From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Mar 2 08:55:09 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Boston Globe on Hobsbawn Message-ID: <20030302.105510.3540.0.farmelantj@juno.com> No regrets In his controversial new memoir, historian Eric Hobsbawm recalls a lifetime in the British Communist Party By Matthew Price, 3/2/2003 IN A 1994 BRITISH television interview, the journalist Michael Ignatieff put a startling question to Eric Hobsbawm, the distinguished historian and long-time communist. ''Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created,'' Ignatieff asked, referring to the Soviet Union and its bloody history, ''the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?'' Hobsbawm's answer was perhaps even more startling. ''Yes,'' responded the historian. He did not hesitate. Few figures of Hobsbawm's stature have maintained such a steadfast devotion to the battered communist project. An unrepentant member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1936 until shortly before the party closed up shop in 1991, Hobsbawm soldiered on through the Cold War, often a skeptical, weary comrade, but a party man nearly to the end; he was certainly England's most famous communist. In Britain, the recent publication of Hobsbawm's memoirs, ''Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life'' (forthcoming from Pantheon in the United States this August) has refocused attention on his long-lasting party loyalties. Today, Hobsbawm calls himself ''a lifelong but anomalous communist,'' and while he has regrets about the past, he offers no apologies for his beliefs. Is the eminent historian a man of abiding principle or appalling blindness? At 85, Hobsbawm is a grandee of the British intellectual establishment: About the only thing missing from his long list of honors is a knighthood. Every inch the English don-he is hardly a fire-breathing revolutionary-Hobsbawm is a man of fastidious demeanor who enjoys listening to jazz records (he was jazz critic for the New Statesman in the 1950s) and has a noted fondness for travel. Hobsbawm made his name in the `50s as a Marxist historian. But his idiosyncratic passions took him far beyond the world of the industrial working classes: He also wrote with sympathy about the rural poor, urban mobs, Sicilian bandits, American gangsters, and other ''primitive rebels,'' as he dubbed them. A vigorous, footloose researcher, Hobsbawm never confined himself to dusty archives or stale seminar rooms; one could just as easily find him confirming a fact with a peasant on an Andean hillside. Later, in a series of panoramic surveys, he charted the rise of capitalism during the ''long nineteenth century'' (1789-1914), winning applause from readers of all political persuasions. Still, Hobsbawm's politics have raised more than a few eyebrows during his life-and never more so than since the publication of ''Interesting Times.'' Even the most sympathetic readers, such as New Left Review editor Perry Anderson, note a troubling silence about the Stalinist terrors that tested-and broke-the faith of other ardent Party members. In The Times Literary Supplement, historian Richard Vinen bristled at Hobsbawm's omissions. ''There is something disconcerting about the way in which Hobsbawm veers away from questions about his own political commitment,'' Vinen wrote. ''Indeed, the closer that he comes to such questions, the more confusing he becomes.'' In Prospect magazine, the writer Ian Buruma concluded that Hobsbawm ''is a decent man who served a blood-soaked cause.'' In his memoir, Hobsbawm stresses the importance of time, place, and historical circumstance as a powerful catalyst for his beliefs. He relates that he was born to nonreligious Jewish parents in 1917; his father was an English citizen living in Alexandria, Egypt, his mother a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hobsbawm spent his boyhood in Vienna and, after the death of both parents in the late `20s, in Weimar Berlin. Berlin, a left-wing city with a strong workers' movement, would be a crucible for his beliefs. He watched the disintegration of Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazis. By 1933, with Hitler in power, the teenage Hobsbawm moved to England to live with a relative. He entered Cambridge University and joined the Communist Party soon after. Reading Hobsbawm's richly textured evocations of Berlin and Vienna between the wars, one can see the political and psychological appeal Communism would have had for an uprooted, parentless young man whose world-both public and private-was falling to pieces around him. Liberalism and democracy had failed, and ''we were not liberals,'' he states. The CP gave him a structure and an outlook; being a member of a vanguard party, he writes, ''was a combination of discipline, business efficiency, utter emotional identification, and a sense of total dedication.'' In surveying the 20th century, Hobsbawm's favorite reference points are the Popular Front of the 1930s and the oft-romanticized crusade against Fascism-not the grim realities of show trials, forced collectivization, political murder, man-made famine, censorship, and the general ruthlessness of Stalin's Russia. About these, ''Interesting Times'' has its contradictions and evasions. Hobsbawm tells us he is moved by the appeal of anti-fascism; but, on his own account, he was little troubled by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, even though it caused an uproar in Party circles of London, Paris, and New York. Khrushchev's speech on Stalin's crimes, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, caused two of his close colleagues, E.P. Thompson and fellow historian Christopher Hill (who died this past Monday at 91), to leave the party. But not Hobsbawm. He loathed the thought of ''being in the company of anticommunists'' like Arthur Koestler. The party, for all its flaws, was his home. ''The reasons for going were not strong enough,'' he writes. ''In practice I recycled myself from militant to sympathizer or fellow-traveler.'' Spiritually, he drifted into the orbit of the relatively mainstream Italian Communist Party (where he had many personal contacts), becoming, he tells me, merely an ''ornament'' to the British Communist Party. He was hardly out in the street flogging copies of the Daily Worker. Today, Hobsbawm admits that ''we kept our eyes and ears shut about things like the trials,'' and that he ''couldn't conceivably defend the Stalinist terror.'' Still, he repeatedly stresses that communism was a movement of world revolution. ''The appalling things that happened in Russia were only one side of the picture for us-as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Russia and the power of the Soviet Union were a force for liberation for colonial peoples.'' He adds, ''You may say that wasn't such a good idea in some parts of the world. But it was felt to be.'' How did Hobsbawm's politics affect his scholarship? Can a communist also be a judicious scholar? This is a question which, at least in some quarters, has been hotly debated. In a New Criterion essay which savaged the historian this January, journalist David Pryce-Jones thundered that ''Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events.'' Arguably, Hobsbawm's failures are most glaring when the topic is the communist world of the 20th century. In his only full-length work on 20th-century history, ''The Age of Extremes'' (1994), he dubiously argues that ''the Soviet system was not `totalitarian.''' His bold description of the Cold War years as ''The Golden Age'' raised the hackles of a few critics. ''To refer to the years 1950-1974 as a `Golden Age' cannot help but sound ironic to someone from, say, Prague,'' the historian Tony Judt commented in the New York Review of Books. For Hobsbawm, the Cold War is an object of considerable nostalgia. He places heavy emphasis on the rising affluence of the Western working classes, who flourished in the two decades after World War II, becoming able to afford washing machines and cars. At the same time, he points out that the Soviet Union outperformed the West economically in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the Cold War provided the world with a stable system of international relations (given our present situation, a compelling argument), and the might of the Soviet Union gave capitalism an ''incentive'' to reform itself-''fear''-that is lacking today. Hobsbawm continues to speak fondly of the Brezhnev era. He recalls that a ''lady from Leningrad who married a close friend of mine told me in the 1970s: ''You must realize that for ordinary Russians these are the best times in their or their father's and grandfather's lives.''' What of his political convictions today? I ask. ''I was very strongly committed and I remain committed to collective action for change,'' Hobsbawm says. He tells me how enormously cheered he is by the recent victory of Lula, Brazil's new left-wing president. And he cites a recent poll showing that the Vietnamese are the most satisfied with the prospects for their children. Still, he is sobered by the 20th century's ugly history. Via e-mail, he ventures a final assessment: ''It is not for someone who supported the USSR to minimize the human costs of the Soviet and Chinese experiments.'' But, he adds, ''It is for others to say that not only Communism was blood-stained.'' Matthew Price, a Brooklyn-based writer, is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 3/2/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Mar 2 09:34:20 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Terry Eagleton on fundamentalism Message-ID: <20030302.113422.3212.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Pedants and partisans Terry Eagleton argues that fundamentalism is characterised by a dangerous reverence for words Saturday February 22, 2003 The Guardian There are two things desirable for fighting fundamentalists. The first is not to be one yourself. The US government's war on the movement is somewhat compromised by the fact that it is run by scripture-spouting fanatics for whom the sanctity of human life ends at the moment of birth. This is rather like using the British National party to run ex-Nazis to earth, or hiring Henry Kissinger to i nvestigate mass murder, as George Bush recently did by nominating him to inquire into the background to September 11. Fundamentalists of the Texan stripe are not best placed to hunt down the Taliban variety. The second desirable thing is to know what fundamentalism is. The answer to this is less obvious than it might seem. Fundamentalism doesn't just mean people with fundamental beliefs, since that covers everyone. Being a person means being constituted by certain basic convictions, even if they are largely unconscious. What you are, in the end, is what you cannot walk away from. These convictions do not need to be burning or eye-catching or even true; they just have to go all the way down, like believing that Caracas is in Venezuela or that torturing babies is wrong. They are the kind of beliefs that choose us more than we choose them. Sceptics who doubt you can know anything for sure have at least one fundamental conviction. "Fundamental" doesn't necessarily mean "worth dying for". You may be passionately convinced that the quality of life in San Francisco is superior to that in Strabane, but reluctant to go to the gallows for it. Fundamentalists are not always the type who seize you by the throat with one fist while thumping the table with the other. There are plenty of soft-spoken, self-effacing examples of the species. It isn't a question of style. Nor is the opposite of fundamentalism lukewarmness, or the tiresome liberal prejudice that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Tolerance and partisanship are not incompatible. Anti-fundamentalists are not people without passionate beliefs; they are people who number among their passionate beliefs the conviction that you have as much right to your opinion as they have. And for this, some of them are certainly prepared to die. The historian AJP Taylor was once asked at an interview for an Oxford fellowship whether it was true that he held extreme political beliefs, to which he replied that it was, but that he held them moderately. He may have been hinting that he was a secret sceptic, but he probably just meant that he did not agree with forcing his beliefs on others. The word "fundamentalism" was first used in the early years of the last century by anti-liberal US Christians, who singled out seven supposed fundamentals of their faith. The word, then, is not one of those derogatory terms that only other people use about you, like "fatso". It began life as a proud self-description. The first of the seven fundamentals was a belief in the literal truth of the Bible; and this is probably the best definition of fundamentalism there is. It is basically a textual affair. Fundamentalists are those who believe that our linguistic currency is trustworthy only if it is backed by the gold standard of the Word of Words. They see God as copperfastening human meaning. Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate. Fundamentalists, however, fail to realise that the phrase "sacred text" is self-contradictory. Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic. Words that could only ever mean one thing would not be words. Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work. For them, it is as though we have to measure Everest down to the last millimetre if we are not to be completely stumped about how high it is. It is not surprising that fundamentalism abhors sexuality and the body, since in one sense all flesh is rough, and all sex is rough trade. The New Testament author known as Luke is presumably aware that Jesus was actually born in Galilee. But he needs to have him born in Judea, since the Messiah is to spring from the Judea-based house of David. A Messiah born in bumpkinish Galilee would be like one born in Gary, Indiana. So Luke coolly invents a Roman census, for which there is no independent evidence, which requires everyone to return to their place of birth to be registered. Since Jesus's father Joseph comes from Bethlehem in Judea, he and his wife Mary obediently trudge off to the town, where Jesus is conveniently born. It would be hard to think up a more ludicrous way of registering the population of the entire Roman empire than having them all return to their birthplaces. Why not just register them on the spot? The result of such a madcap scheme would have been total chaos. The traffic jams would have made Ken Livingstone's job look positively cushy. And we would almost certainly have heard about this international gridlocking from rather more disinterested witnesses than Luke. Yet fundamentalists must take Luke at his word. Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs, in love with a dead letter. The letter of the sacred text must be rigidly embalmed if it is to imbue life with the certitude and finality of death. Matthew's gospel, in a moment of carelessness, presents Jesus as riding into Jerusalem on both a colt and an ass - in which case, for the fundamentalist, the Son of God must indeed have had one leg thrown over each. The fundamentalist is a more diseased version of the argument-from-the-floodgates type of conservative. Once you allow one motorist to throw up out of the car window without imposing a lengthy prison sentence, then before you know where you are, every motorist will be throwing up out of the window all the time, and the roads will become impassable. It is this kind of pathological anxiety, pressed to an extreme, which drove the religious police in Mecca early last year to send fleeing schoolgirls back into their burning school because they were not wearing their robes and head dresses, and which inspires family-loving US pro-lifers eager to incinerate Iraq to gun down doctors who terminate pregnancies. To read the world literally is a kind of insanity. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Mar 2 16:37:12 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Iraq war and its timing (FWD from Bertell Ollman) Message-ID: <20030302.183713.2744.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Dear Friends, I have recently written a short piece on the war that I want to share with you. BELOW. If you find it worthwhile, please pass it on to your e-mail list(s). Comments are, of course, welcome. Thanks. Bertell Ollman WHY WAR WITH IRAQ? WHY NOW? PHANTOM REASONS AND REAL ONES By Bertell Ollman (Dept. of Politics,NYU) Has America ever gone to war with less public understanding of what the war is about? Why is our Government so determined to attack Iraq? And why the rush to do it now? War is a very serious business. So I am not going to insult your intelligence by spending any time on the half dozen changing reasons that our Government has offered as a justification for starting this war. As anyone who is not addicted to Fox News knows, they are either false, grossly exaggerated, irrelevant or simply silly (I don't know whether to place the charge that Saddam is an evil man under irrelevant or silly). But - and this is of crucial importance - even if all the Government's charges were true, not exaggerated and relevant, this would still not justify a war if there were other ways of dealing with them and/or if a war would make Americans more liable to attack by our enemies than we already are. The U.N. inspections are working and if we increased the number of inspectors and gave them more time, they would work better still. Along with frequent overflights, some of the U.N. imposed sanctions and the threat of massive retaliation should Saddam attack one of his neighbors, they have already achieved most of the aims for which almost-elected President Bush says he intends to go to war. That is, given the Government's own terms of debate, the war would appear to be unnecessary. And if anyone had any doubts about the effect of such a war on our safety here in the U.S., Ossama Bin Laden's most recent tape (if genuine) should have made it clear that this war will bring us more terrorist attacks and not less. Critics who see this far and no further are content to condemn the Government for its stupidity - easy to do with Bush at the helm - and craziness. Our leaders seem to be making a terrible mistake. General Zinni, a leading U.S.military figure and diplomat, has said that he doesn't know on which planet the hawks in Washington are living. And many others, including ex-President Carter, General Schwartzkopf and even officials in the intelligence (sic) community, have expressed similar sentiments. But the leaders of our Government are not that stupid or crazy, and war is too important a matter to go forward without good reasons. They have their reasons. They just don't want to give them to us, because they suspect that most Americans wouldn't accept them as a justification for war. If we examine who our leaders are, their background and interests, some of what they've done and said before coming to power, and what they would gain from a war, it is not too hard to arrive at what these men and their one woman are thinking. In my opinion, here are the real reasons that our Government is about to engage in its second massacre of Muslims in as many years: l) Oil. The Bush oiligarchy wants direct control over a country whose proven oil reserves are second only to those of Saudi Arabia. American oil giants own none of this oil now. How much do you think they will own one year after the war? Direct U.S. control over Iraqui oil will not only put the profits of selling the oil and servicing the oil fields into American hands, but will also also put the U.S. Government in a position to effect the price of oil by determining how much of it is put onto the market at any one time and to secure the dollar's position as the currency of choice in the purchase of oil by other countries (since 2000, Iraq has tried to undermine the hegemony of the dollar in world trade - with all its implications for U.S. financial domination - by selling its oil for Euros). And, as the availablility of this non-renewable source of energy begins to decline (it has been estimated that the world has about fifty years worth of oil left), the U.S. will be in a position to decide, almost unilaterally, which countries will grow and develop and which will not. 2) Secure the water supplies - not often mentioned - with which Iraq is blessed and all surrounding countries are to some degree dependent. 3) Establish American military and political power - if not direct colonial control - of a major Arab country in the heart of the middle-east for an indefinite period to help ensure the existence of friendly governments and market economies throughout the region. 4) Provide a rationale to expand the military budget and with it the profits of the arms industry, which includes the oil industry. 5) Help make Americans forget that we lost the war in Afghanistan, whose main objective was not to remove the Taliban but to destroy Al Queda and capture Ossama Bin Laden. 6) Upstage the media attention given to the failure of the Government's economic policies (unemployment up 35%, stock market down 34 %, etc. and etc. since Bush took office) as well as the high level financial scandals in which both Bush and Cheney have been implicated. 7) Create an atmosphere of permanent crisis with its side-bars of fear and patriotism that will help the GOP to push through the rest of its ultra-conservative political agenda and win the next presidential election. Though we can't know which reasons are most important for any given official, I think it is pretty clear that they all play a role and that, taken together, they are enough to account for the trigger-happy behavior of the Government. There happens to be one other major reason for their actions, however, that deserves to be mentioned, if only because it is usually passed over, even by the strongest critics of the war. And this is that the war with Iraq will serve some of Israel's most important national interests, at least as interpreted by its current right wing Government. It is seldom mentioned, of course, because anyone who does so risks being denounced as an anti-semite, next to which being called a mass murderor today seems rather tame. So before developing this point, let me just say that I am Jewish. This way I can only be condemned as a "self-hating Jew". What, then, are the main interests of the Israeli Government that will be served by this war? 1) The war will provide Israel some relief from the growing sentiment among the American public that the U.S. Government should cut off or drastically reduce both economic and military aid to Israel until it vacates all Arab lands (a little publicized Times/CNN poll showed that 60% of Americans supported such a call). 2) Under the cover of war, Sharon will be able to put into effect his version of the "final solution" to the Palestinian problem, the expulsion of all West Bank Arabs into the surrounding countries. 3) Destroying what's left of Iraq's military power neutralizes Israel's most important rival in the region. 4) Establishing a semi-permanent American military presence in Iraq puts U.S. troops in a position to police the whole area for Israel. If Mohammed can't go to the mountain - you have all heard this one - it is said that the mountain will go to Mohammed. Given their problems with the Arabs, some Israelis have joked that it would be nice if they could pick up the whole of Israel and move it to Long Island. Well, Mohammed couldn't get to this mountain. But now with the U.S. about to move into Israel's neighborhood, the mountain has come to Mohammed. Talk about miracles. 5) U.S. control of Iraqui oil and water resources will allow Israel, its best friend in the middle-east, to gain a share of both. 6) The war and the ensuing American occupation of Iraq will also give a much needed boost to Israel's ailing economy through various war related sales and services. When you add all this up, it seems that war against Iraq is even more in the interests of the Israeli Government than it is in the interests of the American Government. It is no surprise then that among our Government's top foreign policy advisors some of the biggest hawks are right wing Zionists like - Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Defense Secretary, who earlier in life wanted to immigrate to Israel and who wrote his first official paper calling for an invasion of Iraq back in 1992), Douglas Feith (Under Secretary for Policy in the Dept. of Defense), Elliot Abrams (National Security Council), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff for Vice President Cheney), Eric Edelman (Libby's top assistant), and Richard Perle (Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, who the F.B.I. found passing classified information from the National Security Council to the Israeli Embassy when he was a Senate staffer in 1970 and who has worked as an election advisor for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu between 1996-'99) . Can you imagine the ruckus there would be if this number of communists or Free Masons or black nationalists were found in the higher reaches of our foreign policy establishment? Let me repeat that I am not speaking of Jews here but of right wing Zionists, or those who subscribe to an extreme version of a nationalist ideology that is currently in power in another country, a country that has a crucial stake in how the American Government acts in its region. Now, I don't believe that U.S. policy on Iraq has been made by these Zionists advisors, but neither do I believe that they are without influence in the matter or that their right wing Zionism does not affect what they tell Bush, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld. Rather,in my view, what we have here is a convergence of two imperialisms. It is Bush's and Sharon's complementary interests that have put them in bed together. The bevy of right wing Zionist advisors that surround Bush would have encouraged this tryst and perhaps served as match-maker. They have probably also helped to convince Bush - assuming he needed any convincing - that if he served Israel's interests in this manner he would garner the support of enough American Jews, most of whom have become Zionists (soft or hard) in recent years, to put him over the top in the next election. (No one should suppose that Karl Rove, Bush's exceptionally savvy political advisor, hasn't carefully taken note of this opportunity, or that his man in the White House is indifferent to it. Hence, the otherwise surprising decision to hold the GOP 2004 Nominating Convention in New York City) I suppose this deserves being listed as the Bush crowd's eighth major reason for going to war with Iraq. That still leaves unexplained why the rush to war, why the Government's insistence on starting the war now. If Israel needs a war now to resolve the explosive and worsening problems that have resulted from the failure of its policies in the West Bank, this is not - or at least should not be - a problem for the U.S. But if I'm right in my list of the American and Israeli Governments' real reasons for going to war, THE GREAT DANGER THAT BOTH OF THESE GOVERNMENTS FEAR IS NOT THAT THE U.N. INSPECTIONS WON'T WORK, BUT THAT THEY WILL. For if the inspections work, or show that they are working or can work, then both Governments are denied their ideological cover for going to war. At this point, the U.S. would either have to pull back from the brink, or admit to having other, hitertoo secret reasons, for going to war. However, the great majority of the American people would never a ccept the real reasons for this war, and without their support the American and Israeli Governments could not reap the many economic and political benefits they are hoping for, benefits they can only attain through a full scale war. Well, too bad for them, but not for the hundreds of thousands of people who are certain to die in any war. The great crusading journalist, Izzy Stone, said he could summarize most of what aspiring young reporters need to learn in two words: "Governments lie". If he had extended his lesson just three more words, he might have added - "especially in war". The American Government has a long history of such lies; the sinking of the battleship "Maine" in the Spanish American War, the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident in the Vietnam war, and the invasion of Granada to protect U.S. medical students are but the most notorious examples. Given this history, the Bush team's consistent disregard for the truth (both in getting (s)elected and in pursuing its unpopular policies in virtually every domain), and the collection of dated, confused and irrelevant charges that make up the official case against Iraq, it is hard to believe that anyone could take what the Administration is saying seriously. Sadly, this is not the case. This is also very dangerous, because even most of Bush's critics, in the U.S. and around the world, refer to his position on Iraq as a "mistake" rather than a "lie" and treat their differences with him as a "disagreement" over what means are best suited to attain a common end. "Give the inspections a chance" and "No war without a U.N. resolution" were the most popular slogans in the world-wide demonstrations against the war that took place on February 15th. In short, though Bush has been unable to convince most doubters of his interpretation of events, with his domination over the public stage, he has succeeded in setting the terms of the debate, and in politics as in war being able to choose the terrain on which a battle will be fought is often the decisive step toward winning it. What will happen, in other words, if/when the Government - either under pressure or because they are more intelligent than we give them credit for - accepts the scenario urged by the majority of their critics: a couple months more of inspections and a vague U.N. resolution that even France and Germany can agree on and the U.S. can interpret as an okay to begin its war in Iraq? I am reminded of an incident that occurred in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, where a jurist - I can't recall his name - objected to some Nazi practises that were not covered by the law. Once Hitler's controlled legislature passed laws that made these practises legal, the jurist said he was now satisfied and fell in behind the Fuhrer. Could the same thing happen to most of our politicians, public intellectuals and even movement partisans who are now demanding that Bush act through the U.N. and give the inspections a chance to work? I consider such a turnabout not only possible but even likely, unless more of Bush's critics begin treating his phantom reasons for attacking Iraq with the contempt that they deserve and do a much better job educating the public on the real reasons for war, ALL OF THEM. People who understand these reasons will not let themselves be snookered into supporting the war through any combination of Congressional, NATO or U.N. resolutions. What is the role of 9/11 in all this? It is now clear that there were two kinds of hijacking on Sept. 11th, 2001, the first by free lance terrorists who took over four airplanes and bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the second by U.S. state terrorists who used the events of the day to push through their right wing political agenda and to beat whomever dared criticize them over the head. By prefacing all proposals with the words "In the names of those who died", Bush seems to have appropriated 9/11 in ways very similar to how Israel's right wing Government has appropriated the Holocaust. Sadly, but all too effectively, 9/11 functions politically today as Bush's Holocaust. Perhaps his right wing Zionist advisors also instructed him on how to bring this off. The tragic victims of 9/11 - and of the Holocaust - deserve a better historical fate than this self-interested manipulation by regimes that share many of the worst features of their butchers. Well, what's to be done? Besides urging that we replace the effort to provide the Government with a "better" means to reach our common end (where we accept their terms and framework for the debate) with an even greater effort to expose them (where the real reasons for the war become the main subject for discussion), I can summarize most of what else I have to offer on this subject by passing on an e-mail I got a couple weeks ago. Apparently, a recent study at the University of Sussex in England showed that demonstrating for a cause in which you believe is not only good for your conscience, it's also good for your health. No wonder participating in the big demonstration on February 15th felt so good. So, in the interest of good health - your's, the Iraquis', our troops' and the world's - keep it up. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Thu Mar 6 06:54:02 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] What Next? Message-ID: <20030306.090124.2636.0.farmelantj@juno.com> WHAT NEXT? Marxist Discussion Journal 24 Georgiana Street London NW1 0EA email: whatnextmag@yahoo.co.uk website: http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext What Next? No.25 is now available online. Articles include: • Brian Green on the world economy • Carolyne Culver on war against Iraq • Moshé Machover on Tony Blair's dilemma • Bob Pitt on the SWP and the anti-war campaign • Martin Sullivan on New Labour and public opinion • Dave Osler on New Labour and trust funds • Martin Sullivan on how to fight Blairism • Daniel Blaney on why the Left should back congestion charging • Andrew Robinson on reading Marxism creatively • Chris Wright on Open Marxism • Andrés Nin on Austro-Marxism and the national question • Mike Pearn on Jim Higgins • Jim Higgins on 1956 and all that • Toby Abse on Togliatti and Stalinism ... plus reviews and letters. And it's now available in a PDF version ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Thu Mar 6 15:02:38 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sign the Moveon.org UN Petition Message-ID: <20030306.172542.1888.7.farmelantj@juno.com> Subject: Sign the emergency petition to the U.N. Dear MoveOn member, The response to our emergency petition to the U.N. Security Council has been nothing short of extraordinary. Less than two days after the petition was launched, over 550,000 people have signed, from over 200 countries. It's a strong message from the peoples of the world that the Security Council should support tough inspections in Iraq, not war. It's also the fastest-growing online petition we've ever seen -- and already one of the largest in history. Thanks for being a part of this enormous success. With your help, we can make it even bigger. Please let your friends and colleagues know about the petition by sending them a short note and this email. They can sign up at: http://www.moveon.org/emergency/ We've pushed back our delivery date to Monday -- our sources at the U.N. tell us that's when it'll make the most waves. We need to send the petition to press on Friday night, but we'd like to have as many signers as possible by that time. If each person who signed the petition gets a few friends to sign, we'll easily reach our 750,000 goal -- but it has to happen today. Please take a moment to let your friends know about this important initiative. With your help, we can make an even bigger impact on the U.N. Security Council. Sincerely, --Carrie, Eli, Joan, Peter, Wes, and Zack The MoveOn Team March 6th, 2003 P.S. Our petition was launched in cooperation with the American Friends Service Committee, who have a terrific website that provides resources and information on the crisis in Iraq. Check it out at: http://www.afsc.org/iraq/ P.P.S. Yesterday, our local ad went up in over 111 local newspapers across the nation, our billboards are now up in Detroit, San Francisco and L.A., and our "Inspections Work. War Won't." message is on a quarter of all the busses in Washington D.C. The financial support of MoveOn members for these initiatives has been overwhelming -- you funded over 100 local ads in less than a day! One note of caution about giving to good causes: Never give your credit card number over the phone in response to any telephone solicitation. And only give online or by mail to organizations you know and trust (like us). Thanks for making this work possible. Some links: Our "No link" ad that ran in 111 newspapers yesterday: http://www.moveon.org/localads/localad.pdf Our billboard and busses layout: http://www.moveon.org/billboards/ How to donate to MoveOn.org: http://www.moveon.org/support.html ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Mar 8 12:31:02 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sidney Hook's *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation* Message-ID: <20030308.143103.3408.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Nearly seventy years after its original publication, last year, Prometheus Books republished Sidney Hook's classic work of Marxist scholarship: *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation* which along with his next book *From Hegel to Marx* established Hook as the leading American scholar of Marxism. This book has had an interesting history. Having been originally published by John Day Company in 1933, it was never to be reissued until late last year. And the main reason why it was never reissued for such a long period of time, was because its author, having repudiated the political outlook represented by this book, took steps to suppress it, going so far as to specify in his will, that it never be republished, and it is said, Hook even when so far as to attempt to get this book removed from libraries. Nevertheless, his literary executor, his son, Ernest B. Hook was finally prevailed upon to authorize the republication of this book by Prometheus Books. And indeed, the new version of this book includes an essay by Ernest B. Hook in which he, among other things, explains why he has authorized the reissuing of the book , and admits to a feeling, that he has betrayed his father's wishes. In the end, he feels that he has not really betrayed his father's wishes because his father in his later years, somewhat relaxed his opposition to republication, indeed, at one point, seriously contemplating, reissuing it with a new introduction, in which he would have explained his reasons for having turned against his youthful Marxism. As it so happens, that never came to pass, and Hook never got around to writing a new introduction for *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx* but apparently to make up for that, Ernest did insist that the reissuing of the book include the late Lewis Feuer's cold war essay "From Ideology to Philosophy: Sidney Hook's Writings on Marxism. Ernest seems to believe that Feuer's essay, represents the sort of view that Hook, himself, would have taken, if he had written a new introduction, himself. *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation* after seventy years remains of interest to us because it is one of the outstanding works in the tradition that has come to be known as Western Marxism. Indeed, as a work, it belongs on the bookshelf alongside such other classics of Western Marxism as Lukacs' *History and Class Consciousness*, Korsch's *Marxism and Philosophy* or Herbert Marcuse's *Reason and Revolution*. Hook after having completed his doctorate in philosophy, went to Europe to pursue his post-doc studies. Among other things, he was to visit the Soviet Union, where he spent some time at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, which at that time was in the process of editing and publishing Marx's earlier writings including the *1844 Manuscripts*. Hook while pursuing his studies in Central Europe came across Georg Lukacs' *History and Class Consciousness*, which wasn't translated into English until many years later, as well as Karl Korsch's *Marxism and Philosophy*. Hook attended Korsch's lectures, and struck up a personal friendship with him. Hook, in the Preface of the 1933 edition, acknowledge his indebtedness to both Lukacs and Korsch, and the text of the book, clearly builds upon their arguments, with Hook offering a blistering attack on the kind of 'orthodox Marxism' that had prevailed within the Second International, the sort of Marxism that had been developed and popularized by such figures as Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov. Against Kautsky and Plekhanov, both of whom, Hook interpreted as having vulgarized Marxism into a mechanistic, fatalistic ideology, Hook advanced the notion of praxis. Hook read Kautsky and Plekhanov as having misinterpreted Marx as having taught that the triumph of communism over capitalism to be inevitable. Hook on the contrary argued that the revolution would never occur except by way of human action, informed by theory, that is through praxis. In Hook's view, the positivistic, evolutionist interpretations of Marxism that Kautsky and Plekhanov had popularized had helped to provide a theoretical rationale for the betrayals by the German Social Democrats of the proletarian cause in the First World War. Given Sidney Hook's later notorious anticommunism, it is interesting to note that in *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx* he took a very pro-Lenin, indeed, pro-Leninist stance, and like Lukacs and Korsch before him, maintained that he was advancing a conception of praxis that was consistent with Lenin's. Sidney Hook, as everyone knows was a student of John Dewey at Columbia University, and like his teacher and mentor, a convinced pragmatist. Now in the text of *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx*, he makes no mention of Dewey at all, and yet from the time of its original publication, reviewers and critics from Bertrand Russell and Max Eastman all the way down to contemporary Hook scholars like Christopher Phelps and Cornel West, have quite correctly in my judgement, taken it to be a work of Deweyian- Marxism. Indeed, I think that the young Hook must have been struck by how similar the conceptions of praxis in the work of Lukacs and Korsch were to Dewey's instrumentalism. In fact it seems apparent that for Hook, Marx's dialectical method, as interpreted through the prism of Lukacs and Korsch, and as understood in light of Marx's own earlier writings, was closely akin to the experimental naturalism that he had assimilated from Dewey. Indeed, in an essay, that Hook wrote a couple of years later "Experimental Naturalism," Hook wrote "When Marx's early manuscripts were published, I took the occasion to make a re-study of all his works. . . . I became convinced that his dialectic method by which he strove to combine realism and activism to do justice to the facts of objectivity and relativity. . . involved a nascent experimental naturalism. This was essentially the same position which John Dewey had independently arrived at. . ." The expanded edition of *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation* includes an introductory essay by Ernest B. Hook, a Historical Introduction by Christopher Phelps as well as pieces by Lewis Feuer and Paul Berman. Credit is no doubt due to Paul Kurtz for having helped to persuade Ernest Hook to authorize the book's republication. Jim Farmelant ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Thu Mar 13 05:51:11 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Howard Fast, Best-Selling Novelist, Dies at 88 Message-ID: <20030313.075112.3984.1.farmelantj@juno.com> Howard Fast, Best-Selling Novelist, Dies at 88 March 13, 2003 By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN Howard Fast, whose best-selling historical fiction often featured the themes of freedom and human rights, elements in his own tumultuous political journey through the blacklisting of the 1950's, died yesterday at his home in Old Greenwich, Conn. He was 88. Mr. Fast was one of the 20th century's busiest writers, turning out more than 80 books - plus short stories, journalism, screenplays and poetry - in a career that began in the early 1930's. With novels like "Citizen Tom Paine" (1943), "Freedom Road" (1944) and "Spartacus" (1953), Mr. Fast won popular acclaim for authenticity and detail, creating stories that even his critics admired as page-turners. Mr. Fast's fiction was always didactic to a degree, opposed to modernism, engaged in social struggle and insistent on taking sides and teaching lessons of life's moral significance, and he liked it that way. "Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life," he said in a 1972 interview. Despite the international popularity of historical novels like "Paine," which glorified the professional revolutionary, and the huge commercial success that Mr. Fast's well-paced narratives achieved, his work tended to succeed or fail as art to the extent that he distanced himself from ideology. At his best, in a novel like "The Last Frontier" (1941), about the flight in 1878 of the Cheyenne Indians to their Powder River home in Wyoming, he achieved powerful effects through imaginative objectivity. At his less successful, in novels like "Clarkton" (1947), about a textile-mill strike, and "Silas Timberman" (1954), about an academic victim of McCarthyism, he was sometimes faulted as being drawn toward propagandistic sentimentality. His output was slowed but not entirely interrupted by the blacklisting he endured in the 1950's after it became known that he had been a member of the Communist Party and then refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He served three months in a federal prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress, a charge arising from his refusal to produce the records of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Mr. Fast joined the party in 1943, a decision he often said was made at least in part because of the poverty he experienced as a child growing up in Upper Manhattan. He left the party in 1956, disillusioned by the Soviet Union's own stunning revelations of Stalin's terror and the spread of anti-Semitism there. He wrote a book about his political experiences, "The Naked God" (1957). "I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed," he said in an interview in 1981. "That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices. To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity." Howard Melvin Fast was born Nov. 11, 1914, in Manhattan, one of four children of a working-class couple. His father, Barney, was first an ironworker, then a cable-car conductor, then a garment worker. His mother, Ida, died when he was a child. He often worked part-time jobs to help make ends meet, and graduated from George Washington High School. He sold his first story to Amazing Stories magazine when he was 17. The next year he sold his first novel, a historical romance called "Two Villages," to the Dial Press for a $100 advance. In 1939, after he had published two more books, Simon & Schuster published "Conceived in Liberty," a novel about Valley Forge, which has sold about a million copies and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. That was followed by "The Last Frontier" and then "The Unvanquished" (1942), about George Washington during the bleakest months of the Revolution. The critic Carl Van Doren said "The Unvanquished" was "the next thing to having been on the scene at the time." But Mr. Fast's breakthrough came in 1943 with "Citizen Tom Paine," which the playwright Elmer Rice called, in a highly favorable front-page review in The New York Times Book Review, "a vivid portrait of one of the most extraordinary figures of the 18th century." Many critics and historians agreed that the book played a significant role in restoring the reputation of Paine, the pamphleteer who had been "greatly neglected and greatly misunderstood," Rice wrote, "the victim both of a conspiracy of silence and of a campaign of calumny." In 1944 came the best-selling "Freedom Road," about a former slave in the post-Civil War South who becomes a United States senator and then fights for his life against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1979 "Freedom Road" was made into a television mini-series starring Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson. >From the start, Mr. Fast said, "Freedom Road" was more than a book with a black as the central character. "Its viewpoint," he said, "was considered a shocking one for either popular fiction or for history. In it, the Reconstruction was seen as a time of black renaissance. The carpetbaggers were not raping the South, as in the then popularly held view, but were helping the blacks to education and economic achievement." During those years, Mr. Fast won the Stalin International Peace Prize, in 1953, and "Spartacus," about a slave revolt in ancient Rome, was published. Because of the blacklist, the manuscript went from publisher to publisher without success. Finally, a Doubleday executive said that Mr. Fast should publish it himself but that Doubleday would order 600 copies for its bookstores. It became a best seller. The stigma of the blacklist gradually faded after Mr. Fast's repudiation of Communism. "Spartacus" was reprinted as a paperback and in 1960 was made into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas. Many other successful novels followed, including "April Morning" (1961) and a best-selling multigenerational saga of the Lavette family that began with "The Immigrants" (1977) and included "Second Generation" (1978), "The Establishment" (1979) and "The Legacy" (1981). Mr. Fast's first wife, the former Bette Cohen, died in 1994. He is survived by their children, the novelist Jonathan Fast of Greenwich and Rachel Ben Avi of Sarasota, Fla., and three grandchildren. He is also survived by his second wife, Mercedes O'Connor, whom he married in 1999, and by her three sons, Connor Denis, of Old Greenwich, Augustus Denis, of New Orleans, and James Denis, of Old Greenwich. Mr. Fast also wrote a popular series of detective stories under the name E. V. Cunningham. His hero was a nisei detective, Masao Masuto, a member of the Beverly Hills police force. Masuto was a Zen Buddhist, and Mr. Fast himself was very much involved in Zen, "as a form of meditation and a very nice way of looking at the world," as he put it. Mr. Fast continued to write into his 80's. His last novel, "Greenwich," a story of a high-society dinner party in Greenwich, Conn., and an exploration of guilt and redemption in American society, was published in 2000. "The only thing that infuriates me," he once commented, "is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/obituaries/13FAST.html?ex=1048559187&ei =1&en=96209294dcb58326 Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Mar 14 03:45:46 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sanford's originality came through to the end (LA Times) Message-ID: <20030314.064046.2100.0.farmelantj@juno.com> March 8, 2003 Los Angeles Times Regarding Media Sanford's originality came through to the end by Tim Rutten: In his 99th year, John Sanford was such a singular writer that it's somehow unsurprising that, when death came quietly for him Thursday morning, even it could not quite end his extraordinary career. Sanford published 24 books: nine novels, five genre-defying works he called "creative interpretations of history" and 10 volumes of autobiography and memoirs, including the five-book sequence, "Scenes From the Life of an American Jew." More than half his books were completed after he turned 80. The most recent, "A Palace of Silver," which appeared just this month, was a meditative memoir on the life he and his wife of more than 50 years -- the late screenwriter Marguerite Roberts -- lived after they were blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. According to his literary executor, Jack Mearns, the author left three unpublished books "all written in the last four years. Last summer, he finished the one called 'A Dinner of Herbs' [see excerpts], which comprises vignettes about the women he knew. There's a book about his father, 'A Citizen of No Mean City,' and another, 'Little Sister Spoken For' about the first five years of his marriage to Maggie. "John also had recently completed a major story called 'Judas and Inquiry,' which is about Martin Berkeley, the informer who named more than 150 names [including the Sanfords] before the committee in the 1951 hearings. To the end of his life, John wanted to figure out what was going on in the mind of someone who informed," said Mearns, a professor of psychology at Cal State Fullerton. Sanford, who was born Julian Shapiro in Harlem and trained as a lawyer, may have been the most neglected of serious 20th century American writers. His books are a stunning fusion of formal experimentation and supple, lyric prose. There is nothing like them anywhere in American letters. Though he sometimes was compared to the young John Dos Passos, Sanford's work was so original that it confounded critics and their categories -- probably to his professional detriment. His life's long arc was supported by four pillars: radical politics, radical aesthetics, his mother's early death and his 51-year marriage to Roberts. Carefree son of an indulgent lawyer, Sanford was inspired to take up writing -- and change his name -- by his boyhood friend Nate Weinstein, who would go on to find his own place in the world of letters as Nathanael West. In the 1930s, they came to Hollywood from New York together. There, in 1936 he met Marguerite Roberts, then one of MGM's most successful and highly paid contract screenwriters. Her first screenplay was directed in 1933 by Raoul Walsh, her last in 1971 by Henry Hathaway. The last film she wrote before she was blacklisted was "Ivanhoe," which she refused to see because a frightened MGM removed her credit. Ironically, she broke her exile in 1969 with "True Grit," which won John Wayne, a proponent of the black lists, his only Oscar. In 1938, she and Sanford married. A year later, he joined the Communist Party; she followed him soon after -- more as a matter of convenience than conviction; his new comrades believed the presence of a nonparty member at their gatherings was a security risk. Theirs was an unusual marriage: She provided the money and unwavering encouragement for his literary writing; he cooked and cleaned, wrote and negotiated her contracts. It was during the early years that Sanford produced what many consider his masterpiece, "The People From Heaven." It is a book of extraordinary power, set in 1943 in Warrensburg, N.Y., where a white shopkeeper initiates a wave of racist terror during which he rapes a black woman -- America Smith -- and beats a Native American nearly to death and announces his intention to drive out the town's only Jew. He is stopped only when the black woman draws a gun and kills him. William Carlos Williams called the novel "the most important book of fiction published here in the last 20 years." Carl Sandburg considered it "a sacred book, majestic in its rebukes.... " Sanford's party comrades disagreed. One of the party's cultural leaders denounced the novel as "antisocial." Sanford's retort was to recall the old C.P. slogan that art is a weapon. "If that book isn't a weapon," he said, "I never saw one." To University of Michigan English professor Alan Wald, who selected "The People From Heaven" for inclusion in the University of Illinois Press' ongoing series, "The Radical Novel Reconsidered," the exchange typified the interplay of art and politics in Sanford's work. "His was not a textbook Marxism but a Marxism of a general character," Wald wrote in an introduction to the book. "In his literary work, it was an identification with the underdog against the oppressor, not a Marxism dictated by the U.S. Communist Party." "John was an extremely angry person," Wald said Thursday. "When that anger was channeled into hatred of oppression it was very productive. On the other hand, his profound hatred of informers was undying and a little harsh. He could never imagine that some of them were trapped into what they did." Maggie Sanford left the party in 1947. John Sanford never did. "He never repudiated anything important about Communism," said Wald. "He consolidated his political convictions in the 1930s and held on to them for the rest of his life." As a writer, Wald said, "the important thing about John was that he was extraordinarily original. The stylistic freshness of certain of his projects is simply exceptional. The way in which he treated the interplay of historical and personal events in his work is unparalleled and utterly unique." Mearns, Sanford's executor, is hopeful of finding a publisher who will put the author's works, now mostly out of print, back on the shelves. "My big fear," he said, "lies in the fact that few writers have their reputations made after they die -- Herman Melville and John's friend Nathanael West are rare exceptions. I hope John will find a wider audience." That's a thing devoutly to be wished. As Sanford himself once said, "My books did not fail -- they just didn't sell." ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Mar 17 07:33:05 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Edmund Wilson’s adventure with Communism. (The New Yorker) Message-ID: <20030317.093306.3196.0.farmelantj@juno.com> New Yorker Magazine, 03/24/2003 THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE by LOUIS MENAND Edmund Wilson’s adventure with Communism. The idea for "To the Finland Station" came to Edmund Wilson while he was walking down a street in the East Fifties one day, in the depths of the Great Depression. Wilson was in his late thirties. He had established himself as a critic and reporter with the publication of "Axel’s Castle," a study of modernist writers, in 1931, and "The American Jitters," a collection of pieces based on visits he made to mines and factories, in 1932. His ambition, though, was to write a novel. (An early effort, "I Thought of Daisy," had appeared in 1929; it was not a success.) So he was a little surprised to find himself contemplating an ambitious history of socialist and communist thought, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. But he plainly saw something novelistic in the subject. "I found myself excited by the challenge," he said later, "and there rang through my head the words of Dedalus at the end of Joyce’s 'Portrait'"—"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." He took the title from a novel, Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Wilson had been witness to the condition of workers in Appalachia and Detroit—after bringing relief supplies to striking miners in Pineville, Kentucky, he was run out of town by the local authorities—and although he was suspicious of the Communist Party, he welcomed the Crash as a portent of the death of capitalism, and he embraced Marxism. He voted for the Communist candidate, William Z. Foster, in the 1932 presidential election; the same year, he signed a manifesto calling for "a temporary dictatorship of the class-conscious workers." He was never a Communist, but he did believe that only the Communists were genuinely trying to help the working class. In 1935, after he began work on "To the Finland Station," he tried to persuade his friend John Dos Passos, whose radicalism had begun to cool, that Stalin was a true Marxist, "working for socialism in Russia." full: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030324crat_atlarge ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Mar 17 12:21:43 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: URGENT: Keep the Inspectors in Iraq Message-ID: <20030317.142144.1268.6.farmelantj@juno.com> > This is going out through Not In Our Name. Please forward and act > today! > > Please write or call the Honorable Kofi Annan and various ambassadors to > > the U.N and demand that the inspectors STAGE A REVOLT against any order > or request from the United States/Bush Administration/Pentagon for them > to get out of Iraq. > > Can the US start dropping bombs with the inspectors still in Iraq and > doing their duty as mandated by Sec. Res 1441...as *that* would be > absolute political suicide for Bush. The inspection team is possibly our > > last best hope, something which would carry the weight to actually stop > the bombs from falling. > > Here's a sample letter: > > --------------------------- > > Dear Honorable ______________________ > > Please ask your inspectors in Iraq to remain to do their duty as > mandated by Sec. Res 1441. Please announce that the US has no authority > > to evict the inspectors because they are United Nations employees. > Furthermore, you should not withdraw the inspectors from Iraq without an > > order from the UN Security Council. > > If the inspectors remain, the US cannot start bombing. This is the last > > chance we have before the US proceeds with its "Shock and Awe" invasion > of Iraq. If the US proceeds with its plan to pre-emptively strike Iraq > in an aggressive war, the US is acting illegally and making an attempt > to weaken the effectiveness of the United Nations. This sets a bad > precedent, is damaging to the international situation, and will most > likely provoke, not stop, future terrorist acts. > > The inspectors are the last best hope for the world. > > > --------------------------- > > Addresses of the various UN ambassadors: > > The Hon. Kofi Annan > Secretary General of the United Nations > sg@un.org > ecu@un.org > > FRANCE > S.E. Ambassador M. Jean-Marc de LA Sabliere > france-presse@un.int > (212) 207-9765 > > RUSSIA > H.E. Ambassador Mr. Sergey Lavrov > rusun@un.int > (212) 628-0252 > > > UK > H.E. Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock > uk@un.int > (212) 745-9316 > > CHINA > H.E. Ambassador Wang Yingfan > chinamission_un@fmprc.gov.cn > (212) 634-7626 > > ANGOLA > S.E. Ambassador Dr. Ismael Gaspar Martins > ang-un@angolamissionun.org > (212) 861-9295 > > BULGARIA > H.E. Ambassador Mr. Stefan Tafrov > bulgaria@un.int > (212) 472-9865 > > CAMEROON > S.E. Ambassador Martin Belinga Eboutou > info@cameroonmission.org > (212) 249-0533 > > CHILE > S.E. Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdes > chile@un.int > (212) 832-0236 > > GERMANY > H.E. Ambassador Dr. Gunter Pleuger > contact@germany-un.org > (212) 940-0402 > > GUINEA > H.E. Ambassador M. Francois Lonseny Fall > guinea@un.int > (212) 687-8248 > > MEXICO > S. E. Embajador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser > mexico@un.int > (212) 688-8862 > > PAKISTAN > H.E. Ambassador Munir Akram > pakistan@un.int > (212) 744-7348 > > SYRIA > H.E. Ambassador Dr. Mikha'il Wahbi > syria@un.int > (212) 983-4439 > > SPAIN > H.E. Ambassador Inocencio F. Arias > spain@spainun.org > (212) 682-4460 > > ------------------------------ > > In the counsels of Government, > we must guard against the acquisition > of unwarranted influence, whether > sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. > The potential for the disastrous rise of > misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never > let the weight of this combination > endanger our liberties or democratic processes. > > - President Dwight Eisenhower, January 1961 > > __________________ > > Not In Our Name - Santa Barbara > P.O. Box 91536 Santa Barbara, CA 93190-1536 > WEB: > EMAIL: > > > > > > > > > > > > ~~~~~~~ PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Tue Mar 18 14:21:08 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Death of Herbert Aptheker Message-ID: <20030318.162108.2096.1.farmelantj@juno.com> ***** Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:45:20 -0500 From: Alan Wald Subject: Death of Herbert Apthecker Sender: owner-mlg-ics@lists.andrew.cmu.edu To: mlg Dear Friends, Wanted to let you know that Herbert Aptheker passed away this morning, surrounded by family and friends; he would have celebrated his 88th birthday this summer. Herbert's health had been fragile for some time--especially for the last couple of years--and he'd been in and out of the hospital a number of times since last August, with a series of incidents (from falls, to a minor heart attack and, more recently, some minor strokes). Last week, as he seemed again to weaken dramatically, Herbert and the family decided to forego any further medical interventions, and to focus on making Herbert as comfortable as possible. He was at many points remarkably lucid these last few days, periodically speaking of--and with pleasure listening to conversation about--some of the matters closest to his heart, including African-American history, politics, and culture; hopes and chances for peace; and Major League Baseball. When plans are made for a memorial service in the Bay Area, I'll forward that information to you. Always, Rob -- Alan Wald, Director, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan. Mailing address: 3700 Haven Hall, Ann Arbor, Mi. 48109-1045. Office address: Room 3703 Haven Hall. Office phone: 734-763-1460. Home phone: 734-995-1499. e-mail: awald@umich.edu Faxes can be received at AC office: 734-936-1967 ***** ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Mar 19 17:11:02 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Petras on Perry Anderson on antiwar movement Message-ID: <20030319.193735.3360.1.farmelantj@juno.com> James Petras Rebelión 13 March 2003 Perry Anderson has written a polemical critique of the arguments of the liberal sectors of the anti-war movement. His critique of their support of the United Nations and particularly the Security Council and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty are well-taken if one-sided. Apart from his perceptive criticism of the liberal anti-war camp, the rest of his polemic has deep and pervasive flaws of theory, conceptualization and fact. In the first instance Anderson ignores the plural, complex coalition that brings together radical anti-imperialists, pacifists, religious and secular liberals. Anderson's discussion of US war preparations is devoid of any mention of a theoretical framework worthy of its name. His vague and scarce mention of US 'hegemony' won't do. His reticence in discussing ( or even mentioning ) US imperialism, and the specificities of its governing elite precludes any understanding of the context, radicalization and growth of the anti-war movement and particularly its powerful anti-imperialist wing. Anderson confines himself to the debate between conservatives and liberals who are both pro and anti-war, and then proceeds to insert the mass anti-war movement within these narrow confines. Anderson has a warped understanding of the anti-war movement gathered from the London or Los Angeles Times, or from gossip in Beverly Hills. The anti-war movement is an outgrowth of the radical sectors of the anti-globalization movement, more precisely of the anti-capitalist wing. Secondly the anti-war movement contains a majoritarian sector ( especially outside of the Anglo-US orbit ) opposed to the war irregardless of any UN decision, thus expressing its critical views of the past and present behavior of the UN. Thirdly in many countries, including England, Turkey,Italy and France, workers have taken direct action - strikes - or threatened action in opposition to the imperialist nature of the war. In Northern Italy trade unionists and anti-war activists have blocked railway lines being used to transport convoys loaded with weapons. On March 14, millions of Spanish workers staged a general strike against the war preparations. Anderson's flaccid discussion of the reasons behind the growing anti-war movement is a caricature of the movement, closer to Wolfowitz than to the explanations given by the participants themselves. According to Anderson the opposition is based on cultural repugnance of Republicans, the flaws of Bush's mass media propaganda campaign ("Spectacle") and 'fear'. The major slogans that are chanted in demonstrations throughout the world is "No Blood for Oil", "Oil=War" and many other variations on the same theme reflecting opposition to Washington's war to take over Iraq's oil. These slogans reflect a coherent, logical and precise reasoning linking an imperial war to the quest for domination of a strategic raw material. Anderson underestimates the popular repugnance to mass murder - and the anti-war movements' understanding that millions of Iraqis will be killed, wounded or displaced. Mass popular opinion has been able to see through the unprecedented, massive, homogeneous propaganda campaign of Bush,Blair, Aznar, and Berlusconi etc. Instead of recognizing a new critical public awareness, Anderson criticizes Bush for not waging a sufficiently belligerent and effective propaganda campaign. Anderson apparently forgets they can only project their propaganda images 24 hours a day. The issue of fear of retaliation is a factor influencing the growth of the anti-war movement, but this psychological concern is attached to both anti-war and pro-war sentiments. What turns the psychological condition in a particular direction - toward opposing the US as aggressor - are political, social and economic factors, the recognition that Washington has faked the data justifying the war, that there are no proofs of any credible threats from Iraq and a sense that the US is the real terrorist threat. This is the case in most countries particularly outside of the Anglo-Saxon world. In South Korea, according to recent polls, most people, 4 to 1, see the US as a greater threat than North Korea. In what surely must go down as the most logical deductive and brilliantly flawed argumentation yet seen on the anti-war movement, Anderson argues that "on questions of principle" the Bush Administration's case against its critics (who he tags as emotional) is "iron-clad". As one peruses Anderson's summing up of the assumptions underlying these "principles" he fails to spell out Bush's principle of permanent war based on a world-wide international conspiracy currently operative in 60 countries, the doctrine of preemptive wars, multiple sequencing of war in the Middle East and the illogical position of upholding the UN principles and voiding them in practice. If so much were not at stake it would be amusing to read Anderson's forceful presentation of the Bush Administration's principled war and his half-baked summary of the illogical and incoherent discussion of the liberal anti-war position. In his effort to discredit the liberal anti-war arguments, he inadvertently or deliberately attempts to drive a wedge between the plural coalition opposing the war. To do so his primary weapon is his blanket attack of the UN, the Security Council, the "international community" as merely instruments of US "hegemony". Anderson's generalities contain half-truths, lack any sense of political tactics and strategy and are devoid of any proposals on how to advance the anti-war movement beyond some irrelevant declarations. The starting point is Anderson's lack of understanding of the political behavior of the UN over the past half century. While the US dominated the UN during the 1950- 1960's, during the 1970's the tide turned and the US was a minority faced with the demands for a New International Order. The US had to resort to its veto to block resolutions affecting Washington's special partner, Israel. During the 1990's the US influence in the UN peaked, but with the approach of the Second Gulf War it has declined. There is no doubt that the US is a powerful imperialist country with a vocation for conquest ( not hegemony ) but Anderson ignores the fact that today Washington encounters opposition, and threatens to act independently of the UN. What is the source of this conflict - inter-imperialist rivalries, different governing elites? We never find out, because Anderson in his sublime logical fashion totally ignores these questions and worse fails to see how inter-elite conflicts are an important condition for anti-imperialist advance under certain circumstances. The 30 million anti-war activists include people who still believe in the UN, trust Chirac and rely on a UN resolution. Should the Left break with them and weaken the movement, or should it work along side, presenting its own anti-imperialist arguments and deepening popular consciousness of the systemic causes of war? Clearly the revolutionary and reformist anti-imperialists have correctly chosen the latter route - and with great success both in qualitative and quantitative terms. The anti-war movement is radicalizing, it is growing by the millions as the war grows near and it has pressured bourgeois and imperial allies into temporary opposition. Even if the UN was totally dominated, as Anderson asserts, it has been a forum to raise fundamental issues and to force the US to exhibit its darker side - political blackmail, violent threats, economic corruption and crude spying on UN representatives, thus not only adversely affecting the image of the US but also demonstrating the limits of the UN and the Security Council. The appeals to the UN are transitional demands, linking present moderate anti-war consciousness to a more radical anti-imperialist perspective, providing the Left does not bury its principled position. Anderson's alternative to the anti-imperialist anti-war movement is to "abolish the Security Council" and study the UN's past relations with Iraq. This is hardly relevant to a mass anti-war movement rightly focused on the role of the imperial regime in Washington and its current military projections in the Middle East, a movement intent on deepening and exploiting the "illogical", "contradictory" positions adopted by rival ruling classes and sowing anti-imperialist consciousness among the billions opposed to the war. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Casuistries of Peace and War, Perry Anderson ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Thu Mar 20 06:51:00 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Herbert Aptheker, 87, Prolific Marxist Historian, Is Dead (NY Times) Message-ID: <20030320.085100.520.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Herbert Aptheker, 87, Prolific Marxist Historian, Is Dead March 20, 2003 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Herbert Aptheker, the prolific Marxist historian best known for his three-volume "Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States" and for editing the correspondence and writing of his mentor, W. E. B. DuBois, died on Monday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 87. Along with his work on black history and his outspoken defense of civil rights, he was known as a dominant voice on the American left in the 1950's and 60's and as one of the first scholars to denounce American military involvement in Vietnam. His political views, and particularly a fact-finding trip to Hanoi and Beijing in 1966, resulted in threats by Washington to revoke his passport, a move that provoked a high-profile debate about the legality of State Department travel restrictions. In another public feud, Mr. Aptheker took on the author William Styron, after the publication of his best-selling 1967 novel "The Confessions of Nat Turner," a re-creation of the 1831 Virginia slave insurrection. Mr. Aptheker, as well as some black writers and historians, accused Mr. Styron of distorting the record and promoting racial stereotypes. Mr. Styron, who called his book a "meditation on history," hotly rejected Mr. Aptheker's view, saying it was tainted by politics. Although he wrote, taught and lectured widely on his political views, his only major attempt at elective office was an unsuccessful campaign for the House of Representatives from Brooklyn in 1966 on the Peace and Freedom ticket. Among his lasting contributions was the editing of the DuBois letters. Writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the historian Eric Foner called "The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois" (Massachusetts, 1973-1978) "a landmark in Afro-American history." Yet when DuBois appointed Mr. Aptheker (pronounced AP-tek-er) his literary executor in 1946 and subsequently turned over to him his vast correspondence shortly before his death in 1963, the move was vocally criticized in the black intellectual community. Some felt that as a white man Mr. Aptheker could not truly identify with the black American experience. Others thought that for DuBois to have chosen an avowed Marxist to edit his papers was to make him vulnerable to the accusation, often voiced in the McCarthy era, that he himself was opposed to the American way of life. Yet Mr. Aptheker's editing was greeted with wide praise. Reviewers said that his own extensive writing on African-American history had clearly prepared him for the task. Jay Saunders Redding, the black author and teacher, wrote in Phylon, a journal founded by DuBois, that "what gives a special importance to the letters it contains is the light they shed on the why and how of this history and on the men and women who made it." Herbert Aptheker was born on July 31, 1915, in Brooklyn, the youngest of five children of Benjamin Aptheker, a successful manufacturer of women's underwear, and Rebecca Komar Aptheker. He graduated from Columbia University in 1936, completed a master's degree there in 1937 and a doctorate in history in 1943. His dissertation was published under the title "Black Slave Revolts" (Columbia, 1942). In September 1939, just after he began working toward his doctorate, he joined the Communist Party, because, he said, he saw it as an anti-fascist force and a progressive voice for race relations. He was a hostile witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, and throughout the 1950's he remained on the defensive for his radical views, experiencing violent threats and close federal surveillance. In 1942, he married Fay Philippa Aptheker, his first cousin. She died in 1999. They had one child, a daughter, Bettina, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who is a professor and the chairwoman of Women's Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is also survived by two grandchildren. >From 1942 until 1946, Mr. Aptheker served in the Army, seeing action as an artillery officer in Europe and rising to the rank of major. His first published work was a pamphlet, "The Negro in the Civil War" (1938), later compiled with other pamphlets under the title "To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History" (International Publishers, 1948). After the publication of his dissertation in 1942, he produced books almost yearly. Among his more notable works, in addition to his "Documentary History" (Citadel, 1951-1975) were his multivolume "History of the American People" (International, 1959-1976) and "Anti-Racism in U.S. History" (Greenwood, 1992). In "Anti-Racism," he traced the thread of opposition to black racism that he saw running throughout American history. After he returned to New York after World War II, he applied for a teaching position at Columbia and was advised that because of his politics he would never be hired. In fact he was excluded from academic life until 1969, when student demands for a course on black history led to an invitation to teach at Bryn Mawr College, where he remained until 1973. Yet throughout his long career he lectured informally on black history. He was also DuBois lecturer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1971 to 1972, as a professor at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York from 1971 to 1977 and as a visiting lecturer at Yale, the University of California at Berkeley Law School and Humboldt University in Berlin. He was an associate editor at Masses and Mainstream from 1948 to 1953 and an editor at Political Affairs from 1953 to 1963. In 1964, he founded the American Institute of Marxist Studies in New York. Mr. Aptheker's trip to Hanoi and Beijing in January 1966 stirred a whirlwind of debate over Washington's travel restrictions to certain countries. Mr. Aptheker made the trip with Staughton Lynd, then a history professor at Yale, and Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society. The widely publicized visit was billed as a mission to sound out the government of North Vietnam about the possibility of a negotiated end to the Vietnam War. Federal law on the broadly drawn State Department rules was unsettled. In one case that seemed to put Mr. Aptheker in the clear, the Supreme Court had held unconstitutionally broad a regulation that barred all Communists from traveling in all countries where passports are required. But when the three men returned, the State Department, which viewed their trip as meddlesome, took steps to restrict their travel, though it eventually backed down. To the end of his life, Mr. Aptheker saw his friendship with DuBois as formative. He recalled how in the late 40's they shared an office on 40th Street in Manhattan when DuBois was director of publicity and research for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One day, Mr. Aptheker recalled, DuBois "said to me, `Herbert, any time you have a problem, don't hesitate, just ask me." This meant, he said, having access to one of America's most dynamic minds. "Imagine what that meant to me. I had it right here, and I had the New York Public Library across the street." www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/obituaries/20APTH.html?ex=1049167496&ei=1&en=d 430622666ad78d9 Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Mar 24 20:31:50 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030324.223151.3392.1.farmelantj@juno.com> Apparently, these folk are a sort of Russian version of Stratfor, I guess with ex-KGB types as opposed to the ex-CIA and ex-military intelligence people at Stratfor. Jim F. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------- March 24, 2003 www.iraqwar.ru The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports. [ < previous report | next report > ] March 24, 2003, 0800hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - As of morning (MSK, GMT +3) March 24 the situation in Iraq can be characterized as quiet on all fronts. Attacking coalition forces have settled into positional warfare, they are exhausted, lost the attacking momentum and are in urgent need for fuel, ammunition, repairs and reinforcements. The Iraqis are also busy regrouping their forces, reinforcing the combat units and setting up new defense lines. Exceptionally heavy fighting continued for two days and nights near An-Nasiriya. Both warring sides employed large numbers of tanks and artillery. More than 20,000 troops of the US 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, supported by 200 tanks, 600 other armored vehicles and 150 artillery pieces, were opposed by the Iraqi 3rd Army Corps consisting of up to 40,000 troops, up to 250 tanks, more than 100 artillery, up to 100 mortars and 1000 rocket propelled grenade launchers (RPG) and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM). The two-day battle ended without any significant results. The Americans have failed in trying to use their momentum in capturing An-Nasiriya and attempted to encircle the town from the west, where they encountered strong layered Iraqi defenses and forced to withdraw. The Iraqi forces used this opportunity to attack the US flanks with two brigades, breaking the US combat orders and causing panic among the US troops. The US command was forced to halt the advance of its f orced toward An Najaf and once again redirect several tank battalions to support the attacked units. Nearly 6 hours was needed for the US aviation to stop the Iraqi attack and restore combat order of the US forces. During the past day the coalition aviation flew more than 2,000 close support missions in this area [An-Nasiriya]. "We can only thank God for having air dominance!” said the commander of the US 15th Marines Exp. Corps Col. Thomas Waldhauser in a private conversation with one of the CNN reporters. Later the CNN journalist cited the Colonel in a phone conversation with his editor. The conversation was intercepted. According to the intercepted radio traffic, the US forces have sustained up to 40 killed, up to 10 captured and up to 200 wounded during the fighting near An-Nasiriya. There is confirmed information about one lost attack helicopter and an unconfirmed report about a lost ground attack plane. The US forces have also lost up to 40 armored vehicles, including no less than 10 tanks. Several intercepted reports by the US field commanders stated that their troops are unable to advance due to their soldiers being demoralized by the enemy's fierce resistance and high losses. Four days of continuous advance exhausted the coalition forces, which now have settled into defensive positions nearly on every front to rest and regroup. As of this morning (MSK, GMT +3) the coalition forces are in control of the western part of An-Nasiriya but have no foothold on the left bank of Euphrates. The left bank of the river is controlled by the Iraqi forces, which are conducting engineering works to reinforce their defenses. A part of the Iraqi forces have been deployed to strengthen the defense of An-Najaf, where they expect the next coalition attack. Around 2300hrs (MSK, GMT +3) March 23 a British platoon was ambushed by Iraqi Special Forces unit near Basra. Following a powerful initial artillery barrage the Iraqis engaged the British in close combat and destroyed several armored vehicles. After the Iraqis withdrew the British commander reported up to 8 killed, two missing and more than 30 wounded British soldiers. Thus over the 30% of the unit's troops have been disabled in the attack. Reinforcements and medevac helicopters have been dispatched by the coalition to the scene of the attack. During the past day there has been a sharp increase in combat activity in the coalition's rearguard. Reports have been intercepted showing at least 5 attacks on the coalition military convoys, 8 vehicles destroyed by landmines and 2 ambushes. Iraqi special operation units are mining the roads, setting up ambushes and conduct search and reconnaissance operations. The coalition forces have been ordered to halt the movement of convoys during dark hours and to provide each convoy with combat escort units and air cover. The situation around the borderline town of Umm Qasr (population 1,500) still remains unclear. Radio intercepts and satellite images show that the town was under constant bombardment throughout out the night. The morning photos indicate its complete destruction. This shows that the coalition command, fed up with the Iraqi's stubborn resistance, ordered the complete destruction of the town using aviation and artillery. However, according to reports by the British troops ordered to "clean up" Umm Qasr the town still contains many pockets of resistance. The overall coalition losses at Umm Qasr during the past four days amounted to up to 40 killed and up to 200 wounded. Currently it is impossible to estimate the Iraqi losses at Umm Qasr. As of yesterday's morning the Umm Qasr garrison consisted of 1600 troops. The units of the British marine infantry have failed to establish control over the strategically important Fao peninsula. After yesterday's counterattack by the Iraqis the British forces have been thrown back some 3 to 5 kilometers and were forced into defensive positions. Intercepted radio communications indicate that today the British command will attempt to regain the lost ground after spending the night reinforcing their units on Fao with two additional marine infantry battalions. The overall British losses on the Fao peninsula during the past four days of fighting include up to 15 killed and up to 100 wounded. The Iraqis lost here up to 100 killed and around 100 captured. A heated exchange of fire continues near Basra. The coalition units hesitate to enter the city and limit their actions to constant artillery and aviation bombardment of Basra. So far the coalition forces have failed to completely surround the city and to cut off the defending Iraqi garrison from the main Iraqi forces. The US troops continue landing in northern Iraqi territories controlled by the Kurds. It is expected that as early as tomorrow morning these forces supported by the Kurdish units will make an attempt to capture the town of Kirkuk. Aerial strikes against Iraq continued throughout the night. A total of up to 1,500 combat flights were carried out by the coalition aviation. Additionally, B-52 bombers launched more than 100 cruise missiles from the so-called "Turkish corridor". Some 150 more cruise missiles have been launched by the US and British naval forces. Intercepted radio traffic indicates another lost coalition plane this morning. There was a confirmed loss of a "Predator" unmanned aerial reconnaissance aircraft. Any further advances by the coalition within the next 8-12 hours are unlikely. The coalition command in Qatar has been in meeting since the early morning and is expected to come up with significant changes to the overall operational plan. According to most experts the coalition command made a most serious strategic error by starting the ground phase of the operation nearly at the very start of the war. The Americans have violated their own doctrine where the ground phases of a military operation coincide in time with the destruction of the enemy from the air. The US made serious errors in their estimates of the Iraq's army strength and combat readiness. The US military intelligence and the CIA failed to uncover the true potential of the Iraqi forces and, in essence, misinformed the top military and civilian leadership of the coalition member countries. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-24-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Tue Mar 25 18:40:28 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030325.204030.2836.6.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news078.htm Jim F. ------------------------------------------ War in Iraq - fighting the people March 25, 2003 www.iraqwar.ru The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports. March 25, 2003, 1230hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - As of the morning March 25 the situation on Iraqi fronts remains quiet. Both sides are actively preparing for future engagements. Exhausted in combat the US 3rd Motorized Infantry Division is now being reinforced with fresh units from Kuwait (presumably with up to 1 Marine brigade and 1 tank brigade from the 1st Armored Division (all coming from the coalition command reserves) and elements of the British 7th Tank Brigade from the area of Umm Qasr. The troops have a stringent requirement to regroup and, after conducting additional reconnaissance, to capture An-Nasiriya within two days. The Iraqis have reinforced the An-Nasiriya garrison with several artillery battalions and a large number of anti-tank weapons. Additionally, the Iraqis are actively deploying landmines along the approaches to their positions. However, currently all combat has nearly ceased due to the sand storm raging over the region. Weather forecasts anticipate the storm's end by noon of March 26. According to intercepted radio communications the coalition advance will be tied to the end of the sand storm and is planned to take place during the night of March 26-27. The coalition command believes that a night attack will allow its forces to achieve the element of surprise and to use its advantage in specialized night fighting equipment. There have been no reports of any losses resulting from direct combat in the past 10 hours. However, there is information about two coalition combat vehicles destroyed by landmines. Three US soldiers were wounded in one of these incidents. Positional warfare continues near Basra. The coalition forces in this area are clearly insufficient for continuing the attack and the main emphasis is being placed on artillery and aviation. The city is under constant bombardment but so far this had little impact on the combat readiness of the Iraqi units. Thus, last night an Iraqi battalion reinforced with tanks swung around the coalition positions in the area of Basra airport and attacked the coalition forces in the flanks. As the result of this attack the US forces have been thrown back 1.5-2 kilometers leaving the airport and the nearby structures in the hands of the Iraqis. Two APCs and one tank were destroyed in this encounter. According to radio intelligence at least two US soldiers were killed and no less than six US soldiers were wounded. The coalition forces are still unable to completely capture the small town of Umm Qasr. By the end of yesterday coalition units were controlling only the strategic roads going through the town, but fierce fighting continued in the residential districts. At least two British servicemen were killed by sniper fire in Umm Qasr during the past 24 hours. The coalition command is extremely concerned with growing resistance movement in the rear of the advancing forces. During a meeting at the coalition command headquarters it was reported that up to 20 Iraqi reconnaissance units are active behind the coalition rear. The Iraqis attack lightly armed supply units; they deploy landmines and conduct reconnaissance. Additionally, captured villages have active armed resistance that is conducting reconnaissance in the interests of the Iraqi command and is organizing attacks against coalition troops. During the past 24 hours more than 30 coalition wheeled and armored vehicles have been lost to such attacks. Some 7 coalition servicemen are missing, 3 soldiers are dead and 10 are wounded. The coalition commander Gen. Tommy Franks ordered his forces to clear coalition rears from Iraqi diversionary units and partisans in the shortest possible time. The British side will be responsible for fulfilling these orders. A unit from the 22nd SAS regiment supported by the US 1st, 5th and 10th Special Operations Groups will carry out this operation. Each of these groups has up to 1 2 units numbering 12-15 troops each. All of these units have some Asian or Arabic Americans. The groups also have guides and translators from among local Iraqi collaborators, who went through rapid training at specialized centers in the Czech Republic and in the UK. The sand storms turned out to be the main enemy of the American military equipment. Just the 3rd Motorized Infantry Division had more than 100 vehicles disabled. This is causing serious concern on the part of the coalition command. The repair crews are working around the clock to return all the disabled equipment back into service. The M1A2 Abrams tanks are not known for the their reliable engines as it is, but in the sand storm conditions multiple breakdowns became a real problem for the tank crews. All attempts by the US paratroopers to capture the town of Kirkuk have yielded no result. The Americans counted on the support of the Kurds but the latter refused to take a direct part in the attack and demanded guarantees from the US command that it will prevent a Turkish invasion. The Turkish themselves are avoiding making any promises. Additionally, the situation [at Kirkuk] is affected by the lack of heavy weapons on the part of the US paratroopers. The aviation support alone is clearly not sufficient. The northern group of forces commander Marine Brig. Gen. Osman has requested artillery and armored vehicles. All indications are that so far the US is unable to form a combat-capable strike force in this area. According to satellite reconnaissance it seems likely that the Iraqis had time to remove the captured Apache Longbow attack helicopter of the 11th Aviation Regiment. The pieces remaining at the landing site following a US bombing strike indicate that the bombs hit a crudely constructed mockup. Aerial bombardment of Baghdad has so far failed to produce the expected results. All targets designated before the war have been hit 3 to 7 times, but this had almost no effect of the combat readiness of the Iraqi army, their air defenses or the command and control structures. It seems that during preparation for the war the Iraqis were able to create new, well-protected communication lines and control centers. There is plenty of intelligence information indicating that so far the US electronic reconnaissance was unable to locate and to penetrate the Iraqi command's communication network, which is an indication of the network's high technological sophistication. A particular point of concern for the US command is the huge overuse of precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles. Already the supply of heavy cruise missiles like the "Tomahawk" has been reduced by a third and, at the current rate of use, in three weeks the US will be left only with the untouchable strategic supply of these missiles. A similar situation exists with other types of precision-guided munitions. "The rate of their use is incompatible with the obtained results. We are literally dropping gold into the mud!" said Gen. Richard Mayers during a meeting in Pentagon yesterday morning. [reverse translation from Russian] The US experts already call this war a "crisis". "It was enough for the enemy to show a little resistance and some creative thinking as our technological superiority begun to quickly lose all its meaning. Our expenses are not justified by the obtained results. The enemy is using an order of magnitude cheaper weapons to reach the same goals for which we spend billions on technological whims of the defense industry!" said Gen. Stanley McCrystal during the same Pentagon meeting. [reverse translation from Russian] Since the early morning today the coalition high command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in an online conference joined by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. This meeting immediately follows an earlier meeting last night at the White House. During the night meeting with President Bush emergency actions were outlined to resolve the standstill in Iraq. The existing course of actions is viewed as "ineffective and leading to a crisis". The Secretary of State Collin Powell warned that, if the war in Iraq continues for more than a month, it might lead to unpredictable consequences in international politics. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Mayers reported on the proposed actions and corrections to the plan of the operation in Iraq. George Bush demanded that the military breaks the standstill in Iraq and within a week achieves significant military progress. A particular attention, according to Bush, should be paid to finding and eliminating the top Iraqi political and military leadership. Bush believes that Saddam Hussein and his closest aides are the cornerstone of the Iraqi defense. During today's online meeting at the coalition headquarters Gen. Franks was criticized for inefficient command of his troops and for his inability to concentrate available forces on the main tasks. According to [Russian military] intelligence Pentagon made a decision to significantly reinforce the coalition. During the next two weeks up to 50,000 troops and no less than 500 tanks will arrive to the combat area from the US military bases in Germany and Albania. By the end of April 120,000 more troops and up to 1,200 additional tanks will be sent to support the war against Iraq. A decision was made to change the way aviation is used in this war. The use of precision-guided munitions will be scaled down and these weapons will be reserved for attacking only known, confirmed targets. There will be an increase in the use of conventional high-yield aviation bombs, volume-detonation bombs and incendiary munitions. The USAF command is ordered to deliver to airbases used against Iraq a two-week supply of aviation bombs of 1-tonn caliber and higher as well as volume-detonation and incendiary bombs. This means that Washington is resorting to the "scorched earth" tactics and carpet-bombing campaign. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-25-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Mar 26 04:45:02 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: RE: [A-List] A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030326.064503.2000.5.farmelantj@juno.com> For what it's worth, have these Russian reports with salt. There are a number of errors in their descriptions of the names and composition of US Special Operations units. 1st, 5th & 10th are Special FORCES Groups, not Special "Operations" Groups, and they each consist of three battalions, each battalion of three line companies, and each line company of six ODA's (team, each team with an authorized 12 men (usually 9-10 in reality, but they may have them all at 100% strength or over for this). The 22 SAS more commonly works with its US counterpart, which is not SF, but 1st SFOD-D (Delta). SF ODA's do not have an endless supply of Arab-Asian-Americans. They are overwhelmingly white and Latino. The target languages for 1st Group are Asian, Tagalog especially, and for 10th Group, European, German and Russian especially. When a report like this comes off as way empirical, and some basic facts are in error, it tends to make the facts we can't confirm equally suspect. Here is apiece for the FR website, that we are struggling to get back up (it went down day before yesterday): MILITARY MATTERS Hard Rain Stan Goff I am a veteran of operations gone bad, and right now I am experiencing a powerful sense of vicarious déjà vu. Four days ago, I couldn’t watch CNN for more than ten minutes at a time or I was risking my own mental health. Now, I watch it with the perverse fascination one experiences when seeing an animal die. Obviously, the parade of aging white Generals – even including my old commander Dave Grange – who simultaneously know that the US will prevail militarily through sheer force and that this entire operation is going terribly, terribly wrong, do not understand the wider political implications of what they are witnessing. Still, they seem discomfited. The have been converted into cheap propagandists, and for me it’s a lot like seeing a formerly tyrannical Sergeant Major who’s retired and become an oily insurance salesman, reduced to haunting the barracks, kissing up to his own former troops to earn his way in the real world by selling them policies. How the mighty can fall from great heights! Perhaps that’s too majestic. The Haitians say, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you see nothing but his ass. Many lay people can’t differentiate between substance and apologetics now because the whole society is freshly immersed in its new vocabulary of war. As we just grasp the meanings of terms like “target set” and “battle damage assessment”, and congratulate ourselves on having discerned their meanings, our attention becomes fixed on these trees to the exclusion of a very perilous forest. Those of us who have spent time in the cannibal bureaucracy of the military are well acquainted with this segway from description to rationalization and blame shifting. It is part of the officer career survival course, and it even has a name. We called it tap-dancing. Watch Wesley Clark, the CNN military star, who reputation in the Army was that of an inveterate ass kisser. He harbors presidential pretensions, and he’s smooth as a baby’s butt. Watch how the worry lines now come right through the pancake makeup. Donald Rumsfeld has become positively humble – a first in his lifetime – during his Pentagon briefs. George W. Bush is nearly absent. No one will risk his extemporaneous gaffes and he may be medicated. His two-line appearances are hoarse and fatigued. The story-changing started with “Operational Security.” OPSEC as they say. “Embedded” reporters savored these acronyms like children with chocolates as they left the humdrum of their past assignments to smell the diesel fumes, hear the roar of turbines, feel the sting of sandstorms, and touch the tools of war. OPSEC was suddenly dusted off, and aspects of the operation became clouded to the public. That was on Day Two. Military commanders became camera shy, when for months now they’d been turned into the darlings of the Ken & Barbie media, attracted to the camera lenses like blowflies to a corpse. “OPSEC” was the first sign that things were going wrong. OPSEC is real, but to this point, it had been ditched in an orgy of shit-talking triumphalism. What happened? *** What happened was, the superpower came face to face with its new counterpart; an international popular movement, not against just this war, but against US hegemony. That movement has become a material force on the battlefield, and has midwifed a deep crisis of legitimacy for the US military-political junta. The whole adventure is rooted in systemic crisis, a reality that even the movement itself only apprehends on its left wing. For a longer discussion of that, see Overreach http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_5_overreach.html. How has the antiwar movement become a material force on the Iraqi battleground? Let’s take a snapshot of the tactical situation, as least what we can glean from different accounts. The original battle plan was scrapped. The complexity of planning a military operation of this scope is simply indescribable, and it takes months to do it right. But the unexpected loss of ground fronts, in Turkey in the North and Saudi Arabia in the South, forced a complete reconstruction of plans in a matter of days. The operation could be put off no longer. The aggressor’s back was against the weather wall. The pre-summer sandstorms had already begun, and by late April the heat index inside a soldier’s chemical protective gear will be 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The international antiwar movement had firmed up political opposition around the world and forced the delays that culminated in the UN Security Council becoming a key arena of struggle. For all the infantile leftists who dismissed the UN on moral and ideological – and therefore idealist – grounds, I would say look now at Iraq and see how politics translates into military reality. We stalled where we could stall, and there is an effect. The entire 4th Infantry Division is sitting in the barracks now waiting for their equipment to steam around the Arabian Peninsula because Turkey denied them their front. Medium and short range tactical aircraft that could have struck dozens of key targets are sidelined because they are forbidden to take off from Saudi Arabia to deliver their “payloads.” Inside the Department of Defense there has been a war raging between the Generals of the Army and the Marine Corps and the clique of doctrinal “revolutionaries” pushing Rumsfeld’s crackpot theory of Network Centric Warfare (NCW), the methodological offspring of a strategic doctrine called Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD). The Rumsfeld Doctrine is cyberwar combined with commandos. Rumsfeld and his mentors have an absolute faith in the power of technology as the primary determinant of military outcomes, and a complete ignorance of politics as a force of war. (This will be the subject of a book due out this December, War Lies.) Suffice it to say here, the combination of the failure of this new “doctrine” and the aforementioned “friction,” to use a Clausewitzian term, is creating a military debacle in Iraq. It is important to note that in war, which is an extreme form of politics, success is not measured empirically as it is in a sports competition. It is not measured in body counts or inventories of destroyed war materiel. In fact, it is not perfectly measurable at all. But success has to be gauged against the expectations of the military operation and its final objectives – which are always political. The US inflicted a terrible empirical toll on Southeast Asia and ultimately lost the Vietnam War. The US never grasped the political character of that war. The loss of Vietnam became the basis of the Powell Doctrine, which combines avoidance of decisive ground combat (and therefore avoidance of US casualties) with control over public perceptions of the war through the press. Rumsfeld’s NCW attempts to assert that logic onto the battlefield with extremely complex technology that has displaced decision-making from human commanders to computerized hardware/software. I have referred to this in the past as “the organic composition of the military;” the relative weight of technological to cognitive process. Every strength carries with it a corresponding weakness, and once military leaders perceive the strengths and weaknesses of their opposition, they can avoid the strengths and exploit the weaknesses. The Iraqis are doing just that. Accusations by the United States against the Russians that the latter are providing material assistance may very well be true. The Russians have now thrown in their lot with “old Europe” and China, and they are aiming to undermine US power at every opportunity. I suspect they have not only provided equipment and training on that equipment, but advisory assistance on the reorganization of the Iraqi military. Someone has. The Iraqi military has apparently abandoned is former Soviet-style doctrine, predicated on armor, mass, and centralized command. It has now adopted tactics more suited to Special Operations; agile and decentralized. This cannot happen without a very intentional and systematic reorientation from top to bottom. This is an “asymmetrical” response to the high-tech doctrine the US developed to overcome the doctrine of its own predecessor. This Iraqi doctrinal reorientation is proving stunningly effective. Rumsfeld’s notion that he might “decapitate” the Iraqi military has led to an incessant and inane press speculation about whether on not Saddam Hussein is dead or alive. As the reports rolled of one setback after another, he was asked by the press whether there was any evidence to show that Saddam Hussein is dead. His response: “The word evidence is a hard word.” Less ridiculous and more telling was the statement by a Pentagon official, now dissing his boss: “This is the ground war that was not going to happen in [Rumsfeld’s] plan.” Rumsfeld’s computers told him that the Iraqis would be shocked and awed into capitulation within two days. Instead we have the (suppressed in the US) spectacle of ground troops in disarray as they attempted to cross their initial lines of departure, columns being stopped by urban resistance, ambushes of logistics tails, advances halted by blinding sandstorms, and captive American youngsters on television. These American prisoners of war were maintenance people and cooks, kids who signed up for an enlistment bonus, some college money, and a saleable skill. Now they stare hauntingly back at us all, with their fear almost an aura in their photographs. The earlier uncomplicated advances, however, were remarkable. In set-piece war, Rumsfeld’s impressive display of new battle software worked perfectly. Tank commanders could stay on line by simply referring to a digital display, and no one was pulling ahead into an adjacent unit’s gunsights. Gee whiz. The Generals are preoccupied now on retrieving their tactical victory from the chaos, a retrieval that will cost treasure, lives, and careers. But they are almost certainly also sharpening their knives and fantasizing about the spaces between Donald Rumsfeld’s ribs. The first images of the war were to be the “liberation” of Shia Basra, where jubilant crowds would welcome the conquering American heroes. Instead, Basra fought back with a spectacular ferocity. Now US ground forces are attempting to bypass every urban center on the road to Baghdad, but they are in the restricted terrain of the east, where bypass is not always an option. In Al Nasirya, stale wine turned to vinegar in their mouths. City by city sieges have now become a real possibility, and the longer this war goes, the sharper will be the reaction throughout the region. Aside from stalling, antiwar forces and the naked self-interest of the US regime have given us another multi-faceted victory. The US, fearing further erosion of its wounded legitimacy, has set out to genuinely limit civilian casualties. We have to be honest and clear about this. It is happening. There are certainly civilian casualties, but not nearly the mass slaughter we almost all predicted. Two factors at play here are (1) the need to avoid great damage to the infrastructure of their new prize and (2) the flames of an erupting international rebellion that they can afford to fan no more with their impunity. We must also be honest that this will cause the costs to American troops to go up, in lives. Basra can be conquered in a day if there is a willingness to reduce it to rubble. So the US regime is caught between the Scylla of international rage, including the ever more explosive rage of the Arab and Muslim masses in the region, and the concomitant certainty of further international isolation, and the Charybdis of Powell’s nightmare – a parade of flag-draped coffins. Given this choice, the US will probably be forced to abandon its precise target discrimination, and the bloodletting that has been thusfar limited will happen after all. Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of the US strategy – prior to recent developments – was the “embedded journalists” program. This is a masterpiece of Powell Doctrine. Controlling public perceptions. The criticism of the military “pool” system from the first Gulf War was checkmated. Reporters were put directly on the battlefield, and integrated into the actual military units. Those reporters are then dependent on the troops around them for their daily human contact, and grow quickly to identify directly with the people in those units. Overt censorship is no longer needed. But as the campaign goes further and further awry, these embedded journalists will see some of their new friends wounded and killed, and then the Powell anxiety becomes realized, the war is in our living rooms again, just like Vietnam. This fear of graphic audio-visual images of war is why there was such outrage at Al Jazeera showing dead GIs. The bet that this would be a quick war with images of triumph is about to break the bank. In the North, far from the most visible action, the Turkish military has already begun its incursions. The Kurds, in response, are already signing onto yet another Faustian deal with the Americans, now mostly Special Operations – Rangers to seize airheads and Special Forces to establish relationships with the Kurdish fighters. Without its Northern Front, the US is more dependent than ever on using Kurdish combatants to fight the Iraqis around the rich oilfields near Kirkuk. Fragile Turkey is beset by a severe economic crisis. It majority Muslim population has just elected a moderate Islamic Party, and the popular opposition to the war is overwhelming. The Turkish ruling class cannot afford another insurrection from Kurdish nationalists, and the Turkish military has no intention of watching a Kurdish state take form to their South. Turkey, inside its stable exterior, is becoming a powder keg, and Kurdistan is a furnace. The political implications reach Europe, where one year ago the US saw Turkey as its stalking horse in the EU. Germany has a substantial population of Turkmen and Kurds, and the German government has a real and justifiable fear that open warfare for Kurdistan will spill into the streets of Germany. To mollify the Kurds, the US must hold back the Turkish military, and the Kurds will certainly not drop their demand for an independent Kurdistan. To appease the Turkish military, the US will have to disarm the Kurds. And the Kurds, even as they sign the deal with the devil, know it. The Kurds have no intention of relinquishing their weapons, their autonomy or their dream of independent Kurdistan. The Turks have no intention of allowing it. The US cannot have it both ways. Stay tuned. This diplomatic minefield has been fobbed off on Colin Powell. If he doesn’t hear knives sharpening in his own back room, he’d better listen. Once this is all over, heads will roll, and the visceral enmity between Powell and Perle is well known. Powell, the Kissinger-style realist and brilliant bureaucrat, versus Perle, the racist, right-wing visionary. There are already whispers that Powell will be scapegoated after the war, and other rumors that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle will be handed walking papers, and Powell will run for VP. This fragmentation is another material result of popular resistance around the world, and for some it was the goal. The political destruction of the Bush junta. That objective is now within sight. What comes after remains to be seen. While we have riveted our attention on the blazing guns, a quieter weapon of mass destruction has been unleashed against the US working class – a trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich that will torch the tattered remains of our social infrastructure. The political crisis that is now almost certain in the wake of the war will settle on the United States. Then there are the soldiers. Bear in mind that these are still the most pampered soldiers in the world. Their morale was already eroded by waiting. They were already faced with basic erosions of benefits at home. The sense of dislocation from the doctrinal shift under Rumsfeld (that translates to a lot of confusion and turbulence in day-to-day operations), increases in operational tempo, tripling of average time deployed away from home in the last decade, are taking a toll. Divorces are filed. Homesickness. Bosses who are assholes are now constant companions. A substantial number of troops - particularly Black soldiers - who really see this as a job and not some deep patriotic commitment. Now, with the war is going badly, as they say in the Army, shit rolls downhill, and when things go wrong at the top, there is a lot of blame-shifting and carrying on that percolates down. On a cautionary note, I will mention the incident (about which I don’t know much yet) of the soldier who fragged his officers. Hasan Karim Akbar, 31, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division apparently attacked his own tactical operations center in Kuwait with hand grenades. Akbar was Black and a convert to Islam, according to reports. What we in the movement don’t know could hurt us. There are already ultraleft folk who want to turn this into a cause celebre, saying this is class struggle in the military, etc. It is class conflict, if it is class anything, not class struggle. There is no class consciousness, and moreover, there is ZERO sympathy for it in the armed forces. There are already murmurings across the right-wing web of purging the armed forces of “black muslims.” This will not be a catalyst for generalized class struggle in the military. The more likely result will be a polarization between Black and white, given the latent racism in the military that reflects all of American society. This will emerge over time, and must be navigated very delicately by the left. Some more-militant-than-thou types want to make this sergeant a martyr and they don't even have the facts yet. When the facts are sorted out, we will have to reckon with them. Social polarization of all sorts – outside the military – will emerge in the coming period. It has already started, with the competing street mobilizations of anti-war and pro-war forces. And there is polarization beginning within the anti-war movement as some forces argue for moral censure and others argue for disruption. This too presents a challenge for anti-war forces, and for anti-imperialist forces within the anti-war movement. Part of developing a critical stance on these issues, and figuring out what our role is in the context of this war is understanding the connections and consequences of what we do here, what others do around the world, and what the regime continues to do. I, for one, still see the political destruction of the Bush government as an absolute strategic priority. But we have to ensure that our movement is thinking strategically as well, that we are evading the strengths of our adversaries and exploiting their weaknesses. We have to ensure that we can function in ways that are agile and often decentralized, even as we keep the same enemy in sight. This means that the left pole of the movement, as it moves toward disruption instead of protest, will have to carefully calculate its own tactics to ensure that – even as we hold the movement accountable and preserve our own goals and identities – we do not split the movement or detach ourselves from the masses. That means that audacity and patience must reside in the same space together. Now is a time for discipline. One thing is clear. The counter- counter-propaganda war is vital. We must begin to aim incessant, clear, rigorous, systematic, and dispassionate logic at the Bush Junta's every thinner rationalizations. Leadership is perceived as leader-like only as long as it is respected. The content of the leadership has something to do with whether it is accepted, but impressions are also critical. People will be led by someone who is wrong, but they balk at being led by someone who is ridiculous. We can exploit the absurdities of this administration that are now reproducing like rats. Waving around the Geneva Conventions when our POWs get put on camera, and we've been putting pix of Iraqi prisoners on for days. Invoking a UN resolution to violate a UN charter. Rumsfeld’s comment that, “The word evidence is a hard word.” Examples are legion. They are down, and we dare not let them back up. I’m dusting off an old Bob Dylan record. Hard rain’s a gonna fall. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Mar 26 05:37:23 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Some of Hussein's Arab Foes Admire His Fight (FWD: NY Times) Message-ID: <20030326.073724.2208.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Some of Hussein's Arab Foes Admire His Fight March 26, 2003 By NEIL MacFARQUHAR DAMASCUS, Syria, March 25 - Normally the appearance of Saddam Hussein on television prompts catcalls, curses and prayers for his demise from a regular gathering of about 20 Saudi businessmen and intellectuals, but Monday night was different. When he appeared, they prayed that God would preserve him for a few more weeks. "They want Saddam Hussein to go and they expect him to go eventually, but they want him to hold on a little longer because they want to teach the Americans a lesson," said Khaled M. Batarfi, the managing editor of the newspaper Al Madina, describing the scene in a sprawling living room in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. "Arab pride is at stake here," he added, describing a sentiment sweeping the region from Algeria to Yemen. "American propaganda said it was going to be so quick and easy, meaning we Arabs are weak and unable to fight. Now it is like a Mike Tyson fight against some weak guy. They don't want the weak guy knocked out in the first 40 seconds." >From the outset, there has been a certain ambivalence in the Arab world toward the war in Iraq, an ambivalence tipping toward outright hostility as Baghdad, the fabled capital of "The Arabian Nights," shudders under American bombing. The region's governments, edgy about the idea of a United States-inspired change of government in Iraq, have been trying to placate Washington and siphon the anger off their streets, although they have permitted larger demonstrations than usual. The Middle East's educated elite, seeking deliverance from repressive governments, hope Washington wants to create a model for the region in Iraq, but the United States lacks a credible track record. The public recognizes that leaders like Mr. Hussein abuse their people, but the suspicion that the United States is embarking on a modern crusade against Islam tends to overwhelm other considerations. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, followed by repeated military setbacks, Arabs have felt a certain humiliation in their own neighborhood. The supposed benefits of breaking free of colonialism proved a lie - they could choose neither their neighbors nor their own governments. Fed on rhetoric about lost Arab glory, they have long waited for some kind of savior. The Iraqi leader sought to fill that role, gaining vast public support in 1990 by contending that the road to Jerusalem led through Kuwait. Nobody believes him any more, but the yearning remains. This week it seemed that the Iraqi people, or whoever exactly was fighting America, might win that role. "If Saddam's regime is going to fall, it's better for our future, for our self-confidence and for our image that it falls fighting," said Sadik Jalal al-Azam, a Syrian author and academic. "People are not defending Saddam or his regime, but they are willing to put Saddam aside for a much greater issue." Arab governments opposed the war in Iraq from the outset. They shared no great love for Mr. Hussein, but replacing him by force seemed a bad precedent. "If they do not like 100 regimes around the world, are they going to change all 100?" asked Buthaina Shaaban, a spokeswoman for the Syrian Foreign Ministry, reciting a familiar argument used by opponents of the Bush administration's policy. That prospect is unnerving for Middle Eastern governments for a variety of reasons. In Syria, which is controlled by a rival branch of Iraq's Baath Party, overthrowing the Baathists next door comes uncomfortably close to a scary preview of what might happen there. "Nobody knows who will be next," said Georges Jabbour, a Syrian law professor and member of Parliament. Longtime rulers have begun making noises about reform. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt recently announced a series of minor changes lightening the government's repressive hand, including abolishing the special state security courts for ordinary crimes. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia also started publicly addressing the issue of reform, although that seems more inspired by the post-Sept. 11 discovery of widespread sympathy for Osama bin Laden rather than concern that democracy in Iraq might destabilize the kingdom. "Frankly, we would prefer being attacked by missiles of Jeffersonian democracy to facing Scuds and other missiles," Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said earlier this month. Educated elites across the region once cherished the idea that the United States would push governments in the area to become more democratic, but they gradually abandoned hope. Promises for Iraq have rekindled that hope, although the Bush administration's changing justifications for invading Iraq - from concerns about weapons of mass destruction to the need for a new government - have cast doubt on its sincerity. "The U.S. has always supported the dictators who rule our countries," said Haitham Maleh, the 72-year-old lawyer who is head of the Human Rights Association of Syria. "If they create a real democracy, then any dictatorship will fear its neighbor, but we doubt America will leave a democracy in Iraq." Much of the doubt comes from the perceived double standard in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Washington pushed the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Iraq was flouting United Nations resolutions to disarm, Arabs point out repeatedly, while doing nothing tangible about similar resolutions demanding Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian lands. Given the lack of openness in the Arab world, assessing the broader public mood is difficult. The closest thing to an opinion poll is gauging the random opinions of people encountered. "I have a question about the war," a Palestinian said in Amman. "Why just Saddam, why not all of them?" He reeled off the decades in power accumulated by Yasir Arafat, King Fahd, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Mubarak and on and on. The surprise question hinted at support for getting rid of Mr. Hussein, but also pointed to the public debate over why the United States is singling out Iraq when the region has so many repressive governments. Those reservations grew this week as the images of the bombs devastating Baghdad appeared on television and the civilian toll rose. It was not unusual to see Arabs both weeping and seething in front of the television news. The Arab world started out angry that yet another Arab country was facing destruction, but it was braced for what was promised to be a short campaign. A sea change in that attitude materialized by Sunday morning, following the events at the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. First, American officials said Umm Qasr had fallen, while resistance clearly persisted; then, a marine briefly raised an American flag over the city, long enough for it to be filmed and shown repeatedly on Iraqi television. "That electrified Iraqi patriotism," said Walid Khadduri, an Iraqi expatriate and editor of the Middle East Economic Survey. "The mood changed. It has nothing to do with the regime." The sentiment proved infectious across the region - volunteers even showing up by the score at Iraqi embassies prepared to join the fight. Many Arabs cursed their own governments for doing nothing but issuing empty condemnations. "The Iraqis are real men, and I am proud of them," said Gasser Fahmi, a 30-year-old computer engineer interviewed on a Cairo street. "At the start of the war, I was very frustrated and did not want to hear the news, but now I watch the news closely to see how many losses the Americans suffer." The war is too young yet to see where the ripples will lead, and much hinges on its outcome. But it already seems certain that the war will prove to be a powerful watershed in the region. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/international/worldspecial/26ARAB.html? ex=1049681616&ei=1&en=9139c33a68b67d96 Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Mar 26 11:24:21 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Is Saddam winning political war? (FWD: The Toronto Star) Message-ID: <20030326.132422.2052.3.farmelantj@juno.com> Its always good to keep in mind Cluaswitz's old maxim that "war is politics carried out by other means." Jim F. ------------------------------------------------- Is Saddam winning political war? THOMAS WALKOM Saddam Hussein is almost certain to lose the military war in Iraq. Politically, however, he is winning. This is not trivial. A political win may not stop the Iraqi leader from being deposed. But it can deny America real victory. For months, analysts have puzzled over how Saddam would defend himself against the most powerful nation in the world. Some said he would use chemical and biological weapons against invading U.S. and British forces. Others predicted he would repeat his actions in the first Gulf War and target Israel, in order to draw the Jewish state (and thus o ther Arab countries) into the conflict. These scenarios could still come to pass. But up to now, Saddam has focused on the political elements of the struggle with the United States. And in this, he has proved himself far more adept than U.S. President George W. Bush. This is not to suggest that Bush is politically maladroit. He has a keen understanding of his own country, and has deftly used the fear generated by the Sept. 11 terror attacks to bolster support for a radically aggressive foreign policy that, in normal times, Americans might well reject. But when it comes to larger political issues, Bush and those around him have shown that they either do not understand or do not care to understand. First, the U.S. miscalculated the response of Iraqis to any invasion. It forgot that people don't take kindly to foreigners telling them what to do, no matter how noble the intentions. Relying on the fact that Saddam is a cruel dictator, U.S. war planners assumed that most ordinary Iraqis would welcome anyone who entered their country to depose him. But as reports from journalists entering southern Iraq demonstrate, this is far from true. The BBC describes Iraqis in the so-called liberated towns as sullen and bitter. Others write of lawlessness and of Iraqi civilians berating the American-led coalition for shelling their towns. Throughout the south, the U.S. and British have run into far fiercer resistance than they anticipated. Yet the south was supposed to be the easy part, the section of Iraq populated by Shiite Muslims opposed to Saddam. By contrast, Saddam has described U.S. intentions in language that his countrymen can comprehend. He says Bush wants Iraq's oil. Iraqis, many of whom can remember a time when another imperial power controlled their oil fields, understand this. The fact that the U.S. says it plans to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay U.S. firms to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure that the U.S. is now destroying, also lends credence to Saddam's storyline. Indeed, although many in the West might not like to admit this, Saddam's explanation for the war makes much more sense than Bush's. Which leads to Washington's second great political failure. It has not been able to supply a plausible reason for this war. Many Americans (and some Canadians) have accepted — in the face of all evidence — the U.S. rationale that Iraq is somehow connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. But as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a former aide to John F. Kennedy, wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, almost no one else in the world buys this. "Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy," he wrote. Weapons of mass destruction? To U.S. embarrassment, Saddam has not used the chemical and biological weapons it claims he has stockpiled. Even the few missiles he fired (incorrectly labelled in the media as Scuds) were, the Pentagon acknowledges, legal under United Nations Security Council resolutions. The public relations nightmare faced by Bush is that this war might prove that Saddam was not lying when he said he no longer possessed such weapons. Indeed, so low is U.S. credibility on this front that even if coalition troops produce evidence of chemical and biological weaponry, much of the world will assume it has been fabricated by the CIA. Already, Saddam has won political victories. He stymied Britain and the U.S. at the United Nations through the simple strategy of (eventually) agreeing to successive Security Council demands. Similarly, Iraqi compliance, and Bush's inability to come up with a plausible rationale for his war, has won sympathy among the peoples of neighbouring states. Turkish public opinion prevented the U.S. from opening a second front in Iraq's north. Jordan's government is coming under increasing public criticism for its under-the-table co-operation with Bush. Saddam's hope, presumably, is that the longer the war drags on, the more nervous Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia will become about supporting the U.S., and that this, in turn, could derail the invasion. The laws of probability suggest such hopes are misplaced. However, the longer it takes for America to achieve military victory, the more hollow that victory threatens to become. Anti-Americanism is at a level not seen for 30 years. While, Bush and those around him may not care about this, they should. Armed conquest is the simple part. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- Thomas Walkom's column appears on Tuesday. He can be reached at twalkom@thestar. http://www.torontostar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layou t/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035779832222&call_pageid=968256290204&col= ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Mar 26 19:17:48 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030326.211749.3040.0.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news079.htm Stan and others, please feel free to make corrections Jim F. ------------------------------------------ The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports. March 26, 2003, 1230hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - As of the morning March 26 fierce battles have resumed in Iraq along the entire front. As was previously expected the sand storm has halted the advance of the coalition forces. Additionally, the coalition troops were in serious need of rest, resupply and reinforcement. For much of the day unfavorable weather paralyzed combat activities of one of the main attack groups of the coalition - the 101st Airborne Division, which was forced to completely curtail all of its combat operations. Combat readiness of this division is of strategic importance to the entire coalition force primarily due to the fact that the division operates 290 helicopters of various types, including the 72 Apache attack helicopters. The 101st Airborne Division along with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) forms the backbone of the XVIII Airborne Corps - the main strike force of the coalition. In essence, the 101st Airborne Division provides suppression of the enemy while simultaneously conducting aerial reconnaissance and suppression of any newly-discovered enemy forces. It maintain constant contact with the enemy and contains the enemy until the main forces arrive. Currently the coalition's main forces are conducting combat operations along the approaches to the towns of Karabela and An-Najaf. During the past 24 hours the coalition units in these areas sustained 4 killed and up to 10 wounded. All indications are that one coalition special operations helicopter was lost and no communication with the helicopter could be established. The faith of its crew and the troops it carried is still being investigated. Another two coalition helicopters made emergency landings in areas controlled by friendly forces. Aircraft engines were found to be extremely susceptible to the effects of sand. As was determined by our [GRU] intelligence even before the start of combat operations, the primary goal of the coalition command was an energetic advance across the desert along the right bank of the Euphrates river, reaching the central Iraq with a further thrust toward Baghdad through Karabela. Another strategic attack was to go around Basra through An-Nasiriya toward Al-Ammara followed by a full isolation of the southern [Iraqi] forces, effectively splitting Iraq in half. The first part of the plan - a march across the desert toward Karabela - was achieved, albeit with serious delays. The second part of the plan in essence has failed. Up to this moment the coalition troops were unable to punch through the Iraqi defenses near An-Nasiriya and to force the Iraqis toward Al-Ammara, which would have allowed the coalition to clear the way to Baghdad along the strategically important Mesopotamian river valley with Tigris and Euphrates covering the flanks of the advancing forces. So far only a few coalition units were able to get to the left bank of the Euphrates, where they are trying to widen their staging areas. Additionally, the prolonged fighting near An-Nasiriya allowed the Iraqis to withdraw most of their forces from Basra region and to avoid being surrounded. Currently the coalition forces are trying to get across the river near An-Najaf and Karabela, where, all indications are, heavy combat will continue during the next two days. Harsh criticism from the top US military leadership and pressure from Washington forced the coalition command to resort to more energetic actions. In addition to that the shock of the first days of war among the coalition troops, when they expected an easy trek across Iraq but encountered stiff resistance, is now wearing off. They are now being "absorbed" into the war. Now the coalition actions are becoming more coherent and adequate. The coalition command is gradually taking the initiative away from the Iraqis, which is in part due to the reliance of the Iraqi command on inflexible defensive tactics. Now the main tactical move of the US troops is to use their aerial and ground reconnaissance forces to test the Iraqi defenses, to open them up and, without entering direct close combat, to deliver maximum damage using artillery and ground attack aircraft. The coalition has finally stopped pointlessly moving around in convoys, as was characteristic of the first three days of the ground war. The tactics allowed for increased combat effectiveness and considerably increased losses of the Iraqi side. Due to such attacks by the coalition during the previous night and today's early morning the Iraqis have lost 250 troops killed and up to 500 wounded. Up to 10 Iraqi tanks were destroyed and up to three Iraqi artillery batteries were suppressed. However, despite of the increased combat effectiveness, the coalition forces have so far failed to capture a single sizable town in Iraq. Only by the end of the sixth day the British marine infantry was able to establish tentative control over the tiny town of Umm Qasr. During the hours of darkness all movement around the town is stopped and the occupying troops withdraw to defensive positions. Constant exchanges of fire take place throughout the town. Out of more than 1,500-strong local garrison the British managed to capture only 150 Iraqis. The rest has either withdrew toward Basra or changed into civilian clothes and resorted to partisan actions. Near Basra the British forces in essence are laying a Middle Ages-style siege of a city with the population of two million. Artillery fire has destroyed most of the city's life-supporting infrastructure and artillery is used continuously against the positions of the defending units. The main goal of the British is two maintain a strict blockade of Basra. Their command is c onfident that the situation in the city can be destabilized and lack of food, electricity and water will prompt the local population to cause the surrender of the defending forces. Analysts point out that capture of Basra is viewed by the coalition command as being exceptionally important and as a model for the future "bloodless" takeover of Baghdad. So far, however, this approach does not work and the city's garrison is actively defending its territory. Just during the past night at least three British soldiers were killed and eight more were wounded in the exchange of fire [near Basra]. It is difficult not to not to notice the extremely overstretched frontline of the coalition. This frontline is stretching toward Baghdad through An-Najaf and Karabela and its right flank goes all the way along the Euphrates and is completely exposed. All main supply and communication lines of the coalition are going through unprotected desert. Already the supply routes are stretching for more than 350 kilometers and are used to deliver 800 tonnes of fuel and up to 1,000 tonnes of ammunition, food and other supplies daily to the advancing forces. If the Iraqis deliver a decisive strike at the base of this front, the coalition will find itself in a very difficult situation, with its main forces, cutoff from the resupply units, losing their combat readiness and mobility and falling an easy pray to the Iraqis. It is possible that the Americans are relying on the power of their aviation that should prevent any such developments. It is also possible that this kind of self confidence may be very dangerous. Massive numbers of disabled combat vehicles and other equipment becomes a strategic problem for the coalition. Already, radio intercepts indicate, all available repair units have been deployed to the front. Over 60% of all available spare parts have been already used and emergency additional supplies are being requested. The sand is literally "eating up" the equipment. Sand has a particularly serious effect on electronics and transmissions of combat vehicles. Already more than 40 tanks and up to 69 armored personnel carriers have been disabled due to damaged engines; more than 150 armored vehicles have lost the use of their heat-seeking targeting sights and night vision equipment. Fine dust gets into all openings and clogs up all moving parts. The coalition command has effectively acknowledged its defeat in the information war with the strikes against the television center in Baghdad and now further strikes should be expected against television and ground satellite transmitters. The coalition is attempting to leave the Iraqis without information in order to demoralize them. The extreme length of the resupply routes and the actions of the Iraqi reconnaissance units have created a new problem: the coalition command is forced to admit that it has no information about the conditions on the roads. Currently, as intercepted radio communications show, the coalition command is trying to establish the whereabouts of more than 500 of its troops that fell behind their units, departed with resupply convoys or were carrying out individual assignments. So far it was not possible to establish how many of these troops are dead, captured or have successfully reached other units. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-26-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Thu Mar 27 17:05:39 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030327.190925.3656.0.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from > Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news079.htm Stan and others, please feel free to make corrections Jim F. ------------------------------------------ War in Iraq - requirement for more troops March 27, 2003 www.iraqwar.ru March 27, 2003, 1425hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - There has been a sharp increase in activity on the southern front. As of 0700hrs the coalition forces are subjected to nearly constant attacks along the entire length of the front. The Iraqi command took the advantage of the raging sand storm to regroup its troops and to reinforce the defenses along the approaches to Karabela and An-Najaf with two large armored units (up to two armored brigades totaling up to 200 tanks). The Iraqi attack units were covertly moved near the positions of the US 3rd Infantry Division (Motorized) and the 101st Airborne Division. With sunrise and a marginal visibility improvement the Iraqis attacked these US forces in the flank to the west of Karabela. Simultaneously, massive artillery barrages and counterattacks were launched against units of the US 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division conducting combat operations near An-Najaf. The situation [for the US troops] was complicated by the fact that the continuing sand storm forced them to group their units into battalion convoys in order to avoid losing troops and equipment in near zero-visibility conditions. These battalion convoys were concentrated along the roads leading to Karabela and An-Najaf and had only limited defenses. There was no single line of the front; aerial reconnaissance in these conditions was not possible and until the very last moment the coalition command was unaware of the Iraqi preparations. During one of such attacks [the Iraqi forces] caught off-guard a unit of the US 3rd Infantry Division that was doing vehicle maintenance and repairs. In a short battle the US unit was destroyed and dispersed, leaving behind one armored personnel carrier, a repair vehicle and two Abrams tanks, one of which was fully operational. At the present time visibility in the combat zone does not exceed 300 meters, which limits the effectiveness of the 101st Airborne Division and that of its 70 attack helicopters representing the main aerial reconnaissance and ground support force of the coalition. One of the coalition transport helicopters crashed yesterday during take-off. The reason for the crash was sand in the engine compressors. The Iraqis were able to get in range for close combat without losses and now fierce battles are continuing in the areas of Karabela and An-Najaf. The main burden of supporting the coalition ground troops has been placed with the artillery and ground attack aircraft. Effectiveness of the latter is minimal due to the weather conditions. Strikes can be delivered only against old Iraqi targets with known coordinates, while actually supporting the ground troops engaged in combat is virtually impossible and attempts to do so lead to the most unfortunate consequences. Intercepted radio communications show that at around 0615hrs this morning the lead of a flight of two A-10 ground attack planes detected a convoy of armored vehicles. Unable to see any markings identifying these vehicles as friendly and not being able to contact the convoy by radio the pilot directed artillery fire to the coordinates of the convoy. Later it was discovered that this was a coalition convoy. Thick layers of dust covered up the identification markings - colored strips of cloth in the rear of the vehicles. Electronic jamming made radio contact impossible. First reports indicated that the US unit lost 50 troops killed and wounded. At least five armored vehicles have been destroyed, one of which was an Abrams tank. During the past day the coalition losses in this area [ Karabela and An-Najaf ] were 18-22 killed and up to 40 wounded. Most of the fatalities were sustained due to unexpected attacks by the Iraqi Special Forces against the coalition rears and against communication sites. This is a sign of the increasing diversionary and partisan actions by the Iraqis. During the same period of time the Iraqi forces sustained up to 100 killed, about the same number of wounded and up to 50 captured. Since the beginning of the operation no more than 2000 Iraqi troops were captured by the coalition. The majority of the captured troops were members of regional defense [militia] units. The Iraqis were able to move significant reinforcements to the area of An-Nasiriya making it now extremely difficult for the Americans to widen their staging areas on the left bank of the Euphrates. Moreover, the Americans [on the left bank of the Euphrates] may end up in a very difficult situation if the Iraqis manage to destroy the bridges and to separate [these US units] from the main coalition force. The US forces in this area consist of up to 4,000 Marines from the 1st Marine Division and supporting units of the 82nd Airborne Division. Currently, fighting has resumed in the An-Nasiriya suburbs. During one of the Iraqi attacks yesterday against the US positions the Iraqis for the first time employed the "Grad" mobile multiple rocket launch systems [MLRS]. As the result an entire US unit was taken out of combat after sustaining up to 40 killed and wounded as well as losing up to 7 armored vehicles. There are no other reports of any losses in this area [ An-Nasiriya] except for one US Marine drowning in one of the city's water canals and another Marine being killed by a sniper. During the sand storm the coalition command lost contact with up to 4 coalition reconnaissance groups. Their whereabouts are being determined. It is still unknown what happened to more than 600 other coalition troops mainly from resupply, communications and reconnaissance units communication with which was lost during the past 24 hours. The situation around Basra remains unclear. The Iraqis control the city and its suburbs, as well as the area south of Basra and the part of the adjacent Fao peninsula, which the British have so far failed to take. The British forces are blockading Basra from the west and northwest. However, due to difficult marshy terrain crossed by numerous waterways the British have been unable to create a single line of front and to establish a complete blockade of the city. Currently main combat operations are being launched for control of a small village near Basra where the local airport is located. The British field commanders report that there has been no drop in the combat activity of the Iraqis. On the contrary, under the cover of the sand storm up to two battalions of the "surrendered" Iraqi 51st Infantry Division were moved to the Fao peninsula to support the local defending forces. Rumors about an uprising by the Basra Shiite population turned out to be false. Moreover, the Shiite community leaders called on the local residents to fight the "children of the Satan" - the Americans and the British. During the past 24 hours the British sustained no less than 3 killed and up to 10 wounded due to mortar and sniper fire. It is difficult to estimate the Iraqi losses [in Basra] due to limited available information. However, some reports suggest that up to 30 Iraqi troops were killed during the past day by artillery and aircraft fire. During an attack against a coalition checkpoint in Umm Qasr last night one British marine infantry soldier was heavily wounded. This once again points to the tentative nature of the British claims of control over the town. Information coming from northern regions of Iraq indicates that most of the Kurdish leaders chose not to participate in the US war against Iraq. The primary reason for that is the mistrust of the Kurds toward the US. Yesterday one of the Russian intelligence sources obtained information about a secret agreement reached between the US and the Turkish government. In the agreement the US, behind the backs of the Kurds, promised Turkey not to support in any way a formation of a Kurdish state in this region. The US has also promised not to prevent Turkey from sending its troops [ to Northern Kurdistan] immediately following [the coalition] capture of northern Iraq. In essence, this gives Turkey a card-blanche to use force for a "cleanup" in Kurdistan. At the same time the Kurdish troops will be moved to fight the Iraqis outside of Kurdistan, thus rendering them unable to support their own people. Along the border with Kurdistan Turkey has already massed a 40,000-strong army expeditionary corps that is specializing in combat operations against the Kurds. This force remains at a 4-hour readiness to begin combat operations. All of this indicates that the coalition command will be unable to create a strong "Northern Front" during the next 3-4 days and that the US Marines and paratroopers in this area will have to limit their operations to distracting the Iraqis and to launching reconnaissance missions. During a meeting with the Germany's chancellor [ Gerhard ] Schroeder the heads of the German military and political intelligence reported that the US is doing everything possible to conceal information on the situation in the combat zone and that the US shows an extremely "unfriendly" attitude. Germany's own intelligence-gathering capabilities in this region are very limited. This is the result of Germany, being true to its obligations as an ally, not attempting to bolster its national intelligence operations in the region and not trying to separate its intelligence agencies from the intelligence structures of NATO and the US. There has been a confirmation of yesterday's reports about the plans of the coalition command to increase its forces fighting in Iraq. The troops of the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) are currently being airlifted to the region, while its equipment is traveling by sea around the Arabian Peninsula and the unloading is expected to begin as early as by the end of tomorrow. The Division numbers 30,000 soldiers and officers. By the end of April up to 120,000 more US troops, up to 500 tanks and up to 300 more helicopters will be moved to the region. In addition to that, today the US President [George W] Bush asked the British Prime-Minister [Tony] Blair to increase the British military presence in Iraq by a minimum of 15,000-20,000 troops. At the current level of combat operations and at the current level of Iraqi resistance the coalition may face a sharp shortage of troops and weapons within the next 5-7 days, which will allow the Iraqis to take the initiative. The White House took this conclusion of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff with great concern. During the past seven days of the war the US Navy detained all ships in the Persian Gulf going to Iraq under the US "Oil for Food" program. Since yesterday all these ships are being unloaded in Kuwait. Unloaded food is being delivered by the US military to Iraq and is being distributed as "American humanitarian aid" and as a part of the "rebuilding Iraq" program. These US actions have already cause a serious scandal in the UN. The US explained its actions by its unilateral decision to freeze all Iraqi financial assets, including the Iraqi financial assets with the UN. These assets the US now considers its property and will exercise full control over them. Captains of the detained ships have already called these actions by the US a "piracy." (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-27-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From 100250.512 at compuserve.com Thu Mar 27 17:38:32 2003 From: 100250.512 at compuserve.com (Chris Warren) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030327163832.12187.h013.c014.wm@mail.cswebmail.com.criticalpath.net> Thanks for posting these reports. It is sometimes hard to get to the website. However does anyone have a clear idea what convoy this was that was bombed by the Americans? There was Western news about a bombed convoy, but how does this match up with the times mentioned in the Russian report. Presumably, two separate convoy bombings? Chris Warren ******************************************************* ___________________________________________________ The ALL NEW CS2000 from CompuServe Better! Faster! More Powerful! 250 FREE hours! Sign-on Now! http://www.compuserve.com/trycsrv/cs2000/webmail/ From 100250.512 at compuserve.com Thu Mar 27 17:38:32 2003 From: 100250.512 at compuserve.com (Chris Warren) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030327163832.12187.h013.c014.wm@mail.cswebmail.com.criticalpath.net> Thanks for posting these reports. It is sometimes hard to get to the website. However does anyone have a clear idea what convoy this was that was bombed by the Americans? There was Western news about a bombed convoy, but how does this match up with the times mentioned in the Russian report. Presumably, two separate convoy bombings? Chris Warren ******************************************************* ___________________________________________________ The ALL NEW CS2000 from CompuServe Better! Faster! More Powerful! 250 FREE hours! Sign-on Now! http://www.compuserve.com/trycsrv/cs2000/webmail/ From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Mar 28 10:38:37 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: A Russian view of the war Message-ID: <20030328.123838.3372.0.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news081.htm Jim F. ------------------------------------------ March 27, 2003 www.iraqwar.ru The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports. March 27, 2003, 2321hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow (UPDATE) - Intercepted radio communications indicate that tomorrow we should expect a powerful attack by the coalition. During all day today the coalition troops were being reinforced and fully resupplied with fuel and ammunition. Additional units reserved for maintaining security along the Kuwaiti border were moved today to the front lines. The total number of additional [coalition] forces to enter Iraq numbers up to five battalions and around 800 combat vehicles. By 1600hrs today the sand storm in Iraq has subsided allowing coalition to resume helicopter support of ground troops. At the same time the Iraqi positions were attacked by bombers and ground attack aircraft, which forced the Iraqis to cease their attacks and to resume defensive operations. Available information suggests that the coalition command, despite of the extreme exhaustion of its troops, will attempt to use elements of the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division to actively contain the Iraqi forces around Karabela and to reach the strategic Al-Falludja highway by moving from the west around the Razzaza lake, thus cutting off the way to Jordan. It is expected that by noon of March 29 the main coalition forces will reach this area. During the night from March 29 to March 30 elements of the US 82nd Airborne Division aided by the Army Special Operations units may attempt to capture the Saddam Hussein Airport. Immediately following the capture of the airport the coalition plans to use it for the deployment of a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division, which will be responsible for holding the airport until the arrival of the main forces. Commanders of the reinforced Marine brigade trying to take An-Nasiriya for the fourth day have received strict orders to suppress the Iraqi defenses and to take the town during the next day, after which to continue their advance toward Al-Kut and Al-Ammara. Similarly strict orders were received by the command of the brigade attacking An-Najaf. They will have to take this town, widen the taging area on the left bank of the Euphrates and push the Iraqis away from the town. By the morning of March 29 both these brigades are supposed join up southwest of Al-Kut, where they will be reinforced by the elements of the 101st Airborne Division and, after forming a southern attack line, they would blockade Baghdad from the south. The British command has been ordered to completely take over the Fao peninsula, complete the blockade of Basra from the south and to completely take over the [Basra] airport area. After that the British are to advance toward Basra from the south along the Al-Arab river. Based on this information to say that tomorrow we should expect heated combat would be an understatement. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-27-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Mar 28 19:40:23 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (March 28) Message-ID: <20030328.214025.4088.0.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm Jim F. ------------------------------------------ March 28, 2003 www.iraqwar.ru The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports. March 28, 2003, 1448hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - According to the latest intercepted radio communications, the command of the coalition group of forces near Karabela requested at least 12 more hours to get ready to storm the town. This delay is due to the much heavier losses sustained by the coalition troops during the sand storms then was originally believed. Just the US 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division sustained more than 200 disabled combat vehicles of various types. The 101st Airborne Division reported some 70 helicopters as being disabled. Additionally, the recently delivered reinforcements require rest and time to prepare for combat. At the same time the US forces have resumed attacks near An-Nasiriya and An-Najaf since 0630hrs and are continuously increasing the intensity of these attacks. During the night and early morning of March 28 the Iraqi positions in these areas were subjected to eight aerial assaults by bombers and ground attack aircraft. However, so far [the coalition] was unable to penetrate the Iraqi defenses. Also during the early morning the British units begun advancing along the Fao peninsula. Latest radio intercepts from this area show that under a continuous artillery and aerial bombardment the Iraqis have begun to gradually withdraw their forces toward Basra. First firefights between troops of the US 82nd Airborne Division and the Iraqi forces occurred in northern Iraq in the area of Mosula. At the same time the arrival of up to 1,500 Kurdish troops has been observed in this area. So far it is not clear to which of the many Kurdish political movements these troops belong. Leaders of the largest Kurdish workers party categorically denied participation of their troops. They believe that these may be units of one of the local tribes not controlled by the central authorities of the Kurdish autonomy and "ready to fight with anyone" for money. According to verified information, during the past 48 hours of the Iraqi counterattacks the coalition forces sustained the following losses: up to 30 killed, over 110 wounded and 20 missing in action; up to 30 combat vehicles lost or disabled, including at least 8 tanks and 2 self-propelled artillery systems, 2 helicopters and 2 unmanned aerial vehicles were lost in combat. Iraqi losses are around 300 killed, up to 800 wounded, 200 captured and up to 100 combat vehicles 25 of which were tanks. Most of the [ Iraqi ] losses were sustained due to the artillery fire and aerial bombardment that resumed by the evening of March 27. First conclusions can be drawn from the war The first week of the war surprised a number of military analysts and experts. The war in Iraq uncovered a range of problems previously left without a serious discussion and disproved several resilient myths. The first myth is about the precision-guided weapons as the determining factor in modern warfare, weapons that allow to achieve strategic superiority without direct contact with the enemy. On the one hand we have the fact that during the past 13 years the wars were won by the United States with minimum losses and, in essence, primarily through the use of aviation. At the same time, however, the US military command was stubborn in ignoring that the decisive factor in all these wars was not the military defeat of the resisting armies but political isolation coupled with strong diplomatic pressure on the enemy's political leadership. It was the creation of international coalitions against Iraq in 1991, against Yugoslavia in 1999 and against Afghanistan in 2001 that ensured the military success. The American command preferred not to notice the obvious military failures during expeditions to Granada, Libya and Somalia, discounting them as "local operations" not deserving much attention. Today we can see that in itself massed use of strategic and tactical precision-guided weapons did not provide the US with a strategic advantage. Despite the mass use of the most sophisticated weapons the Americans have so far failed to disrupt Iraqi command and control infrastructure, communication networks, top Iraqi military and political leadership, Iraqi air defenses. At the same time the US precision-guided weapons arsenal has been reduced by about 25%. The only significant advantage of the precision-guided weapons is the capability to avoid massive casualties among the civilians in densely populated areas. What we have is an obvious discrepancy between the ability to locate and attack a target with precision-guided weapons and the power of this weapon, which is not sufficient to reliably destroy a protected target. On the other hand, precision-guided munitions demonstrated their superiority over conventional munitions on the battlefield. The ability to attack targets at long ranges with the first shot is the deciding factor in the American superiority in land battles. The second myth disproved by this war is the myth propagated by the proponents of the "hi-tech" war, who believe in the superiority of the most modern weapons and inability of older-generation weapons to counteract the latest systems. Today the technological gap between the Iraqi weapons and those of the coalition has reached 25-30 years, which corresponds to two "generations" in weapons design. The primary Iraqi weapons correspond to the level of the early 1970s. Since that time the Americans, on the other hand, have launched at least two major rearmament efforts: the "75-83 program" and the "90-97 program". Moreover, currently the US is in the middle of another major modernization and rearmament program that will continue for the next five years. Despite of this obvious gap, Iraqi resistance has already been publicly qualified by the US as "fierce and resilient". Analysts believe that the correlation of losses is entirely acceptable to the Iraqis and they [ the analysts ] do not see any strategic coalition advantage in this war. Once again this proves that success in modern warfare is achieved not so much through technological superiority but primarily through training, competent command and resilience of the troops. Under such conditions even relatively old weapons can inflict heavy losses on a technologically-superior enemy. Two enormous mistakes made by the US command during the planning stages of this war resulted in the obvious strategic failure. The US has underestimated the enemy. Despite the unique ability to conduct reconnaissance against the Iraqi military infrastructure through a wide network of agents implanted with the international teams of weapons inspectors, despite of unlimited air dominance the US military command has failed to adequately evaluate combat readiness of the Iraqi army and its technical capabilities; the US has failed to correctly asses the social and political situation in Iraq and in the world in general. These failures led to entirely inadequate military and political decisions: The coalition force was clearly insufficient for a such a large-scale operation. The number of deployed troops was at least 40% short of the required levels. This is the reason why today, after nine days of war, the US is forced to resort to emergency redeployment of more than 100,000 troops from the US territory and from Europe. This, in essence, is the same number of troops already fighting in Iraq. The buildup and distribution of the coalition forces have been conducted with gross neglect of all basic rules of combat. All troops were massed in one small area, which led to five days of non-stop fighting to widen this area. The initial attack begun without any significant aerial or artillery preparation and almost immediately this resulted in reduced rate of advance and heated positional battles. Today we can see that the US advance is characterized by disorganized and "impulsive" actions. The troops are simply trying to find weak spots in the Iraqi defenses and break through them until they hit the next ambush or the next line of defense. Not a single goal set before the coalition forces was met on time. During the nine days of the war the coalition has failed: - to divide Iraq in half along the An-Nasiriya - Al-Ammara line, - to surround and to destroy the Iraqi group of forces at Basra, - to create an attack group between the Tigris and the Euphrates with a front toward Baghdad, - to disrupt Iraq's military and political control, to disorganize Iraq's forces and to destroy the main Iraqi attack forces. A whole range of problems that require their own solutions was uncovered directly on the battlefield. Thus, combat in Iraq raised serious concerns about the problem of coordination between units from different services. Limited decision-making time and the ability to detect and to engage an enemy at a great distance make "friendly fire" one of the most serious problems of modern warfare. For now the coalition has no adequate solution to this problem. At one location or another every day of this war the coalition troops were attacking friendly forces. The second problem of the coalition is its inability to hold on to the captured territory. For the first time since the war in Vietnam the Americans have to deal with a partisan movement and with attacks against their [the US] lines of communication. Currently the coalition is rushing to form some sort of territorial defense units for guarding its supply lines and for maintaining order in the occupied territories. A range of technical problems with equipment has been revealed during the combat operations. Most operators of the M1A2 Abrams main battle tank agree that the tank was inadequate for performing the set combat tasks. The primary problem is the extremely low reliability of the tank's engine and its transmission in desert conditions. Heat from the sun, hot sand and the constantly present hot dust in the air nearly nullified the advantages offered by the turret-mounted thermal sights. Visibility range of these sights did not exceed 300 meters during movement in convoy and reached up to 700-800 meters during stops. Only during cold nights did the visibility range reach 1000-1,500 meters. Additionally, a large number of thermal sights and other electronics simply broke down. The tiny crystalline sand particles caused electrical power surges and disabled electronic equipment. This was the reason for the decision by the coalition command to stop movement of troops at night when a contact with the enemy was deemed likely. The main strong side of the coalition forces was the wide availability of modern reconnaissance and communication systems that allowed to detect the enemy at long ranges and to quickly suppress the enemy with well-coordinated actions of different types of available forces. In general the US soldiers showed sufficiently high combat resilience. Even in the extremely difficult weather conditions the troops maintained control structure and adequately interpreted the situation. Combat spirit remained high. The majority of troops remain confident in their abilities, while maintaining belief in the superiority of their weapons and maintaining reasonable confidence in the way the war is being fought. It should be noted, however, that the way the war is being fought did create a certain sense of disappointment in most of the troops. Many are feeling that they've been lied to and are openly talking about the stupidity of the high command and its gross miscalculations. "Those star-covered Pentagon idiots promised us a victory march and flowers on the armor. What we got instead were those damned fanatics fighting for every dune and the sand squeaking in your ass!" said one of the wounded recuperating at a hospital in Rammstein. [ Reverse translation from Russian ] Nevertheless, despite of the sand storms the terrain favors the coalition actions by allowing it to employ their entire arsenal of weapons at the greatest possible range, which makes it difficult for the Iraqis to conduct combat operations outside of populated areas. Overestimating the abilities of its airborne forces was a weak side of the coalition. Plans for a wide-scale use of helicopters as an independent force did not materialize. All attempts by the US command to organize aerial and ground operations through exclusive use of airborne forces have failed. Because of these failures by the end of the fourth day of the war all airborne units were distributed across the coalition units and used by the attacking forces for reconnaissance, fire support, and for containing the enemy. The main burden of combat was carried by the "heavy" mechanized infantry and tank units. Another serious drawback in the coalition planning was the exceptionally weak protection in the rear of the advancing forces. This resulted in constant interruptions in fuel supply. Tank units sometimes spent up to 6 hours standing still with empty fuel tanks, in essence, being targets for the Iraqis. Throughout the war delivery of food, ammunition and fuel remains a headache for the US commanders. Among the US soldiers there has been a wide-scale discontent with the quality of the new combat rations. Servicemen are openly calling these rations "shitty." Many soldier just take the biscuits and the sweets and discard the rest of the ration. Commanders of the combat units are demanding from the coalition command to immediately provide the troops with hot food and to review the entire contents of the combat ration. Among the strong sides of the Iraqi troops are their excellent knowledge of the terrain, high quality of defensive engineering work, their ability to conceal their main attack forces and their resilience and determination in defense. The Iraqis have shown good organization in their command and communication structures as well as decisive and a well-planned strategy. Among the drawbacks of the Iraqi forces is the bureaucratic inflexibility of their command, when all decisions are being made only at the highest levels. Their top commanders also tend to stick to standard "template" maneuvers and there is insufficient coordination among the different types of forces. At the same time commanders of the [Iraqi] special operations forces are making good use of the available troops and weapons to conduct operations behind the front lines of the enemy. They use concealment, show cunning and imagination. The first strategic lessons of the war [ Lessons of the war in Iraq are discussed here with a focus on a possible similar war between Russia and the US ] The main of such lessons is the ever-increasing significance of troop concealment as one of the primary methods of combat. Concealment and strict adherence to the requirements for secrecy and security become strategic goals of the defending forces in the view of the US reliance and that of its allies on precision-guided weapons, electronic and optical reconnaissance as well as due to their use of tactical weapons at the maximum possible range afforded by these reconnaissance methods. Importance of concealment is being seen in Iraq and was clearly demonstrated in Yugoslavia, where the Yugoslav Army preserved nearly 98% of its assets despite the three months of bombing. Within our [Russian/European] battle theater concealment methods will offer us [the Russian army] an enormous advantage over the US. The second lesson of this war is the strategic role of the air defenses in modern warfare as the most important service of the armed forces. Only the complete air dominance of the coalition allows it to continue its advance toward Baghdad and to achieve the critical advantage in any engagement. Even the short interruption in air support caused by the sand storms put the US and British troops in a very difficult situation. Elimination of the air defenses as a separate service branch of the [Russian] Armed Forces and its gradual dissipation in the Air Force can be called nothing else but a "crime". [This statement refers to the recent unification of the Russian Air Force (VVS) and the Air Defense Force (PVO) and the secondary role of the air defense force within this new structure.] The third lesson of the war is the growing importance of combat reconnaissance and increased availability of anti-tank weapons capable of engaging the enemy at maximum range. There is a requirement on the battlefield for a new weapon system for small units that would allow for detection of the enemy at maximum distance during day or night; for effective engagement of modern tanks at a range of 800-1000 meters; for engagement of enemy infantry at a range of 300-500 meters even with the modern personal protection equipment possessed by the infantry. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-28-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Mar 29 07:16:18 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Stan Goff's War Bulletin Message-ID: <20030329.091810.2392.0.farmelantj@juno.com> MILITARY MATTERS War Bulletin #2 Visions & Revisions March 28, 2003 Stan Goff There have been two predictable aspects of Bush's war, one political and one related to the actual conduct of the war. These are not separable. The political destruction of Bush and his clique was stamped and waiting for delivery before the first tank rolled across the line of departure in Kuwait. And the Law of Unintended Consequences is operating with a vengeance on the ground. The rest is unpredictable. The junta's diplomatic vandalism had systematically alienated the masses around the world, a force they underestimated wholly, and the underlying intent of the Bush cabal - a military solution for economic war - was understood clearly by the northern capitalist metropoles, by Russia, and by China. The Latin American supra-colony, already in a process of break-up and rebellion, had inaugurated its second big wave of anti-colonial struggle, as others from the global south watched. The hegemon was breaking up, and war was seen by the Bush faction as its best, last chance. Even America's former multilateralist partners - stung by disrespect and alarmed by the bright-eyed bellicosity of Bush, et al - had begun to thirst for US humiliation. Now they are being slaked. The depth of US bourgeois (and therefore generalized cultural) decadence has been on display for months, as impunity and falsehood characterized political discourse, and the last crumbs of American journalism were lapped up into the maw of the media-military nexus. Half the US population had accepted one central and demonstrably idiotic assertion, that Iraqi leadership played some facilitative role in the September 11th attacks. Now enough of American-society-in-denial - especially white society - had its rationalization. The international legal framework that took six decades to assemble was ripped apart and shipped to the same landfill as the detritus of US bourgeois democracy - similarly cast off in 2000. The entire adventure we are witnessing was conceived from a really-existing condition of weakness http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_5_overreach.html. I have said that for some time. Even progressive forces have been intimidated by the raw power of the US military machine and the demonstrated willingness to use it. There was the sense that it was a juggernaut. That's how bullies http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_4_victoriesover.html operate; through intimidation. But they miscalculated. I miscalculated, too. We learn most from our errors, and it is through examining errors we refine our analysis and get closer to the truth of things. Now is a good time to critique what was written just as the war began in earnest. In "Rolling Start" http://www.freedomroad.org/milmatters_12_rollingstart.html , I identified several variables that would complicate the conduct of the war for the US; the loss of the Turkish front, the last minute changes in the plans growing out of that loss, the canalization of the ground attack along a single south-north axis and corresponding vulnerability of supply lines, and the terrific impact of weather. We are still waiting to see if my dire prognostications related to Kurdistan materialize. But I made two very significant errors. I underestimated the quality of Iraqi resistance, and I overestimated the scope of the initial air campaign. I stated: "The Iraqi military won't prevail because they can't. They are weak, under-resourced, poorly led, and demoralized. What the delays mean is that the US will depend on sustaining the initiative and momentum through brutal, incessant bombing designed to destroy every soldier, every installation, every vehicle, every field kitchen in the Iraqi military." What I did not know, which is becoming very apparent, is that while Donald Rumsfeld was imposing his vaunted "Revolution in Military Affairs," his crackpot theory of "network centric warfare" that substitutes technology for leadership (against fierce resistance from the Army and Marines) on the US armed forces, there was another revolution in military affairs going on inside Iraq. The Iraqi military was reorganizing from the ground up for an agile, decentralized, urban-based warfighting capability, that abandoned Soviet-style conventional armor-centric doctrine for something more akin to doctrine that was taught but seldom practiced by Special Operations forces in the US during the Cold War, particularly "stay-behind" disruption of enemy lines of communications, once the primary mission of 10th Special Forces in the event of a general conflict with the Warsaw Pact. And the massive bombing. It remains to be seen, but it was not used as I thought it would be, probably for two reasons; political pressure to paint a humanitarian face on the invasion, and reluctance - given the ongoing economic crisis in the US - to impose too high a cost on post-invasion infrastructure repairs. I am reminded now of T. S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, where Prufrock's neurotic internal voice tells him there will be "time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions. In a minute there is time, For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." Surely, if we sent a copy of "Prufrock" to the Bush cabinet, they might weep with recognition. Everything that could have gone wrong with the American invasion is going wrong, and the longer it goes, the wronger it gets. And with these reversals, the danger to everyone increases by orders of magnitude. Especially Iraqis. The efficacy of Iraqi tactics is being met with revisions of the Rules of Engagement (ROE in military-speak). These are the rules related to when soldiers can and can not "engage" (that means attempt to kill) enemy soldiers and civilians. As the invasion began, the ROE was comparatively strict. Embedded reporters were pretty close to the action, after all, and there was the underwriting assumption that there would be no significant resistance. On Tuesday, March 25th, CENTCOM began openly saying they would change the ROE to reflect the "new reality." With the end of the sandstorms, the US Air Force and Navy resumed its air assault, this time testing its 4,700 pound bunker busters on Baghdad. Army Apache helicopters and Air Force A-10's (the weapons platform that fires depleted uranium rounds) are hitting forward of the Army and Marine axis of advance, using the "new" ROE, and reports are already filtering out of Iraq of nightmarish scenes of scorched and shattered vehicles and bodies that include passenger cars, buses, and plenty of civilians. It has become apparent, given the continued furious resistance of the Iraqis, including audacious attacks on both US supply lines and combat units, that Baghdad will be no cakewalk. Bush and his generals are now at a fork in the road, where they must choose either to wreck Baghdad or lay siege to it. House to house fighting in Baghdad will begin a televised file of military caskets returning to America. That will quickly become intolerable, and the administration will collapse. The other unthinkable option Bush has is to quit. Quit. That must be our demand. Out of Iraq, now! But they won't. They are now caught in the same deadly trap they have built for Iraq. The sad truth seems to be, we are witnessing the certain political self-destruction of Bush & Co., but it will come at a cost paid for with many Iraqi lives. I expect a renewed American assault before the weekend is past, and this one with a shattering display of air power. It is costing American lives now, too. More than we know. On Thursday, the 27th, during a CENTCOM briefing, the charming and affable Brigadier General Vincent Brooks became short with reporters and flatly stated that CENTCOM would not release US casualty figures any longer. The night prior, an embedded CNN reporter had broadcast in real-time that Marines near Nasiriyah were engaged in a firefight with Iraqis that wounded 21 Marines within one hour. Eleven from Camp Lejuene, NC, near where I live, are dead. Things are gong very badly for troops on the long northbound column. Vehicles are deadlined from the sand. People are frightened, underslept, and they stink. The tempo that exhilarated them three days ago is now turning to deep muscular and psychological fatigue. Many are now wondering what they have gotten into. Thoughts of dying in a state of discomfort are popping up, thoughts of being maimed for life. Tempers are flaring. The food is all starting to taste the same. The mosquitoes and sand flies are thick at night. Supply disruptions have created a tobacco shortage. Home is unreachable. People are crying silently in the dark. A goodly number of these people haven't yet reached their 20th birthday. These are the lads who will be driven forward soon in the next assault. An image on the television. a Marine Amtrack rolled over, upended in a swamp; literally, a quagmire. Donald Rumsfeld has taken to threatening Iranians and Syrians, excoriating the press for their "mood swings." Rumsfeld is living to regret his Orwellian propaganda ploy of "embedding" the press. Now many will become witnesses. His "revolution in military affairs" has become a "revolution in rationalizations." The conventional Generals, steeped in their own orthodoxies, are saying Rumsfeld's mistake was trying to "do it on the cheap," that he didn't put enough forces on the ground. He stretched them thin along their primary avenue of approach to Baghdad and exposed their supply lines. This is all true, but it's very incomplete. My outgoing Battalion commander when I first reported in the 2nd Ranger Battalion in 1979 was then-Colonel Wayne Downing. Downing is a retired General now, and a pundit working for MSNBC. He had a different take. "These are people who love their country," he said, "and apparently they're willing to fight to defend it from an invader." When Downing and I were assigned to the early Rangers, we trained incessantly on the same kinds of tactics that are now being employed by the Iraqis. Reconnaissance, ambush, and raid. Rumsfeld's error is not only the size of his forces. What the media has failed to recognize is the role technology plays not only in projecting violence onto the battlefield, but in replacing the intuition of field commanders for making decisions. I predict that some day, when the dust settles and someone takes a serious look at what happened militarily in Iraq in 2003, this subordination of thinking to technology - along with the small unit decentralization of Iraqi forces, forces who were willing to fight an invader - will be identified as the decisive factors in what is shaping up to be a very Pyrrhic victory for the US, and a world historic turning point in relations between the global north and south. For the first time, I am slightly less than 100 percent sure there will be a victory at all. That is a hugely qualified statement, but the improbable can become the real as abruptly as an accident. Another enormous sandstorm, new variables from outside the country, an open outbreak of guerrilla war in Afghanistan, a colossal act of American stupidity. these are the stuff of catalysts. The administration has impressed the whole chain of command into the service of lies. The US kills civilians in a marketplace. The Iraqis did it. The Iraqis are "forcing their own people to wage suicide attacks". What began with an insipid conversation about whether or not Saddam was dead has progressed through a chemical factory that wasn't operational, a Basra uprising that didn't exist, thousands of phantom Iraqi prisoners of war, the miraculous rediscovery of the Geneva Convention, to this lurid tale retold by Washington Post reporter Walter Lippman on March 28th: "As U.S. warplanes pounded Iraqi defenders with bombs and missiles, several Army and Marine units engaged in close combat with Iraqi paramilitary forces and regular army units. Brooks said they 'conducted active security operations to eliminate identified terrorist death squads,' a reference to Iraqi cadres who U.S. and British officials say are threatening Iraqi civilians to compel the men in their families to fight. "Rumsfeld said these 'death squads' take orders directly from Hussein's family, and he denounced them in some of the strongest language he has used since the war began. "'Their ranks are populated with criminals released from Iraqi prisons,' he said. 'They dress in civilian clothes and operate from private homes confiscated from innocent people and try to blend in with the civilian population. They conduct sadistic executions on sidewalks and public squares, cutting the tongues out of those accused of disloyalty and beheading people with swords. They put on American and British uniforms to try to fool regular Iraqi soldiers into surrendering to them, and then execute them as an example for others who might contemplate defection or capitulation.'" Cutting out tongues. They have finally outdone the Kuwaiti incubator story. Other rumors suggest "the Fedayeen also run after dogs in the capitol, capture them, tear their limbs one by one, and sink their teeth into them." Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace of the US Army had a moment of clarity when he spoke the real truth: "The enemy that we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed." Saddam Hussein has become the embodiment of a resurgent Arab pride. Bush as been reduced to one of those dolls with a string on its back that you pull to hear "Iraq will be free, Iraq will be free, Iraq will be free." It might be funny if it weren't for the grim truth that the price of admission to this farce shall be a river of blood. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Mar 29 19:32:44 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (March 29) Message-ID: <20030329.213246.3864.0.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/ Jim F. ------------------------------------------ March 29, 2003, 0924hrs MSK (GMT +4 DST), Moscow - During the past day the situation on the US-Iraqi front remained largely unchanged. The US is continuing reinforcing the attack group near Karabela for a thrust toward Baghdad. By the morning of March 29 up to 20,000 coalition troops were massed in the area of Karabela. This forces includes up to 200 tanks, 150 artillery systems and more than 250 helicopters. The order for the attack will be given by the coalition commander Gen. Tommy Franks, who, according to intercepted radio communications, will personally inspect the troops during the next several hours. Around 1900hrs yesterday an Apache attack helicopter crashed. Intercepted radio communications show that the helicopter was heavily damaged in a combat mission. The helicopter's pilot lost control during landing and the helicopter crashed, causing serious damage to another helicopter that landed earlier. The coalition troops have so far failed to take An-Nasiriya despite of the categorical orders from the command and more than 800 combat missions by the strike aircraft. All attempts to break through the Iraqi defense were met by Iraqi counterattacks. After 24 hours of fighting the coalition troops only managed to advance several hundred meters in two sectors near An-Nasiriya at the cost of 4 destroyed armored personnel carriers, no less that 3 Marines killed by sniper and mortar fire, 10 wounded and 2 missing in action. The exact Iraqi losses are being determined. The Americans have also failed to advance near An-Najaf. Every coalition attack was met by massive artillery barrages from the Iraqi side. Later during the day the Iraqis mounted a counterattack throwing the US forces back by 1.5-2 kilometers. No fewer than 10 Marines were killed or wounded. After exchanging fire for six hours both warring sides remained in the same positions. Iraqi losses in this area are estimated to be 20 killed and up to 40 wounded. Near Basra the British troops pushed the Iraqi defense lines on the Fao peninsula but were unable to capture the entire peninsula. The British advance was a maximum of 4 kilometers from the highway leading to Basra. Radio intercepts show that in this attack the Iraqis shot down a British helicopter. Additionally, two tanks and one APCs were destroyed by landmines. At least 2 [British] servicemen were killed, around 20 were wounded and 15 were captured by the Iraqis. Exchange of fire continued in the area of the Basra airport. The Iraqis destroyed one coalition APC wounding two coalition soldiers. The Iraqi losses are difficult to estimate, but available information suggests that up to 20 Iraqi soldiers and local militia members might have been killed in the air and artillery strikes. All attempts by the British troops to break through the Iraqi defenses from the south along the Al-Arab river have yielded no results. The British command reported that it is unable to storm Basra with the available forces and will require no less than two additional brigades and at least five additional artillery battalions. Thus, to avoid further casualties the British are adopting defensive tactics, while trying to maintain a tight blockade around Basra and trying to improve their positions with small localized attacks. The British are also maintaining pressure on the Iraqi positions on the Fao peninsula. The psychological levels among the city's residents, according to interviews, is far from critical. The Iraqi military made several public announcements to the residents offering them a chance to leave the city. However, most of the residents do not want to leave, fearing the fate of the Palestinian refugees, who, after losing their homes, gained pariah status in the Arab world. Basra's residents were extremely depressed by the video footage aired by the coalition command showing Iraqis on the occupied territories fighting for food and water being distributed by the coalition soldiers. The city's population views this as a sample of what awaits them if the Americans come... At the Al-Kuwait airport the unloading of the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division is continuing and is expected to be completed by the night of April 1. During a night flight one of the US military transport aircraft requested an emergency landing. What happened to the plane is still being determined. Currently the coalition command is deciding how better use the 4th Infantry Division. The complete deployment [of the division] and preparations for combat are expected to take at least 10 days. However, the combat units require immediate reinforcements and it is possible that the [4th Infantry} Division will be joining combat in stages, as the units become ready. This will mean a considerable reduction of the Division's combat effectiveness. A report was obtained, prepared by the Al-Kuwait-based [coalition] Psychological Operations Tactical Group for the [coalition] Special Ground Forces Command. The report analyzed the effectiveness of the information and propaganda war. According to the report, analysis of the television broadcasts, intercepted radio communications, interrogations of Iraqi POWs show that psychologically the Iraqis are now "more stable and confident" that they were during the last days before the war. This, according to the report, is due primarily to the coalition's numerous military failures. "...Following nervousness and depression [of the Iraqis] during the first days of the war we can now observe a burst of patriotic and nationalistic feelings. ...There has been a sharp increase in the number of Iraqi refugees, who left the country before the war, returning to Iraq. A "cult of war" against the US and the UK is now emerging among the Iraqis...", the report states. [Reverse translation from Russian] [Coalition] analysts believe that if this attitude of the Iraqis is not changed within the next 7 days, a "resistance ideology" may take over the Iraqi minds, making the final [coalition] victory even more difficult. In response to this report the US Army Psychological Operations command decided to combine all Iraqi POWs into large groups and to distribute the resulting video footage to the world media. A more active use of the Iraqi opposition was suggested for propaganda work in the occupied villages. The same opposition members will be used to create video footage of the "repented" Iraqi POWs and footage of the local [Iraqi] population "opposing Saddam." Radio communications intercepted during the last five days suggest that the coalition is using Israeli airfield for conducting night air strikes against Iraq. Combat aircraft are taking off regularly from the [Israeli] Hatzerim and the Navatim airbases do not return to the same bases but fly toward the border with Jordan while maintaining complete radio silence. Possibly these are just Israeli Air Force exercises, However, [Russian] radio intercept and radar units observe increased intensity of radio communications coming from the Jordanian air force and air defense communication centers during such overflights, as well as changes in the operating modes of the US Army "Patriot" tracking radars deployed in Jordan. This indicates the Israeli airbases as used as forward airfield or that some of the coalition air force units are based there. Normally the IAF F-15I fighter-bombers and A-4N strike aircraft operate from the Hatzerim airbase and the F-16 fighter-bombers operate from the Nevatim base. Experts believe that these airbases may be used by the F-117 stealth bombers "officially" based at the Al-Udaid airbase in Qatar. Using these two locations minimizes the risk to the F-117s by allowing them to fly along the left bank of the Euphrates (in the direction of Turkey) and to avoid the dangerous maneuvering over Iraq. The destruction of the telephone stations in Baghdad did nothing to disrupt the communications of the Iraqi army. The coalition command acknowledged this fact after analyzing the dense [Iraqi] radio traffic. Because of that the USAF was ordered to employ the most powerful available [conventional] munitions against predetermined strategic targets. This attacks will be carried out immediately before renewing ground advance. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-29-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Mar 30 12:56:57 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Did Washington underestimate Iraqi resolve? (FWD: Jane's Defence Weekly) Message-ID: <20030330.145658.3208.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Follow this link: http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jdw/jdw030328_4 _n.shtml Or simply read this: 28 March 2003 Did Washington underestimate Iraqi resolve? Andrew Koch JDW Washington Bureau Chief Coalition war plans in Iraq, developed at least initially in part around trying to persuade wider elements of the Iraqi armed forces not to fight, are being reconsidered as Iraqi morale has to date stood up relatively well. US military commanders have begun to acknowledge that the Fedayeen Saddam and Special Security Organisation (SSO) paramilitary and other Iraqi forces are fighting more fiercely and capably than initial war plans envisaged. However, say US defence and intelligence officials with experience in the region, the Iraqi resolve should come as no surprise. They say US intelligence reports have repeatedly warned that Iraqi paramilitary forces closely tied to Saddam Hussein's regime were not likely to give up easily and could organise hit-and-run attacks to the rear of US forces. The problem, the officials tell JDW, is that senior US civilian officials in the US Department of Defense did not heed the advice. This underestimation is directly affecting the war planning, one element of which has been to try to detach senior Iraqi leaders and Ba'ath party officials from the country's regular army. If that was successfully accomplished Iraqi defences could be quickly overcome with a smaller US force. Without it, the length and intensity of the aerial bombing campaign will be far greater, as will the number of combat troops required. Further, coalition commanders had hoped that the wider surrender of Iraqi regular units would enable them to keep the infrastructure of the country intact and save as much of the Iraqi Army as possible to help police a post-Saddam Iraq. Part of the problem, officials say, is that coalition forces are less welcome than the senior civilian defence officials believed. Not only does that negatively impact on the coalition military plans, but also harms the operation's wider political objectives. The longer Iraqi resistance continues away from Baghdad - particularly in areas not fully under President Saddam Hussein's immediate control - the more the image the coalition portrayed of his government as being universally despised by its people is damaged. US officials insist this lukewarm reception to date is not because of any support for Saddam among the Iraqis, but rather is due to lingering fears over possible retribution by Ba'ath loyalists. US defence officials note that Fedayeen Saddam, SSO and other regime loyalists have been dispersed among front-line army soldiers, threatening to shoot them if they surrender or do not fight. However, that appears an incomplete explanation. One intelligence official said that nationalism is a greater factor than many expected. The negative image of the US among many Iraqis is also a factor, he said. All of this indicates a more protracted and violent conflict than many had expected, and perhaps an even more difficult post-conflict period. 455 of 754 words Copyright 2003 Jane's Information Group. All rights reserved. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Mar 31 13:36:05 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:08 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Centennial of 'Souls' Anniversary of Du Bois classic prompts book projects and conferences Message-ID: <20030331.153606.176.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Chronicle of Higher Education, April 4, 2003 The Centennial of 'Souls' Anniversary of Du Bois classic prompts book projects and conferences By SCOTT McLEMEE One hundred years ago this month, W.E.B. Du Bois, then a 35-year-old professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, published a slender volume of essays called The Souls of Black Folk. It quickly ran through several printings, and went on to become an American classic. Its centennial is being celebrated by events at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among other places. The book's long-term durability would not have surprised Du Bois, a man with an entirely justified confidence in his own abilities. Its immediate effect, however, was to make the author's life more difficult. And his life was already difficult. The first African-American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University, Du Bois had sophisticated tastes and a rather aristocratic manner. He could judge any concert, play, or museum exhibition by exacting standards, given his travels in Europe as a student. But segregation meant that most cultural life in Atlanta was off-limits to him, and Du Bois's refusal to make any concession to Jim Crow meant that even routine transportation was a problem. The steady diet of insults that went with life in the South following Reconstruction might have given him ulcers. Instead, it drove Du Bois to turn out a stream of articles on black history, culture, and politics for distinguished literary journals such as The Dial and The Atlantic Monthly. He also contributed papers to scholarly journals such as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Arranging his best essays into a book, he polished them until they were dazzlingly brilliant. His sentences at times echo the cadences of the King James Bible. He makes subtle references to Greek mythology. Each chapter opens with a passage of classic European literature, paired with a bar of music from black spirituals (which he called "the sorrow songs"). And the whole book is permeated with allusions to German Romanticism -- beginning with the title, with its reference to the nationalistic concept of the Volk. "Every so often, someone gives us a powerful work that changes the way we look at the world," says Dolan Hubbard, chairman of English and language arts at Morgan State University, in Baltimore. "Du Bois did that. The 360 degrees of black life are reflected in his book. He revealed the inner rhythm of black experience in the United States, and he created a language with which to articulate ourselves." full: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i30/30a01601.htm ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Mar 31 18:18:44 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri Dec 15 09:53:09 2006 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Russian view of the war (March 30) Message-ID: <20030331.202746.2520.5.farmelantj@juno.com> The English translation, that appears below comes from Venik's Aviation http://www.aeronautics.ru/ Jim F. ------------------------------------------ March 30, 2003, 2042hrs MSK (GMT +4 DST), Moscow - No significant changes have been reported during March 29-30 on the Iraqi-US front. Positional combat, sporadic exchange of fire and active search and reconnaissance operations by both sides continue along the entire line of the front. American troops continue massing near Karabela. As was mentioned in the previous update, the US group of forces in this area numbers up to 30,000 troops, up to 200 tanks and up to 230 helicopters. Latest photos of this area suggest that the [US] troops are busy servicing and repairing their equipment and setting up the support infrastructure. According to radio intercepts, the coalition commander Gen. Tommy Franks has visited the US forces near Karabela. He personally inspected the troops and had a meeting with the unit commanders. Currently no information is available about the topics discussed during the meeting. However, it is believed that the [coalition] commander listened to the reports prepared by the field commanders and formulated the main objectives for the next 2-3 days. The current technical shape of the coalition forces was discussed during the meeting at the coalition central headquarters. During a personal phone conversation with another serviceman in the US one participant of this meeting called this technical state "depressing". According to him "...a third of our equipment can be dragged to a junk yard right now. We are holding up only thanks to the round-the-clock maintenance. The real heroes on the front lines are not the Marines but the "ants" from the repair units. If it wasn't for them we'd be riding camels by now..." [Reverse-translated from Russian] Based on the intercepted radio communications, reports from both sides and other intelligence data, since the beginning of the war the coalition lost 15-20 tanks, around 40 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, more than 50 military trucks and up to 10 helicopters. In addition to that there have been at least 40 more disabled tanks, about the same number of disabled APCs and IFVs, about 100 disabled wheeled vehicles of all types and around 40 disabled helicopters. These numbers are based on the analysis of non-classified technical reports received daily by the Pentagon. During the attack last night up to two US Marine battalions attempted to push the Iraqis out of their defensive positions near An-Najaf. Despite of the preliminary 4-hour-long artillery and aerial bombardment once they approached the Iraqi positions the US troops were met with heavy machine-gun and RPG fire and were forced to return to their original positions. One US tanks was destroyed by a landmine and two APCs were hit during this night attack. Radio intercepts show that 2 Marines were killed and 5 were wounded. The latest attempt by the US troops to improve their positions on the left bank of the Euphrates near An-Nasiriya was also a failure. Despite of all the precautions taken to ensure the tactical surprise the US forces were met with heavy fire and returned to the original positions. According to the reports by the [US] field commanders, three Marines were missing in action and four were wounded in this engagement. These failed attacked have once again confirmed the fears of the coalition command that the Iraqi forces were much better technically equipped than was believed before the war. In particular, the DIA [US Defense Intelligence Agency] intelligence report from February 2003 insisted that the Iraqi army practically had no night vision equipment except for those systems installed on some tanks and serviceability of even that equipment was questioned. In reality, however, the coalition troops have learned that the Iraqis have an adequate number of night vision surveillance systems and targeting sights even at the squadron level and they know how to properly use this equipment. A particular point of concern [for the coalition] is the fact that most Iraqi night vision systems captured by the coalition are the latest models manufactured in the US and Japan. After analyzing the origins of this equipment the US begun talking about the "Syrian connection". In this regard, the US military experts have analyzed Syria's weapons imports for the past two years and have concluded that in the future fighting [in Iraq] the coalition troops may have to deal with the latest Russian-made anti-tank systems, latest radars and radio reconnaissance systems resistant to the effects electronic counter measures. In the same area [An-Najaf] a coalition checkpoint manned by the US Marines was attacked by a suicide bomber - an Iraqi soldier - who detonated a passenger car loaded with explosives next to the US troops. At least 5 of them were killed. In a closed radio address to the coalition troops the coalition command asked the soldiers to show "patience and restrain" and "not to let loose their emotions and feelings of anger" [Reverse-translated from Russian] The radio address was recorded following an incident in the area of Umm Qasr when, in plain view of the locals, British soldiers executed two Iraqis after finding a submachine-gun in their house; and after a US attack helicopter returning from a combat mission opened cannon fire on a passenger car and its occupants. It was announced [by the coalition] that both of these incidents will be investigated. However, military psychologists believe that these incidents are the result of the troops being subjected to enormous stress; psychologists say that these soldiers require medical treatment. Near Basra the British forces have completely abandoned offensive operations and switched to positional warfare. Isolated attacks continue in the airport area - still not under full British control - and on the Fao peninsula where the Iraqis continue to hold a large staging area. According to the British field commanders, the troops are extremely exhausted and are in dare need of rest and reinforcements. Three British soldiers went missing and two more were wounded in this area during the past 24 hours. A supply convoy of the 3rd Motorized Infantry Division was ambushed last night to the south of An-Nasiriya. In the course of the attack 10 fuel trucks were destroyed, one escorting APC was hit, 8 troops were wounded and 1 is missing. So far it is not known who was behind the attack: the Iraqi army combat reconnaissance units or the partisans operating in this area. Analysis of the information coming from the combat zone shows a rapid decline in the [coalition's] contacts with the media and increasing restrictions on all information except for the official reports. For example, since yesterday morning all phone and Internet lines used by the coalition troops to maintain contact with relatives in the US and Europe have been shut down at the division level and below. Not only does this indicate that the coalition command is trying to change the course of the information war, but this also points to a possible upcoming massive coalition attack against the Iraqi forces and an attempt on the part of the [coalition] commanders to prevent any information leaks. [Russian] analysts believe that all the talk about a "two-week timeout" in the war is nothing more than a disinformation attempt by the coalition. Forces and equipment currently available to the coalition will be sufficient for at least 1-2 weeks of active combat; this is comparable to the duration of a major combat operation. It is likely that such an operation may take place during the next day in the area of Karabela. Goals of this operations have already been discussed in previous reports. At the same time the coalition is already planning a new large-scale operation that will utilize the new forces currently being deployed to the region. Based on our [Russian] intelligence and that of our allies [Russian] military experts believe that this large-scale operation will be launched from the general vicinity of Karabela and will develop into a wide maneuver around Baghdad from the west ending in the area of the Tartar lake east of Al-Hadid (or east of the Tartar lake at Samarrah). From this point a part of the force will continue advancing toward Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit and from there it will turn toward Baghdad from the north through Samarrah and Baahkuba; meanwhile the rest of the [coalition] force will strike the rears of the Iraqi forces fighting in the north near Kirkuk and Mosul. Such an operation would require up to 60,000 troops, no less than 300 tanks a nd 200 helicopters. It is believed that such forces can be put together by April 15 and by April 18 they should be ready to attack. Certain available information points to a serious conflict between the coalition command and the US political and military leadership. The [US] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - the main planner and lobbyist of the military operation against Iraq - accuses the coalition command and Gen. Tommy Franks personally of being passive and indecisive, which [in Rumsfeld's opinion] led to the lengthening of the conflict and the current dead end situation. In his turn Franks in front of his subordinates calls the Secretary of Defense the "old blabbermouth" and an "adventurist" who dragged the army into the war on the most unfavorable terms possible. However, most [US military] officers believe that both military leaders are responsible for the coalition's military failures. Rumsfeld allowed gross errors during the planning of forces and equipment required for the war, while Franks did not show enough strength to get the right forces and the right training for the troops in this campaign and, in essence, surrendered to the whims of the politicians... It is entirely possible that the future of this war will see the departure of one of these two commanders. Some reports suggest that Rumsfeld has already proposed to President Bush a change in the coalition command. However, Bush declined this proposal calling it untimely and damaging to the morale of the troops and that of the American people. (source: iraqwar.ru, 03-30-03, translated by Venik) ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com