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Musical Innerlube: Atari Teenage Riot

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Australia, Afghanistan and three unanswered questions

By Kellie Tranter, On Line Opinion

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place. Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, September 29, 2001.

No thinking person can read, hear or watch the evidence being unearthed at the Chilcot Inquiry into the legality of the Iraq war without also questioning the legality of the war in Afghanistan.

Governments say they keep no official or unofficial body counts but unofficial reports suggest that as many as 1.3 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq. How many people have been killed in Afghanistan? How many of the people killed in either country were actually combatants or terrorists?

In 2008 Prime Minister Rudd delivered an address at the Australian War Memorial CEW Bean Foundation dinner about why we are involved in Afghanistan, what we are trying to achieve and how we are trying to achieve it.

He spoke of the “… need for a more stable Afghanistan … one that supports security rather than offers succour to those who seek to undermine it … will make for a more secure world ... a goal endorsed by the United Nations Security Council”. The UN Security Council may endorse that specific goal, but tell us, Mr Rudd, did the Security Council actually sanction the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001?

According to Marjorie Cohn, the immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law:

The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan. Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemned the September 11 attacks, and ordered the freezing of assets; the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information; and urged ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.

The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not "armed attacks" by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.

Is she right Mr Rudd?

Ian Hamilton QC, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Law Awards of Scotland, seems to think so. He has challenged the Lord Advocate to prosecute him for publishing remarks encouraging officers engaged in the Afghan campaign to disobey their immediate superiors due to the illegality of the war there.

To encourage such conduct is in itself a crime. Hamilton argues that Scottish politicians should be calling for this action, but fear of prosecution is preventing them from doing so. He has therefore challenged the Lord Advocate to prosecute him, and says that in order to succeed it would be necessary to prove the Afghan war is legal. He asserts that it is not.

And he's not alone. The National Lawyers Guild International Committee is preparing a White Paper that will delineate the legal arguments against the War in Afghanistan and Dr Myra Williamson Lecturer of Law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand has released a book seeking to challenge “received wisdom” on the legality of the action against Afghanistan.

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The stakes in "punishing" Greece

By Rick Wolff, MRZine

Global capitalism imploded in 2007.  The central causes of capitalism's crisis include:

1. the end of real wage increases in the US and the substitution of rising worker debt far beyond what workers could sustain;
2. the buildup of excess global industrial capacity;
3. the explosion of speculation and excess risk-taking by banks, other financial and non-financial corporations, and the rich;
4. the systematic misrepresentation of credit risks by capitalist rating firms;
5. the failure of supervision and regulation by governments increasingly dependent on corporations and the rich (for campaign contributions, lobbyists' supports, etc.) over the last quarter century;
6. the growing indebtedness of governments;
7. the huge imbalances between trade and capital flows among nations (and, above all, the trade deficits of the US and the trade surpluses of the PRC)

In this list, the role of Greece is minor almost to the vanishing point.  But Greek workers loom large among the proposed victims of the capitalist crisis they did not cause.

When the global capitalist crisis hit in 2007, Greece like most other countries boosted its deficit finance.  It had already been running high government deficits largely based on very rosy predictions of Greece's economic prospects given its low (for Europe) wages and rising productivity in the years before 2007.  So Greece has borrowed a lot (although other countries who borrowed more and for similar reasons are not -- yet -- being treated like Greece).

The problem for Greek national debt is that other, larger, richer capitalist nations -- those whose capitalists' actions were the leading causes of the global crisis -- have also vastly increased their borrowing.  Lending to the latter is far safer than lending to the poorer, often more indebted countries like Greece, Portugal, etc.  So lenders are requiring them to pay much higher interest rates just to meet their current debt obligations (and they probably need to borrow more, just like other countries, to avoid another nasty recessionary downturn).  Lenders are also threatening to stop lending unless these poorer countries lower the ratio between their debt and their GDP (the widely used measure of the country's total output and thus its ultimate ability to pay back its debts).

To make the billions in extra interest payments and/or to lower their outstanding debt, governments in countries like Greece would have to raise taxes on their people or cut spending on their peoples' needs or both.  Those steps would provide those governments with the funds to pay higher interest rates on their debt and lower the total of outstanding debt.

In simple English: the global capitalist crisis first brought an economic downturn to Greece, and now the "recovery" seeks to impose on the Greek people an indefinite period of economic suffering as global lenders provide funds to the richer, larger capitalist economies elsewhere so that they can avoid what is demanded of the Greeks.  The same leaders of business and government who produced the crisis are managing the "recovery" in just this way.

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