What the Good News From Iraq Really Means
by Michael Schwartz
As the Smoke Clears in Iraq: Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple -- usually front page - reports on the country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went by without a mention of the war.
The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis disappeared. There are still occasional stories about high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions, and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life.
A typical "return to normal life" piece appeared October 11th in the New York Times under the headline, "Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety." Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her students by assuring them that "security has returned to Baghdad, city of peace."
Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam Dagher hedged the "return to normal" theme. Here was his first paragraph in full:
"On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama looked uneasy standing in formation under an already stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates listened to a teacher's pep talk -- probably a necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn playground."
This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school, amplified in the body of Dagher's article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated) decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign reporters to move around enough to report on the real conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided U.S. readers with a far fuller picture of the devastation George Bush's war wrought.
In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land. The major newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their staffs there and -- with a relative trickle of exceptions like Dagher's fine report -- what's left is often little more than a collection of pronouncements from the U.S. military, or Iraqi and American political leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American public's image of the situation there.
In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of a kind that can always be easily explained in a short report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on artillery and air power during the worst days of fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure. Political and economic changes imposed by the American occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very tools they would now need to launch a major reconstruction effort in their own country.
As a consequence, what was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society -- economically, socially, and technologically -- has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world. Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches, which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used until U.S. forces withdraw from the country, provides a glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out of the abyss into which the U.S. invasion pushed it.
Consider only a small sampling of the devastation.
The Economy: Fundamental to the American occupation was the desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein's Baathist state apparatus and the economic system it commanded. A key aspect of this was the closing down of the vast majority of state-owned economic enterprises (with the exception of those involved in oil extraction and electrical generation).
In all, 192 establishments, adding up to 35% of the Iraqi economy, were shuttered in the summer and fall of 2003. These included basic manufacturing processes like leather tanning and tractor assembly that supplied other sectors, transportation firms that dominated national commerce, and maintenance enterprises that housed virtually all the technicians and engineers qualified to service the electrical, water, oil, and other infrastructural systems in the country.
Justified as the way to bring a modern free-enterprise system to backward Iraq, this draconian program was put in place by the President's proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III. The result? An immediate depression that only deepened in the years to follow.
One measure of this policy's impact can be found in the demise of the leather goods industry, a key pre-invasion sector of Iraq's non-petroleum economy. When a government-owned tanning operation, which all by itself employed 30,000 workers and supplied leather to an entire industry, was shuttered in late 2003, it deprived shoe-makers and other leather goods establishments of their key resource. Within a year, employment in the industry had dropped from 200,000 workers to a mere 20,000.
By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment. Meanwhile, the country's agriculture, a key component of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling of government establishments and services. The lush farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers suffered badly. The once-thriving date palm industry was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations of pests when the occupation eliminated a government-run insecticide spraying program. Even oil refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum activities were shuttered.
This economic devastation fueled the insurgency by generating desperation, anger, and willing recruits. The explosion of resistance, in turn, tended to obscure -- at least for western news services -- the desperate circumstances under which ordinary Iraqis labored.
As violence has subsided in Baghdad and elsewhere, demands for relief have come to the fore. These are not easily answered by a still largely non-functional central government in Baghdad whose administrative and economic apparatus was long ago dismantled, and many of whose key technical personnel had fled into exile. Meanwhile, in early 2006, the American occupation declared that further reconstruction work would be the responsibility of Iraqis. It is not clear into what channels the growing discontent over an economy that remains largely in the tank and a government that still cannot deliver ordinary services will flow.
Electricity: A critical factor in Iraq's collapse has been its decaying electrical grid. In areas where the insurgency raged, facilities involved in producing and transmitting electricity were targeted, both by the insurgents and U.S. forces, each trying to deprive the other of needed resources. In addition, Bremer eliminated the government-owned maintenance and engineering enterprises that had been holding the electrical system together ever since the U.N. sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War deprived Iraq of material needed to repair and upgrade its facilities. Maintenance and replacement contracts were given instead to multinational companies with little knowledge of the existing system and -- due to cost-plus contracting -- every incentive to replace facilities with their own proprietary technology. In the meantime, many Iraqi technicians left the country.
The successor Iraqi governments, deprived of the capacity to manage the system's reconstruction, continued the U.S. occupation policy of contracting with foreign companies. Even in areas of the country relatively unaffected by the fighting, those companies did the lucrative thing, replacing entire sections of the electric grid, often with inappropriate but exquisitely expensive equipment and technology.
A combination of factors -- including pressure from the insurgency, the soaring costs of security, and an almost unparalleled record of endemic waste and corruption -- led to costs well beyond those originally offered for the already overpriced projects. Many were then abandoned before completion as funding ran out. Completed projects were often shabbily done and just as often proved incompatible with existing facilities, introducing new inefficiencies.
In one altogether-too-typical case, Bechtel installed 26 natural gas turbines in areas where no natural gas was available. The turbines were then converted to oil, which reduced their capacity by 50% and led to a rapid sludge build-up in the equipment requiring expensive maintenance no Iraqi technicians had been trained to perform. In location after location, the turbines became inoperative.
Even before the invasion, the decrepit electrical system could not meet national demand. No province had uninterrupted service and certain areas had far less than 12 hours of service per day. The vast investments by the occupation and its successor regimes have increased electrical capacity since the invasion of 2003, but these gains have not come close to keeping up with skyrocketing demand created by the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, private security personnel, and occupation officials, as well as by the introduction of all manner of electronic devices and products in the post-invasion period. Recent U.N. reports indicate that, in the last year, electrical capacity has slipped to less than half of demand. With priority going to military and government operations, many Baghdad neighborhoods experience less than two hours of publicly provided electricity a day, forcing citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive and polluting gasoline generators.
In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that they had experienced inadequate electricity in the previous month. During the heat of summer and the cold of winter, these shortages create real health emergencies.
In 2004, the U.N. estimated that $20 billion in reconstruction funds would be needed for a fully operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from $40 billion to $80 billion.
Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow through the country from the northwest to the southeast, have since time immemorial irrigated the rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the fish that are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided water for animal and human consumption. American-style warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and air power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in upstream Sunni cities like Tal Afar, Falluja, and Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One result was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage systems. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, for instance, where much fighting has taken place and American air power was called in regularly, there is now a lake of sewage clearly visible on satellite photographs.
The ultimate destination of significant parts of the filth from devastated sewage systems was the two rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing through the streets and into those rivers has left them thoroughly contaminated. Their water can no longer be safely drunk by humans or animals, the remaining fish cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.
Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has proven woefully insufficient to handle this massive flow of contamination, while inadequate electric supplies insure that the country's few functional purification plants are less than effective.
In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely reconstructed, but repairs cannot even begin without a viable electrical system, a reinvigorated engineering and construction sector, and a government capable of marshalling these resources. None of these prerequisites currently exist.
Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the initial invasion, the U.S. military often commandeered schools as forward bases, attracted by their well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and many rooms for offices and barracks. Two incidents in which American gunfire from an occupied elementary school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni city of Falluja may have been the literal sparks that started the insurgency. Many schools would subsequently be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles fought in or near them.
Under the U.S. occupation's de-Baathification policy, thousands of teachers who belonged to the Baath Party were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of students teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government enterprises deprived the schools of supplies -- including books and teaching materials -- as well as urgently needed maintenance.
The American solution, as with the electric grid, was to hire multinational firms to repair the schools and rehabilitate school systems. The result was an orgy of corruption accompanied by very little practical aid. Local school officials complained that facilities with no windows, heating, or toilet facilities were repainted and declared fit for use.
The dwindling central government presence made schools inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with administrators, teachers, and especially college professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for ideological reasons. This, in turn, stimulated a mass exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from the country, removing precious human capital essential for future reconstruction.
Finally, in Baghdad, the U.S. military began installing ten-foot tall cement walls around scores of communities and neighborhoods to wall off participants in the sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were often separated from their schools, reducing attendance at the few intact facilities to those students who happened to live within the imprisoning walls.
This fall, as some of these walls were dismantled, residents discovered that many of the schools were virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie neighborhood which "is falling apart, and overwhelmed by the children of almost 4,000 Shiite refugee families who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof is caving in, classroom floors and hallways are stripped bare, and in the playground a pile of burnt trash was smoldering."
The Dysfunctional Society: Much has been made in the U.S. presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil surplus the Iraqi government built up in these last years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is currently being held in American financial institutions, with various American politicians threatening to confiscate it if it is not constructively spent. Yet even this bounty reflects the devastation of the war.
De-Baathification and subsequent chaos rendered the Iraqi government incapable of effectively administering projects that lay outside the fortified, American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad. A vast flight of the educated class to Syria, Jordan, and other countries also deprived it of the managers and technicians needed to undertake serious reconstruction on a large scale.
As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted for facility construction and reconstruction last year were even spent. Some government ministries spent less than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the large oil surpluses have become magnets for massive governmental corruption, further infuriating frustrated citizens who, after five years, still often lack the most basic services. Transparency International's 2008 "corruption perceptions index" listed Iraq as tied for 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.
The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land, housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their homes; many millions of others have been scarred by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of common criminality. Education and medical systems have essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous societies on earth.
As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and technical devastation became ever more entwined, reinforcing one another. The country's degraded sewage and water systems, for example, have spawned two consecutive years of widespread cholera. It seems likely that this year, the disease will only subside when the cold weather makes further contagion impossible, but this "solution" also guarantees its reoccurrence each year until water purification systems are rebuilt.
In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's once vaunted medical system, since two-thirds of the country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are often in a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain scarce, and equipment, if available at all, is outdated. The rebuilding of the water and medical systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the electrical system is restored to reasonable shape. Repair of the electrical grid awaits a reliable oil and gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and this cannot be constructed without the expertise of technicians who have left the country, or newly trained specialists that the educational system is now incapable of producing. And so it goes.
On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why American military leaders regularly insist that the country's current relative quiescence is, at best, "fragile." They believe only the most minimal reductions in U.S. forces in Iraq (still hovering at close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.
Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities, military officials working close to the ground know that the country's state of disrepair, and an inability to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this could explode in further sectarian violence or yet another violent effort to expel the U.S. forces from the country.
Copyright 2008 Michael Schwartz
Michael Schwartz's new book, War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket, 2008), has just been released. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His work on Iraq has appeared in numerous outlets, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts.
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Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Iraq: Did the Surge Work?
by George Hunsinger
Violence, Alexander Solzenitsyn once observed, finds refuge in falsehood, even as falsehood is supported by violence. "Anyone who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle." (Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1972) A practical rule can be deduced. Where there is violence, look for falsehood; where there is falsehood, look for violence. If Solzenitsyn is correct, they go together.
According to conventional wisdom, it seems that the "surge" in Iraq was a huge success. For example, a recent CNS News story was headlined: "With Success of Surge, NY Times' Iraq War Coverage Drops to All-Time Low" (October 21, 2008). The Times' coverage has dropped 60 per cent since 2004, and this is not terribly different from other news outlets. The media has lost interest in Iraq. Whether the surge really "worked," however, is another story.
In September 2007, Juan Cole, the respected Middle East expert, wrote an article called "Big Lies Surround the Iraq 'Surge.'" At that time he stated: "US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and . . . violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the Surge. Violence is way up this year." But, one might reply, that was then and this is now. How do matters stand more than a year after this gloomy verdict? A widespread consensus exists today throughout the political campaigns and the mainstream media that the great success of the Surge is beyond doubt.
The so-called Surge -- a euphemism for escalation -- was designed to increase security in Iraq. U.S. presence in the country was to be increased by 30,000 personnel along with a three-fold contribution in Iraqi forces. Additional troops were to be provided by coalition partners. Baghdad was selected as the center of the campaign. If security could be increased for the country's largest city, the rest would surely follow. A Shi'ite and Sunni "fault line" ran throughout the city.
In January 2007, a year after being launched, the Surge was widely acclaimed as a triumph. Contrary to naysayers like Cole, violence across the country was said to be down by 60 percent. Al Qaeda in Iraq, expelled from Baghdad and Anbar Province, was said to be on the run, and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior reported that it was 75 percent destroyed. Not only was the violence in Iraq reduced, but Al Qaeda was being decimated.
Again, however, Cole, who relies on independent sources in the original languages, argued otherwise. What actually seems to have happened, he wrote in the summer of 2008, was that, first, the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad were disarmed by the escalation troops. Then, "once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them."
Mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad ended up with almost no Sunnis. In 2007 Baghdad went from being predominantly Sunni to being overwhelmingly Shiite. According to Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress, Baghdad, once having a 65 percent Sunni majority, "is now 75 percent Shia."
"My thesis," wrote Cole, "would be that the U.S. inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods."
Cole's thesis has received important confirmation. According to Bob Woodward, in his new book The War Within (Simon & Schuster, 2008), the biggest factor behind the reduced violence in Iraq was "very possibly" not the Surge, but a resort to Death Squads. A "Top Secret" memo viewed by Woodward indicates that the Sunnis were systematically targeted and assassinated. What took place was reminiscent of the infamous Phoenix Program instituted by the U.S. in Vietnam. It was a strategy of summary executions.
Yet another confirmation appeared in a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of California. Based on an examination of satellite photos across Baghdad, the study observed that Sunni neighborhoods, which showed a dramatic decrease of nighttime light in Sunni neighborhoods, had been abandoned by their inhabitants. The surge, the study concluded, "has had no observable effect." The study attributed the tremendous decline in Baghdad's Sunni population to relocations and ethnic cleansing.
Tom Hayden raises some disturbing questions. "Why were the targets killed instead of being detained? How many targeted individuals were killed or made to disappear? . . . How are the operations consistent with US constitutional law and international human rights standards?" Why has thee been no congressional investigation?
According to UN reports, the number of Iraqi refugees has spiked during the Surge. Between 2.5 and 4 million are now estimated to exist outside their country, while another 2.5 are internal refugees. At least 2 million Sunni refugees cannot return to their homes without fear of being slaughtered.
People's lives remain shattered. One in four has had a family member who was murdered. "The humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world," according to the Iraqi Red Cross/Red Crescent. Iraq's health care system is "now in worse shape than ever."
Unemployment remains high, sanitation and electrical facilities remain degraded, families use up to a third of their monthly income to buy drinking water. Tens of thousands are being held in detention camps. According to the UN, "the detention of children in adult detention centers violates U.S. obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as accepted international human rights norms." (AP, May 19, 2008)
Resorting to Death Squads, while ignoring the humanitarian crisis and touting the Surge, seems to offer yet another instance of Solzenitsyn's bleak prognosis that violence seeks refuge in falsehood.
George Hunsinger teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary
Violence, Alexander Solzenitsyn once observed, finds refuge in falsehood, even as falsehood is supported by violence. "Anyone who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle." (Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1972) A practical rule can be deduced. Where there is violence, look for falsehood; where there is falsehood, look for violence. If Solzenitsyn is correct, they go together.
According to conventional wisdom, it seems that the "surge" in Iraq was a huge success. For example, a recent CNS News story was headlined: "With Success of Surge, NY Times' Iraq War Coverage Drops to All-Time Low" (October 21, 2008). The Times' coverage has dropped 60 per cent since 2004, and this is not terribly different from other news outlets. The media has lost interest in Iraq. Whether the surge really "worked," however, is another story.
In September 2007, Juan Cole, the respected Middle East expert, wrote an article called "Big Lies Surround the Iraq 'Surge.'" At that time he stated: "US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and . . . violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the Surge. Violence is way up this year." But, one might reply, that was then and this is now. How do matters stand more than a year after this gloomy verdict? A widespread consensus exists today throughout the political campaigns and the mainstream media that the great success of the Surge is beyond doubt.
The so-called Surge -- a euphemism for escalation -- was designed to increase security in Iraq. U.S. presence in the country was to be increased by 30,000 personnel along with a three-fold contribution in Iraqi forces. Additional troops were to be provided by coalition partners. Baghdad was selected as the center of the campaign. If security could be increased for the country's largest city, the rest would surely follow. A Shi'ite and Sunni "fault line" ran throughout the city.
In January 2007, a year after being launched, the Surge was widely acclaimed as a triumph. Contrary to naysayers like Cole, violence across the country was said to be down by 60 percent. Al Qaeda in Iraq, expelled from Baghdad and Anbar Province, was said to be on the run, and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior reported that it was 75 percent destroyed. Not only was the violence in Iraq reduced, but Al Qaeda was being decimated.
Again, however, Cole, who relies on independent sources in the original languages, argued otherwise. What actually seems to have happened, he wrote in the summer of 2008, was that, first, the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad were disarmed by the escalation troops. Then, "once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them."
Mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad ended up with almost no Sunnis. In 2007 Baghdad went from being predominantly Sunni to being overwhelmingly Shiite. According to Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress, Baghdad, once having a 65 percent Sunni majority, "is now 75 percent Shia."
"My thesis," wrote Cole, "would be that the U.S. inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods."
Cole's thesis has received important confirmation. According to Bob Woodward, in his new book The War Within (Simon & Schuster, 2008), the biggest factor behind the reduced violence in Iraq was "very possibly" not the Surge, but a resort to Death Squads. A "Top Secret" memo viewed by Woodward indicates that the Sunnis were systematically targeted and assassinated. What took place was reminiscent of the infamous Phoenix Program instituted by the U.S. in Vietnam. It was a strategy of summary executions.
Yet another confirmation appeared in a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of California. Based on an examination of satellite photos across Baghdad, the study observed that Sunni neighborhoods, which showed a dramatic decrease of nighttime light in Sunni neighborhoods, had been abandoned by their inhabitants. The surge, the study concluded, "has had no observable effect." The study attributed the tremendous decline in Baghdad's Sunni population to relocations and ethnic cleansing.
Tom Hayden raises some disturbing questions. "Why were the targets killed instead of being detained? How many targeted individuals were killed or made to disappear? . . . How are the operations consistent with US constitutional law and international human rights standards?" Why has thee been no congressional investigation?
According to UN reports, the number of Iraqi refugees has spiked during the Surge. Between 2.5 and 4 million are now estimated to exist outside their country, while another 2.5 are internal refugees. At least 2 million Sunni refugees cannot return to their homes without fear of being slaughtered.
People's lives remain shattered. One in four has had a family member who was murdered. "The humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world," according to the Iraqi Red Cross/Red Crescent. Iraq's health care system is "now in worse shape than ever."
Unemployment remains high, sanitation and electrical facilities remain degraded, families use up to a third of their monthly income to buy drinking water. Tens of thousands are being held in detention camps. According to the UN, "the detention of children in adult detention centers violates U.S. obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as accepted international human rights norms." (AP, May 19, 2008)
Resorting to Death Squads, while ignoring the humanitarian crisis and touting the Surge, seems to offer yet another instance of Solzenitsyn's bleak prognosis that violence seeks refuge in falsehood.
George Hunsinger teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary
Final Text of Iraq Pact Reveals a US Debacle
by Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The final draft of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the U.S. military presence represents an even more crushing defeat for the policy of the George W. Bush administration than previously thought, the final text reveals.
The final draft, dated Oct. 13, not only imposes unambiguous deadlines for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011 but makes it extremely unlikely that a U.S. non-combat presence will be allowed to remain in Iraq for training and support purposes beyond the 2011 deadline for withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces.
Furthermore, Shiite opposition to the pact as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty makes the prospects for passage of even this agreement by the Iraqi parliament doubtful. Pro-government Shiite parties, the top Shiite clerical body in the country, and a powerful movement led by nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that recently mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in protest against the pact, are all calling for its defeat.
At an Iraqi cabinet meeting Tuesday, ministers raised objections to the final draft, and a government spokesman said that the agreement would not submit it to the parliament in its current form. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told three news agencies Tuesday that the door was "pretty far closed" on further negotiations.
In the absence of an agreement approved by the Iraqi parliament, U.S. troops in Iraq will probably be confined to their bases once the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31.
The clearest sign of the dramatically reduced U.S. negotiating power in the final draft is the willingness of the United States to give up extraterritorial jurisdiction over U.S. contractors and their employees and over U.S. troops in the case of "major and intentional crimes" that occur outside bases and while off duty. The United States has never allowed a foreign country to have jurisdiction over its troops in any previous status of forces agreement.
But even that concession is not enough to satisfy anti-occupation sentiments across all Shiite political parties. Sunni politicians hold less decisive views on the pact, and Kurds are supportive.
Bush administration policymakers did not imagine when the negotiations began formally last March that its bargaining position on the issue of the U.S. military presence could have turned out to be so weak in relation with its own "client" regime in Baghdad.
They were confident of being able to legitimize a U.S. presence in Iraq for decades after the fighting had ended, just as they did in South Korea. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had declared in June 2007 that U.S. troops would be in Iraq "for a protracted period of time".
The secret U.S. draft handed to Iraqi officials Mar. 7 put no limit on either the number of U.S. troops in Iraq or the duration of their presence or their activities. It would have authorized U.S. forces to "conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain certain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security", according to an Apr. 8 article in The Guardian quoting from a leaked copy of the draft.
When Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded a timetable for complete U.S. withdrawal in early July, the White House insisted that it would not accept such a timetable and that any decision on withdrawal "will be conditions based". It was even hoping to avoid a requirement for complete withdrawal in the agreement, as reflected in false claims to media Jul. 17 that Bush and Maliki had agreed on the objective of "further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq" rather than complete withdrawal.
By early August, however, Bush had already reduced its negotiating aims. The U.S. draft dated Aug. 6, which was translated and posted on the internet by Iraqi activist Raed Jarrar, demanded the inclusion of either "targeted times" or "time targets" to refer to the dates for withdrawal of U.S. forces from all cities, town and villages and for complete combat troop withdrawal from Iraq, suggesting that they were not deadlines.
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad Aug. 21, the United States accepted for the first time a firm date of 2011 for complete withdrawal, giving up the demand for ambiguous such terms. However, the Aug. 6 draft included a provision that the U.S. could ask Iraq to "extend" the date for complete withdrawal of combat troops, based on mutual review of "progress" in achieving the withdrawal.
Because it had not yet been removed from the text, U.S. officials continued to claim to reporters that the date was "conditions-based", as Karen DeYoung reported in the Washington Post Aug. 22.
The administration also continued to hope for approval of a residual force. U.S. officials told DeYoung the deal would leave "tens of thousands of U.S. troops inside Iraq in supporting roles...for an unspecified time". That hope was based on a paragraph of the Aug. 6 draft providing that the Iraqi government could request such a force, with the joint committee for operations and coordination determining the "tasks and level of the troops..."
But the Oct. 13 final draft, a translation of which was posted by Raed Jarrar on his website Oct. 20, reveals that the Bush administration has been forced to give up its aims of softening the deadline for withdrawal and of a residual non-combat force in the country. Unlike the Aug. 6 draft, the final text treats any extension of that date as a modification of the agreement, which could be done only "in accordance to constitutional procedures in both countries".
That is an obvious reference to approval by the Iraqi parliament.
Given the present level of opposition to the agreement within the Shiite community, that provision offers scant hope of a residual U.S. non-combat force in Iraq after 2011.
Another signal of Iraqi intentions is a provision of the final draft limiting the duration of the agreement to three years -- a date coinciding with the deadline for complete withdrawal from Iraq. The date can be extended only by a decision made by the "constitutional procedures in both countries".
The final draft confirms the language of the Aug. 6 draft requiring that all U.S. military operations be subject to the approval of the Iraqi government and coordinated with Iraqi authorities through a joint U.S.-Iraqi committee.
The negotiating text had already established by Aug. 6 that U.S. troops could not detain anyone in the country without a "warrant issued by the specialized Iraqi authorities in accordance with Iraqi law" and required that the detainees be turned over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours. The Oct. 13 "final draft" goes even further, requiring that any detention by the United States, apart from its own personnel, must be "based on an Iraqi decision".
The collapse of the Bush administration's ambitious plan for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq highlights the degree of unreality that has prevailed among top U.S. officials in both Washington and Baghdad on Iraqi politics. They continued to see the Maliki regime as a client which would cooperate with U.S. aims even after it was clear that Maliki's agenda was sharply at odds with that of the United States.
They also refused to take seriously the opposition to such a presence even among the Shiite clerics who had tolerated it in order to obtain Shiite control over state power.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam ", was published in 2006.
© 2008 Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON - The final draft of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the U.S. military presence represents an even more crushing defeat for the policy of the George W. Bush administration than previously thought, the final text reveals.
The final draft, dated Oct. 13, not only imposes unambiguous deadlines for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011 but makes it extremely unlikely that a U.S. non-combat presence will be allowed to remain in Iraq for training and support purposes beyond the 2011 deadline for withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces.
Furthermore, Shiite opposition to the pact as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty makes the prospects for passage of even this agreement by the Iraqi parliament doubtful. Pro-government Shiite parties, the top Shiite clerical body in the country, and a powerful movement led by nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that recently mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in protest against the pact, are all calling for its defeat.
At an Iraqi cabinet meeting Tuesday, ministers raised objections to the final draft, and a government spokesman said that the agreement would not submit it to the parliament in its current form. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told three news agencies Tuesday that the door was "pretty far closed" on further negotiations.
In the absence of an agreement approved by the Iraqi parliament, U.S. troops in Iraq will probably be confined to their bases once the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31.
The clearest sign of the dramatically reduced U.S. negotiating power in the final draft is the willingness of the United States to give up extraterritorial jurisdiction over U.S. contractors and their employees and over U.S. troops in the case of "major and intentional crimes" that occur outside bases and while off duty. The United States has never allowed a foreign country to have jurisdiction over its troops in any previous status of forces agreement.
But even that concession is not enough to satisfy anti-occupation sentiments across all Shiite political parties. Sunni politicians hold less decisive views on the pact, and Kurds are supportive.
Bush administration policymakers did not imagine when the negotiations began formally last March that its bargaining position on the issue of the U.S. military presence could have turned out to be so weak in relation with its own "client" regime in Baghdad.
They were confident of being able to legitimize a U.S. presence in Iraq for decades after the fighting had ended, just as they did in South Korea. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had declared in June 2007 that U.S. troops would be in Iraq "for a protracted period of time".
The secret U.S. draft handed to Iraqi officials Mar. 7 put no limit on either the number of U.S. troops in Iraq or the duration of their presence or their activities. It would have authorized U.S. forces to "conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain certain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security", according to an Apr. 8 article in The Guardian quoting from a leaked copy of the draft.
When Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded a timetable for complete U.S. withdrawal in early July, the White House insisted that it would not accept such a timetable and that any decision on withdrawal "will be conditions based". It was even hoping to avoid a requirement for complete withdrawal in the agreement, as reflected in false claims to media Jul. 17 that Bush and Maliki had agreed on the objective of "further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq" rather than complete withdrawal.
By early August, however, Bush had already reduced its negotiating aims. The U.S. draft dated Aug. 6, which was translated and posted on the internet by Iraqi activist Raed Jarrar, demanded the inclusion of either "targeted times" or "time targets" to refer to the dates for withdrawal of U.S. forces from all cities, town and villages and for complete combat troop withdrawal from Iraq, suggesting that they were not deadlines.
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad Aug. 21, the United States accepted for the first time a firm date of 2011 for complete withdrawal, giving up the demand for ambiguous such terms. However, the Aug. 6 draft included a provision that the U.S. could ask Iraq to "extend" the date for complete withdrawal of combat troops, based on mutual review of "progress" in achieving the withdrawal.
Because it had not yet been removed from the text, U.S. officials continued to claim to reporters that the date was "conditions-based", as Karen DeYoung reported in the Washington Post Aug. 22.
The administration also continued to hope for approval of a residual force. U.S. officials told DeYoung the deal would leave "tens of thousands of U.S. troops inside Iraq in supporting roles...for an unspecified time". That hope was based on a paragraph of the Aug. 6 draft providing that the Iraqi government could request such a force, with the joint committee for operations and coordination determining the "tasks and level of the troops..."
But the Oct. 13 final draft, a translation of which was posted by Raed Jarrar on his website Oct. 20, reveals that the Bush administration has been forced to give up its aims of softening the deadline for withdrawal and of a residual non-combat force in the country. Unlike the Aug. 6 draft, the final text treats any extension of that date as a modification of the agreement, which could be done only "in accordance to constitutional procedures in both countries".
That is an obvious reference to approval by the Iraqi parliament.
Given the present level of opposition to the agreement within the Shiite community, that provision offers scant hope of a residual U.S. non-combat force in Iraq after 2011.
Another signal of Iraqi intentions is a provision of the final draft limiting the duration of the agreement to three years -- a date coinciding with the deadline for complete withdrawal from Iraq. The date can be extended only by a decision made by the "constitutional procedures in both countries".
The final draft confirms the language of the Aug. 6 draft requiring that all U.S. military operations be subject to the approval of the Iraqi government and coordinated with Iraqi authorities through a joint U.S.-Iraqi committee.
The negotiating text had already established by Aug. 6 that U.S. troops could not detain anyone in the country without a "warrant issued by the specialized Iraqi authorities in accordance with Iraqi law" and required that the detainees be turned over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours. The Oct. 13 "final draft" goes even further, requiring that any detention by the United States, apart from its own personnel, must be "based on an Iraqi decision".
The collapse of the Bush administration's ambitious plan for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq highlights the degree of unreality that has prevailed among top U.S. officials in both Washington and Baghdad on Iraqi politics. They continued to see the Maliki regime as a client which would cooperate with U.S. aims even after it was clear that Maliki's agenda was sharply at odds with that of the United States.
They also refused to take seriously the opposition to such a presence even among the Shiite clerics who had tolerated it in order to obtain Shiite control over state power.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam ", was published in 2006.
© 2008 Inter Press Service
McCain does not support farm bills
by Lee Okeson
I was born, raised and educated in North Dakota. To this day I have family, friends and economic connections within the state. With dismay, I note that the state is in the red (John McCain) category on the national maps showing voter preferences for presidential candidates.
It is said that voters generally do not vote for what would be in their best interest. This would seem to be the case here. McCain has not been in support of farm program bills in the Senate. North Dakota is one of the largest recipients, nationally, of benefits from these bills. Also, McCain has consistently voted in opposition to ethanol proposals.
North Dakota has maintained strong Democratic representation in the national legislature. It has long supported and protected the State Bank and State Mill, which date back to the time of the Nonpartisan League. Now is the time to keep in mind what is best for the people in the state.
North Dakota voters are urged to vote for Barack Obama for president. It is in their, and the nation’s, best interest to do so.
I was born, raised and educated in North Dakota. To this day I have family, friends and economic connections within the state. With dismay, I note that the state is in the red (John McCain) category on the national maps showing voter preferences for presidential candidates.
It is said that voters generally do not vote for what would be in their best interest. This would seem to be the case here. McCain has not been in support of farm program bills in the Senate. North Dakota is one of the largest recipients, nationally, of benefits from these bills. Also, McCain has consistently voted in opposition to ethanol proposals.
North Dakota has maintained strong Democratic representation in the national legislature. It has long supported and protected the State Bank and State Mill, which date back to the time of the Nonpartisan League. Now is the time to keep in mind what is best for the people in the state.
North Dakota voters are urged to vote for Barack Obama for president. It is in their, and the nation’s, best interest to do so.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Campaign
By RALPH NADER
The three so-called presidential debates—really parallel interviews by reporters chosen by the Obama and McCain campaigns—are over and they are remarkable for two characteristics—convergence and avoidance.
A remarkable similarity between McCain and Obama on foreign and military policy kept enlarging as Obama seemed to enter into a clinch with McCain each time McCain questioned his inexperience or softness or using military force.
If anyone can detect a difference between the two candidates regarding belligerence toward Iran and Russia, more U.S. soldiers into the quagmire of Afghanistan (next to Pakistan), kneejerk support of the Israeli military oppression, brutalization and colonization of the Palestinians and their shrinking lands, keeping soldiers and bases in Iraq, despite Obama’s use of the word “withdrawal,” and their desire to enlarge an already bloated, wasteful military budget which already consumes half of the federal government’s operating expenses, please illuminate the crevices between them.
This past spring, the foreign affairs reporters, not columnists, for the New York Times and the Washington Post concluded that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are advancing foreign and military policies similar to those adopted by George W. Bush in his second term.
Where then is the “hope” and “change” from the junior Senator from Illinois?
Moreover, both Obama and McCain want more nuclear power plants, more coal production, and more offshore oil drilling. Our national priority should be energy efficient consumer technologies (motor vehicles, heating, air conditioning and electric systems) and renewable energy such as wind, solar and geothermal.
Both support the gigantic taxpayer funded Wall Street bailout, without expressed amendments. Both support the notorious Patriot Act, the revised FISA act which opened the door to spy on Americans without judicial approval, and Obama agrees with McCain in vigorously opposing the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
What about avoidance? Did you see them speak about a comprehensive enforcement program to prosecute corporate crooks in the midst of the greatest corporate crime wave in our history? Did you see them allude to doing anything about consumer protection (credit card gouging, price of medicines, the awful exploitation and deprivation of the people in the inner city) and the ripoffs of buyers in ever more obscure and inescapable ways?
Wasn’t it remarkable how they never mentioned the poor, and only use the middle class when they refer to “regular people?” There are one hundred million poor people and children in this nation and no one in Washington, D.C. associates Senator Obama, much less John McCain, with any worthy program to treat the abundant poverty-related injustices.
What about labor issues? Worker health and safety, pensions looted and drained, growing permanent unemployment and underemployment, and outsourcing more and more jobs to fascists and communist dictatorships are not even on the peripheries of the topics covered in the debates.
When I was asked my opinion about who won the debates, I say they were not debates. But I know what won and what lost. The winners were big business, bailouts for Wall Street, an expansionary NATO, a boondoggle missile defense program, nuclear power, the military-industrial complex and its insatiable thirst for trillions of taxpayer dollars, for starters.
What lost was peace advocacy, international law, the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement, taxpayers, consumers, Africa and We the People.
The language of avoidance to address and challenge corporate power is spoken by both McCain and Obama, though interestingly enough, McCain occasionally uses words like “corporate greed” to describe his taking on the giant Boeing tanker contract with the Pentagon.
Funded by beer, tobacco, auto and telecommunications companies over the years, the corporation known as the Commission on Presidential Debates features only two corporate-funded candidates, excludes all others and closes off a major forum for smaller candidates, who are on a majority of the states, to reach tens of millions of voters.
In the future, this theatre of the absurd can be replaced with a grand coalition of national and local citizen groups who, starting in March, 2012 lay out many debates from Boston to San Diego, rural, suburban and urban, summon the presidential candidates to public auditoriums to react to the peoples’ agendas.
Can the Democratic and Republican nominees reject this combination of labor, neighborhood, farmer, cooperative, veteran’s, religious, student, consumer and good government with tens of millions of members? It will be interesting to see what happens if they do or if they do not.
Ralph Nader is running for president as an independent.
The three so-called presidential debates—really parallel interviews by reporters chosen by the Obama and McCain campaigns—are over and they are remarkable for two characteristics—convergence and avoidance.
A remarkable similarity between McCain and Obama on foreign and military policy kept enlarging as Obama seemed to enter into a clinch with McCain each time McCain questioned his inexperience or softness or using military force.
If anyone can detect a difference between the two candidates regarding belligerence toward Iran and Russia, more U.S. soldiers into the quagmire of Afghanistan (next to Pakistan), kneejerk support of the Israeli military oppression, brutalization and colonization of the Palestinians and their shrinking lands, keeping soldiers and bases in Iraq, despite Obama’s use of the word “withdrawal,” and their desire to enlarge an already bloated, wasteful military budget which already consumes half of the federal government’s operating expenses, please illuminate the crevices between them.
This past spring, the foreign affairs reporters, not columnists, for the New York Times and the Washington Post concluded that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are advancing foreign and military policies similar to those adopted by George W. Bush in his second term.
Where then is the “hope” and “change” from the junior Senator from Illinois?
Moreover, both Obama and McCain want more nuclear power plants, more coal production, and more offshore oil drilling. Our national priority should be energy efficient consumer technologies (motor vehicles, heating, air conditioning and electric systems) and renewable energy such as wind, solar and geothermal.
Both support the gigantic taxpayer funded Wall Street bailout, without expressed amendments. Both support the notorious Patriot Act, the revised FISA act which opened the door to spy on Americans without judicial approval, and Obama agrees with McCain in vigorously opposing the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
What about avoidance? Did you see them speak about a comprehensive enforcement program to prosecute corporate crooks in the midst of the greatest corporate crime wave in our history? Did you see them allude to doing anything about consumer protection (credit card gouging, price of medicines, the awful exploitation and deprivation of the people in the inner city) and the ripoffs of buyers in ever more obscure and inescapable ways?
Wasn’t it remarkable how they never mentioned the poor, and only use the middle class when they refer to “regular people?” There are one hundred million poor people and children in this nation and no one in Washington, D.C. associates Senator Obama, much less John McCain, with any worthy program to treat the abundant poverty-related injustices.
What about labor issues? Worker health and safety, pensions looted and drained, growing permanent unemployment and underemployment, and outsourcing more and more jobs to fascists and communist dictatorships are not even on the peripheries of the topics covered in the debates.
When I was asked my opinion about who won the debates, I say they were not debates. But I know what won and what lost. The winners were big business, bailouts for Wall Street, an expansionary NATO, a boondoggle missile defense program, nuclear power, the military-industrial complex and its insatiable thirst for trillions of taxpayer dollars, for starters.
What lost was peace advocacy, international law, the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement, taxpayers, consumers, Africa and We the People.
The language of avoidance to address and challenge corporate power is spoken by both McCain and Obama, though interestingly enough, McCain occasionally uses words like “corporate greed” to describe his taking on the giant Boeing tanker contract with the Pentagon.
Funded by beer, tobacco, auto and telecommunications companies over the years, the corporation known as the Commission on Presidential Debates features only two corporate-funded candidates, excludes all others and closes off a major forum for smaller candidates, who are on a majority of the states, to reach tens of millions of voters.
In the future, this theatre of the absurd can be replaced with a grand coalition of national and local citizen groups who, starting in March, 2012 lay out many debates from Boston to San Diego, rural, suburban and urban, summon the presidential candidates to public auditoriums to react to the peoples’ agendas.
Can the Democratic and Republican nominees reject this combination of labor, neighborhood, farmer, cooperative, veteran’s, religious, student, consumer and good government with tens of millions of members? It will be interesting to see what happens if they do or if they do not.
Ralph Nader is running for president as an independent.
The real Gov. Palin as told by Alaskans
by K.S. Collins Palmer, Alaska
I was born in Fargo, raised in a small farm town and attended Moorhead State. I'm currently an Alaskan (23-plus years). One of the amenities that I treasure most about small-town living is that a person's word better be good, because if it isn't, everyone in town will know. I know that Gov. Sarah Palin is a liar, and so do many others:
Alaskan Republican pundit Paul Jenkins wrote, "The two axioms to remember about Palin are these: The rules do not apply to her, and she is an opportunist always looking for buses with lots of room underneath, lots of room for all the political bodies."
Per Alaska's Rush Limbaugh, Dan Fagan: "No politician is so popular and charismatic that they should be above accountability and telling the truth. Not even Sarah Palin."
Fairbanks retired school Principal R.D. Levno says, "She's a child, inexperienced and simplistic. It's taking us back to junior high school. She's one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented."
From an Anchorage Daily News Oct. 14 editorial: "Her response (Troopergate) is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian. In plain English, she did something 'unlawful.' She broke the state ethics law. Gov. Palin, read the report. It says you violated the ethics law."
I ask all of you to seek out the truth and ask yourselves: Since when is lying an appropriate practice in either church or state?
I was born in Fargo, raised in a small farm town and attended Moorhead State. I'm currently an Alaskan (23-plus years). One of the amenities that I treasure most about small-town living is that a person's word better be good, because if it isn't, everyone in town will know. I know that Gov. Sarah Palin is a liar, and so do many others:
Alaskan Republican pundit Paul Jenkins wrote, "The two axioms to remember about Palin are these: The rules do not apply to her, and she is an opportunist always looking for buses with lots of room underneath, lots of room for all the political bodies."
Per Alaska's Rush Limbaugh, Dan Fagan: "No politician is so popular and charismatic that they should be above accountability and telling the truth. Not even Sarah Palin."
Fairbanks retired school Principal R.D. Levno says, "She's a child, inexperienced and simplistic. It's taking us back to junior high school. She's one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented."
From an Anchorage Daily News Oct. 14 editorial: "Her response (Troopergate) is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian. In plain English, she did something 'unlawful.' She broke the state ethics law. Gov. Palin, read the report. It says you violated the ethics law."
I ask all of you to seek out the truth and ask yourselves: Since when is lying an appropriate practice in either church or state?
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Grand Illusion of American Power
by H.D.S. Greenway
The other day I went to hear my favorite soldier-scholar, Andrew Bacevich, give a talk at Boston University, where he teaches. A retired colonel and Vietnam veteran, Bacevich's new book is called "The Limits of Power, The end of American Exceptionalism."
Bacevich has migrated from a conservative outlook to what might be called a neo-Niebuhrean position - his thinking being influenced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bacevich calls "the most clear-eyed of American prophets."
Niebuhr warned against "dreams of managing history," a combination of arrogance and narcissism that posed a moral threat. That's why Niebuhr is often held in contempt by neo-conservatives for whom power is everything. Bacevich's concern is that the dream has become a physical threat that could lead to America's inevitable decline.
There is a mythical American narrative, according to Bacevich, that the United States is a nation "providentially set apart in the New World and wanting nothing more than to tend to its own affairs," only grudgingly responding to calls for global leadership "in order to preserve the possibility of freedom." In reality, the United States has sought expansion, first by pushing west until it reached the sea, then through a brief period of direct colonialism, and more recently through a ruthless if indirect imperial policy of control. It worked spectacularly. The United States became a great power replete with material abundance.
Right around the time of the Vietnam War, Bacevich argues, this began to unravel. Trade imbalances, federal deficits, "mushrooming entitlements, plummeting savings rates, and energy dependence" led us to become a debtor nation, counting on others to foot the bill. "The positive correlation between expansion, power, abundance, and freedom began to become undone . . . Further efforts at expansionism have led to the squandering of American power," according to Bacevich.
The actions of the Bush administration after 9/11 may have been designed to make the United States safe from another attack. But the chosen method was nothing less than to "assert American power throughout the Greater Middle East . . . to transform this region, to employ American power, both hard and soft, to impose order while ensuring stability, order, access, and adherence to American norms - in essence to establish unambiguous US hegemony so that the Islamic world will no longer serve as a breeding ground for terrorists who wish to kill us."
The grand illusion of American power as a transformative agent is evident in what Bush's lieutenants had to say. "We have a choice," said Donald Rumsfeld in September, 2001. Either we change the way we live, "which is unacceptable," or we "change the way they live, and we chose the latter. " Or as Douglas Feith would later put it: America's purpose was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."
This grand imperial overreach never had a chance. Transforming Islam can only be done by Muslims themselves, in their own due time. The new "liberated" Iraq has not changed the Middle East. The passions of the Middle East have transformed Iraq, perhaps more stable now than a year ago but in no way destined to achieve what Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al wanted and expected.
The net result is that much of the world now looks on the Bush administration's resurrection of Woodrow Wilson's ideals and the expansion of democracy as a cover for coercion and bare-knuckle dominance. As Bacevich says, Bush always confused strategy with ideology.
Militarily, we threw containment and deterrence out the window, banking on the "shock and awe" of preventive war. It hasn't worked. We are bogged down in two wars with an end to neither in sight.
Bacevich doesn't see the November election as necessarily producing a beneficial change. John McCain touts the stalemated Iraq war as a success, while Barack Obama calls for more effort in Afghanistan. In Bacevich's view, it is the entire doctrine of preventive war that has proved a failure. There has to be a better way than occupying Muslim countries.
Both McCain and Obama "implicitly endorse the global war on terror as the essential core of US policy," while in reality it's the entire concept that needs to be rethought.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
The other day I went to hear my favorite soldier-scholar, Andrew Bacevich, give a talk at Boston University, where he teaches. A retired colonel and Vietnam veteran, Bacevich's new book is called "The Limits of Power, The end of American Exceptionalism."
Bacevich has migrated from a conservative outlook to what might be called a neo-Niebuhrean position - his thinking being influenced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bacevich calls "the most clear-eyed of American prophets."
Niebuhr warned against "dreams of managing history," a combination of arrogance and narcissism that posed a moral threat. That's why Niebuhr is often held in contempt by neo-conservatives for whom power is everything. Bacevich's concern is that the dream has become a physical threat that could lead to America's inevitable decline.
There is a mythical American narrative, according to Bacevich, that the United States is a nation "providentially set apart in the New World and wanting nothing more than to tend to its own affairs," only grudgingly responding to calls for global leadership "in order to preserve the possibility of freedom." In reality, the United States has sought expansion, first by pushing west until it reached the sea, then through a brief period of direct colonialism, and more recently through a ruthless if indirect imperial policy of control. It worked spectacularly. The United States became a great power replete with material abundance.
Right around the time of the Vietnam War, Bacevich argues, this began to unravel. Trade imbalances, federal deficits, "mushrooming entitlements, plummeting savings rates, and energy dependence" led us to become a debtor nation, counting on others to foot the bill. "The positive correlation between expansion, power, abundance, and freedom began to become undone . . . Further efforts at expansionism have led to the squandering of American power," according to Bacevich.
The actions of the Bush administration after 9/11 may have been designed to make the United States safe from another attack. But the chosen method was nothing less than to "assert American power throughout the Greater Middle East . . . to transform this region, to employ American power, both hard and soft, to impose order while ensuring stability, order, access, and adherence to American norms - in essence to establish unambiguous US hegemony so that the Islamic world will no longer serve as a breeding ground for terrorists who wish to kill us."
The grand illusion of American power as a transformative agent is evident in what Bush's lieutenants had to say. "We have a choice," said Donald Rumsfeld in September, 2001. Either we change the way we live, "which is unacceptable," or we "change the way they live, and we chose the latter. " Or as Douglas Feith would later put it: America's purpose was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."
This grand imperial overreach never had a chance. Transforming Islam can only be done by Muslims themselves, in their own due time. The new "liberated" Iraq has not changed the Middle East. The passions of the Middle East have transformed Iraq, perhaps more stable now than a year ago but in no way destined to achieve what Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al wanted and expected.
The net result is that much of the world now looks on the Bush administration's resurrection of Woodrow Wilson's ideals and the expansion of democracy as a cover for coercion and bare-knuckle dominance. As Bacevich says, Bush always confused strategy with ideology.
Militarily, we threw containment and deterrence out the window, banking on the "shock and awe" of preventive war. It hasn't worked. We are bogged down in two wars with an end to neither in sight.
Bacevich doesn't see the November election as necessarily producing a beneficial change. John McCain touts the stalemated Iraq war as a success, while Barack Obama calls for more effort in Afghanistan. In Bacevich's view, it is the entire doctrine of preventive war that has proved a failure. There has to be a better way than occupying Muslim countries.
Both McCain and Obama "implicitly endorse the global war on terror as the essential core of US policy," while in reality it's the entire concept that needs to be rethought.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
Palin's Qualifications Now Top Concern Over McCain Candidacy
Huffington Post
Two polls released Tuesday provide striking evidence of Palin's transformation over the course of two months from GOP energy boost to major drawback, as the Alaska governor's rising unfavorability ratings have become a critical vulnerability for the McCain campaign.
Palin's qualifications to be president now rank as voters' top concern about John McCain's candidacy - "ahead of continuing President Bush's policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq," according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
Fifty-five percent of respondents now say Palin is not qualified to serve as president, a five-point jump from the previous NBC/WSJ survey.
In addition, for the first time, more voters have a negative opinion of her than a positive one. In the survey, 47 percent view her negatively, versus 38 percent who see her in a positive light.
That's a striking shift since McCain chose Palin as his running mate in early September, when she held a 47 to 27 percent positive rating.
According to another poll by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, opinions of Palin have flipped in the last month, especially among the female voters she was expected to attract to the McCain ticket.
Nearly half -- 49% -- of voters have an unfavorable opinion of her while 44% have a favorable view. A month ago, "favorable opinions of Palin outnumbered negative ones by 54% to 32%."
Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 60% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% in mid-September. Notably, opinions of Palin have a greater impact on voting intentions than do opinions of Joe Biden, Obama's running mate.
Two polls released Tuesday provide striking evidence of Palin's transformation over the course of two months from GOP energy boost to major drawback, as the Alaska governor's rising unfavorability ratings have become a critical vulnerability for the McCain campaign.
Palin's qualifications to be president now rank as voters' top concern about John McCain's candidacy - "ahead of continuing President Bush's policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq," according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
Fifty-five percent of respondents now say Palin is not qualified to serve as president, a five-point jump from the previous NBC/WSJ survey.
In addition, for the first time, more voters have a negative opinion of her than a positive one. In the survey, 47 percent view her negatively, versus 38 percent who see her in a positive light.
That's a striking shift since McCain chose Palin as his running mate in early September, when she held a 47 to 27 percent positive rating.
According to another poll by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, opinions of Palin have flipped in the last month, especially among the female voters she was expected to attract to the McCain ticket.
Nearly half -- 49% -- of voters have an unfavorable opinion of her while 44% have a favorable view. A month ago, "favorable opinions of Palin outnumbered negative ones by 54% to 32%."
Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 60% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% in mid-September. Notably, opinions of Palin have a greater impact on voting intentions than do opinions of Joe Biden, Obama's running mate.
Monday, October 20, 2008
And his name was Kareem
"And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American, he was born in New Jersey, he was 14 at the time of 9/11 and he waited until he can go serve his counrty and he gave his life."
Sunday, October 19, 2008
U.S. Pact Hits Snag as Iraq Shiites Seek Changes
By Mary Beth Sheridan and Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 19, 2008
BAGHDAD, Oct. 19 -- The Iraqi parliament's biggest political bloc is calling for all American troops to leave this country by the end of 2011 as a condition for approving a new agreement extending the U.S. military presence in Iraq, a senior official said Sunday.
The United Iraqi Alliance is also insisting that Iraq have a bigger role in determining whether U.S. soldiers accused of wrongdoing are subjected to prosecution in Iraqi courts.
If the conditions are not met, "I cannot see that this agreement will see the light," said Sami al-Askeri, a Shiite parliamentarian and political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
It was not immediately clear if the U.S. would accept the conditions, which would make significant changes to the draft agreement produced in recent days. The bilateral accord is aimed at replacing a United Nations mandate that provides the legal authority for U.S. troops to be in Iraq. It expires on Dec. 31.
The Bush administration has resisted setting firm dates for the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq, saying it should be based on security conditions. U.S. authorities ultimately accepted a compromise in the agreement, which set a withdrawal date of the end of 2011 but provided for an extension by mutual agreement.
Askeri said the possibility of an extension raised concerns among members of the Shiite bloc, who met on Saturday night.
"Some people say, what's going on?" he said. "This article opens the door to the next government" of Iraq to lengthen the U.S. troops' stay, he said. Iraq holds national elections next year.
On the issue of legal jurisdiction, the draft accord says that U.S. forces can be subject to Iraqi law if they are accused of a major crime while outside their bases and off-duty. American troops rarely leave their bases when not on official missions, so it would appear that soldiers would rarely, if ever, be subject to Iraqi law.
Askeri said that lawmakers did not want U.S. military authorities to make the decision on when a soldier was considered off-duty. That determination should be made by a joint committee, and if they deadlocked, it should go to an Iraqi court, he said. The Pentagon insists on having sole legal jurisdiction over U.S. troops in most foreign countries.
The draft status of forces agreement was being discussed Sunday night by the Iraqi Political Council for National Security, an advisory body of senior executive, legislative and judicial officials. If the council gives it the green light, the accord is to be sent to the Cabinet and the Parliament for approval.
The concerns voiced by Shiite lawmakers are the first major hurdle in what many U.S. and Iraqi officials anticipate will be a contentious and drawn-out process.
"We continue to be in discussion with the Iraqis and the Iraqis continue to discuss this amongst themselves," said Susan Ziadeh, the spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. "That's to be expected. We'll see where these discussions lead."
Lawmakers aligned with Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr are the most vocal critics of an agreement that would extend the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. They control 30 seats in the 275-seat Parliament, while the Shiite alliance has 85. Sadr leaders convened a large demonstration in Baghdad on Saturday during which thousands marched to express their opposition to the accord.
Kurdish lawmakers, who make up the second biggest block in parliament, support a deal. Leaders of Sunni blocs have not publicly expressed a strong opinion for or against the proposed agreement, saying they need time to examine the draft.
Discussions about contentious bills have stalled in Iraq's parliament for months amid bickering and deadlocks. Many lawmakers are likely to be particularly sensitive to the potential political ramifications of their stance on the agreement because it is expected to come up for a vote weeks before provincial elections.
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 19, 2008
BAGHDAD, Oct. 19 -- The Iraqi parliament's biggest political bloc is calling for all American troops to leave this country by the end of 2011 as a condition for approving a new agreement extending the U.S. military presence in Iraq, a senior official said Sunday.
The United Iraqi Alliance is also insisting that Iraq have a bigger role in determining whether U.S. soldiers accused of wrongdoing are subjected to prosecution in Iraqi courts.
If the conditions are not met, "I cannot see that this agreement will see the light," said Sami al-Askeri, a Shiite parliamentarian and political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
It was not immediately clear if the U.S. would accept the conditions, which would make significant changes to the draft agreement produced in recent days. The bilateral accord is aimed at replacing a United Nations mandate that provides the legal authority for U.S. troops to be in Iraq. It expires on Dec. 31.
The Bush administration has resisted setting firm dates for the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq, saying it should be based on security conditions. U.S. authorities ultimately accepted a compromise in the agreement, which set a withdrawal date of the end of 2011 but provided for an extension by mutual agreement.
Askeri said the possibility of an extension raised concerns among members of the Shiite bloc, who met on Saturday night.
"Some people say, what's going on?" he said. "This article opens the door to the next government" of Iraq to lengthen the U.S. troops' stay, he said. Iraq holds national elections next year.
On the issue of legal jurisdiction, the draft accord says that U.S. forces can be subject to Iraqi law if they are accused of a major crime while outside their bases and off-duty. American troops rarely leave their bases when not on official missions, so it would appear that soldiers would rarely, if ever, be subject to Iraqi law.
Askeri said that lawmakers did not want U.S. military authorities to make the decision on when a soldier was considered off-duty. That determination should be made by a joint committee, and if they deadlocked, it should go to an Iraqi court, he said. The Pentagon insists on having sole legal jurisdiction over U.S. troops in most foreign countries.
The draft status of forces agreement was being discussed Sunday night by the Iraqi Political Council for National Security, an advisory body of senior executive, legislative and judicial officials. If the council gives it the green light, the accord is to be sent to the Cabinet and the Parliament for approval.
The concerns voiced by Shiite lawmakers are the first major hurdle in what many U.S. and Iraqi officials anticipate will be a contentious and drawn-out process.
"We continue to be in discussion with the Iraqis and the Iraqis continue to discuss this amongst themselves," said Susan Ziadeh, the spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. "That's to be expected. We'll see where these discussions lead."
Lawmakers aligned with Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr are the most vocal critics of an agreement that would extend the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. They control 30 seats in the 275-seat Parliament, while the Shiite alliance has 85. Sadr leaders convened a large demonstration in Baghdad on Saturday during which thousands marched to express their opposition to the accord.
Kurdish lawmakers, who make up the second biggest block in parliament, support a deal. Leaders of Sunni blocs have not publicly expressed a strong opinion for or against the proposed agreement, saying they need time to examine the draft.
Discussions about contentious bills have stalled in Iraq's parliament for months amid bickering and deadlocks. Many lawmakers are likely to be particularly sensitive to the potential political ramifications of their stance on the agreement because it is expected to come up for a vote weeks before provincial elections.
Iraqis March For Freedom From US
by Deborah Haynes and Sarmad Ali - Baghdad
Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shia cleric, called on Iraqi politicians today to reject an accord to allow US troops to stay in the country beyond 2008, as tens of thousands of his followers protested against the pact in the streets of Baghdad.
In a display of anger at one point, members of the crowd set fire to effigies of George Bush and Condoleezza Rice as well as an American and an Israeli flag.
"Yes, yes Iraq! No, no to the occupation!" the protestors chanted as they marched, peacefully, from the Shia slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad to a public square a couple of miles away. Many waved the Iraqi flag or flags in the green of Shia Islam.
Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, who lives in Iran, conveyed his message to lawmakers through an aide, Sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammadawi, who spoke at the rally.
"The Iraqi Government has abandoned its duty before God and its people and referred the agreement to you knowing that ratifying it will stigmatise Iraq and its government for years to come," the Sheikh said.
The radical cleric, who commands the al-Mehdi Army militia and is rarely seen in public, also challenged a belief that Baghdad will move closer to ending the US presence in Iraq by signing a status of forces agreement with Washington.
"Whoever tells you that it gives us sovereignty is a liar. I am confident that you brothers in Parliament will champion the will of the people over that of the occupier ... Do not betray the people," his message said.
The comments come as the United States and Iraq move to finalise the status of forces accord.
The document must be signed by December 31 when a United Nations Security Council mandate authorising the presence of foreign troops in Iraq expires. Failure to do so will require Baghdad to ask for an extension of the UN mandate.
Britain must also sign an agreement to enable its small contingent in the south of Iraq to stay into 2009. London has said it will use the US-Iraq pact as a blueprint for its accord but time is fast running out for all sides.
Emotions against foreign forces in Iraq ran high among the protestors.
Many arrived in Sadr City last night, travelling by bus from towns and cities in the south, including one Sheikh who came from Nassiriyah.
"Our country is occupied. We call for the occupiers to be driven out yesterday and not tomorrow," said Sheikh Khalid Ahmed, dressed in a blue gown, a black robe and a white turban.
"The occupiers and the Government that cooperates with them have brought disgrace to the country and caused destruction and hatred among the people who used to live together as one," said the man, in his 40s.
Um Fatima, a woman taking part in the rally, accused US-led forces of stealing Iraq's riches.
"I refuse any status of forces agreement with those who slaughtered my people and allowed ethnic cleansing and sectarian killings," said the 38-year-old, a teacher in Sadr City.
Security was tight surrounding the demonstration, with roads leading to the area in the east of Baghdad sealed off by police and army.
Followers of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr described the event as a rescheduled "million man march" initially called in April when the al-Mehdi Army was fighting US and Iraqi forces in Basra, southern Iraq, and Baghdad.
But today's turnout, while in the tens of thousands, was well shy of 1 million, perhaps a reflection of the power shift that has taken place in the past six months, with Iraqi forces largely in control of the capital and down to the south.
© 2008 The Times Online
Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shia cleric, called on Iraqi politicians today to reject an accord to allow US troops to stay in the country beyond 2008, as tens of thousands of his followers protested against the pact in the streets of Baghdad.
In a display of anger at one point, members of the crowd set fire to effigies of George Bush and Condoleezza Rice as well as an American and an Israeli flag.
"Yes, yes Iraq! No, no to the occupation!" the protestors chanted as they marched, peacefully, from the Shia slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad to a public square a couple of miles away. Many waved the Iraqi flag or flags in the green of Shia Islam.
Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, who lives in Iran, conveyed his message to lawmakers through an aide, Sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammadawi, who spoke at the rally.
"The Iraqi Government has abandoned its duty before God and its people and referred the agreement to you knowing that ratifying it will stigmatise Iraq and its government for years to come," the Sheikh said.
The radical cleric, who commands the al-Mehdi Army militia and is rarely seen in public, also challenged a belief that Baghdad will move closer to ending the US presence in Iraq by signing a status of forces agreement with Washington.
"Whoever tells you that it gives us sovereignty is a liar. I am confident that you brothers in Parliament will champion the will of the people over that of the occupier ... Do not betray the people," his message said.
The comments come as the United States and Iraq move to finalise the status of forces accord.
The document must be signed by December 31 when a United Nations Security Council mandate authorising the presence of foreign troops in Iraq expires. Failure to do so will require Baghdad to ask for an extension of the UN mandate.
Britain must also sign an agreement to enable its small contingent in the south of Iraq to stay into 2009. London has said it will use the US-Iraq pact as a blueprint for its accord but time is fast running out for all sides.
Emotions against foreign forces in Iraq ran high among the protestors.
Many arrived in Sadr City last night, travelling by bus from towns and cities in the south, including one Sheikh who came from Nassiriyah.
"Our country is occupied. We call for the occupiers to be driven out yesterday and not tomorrow," said Sheikh Khalid Ahmed, dressed in a blue gown, a black robe and a white turban.
"The occupiers and the Government that cooperates with them have brought disgrace to the country and caused destruction and hatred among the people who used to live together as one," said the man, in his 40s.
Um Fatima, a woman taking part in the rally, accused US-led forces of stealing Iraq's riches.
"I refuse any status of forces agreement with those who slaughtered my people and allowed ethnic cleansing and sectarian killings," said the 38-year-old, a teacher in Sadr City.
Security was tight surrounding the demonstration, with roads leading to the area in the east of Baghdad sealed off by police and army.
Followers of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr described the event as a rescheduled "million man march" initially called in April when the al-Mehdi Army was fighting US and Iraqi forces in Basra, southern Iraq, and Baghdad.
But today's turnout, while in the tens of thousands, was well shy of 1 million, perhaps a reflection of the power shift that has taken place in the past six months, with Iraqi forces largely in control of the capital and down to the south.
© 2008 The Times Online
Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Palin Plunge: Voters Sour On McCain VP Pick
The Salt Lake Tribune, which supported George W. Bush in 2004, commented that "out of nowhere, and without proper vetting, the impetuous McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. She quickly proved grievously under-equipped to step into the presidency should McCain, at 72 and with a history of health problems, die in office. More than any single factor, McCain's bad judgment in choosing the inarticulate, insular and ethically challenged Palin disqualifies him for the presidency." The Kansas City Star, in turn, described Palin as "unqualified."
Ending the War Without End
by David Swanson
The three participants in the third U.S. presidential debate last week pretended Iraq didn't exist, but if you go to a rally of supporters for either candidate it's the top issue talked about. Baghdad, a city in ruins, divided into ethnically cleansed fiefdoms of rubble, rats, and open sewage, a place where one risks death by walking outside, is managing major rallies of tens of thousands of people in opposition to the treaty to extend the occupation for three more years (and beyond) that is being negotiated by Bush and Maliki. And yet, the U.S. peace movement is largely hibernating until the November 4th U.S. elections, and the U.S. Congress remains almost entirely comatose.
To a consumer of U.S. corporate media this makes some sense. The occupation is for the benefit of the people of Iraq and, with the help of "the surge", it is "succeeding." President Bush is actually working on an "agreement" to "end" the "war." Peace activists should be celebrating, right?
To begin the reeducation process necessary to recognize such positions as sick jokes, I recommend the best history of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that I've seen: Michael Schwartz's "War Without End: The Iraq War in Context." This book puts incidents of violence we hear about in the context of the massive violence we don't hear much about, and puts all of it in the context of the economic and social devastation imposed on Iraq by the people we absurdly call our public servants. Schwartz also helps to make the complex clearer and simpler by framing his account in terms of the actual oily motivations of our government, rather than any of the pretended rationales.
Iraq was to be a brief stop on the march of U.S. empire into other Middle Eastern nations. But Iraq was not to be invaded and then allowed to recover in its previous form; it was to be completely remade as a totally privatized participant in the global economy. Of course, these two ideas were incompatible and resulted in the occupiers' attempt to accomplish in days what would have had to take decades in order to succeed at all even on its own terms. And massive additions of U.S. troops even early on would only have slowed the process of economically driven resistance. "The cycle of protest, repression, and escalation," Schwartz convincingly argues, "would have eventually run its course."
The resistance grew out of U.S. actions that destroyed the Iraqi economy and infrastructure and prevented their restoration, actions sometimes aimed at creating a neocon paradise of trickledown success, and sometimes aimed more successfully at destruction and mass punishment. And yet, most of the violence has never come from the resistance. It comes from the U.S. occupiers. The assault on Fallujah was an assault on a relatively peaceful city aimed at wresting control of it from opponents of the occupation, not at pacifying any violence. U.S. assaults on civilians are, by and large, not collateral damage, but the intentional sending of a message to other civilians not to aid the resistance. And the various acts of handing sovereignty over to Iraqis have never been understood by most Iraqis as anything more than laughable pretenses.
Most of Iraq is controlled by Sunni or Shia militias. The U.S. military and the puppet Iraqi government control very little. The U.S. military has negotiated cease-fires with Shia and Sunni groups, reducing violence but adding to the groups' consolidation of local power, power that will be increasingly used to demand major public economic projects of exactly the sort that the U.S. government refuses to provide, either in Iraq or in the United States. Yes, many are dead and many more have been driven from their homes, and still many, many more are weakened and injured. And yet, there is every indication that the resistance will be growing, not diminishing.
It is in this context that we should view the current attempt by Bush to legitimize and extend the occupation, his releasing last week of yet another unconstitutional "signing statement" giving himself the power to spend funds to control Iraq's oil, and his efforts to unconstitutionally create a treaty with Iraq, without Senate approval. If the treaty is put into place and accepted by the Iraqi Parliament and ignored by a spineless Congress, it will sanction three more years of occupation (to be followed by endless years of reduced-size occupation) but require "ending" (meaning reducing) the occupation by 2011. It will also technically take immunity from Iraqi law away from US troops and mercenaries in limited circumstances when off base and off duty, although the likelihood of actual prosecutions seems limited. Oh, and we will have established that a president can make treaties without even going through the pretense that Congress still exists.
A handful of Congress Members, led as always by Kucinich, are speaking out. And it is entirely possible that a bipartisan coalition of the sort that temporarily opposed Paulson's Plunder will coalesce in Congress: some opposing the treaty because it subjects American criminals to the rule of law in Iraq, others because it is a treaty created without Senate approval thus putting another nail in the coffin of Congress, and still others because it sanctions three more years of killing and dying and the impoverishment -- on different scales -- of the people of both nations. And yet, in very rare cases can this opposition in Congress be expected to amount to anything more than rhetoric, at least not without massive pressure from us -- yes, you and me.
If the treaty is rejected, the occupation will lose its United Nations fig leaf of legality on January 1st, and the general consensus is that all troops and mercenaries will be kept on bases. We will have the opportunity then of pointing out the resulting reduction in violence, of insisting on the rule of law, and of demanding the immediate withdrawal of every man and woman serving in Iraq as occupiers.
We need members of Congress to demand publication of the treaty in English and Arabic, hold public hearings, and insist on the Senate's right to ratify or reject all treaties. Yes, I know that we can usually count on the Iraqi Parliament to represent us better than our own Congress, and yes, I know, there is a U.S. election next month, but that just makes two particular senators especially important to lobby. No election can stop you from sending Obama, McCain, and every other member of Congress a note like this one, or calling them on the phone, or visiting them in person with this message:
Dear ______________ (member of Congress)
I am aware that President Bush is currently in the process of unconstitutionally making a treaty (misleadingly called a Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA) with Iraq without Senate approval. I am writing to ask you to insist that this treaty be published in English and Arabic, that public hearings be held on the matter, and that the Senate reserve the right to ratify or reject the treaty. Should this so-called SOFA be enacted without Congressional approval, it will establish that a president can make treaties without Congress, which, as you know, is unconstitutional.
As my representative, it is your fundamental duty to ensure that the Constitution of the United States of America is respected and upheld.
If you and your colleagues in Congress choose to ignore this matter and the SOFA is put into place and accepted by the Iraqi Parliament, there will be three more years of occupation followed by many more years of what will amount to a reduced-size occupation. A majority of American people has already made it abundantly clear that we want the U.S. out of Iraq as soon as possible. I strongly urge you to do everything you can to carry out our wishes.
The three participants in the third U.S. presidential debate last week pretended Iraq didn't exist, but if you go to a rally of supporters for either candidate it's the top issue talked about. Baghdad, a city in ruins, divided into ethnically cleansed fiefdoms of rubble, rats, and open sewage, a place where one risks death by walking outside, is managing major rallies of tens of thousands of people in opposition to the treaty to extend the occupation for three more years (and beyond) that is being negotiated by Bush and Maliki. And yet, the U.S. peace movement is largely hibernating until the November 4th U.S. elections, and the U.S. Congress remains almost entirely comatose.
To a consumer of U.S. corporate media this makes some sense. The occupation is for the benefit of the people of Iraq and, with the help of "the surge", it is "succeeding." President Bush is actually working on an "agreement" to "end" the "war." Peace activists should be celebrating, right?
To begin the reeducation process necessary to recognize such positions as sick jokes, I recommend the best history of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that I've seen: Michael Schwartz's "War Without End: The Iraq War in Context." This book puts incidents of violence we hear about in the context of the massive violence we don't hear much about, and puts all of it in the context of the economic and social devastation imposed on Iraq by the people we absurdly call our public servants. Schwartz also helps to make the complex clearer and simpler by framing his account in terms of the actual oily motivations of our government, rather than any of the pretended rationales.
Iraq was to be a brief stop on the march of U.S. empire into other Middle Eastern nations. But Iraq was not to be invaded and then allowed to recover in its previous form; it was to be completely remade as a totally privatized participant in the global economy. Of course, these two ideas were incompatible and resulted in the occupiers' attempt to accomplish in days what would have had to take decades in order to succeed at all even on its own terms. And massive additions of U.S. troops even early on would only have slowed the process of economically driven resistance. "The cycle of protest, repression, and escalation," Schwartz convincingly argues, "would have eventually run its course."
The resistance grew out of U.S. actions that destroyed the Iraqi economy and infrastructure and prevented their restoration, actions sometimes aimed at creating a neocon paradise of trickledown success, and sometimes aimed more successfully at destruction and mass punishment. And yet, most of the violence has never come from the resistance. It comes from the U.S. occupiers. The assault on Fallujah was an assault on a relatively peaceful city aimed at wresting control of it from opponents of the occupation, not at pacifying any violence. U.S. assaults on civilians are, by and large, not collateral damage, but the intentional sending of a message to other civilians not to aid the resistance. And the various acts of handing sovereignty over to Iraqis have never been understood by most Iraqis as anything more than laughable pretenses.
Most of Iraq is controlled by Sunni or Shia militias. The U.S. military and the puppet Iraqi government control very little. The U.S. military has negotiated cease-fires with Shia and Sunni groups, reducing violence but adding to the groups' consolidation of local power, power that will be increasingly used to demand major public economic projects of exactly the sort that the U.S. government refuses to provide, either in Iraq or in the United States. Yes, many are dead and many more have been driven from their homes, and still many, many more are weakened and injured. And yet, there is every indication that the resistance will be growing, not diminishing.
It is in this context that we should view the current attempt by Bush to legitimize and extend the occupation, his releasing last week of yet another unconstitutional "signing statement" giving himself the power to spend funds to control Iraq's oil, and his efforts to unconstitutionally create a treaty with Iraq, without Senate approval. If the treaty is put into place and accepted by the Iraqi Parliament and ignored by a spineless Congress, it will sanction three more years of occupation (to be followed by endless years of reduced-size occupation) but require "ending" (meaning reducing) the occupation by 2011. It will also technically take immunity from Iraqi law away from US troops and mercenaries in limited circumstances when off base and off duty, although the likelihood of actual prosecutions seems limited. Oh, and we will have established that a president can make treaties without even going through the pretense that Congress still exists.
A handful of Congress Members, led as always by Kucinich, are speaking out. And it is entirely possible that a bipartisan coalition of the sort that temporarily opposed Paulson's Plunder will coalesce in Congress: some opposing the treaty because it subjects American criminals to the rule of law in Iraq, others because it is a treaty created without Senate approval thus putting another nail in the coffin of Congress, and still others because it sanctions three more years of killing and dying and the impoverishment -- on different scales -- of the people of both nations. And yet, in very rare cases can this opposition in Congress be expected to amount to anything more than rhetoric, at least not without massive pressure from us -- yes, you and me.
If the treaty is rejected, the occupation will lose its United Nations fig leaf of legality on January 1st, and the general consensus is that all troops and mercenaries will be kept on bases. We will have the opportunity then of pointing out the resulting reduction in violence, of insisting on the rule of law, and of demanding the immediate withdrawal of every man and woman serving in Iraq as occupiers.
We need members of Congress to demand publication of the treaty in English and Arabic, hold public hearings, and insist on the Senate's right to ratify or reject all treaties. Yes, I know that we can usually count on the Iraqi Parliament to represent us better than our own Congress, and yes, I know, there is a U.S. election next month, but that just makes two particular senators especially important to lobby. No election can stop you from sending Obama, McCain, and every other member of Congress a note like this one, or calling them on the phone, or visiting them in person with this message:
Dear ______________ (member of Congress)
I am aware that President Bush is currently in the process of unconstitutionally making a treaty (misleadingly called a Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA) with Iraq without Senate approval. I am writing to ask you to insist that this treaty be published in English and Arabic, that public hearings be held on the matter, and that the Senate reserve the right to ratify or reject the treaty. Should this so-called SOFA be enacted without Congressional approval, it will establish that a president can make treaties without Congress, which, as you know, is unconstitutional.
As my representative, it is your fundamental duty to ensure that the Constitution of the United States of America is respected and upheld.
If you and your colleagues in Congress choose to ignore this matter and the SOFA is put into place and accepted by the Iraqi Parliament, there will be three more years of occupation followed by many more years of what will amount to a reduced-size occupation. A majority of American people has already made it abundantly clear that we want the U.S. out of Iraq as soon as possible. I strongly urge you to do everything you can to carry out our wishes.
Torture
When history is written about America in the Bush years it will be a dark chapter indeed. Particularly, as we uncover more and more terrible facts about how this President and this Administration have corrupted our Constitution and betrayed the principles that have made this nation so great.
It was revealed this week that President Bush gave written approval to the CIA to conduct torture.
Of course, they don't call it torture. They call them "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." These techniques were so severe that according to an article in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/14/AR2008101403331.html), the CIA desperately needed the written approval so they would not be prosecuted after engaging in this horrible and illegal conduct.
Let there be no mistake – from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib – our country has approved behavior that has destroyed our moral standing in the world.
There is no doubt that our nation faces grave dangers, and we must respond aggressively to protect our nation and citizens. But our response cannot be to take repulsive actions that threaten the very morality of our nation.
This again is not a partisan issue. Both Presidential candidates have come out against torture. Awful things happen in war, and our soldiers must always be given the best tools and support to defend themselves. When mistakes are made, we must see behavior in the context of what they have been ordered to do.
But the systematic approval of torture, violating domestic and international law, must not be tolerated. Period. Relabeling torture as "enhanced interrogation" does not make it any less illegal.
That we would summarily walk away from our principles, established in law and proudly defended by our soldiers, speaks to a broader point: It is in our national interest – and indeed an issue of national security – to retain the higher moral ground. In the last eight years, our missteps and misdeeds made the world more dangerous for Americans, and the list of Allies willing to step into the fight against extremists significantly shorter.
For decades, we cultivated an image of America that defended the abused and downtrodden. Brave soldiers spilt their blood on the streets of Mogadishu, not to stop extremism, but to make sure those that were starving could get the food we sent them.
We expend billions of dollars to address humanitarian crisis around the globe. In some cases, we were more responsive to international disasters than we were to our own.
How, then – does the world reconcile that with an administration that would officially deny the basic human rights and due process that we advertise as part of the American ethos?
They can't - and we can't - until we address these crimes.
Please remind your member of Congress and the leadership that these issues are important to you.
It was revealed this week that President Bush gave written approval to the CIA to conduct torture.
Of course, they don't call it torture. They call them "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." These techniques were so severe that according to an article in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/14/AR2008101403331.html), the CIA desperately needed the written approval so they would not be prosecuted after engaging in this horrible and illegal conduct.
Let there be no mistake – from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib – our country has approved behavior that has destroyed our moral standing in the world.
There is no doubt that our nation faces grave dangers, and we must respond aggressively to protect our nation and citizens. But our response cannot be to take repulsive actions that threaten the very morality of our nation.
This again is not a partisan issue. Both Presidential candidates have come out against torture. Awful things happen in war, and our soldiers must always be given the best tools and support to defend themselves. When mistakes are made, we must see behavior in the context of what they have been ordered to do.
But the systematic approval of torture, violating domestic and international law, must not be tolerated. Period. Relabeling torture as "enhanced interrogation" does not make it any less illegal.
That we would summarily walk away from our principles, established in law and proudly defended by our soldiers, speaks to a broader point: It is in our national interest – and indeed an issue of national security – to retain the higher moral ground. In the last eight years, our missteps and misdeeds made the world more dangerous for Americans, and the list of Allies willing to step into the fight against extremists significantly shorter.
For decades, we cultivated an image of America that defended the abused and downtrodden. Brave soldiers spilt their blood on the streets of Mogadishu, not to stop extremism, but to make sure those that were starving could get the food we sent them.
We expend billions of dollars to address humanitarian crisis around the globe. In some cases, we were more responsive to international disasters than we were to our own.
How, then – does the world reconcile that with an administration that would officially deny the basic human rights and due process that we advertise as part of the American ethos?
They can't - and we can't - until we address these crimes.
Please remind your member of Congress and the leadership that these issues are important to you.
Dear Conservatives, Will You Help Save the Republic from Military Takeover?
by Naomi Wolf
Dear Conservative America:
I am reaching out with a warning to you that is as heartfelt as the one I have been bringing my fellow citizens for months. But you are the most important audience of all for this, because you hold the key to whether or not we can save our republic in time.
I have been arguing that we are seeing the classic building blocks being laid for a police state: My thesis in The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is that we are seeing the classic 10 steps being set in place that always underlie a violent police state. My argument in its sequel, Give Me Liberty, is that we must rise up as tactically and effectively as patriots to stop this suppression of freedom.
I hope to persuade you of the profound moral repugnance a true conservative should feel for the plans that are afoot in this nation.
What is the newest news? The Army Times declared that "beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the (1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division) will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North" ... "the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities."
They are tasked to help with "civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack …"
What this means is that U.S. citizens can now be "controlled" by the military on our streets through technologies -- such as Tasers and rubber bullets -- that terrify and torment and stun but do not usually kill citizens the way that citizens in Iraq are terrified, tormented and stunned by U.S. military forces.
Who will be "subdued," according to the blueprint, if and when this military unit takes to our streets? The first group of Americans to be subdued is likely to be protesters; then, going by the blueprint, you will see the military using Tasers to subdue people who ask whether there is a warrant permitting agents to burst into their home, as happened at the RNC. People could be Tasered while protesting when voters are turned away by the wholesale purges of quarter-millions of voters from the rolls that Robert Kennedy Jr. has been documenting; or, there is likely to be Tasering and other kinds of subjugation of people protesting corrupted voting machines.
Why does this undermine American freedom? Federal laws, most notably the Posse Comitatus Act, have prohibited the military from being deployed within the United States for 200 years. Yet the Army Times reports that "expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one."
The founders sought to keep soldiers off our streets because they knew how easily a standing army could subdue a population. That's why the National Guard is answerable primarily to the governors of states and hence to the people of the United States. But the military is answerable to the commander in chief. These are the president's troops. The president now has a personal army. One definition of a police state is when the leader has seized control of the military to police citizens domestically.
Why listen to me? Not because I am a genius, but because this blueprint is so very predictive. Listen to me because everything that I warned would happen, according to the historical record, has happened, and I have documented the borne-out evidence of the crisis in Give Me Liberty.
I warned that the executive would soon simply start to subvert the rule of law. See what the administration has done in response to congressional subpoenas.
I warned that the torture we saw in U.S.-held prisons was certainly directed from the top -- a fact that Jane Mayer and others have fully documented since.
I warned that within six months we would see the definition of "terrorist" expanded so that the "terrorists" in the news would soon look like heartland, mainstream Americans. We now hear that mere protesters at the RNC in Minnesota have been charged as terrorists.
Another definition of a police state is when the leader seeks to seize control of big chunks of the national economy -- with no oversight or accountability. Sound familiar?
Consider this, conservative business leaders: What matters to a would-be dictator -- look at Latin America -- is that the leader is able to intervene in the economy and essentially use his clout and his cronies to intimidate competitors or manipulate the economic playing field. Dictators do not care if there is no middle class anymore in their countries, or no upper-middle class. Indeed, they are well served by the kinds of economies you see all over Latin America in which the cronies of the regime vacuum up wealth and intimidate their less-connected peers, in which the middle and upper-middle classes sink into misery while the poor simply suffer with little infrastructure to support them.
The coup has already taken place in terms of the laws that have been passed. With wiretapping, the mass arrests of protesters and the directive that allows the executive to seize control of all systems of government in the event of an emergency, the coup is in place, ready only for activation.
Is the Bush team seeking to calm or whip up fear in the face of the economic meltdown? Look at how many times Bush, McCain and Palin use the phrase "We're in crisis mode." Then think of FDR, with nothing to fear but fear itself.
The only way to stop the Rove-Cheney cabal from moving ahead with this coup without the headlines will be a principled and patriotic Republican revolution against this plan. That is why resistance from Republicans to the Paulson "rescue" was so very heartening.
It will take Republicans to understand that criminals have seized control of the White House -- and I don't use that term rhetorically: There are distinct crimes this regime has already committed, and deploying our military to police us is yet one more.
It will take Republicans across America to consider the lessons of history: In a police state, your politics do not protect you.
How will commerce proceed in such an America? How will capital flow? How will elections unfold? How will liberty be anything more than an echo of a fair and valiant recent past? This is not a liberal nightmare. This is the nightmare of any true conservative patriot.
Please speak to one another about this crisis. Please see it for what it is. And please join our transpartisan rebellion against the paper coup which is all too soon to materialize as boots hit the ground in the United States for the first time in a century. Please stand up for true conservatism, and stand up for a free America.
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/103554/
Dear Conservative America:
I am reaching out with a warning to you that is as heartfelt as the one I have been bringing my fellow citizens for months. But you are the most important audience of all for this, because you hold the key to whether or not we can save our republic in time.
I have been arguing that we are seeing the classic building blocks being laid for a police state: My thesis in The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is that we are seeing the classic 10 steps being set in place that always underlie a violent police state. My argument in its sequel, Give Me Liberty, is that we must rise up as tactically and effectively as patriots to stop this suppression of freedom.
I hope to persuade you of the profound moral repugnance a true conservative should feel for the plans that are afoot in this nation.
What is the newest news? The Army Times declared that "beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the (1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division) will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North" ... "the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities."
They are tasked to help with "civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack …"
What this means is that U.S. citizens can now be "controlled" by the military on our streets through technologies -- such as Tasers and rubber bullets -- that terrify and torment and stun but do not usually kill citizens the way that citizens in Iraq are terrified, tormented and stunned by U.S. military forces.
Who will be "subdued," according to the blueprint, if and when this military unit takes to our streets? The first group of Americans to be subdued is likely to be protesters; then, going by the blueprint, you will see the military using Tasers to subdue people who ask whether there is a warrant permitting agents to burst into their home, as happened at the RNC. People could be Tasered while protesting when voters are turned away by the wholesale purges of quarter-millions of voters from the rolls that Robert Kennedy Jr. has been documenting; or, there is likely to be Tasering and other kinds of subjugation of people protesting corrupted voting machines.
Why does this undermine American freedom? Federal laws, most notably the Posse Comitatus Act, have prohibited the military from being deployed within the United States for 200 years. Yet the Army Times reports that "expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one."
The founders sought to keep soldiers off our streets because they knew how easily a standing army could subdue a population. That's why the National Guard is answerable primarily to the governors of states and hence to the people of the United States. But the military is answerable to the commander in chief. These are the president's troops. The president now has a personal army. One definition of a police state is when the leader has seized control of the military to police citizens domestically.
Why listen to me? Not because I am a genius, but because this blueprint is so very predictive. Listen to me because everything that I warned would happen, according to the historical record, has happened, and I have documented the borne-out evidence of the crisis in Give Me Liberty.
I warned that the executive would soon simply start to subvert the rule of law. See what the administration has done in response to congressional subpoenas.
I warned that the torture we saw in U.S.-held prisons was certainly directed from the top -- a fact that Jane Mayer and others have fully documented since.
I warned that within six months we would see the definition of "terrorist" expanded so that the "terrorists" in the news would soon look like heartland, mainstream Americans. We now hear that mere protesters at the RNC in Minnesota have been charged as terrorists.
Another definition of a police state is when the leader seeks to seize control of big chunks of the national economy -- with no oversight or accountability. Sound familiar?
Consider this, conservative business leaders: What matters to a would-be dictator -- look at Latin America -- is that the leader is able to intervene in the economy and essentially use his clout and his cronies to intimidate competitors or manipulate the economic playing field. Dictators do not care if there is no middle class anymore in their countries, or no upper-middle class. Indeed, they are well served by the kinds of economies you see all over Latin America in which the cronies of the regime vacuum up wealth and intimidate their less-connected peers, in which the middle and upper-middle classes sink into misery while the poor simply suffer with little infrastructure to support them.
The coup has already taken place in terms of the laws that have been passed. With wiretapping, the mass arrests of protesters and the directive that allows the executive to seize control of all systems of government in the event of an emergency, the coup is in place, ready only for activation.
Is the Bush team seeking to calm or whip up fear in the face of the economic meltdown? Look at how many times Bush, McCain and Palin use the phrase "We're in crisis mode." Then think of FDR, with nothing to fear but fear itself.
The only way to stop the Rove-Cheney cabal from moving ahead with this coup without the headlines will be a principled and patriotic Republican revolution against this plan. That is why resistance from Republicans to the Paulson "rescue" was so very heartening.
It will take Republicans to understand that criminals have seized control of the White House -- and I don't use that term rhetorically: There are distinct crimes this regime has already committed, and deploying our military to police us is yet one more.
It will take Republicans across America to consider the lessons of history: In a police state, your politics do not protect you.
How will commerce proceed in such an America? How will capital flow? How will elections unfold? How will liberty be anything more than an echo of a fair and valiant recent past? This is not a liberal nightmare. This is the nightmare of any true conservative patriot.
Please speak to one another about this crisis. Please see it for what it is. And please join our transpartisan rebellion against the paper coup which is all too soon to materialize as boots hit the ground in the United States for the first time in a century. Please stand up for true conservatism, and stand up for a free America.
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/103554/
Friday, October 17, 2008
McCain Said It, Why Don't We?
By SUZANNE SMITH
John McCain said it. Right out loud in the third debate.
“Obviously, we had to take Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait or it would've threatened the Middle Eastern oil supply.”
The first gulf war was about defending access to oil after all. McCain reiterated the theme later on, as he has in past debates, when he said that we need to “eliminate our dependence on the places in the world that harm our national security.”
What he didn’t say out loud is that the current war, the one in Iraq, is also about defending access to oil and other energy resources. This war has cost us $656 billion and counting. Our country has a long history of using military intervention to secure energy resources.
Indeed, according the latest report by the National Priorities Project (NPP), the US will spend around $100 billion of our defense budget this year alone defending access to fossil fuels worldwide. That figure does not include what is spent on the Iraq War, which, when included, will add an additional $100 billion.
That’s $200 billion dollars that could be spent, in one year alone, on alternative energy resources and infrastructure, on renewable energy subsidies that will help create green collar jobs for working America.
Yet we spend just a couple of billion dollars each year on renewable energy and conservation. This number needs to be increased dramatically, and neither candidate has gone into detail about how to do that.
However, in response to Bob Sheiffer’s question last night about what should be cut from the budget, McCain said, “We have presided over the largest increase in government since the Great Society.”
What he didn’t say was that the military budget has increased by over 100% since 2000, and we now spend more than the rest of the world combined. But McCain did say he’d cut spending on defense. “I know how to save billions of dollars in defense spending,” he said. “I know how to eliminate programs.” He said it, although he didn’t name the programs.
Let us offer some suggestions. The Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2009, has identified reasonable ways of eliminating $61 billion worth of unnecessary weapons programs and waste in one year. Add to that the total amount of money NPP estimates the US spends defending oil in one year, and we are well on our way to a renewed investment in energy that is clean and efficient, and to eliminating these global conflicts over energy resources.
In the New Yorker in early September, Sarah Palin was quoted as saying, about the Iraq War, “it better not have to do with oil and dependence on foreign energy”. She has a son there, after all.
The fact is, our economic and military policies are intertwined. Energy is the life-blood of our economy, and our energy policy is, to this point, inextricably tied to our foreign policy. Let’s bring this issue, and our soldiers, home.
In this post-debate environment, let’s forget about performance, forget about facial expressions, forget about Joe the Plumber. Let’s get to the most important issue of our time – energy and its connection to war. McCain said it. Sarah Palin said it. We need to be fearless and continue saying it. Right out loud.
Suzanne Smith is the Research Director at the National Priorities Project (www.nationalpriorities.org), which has just released a ground-breaking report, “The Military Cost of Securing Energy.”
John McCain said it. Right out loud in the third debate.
“Obviously, we had to take Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait or it would've threatened the Middle Eastern oil supply.”
The first gulf war was about defending access to oil after all. McCain reiterated the theme later on, as he has in past debates, when he said that we need to “eliminate our dependence on the places in the world that harm our national security.”
What he didn’t say out loud is that the current war, the one in Iraq, is also about defending access to oil and other energy resources. This war has cost us $656 billion and counting. Our country has a long history of using military intervention to secure energy resources.
Indeed, according the latest report by the National Priorities Project (NPP), the US will spend around $100 billion of our defense budget this year alone defending access to fossil fuels worldwide. That figure does not include what is spent on the Iraq War, which, when included, will add an additional $100 billion.
That’s $200 billion dollars that could be spent, in one year alone, on alternative energy resources and infrastructure, on renewable energy subsidies that will help create green collar jobs for working America.
Yet we spend just a couple of billion dollars each year on renewable energy and conservation. This number needs to be increased dramatically, and neither candidate has gone into detail about how to do that.
However, in response to Bob Sheiffer’s question last night about what should be cut from the budget, McCain said, “We have presided over the largest increase in government since the Great Society.”
What he didn’t say was that the military budget has increased by over 100% since 2000, and we now spend more than the rest of the world combined. But McCain did say he’d cut spending on defense. “I know how to save billions of dollars in defense spending,” he said. “I know how to eliminate programs.” He said it, although he didn’t name the programs.
Let us offer some suggestions. The Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2009, has identified reasonable ways of eliminating $61 billion worth of unnecessary weapons programs and waste in one year. Add to that the total amount of money NPP estimates the US spends defending oil in one year, and we are well on our way to a renewed investment in energy that is clean and efficient, and to eliminating these global conflicts over energy resources.
In the New Yorker in early September, Sarah Palin was quoted as saying, about the Iraq War, “it better not have to do with oil and dependence on foreign energy”. She has a son there, after all.
The fact is, our economic and military policies are intertwined. Energy is the life-blood of our economy, and our energy policy is, to this point, inextricably tied to our foreign policy. Let’s bring this issue, and our soldiers, home.
In this post-debate environment, let’s forget about performance, forget about facial expressions, forget about Joe the Plumber. Let’s get to the most important issue of our time – energy and its connection to war. McCain said it. Sarah Palin said it. We need to be fearless and continue saying it. Right out loud.
Suzanne Smith is the Research Director at the National Priorities Project (www.nationalpriorities.org), which has just released a ground-breaking report, “The Military Cost of Securing Energy.”
Thursday, October 16, 2008
IVAW Members Arrested While Attempting to Present Questions to Obama and McCain
One hour before the final presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, fourteen members of IVAW marched in formation to Hofstra University to present questions for the candidates concerning the occupation of Iraq and the treatment of returning veterans. IVAW had requested permission from debate moderator Bob Schieffer to ask their questions during the debate but got no response.
The contingent of veterans in dress uniforms and combat uniforms attempted to enter the building where the debate was to be held in order to ask their questions but were turned back by police. The ten IVAW members at the front of the formation were immediately arrested, and others were pushed back into the crowd by police on horseback. Several members were injured, including former Army Sergeant Nick Morgan who suffered a broken cheekbone when he was trampled by police horses before being arrested.
"Neither of the candidates has shown real support for service members and veterans. We came here to try and have serious questions answered, questions that we as veterans of the Iraq war have a right to ask, but instead we were arrested. We will continue to ask these questions no matter who is elected. We believe that the time has come to end this war and bring our troops home" said Jason Lemieux, a former Sergeant in the US Marine Corps who served three tours in Iraq, and member of IVAW.
The questions that are important to Iraq Veterans Against the War
The invasion and occupation of Iraq is illegal based on criteria in our own Constitution, as well as international law and the Geneva Conventions. Sen. Obama, is it not the right of service members to refuse deployment and participation in the occupation of Iraq? As President, will you support the rights of service men and women who refuse participation in this criminal war?
Sen. McCain, we currently have thousands of veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them with severe injuries. The rate of suicide attempts among veterans is at the shocking rate of up to 1,000 per month. Sen. McCain, you have consistently voted against an increase in VA funding and other legislation that would take care of veterans. As President, will you be prepared to fully fund and staff the VA system and how will you address your poor voting record on veteran’s issues?
IVAW needs your support today
The ten IVAW members who were arrested will be arraigned on November 10, and we will be building support for them in the coming weeks. Former Army sergeant Nick Morgan is currently seeking additional medical help and recovering from his head injury. Please consider making a donation today to IVAW’s legal defense fund, or specifically for Nick Morgan’s medical bills. Please make a donation to IVAW today.
Peace,
Kelly Dougherty
Former Sergeant, Army National Guard
Executive Director
Iraq Veterans Against the War
The contingent of veterans in dress uniforms and combat uniforms attempted to enter the building where the debate was to be held in order to ask their questions but were turned back by police. The ten IVAW members at the front of the formation were immediately arrested, and others were pushed back into the crowd by police on horseback. Several members were injured, including former Army Sergeant Nick Morgan who suffered a broken cheekbone when he was trampled by police horses before being arrested.
"Neither of the candidates has shown real support for service members and veterans. We came here to try and have serious questions answered, questions that we as veterans of the Iraq war have a right to ask, but instead we were arrested. We will continue to ask these questions no matter who is elected. We believe that the time has come to end this war and bring our troops home" said Jason Lemieux, a former Sergeant in the US Marine Corps who served three tours in Iraq, and member of IVAW.
The questions that are important to Iraq Veterans Against the War
The invasion and occupation of Iraq is illegal based on criteria in our own Constitution, as well as international law and the Geneva Conventions. Sen. Obama, is it not the right of service members to refuse deployment and participation in the occupation of Iraq? As President, will you support the rights of service men and women who refuse participation in this criminal war?
Sen. McCain, we currently have thousands of veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them with severe injuries. The rate of suicide attempts among veterans is at the shocking rate of up to 1,000 per month. Sen. McCain, you have consistently voted against an increase in VA funding and other legislation that would take care of veterans. As President, will you be prepared to fully fund and staff the VA system and how will you address your poor voting record on veteran’s issues?
IVAW needs your support today
The ten IVAW members who were arrested will be arraigned on November 10, and we will be building support for them in the coming weeks. Former Army sergeant Nick Morgan is currently seeking additional medical help and recovering from his head injury. Please consider making a donation today to IVAW’s legal defense fund, or specifically for Nick Morgan’s medical bills. Please make a donation to IVAW today.
Peace,
Kelly Dougherty
Former Sergeant, Army National Guard
Executive Director
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Capitalism Without Capital?
by Ron Paul
It has been long understood that our federal government is going deeper into debt, consistently raising the debt ceiling and demonstrating no fiscal restraint. In recent years, debt ceiling increases have been placed in “must pass” legislation as a means to guarantee that Republicans as well as Democrats would vote for them when Congress was under Republican control.
We also know our nation’s “negative savings rate” reflects the habits of private citizens, showing those habits to be not tremendously different than the habits of the public sector. Yet, the signs of decline are becoming ever more apparent. So apparent, in fact, that it seems unlikely that bailouts or other gimmicks will have even short-term success. More inflation, and creating moral hazard by bailing out egregious offenders, is a recipe for disaster. These activities can seem to provide some short-term relief, but it seems we are now at a significant crisis point, where monetary policy gimmicks don’t provide the band-aids they did in the past.
Not only is our nation on the verge of bankruptcy, but so are its people and private institutions. We are now repeatedly hearing about businesses “needing to access the credit market to make payroll.” This is an unmistakable sign of more dire consequences ahead for the economy. If businesses must borrow just to make payroll, this is evidence of a severe undercapitalization that cannot be sustained, even for the short run.
Couple these facts with items such as the explosion of the “payday loan” industry and the unmasking of the false sense of economic well-being is nearly complete. These payday loan companies use preferred access to easy credit to inject cash into the hands of the working poor. They are nearly always set up in lower-income neighborhoods. These people, who are struggling to buy food and pay rent, get addicted to the credit drug. Their standard of living is only further depressed by the interest payments on these loans that make them profitable to their providers. Thus, the recipients are left even less capable of paying for items such as food and housing in the long run, without using this credit again and again.
These people are often the very ones being paid by businesses who “borrow to make payroll.” This is the dark underbelly of the fiat money, borrow-and-spend economy this nation has been building. As the government takes over more and more functions of the economy many see the rise of socialism as an antidote to this failure of “capitalism.” However, the fact remains that our economy has been increasingly running on debt, not capital. Capitalism does not exist without capital and debt is not, has never been and will never be a form of capital. Only now are we seeing the more dire implications of an economy without capital.
It has been long understood that our federal government is going deeper into debt, consistently raising the debt ceiling and demonstrating no fiscal restraint. In recent years, debt ceiling increases have been placed in “must pass” legislation as a means to guarantee that Republicans as well as Democrats would vote for them when Congress was under Republican control.
We also know our nation’s “negative savings rate” reflects the habits of private citizens, showing those habits to be not tremendously different than the habits of the public sector. Yet, the signs of decline are becoming ever more apparent. So apparent, in fact, that it seems unlikely that bailouts or other gimmicks will have even short-term success. More inflation, and creating moral hazard by bailing out egregious offenders, is a recipe for disaster. These activities can seem to provide some short-term relief, but it seems we are now at a significant crisis point, where monetary policy gimmicks don’t provide the band-aids they did in the past.
Not only is our nation on the verge of bankruptcy, but so are its people and private institutions. We are now repeatedly hearing about businesses “needing to access the credit market to make payroll.” This is an unmistakable sign of more dire consequences ahead for the economy. If businesses must borrow just to make payroll, this is evidence of a severe undercapitalization that cannot be sustained, even for the short run.
Couple these facts with items such as the explosion of the “payday loan” industry and the unmasking of the false sense of economic well-being is nearly complete. These payday loan companies use preferred access to easy credit to inject cash into the hands of the working poor. They are nearly always set up in lower-income neighborhoods. These people, who are struggling to buy food and pay rent, get addicted to the credit drug. Their standard of living is only further depressed by the interest payments on these loans that make them profitable to their providers. Thus, the recipients are left even less capable of paying for items such as food and housing in the long run, without using this credit again and again.
These people are often the very ones being paid by businesses who “borrow to make payroll.” This is the dark underbelly of the fiat money, borrow-and-spend economy this nation has been building. As the government takes over more and more functions of the economy many see the rise of socialism as an antidote to this failure of “capitalism.” However, the fact remains that our economy has been increasingly running on debt, not capital. Capitalism does not exist without capital and debt is not, has never been and will never be a form of capital. Only now are we seeing the more dire implications of an economy without capital.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Bush approved CIA torture program
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/11576
The Bush administration explicitly endorsed the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods against al Qaeda suspects in a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The previously undisclosed classified memos were requested by then CIA Director George Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, the newspaper reported, citing administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents.
A White House spokesman had no comment on the report.
According the newspaper, intelligence officials sought cover from the White House because they were worried about a possible backlash if details of the interrogation program became public.
Justice Department lawyers signed off on the agency's interrogation methods beginning in 2002, but senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing, the Post reported.
Repeated requests by the CIA chief for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the agency that the administration might later distance itself from decisions about the handling of captured al Qaeda leaders, the Post said, citing former intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The officials told the newspaper Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003 during a meeting with members of the National Security Council.
A few days later, Tenet received a brief memo conveying the administration's approval for the CIA's interrogation methods, the officials were cited as saying.
Tenet made a second request for written approval in June 2004, after the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Post said.
Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe the still classified documents in detail, the newspaper reported.
The Bush administration explicitly endorsed the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods against al Qaeda suspects in a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The previously undisclosed classified memos were requested by then CIA Director George Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, the newspaper reported, citing administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents.
A White House spokesman had no comment on the report.
According the newspaper, intelligence officials sought cover from the White House because they were worried about a possible backlash if details of the interrogation program became public.
Justice Department lawyers signed off on the agency's interrogation methods beginning in 2002, but senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing, the Post reported.
Repeated requests by the CIA chief for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the agency that the administration might later distance itself from decisions about the handling of captured al Qaeda leaders, the Post said, citing former intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The officials told the newspaper Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003 during a meeting with members of the National Security Council.
A few days later, Tenet received a brief memo conveying the administration's approval for the CIA's interrogation methods, the officials were cited as saying.
Tenet made a second request for written approval in June 2004, after the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Post said.
Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe the still classified documents in detail, the newspaper reported.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
War Hero or War Criminal?
By ROBERT RICHTER
As character assassination attacks on Sen. Barack Obama have now taken over Sen. John McCain's campaign, and because McCain cites his military experience as of prime importance, now is the time to focus closer attention on a facet of the Arizona Senator's own character. This is related to his 23 combat missions for Operation Rolling Thunder - the Pentagon's name for U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals - and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.
An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot's name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute.
Why would anyone have wanted to prosecute McCain and the other captured pilots? Taylor's argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders.
There were questions raised about whether the Geneva conventions applied to the pilots, since there had been no formal declaration of war by the U.S. against the Hanoi regime - and the Geneva rules presumably are only in force in a “declared” war.
Anti-war critics at the time claimed that despite the Pentagon's assertion that only military targets were bombed, U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, a charge that turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times' chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.
In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: "Bomb damage...extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway...small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated." U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara conceded some years later that more than a million deaths and injuries occurred in northern Vietnam each year from 1965 to 1968, as a result of the 800 tons of bombs a day dropped by our pilots.
In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in “a heavily populated part of Hanoi” when he was shot down.
If Gen. Taylor tried McCain, would he have defended himself as “just following orders” despite the Geneva conventions barring that kind of bombing and the Nuremberg principles negating “just following orders?“
The targets McCain and his fellow pilots actually bombed in Vietnam and his justification then or now for the actions that led to his capture, are no longer simply old news. They are part of what must be taken into account today, as voters weigh support for him or Obama to be the next President of the United States.
This is not about the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam. It is about the character of a man who seeks to be U.S. President, who perhaps was not simply a brave warrior, but a warrior who by his own admission, bombed and was ready to bomb targets in violation of the Geneva conventions and Nuremberg principles.
_____
When I passed along Gen. Taylor's comments to my network superiors the program was scrapped: too hot to handle. Instead Air War Over the North was telecast, about “precision bombing” North Vietnam military targets by U.S. pilots. A few years after that broadcast, a Pentagon public information executive gleefully told Roger Mudd in The Selling of the Pentagon that he, the Pentagon official, not only had persuaded CBS to produce Air War Over the North, he even chose those to be interviewed and coached them about what they should say. This unethical collaboration and intercession by the Pentagon in the news media is sadly all too familiar a tactic repeated in the Bush-Cheney years.
Robert Richter was political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968.
As character assassination attacks on Sen. Barack Obama have now taken over Sen. John McCain's campaign, and because McCain cites his military experience as of prime importance, now is the time to focus closer attention on a facet of the Arizona Senator's own character. This is related to his 23 combat missions for Operation Rolling Thunder - the Pentagon's name for U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals - and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.
An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot's name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute.
Why would anyone have wanted to prosecute McCain and the other captured pilots? Taylor's argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders.
There were questions raised about whether the Geneva conventions applied to the pilots, since there had been no formal declaration of war by the U.S. against the Hanoi regime - and the Geneva rules presumably are only in force in a “declared” war.
Anti-war critics at the time claimed that despite the Pentagon's assertion that only military targets were bombed, U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, a charge that turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times' chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.
In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: "Bomb damage...extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway...small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated." U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara conceded some years later that more than a million deaths and injuries occurred in northern Vietnam each year from 1965 to 1968, as a result of the 800 tons of bombs a day dropped by our pilots.
In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in “a heavily populated part of Hanoi” when he was shot down.
If Gen. Taylor tried McCain, would he have defended himself as “just following orders” despite the Geneva conventions barring that kind of bombing and the Nuremberg principles negating “just following orders?“
The targets McCain and his fellow pilots actually bombed in Vietnam and his justification then or now for the actions that led to his capture, are no longer simply old news. They are part of what must be taken into account today, as voters weigh support for him or Obama to be the next President of the United States.
This is not about the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam. It is about the character of a man who seeks to be U.S. President, who perhaps was not simply a brave warrior, but a warrior who by his own admission, bombed and was ready to bomb targets in violation of the Geneva conventions and Nuremberg principles.
_____
When I passed along Gen. Taylor's comments to my network superiors the program was scrapped: too hot to handle. Instead Air War Over the North was telecast, about “precision bombing” North Vietnam military targets by U.S. pilots. A few years after that broadcast, a Pentagon public information executive gleefully told Roger Mudd in The Selling of the Pentagon that he, the Pentagon official, not only had persuaded CBS to produce Air War Over the North, he even chose those to be interviewed and coached them about what they should say. This unethical collaboration and intercession by the Pentagon in the news media is sadly all too familiar a tactic repeated in the Bush-Cheney years.
Robert Richter was political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Is John McCain Still Trapped in Vietnam?
by Mary Shaw
Senator John McCain has become notorious for playing the POW card in his campaign for the presidency, as if that somehow qualifies him for the job. But, in McCain's case, I think his status as a former POW would actually detract from his ability to lead this nation effectively.
You see, he doesn't seem to have recovered from his POW experience, or the Vietnam war in general. He seems to be lacking closure. And this appears to be affecting his foreign policy.
What else could so clearly explain his desire to remain in Iraq for 100 years or more, if that's what it takes to "win" an unwinnable occupation? He needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. He needs to win Vietnam, even if it's in Iraq.
What else could so clearly explain his eagerness to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran"? He needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. He is still in a cage and he needs to lash out. He needs to keep fighting.
What else could so clearly explain his recent claim of "I know how to win wars"? After all, we did not win the Vietnam war. But maybe he hasn't gotten there yet. He needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. To McCain, the Vietnam war is not over. He needs to win it -- even if it is a proxy war -- or else be a failure in his own mind.
What else could so clearly explain why he recently addressed an audience not as "my friends", as usual, or "my fellow citizens", but rather as "my fellow prisoners"? He has a way to go to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. On some level, he is still at the Hanoi Hilton. And we're all there with him.
And what else could so clearly explain why McCain -- himself a torture survivor -- would vote earlier this year against a bill that would ban the CIA from using torture, even though he had previously spoken out against torture? Fight it as he may have for so long, ultimately he needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. An eye for an eye -- no matter whose eye.
Deep down inside, he needs to get even. He needs to win that war in Vietnam, however symbolically, and whatever the cost to our troops, this nation, the world, and his soul.
And, in doing so, he can also appease the conscienceless, selfish, and bloodthirsty base -- the same base that has controlled George W. Bush for the past eight years.
Neither motivation is a very good excuse.
Neither motivation is healthy for this nation.
And neither motivation will bring the kind of change that we all want and need so desperately.
We need a president who can learn from the past, not dwell on it -- or in it.
Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated.
Senator John McCain has become notorious for playing the POW card in his campaign for the presidency, as if that somehow qualifies him for the job. But, in McCain's case, I think his status as a former POW would actually detract from his ability to lead this nation effectively.
You see, he doesn't seem to have recovered from his POW experience, or the Vietnam war in general. He seems to be lacking closure. And this appears to be affecting his foreign policy.
What else could so clearly explain his desire to remain in Iraq for 100 years or more, if that's what it takes to "win" an unwinnable occupation? He needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. He needs to win Vietnam, even if it's in Iraq.
What else could so clearly explain his eagerness to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran"? He needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. He is still in a cage and he needs to lash out. He needs to keep fighting.
What else could so clearly explain his recent claim of "I know how to win wars"? After all, we did not win the Vietnam war. But maybe he hasn't gotten there yet. He needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. To McCain, the Vietnam war is not over. He needs to win it -- even if it is a proxy war -- or else be a failure in his own mind.
What else could so clearly explain why he recently addressed an audience not as "my friends", as usual, or "my fellow citizens", but rather as "my fellow prisoners"? He has a way to go to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. On some level, he is still at the Hanoi Hilton. And we're all there with him.
And what else could so clearly explain why McCain -- himself a torture survivor -- would vote earlier this year against a bill that would ban the CIA from using torture, even though he had previously spoken out against torture? Fight it as he may have for so long, ultimately he needs to take care of the unfinished business in his psyche. An eye for an eye -- no matter whose eye.
Deep down inside, he needs to get even. He needs to win that war in Vietnam, however symbolically, and whatever the cost to our troops, this nation, the world, and his soul.
And, in doing so, he can also appease the conscienceless, selfish, and bloodthirsty base -- the same base that has controlled George W. Bush for the past eight years.
Neither motivation is a very good excuse.
Neither motivation is healthy for this nation.
And neither motivation will bring the kind of change that we all want and need so desperately.
We need a president who can learn from the past, not dwell on it -- or in it.
Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated.
Step Up And Support Ralph Nader
Fascism, like socialism, is rooted in a market society that refused to function.
A financial system always devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism -- and a Mafia political system.
A self-regulating market turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment.
Who is this speaking?
It is the Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, author of the influential book The Great Transformation (1944).
Polanyi fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University.
Remembering Polanyi, former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges writes today:
"I place no hope in Obama or the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a pathetic example of liberal, bourgeois impotence, hypocrisy and complacency. It has been bought off. I will vote, if only as a form of protest against our corporate state and an homage to Polanyi's brilliance, for Ralph Nader. I would like to offer hope, but it is more important to be a realist. No ethic or act of resistance is worth anything if it is not based on the real. And the real, I am afraid, does not look good."
We live in difficult times.
But one man has shown the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the corporate state -- Ralph Nader.
For most of this year, Ralph has been barnstorming across the country -- bringing a message of hope and resilience to a troubled America.
And now it's time to step up and support Ralph Nader and the shift the power platform he has gifted to the American people.
A financial system always devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism -- and a Mafia political system.
A self-regulating market turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment.
Who is this speaking?
It is the Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, author of the influential book The Great Transformation (1944).
Polanyi fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University.
Remembering Polanyi, former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges writes today:
"I place no hope in Obama or the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a pathetic example of liberal, bourgeois impotence, hypocrisy and complacency. It has been bought off. I will vote, if only as a form of protest against our corporate state and an homage to Polanyi's brilliance, for Ralph Nader. I would like to offer hope, but it is more important to be a realist. No ethic or act of resistance is worth anything if it is not based on the real. And the real, I am afraid, does not look good."
We live in difficult times.
But one man has shown the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the corporate state -- Ralph Nader.
For most of this year, Ralph has been barnstorming across the country -- bringing a message of hope and resilience to a troubled America.
And now it's time to step up and support Ralph Nader and the shift the power platform he has gifted to the American people.
On Columbus Day, Correcting Columbus’ Legacy
by Mark Anthony Rolo
On Monday, Oct. 13, schoolteachers across the nation should find the courage to speak the truth about the man who sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
Trying to explain to youngsters how this country came to be is surely no easy task.
How can you sugarcoat telling a fourth-grader that Columbus did not "discover" the "new" world - that he more accurately opened the door to conquering it?
How do you explain to a fifth-grader that the only measurable blood spilled in Columbus' encounter was that of indigenous Caribbean islanders?
Can you even use the word "genocide" in a sixth-grade classroom?
There was a time in this country once when celebrating the feats of Columbus and his successors was less complicated. Only a generation ago, students did not learn the full extent of Columbus' impact on the peoples who inhabited this continent.
But let's set the historical record straight.
Hundreds of thousands of indigenous Taino Indians were raped, murdered, and forced into brutal slavery as a result of Columbus' conquest. Much of the Taino population fell to new diseases such as smallpox. Extinction is all that remains of the Taino today.
Those who like to honor Columbus would have us believe that bringing up the darker side of the explorer is an attempt to blow the man's memory off course.
But these facts of genocide and land theft are not part of a revisionist, false history. In his own words spelled, out in his personal diary, Columbus acknowledged his scheme to subjugate the Taino Indians: "I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased."
Columbus' men rounded up 1,500 people and selected 500 as slaves to be shipped off to Spain. Two hundred died en route. This did not deter Columbus, who, according to historian Howard Zinn, later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
Some defenders of Columbus fall back on the rationale that he was just a man of his time, with the prejudices that prevailed. But one of Columbus' own contemporaries, Bartoleme de las Casas, a Spanish colonist turned priest, spent his last years trying to wash the indigenous blood from his hands by calling for an end to the slave trade.
This year many teachers may stress tolerance of opposing views as they try to bring a broader and more balanced view of Columbus' legacy into the classroom. But a lesson plan on tolerance won't do.
Putting an end to the hero worship of Columbus begins with telling the truth: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 not to explore, but to conquer with domination, brutality and - yes - genocide.
Copyright 2008 The Progressive Magazine
Mark Anthony Rolo is an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe in Wisconsin. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
On Monday, Oct. 13, schoolteachers across the nation should find the courage to speak the truth about the man who sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
Trying to explain to youngsters how this country came to be is surely no easy task.
How can you sugarcoat telling a fourth-grader that Columbus did not "discover" the "new" world - that he more accurately opened the door to conquering it?
How do you explain to a fifth-grader that the only measurable blood spilled in Columbus' encounter was that of indigenous Caribbean islanders?
Can you even use the word "genocide" in a sixth-grade classroom?
There was a time in this country once when celebrating the feats of Columbus and his successors was less complicated. Only a generation ago, students did not learn the full extent of Columbus' impact on the peoples who inhabited this continent.
But let's set the historical record straight.
Hundreds of thousands of indigenous Taino Indians were raped, murdered, and forced into brutal slavery as a result of Columbus' conquest. Much of the Taino population fell to new diseases such as smallpox. Extinction is all that remains of the Taino today.
Those who like to honor Columbus would have us believe that bringing up the darker side of the explorer is an attempt to blow the man's memory off course.
But these facts of genocide and land theft are not part of a revisionist, false history. In his own words spelled, out in his personal diary, Columbus acknowledged his scheme to subjugate the Taino Indians: "I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased."
Columbus' men rounded up 1,500 people and selected 500 as slaves to be shipped off to Spain. Two hundred died en route. This did not deter Columbus, who, according to historian Howard Zinn, later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
Some defenders of Columbus fall back on the rationale that he was just a man of his time, with the prejudices that prevailed. But one of Columbus' own contemporaries, Bartoleme de las Casas, a Spanish colonist turned priest, spent his last years trying to wash the indigenous blood from his hands by calling for an end to the slave trade.
This year many teachers may stress tolerance of opposing views as they try to bring a broader and more balanced view of Columbus' legacy into the classroom. But a lesson plan on tolerance won't do.
Putting an end to the hero worship of Columbus begins with telling the truth: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 not to explore, but to conquer with domination, brutality and - yes - genocide.
Copyright 2008 The Progressive Magazine
Mark Anthony Rolo is an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe in Wisconsin. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Congressman Says McCain 'Sowing Seeds of Hatred'
by: The Associated Press
Washington - Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and veteran of the civil rights movement, says the negative tone of the Republican presidential campaign reminds him of the hateful atmosphere that segregationist Gov. George Wallace fostered in Alabama in the 1960s.
Republican candidate John McCain on Saturday called Lewis' remarks "shocking and beyond the pale."
The Obama campaign said the Illinois senator doesn't believe McCain or his policy criticism is at all comparable to Wallace and his segregationist policies.
In a statement issued Saturday, Lewis said McCain and running mate Sarah Palin were "sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse." He noted that Wallace also ran for president.
"George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights," said Lewis, who is black. "Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."
One of the seminal events of the civil rights movement was the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963. Four black girls died in the blast, which was linked to a Ku Klux Klan group.
Late Saturday, Lewis released another statement saying it was not his "intention or desire" to directly compare McCain or Palin to Wallace.
"My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior," he said. "I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation."
Lewis' comments follow widely reported examples of anger at McCain rallies that has been aimed at Obama, the first black man to be a major party's nominee for president. During some rallies featuring McCain and Palin, supporters have shouted "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar" and even "off with his head."
The outbursts came amid a harshly personal line of attack against Obama by the GOP campaign. McCain and Palin have said Obama failed to tell the truth about his ties to 1960s radical William Ayers, had a radical agenda on abortion, and wasn't really known to voters. Last weekend, Palin signaled the uptick in the criticism when she charged that Obama was "palling around with terrorists," a reference to Ayers, and that he didn't see the U.S. as others did.
McCain drew boos at a town-hall meeting Friday in Minnesota when he defended Obama after a supporter said he feared what would happen if Obama were elected president. He also cut short a woman who said Obama was an Arab, and he called his rival "a decent, family man."
On Saturday, McCain called on Obama to repudiate Lewis' remarks. While dismissing the comparison to Wallace, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Lewis was on target in other ways.
"John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States 'pals around with terrorists,"' Burton said in a statement.
In his remarks, Lewis also said: "As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better."
McCain rejected any comparison to Wallace.
"I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track," McCain said.
In August, while appearing at a forum on faith, McCain was asked to name three "wise people" he would listen to. He cited Lewis as well as Gen. David Petreaus, head of U.S. troops in Iraq, and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a top adviser to his campaign.
Washington - Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and veteran of the civil rights movement, says the negative tone of the Republican presidential campaign reminds him of the hateful atmosphere that segregationist Gov. George Wallace fostered in Alabama in the 1960s.
Republican candidate John McCain on Saturday called Lewis' remarks "shocking and beyond the pale."
The Obama campaign said the Illinois senator doesn't believe McCain or his policy criticism is at all comparable to Wallace and his segregationist policies.
In a statement issued Saturday, Lewis said McCain and running mate Sarah Palin were "sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse." He noted that Wallace also ran for president.
"George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights," said Lewis, who is black. "Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."
One of the seminal events of the civil rights movement was the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963. Four black girls died in the blast, which was linked to a Ku Klux Klan group.
Late Saturday, Lewis released another statement saying it was not his "intention or desire" to directly compare McCain or Palin to Wallace.
"My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior," he said. "I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation."
Lewis' comments follow widely reported examples of anger at McCain rallies that has been aimed at Obama, the first black man to be a major party's nominee for president. During some rallies featuring McCain and Palin, supporters have shouted "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar" and even "off with his head."
The outbursts came amid a harshly personal line of attack against Obama by the GOP campaign. McCain and Palin have said Obama failed to tell the truth about his ties to 1960s radical William Ayers, had a radical agenda on abortion, and wasn't really known to voters. Last weekend, Palin signaled the uptick in the criticism when she charged that Obama was "palling around with terrorists," a reference to Ayers, and that he didn't see the U.S. as others did.
McCain drew boos at a town-hall meeting Friday in Minnesota when he defended Obama after a supporter said he feared what would happen if Obama were elected president. He also cut short a woman who said Obama was an Arab, and he called his rival "a decent, family man."
On Saturday, McCain called on Obama to repudiate Lewis' remarks. While dismissing the comparison to Wallace, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Lewis was on target in other ways.
"John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States 'pals around with terrorists,"' Burton said in a statement.
In his remarks, Lewis also said: "As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better."
McCain rejected any comparison to Wallace.
"I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track," McCain said.
In August, while appearing at a forum on faith, McCain was asked to name three "wise people" he would listen to. He cited Lewis as well as Gen. David Petreaus, head of U.S. troops in Iraq, and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a top adviser to his campaign.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
(This shocking account was written by Ana Dubey, who has a PhD in psychology and has a private practice in San Francisco. Ana's husband is currently a Managing Director of a private equity firm in the Bay Area. Ana and her husband are not political activists and don't have any personal ax to grind. In fact, in writing this account of her experience with John McCain, Ana is acting outside of her own economic self-interest as she and her husband are among the top 3-5% of our population who would benefit from the McCain tax/economic policies.)
It was just before John McCain's last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).
It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately. He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was "if he likes this so much, why hasn't he memorized any of this yet?" I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his "readings" which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people's buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.
Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn't meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight. McCain's appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.
Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: "Oh, that was Cindy's idea - I didn't have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona. No, it wasn't my idea at all."
I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, "If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson." Given McCain's personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII - but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn't seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.
My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn't be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, "Don't you know who I am." I looked him in the face and said, "Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met" and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain's bullying.
Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can't imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President.
As posted on neilyoung.com
It was just before John McCain's last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).
It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately. He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was "if he likes this so much, why hasn't he memorized any of this yet?" I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his "readings" which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people's buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.
Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn't meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight. McCain's appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.
Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: "Oh, that was Cindy's idea - I didn't have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona. No, it wasn't my idea at all."
I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, "If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson." Given McCain's personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII - but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn't seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.
My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn't be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, "Don't you know who I am." I looked him in the face and said, "Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met" and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain's bullying.
Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can't imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President.
As posted on neilyoung.com
Friday, October 10, 2008
McCain and the Meltdown
by Ari Berman
The parallels between the collapse of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s and the Wall Street meltdown of today are unmistakable. Few pieces explain the roots of the S&L debacle--and its relevance today--better than legendary investigative reporter Robert Sherrill's breathtaking 1990 exposé in The Nation, "S&Ls, Big Banks and Other Triumphs of Capitalism."
The section on jailed Lincoln Savings & Loan magnate Charles Keating is particularly memorable. "If any one hustler was the living symbol of the underlying rot of the savings and loan industry as created by Congress and Reagan's biography in the 1980s, it was Charles Keating," Sherrill writes.
A constant in both crises is John McCain. McCain and four other senators (dubbed the Keating Five) intervened to protect Keating from banking regulators. McCain was later rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for "poor judgment" and embarrassed by the $112,000 in campaign contributions, trips and gifts he had accepted from Keating. Cindy McCain and her father were also partners with Keating in a shopping mall development in Arizona. In his autobiography, McCain called the Keating episode "the worst mistake of my life."
McCain eventually became a born-again crusader for campaign-finance reform. But he continued to surround himself with corporate lobbyists and push for greater deregulation of the finance industry, missing the greatest lesson from Sherrill's story: "thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about."
Sherrill's pathbreaking reporting sheds light on all that was wrong with the deregulatory politics back then--as well as on what has fed our current financial crisis. It's worth a second read: "S&Ls, Big Banks and Other Triumphs of Capitalism," from the November 19, 1990, issue.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
The parallels between the collapse of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s and the Wall Street meltdown of today are unmistakable. Few pieces explain the roots of the S&L debacle--and its relevance today--better than legendary investigative reporter Robert Sherrill's breathtaking 1990 exposé in The Nation, "S&Ls, Big Banks and Other Triumphs of Capitalism."
The section on jailed Lincoln Savings & Loan magnate Charles Keating is particularly memorable. "If any one hustler was the living symbol of the underlying rot of the savings and loan industry as created by Congress and Reagan's biography in the 1980s, it was Charles Keating," Sherrill writes.
A constant in both crises is John McCain. McCain and four other senators (dubbed the Keating Five) intervened to protect Keating from banking regulators. McCain was later rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for "poor judgment" and embarrassed by the $112,000 in campaign contributions, trips and gifts he had accepted from Keating. Cindy McCain and her father were also partners with Keating in a shopping mall development in Arizona. In his autobiography, McCain called the Keating episode "the worst mistake of my life."
McCain eventually became a born-again crusader for campaign-finance reform. But he continued to surround himself with corporate lobbyists and push for greater deregulation of the finance industry, missing the greatest lesson from Sherrill's story: "thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about."
Sherrill's pathbreaking reporting sheds light on all that was wrong with the deregulatory politics back then--as well as on what has fed our current financial crisis. It's worth a second read: "S&Ls, Big Banks and Other Triumphs of Capitalism," from the November 19, 1990, issue.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
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