Thursday, July 30, 2009

Obama's Empire: An Unprecedented Network of Military Bases That is Still Expanding

The 44th president of the United States was elected amid hopes that he would roll back his country’s global dominance. Today, he is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding.

by Catherine Lutz

In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, "to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad", it was vital to maintain "the strongest military on the planet". Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush's defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: "We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security."

Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.

The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.

The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter". From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to "trouble spots" around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory"). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.

The global expansion of US bases - and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower - is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and south Asia (CENTO) and south-east Asia (SEATO), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAS) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War - such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines - became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.

Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.

On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.

Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of "deployment" or "forward operating" bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of ­Saddam Hussein".

The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded ­military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, "Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel."

Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment", such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, "co-operative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads". These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.

Moreover, these bases are the anchor - and merely the most visible aspect - of the US military's presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility - and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and "given" to the US by another of the war's victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon's claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have ­often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations' missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: "When soldiers come, war comes." On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of "foreign aid" for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers' local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers' violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate ­significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.

Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself - including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance - is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy's removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military's activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.

Many are also concerned by other countries' overseas bases - primarily European, Russian and Chinese - and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.

In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine's recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous pro­tests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.

The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on "force protection", in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defence staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. Regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements", not "status of forces agreements", or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.

The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that "we pursue no bases" in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.

© 2009 The New Statesman

Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of "The Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle against US Military Posts" (Pluto Press, £17.99)

Monday, July 27, 2009

Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks

by Thom Hartmann

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US... Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, "What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?"

It's an interesting question. If there is a "free market" of labor for CEOs, then you'd think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth's stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they'd have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who'd work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.

So why is executive pay so high?

I've examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it's such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult-so impossible for mere mortals-that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.

Democracy in the workplace is known as a union. The most democratic workplaces are the least exploitative, because labor has a power to balance capital and management. And looking around the world, we can clearly see that those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way (in and out of the workplace) are the ones that have the highest quality of life. Those that are the most despotic, from the workplace to the government, are those with the poorest quality of life.

Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results. An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game - chaos. And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.

By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished - as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society. And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.

This article is largely excerpted from Thom Hartmann's new book "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The NSA Is Still Listening to You

Bush went away, but domestic surveillance overreach didn't. It's now the law, and the ACLU is fighting back

by James Bamford

This summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

The need for such extraordinary data storage capacity stems in part from the Bush administration's decision to open the NSA's surveillance floodgates following the 9/11 attacks. According to a recently released Inspectors General report, some of the NSA's operations -- such as spying on American citizens without warrants -- were so questionable, if not illegal, that they nearly caused the resignations of the most senior officials of both the FBI and the Justice Department.

Last July, many of those surveillance techniques were codified into law as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA). In fact, according to the Inspectors General report, "this legislation gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications" than the warrantless surveillance operations had. Yet despite this increased power, congressional oversight committees have recently discovered that the agency has been over-collecting on the domestic communications of Americans, thus even exceeding the excessive reach granted them by the FAA.

I am an author and journalist specializing in national security issues and terrorism, and often communicate with parties in the Middle East as part of my work. Because of concerns that my communications might have been monitored, in early 2006, shortly after NSA's warrantless surveillance program was revealed by the New York Times, I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA that argued that the program was illegal and should be shut down. We prevailed in federal district court, with Judge Anna Diggs Taylor finding that President Bush had violated both the law and the Constitution, but lost on the government's appeal when the court ruled the plaintiffs could not prove that they were personally victims of the secret eavesdropping program. In a decision worthy of Lewis Carroll, the appeals court held both that the government could refuse to confirm or deny whether it had monitored plaintiffs' communications and that plaintiffs could not challenge the constitutionality of the program unless they could show that their communications had been monitored. A dissenting judge pointed out that the court's decision was inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent and would effectively render the program unreviewable by the courts.

On Wednesday, the ACLU will once again appear in federal court, this time in a separate lawsuit charging that the new FAA statute is unconstitutional. The ACLU is right. While the FAA prohibits the agency from intentionally "targeting" people within the U.S., it places virtually no restrictions on the targeting of people outside the U.S. even if those targets are communicating with U.S. citizens and residents. The law essentially allows the agency virtually unfettered access to the international communications of innocent Americans in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Also troublesome is the fact that the FAA emasculates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one independent check and balance between the agency and the American public. Originally established as a response to the discovery by Congress in the mid-1970s that the NSA had been illegally eavesdropping domestically for decades, the FISA court required the government to show that there was probable cause to believe that its surveillance target was an agent of a foreign government or terrorist group in order to obtain a necessary warrant. But the new law does away with this requirement, and now the NSA does not even have to identify the targets of its surveillance at all as long as it is targeting people outside the U.S., leaving the agency free, for example, to target human rights activists or media organizations overseas, even if they are communicating with family or editors back in the U.S. As former NSA "voice interceptor" Adrienne Kinne told me in my book, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," the agency targeted both groups during the Bush administration, including eavesdropping on intimate bedroom conversations.

Further removing the FISA court from any meaningful role, the new law even gags the judges, prohibiting them from asking the government who, what, where or why it is launching any particular surveillance program.

Finally, the FAA fails to place any meaningful limitations on the NSA's retention of phone calls, e-mail and other communications that it collects -- necessitating the colossal data storage mausoleums it is now building. The agency need only show that it has "reasonably designed" procedures to minimize information retention, which must give way to the NSA's need "to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information." And because "foreign intelligence" is very broadly defined, this allows the NSA to conduct immense data mining operations within those centers.

Among the most striking discoveries to come out of the Inspectors General report was that, despite the enormous expansion of the NSA's capabilities, including turning its giant ear inward for the first time in three decades, no one could point to any significant counterterrorism success. Instead, it warned that while the agency had little difficulty collecting vast amounts of data, the trouble was analyzing it all. It was a problem akin to Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood. In this "labyrinth of letters," Borges wrote, "there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences." In addition to the civil liberties and constitutional defects in the new surveillance law, another compelling argument against it is that it only increases the amount of "senseless cacophonies" in America's Library of Babel.

© 2009 Salon.com

James Bamford is the author of three books on the National Security Agency, including his latest, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," which has just been released in paperback.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Saving Private Bergdahl

By DAVE LINDORFF

Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for 23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to happen to him.

But I’m willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now, that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called War on Terror.

I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be suckered into joining the US military and was then dispatched to fight and kill people in some far-off land where the US had no reason to be in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of captives.

The sad truth, however, is that neither the Bush/Cheney administration, which simply tossed out the Geneva Conventions in 2001 and said its provisions, despite being signed into law by the US, did not apply to the war in Afghanistan, which was the first assault in what they conceived as a borderless and endless War on Terror, nor the Obama administration, which has refused to grant full Geneva Convention rights to the captives it holds in places like Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, or at Guantanamo Bay, or to prosecute those who tortured and ordered torture in the prior administration, has followed the law.

There are plenty of Americans, both in Congress, and among the US population at large, who have lustily approved of the torture of suspected fighters captured by American forces. All kinds of excuses have been trotted out for this willful violation of US and international law. The Taliban was not a legitimate government, they argue, so their fighters are not really soldiers. Al Qaeda is not a country, so its fighters are not really even enemy combatants, they say. Some go so far as to simply say, “These people are killers, so we America is justified in doing what it wants to them.” They’ll also trot out the excuse of expediency: we were attacked, and if it takes torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques” to use a popular emphemism for such exquisite tortures as head banging or water-boarding), to find out what they’re planning, then that’s okay.” Vice President Dick Cheney, following the 9-11 attacks, referred to the US having to “turn to the dark side, “ almost unable to hide the gleam in his eye as he announced this.

But once we do that kind of thing, we have, it must be admitted, surrendered any moral authority to demand that our own soldiers, if captured, be treated humanely and in accordance with international law.

So poor Pvt. Bergdahl is now at the mercy of the same Taliban organization whose members have been tortured and killed at the hands of the US and its allies.
Thousands of Taliban were simply killed—either shot or left to die in closed shipping containers, by an Afghan warlord who was America’s key ally in the initial attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda—an atrocity which was covered up for years by the Bush/Cheney administration, and which President Obama only recently ordered investigated. At Guantanamo, as many as 80 percent of the captives were innocent of terrorism, but were, and in many cases continue to be held because the government either doesn’t want to admit what it did to them, or because it has so abused them that if they weren’t enemies of America, they are now. Some of those captured and brought to the hell-hole of Guantanamo were children as young as 12—a blatant violation of international law. They even had their own camp there—Camp Iguana—just for captured children.

We have to hope that the Taliban will overlook the ongoing crime of America’s mistreatment of war prisoners—mistreatment that in many cases led to death at the hands of American interrogators and prison guards.

If they were smart, the Taliban would treat Pvt. Bergdahl in strict accordance with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, and would ask the International Red Cross and Red Crescent to broker a prisoner-of-war trade of Pvt. Bergdahl for the prisoners being held at Bagram and Guantanamo.

Such a swap might put the US back on the road of civilized behavior, and might save Pvt. Bergdahl.

The one thing we all have to hope is that the Taliban treat him better than our own country has been treating its captives.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Making Sense of Cheney's Madness

by Ivan Eland

The seeming irrationality behind the George W. Bush administration’s “against the grain” (and the law) policies on torture, warrantless domestic surveillance, and now notification of Congress about CIA covert operations was not irrational at all.

Most experts say that torture is counterproductive because the subject will tell the interrogator what he or she wants to hear to stop the pain and because many military people say that it merely revs up the opposition, gives them no incentive to surrender, and gives them every incentive to torture U.S. military personnel.

Yet in the face of this mountain of authoritative opinion and the policy’s clear violation of international law and a U.S. criminal statute against torture, the Bush administration gleefully did it anyway.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) clearly prohibited surveillance in the United States without a court-approved warrant and explicitly stated that it was the only law governing that practice.

The Bush administration, in the wake of 9/11, made no effort to get a likely willing Congress to change the already flexible law. After all, if surveillance had been urgently needed to stop a terrorist attack, the secret and pro-security court could have issued the warrant after the fact.

But the Bush administration strangely chose to flagrantly violate the law and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to conduct domestic warrantless searches anyway.

Most recently, it has been revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney told the CIA to violate a law requiring prompt disclosure of even anticipated covert operations.

The red herring that Republicans are now trying to stand by in defense of the uncharacteristically silent Cheney — that the executive branch must guard intelligence sources and methods — could apply to a particular assassination attempt but not the existence of the entire program over a seven-year period.
Amazingly, Vice President Cheney — not even the President — decided to knowingly and affirmatively disregard the law.

Are these merely examples of Cheney’s or Bush’s arrogance? I suppose arrogance plays a part, but to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, no crisis should go unexploited.

Pundits galore, including this one, have railed against the Bush administration for cynically using the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq. But fewer have noticed an even worse legacy of the Bush administration than the Iraqi quagmire.

What could be worse than killing U.S. service people and innocent Iraqis? The unitary theory of the executive, that’s what.

Dick Cheney came into office believing that executive power had been excessively eroded during the Vietnam and Watergate years. Few reputable scholars believe this nonsense.

Most presidential scholars have concluded that the executive branch has grown in power vis-à-vis the other governmental branches since the turn of the 20th century, but really got boosted to an “imperial presidency” during the Cold War from the Truman presidency onward.

This development is a far cry from the legislative-dominated system that the nation’s founders and the Constitution envisioned. The slight rollback of executive power during Vietnam and Watergate was only a momentary pause as the executive juggernaut rolled forth up to the Bush administration.

Cheney’s advocacy of the unitary theory, and evidently convincing his self-interested boss to buy into it too, meant that the administration believed that it could use broadly construed commander-in-chief powers — another anathema to the founders — to ignore congressionally passed laws during “wartime.” In dictatorships, we call this “rule by decree.”

So the administration’s willful violation of laws had the more sinister purpose and effect of establishing a “hyper-imperial presidency.” This is the single most important thing that the Bush administration did in office and the worst.

We can already see that in the Obama and probably future administrations, executive self-restraint will be much harder in the face of the temptations of this more powerful inherited office, which will be based on the Bush-era precedents. Fear for the republic.

© 2009 Consortium News

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute.

Monday, July 20, 2009

War Without Purpose

by Chris Hedges

Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.

The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.

We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.

We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where’s Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.

No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we “liberating” the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don’t know what we are doing.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a “cultural shift” in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they are under attack. This is what troops under fire do. They do not have the luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later. The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians, violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district. Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.

The offensive by NATO forces in Helmand province will follow the usual scenario laid out by military commanders, who know much about weapons systems and conventional armies and little about the nuances of irregular warfare. The Taliban will withdraw, probably to sanctuaries in Pakistan. We will declare the operation a success. Our force presence will be reduced. And the Taliban will creep back into the zones we will have “cleansed.” The roadside bombs will continue to exact their deadly toll. Soldiers and Marines, frustrated at trying to fight an elusive and often invisible enemy, will lash out with greater fury at phantoms and continue to increase the numbers of civilian dead. It is a game as old as insurgency itself, and yet each generation of warriors thinks it has finally found the magic key to victory.

We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement. The Taliban, in Pakistan’s eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan’s primary concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit Afghanistan. And the government’s well-publicized battle with the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.

The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France’s Lyon and London’s Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Sarah Palin Outdoes Herself

by David Michael Green

Watching Sarah Palin in action is always an exercise in astonishment, but I don't think anything she's done to date could top the speech she gave announcing her resignation as governor of Alaska.

I watched her with my jaw dropped, left nearly speechless not only by what she said but by how she said it. And, most especially, by the insanely frightening notion that tens of millions of Americans not only don't see her as some sort of Tina Fey character built for howling laughs, but in fact an object of adoration.

Hey, Jesus, do we really need so overt a reminder that the once mighty empire is now in complete free fall? Wasn't eight years of Kid Caligula enough?

I don't even know what to do or think or make of her style of public speaking, and I'm not even sure I understand why I don't. Is it that she so unambiguously violates all the rules of our already embarrassing political praxis by presenting herself as so transparently false, so unashamedly faking her way through national issues of which she is totally ignorant?

Chance the Gardener literally - literally! - had more credibility than Sarah Palin, somehow. Is it because he was completely authentic in his ignorance, and she so completely disingenuous?

Is it the singy-songy, Golly-gosh Gomer!, candy-coated old-fashioned homespun goody-goodness of her TV persona that freaks me out, a character so one-dimensional it could make porn stars seem like Oscar-winning thespians by comparison?

Is it the mangled English so grating to the ear that even George W. Bush can't bear to listen to it?

Is it the stitched together phrases that make her speeches sound like she chose all her tired slogans from the bargain bins of the local Dollar Store, and then had Taawwd jam them together for her at the last moment?

Or is it the goof-happy plastic demeanor, drenched in poured-over-the-top buckets of faux sincerity, making her come off like some stoned cheerleader telling you just how important that next first-down really, really is? "No, I mean really. Really!"

And speaking of stoned, don't you just feel like you must be high when you see her in action, like somebody must have slipped you a mickey? Don't you just find yourself thinking "I thought that mushrooms-in-applesauce dish was a weird culinary combination!"?

Like the fool that I am, I listened to that rambling, incoherent, Hieronymous Bosch painting of a speech she gave, looking for some sort of thematic thread that held the thing together in any sort of fashion (apart, that is, from it being a transparent attempt at linguistic murder through induced insanity, evidently aimed at her Wasilla Community College English professor).

Silly me, though - it sure didn't make a lot sense. At least if you go in for that whole logic thing and all. Of course, we're talking about an evangelical Christian Republican from Wasilla, Alaska here, so the joke's obviously on me for even trying.

But here, near as I can tell, is what I think she was trying to say in her rambling resignation speech:

1. I can "progress" Alaska and America with or without a title.

2. I'm wasting my precious time here on Earth as Governor, defending against false accusations.

3. Therefore I'm not going to run for a second term.

4. Therefore I'm not going to finish my first one either, like some governors do, as a "lame-duck" going off on junkets and stuff.

5. (Oh, and by the way, the troops in the military are really, really great people. Not that that has a damn thing to do with anything, but if I talk a lot about them it'll score me lots of points with idiots, just like it did for Bush.)
Pretty noble, eh? She loves her job, but she's going to sacrifice it all for the people of Alaska. You know, the one's who asked her to actually serve all four years of her term when they honored her with the highest office in the state.

Palin talks incessantly about Alaska, but darned if I can figure out how she's gonna progress the state better from outside of the most powerful position in government than in it. Is she gonna be a CEO now? An editorial writer? A lobbyist? And for what? Abstinence? Are we really supposed to believe that she would have more influence on legislators from the deck of her fishing boat than she would as governor? Not to mention one with a veto pen?

The false-choice she sets up to cover her retreat is astonishingly bald, as well. It's as if she were to say "I've decided to become an alcoholic because I don't want to subject you all to genocide". As if those were the only two choices. As if one had anything to do with the other. As if the fact that some governors go off on junkets means that she had to choose between one of two lousy options - 18 months of wasted gubernatorial excess versus noble self-sacrifice in resigning the position. As if she hasn't already been on the junket and speech circuit anyhow.

Most bizarre of all is her repeated invocation of the silly tough guy image she and her handlers have created for her, including her Sarah Barracuda point-guard mantra, "I am a fighter, I thrive on challenge." Challenge, huh? Does she mean the challenge of finding something more fun to do with the next year and a half than her actual job? Only in the bizarro universe of Regressiveland does war equal peace, family values equal cheating on your wife and paying off mistresses, and quitting your job equal being a tough, Barracuda-like fighter.

Nobody with bigger aspirations (or even without) ever resigns a job like this midway through the first term unless they've been elected to a higher position, have a lethal disease about to take them out, or are facing serious scandal. I'd say you can bet your left testicle that Palin falls neatly into category three. And, even if you can't find one in your particular pair of pants to wager, borrow one from your brother, boyfriend or husband. It ain't goin' anywhere, I can tell you that. Indeed, the real question isn't what you could lose, but rather what you could win. What to bet against that? Who - besides Barack Obama and nearly every Democrat in Washington - needs three balls, anyhow?

Palin likes to claim that all the scandal investigations launched against her have come to nothing. Believe it or not, that actually is true, provided of course you don't count the other ones that have. The Alaska (Republican-controlled) legislature, for example, determined that she had abused her office by having state employees fire her former brother-in-law from his job. Which of course is not to be confused with the current very public battle she's engaged in with her former-almost-but-not-quite-son-in-law, Levi, who resides in the next trailer over. Then there's the small matter of the back taxes she's had to repay on travel expenses she charged the state, for staying in her own home in Wasilla, no less. Nice gig if you can get it, eh?

Of course, the real mystery of the Palin Phenomenon is in the second word in the term, not the first.

There will always be morons who - themselves privately startled beyond belief that anyone, let alone a good portion of an entire country, takes them seriously - will don the mask of super-confidence and gleefully carpe the snot out of the freakin' diem as long as the ride lasts. American history is littered with the damage done by Palins of every size and shape. Heck, we just lived through eight years of that very thing. Boy Bush didn't have Palin's chest, but he was nevertheless every bit the boob she is. The only difference was that his daddy's name played the role of the deus ex machina who plucked him from drunken obscurity and into the leadership ranks of the world's only superpower, whereas for Lady Sarah it was a desperate John McCain.

To be sure, idiotic politicians are a dime a dozen. But what in the world accounts for the massive crowds who follow these absolute and complete nothingburgers, let alone rabidly? I trust there are a thousand graduate students completing psychology dissertations on this subject as we speak, for surely that is the only domain wherein the answer can be found. It can't possibly be logic, since quitting on the job has only enhanced Palin's status for these kooks, not diminished it. Indeed, it's become hard to imagine what she could do to lose their affections. My best guess is that her mangled syntax, low-rent personal soap opera of a family, and her faux feistiness against "them" speaks to the loosely-targeted but powerful rage coursing through the veins of America's disenfranchised. Especially the white male subspecies, who may not know much about much, but nevertheless have a vague sense that, like their daddies before them, they're entitled to have more status than other folks in this society (excepting, of course, the nice oligarchs who feed them heaping helpings of racism, sexism, Jesusism, xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism to keep them off the scent of class consciousness).

It all works well enough to suggest - if you had to guess right now - that Palin would fairly readily win the nomination of her party for president in 2012. The kinda folks who are activists and GOP primary voters adore her completely, and it's therefore harder to not see that happening than it is to imagine her winning. And, in a way, it would be worth it, just for the laughs in watching her eviscerate the plastic droid currently DBA Mitt Romney, along with Newt Gingrich, the verbal bully who is spending his entire adulthood making up for all the beatings he got from the other kids all through primary and secondary school. Oh, and college and grad school too.

Hardy-har-har, eh? Lots of fun watching that show, huh? What the heck. Palin guarantees high entertainment value, and the Republican Party could never possibly win the presidency in 2012, right? So who cares who gets the nomination? I mean, voters remember the Bush disaster. And the GOP is losing young people, women, Hispanics and all manner of other sentient beings in droves, right? Right?

Yeah, well, right indeed. Except for one minor detail.

If the Democrats are given four years to govern and they adopt half-measure after Milquetoast point-four-three-rounded-up-to-half-measure - all to little or no effect - then there will be a little surprise in November of 2012. If they fail to produce a robust economy, or if they end the recession but produce a jobless recovery, it's not gonna go the way it looked after last November. If they fail to use the bully pulpit to sell good ideas and aggressively discredit the disastrously failed ones, there's gonna be a different script three years from now, no matter how good a speech Obama gives.

Normally, I'd put Sarah Palin down as an easy shot for the nomination but a long shot for winning the general election. But if the Democrats do all the stupid things listed above, then the battle for the Republican nomination will wind up being be the actual contest, with the victor in that race easily beating the incumbent president who failed to produce a recovery or vanquish the bankrupt ideas of those who made the mess in the first place.

But who could be stupid enough to allow them to do that?

Can you say "Barack Obama"?

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Afghanistan: Marines' Mission Doomed to Failure

by Sonali Kolhatkar

Editor’s Note: Just two weeks into July, the month is already the deadliest for NATO troops in Afghanistan. The high casualty count is at least partially the result of Operation Khanjar, the largest U.S. Marine Corps ground offensive in years. But NAM contributor Sonali Kolhatkar writes that NATO's modus operandi are doomed to failure.

The United States’ new offensive into Afghanistan’s troubled Helmand province provides a test case for achieving President Obama’s stated goal: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

It is the first major push of its kind, relying on a massive ground presence of thousands of Marines rather than air strikes, which American strategists acknowlege have killed far too many civilians over the past two years. But while Operation Khanjar realizes Washington’s increased desire to divert more “resources” into Afghanistan, it is unclear what, if anything, can be accomplished by this kind of brute force.

At the launch of the offensive, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal gave only the following explanation: that his intention is to “clear, hold and build” in Taliban strongholds like Helmand.

But what exactly does “clear” mean? If it means to kill, the U.S. Marines will have to distinguish between Taliban and non-Taliban Afghans to avoid more civilian casualties. This is a near-impossible task. The Taliban do not wear a uniform or carry membership cards. They carry weapons, but so do Afghan civilians, who do so to protect their families. In an effort to lower the embarrassing count of civilians killed (often greater than the numbers killed by the Taliban), McChrystal has ordered troops to cut short any pursuit of Taliban fighters if civilians are at risk.

The U.S. troops have to play cautious -- they have everything to lose: their own lives and the diminishing goodwill of the Afghan people. Unfortunately for the troops, Afghan civilian resentment, built up over the past several years, has not vaporized just because the U.S. military’s rules of engagement have officially changed. The Marines are facing a Taliban force bolstered by the survivors of U.S. bombs and the loved ones of those killed. The Taliban’s greatest advantage is their ability to move through a population increasingly sick of “death-by-occupation,” leaving the U.S. troops with only two options: risk letting the Taliban escape, or kill the Taliban even if it means killing civilians in the process and violating the new rules. Both scenarios lead to a Taliban victory.

Perhaps by “clear,” McChrystal means capture. But that raises more difficult questions: Where will they put the prisoners, and what sort of justice will be offered? Will the United States turn Bagram into a greater gulag than Guantanamo? Will they turn over those who survive their torture and interrogation to secret military tribunals? In releasing 90 percent of those imprisoned at Guantanamo without charge, the United States has already proved inept at distinguishing al Qaeda and Taliban members from ordinary civilians over the past eight years. Imprisoning and torturing innocent civilians has the same obvious effect as killing them: increased hostility and resentment toward the occupation.

Perhaps by “clear,” McChrystal simply means pushing the Taliban out of the areas where they are operating into surrounding areas. Already there are reports that the Taliban have escaped the current offensive, simply retreating to the western and northern parts of the country and launching their own counter-operation: Iron Net, intended to trap the U.S. forces. They have killed dozens of troops and civilians through roadside and suicide bombs in the past week alone. In response, the United States has reportedly fallen back on the discredited strategy of air raids to kill dozens of people they claim are “militants,” but likely include civilians.

If the current strategy does result, intentionally or not, in displacing the problem into new areas, presumably more Marines will have to be deployed to those areas to repeat the cat-and-mouse game, and push the Taliban up against borders that they cannot infiltrate.

But Afghanistan is not a small country (it is comparable in size to Iraq) and by this logic, the United States is looking at a long-term blanket occupation of the country, something that ordinary Afghans have increasingly declared they do not want.

A BBC-ABC News poll conducted prior to the current ground offensive revealed that less than 50 percent of Afghans have a favorable opinion of the United States, down from 68 percent in 2005. (The poll also revealed an even greater dislike of the Taliban, meaning that Afghans tolerate the U.S. military only because they have no other options.

The likelihood of American success in Afghanistan is at best dim and, at worst, heading inevitably toward a lose-lose situation. Given the impossibility of surgically identifying and killing a moving and elusive target, there are only two possible outcomes: killing a lot of civilians, or pushing the insurgency to the rest of the country, or both. After the Iraq debacle, are Americans ready for yet another unpopular occupation, protracted war and thousands of U.S. casualties?

Perhaps the name is apt: the United States' Operation Khanjar is named for an Arabic (not Afghan) dagger widely used in past centuries by fighters in the Gulf Arab region, in countries like Oman. But today, the Khanjar is largely a ceremonial weapon, a decorative objet d’art used to adorn walls but useless in a real fight. Like the Khanjar, the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, out-of-touch with reality, is more symbolic than practical.


© 2009 New America Media

Sonali Kolhatkar is Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based non-profit that supports women's rights activists in Afghanistan. Sonali is also co-author of "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence." She is the host and producer of Uprising, a nationally syndicated radio program with the Pacifica Network.

A Lesson From Vietnam for Obama’s War in Afghanistan

by Joe Galloway

It was half a century ago, on the night of July 8, 1959, that the first two American soldiers to die in the Vietnam War were slain when guerrillas surrounded and shot up a small mess hall where half a dozen advisers were watching a movie after dinner.

Master Sgt. Chester Ovnand of Copperas Cove, Texas, and Maj. Dale Buis of Imperial Beach, Calif., would become the first two names chiseled on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — the first of 58,261 Americans who died in Vietnam during the next 16 years.

The deaths of Ovnand and Buis went largely unnoticed at the time, simply a small beginning of what would become a huge national tragedy.

Presidents from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson to Richard M. Nixon to Gerald R. Ford made decisions — some small and incremental, some large and disastrous — in building us so costly and tragic a war.

The national security handmaidens of those presidents, especially those who served Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, were supposedly the best and brightest that Harvard and Yale and Princeton could contribute.

Presidents right up to today’s like to surround themselves with such self-assured and certain men, men whose eagerness to find war the answer to most problems often grows in direct proportion to their lack of experience in uniform or combat.

This small history lesson can be read as a cautionary tale to President Barack Obama’s team as they oversee an excruciating slow-motion end of one war, Iraq, and a pell-mell rush to wade ever deeper into another one in the mountains and deserts of remote and tribal Afghanistan.

The story grows out of a battle in the very beginning of the American takeover of the war in South Vietnam in the fall of 1965 when a defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, counted the bodies and the beans and offered his president two directly opposing options.

In the wake of the Ia Drang Valley battles of November 1965 — the first major collision between an experimental airmobile division of the U.S. Army and regular soldiers in division strength from the People’s Army of North Vietnam — President Johnson ordered McNamara to rush to Vietnam and assess what had happened and what was going to happen.

Up till then, just more than 1,000 Americans, mostly advisers and pilots, had been killed in Vietnam since Ovnand and Buis. Then, in just five days 234 more Americans had been killed and hundreds wounded in the Ia Drang. There weren’t even enough military coffins in the country to handle the dead.

McNamara took briefings from Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam, and from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and assorted spy chiefs and diplomats. Then he flew to An Khe in the Central Highlands and was briefed on the Ia Drang battles by then Lt. Col. Hal Moore, who had commanded on the ground in Landing Zone XRAY in the Ia Drang.

On the plane home to Washington, McNamara dictated a Top Secret/Eyes Only memo to President Johnson dated Nov. 30, 1965. In that report he stated that the enemy had not only met but had exceeded our escalation of the war and we had reached a decision point. In his view there were two options:

–Option One: We could arrange whatever diplomatic cover we could arrange and pull out of South Vietnam.

–Option Two: We could give Gen. Westmoreland the 200,000 more U.S. troops he was asking for, in which case by early 1967 we would have more than 500,000 Americans on the ground and they would be dying at the rate of 1,000 a month. (He was wrong; the death toll would reach more than 3,000 a month at the height of the war). "All we can possibly achieve (by this) is a military stalemate at a much higher level of violence," McNamara wrote.

On Dec. 15, 1965, the president assembled what he called the "wise men" for a brainstorming session on Vietnam. He entered the Cabinet room holding McNamara’s memo. He shook it at McNamara and asked: "Bob, you mean to tell me no matter what I do I can’t win in Vietnam?" McNamara nodded yes; that was precisely what he meant.

The wise men sat in session for two days. Participants say there was no real discussion of McNamara’s Option One — it would have sent the wrong message to our Cold War allies — and at the end there was a unanimous vote in favor of Option Two — escalating and continuing a war that our leaders now knew we could not win.

Remember. This was 1965, 10 years before the last helicopter lifted off that roof in Saigon. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get sucked into a war or jump feet first into a war than it is to get out of a war.

There’s no question that President Obama inherited these two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, from the Bush/Cheney administration. But the buildup in Afghanistan and the change in strategy belong to Obama and his version of the best and brightest.

The new administration has dictated an escalation from 30,000 U.S. troops to more than 60,000, and even before most of them have actually arrived commanders on the ground are already back asking for more, and why not? When you are a hammer everything around you looks like a nail.

Some smart veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan, on the ground now or just back, say that at this rate we will inevitably lose the war in Afghanistan; that the situation on the ground now is far worse than Iraq was at its lowest point in 2006 and early 2007. They talk of a costly effort both in lives and national treasure that will stretch out past the Obama administration and maybe the two administrations after that.

President Obama needs to call in the "wise men and women" for a fish-or-cut-bait meeting on his two ongoing wars. Let’s hope that this time around, there’s an absence of the arrogance and certainty of previous generations of advisers.

Let’s hope that they choose to speed up the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and get out before the Iraqi people and leaders order us to leave.

Let’s hope, too, that they weigh very carefully all the costs of another decade or two of war in Afghanistan.

Failing that, they should at the very least begin an immediate drive to increase the number of available beds in military and Veterans Administration hospitals, and expand Arlington National Cemetery and the national military cemeteries nationwide.

(C) 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Sinister Purpose Behind Bush Administration Lawlessness

by Ivan Eland

The seeming irrationality behind the George W. Bush administration’s "against the grain" (and the law) policies on torture, warrantless domestic surveillance, and now notification of Congress about CIA covert operations was not irrational at all.


Most experts say that torture is counterproductive because the subject will tell the interrogator what he or she wants to hear to stop the pain and because many military people say that it merely revs up the opposition, gives them no incentive to surrender, and gives them every incentive to torture U.S. military personnel. Yet in the face of this mountain of authoritative opinion and the policy’s clear violation of international law and a U.S. criminal statute against torture, the Bush administration gleefully did it anyway.


The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) clearly prohibited surveillance in the United States without a court-approved warrant and explicitly stated that it was the only law governing that practice. The Bush administration, in the wake of 9/11, made no effort to get a likely willing Congress to change the already flexible law. After all, if surveillance had been urgently needed to stop a terrorist attack, the secret and pro-security court could have issued the warrant after the fact. But the Bush administration strangely chose to flagrantly violate the law and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to conduct domestic warrantless searches anyway.


Most recently, it has been revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney told the CIA to violate a law requiring prompt disclosure of even anticipated covert operations. The red herring that Republicans are now trying to stand by in defense of the uncharacteristically silent Cheney — that the executive branch must guard intelligence sources and methods — could apply to a particular assassination attempt but not the existence of the entire program over a seven-year period. Amazingly, Vice President Cheney — not even the president — decided to knowingly and affirmatively disregard the law.


Are these merely examples of Cheney’s or Bush’s arrogance? I suppose arrogance plays a part, but to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, no crisis should go unexploited. Pundits galore, including this one, have railed against the Bush administration for cynically using the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq. But fewer have noticed an even worse legacy of the Bush administration than the Iraqi quagmire.


What could be worse than killing U.S. service people and innocent Iraqis? The unitary theory of the executive, that’s what.


Dick Cheney came into office believing that executive power had been excessively eroded during the Vietnam and Watergate years. Few reputable scholars believe this nonsense. Most presidential scholars have concluded that the executive branch has grown in power vis-à-vis the other governmental branches since the turn of the 20th century, but really got boosted to an "imperial presidency" during the Cold War from the Truman presidency onward. This development is a far cry from the legislative-dominated system that the nation’s founders and the Constitution envisioned. The slight rollback of executive power during Vietnam and Watergate was only a momentary pause as the executive juggernaut rolled forth up to the Bush administration.


Cheney’s advocacy of the unitary theory, and evidently convincing his self-interested boss to buy into it too, meant that the administration believed that it could use broadly construed commander-in-chief powers — another anathema to the founders — to ignore congressionally passed laws during "wartime." In dictatorships, we call this "rule by decree." So the administration’s willful violation of laws had the more sinister purpose and effect of establishing a "hyper-imperial presidency." This is the single most important thing that the Bush administration did in office and the worst. We can already see that in the Obama and probably future administrations, executive self-restraint will be much harder in the face of the temptations of this more powerful inherited office, which will be based on the Bush-era precedents. Fear for the republic.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Robert McNamara's Second Vietnam

by Walden Bello

The conventional view of Robert McNamara, who passed away a few days ago, is that after serving as the chief engineer of the disastrous U.S. war in Vietnam, he went on in 1968, to serve as president of the World Bank. In this way, he sought to salve his troubled conscience by delivering development assistance to poor countries.
The reality is, as usual, more complex.

Development from Above?

As president of the Bank, the world's premier channel for multilateral aid, McNamara did quadruple the institution's lending portfolio to $12 billion. The key beneficiaries, however, were authoritarian dictatorships. Indeed, the rise to hegemony of authoritarian regimes in the developing world cannot be separated from the massive funding that the World Bank under McNamara provided them. By the late 1970s, five of the top seven recipients of World Bank aid were military, presidential-military, or military-controlled regimes: Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines.

Why did the Bank under McNamara feel a special affinity to military-dominated regimes? A major reason stems from McNamara's own background. He was one of the prototypes of the "technocrat," a term coined in the early 1960s to refer to the seemingly apolitical practitioner of the science of political and economic management. As chief executive of the Ford Motor Company and later head of the Defense Department, McNamara ran organizations that were hierarchical and non-democratic in structure. Not surprisingly, he was susceptible to the rhetoric of authoritarian regimes that promised to sanitize the political arena in order, according to them, to allow economic managers the space to modernize the country.

The Marcos Connection

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was one of the leaders who most successfully cultivated the image of bringing "development from above." In 1972, he imposed martial law in order, in his words, to "break the democratic deadlock" that had become a barrier to development. "All that people ask," Marcos explained, "is some kind of authority that can enforce the simple law of civil society. Only an authoritarian system will be able to carry forth the mass consent and to exercise the authority necessary to implement new values, measures, and sacrifices."

Skillfully deploying a cadre of technocrats to impress the World Bank president, Marcos won McNamara over to backing his regime in a major way. The country was upgraded to what the Bank called a "country of concentration." Between 1950 and 1972, the Philippines received a meager $326 million in Bank assistance. In contrast, between 1973 and 1981, the Bank funneled more than $2.6 billion into the country. Whereas prior to martial law, the Philippines ranked about 30th among recipients of Bank loans, by 1980 it placed eighth among 113 developing countries.

In return for this massive increase in aid, the Bank was given carte blanche to forge a comprehensive economic development plan for the Philippines. The two pillars of the strategy were "rural development" and "export oriented industrialization."

Containing the Countryside

"Rural development" was the Bank's response to the agricultural crisis. The centerpiece of the strategy was increasing the productivity of small farmers through the delivery of "technological packages" and upgrading agricultural support services like credit systems. Rural development, however, had implications that went beyond improved efficiency.

As McNamara explained to the Bank's board of governors, the strategy would "put the emphasis not on redistribution of income and wealth — as justified as that may be in our member countries — but rather on increasing the productivity of the poor, thereby providing for an equitable sharing in the benefits of growth." In short, rural development was partly counterinsurgency, directed at defusing the appeal of the revolutionary movement among the restive rural masses. It was, as one development specialist close to the Bank described it, "defensive modernization" which, if successful, will create a smallholder sector closely integrated with the national economy. Bank projects will encourage subsistence farmers to become small-scale market producers. With economic ties to other sectors, the farmers will be loath to link their interests to those not yet modernized and will hesitate to disrupt the national economy for fear of losing their own markets.

Export-oriented Industrialization

When it came to industry, McNamara pushed Marcos and other World Bank clients to "turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion." Quotas were to be eliminated and tariffs brought down to expose protected local industries to the winds of international competition; exporters were to be given incentives; export processing zones were to be set up; and wages were to be kept low to attract foreign investors. The Bank shot down a plan by Marcos' more nationalistic technocrats to set up "11 big industrial projects," including an integrated steel industry and a petrochemical complex. The Bank did not consider this attempt to create a strategic industrial core to be in line with export promotion.

As in the case with rural development, there was a social logic to export-oriented industrialization. Persisting in industrialization based on the internal market would have meant having to undertake massive income redistribution in order to expand the market necessary to sustain it, a move opposed by the local elite. By instead hitching the industrialization process to growing export markets, the Bank broke the link between industrialization and domestic income redistribution. The cost, however, was intensifying class conflict as governments attempted to keep wages low and exports competitive.

The World Bank vision was grand, but implementation of a project that favored foreign interests and the traditional elites met mass resistance. The project was also dogged by corruption, cronyism, incompetence, and when it came to land reform, lack of political will. Then there was the special problem of Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, who wanted to corner more and more World Bank money for her projects. "Mrs. Marcos," one Bank bureaucrat wrote in a briefing paper for McNamara, "has identified herself with a few showcase projects that we consider ineffective and which are a bit of a joke among knowledgeable Filipinos."

Crisis and the Advent of Structural Adjustment

By the early 1980s, the World Bank program was floundering, prompting management to commission political risk analyst William Ascher to assess the situation. Ascher's findings were grim. The Marcos regime was marked by "increasing precariousness" and "the World Bank's imprimatur on the industrial program runs the risk of drawing criticism of the Bank as the servant of multinational corporations and particularly of US economic imperialism."

In a desperate effort to salvage a deteriorating situation, the Bank forced Marcos to appoint a cabinet of technocrats headed by Prime Minister Cesar Virata, its most trusted agent in the country. But the cure that Virata and company administered was worse than the disease. The country was subjected, along with only three other countries that agreed to be guinea pigs, to an experimental Bank program called "structural adjustment" that involved the comprehensive liberalization and deregulation of the economy. The program, one of McNamara's last innovations before he retired in 1981, sought to fully expose developing economies to international market forces in order make them more efficient. In the Philippines, this adjustment entailed bringing down the effective rate of protection for manufacturing from 44 to 20%. Instead of invigorating the economy, however, this shock liberalization combined with the international recession of the early 1980s to bring about deep economic contraction from 1983 to 1986.

Indeed, structural adjustment led not only to deindustrialization; according to one study, it also created so much unemployment that migration patterns changed drastically. The large migration flows to Manila declined, and most migrants could turn only to open access forests, watersheds, and artisanal fisheries. Thus the major environmental effect of the economic crisis was overexploitation of these vulnerable resources.

Adjustment led to a decade of stagnation from which the country never really recovered, even as its neighbors, who were smart enough to avoid being saddled with the program, were registering 6-10% growth rates in 1985-1995.

Familiar Ending

Yet there was one unintended benefit for the Philippines: The economic chaos that structural adjustment provoked was one of the key factors that brought about the ouster of Marcos in the combined civil-military uprising of February 1986.

By that time, McNamara had been out of the Bank for five years. Ensconced in retirement, he must, however, have seen parallels between the last U.S. helicopters leaving Saigon in 1975 and Marcos going into exile in Hawaii on a U.S. aircraft in 1986. The Philippines was McNamara's second Vietnam. Like the first, it was a memory the once-celebrated whiz-kid of the Kennedy administration would probably have preferred to bury.

Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies

Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. A retired professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, he is currently a columnist at Foreign Policy In Focus and a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based analysis and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which is The Food Wars (New York: Verso, 2009). He can be reached at waldenbello (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Robert McNamara and Smedley Butler

by Tom Gallagher

There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the past week over how we ought to think about the late Robert McNamara. (And yes, real ink, not just virtual – even the remaining real newspapers were in on it.) Does the fact that he came to realize that the Vietnam War (“McNamara’s War” to some) was wrong even as he continued to pursue it as Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Secretary make him a better or a worse person? And what of his willingness to say it publicly – but only three decades later? There may be a more useful way to think about him, however. And it involves considering him not in conjunction with, say, Henry Kissinger, who followed a course similar to his but apparently without hesitation, but more in terms of General Smedley Butler, someone who did learn from his experience.

Butler, of course, achieved far greater clarity than the ever-hedging McNamara did. Butler’s story is fairly well known: four years after a military career that included service in Cuba, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, and France, he wrote a book called “War is a Racket.” He gave speeches in which he would say things like, “during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Whether any of this later-in-life understanding made Butler a better or worse person I do not know. What I do know, though, is that what Butler was willing to say and write was extremely helpful to more than one generation of antiwar activists: “Hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to this guy, he should know.”

Likewise, I suggest to no one that they should get over their antipathy to Robert McNamara if that is what they feel – the evil that he and Kissinger and the rest did will long outlive them. And anyone who no longer hates the criminals should certainly remain outraged at their crimes. But let us take something of value out of McNamara’s life.

When we encounter potential military recruits looking to serve in one of the nation’s seemingly always available wars but not looking too closely at exactly what it is we’re fighting for because they assume our leaders wouldn’t lead them astray on matters of life and death, let’s tell them about Robert McNamara. If the man in charge of one of our wars could later write that what the US did at the time was “wrong, terribly wrong,” don’t we all owe it to ourselves to take a closer look at where those in power are leading us today?

And when it comes to questioning the conduct of modern war, it’s hard to beat McNamara’s comments in Errol Morris’ documentary film “The Fog of War”: “We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” he told Morris. “[General Curtis] LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.” And that was World War II he was talking about – the “good war.” Words to keep in mind the next time one of our drones accidently bombs a wedding.

A remark of McNamara’s made during a C-SPAN discussion of his 1995 memoir, “Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” is a good reminder of just how infuriating he could be, right to the end. In regard to Vietnam, he told his interviewer, “We were fighting -- and we didn't realize it -- a civil war. Now, true, obviously there were Soviet and Chinese influence and support and no question that the communists were trying to control South Vietnam, but it was basically a civil war.”

Well, if McNamara didn’t know it was a civil war, it wasn’t because tens of thousands of the war’s opponents hadn’t said so or because President Eisenhower hadn’t publicly acknowledged that Ho Chi Minh would have been elected president of Vietnam in a fair election.

But even if McNamara may never have been a man to be taken entirely at his word, what he went on to say on C-SPAN that day might just have some value today as the US plunges deeper into an already nearly eight year old war in Afghanistan: “And one of the things we should learn is you can't fight and win a civil war with outside troops, and particularly not when the political structure in a country is dissolved.”

Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco antiwar activist who initiated last November's successful Proposition U calling upon the city's congressional representatives to vote no further funding for the Iraq War. He is a past member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Contact him at TGTGTGTGTG@aol.com

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan

by Norman Solomon

The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now.

That's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

But "escalation" isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States.

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad -- nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper -- nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "demonic suction tube," complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren't already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual -- a repetition compulsion of the warfare state -- carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he'd decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a "Special National Security Estimate" -- a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that "in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary."

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: "There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan."

Mullen's comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come "piecemeal" -- "with no more high-level emphasis than necessary."

Norman Solomon, co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, is the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Adding Up the True Costs of Two Wars

by Joseph Stiglitz & Linda Bilmes

Last week the U.S. "stood down" in Iraq, finalizing the pullout of 140,000 troops from Iraqi cities and towns -- the first step on the long path home. After more than six years, most Americans are war-weary, even though a smaller percentage of us have been involved in the actual fighting than in any major conflict in U.S. history.

But not so fast. The conflict that began in 2003 is far from over for us, and the next chapter -- confronting a Taliban that reasserted itself in Afghanistan while the U.S. was sidetracked in Iraq -- will be expensive and bloody. The death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan reached 5,000 in June. An additional 80,000 Americans have been wounded or injured since the war in Iraq began. More than 300,000 of our troops have required medical treatment, and Army statistics show that more than 17 percent of our returning soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, even though most of the population has long told pollsters they can't wait for U.S. forces to leave, U.S. officials have said we are likely to station 50,000 troops at military bases in the country for the foreseeable future. This is because the situation in Iraq is highly precarious.

Moreover, the U.S. barely has begun to face the enormous financial bill for the war. By our accounting, the U.S. has already spent $1 trillion on operations and related defense spending, with more to come -- and it will cost perhaps $2 trillion more to repay the war debt, replenish military equipment and provide care and treatment for U.S. veterans back home. Many of the wounded will require indefinite care for brain and spinal injuries. Disability payments are ramping up and will grow higher for decades. The stress of extended, multiple tours to Iraq means that a whole generation of U.S. military men and women may now be suffering from long-term mental health issues. The suicide rate in the Army is at its highest level since record-keeping began.

This wartime spending undoubtedly has been a major contributor to our present economic collapse. The U.S. has waged an expensive war as if it required little or no economic sacrifice, funding the conflict by massive borrowing. As we've observed in the past, you can't spend $3 trillion on a reckless foreign war and not feel the pain at home.

Burned by the difficulties in Iraq, our political leaders have no illusions about the length and difficulty of the challenge facing us in Afghanistan. But in other respects we seem set to repeat the same mistakes that we made in Iraq. The president has just signed yet another "emergency" supplemental appropriations measure ($80 billion) to fund continuing operations in Iraq and expansion into Afghanistan. This means that for the 30th time since 2001, war spending has been rushed through the budget process without serious scrutiny.

Obstacles continue to beset returning veterans too. Despite an increase in the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, the backlog of disability claims has reached its highest level.

Early this year, President Barack Obama committed 20,000 troops to a "surge" in Afghanistan. That, combined with a large, ongoing presence in Iraq and continued reliance on private contractors for virtually every aspect of military support, remains a recipe for staggering out-of-control expenditures. Surely we can draw some lessons from the Iraq debacle and set aside money to care for our veterans, crack down on fraud and profiteering, and account for the true costs of the war in the budget so the American taxpayer can see what we are paying for.

© 2009 The Capital Times

Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard University is a former assistant secretary of Commerce. Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University is a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. They are the co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."