2018 year of indifference to human suffering, but hope for 2019

 

Summit of the year: Trump meeting Kim Jong-un in Singapore

ith the controversial actions of the United States President Donald Trump giving rise to a tumultuous world order, the year that comes to an end in three more days can easily be labelled as a year of indifference to human suffering.

Tens of thousands of children die of starvations and disease in Yemen in scenes reminiscent of Somalia in the 1990s, but Trump has made little effort to stop the Saudi-Arabia-led war on the poorest Arab nation. Even after, the Senate, as a response to Saudi Arabia’s extrajudicial killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, passed last month a resolution urging the US to stop its support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, Trump puts business with Saudi Arabia before the urgent need to end the Yemeni people’s suffering which the World Food Programme has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

According to the international charity group, Save the Children, more than 85,000 children under five have died of extreme hunger in Yemen since the war began in 2015, while other aid agencies estimate that of two million Yemeni children, who are mere skins on bones, nearly one hundred die daily in Yemen. The indifference of the world community – or its complicity -- even after seeing the shocking images of dying children is as appalling as it is puzzling. 

Despite being beset by regular resignations of senior officials, the latest being Defence Secretary James Mattis, multiple scandals, investigations over collusion with Russia and a government shutdown, Trump is adamant and does what he wants in the way he wants.  In his bid to appease Saudi Arabia, Trump also disregards calls to take punitive measures against the Gulf nation for the gruesome killing of Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate office in Istanbul on October 2.  Apart from Turkey, the rest of the world has not taken a moral stand on this issue and continues its relations with Saudi Arabia regardless, as though human rights are only a matter to be taken up when powerless states commit excesses. 

The year also underlined a depressing reality that the world failed miserably to deal with the life-and-death issue of climate change.  With 2018 being regarded as the fourth warmest year on record since 1880, the blow the Trump administration’s self-centred policy dealt to the climate change agreement by withdrawing from it last year had a cumulative effect.  With the US, one of the biggest polluters of the planet, not in the picture, the climate conference in the Polish coal town of Katowice this month became just another talk shop.

Trump’s make-America-great-again policy does not allow other nations to benefit at the expense of US sacrifices.  He has dismissed climate change warnings as a hoax perpetrated by China. 

The year also saw the United States launching a protracted trade war with China. The tit-for-tat trade sanctions had an adverse impact on the growth of the global economy, affecting largely developing nations.

If 2017 was a year of hope for migrants fleeing war and poverty, 2018 is a year of nightmare for migrants, especially those from Latin America. 

This week, a second migrant child died in US custody as the Trump administration, which is hell bent on building a border wall -- instead of bridges to bring people together -- persists with its tough stand on migrants coming from Latin American nations. Most of these nations, especially El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, have been pushed into poverty as a result of Washington’s interventionist foreign policy. 

Yet another Trump action that paid little or no attention to human suffering is the sanctions imposed on Iran. The Trump administration, in yet another controversial move, withdrew from the seven-nation Iran nuclear deal and slapped fresh sanctions on Iran, denying the oil-producing nation the opportunity to raise the living standards of its people suffering under decades of tough international sanctions. The move also shot up world oil prices deepening the economic crises many developing nations face. 

Talking of human suffering and global indifference, Palestine needs a special mention. This year also is yet another annus horribilis for the Palestinian people. The Trump administration’s recognition of the whole of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and the shifting of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem dashed the Palestinians’ hope for an independent state with East Jerusalem as their capital. The defiant Palestinians continue their peaceful struggle, with Palestinian refugees in Gaza launching a Great March to Return to draw the world’s attention to their plight, the injustice caused to them and the humiliation they undergo in the hands of Israeli occupation forces. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the launch of the Great March in March this year.  Yet the international community’s contribution towards ending the Palestinian people’s suffering is distressingly nominal. 

The international community’s indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people continues this year, too. There was little progress on the Syrian front in terms of peace moves. With the Syrian troops now in control of much of the country, and the ISIS terrorists on the run, the war has reached a stalemate. But, it could escalate anytime, as Trump is calling back the US troops from Syria and giving regional power Turkey a freehand to deal with the Syrian Kurdish rebel group YPG which Ankara regards as an extension of the Turkish separatist group PKK. 

A woman holds her skin-on-bones son at a malnutrition treatment center in Sanaa, Yemen. Pic Reuters

The Trump administration in a rash decision is also planning to slash the US military strength in Afghanistan by half. Though a US withdrawal is welcome from Syria and Afghanistan, the move should have been accompanied by measures aimed at permanent peace.  
In terms of world peace, the biggest event this year was the summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June. The meeting, however, was seen more as a cameo performance by the two maverick leaders than any genuine attempt to strike peace.  As the year began, the world was gripped by fears of a nuclear war between the US and North Korea over Pyongyang’s missile tests.  After the June talks, North Korea dismantled its nuclear weapon test sites, but is now complaining that the US has not kept to its part of the deal.

The year also saw a slowdown in China’s growth, but its push to expand the Belt-and-Road Initiative is making progress, nevertheless, amid criticism that the BRI was China’s neocolonial project driven by debt diplomacy. 
Russia, meanwhile, continues to assert itself in 2018, getting involved in a war of words with Britain following chemical poisoning attacks on Russian dissidents living in Britain. 

The year’s another big story is Britain’s struggle to get a Brexit deal approved in parliament to complete its divorce with the European Union in March next year. 
In South Asia, the setback the Narendra Modi government suffered in recent elections, the defeat of the Maldivian strongman Abdulla Yameen in the presidential election, cricket legend Imran Khan’s rise to prime ministerial seat and, of course, Sri Lanka’s constitutional coup, dominated world headlines.  Another significant development of the year was Malaysia’s general election which saw Mahathir Mohamed’s return to power on a platform of anti-corruption in May. 

On a positive note, though 2018 is a year of indifference, 2019 can be a year of hope, or at least let us hope it will be so, as we see a glimmer of peace hope in the distant horizon with regard to Yemen and Syria. Also 2019 could be an eventful year for the US, with the release of the report on the Robert Mueller investigation into the Trump camp’s alleged liaison with Russia likely any time. Will President Trump survive the probe’s outcome? This question may dominate the political discourse next year. 

Trump Bullying Will Hurt Millions of Iranians

by Medea Benjamin 

Iranian government officials want to know how the Trump administration can get away with punishing Iran and other countries for complying with the internationally recognized nuclear deal signed in 2015. “The US is, in effect, threatening states who seek to abide by Resolution 2231 with punitive measures,” said President Rouhani. “This constitutes a mockery of international decisions and the blackmailing of responsible parties who seek to uphold them.”

Treating the welfare of the Iranians people like a TV show, Donald Trump used a meme from The Game of Thrones—an arrogant, stylized photo of himself with the tagline: “Sanctions Are Coming November 5”—to announce the new round of crippling sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports, banks and shipping.

This is the second round of sanctions since Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, a deal that was signed in 2015 not only by the US and Iran, but also by Germany, England, France, Russia and China—and approved unanimously by the UN Security Council. It’s also a deal that has been working. Iran has been complying with the most intrusive inspections regime ever devised, as the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed 13 times.

Trump, always ready to bulldoze international agreements, unilaterally withdrew from the deal and imposed a first round of sanctions in August and the second round now. These sanctions are designed to stop not just US companies from trading with Iran, but all companies—anywhere in the world. According to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, “Any financial institution, company, or individual who evades our sanctions risks losing access to the U.S. financial system and the ability to do business with the United States or U.S. companies.” In effect, the Trump administration, practicing imperial hubris on steroids, is determined to punish countries abiding by an internationally approved agreement.

Faced with US threats, big Western companies that had recently signed contracts with Iran, such as Total, Eni, Boeing, Airbus, and Peugeot, have cancelled multi-billion dollar deals.

Desperate to counter US sanctions, the European Union is creating a mechanism called the “special purpose vehicle.” It is essentially a barter system, similar to one used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to exchange Iranian oil for European goods without money changing hands.The US government has vowed to sabotage this effort. “I have no expectation that there will be any transactions that are significant that go through a special purpose vehicle based upon what I’ve seen,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said. “But if there are transactions that have the intent of evading our sanctions, we will aggressively pursue our remedies.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted that even before the November 5 sanctions went into effect, the US had already succeeded in reducing Iranian crude oil exports by more than 1 million barrels, and insists that the goal is to stop ALL Iranian oil exports. The administration is granting temporary waivers to eight countries, including India, South Korea and Japan, principally out of concern that withdrawing so much oil from the market at once would lead to a spike in global oil prices. Moreover, they are merely six-month waivers contingent on countries “winding down” their oil business with Iran. A major stipulation for the waivers is that Iran’s revenues must be kept in foreign accounts that can only be used for trade in “nonsanctioned goods and services.”

While this economic stranglehold is officially designed to “stop Iran’s destabilizing activities across the world,” Trump administration officials are known to be gunning for regime change, hoping that distraught Iranians take to the streets to overthrow their government.

Indeed, since last December there have been sporadic protests against the economic hardships. But will unorganized protesters really be capable of toppling a well-armed, tightly controlled regime? Some analysts speculate that what the Trump administration wants in Iran is not even regime change but chaos, with Iranians fighting each other so they won’t be projecting power beyond their borders.

Trump’s wishful thinking aside, the most likely effects of the sanctions will be to further inflame regional conflicts, empower conservative forces in Iran, make other governments resentful of US imperial overreach and worst of all, needlessly cause suffering to millions of Iranian citizens.

The sanctions are already taking a tragic toll. While there are humanitarian exemptions on food and medicines, restrictions on banks and shipping companies make even exempted items difficult to obtain. Asked about humanitarian exemptions, French Ambassador to Washington Gerard Araud said, “The banks are so terrified by the sanctions that they don’t want to do anything with Iran.”

Below is a sampling of the desperate messages we have been getting from people in Iran:

• We are suffering the sanctions with our bodies and souls. Businesses are closing, workers are losing their jobs, food prices are increasing by the hour. We may not be happy with our government, but this economic situation makes us more dependent on the government.
• When I sleep at night there is one set of food prices. When I get up in the morning, they have doubled. We are losing our ability to buy food for our children because of Mr. Trump.
• My grandmother in Iran has gone blind in one eye because she can no longer access her diabetes medicine. Thanks America.
• I am a teacher in Iran. Before President Trump violated the nuclear deal, my salary was $800 a month. Now I have to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, just to make $250. The harsher the sanctions, the more difficult our lives become.I don’t know why we should suffer the consequences of decisions made by stubborn officials, whether here or in the United States. We just want to live normal lives.

Donald Trump is only too happy to make a mockery of international decisions. It is up to the rest of the world to stop him.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the new book, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her previous books include: Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection; Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control; Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide).

Noam Chomsky: Hopes and Anxieties in the Age of Trump

By Saul Isaacson 

Noam Chomsky offers insights on issues ranging from Iran to Latin America and the risk of nuclear war under Trump.

For over half a century, Noam Chomsky, celebrated linguist and current Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair at the University of Arizona, has provided intellectual and moral leadership to critics of American foreign policy. In the interview below, conducted in his office at the University of Arizona on August 7, 2018, Chomsky discusses the American obsession with Iran, and why the Trump administration seems ready for a confrontation. He also addresses the disappointing trends in two Latin American nations, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Above all, Chomsky expresses his concerns over nuclear weapons, especially in the unpredictable hands of Donald Trump. Reprinted below is the entire text of the interview

In the larger sense, do you believe that there is still a reservoir of untapped anti-Semitism in the United States?

It’s not even untapped. Take the strongest supporters of Israel, the Christian evangelicals. That’s the most anti-Semitic group in history. I mean, even Hitler didn’t say that all Jews should go to eternal perdition. Can you be any more anti-Semitic than that?

But what about mainstream American society? Less so?

I mean, it was true up until, I’d say, about mid-1950s. So, I was a student at Harvard in the 1950s. I mean, you could cut the anti-Semitism with a knife. It wasn’t—one of the reasons MIT became a great institution is because people like Norbert Wiener couldn’t get jobs at Harvard, literally. Paul Samuelson, Bob Solow, so they came down to the engineering school down the street. Didn’t care. But, so there was plenty of it. But it’s pretty much—I mean, it could easily—it could be an upsurge. These things are always right below the surface. But right now, I think there isn’t much, except for groups like Christian evangelicals or white nationalists, you know, they don’t like anybody.

Can you see Democrats taking a less pugnacious stance toward Iran in 2020? It seems that they’re showing a little bit less sympathy for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Perhaps that will be replicated in other places in the Middle East, like Iran. Is there any hope for that?

That’s really hard to predict. I mean, the hatred of Iran is such a deep-seated part of modern American culture. To eradicate it is going to be very hard. I mean—take this morning’s New York Times. It’s pretty interesting, take a look at the lead story. It’s about Trump canceling, you know, the withdrawal of the—reinstituting the sanctions against Iran. And the headline says, and then the story says that Trump thinks that reinstituting sanctions will cut back Iran’s weapons production and cut down the—their repression inside Iran, and stop their meddling in the Middle East. I mean, first of all, does Trump think that? Probably not. Is there any truth to it? There isn’t a particle of truth to any of it. The most repressive countries in the Middle East are the ones we support. By comparison to Saudi Arabia, Iran looks like Norway, you know. As far as violence in the Middle East is concerned, the Saudi Arabian [and] UAE actions in Yemen, which we’re supporting, are much worse than anything. But here’s the—here’s the framework of discussion, you know. To break through that kind of, you know, just presuppositions, they don’t even say it, it’s just the presupposition …

Is it about—merely about hegemony? How do you explain the virulent disgust and hatred for Iran?

It’s very simple: in 1979 Iran moved towards independence. And worse than that, they overthrew the U.S.-imposed tyrant who had been ruling the country and U.S. interests. They’re not going to forget that. In fact, immediately right after the Iranian revolution, the U.S. began supporting the Iraqi invasion of Iran, which was devastating. Iraq was using chemical weapons, was killing hundreds of thousands of people, it was supported all the way through. In fact, at the very end it won the war for Iraq by closing the Persian Gulf to Iran.

So, could you say we’ve already had a war with Iran by way of the Iran-Iraq war?

…we didn’t really go to war with Iran because they’re not dumb enough to send troops to Iran. They’re pretty dumb, but not that dumb. What they’ll do, if they feel like it, is bomb from a distance, you know, missiles from the gulf, which could be pretty awful.

Speaking of bombs and missiles, I recently read The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg. I found it riveting.

It’s a very important book.

Yeah. And he [Ellsberg] talks about key transition points and what is acceptable barbarism in war. He starts with the traditional notion that soldiers kill only soldiers, and then the bombing of civilians, and the way “Bomber” Harris worked it down to a science, and then the incineration of cities was the next step, and then the atomic bomb, and the savagery of Curtis LeMay; it’s really a beautifully-written book, very moving. But it made me think about Trump. Are we at another one of those key pivotal moments [featuring] a president with a trigger finger, and more and more nations with nuclear weapons?

Well, you know, Trump is a deviation from standard political history. He doesn’t give a shit about geostrategic issues. He doesn’t care what the hell he’s doing. If he smashes up the international economy, fine. If he throws out NATO, who cares? The only thing he cares about is himself, literally, and everything he’s doing follows from just the recognition that he’s a narcissistic megalomaniac who wants to make sure that, you know, he’s on top. He wins everything. And he has to keep his base under control. And he’s very good at it. He knows exactly what buttons to push to keep angry people—angry for good reasons, for the most part—to keep them sort of following him. He’s shafting them at every turn. Just take a look at wages. Since he’s come in, real wages have declined. They were actually starting to rise under Obama, and they’re starting to decline. But he’s keeping them in line. And the way he does it, by just doing one crazed thing after another, which looks as though he’s defending us. And they’re passionate. They revere him. So, you take a look—and on nuclear weapons, actually he’s got the best position of any politician in the country. He’s saying, we should reduce tensions with Russia. And he’s making moves to allow the Koreans to move slowly towards denuclearization, and it’s perfect. And that’s what everyone, including the Democrats, is denouncing him for.

Do you think those gestures are sincere?

No, of course not. Nothing is sincere. But, you know, it’s like a clock that nobody wound. It’s right twice a day. So, these are the—they should be praising him for that and supporting it, but instead, the liberals are so insane that they’re attacking him for the few things he’s doing which makes sense. Of course, we should reduce tensions with Russia. Of course, we should allow Korea to move towards denuclearization in a sensible way. I mean, try to find one liberal commentator or political leader who’s supporting him on that. I mean, the person—the one person who’s supporting him on that is the nuttiest guy in congress, Ron Paul. I mean, it’s crazy.

Do you think Trump is more likely to use tactical nuclear weapons than other presidents?

Well, I think the danger with Trump and nuclear weapons is something else. If this Mueller investigation ever comes up with something, which I doubt very much, but if it comes up with something that implicates Trump, everybody’s in trouble because he’s going to react like a maniac. Might try to start a war in the United States. He might start nuking people. He might do anything. Anything that goes after him personally is very dangerous. So, again, I think the liberals are out of their minds on this. What they want to do is implicate Trump, you know, threaten to impeach him, at which point he could go crazy. And he has a lot of power. Maybe the military wouldn’t follow his orders, who knows, but they might, you know.