Funferal

Political Analysis

I’ve been a ‘sustaining donor’ of < a href="http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm">ZNet – the website associated with Z magazine for some time. The main perk, from my point of view, is receiving daily commentaries by activists such as Zinn, Chomsky and others. The reason I mention this now is that I’ve just read today’s commentary, which is an excerpt from an interview with Rahul Mahajan to appear in the May edition of Z Magazine, and it provides some of the best analysis of the war in Iraq that I have seen recently. An excerpt:

(4) Will there be democracy in Iraq, as a result of this invasion?
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has funded a military coup attempt in Venezuela; it has set into motion plans to create a quisling government for occupied Palestine; and, most relevant, it has created a colonial-style puppet government in Afghanistan. The loya jirga process was itself fundamentally American-controlled; delegates were approved by the United States, and groups that might have caused a problem, like the still very large Watan Party (successor of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan), were left out.
The delegates were brought together by the United States into a meeting with the agenda controlled by the warlords and others who had been bought off by the US. There was an intense atmosphere of coercion and intimidation. Even so, the handpicked jirga would not have ratified the US choice for interim president, so the preferred candidate, Zahir Shah, was forced to step down, and the delegates were presented with a fait accompli to rubber-stamp.
In Iraq, the US will undoubtedly engineer a process to create a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It will, however, be from the beginning a process designed to create a government that will serve US “strategic” interests and not those of the Iraqi people, and one that is tied by extremely tight strings to Washington.

I urge anyone interested in ongoing access to critical social analysis – not just of the war in Iraq, but a wide range of ongoing issues – to sign up. While not all the pieces are equally incisive, the signal to noise ratio is much better than in many other sources, and one gets a good overview of a wide range of social activism.