But a counterinsurgent can only control a population by providing them with security. It doesn’t matter how many schools and clinics we open, how many soccer balls and candy bars we hand out to the kids, how many Iraqi reporters we pay to write articles about what nice people we really are, or all the civil affairs and psychological operations we conduct. All these things don’t matter if, after we do them, we then drive back to our bases and leave the population in the hands of an enemy who knocks on their doors at night and doesn’t take no for an answer.

Coalitions for change: Building bridges in Howard’s Australia

Jenny McAllister

Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements, Sydney, University of NSW Press, 2005, (304 pp). ISBN (paperback) RRP $39.95

The most significant factor in mobilising large numbers has been renewed willingness within Left groups to build coalitions for social change. The Walk Against the War Coalition successfully brought together the Labor Council, the Palm Sunday Committee, the National Union of Students, along with up to ninety other groups, held together by 16 co-ordinators who worked to make the coalition cohesive and the campaign effective.

The single most effective criticism of Left activism is that it is unrepresentative. It’s commonplace to say that Howard’s conservatives have won the hearts and minds of groups that the Left claims to speak for—migrants, women, the working class and, more recently, Indigenous communities facing sexual violence.

Maddison and Scalmer’s chapter ‘Redistribution and recognition’ deals directly with the challenge of building a coalition that can accommodate both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movement goals

Globalist Perspective > Global Culture The Future of Decadent Europe
By Tony Judt | Friday, June 02, 2006

The conventional wisdom holds that Europe today is economically or socially dysfunctional. According to this view, Europe — with its long vacations and generous pensions — is in many ways a better place to live than the United States — but that level of comfort cannot last.

And yet, when we assume the necessity of efficiency and the inevitability of economic primacy in the shaping of our future, we ought to be aware that we turn ourselves into slaves to 19th century economists, including, of course, Karl Marx.

Rather than focus exclusively on efficiency, we need to pay a little more attention to politics. The European state after 1945 transformed itself quite rapidly from a tax-raising, military-spending machine of the kind it had been since the 17th century into a social state, spending huge amounts of money on health, education, pensions, housing, welfare and public facilities.

More specifically, they were an attempt to prevent a return to the past. The liberal welfare states of Europe were not built as a vision of a utopian future. They were built as a barrier to Europe's 20th century — as it had just been experienced.

In this context, bear in mind that most of the men who built the welfare states in Europe were not young social democrats. Most of the people actually implementing this program after 1945 in Western Europe were Christian Democrats — or liberals rather than socialists of any kind. Indeed, they were old — very old — liberals.

William Beveridge, who wrote the famous 1942 report that became the basis of the British welfare state, was born in 1879. Winston Churchill, the man who commissioned that report, was born in 1874. Clement Attlee, the prime minister who actually implemented it, was born in 1883.

They all shared Keynes's view, expressed just before his death in 1946, that after the experience of World War II there would be a craving for social and personal security in Europe. And there was. The welfare state was constructed primarily as a security revolution — rather than a social revolution.

Fast forward to the present. It is very clear that a state that can actually provide security is going to be more necessary in the 21st century than it was in the final years of the 20th. This does not just refer to security that protects against terrorism and the like, but also to security that responds to the fear of economic and physical vulnerability.

The reason for this is a predictable return to the degree of insecurity, uncertainty and fear of the future that people felt, not in the 1990s, 1980s or 1970s — but in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

What Does Olmert Want?

By Amos Elon

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977

by Gershom Gorenberg

Times Books, 454 pp., $30.00

"I hate the corpses of empires," Rebecca West wrote. "They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy."^[1]

It was a mean little empire, even before the inhabitants became restive. Other colonialists co-opted local elites, intermarried, built universities, great waterworks, and other public amenities for the colonized; Israel did little of the sort.

he shows how only seven months after the 1967 war there were already eight hundred settlers living in the West Bank. The obsessive drive by all Israeli governments after 1967 to establish "facts on the ground" (the Hebrew translation for faits accomplis) was also an almost blind reflex reaction born of past experience—the practice of Israel's founding fathers to add "one dunam after another"

Hell is truth seen too late, as Hobbes said.

Predictably, it has no Israeli-Palestinian members; more surprising, it has no ministers from the Russian émigré party that now claims to represent approximately one million Israelis.

Olmert says Abbas by now is not an effective partner for peace. He may be right. Gaza and the West Bank seem on the verge of civil war between Hamas and other factions. In mid-May, Palestinian sources claimed that Hamas members were plotting to kill Abbas.

Withdrawal" is still a dirty word in Israel. Olmert carefully avoids it. He prefers the sanitized terms "disengagement," "convergence," or, more often lately, hitkansut, a Hebrew word that defies translation, implying a closing of ranks within the warm bosom of the family.

When completed, the wall will run 759 kilometers. It will then be three times longer than the Israeli–Jordanian border before 1967, enclosing the Jewish state inside one enormous bunker.

The third obstacle is that the new wall will cut off some 200,000 Palestinians in Greater Jerusalem from their relatives, their natural hinterland, their universities, public institutions, businesses, workshops, and the property they own on the West Bank. Tens of thousands of other Palestinians on either side of the wall will be cut off from their orange and olive groves and their fields.

The municipal government still badly neglects the remaining purely Palestinian neighborhoods. Many are sadly run down. Behind the Mount of Olives and in the Valley of Hinom, below the Old City walls, the Palestinian quarters look more like Cairo slums. Mountains of garbage lie in the street, there are potholes everywhere, no sidewalks, no proper streetlights, and no parks, as there are on the Jewish side. An open sewer runs though muddy streets.

Israel had been warned early on that the settlements violated international law by, among others, the United States, and early in the fall of 1967, even by the legal adviser of the Israeli foreign ministry, who later became a judge on the International Court in The Hague. The warnings were ignored.

Conquerors frequently construe the law in their own interest, as was the case in America, where, according to Stuart Banner, a professor at UCLA, the Indians lost much of their land largely because of a continuing divergence between law and practice.^[2]

In the meantime, a purely local clash became part of a menacing "clash of civilizations."

See Stuart Banner, How The Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2005).

If we are planning a long-term occupancy in Iraq, shouldn't the American people be told? Our government is spending billions of our tax dollars building permanent bases that it will not publicly admit are being built. That is because our leaders do not want to confess that "standing down" merely means withdrawing to garrisons outside the troubled urban areas that we cannot seem ever to pacify.

Noam Chomsky: Why it's over for America

Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes.

as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, "the American 'system' as a whole is in real trouble -