The last days of the past decade were symptomatic – innocent US Americans have been killed by a Muslim terrorist, and they were not the first and won’t be the last to die for the nation’s life style:

But they happened to die for the US’ life style – in Afghanistan, in this war US Americans are in for.

Never-the-less, they were innocent victims by default, although the Forward Operating Base Chapman in a remote mountain region in eastern Afghanistan is notorious to control the secret US missions to kill militant leaders and other villagers across the border with Pakistan using unmanned drone aircrafts.

However, they were innocent by default because they were US civilians.

You wonder? So let’s have a look at facts and fiction in the US Disneyland reality.

Civilians defending the US American life style in Afghanistan – perhaps tourists? The Disneyland Media Machine is working flat out – black is white and lies become truth. There was absolutely no trace of a whiff of any doubt – its benefit is reserved for different issues, for instance, when in these same days when the innocent US civilians died there were ‘claims of civilians killed by foreign forces’:

Private US outpost in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border to provide US civilians with shelter

But if we follow the words of Obama, he’s not mentioning the Afghan students ‘who have made great sacrifices’, too – anyway, they died for the US way of life which is not theirs and which they did not want to live.

So because they are the wrong civilians they deserve more than one doubt: are they dead, really dead? and are they really civilians, innocent civilians? or are they Taliban – at least, they certainly know someone who is. OK, they are dead, sorry for them, but what did they do where they have been killed…? So many questions, so many doubts – we’ll have an inquiry.

However, Obama addressed the true civilians, the real ones:

What these ‘civilians’, innocent and serving in the shadows, have been doing ‘in the shadows’, could clearly be answered by Erik Prince, former US navy SEAL and founder of Blackwater recently renamed Xe.

Vanity Fair just published an article where he was outed as an active CIA ‘asset’ who has participated at least in one CIA assassination program. Author was Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney, and most likely not quite unfamiliar with the subject. He quoted Erik Prince describing the ‘job in the shadow’ as

Undoubtedly, the US of A. don’t spare either efforts or pain to spread democracy and its values, Disneyland style, wherever and whenever.

Origin: Global Research, December 31, 2009. By Rick Rozoff.
	US Troops Defending US Life Style in Afghanistan

January 1 will usher in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.

Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.

The Afghan war, the U.S.’s first air and ground conflict in Asia since the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first land war and Asian campaign, began during the end of the 2001 war in Macedonia launched from NATO-occupied Kosovo, one in which the role of U.S. military personnel is still to be properly exposed [1] and addressed and which led to the displacement of almost 10 percent of the nation’s population.

In the first case Washington invaded a nation in the name of combating terrorism; in the second it abetted cross-border terrorism. Similarly, in 1991 the U.S. and its Western allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait and launched devastating and deadly cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties inside Iraq in the name of preserving the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait, and in 1999 waged a 78-day bombing assault against Yugoslavia to override and fatally undermine the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the name of the casus belli of the day, so-called humanitarian intervention.

Two years later humanitarian war, as abhorrent an oxymoron as the world has ever witnessed, gave way to the global war on terror(ism), with the U.S. and its NATO allies again reversing course but continuing to wage wars of aggression and “wars of opportunity” as they saw fit, contradictions and logic, precedents and international law notwithstanding.

Several never fully acknowledged counterinsurgency campaigns, some ongoing – Colombia – and some new – Yemen – later, the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003 with a “coalition of the willing” comprised mainly of Eastern European NATO candidate nations (now almost all full members of the world’s only military bloc as a result of their service).

The Pentagon has also deployed special forces and other troops to the Philippines and launched naval, helicopter and missile attacks inside Somalia as well as assisting the Ethiopian invasion of that nation in 2006. Washington also arms, trains and supports the armed forces of Djibouti in their border war with Eritrea. In fact Djibouti hosts the U.S.’s only permanent military installation in Africa to date [2], Camp Lemonier, a United States Naval Expeditionary Base and home to the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), placed under the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) when it was launched on October 1, 2008. The area of responsibility of the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa takes in the nations of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen and as “areas of interest” the Comoros, Mauritius and Madagascar.

That is, much of the western shores of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, among the most geostrategically important parts of the world. [3]

U.S. troops, aerial drones, warships, planes and helicopters are active throughout that vast tract of land and water.

With senator and once almost vice president Joseph Lieberman’s threat on December 27 that “Yemen will be tomorrow’s war” [4] and former Southern Command chief and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark’s two days later that “Maybe we need to put some boots on the ground there,” [5] it is evident that America’s new war for the new year has already been identified. In fact in mid-December U.S. warplanes participated in the bombing of a village in northern Yemen that cost the lives of 120 civilians as well as wounding 44 more [6] and a week later “A US fighter jet…carried out multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen’s northern rugged province of Sa’ada….” [7]

The pretext for undertaking a war in Yemen in earnest is currently the serio-comic “attempted terrorist attack” by a young Nigerian national on a passenger airliner outside of Detroit on Christmas Day. The deadly U.S. bombing of the Yemeni village mentioned above occurred ten days earlier and moreover was in the north of the nation, although Washington claims al-Qaeda cells are operating in the other end of the country. [8]

Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not the only battlegrounds where the Pentagon is active. On October 30 of 2009 the U.S. signed an agreement with the government of Colombia to acquire the essentially unlimited and unrestricted use of seven new military bases in the South American nation, including sites within immediate striking distance of both Venezuela and Ecuador. [9] American intelligence, special forces and other personnel will be complicit in ongoing counterinsurgency operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the nation’s south as well as in rendering assistance to Washington’s Colombian proxy for attacks inside Ecuador and Venezuela that will be portrayed as aimed at FARC forces in the two states.

Targeting two linchpins of and ultimately the entire Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Washington is laying the groundwork for a potential military conflagration in South and Central America and the Caribbean. After the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras on June 28, that nation has announced it will be the first ALBA member state to ever withdraw from the Alliance and the Pentagon will retain, perhaps expand, its military presence at the Soto Cano Air Base there.

A few days ago “The Colombian government…announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and has activated six new airborne battalions” [10] and shortly afterward Dutch member of parliament Harry van Bommel “claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao” [11] off the Venezuelan coast.

In October a U.S. armed forces publication revealed that the Pentagon will spend $110 million to modernize and expand seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, across the Black Sea from Russia, where it will station initial contingents of over 4,000 troops. [12]

In early December the U.S. signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, which borders the Russian Kaliningrad territory, that “allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish territory.” [13] The U.S. military forces will operate Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) batteries as part of the Pentagon’s global interceptor missile system.

At approximately the same time President Obama pressured Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to base missile shield components in his country. “We discussed the continuing role that we can play as NATO allies in strengthening Turkey’s profile within NATO and coordinating more effectively on critical issues like missile defense,” [14] in the American leader’s words.

“Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hinted his government does not view Tehran [Iran] as a potential missile threat for Turkey at this point. But analysts say if a joint NATO missile shield is developed, such a move could force Ankara to join the mechanism.” [15]

2010 will see the first foreign troops deployed to Poland since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and the installation of the U.S’s “stronger, swifter and smarter” (also Obama’s words) interceptor missiles and radar facilities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South Caucasus. [16]

U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan, site of the longest and most wide-scale war in the world, will top 100,000 early in 2010 and with another 50,000 plus troops from other NATO nations and assorted “vassals and tributaries” (Zbigniew Brzezinski) will represent the largest military deployment in any war zone in the world.

American and NATO drone missile and helicopter gunship attacks in Pakistan will also increase, as will U.S. counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines and Somalia along with those in Yemen where CIA and Army special forces are already involved.

U.S. military websites recently announced that there have been 3.3 million deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 with 2 million U.S. service members sent to the two war zones. [17]

In this still young millennium American soldiers have also deployed in the hundreds of thousands to new bases and conflict and post-conflict zones in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Djibouti, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mali, the Philippines, Romania, Uganda and Uzbekistan.

In 2010 they will be sent abroad in even larger numbers to man airbases and missile sites, supervise and participate in counterinsurgency operations throughout the world against disparate rebel groups, many of them secular, and wage combat operations in South Asia and elsewhere. They will be stationed on warships and submarines equipped with cruise and long-range nuclear missiles and with aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the world’s seas and oceans.

They will construct and expand bases from Europe to Central and South Asia, Africa to South America, the Middle East to Oceania. With the exception of Guam and Vicenza in Italy, where the Pentagon is massively expanding existing installations, all the facilities in question are in nations and even regions of the world where the U.S. military has never before ensconced itself. Practically all the new encampments will be forward bases used for operations “down range,” generally to the east and south of NATO-dominated Europe.

U.S. military personnel will be assigned to the new Global Strike Command and for expanded patrols and war games in the Arctic Circle. They will serve under the Missile Defense Agency to consolidate a worldwide interceptor missile network that will facilitate a nuclear first strike capability and will extend that system into space, the final frontier in the drive to achieve military full spectrum dominance.

American troops will continue to fan out to most all parts of the world. Everywhere, that is, except to their own nation’s borders.

Notes

[ 1] Scott Taylor, Macedonia’s Civil War: ‘Made in the USA’
Antiwar.com, August 20, 2001

[ 2] AFRICOM Year Two: Seizing The Helm Of The Entire World
Stop NATO, October 22, 2009

[ 3] Cold War Origins Of The Somalia Crisis And Control Of The Indian Ocean
Stop NATO, May 3, 2009

[ 4] Fox News, December 27, 2009

[ 5] Fox News, December 29, 2009

[ 6] Press TV, December 16, 2009

[ 7] Press TV, December 27, 2009

[ 8] Yemen: Pentagon’s War On The Arabian Peninsula
Stop NATO, December 15, 2009

[ 9] Rumors Of Coups And War: U.S., NATO Target Latin America
Stop NATO, November 18, 2009

[10] BBC News, December 20, 2009

[11] Radio Netherlands, December 22, 2009

[12] Bulgaria, Romania: U.S., NATO Bases For War In The East
Stop NATO, October 24, 2009

[13] Polish Radio, December 11, 2009

[14] Administration of Barack H. Obama, December 7, 2009

[15] Tehran Times, January 13, 2010

[16] Black Sea, Caucasus: U.S. Moves Missile Shield South And East
Stop NATO, September 19, 2009
U.S. Expands Global Missile Shield Into Middle East, Balkans
Stop NATO, September 11, 2009

[17] World’s Sole Military Superpower’s 2 Million-Troop, $1 Trillion Wars
Stop NATO, December 21, 2009

Related posts:

1. Change Obama stands for: Marine Gen. James Jones
2. Change Obama stands for: Hillary Clinton
3. Change: Remaking the World in America’s Image

As we know, contemporary Christian crusaders nowadays don’t come along wearing a suit of armour, riding on a warhorse and holding a sword in their hand.

Related posts:

1. Saddam, Dec. 13, 2003: Let’s now charge the accomplices
2. Nuremberg and Iraq
3. Change: Remaking the World in America’s Image

In his Liberal Conspiracy column UK journalist and blogger Sunny Hundal stated that

“there seem to be far too many uninformed people out there saying something must be done about Iran.”

And he continued posing the adequate questions:

“What? Invasion?
Lots of public support for Moussavi?
What is with this idiotic right-wing view that they have the right to interfere in every part of the world?”

Admitted that Ahmadinejad is being exposed as an undemocratic tyrant, willing to use illegal militias that kill protesters to assert his authority, and admitted, too, that the election was a fraud, then last but not least let’s proceed and admit as well that US Americans surely are experienced experts with stolen elections and trigger-happy militias called patriots, not only in their own country.

If Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted, however, Moussavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. So let’s face up to the question:

Are the Iranian Election Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker, ‘Preparing the Battlefield’:

“Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

And again, last but not least, we will have to note the fact, too, given that many protesters have been shouting ‘Death to America’ and condemning the west generally, the one move that will unite most Iranians with Ahmadinejad is overt attempts to interfere by the US or any other western country.

Of course, the protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants, but first and foremost, the Iranian uprising is home grown: the history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny, although the protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine.

Even a ‘non-political’ website, Charting Stocks, answers its own question “Do We Really Care About Democracy?” like that:

“The fact is that we don’t care about democratic elections.”

But once upon a time there was an Illinois state senator who, on October 2, 2002, gave a speech at a major anti-war rally in Chicago:

“Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”

So now, as change has come to the US, finally, you surely have heard much about the democratic elections in Saudi Arabia lately. You didn’t? Of course not, because they don’t have elections at all. But what about any media outrage for the people of Saudi Arabia, a country ruled by one of the most repressive regimes on the planet?

And what about Egypt? Have you ever heard about democratic elections over there?

Probably not. But don’t worry, they are the good ones, because they are allies to the US: Egypt is the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, while Saudi Arabia is the number-one buyer of U.S. arms, as Stephen Zunes explains in his ‘Foreign Policy in Focus’ article How Not to Support Democracy in the Middle East.

And do you know who won last months Panamanian election ? Did you even know there was an election? Well, it’s not your fault if you don’t.

Or have you ever heard anything from the mainstream media of the democratically elected governments the US removed?

Michael Parenti, one of the US’ leading political scholars, writes in his book “Against Empire”:

“The United States has overthrown democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Guyana, The Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia, Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the US national security state.”

You didn’t know that? Then perhaps you will know something about the 2006 (monitored) democratic election in Gaza in which the people resisted western threats and bribes and elected Hamas as their leader. You know, they voted the wrong way and had to be punished for it. Oh, you didn’t know that either?

So take this as a reminder when you’re thinking about Iran and democracy:

“Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away”

Origin: truthdig, Jun 22, 2009. By Chris Hedges.

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.

We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.

The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny. These tyrants were almost always propped up and funded by foreign powers. This suppression and distortion of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power, unleashing another tragic cycle of Iranian resistance.

“The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.”

“Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.

Especially ludicrous is the sight of people in Washington calling for intervention on behalf of democracy in Iran when just last year they were calling for the bombing of Iran. If they had had their way then, many of the brave protesters on the streets of Tehran today—the ones they hold up as heroes of democracy—would be dead now.”

Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran—something our intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America’s venal role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the defense of democracy than most Americans.

Where were we when our election was stolen from us in 2000 by Republican operatives and a Supreme Court that overturned all legal precedent to anoint George W. Bush president? Did tens of thousands of us fill the squares of our major cities and denounce the fraud? Did we mobilize day after day to restore transparency and accountability to our election process? Did we fight back with the same courage and tenacity as the citizens of Iran? Did Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?

President Obama retreated in his Cairo speech into our spectacular moral nihilism, suggesting that our crimes matched the crimes of Iran, that there is, in his words, “a tumultuous history between us.” He went on: “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.” It all, he seemed to say, balances out.

I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance and uses its power to deny popular will. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes—caustically nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels—when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorism within the United States, as our intelligence services currently do in Iran. The attacks on Iranian soil include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations” of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation was reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out these policies against us?

We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence. The louder the Israelis and their idiot allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the happier are the bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting Ahmadinejad call us “the Great Satan,” but there is a very palpable reality that has informed the terrible algebra of their hatred.

Our intoxication with our military prowess blinds us to all possibilities of hope and mutual cooperation. It was Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran from 1997 to 2005—perhaps the only honorable Middle East leader of our time—whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters led to the demise of his lofty “civil society” at the hands of more ruthless, less scrupulous opponents. It was Khatami who proclaimed that “the death of even one Jew is a crime.” And we sputtered back to this great and civilized man the primitive slogans of all deformed militarists. We were captive, as all bigots are, to our demons, and could not hear any sound but our own shouting. It is time to banish these demons. It is time to stand not with the helmeted goons who beat protesters, not with those in the Pentagon who make endless wars, but with the unarmed demonstrators in Iran who daily show us what we must become.

The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are defined by these statutes as criminal “wars of aggression.” They are war crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side of those who share our democratic ideals.

Related posts:

1. An Open Letter to Barack Obama on Iran
2. A War of Self-Destruction
3. US Election Fraud & Subversion of Democracy

When US president Obama received at the White House on May 6, 2009, his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari, the same day the police chief of Farah province in southern Afghanistan said that the US air force’s strike on the village of Bala Baluk two days earlier, intended to free Afghan troops attacked by guerrillas, had resulted in more than a hundred victims, mostly civilians. As usual, investigations were launched by US and Afghan authorities, as well as UN representatives.

As Robert Fisk commented,

According to the UN, 2118 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008, the most deadly year for its people since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001; this was an increase of almost 40% over 2007.

But this year, after Obama has made the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan his war, the US has killed twice as many Afghan civilians as the Taliban did and that number is sure to rise, although, or because, the Taliban attacks in the first four months of this year were up 73% over 2008, according to NATO.

Last September, the US American NGO Human Rights Watch noted:

Human Rights Watch regularly condemns the lack of transparency of US authorities, which are slow to recognise their mistakes. After a raid on the village of Azizabad in the province of Herat on the 22 August 2008, which killed 90 civilians, mostly women and children, the US-led coalition Operation Enduring Freedom admitted to only the death of “five to seven” civilians and 30 to 35 Taliban – and that admission, which followed an internal investigation, denied the findings of the UN and Kabul government. Karzai, furious, went so far as to suggest a renegotiation of the terms of the presence of international forces.

Origin: truthdig, May 10, 2009. By Chris Hedges.
	Obama’s new Guantánamo: Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

Afghan survivors carted some two dozen corpses from their villages to the provincial capital in trucks this week to publicly denounce the carnage. Some 2,000 angry Afghans in the streets of the capital chanted “Death to America!” But the grief, fear and finally rage of the bereaved do not touch those who use high-minded virtues to justify slaughter. The death of innocents, they assure us, is the tragic cost of war. It is regrettable, but it happens. It is the price that must be paid. And so, guided by a president who once again has no experience of war and defers to the bull-necked generals and militarists whose careers, power and profits depend on expanded war, we are transformed into monsters.

There will soon be 21,000 additional U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan in time for the expected surge in summer fighting. There will be more clashes, more airstrikes, more deaths and more despair and anger from those forced to bury their parents, sisters, brothers and children. The grim report of the killings in the airstrike, issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which stated that bombs hit civilian houses and noted that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead, will become familiar reading in the weeks and months ahead.

We are the best recruiting weapon the Taliban possesses. We have enabled it to rise from the ashes seven years ago to openly control over half the country and carry out daylight attacks in the capital Kabul. And the war we wage is being exported like a virus to Pakistan in the form of drones that bomb Pakistani villages and increased clashes between the inept Pakistani military and a restive internal insurgency.

I spoke in New York City a few days ago with Dr. Juliette Fournot, who lived with her parents in Afghanistan as a teenager, speaks Dari and led teams of French doctors and nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, into Afghanistan during the war with the Soviets. She participated in the opening of clandestine cross-border medical operations missions between 1980 and 1982 and became head of the French humanitarian mission in Afghanistan in 1983. Dr. Fournot established logistical bases in Peshawar and Quetta and organized the dozen cross-border and clandestine permanent missions in the resistance-held areas of Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Badakhshan, Paktia, Ghazni and Hazaradjat, through which more than 500 international aid workers rotated.

She is one of the featured characters in a remarkable book called “The Photographer,” produced by photojournalist Didier Lefèvre and graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert. The book tells the story of a three-month mission in 1986 into Afghanistan led by Dr. Fournot. It is an unflinching look at the cost of war, what bombs, shells and bullets do to human souls and bodies. It exposes, in a way the rhetoric of our politicians and generals do not, the blind destructive fury of war. The French humanitarian group withdrew from Afghanistan in July 2004 after five of its aid workers were assassinated in a clearly marked vehicle.

“The American ground troops are midterm in a history that started roughly in 1984 and 1985 when the State Department decided to assist the Mujahedeen, the resistance fighters, through various programs and military aid. USAID, the humanitarian arm serving political and military purposes, was the seed for having a different kind of interaction with the Afghans,” she told me. “The Afghans were very grateful to receive arms and military equipment from the Americans.”

“But the way USAID distributed its humanitarian assistance was very debatable,” she went on. “It still puzzles me. They gave most of it to the Islamic groups such as the Hezb-e Islami of [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar. And I think it is possibly because they were more interested in the future stability of Pakistan rather than saving Afghanistan. Afghanistan was probably a good ground to hit and drain the blood from the Soviet Union. I did not see a plan to rebuild or bring peace to Afghanistan. It seemed that Afghanistan was a tool to weaken the Soviet Union. It was mostly left to the Pakistani intelligence services to decide what would be best and how to do it and how by doing so they could strengthen themselves.”

The Pakistanis, Dr. Fournot said, developed a close relationship with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, like the Americans, flooded the country with money and also exported conservative and often radical Wahhabi clerics. The Americans, aware of the relationship with the Saudis as well as Pakistan’s secret program to build nuclear weapons, looked the other way. Washington sowed, unwittingly, the seeds of destruction in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It trained, armed and empowered the militants who now kill them.

The relationship, she said, bewildered most Afghans, who did not look favorably upon this radical form of Islam. Most Afghans, she said, wondered why American aid went almost exclusively to the Islamic radicals and not to more moderate and secular resistance movements.

“The population wondered why they did not have more credibility with the Americans,” she said. “They could not understand why the aid was stopped in Pakistan and distributed to political parties that had limited reach in Afghanistan. These parties stockpiled arms and started fighting each other. What the people got in the provinces was miniscule and irrelevant. And how did the people see all this? They had great hopes in the beginning and gradually became disappointed, bitter and then felt betrayed. This laid the groundwork for the current suspicion, distrust and disappointment with the U.S. and NATO.”

Dr. Fournot sees the American project in Afghanistan as mirroring that of the doomed Soviet occupation that began in December 1979. A beleaguered Afghan population, brutalized by chaos and violence, desperately hoped for stability and peace. The Soviets, like the Americans, spoke of equality, economic prosperity, development, education, women’s rights and political freedom. But within two years, the ugly face of Soviet domination had unmasked the flowery rhetoric. The Afghans launched their insurgency to drive the Soviets out of the country.

Dr. Fournot fears that years of war have shattered the concept of nationhood. “There is so much personal and mental destruction,” she said. “Over 70 percent of the population has never known anything else but war. Kids do not go to school. War is normality. It gives that adrenaline rush that provides a momentary sense of high, and that is what they live on. And how can you build a nation on that?”

The Pashtuns, she noted, have built an alliance with the Taliban to restore Pashtun power that was lost in the 2001 invasion. The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is, to the Pashtuns, a meaningless demarcation that was drawn by imperial powers through the middle of their tribal lands. There are 13 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and another 28 million in Pakistan. The Pashtuns are fighting forces in Islamabad and Kabul they see as seeking to wrest from them their honor and autonomy. They see little difference between the Pakistani military, American troops and the Afghan army.

Islamabad, while it may battle Taliban forces in Swat or the provinces, does not regard the Taliban as a mortal enemy. The enemy is and has always been India. The balance of power with India requires the Pakistani authorities to ensure that any Afghan government is allied with it. This means it cannot push the Pashtuns in the Northwest Frontier Province or in Afghanistan too far. It must keep its channels open. The cat-and-mouse game between the Pakistani authorities and the Pashtuns, which drives Washington to fury, will never end. Islamabad needs the Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan more than the Pashtuns need them.

The U.S. fuels the bonfires of war. The more troops we send to Afghanistan, the more drones we send on bombing runs over Pakistan, the more airstrikes we carry out, the worse the unraveling will become. We have killed twice as many civilians as the Taliban this year and that number is sure to rise in the coming months.

“I find this term ‘collateral damage’ dehumanizing,” Dr. Fournot said, “as if it is a necessity. People are sacrificed on the altar of an idea. Air power is blind. I know this from having been caught in numerous bombings.”

We are faced with two stark choices. We can withdraw and open negotiations with the Taliban or continue to expand the war until we are driven out. The corrupt and unpopular regimes of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari are impotent allies. The longer they remain tethered to the United States, the weaker they become. And the weaker they become, the louder become the calls for intervention in Pakistan. During the war in Vietnam, we invaded Cambodia to bring stability to the region and cut off rebel sanctuaries and supply routes. This tactic only empowered the Khmer Rouge. We seem poised, in much the same way, to do the same for radical Islamists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“If the Americans step up the war in Afghanistan, they will be sucked into Pakistan,” Dr. Fournot warned. “Pakistan is a time bomb waiting to explode. You have a huge population, 170 million people. There is nuclear power. Pakistan is much more dangerous than Afghanistan. War always has its own logic. Once you set foot in war, you do not control it. It sucks you in.”

Related posts:

1. Afghanistan: Not a Good War
2. The Imperial Unconscious
3. Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart

Contemporary Christian crusaders nowadays don’t come along wearing a suit of armour, riding on a warhorse and holding a sword in their hand.
Today they come from US Disneyland and are called US troops.

He could say so, because – as he had confided to French President Jacques Chirac in an early 2003 phone call – he knew that the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse…

“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

And Robert Draper reported in the periodical GQ,

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

It was US Lieutenant-General William G Boykin, at that time deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence who told audiences that terrorists hated America because it was a nation of Christian believers: the enemy in the war on terrorism was Satan.

“Well you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his,” said Lt Gen Boykin, recalling a Muslim fighter in Somalia who said he had the protection of Allah against US forces.

“I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”

That was in 2003. And this in 2006, with a report from 2008:

Reality or Fiction?
U.S. troops ‘evangelizing’ in combat
WorldNetDaily, December 16, 2008

“U.S. Army Spc. Dustin Chalker, a combat medic, claims videos discovered by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reveal soldiers and Christian missionaries declaring their faith and saying they would like to spread Christianity to Muslims, the Associated Press reports. The recording allegedly shows embedded missionaries distributing Bibles.”

According to the report, the video was recorded for a Trinity Broadcasting Network program called “Travel the Road” that aired on April 2006. It features missionaries Tim Scott and Will Decker in Afghanistan and also shows members of the Oklahoma National Guard.

But in 2009, Al Jazeera published footage shot at the notorious US Bhagram Air Base showing Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, in a recorded sermon, telling soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility

“to be witnesses for him:”:

“The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.

“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

Questioned about the footage, Greg Julian, a US colonel in Afghanistan, told Al Jazeera:

“Most of this is taken out of context … this is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism.

“This footage was taken a year ago … the Bibles were taken into custody and not distributed.

“There is no effort to go out and proselytise to Afghans.”

One day after the Pentagon accused the network of being ‘irresponsible’ for its initial report, Al Jazeera released extended footage of unedited tapes to show soldiers discussing Afghan conversions of the ‘hunt for Jesus’:

Origin:
AlterNet, May 5, 2009.
By Jeremy Scahill.

Hours after Al Jazeera first broadcast a video showing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan being instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population, the Pentagon shot back. It charged that Al Jazeera had “grossly misrepresent[ed] the truth.” Col. Greg Julian, told Al Jazeera: “Most of this is taken out of context … this is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism.”

Now, Al Jazeera and the man who filmed the controversial material are striking back. The network has just released unedited and unaltered footage of U.S. soldiers in ‘bible study’ in Afghanistan. Jazeera describes it as “Extended footage shot by Brian Hughes, a U.S. documentary maker and former member of the U.S. military who spent several days in Bagram near Kabul.”

In Al Jazeera’s original report, Hughes addressed the fact that soldiers had imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari. “[U.S. soldiers] weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons,” Hughes told Al Jazeera. “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”

Regarding allegations that the sermon of the military’s top chaplain in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, where he instructs soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus” was taken out of context, Hughes said in a statment, “Any contention by the military that his words are purposefully taken out of context to alter the tone or meaning of his sermon is absolutely false.”

Hughes is completely standing by the accuracy of Al Jazeera’s report. Here is Hughes’s statement:

“On Sunday, May 3, the Al Jazeera English network and I made an agreement to produce a broadcast segment from a rough cut of my documentary film. This opportunity came after a May 2009 Harper’s magazine cover story called “Jesus Killed Mohammed.” While he researched and prepared that article, I allowed the author Jeff Sharlet to view the work-in-progress documentary. Sharlet’s article brought the film to Al Jazeera English’s attention.

My documentary, titled The Word and the Warriors, is inspired by a personal experience I had while serving as a combat flight crew member during the first Gulf War. During a very difficult and emotional time at war, an Army chaplain provided me comfort and counsel. I will never forget the important advice or the man who – without questioning my own faith – helped me at a time of need.

For two-and-a-half years, I have been researching and producing this film. I have traveled the world, interviewing both military servicemembers and civilians about the important role of these religious leaders/military officers.

During April/May 2008, I went to Afghanistan. With the assistance and full cooperation of the U.S. Army, I was allowed to film at Bagram Air Field. During that time, I was always wearing press credentials, and I was always accompanied by a media liaison while filming. The media liaison staff knew everything I filmed and – as I was told by them – they filed reports every evening about what I had filmed. It was my primary media liaison, an Army NCO, who – on my first day – invited me to meet LTC Gary Hensley. Hensley, the ranking chaplain in Afghanistan talked to me off camera expressing a concern he had about allowing me to film his chaplains. At the conclusion of the discussion, he agreed that I would be allowed to embed with his chaplains and invited me to film several hours of religious services.

Those hours at the Enduring Faith Chapel included his own sermon at a service called Chapel Next. With the exception of a few minutes I could not film because I was reloading my camera or moving to position for another shot, I videotaped Hensley’s entire sermon.

Any contention by the military that his words are purposefully taken out of context to alter the tone or meaning of his sermon is absolutely false.

In recent press statements, the military also contends that – in the footage depicting the Afghan-language (Dari and Pashto) bibles – a cut was made before “it would have shown that the chaplain instructed that the Bibles not be distributed.” This is a false statement. The chaplain – as seen in the footage before the cut – instructs the group to be careful and reiterates the definition of General Order #1. After this cut he begins to organize the group for the evening’s bible study lessons.

Finally, and in my opinion most important, is the fact that EVERY FRAME of the rough cut from Bagram was provided to the U.S. Army Public Affairs Office in advance of this release. On Thursday, April 30 at approximately 1 pm EST, the Army took possession of a DVD with this footage by accepting a FedEx from me. Since Al Jazeera English first aired the piece Sunday, May 3 at 10pm EST, the Army had every frame of this rough cut for more than 80 hours.”

Following Fault Lines, we know how the US is turning soldiers into crusaders:

“The United States is a deeply religious country, over 90% believe in god and 80% believe in miracles. For the US military, dealing with its own religious identity has become an internal battle. Growing evidence points towards a rising influence of evangelical Christianity, and with two wars still raging in Muslim countries with significant religious overtones, there could be serious consequences for the US mission.”

Watch Part 2:

Related posts:

1. Child soldiers in the United States
2. US Military Entangled in ‘Extreme Missionary’ Christian Reality TV Show
3. Christian Right’s Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth

Change is coming to the US, inevitably, and perhaps it’s not the one Barack Obama was talking about in his victory address, announcing: “A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

Superficial appearances which are going to change slowly but long-lasting – the media glitz, the Hollywood glamour, the everyday spectacle of the U.S. citizens going about their free democratic lives in the sprawl of shopping malls and suburbia – hide the reality that the U.S. society is a militaristic one, and war is a hidden feature deeply rooted in US history.

As Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, said in a speech delivered in 1933:

For Americans to see themselves as they really are and move forward in the world, would be the only true real change possible, and in order to start with, they first and foremost have to say goodbye to the “American Century”. It was, after all, never more than an array of illusions in which Americans took more credit than they deserved for triumphs and not nearly enough for follies and crimes committed:

Rewriting the Past by Adding In What’s Been Left Out Origin: TomDispatch.com, April 28, 2009. By Andrew J. Bacevich.

Over and out: the American Century

In a recent column, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote, “What Henry Luce called ‘the American Century’ is over.” Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce’s pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.

When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay, “The American Century,” hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.

With the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, Americans diddled. Luce urged them to get off the dime. More than that, he summoned them to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world… to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Read today, Luce’s essay, with its strange mix of chauvinism, religiosity, and bombast (“We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world…”), does not stand up well. Yet the phrase “American Century” stuck and has enjoyed a remarkable run. It stands in relation to the contemporary era much as “Victorian Age” does to the nineteenth century. In one pithy phrase, it captures (or at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit and inspiration for all humankind.

In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on December 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like.

Thank You, Comrades

So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants.

The problems with this account are two-fold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores, or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story-line.

The net effect is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short, the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring the American Century over, the American people — and especially the American political class — still remain in its thrall.

Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include much that the American Century leaves out.

For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2% of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true “Greatest Generation” is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.

Hard on the heels of World War II came the Cold War, during which erstwhile allies became rivals. Once again, after a decades-long struggle, the United States came out on top.

Yet in determining that outcome, the brilliance of American statesmen was far less important than the ineptitude of those who presided over the Kremlin. Ham-handed Soviet leaders so mismanaged their empire that it eventually imploded, permanently discrediting Marxism-Leninism as a plausible alternative to liberal democratic capitalism. The Soviet dragon managed to slay itself. So thank you, Comrades Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev.

Screwing the Pooch

What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States — missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.

The instances of folly and criminality bearing the label “made-in-Washington” may not rank up there with the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik Revolution, the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, or the Holocaust, but they sure don’t qualify as small change. To give them their due is necessarily to render the standard account of the American Century untenable.

Here are several examples, each one familiar, even if its implications for the problems we face today are studiously ignored:

Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been an American Century, it begins here, with the U.S. government breaking a solemn commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even today’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The line connecting these various developments may not be a straight one, given the many twists and turns along the way, but the dots do connect.

The Bomb. Nuclear weapons imperil our existence. Used on a large scale, they could destroy civilization itself. Even now, the prospect of a lesser power like North Korea or Iran acquiring nukes sends jitters around the world. American presidents — Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line — declare the abolition of these weapons to be an imperative. What they are less inclined to acknowledge is the role the United States played in afflicting humankind with this scourge.

The United States invented the bomb. The United States — alone among members of the nuclear club — actually employed it as a weapon of war. The U.S. led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the U.S. still maintains an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of some other nation doing as the United States itself has done.

Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited those who govern the Islamic republic to “unclench their fists.” Yet to a considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making. For most Americans, the discovery of Iran dates from the time of the notorious hostage crisis of 1979-1981 when Iranian students occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran, detained several dozen U.S. diplomats and military officers, and subjected the administration of Jimmy Carter to a 444-day-long lesson in abject humiliation.

For most Iranians, the story of U.S.-Iranian relations begins somewhat earlier. It starts in 1953, when CIA agents collaborated with their British counterparts to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and return the Shah of Iran to his throne. The plot succeeded. The Shah regained power. The Americans got oil, along with a lucrative market for exporting arms. The people of Iran pretty much got screwed. Freedom and democracy did not prosper. The antagonism that expressed itself in November 1979 with the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was not entirely without cause.

Afghanistan. President Obama has wasted little time in making the Afghanistan War his own. Like his predecessor he vows to defeat the Taliban. Also like his predecessor he has yet to confront the role played by the United States in creating the Taliban in the first place. Washington once took pride in the success it enjoyed funneling arms and assistance to fundamentalist Afghans waging jihad against foreign occupiers. During the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, this was considered to represent the very acme of clever statecraft. U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen caused the Soviets fits. Yet it also fed a cancer that, in time, exacted a most grievous toll on Americans themselves — and has U.S. forces today bogged down in a seemingly endless war.

Act of Contrition

Had the United States acted otherwise, would Cuba have evolved into a stable and prosperous democracy, a beacon of hope for the rest of Latin America? Would the world have avoided the blight of nuclear weapons? Would Iran today be an ally of the United States, a beacon of liberalism in the Islamic world, rather than a charter member of the “axis of evil?” Would Afghanistan be a quiet, pastoral land at peace with its neighbors? No one, of course, can say what might have been. All we know for sure is that policies concocted in Washington by reputedly savvy statesmen now look exceedingly ill-advised.

What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze, thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it ass-backwards.

Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.

Indeed, we ought to apologize. When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin, nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of U.S.-Cuban relations for so long. President Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past U.S. interventionism has wrought.

The United States should do these things without any expectations of reciprocity. Regardless of what U.S. officials may say or do, Castro won’t fess up to having made his own share of mistakes. The Japanese won’t liken Hiroshima to Pearl Harbor and call it a wash. Iran’s mullahs and Afghanistan’s jihadists won’t be offering to a chastened Washington to let bygones be bygones.

No, we apologize to them, but for our own good — to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly, and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.

To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.

Related posts:

1. A Failed Project for the New American Century?
2. The sun sets early on the American Century
3. The Limits of Power: Andrew Bacevich on the End of American Exceptionalism

Ever heard of the Human Development Index (HDI)? No? You mean US Disneylanders don’t have any?

Never mind. At least US Disneylanders can learn by experience – if not cognitive – and that’s why they’re having their crash course in reality experience right now.

Reality check: David Vine, “Too Many Overseas Bases” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 25, 2009)

Costs Far Exceeding Dollars and Cents

The Benefits of Fewer Bases

It’s evident, the warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and so it couldn’t disappear when the last lunatic in the Oval Office moved on.

But back to the HDI – which is new to the US:

“There are US Americans who are a full fifty years behind others in terms of their level of development.”

Tendency: rising.

Such degrees of inequality – whether high or rising, whatever – in the US (closer to Turkey on such measures than to France) are reflected in the HDI scores.

A new report shows that in terms of aggregate health, education, purchasing power, security and general well-being, the U.S. has been in decline – not really new to the world.

Origin:
The Nation, March 4, 2009.
By Dalton Conley.

The president’s proposed budget will do much to bring progressivity back to the tax code. Upper-income households–which have gained the most over the past three decades–will contribute around 80 percent of federal revenues, and more modest incomes will finally catch some real tax relief. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans have applauded the administration’s move to impose limits on executive compensation by attaching strings to bailout money. The reason is one of basic fairness, of course. But it turns out that limiting the windfalls of the few may actually be good for us all. That’s because there appears to be a relationship in the United States between inequality–which is largely driven by an explosive rise in incomes at the top–and overall levels of human development.

In the ticker tape of economic bad news, there is perhaps one dire statistic that has not gotten as much attention as it deserves: the American Human Development Index (HDI), released for the first time last year. The American HDI is especially troubling because it puts all this economic gloom and doom in stark human terms. And the results are somewhat surprising: in good times as well as bad, in terms of aggregate health, education, purchasing power, security and general well-being, we have been in decline.

The HDI has long been used by experts and officials concerned with advancement in poor countries. In 1990 Mahbub ul Haq–a former World Bank official who had also served as Pakistani finance minister–created the indicator to capture the actual experiences of people in a given country or region in a way that GDP and other indicators of economically measurable output could not.

With some slight adjustments, the index was retrofitted to work for rich countries. The score consists of three dimensions: health, as measured by life expectancy at birth; access to knowledge, captured by educational enrollment and attainment; and income, as reflected by median earnings for the working-age population. And now the results are finally in.

The first bit of bad news is that America was slipping well before our most recent downturn. Whereas during the 1980s we were consistently No. 2 in the world (Switzerland occupied the top slot in 1980, while Canada did from 1985 to 1990), by the mid-1990s we had slipped to six. And by 2006 (the most recent year available), we had even fallen out of the Top 10 (to slot 15). Income clearly doesn’t capture every dimension, since the United States still holds the No. 2 position in terms of income per capita. Rather, other aspects of American society make it less “developed” than it should be, given the resources available here.

This decline proceeded apace through the Reagan and first Bush administrations, during the go-go Clinton ’90s, and through the regime of George W. Bush. We have slipped in periods of budget deficits and during the largest surplus in US history. So something deeper about the structure of American society is probably responsible.

Of course, there are some pretty good suspects. There is, for example, the issue of nearly 50 million people who don’t have health insurance. There is the fact that college completion rates have been flat since the ’70s despite an increasingly technological economy. And there is the wage stagnation for the bottom half, a problem that has dogged us since the oil shock of 1973. But there is one larger force underlying these trends that has been gaining steam over the past three decades, and that’s income inequality.

Income inequality has been rising since the late ’60s and is greater in the United States than in any other developed (i.e., rich) country. Income inequality can matter for general health, knowledge and our shared standard of living, for several reasons. First, the more that Americans have vastly different economic means at their disposal, the harder it is to generate political support for investments that would raise all boats. For instance, inequality often leads well-to-do people to abandon the public school system — or to move to particularly well-funded districts, where house prices are highest. Some scholars even posit that high inequality harms our health, as a result of the stress from relative deprivation and increased efforts to keep up with the Joneses (or, as the case may be, the Gateses). While this claim remains highly controversial among health economists, the observation that more-unequal countries generally display worse health than more-equal ones is not in dispute. Such high (and rising) degrees of inequality in the United States (we are closer to Turkey on such measures than we are to France) are reflected in the HDI scores. Some Americans are a full fifty years behind others in terms of their level of development.

Yet the relationship between inequality and overall HDI scores is not straightforward. For example, state-level inequality is not a reliable predictor. The District of Columbia, New York and Connecticut all have high levels of inequality — and are among the richest regions — yet perform at the top in their American HDI scores. On the other hand, another rich state, California, boasts three out of the top five Congressional districts in terms of HDI (including Silicon Valley, West Los Angeles and West Orange County) while also bearing the shame of the worst district in the United States (Kings County in the Central Valley, which includes Fresno). Kings County is further behind in human development terms than any district in rural Mississippi; it is equivalent to the US average during the 1970s, and it isn’t comparable to the scores of any of the rich countries we like to think of as our peers.

These differences — even among rich states — probably reflect distinct policy choices about how to invest in children and families. For instance, California — held hostage by Proposition 13, which has limited property taxes over the last three decades — is among the bottom half of spenders on K-12 education, despite having a diverse population with great needs in terms of English as a Second Language and related services. Meanwhile, New York spends more per pupil than any other state, and the District of Columbia and Connecticut are not far behind. In other words, educational investment might act as a bulwark against inequality’s pernicious effects on human development.

Putting inequality in human development terms captures the cost to our collective future better than GDP, income or other abstract measures can, even — or especially — in perilous economic times such as these. And such a framework makes clear that if we want America to be “number one,” it is more a matter of pulling up the bottom than of continuing to concentrate gains at the top. Until we deal with the rising tide of inequality we will not lift all boats — recovery or no recovery.

Related posts:

1. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – the All-in-One Solution
2. Child soldiers in the United States
3. John McCain’s Chilling Project for America

Afghan Faces, Predators, Reapers, Terrorist Stars, Roman Conquerors, Imperial Graveyards, and Other Oddities of the Truncated American Century

Origin:
TomDispatch, March 01, 2009.
By Tom Engelhardt.

Sometimes, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be ‘modest, realistic,’ and ‘above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,’ Gates said.

‘The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.’

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it:

“There must be an Afghan face on this war.”

U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace — and no less unremarked upon — for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there.

Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory — and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War — ours — a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war.

And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It’s the language — behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought — that is essential to Washington’s vision of itself as a planet-straddling goliath. Think of that “Afghan face”/mask, in fact, as part of the flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.

Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities; but it also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

Spreading democracy, this of course is
another US Disneyland way to make friends with Iraqi barbarians

War Hidden in Plain Sight:

There has recently been much reporting on, and even some debate here about, the efficacy of the Obama administration’s decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, now calls “Af-Pak” — the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since August 2008, more than 30 such missile attacks have been launched on the Pakistani side of that border against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. The pace of attacks has actually risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.

Thanks to Senator Diane Feinstein, we also know that, despite strong official Pakistani government protests, someone official in that country is doing more than looking the other way while they occur. As the Senator revealed recently, at least some of the CIA’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We learned recently as well that American Special Operations units are now regularly making forays inside Pakistan “primarily to gather intelligence”; that a unit of 70 American Special Forces advisors, a “secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command,” is now aiding and training Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops, again inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) these American efforts, the influence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually expanding, even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.

Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part of the American war in Afghanistan is still referred to in major U.S. papers as a “covert war.” As news about it pours out, who it’s being hidden from is one of those questions no one bothers to ask.

On February 20th, the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger typically wrote:

“With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government… Under standard policy for covert operations, the C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration.”

On February 25th, Mazzetti and Helene Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta essentially bragged to reporters that “the agency’s campaign against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the ‘most effective weapon’ the Obama administration had to combat Al Qaeda’s top leadership… Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that ‘operational efforts’ focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful.” Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the attacks are “probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now.” She added, “Mr. Obama and National Security Adviser James Jones have strongly endorsed their use, [Panetta] said.”

Uh, covert war? These “covert” “operational efforts” have been front-page news in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the U.S. presidential campaign debates, and they certainly can’t be a secret for the Pashtuns in those border areas who must see drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly, or experience the missiles arriving in their neighborhoods.

In the U.S., “covert war” has long been a term for wars like the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which were openly discussed, debated, and often lauded in this country. To a large extent, when aspects of these wars have actually been “covert” — that is, purposely hidden from anyone — it has been from the American public, not the enemies being warred upon. At the very least, however, such language, however threadbare, offers official Washington a kind of “plausible deniability” when it comes to thinking about what kind of an “American face” we present to the world.

Imperial Naming Practices:

In our press, anonymous U.S. officials now point with pride to the increasing “precision” and “accuracy” of those drone missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda figures without (supposedly) taking out the tribespeople who live in the same villages or neighboring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an almost sterile quality. They tend to emphasize the extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid “collateral damage.” To many Americans, it must then seem strange, even irrational, that perfectly non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be quite so outraged about attacks aimed at the world’s worst terrorists.

On the other hand, consider for a moment the names of those drones now regularly in the skies over “Pashtunistan.” These are no less regularly published in our press to no comment at all. The most basic of the armed drones goes by the name of Predator, a moniker which might as well have come directly from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about an alien that feasts on humans. Undoubtedly, however, it was used in the way Col. Michael Steele of the 101st Airborne Division meant it when he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq (according to Thomas E. Ricks’ new book The Gamble) to remember: “You’re the predator.”

The Predator drone is armed with “only” two missiles. The more advanced drone, originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-Pak, has been dubbed the Reaper — as in the Grim Reaper. Now, there’s only one thing such a “hunter-killer UAV” could be reaping, and you know just what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to 14 missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wallop.

Oh, by the way, those missiles are named as well. They’re Hellfire missiles. So, if you want to consider the nature of this covert war in terms of names alone: Predators and Reapers are bringing down the fire from some satanic hell upon the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border regions.

In Washington, when the Af-Pak War is discussed, it’s in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of “global counterinsurgency” or “irregular warfare” (IW), of “soft power,” “hard power,” and “smart power.” But flying over the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged face of predation and death, ready at a moment’s notice to deliver hellfire to those below.

Imperial Arguments:

Let’s pursue this just a little further. Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most sky-borne “collateral damage” squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen bluntly explained recently, “[T]he enemy hides behind civilians.” Hence, so this Empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban’s doing.

U.S. military and civilian spokespeople have long accused Taliban guerrillas of using civilians as “shields,” or even of purposely luring devastating air strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create civilian casualties and so inflame the sensibilities of rural Afghanistan. This commonplace argument has two key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill civilians) and the implication that the Taliban fighters “hiding” among innocent villagers or wedding revelers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow Pashtuns at risk rather than come out and fight like men — and, of course, given the firepower arrayed against them, die.

The U.S. media regularly records this argument without reflecting on it. In this country, in fact, the evil of combatants “hiding” among civilians seems so self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, that no one thinks twice about it.

And yet like so much of Empire-speak on a one-way planet, this argument is distinctly uni-directional. What’s good for the guerrilla goose, so to speak, is inapplicable to the imperial gander. To illustrate, consider the American “pilots” flying those unmanned Predators and Reapers. We don’t know exactly where all of them are (other than not in the drones), but some are certainly at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to leave the protection of those civilians and come out into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in the usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot firing that Hellfire missile into some Pakistani border village or compound is, after all, using the UAV’s cameras, including by next year a new system hair-raisingly dubbed “Gorgon Stare,” to locate his target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter video game, firing the missile, possibly from many thousands of miles away.

And yet nowhere in our world will you find anyone making the argument that those pilots are in “hiding” like so many cowards. Such a thought seems absurd to us, as it would if it were applied to the F-18 pilots taking off from aircraft carriers off the Afghan coast or the B-1 pilots flying out of unnamed Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia. And yet, whatever those pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experience a mechanical malfunction, they are in no more danger than if they, too, were somewhere outside Las Vegas. In the last seven years, a few helicopters, but no planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.

When the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the CIA supplied them with hand-held Stinger missiles, the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the U.S. arsenal, and they did indeed start knocking Soviet helicopters and planes out of the skies (which proved the beginning of the end for the Russians). The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists have no such capability today, which means, if you think about it, that what we here imagine as an “air war” involves none of the dangers we would normally associate with war. Looked at in another light, those missile strikes and bombings are really one-way acts of slaughter.

The Taliban’s tactics are, of course, the essence of guerrilla warfare, which always involves an asymmetrical battle against more powerful armies and weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends on the ability of the guerrilla to blend into the environment, natural and human, or, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it, to “swim” in the “sea of the people.”

If you imagine your enemy simply using the villagers of Afghanistan as “shields” or “hiding” like so many cowards among them, you are speaking the language of imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the American public) to the actual realities of the war you’re fighting.

Imperial Jokes:

In October 2008, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, refused to renew the U.S. lease at Manta Air Base, one of at least 761 foreign bases, macro to micro, that the U.S. garrisons worldwide. Correa reportedly said: “We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorean base. If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”

This qualifies as an anti-imperial joke. The “leftist” president of Ecuador was doing no more than tweaking the nose of goliath. An Ecuadorian base in Miami? Absurd. No one on the planet could take such a suggestion seriously.

On the other hand, when it comes to the U.S. having a major base in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian land that not one in a million Americans has ever heard of, that’s no laughing matter. After all, Washington has been paying $20 million a year in direct rent for the use of that country’s Manas Air Base (and, as indirect rent, another $80 million has gone to various Kyrgyzstani programs). As late as last October, the Pentagon was planning to sink another $100 million into construction at Manas “to expand aircraft parking areas at the base and provide a ‘hot cargo pad’ — an area safe enough to load and unload hazardous and explosive cargo — to be located away from inhabited facilities.” That, however, was when things started to go wrong. Now, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has voted to expel the U.S. from Manas within six months, a serious blow to our resupply efforts for the Afghan War. More outrageous yet to Washington, the Kyrgyzstanis seem to have done this at the bidding of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has the nerve to want to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in what used to be the borderlands of the old Soviet Union.

Put in a nutshell, despite the crumbling U.S. economic situation and the rising costs of the Afghan War, we still act as if we live on a one-way planet. Some country demanding a base in the U.S.? That’s a joke or an insult, while the U.S. potentially gaining or losing a base almost anywhere on the planet may be an insult, but it’s never a laughing matter.

Imperial Thought:

Recently, to justify those missile attacks in Pakistan, U.S. officials have been leaking details on the program’s “successes” to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the “possibly wishful estimate” that the CIA “covert war” has led to the deaths (or capture) of 11 of al Qaeda’s top 20 commanders, including, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, “Abu Layth al-Libi, whom U.S. officials described as ‘a rising star’ in the group.”

“Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves — hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka “the bamboo Pentagon.” Of course, it wasn’t there to be found, except in Washington’s imperial imagination.

In the Af-Pak “theater,” we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership one by one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures (as well as whoever was in their vicinity), are distinctly counterproductive. The deaths of those figures in no way compensates for the outrage, the destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region. They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.

What it’s hard for Washington to grasp is this: “decapitation,” to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.

Only recently, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that, while top U.S. officials were exhibiting optimism about the effectiveness of the missile strikes, Pakistani officials were pointing to “ominous signs of Al Qaeda’s resilience” and suggesting “that Al Qaeda was replenishing killed fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer allegiances to local Pakistani tribes… The Pakistani intelligence assessment found that Al Qaeda had adapted to the blows to its command structure by shifting ‘to conduct decentralized operations under small but well-organized regional groups’ within Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Imperial Dreams and Nightmares:

Americans have rarely liked to think of themselves as “imperial,” so what is it about Rome in these last years? First, the neocons, in the flush of seeming victory in 2002-2003 began to imagine the U.S. as a “new Rome” (or new British Empire), or as Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time Magazine, “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”

All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don’t, and the imperial bragging about surpassing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan War, in fact, those (resupply) “roads” seem to lead, embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post recently, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama American mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn’t help starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they conquered. As he tells it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen assures us, the Locrians so believed in “the reputation for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built” that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate, knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded restitution; and indeed, the tyrant was removed.

Admittedly, this seems a far-fetched analogy to the U.S. in Afghanistan (and don’t for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even though the Obama-ites evidently now believe him corrupt and replaceable). Still, as Mullen sees it, the point is: “We don’t always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference.”

Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in his somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just) “early” Romans — before, of course, the fatal rot set in.

And then there’s the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, a superb reporter who, in his latest book, gives voice to the views of Centcom Commander David Petraeus. Reflecting on Iraq, where he (like the general) believes we could still be fighting in “2015,” Ricks begins a recent Post piece this way:

“In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East… The structures brought home a sad realization: It’s simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East… It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean — following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.”

With the waning of British power, Ricks continues, it “has been the United States’ turn to take the lead there.” And our turn, as it happens, just isn’t over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial unconscious. Take David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures, civilian and military, he has lately begun to issue warnings about Afghanistan’s dangers. As the Washington Post reported, “[Petraeus] suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. ‘Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,’ he said. ‘We cannot take that history lightly.’”

Of course, he’s worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find curious — exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here — is the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in which to die.

And he’s not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Gates put the matter similarly recently: “Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the U.S. would simply ‘go the way of every other foreign army that’s ever been in Afghanistan.’”

Imperial Blindness:

Think of the above as just a few prospective entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be compiled. We’re so used to such language, so inured to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn’t seem like a language at all. It’s just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight wars halfway across the globe, find triumph or tragedy in the gain or loss of an air base in a country few Americans could locate on a map, and produce military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit.

We don’t find it strange to have 16 intelligence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running “covert wars” in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same borderlands destroying those who come into camera view. We’re inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language (and pretensions) that go with it.

If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth functioning of such an enormous undertaking. Embedded in its words and phrases is a fierce way of thinking (even if we don’t see it that way), as well as plausible deniability. And in the good times, its uses are obvious.

On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that same language can suddenly work to blind the imperial custodians — which is, after all, what the foreign policy “team” of the Obama era is — to necessary realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the “American face” in the mirror actually looks like, you can’t see it.

And sometimes what you can’t bring yourself to see can, as now, hurt you.

Related posts:

1. The Loss of an Imperial Dream
2. Obama: Less Imperialist, More Imperial
3. Afghanistan: Becoming What We Seek to Destroy

In their latest bulletin dated mid-February the European think tank LEAP addresses the issue of the global systemic crisis entering a phase of “global geopolitical dislocation” in the third quarter of 2009.

The scientists foresee a state of “generalized every man for himself” in the countries stricken by the crisis. That panic would then conclude in logical confrontations, in other words, with partial civil wars.

The French newspaper Le Monde summarises the conclusions of the LEAP experts like this (translated):

According to that association, made up of independent contributors from European political, economic and diverse professional circles, the most dangerous regions are those where the system of social protection is the weakest.

Thus, the crisis would be able to spark violent popular revolts, the intensity of which would be aggravated by the free circulation of firearms. Latin America, as well as the United States, are the areas most at risk.

“There are 200 million guns in circulation in the United States and social violence already manifests itself through gangs,” LEAP head, Franck Biancheri, reminds us. Moreover, LEAP experts already detect population flight from the United States to Europe, “where direct physical danger will remain marginal,” they maintain.

Aside from armed conflicts, LEAP alerts us to the risks of possible energy, food and water shortages in regions dependent on the outside for supplies, and it advises that people stock up on provisions. This apocalyptic perspective could be ridiculed had not this think tank – as of February 2006 – predicted the onset and sequence of the present crisis with disturbing accuracy. So, three years ago, the association described the coming of a “global systemic crisis,” initiated by a global financial infection related to American over-indebtedness, followed by a stock market collapse, specifically in Asia and the United States (of -20 to -50 percent in a year), then the bursting of all the global real estate bubbles in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and emerging countries. All that would bring about a recession in Europe and a “very Great Depression” in the United States.

Origin:
Laboratoire européen d’Anticipacion Politique,
Public announcement GEAB N°32, February 16, 2009.

Back in February 2006, LEAP/E2020 estimated that the global systemic crisis would unfold in 4 main structural phases: trigger, acceleration, impact and decanting phases. This process enabled us to properly anticipate events until now. However our team has now come to the conclusion that, due to the global leaders’ incapacity to fully realise the scope of the ongoing crisis (made obvious by their determination to cure the consequences rather than the causes of this crisis), the global systemic crisis will enter a fifth phase in the fourth quarter of 2009, a phase of global geopolitical dislocation.

According to LEAP/E2020, this new stage of the crisis will be shaped by two major processes happening in two parallel sequences:

A. Two major processes:

1. Disappearance of the financial base (Dollar & Debt) all over the world

2. Fragmentation of the interests of the global system’s big players and blocks

B. Two parallel sequences:

1. Quick disintegration of the current international system altogether

2. Strategic dislocation of big global players.

We had hoped that the decanting phase would give the world’s leaders the opportunity to draw the proper conclusions from the collapse of the global system prevailing since WWII. Alas, at this stage, it is no longer possible to be optimistic in this regard. [1]

In the United States, as in Europe, China and Japan, leaders persist in reacting as if the global system has only fallen victim to some temporary breakdown, merely requiring loads of fuel (liquidities) and other ingredients (rate drops, repurchase of toxic assets, bailouts of semi-bankrupt industries,…) to reboot it. In fact (and this is what LEAP/E2020 means ever since February 2006 using the expression “global systemic crisis”), the global system is simply out of order; a new one needs to be built instead of striving to save what can no longer be saved.

Orders in the manufacturing sector, Quarter 4 2008 (Japan, Eurozone, United Kingdom, China, India) – Sources : MarketOracle / JPMorgan

History is not known to be patient, therefore the fifth phase of the crisis will ignite this required process of reconstruction, but in a harsh manner: by means of a complete dislocation of the present system, with particularly tragic consequences in the case of several big global players, as described in this 32nd issue of the GEAB (see the two parallel sequences).

According to LEAP/E2020, there is only one very small launch window left to prevent this scenario from shaping up: the next four months, before summer 2009. Practically speaking, the April 2009 G20 Summit is probably the last chance to put on the right tracks the forces at play, i.e. before the sequence of UK and then US defaults begin [2]. Failing which, they will lose their capacity to control events [3], including those in their own countries for many of them; and the world will enter this phase of geopolitical dislocation like a “drunken boat”. At the end of this phase of geopolitical dislocation, the world will look more like Europe in 1913 rather than our world in 2007.

Because they persisted in bearing the ever-increasing weight of the ongoing crisis, most states, including the most powerful ones, failed to realise that they were planning their own trampling under the weight of History, forgetting that they were merely man-made organisations, only surviving because they matched the interest of a large majority. In this 32nd edition of the GEAB, LEAP/E2020 has chosen to anticipate the fallout of this phase of geopolitical dislocation so far as it affects the United-States, EU, China and Russia.

US Monetary base – (12/2002 – 12/2008) – Source US Federal Reserve / DollarDaze

It is high time for the general population and socio-political players to get ready to face very hard times during which whole segments of our societies will be modified [4], temporarily disappear or even permanently vanish. For instance, the breakdown of the global monetary system we anticipated for summer 2009 will indeed entail the collapse of the US dollar (and all USD-denominated assets), but it will also induce, out of psychological contagion, a general loss of confidence in paper money altogether (these consequences give rise to a number of recommendations in this issue of the GEAB).

Last but not least, our team now estimates that the most monolithic, the most « imperialistic » political entities [5] will suffer the most from this fifth phase of the crisis. Some states will indeed experience a strategic dislocation undermining their territorial integrity and their influence worldwide. As a consequence, other states will suddenly lose their protected situations and be thrust into regional chaos.

[1] Barak Obama, like Nicolas Sarkozy or Gordon Brown, spend their time chanting about the historic dimension of the crisis, but they are just hiding the fact that they fully misunderstand its nature in an attempt to clear their names from the future failure of their policies. As to the others, they prefer to persuade themselves that the problem will be solved like any normal technical problem, albeit a little more serious than usual. Meanwhile everyone continues to play by decades old rules, unaware of the fact that the game is vanishing from under their noses.

[2] See previous GEABs.

[3] In fact it is probable that the G20 will find it more and more difficult to simply meet, as the growing trend is one of « every man for himself ».

[4] Source : New York Times, 102/14/2009

[5] Idem companies.

Related posts:

1. Closing Gitmo is just the beginning
2. U.S. Supreme Court’s global influence is waning
3. Change Obama stands for: Permanent War for Global Empire and Unchallenged Military Hegemony

Although Guantánamo has become an emblem of the erosion of the US’s legitimacy on human rights issues over the past decades, now after the new US president’s first month in office, CHANGE has come to the US:

“I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture.”

Was it Obama who said so? Or was it a George W. Bush mutant? Anyway, whoever, he continued:

“Living our values … makes us stronger.”

It must be a message from US Disneyland, straight from the horse’s mouth.

And if you think Guantánamo has been closed in the meantime, secretly, or they did change their methods over there, think again.

What has changed is the Obama administration’s evaluation that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions: the Guantánamo prison is “well-run now,” with no signs of inmate mistreatment, US Attorney General Eric Holder said after a recent visit.

“I was impressed by the people who are presently running the camp,”
Holder said.
“I think the facilities there are good ones.”

Nevertheless, Ahmed Ghappour, a British-American lawyer with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 detainees at Guantánamo, just said to Reuters:

“According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated.”

“If one was to use one’s imagination, (one) could say that these traumatized, and for lack of a better word barbaric, guards were just basically trying to get their kicks in right now for fear that they won’t be able to later,” he said.

As the Guantánamo Bay prison camp has become such a negative symbol worldwide, the Obama administration decided to get rid of it. They loudly announced to close it within a year and secretly decided to expand Afghanistan’s Bagram US Air Base north of Kabul instead for some $60 million US-$ – to make it Obama’s new Guantánamo, allowing to hold five times as many prisoners as remain at Gitmo.

The base became notorious when two Afghan inmates died after the use of torture techniques in 2002, and by the 2008 Academy Award winning film Taxi to the Dark Side which focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar.

Dilawar was beaten to death by US soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.

The film also goes on to examine the USA’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation.

Right now the U.S. government is holding more than 600 prisoners at Bagram, but the Obama administration will be going to double that number – and the detainees held at the Bagram air base have no right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, lawyers from Obama’s Department of Justice said in a brief filing in federal court last week, adopting the same position taken by the George W. Bush administration.

Marjorie Cohn, president of the US National Lawyers Guild, commented:

“The Obama administration is reportedly sending detainees to Bagram instead of Guantánamo. It is alarming that hundreds of people in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan will evidently be denied access to courts to review their ‘enemy combatant’ designations.”

One of the detainees who passed through the Afghan prison was Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who returned to the UK a week ago after his release from Guantánamo Bay. Mr Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, head of the legal charity Reprieve, said:

“Guantanamo Bay was a diversionary tactic in the ‘War on Terror’. Totting up the prisoners around the world – held by the US in Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, the prison ships and Diego Garcia, or held by US proxies in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco – the numbers dwarf Guantánamo. There are still perhaps as many as 18,000 people in legal black holes.”

And, as The Independent in its leading article ‘Obama, tell us the whole truth’ on Feb. 22, 2009 noted:

“What is more, Leon Panetta, Mr Obama’s nominee as CIA director, charged with ending the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding by US agents, said that the agency is likely to continue to transfer detainees to third countries. It would rely on the same assurances of good treatment on which the Bush administration depended.”

Origin: Scoop Independent News, Feb. 24, 2009. By Sherwood Ross.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its creator President Harry Truman that it might degenerate into “an American Gestapo.” It has been just that for so long it is beyond redemption. It represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently.

Over the years “the Agency” as it is known, has given U.S. presidents so much wrong information on so many critical issues, broken so many laws, subverted so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many dictators, and killed and tortured so many innocent human beings that the pages of its official history could be written in blood, not ink. People the world over regard it as infamous, and that evaluation, sadly for the reputation of America, is largely accurate. Besides, since President Obama has half a dozen other major intelligence agencies to rely on for guidance, why does he need the CIA? In one swoop he could lop an estimated 27,000 employees off the Federal payroll, save taxpayers umpteen billions, and wipe the CIA stain from the American flag.

If you think this is a “radical” idea, think again. What is “radical” is to empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has hinted, is chilling. These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur again.

“The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before—beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama,” writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book “Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA”(Random House). Weiner has won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the intelligence community. “It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before—beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before…”

In Iran in 1953, for example, a CIA-directed coup restored the Shah (king) to absolute power, initiating what journalist William Blum in “Rogue State” (Common Courage Press) called “a period of 25 years of repression and torture; while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the US and Britain each getting 40 percent.” About the same time in Guatemala, Blum adds, a CIA-organized coup “overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims—indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century.” The massive slaughter compares, at least in terms of sheer numbers, with Hitler’s massacre of Romanian and Ukranian Jews during the holocaust. Yet few Americans know of it.

Blum provides yet other examples of CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow neutralist president Sukarno. It plotted Sukarno’s assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government, including bombing runs by American pilots, Blum reported This particular attempt, like one in Costa Rica about the same time, failed. So did the CIA attempt in Iraq in 1960 to assassinate President Abdul Kassem. Other ventures proved more “successful”.

In Laos, the CIA was involved in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960, creating a clandestine army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In Ecuador, the CIA ousted President Jose Velasco for recognizing the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro The CIA also arranged the murder of elected Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and installation of Mobutu Seko who ruled “with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers,” Blum recalls.

In Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a military coup against leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of elected President Salvador Allende in 1973 and brought to power the murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet who executed 3,000 political opponents and tortured thousands more. In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped subvert the elections and backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month of operation. “Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine,” Blum writes.

In South Africa, the CIA gave the apartheid government information that led to the arrest of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who subsequently spent years in prison. In Bolivia, in 1964, the CIA overthrew President Victor Paz; in Australia from 1972-75, the CIA slipped millions of dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party; ditto, Brazil in 1962; in Laos in 1960, the CIA stuffed ballot boxes to help a strongman into power; in Portugal in the Seventies the candidates it financed triumphed over a pro-labor government; in the Philippines, the CIA backed governments in the 1970-90 period that employed torture and summary execution against its own people; in El Salvador, the CIA in the Nineties backed the wealthy in a civil war in which 75,000 civilians were killed; and the list goes on and on.

Of course, the hatred that the CIA engenders for the American people and American business interests is enormous. Because the Agency operates largely in secret, most Americans are unaware of the crimes it perpetrates in their names. As Chalmers Johnson writes in “Blowback”(Henry Holt), former long-time CIA director Robert Gates, now Obama’s defense secretary, admitted U.S. intelligence services began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet invasion in December, 1979.

As has often been the case, the CIA responded to a criminal order from one of the succession of imperial presidents that have occupied the White House, in this instance one dated July 3, 1979, from President Jimmy Carter. The Agency was ordered to aid the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul—aid that might sucker the Kremlin into invading. “The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on,” Johnson writes, helping bin Laden train many of the 35,000 Arab Afghans.

Thus Carter, like his successors in the George H.W. Bush government — Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell, “all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the ‘collateral damage’ that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance,” Johnson added. Worse, the Bush-Cheney regime after 9/11 “set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officer and contractors used techniques that included torture,” Weiner has written. By some estimates, the CIA in 2006 held 14,000 souls in 11 secret prisons, a vast crime against humanity.

That the CIA has zero interest in justice and engages in gratuitous cruelty may be seen from the indiscriminate dragnet arrests it has perpetrated: “CIA officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand people in more than one hundred countries in the year after 9/11,” Weiner writes, adding that only 14 men of all those seized “were high-ranking authority figures within al Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency jailed hundreds of nobodies…(who) became ghost prisoners in the war on terror.”

As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence, the record of the CIA has been a fiasco. The Agency was telling President Carter the Shah of Iran was beloved by his people and was firmly entrenched in power in 1979 when any reader of Harper’s magazine, available on newsstands for a buck, could read that his overthrow was imminent—and it was. Over the years, the Agency has been wrong far more often than it has been right.

According to an Associated Press report, when confirmed by the Senate as the new CIA director, Leon Panetta said the Obama administration would not prosecute CIA officers that “participated in harsh interrogations even if they constituted torture as long as they did not go beyond their instructions.” This will allow interrogators to evade prosecution for following the clearly criminal orders they would have been justified to disobey.

“Panetta also said that the Obama administration would continue to transfer foreign detainees to other countries for questioning but only if U.S. officials are confident that the prisoners will not be tortured,” the AP story continued. If past is prologue, how confident can Panetta be the CIA’s fellow goons in Egypt and Morocco will stop torturing prisoners? Why did the CIA kidnap men off the streets of Milan and New York and fly them to those countries in the first place if not for torture? They certainly weren’t treating them to a Mediterranean vacation. By its long and nearly perfect record of reckless disregard for international law, the CIA has deprived itself of the right to exist.

It will be worse than unfortunate if President Obama continues the inhumane (and illegal) CIA renditions that President Bill Clinton began and President Bush vastly expanded. If the White House thinks its operatives can roam the world and arrest and torture any person it chooses without a court order, without due process, and without answering for their crimes, this signifies Americans believe themselves to be a Master Race better than others and above international law. That’s not much different from the philosophy that motivated Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. It would be the supreme irony if the American electorate that repudiated racism last November has voted into its highest office a constitutional lawyer who reaffirms his predecessor’s illegal views on this activity. Renditions must be stopped. The CIA must be abolished.

Related posts:

1. Taxi to the Dark Side
2. Closing Gitmo is just the beginning
3. United States maintains secret prisons on ships in the ocean

When each day the world’s global population is coming closer to 7 billion, the US have just passed the 300 million.

US Americans constitute less than 5% of the world’s population.

The US, however, not only has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners and is successfully defending its position as the world’s leading jailer.

The US constitutes less than 5% of the world’s population but

• accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending.
• spends on its military 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and 98.6 times more than Iran.
• its military spending is more than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined.

US Americans constitute less than 5% of the world’s population but

• consume 24% of the world’s energy: on average, one US American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 280 Haitians, and 307 Tanzanians.

• consume about 21 million barrels of oil per day while the US’ own crude oil output is just over 5 million barrels a day.

US Americans constitute less than 5% of the world’s population but

• eat 200 billion more calories per day than necessary – enough to feed 80 million people.

• spend $30 billion a year on diet programs – one-third of the US population is significantly overweight.

Today’s world food supply supplies 2,700 calories per person per day and could feed the world, but the distribution of that food neglects 20% of the population.

56% of the US farmland is used to produce beef; 80% of corn and 95% go to feeding livestock in the US, while one-third of total world grain output is fed to livestock; and here’s water:

• The average global individual daily consumption of water is 159 gallons, while more than half the world’s population lives on 25 gallons.

• US Americans use 408 billion gallons of water per day, a statistical per capita average of more than 1300 gallons.

• Producing 1 pound of wheat requires 25 gallons of water with modern Western farming techniques. Producing 1 pound of beef requires 5,214 gallons of water.

US Americans constitute less than 5% of the world’s population but

• own roughly one-third of the world’s auto mobiles.

• drive about as many miles as the rest of the world combined.

• are far and away the largest per capita producers of carbon dioxide: the US produces 22% of the world’s total industrial carbon dioxide emissions.

Although the fastest population growth is happening in Africa an US American’s impact on the environment will be over 250 times greater than a Sub-Saharan African.

With only one-twentieth of the world’s population, US Americans consume 20% of its resources.

During his inauguration speech, the new US president Barack Obama promised:

“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence.”

Mickey Z. commented:

“Here’s a news flash for the Pope of Hope: “Our way of life” (in the more general sense) not only needs to be apologized for, it needs to be permanently altered…in a major way.
…
Ponder this: a human born in America will have, on average, 370 times more of an environmental impact than a human born in Ethiopia. Let the president of Ethiopia eschew lifestyle apologies (for now). Here in the United States of Consumption, we lack that luxury.”

No, it’s not going to be OK.
Origin: Truthdig, February 2, 2009. By Chris Hedges.

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless.

Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book “Democracy Incorporated” uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

I reached Wolin, 86, by phone at his home about 25 miles north of San Francisco. He was a bombardier in the South Pacific during World War II and went to Harvard after the war to get his doctorate. Wolin has written classics such as “Politics and Vision” and “Tocqueville Between Two Worlds.” His newest book is one of the most important and prescient critiques to date of the American political system. He is also the author of a series of remarkable essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from public awareness because, as he told me, “it is harder and harder for people like me to get a public hearing.” He said that publications, such as The New York Review of Books, which often published his work a couple of decades ago, lost interest in his critiques of American capitalism, his warnings about the subversion of democratic institutions and the emergence of the corporate state. He does not hold out much hope for Obama.

“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged,” Wolin told me when I asked him about the new Obama administration. “This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium.”

Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that without “radical and drastic remedies” the response to mounting discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge “expansion of government power.”

“Our political culture has remained unhelpful in fostering a democratic consciousness,” he said. “The political system and its operatives will not be constrained by popular discontent or uprisings.”

Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive. I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in our standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty lead the working and middle classes to place their faith in demagogues, especially those from the Christian right?

“I think that’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “That was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn’t just FDR. There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin. There were even more extreme movements including the Klan. The extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and bleakness is a very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism.”

He said the widespread political passivity is dangerous. It is often exploited by demagogues who pose as saviors and offer dreams of glory and salvation. He warned that “the apoliticalness, even anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements in taking us towards a radically dictatorial direction. It testifies to how thin the commitment to democracy is in the present circumstances. Democracy is not ascendant. It is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The extent to which young people have been drawn away from public concerns and given this extraordinary range of diversions makes it very likely they could then rally to a demagogue.”

Wolin lamented that the corporate state has successfully blocked any real debate about alternative forms of power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not, he said. And those who critique corporate power are given no place in the national dialogue.

“In the 1930s there were all kinds of alternative understandings, from socialism to more extensive governmental involvement,” he said. “There was a range of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is the narrow range within which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed to work with the financial system. So the people who helped create this system are put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major effort to think outside the box.”

“The puzzle to me is the lack of social unrest,” Wolin said when I asked why we have not yet seen rioting or protests. He said he worried that popular protests will be dismissed and ignored by the corporate media. This, he said, is what happened when tens of thousands protested the war in Iraq. This will permit the state to ruthlessly suppress local protests, as happened during the Democratic and Republic conventions. Anti-war protests in the 1960s gained momentum from their ability to spread across the country, he noted. This, he said, may not happen this time. “The ways they can isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are formidable,” he said.

“My greatest fear is that the Obama administration will achieve relatively little in terms of structural change,” he added. “They may at best keep the system going. But there is a growing pessimism. Every day we hear how much longer the recession will continue. They are already talking about beyond next year. The economic difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and because of globalization more difficult to deal with. I wish the political establishment, the parties and leadership, would become more aware of the depths of the problem. They can’t keep throwing money at this. They have to begin structural changes that involve a very different approach from a market economy. I don’t think this will happen.”

“I keep asking why and how and when this country became so conservative,” he went on. “This country once prided itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It is probably the most conservative of all the advanced countries.”

The American left, he said, has crumbled. It sold out to a bankrupt Democratic Party, abandoned the working class and has no ability to organize. Unions are a spent force. The universities are mills for corporate employees. The press churns out info-entertainment or fatuous pundits. The left, he said, no longer has the capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state. He said that if an extreme right gains momentum there will probably be very little organized resistance.

“The left is amorphous,” he said. “I despair over the left. Left parties may be small in number in Europe but they are a coherent organization that keeps going. Here, except for Nader’s efforts, we don’t have that. We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It goes nowhere.”

Related posts:

1. Change Obama stands for: Marine Gen. James Jones
2. What Change in US America Really Means
3. Bring on the Victims! Condemn the Fighters!

From CHANGE to REINVENTING AMERICA – everything now seems to be on the agenda in the US.

Do not ask, which one is meant of the Americas, because US Disneylanders only know this one and only. Psychologists call it ‘selective perception’, meaning that people tend to perceive things according to their beliefs more than as they really are.

And US Disneylanders are strong in believing, it’s a specific part of their national DNA: to believe in myths is one of their essential features.

So many of them now believe, having elected another president – a ‘real’ one – that they have fulfilled their part of this fabulous CHANGE they are so proud of.

They believe that now it’s the president’s turn to keep the change going – that’s what he was elected for – although CHANGE hasn’t really started yet.

“Yes, we did it”, you can hear them babbling all along – just as if they still can’t believe that they really did it. And what is it they so proudly did? They have disposed of their last president because he turned out to be a loser, not because he is or became or was a criminal, a liar, a crook or only the dumb front man of a criminal corporate US Mafia conspiracy.

All this is irrelevant and doesn’t matter.

His failure was the wreckage of that business ‘as usual’ he had been elected to ensure for the next (“American”, of course) century.

His failure was, that all this stuff happened – 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, torture, massive fiscal deficits, contempt for science and then, finally, the economic and financial collapse.

At the end, his folks changed their colour from winner to whiner, and, yielding to despair – a drowning man will ever clutch at a straw, you know – they even voted for a black messiah to bring them back on a victory road, whatever.

And now, as CHANGE is on the agenda, they want to have changed everything but themselves and their so called ‘values’.

Oh yes, these legendary ‘values’, where are they evident – in the myths or in reality?

The answer is simple. The ‘values’ you find in the myths are Disneyland values, unreal, a kind of religion, for believers only, and solely created to make the real ones invisible. For those, the real values, you have to look at reality and its real history, and there you discover the root of the matter: mendacity, appearing on all levels of US American life, as a manifestation of dominant mental Disneyland.

Having delivered their votes as their part of CHANGE, which is another belief and self-deception, they feel to be out of the woods now, and returning to their good ol’ times of ‘business as usual’ is all they want.

The last president and his two terms – a loser, irrelevant, staple it together and call it bad weather – that’s the Disneyland way. Disneyland is designated for winners only – ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’ – don’t look back, let’s move forward: this is American!

Or, as VP Joe Biden has said: “We should be looking forward, not backwards.”

CHANGE, however, needs a different approach, and it’s indispensable to start with an examination of the past, without Disneyland glasses, but self-critical instead and step by step, to overcome successfully this notorious Disneyland mendacity.

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

- C.S. Lewis, Irish-born British scholar and novelist, 1898 – 1963.

Origin: The Smirking Chimp, January 27, 2009. By Bob Higgins.

There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America’s most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract “information” from detainees in that and other facilities.

In a piece in this morning’s Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.”

Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, “the world” did not “change” on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a “very different country” on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen’s (and others) claim.

In many ways it is our body of law that binds the past, present and future. The rule of law gives constancy to our “values.” Laws may change but the process of change is, and should be reasoned and deliberate, not an impassioned reaction to the events of the day. That kind of reaction to the passions of the moment is the path of the lynch mob.

If, as is said in legal circles, “big cases make for bad law,” the events of 9/11 and the rapid changes in our laws and public policy that resulted from the reaction to those events gives us the mother of all examples of the aphorism. An extremely big case led to a series of terrible revisions of our laws.

Among the legion of egregious errors committed by the last Republican administration was the naming of the war that it proposed to fight following the criminal destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of a fourth commercial airliner in a Pennsylvania pasture.

As has been pointed out numerous times “War on Terror” is an unfortunate term which calls for a war on a tactic: terror. You can no more fight a war against “terror” than you can fight a war against “covering fire,” “encirclement” “camouflage” or “surprise.”

Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the Goebbelian PR squad in the White House basement used the term “terror” more for its perceived effectiveness in arousing the public than for any accuracy in describing their strategy, or as Bush put it, “strategery.” It was in the Bush White House that the ad boys gave the word a capital “T” and used it as their “brand” for instilling public fear and acquiescence in nearly any act that they chose to carry out over the ensuing seven years.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 involved specific criminal acts, all of which are spelled out in federal and state law and punishable by lengthy prison terms up to and including life in prison. Under federal law, death penalty statutes would apply for the murder of the thousands of victims of the crimes.

When the World trade center was bombed the first time in 1993 the crime was investigated by the NYPD, the ATF and the FBI with the help, no doubt, of other agencies both here and abroad. A thorough investigation by law enforcement professionals resulted in the arrest, conviction and life sentences for the criminals involved.

The Marines were not sent in, nor were the Army and Navy deployed in force and the country did not go to war. Rather than launching a full scale campaign of “shock and awe,” the Clinton administration, in its wisdom, effectively, sent in “Columbo.”

Following the crimes of 9/11 the mindset of our “leadership” was very different; actually, it now seems that the minds were made up before the event, made up in fact even before the 2000 election.

An investigation quickly confirmed the involvement of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and it was quickly decided to take on the Taliban and al Qaeda, Afghanistan was never intended to be the main thrust, nor was bin Laden to be the main target.

The public was, quite rightly, afraid after the attacks; I was. (I watched it on TV too) It was a time of fear and uncertainty that called for calm leadership and thoughtful action.

That is not what we got. We got a strutting cowboy alternately threatening the world, boasting of American might, and daring potential adversaries to “bring it on.” He sounded like a drunken Saturday night drugstore cowpoke, cranked up on Jack Daniels, inviting any and all to a session of parking lot gravel dancing. “Mano a mano?”

Afghanistan and the Taliban were bottled up quickly, bin Laden isolated and rendered ineffective (at least temporarily) and the public roared its approval. (Cohen cites Bush’s 92% approval ratings)

But our leadership kept feeding the collective fear and fanning the flames of public passion with manufactured intelligence, imagined alliances, an “axis of evil” cut from whole cloth and mythical “weapons of mass destruction.”

Afghanistan and bin Laden was not enough, it would not serve as the entree to the Middle East that our “leadership” required, and in fact, his capture or death would retard the main goal of this posse. Saddam Hussein was to be the quarry, Iraqi oil the tool, American hegemony in the Middle East the ultimate prize.

Proof, (at least the appearance of proof) was needed to bind Iraq and Hussein with al Qaeda and bin Laden. Proof was needed to tie bin Laden’s ability to acquire WMD to Hussein, to Iran, to anywhere they wanted to make a move.

They spread cash all over Afghanistan, all over Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Wads of hundred dollar bills, five grand here, ten there, were offered for information about al Qaeda members in some of the world’s most impoverished countries, places where the annual per capita income is less than I spend on rum, and they got results.

People turned in cab drivers, personal rivals, enemies, tourists, their wife’s divorce lawyer, you get the picture. Lots of suspects, never mind that they were often told by locals, by advisers, by interpreters that they were collaring the wrong guys, that many of these people were just hapless bystanders who had wandered into the net. It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because they weren’t looking for facts; they were looking for “information.” “Information” was necessary to tie Saddam to the “war on terror,” so electrodes were attached, thumbs were screwed, genitals mistreated, people were “extraordinarily hydrated,” and they got lots of “information.”

Hook me up to the Toquemada machine and I’ll confess to anything, any crime, any degradation to make the pain stop, and so will you. In a few days any of us will confess to being responsible for original sin, to make the pain stop.

Did they get facts, sure, cast a net that wide and you’re bound to catch something edible, but I expect that the ratio of facts to “information” is, as they say, “highly classified.”

At what cost did they gather these facts? We’ll probably never know how many average Joes were destroyed, how many families ruined, how many people were murdered as a result of these “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or how many minds were destroyed in the process.

And that is why we cannot “look forward,” we cannot ignore these terrible, willful crimes, these war crimes, these crimes against humanity.

We must answer as a society for the criminality of our leadership by prosecuting them for what they purported to do in our name.

Cohen adds this:

“At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives — and maybe were — and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs — not time-stampers who take no chances.”

Is the cop on the street who beats a false confession out of a teenage suspect making a “sincere effort” to enforce the law? Is he saving lives?

Are the “finest people” those who can be persuaded to violate all norms of human decency?

Are those who resist power and insist on following the rule of law, now to be called “time stampers,” “who take no chances?”

Cohen writes:

“The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done — back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.”

I suggest that blue ribbon commissions are usually hired when whitewashing is felt to be the solution. I think that this is a job for the Justice department and perhaps a special prosecutor.

We don’t need to find out what went wrong, there is a world full of opprobrium focused on our country as a result of these crimes, there is a sea of blood and body parts to attest to what went wrong. There is a universe filled with screams of torment to testify to what went wrong; it is time to find out whom, to what degree and to punish accordingly.

Yes we were scared, I too wanted to be secure but I have never been willing to give up my rights or the human rights of others for my personal safety; so don’t, Mr. Cohen, try to blame this on me or the American people. We didn’t sign on for crimes against humanity.

I’ll leave you with this; I am a Marine veteran of Vietnam; twice a year (as I remember) we were instructed in the Military “Code of Conduct.”

Here is a relevant excerpt:

“It is a violation of the Geneva Convention to place a prisoner under physical or mental duress, torture or any other form of coercion in an effort to secure information.”
US Military Code of Conduct

Fact: Torture is illegal under US and international law.

Fact: We hung German officers and civilians for ordering others to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Fact: We executed Japanese soldiers in WW2 for water boarding allied prisoners.

Fact: We punished our troops in Vietnam for the same offenses.

Leadership must be prosecuted for issuing unlawful orders to their troops which require them to violate our laws, treaties and conventions and the troops they lead are required to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders whether from superior officers, from a frightened populace or… from a lynch mob.

Related posts:

1. The torture time bomb
2. The trail of torture
3. At the Age of 22 Omar Khadr Has Spent a Third of His Life in Guantánamo

On Friday, Jan. 16, 2009, The Guardian published a noteworthy declaration, signed by many prominent, mostly UK based scientists and artists, calling “to stop Israel from winning its war.”

“The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel’s ongoing appropriation of their land and resources.”

One year ago, on Jan. 23, 2008, Soumaya Ghannoushi stated in The Guardian, “Gaza explodes”, and gave her description of the situation at that time – which even has worsened since then:

“Gaza is a big prison. A wall, electric fences and watchtowers manned by hundreds of armed soldiers make escape almost impossible. Israel’s much vaunted disengagement is a fallacy. Gaza is still very much occupied. Even before Hamas was elected into power, the Israeli government not only severely restricted entry from the strip into Israel, but also controlled passage through the border crossing into Egypt and refused to allow the Palestinians to open their airport or seaport.

Two months ago, the Annapolis summit was convened in the US to “kick start the peace process” and “lay the foundation for the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state.” A week ago, Bush toured the region from Jerusalem to Riyadh and Sharm el Sheikh loaded with smiles, promises of peace and prosperity, and pledges of “staying engaged”.

But for Palestinians, life has grown more unbearable since Bush decided to get “engaged”. Since Annapolis, the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israelis has soared 100%. The ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed last year was the most unbalanced ever, at 40:1, up from 30:1 in 2006 and 4:1 from 2000-2005. The total death toll for 2007 stands at 322 Palestinians and eight Israelis. Of the eight, five were soldiers who died while carrying out military operations inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The pretext for these endless killings is the Qassam rockets. But the truth is that the daily incursions, assassinations, and embargo, have proceeded without fail before and after the rockets. The excuses change all the time, but the reality of occupation remains the same.

Since the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Israel has sealed off all its crossings with Gaza with Washington’s full backing. It has also exerted enormous pressure on the Egyptians to close the Rafah border, blocking the only point of passage from the beleaguered strip to the outside world.

Gaza is at Israel’s mercy. It depends almost totally on it for electricity and fuel, a result of the 38 years of Israel’s direct control over of the Strip. This dependence has grown since June 2006, when Israel bombed Gaza’s only power station. This was forced to close on Sunday when Israel blocked fuel shipment to the Strip. And, of course, no electricity does not mean dark candlelit nights only; it means no heating in the cold Gazan winter, and, more crucially, no water, with no fuel to pump, treat, or deliver the vital liquid to homes, schools, medical clinics or hospitals.

It is difficult to imagine the depth of Gazans’ misery. For months a terrible cloud of stench has been hanging over the tiny coastal strip. The sanitation system is in a state of paralysis. Raw sewage is spilling out on to the streets, homes and fields, and in order to save fuel, the city has stopped collecting garbage – 400 metric tons a day.

The siege has reduced 85% of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to total dependency on food aid, the highest rate anywhere in the world. More than 95% of businesses and factories have been forced to close their doors (3,500), leading to the loss of more than 65,000 jobs. For Gazans, border closures mean starvation.

The health system is crippled, with rapidly declining medical supplies, generated by the blockage of international aid. Hospitals are out of funds. 107 types of basic medicines are depleted, 136 supplies, including syringes and tape are stopped at the border, and the number of patients permitted to leave for medical treatment has grounded almost to a halt, leading to tens of deaths.”

Today, one year later, on the eve of the inauguration of a new US president, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said: “The conditions have been created that our aims, as declared, were attained fully, and beyond.”

That’s the only language Israel can speak: the language of death.

Origin:
Truthdig, Jan. 12, 2009.
By Chris Hedges.

The incursion into Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building ringed Palestinian enclaves where Israel will always have the ability to shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate misery. The Israeli attack on Gaza is about building a hell on earth.

This attack is the final Israeli push to extinguish a Palestinian state and crush or expel the Palestinian people. The images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. And the language of death is all the Palestinians will be able to speak back. The slaughter—let’s stop pretending this is a war—is empowering an array of radical Islamists inside and outside of Gaza. It is ominously demolishing the shaky foundations of the corrupt secular Arab regimes on Israel’s borders, from Egypt to Jordan to Syria to Lebanon. It is about creating a new Middle East, one ruled by enraged Islamic radicals.

Hamas cannot lose this conflict. Militant movements feed off martyrs, and Israel is delivering the maimed and the dead by the truckload. Hamas fighters, armed with little more than light weapons, a few rockets and small mortars, are battling one of the most sophisticated military machines on the planet. And the determined resistance by these doomed fighters exposes, throughout the Arab world, the gutlessness of dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who refuses to open Egypt’s common border with Gaza despite the slaughter. Israel, when it bombed Lebanon two years ago, sought to destroy Hezbollah. By the time it withdrew it had swelled Hezbollah’s power base and handed it heroic status throughout the Arab world. Israel is now doing the same for Hamas.

The refusal by political leaders from Barack Obama to nearly every member of the U.S. Congress to speak out in the major media in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and hypocrisy. Those who openly condemn the Israeli crimes, including Israelis such as Yuri Avnery, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, as well as American stalwarts Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, are ignored or treated like lepers. They are denied a platform in the press. They are rendered nearly voiceless. Falk, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories and a former professor of international law at Princeton, was refused entry into Israel in December, detained for 20 hours and deported. Never mind that nearly all these voices are Jewish.

I called Avnery at his home in Israel. He is Israel’s conscience. Avnery was born in Germany. He moved to Palestine as a young boy with his parents. He left school at the age of 14 and a year later joined the underground paramilitary group known as the Irgun. Four years afterward, disgusted with its use of violence, he walked away from the clandestine organization, which carried out armed attacks on British occupation authorities and Arabs. “You can’t talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist,” he says when confronted with his persistent calls for peace with the Palestinians. Avnery was a fighter in the Samson’s Foxes commando unit during the 1948 war. He wrote the elite unit’s anthem. He became, after the war, a force for left-wing politics in Israel and one of the country’s most prominent journalists, running the alternative HaOlam HaZeh magazine. He served in the Israeli Knesset. During the 1982 siege of Beirut he met, in open defiance of Israeli law, with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He has joined Arab protesters in Israel the past few days and denounces what he calls Israel’s “instinct of using force” with the Palestinians and the “moral insanity” of the attack on Gaza. Avnery, now 85, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1975 by an Israeli opponent, and in 2006 the right-wing activist Baruch Marzel called on the Israeli military to carry out a targeted assassination of Avnery.

“The state of Israel, like any other state,” Avnery said, “cannot tolerate having its citizens shelled, bombed or rocketed, but there has been no thought as to how to solve the problem through political means or to analyze where this phenomenon has come from, what has caused it. Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others. We are too self-centered. We cannot stand in the shoes of Palestinians or Arabs to ask how we would react in the same situation. Sometimes, very rarely, it happens. Years ago when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if were a Palestinian, he said, ‘I would join a terrorist organization.’ If you do not understand Hamas, if you do not understand why Hamas does what it does, if you don’t understand Palestinians, you take recourse in brute force.”

The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians betrays the memory of those killed in other genocides, from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not—no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against—you are culpable. And we are very culpable. The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs are all part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid the U.S. gives to Israel. Palestinians are being slaughtered with American-made weapons. They are being slaughtered by an Israeli military we lavishly bankroll. But perhaps our callous indifference to human suffering is to be expected. We, after all, kill women and children on an even vaster scale in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bloody hands of Israel mirror our own.

There will be more dead Palestinian children. There will be more cases like that of the U.N. school, used as a sanctuary by terrified families, that was blown to bits by Israeli shells, with more than 40 killed, half of them women and children. There will be more emaciated, orphaned children. There will be more screaming or comatose wounded in the corridors of Gaza’s glutted hospital corridors. And there will be more absurd news reports, like the one on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, titled “A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery.” In this story, unnamed Israeli intelligence officials gave us a spin on the war worthy of the White House fabrications made on the eve of the Iraq war. We learned about the perfidious and dirty tactics of Hamas fighters. Foreign journalists, barred from Gaza and unable to check the veracity of the Israeli version of the war, have abandoned their trade as reporters to become stenographers. The cynicism of conveying propaganda as truth, as long as it is well sourced, is the poison of American journalism. If this is all journalism has become, if moral outrage, the courage to defy the powerful, the commitment to tell the truth and to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, no longer matters, our journalism schools should focus exclusively on shorthand. It seems to be the skill most ardently coveted by most senior editors and news producers.

There have always been powerful Israeli leaders, since the inception of the state in 1948, who have called for the total physical removal of the Palestinians. The ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Palestinians by Jewish militias in 1948 was, for them, only the start. But there were also a few Israeli leaders, including the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who argued that Israel could not pick itself up and move to another geographical spot on the globe. Israel, Rabin believed, would have to make peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors to survive. Rabin’s vision of two states, however, appears to have died with him. The embrace of wholesale ethnic cleansing by the Israeli leadership and military now appears to be unquestioned.

“It seems,” the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote recently, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology—in its most consensual and simplistic variety—has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]. …”

Gaza has descended into chaos. Hamas, which despite Israeli propaganda has never mustered the sustained resistance Hezbollah carried out during the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, will be ruled in the future by antagonistic bands of warlords, clans and mafias. Gaza will resemble Somalia. And out of that power vacuum will rise a new generation of angry jihadists, many of whom may spurn Hamas for more radical organizations. Al-Qaida, which has been working to gain a foothold in Gaza, may now have found its opening.

“Hamas will win the war, no matter what happens,” Avnery said. “They will be considered by hundreds of millions of Arabs heroes who have recovered the dignity and pride of Arab nations. If at the end of the war they are still standing in Gaza this will be a huge victory for them, to hold out against this huge Israeli army and firepower will be an incredible achievement. They will gain even more than Hezbollah did during the last war.”

Israel operates under the illusion that it can crush Hamas and install a quisling Palestinian government in Gaza and the West Bank. This puppet government will be led, Israel believes, by the discredited Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, now cowering in the West Bank after being driven out of Gaza. Abbas, like most of the corrupt Fatah leadership, is a detested figure. He is dismissed as the Marshal Pétain of the Palestinian people, or perhaps the Hamid Karzai or the Nouri al-Maliki. He is as loathed as he is powerless.

Israel’s destruction of Hamas and reoccupation of Gaza will not bring peace or security to Israel. It will merely obliterate the only internal organization with enough stature and authority in Gaza to maintain order. The Israeli assault, by destroying Hamas as a governing force, has opened a Pandora’s box of ills. Life will become a nightmare for most Palestinians and, in the years ahead, for most Israelis.

Related posts:

1. Israel’s targets in Gaza
2. Israel’s Lie Machine is Working Flat Out
3. Gaza, Disneyland and the Amnesic Loss of Memory

George W’s presidency began with the supreme court’s handing him power following an election he didn’t win. It ended with his own military ruling his administration had tortured a terrorism suspect so cruelly that he can’t be put on trial.

In between, to quote the noted philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, ‘stuff happened’ – 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, torture, massive fiscal deficits, contempt for science and, finally, economic collapse.

At one of his last talk to the press last Monday, January 12, 2009, saying goodbye to what’s left of all his mess, he summarized that he and his administration “had fun.”

So is He, The Glorious, the Born Again, He who continuously is connected to and led by His One and Only Holy Personal Supervisor, is he – no, can this US president really be misunderestimated at all?

Origin: Asia Times, Jan. 17, 2009. By Pepe Escobar.

WASHINGTON – And now, the end is near; the final curtain drops in a cold, paranoid Fortress DC under maximum red alert. In a contrived Oscar night-style mood, with thanks aplenty, George W Bush delivered his farewell address from the East Room of the White House on January 15.

Bottom lines: he turned Afghanistan into “a young democracy fighting terror”; he turned Iraq into “a young democracy in the heart of the Middle East”; he brags “America is promoting human rights”; and more than anything, America under his watch got seven years without another 9/11. But “the terrorists” will be back.

There may have been things he would have done differently – no specifics given. But certainly there’s no Nietzschean “Beyond Good and Evil” for him; this is a world where “oppressive ideologies” in the Muslim world “condemn women to subservience” compared to those who seek “liberty and justice as a path to peace” (America and her allies, of course). And “they” hate us because they hate us: “America did nothing to seek or deserve this conflict”.

A few days earlier, holding hands with his wife Laura on Larry King Live, he looked like a discombobulated wax doll. And then there was the final presser at the White House – including the drab anticlimax of an abrupt thanks to the few assembled hacks and a hasty exit to the tune of general perplexity.

The performance also boasted White House interns who had to be conscripted to fill the empty seats. Regrets? He had a few (Katrina, the Mission Accomplished banner), but then again, too few to mention. He was all wired up defending his “good, strong record” – a man incapable of introspection or even a hint of self-doubt. Once again he would never acknowledge mistakes: everything from Abu Ghraib to not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they were just “disappointments”.

The Lone Ranger

It’s been a long and winding road since that “I think the United States must be humble” he uttered in a 2000 debate with Al Gore, since the “compassionate conservative” rhetoric, and since the “uniter, not a divider” motto. So let’s go through some of this “good, strong record”.

When Bush came into office the US had a US$237 billion surplus. Three days after 9/11, on September 14, 2001, his approval rate was 86%. By mid-2004, the budget deficit was in excess of $400 billion – and growing. (Thanks in large part to a big bipartisan majority in Congress having happily passed his $1.35 trillion package of tax cuts to the rich in May 2001.)

By mid-December 2008, his popularity ratings had plunged to 23% – only one point from an all-time low in every poll taken since 1938. Still, at 30% this month, this means that almost one in three Americans still approve of his job. H L Mencken must be wallowing in horror in his grave.

Coming close to destroying a superpower and the global economy virtually single-handedly is not bad for someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth who never held a steady job until the age of 45 – until “turd blossom” Karl Rove, the little, fat, bald Machiavelli, engineered him as the ultimate, corporate-pleasing, Southern Strategy lethal weapon, and Bush family consigliere James Baker turned a massive electoral fraud, mostly in Florida and Ohio, into a hijacked mandate via the Supreme Court. (American corporate media, by the way, loved it.)

As for the 2004 re-election – when his approval rate was at most 40% – it was a mix of low-tech – absentee ballots that were never mailed, rejected “provisional ballots”, “spoiled ballots” – and high-tech – via scores of dodgy Diebold machines – corruption.

Bush was the dream Project for a New American Century (PNAC) president. The PNAC’s bible was the 2000-penned “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century”, which unabashedly advocated “American hegemony” and “full-spectrum dominance”, and which was itself based on the 1991-penned “Defense Planning Guidance”, also known as the Wolfowitz doctrine.

The PNAC – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz – migrated in full force to the Bush administration and could not have been readier after 9/11 to engage in the nonsensical, global “war on terror”. An endeavor those wily Brits, via Foreign Secretary David Milliband, took the opportunity to formally bury in style a few hours before Bush’s farewell.

The “war on terror” catalogue included launching pre-emptive wars disguised as wars of liberation; torture as official US state policy; and a war against Islam, “suspicious” Muslims in particular and Latino immigrants in the homeland. The “war on terror” framework facilitated something that was already planned and had been discussed at the G-8 meeting in Genoa in July 2001. Namely, an October 2001 attack on Afghanistan to get rid of those pesky, turbaned former darlings of Unocal, the Taliban. Washington wanted its pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, and was determined to get it.

Dates with destiny

The “good, strong record” is peppered with unforgettable dates.

# Take August 6, 2001, when Bush royally ignored the now legendary memo warning that Osama bin Laden was “determined to strike in the US”. After a Central Intelligence Agency analyst briefed him he came up with “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”

# Take fateful September 11, 2001, when he declared the global “war on terror”. And global it certainly was, all across the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” – from the Andes in Colombia to the Horn of Africa and then through the Middle East to South, Southeast and Central Asia.

# Take January 29, 2002, his first State of the Union address, when he in fact declared war on “at least a dozen countries …” and qualified North Korea, Iran and Iraq as the “axis of evil”.

# Take February 7, 2002, when he issued an executive order declaring the Geneva Conventions off-limits to suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives. The memo, as Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson told Vanity Fair, was written by Cheney’s counsel David Addington, “blessed by one or two people at the Office of Legal Counsel”, passed to Cheney, passed to Bush and signed by Bush. Wilkerson gleefully compared Addington’s role with Cheney to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s role with Bin Laden.

# Take September 20, 2002, when he launched the Bush doctrine (yes, that thing that totally baffled Sarah “Barracuda” Palin), which breaks down to the Empire’s divine, unilateral right to launch a war against any “terrorist” state. The doctrine – a barely disguised ploy to assure control of global sources of energy – was enshrined as official policy in the 2002 National Security Strategy. It implies a US Empire of Bases – reaching 900 soon – in dozens of countries; a bloated Pentagon budget, plus hidden “extras” beyond $1 trillion a year; and of course a non-stop war mentality, with ramifications that lead to the weaponization of outer space.

The Bush years were a nightmarish maze of violations of the rule of law and the smashing of constitutional liberties – from the 300-page-long USA Patriot Act to the Homeland Security Act and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that now terrorizes not only illegal but also legal Muslim and Latino immigrants.

And then there is masterpiece – the Iraq War.

# How not to remember July 23, 2002 – the day of the now famous Downing Street memo, revealed only years later, when Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British intelligence, coined the indelible phrase “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.

# How not to remember September 15, 2002 – when the assistant to the president for economic policy, Lawrence Lindsey, estimated the cost of a war in Iraq between $100 billion and $200 billion. A furious Donald Rumsfeld – always in love with the Khmer Rouge school of management – called it “baloney”. Lindsey is fired in December. Years later, in 2008, Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes estimate the real cost of the war may be as much as $3 trillion.

# How not to remember January 21, 2003 – when according to Sir David Manning, Tony Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, Bush and Blair settled on an actual date for the start of the war – no matter what resulted from the Hans Blix-conducted UN inspections.

Baghdadis today compare Bush’s oeuvre in honor of democracy and the free market in Iraq to Genghis Khan’s in the 14th century. Khan’s pyramid of skulls left by the Tigris find echo in Bush’s benchmarks: at least 1 million deaths caused directly or indirectly by the war and occupation, more than 4 million internally and externally displaced, mass poverty, 70% unemployment, and the virtual nonexistence of fresh drinking water, sanitation, electricity, medical care, education, and security.

The waste land Bush was the champion of corporation, speculation, wild privatization and the end of public education. Bush’s systematic war on the American middle and working classes – his “ownership society” – signified non-stop wealth redistribution towards the top. Ninety-percent of American families are now reduced to little or no net worth, they’ve been plunged into debt hell.

Bush was not only the scourge of a dying middle class; he was the champion of the underclass – at least in terms of assuring its overwhelming expansion. The Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) has assessed that one in three jobs in the US – concerning at least 47 million people – pays ridiculously low wages with few or no benefits. According to the CEPR, one in every four US workers – about 35 million people – earn poverty level wages.

Under his watch, a mega-bubble economy based on speculative greed and massive fraud went bonkers – disaster capitalism at home. At his final presser Bush had the gall – of course not contested – to say it was not his fault the financial crisis happened during his tenure. Of course, he forgot to say this was a crisis by design – guaranteeing an even greater concentration of financial and economic power, in global terms, for a minimum elite comprising Masters of the Universe JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup.

It’s a “good, strong record” pile up; from the neglect of poor blacks in post-Katrina New Orleans to rejecting the Kyoto Protocol; from hiring hacks to spill White House propaganda to vetoing stem cell research legislation twice; from building a multi-billion dollar wall across the Mexico border to stop Latino immigration to exempting Big Chemical from monitoring lead emissions.

The Center for Public Integrity’s “Broken Government By the Numbers” report adds an extra X-ray of the Bush wasteland. From 935 “demonstrably false statements” in the run-up to the Iraq war to 45 million people with no health care (and tens of millions in some very precarious scheme); from 60% of Environmental Protection Agency scientists reporting political interference in their work to 760,800 disability claims awaiting hearings by the Social Security Administration as of October 2008; from 190,000 missing weapons in Iraq to $212.3 million in Halliburton “extras” for construction work in Iraq; from less than 3% of US electricity needs provided by alternative energy to $60 billion in annual Medicare fraud.

Some people actually loved his methods. Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former ambassador to the US, told Vanity Fair that “the Chinese have been brilliant in playing the Bush years. Asia is one part of the world where many will see George Bush in a positive light, although not necessarily for the reason he may have wished”.

Another character who has been brilliant in playing the Bush game has been no other than Osama “dead or alive” bin Laden, who, dead or alive, could not miss the opportunity to salute Bush via an audiotape released this week. Bin Laden said, “The question is, can America continue the war against us for several more decades? The reports and signs show us otherwise.” Osama seemed to be quite amused by the “inheritance” Bush left to Obama: “If he withdraws from the war, it is a military defeat. If he continues, he drowns in economic crisis.”

And this when the war in Iraq – as Paul Krugman has noted – is costing about as much each year as the insurance subsidies Obama would need to implement universal health care in the US.

Anyway, none of this is his business anymore. Bush will fade into retirement in a commute between a sleepy Dallas suburb and the Crawford ranch where he spent more than 450 days of the presidency. Whatever he does, he won’t be disappointed with history’s judgment.

What a record: stolen elections, corporate greed, fraud and corruption, unlimited spending, wealth redistribution (to the top), no checks and balances, rampant militarization, the destruction of Iraq, permanent war, and unquantifiable, unrepayable national debt. Not many world emperors are able to create a vast wasteland, call it a government, and then retire.

Related posts:

1. September 11th From Chile to Washington: Bush Follows in Pinochet’s Footsteps
2. US empire will survive Bush
3. The Bush Administration Is an Ongoing Criminal Conspiracy Under International Law and U.S. Domestic Law

There is a widespread acceptance in the US, beginning with the apologetic arguments of President Bush, that whatever Israel does is always justified.

Origin: The New Statesman, January 6, 2009. By Ben White.

Gaza bombing, Jan. 3, 2009

In just the first six days of ‘Operation Cast Lead’, the Israeli Air Force carried out more than 500 sorties against targets in the Gaza Strip. That meant an attack from the air roughly every 18 minutes for almost a week – not counting hundreds of helicopter attacks, tank and navy shelling, and infantry raids. At the time of writing, the operation was into its 10th day.

That’s an intense number of attacks for a territory of similar size to the city of Seattle.

No surprise then that the casualty figures are high: to date, more than 500 Palestinians dead with thousands injured. Moreover, many of the ‘targets’ struck by Israel seem to be of dubious military value. Indeed, by last Saturday, there was talk of Israel ‘running out’ of targets.

Even in the first wave of airstrikes, one of the most high profile hits was a police graduation ceremony.

Because these were so-called ‘Hamas police’ there was some debate about the legitimacy of the target.

As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem put it, the dozens of Palestinians killed had been studying “first-aid, handling of public disturbances, human rights, public-safety exercises, and so forth”.

The graduates would then have been “assigned to various arms of the police force in Gaza responsible for maintaining public order”. B’Tselem emphasises that “an intentional attack on a civilian target is a war crime”.

Could it be that in reality Israel has had few genuinely high value targets to hit in Gaza?

So far the government ministries destroyed have included those for education, transportation, housing, as well as the parliament, while Israel has also attacked a university, money changers, civilian apartment blocks, harbours, a bird farm, and a television station.

The Israeli military also hit at mosques, killing departing worshippers, and even destroyed the American International School, killing the caretaker.

The same school had previously been the focus of anti-US violence, though this time around (with the school actually levelled) those who had previously pointed fingers at ‘fundamentalist’ Palestinian vandals have been curiously quiet.

Meanwhile – as part of its media management – Israel has largely prevented the international media from entering the Gaza Strip.

Many analysts and commentators still simply accept Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) statements as gospel, and repeat verbatim the claims that only ‘weapons caches’, ‘tunnels’, or ‘rocket launching sites’, have been targeted. Furthermore, the IDF has apparently used its own video footage of attacks to lie about civilian casualties, both this time around and in the past.

And both the high proportion of civilian targets and the comparatively weak response by Hamas make the level of menace assigned to Hamas by Israeli propaganda look, well, somewhat questionable.

Even taking the Israeli government and IDF at their word about the operation’s objectives, the targets struck thus far are of dubious strategic merit.

If the aim is to destroy Hamas, this is clearly a fantasy. For some Palestinians, the assault on the Gaza Strip will have only consolidated or increased their support for the organisation, but more importantly, you don’t weaken a socio-religious political movement with F-16s and drones (although apparently in the best colonial tradition, you may ‘teach them a lesson’, according to Shimon Peres).

In which case, Israel may well have a different kind of aim for ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The head of the UN’s relief agency in Gaza, John Ging, was reported to have accused Israel of deliberately targeting infrastructure necessary for the governance of Gaza:

“The whole infrastructure of the future state of Palestine is being destroyed,” he said. “Blowing up the parliament building. That’s the parliament of Palestine. That’s not a Hamas building. The president’s compound is for the president of Palestine.”

A Gazan businessman wrote on the Guardian website that post-operation, “it will be extraordinarily difficult for Palestinians, particularly Gazans, to rebuild and develop their institutions of civil service”, before observing that “perhaps this is what Israel’s anti-peace camp is after; an end to the persistence of Gaza’s ordinary people in wanting the chance of a peaceful and dignified life”.

Mustafa Barghouti has also noted that the choice of targets in Gaza indicates Israel is “hoping to create anarchy in the Strip by removing the pillar of law and order”.

It is thus reminiscent of the general thrust of then-PM Ariel Sharon’s policies as typified in 2002’s ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ which targeted the day-to-day institutions and symbols of the Palestinian Authority.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the popular discourse regarding Hamas and the Gaza Strip for some years in the West has helped prepare the way for Israel to strike civilian targets and claim self-defence against ‘terrorist infrastructure’.

From the refusal to accept the results of the democratic Palestinian elections to the endless repetition of Israeli propaganda about the unreciprocated ‘good will’ of the so-called ‘disengagement’ in 2005, the Gaza Strip has been signed off as a teeming ‘Hamastan’ of targets just desperate to be martyred.

An IDF spokesperson has said that: “Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target”, the kind of logic that even the BBC mentioned is an echo of Hamas’ own justification for attacking Israeli civilians on the basis they serve in the army.

In the context of the Gaza Strip – where Hamas as the governing authority is naturally involved with everything from food distribution to medical clinics, and from higher education institutes to parking fines – it now seems every Palestinian is in the crosshairs.

Related posts:

1. Israel’s Lie Machine is Working Flat Out
2. From the Ashes of Gaza
3. Israel: The Language of Death

Similar to the United States, Israel has plenty of tactics for war, but none for peace.

And that’s not an accident.

Provided with the same kind of steadfast belief in their own exceptionalism, they both are clutching at the same world view, and the world they make desperate efforts to live in is Disneyland – a world of their own, based upon myths, religion and fantasy.

Associated in a common destiny, they constitute an exclusive axis of exceptionalism where the real world doesn’t matter and lies are used to fight reality, organised by their integrated propaganda network for global disinformation.

As the former Guardian editor Peter Preston wrote, there was no truth in the US mainstream media:

“Forget, alas, all the usual stuff about fairness, balance and freedom of independent thought. Merely follow Editor and Publisher magazine‘s own accounting for the first eight media days of Gaza warfare.

Coverage: “Largely one-sided, with little editorialising or commentary arguing against broader Israeli actions.” And: “Most notably, the New York Times produced exactly one editorial, not a single commentary by any of its columnists and only two op-eds (one already published elsewhere).”

Ground invasion? The Times never addressed its wisdom or unwisdom before the tanks rolled forward. A Washington Post editorial, after the event, thought invading “risky“.

In general, with the New York Post, the Daily News and all the usual suspects cheerleading away, there was no balance, no fairness and precious little you could call independent thought. Tel Aviv seemed to bark orders: the US media just wagged its tail.”

Origin:
Global Research, Dec. 31, 2008, Middle East Online.
By Stuart Littlewood.

While the murderous assault on Gaza continues, I notice there’s a briefing document on the website of the Israeli Embassy in London which has a lie in every line. The West’s mainstream media repeat them, and even the most senior TV and radio interviewers don’t bother to challenge them.

The document is a transcript of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s statement to the Israeli press dated 27 December 2008 – a day that will live in infamy. It is a perfect example of the falsehoods used to dupe not only us westerners but Israel’s own people. The statement shows how the regime’s view of itself is constructed on a web of dishonesty and self-delusion.

For example:

- “Israeli citizens have been under the threat of daily attack from Gaza for years.”

Palestinians have been under harsh Israeli occupation for 60 years.

- “Only this week hundreds of missiles and mortars shells were fired at Israeli civilian communities.”

Only one in 500 Qassam rockets causes a fatality. How many thousands of Israeli bombs, missiles, rockets, grenades and tank-shells have been blasted into the crowded city and towns of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s high-tech weaponry?

- “Until now we have shown restraint. But today there is no other option than a military operation.”

The only legitimate option for Israel is to end the occupation and withdraw behind its 1967 border, as required under international law and UN resolution. Israel has been killing Palestinians at the rate of 8 to 1 since 2000, and children at the rate of nearly 12 to 1 (B’Tselem figures). This is somebody’s idea of restraint?

- “We need to protect our citizens from attack through a military response against the terror infrastructure in Gaza.”

Self defence is not a right exclusive to Israel. Palestinians have an equal right to protect their citizens from the terror tactics of Israel.

- “Israel left Gaza in order to create an opportunity for peace.”

Israel never left Gaza. It still occupies Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and controls all entrances and exits.

- “In return, the Hamas terror organization took control of Gaza and is using its citizens as cover while it deliberately targets Israeli communities and denies any chance for peace.”

Hamas was voted into power as the legitimate government of Palestine. Israel chose not to accept the people’s choice, which amounted to a denial of their human rights, and immediately set about obliterating it.

- “We have tried everything to reach calm without using force. We agreed to a truce through Egypt that was violated by Hamas, which continued to target Israel, hold Gilad Shalit and build up its arms.”

Try talking. The Israelis’ ongoing siege and economic blockade, begun shortly after Hamas was elected early in 2006, was never going to generate calm. And why is Shalit considered more important than the 9,000 Palestinians abducted and held prisoner by Israel? As soon as a Hamas government was formed Israeli troops arrested 8 Hamas ministers and 20 other parliamentarians, making the work of government impossible.

- “Israel continues to act to prevent humanitarian crisis and to minimize harm to Palestinian civilians.”

Every agency operating in Gaza has warned of the deepening humanitarian crisis and protested about the starvation and suffering, especially of children many of whom show evidence of stunted growth.

- “The responsibility for harm to civilians lies with Hamas.”

Not according to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

- “Hamas is a terrorist organization, supported by Iran, that does not represent the legitimate national interests of the Palestinian people but a radical Islamist agenda that seeks to deny peace for the peoples of this region.”

Hamas was the popular choice of Palestinians at the last election. It is entitled under international law to take up arms against an illegal occupier and invader. If it is supported by Iran, so what? Israel receives mega-support from the US. When it comes to terror, it is Israel’s conduct which fits the US definition of terrorism so perfectly – see Bush’s Executive Order 13224, Section 3.

- “While confronting Hamas, Israel continues to believe in the two State solution and remains committed to negotiations with the legitimate Palestinian Authority in the context of the peace process, launched at Annapolis.”

Israel is busy establishing irreversible facts on the ground that make a viable Palestinian state impossible. As everyone knows, the regime has reneged on the peace process and carries on building illegal settlements and the illegal Wall, and demolishing Palestinian homes. Months ago Hamas accepted a Palestinian state based on internationally recognized (pre-1967) borders, in accordance with UN resolutions, with full sovereignty and its capital in Jerusalem, but this has been ignored. Hamas also offered a 10-year truce, also ignored. Earlier, Arafat and the PLO recognized the State of Israel in the Oslo agreement but what good did it do? Today’s US-backed, Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority is not representative of the Palestinian people.

- “Israel expects the support and understanding of the international community, as it confronts terror, and advances the interest of all those who wish the forces of peace and co existence to determine the agenda of this region.”

Israel, next to the US, is the biggest purveyor of terror in the region and only advances its own interests. It may get the support of Israel lobby stooges in other western governments but is rapidly earning the contempt of everybody else.

From a statement dated 22 December 2008:

- “Hamas, backed by Iran, has regularly stated its desire to see the complete destruction of Israel.”

Israel is itself a leading destroyer and currently engaged in trying to wipe out Hamas and the Gazans. Iran’s Ahmadinajad quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” – fair comment considering Jerusalem, with Bethlehem, was designated an ‘international city’ under the UN Partition Plan. Israeli propaganda twisted the Iranian’s words to read “Israel must be wiped off the map”. Zionist sources and the manifestos of Israeli political parties have made it clear for a long time that Israel plans to wipe Palestine off the map, and every act and lie is directed towards that end.

- “Our fight is not with the people of Gaza; it is with the extremists of Hamas.”

Then why does the Israeli navy harass and fire on peaceable Gazan fishermen who are well within their own territorial waters? Why does Israel prevent Palestinian students from taking up places at foreign universities and block hospital spares, medicines, foodstuffs and foreign medics from entering Gaza? Why has the Israeli navy just rammed a mercy vessel in international waters taking doctors and medicines to Gaza? Latest air-strikes have hit the Islamic University and the ministry of education. These are direct attacks on Gazan civil society and its infrastructure.

- “Hamas started this conflict, and it bears responsibility for any harm to civilians on either side.”

The conflict, started by Jewish terrorists, has been going on for 60 years, decades before Hamas came into being.

- “Israel’s only responsibility is to protect Israeli citizens.”

As the occupying power Israel has a duty to see that the people of the occupied territories come to no harm.

- “Just as Israel seeks to defend its civilian population, Hamas seeks to kill them.”

This reads far better the other way round: “Just as Hamas seeks to defend its civilian population, Israel seeks to kill them.”

- “Rocket attacks have continued for years and are now a daily occurrence. How long does the international community expect Israel will wait before defending itself against them?”

The rocket attacks will end when Israel ends the occupation and stops terrorizing its neighbours.

- “In the south of Israel, Israeli citizens live with air raid sirens sounding every day – sometimes every hour. Their situation is intolerable.”

Not half as intolerable as it is for the Gazans, who live in constant fear of air raids and re-invasion and are constantly under surveillance by armed drones which can fire missiles under computer control from an armchair in Israeli headquarters.

- “For years, the international community has turned a blind eye to this onslaught. Only when Israel seeks to stop the rockets do they take notice.”

For years the international community has turned a blind eye to Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, which is why the problem remains unsolved.

- “Hamas is not only the enemy of Israel – it is the enemy of every Palestinian who believes in peace.”

Israelis just can’t come to terms with the Palestinians’ democratic choice and are bent on obliterating it.

- “It is Hamas’ attacks – not Israel’s reactions – that destroy every opportunity we have for peace.”

The world has managed to work out by now that Israel doesn’t want peace until it has stolen all the land and water it needs to expand its racist state into a ‘Greater Israel’. It is well on the way to achieving this and won’t be thwarted.

- “Palestinian militants targeted by Israel are not just the enemies of the Israeli people; they are criminals under international law, and enemies of peace.”

Israel is in no position to preach international law.

- “What is collective punishment? ‘Collective punishment’ is a city – schools, hospitals, homes – civilians being bombarded every single day by rockets and mortars.”

Collective punishment is keeping a whole population bottled up under siege and blocking supplies and exports, smashing their infrastructure, wrecking their economy and starving their children. Trying to equate Sderot with what’s happening in the Gaza Strip is idiotic.

- “Today’s Middle East is divided between extremists and pragmatists. Hamas, backed by Iran, belongs to the extremists, who must be defeated for the sake of the future of the Middle East…. Israel’s primary goal is peace.”

Israel’s primary goal is the expansion of Israel by making the occupation of the West Bank permanent and bringing the Gazans to their knees.

The core issue in this struggle is the illegality of Israel’s brutal occupation. Israel goes to great lengths to avoid and suppress all mention of it and play-acts the pathetic victim. As the official statements (above) show, the strategy is to frame and define the situation in Israel’s own terms regardless of the truth. It uses advanced propaganda skills, and the elaborate Israel lobby network, to persuade western politicians and media to accept Israel’s version of events (and even use Israel’s biased language) and not question its motives.

In political PR terms it works wonderfully well. The loony leaders of my own government happily spread the poison and don’t seem interested in halting Israeli aggression and the vaporizing, dismembering and crushing of Gaza’s population. In human PR terms it is a disaster.

I have been listening to the BBC’s senior interviewers these last few days. None has had the gumption to ask Israeli spokesmen the only question that matters – the ‘killer’ question on which hangs the key to peace:

WHEN IS ISRAEL GOING TO END ITS OCCUPATION AND RETURN TO THE PALESTINIANS THEIR LANDS AND FREEDOM?

Related posts:

1. Israel’s targets in Gaza
2. Israel: The Language of Death
3. From the Ashes of Gaza

If you try to consider the US’ sordid role interfering in foreign politics, you inevitably come across the ‘select and corrupt’ tactics.

In any case, however, the US remains the most corrupted, true to itself.

In Iraq, the US supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, Shiites against Sunnis, Sunnis against Kurds, Kurds against Shiites – and all the game vice versa.

And let’s not forget: in Afghanistan the US was midwife of the Taliban and supported Bin Laden against the Soviet Union, just as they bonded with Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the ISIS in Pakistan.

In April 2008 Vanity Fair reported:

“… a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war.”

“There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas’s national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. …

Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as ‘our guy’.”

“The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)”

“But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.”

Origin:
AlterNet, January 3, 2009.
By Stephen Zunes.

The United States bears much of the blame for the ongoing bloodshed in the Gaza Strip and nearby parts of Israel. Indeed, were it not for misguided Israeli and American policies, Hamas would not be in control of the territory in the first place.

Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations and other entities that stressed an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population. The hope was that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation.

While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station. For example, in the occupied Palestinian city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli soldiers — who had shown no hesitation in brutally suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations — stood by when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering family-planning services for women.

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip 20 years earlier. Israel’s priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent during this period were revealing: In 1988, Israel forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian-style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace, while allowing Yassin to circulate anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the destruction of Israel by force of arms.

American policy was not much different: Up until 1993, U.S. officials in the consular office in Jerusalem met periodically with Hamas leaders, while they were barred from meeting with anyone from the PLO, including leading moderates within the coalition. This policy continued despite the fact that the PLO had renounced terrorism and unilaterally recognized Israel as far back as 1988.

One of the early major boosts for Hamas came when the Israeli government expelled more than 400 Palestinian Muslims in late 1992. While most of the exiles were associated with Hamas-affiliated social service agencies, very few had been accused of any violent crimes. Since such expulsions are a direct contravention to international law, the U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned the action and called for their immediate return. The incoming Clinton administration, however, blocked the United Nations from enforcing its resolution and falsely claimed that an Israeli offer to eventually allow some of exiles back constituted a fulfillment of the U.N. mandate. The result of the Israeli and American actions was that the exiles became heroes and martyrs, and the credibility of Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinians grew enormously — and so did its political strength.

Still, at the time of the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993, polls showed that Hamas had the support of only 15 percent of the Palestinian community. Support for Hamas grew, however, as promises of a viable Palestinian state faded as Israel continued to expand its colonization drive on the West Bank without apparent U.S. objections, doubling the amount of settlers over the next dozen years. The rule of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Yassir Arafat and his cronies proved to be corrupt and inept, while Hamas leaders were seen to be more honest and in keeping with the needs of ordinary Palestinians. In early 2001, Israel cut off all substantive negotiations with the Palestinians, and a devastating U.S.-backed Israeli offensive the following year destroyed much of the Palestinian Authority’s infrastructure, making prospects for peace and statehood even more remote. Israeli closures and blockades sank the Palestinian economy into a serious depression, and Hamas-run social services became all the more important for ordinary Palestinians.

Seeing how Fatah’s 1993 decision to end the armed struggle and rely on a U.S.-led peace process had resulted in increased suffering, Hamas’ popularity grew well beyond its hard-line fundamentalist base and its use of terrorism against Israel — despite being immoral, illegal and counterproductive — seemed to express the sense of anger and impotence of wide segments of the Palestinian population. Meanwhile — in a policy defended by the Bush administration and Democratic leaders in Congress — Israel’s use of death squads resulted in the deaths of Yassin and scores of other Hamas leaders, turning them into martyrs in the eyes of many Palestinians and increasing Hamas’ support still further.

Hamas Comes to Power

With the Bush administration insisting that the Palestinians stage free and fair elections after the death of Arafat in 2004, Fatah leaders hoped that coaxing Hamas into the electoral process would help weaken its more radical elements.  Despite U.S. objections, the Palestinian parliamentary elections went ahead in January 2006 with Hamas’ participation. They were monitored closely by international observers and were universally recognized as free and fair. With reformist and leftist parties divided into a half-dozen competing slates, Hamas was seen by many Palestinians disgusted with the status quo as the only viable alternative to the corrupt Fatah incumbents, and with Israel refusing to engage in substantive peace negotiations with Abbas’ Fatah-led government, they figured there was little to lose in electing Hamas. In addition, factionalism within the ruling party led a number of districts to have competing Fatah candidates. As a result, even though Hamas only received 44 percent of the vote, it captured a majority of parliament and the right to select the prime minister and form a new government.

Ironically, the position of prime minister did not exist under the original constitution of the Palestinian Authority, but was added in March 2003 at the insistence of the United States, which desired a counterweight to President Arafat. As a result, while the elections allowed Abbas to remain as president, he was forced to share power with Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister.

Despite claiming support for free elections, the United States tried from the outset to undermine the Hamas government. It was largely due to U.S. pressure that Abbas refused Hamas’ initial invitation to form a national unity government that would include Fatah and from which some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders would have presumably been marginalized. The Bush administration pressured the Canadians, Europeans and others in the international community to impose stiff sanctions on the Palestine Authority, although a limited amount of aid continued to flow to government offices controlled by Abbas.

Once one of the more-prosperous regions in the Arab world, decades of Israeli occupation had resulted in the destruction of much of the indigenous Palestinian economy, making the Palestinian Authority dependent on foreign aid to provide basic functions for its people. The impact of these sanctions, therefore, was devastating. The Iranian regime rushed in to partially fulfill the void, providing millions of dollars to run basic services and giving the Islamic republic — which until then had not been allied with Hamas and had not been a major player in Palestinian politics — unprecedented leverage.

Meanwhile, record unemployment led angry and hungry young men to become easy recruits for Hamas militants. One leading Fatah official noted how, “For many people, this was the only way to make money.” Some Palestinian police, unpaid by their bankrupt government, clandestinely joined the Hamas militia as a second job, creating a dual loyalty.

The demands imposed at the insistence of the Bush administration and Congress on the Palestinian Authority in order to lift the sanctions appeared to have been designed to be rejected and were widely interpreted as a pretext for punishing the Palestinian population for voting the wrong way. For example, the United States demanded that the Hamas-led government unilaterally recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, even though Israel has never recognized the right of the Palestinians to have a viable state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or anywhere else. Other demands included an end of attacks on civilians in Israel while not demanding that Israel likewise end its attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza Strip. They also demanded that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority accept all previously negotiated agreements, even as Israel continued to violate key components of the Wye River Agreement and other negotiated deals with the Palestinians.

While Hamas honored a unilateral cease-fire regarding suicide bombings in Israel, border clashes and rocket attacks into Israel continued. Israel, meanwhile, with the support of the Bush administration, engaged in devastating air strikes against crowded urban neighborhoods, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties. Congress also went on record defending the Israeli assaults — which were widely condemned in the international community as excessive and in violation of international humanitarian law — as legitimate acts of self-defense.

A Siege, Not a Withdrawal

The myth perpetuated by both the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties was that Israel’s 2005 dismantling of its illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of military units that supported them constituted effective freedom for the Palestinians of the territory. American political leaders from President George W. Bush to House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have repeatedly praised Israel for its belated compliance with a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal of these illegal settlements (despite Israel’s ongoing violations of these same resolutions by maintaining and expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights).

In reality, however, the Gaza Strip has remained effectively under siege. Even prior to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, the Israeli government not only severely restricted — as is its right — entry from the Gaza Strip into Israel, but also controlled passage through the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, as well. Israel also refused to allow the Palestinians to open their airport or seaport. This not only led to periodic shortages of basic necessities imported through Egypt, but resulted in the widespread wasting of perishable exports — such as fruits, vegetables and cut flowers — vital to the territory’s economy. Furthermore, Gaza residents were cut off from family members and compatriots in the West Bank and elsewhere in what many have referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison.

In retaliation, Hamas and allied militias began launching rocket attacks into civilian areas of Israel. Israel responded by bombing, shelling and periodic incursions in civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, which, by the time of the 2006 cease-fire, had killed over 200 civilians, including scores of children. Bush administration officials, echoed by congressional leaders of both parties, justifiably condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas-allied units into civilian areas of Israel (which at that time had resulted in scores of injuries but only one death), but defended Israel’s far more devastating attacks against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip. This created a reaction that strengthened Hamas’ support in the territory even more.

The Gaza Strip’s population consists primarily of refugees from Israel’s ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine almost 60 years ago and their descendents, most of whom have had no gainful employment since Israel sealed the border from most day laborers in the late 1980s. Crowded into only 140 square miles and subjected to extreme violence and poverty, it is not surprising that many would become susceptible to extremist politics, such as those of the Islamist Hamas movement. Nor is it surprising that under such conditions, people with guns would turn on each other.

Undermining the Unity Government

When factional fighting between armed Fatah and Hamas groups broke out in early 2007, Saudi officials negotiated a power-sharing agreement between the two leading Palestinian political movements. U.S. officials, however, unsuccessfully encouraged Abbas to renounce the agreement and dismiss the entire government. Indeed, ever since the election of a Hamas parliamentary majority, the Bush administration began pressuring Fatah to stage a coup and abolish parliament.

The national unity government put key ministries in the hands of Fatah members and independent technocrats and removed some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders and, while falling well short of Western demands, Hamas did indicate an unprecedented willingness to engage with Israel, accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and negotiate a long-term cease-fire with Israel. For the first time, this could have allowed Israel and the United States the opportunity to bring into peace talks a national unity government representing virtually all the factions and parties active in Palestinian politics on the basis of the Arab League peace initiative for a two-state solution and U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. However, both the Israeli and American governments refused.

Instead, the Bush administration decided to escalate the conflict by ordering Israel to ship large quantities or weapons to armed Fatah groups to enable them to fight Hamas and stage a coup. Israeli military leaders initially resisted the idea, fearing that much of these arms would end up in the hands of Hamas, but — as Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put it — “our government obeyed American orders, as usual.” That Fatah was being supplied with weapons from Israel while Hamas was fighting the Israelis led many Palestinians — even those who don’t share Hamas’ extremist ideology — to see Fatah as collaborators and Hamas as liberation fighters. This was a major factor leading Hamas to launch what it saw as a preventive war or a countercoup by overrunning the offices of the Fatah militias in June 2007 and, just as the Israelis feared, many of these newly supplied weapons have indeed ended up in the hands of Hamas militants. Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip ever since.

The United States also threw its support to Mohammed Dahlan, the notorious Fatah security chief in Gaza, who — despite being labeled by American officials as “moderate” and “pragmatic” — oversaw the detention, torture and execution of Hamas activists and others, leading to widespread popular outrage against Fatah and its supporters.

Alvaro de Soto, former U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, stated in his confidential final report leaked to the press a few weeks before the Hamas takeover that “the Americans clearly encouraged a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas” and “worked to isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with recognition and weaponry.” De Soto also recalled how in the midst of Egyptian efforts to arrange a cease-fire following a flare-up in factional fighting earlier this year, a U.S. official told him that “I like this violence … it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.”

Weakening Palestinian Moderates

For moderate forces to overcome extremist forces, the moderates must be able to provide their population with what they most need: in this case, the end of Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and its occupation and colonizing of the remaining Palestinian territories. However, Israeli policies — backed by the Bush administration and Congress — seem calculated to make this impossible. The noted Israeli policy analyst Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem Post just prior to Hamas’ electoral victory, how “Israel ‘s unilateralism and determination not to negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority, which was already severely crippled by … Israeli actions that demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority governing bodies and institutions.”

Bush and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress have also thrown their support to the Israeli government’s unilateral disengagement policy that, while withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, has expanded them in the occupied West Bank as part of an effort to illegally annex large swaths of Palestinian territory. In addition, neither Congress nor the Bush administration has pushed the Israelis to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, which have been suspended for over six years, despite calls by Abbas and the international community that they resume. Given that Fatah’s emphasis on negotiations has failed to stop Israel’s occupation and colonization of large parts of the West Bank, it’s not surprising that Hamas’ claim that the U.S.-managed peace process is working against Palestinian interests has resonance, even among Palestinians who recognize that terrorism by Hamas’ armed wing is both morally reprehensible and has hurt the nationalist cause.

Following Hamas’ armed takeover of Gaza, the highly respected Israeli journalist Roni Shaked, writing in the June 15 issue of Yediot Ahronoth, noted that “The U.S. and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure.” Despite claims by Israel and the United States that they wanted to strengthen Abbas, “in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert’s kisses and backslapping turned Abbas into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street.”

De Soto’s report to the U.N. Secretary-General, in which he referred to Hamas’ stance toward Israel as “abominable,” also noted that “Israeli policies seemed perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants.” Regarding the U.S.-instigated international sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, the former Peruvian diplomat also observed that “the steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect.”

Some Israeli commentators saw this strategy as deliberate. Avnery noted, “Our government has worked for year to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal form the occupied territories and the settlements there.” Similarly, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Center observed, “the fact is that Israeli (and American) right-wingers are rooting for the Palestinian extremists” since “supplanting … Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.” The problem, Avnery wrote at that time, is that “now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory.”

Since then, the Israeli strategy has been to increase the blockade on the Gaza Strip, regardless of the disastrous humanitarian consequences, and more recently to launch devastating attacks that have killed hundreds of people, as many as one-quarter of whom have been civilians. The Bush administration and leaders of both parties in Congress have defended Israeli policies on the grounds that the extremist Hamas governs the territory.

Yet no one seems willing to acknowledge the role the United States had in making it possible for Hamas to come to power in Gaza in the first place.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chairman of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

Related posts:

1. Gaza: If Hamas Did Not Exist
2. Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power
3. From the Ashes of Gaza

The truth is: Israel has no intention of granting a Palestinian state.

CounterPunch, January 1, 2008.
By Jennifer Loewenstein.

Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel’s will is at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated “calls” for a “ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world’s bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.

The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of the Empire’s obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.

This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world’s population. The primary symbols today are Islamic – the mosques, the Qur’an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.

There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.

Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’ begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?

The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.

It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United States—it voted against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions.

Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.

Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.

Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the ‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?

The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached via email.

Related posts:

1. The US’ Hidden Role in Hamas’ Rise to Power
2. Gaza, Disneyland and the Amnesic Loss of Memory
3. Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power

“Escalation goes on, more Israeli air raids kill more civilians”, 23 year old Sameh A. Habeeb, Palestinian born and raised in Gaza, has posted in his blog on December 30, 2008:

“The Israeli announced decapitation strategy of targeting Hamas movement and avoiding civilians clearly unveiled. The F16s targeted a group of governmental building using tons of explosion resulting in killing at least 4 Palestinians. The bombings lasted for 30 minutes echoed across Gaza City causing great trauma and panic for civilians. Total damage stormed the buildings while partially destroyed some neighboring populated buildings.

Israeli warplanes, drones, artillery machines, and apache helicopters broadly took part in the nightly raids. Israeli air raids destroyed a sport club and a building inside the Islamic University of Gaza IUG. IUG was hit Monday night and 2 building were destroyed. One of the destroyed building was the laboratory funded by Islamic Development Bank estimated of millions of dollars.

The bombings continued for the whole night in separated areas in Gaza Strip. Many civic targets were bombs including mosques in Khanyonis City.”

In the face of Israel’s latest onslaught, the only option for Palestinian nationalism is to embrace a one-state solution.

Origin:
The Guardian, December 30, 2008.
By Tariq Ali.

The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.

Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy’s chilling essay in the London Review of Books) were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had “provoked” Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato’s favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis.

As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the west claims it is combating in the “war against terror”.

The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both sides, issues related to recent history. One fact that needs to be recognised is that there is no Palestinian Authority. There never was one. The Oslo Accords were an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and shrivelled Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer. The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more than a supplicant for EU money.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. The west and Israel tried everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the “international community” in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, US and EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run.

Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza – in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer, “the public will then support the Authority against Hamas.”

Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this. Hamas’s electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those of the party it had defeated at the polls. Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a “peace process” that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people.

It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad base of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran. How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of IDF killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer, despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests that followed, in which some 300 Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.

On August 19 2003, a self-proclaimed “Hamas” cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in west Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas, in turn, responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the EU declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization – a longstanding demand of Tel Aviv.

What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline – demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest-armed oppression of modern history.

“Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for 45 years against occupation force,” said General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. The real grievance of the EU and US against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The west’s priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas – as publicly picked for his post by Washington, as was Karzai in Kabul – at the expense of the legislative council is another.

No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to western and Israeli interests, but it would not have been unprecedented. Hamas’ programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown.

The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. Soon after the Hamas election victory in Gaza, I was asked in public by a Palestinian what I would do in their place. “Dissolve the Palestinian Authority” was my response and end the make-believe. To do so would situate the Palestinian national cause on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equitably, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size – not 80% to one and 20% to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way.

And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare (in The Merchant of Venice), which I have slightly altered:

“I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that … the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

Related posts:

1. Israel’s targets in Gaza
2. Gaza, Disneyland and the Amnesic Loss of Memory
3. Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power

Calling it a “stroke of brilliance”, Israel’s biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed”.

The daily Ma’ariv agreed: “We left them in shock and awe”.

As so often, the term ‘terrorism’ has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak.

Origin: The Guardian, December 29, 2008. By Nir Rosen.

I have spent most of the Bush administration’s tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush’s final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.

Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.

The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. “All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks,” as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.

I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.

Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. “The terrorist”, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. “The terrorist was arrested by security forces,” the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?

In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some “collateral” civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to “shock and awe”, as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.

Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.

It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.

I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country’s exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today’s world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It’s merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.

Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food had not set it back decades already.

The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas’s military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?

A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?

Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with America.

A failed American administration departs, the promise of a Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new president comes to power, but the people of the Middle East have too much bitter experience of US administrations to have any hope for change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated that their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose oppression it either ignores or supports?

Related posts:

1. Gaza, Disneyland and the Amnesic Loss of Memory
2. From the Ashes of Gaza
3. Israel’s targets in Gaza

When just one year ago the chieftain of US Disneyland was travelling the Middle East he enjoyed the myths of his fantasy island. And once again, it is worth to remember – no, not those deep insights demonstrating his impressive capacity to understand the US economy or the benevolent process of nation building in Iraq, but rather this personal “commitment to Middle Eastern peace”, quite simple to achieve with his ingenious “three-track strategy”, which “will come into being by the time I leave office”.

What means: right now.

So if you ever really wanted to understand what observing the world in fact is causing, when heavily armed to the teeth wearing Disneyland glasses – assimilate his timeless words, spoken on January 4, 2008:

“So this is a really good opportunity to travel and be with friends, and have frank discussions about particularly three items: one, the United States’ commitment to the peace process; that what happened in Annapolis is the beginning of serious discussions, a serious attempt by the United States to encourage the Israelis and the Palestinians to develop a vision of what a Palestinian state will look like.

And I am very optimistic that such a vision will come into being by the time I leave office. And the reason I am is because I know the two leaders well, and I believe both are committed to a two-state solution and both understand that in order for that state to come into being, subject to the road map, that there has to be more than just words, there has to be clarity in what a Palestinian state will look like.

Secondly, I’m looking forward to sitting down with friends and allies to assure them of my commitment to Middle Eastern peace and to work with them to make sure they’re committed to Middle Eastern peace; that I will remind them that we’ve got a three-track strategy — one is the vision, two is the implementation of the road map — in other words, the United States chairs a committee with the Palestinians and the Israelis to deal with road map issues — and three, a commitment by the United States and others to build the institutions necessary for a Palestinian democracy to thrive.”

In fact, however, and as usual, reality didn’t pass Disneyland check, and, as usual as well, it doesn’t matter.

Not surprisingly, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s endless shuttle diplomacy in all these years is now confirmed in its utter futility, not surprisingly because a peaceful solution to the conflict never was her real concern.

Accordingly, her concern is a different one, following defined US interests in the region. And so, taking once again the US’ role as an honest broker ad absurdum, she did not even mention Israel’s military assault in her first official statement on the situation, not surprisingly again.

Her full statement, December 27, 2008:

“The United States is deeply concerned about the escalating violence in Gaza. We strongly condemn the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and hold Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence there. The ceasefire must be restored immediately and fully respected. The United States calls on all concerned to protect innocent lives and to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza. “

But it’s not only reality that doesn’t matter, it’s history, too, inevitably.

As Robert Fisk has observed (Dec. 29, 2008), lessons of history are ignored:

“We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care any more – providing we don’t offend the Israelis. It’s not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel’s side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.

Ever since 1948, we’ve been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist “death wagon” will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be “liberated”. And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise “restraint” – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas’s home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.”

And even more, it’s not only the lessons of history, it’s history itself, being incompatible with their Disneyland and therefore completely ignored, inevitably again.

So let’s remember the real history:

Origin:
The Independent, December 30, 2008.
By Robert Fisk.

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.

But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn’t worry the world.

Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon’s bloody “pacification”, starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.

Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I’m talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the Israelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. “It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in,” Said once said of Gaza. “It’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.”

Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that “sometimes also civilians pay the price,” an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel’s arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was “pointless to play the numbers game”. Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the “numbers game” and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN’s conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.

To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.

As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an “action committee” to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few months, we’ll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having “secret talks” – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.

Related posts:

1. Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power
2. From the Ashes of Gaza
3. Israel’s targets in Gaza

As the officials of the Bush administration pack up in Washington and move into their posh suburban homes around the country, will they be able to rest easy, or will they be haunted by the fear that they will be held accountable for war crimes?

Heinous crimes are now synonymous with this US administration. If it isn’t held to account, what does that say about the US?

If Bush and Cheney are allowed to retire quietly, the US will have failed to reestablish that bedrock principle of a democratic republic: the rule of law.

Then, at least, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and the rest of the gang will have to hesitate before making plans to travel abroad in 2009. Or indeed at any time – ever again.

In the end, we remember, it was a lone Spanish magistrate, not a Chilean court, who ensured the arrest of Augusto Pinochet.

Will it be again other prosecutors elsewhere in the world who weigh their responsibilities?

Origin:
The Nation, December 17, 2008.
By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith.

There are many reasons to anticipate that the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress will let sleeping dogs lie. Attention to criminal acts by the former administration would probably anger Republicans, whose support Obama is hoping to win for his first priority, his economic program. Democratic Congressional leaders have known a great deal about Bush administration lawlessness, and in some cases have even given it their approval–making an unfettered review seem unlikely.

Some of Obama’s own top appointees would undoubtedly receive scrutiny in an unconstrained investigation–Obama’s reappointed defense secretary Robert Gates, for example, has had responsibility not only for Guantánamo but also for the incarceration of tens of thousands of Iraqis in prisons in Iraq like Camp Bucca, which the ‘Washington Post’ described in a headline as “a Prison Full of Innocent Men,” without even a procedure for determining their guilt or innocence–unquestionably a violation of the Geneva Conventions in and of itself.

But the repose of the Cheneys, Bushes, Gonzaleses and Rumsfelds may not turn out to be so undisturbed. In his notorious torture memo, Alberto Gonzales warned about “prosecutors and independent counsels” who may in the future decide to pursue “unwarranted charges” based on the US War Crimes Act’s prohibition on violations of the Geneva Conventions. While no such charges are likely to be brought anytime soon, neither are they likely to vanish. In the short run, Obama and his team face inescapable questions about the legal culpability of the Bush administration. And in the long run, such charges are likely to grow only more unavoidable once the former officials of that administration have lost the authority to quash them.

In April Obama said that if elected, he would have his attorney general initiate a prompt review of Bush-era action to distinguish between possible “genuine crimes” and “really bad policies.”

“If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Obama told the ‘Philadelphia Daily News’. He added, however, that “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, speaking to the American Constitution Society in June, described Bush administration actions in terms that sound a whole lot more like “genuine crimes” than like “really bad policies”:

“Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution…. We owe the American people a reckoning.”

A Reckoning?

While attention has focused on whether, once president, Obama will move quickly to close Guantánamo, shut down secret prisons, halt rendition and ban torture, there’s a less visible struggle over whether and how to provide a reckoning for war crimes past.

A growing body of legal opinion holds that Obama will have a duty to investigate war crimes allegations and, if they are found to have merit, to prosecute the perpetrators.

In a December 3 Chicago Sun-Times op-ed, law professors Anthony D’Amato (the Leighton Professor at Northwestern University School of Law) and Jordan J. Paust (the Mike & Theresa Baker Professor at the Law Center of the University of Houston) ask whether president-elect Barack Obama will have “the duty to prosecute or extradite persons who are reasonably accused of having committed and abetted war crimes or crimes against humanity during the Bush administration’s admitted ‘program’ of ‘coercive interrogation’ and secret detention that was part of a ‘common, unifying’ plan to deny protections under the Geneva Conventions.”

They answer, “Yes.”

“Under the US Constitution, the president is expressly and unavoidably bound to faithfully execute the laws.” The 1949 Geneva Conventions “expressly and unavoidably requires that all parties search for perpetrators of grave breaches of the treaty” and bring them before their own courts for “effective penal sanctions” or, if they prefer, “hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party.”

The statement is particularly authoritative–and particularly striking–because Paust is also a former captain in the United States Army JAG Corps and member of the faculty at the Judge Advocate General’s School.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights says that one of Barack Obama’s first acts as president should be to “instruct his attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush Administration officials who gave the green light to torture.”

Parallel to the legal community, members of Congress and president-elect Obama are trying to chart a strategy that avoids the appearance of seeking to punish Bush administration officials without appearing blatantly oblivious to their apparent war crimes. According to the AP’s Lara Jakes Jordan, “Two Obama advisors say there’s little–if any–chance that the incoming president’s Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.” Instead, “Obama is expected to create a panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission to study interrogations, including those using waterboarding and other tactics that critics call torture.”

Asked if Bush administration officials would face prosecution for war crimes, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy flatly said, “In the United States, no,” but he does intend to continue to investigate Bush administration officials and their interrogation policies. “Personally, I would like to know exactly what happened. Torture is going to be a major issue.”

Continue the Cover-Up?

President-elect Obama may well seek to delay taking a stand for or against such accountability actions. But he is likely to be confronted early in his administration by choices about whether to continue or terminate legal cover-up operations the Bush administration currently has under way.

For example, the Bush administration has blocked the civil suit against US officials by Canadian Maher Arar for his “rendition” to Syria and his torture there by invoking the “state secrets” privilege. According to Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, they have appointed a prosecutor to investigate the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations, but the investigation is limited only to whether crimes were committed in relation to the destruction of the tapes–not whether what was being videotaped is a crime. The administration has refused to cooperate with the trial of twenty-six Americans, mostly CIA agents, who kidnapped a terrorism suspect in Milan and flew him to Egypt where, he says, he was tortured. And they have refused to provide secret documents to the British High Court in the case of Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed that may demonstrate that US officials were complicit in his torture in Morocco.

If the Obama administration continues the Bush administration’s efforts to prevent investigators from investigating and courts from hearing such cases, it will rapidly become part of the cover-up. If it begins to, at a minimum, stop obstructing such proceedings, the result could be a rapid crumbling of the wall of silence the Bush administration has tried so assiduously to build around its “war on terror.”

A bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 11 will make it far more difficult to evade the responsibility of holding Bush administration officials legally accountable for war crimes. Released by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain after two years of investigation, the report concluded:

The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own…. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees…. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.

In an interview published in the Detroit News, Senator Levin said he was not responsible for deciding whether officials should be prosecuted for authorizing torture, but he admitted that there is enough evidence that victims of abuse could file civil lawsuits against their assailants. Levin also suggested that the Obama administration “needs to look for ways in which people can be held accountable for their actions.”

An Accountability Movement

Outside the Beltway, a movement to hold Bush administration officials accountable for torture and other war crimes after they leave office is gradually emerging. It received a boost when over a hundred lawyers and activists met in Andover, Massachusetts on September 20 at a conference entitled “Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals.” The conference created an ongoing committee to coordinate accountability efforts. At the close, conference convener Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law noted more than twenty strategies and specific actions that had been proposed, ranging from the state felony prosecutions proposed by former district attroney Vincent Bugliosi to the international prosecutions pioneered by the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Rumsfeld cases; and from impeaching Bush appointees like Federal Judge Jay Bybee to public shaming of torture-tainted former officials like ohn Yew, now a professor at the University of California Law School.

One of proposals discussed at the Andover conference was the creation of a citizens’ War Crimes Documentation Center, modeled on the special office set up by the Allied governments before the end of World War II to investigate and document Nazi war crimes. Such a center could be the nexus for research, education and coordination of a wide range of civil society forces in the US and abroad that are demanding accountability. It could bring together the extensive but scattered evidence already available, to compile a narrative of what actually happened in the Bush administration. It could help or pressure Congress to conduct investigations to fill in the blanks. It could pull together high-profile coalitions to campaign around the issue of accountability for specific crimes like torture. If Obama does initiate some kind of investigating commission, such a center could provide it with information and help hold it accountable.

A Moral Education

There are a myriad of reasons for urgently holding the Bush regime to account, ranging from preventing unchallenged executive action from setting new legal precedent to providing a compelling rationale for the immediate cessation of bombing civilians in the escalating Afghan war.

But the issue raised by Bush administration war crimes is even larger than any person’s individual crimes. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” The long history of aggressive war, illegal occupation, and torture, from the Philippines to Iraq, have given the American people a moral education that encourages us to countenance war crimes. If we allow those who initiated and justified the illegal conquest and occupation of Iraq and the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to go unsanctioned, we teach the world–and ourselves–a lesson about what’s OK and legal.

As countries like Chile, Turkey and Argentina can attest, restoration of democracy, civic morality and the rule of law is often a slow but necessary process, requiring far more than simply voting a new party into office. It requires a wholesale rejection of impunity for the criminal acts of government officials. As Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) put it, “We owe it to the American people and history to pursue the wrongdoing of this administration whether or not it helps us politically…. Our actions will properly define the Bush Administration in the eyes of history.”

Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below, and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan/Holt). He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work. He is a co-founder of WarCrimesWatch.org. more…

Brendan Smith is a legal analyst whose books include Globalization From Below and, with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, of In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan). He is current co-director of Global Labor Strategies and UCLA Law School’s Globalization and Labor Standards Project, and has worked previously for Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and a broad range of unions and grassroots groups. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, CBS News.com, YahooNews and the Baltimore Sun. Contact him at smithb28@gmail.com.

Related posts:

1. Nine Reasons to Investigate US War Crimes Now
2. The Bush Administration Is an Ongoing Criminal Conspiracy Under International Law and U.S. Domestic Law
3. The trail of torture

In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006)  Chalmers Johnson observed that since

“1947, while we have used our military power for political and military gain in a long list of countries, in no instance has democratic government come about as a result.”

“Liberation” and “spreading democracy” are the traditional linguistic cover designed to hide the venality behind imperial conquest. The image of the U.S. as a benevolent world saviour which engages in “nation-building” is just another convenient Disneyland myth that has no bearing on the reality of the corporate global project.

Origin:
Truthdig, Dec. 16, 2008.
By William Pfaff.

Early in December, the press reported from the Barack Obama transition team that the president-elect has signed onto a foreign policy program continuing the “war against terror” on new, expanded and fundamentally changed terms. The United States will attack the sources of the problem of terrorism. It will start from scratch in “rogue,” “failed” and other distressed Middle Eastern, South Asian and African states, to build them up into modern democracies.

The Washington foreign policy community has been working on this idea. Condoleezza Rice announced last summer that new, multi-agency teams were being formed to move into countries to build democratic institutions and practices there, in addition to providing traditional aid. “Democratic state-building,” she said, was the “new American wisdom.” Robert Gates, who will continue as defense secretary in the Obama administration, has already endorsed the substance of this program. Washington will—in Secretary Rice’s words—“change the world in America’s image.”

Let me change the subject for a moment. Recent days have brought information on a 513-page federal report on the American-led reconstruction of American-destroyed Iraq, which has proved to be a $100-billion disaster, incorporating ignorant assumptions, waste, organizational chaos, bureaucratic and personal rivalries, lies and incompetence.

According to the document, during the past five years little more has been accomplished than restoration of the basic services and productive capacity that was destroyed by the American invasion and the looting that followed.

This is after killing or wounding—how many, a half million?—Iraqi civilians in order to liberate them. No wonder the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at George W. Bush at the president’s farewell Baghdad news conference, and shouted “you dog!”—the worst insults possible in Arabic culture. This happened because no one in responsibility knew what they were doing, beyond the military objectives. The neoconservatives assured the president that America built democracies in Germany and Japan after the war. Surely Iraq would be easier yet. No one in power asked anyone who was there in Germany or Japan, or bothered to consult the records, which are ample.

Japan was “democratized” because the emperor, having been informed that such was the wish of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, ordered his people to become democrats. Japan had a parliament and constitutional monarchy before the war, then became a military dictatorship, and by fiat became a constitutional democracy again after the war.

The British and American occupation authorities in Germany in 1945 began “denazification” but soon found that, as most official positions in the country had required Nazi Party membership, if they denazified Germany there would be no one to run it. They settled for prosecuting actual war criminals. As the Cold War then began, they let the Germans get on with installing a democratic system as ordered (Germany had been a parliamentary democracy before Hitler and his party were democratically elected). The first thing the Bush administration did in its crusade to democratize Iraq was to fire all the people who knew how to run it.

Something else has happened recently that bears on the issue of American official competence. This was the confession by one of the most respected men on Wall Street, former chairman of the NASDAQ exchange, that he had for years been running a simple Ponzi pyramid swindle (paying high returns to established customers out of the funds newcomers invest). With this, on his own account, he stole $50 billion from individuals, including sophisticated investors, as well as banks in the United States and abroad.

Bernard Madoff seems to have done this over a 40-year period (he started his investment firm in 1960), despite three Securities and Exchange Commission investigations, formal complaints to the SEC from competitors, conspicuous secrecy about his clients and methods, published accounts going unquestioned despite being prepared by an obscure two-man auditing firm, and persistent Wall Street rumors and suspicions. It may be the biggest financial swindle ever committed.

It comes at an unfortunate moment for American-style capitalism, which it has been the U.S. aim to install worldwide. The capitalist world suffers a liquidity crisis and impending catastrophe that may prove worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has been caused by American financial fraud and incompetence. Following this evidence of American fiasco in running its own affairs, let me return to the subject of a foreign policy devoted to remaking other countries “in the American image.”

The conclusions of the report on American reconstruction of Iraq included the following statement:

“Five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the U.S. government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program.”

I would think this should be written in fiery letters over the portal of the future president Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

You can visit William Pfaff’s Web site here.

Related posts:

1. Change: Remaking the World in America’s Image
2. Change 2010, Obama Style: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World
3. US: Welcome to the real world

Weather Forecast

The day will get off to a cloudy start.
It will be quite chilly
But as the day progresses
The sun will come out
And the afternoon will be dry and warm.

In the evening the moon will shine
And be quite bright.
There will be, it has to be said,
A brisk wind
But it will die out by midnight.
Nothing further will happen.

This is the last forecast.

Harold Pinter, born October 10, 1930, in East London, playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist; died December 24, 2008.

As The Guardian noted, he

“was the most influential, provocative and poetic dramatist of his generation.”

“Pinter was born into a Jewish family in the London borough of Hackney. His grandparents were Jews who had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa. His father, Jack, was a hard-working tailor whose own family had artistic leanings: his mother, Frances, came from a convivial, extrovert and spiritually sceptical clan. And it was not difficult to trace in Pinter’s own complex personality elements from both sides of the family. He balanced his father’s faintly authoritarian nature with his mother’s instinctive generosity.”

In 2007 he became one of the signatories of the founding Independent Jewish Voices, an organisation set up to represent British Jews in response to perceived uncritical support of Israel in existing Jewish bodies.

He was an early supporter of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

In 1985, when visiting NATO member Turkey together with fellow playwright Arthur Miller on behalf of International P.E.N., to investigate allegations of torture and persecution of Turkish writers, he was thrown out of the US embassy when he spoke of Turkish oppression including victims having an electric current applied to their genitals.

His comment:

“Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller – a voluntary exile – was one of the proudest moments in my life.”

Although awarded the “Commander of the Order of the British Empire” by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966, he refused a knighthood from Prime Minister John Major in 1996 saying he was “unable to accept such an honour from a Conservative government”.

Since then, Pinter has focused increasingly on political issues, opposing the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the United States’s 2001 War in Afghanistan, and its 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

When he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2005, Pinter delivered his acceptance speech by video, sitting in a wheelchair, with a rug over his knees and framed by an image of his younger self – here’s what he said.

Origin:
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005,
Harold Pinter‘s acceptance speech.

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said:

‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity.

‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’

There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said:

‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable.

‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

Related posts:

1. December 7, 1941: “Remember Pearl Harbor!”
2. US 2008: Poverty in major US cities comparable to Abidjan, Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Santiago
3. What Change in US America Really Means

When in 1997 Kagan as one of the co-founders was launching the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), he thought to eternalise the native US American global leadership, defined in its Statement of Principles.

At that time, the world viewed by US Disneylanders looked very bright:

“Having defeated the ‘evil empire,’ the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance…”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996.

And the way to be successful was looking clear and easy to go:

• “we need to increase defense spending significantly” and

• “…a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the U.S. global responsibilities…”
PNAC, “Statement of Principles,” June 3, 1997.

As a perseverative mantra, ‘U.S. global responsibilities’ meant what in PNAC’s militaristic ultra-nationalism is called ‘America’s unique role’:

“What should the U.S. role be? Benevolent global hegemony.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996.

But the chosen executor has made such a good job of it, that

never before:

• the US has been more isolated than now on this globe.

• the outlook for US economic and financial systems has been significantly worse.

• the US’ global reputation as a civilised nation was likewise down.

• any US president has been more irrelevant inside and outside of his own country.

• the US president not only is considered by most people on this globe to be a moron but a war criminal, too, who should appear in the dock of the United Nation’s International Court of Justice (ICC).

Fortunately, the US refuses collaboration and support, “directly or indirectly,” because the ICC “inevitably will complicate the exercise of American geopolitical leadership.” Instead the US was striving from the Court’s start “to maximize the chances that the ICC will wither and collapse,” being considered as a “roadblock” to present and “future U.S. foreign policy.”

And what’s in the focus of this future U.S. foreign policy Kagan is advocating?

It’s “The Sovereignty Dodge”: sovereignty should not be taken “for granted. In the 21st century, sovereign rights need to be earned.”

However, one president and several wars later the New American Century already was over again before it really has started.

Déjà-vu?

Yes, in 1933, the German Nazis, promoting another Herrenvolk religion, but being less moderate than the US Neocons, had proclaimed another ever-lasting period in history – the Third Reich was defined as a ‘Reich of a Thousand Years’, too.

One world war later, when the Reich of a Thousand Years was over, it had lasted twelve years.

Origin:
Palestine Chronicle, Dec. 8, 2008.
By Jim Miles.

Robert Kagan is a difficult subject to analyze. At times his writing seems to be very honest and directly critical of U.S. intentions as well as being clearly honest about the sometimes “dangerous nation” aspect of its history and foreign policy. Underlying it all however is his own patriotic blindness that ends up always supporting U.S. exceptionalism and uniqueness, always expressing the egocentric viewpoint that the U.S. is the indispensable nation. The U.S. is not indispensable.

Nor is it a bastion of “democratic capitalism” that is the only way forward from here, here being a point in renewed history – according to Kagan – in which there are either “democrats” or “autocrats.” Kagan does not see in shades of gray, countries and politicians are either one or the other. His arguments, while seemingly coherent at certain points tend to dissolve into self-contradiction, the main contradiction being the solid criticism that “what you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you say.” For all that Kagan tries to present as the positives of the U.S., of the underlying good intentions of the U.S. – at the same time recognizing its sometimes hard handed methods of interfering in other countries – he really does not understand that perceptions built on those hard handed actions over-ride all the rhetoric and jingoism about the greatness and indispensability of the U.S. as the world’s guide to a better world.

The huge contradictions between rhetoric and action should in the critical analyst’s mind lead to the summation that it is what is done that truly represents the ideals of the country.  And what is done by the U.S. has precious little to do with democracy and a whole lot to do with capitalism, precious little to do with true democracy – from ‘demos’ – the people, and ‘-cracy’, power – and much more to do with the power of the elites that control the people whether they live in a relative free society or in a more authoritarian one.

My summary notes at the end of “The Return of History” indicate that Kagan’s arguments are beguiling but essentially bi-polar and simplistic, providing a continuing rationale for an ongoing U.S. hegemonic role. [1]

Initial reactions include critiques of the two main ideas of this elongated essay. The first obvious one being that capitalism is neither the main route to democracy nor the main route to freedom, and as has been currently witnessed by the global billions, is simply a set of opaque non-democratic structures that are used to garner wealth from the masses of workers and employees – and worse, the peasants and landless and labourers – and raise it to the upper echelons of the elite. In association with that, democracy remains undefined, as if it is a universal obvious. While it would be nice if it were universally obvious, the manner in which the word is used by most U.S. administrations makes the word more of warning of U.S. negative intentions rather than their true interest in the majority populace having an actual say in governance.

Democracy and Capitalism within a Superpower

Kagan starts his arguments with a recognition that the world is “normal again”, that history did not end as postulated by Fukuyama – an idea that fully supported the jargon and rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism, the “perfection of its institutions” and its indispensability. He is quite confident, and expresses it frequently through the work, that the U.S. remains the sole superpower, an argument based on….well, it’s not defined, again it is presumed to be understood.

Does it matter that U.S. military technology is the most sophisticated (arguably – what do we really know about Chinese advances in technology?) when rag tag bands of militias can pin down the majority of active fighting forces in two desolate regions of the world (made desolate by ongoing imperial ambitions and occupation)? Does it matter that regardless of U.S. dominance in military and nuclear technology that other nations can just as readily inflict massive and catastrophic damage to the U.S. with their military and nuclear power (there will be no winners in another world war that is without limits)?  Does it matter that the U.S. economy is built on a debt structure that is at the moment imploding on itself, while those of the elite who brought us to this position are the ones trying futilely to get us out of the mess? Does it matter that demographically the U.S. has one of the worst records of the developed nations in what are normally considered indicators of national well-being such as infant mortality rate, life span, poverty rates, income gaps….? Does it matter that the rest of the world has to continue to live with an arrogant egocentric nation whose rhetoric is far outweighed by its brutal tactics to remain in control? If that defines a superpower, then yes, the U.S. is the sole superpower.

The underlying theme is stated quite clearly near the beginning: “Since democratic capitalism was the most successful model for developing societies, all societies would eventually choose that path.”

Problems immediately arise, as noted above, with “democratic capitalism”, with its assumption as being a “successful model”, and eventually for it being a “chosen” path.  How much choice is there when democratic governments around the world have been overthrown with great regularity: the Cuban freedom fighters and the Philippino freedom fighters were sidelined by the U.S. military after the Spanish-American war [2];  the democratic government of Mossadegh was overthrown by joint manipulations of the CIA and British intelligence; the Italian and Greek popular movements towards social democracy were subverted; the Vietnam war would never have happened if the U.S. had allowed for a democratic vote sponsored by the UN on  the joining of North and South Vietnam; most of the democratic governments of Central America faced subversion and interference from CIA and other U.S. sponsored operatives, from Nicaragua and Guatemala through to Allende’s overthrow and Pinochet’s reign of disappearances in Chile. While democracy withers on the vine in most areas of U.S. intervention (or survives in spite of it after millions of people in opposition to the elites are murdered by death squads, government operatives, or direct U.S. military action), the U.S. pours massive amounts of manure into areas that it sees as “strategic interests”.

The U.S. has supported some notable “autocrats” in its own endeavours to secure resources and markets for its corporate partners. Currently in the Middle East alone, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are bought off with massive aid programs and petrodollar purchases of military goods that are essentially useless. U.S. military forces remain in Iraq regardless of the democratic wishes of the majority of the people who never wanted them there in the first place, who never hosted terrorists and only had the misfortune of living on huge pools of oil. Autocrats under the U.S. influence are frequent, ranging from Syngman Rhee (Korea), Suharto (Indonesia), Pinochet (Chile), Reza Pahlevi (Iran), to the current crop in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other Middle East countries listed above.

At the centre of Middle East non-democracies is the state of Israel – while self-proclaiming its democratic nature it holds millions of Palestinians subject to harsh and internationally illegal treatment in various bantustan style regions. Several other factors play an important role here. The first is the unequivocal support of the U.S. for Israeli policy, a U.S. foreign policy destined to continue under Barak Obama. Secondly, the U.S. supports Israel with more than $3 billion in aid money per annum, allowing it to succeed financially while maintaining an ever tightening noose around the collective Palestinian neck.  Finally, after the fully democratic elections in which Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian government, the election was denied by the U.S., Canada, and most European countries as invalid because Hamas was described as a terrorist organization.  Government terror does not really bother the U.S. as they use it frequently themselves (think of carpet bombing, torture, extradition, cluster bombs, chemical weapons), while tending to ignore it when it occurs in countries where they either have no interest, or countries where a subservient government follows the accepted line.

So far, not much “choice”, not much democracy. As for capitalism, it does not require democracy to flourish, rather it tends to limit democracy to the elites capable of hanging onto power by using their wealth and power to pervert or subjugate a real democratic process. ‘Finance capitalism’ has a requirement for cheap politically ineffectual labour, has a requirement that many people are poor to produce wealth that others gather to themselves, and most obviously currently, has a requirement that the masses indebt themselves to the corporate wealthy who in turn seek succour from their buddies in government when times get rough.  If the people truly had power, their would be a much more equitable distribution of wealth, much more in the way of services provided for the people, and more than likely, much more in the way of peaceful fair trade globalization initiatives that accounted for the environment, workers conditions, and care of the citizens of the producing countries.

These arguments critique the basic underlying thesis of Kagan’s writing. If correct they essentially nullify all of Kagan’s supporting arguments but within his writings there are other perceptions and statements that are interesting to look at.

Russia

In his arguments on autocracy Kagan discusses the resurgence of “nationalism”, an idea that never disappeared in the first place and was only wishfully denied existence within the false concept of the end of history that Kagan bought into.

Kagan as with many other writers of the political right uses information out of context.  His first example is the military spending of Russian said to be larger than any other country except China and the U.S. A bit disingenuous, as the U.S. budget at $711 billion (not including the money budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan) dwarfs the Russian budget of $70 billion and China’s at $122 billion. The U.S. budget is larger than all the military budgets combined in the world, a claim that Russia is probably quite proud not to make.

Shortly after that argument Kagan writes of the “billions of dollars in foreign assistance the West provided to Russian in the 1990s were a far cry from the huge sums the victorious powers tried to extract from Germany after 1918.” I do not see the connection of how that supports his argument of supposed western generosity towards Russia – rather it hides the idea that most of those funds were used to bail out an economy that threatened to collapse and endanger U.S. interests – the people of Russia never saw the money, the corporate elites of both Russia and the incoming western corporations felt that relief.

Many of his observations of Russia are accurate – and very understandable from a Russian perspective, something U.S. theorists and politicians are incapable of doing, lost in their own exceptionalism and uniqueness. While castigating Putin throughout the work as an “autocrat”, he does not mention his popularity in Russia that arises from his strong position vis a vis the U.S., the latter seemingly determined to undermine Russia on every front militarily, economically, and politically regardless of their encouraging words about non-interference in Russian affairs and not having NATO move east to the Russian border. He did make an accurate prediction about Russia’s interactions with Tbilisi wondering what Europe and the U.S. would do if “Russia played hardball in either Ukraine or Georgia? They might well do nothing.” All proven true, except that it was Tbilisi that instigated the mini-war that only brought on more U.S. rhetoric about freedom and democracy while they continued to occupy two countries they invaded five years earlier.

For all that Kagan presents about Putin, if one considers Kagan’s obvious predisposition and bias, the actual information really provides a positive view of all that Putin has accomplished for Russia. It is a stronger healthier country now that is was at the end of the 1990s and it has avoided most of the economic depredations of western corporations and of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. Certainly Russia is manipulating for its own national benefit, but with its wealth of natural resources and its own tired history of invasions and interventions from outside, it would seem a rationale approach for its own people’s security. It could be otherwise, but the apparent and real threats from the west and in particular the U.S. almost require this kind of reaction.

China

Kagan moves on to China, observing interestingly enough that “as with all great powers, there is also a military aspect to greatness…While becoming a great commercial power, China is also becoming a military power.  After all, commercial nations are not pacific nations.”

In my mind, this only adds support to my arguments above about capitalism and democracy and only provides contradiction to Kagan’s initial idea. The “hidden fist” of “democratic capitalism” heavily denies the democracy function, and perhaps unwittingly supports the idea that capitalism is based on a warrior economy (as if there should be any doubt of that in any serious person’s consideration of events versus rhetoric).

There is also a strange twist to the globalization argument, more than likely unintended by Kagan, when he says, “Never before has China been so closely bound up with the rest of the world…And therefore China needs a modern capable military.” Again, does that mean that globalization necessitates militarization (the U.S. example would indicate yes, it does)? Does then capitalism rely on military capabilities and require militarization for ‘success’ however it is measured? Kagan’s rationale seems to indicate that – in contradiction again to his main idea of freedom and democracy via capitalism – yes, it does. The argument underscores the belief that international relations involve military interactions, and while Kagan superficially seems to be against the militancy of nationalism, his own arguments tend to indicate that underneath it all – if globalization is a sign of capitalism writ large – then military power is a component of capitalism making it not even remotely democratic – it is not the ‘demos’ the people, that call for war, unless manipulated by the elites who tend not being the ones that do the fighting and killing (and dying).

The arguments Kagan makes concerning China reflect powerfully on the U.S. as well.  He acknowledges that the Chinese “don’t believe any of this, and with reason.” What they don’t believe is the rhetoric thrown out by the U.S. about peaceful globalization and therefore China does not need military programs. While throwing out the jargonistic term “postmodern”, itself undefined but substantively meaning we need to give in to the U.S. view, Kagan does admit the reality of “whether the United States itself would ever follow its own advice and abjure power politics.”

“Errors of Commission and Omission”

The latter statement leads into some accurate perspectives that Kagan provides in observing the U.S.’ own actions around the world. When he asks “did the United States pull back from its extended global involvements [military] and become a more passive, restrained presence in the world?” he knows and acknowledges that “The answer to this question is no.” Rather, “Unchecked by Soviet power” the U.S. “attempted to establish, where possible, the kind of democratic and free-market capitalistic order that Americans [3] preferred.” As argued above, democracy and free markets are nothing but rhetoric useful to U.S. interpretations of there own economic, financial, and military depredations in other countries. Anyone who has followed current events should know that the U.S. took full advantage of their power, did not reduce yet rather increased their militancy and global domination economically (now viewed rather dimly through the awareness of global economic meltdown) for their own power and wealth. Quite simply, they blew the chance for a true global peace if they had actually listened to the rest of the world and had not gone off on their own unilateral supreme dominance quest.

Other comments from Kagan concerning U.S. foreign policy hold true:

“This expansive, even aggressive global policy was consistent with American foreign policy traditions.”

“Americans want what they want, and not just economic opportunity and security but also a world that roughly suits their political and moral preferences.”

“The United States, though traditionally jealous of its own sovereignty, has always been ready to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations.”

“The United States, of course, paid this [national sovereignty] little heed – it had intervened and overthrown sovereign governments dozens of times throughout its history.”

Unfortunately, these honest expressions of what the U.S. is really about are accompanied by the ongoing rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism and good intentions:

“A nation that cherishes self-determination is uncomfortable depriving others of that right.”

“…the noble generosity of spirit and perception of enlightened self-interest that lead the United States out into the world to assist others….”

The latter statement is preceded by the predominant excuse for U.S. global bullying, that any “mistakes” made by the U.S., anything that goes wrong, all the “misperceptions” held by foreigners, is “…an American problem, due to errors of commission and omission, not only in recent years, but throughout history.”

So all those wars and fights and battles from the first genocide of native Americans through to Iraq and Afghanistan (have I been here before?) are not because we are evil minded imperialists searching for power, wealth, control without concern for any other, but because we have made some mistakes along the way. Everyone is entitled to mistakes, but to make the same ones over and over – and over again – indicates the lack of ability to learn, a collective will to not care, and an underlying motive against the very motives constantly reiterated yet ignored by U.S. politicians, military, economic, and media personnel.

It returns to the statement, “What you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you are saying.” Well, I can hear it, and balancing actions against words, the actions carry infinitely more weight than the jingoism and rhetoric of exceptionalism. And again, democracy and freedom are great ideals, but without a clear definition, one that is garbled by military occupation, economic dominance and subjugation, the ideals are somewhat irrelevant to what you do.

The greatest criminal excuse of all time is that while my intentions have always been noble and honourable, I simply can’t seem to do things correctly (criminally insane?) – but that’s okay ‘cause we’re doing our best.  The underlying motive for all this fine sounding self-promoting rhetoric – and the U.S. is most “exceptional” at that – is greed for the accumulation of power and wealth regardless of the human pain and suffering imposed on others. Dangerous nation indeed.

Some Odds and an End

Kagan dips into other topics, other countries along the way. He discusses Japan and India in particular as rising powers. He uses the terms “postmodern” and “liberal” quite frequently, both terms with assumed meanings but without true definition. Postmodern is one of those undefined terms that really means nothing, more jargon added to the political scientists lexicon to make it more rarefied and obtuse and supposedly of a higher order of learning that the masses cannot access.

Liberal carries several meanings: a general broadening of the mind; generous; and favourable to democratic reform. The mind of the U.S. politician has hardly broadened since its inception, demonstrated by those constantly revisited “errors and commissions” over its history. The only thing generous about it is the amount of money it provides to its supporters in various forms and in the amount of military hardware and ordinance it spreads around the globe. As for being favourable to democratic reform, I think that has already been put into serious doubt. Any true democratic reform that goes against the interest of U.S. politicians/economists/corporate leaders is quickly upset by U.S. intervention.

Kagan arrives at a conclusion that is suspect, mainly because his whole thesis is suspect, but given that, his proposal is not very well thought out. He offers the world a “concert of democracies” citing problems with the United Nations without recognizing that two of the biggest problems concern the United States: first, the U.S. has consistently gone against many UN security Council resolutions that deal with one of the main sparks of Middle trouble, the Israel/Palestine question; beyond that the U.S. typically flaunts its unilateral position using the UN only as convenient and only if it works in its favour while abrogating many international treaties. If the UN were truly democratic, there would be no security council and no veto power, but instead some form of UN cabinet selected from a variety of countries representative of global populations. The big if is if the superpower would ever allow itself to abide by international regulations voted on and determined by the majority of the world’s population. The arrogance and ignorance prevalent in most aspects of U.S. life would make that seem impossible.

Kagan’s conclusion does not deserve much space. When the initial thesis is so badly flawed, with a simplistic dichotomy between “democracies” and “autocracies” followed by arguments that are circular, repetitive and self-contradictory (“what you do…”) his solution can have no validity either. His final statement is a reminder of Pax Americana that “the future international order will be shaped by those who have the power and collective will to shape it.” Straight out of the pages of the neocon playbook.  We have lived through that over the past half century, somehow it did not quite work out the way it was supposed to. Dangerous? Yes. Indispensable? Only in the legend in its own mind.

Notes:

[1] The Return of History and the End of Dreams. Robert Kagan. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008.

[2] in support of these references are many texts and articles that are reviewed critically and can be found at The Palestine Chronicle or at Secret Cove.

[3] as noted by a critical and correct editor “Americans” refers to everyone in the Western Hemisphere, which tends to be an insult to many true Americans that do not live in the United States. However, in a quote, the word can stand as reminder of U.S. political presumption.

Related posts:

1. Change Obama stands for: Robert Gates
2. The Limits of Power: Andrew Bacevich on the End of American Exceptionalism
3. Blundering U.S. Should Spare the World Any More Nation Building

Large numbers of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacist extremists have been infiltrating the US armed forces in an effort to get combat and weapons training.
And they indeed intend to actively participate in ‘Spreading Democracy’ and ‘Nation Building’ across the globe.

Origin: Southern Poverty Law Center, Winter 2008. By David Holthouse.

The racist skinhead logged on with exciting news: He’d just enlisted in the United States Army.

“Sieg Heil, I will do us proud,” he wrote. It was a June 3 post to AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which “Sobibor’s SS,” who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala., had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II).

About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor’s SS bragged in another post to Forum 14 that he’d specifically requested and been assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D.

MOS98D soldiers are in high demand right now. That’s because they’re specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, part of learning how to disarm an IED is learning how one is made.

“I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share them here,” Sobibor’s SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose than defending America: “Once all the Jews are gone the world will start fixing itself.”

Sobibor’s SS included enough biographical details in his various posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he’s a single father from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator with access to enlistment records for recent months should have little trouble determining whether the Army may actually be teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind about tactical bomb-making.

But there’s little reason to expect that will happen.

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives.

Forty members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military. “Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public,” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. “We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

But neither Rumsfeld nor his successor, Robert Gates, launched any sort of systemic investigation or crackdown. Military and Defense Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces or to weed out those already in uniform.

Furthermore, new evidence is emerging that not only supports the Intelligence Report‘s original findings, but also indicates the problem may have worsened since the summer of 2006, as enlistment rates have continued to plummet, and the military has struggled to meet recruitment goals in a time of unpopular war. Asked about the latest developments, military officials this fall declined to comment.

A new FBI report confirms that white supremacists are infiltrating the military for several reasons. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.”

The FBI report details more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. For example, in September 2006, the leader of the Celtic Knights, a central Texas splinter faction of the Hammerskins, a national racist skinhead organization, planned to obtain firearms and explosives from an active duty Army soldier in Fort Hood, Texas. That soldier, who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was a member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.

“Looking ahead, current and former military personnel belonging to white supremacist extremist organizations who experience frustration at the inability of these organizations to achieve their goals may choose to found new, more operationally minded and operationally capable groups,” the report concludes. “The military training veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.”

In May, Army Cpl. Adrian Petty, a member of the Vinlanders Social Club (VSC) skinhead gang, posted several photos to his MySpace page showing himself in uniform serving in Iraq. One, depicting him riding in a Humvee, was captioned, “On Another VSC Recruiting Mission.”

Currently, 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com identify themselves as active-duty military personnel. Six of these individuals are members of “White Military Men,” a New Saxon sub-group.

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified himself in his New Saxon account as “Lance Corporal Burton” of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a master’s thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his “About Me” section, Burton writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and, “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House).”

Kennard, who was working on his thesis for Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, also monitored claims of active-duty military service earlier this year on the neo-Nazi online forum Blood & Honour, where “88Soldier88″ posted this message on Feb. 18: “I am in the ARMY right now. I work in the Detainee Holding Area [in Iraq]. … I am in this until 2013. I am in the infantry but want to go to SF [Special Forces]. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come.”

One of the Blood & Honour members claiming to be an active-duty soldier taking part in combat operations in Iraq identified himself to Kennard as Jacob Berg. He did not disclose his rank or branch of service. “There are actually a lot more ‘skinheads,’ ‘nazis,’ white supremacists now [in the military] than there has been in a long time,” Berg wrote in an E-mail exchange with Kennard. “Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don’t every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I’m so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”

The Army is currently investigating war crimes allegations leveled against Iraq combat veteran and active-duty Army soldier Kenneth Eastridge, 24, who in November was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the December 2007 murder of a fellow serviceman. After Eastridge was arrested for that killing, National Public Radio publicized his MySpace page, which showed Eastridge displaying a tattoo of SS lightning bolts, a common neo-Nazi insignia.

Another member of Eastridge’s company recently told Army investigators that Eastridge used a stolen AK-47 to fire indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians from his moving Humvee on the streets of Baghdad. “The military is to some extent desperate to get people to fight, soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically sick, but they continue to send them,” Eastridge’s attorney told Kennard. “Having a tattoo was the least of [Eastridge's] concerns.”

As part of the research for his thesis, “The New Nazi Army: How the U.S. military is allowing the far right to join its ranks,” Kennard used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division investigative reports concerning white supremacist activity in 2006 and 2007. They show that Army commanders repeatedly terminated investigations of suspected extremist activity in the military despite strong evidence it was occurring. This evidence was often provided by regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which are made up of FBI and state and local law enforcement officials.

For example, one CID report details a 2006 investigation of a suspected member of the Hammerskins, a multi-state racist skinhead gang, who was stationed at Fort Hood, a large Army base in central Texas. According to the report, there was “probable cause” to believe that the soldier “had participated in a white extremist meeting and also provided a military technical manual 31-210, Improvised Munitions Handbook, to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.”

The report shows that agents only interviewed the subject once, in November 2006, before Fort Hood higher-ups called off the investigation that December.

Another report, also from 2006, covers an investigation of another Fort Hood soldier who was posting messages on Stormfront.org, a major white supremacist website. One CID investigator expresses his frustration at the muddled process for dealing with extremists. “We need to discuss the review process,” he writes. “I’m not doing my job here. Needs to get fixed.”

A third CID report, regarding a 2007 investigation, notes the termination of an investigation of a soldier at Fort Richardson, Alaska, who was reportedly the leader and chief recruiter for the Alaska Front, a white supremacist group. According to the report, the investigation was halted because the solider was “mobilized to Camp Shelby, MS in preparation for deployment to Iraq.”

Related posts:

1. U.S. Military’s Middle East Crusade for Christ
2. US Military Entangled in ‘Extreme Missionary’ Christian Reality TV Show
3. The Imperial Unconscious

As Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted:
“The Bush administration has already come close to painting our current wars as wars against Islam — many in the Christian right apparently have this belief…”	Holy Warriors, March 19, 2003, preparing to invade Iraq the next day.
“If these wars, bad enough as imperial wars, are fought as religious wars, we are facing a very dark age that could go on for a hundred years and that will be very bloody.”

Origin:
The Public Record, December 13, 2008.
By Jason Leopold.

The Pentagon has once again come under fire by a military watchdog organization for its involvement in the production of two cable programs, one that featured two so-called “extreme” missionaries embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The popular reality series, “Travel the Road,” aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and featured Will Decker and Tim Scott, two so-called “extreme” missionaries who travel the globe to “preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and encourage the church to be active in the Great Commission.”

The other cable program green-lit by the Pentagon is “God’s Soldier,” which aired in September on the Military Channel, and was filmed at Forward Operating Base McHenry in Hawijah, Iraq. It features an Army chaplain openly promoting fundamentalist Christianity to active-duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a watchdog organization, first disclosed details about the cable programs in the group’s weekly newsletter on Friday. The group plans to amend a federal lawsuit it filed against the Department of Defense earlier this year, currently in federal District Court in Kansas City, Kansas to “include these despicable unconstitutional promotions of fundamentalist Christianity in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan,” said MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein.

Part of the second season of “Travel the Road” was filmed on location in Afghanistan and aired in April 2006, where Decker and Scott were embedded with the Army, and shows numerous scenes of the men accompanying U.S. Army soldiers on patrol.  The missionaries are also filmed evangelizing the local Afghans by distributing New Testaments to them in their native Darri language.

In one scene, an Army Chaplain named Capt. Brad Hanna of the Oklahoma National Guard, talks about the possibility of a “revival” in Afghanistan and says he frequently speaks to Afghans about converting to Christianity. Hanna was made a full-time support chaplain for the Oklahoma National Guard after he returned from Afghanistan.

Additionally, Decker and Scott prominently cite SSgt. Sheldon Hoyt, who was stationed in Afghanistan with the Oklahoma National Guard’s 45th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, as playing a hands-on role in helping the missionaries facilitate their proselytizing as opposed to simply being a tour guide of sorts.

In sanctioning Decker and Scott’s work, the Pentagon appears to have committed numerous constitutional violations as well as breached military regulations such as United States Central Command’s General Order 1-A, which strictly prohibits any proselytization in the Middle Eastern theater of operations.

Earlier this year, U.S. military personnel launched a major initiative to convert thousands of Iraqi citizens to Christianity also by distributing Bibles and other fundamentalist Christian literature translated into Arabic to Iraqi Muslims.

An article published on the website of Mission Network News reported that Bible Pathway Ministries, a fundamentalist Christian organization, disclosed that the organization provided thousands of a special military edition of its Daily Devotional Bible study book to members of the 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, currently stationed in Iraq.

The project “came into being when a chaplain in Iraq (who has since finished his tour) requested some books from Bible Pathway Ministries (BPM).”

“The resulting product is a 6″x9″ 496-page illustrated book with embossed cover containing 366 daily devotional commentaries, maps, charts, and additional helpful information,” the Mission Network News report said.

Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne told Mission Network News, “the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they’re using it to minister to the local residents.”

“Our division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers,” Llanos said. “We need to pray for protection for our soldiers as they patrol and pray that God would continue to open doors. The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They’re continuing to spread the Word.”

Karen Hawkins, a BPM official, said military chaplains “were trying to encourage [soldiers] to be in the Word everyday because they’re in a very dangerous situation, and they need that protection.”

The distribution of the Bibles and Christian literature came at the same time that U.S. Marines guarding the entrance to the city of Fallujah handed out “witnessing coins” to Sunni Muslims entering the city that read in Arabic on one side: “Where will you spend eternity?” and “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16″ on the other.

But it’s the military chaplains who have been criticized for allegedly force-feeding soldiers a form of fundamentalist Christianity originating from highly controversial, apocalyptic “End Times” evangelists and their mega-churches. Evangelical Christians have become such a dominating presence in the military’s chaplain corps that the Air Force held a four-day Spiritual Fitness Conference at Hilton Hotel in Colorado Springs in 2005 for chaplains and their families.

The U.S. Constitution says the federal government is prohibited from using the machinery of the state to promote any single religion. But, disturbingly, “God’s Soldier,” produced with the full co-operation of the 2-27 Infantry Battalion “Wolfhounds,” and “Travel the Road” comes off more like an advertisement for fundamentalist Christianity and a promotional tool for the faith.

“God’s Soldier” was co-produced by Jerusalem Productions, a British production company whose “primary aim is to increase understanding and knowledge of the Christian religion and to promote Christian values, via the broadcast media, to as wide an audience as possible.”

Before “God’s Soldier” aired on Sept. 10, the Discovery Channel, which owns the Military Channel, advertised the program by stating that it would feature several Army Chaplains from a wide variety of denominations discussing their work in the military.

“Follow a group of U.S. Army Chaplains from different faiths on a tour of duty in Iraq as they comfort wounded and dying soldiers, reassure panicked and depressed soldiers, as well debriefing those soldiers that return from their tours of duty,” the marketing literature for “God’s Soldier” said.

Instead, “God’s Soldier,” zeroed in on one chaplain, Capt.. Charles Popov, who appears in the first scene of the program in a godlike pose looking down upon the military base and urging soldier to attend Christian Bible study.

“Hey this is God,” Chaplain Popov says. “Come to Bible study tonight at 1900. Purpose Driven Life. You only have 25,000 days in your life, and probably half of it’s gone.”

The author of the book, “Purpose Driven Life,” that Popov referenced is Rick Warren, the leader of a fundamentalist mega-church in Southern California. In a recent interview with Fox News pundit Sean Hannity, Warren said, “the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped…. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers.”

MRFF’s research has found that “The Purpose Driven Life” is second only to the Bible itself as the most widely promoted religious book to our military.

In another scene from “God’s Soldier,” Popov is featured blessing a group of soldiers about to go out on a patrol.

“I pray that you would give them the ability to exterminate the enemy and to accomplish the task that they’re been sent forth by God and country to do. In Christ’s name I pray. Amen,” Popov says as he leads the group of soldiers in prayer. “Every soldier should know Romans 13, that the government is set up by God, and the magistrate, or the one who wields the sword — you have not swords but 50 cals and [unintelligible] like that — does not yield it in vain because the magistrate has been called, as you, to execute wrath upon those who do evil.”

Popov is studying toward a Brigade Chaplain supervisory position and the rank of Major at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina’s US Army Chaplain School in the Army C-4 class.

Another clip from “God’s Soldier” contains what appears to be a violation of strict regulations governing Army chapels: a large cross-shaped window covering about a third of the height of the door.

“The actions of Army chaplain Popov are abominable beyond measure even when slightly judged by constitutional standards,” said Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. “Look, damn it, let’s call it what it is. [Popov] and his approving Army superiors are the quintessential poster-child for the treason; yes treason, of aiding and abetting our enemies.

“Indeed, they are creating the most prolific recruiting weapon ever imagined for the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists comprising al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the insurrectionists and the Jihadists. Chaplain Popov and his lickspittle Army lapdogs have tragically painted the wretched perception that this conflict is between the righteous armies of Jesus against the evildoers of all Islam. This conflict of religious extermination has happened before. They called it The Crusades.”

Since he launched his watchdog organization four years ago, Weinstein said he and MRFF have been contacted by more than 10,000 active duty and retired members of the U.S. Armed Forces, many of who served or serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who identify themselves as Christians. They told Weinstein that they were “severely” pressured by their military chain of command to convert to Christianity.

Weinstein, the author of “With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military.” and a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), has exposed scores of cases in which the Department of Defense has promoted and sanctioned fundamentalist Christian proselytizing among U.S. soldiers in violation of the U.S. Constitution, established federal case law and military regulations.

The most egregious case of the Pentagon’s close ties with Christian fundamentalist groups was formally investigated by the Pentagon’s inspector general, as a result of a highly publicized complaint lodged by Weinstein’s group, in 2007 in which high-ranking Defense Department officials appeared in a promotional video in uniform promoting the fundamentalist organization Christian Embassy.

In a 45-page inspector general report, Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, Army Brig. Gen. Bob Caslen, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, and a colonel and lieutenant colonel whose names were redacted were found to have “improperly endorsed and participated with a non-Federal entity while in uniform.”

Caslen was formerly the deputy director for political-military affairs for the war on terrorism, directorate for strategic plans and policy, joint staff. He was reassigned to the prestigious position of West Point Command of Cadets overseeing the 4,200 cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. Caslen told DOD investigators he agreed to appear in the video upon learning other senior Pentagon officials had been interviewed for the promotional video.

At least one senior military official defended their actions, according to the inspector general’s report, saying the “Christian Embassy had become a ‘quasi-Federal entity,’ since the DOD had endorsed the organization to General Officers for over 25 years.”

“These unconscionable efforts by the leadership of our American armed forces to portray our United States military as the avenging Army of Jesus must stop here and now,” Weinstein said. “It is directly leading to the emboldening of our enemy which, in turn, is maiming and killing brave American service men and women.

Related posts:

1. U.S. Military’s Middle East Crusade for Christ
2. “Onward Christian Soldiers!” reloaded
3. Christian Right’s Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
If you count the number of people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population, the US figure is a multiple of the median among all other nations.

The US’ prison population has increased approximately 500 percent in the last 30 years, and continues to grow: the ‘Land of the Free’ is the world’s leading jailer.
And it’s a thriving business. While the rest of the economy, the financial and mortgage systems are going down the abyss, prisons still remain a stable and growing business. Origin: OurFuture.org, Dec. 12, 2008. By Eric Lotke.

Two things happened yesterday. First, I published this major post about the role prisons play in the U.S. economy. Later yesterday evening, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released new data about people in prison. Any surprise? The number continued to rise.

Yes, crime continues to decline; and yes, “soft on crime” was absent from this year’s election debate. But still the U.S. locks up more and more people.

We have 2.3 million people behind bars. 1 out of every 100 adults overall. 1 out of 9 black man in his twenties. Our rates of incarceration are seven times historical and international norms, and we spend about $200 billion every year on the crime control industry. But still we build.

Part of the problem (and the solution) is in criminal justice policy – sentencing and parole practice, in particular. We can and should find smart, cost-effective ways to keep people safe. But part of the problem is also in economic policy. Not just the recession, which will probably push crime up soon enough, but in the role that prisons play in rural economies.

Rural America has been struggling for years. Prisons are often offered as a quick fix. Instant jobs with government benefits.

No, they don’t work well for economic development in the long run. And yes, many of the best jobs go to people from out of town. But it isn’t presented that way by rural politicians looking for rural votes from people who are genuinely looking for work.

That’s why I proposed a grant program by the federal government to help states cover transitional costs to move from prison economies to more productive purposes. It would help the rural economies, where people would rather find work without razor wire fencing, and it could free states to redirect their own resources out of prisons and into other state uses – from schools to roads to hospitals.

It’s just one thing. But it’s not only the change we need. It’s something that needs to change.

OurFuture.org, Dec. 11, 2008.
By Eric Lotke.

China has opened a new subway system every year for the past six years. The U.S. has opened 45 new prisons and jails. Who’s setting up to lead in the 21st century?

“Expanding prisons mean more jobs,” explained the Fayetteville Observer over the summer.

The rural North Carolina community was celebrating the $19 million expansion of a $90 million prison that opened in 2003 and immediately filled to capacity. Such growth is a boon for rural, economically distressed counties. “Prison jobs bring added payroll, boost housing markets and draw new retail customers to poor parts of the state,” observed the Observer.

The good news is that public investment can work. The bad news is that better choices must be made. We need to distinguish between prisons for crime control and prisons as a jobs program, between building for the future and building for the past.

• “We’re always looking for ways to bring jobs to Wilkes County,” said state senator Jim Whitehead of Georgia, when funding fell into place for a new pre-release center.
• “This is the biggest thing to happen to Stewart County since I’ve been here,” said the chair of the county board when the private, for-profit Corrections Corporation of America opened a new 1,524 person detention center. “Everything’s been leaving rather than coming in the 10 years I’ve been here. The biggest thing this will do is provide jobs for the county and the area.”
• Push state to build prison here,” editorialized the Altoona Mirror in central Pennsylvania, three weeks before the election. “What would the area do to obtain 600 well-paying jobs in what could be termed a recession-proof industry? It’s not a rhetorical question. Those jobs could happen. But it’s important that our local and state leaders don’t drop the ball.”

President-elect Barack Obama is planning a massive new public works program. He wants to employ 2.5 million people rebuilding our roads and schools and bridges. That’s great. It’s more than great. We need the projects, we need the jobs, and the proposal is on the order of magnitude of the problem.

Part of the program could be a reconsideration of the role prisons play in our rural economy. That role seems to have taken on a life of its own.

“When folks here heard the governor wanted to close the 137-year-old Pontiac Correctional Center, sucking hundreds of jobs from the area, they mobilized in a way that only small towns can. They held rallies and a parade. Streets were lined with blue-and-white ‘Save Our Prison’ signs and residents were outfitted in T-shirts to match.” The local ABC news affiliate described it as “a struggle for their economic lives,” as the state considered closing the town’s second-largest employer to help fill a $700 million hole in the state budget.

States are truly struggling. Forty-one states have already reported budget problems for the current or upcoming fiscal year, and it’s likely to get worse. States are starting to cut benefits and services ranging from health care to public schools and early childhood education.

But one budget item is never questioned: prisons.

Even as states spend nearly $50 billion on prisons every year and counties spend over $20 billion on jails, we build additional locked capacity. Even with U.S. incarceration rates at seven times historical and international norms, we build. Even as crime continues on its 15-year descent to levels not seen in 40 years, we find money to build even more.

The sacrifices we make to build these prisons are astonishing. Between 1987 and 2007, state spending on prisons increased by 40 percent (as a percent of the general fund). State spending on higher education decreased by 30 percent. We are financing our prisons by cutting our colleges.

We continue to build even though prisons are often disappointing for economic development. The best jobs go to people from out of town, and dollars spent on prisons have little “multiplier” effect. They don’t generate future additional dollars of economic activity, as do dollars spent on transportation, schools and so forth. Every dollar invested in highway construction generates $2.50 of gross domestic product in the short term. Raising teacher wages by 10 percent is associated with a 5 percent decrease in drop-out rates. But still we shortchange our schools and other rural enterprise, and build new prisons.

The solution is to recognize that prisons have an economic logic of their own. The Pentagon budget is understood as a combination of military necessity and commercial interests. We need to understand the appeal prisons offer to struggling rural communities in the same way.

The challenge is to break the link between prison as industry and prison as crime control. The challenge is to show a way out for governors and legislators who want to reduce the burden of the corrections budget but genuinely cannot because of the immediate and legitimate trouble it causes to their constituencies.

HERE’S HOW: As our new federal leaders develop plans for stimulus and infrastructure investment, they should self-consciously direct resources to break the link between prisons and the dependent rural economies. They should create a grant program to help states transition from prison economies to more productive uses.

People are ready for this kind of change. Way back in 1999, when there were half a million fewer people in American prisons and jails, John DiIulio, one of the main movers behind the prison explosion, said we had reached a point of diminishing returns. But we can’t change course; the transition costs are too high:

• Drug treatment and prevention programs are cheaper in the long run, but they cost money up front to start.
• Cost savings to some are job losses to others. Especially when the programs go to scale and entire prisons are shut down or construction projects avoided. What should people do in the interim?

That’s where federal assistance can come in. Part of the infrastructure/investment/stimulus money can be directed to cover transitional costs out of the prison economy. A few billion dollars of federal money in the short term can help states break the prison hammerlock, and free them to redirect tens of billions of state dollars to other purposes – from schools to roads to hospitals.

That’s the proposal: a federal grant program that helps states manage transitional costs in the short run. Much like the federal VOI/TIS Justice Department grant program helped build prisons in the 1990s, a transition grant program can help to unbuild them in the 2000s (perhaps best administered by the Commerce Department). Let the laboratories of democracy experiment over techniques, but the federal government can help ease the transition.

It’s a modest investment for the federal government that can yield substantial dividends quickly. But it needs to be consciously identified as a goal. Left alone the prison autopilot will continue to rise.

Related posts:

1. US: Record Numbers for World’s Leading Jailer
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3. United States maintains secret prisons on ships in the ocean

Despite the facts, the vice-president still insists that Saddam Hussein could have produced weapons of mass destruction. And he doesn’t mean flying shoes.

Origin:
The Guardian, December 16, 2008.
By Scott Ritter.

In yet another attempt at revisionist history by the outgoing Bush administration, vice-president Dick Cheney, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, took exception to former presidential adviser Karl Rove’s contention that the US would not have gone to war if available intelligence before the invasion had shown Iraq not to possess weapons of mass destruction. Cheney noted that the only thing the US got wrong on Iraq was that there were no stockpiles of WMD at the time of the 2003 invasion. “What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock.”

The vice-president should re-check both his history and his facts. Just prior to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, the UN had teams of weapons inspectors operating inside Iraq, blanketing the totality of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure. They found no evidence of either retained WMD, or efforts undertaken by Iraq to reconstitute a WMD manufacturing capability. Whatever dual-use industrial capability that did exist (so-called because the industrial processes involved to produce legitimate civilian or military items could, if modified, be used to produce materials associated with WMD) had been so degraded as a result of economic sanctions and war that any meaningful WMD production was almost moot. To say that Saddam had the capability or the technology to produce WMD at the time of the US invasion is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

While one can make the argument that Saddam had the people, insofar as the scientists who had participated in the WMD programmes of the 1980s were still in Iraq and, in many cases, still employed by the government, these human resources were irrelevant without either the industrial infrastructure, the economic base or the political direction needed to produce WMD. None of these existed. The argument Cheney makes on feed stock is even more ludicrous. Precursor chemicals used in the lawful manufacture of chemical pesticides were present in Iraq at the time of the invasion, but these were unable to be used in manufacturing the sarin, tabun or VX chemical nerve agents the Bush administration claimed existed inside Iraq in stockpile quantities prior to the invasion.

The same can be said about Iraqi biological capability. The discovery after the invasion of a few vials of botulinum toxin suitable for botox treatments, but unusable for any weapons purposes, does not constitute a feed stock. And as for the smoking gun that the Bush administration did not want to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, there was no nuclear weapons programme in Iraq in any way shape or form, nor had there been since it was dismantled in 1991. Cheney’s dissimilation of the facts surrounding Iraqi WMD serves as a distraction from the reality of the situation. Not only did the entire Bush administration know that the intelligence data about Iraqi WMD was fundamentally flawed prior to the invasion, but they also knew that it did not matter in the end. Bush was going to invade Iraq no matter what the facts proved.

Cheney defended the invasion and subsequent removal of Saddam from power by noting that “this was a bad actor and the country’s better off, the world’s better off with Saddam gone”. This is the argument of the intellectually feeble. It would be very difficult for anyone to articulate that life today is better in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra or any non-Kurdish city than it was under Saddam. Ask the average Iraqi adult female if she is better off today than she was under Saddam, and outside of a few select areas in Kurdistan, the answer will be a resounding “no”.

The occupation of Iraq by the United States is far more brutal, bloody and destructive than anything Saddam ever did during his reign. When one examines the record of the US military in Iraq in terms of private homes brutally invaded, families torn apart and civilians falsely imprisoned (the prison population in Iraq during the US occupation dwarfs that of Saddam’s regime), what is clear is that the only difference between the reign of terror inflicted on the Iraqi people today and under Saddam is that the US has been far less selective in applying terror than Saddam ever was.

At a time when the US and the world struggle with a resurgent Iran, the Iranian-dominated Dawa party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki governs Iraq today in name only. The stability enjoyed by Iraq today has been bought with the presence of 150,000 US troops who have overseen the ethnic cleansing of entire neighbourhoods in cities around Iraq, and who have struck temporary alliances with Shia and Sunni alike which cannot be sustained once these forces leave (as they are scheduled to do by 2011).

Invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the glue that held that nation together as a secular entity, was the worst action the US could have undertaken for the people of Iraq, the Middle East as a whole and indeed the entire world. For Cheney to articulate otherwise, regardless of his fundamentally flawed argument on WMD, only demonstrates the level to which fantasy has intruded into the mind of the vice-president.

Related posts:

1. Saddam, Dec. 13, 2003: Let’s now charge the accomplices
2. 2003 AD: How US Disneyland’s Holy Warriors Invaded Iraq – an Unholy Image Gallery
3. Britain leaves Iraq in shame. The US won’t go so quietly

Illinois may seem like the most corrupt state in America – but only if you overlook some of the other contenders.

Origin:
The Guardian, December 15, 2008.
By Kate Klonick.

One of the more interesting things (and there were many) at the FBI’s press conference announcing the indictment of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was a line from one of the investigators: “If [Illinois] isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States, it’s certainly one hell of a competitor”.

Well, if not Illinois, than who? Alaska has been filled with recent scandal, as has Louisiana. Americans from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island will certainly claim that theirs is the most corrupt state in the union, and all will have plenty of examples.

Blagojevich might be all over the news, but he’s certainly not alone as a corrupt politician in Illinois. Three of the state’s last eight governors have served prison sentences, and if the FBI has its way, Blagojevich will be the fourth.

Most recently, George Ryan, Blagojevich’s immediate predecessor as governor is a current resident of a federal penitentiary in Indiana convicted of a host of felonies – racketeering, tax fraud and lying to investigators, just to name a few. In his time as the secretary of state in Illinois, a position he held before becoming governor, Ryan and officials beneath him gave hundreds of truck licenses to unqualified drivers in exchange for bribes. At least 55 accidents resulted from those truck drivers and 11 deaths are attributable to licenses distributed from Ryan’s office.

In addition to the bribes he accepted on licenses, Ryan had plenty of other shady dealings: giving state contracts to friends’ businesses, using state money for campaign work and then trying to hide it all from investigators when they started asking questions.

So clearly Illinois has a head start on high-level scandal, but Alaska and Louisiana might tie for a close second.

Alaska, of course, has convicted felon Sen. Ted Stevens – who was almost re-elected just eight days after a jury found him guilty of seven felony counts. Stevens was indicted over the summer and stood trial this fall for failing to fully disclose his finances, namely forgetting to mention a $250,000 home renovation organised for the senator by the CEO of a major oil distributor in the state. The government’s long investigation into Stevens managed to bring down five other state senators as well, three of whom are currently in jail.

The state’s lone representative is also being investigated by the FBI. Don Young, who recently won re-election, has spent millions of dollars trying to stave off investigators who are looking into his dealings with the same shady oil CEO that brought down Ted Stevens.

And that’s not even mentioning Sarah Palin, of course, who was found to have abused her power after a legislative investigation found that she tried to have a state trooper fired.

Louisiana, too, is no stranger to bribery. Representative William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson, who just lost re-election, had $90,000 in cash in his freezer when his home was raided by the FBI in 2005. The money was allegedly intended as a bribe for a Nigerian official, in an attempt by Jefferson to secure a stake for his children in a communications company’s deal in Africa. At the end of the day, Jefferson was indicted on 16 charges of corruption.

Among other corrupt Louisiana federal legislators, there’s Senator David Vitter who was memorably one of the clients of the late but infamous “DC Madam” Deborah Palfrey. Vitter has racked up over $200,000 in legal bills since he was exposed as part of Palfrey’s circle of clients.

In the northeast, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has had his obvious indiscretions and hypocrisies. But besides Spitzer, and perhaps Vito Fossella, the drunk-driving, out of wed-lock fathering representative from Staten Island, New York doesn’t seem to have the same chutzpah in national level corruption and bribery – at least not lately.

Rhode Island and Massachusetts both have long histories of corrupt politicians. Providence’s former mayor, Buddy Cianci, was just released from a stint in federal prison. Massachusetts seems to have an inordinate number of corrupt state legislators. But Rhode Island, at least for the time being, seems to have cleaned up its act and Massachusetts doesn’t have federal level corruption that rivals the big three of Illinois, Alaska and Louisiana.

The Garden State, however, might be a formidable competitor. There’s Jim McGreevey, the former governor who famously appointed his secret gay lover to a position of homeland security advisor and then resigned after declaring he was “a gay American”. But while the state is home to former Senator Harrison Williams (convicted of bribery and conspiracy while in office) and former Representative and Senator Robert “The Torch” Torricelli, there just isn’t the ratio of high-ranking corruption convicted offenders in recent history.

With Stevens convicted, Blagojevich likely to be tried and convicted and Jefferson’s trial fast approaching, Alaska, Illinois and Louisiana head this dubious group of the country’s most corrupt states. Both Stevens and Jefferson have been taken out of office by voters and now face their respective sentencing and trials with civilian status. Blagojevich remains governor for now, though around noon today, the Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan filed a motion with the state supreme court over Blagojevich’s “inability to do his job”. She said she would move forward with impeachment if he did not resign.

It’s worth noting that perhaps Alaska and Louisiana’s long list of corrupt politicians and representatives might have something to do with their states’ histories. Both states were once territories purchased by the federal government, making them virtually founded on a “pay to play” scheme. The corrupt leaders of today come from a long line of corrupt leaders of yesterday. Perhaps “inability to do [the] job” is a historical qualification for office in these states.

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