialism is one thing. But ignoring Iraqi fascism is quite another. In the wake of the Gulf War, and after then-President Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up, mass armed rebellion swept Iraq in the spring of 1991. More than a dozen major cities fell into the hands of the Iraqi rebels. Yet, as American forces stood by with arms crossed, Saddam’s troops and attack helicopters drowned the rebellion in blood, taking at least 100,000 lives. The anti-Saddam opposition was openly and tragically betrayed by Washington.

American leftists and peace activists must not now repeat the same sin. Only a quintessentially American arrogance would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi socialists and leftists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq. And as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans, especially peace activists, should take the trouble to do the same.

Frank Smyth is finishing a book on the 1991 Iraqi uprisings, which he reported on for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice.

Iraq’s Eclipsed Red Star?

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“Iraq’s Eclipsed Red Star?” by Frank, Guerrilla News Network, January 13, 2003.

Not that long ago, when American progressives spoke about being in solidarity with the people of a foreign nation they were supporting leftist national liberation movements. Back in the 1980s, for instance, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador was allied with that Central American country’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front which included the El Salvador Communist Party. Not anymore, at least not when it comes to Iraq. How many anti-war activists like Sean Penn who recently visited Baghdad know their left from their right in Iraq?

Today Iraqi leftists still play roles inside and outside Iraq. But don’t expect to either read or hear much about any Iraqi leftist groups in either the mainstream or even the so-called “alternative” press. After all, who knew that the most detailed reporting available anywhere about ongoing specific humanitarian crimes by Saddam’s regime is found at none other than the Iraqi Communist Party website, Iraqcp.org?

“[T]he bodies of tens of people from the city of Basra, who were executed by firing squads of the dictatorial regime in late March 1999, are buried in a mass grave in the Burjesiyya district near the town of Zubair, about 20 km south east of Basra,” reads the Iraqi Communist Party website about a brief anti-Saddam uprising three years ago in the Shi’a-dominated, southernmost city. “Some of the victims fell into the hands of security forces after being wounded, or when their ammunition had finished. But most of the arrests took place during the following days when the authorities…unleashed an unprecedented campaign of police raids, house searches and detentions.

“The detainees, who were numbered in their hundreds, were then held at the detention centre of the Security Directorate of Basra governorate, in Al-Ashar district. They were subjected to barbaric torture over many days,” Iraqcp.org goes on. “Family members of security men who had been killed in the heroic revolt were brought to the scene, each was handed a machine gun, and they were told to avenge their dead by firing at the youths and men lined up before them. The massacre culminated with security men firing their hand guns at the [h]eads of their victims. The horrific scene ended with throwing the bodies of victims in a deep pit dug with a bulldozer which was used later to cover up the site in an attempt to hide the traces of the crime.

“Our party sources have been able to compile the names of some of these victims (a list is attached to this statement). The authorities, as part of the policy of collective punishment, demolished their houses, and detained their families, including women and children. The fate of these innocent detainees is still unknown. Reliable sources in Basra have estimated the total number of victims of the campaign of mass executions, which followed the suppression of the popular revolt, to range from 400 to 600 people.”

The Iraqi Communist Party was once by far that oil-rich country’s broadest leftist movement. Even before Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Communist Party was organizing trade unions and other civic groups. The leftist party has also long been Iraq’s most diverse political movement to cut across traditional population lines to incorporate many disenfranchised majority Shi’as and minority Kurds. Even though tens of thousands of cadre have since perished in Saddam’s gulags, the Iraqi Communist Party today maintains a clandestine network across Iraq, despite still being targeted by the ruling Ba’athist regime. Iraqcp.org reports not only ongoing human rights abuses, but ongoing armed civil resistance to the regime.

But how many American anti-war activists like Sean Penn have heard of it? Last month the Oscar-nominated actor said he was putting his conscience first when he visited Baghdad. Yet the 42-year-old star of many films including his latest one, “I Am Sam,” spoke in Baghdad like he knew he was on weak ground. “I’m afraid of saying something that might hurt somebody, and then find out I was wrong in the first place,” he told The New York Times. Sean Penn said he did not want to end up being outcast like Jane Fonda was after her 1972 trip to the communist North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi during the Vietnam war, or like his later father, Leo Penn, was during Washington’s “Red Scare” witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

It was unwittingly ironic for the younger Penn to bring up his father in the capital of Saddam’s Iraq. Leo Penn performed in plays like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men before migrating to the film industry. But Paramount studios refused to renew his contract in 1945 over his trade union activities, and continued to blacklist him afer he supported the Hollywood 10, or the first group of fellow actors and others who were jailed for refusing to answer questions about their alleged communist ties before Congress. (Leo Penn’s career suffered, too, until the advent of television where he became an Emmy-winning director of prime time dramas like the New York City detective series, “Kojak.”)

Today the Iraqi Communist Party firmly opposes the Bush administration’s war plans. “No to imperialism! No to war!” reads Iraqcp.org. Many of the administration’s so-called justifications for invading Iraq are indeed bogus — not least of all the claim that Saddam’s regime had anything to do with 9/11. Moreover, any unilateral military action against Iraq, especially at this time of extremely heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions, is certain to inflame anti-American sentiments throughout both the Arab and the Muslim worlds, only driving more recruits into Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network. In addition, the Bush administration has greatly exaggerated the current strategic threat posed by Saddam’s regime to the United States along with its allies led by Israel.

But that hardly makes the Iraqi despot any more likeable now than he ever was like back during the 1980s when Saddam was a secret ally (using chemical gas) of the U.S. administration led by President Ronald Reagan. Sean Penn at least once sagely called Saddam a “tyrant” guilty of “criminal viciousness” in a paid ad on a full page last fall of The Washington Post. Similarly, the noted anti-war critic, Noam Chomsky, once last summer on “Z-net” said about Saddam, “I think he is as evil as they come.” But too many other anti-war activists only downplay any criticism whatsoever against Saddam or his regime. Moreover, unlike most American leftists, Iraqi leftists offer a policy alternative. Instead of a unilateral U.S. invasion, Iraqi communists, and others want the international community to back a broad military front against his regime.

Iraqi leftist groups also favor other positions only ignored by most American leftists like U.N. human rights monitoring inside Iraq. And instead of a unilateral American invasion, many independent Iraqi groups support a multilateral one leading to not only Saddam’s overthrow but also him and others eventually facing humanitarian charges in an international tribunal. Nobody from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, does a better job, in fact, than the Iraqi Communist Party in documenting ongoing abuses by Saddam’s regime.

“Under [the] direct supervision of Qusay, the younger son of the dictator Saddam Hussein…15 political prisoners were executed, Nazi-style, in a poison gas chamber on 10 August 2001,” reads Iraqcp.org, relying in no small way on the Communist party’s underground cadre and sources inside Iraq. “The victims were placed inside a specially designed chamber and then a poisonous gas was released through vents. They were dead within 27 seconds. Their bodies were left there for one hour until the gas was extracted through a special vent.

“The Gas Chamber,” the Iraqcp.org report goes on, “and its operation began after approval by Qusay. It seems that this barbaric method was designed to facilitate mass physical liquidation of prisoners and detainees in a shorter time and with less effort. The dictatorial regime is continuing its notorious ‘Prison Cleanup’ campaign which has so far claimed the lives of more than 3000 prisoners and detainees.”

Last year, President Saddam Hussein emptied his prisons including his largest one, Abu Ghraib, right after he orchestrated an allegedly unanimous referendum on his rule. The listener-supported Pacifica Network’s “Democracy Now!” radio show in many large U.S. cities aired one Iraqi source after another including officials claiming it was a legitimate reflection of Saddam’s popularity without even suggesting that there might be any other Iraqi view; the Iraqi Communist Party called the referendum a farce, adding that “our people are too familiar with the deceit and manipulations practiced by the regime.” Countless political prisoners remain missing, according to not only the Iraqi Communist Party but also to other non-U.S.-backed Iraqi groups like the Shi’a-run al-Khoei Foundation based in London.

When it comes to internal security measures, Saddam copies a late communist, ironically, whom he admires, the former Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. Saddam’s independent biographer, the Palestinian author Said K. Aburish, wrote: “he has modeled himself after and adopted the ways of Joseph Stalin and merged them with his tribal instincts.” But no matter how much he borrows from Stalin, Saddam has never held anything but contempt for Iraqi leftists.

“I used to have a Communist friend at school,” Saddam told his own authorized biographer, the [Lebanese] writer Faoud Matar. “He’s dead now, God rest his soul. He spent most of his time reading communiques and declarations to us, his schoolmates. All we did was make fun of him,” added Saddam in the 1990 edition of his approved biography published in London. “[W]e knew his theories came from abroad; they had been introduced by a foreigner, not an Arab.” At 22, Saddam Hussein carried out his first assassination plot, against a communist-backed leader in Baghdad who was the first President of Iraq. In fact, the young man from Tirkit was not accepted into the Ba’ath party until after he and others shot at President Abdel-Karim Qassem, who was backed by the Iraq Communist Party and many trade unions. President Qassem survived, while Saddam was wounded in the leg.

Instead of leftist ideology, Ba’athism unabashedly champions ethnic nationalism in order to build an ethnic-based greater nation. The [name of the] Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath party explicitly excludes every one in five Iraqis who are ethnic Kurds. Moreover the Ba’athists’ pan-Arab message is made mainly by Arabs of the Sunni Muslim faith like Saddam, and their Sunni-based Arab nationalism also has little appeal with Arab Muslims of the Shi’a faith who comprise three out of five Iraqis. Rather than empower either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or its Kurdish minority, the Ba’ath party merely displaced Iraq’s old rulers of Sunni Arab-led monarchists based in Baghdad with new Sunni Arab-led rulers like Saddam from rural regions north of the capital.

“A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba’ath party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus,” writes Faleh A. Jabar, the University of London scholar and former Iraqi communist party newspaper editor, in the current issue of the Madison, Wisconsin-based monthly, The Progressive. “You had either to be with the Ba’ath or you were against it.”

Today most of Kurdish-speaking Iraq in the north enjoys U.S.-enforced autonomy from Saddam’s regime, while Shias in the south still resist. Take Basra, where Saddam’s officials have recently brought visiting U.S. peace activists. “We were welcomed warmly into the home of Abu Haider, the father of a young boy who was killed three years ago by a U.S. Tomaha[w]k missile shot from a ship in the Gulf,” reads a pre-Christmas report from Pax Christi, a faith-based group. Pax Christi’s newsletter today says that this U.S. missile attack occurred in Basra in 1998; the same year Saddam’s regime there interred dozens of anti-Saddam rebels and others in secret graves, according to Iraqcp.org.

Most American anti-war activists also downplay another issue that Iraqi leftists are most worried about. What might a post-Saddam Iraq look like? The Communist Party refused to join the recent U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition meeting in London, pointing out that Washington has only been planning to replace Saddam’s regime with another minority dictatorship. The Iraqis closest to Washington remain deposed aristocrats, although the Bush administration finally just dumped the Pentagon-alone-backed plan to restore former supporters of the [3]7-year-reigning Kingdom of Iraq to power back from exile in London as the Iraqi National Congress.

Instead of the U.S.-backed return of the old ruling class, the Communist Party, Shia and Kurdish opposition groups want U.N.-monitored elections after Saddam inside Iraq leading to a federal representative government. This is an ongoing struggle yet to be adequately reported, unfortunately, in any U.S. press, and the issue represents a genuinely democratic frontline with so far few if any so-called American “progressives” on it.

American and Iraqi leftists also differ over whom to blame for any coming war. Iraqcp.org blames not only the Bush administration, but also the Iraqi government. In this regard, the Iraq Communist Party ironically joins the Bush administration in unequivocally demanding that Saddam fully cooperate with U.N. inspections to prevent his regime from newly developing more weapons of mass destruction. “The rulers” of “the dictatorial regime in Iraq,” reads Iraqcp.org, put “their selfish interest above the people’s national interest, refusing to allow the [work] of U.N. weapons inspectors, and thus preventing action to spare our people and country looming dangers.”

Opposing American imperialism is one thing. But ignoring Iraqi fascism is another. In Baghdad, Sean Penn said, “I would hope that all Americans will embrace information available to them outside conventional channels.” Hopefully he and other antiwar Americans will take his own advice and read unconventional channels like Iraqcp.org. Only a quintessentially American sense of chauvinism would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi Marxists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq, and, as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans should too of course including anti-war activists.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who is writing a book at the 1991 Iraqi uprisings. He has covered leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, Iraq and Rwanda. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com.”

Living Dangerously: A Review of “The Lion’s Grave”

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THE LION’S GRAVE: Dispatches from Afghanistan
By Jon Lee Anderson
Grove. 244 pp. $24

Any egomaniac with an audience can do a live stand-up in an alleged combat zone these days, but Jon Lee Anderson is a war correspondent’s journalist. On Sept. 11, while most Americans were still either looking up or glued to their television sets, Anderson sent an e-mail from southern Spain to his editor at The New Yorker in Manhattan. “I am guessing you never made it to the office. I hope everyone at The New Yorker is OK,” he wrote. “I feel like I should be heading for Afghanistan, which I fully expect to be flattened any day now.”

The result is an insightful book of dispatches that are different in focus from, but reminiscent, in their on-the-ground style, of the late Ernie Pyle’s reporting from North Africa during World War II. In London, Anderson bought a portable satellite phone, which he used to file his reports from Central Asia over the ensuing months. A pack of hundreds of other reporters descended upon the region in late 2001, but Anderson, who had been covering the country since the days of the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, was nearly the first journalist to reach Afghanistan after Sept. 11. All but one of these dispatches previously appeared in the weekly magazine, but much of the writing remains prescient.

“The sight of women, or at least discernibly human creatures in feminine clothes, is about the only thing that relieves the harshness of the landscape. This visible part of Afghan society is unremittingly male, as is the land, which is drab and muscular,” writes Anderson. “Barefoot boys walk back and forth through beds of harvested rice, turning the grains with their toes to dry them in the sun. . . . Lambs are tethered next to men with long knives who slaughter them and hang the carcasses from hooks, hacking them into a steadily diminishing mess of blood and meat and bone and fat by day’s end. Grain and vegetables are weighed in tin scales that are balanced with stones.”

Anderson also gives his readers a window on himself. The book’s narrative journalism is framed by contemporaneous e-mails that either begin or end every chapter. Most were sent by Anderson via laptop (with a special bullet-proof casing) and satellite phone to his editor, Sharon DeLano. Some e-mails show the hardships of prolonged frontline reporting. “Our compound has mud walls and mud floors and mud everything,” he tells DeLano. “Outside, there is a large dirt patio with two hole-in-the-floor latrines, a vigilant mongrel dog, and — as of yesterday — a scorpion in the washroom.”

Other e-mails reveal another side of a correspondent who is apparently not afraid of talking back to men with guns: “One [Afghan combatant] asked for a cigarette. I gave him one, but chided him, since it was Ramadan, and Muslims are not supposed to smoke [or eat or drink] during the daylight hours. Then another man came up and demanded a cigarette and I could see that the whole group of ten or so fighters were planning on doing this. So I said, No more.”

“A third mujahideen, a burly man with a large PK machine gun slung over his shoulder, leered at me and grabbed me between the legs, hard. Then he darted away and laughed. I followed him and kicked him in the rear end, twice. This made his comrades roar with laughter, but he didn’t think it was so funny, and he pointed his gun at me, then lowered it. I began cursing him in English and he raised the gun at me again and I could tell that he was cursing me too, in Dari. We had something of a standoff.”

The book, as its title suggests, revolves around the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, “The Lion of Panjshir,” the Northern Alliance commander who was killed by two Arab men posing as journalists two days before Sept. 11. Anderson convincingly ties the assassination to Osama bin Laden, who, like Anderson himself, apparently expected an American retaliation on Afghan targets in response to Sept. 11. In the only new reporting in the book, Anderson explores bin Laden’s former home base south of Jalalabad, where he introduces readers to a heavily armed American named “Jack,” a 46-year-old former U.S. Army Green Beret from Fayetteville, N.C., who claimed, “I have no official relationship to the U.S. government.”

The strength of The Lion’s Grave goes beyond its character profiles to its effective navigation of the crisscrossing lines of Afghan politics. Anderson already knew the country and its players, not only the late Massoud but also many lesser-known Afghans, including noncombatants. Like the dispassionately illuminating biography of Che Guevara that largely earned this correspondent his name, this book captures a time and a place that no one who reads it will forget. The text is interspersed with black-and-white images by Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak that depict austere Afghans usually in a cold landscape. For anyone tired of instant journalism, this book reflects an older art.

Frank Smyth is writing a book on the 1991 Iraqi uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Hussein Opens His Prison Doors to Trouble

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Original story found here.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein released thousands of political and other prisoners from jails across his country last Sunday, including from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. The broad amnesty was no doubt welcomed by many Iraqi families whose loved ones disappeared years, if not decades, ago because of their real or suspected opposition to his regime. Hussein’s spokesmen said he freed the prisoners in gratitude, after Iraqis allegedly voted unanimously to reaffirm their support for his rule. But the act of amnesty only angered some families, whose relatives remain missing.

Many regimes around the world have brutalized their own citizens, but few have tortured and killed as many people as Hussein’s has. Eleven years ago a French photographer, Alain Buu, and myself, then a stringer for CBS News radio, spent two weeks in Abu Ghraib after we were captured traveling with Iraqi rebels during anti-Hussein uprisings following the Persian Gulf War. In prison, we saw Hussein’s guards select individual Iraqi captives, ranging from men to even one frail boy, to torture for fun at night, while intelligence operatives painfully interrogated the same prisoners during the day. Hussein’s amnesty seems to show that he is concerned about his political image as the Bush administration marches toward war. The Iraqi leader may be trying to avoid a military contest that even he, this time, knows he cannot win, and he is showing his alleged compassion to Iraqis and others whom he finally sees he could use on his side.

Ironically, he now has something in common with President George W. Bush. Each leader has recently betrayed his own instincts to try to broaden his own respective political coalition: While Bush previously announced his goal to change the Iraqi regime unilaterally if necessary, lately the administration has been negotiating with France and Russia in the UN Security Council over the terms for UN arms inspectors to return to Iraq. Not unlike Hussein, the Bush administration seems to be learning the hard way that more allies are better than one or none.

There is no need for Bush to act alone. Hussein is more widely despised than almost any other world leader, with enemies spread not only around the globe but within Iraq as well. His Iraqi enemies go far beyond the relatively few Iraqis associated with the U.S.-backed opposition based in London. The U.S. Defense Department is training 500 Iraqis recommended by the Iraqi National Congress, led by ex-monarchists.

Hussein’s opponents cut across Iraqi politics, ethnicity and religion. Human rights abuses by Hussein’s regime against his people have been widely documented, and even the Iraqi Communist Party’s Web site includes many reports about torture and mass executions at Abu Ghraib. Emptying his largest gulags may only backfire; Shia women in particular have become emboldened to demand information about their disappeared sons.

One Hussein detractor outside Iraq includes none other than Osama Bin Laden. Whether or not any ties between Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida organization and Hussein’s regime are ever firmly established, these two anti-American leaders are indeed enemies. In the summer before Sept. 11, bin Laden broadcast his contempt for Hussein through Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network, in the video that Al-Qaida released last year. Bin Laden calls Hussein “a false Muslim,” who only worships himself and his ruling Ba’ath party. It wasn’t until the eve of the Gulf War when Hussein for the first time raised an Islamic banner, adding the words “God is Great” — written in his own handwriting — to the Iraqi tricolor. According to Bin Laden, the Iraqi leader is a cynic, not a fundamentalist.

As Bush talks about regime change in Iraq, the administration and its supporters should keep in mind that Iraqis have heard it all before. In 1991, during the Gulf crisis, then-President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam … to step aside.” Millions of Shias in the south and Kurds in the north did just that, joining thousands of defecting regular Iraqi troops and officers against his regime. At different times, Iraqi rebels controlled 14 out of 17 Iraqi cities, including the outskirts of Baghdad. But the former Bush administration was hoping for a coup and not a popular insurrection, so it ordered American troops that were then in southern Iraq to stand by — and Hussein’s elite forces crushed the rebels in four weeks.

Many of the prisoners whom Hussein just released have been jailed since that spring, and most of them are either Shi’as or Kurds. Despite his professed gratitude, this was a calculated act by a threatened despot newly willing to play any card in his hand. The freed prisoners include many Iraqis who have fought his regime in the past, and letting them go remains a gamble. No one should underestimate what he might do next.

Iraq’s Forgotten Majority

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Original story found here.

WASHINGTON — Last month, President Bush invoked the prospect of a democratic Iraq in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, while Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress that he foresaw “a government of Iraqis governing Iraqis in a democratic fashion.” Yet the administration remains closest to Sunni Arabs, a minority group of Iraqis that has never shared power. This does not bode well for a stable post-Hussein Iraq.

Sunni Arabs, including Saddam Hussein and most Iraqis in the American-backed opposition, account for no more than 16 percent of the Iraqi population; they dominate central Iraq as far south as Baghdad. Ethnic Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslims, make up about 20 percent of Iraq’s population and are concentrated in the mountainous north. But nearly two-thirds of Iraqis are Shi’ite Muslims, and they populate the slums of Baghdad as well as the south of Iraq. Unlike Kurds and others in the northern no-flight zone, who have received a proportionate share of Iraqi revenues under the United Nations-administered oil-for-food program, Iraqis in the vast southern zone have suffered greatly from a decade of sanctions. Saddam Hussein, of course, is entirely willing to let them suffer.

Shi’ite Muslims would be the largest voting bloc in any democratic Iraq. This is why the Bush administration must find a way to integrate them into its Iraq planning, something it has so far failed to do. It is also a principal reason why Saddam Hussein has suppressed Shi’ism. In recent years Saddam Hussein has hand-picked one Shi’ite cleric after another to lead the Shiite community, only to see each one defy him ? and be murdered quickly thereafter. In a shooting spree beginning in 1998, one top Iraqi Shiite cleric after another was gunned down. Iraq’s last grand ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was murdered with his two sons on a road near Najaf. Another powerful cleric, Hussain Bahr al-Uloom, died under mysterious circumstances last year.

It is Shi’ites who have most consistently fought Saddam Hussein since 1991, when Shi’ite clerics called for an uprising. “The Shia uprising in the south was far more dangerous than the Kurdish insurgency in the north,” one eyewitness later reported to the State Department. Although the small and disastrous northern uprising in 1996 had no exact counterpart in the south, a Shi’ite group attacked Mr. Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, that year and crippled him. In 1998 Shi’ite rebels attacked Mr. Hussein’s second in command, Izzat Ibrahim.

American officials have long been reluctant to work with Iraqi Shi’ites out of fear that they might be too close to Iran, where the Shi’ite faith predominates. But Iraqi and Iranian Shi’ites are not as close as it might seem. The Iraqis are Arabs and the Iranians are Persian. They also, with some exceptions, follow very distinct and sometimes hostile forms of Shi’ism: Akhbari in Iraq, Usuli in Iran. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: The scholar Juan Cole commented in reaction to this NYT’s op-ed that the Usuli school is predominant in both contemporary Iran and Iraq, although there are still some practioners of the Akhbari school in Iraq.] Akhbari Shi’ism has never promoted political rule, while the Usuli school produced the politically active caste of priests that is a distinctive feature of Iranian Shi’ism.

Iraqi Shi’ites demonstrated their independence from Iranian Shi’ites in 1980 after Iraq invaded Iran. A Central Intelligence Agency report noted in 1991 that Iraq’s Shi’ites “rejected Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini’s concept of velayat-e faqui (political rule by a supreme religious leader) and remained loyal to Baghdad during the eight-year war with Iran.”

Despite a lack of political connection, Iraq’s most important Shi’ite clerics survive in exile in Iran today. Only in August did Bush administration officials meet with the brother of Shiite leader Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, head of the influential Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is based in Tehran. This is only a small step toward forming a representative anti-Hussein coalition.

For the most part, the Bush administration continues to work with Sunni groups. Among the Iraqi opposition, the State Department is closer to the Iraqi National Accord, while the Defense Department is closer to the Iraqi National Congress. Both groups are dominated by Sunni Arabs (although the president of the congress, Ahmad Chalabi, has a Shi’ite mother). The Iraqi National Congress is far more active in Washington and another congress leader, al-Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, in August announced his proposal to restore the Iraqi monarchy, which was installed by Britain in 1921 and lasted just 37 years. The Sunni Arab-led kingdom was never popular with either the Shi’ite majority or the Kurds.

The Bush administration can gain political credibility for its actions on Iraq only by engaging all groups there. Iraqi Shi’ites in exile in London and Tehran are seeking reassurances that, after Saddam Hussein, they would for the first time enjoy their fair share of power. Meanwhile, leaders of the Kurdish minority recently told American journalists that a unified, representative Iraq is what they want. Any viable outcome must also address the concerns of Iraq’s neighbors, particularly Turkey and Iran.

One possibility for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is a decentralized state with considerable regional autonomy, including the division of oil revenues to ensure adequate budgets for provincial development. This could be the only way to keep the nation together. But getting there would require talking directly to leaders of all three population groups. No plan will work that does not take into account the nearly two-thirds of Iraqis who are Shi’ites.

Frank Smyth has written frequently on Iraq.

Expanding Globalization’s Agenda

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One poster carried by a young protester near the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington last Sunday showed many small fish coming together in the shape of a huge, collective fish to swallow a big one. The question for many activists and others is how to help empower the little fish in poor countries.

Demonstrators this week in Washington, like the ones last fall in Seattle, seek to slow down or stop the globalization process that has so far championed only capital. They include the AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth that helped organize the non-violent rallies in both Seattle and Washington (Young anarchists led most of the violent protests that occurred in both cities). The “South Summit” of 133 developing nations that assembled last week in Cuba echoed some of their demands.

An uphill fight

Unlike the protesters on the street, most human-rights groups take no stand on globalization and articulate no positions on any economic issues. Nonetheless, they often try to piggyback on the commercial ties that globalization seeks to expand. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute each regularly lobby the United States and other Western governments to pressure weaker nations to respect international human-rights standards as a condition of expanded trade and other bilateral relations.

The demonstrators have highlighted dubious WTO/IMF practices

The street demonstrations deserve credit for bringing needed attention to the most dubious practices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the IMF. They need greater transparency and a more participatory decision-making process. The painful and destabilizing form of globalization that the IMF practices, especially, needs to change. And the notion that nations should embrace free societies at the same time that they accept free trade remains almost as low on the agenda for people working inside the institutions as it is for those outside them protesting their annual meetings.

Trying to stop globalization is like trying to win the war on drugs; both efforts seek to negate market dynamics. Nevertheless, presuming that communities everywhere should stand by while capital-driven globalization overwhelms and, in too many cases, impoverishes them is just as narrow-minded. The current agenda of most globalization backers, including the Clinton administration, is hardly inspiring to anyone but those who have already accumulated much capital. Today’s open economic waters give wealthy nations and their corporations the obvious advantage.

Last week’s scenes in Washington resonated across the Florida straits in Havana, where U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressed the “South Summit.”

The 133 nations meeting in Havana timed their gathering to coincide with the annual IMF and World Bank meetings. Some Americans might easily dismiss the “Group of 77” (still known for the original group of 77 states that began the poor nation movement back in 1964) if one did not know that the Southern coalition today includes many nations important to U.S. interests like Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia.

The limitations of protest

The agenda of the “South Summit” was a bit more focused than the protests in Washington. This year’s chairman is Nigeria’s U.N. representative, Chief Arthur C.I. Mbanefo. He echoed the call by American church groups in Washington for broad debt relief for developing nations. In Havana, Annan avoided the most controversial issues while urging delegates to make sure that “the voice of the South [is] heard good and loud” by sticking to a “positive, practical agenda.” Like the demonstrators in Washington, one 40-nation panel of the group demanded not only both more transparency and broader participation in decision-making at both the IMF and the World Bank, but also more power for the U.N. General Assembly and enlargement of the U.N. Security Council.

The “Group of 77,” however, does not want to abolish the World Bank or the more-resented IMF, which a group press release said could still play an effective role in “stabilizing volatile international capital flows.” Neither do leading anti-poverty non-governmental organizations, like OXFAM. In recent years, the World Bank has expanded badly needed programs like providing credit to women (repeated studies have shown that they are far more reliable to repay them than men are) to help them establish their own small businesses in the face of the multinational corporations that are now earning the most from globalization.

Of course, implement any large-scale debt relief or anti-poverty measures for most developing nations would require more resources from wealthy nations. And the United States still gives little more than one-tenth of 1{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of its total economic output for non-military foreign aid, far less proportionately than either Western Europe that on average gives over two-tenths of 1{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}, or Japan that gives nearly three-tenths of 1{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}. Yet hardly anyone in the globalization debate — in the United States at least — has yet to suggest that Americans should pay higher taxes in order to finance such measures. Instead, most of the demonstrators in Washington, like the heads of state and foreign ministers in Havana, are demanding a transfer of resources from North to South without saying how the United States, Europe, and Japan should divide up the bill.

The limitations of this approach are apparent, and it makes for an unusual alliance between wealthy non-American elites and anti-wealthy American radicals. Most developing nations are dominated and governed by their own privileged circles, while most demonstrators this spring in Washington say they are agitating on behalf of the world’s masses. Today both foreign elites and American demonstrators seek to strengthen the international concept of national sovereignty to resist World Bank and IMF measures that in recent years have inflicted painful measures on corrupt elites along with the usual poor in a few nations like Indonesia. At the same time, most American labor and environmental groups distrust their own government too much to try and piggyback their demands on globalization’s cross-border agenda.

Let go of sovereignty

Unlike anti-globalization protesters, human-rights activists do not cling to the concept of state sovereignty. They are not necessarily worried about wealthy states pushing weaker ones around. That leading human-rights groups criticized the NATO war on Yugoslavia only on tactical grounds is one example. They also supported the case against Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who stands accused in Spain of having committed crimes against humanity in Chile.

The effort to establish the International Criminal Court further challenges the sovereignty of all states. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International back the court, while they defend political and collective bargaining rights across borders. Neither group takes any position outside its mandate. George Soros, for one, openly supports a limited, regulated form of capitalism that would give small fish a better chance to compete and grow.

Whether to strengthen or weaken national sovereignty in the 21st century is an issue of profound importance for not only the international flow of capital but also for information, rights and standards. Clinging to sovereignty as a panacea for globalization’s woes is as myopic as trying to break down borders for capital alone. The United States will only gain credibility among people and states to open more markets if it couples the campaign with the international adoption of minimum standards to protect labor, people and the planet. In the long run, their adoption would not only reduce costs, it would help stabilize nations and create emerging markets for not only investments, but goods.

Instead, globalization’s backers like the Clinton administration follow short-sighted greed. One thing is already clear in the water. The little fish need help, and only a few of them are getting any, even though many different people, groups and institutions speak in their name.

Frank Smyth is a contributing editor at IntellectualCapital.com.