Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
January 17 / 18, 2003
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No Stan
for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
January 17 / 18, 2004
Blaming the Symptoms
Population
International on Violent Conflict
By JOSHUA MULDAVIN
and JOSEPH NEVINS
In his alarmist, best-selling book, The Population
Bomb (originally published in 1968), Paul Erlich predicted
global disaster on account of overpopulation and mounting consumption.
Increasing violent conflict would be one of the deadly results.
The likelihood of war, he wrote, would grow "with each addition
to the population, intensifying competition for dwindling resources
and food."
The post-Cold War era has seen a dramatic
increase in the outbreak of wars. From the former Yugoslavia
to the Congo, the former Zaire, from Rwanda to Indonesia, horrific
violence has plagued numerous countries since the fall of the
Berlin Wall. The question is, why? Might it be related to Erlich's
apocalyptic prognostications?
Researchers associated with Population
Action International (PAI), a Washington, D.C.-based pro-family
planning and policy advocacy group seem to think so. In a 100-page
report released with great fanfare on December 17, they contend
that there is a significant link between excessive population
growth and violent civil conflict--deadly violence between national
governments and non-state insurgents, or between different factions
of a territorial state.
The authors emphasize, however, that
it is not simply population growth that is the problem. It is
the combination of disproportionately high numbers of young adults
(between 15 and 29 years of age), rapid urbanization, and scarcities
of cropland and water, which make conflict more likely.
At the same time, the PAI researchers
are careful to note that "Demographic processes neither
lead inevitably to, nor do they eliminate the risk of, civil
conflict." That said, they assert that countries in the
later stages of the demographic transition --a shift from high
population growth to low that typically takes place as countries
evolve from "developing" to "developed"--are
significantly less likely to experience violent civil conflict.
This relationship, they argue, although not one of "direct
causation," is, nevertheless, "striking and consistent."
In other words, population growth is,
in the end, the principal source of the problem.
Part of the political agenda in publicizing
the report, entitled "The Security Demographic," is
to encourage Western governments--especially that of the United
States--to increase funding for family planning and programs
that augment the status of women and girls. Although laudable
in and of themselves, the objectives are based on faulty assumptions.
As such, they lay the groundwork for dangerous "solutions"
to the supposed problem of population growth in the name of reducing
violent conflict.
A key, unspoken assumption of the authors
is that nation-states are self-contained, and are thus uniquely
responsible for their own successes and failures. The world,
however, has always been one of connections--ones that transcend
boundaries and that are typically profoundly unequal in terms
of their effects. Indeed, the very making of the world political
map and global economy--one in which tens of millions die annually
from preventable malnutrition and disease due to unequal access
to and distribution of resources--is, in large part, a result
of Western imperialism. It is hardly a coincidence that the vast
majority of the poverty-stricken countries that concern the authors
as sites of current or potential future conflict are former colonies.
For such reasons, it is folly to try
to comprehend the existence of geographic concentrations of poverty--or
wealth for that matter--by analyzing factors only contained within
those particular areas, just as it would be wrong to limit such
an inquiry to a narrow time frame that ignored history. Poverty
and wealth are the outcomes of processes that transcend narrow
notions of history and geography. Similarly, it is too simple
to make sharp distinctions between countries at war and those
at peace, especially when the latter are often intimately involved
in supporting in numerous ways direct protagonists in an armed
conflict.
To state the obvious, one can only understand
why a specific conflict occurs by comprehensively examining a
complex array of factors, a key one being history. Although the
PAI press release announcing the report's release gushes that
it "builds on 25 years of existing scholarly research and
examines 180 countries," a look at the report's references
reveals that the authors avoided any such thorough consideration.
Apart from a single book on Sierra Leone and a handful of articles
that focus on individual countries, the literature upon which
they drew is devoid of in-depth analysis of the roots of any
conflict. Instead, they relied largely on global or regional
surveys of population trends, environmental matters, and war,
as well as generalized development analyses. By uncritically
embracing the totalizing framework of the demographic transition,
the authors display a notion of history that suggests some sort
of universal process-one size fits all. Thus, it is the interplay
between the size of a population, its growth rate, and a fixed
resource base that determine the likelihood of conflict, not
the specific underlying phenomena or other myriad factors.
The shortcomings of such an approach
are painfully evident if one analyzes any of the specific countries
that concern the authors. Two of the twenty-five they identify
as having "very high levels of demographic risk of civil
conflict," for example, are East Timor and occupied Palestine
as both have high levels of population growth, rapidly increasing
urbanization, and insufficient amounts of cropland and potable
water. But it is nonsense to think that one can understand the
presence of these phenomena without any sort of serious historical
and political analysis, one that entails examining the systematic
dispossession of the territories' peoples and resource base by
colonizing forces and their partners-in-crime from the "international
community." To the extent these areas risk "civil conflict,"
limiting population growth--the key variable--would do little
to nothing to reduce societal tensions.
As even the PAI authors contend, "demographically
high-risk" countries have avoided mass violence through
various mechanisms--ranging from land redistribution to encouraging
out-migration. Thus, high population growth is not a causal factor.
At best, it only seems to be an accompanying factor, the effects
of which are far less clear than the report suggests.
Given the types of interventions discussed
by the authors that have lessened tensions within particular
territories, would it not make more sense to focus on combating
endemic poverty, lessening socio-economic inequality within and
between countries, and stifling the international arms trade?
Or how about eliminating or, at least, greatly liberalizing immigration
controls by wealthy countries so that the poor have greater opportunities
to access resources (such as relatively high-paying jobs) that
will allow them to break out of their poverty? Or, to address
a specific "at-risk" area of the world, how about ending
Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands and allowing Palestinians
a just share of the area's water resources?
Despite all their caveats and liberal
pretensions, the PAI researchers have produced a dangerous and
profoundly conservative report. Regardless of their intentions,
the effect of their analysis and prescriptions is to reinforce
an ugly global status quo--one in which there are huge and growing
gaps between rich and poor. It is a socio-chasm that often corresponds
to racial distinctions, what many have characterized as "global
apartheid."
The framing of their analysis in terms
of demography focuses attention on mythical hyper-fertile Third
World hordes, while obfuscating historical and contemporary factors
that underlie poverty. As a result, the authors put forth an
argument that is literally backward: Poverty and insecurity are
not the result of too many people, as they suggest; rather, large
numbers of people, and their urban concentrations are the result
of historic impoverishment and insecurity, as well as misguided
forms of development. Perhaps if the researchers had actually
conducted on-the-ground research in the countries concerned,
and spoken to some of the human beings that embody the supposed
demographic high risk their conclusions would have been very
different.
Backward analysis leads to misguided
solutions. Hence, the report includes among its recommendations
that military and intelligence analysts develop expertise in
demographic matters. This is a recipe for disaster: Given the
typical brutality of military establishments--especially in countries
under occupation or authoritarian regimes, or in countries with
ethnically different populations deemed undesirable by ruling
elites--one can imagine all sorts of ugly types of interventions
to combat "demographic threats."
In mid-December, for example, Ha'aretz,
an Israeli newspaper, reported that Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, a senior
researcher at the Israeli government's Armaments Development
Authority, had called upon the state to "implement a stringent
policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population."
Explaining why there was a need for such a policy, he continued:
"the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'ersheba have
turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."
There is nothing in the PAI report to
suggest that its authors would endorse such practices. To the
contrary, they emphasize voluntary measures. But in advocating
military involvement in population control, the authors open
the door to unsavory characters and institutions. And by pointing
the finger of blame at the poor and those at the margins of economic
power, people who have little control over the forces shaping
their lives, while failing to call for redistribution of wealth
and control of and access to resources, the PAI team shields
and serves the interests of the rich and powerful. It is this
latter group (numerically small on a global scale) that consumes
the majority of the world's resources, while working to maintain
an international political economy that denies the global majority
a fair share of the planet's wealth.
This is what needs to be challenged.
Joshua Muldavin is the Henry R. Luce Professor in Asian
Studies and Human Geography at Sarah Lawrence College.
Joseph Nevins
is an assistant professor of geography at Vassar College, and
the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal
Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|