News Release Archive - 2007

Last week, the Senate voted 75­23 for the Biden amendment. Today, the Washington Post published a piece by Joseph Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations in which they write “our plan is not partition…”

The following analysts are available for interviews:

REIDAR VISSER
Visser recently wrote the piece “The U.S. Senate Votes to Partition Iraq. Softly.”

He is author of the book Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq and editor of the website historiae.org, which covers contemporary Iraqi politics. Visser is a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

DAHLIA WASFI, M.D.
Born in Iraq (her mother’s family is Jewish and fled Austria during the rise of Hitler, her father’s family is Iraqi) with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Wasfi spent three months in Iraq in 2006. She has been speaking with Global Exchange and other groups. She said today: “Dividing Iraq — and the rest of the Middle East — into smaller (i.e. weaker) states has been a strategy goal by Zionists for some time. For example, see Israel Shahak’s report.
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ERIC DAVIS
Political science professor at Rutgers University, Davis is author of several books including Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq.

Davis said today: “The U.S. Senate passage of the Biden Resolution on Sept. 27 was both ill-advised and unnecessary. First, Iraqis see the resolution as a step towards partition of their country, Biden’s disavowals notwithstanding. A BBC-ABC poll in March found that 94 percent of Iraqis said they don’t want Iraq to be divided according to sectarian criteria. Second, Iraqis already have a constitution that enshrines the concept of federalism. Thus the resolution is unnecessary.

“Third, the proposal would further weaken Iraq’s central government by devolving more power to the provinces, thereby impeding Iraqi efforts at reconstruction and political reconciliation. A weak central government would be even less capable of suppressing political violence, such as that which is occurring around Iraq’s port city of Basra as different Shiite militias struggle for control of the south’s oil wealth. Fourth, 25 percent of the Iraqi population is intermarried and virtually all parts of the country are ethnically heterogeneous. It would be logistically impossible to create ethnically homogeneous enclaves within Iraq. Indeed, most analysts feel that any such efforts to create such enclaves would lead to more, not less violence in Iraq.”

“Finally, the Iraqi and Arab world’s reaction to the Biden Resolution has been overwhelmingly negative. Even Iraq’s Kurdish leaders have stated that they support federalism, but not partition. This resolution has reinforced public opinion in Iraq and the larger
Middle East that the United States used the invasion of Iraq as a pretext to control Iraq’s vast oil wealth. Iraqi newspapers such al-Sabah, al-Mada, al-Zaman (which has an English section), and many other Iraqi and Arab newspapers have all condemned the resolution as an unwarranted interference in Iraqi internal affairs. What the Biden Resolution has accomplished is to reinforce the perception throughout the Middle East that the U.S. is following the traditional colonial strategy of divide and conquer.”
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VERA BEAUDIN SAEEDPOUR
Editor of Kurdish Life and founder of the Kurdish Library in New York City, Saeedpour is available for a limited number of in-depth interviews. She said today: “The Biden plan is essentially a replica of the [first] Bush administration plan to internally divide Iraq, with one exception. Back in 1990 when the plan first surfaced, the configuration looked like this: Kurds were to get the north. The quid pro quo: they were to support the Turkish military against the PKK and forego any claim to Kirkuk. The Kurds agreed to both. Turkey’s then Prime Minister Turgut Ozal was assured that Iraqi Turkmen would get Kirkuk. He acquiesced to Kurdish autonomy because he was persuaded that without Kirkuk the Iraqi Kurds could not establish a separate nation.

“After the first Gulf war, Israel established its first outpost in the Middle East in Iraqi Kurdistan and in 1993 Ozal died. The partition plan was revised. Now Kirkuk would go to the Kurds; Arabs would be divided along sectarian lines. Under the noses of the mainstream media, the administration has been on track, generating facts on the ground, not least the Iraqi constitution, to assure partition masked as ‘federation.’ Kurdish Life has been following this polluted estuary for over past 16 years. And still the pundits and the politicians keep insisting that Washington has ‘no plan?’ Balderdash.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

On October 4, 1957, the launch of Sputnik had enormous impacts on U.S. society. Fifty years later, the anniversary on Thursday provides an opportunity to assess those impacts — and to reassess the political priorities and hopes for technology in present-day American life.

NORMAN SOLOMON
Writing about Sputnik in his new book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, Solomon concludes that the U.S. response to the Soviet triumph in space 50 years ago set the United States on a destructive course of misdirected priorities that continues today.

“Society’s crash course on a science trajectory was about learning and training to think in ways that would boost the quest for advanced technologies,” the book says. But the extreme emphasis on channeling scientific efforts in regimented directions caused many young Americans “to look at the customary straight-and-narrow path as a grim forced march.”

An excerpt from Made Love, Got War was published on the Web yesterday.

Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, will be available for a limited number of interviews while in Washington, D.C., later this week for the 50th anniversary of Sputnik.
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BRUCE GAGNON
Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, which on Thursday begins a “Keep Space for Peace Week.”

Gagnon said today: “U.S. military planning documents have long spelled out a vision of dominating the Earth from ‘the high ground’ of space for military and economic advantage. The U.S. government — through the Clinton and Bush years — has been among the very few votes at the United Nations against assuring that space will be non-weaponized. The Global Network has been organizing to change U.S. policy so that the arms race does not move to the heavens.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

LARRY SOLOMON
Former UAW Local 751 president in Decatur, Ill., Solomon worked at Caterpillar for 34 years. He said today: “The UAW better be very careful about this Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association that GM is pushing.

“For years, we were told by Caterpillar that we were getting an invisible paycheck in the form of free healthcare for the rest of our lives. Then, just as I was retiring in 1998, they put a VEBA in place. The fund ran out in 2004. So now, me and the wife are paying $200 a month for coverage in addition to all kinds of out of pocket expenses we were never supposed to deal with — and those expenses are likely to rise. Other members of the union have begun a lawsuit.”

CHRIS KUTALIK
Editor of Labor Notes magazine, based in Detroit Michigan, Kutalik wrote the piece “Auto Makers Push VEBA Solution for Industry Crisis” a month ago.

He said today: “On the surface, a VEBA is nothing more than a federally recognized non-profit 501(c)(9) corporation set up to insure that healthcare, pension, unemployment, or other benefits are routinely paid out to workers covered by the trust. There are at least 2,700 VEBAs currently already in existence for union and non-union employees in industries ranging from steel to utilities to telecommunications.

“On closer examination, red flags pop up. A number of the trusts start off under-funded. Many UAW members fear that under-funding could lead to a simple, grim arithmetic: each dollar shortchanged will presumably translate into a dollar that can’t be spent on healthcare premiums, co-pays, deductibles, or quality of care. Under an under-funded VEBA, the remaining costs of maintaining healthcare benefits are often shifted back to workers themselves.”More Information

WARREN DAVIS
Davis was a UAW regional director for 19 years. He and two other former UAW executive board members have written a series of open letters to the current union leadership. Their latest statement, released yesterday, states: “We regret the decision by the UAW negotiators to tentatively agree to place the future health care protection of hundreds of thousands of UAW retired members under a union run Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA. …

“We have previously noted the lack of any real discussion or debate among the members and secondary leadership of the union prior to the negotiations on the VEBA. Springing a new and potentially hazardous economic concept on an unsuspecting membership, either active or retired, is alien to the democratic principles in our governing constitution. …

“From the start, this round of negotiations was projected by the media to be about what autoworkers could do — meaning give up — to help the domestic auto manufacturers out of the ‘competitiveness’ hole they’d dug themselves into. Yet GM showed a profit last quarter of $891 million as reported July 31, 2007 in Market Watch and their stock is soaring.” The full letter is available.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541)
484-9167.

STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes was part of a private two-hour meeting today with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Zunes is Middle East editor of Foreign Policy in Focus, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
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IAN WILLIAMS
Author of the book The UN For Beginners, Williams writes about the United Nations for various publications including The Nation and The Guardian. He said today: “UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon may finally be growing into the job. After nine months of putting his faith in the White House, the U.S. will actually be $2 billion in arrears to the UN by the end of the year, including hundreds of millions needed for the peacekeeping force in Darfur.

“And after giving Israel a pass, he has eventually issued a statement sternly condemning Israel’s threat to … cut off electricity and water to Gaza. Ban-Ki Moon apparently is beginning to be mindful of the concerns of the non aligned countries as well as the U.S. and Israel.

“Ahmadinejad is obviously not a human rights poster boy. But why is he being demonized in this way? Some people want another disastrous war, this time against Iran. Why is India, and now Israel [both non-signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], being allowed nuclear technology by the U.S., when NPT signatory Iran is threatened with sanctions and warfare? Selective non-proliferation IS proliferation.”
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JAMES PAUL
Executive director of the Global Policy Forum which monitors the UN, Paul said today: “There were many protest signs that read ‘Ahmadinejad is Hitler.’ There were also anti-Bush protests, with ‘Bush is Hitler’ signs. It’s sad that people are using this Hitler analogy so loosely and engaging in a one-dimensional discourse around the UN General Assembly session. Columbia president Lee Bollinger betrayed his ignorance on Iran when he called Ahmadinejad a ‘dictator’ — since the Iranian president’s power is actually quite limited. No one is thinking seriously, not even Bollinger, a well-known scholar of the law and free speech.

“At the UN, Bush cynically talked about Burma, Zimbabwe, Darfur and other crises, to position the United States government as the defender of justice and human rights, useful diversions from the violence and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like most other leaders at the UN, Bush was speaking firstly to his domestic audience, trying to appear the statesman and even the supporter of the UN.

“Bush mentioned Iran only very briefly — a relief since many expected new threats that might lay the basis for military attacks. Another small piece of good news from the U.S. president: He announced that the U.S. would buy grain from local markets following disasters rather than dumping [U.S. grain]. If true, that would be a change from long-standing and very damaging policy, that has ruined agriculture in many poor countries.”

“The UN gathering of the world’s leaders reminds us that they are a disappointing lot. They offer high-flown rhetoric, but their practice is tragically short of what we need. They produce ‘spin’ and a language of power, when we need truth, honesty and justice.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

CHRIS KUTALIK
Editor of Labor Notes magazine, based in Detroit Michigan, Kutalik said today: “Many have portrayed the national strike launched at General Motors as something that fell from the sky. For United Auto Workers’ members and other labor observers the only surprise was in how long such a confrontation took to develop. Industrial restructuring; the gutting of pensions and retiree benefits; the crisis in sky-rocketing private healthcare; and the push from employers to shift the burdens of these trends back onto workers have created a situation where we will start to see more and more strikes, lockouts, contract campaigns, and other work stoppages in many diverse sectors in days to come.”
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WARREN DAVIS
Davis was a UAW regional director for 19 years. Today he was at a picket line and was among the three signatories on an open letter to the current UAW leadership: “We are writing to express our grave concerns over reports that consideration is being given by UAW negotiators in contract talks with GM, Ford and Chrysler to a union-managed Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA healthcare trust fund to cover hundreds of thousands of retired autoworkers. Such a proposal, if ratified as part of a new collective agreement, would represent a radical shift in the traditions of our union.” The full text of the letter is available.

SUSAN HELPER
SBC professor of regional economic development at Case Western University in Ohio, Helper focuses on the auto industry. An interview with Helper entitled “Starting on the Shop Floor: The U.S. Auto Industry Shakeup” is the feature story in the new issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

Helper said today: “GM is is a poorly managed company. Until they start making cars that people want to buy, both unions and suppliers are going to be hurt.”
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NELSON LICHTENSTEIN
Professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Lichtenstein is editor of Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism and other books on politics and labor. He said today: “A major factor in the strike is healthcare — if GM is going to be able to relieve itself of its healthcare obligations. Rather than pushing for a national, universal system of health insurance GM is seeking to foist its health benefit obligations onto the union by putting together a ‘health insurance trust’ that will be administered by the union alone.

“Another major issue is GM continuing to globalize — that is, increasingly buying cheap parts from Mexico or Alabama or East Asia; they might not build the car there and GM might subcontract that work, but that drives down the costs and endangers high-wage jobs in the U.S. This comes in the context of the UAW having been unable to unionize Toyota and Honda plants in the U.S., so the union’s fate is now linked far too closely to the dwindling set of companies like GM, where it holds collective bargaining relationships.

“When industrial unionism was more militant and dynamic, UAW leaders like Walter Reuther were relatively unconcerned to see poorly managed companies go bankrupt so long as their market share was filled by their high-wage, unionized competitors.

“U.S. labor law, like Taft-Hartley, has also hurt unions. This has emboldened managers and their anti-union consultants to transform the National Labor Relations Board certification election — which used to be a path of unionization — into an anti-union tool.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

Sen. James Webb (D-Va) said on the Senate floor today about the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment on Iran: “It could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war.”

(Copy of the legislation is available online.)

GARETH PORTER
Investigative journalist Porter has just written the piece “The Evidence Against the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment.” He is author of several books including Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam and has written extensively on Iran the last several years.
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CARAH ONG
Ong is Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, her most recent piece is “Revised Lieberman-Kyl Amendment.”
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MARJORIE COHN
Cohn just wrote the piece “Pursue Diplomacy, Not War, With Iran.” She is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of the book Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

Today Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is speaking to the National Press Club and at Columbia University.

JOHN LEINUNG
A member of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization of family members of people killed in the 9-11 attacks, Leinung said today: “If he really wanted to go lay a wreath [at the WTC site], let him lay a wreath. I would object to him — as we’ve objected to any political figure — using it for a political statement.”
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ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN
Abrahamian, who was born in Iran, is a distinguished professor of history at City University of New York. He is the author of the article “Iran: The Next Target?” and several books including Iran Between Two Revolutions.

ROSS POURZAL
Pourzal is with the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran.

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DAVID BARSAMIAN
Journalist Barsamian’s latest book, Targeting Iran, has just been released. He has recently been in Iran, Lebanon and Syria.

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STEPHEN ZUNES
Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, Zunes said: “As extreme as Ahmadinejad’s views may be, they do not usually represent the thinking of the clerical leadership which are the real power in the country. The Iranian president is not, to give just one example, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Just as Ahmadinejad’s predecessor Muhammed Khatami was unable to push through his reformist agenda, Ahmadinejad has proven himself similarly impotent in pushing his more hard-line agenda. The disproportionate attention given to the outrageous statements of the current Iranian president by those in Washington despite his lack of real power appears to be motivated more out of a desire to promote the Bush administration’s hostile agenda toward Iran than an honest reflection of the complex realities of contemporary Iranian politics.”

Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.

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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan,(541) 484-9167.

STEPHEN ZUNES
Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, Zunes said: “[Iranian] General [Mohammed] Alavi’s comment regarding Iran’s contingency plans to attack Israel with air and missile raids was explicitly in reference to how Iran would respond if attacked by Israeli forces. Despite White House claims to the contrary, Iran was simply re-stating the policy it has in common with most countries: if a foreign power attacks your country, you defend yourself by attacking them as well. Israel has certainly made clear its willingness to do so if attacked by Iran. Why does Washington find this Iranian position so surprising or provocative?”

Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.

The U.K.-based Center for International Studies and Diplomacy has recently released a paper regarding U.S. plans for a possible attack on Iran titled “Considering a War with Iran.”
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SARA ROY
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Israeli government has decided that it “would disrupt electricity and fuel supplies” to Gaza. The United Nations Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, said Wednesday: “Such a step would be contrary to Israel’s obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law.”

Senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, Roy is author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development and Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

Roy said: “It is false to say that Hamas controls Gaza and Fatah controls the West Bank. … Israel controls all borders and hence, the economy, all demographic and commercial movement, water and airspace. Despite its ‘disengagement’ Israel still occupies Gaza as it does the West Bank, where Israeli settlements and their infrastructure, and the separation wall are the primary expressions of Israeli domination. It is the occupation — which gave rise to Hamas — that is conveniently overlooked, indeed forgotten, by many observers in the U.S.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

ZOLTAN GROSSMAN
Grossman is a geographer and faculty member at The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Wash.) and wrote the new article “The Korea Model Rationale for Staying in Iraq: An Endless Occupation?”

He said today: “The ‘Korea Model’ is President Bush’s rationale for extending the U.S. occupation of Iraq from four years to four decades — or more. But comparing Iraq and Korea is like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike in Iraq, U.S. troops are not fighting against an insurgency in the streets and villages of South Korea. Iraq has been divided along ethnic and religious lines, whereas South Korea is one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries on Earth.

“Washington claims to promote ‘democracy’ in Iraq, but it backed a string of military dictatorships to secure control over South Korea. Most Iraqis have wanted U.S. troops to leave (and do not view neighboring countries as a threat), whereas many South Koreans at least initially backed a U.S. presence as ‘protection’ from North Korean attack. But the South Korean public is increasingly questioning the U.S. military presence as prolonging the North-South divide, and are opposing the expansion of U.S. military bases that disrespect women and rural people.

“Rather than following a ‘Korea Model’ in Iraq, the U.S. seems to following a ‘Palestine Model,’ using checkpoints, walls and imprisonment to control an independence-minded population. Permanent (or ‘enduring’ in the Pentagon’s wordplay) U.S. military bases in Iraq will merely increase Iraqi resentment over the years, draw more U.S. troops into continuing internal conflicts, and ensure more instability and a harsher ‘blowback’ in the decades ahead.”
Grossman contributed to the Transnational Institute’s recently-released mapping of hundreds of foreign bases using Google Earth.
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CATHERINE LUTZ
Author of the forthcoming book The Bases of Empire: The Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts Lutz said today: “The U.S. is centralizing bases in Korea, from an at least somewhat defensive posture to a more offensive posture. So, the U.S. bases in Iraq, like the bases in South Korea, have the purpose of allowing the U.S. to launch warfare against neighboring countries. That is how the U.S. military has used its global network of bases for decades. Bases in the Philippines were used in the Vietnam War and bases in Germany were used to facilitate the invasion of Iraq. The purpose of U.S. military bases is rarely simply or even primarily to act in defense of the countries in which they are located.

“The movement against U.S. bases and unhappiness with their presence in many quarters has led the Pentagon to rename permanent bases as, for example, ‘enduring’ bases or ‘cooperative security locations.'” Lutz is professor of anthropology at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, M.D.
Himmelstein is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He said today: “Hillary Clinton is combining two failed Massachusetts plans: the [former Gov. Michael] Dukakis plan, which fell apart 20 years ago, and the [Gov. Mitt] Romney plan, which is in the process of falling apart.

“Clinton is advocating the Marie Antoinette approach to health care: ‘Let them buy their own coverage.’ She is attempting to force middle class families to buy coverage without making it affordable. Clinton wants to keep the private insurance industry in the middle of the system.” Himmelstein is co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

QUENTIN YOUNG, M.D.
Young is national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program. He said: “It’s always ironic to hear Clinton talk about standing up to the insurance companies. She’d tried to work them into her plan [in the mid-’90s], which is a large part of why it failed. The biggest insurance companies actually backed her plan for a time while the smaller ones opposed it.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.