Almost
Home, CounterPunchers! Annual
Fundraising Appeal
We interrupt your regular reading
habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch
needs your financial support!
We're not in the habit of making
idle threats and this isn't one. Either we meet our fundraising
goal of $60,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced
to drastically curtail the operation of our website. It's near
the end of our year and the wolves are gathering at the door.
CounterPunch's website is supported
almost entirely by subscribers to the print edition of our newsletter.
We don't clutter the site by selling annoying popup ads. We tried
getting money out of Google, but they gave us the boot. We aren't
on the receiving end of six-figure grants from big foundations.
George Soros doesn't have us on retainer. And we don't sell tickets
on cruiseliners.
The continued existence of
CounterPunch depends solely on the support and dedication of
our readers. And we know there are a lot of you. We get thousands
of emails from you every day. Our website receives nearly 100,000
visits each day-and those numbers grow by the month. Of course,
all these readers chew up a lot of bandwidth and that costs money.
Through the Iraq war, the daily
traumas of the Bush administration, hurricanes, earthquakes and
the disappearance of the Democrats, many of you have found a
refuge at CounterPunch and made us your homepage. You tell us
that you love CounterPunch because the quality of writing you
find here every day and because we never flinch under fire. We
appreciate the support and are prepared for the fierce battles
to come as the Bush administration expands its wars abroad and
at home.
To contribute by phone you
can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683
or mail contribution to:
CounterPunch
PO Box 228
Petrolia, CA 95558
Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
16, 2006
Compassion and Refugees
Sources
of Violence
By KATHY KELLY
Barely a day goes by when I don't learn
a new report about a beleagured Iraqi refugee, or of an entire
family, in desperate need of help. We think hard, within our
Voices for Creative Nonviolence network, about ways to build
concern for the estimated three million Iraqis who have been
displaced from their homes. Ironically, I think some of the
people who can best empathize with Iraqi refugees are the U.S.
soldiers stationed in Iraq, far from their homes and families.
Recently, an A.P. reporter
in Baghdad described a town hall meeting which U.S. military
officials helped organize in a Shi'ite area of northern Baghdad.
("U.S. takes on community building in Iraq" by Lauren
Frayer, 11/11/06) Tucked into the article is her observation
of two U.S. soldiers who stood guard during the 3-hour meeting.
"Outside the auditorium, two U.S. Army snipers clicked
their rifles on safety and kicked at tufts of grass to pass the
time."
It's easy to imagine the idled
soldiers composing letters, mentally, to loved ones, or perhaps
pulling out pictures of loved ones and longing to be home.
Displaced Iraqi refugees describe
to us how they want to take care of their children, how they're
beset by feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, and how, sometimes,
they have a lot of "down time" with no meaningful work.
I'm guessing that similar conversations happen amongst U.S.
military in Iraq. A major difference is that vast sums of money
are spent to maintain the U.S. soldiers in Iraq and to equip
them with weapons and supplies.
I suppose it's much more difficult
for an analyst employed by a U.S. "think tank" to identify
much with the everyday cares and concerns of Iraqi refugees when
contemplating ways to build better security for the United States
presence in the region.
Kenneth Pollack*, Director
of Research for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, recently
wrote an article entitled "Iraq Refugees: Carriers of Conflict"
which was published in the Atlantic Monthly (November, 2006).
Most of his article depicts the refugees themselves as "the
problem." Pollack cites instances in Middle East history
in which refugees have fomented civil unrest; he writes of "sanctuaries
for militia groups" wherein militia leaders sometimes become
leaders of refugee communities. "Tribal elders and other
leaders who might oppose violence may find themselves enfeebled
by both the trauma of flight and the loss of their traditional
basis of power (typically, control of land). As a result, refugee
camps can become deeply radicalized communities, dangerous to
their host countries in several ways. The mere presence of militias
among the refugees tends to embroil the host country in war by
making it a target."
Mr. Pollack's analysis regarding
refugees could be reconsidered in light of how many Iraqis might
view the presence of U.S. troops who are "displaced"
on foreign soil in Iraq. The U.S. troops could be viewed as
newcomers bringing conflict with them. Suppose we imagined this
excerpt from Mr. Pollack's article as a commentary not on Iraqi
refugees but on the U.S. troop presence in Iraq: "Most
Iraqi refugees (substitute U.S. troops) are not in camps,
but dispersed among local populations. But refugees, (substitute
U.S. troops) whether in camps or not, can also corrode state
power from the inside, fomenting the radicalization of domestic
populations and encouraging rebellion against host governments.
The burden of caring for hundreds of thousands of refugees (substitute
U.S. troops) is heavy, straining government administrative
capacity and possibly eroding public support for regimes shown
to be weak, unresponsive, or callous."
In his article, Mr. Pollack
doesn't prescribe any ways to alleviate the plight of refugees.
Shortly before the article was published, conditions worsened
for Iraqi refugees when the budget for the United Nations High
Commission on Refugees was cut in half.
From an October 22, 2006, IRIN
report: "More than three million Iraqis who have been forced
to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring
countries are facing what UNHCR describes as a 'very bleak future'
after the agency's budget for offices across the region was halved
for the coming year," said Andrew Harper, coordinator for
the Iraq unit at UNHCR in Geneva. He told IRIN that funds for
the agency's Iraq programme have been drastically reduced for
2007 because of donors scaling back their contributions. "Iraq
has seen the largest and most recent displacement of any UNHCR
project in the world, yet even as more Iraqis are displaced and
as their needs increase, the funds to help them are decreasing,"
said Harper. "This growing humanitarian crisis has simply
gone under the radar screen of most donors."
According to some estimates,
U.S. taxpayers will be asked to spend close to 2 trillion dollars
for the war in Iraq. Feasibly, a generous portion of U.S. wealth
and productivity could be directed toward assisting Iraqi refugees
and developing a reparations package which could be placed in
escrow, under the control of a third party, neutral group for
disbursement.
By doing this, we could help
uproot the fundamentally cruel unfairness that often causes the
conflicts Mr. Pollack wants us to fear.
The narrow focus on Iraqi refugees
as potential "carriers" of conflict, coupled with a
U.S. foreign policy which has been based on threat and force,
suggests that the current administration won't be committed to
meeting basic human rights of Iraqi refugees, whether they've
been displaced within Iraq or have fled outside of Iraq.
This doesn't lessen our own
responsibility to organize nonviolent direct action seeking a
U.S. foreign policy based on fairness and justice toward Iraqis.
Helping U.S. people develop caring and compassionate views toward
all refugees, including Iraqis who were living in their own homes
before the U.S. illegally and immorally invaded their country,
would be one way to secure a better future for all children.
* [Alexander Cockburn adds:
Re Pollack, the following is from a recent column of mine: "Open
up the Washington Post and the strategic vision on display was
an utterly mad piece co-written by one of the big boosters for
war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack, a hack thinker at the Brookings
Institution, now an integral part of Israeli territory with its
"Saban Center for Middle East Policy" named for the
fanatic Zionist billionaire Haim Saban, majority owner of Paramount
Pictures, a man who handed the Democratic Party a total of $12.3
million in 2002, a $7 million component of which was the biggest
single contribution ever recorded up to that time. Silent about
his own role as war promoter (his speciality was Saddam's imaginary
nuclear threat), oblivious to the lessons of disaster in Iraq,
reduplicated in the war in Lebanon, Pollack and Georgetown U's
Daniel Byman called for more US troops to be sent to Iraq, to
help set up "refugee collection points" -- ie concentration
camps -- on Iraq's eastern border and for tripwires -- no doubt
ultimately nuclear -- to be established in expectation of war
with Iran. You think Republican neocons are the only crazy ones?"
What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
A Special Investigation:
China's Mass Murder for Body Parts
CounterPunch
outlines the terrible evidence that thousands of Falun Gong members
have been killed to supply China's body parts trade with the
West. Larry Lack reviews
the evidence and explains why the US government is keeping its
mouth shut. CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month But remember, we are
funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch.
Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
