February 2012

The Article: US Weapons at War by the Arms Trade Resource Center. And here I was, thinking that they hated our freedoms.

The Text: A new report by the New York-based World Policy Institute finds that a majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world go to regimes defined as undemocratic by our own State Department. Furthermore, U.S.-supplied arms are involved in a majority of the world’s active conflicts.

“Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe,” notes report co-author William D. Hartung. “Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments.”

“Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush’s pledge to ‘end tyranny in our world’ than the United States’ role as the world’s leading arms exporting nation, ” said Frida Berrigan, the report’s co-author. “Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition partners, these alleged benefits often come at a high price.”

As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan while pledging comparable high tech military hardware to its rival India, U.S. arms sometimes go to both sides in long brewing conflicts. And the tens of millions of U.S. arms transfers to Uzbekistan exemplify the negative consequences of arming repressive regimes.

Among the key findings of this report are the following:

In 2003, the last year for which full information is available, the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts. From Angola, Chad and Ethiopia, to Colombia, Pakistan, Israel and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest U.S. arms sales programs (Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales) to these conflict nations totaled nearly $1 billion in 2003.

In 2003, more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report: in the sense that “citizens do not have the right to change their own government.” These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers in 2003, with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).

When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 — a full 80% — were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

The largest U.S. military aid program, Foreign Military Financing (FMF), increased by 68% from 2001 to 2003, from $3.5 billion to nearly $6 billion. The biggest increases went to countries that were engaged as U.S. allies in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, including Jordan ($525 million increase from 2001 to 2003), Afghanistan ($191 million increase), Pakistan ($224 million increase), and Bahrain ($90 million increase). The Philippines, where the United States stepped up joint operations against a local terrorist group with alleged links to al-Qaeda, also received a substantial increase from 2001 to 2003 ($47 million).

Military aid totals have leveled off slightly since their FY 2003 peak, coming in at a requested $4.5 billion for 2006. The number of countries receiving FMF assistance increased by 50% from FY 2001 to FY 2006—from 48 to 71.

“Arming repressive regimes while simultaneously proclaiming a campaign against tyranny undermines the credibility of the United States and makes it harder to hold other nations to high standards of conduct on human rights and other key issues,” argues Frida Berrigan.

Arming undemocratic governments often helps to enhance their power, fueling conflict or enabling human rights abuses. These blows to the reputation of the United States are in turn impediments to winning the “war of ideas” in the Muslim world and beyond, undermining efforts to dry up financial and political support for terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda.

“The time has come to impose greater scrutiny on U.S. arms transfers and military aid programs,” says William Hartung. “They are not simply another tool in the foreign policy toolbox, to be used to win friends and intimidate adversaries as needed.”

A good starting point towards a more sound arms sales policy would be to implement the underlying assumptions of U.S. arms export law, which call for a rming nations only for purposes of self-defense and avoiding arms sales to nations that engage in patterns of systematic human rights abuses. This shift could come either via new legislation or Executive Branch policy initiatives.

Equally important, the automatic assumption that arms transfers are the preferred “barter” for access to military facilities or other security “goods” sought from other nations should be seriously re-considered. Economic aid, political support and other forms of engagement should be explored as alternatives whenever possible.

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“Men have a stake in believing that we are not really like that. Women have a stake in believing that men really don’t see them that way. For each party, facing the truth often feels as if it is too much to bear. So we turn away and pretend.”

Robert Jensen in Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.

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Incroyable! An interesting discussion between Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul that essentially represents the dynamics of the Iraq debate for not only Republicans, but for a large portion of the American electorate. Especially considering the wonders of the past week witnessed at the Democratic debate, it’s refreshing to see these kind of conversations happening.

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I saw it coming
I just thought that you should know
I’m feeling better every day
I’m only waiting if you stay
So don’t feel bad
Your faith was an illusion
And you’re as loyal as your faith
Will let you be

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The Article: From the Guardian, comes The Original Political Vision: Sex, Art and Transformation by Terry Eagleton, detailing the vision of William Blake and that of Gordon Brown.

The Text: One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain’s greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called “the vision thing” in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God’s head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. “House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools,” he wrote. “They seem to me to be something other than human life.”

Article continues
Like Brown, Blake grew up in a lower-middle-class Christian milieu. But the culture from which Blake sprang was one of the most precious Britain has produced, in which Jacobin artisans and Republican booksellers rubbed shoulders with Dissenting preachers and occult philosophers; the country was effectively a police state, ridden with spies and hunger rioters. Brown’s Britain is not yet a police state, but its technologies of spying and surveillance surpass the wildest dreams of the autocrats of Blake’s day. Blake himself was tried for sedition and acquitted, having allegedly cried in public: “Damn the king and his country!” Today whole sectors of the labour movement bow the knee to monarchy, or at least tolerate it as a minor irritant. The history of labour from Blake to Brown is, among other things, how dissent became domesticated.

Blake’s politics were not just a matter of wishful thinking, as so many radical schemes are today. Across the Atlantic one great anti-colonial revolution had held out the promise of liberty, and to the poet’s delight another had broken out in the streets of Paris. Together they promised to bring an end to the rule of state and church – “the Beast and the Whore”, as Blake knew them. Most of our own writers, however, seem to know little of politics beyond the value of individual liberties.

In this, they are faithful to the libertarian lineage of John Milton; but Milton knew rather more about politics than freedom of expression. In his greatest poem, he mourned the paradise that radical Puritans had hoped to witness on earth. As mythologer-in-chief of the English 17th-century revolution, he urged the cutting off of the king’s head, and was lucky to escape with his own. It is hard to imagine Craig Raine or Ian McEwan posing a threat to the state.

In his own mighty epic – Milton – Blake turned back to his great Protestant forebear from a Britain now scarred by industrial capitalism. He raided Milton’s work to foster his own visions of liberation, passing on the revolutionary torch to WB Yeats. This self-appointed mythmaker to the Irish war of independence was inspired by Blake’s notion of the poet as prophet and public activist.

Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud’s. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” he claims, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations.

They do so, too, by persuading us to be “moderate”; Blake, however, was not enamoured of the third way. The New Testament that Gordon Brown reads in his Presbyterian fashion as a model of prudence, conscience and sobriety, Blake read as a hymn to creative recklessness. He sees that Jesus’s ethics are extravagant, hostile to the calculative spirit of the utilitarians. If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak; if they ask you to walk one mile, walk two. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and those who restrain their desires do so because their desires are feeble enough to be restrained.

The energy captured in Blake’s watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: “To generalise is to be an Idiot,” Blake writes. And again: “The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common.” The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.

Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of “moving on”. Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that “everything that lives is holy”, and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem.

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