This Way to the Other Side

Rolling stone magazine, better know for its exposes on rock stars has published a incredibly detailed report on the role Goldman Sachs, the American and international financial giant, who has played in forment the current and previous financial meltdowns, starting from the Great Depression and every major financial crisis in between, mainly through the production of commercial paper. The writer, Matt Taibbi alludes also to the future and argues that the next bubble to surface will be even larger than all the others, carbon trading, and Goldman Sachs are engineering that as well.

Afghanistan has seen more than fifty five young international solders killed so far this month, more than any month in the short bloody history of this war. In the English Independent magazine, a mother of a young soldier killed in Gereshk in the southern province of Helmand, allowed them to publish a series of letters he had written to her, including one he had written in the eventuality of his death.

It brings home the realism of human suffering and loss to those that easily dismiss the numbers killed as just another statistic and are otherwise unaffected by the war.

For the people of Afghanistan however, the war is a matter of daily lifestyle. They move about with the understanding that they are always at risk. I am particularly affected in asking my engineers to travel to remote places to carry out our work of reconstruction. Incidentally we have three projects in the very village where the young soldier mentioned above was killed.

This is not to address the war, but what goes on behind the war. In a recent blog column, there was a discussion and assorted sympathies for the family of the young soldiers killed in this war. That did however bring out a number of mixed responses towards the purpose. The conventional wisdom of the blogger suggesting that it was being waged and fought as was the other war in Iraq, to secure the world from terrorism and the collective menace of fanatical jihadists. This however is largely not supported from the history of the Iraq war.

But in all of the discussion of right and wrong, there is central factor that is not generally being considered, that is that the wars are not meant to end. There is a dominant US industry sector that depends almost exclusively on the continuation of conflicts. Presently some 40% of manufacturing industry in the US is tied into defense related industries. The five largest arms manufacturing nations in the world are the five permanent member of the UN Security Council.

I am cynical enough to accept that the death of a few soldiers can be considered by corporations involved in this industry to be unfortunate consequences but a reasonable price to pay for the trillions of dollars involved in world wide munition sales each year. Most countries spend on average 3% of there GDP on arms build up and defense. The US spend around 5% of GDP or 610 billion. That is around one and a half  trillion dollars annually world wide on defense spending. The few million involved to fund the 4000 or so Taliban is a fraction of that required to keep their operation functioning and even that is done through an unrestrained drug trade.

Conventional armies need an armed opposition if they are to continue being needed. If there was no need for armies, there would be no need for arms and therein lay the circular problem.

According to a former president of the World Bank,the amount spent on warfare worldwide is twenty times that spent on development. There is no where in the world Departments of Peace, only Departments of War. It is this that will see the death of a soldier affecting families everywhere and young soldiers being killed to fight battles for which they would hardly understand the reasons behind it.

I was reading an article this morning in the Jerusalem Post that describes the rape of young Iranian girls by a member of the notorious Iranian Basiji, the volunteer force that supports the Ayatollah. That got me to thinking about what purpose it was intended to serve, not the violence of the act being reported but the purpose behind the publication of something that is largely unsupported accusations.

In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks.

Iranian women protest in Teheran.

He has also detailed aspects of his earlier service in the force, including his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution.

The interview took place by telephone, and on condition of anonymity. It was arranged by a reliable source whose identity can also not be revealed.

It was the last part of that passage that caught my attention. An unknown speaking to a journalist arranged by another unknown, published in a newspaper that is not known for its good relationship or political intentions towards Iran. What I see it as, and it surprises me that those journals that have reprinted it do not see the same, “as told by an unknown through an unknown intermediary in a paper who has an particular agenda and who will certify it is correct with nothing but their word”, are not asking the same questions.

We are as this shows, lulled into a sense of abhorrence against not only this specific action, but Iran and Islam as a whole, or at least that is the intent. Which leads me to opine why this is being published.

Specifically, we are supposed to feel anger towards Iran that, according to this accusation has a legal religious process that causes young women if they are virgins to be raped before they are executed for unknown or unspecified crimes. That Iran executes women is not in doubt. They are, like the US, one of the countries with the highest execution rates of its criminals in the world.  That the women in question are guilty of a crime against the state or not is not discussed and of course it is indisputable that some crimes in Iran are not considered punishable by death by most western nations. Not withstanding that many if not most civilized nations also consider punishment by death for any crime to be draconian and unnecessary.

No, the purpose of the article is not to discuss it’s veracity, we are left with unknowns speaking to unknowns with accusations that cannot be supported and even if it were, does not confirm that this is normal behavior in Iran. The purpose is simply to inflame our passion as just and reasonable men and women and cause us to despise the Iranian people and it’s leaders and their religion, all of whom are the ultimate victims here. The end result planned for this is that we come to hate these people and wish dreadful things upon them. We are not meant to see them as ordinary people just like us with common view and morals like us, with values and desires like us but view them collectively as beasts who would rape young virgins in order to execute them notwithstanding that it is also Iranians purportedly affected by this obscenity.

As we grow to hate them more and more with each snippet of atrocity we are constantly fed from unknown accusers, we will feel no sympathy when Israeli planes set out to bomb them back into the stone age, killing hundreds if not thousands or even hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who for the most part, are simply going about their business as do you and I and are not party to the evil things men do to their fellow men if it were true.

Israel is posturing for a war with Iran but first it is waging a battle with public opinion.  According we are being molded and shaped in containing  our opinion in order that we do not object too strenuously to that action being taken when it eventually is, even though the basis for this war it is spurious and unsubstantiated as is the individual claims presented in this particular article above.

War with Iran is more complex than the picture painted before us. It has professed nuclear ambitions however it maintains and independent inspectors confirm, that is for peaceful purposes. According to the international conventions and obligations contained within the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty to which it is a signatory, it is doing no more or less than any other signatory is entitled to do. But still, that is not the real reason. Iran supports resistance to the expansion of Israel in Lebanon, Syria the West bank and Gaza and Israel has no tangible basis for addressing that support since Iran’s hand prints are only vaguely apparent. It needs what appears to be a more legitimate reason to wage war that will passage across sovereign nations and with the blessing of the United States who control the airspace. This is incidental to the fifty year battle for the control of the Iranian oil fields.

Before that happens, the world needs to reflect and take account of these repeatedly negative reports from Iran and its religious mores. Out of any nation, misery and suffering can be found both institutionally and privately.  Laws are not always just or fair. Iran is no different but perhaps more harsh than we would like.

What we do not see is the other side of the people of Iran although recent events have bought much attention to the place and presented a more human side to the people if not the government.  We need to look carefully for what purpose we are presented with abhorrent stories, with summaries and conjectures that present a whole population as less worthy to live than we are and understand that there is an agenda behind it all, and not one we would reasonably support if we were to be presented with all of the facts contained in them.

Ok, so I write in many ways arguing that international aid is not working. A recent article in Spiegel supports that assertion and has African Economist James Shikwati pleading to Western donors that aid does more harm than good just as the G8 summit has agreed to deliver more aid to Aftica.As Shikwati says “Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.”

Much the same can be said for the delivery of aid funding to any country. In  another article in Spiegel, Gerhard Sporl contends that the EU and the UN have no exit strategy for the Balkans with the west continuing the same tired old policies they have for a decade. As Shikwati says, there is an industry of bureaucrats who have little interest in seeing peace and development actually come to the region. They would lose their positions.

In a perhaps more telling article by Patrisimo, an African working in America, she writes about interest in her program by Jeffery Sachs who has a well financed yet unproductive exercise in Kenya where international aid agencies offer handouts without looking at the effect that those handouts are having.

In view of the recent interest by the UN to revisit its Millennium Development Goals, I wonder if they will really seek an answer or if they will continue to view things from a lofty height without seeing the wood for the trees.