Fault Lines presenter Avi Lewis sits down for a one-on-one interview with author and activist, Arundhati Roy, one of PULSE’s 20 Top Global Thinkers of 2009.
Author: Idrees Ahmad
I am a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling and a former research fellow at the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies. I am the author of The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). I write for The Observer, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, Dissent, The National, VICE News, Huffington Post, In These Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), Adbusters, Guernica, London Review of Books (Blog), The New Arab, Bella Caledonia, Asia Times, IPS News, Medium, Political Insight, The Drouth, Canadian Dimension, Tanqeed, Variant, etc. I have appeared as an on-air analyst on Al Jazeera, the BBC, TRT World, RAI TV, Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon, Alternative Radio with David Barsamian and several Pacifica Radio channels.
‘This Time We Went Too Far’
You can purchase Norman Finkelstein’s new book here.
Current State of Investigative Reporting
Newspapers across the nation are in serious trouble, pummeled by the recession, by declining revenue […]and readership, and by competition from round-the-clock online resources. Speaking at a reception marking the launch of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at BU, Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and an author, speaks about the current state of investigative reporting.Hosted by New England Center for Investigative Reporting on May 19, 2009.
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Suicide Bombers
The Riz Khan show asks what motivates a person to sacrifice their own life in order to kill others. There are sensible answers from the venerable Robert Pape, Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and much twaddle from Farhana Ali, a particularly clueless terrorologist. If this stupid woman is serving as a ‘senior instructor for the US Afpak team’, then God help America and God help the people of ‘Afpak’. (I suspect Pape was thinking the same. His laughter at the end of the interview was eloquent).
Keynes is Back
I am reading Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abellas hagiographic account of the rise of the RAND Corporation in which he shows how ideas that originated with its mathematicians have by virtue of its proximity to power come to dominate such diverse disciplines as political science, international relations, philosophy, sociology, (even religious studies!) and economics (NB: for more on the subject, don’t miss Adam Curtis’s classic film The Trap). Prominent among them are systems analysis, game theory, and rational choice theory. The latter gave us everything from the arms race to the recent financial collapse. In his review of Robert Skidelsky’s Keynes: The Return of the Master, the new biography of John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Stiglitz writes:
We should be clear about this: economic theory never provided much support for these free-market views. Theories of imperfect and asymmetric information in markets had undermined every one of the ‘efficient market’ doctrines, even before they became fashionable in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Bruce Greenwald and I had explained that Adam Smith’s hand was not in fact invisible: it wasn’t there. Sanford Grossman and I had explained that if markets were as efficient in transmitting information as the free marketeers claimed, no one would have any incentive to gather and process it. Free marketeers, and the special interests that benefited from their doctrines, paid little attention to these inconvenient truths.
While economists who criticised the ruling free-market paradigm often still employed, as a matter of convenience, simple models of ‘rational’ expectations (that is, they assumed that individuals ‘rationally’ used all the information that they had available), they departed from the ruling paradigm in assuming that different individuals had access to different information. Their aim was to show that the standard paradigm was no longer valid when there was even this seemingly small and obviously reasonable change in assumptions. They showed, for instance, that unfettered markets were not efficient, and could be characterised by persistent unemployment. But if the economy behaves so poorly when such small realistic changes are made to the paradigm, what could we expect if we added further elements of realism, such as bouts of irrational optimism and pessimism, the ‘panics and manias’ that break out repeatedly in markets all over the world?
Joseph Stiglitz on Media Matters with Bob McChesney
Joseph Stiglitz on BookTV, interviewed by Lori Wallach of Public Citizen.
Bomb Power: The Rise of the National Security State
Garry Wills discusses his important new book Bomb Power.
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian, critic, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills for a discussion his new book, Bomb Power. Wills recalls his formative influences including his Catholic faith and education; William Buckley and the editors of The National Review; the Vietnam War protests; and the Civil Rights movement. He compares Obama to past presidents and explains why his support turned to criticism. He analyzes the impact of the atomic bomb on the U.S. constitutional system arguing that its development created a national security state characterized by an enlargement of Presidential power at the expense of other branches of government.
Pakistan: A new wave of attacks?
This is a video of my appearance on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. For context, I’d encourage viewers to read my articles in Political Insight and Le Monde Diplomatique.
The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for an attack on the US consulate in Peshawar on Monday. Is Pakistan paying the price for battles waged by the United States in the region?
Wikileaks releases evidence of US warcrime in Iraq
The wonderful folks at WikiLeaks.org have released a video that captures a US Apache gunship murdering two Reuters journalists — 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40 — and 18 Iraqis while wounding two children. Let me warn readers that the footage is disturbing, but not nearly as disturbing as the Nazi-like gloating of the killers. But the worse comes later when a clearly unarmed man, mortally wounded, is being assisted by some brave individuals in a minivan, with children inside, and very deliberately shot at by the murderers in the Apache gunship.
The Guardian reports that WikiLeaks.org, will be shortly releasing a video of another atrocity, this time in Afghanistan. Wikileaks obtained the video after the Pentagon blocked a freedom of information request by Reuters. According to Wikileaks director Julian Assange, they had to break through encryption by the military to view the video.
Here is Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, speaking to Al Jazeera about why the story is only coming out now and how it was concealed earlier.
Continue reading “Wikileaks releases evidence of US warcrime in Iraq”
From the Front Line: Insurgent Pakistan
This article appeared in the Political Studies Association‘s excellent new publication Political Insight.
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
No nation has ever made a frank avowal of its real imperial motives. It always claims to be primarily concerned with the peace and prosperity of the people whom it subjugates. — Reinhold Niebuhr
The ironies of US President Barack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo were widely noted. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had a Nobel laureate used the acceptance ceremony to make a case for war. Both men appealed to St Augustine’s authority to support the justness of their cause. However, when Roosevelt spoke he had already concluded the peace for which he was honoured; Obama’s lies distant in the purgatory of ‘hope’. In the present he remains at war — as Henry Kissinger was, when he picked up his prize — having recently ordered the second major escalation of his brief presidency. Kissinger’s war simmered on for two more years; Obama’s will likely last longer.
Afghanistan may well become Obama’s Vietnam, but his diversion is not Cambodia, or Laos, it is nuclear-armed Pakistan. History sometimes repeats itself both as tragedy and farce.
Weeks before Obama described al-Qaeda as a threat on a par with Nazi Germany, national security adviser, General James Jones, told CNN that the organisation had fewer than a hundred men in Afghanistan. Driven by institutional inertia and vulnerable to the charge of weakness, Obama appears unable to disengage. Instead he has borrowed Bush’s rhetoric of good and evil and joined the fear factory. He has subsumed al-Qaeda and the Taliban into a singular threat of global proportions whose defeat he pronounced ‘fundamental to the defense of our people’. Afghanistan, he argued,will not be pacified until the Taliban’s allies in Pakistan are vanquished. Precipitate withdrawal will restore the Taliban to power, and create a safe haven for al-Qaeda to plan more terrorist attacks on the west.
On the abuse of language
Tony Judt on linguistic subterfuges practised in Europe and America.
In America the misuse of language is usually cultural rather than political. People will accuse Obama of being a socialist. Italians would say magari – if only. However, no one takes this very seriously. What we have instead in the US is cultural communities policing what can and can’t be said, and that shapes how we define difference. The idea is that you can’t have an elite, since elitism is undemocratic and unegalitarian. Therefore, you always make the point that people are in some important way the same. If they are badly disabled like me, they are ‘differently abled’, which I find very amusing. It is not a ‘different’ ability: it is no ability. But since it’s politically uncomfortable to distinguish between people who can do things and people who can’t, the latter are described as separate but equal. There are numerous things wrong with this: first, it is lousy language; second, it creates the illusion of sameness or achievement in its absence; third, it conceals the effects of real power and capacity, real wealth and influence. You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.
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