Green Hands Dipped In Blood: The DDT Genocide

By John Jalsevac

Acrobat version - http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005_docs/DDTworstcrime.pdf

1. The Worst Crime of the 20th Century

“Which kills more: ideology or religion?”1  asks author Andrew Kenney in the title of what is certainly one of the more startling pieces I’ve read in some time.

For Kenney, however, it’s not the meat of that question that’s really up for debate, and it’s not his answer to the meat of it that’s startling; after all, a summary finger count shows that the man who favors the religious wars has his work cut out to match the math of the fascist and communist regimes that have dropped the metaphorical guillotine since the French Revolution.

What makes Kenney’s article startling is not that the self-professed atheist necessarily concludes that the reds (communists) and the browns (fascists) have contributed much more heartily to history’s flow of blood than any religion, but that, of the three available ideological colors, it is the extremists of the green standard whose hands are perhaps guiltiest for the last century’s outpouring of crimson.

According to Kenney over 50,000,000 people died in the 20th century because of the gratuitous recklessness of eco-extremists; this estimate is actually quite conservative in comparison to junkscience.com’s claim that over 80,000,000 have dropped at the hands of the tree-huggers. 

“In purely numerical terms,” says Kenney about the alleged murderous scheme, “it was the worst crime of the 20th century.”

 But what was the worst crime?

“The banning of DDT,” says Kenney.

Of course this could be comfortably put to rest as the ranting of just another, competing ideological nut were it not that Kenney is in very, very good company.

A New York Times article of January of this year, titled It’s Time to Spray DDT proclaimed what long ago became the obvious, that “the evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.”2  The American Council on Science and Health printed an article in 2002 entitled The DDT ban turns 30 – millions dead of malaria because of ban, more deaths likely.3  In 2003 Front Page Magazine ran an article entitled Rachel Carsons’ Ecological Genocide, similarly concerned with the DDT ban, and employing that loaded word “genocide”.4  And in his popular novel, State of Fear, Michael Crichton also espoused this view, describing the DDT ban as “arguably the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” He continues, “since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.”5

2. The Tragic History Of DDT and Silent Spring

The history of DDT is a tragic one. The chemical, the proper name of which is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, was first isolated in the late 19th century. No practical use was found for it, however, until Paul Herman Muller determined in 1939 that it made for an effective insecticide.

Used extensively during WWII and afterwards, the remarkably cheap and easy-to-process pesticide is widely credited with the complete eradication of the scourge of malaria from the Western world. The white powder, once dusted on the walls of a house or on the human body, works by killing malaria and typhus carrying vectors such as mosquitoes or lice.

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia DDT performed the feat of reducing the worldwide malaria mortality rate from a hefty 192 per 100,000 to a low of 7 per 100,000. Paul Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1948 for his lifesaving work with DDT.

With Muller’s miracle-pesticide in widespread use the movement towards a malaria-free earth was progressing swimmingly until Rachel Carson erupted hysterically onto the international scene. She alleged in her deeply influential 1962 book Silent Spring that DDT caused cancer and was aiding the rapid extinction of raptors such as bald eagles by thinning their egg shells. Environmentalists everywhere took up the cause and soon achieved the first great and unifying victory of the modern environmental movement—the worldwide banning of DDT.

And that would be perfectly all right, perhaps, if any of Carson’s allegations were true.

3. Rachel Carson’s Allegations Disproved

But in 2004 a study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons concludes “Public pressure [to ban DDT] was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research. Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated. The worldwide affect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths .”6   In fact, it is difficult to choose which of the countless studies that have vindicated DDT over the years I should cite.

One study saw volunteers consume 35mg of raw DDT daily for a period of two years with no short or long-term ill effects .7   One anti-DDT-ban scientist began his every lecture on the subject by ingesting a teaspoon of DDT powder.8  Of the workers who applied thousands of tons of DDT without any protection, none have shown an increased risk of cancer or any other illness. Even the alleged thinning of the eggshells of raptors that environmentalists now tout as a last and desperate reason for continuing the archaic ban has been proven false.

4. The DDT Ban Put In Perspective

Allow me to provide some perspective. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO), DDT is classified as Group 2B carcinogenicity; that is, there is an admitted insufficient evidence of carcinogenicity.9  On the other hand, a report issued but a few weeks ago by the IARC classified combined estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives, the most widely prescribed contraceptive on the market, as Group 1 carcinogenicity.10

The oral contraceptives, which the WHO claims over 100 million women worldwide regularly ingest, are by this classification defined as definitely carcinogenic. And yet, DDT,  by now proven innocent as a babe after decades of scrutiny, the harmless miracle-chemical the purpose of which is to prevent the excruciating death of millions, is strictly regulated with a worldwide ban, while the proven carcinogenic, cancer-causing contraceptive, used to prevent the creation of human life, is handed out like candy.

But here’s the real kicker. According to the WHO there is some evidence that besides causing substantially increased risks of breast, liver, and cervical cancer, combined oral contraceptives may cause a decrease in the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer. The WHO therefore justifies downplaying the immediate risk to hundreds of millions of women worldwide because “it is possible that the overall net public health outcome may be beneficial.”

Curiously, however, the WHO’s analysis of DDT grants the pesticide no such benevolent handicap. DDT has saved millions of lives, and the ban, based upon long disproved claims of carcinogenicity, is perpetuating the annual death of millions. Talk about a beneficial “overall net public health outcome”! But of course, maybe after another forty years of testing and research it will be found that DDT powder once caused someone to sneeze to death.

Adding insult to injury, over the past five years numerous powerful international bodies have sought to make the DDT ban even stricter. 

Currently it is possible for tropical nations most ravaged by malaria to apply for exceptions to the DDT ban, which exceptions undergo review every three years by the WHO. This provision is of little use to most third world nations, since there is a global stigma attached to DDT, and many charitable bodies will not fund relief efforts unless it is agreed that DDT will not be used. Besides that, the cost of DDT has increased substantially. But in 2000, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) convention in Johannesburg flaunted science and common sense and sought to choke that final loophole of grace and make the DDT ban total; ultimately they failed in their bid, due to the ardent pleas of malaria experts and the third world countries most affected by malaria. In addition the Stockholm Convention, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund have all clamoured since the year 2000 for the total banning of DDT.

5. Why Does the DDT Ban Continue?

But if it is so patently illogical and scientifically apocryphal, why is it that the ban continues unabated?

The answer to that riddle is likely beyond even the powers of Oedipus to discover in full, and is certainly beyond the limited scope of this article. It probably has a lot to do with what Charles Wurter, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund said in October 1969: “If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT.”11  It seems more than safe at this point to call that statement prophetic. For the green extremists to admit defeat now would be to renege in large part the authority won by the victory they achieved in the DDT war.

Perhaps this malaria holocaust is, in large part, allowed to continue because the millions who needlessly die by the disease do so outside of the scope of the roving eye of the West. DDT long ago made malaria a tropical and not a Western phenomenon, and thus the millions of third world malarial deaths have no visible faces to excite Western sympathies or funding.

However, more fundamental than that, it appears, is the singular and sinister nature of modern environmentalism as an ideology. Professing a creed that is eminently respectful of life of such, it often happens that adherents of the green ideology come out with things that don’t jive. The scientist mentioned earlier, J. Gordon Edwards, who regularly consumed raw DDT powder before speaking about it, once called Rachel Carson’s philosophy a “lack of concern for human lives.” He continued, “She could vividly describe the death of a bird…but nowhere in the book does she even think to describe the death of a human by an insect-borne disease.” 12

And Carson, as one of the mothers of environmentalism, has left that sordid legacy behind her.

Earth First! Founder Dave Foreman’s beliefs typify that legacy. “Ours is an ecological perspective,” he said in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, launching into a description worthy of Wordsworth, “that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g. malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”13  Unless, I presume, Mr. David Foreman happened to be the one convulsing to death.

The environmentalist movement long ago distanced itself from whatever token respect it once professed for human life and has come out instead in cooing support of panda life. This would be cute were it not murderous.

Apparently, however, some eco-extremists are coming to recognize the deficiencies of their own ideology. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their controversial essay The Death of Environmentalism allege that “Environmental groups have spent the last 40 years defining themselves against conservative values like cost-benefit accounting, smaller government, fewer regulations, and free trade, without ever articulating a coherent morality we can call our own. Most of the intellectuals who staff environmental groups are so repelled by the right's values that we have assiduously avoided examining our own in a serious way.” 14

If we are to believe these remarks of Shellenberger and Nordhaus (and I certainly do), then environmentalists have initiated and stubbornly sustained a genocidal ban on DDT, because they are “repelled” by the morality of the “right”. And like rebellious teens they would  rather react and continue to react against an established order than to consider the destruction they are leaving in their wake.

6. DDT and Population Control

But that is certainly not yet the end of the story. One of the most revealing quotations related to the issue at hand is another by Charles Wurster, who was reported to have said in 1971, after it was pointed out to him by a reporter that the widespread usage of the pesticide DDT saved lives: “So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them…”

Some members of the left have alleged that this quote by Wurster is false, fabricated by a disgruntled former employee of Wurster’s. And that may be so though it has hardly been proven; but either way, that statement remains in essence the clearest, bluntest _expression of a theory and an attitude that has flourished ever since Thomas Malthus published his infamous work “An Essay on the Principle of Population”; individuals as diverse as Nietzsche, Hitler and Margaret Sanger have all expressed it in one form or another.

Francis Galton, the influential British eugenicist, elucidated these ideas in a more ‘academic’ fashion in his book Memories of My Life, saying:

[Eugenics] first object is to check the birth rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for; and those only of the best stock. 15

It is no coincidence that population control and environmentalism have always been inextricably entwined in the grand scheme of liberal ideology. Both are founded upon an pernicious belief that man is little more than a pollutant, a scum to be prevented from interfering any more than necessary with the purity of the natural biosphere. As such it is especially difficult to believe that the fact that malaria is yet another of the scourges unleashed upon the poor and sick of the third world that goes unchecked by the Western world is merely a coincidence.

The DDT ban, ostensibly supported by false and archaic claims of carcinogenicity, makes no sense unless the goals of environmentalist/over-population activists are taken into account. As one environmentalist commentator put it: “What I said is that the mosquitos [sic] and malaria in question acted as a natural population control. After the introduction of DDT into some areas of Africa, the population increased so much that people began starving.  Population control sounds a lot better to me than starvation and the environmental destruction caused by overpopulation.”16

Junkscience.com claims that “In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, ‘Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing’.”

In short, it is much easier for the West to kill off the poor, or allow them to die at the hand of “natural” diseases, than to determine how to feed them. And that is quite true, for the mouth of a corpse doesn’t cry out to be fed. But is it right? No; a thousand times no.

The “green eco-imperialist legacy of death” mentioned above junkscience.com’s infamous malaria clock,17  which calculates over 89,000,000 malaria-ravished corpses since DDT was banned, is exactly right. But now it is time for that genocidal legacy to come to an end; it is time that environmentalists threw off their adolescent petulance, admitted their grievous wrong, learned to respect the lives of all no matter their race, creed or economic status, and again permitted Third World countries what they deserve—easy access to the desperately needed, life-saving malaria-fighting pesticide DDT.
______________________________________________________________________________________

1.Kenney, Richard, “What Kills More: Ideology or Religion?” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1411041/posts, 2005.
2. Kristof, Nicholas, “It’s Time To Spray DDT”  http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D12FE355D0C7B8CDDA80894DD404482, 2005.
3. Seavey, Todd, “The DDT Ban Turns 30 — Millions Dead of Malaria Because of Ban, More Deaths Likely”  http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.442/healthissue_detail.asp, 2002.
4. Makson, Lisa, “Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide” http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9169, 2003.
5. Crichton, Michael, State of Fear, (Harper Collins, 2004) Pg. 487
6. Edwards, J. Gordon, “DDT: A Case Study In Scientific Fraud” http://www.fightingmalaria.org/pdfs/Edwards%20-%20DDT%20Fraud.pdf, 2004.
7. Hayes, W. 1956. JAMA 162:890-897.
8. Cashill, Jack, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45063, 2005. 
9. IARC, “DDT and Associated Compounds” , http://www-cie.iarc.fr/htdocs/monographs/vol53/04-ddt.htm, 1997. 
10. IARC, “IARC Monographs Programme Finds Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Contraceptives and Menopausal Therapy are Carcinogenic to Humans”, http://www.iarc.fr/ENG/Press_Releases/pr167a.html, 2005.
11. Tren, Richard and Bate, Roger, "Malaria and the DDT Story" . IEA Research Paper No. OP 117. http://ssrn.com/abstract=677448.
12. Cashill, Jack, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45063, 2005.
13. Foreman, Dave. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. (New York: Harmony Books), 1991.
14. Shellenberger, Michael and Nordhaus, Ted. “The Death of Environmentalism” http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf, 2004. 
15. Galton, Francis, Memories Of My Life, http://www.mugu.com/galton/books/memories/galton-memories-1up-v2-300dpi.pdf, 1908. (Emphasis mine)
16. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/1/9/173940/4293 
17. http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.htm

"Follow that chicken" is not one of the more inspiring lines in the history of detective fiction, nor one of the more frightening in the genre of horror. It's perhaps on the level of that classic grade-Z sci-fi film, Night of the Lepus, in which the giant, rampaging, mutant rabbits were just... well, big bunnies. And yet, don't be fooled, the chicken, probably first domesticated in Southeast Asia some 8,000 years ago, might prove the death of many of us, and for its possible depredations, we are painfully unprepared.

In 1918, a flu epidemic emerged from the trenches of World War I's Western Front -- essentially the war‘s equivalent of the slums -- and swept across the world (twice) ridding it of somewhere between 25 million and 100 million human beings (the equivalent in today's population terms of possibly upwards of a billion people). There have been flu pandemics since, but none faintly on such a scale. For nearly a decade, epidemiologists, public health officials, and veterinary researchers -- by now, in fact just about the whole global medical/scientific community -- have been warning that such a new pandemic is a frightening possibility, if not a near certainty. At the same time, some of them have been performing prodigious genetic detective work as a mutant flu virus, H5N1, has lodged in the systems of wild fowl in southern China, moved into massed domestic fowl populations nearby, and begun to spread to human beings; all the while still genetically evolving in birds (domestic and wild), swine, and even perhaps people, "looking for" the means to leap not just from bird to bird, or bird to swine, or even from bird to human, but from human to human at a staggering rate.

Nothing could more quickly remind us that we humans are part of nature than a flu pandemic; yet three quite unnatural changes in our world have drastically increased the danger of such a pandemic. A livestock revolution has gathered domestic birds together -- think Tyson chickens -- onto giant corporate farms in prodigious numbers, clustering them into what are essentially giant bird slums, where any new disease is guaranteed to spread more easily. Meanwhile, throughout the third world, impoverished human beings have been gathering in far greater urban concentrations than anything imaginable a century ago, and any of these are potential hatcheries for a pandemic. Finally, globalization and global air travel have made the spread of a pandemic, once started, almost instantaneous. In the meantime, H5N1, spreads by an older set of air paths -- avian migration routes -- having just made it to Russia. And we wait.

What makes this an especially dangerous situation in the U.S. is that the Bush administration has largely chosen to redirect its public-health budget to preparations for "biowar" possibilities -- smallpox, Ebola Fever, and the like -- which may never endanger us, while scanting the kind of biowar (think Hitchcock's The Birds, not Osama bin Laden) that is actually likely to do so. Between the administration's priorities and Big Pharma's urge to go for the profits -- flu shots are unprofitable products -- America's public health structure is in increasingly woeful shape and certainly, despite endless warnings about what might come, in no shape at all to deal with a nationwide flu pandemic.

All of this, by the way, I know only because Mike Davis has just published a must-read, brief new book, Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu, a scientific detective story, a tale of potential horror, and a sociological thriller about our 21st century world. This is a situation with which we should all be acquainted. Even the President evidently belated agrees. Along with Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (about which I won't even speculate) and a history of salt, he's taken John M. Barry's account of the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza off to Crawford to read. Maybe I should send a copy of the Davis book down to Crawford as well and Cindy Sheehan could present it to him at their meeting.

Recently, avian flu, which for some years had flown below the headlines and nested on the inside pages of our newspapers, has hit the front-page. (On this issue, as Davis points out, the New York Times has been especially good.) The latest headlines -- about a potential vaccine for this possible pandemic -- undoubtedly caused a collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, relief is not actually in sight as Mike Davis explains below, offering his latest update on the monster at our door. Tom

Has Time Run Out?

The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic
By Mike Davis

Deadly avian flu is on the wing.

The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next ten weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls, and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.

An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu subtype that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918. As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi, and Mumbai.

The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds."

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with "genotype Z," the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.

Yi Guan, leader of a famed team of avian flu researchers who have been fighting the pandemic menace since 1997, complained to the British Guardian in July about the lackadaisical response of Chinese authorities to the unprecedented biological conflagration at Lake Qinghai.

"They have taken almost no action to control this outbreak. They should have asked for international support. These birds will go to India and Bangladesh and there they will meet birds that come from Europe." Yi Guan called for the creation of an international task force to monitor the wild bird pandemic, as well as the relaxation of rules that prevent the free movement of foreign scientists to outbreak zones in China.

In a paper published in the British science magazine Nature, Yi Guan and his associates also revealed that the Lake Qinghai strain was related to officially unreported recent outbreaks of H5N1 among birds in southern China. This would not be the first time that Chinese authorities have been charged with covering up an outbreak. They also lied about the nature and extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which originated in Guangdong but quickly spread to 25 other countries. As in the case of SARS' whistleblowers, the Chinese bureaucracy is now trying to gag avian-flu scientists, shutting down one of Yi Guan's laboratories at Shantou University and arming the conservative Agriculture Ministry with new powers over research.

Meanwhile, as anxious Indian scientists monitor bird sanctuaries throughout the subcontinent, H5N1 has spread to the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet; to western Mongolia; and, most disturbingly, to chickens and wildfowl near the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk.

Despite frantic efforts to cull local poultry, Russian Health Ministry experts have expressed pessimism that the outbreak can be contained on the Asian side of the Urals. Siberian wildfowl migrate every fall to the Black Sea and southern Europe; another flyway leads from Siberia to Alaska and Canada.

In anticipation of this next, and perhaps inevitable, stage in the world journey of avian flu, poultry populations are being tracked in Moscow; Alaskan scientists are studying birds migrating across the Bering Straits, and even the Swiss are looking over their shoulders at the tufted ducks and pochards arriving from Eurasia.

H5N1's human epicenter is also expanding: in mid-July Indonesian authorities confirmed that a father and his two young daughters had died of avian flu in a wealthy suburb of Jakarta. Disturbingly, the family had no known contact with poultry and near panic ensued in the neighborhood as the press speculated about possible human-to-human transmission.

At the same time, five new outbreaks among poultry were reported in Thailand, dealing a terrible blow to the nation's extensive and highly-publicized campaign to eradicate the disease. Meanwhile, as Vietnamese officials renewed their appeal for more international aid, H5N1 was claiming new victims in the country that remains of chief concern to the WHO.

The bottom line is that avian influenza is endemic and probably ineradicable among poultry in Southeast Asia, and now seems to be spreading at pandemic velocity amongst migratory birds, with the potential to reach most of the earth in the next year.

Each new outpost of H5N1 -- whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia, or humans in Vietnam -- is a further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans.

This exponential multiplication of hot spots and silent reservoirs (as among infected but asymptomatic ducks) is why the chorus of warnings from scientists, public-health officials, and finally, governments has become so plangently insistent in recent months.

The new U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an "absolute certainty," echoing repeated warnings from the World Health Organization that it was "inevitable." Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100 percent."

In the same grim spirit, the British press revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" -- a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies like the recent London bombings from a secret war room in Whitehall -- to deal with an avian flu crisis.

Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington. Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National Institutes of Health where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections," the White House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by wanton carnage in Iraq.

As the President was packing for his long holiday in Texas, the Trust for America's Health was warning that domestic preparations for a pandemic lagged far behind the energetic measures being undertaken in Britain and Canada, and that the administration had failed "to establish a cohesive, rapid and transparent U.S. pandemic strategy."

That increasingly independent operator, Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), had already criticized the administration in an extraordinary (and under-reported) speech at Harvard at the beginning of June. Referring to Washington's failure to stockpile an adequate supply of the crucial anti-viral oseltamivir (or Tamiflu), Frist sarcastically noted that "to acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in line behind Britain and France and Canada and others who have tens of millions of doses on order."

The New York Times on its July 17 editorial page, a May 26 special issue of Nature and the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs have also hammered away at Washington's failure to stockpile enough scarce antivirals -- current inventories cover less than 1% of the U.S. population -- and to modernize vaccine production. Even a few prominent Senate Democrats have stirred into action, although none as boldly as Frist at Harvard.

The Department of Health and Human Services, in response, has sought to calm critics with recent hikes in spending on vaccine research and antiviral stockpiles. There has also been much official and media ballyhoo about the announcement of a series of successful tests in early August of an experimental avian flu vaccine.

But there is no guarantee that the vaccine prototype, based on a "reverse-genetically-engineered" strain of H5N1, will actually be effective against a pandemic strain with different genes and proteins. Moreover, trial success was based upon the administration of two doses plus a booster. Since the government has only ordered 2 million doses of the vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, this may provide protection for only 450,000 people. As one researcher told Science magazine, "it's a vaccine for the happy few."

At the least, gearing up for larger-scale production will take many months and production itself is limited by the antiquated technology of vaccine manufacture which depends upon a vulnerable and limited supply of fertile chicken eggs. It would also likely mean the curtailment of the production of the annual winter flu vaccine that is so often a lifesaver for many senior citizens.

Likewise, Washington's new orders for antivirals, as Senator Frist predicted, will have to wait in line behind the other customers of Roche's single Tamiflu plant in Switzerland.

In short, it is good news that the vaccine tests were successful, but that does little to change the judgment of the New York Times that "there is not enough vaccine or antiviral medicine available to protect more than a handful of people, and no industrial capacity to produce a lot more of these medicines quickly."

Moreover, the majority of the world, including all the poor countries of South Asia and Africa where, history tells us, pandemics are likely to hit especially hard, will have no access to expensive antivirals or scarce vaccines. It is even doubtful whether the WHO will have the minimal pharmaceuticals to respond to an initial outbreak.

Recent theoretical studies by mathematical epidemiologists in Atlanta and London have raised hopes that a pandemic might be stopped in its tracks if 1 to 3 million doses of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were available to douse an outbreak in a failsafe radius around the early cases.

After years of effort, however, the WHO has only managed to inventory about 123,000 courses of Tamiflu. Although Roche has promised to donate more, the desperate rush of rich countries to accumulate Tamiflu will be certain to undercut the World Health Organization's stockpile.

As for a universally available "world vaccine," it remains a pipe-dream without new, billion-dollar commitments from the rich countries, above all the United States, and even then, we are probably too late.

"People just don't get it," Dr. Michael Osterholm, the outspoken director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota recently complained. "If we were to begin a Manhattan Project-type response tonight to expand vaccine and drug production, we wouldn't have a measurable impact on the availability of these critical products to sufficiently address a worldwide pandemic for at least several years."

"Several years" is a luxury that Washington has already squandered. The best guess, as the geese head west and south, is that we have almost run out of time. As Shigeru Omi, the Western Pacific director of WHO, told a UN meeting in Kuala Lumpur in early July: "We're at the tipping point."

Mike Davis is the author of the just published Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).

Copyright 2005 Mike Davis

Is the Iran Crisis for Real?
 
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Are the Iranian mullahs close to acquiring the bomb? Has Iran violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty by restarting its conversion of yellowcake into uranium hexaflouride? The answer to both is no.

By a recent U.S. intelligence review, Iran may be 10 years away from a bomb. And under the NPT, Iran is allowed to enrich uranium for use in her own nuclear power plants.

Why, then, this talk of confrontation and pre-emptive strikes? Even if Iran had a weapon, to give it to a terrorist or to use it on a U.S. target would be an act of suicidal insanity by a regime that, no matter how militant, has shown no desire for war with America.

What is the worry? Just this. If or when Iran goes nuclear, she has a deterrent to intimidation. U.S. freedom of action in the Persian Gulf comes to an end. We would have to behave as gingerly with the mullahs as we do with Kim Jong Il, something intolerable to our neoconservatives and President Bush.

For the Israelis, an Iranian bomb would have the same impact as Stalin's explosion of a bomb had on us in 1949. Israel's invulnerability would come to an end. She would enter the world of Mutual Assured Destruction, like the one we had to live in during the Cold War. Thus, for Israel, the sooner the Americans pulverize Iran's infant nuclear facilities, the better. But herein lies the problem for President Bush.

Britain, France and Germany do not want to take the first step to confrontation by asking the U.N. Security Council to vote sanctions on Iran for restarting the enrichment process. And even if the Europeans agree to go to the Security Council, a resolution calling for sanctions would face vetoes by Russia and China.

If the council then rejects sanctions, but America and her NATO allies impose them, the world will be divided between Russia-China-Iran on one side and the United States and its backers on the other. It would be interesting to see how many U.S. allies are willing to support sanctions on the third largest oil producer on earth when oil is running at $65 a barrel.

Moreover, if the present negotiations end in sanctions on Iran, then, just as North Korea sped up its nuclear program when talks broke down, Iran might do the same. That would leave the United States with the final option: air and missile strikes to destroy all of Iran's known facilities for the enrichment of uranium.

But as Iran is permitted such facilities as long as it allows absolute freedom for U.N. inspectors, how could we justify such acts of war?

After all, we give a $160 billion trade surplus to China, though she is targeting our cities with nuclear missiles. President Bush cut a deal to help India develop nuclear power, though she has tested bombs. We give foreign aid to Pakistan and Israel, which had clandestine and successful programs that built atomic weapons. And we have a basket of goodies on offer to Kim Jong Il if he will shut down his nuclear facilities and hand over any bombs.

Where is the consistency here?

There is another consideration. Iran's response to any U.S. strike is unlikely to be to go limp like a peacenik demonstrator. As Michael Mazeer of the U.S. National War College writes in The New Republic, Iran's best strategy might be to lash out in retaliation.

What could Iran do? Plenty. Send Revolutionary Guards into Iraq to make that country a worse hell for the 135,000 U.S. troops. Incite Hezbollah to launch rockets on Israel to widen the war. Attack U.S. allies in the Gulf. Encourage the Shi'ites in Iraq and Saudi Arabia to attack Americans. Mine the Strait of Hormuz. Activate Islamic loyalists to bring terror home to the United States.

In short, a U.S. attack on Iran could lead to war across the region and interruption of the 15 million barrels of oil a day that come from the Gulf, which would drive the world economy into instant cardiac arrest.

And as the United States lacks the ground forces to invade Iran and topple the regime, U.S. retaliation would be restricted to air and cruise missile strikes. But just as 9/11 united Americans behind President Bush, attacks on Iran might unite the Iranian people behind the mullahs' regime, enhancing its prestige as it fought America to protect Iran's equal right to pursue nuclear power and nuclear technology, an issue upon which almost all Iranians agree.

President Bush should think long and hard before yielding to the War Party a second time. Iran is a nation three times the size of Iraq and with three times the population. This would be no cakewalk.

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Will They Lose Their Ventures?

Hide Tide of the Neocons

By GARY LEUPP

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3

The neocon plan as I understand it is to stand by while the EU-Iran talks collapse; hold France, Germany and Britain to an earlier promise to support UN sanctions against Iran in the wake of that collapse; push Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA to find Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (even though it's not); attempt, knowing the effort will fail, to acquire a Security Council resolution condemning Iran; have John Bolton as new U.S. ambassador to the UN declare the organization irresponsible if not useless; and then tell the American people the U.S. has tried to deal with Iran's nuclear weapons threat (and its support for international terrorism, and the prospect of nukes falling into the hands of Islamic Jihad or Hizbollah) through the international body, but failed due to China's obstructionism based on Chinese selfish demand for Iranian oil.

Soon thereafter (before a massive movement against an attack on Iran can form) they would like to conduct a horrific tactical-nuke operation against Iranian nuclear facilities as well as government offices. Scott Ritter suggests that they plan an actual invasion from Azerbaijan. They apparently plan to use Mujahadeen Khalq forces much as they used Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. Europe might stay out this time, although Israel may have an important role, and France having generally reconciled with the U.S. and having worked with the U.S. to reconfigure Syria and Lebanon (and Haiti) may be assigned a major role in her former colonies in the Levant.

The neocons must anticipate resurgent resistance activity in Afghanistan (due both to the activities of one-time CIA favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as well as to Taliban "remnants"), as well as intensified fighting in Iraq, where the Shiites and Sunnis alike will see the Iran attack as a U.S. war on Islam, on behalf of Israel. The American Empire in Southwest Asia will as it expands remain in a semi-chaotic state, with weak client regimes struggling alongside overstretched U.S. forces to contain insurgencies. But that is okay with the neocons, who delight in chaos and see glorious victory and progress in the disarray of Afghanistan and Iraq. They apparently think that their imperial goals can be achieved even in the context of ongoing low-intensity warfare, and that they can meet those goals (of controlling the flow of oil and gas and establishing permanent military bases throughout the region) without a Vietnam-like disaster, or a level of dissent in the U.S. that could actually lead to the fall of the Bush administration.

Over two years ago I wrote that "the neocons' Achilles heel is arrogance. They did not plan on the degree of Iraqi opposition, just as they did not anticipate the magnitude of the global antiwar movement in the months before the March attack." They may not have expected that their noble lies would produce some serious scandals, which probably have led several of them (including Feith and Libby) to leave their posts. They may think that they can ride out any near-future political storm, or at least achieve the next goals in the Terror War before they become totally exposed and discredited. But ongoing resistance in all of the attacked countries, combined with resistance to wars of conquest in the U.S. itself, might actually force an end to the "Greater Middle East" empire project. It's just conceivable that within a fairly short time we'll have, not an America on the march in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, but America in crisis, bitterly divided politically and culturally, internationally more isolated and opposed than now, and unable to realize its foreign policy goals or to afford their prosecution.

I personally think there'll be an attack on Iran this year, but then I expected one in June or July. It seems that the schedule has been delayed, and the whole plan could certainly be aborted. A vast movement in this country specifically demanding "Hands Off Iran!" could help prevent the planned attack. But while millions of Americans saw the Iraq attack coming, and protested, the Iran attack if it comes will come swiftly, "like a thief in the night." Surely it would provoke popular opposition, but how big would it be, both in Iran and here? How well would the regime be able to deploy its Apocalypse-obsessed fundamentalist Christian Zionist supporters? How vigorously might it deploy the fascistic means in place to curb dissent?

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune

This is what they're thinking. They have three more years, and foes---advocates of "reality mode" reasoning, international law, domestic constitutional law, and basic morality---are working hard to ruin them and their project. Time is of the essence. If they don't achieve their program now, the rest of their lives may be "bound in shallows and miseries"--maybe in jail cells if there's a substantial political shift. Polls show the country deeply divided on the president's performance, more than half questioning his honesty, more than half finding the Iraq war not "worth the cost." Far behind are the halcyon days of the U.S. flags on half the houses, half the cars. "United We Stand" doesn't cut it so well anymore, because we are in fact a very divided people. But another 9-11 might shellshock a substantial portion of those now critical. It might incline them to embrace the general drift towards fascism.

When we read that Cheney's office has specifically told the Pentagon that the military should be prepared for an attack on Iran in the immediate aftermath of "another 9-11," we realize that the administration understands full well and is eager to use the "opportunities" such an attack would provide them. http://www.justinlogan.com/justinlogancom/2005/07/what_is_the_pla.html To draw again on Shakespeare's drama about Imperial Rome, the conspirators must "take the current while it serves"---or lose their ventures.

The historical record shows us that Brutus and his fellow conspirators succeeded short term but indeed lost out in the end. The unruly masses and their own bad timing brought an end to their ventures. There's no such thing as historical inevitability; there are merely historical opportunities, such as those provided to the unscrupulous by the tragedy of 9-11. The neocons have ruthlessly exploited those opportunities, but might just maybe, following their triumphalist voyage, get trapped in the shallows, shipwrecked in the shoals, appropriately miserable.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

US, China Entering New Cold War

The main theme running through East Asian history in recent years has shifted away from economic issues and a war on terror, and is now focused on geopolitical conflict. The contest between the major powers -- which is becoming increasingly tense -- looks more and more like a "Cold War" between the US and China.

The contemporary focus in both East Asia and the world has changed. Apart from Taiwan, no one still believes in the empty cliche that the economy is everything. Over the past four years, the war on terror has receded from being clearly in focus to background buzz, and the anti-terror alliance between the US, Russia, China and other countries has practically disintegrated.

It has been replaced by a geopolitical contest between major powers, particularly the US and China. This is clearly indicated by recent incidents, including China National Offshore Oil Corp's (CNOOC) failure to take over the US oil company Unocal, Uzbekistan's decision to drive the US military off its territory, and the six-party talks about nuclear disarmament on the Korean Peninsula.

In the end, CNOOC had to back down from its attempt to acquire Unocal. This acquisition, which would have been the largest ever by a Chinese company had it succeeded, put the US on the alert against China, and it also revealed how contradictory the two countries' energy strategies are.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is aware that their greatest weakness lies in a lack of energy resources. Beijing is now seeking to increase its energy assets and secure diverse energy sources in Central Asia, Siberia and its nearby marine territories. It is also strengthening its navy to change the current situation in which the US controls the sea lanes through which China's crude oil is transported. Energy and the wish to gain regional hegemony is leading China to make a concrete attempt to become the dominant power in East Asia and the Western Pacific.

Concerns over energy security are making Beijing authorities eager to drive out US forces from Central Asia as a way of breaking through the US' "containment." On July 5, the Astana, Kazakhstan summit of the China and Russia-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) resulted in a joint communique citing the gradual stabilization of the situation in Afghanistan as a reason for demanding that the US present a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Central Asia.

On July 30, the Uzbek government sent a diplomatic note to the US government giving it 180 days to remove US troops and military equipment from the K2 base in Uzbekistan, possibly as a result of strong US criticism against the government following the May massacre by the Uzbek military of hundreds of residents of the city of Andijan. This is a rare setback for the US, and behind this decision by the Tashkent authorities was strong support from Russia and, most of all, China.

The US government is familiar with the Chinese communists' method of attack and their strategic ambitions. The Pentagon's latest annual report on China's military strength, which was issued on July 19, for the first time points out that China's active expansion of its military arsenal is not only aimed at Taiwan, but rather at "Taiwan and beyond."

The report says that, "Some Chinese military analysts have expressed the view that control of Taiwan would enable the PLA Navy to move its maritime defensive perimeter further seaward and improve Beijing's ability to influence regional sea lines of communication."

The changes in the Sino-US relationship clearly also affect the situation on the Korean Peninsula. The recently held fourth round of the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue was the longest of the rounds. Although Russia (with China's blessing) used new ways of throwing US plans into disarray, the whole process shows that Washington has changed its policy and now is willing to keep negotiations going and reach a solution in order to deprive China of its "North Korean card." This places the US in a more advantageous position in its competition with China.

All signs point to China and the US now entering into a new version of the Cold War. The two are still important trading partners, but they are also becoming involved in a geopolitical struggle centering around their opposing energy strategies. This struggle is now heating up.

Chang Hsi-mo is an assistant professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at National Sun Yat-sen University.

Translated by Daniel Cheng and Perry Svensson

Pentagon Devising Scenarios for Martial

Law in US

By Patrick Martin
9 August 2005

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According to a report published Monday by the Washington Post, the Pentagon has developed its first ever war plans for operations within the continental United States, in which terrorist attacks would be used as the justification for imposing martial law on cities, regions or the entire country.

The front-page article cites sources working at the headquarters of the military’s Northern Command (Northcom), located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The plans themselves are classified, but “officers who drafted the plans” gave details to Post reporter Bradley Graham, who was recently given a tour of Northcom headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base. The article thus appears to be a deliberate leak conducted for the purpose of accustoming the American population to the prospect of military rule.

According to Graham, “the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.”

The Post account declares, “The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement.”

A total of 15 potential crisis scenarios are outlined, ranging from “low-end,” which Graham describes as “relatively modest crowd-control missions,” to “high-end,” after as many as three simultaneous catastrophic mass-casualty events, such as a nuclear, biological or chemical weapons attack.

In each case, the military would deploy a quick-reaction force of as many as 3,000 troops per attack—i.e., 9,000 total in the worst-case scenario. More troops could be made available as needed.

The Post quotes a statement by Admiral Timothy J. Keating, head of Northcom: “In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned—of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved—to take the lead.”

The newspaper describes an unresolved debate among the military planners on how to integrate the new domestic mission with ongoing US deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign conflicts. One major document of over 1,000 pages, designated CONPLAN 2002, provides a general overview of air, sea and land operations in both a post-attack situation and for “prevention and deterrence actions aimed at intercepting threats before they reach the United States.” A second document, CONPLAN 0500, details the 15 scenarios and the actions associated with them.

The Post reports: “CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting” at Northcom headquarters.

While Northcom was established only in October 2002, its headquarters staff of 640 is already larger than that of the Southern Command, which overseas US military operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

About 1,400 National Guard troops have been formed into a dozen regional response units, while smaller quick-reaction forces have been set up in each of the 50 states. Northcom also has the power to mobilize four active-duty Army battalions, as well as Navy and Coast Guard ships and air defense fighter jets.

The Pentagon is acutely conscious of the potential political backlash as its role in future security operations becomes known. Graham writes: “Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. By contrast, other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.”

Military lawyers have studied the legal implications of such deployments, which risk coming into conflict with a longstanding congressional prohibition on the use of the military for domestic policing, known as posse comitatus. Involving the National Guard, which is exempt from posse comitatus, could be one solution, Admiral Keating told the Post. “He cited a potential situation in which Guard units might begin rounding up people while regular forces could not,” Graham wrote.

Graham adds: “when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary, with lead responsibility passing back to civilian authorities.”

A remarkable phrase: “probably would be temporary.” In other words, the military takeover might not be temporary, and could become permanent!

In his article, Graham describes the Northern Command’s “Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center, which joins military analysts with law enforcement and counterintelligence specialists from such civilian agencies as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service.” The article continues: “A senior supervisor at the facility said the staff there does no intelligence collection, only analysis. He also said the military operates under long-standing rules intended to protect civilian liberties. The rules, for instance, block military access to intelligence information on political dissent or purely criminal activity.”

Again, despite the soothing reassurances about respecting civil liberties, another phrase leaps out: “intelligence information on political dissent.” What right do US intelligence agencies have to collect information on political dissent? Political dissent is not only perfectly legal, but essential to the functioning of a democracy.

The reality is that the military brass is intensely interested in monitoring political dissent because its domestic operations will be directed not against a relative handful of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists—who have not carried out a single operation inside the United States since September 11, 2001—but against the democratic rights of the American people.

The plans of Northcom have their origins not in the terrible events of 9/11, but in longstanding concerns in corporate America about the political stability of the United States. This is a society increasingly polarized between the fabulously wealthy elite at the top, and the vast majority of working people who face an increasingly difficult struggle to survive. The nightmare of the American ruling class is the emergence of a mass movement from below that challenges its political and economic domination.

As long ago as 1984—when Osama bin Laden was still working hand-in-hand with the CIA in the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan—the Reagan administration was drawing up similar contingency plans for military rule. A Marine Corps officer detailed to the National Security Council drafted plans for Operation Rex ’84, a headquarters exercise that simulated rounding up 300,000 Central American immigrants and likely political opponents of a US invasion of Nicaragua or El Salvador and jailing them at mothballed military bases. This officer later became well known to the public: Lt. Colonel Oliver North, the organizer of the illegal network to arm the “contra” terrorists in Nicaragua and a principal figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

As for the claims that these military plans are driven by genuine concern over the threat of terrorist attacks, these are belied by the actual conduct of the American ruling elite since 9/11. The Bush administration has done everything possible to suppress any investigation into the circumstances of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—most likely because its own negligence, possibly deliberate, would be exposed.

While the Pentagon claims that its plans are a response to the danger of nuclear, biological or chemical attacks, no serious practical measures have been taken to forestall such attacks or minimize their impact. The Bush administration and Congress have refused even to restrict the movement of rail tank cars loaded with toxic chemicals through the US capital, though even an accidental leak, let alone a terrorist attack, would cause mass casualties.

In relation to bioterrorism, the Defense Science Board determined in a 2000 study that the federal government had only 1 of the 57 drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tools required to deal with such an attack. According to a report in the Washington Post August 7, in the five years since the Pentagon report, only one additional resource has been developed, bringing the total to 2 out of 57. Drug companies have simply refused to conduct the research required to find antidotes to anthrax and other potential toxins, and the Bush administration has done nothing to compel them.

As for the danger of nuclear or “dirty-bomb” attacks, the Bush administration and the congressional Republican leadership recently rammed through a measure loosening restrictions on exports of radioactive substances, at the behest of a Canadian-based manufacturer of medical supplies which conducted a well-financed lobbying campaign.

Evidently, the administration and the corporate elite which it represents do not take seriously their own warnings about the imminent threat of terrorist attacks using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons—at least not when it comes to security measures that would impact corporate profits.

The anti-terrorism scare has a propaganda purpose: to manipulate the American people and induce the public to accept drastic inroads against democratic rights. As the Pentagon planning suggests, the American working class faces the danger of some form of military-police dictatorship in the United States.

See Also:
US Congress votes to make Patriot Act permanent
[1 August 2005]

AND THE GIANT SUV

THAT IS AMERICA

GOES OFF THE CLIFF...