December 28, 2007
BHUTTO, BUSH, AND MUSHARRAF
With the assassination of Ms. Bhutto, we are given to understand, by many newspaper stories and broadcasts, that anti-democratic religious zealots killed Pakistan’s last hope for democracy.
Ms. Bhutto was in many ways an admirable and accomplished leader, a talented woman of courage, but her assassination was a far more complex event than simplistic claims about the dark work of anti-democratic forces.
President Musharraf, for most of the years since the American invasion of Afghanistan, was treated in public as an acceptable ally by the United States. The U.S. desperately needed Pakistan's help in its invasion of Afghanistan, a land about which American politicians had little understanding. To secure that help, America forgave Pakistan’s debts, removed its embargo-bad guy status (for developing atomic weapons in secret), provided large amounts of military assistance, and even managed to swallow its pride over the embarrassing work of Pakistan’s scientific hero, Dr. A. Q. Khan, who supplied atomic-weapons technology to other countries.
Once Americans had mired themselves in Afghanistan – after all the hoopla over a “victory” which amounted to little more than massive bombing while the Northern Alliance warlords did most of the fighting against their rival, the Taleban - the extent of the mess into which they had put themselves slowly dawned. This is particularly true regarding the almost non-existent border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a huge area that forms almost a de facto third country of Pashtuns.
Intense pressure started being applied to Musharraf to allow American special forces to conduct the kind of brutal and socially-disruptive operations they have maintained in the mountains of Afghanistan. The American approach to rooting out the dispersed Taleban, following its initial “victory,” amounted to going from village to village in the mountains, crashing down doors, using stun grenades, holding men at gunpoint in their own homes, separating the village's women from the men's protection, plus many other unforgivable insults in such a tradition-bound land.
All of this has really been getting them nowhere. In effect, the American government demonstrated it had no idea what to do in Afghanistan after it invaded, only knowing it wanted to get the "bad guys."
Recently, Musharraf's position vis-à-vis the U.S. has undergone a dramatic change. Overnight, the State Department changed him from valiant ally to enemy of democracy, and the American press obliged with the appropriate stories and emphasis.
The reason for this change was simply Musharraf’s refusal to cooperate enough with Bush's secret demands to extend America’s special-forces operations into Pakistan's side of the Pashtun territory: that is, to allow a foreign country into his country to terrorize and insult huge parts of its population. In Bush’s worldview, this only amounted to Pakistan’s fully embracing the “war on terror,” but for many Pakistanis, the “war on terror” is only one more aspect of American interference in their part of the world. The Taleban is viewed by millions there as heroic resisters, standing up to American arrogance, a view not without some substance.
In trying to accommodate Bush, Musharraf launched various showy operations by Pakistan’s army, but his efforts were viewed in Washington as weak. The U.S. kept pushing the limits, trying to force Pakistan to internalize the “war on terror,” and Musharraf resisted. There was a horrific incident in which the U.S. bombed a madrassah (a religious school) in rural Pakistan, succeeding only in killing eighty children, falsely claiming it was Pakistan’s work against a terrorist center.
Musharraf has, rather bravely, opposed America’s demands for a de facto American invasion of his country. He has been remarkably outspoken about American policies on several occasions, not something calculated to endear him to Bush’s gang. So, suddenly he became an undemocratic pariah who needed to be replaced. It was easy enough to exploit public dissatisfaction with a military dictator, even if he was only trying to do his best for his country within some terrible limits.
America gave Ms. Bhutto a blessing and a gentle push, likely a bundle of cash, and undoubtedly the promise of lots of future support, to return home as opposition to Musharraf. One could fairly say that her assassination just proves how little Washington policymakers understand the region. It sent her to her death, desperately hoping against hope to get what it wanted.
Ms. Bhutto was regarded in Washington as more amenable to American demands in Pakistan. She had the double merit of being able to give Pakistan’s government the gloss of democracy while serving key American interests. But it couldn’t be clearer that democracy is not what the U.S. was really concerned with, because Musharraf was just a fine ally so long as he did as he was told.
The truth is that Musharraf has, in opposing America's demands, been a rather brave representative of Pakistan's interests, a patriot in American parlance.
True democracy for a place like Pakistan is a long way off, not because of this or that leader or party, but because of the country's backward economic state. This is even truer for Afghanistan. You cannot instantly create democracies out of lands living in centuries-old economies, burdened with centuries-old customs. The best thing America could have done for this region would have been generous economic assistance, but the U.S. has demonstrated, again and again, it has little genuine interest in that sort of thing. The customs and backwardness of centuries only melt away under the tide of economic development. Democracy follows almost automatically eventually.
The quick fix is what the U.S. demands, a quick fix to its own perceptions of problems under the guise of supporting democracy and opposition to terror, will achieve absolutely nothing over the long term.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
THE ANNAPOLIS CONFERENCE: DEAD MAN WALKING
December 12, 2007
The Annapolis Conference was, like so many political and diplomatic events of our time, highly choreographed, finely stage-managed, and heavily marketed. Yet, as soon as it was over, it was apparent little had happened, much as when a child opens a much-advertised, expensive plastic toy on Christmas, a brief, glitzy, big-eyed moment followed quickly by tedium. You might compare it to a George Bush press conference or any American presidential debate. Indeed, such choreographed non-events make up a fair portion of what Americans see on their evening news, a phenomenon we might call virtual or synthetic news.
I am reminded of a Bush summit with the oleaginous Tony Blair, both of them standing at parallel podiums, pontificating and smiling as though they regarded themselves as re-incarnations of Roosevelt and Churchill, which undoubtedly they do. When they finished saying nothing glibly (glibly, at least in Blair’s case) they turned towards each other and walked like two cuckoo-clock figures to meet and turn again, marching out in lock step along a red carpet, for all the world the just-crowned king and queen of the high-school prom leaving the dance floor. Or I recall Richard Nixon’s inspiration to have guards at the White House dressed in powder-blue uniforms complete with feathered marching-band hats and horns blaring “Hail to the Chief” each time the great man appeared. It was the court of Louis XIV as furnished by Wal-Mart.
It is actually hard to understand what precisely motivated the conference. It is clear that Condoleezza Rice, an utterly forgettable Secretary of State without an achievement worth citing, someone who likes to talk and hear herself talk, to shop for expensive shoes on Fifth Avenue, and to play the role of child prodigy up from America’s backwoods at White House soirees, hoped to do something substantial with this conference. It is a practice that’s called “leaving a legacy” by the American press. It’s a grand old tradition. All Presidents and Secretaries of State are supposed to leave some kind of legacy, just as the first female Secretary of State, Ms. Albright, left tens of thousands of children dead with sanctions on Iraq or Colin Powell left us with the lasting memory of lying through his teeth at the United Nations General Assembly in order to promote the invasion of Iraq.
It’s equally clear that something desperately needs to be done in the Middle East. It’s sinking into perpetual, bloody insanity. Israel’s near-paranoid ideas about its own security are sucking much of the planet’s resources into the political equivalent of a black hole from which nothing emerges. Israel never has enough security. Occupation, reprisals, and wars haven't supplied enough. Arrest and torture haven't supplied enough. Spies and assassinations haven't supplied enough. Atomic weapons haven't supplied enough. Walls do not supply enough.
The poor Palestinians pay a terrible price for crimes against the Jews with which they had absolutely nothing to do. The self-righteous United States is only too happy to see them paying it. After all, the greatest opportunity there was to avoid the Holocaust was for the United States to open its doors, which it adamantly refused to do for even a single boatload of Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
Well, where someone else is paying the freight, America loves assuming idealistic poses, making gestures and speeches about peace and rights and all good things human. Indeed, over decades of American posturing and blubbering, conditions in the occupied territories have become worse in many ways: more than a quarter million Israeli “settlers” now live on what can only be honestly described as stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, and a giant wall, far more massive and foreboding than the infamous wall that once separated East and West Berlin, sits on still more Palestinian land, separating families and destroying their commerce and livelihoods.
Almost certainly over time, Israel’s wall will generate a considerable dead zone even further into the West Bank, ready at some point in the future to be “re-claimed” by more settlers. It’s worth noting that the Palestinians today control just over twenty percent of Palestine, a territory that once was entirely theirs and that according to maps drawn in the international diplomacy that pre-dated modern Israel was to be divided equitably between Jews and Arabs.
Many Jews, perhaps most, subscribe to the notion that they have an ancient claim to Israel because of the Bible stories, an argument pretty much comparable to Greece making claims on the coast of Turkey because ancient Greece won the Trojan War as recorded in the Iliad and the Odyssey. This of course totally ignores history, and the many conquests of ancient Israel, a land Jews occupied only a small fraction of the time they did not over the last twenty-five hundred years or so. Moreover, if you take such an argument literally, then the land of Israel actually belongs to descendents of the ancient people, Canaanites and Philistines, of the Bible stories, whoever they may be. I suppose the Egyptians have a claim, too, since Egypt controlled some the area as part of its empire a very long time ago. Then, too, there’s the potential claim of the ancient Phoenicians whose alphabet we still use. Clearly, this kind of claim reduces to silly stuff, but it has emotional power for Jews and for Christians raised on Old Testament stories.
Well, every people is entitled to national myths, and the rest of us do not have to regard seriously the claim that George Washington never told a lie or that Rome was founded by babes raised by a she-wolf. The trouble with this particular Israeli myth is the dangerous modern extension to which it leads. Conservative Israelis and virtually every leader since the state’s foundation in fact believe they are entitled to what they regard as all of ancient Israel, something that includes the West Bank and Gaza and indeed the Southern part of modern Lebanon and a bit of Syria. Of course, there are no maps of ancient Israel on papyrus preserved in clay containers, only modern creations based either closely or loosely on Biblical scholarship, but in any event as dependable as all efforts based on scraps of ancient text which itself is full of myths and exaggerations.
I believe that dedication to the dream of ancient Israel, what is often called Greater Israel, has been the major barrier to peace since the modern founding. That is not a widely accepted proposition, but there are many reasons to regard it as a true one. Disinformation and black operations of many kinds have left the general public, at least in America, with the idea that Israel was content with its borders and that it was only the fury of “irrational” Arabs that preventing Israel’s living in peace. The truth is that virtually all Arab leaders accept the existence of Israel, have no intention of trying to destroy Israel, and, anyway, do not have the means for doing so. They would however like very much to see some justice, as would millions of others.
The example of the Six Day War is perhaps the most revealing of many instances of disinformation and black operations. We have the views of many astute contemporary observers four decades ago, including one of the world statesmen of the time, President de Gaulle of France, that Israel manipulated conditions for that war, using Arab anger over a long series of provocations to get the war it wanted, knowing well that it could win and that ultimately, in any event, its security was guaranteed by the United States. This operation was a complete success, leaving Israel with real estate it desired and leaving the world’s general public with the psychologically important (false) impression of little David standing up to the Philistines. Who doesn’t admire the gritty little guy standing up for his rights?
Forty years later, Israel still holds most of these conquests, treating the inhabitants shamefully, as badly as ever apartheid South Africa treated the people it did not want, and Israel continues to launch attacks or provocations over other areas of Greater Israel, southern Lebanon and Syria, while gradually bricking over the West Bank. It gave Egypt back the Sinai because world pressure was overwhelming after Sadat’s stunning act of statesmanship in coming to Israel. The pressure was reflected in sharing the Nobel Peace Prize earned by Sadat with an Israeli Prime Minister who was an unapologetic old terrorist associated with the Irgun (a group responsible for, among other terrors, the King David Hotel bombing, 1946, and the Deir Yassin massacre, 1948) and an ardent supporter of Greater Israel to his death, something he repeatedly reminded President Carter of at Camp David. The Sinai is not one of the world’s hottest pieces of real estate and in return for giving it up, Israel gained peace with the only Arab country capable of being a serious threat. Moreover, the United States opened its check book to cement the peace with economic assistance to Egypt now second only to the huge amount given to Israel, and Israel received several billion dollars to relocate defences in the Sinai. An equivalent set of conditions does not apply to any of the other occupied territories.
When Israel announces a “freeze” in West Bank settlements, as it routinely feels obliged to declare for a conference such as Annapolis, it does not mean a halt to road and other construction projects already underway in the last batch of property seized from others, and it does not even mean enforcement against liebensraum-crazed settlers who always charge out with their submachine guns to grab someone else’s olive grove and start some new informal settlements with beat-up trailers, flags, and razor wire.
It is ironic that the United States seems so little concerned about the settlers, matters around ownership and property in other lands always assuming overwhelming importance in American foreign policy. Wars have been fought over it. The long dirty terror war against Castro started over just such issues. The only explanation for the vast slaughter in Vietnam was that people’s choosing the wrong economic system, the leaders in America’s rump-state ally being dictators as surely as those in the North. This behavior by Israelis is as lawless as any fleecing of foreign investors in Moscow by the Russian mafia or the uncompensated nationalization of American corporate assets in what were once commonly called banana republics, this last being the cause of a whole series of secret, violent interventions by America.
The problems involved now with returning to the Green Line, as U.N. resolutions and the needs of genuine peace require, seem almost insurmountable. How do you move more than a quarter of a million people in any reasonable time? And if the people refuse to be moved, as is very much likely to be the case with many on the West Bank? The Israeli Army recently had a difficult time with a relatively small number of settlers who lived in a hopeless colony behind razor wire in Gaza. One can only imagine what a comparable change in the West Bank would involve.
I should observe here that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is best understood as a tactic, the West Bank being a place of far greater immediate interest. Gaza has been called a giant open prison, and that description is not far from the truth. Its 139 square miles are jammed with about 1.4 million people, more than ten times the population density of Israel, and it enjoys no access by land, sea, or air without Israeli permission. No one can regard it as having any potential as an independent, viable state. The ultimate fate of Gaza in Israeli government thinking may be either to remain as an isolated, undefined entity, providing a pool of cheap labor as required, or a place to be made so uncomfortable over time that most of its people flee.
The idea of causing people to flee from a hopeless situation is an old one in Israel. We have statements going back to the late Moshe Dayan in his prime to that effect concerning the territories. As to cheap labor, the simple demographic fact is that Palestinians have birth rates comparable to certain other poor areas of the world such as West Africa. This maintains a young and growing population. Israel’s birth rates, except for the ultra-orthodox minority, compare to those in other advanced states whose populations have passed through demographic transition. No advanced Western society can replace its own population through natural increase, and that is why migration is beginning to be important in lands where once it played a small role. Gaza’s gates over the decades have been opened or closed many times to the many workers in Gaza employed in Israel according to changes in the political and security environment.
Many Israelis, not just settlers, do not want to return land recently taken from Palestinians. There is actually a wide spectrum of opinion in Israel on this matter, running from those who never want to give anything back to Arabs to those willing to return to the Green Line. Polls show this last group is not dominant and that most Israelis believe in holding onto at least some of the territories. A vision of some form of Greater Israel still holds sway over much of public opinion.
And the difficulties associated with a return to the Green Line are only heaped up with other insurmountable problems such as the right of return of Palestinian refugees early Israel terrorized into running away. United Nations’ principles supposedly assure the right of return of any people cast out in this fashion, but Israel is never going to agree with this principle because its democracy is based on an assured overwhelming Jewish majority in perpetuity.
During the same decades of adverse change in the Middle East, conditions also have changed within the United States. They have changed in several ways. First, America has become, unabashedly, an imperialist power. For many decades there was a kind of Jeffersonian fig leaf over the rise of America’s empire, which ironically began with Jefferson himself. It was always advertised as a bastion of liberty, a place of refuge, a society that embraced human rights – all arising from the revolt of a young, scrappy people against the world’s last great imperial power. But since World War II, and increasingly since the fall of the Soviet Union, Americans have started saying there’s nothing wrong with being an empire and using military muscle where they see fit. Some of the boldest words around this changing attitude, attempting to palatably market what was once considered unpalatable, come from the neo-cons who have enjoyed such great influence under the weak and ineffectual Bush. They call openly for America to assume the imperial purple of Rome on a planetary scale. You have the military power, America, use it. To hell with what the other ninety-five percent of humanity thinks or fears.
Central to the neo-con effort is a drive to make Israel what they consider more secure, the most noted neo-cons being rather intense defenders of Israel’s excesses. This security need, of course, was the major impetus behind the invasion of Iraq. It was also the impetus behind America’s support for Israel’s bloody attack on Lebanon. And it is the impetus behind all the noisy threats against Iran.
Israel is discussed by the neo-cons in terms of democracy and enlightenment in the Middle East, ignoring the fact that Israel limits its population by religious identity, which really is not quite what most of us mean by democracy. And with regard to human rights and enlightenment, holding millions in seemingly perpetual bondage is a very odd interpretation. Few Americans know that there is no such thing as a Bill or Charter of Rights in Israel. Such a document would require a great feat of imagination when your population is defined by religious identity and you hold others in bondage. While about 19% of Israel’s population is Arab, that fact alone is a source of constant unease in Israel. These people are descendents of those who refused to flee under the violence of Israel’s creation, and today in many respects they are not treated as equal citizens.
Israel has become an important component in what neo-cons see as the American Empire. It sometimes serves as a proxy actor for American interests in the region, an imperial pied-à-terre, it has been armed and equipped to resemble a miniature geo-political replica of the United States, and, perhaps most importantly, Israel has a set of ruthless policies the neo-cons would very much like the United States to adopt almost in their entirety. Under Bush, this last has come near to becoming reality.
No national American politician today speaks in anything but exquisite political correctness about the Middle East – unless he or she is talking about Iraq or Iran or Syria, in which case threats of bombs and hellfire are always deemed appropriate – never forgetting to lavishly praise Israel for its long search for peace, even when the search involves mass slaughter in Lebanon with cluster bombs or the cold-blooded murder of UN observers. Indeed, politicians of either political party today literally run a gauntlet of American Jewish organizations, attending rubber-chicken dinners wearing de rigueur yarmulkes, making pledges for Israel more solemn-sounding than anything they make about any other part of the planet.
You’d think it was a service club environment during the Cold War, and the pledges concerned the unspeakable horrors of communism, but it’s not the Cold War, and the Palestinians are not enemies, just victims fighting back with largely ineffectual means. What’s more, Israel - as it has proved so many times with its extensive and damaging spying, dirty tricks and black operations, secret projects such as those for developing nuclear weapons or assisting South Africa to do so, high-handed turns in policy, and misuse of American-supplied armaments in violation of signed agreements - is often not even a particularly good friend to the United States.
Now, American politicians do not make pledges of undying devotion out of sheer emotionalism. Emotions for American politicians generally are things only to be manipulated for effect. So why the pledges? The most important reason concerns the structure of American national politics. Lobbying is a central part of how Americans are governed, almost resembling a fourth branch of government. In addition, American politics are totally driven by money, much the way national consumer products are pushed into existence by expensive marketing and advertising campaigns. Effective advertising has been proved a profitable technique in selling products and in selling politicians. Money is literally the oxygen of American political life. Special interests supply most of this political oxygen. The better lobbyists have learned how to market their support and to lever their resources for the greatest possible effect. They use their resources to help their supporters and to hurt those who oppose them.
Every thinking American knows Israel’s lobby is today a very powerful force in American politics, no matter the endless name-calling against such a non-inflammatory and thoughtful book as Mearsheimer and Walt which only documents what people already know anecdotally. Indeed, the very size and noise of the opposition raised against that calm, scholarly, rather dull book are measures of its accuracy.
The Israeli lobby has a conventional formal face in AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), but it consists of much more than just that organization which follows along the similar lines and is subject to the same rules as hundreds of lobbies in Washington. The whole Israeli lobby involves many organizations working towards the same general goals and includes a large number of columnists and broadcasters who periodically focus on certain issues almost resembling a flock of birds landing on the same roof.
The cooperation between these group and individuals is largely informal, greatly resembling the loose structure that exists between the White House and the mainline media in the United States around foreign policy. Yes, America has freedom of the press, but that does not mean that those who actually own a press will pursue the broader public interest. It is demonstrable that they often do not. The New York Times or ABC do not call to ask the White House what they should or should not print or broadcast about Iraq or many other matters: they generally know from long association and common interests. These business organizations – and that is just what newspapers and broadcasters are, business organizations, not idealistic organizations dedicated to truth - want to keep their government sources, and they want to keep their advertisers, and they want generally to keep their credibility with establishment interests.
Israel’s total aggregate lobby has a shared informal understanding of, and intense emotional involvement with, the “King’s great matter” as Cardinal Wolsey described Henry VIII’s need for a divorce. The great matter in this case is a shared perception of Israel’s constant need for winning and appearing positive in all things from public relations to war.
One of Israel’s great supporters today in America is the Religious Right, people who are the very ones you might reasonably suspect of anti-Semitism - the authentic, virulent stuff, not the stuff of phoney accusations now routinely hurled at any critic of Israel. After all, haters are haters, and these people have leaders who rant and scream in public against anything or anyone a little different than themselves. They have a long record of being on the wrong side of nearly every important movement from civil rights to women’s rights. An earlier generation of them was among the extremely vocal against accepting Jewish refugees in the 1930s, and they were among those who flirted with Hitler and Nazism in now near-forgotten movements like the American Bund.
Perhaps nothing better represents some of the bizarre confusion associated with American policy towards Israel than the support of these people. I think we all know they are not the kind of people who would welcome a large Jewish migration to the United States even today. Their support of Israel is part of a religious mysticism in thrall to lurid nightmares from The Book of Revelations concerning the Second Coming of Christ, Anti-Christ, the “mark of the beast,” and great wars and upheavals signifying the end of time. I suspect enjoyment of this violent stew has at least something to do in part with secret cravings of anti-Semitic appetites, hardly the kind of friends for which anyone could hope. Their approach today seems to be to expedite the coming of Armageddon.
We have a great and enduring irony in that only when America pushes does Israel respond. It is an irony because the difficulty of pushing increases with the influence of the Israeli lobby, which today is almost certainly larger and better established than ever. Judging by the last half century of history, one has to say that Israel on its own has never shown much statesmanship or generosity towards its neighbors in the Middle East. Visions of Greater Israel are a large part of the explanation. The great gestures have come from others. Israel’s policy from the beginning has been best characterized by the phrase “the iron wall,” an expression coined by an early Zionist to prescribe Israel’s appropriate future posture towards Arabs.
Reports told us weeks before Annapolis that Bush had been told – by, among others, Senator Lieberman, someone who talks about Israel as though he were speaking of a neighbourhood in his Senate district – that Olmert must not be pushed at this time. His political situation is too precarious. That alone doomed any hope of genuine progress. As it proved, the conference was nothing more than a kick-off ceremony for talks that are supposed to take place over the next year between Olmert and Abbas. One hesitates to point out that were there any genuine interest in such talks, they could have occurred, without Condoleezza and without Annapolis, at any time since Arafat’s death in 2004, but Abbas has been pretty consistently ignored over that time by Israel, treated as a doorman or janitor. He has received some token gestures – a limited amount of the Palestinians own funds released and a few hundred prisoners here and there out of the nine thousand Israel illegally held – only after his convulsions with Hamas in Gaza.
Speaking of Hamas, the absence of one of the major parties to the conflict absolutely dooms the prospects of talks. Israel justifies this by saying it won’t treat with terrorists, but this is ridiculous considering the role terror played in Israel’s own founding. Judging by the number of innocent civilians killed just in recent years, I think it fair to say that the IDF qualifies as at least as great a terrorist organization as any Palestinian group or party. Something like 1,500 civilians killed with little excuse in southern Lebanon? Buildings full of civilians in Gaza blown up in efforts to assassinate one man? Punishment-slaughter expeditions like Jenin or Rafah?
Regardless, to make peace you do not have to like your neighbor. Hamas has made it clear it was ready to reach an understanding with Israel, but all such suggestions are arrogantly ignored. Such an understanding over time would have allowed Israeli and Palestinian officials to work together to solve problems. A great irony here is that Israeli secret services once subsidized Hamas to create competition for Fatah, and that is exactly what has happened now, a wasteful civil conflict has been generated between Hamas and Fatah. One feels sure Israeli leaders are more than a little amused in private at a situation they always regard with stern faces in public. Hamas is not and has never been a genuine threat to Israel’s security. The truth is that Hamas might have made a better partner in peace arrangements than Fatah with its long history of internal corruption. Of course, too, Hamas was elected in an election cleaner than that which put George Bush into office.
But you have to start by actually wanting peace. Peace is not having a neighbor who follows your every wish and whim and fulfills exactly the conditions you lay down before even talking. That isn’t peace, that’s tyranny.
Peace, following long conflict, never comes without sacrifice, but many Israeli leaders and American apologists for Israel speak as though that were not the case here. The offer Ehud Barak made to Arafat at Camp David - the offer of a perpetual Bantustan with all kinds of segregationist rules about who could travel on what road – entailed little sacrifice for Israel, unless you want to call simply accepting the idea that any Palestinians should continue to live in the West Bank and Gaza a sacrifice. And perhaps that is not an exaggeration. New settlements have been created year after year since, Israel calling the settlements “facts on the ground,” a deliberately vague phrase that could mean anything from bargaining chips to the new permanent reality. To the outside observer, it is difficult to see this growth of settlements as anything but a slow-motion version of ethnic cleansing on the relatively small part of Palestine Israel does not now call its own.
From the distance of a satellite in orbit, the settlements’ growth must somewhat resemble cancer metastasizing into a body as new clumps of buildings appear and roads and barriers form like connective webs of tissue. It is a dismal reality, and it has nothing to do with peace.
The Annapolis Conference was, like so many political and diplomatic events of our time, highly choreographed, finely stage-managed, and heavily marketed. Yet, as soon as it was over, it was apparent little had happened, much as when a child opens a much-advertised, expensive plastic toy on Christmas, a brief, glitzy, big-eyed moment followed quickly by tedium. You might compare it to a George Bush press conference or any American presidential debate. Indeed, such choreographed non-events make up a fair portion of what Americans see on their evening news, a phenomenon we might call virtual or synthetic news.
I am reminded of a Bush summit with the oleaginous Tony Blair, both of them standing at parallel podiums, pontificating and smiling as though they regarded themselves as re-incarnations of Roosevelt and Churchill, which undoubtedly they do. When they finished saying nothing glibly (glibly, at least in Blair’s case) they turned towards each other and walked like two cuckoo-clock figures to meet and turn again, marching out in lock step along a red carpet, for all the world the just-crowned king and queen of the high-school prom leaving the dance floor. Or I recall Richard Nixon’s inspiration to have guards at the White House dressed in powder-blue uniforms complete with feathered marching-band hats and horns blaring “Hail to the Chief” each time the great man appeared. It was the court of Louis XIV as furnished by Wal-Mart.
It is actually hard to understand what precisely motivated the conference. It is clear that Condoleezza Rice, an utterly forgettable Secretary of State without an achievement worth citing, someone who likes to talk and hear herself talk, to shop for expensive shoes on Fifth Avenue, and to play the role of child prodigy up from America’s backwoods at White House soirees, hoped to do something substantial with this conference. It is a practice that’s called “leaving a legacy” by the American press. It’s a grand old tradition. All Presidents and Secretaries of State are supposed to leave some kind of legacy, just as the first female Secretary of State, Ms. Albright, left tens of thousands of children dead with sanctions on Iraq or Colin Powell left us with the lasting memory of lying through his teeth at the United Nations General Assembly in order to promote the invasion of Iraq.
It’s equally clear that something desperately needs to be done in the Middle East. It’s sinking into perpetual, bloody insanity. Israel’s near-paranoid ideas about its own security are sucking much of the planet’s resources into the political equivalent of a black hole from which nothing emerges. Israel never has enough security. Occupation, reprisals, and wars haven't supplied enough. Arrest and torture haven't supplied enough. Spies and assassinations haven't supplied enough. Atomic weapons haven't supplied enough. Walls do not supply enough.
The poor Palestinians pay a terrible price for crimes against the Jews with which they had absolutely nothing to do. The self-righteous United States is only too happy to see them paying it. After all, the greatest opportunity there was to avoid the Holocaust was for the United States to open its doors, which it adamantly refused to do for even a single boatload of Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
Well, where someone else is paying the freight, America loves assuming idealistic poses, making gestures and speeches about peace and rights and all good things human. Indeed, over decades of American posturing and blubbering, conditions in the occupied territories have become worse in many ways: more than a quarter million Israeli “settlers” now live on what can only be honestly described as stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, and a giant wall, far more massive and foreboding than the infamous wall that once separated East and West Berlin, sits on still more Palestinian land, separating families and destroying their commerce and livelihoods.
Almost certainly over time, Israel’s wall will generate a considerable dead zone even further into the West Bank, ready at some point in the future to be “re-claimed” by more settlers. It’s worth noting that the Palestinians today control just over twenty percent of Palestine, a territory that once was entirely theirs and that according to maps drawn in the international diplomacy that pre-dated modern Israel was to be divided equitably between Jews and Arabs.
Many Jews, perhaps most, subscribe to the notion that they have an ancient claim to Israel because of the Bible stories, an argument pretty much comparable to Greece making claims on the coast of Turkey because ancient Greece won the Trojan War as recorded in the Iliad and the Odyssey. This of course totally ignores history, and the many conquests of ancient Israel, a land Jews occupied only a small fraction of the time they did not over the last twenty-five hundred years or so. Moreover, if you take such an argument literally, then the land of Israel actually belongs to descendents of the ancient people, Canaanites and Philistines, of the Bible stories, whoever they may be. I suppose the Egyptians have a claim, too, since Egypt controlled some the area as part of its empire a very long time ago. Then, too, there’s the potential claim of the ancient Phoenicians whose alphabet we still use. Clearly, this kind of claim reduces to silly stuff, but it has emotional power for Jews and for Christians raised on Old Testament stories.
Well, every people is entitled to national myths, and the rest of us do not have to regard seriously the claim that George Washington never told a lie or that Rome was founded by babes raised by a she-wolf. The trouble with this particular Israeli myth is the dangerous modern extension to which it leads. Conservative Israelis and virtually every leader since the state’s foundation in fact believe they are entitled to what they regard as all of ancient Israel, something that includes the West Bank and Gaza and indeed the Southern part of modern Lebanon and a bit of Syria. Of course, there are no maps of ancient Israel on papyrus preserved in clay containers, only modern creations based either closely or loosely on Biblical scholarship, but in any event as dependable as all efforts based on scraps of ancient text which itself is full of myths and exaggerations.
I believe that dedication to the dream of ancient Israel, what is often called Greater Israel, has been the major barrier to peace since the modern founding. That is not a widely accepted proposition, but there are many reasons to regard it as a true one. Disinformation and black operations of many kinds have left the general public, at least in America, with the idea that Israel was content with its borders and that it was only the fury of “irrational” Arabs that preventing Israel’s living in peace. The truth is that virtually all Arab leaders accept the existence of Israel, have no intention of trying to destroy Israel, and, anyway, do not have the means for doing so. They would however like very much to see some justice, as would millions of others.
The example of the Six Day War is perhaps the most revealing of many instances of disinformation and black operations. We have the views of many astute contemporary observers four decades ago, including one of the world statesmen of the time, President de Gaulle of France, that Israel manipulated conditions for that war, using Arab anger over a long series of provocations to get the war it wanted, knowing well that it could win and that ultimately, in any event, its security was guaranteed by the United States. This operation was a complete success, leaving Israel with real estate it desired and leaving the world’s general public with the psychologically important (false) impression of little David standing up to the Philistines. Who doesn’t admire the gritty little guy standing up for his rights?
Forty years later, Israel still holds most of these conquests, treating the inhabitants shamefully, as badly as ever apartheid South Africa treated the people it did not want, and Israel continues to launch attacks or provocations over other areas of Greater Israel, southern Lebanon and Syria, while gradually bricking over the West Bank. It gave Egypt back the Sinai because world pressure was overwhelming after Sadat’s stunning act of statesmanship in coming to Israel. The pressure was reflected in sharing the Nobel Peace Prize earned by Sadat with an Israeli Prime Minister who was an unapologetic old terrorist associated with the Irgun (a group responsible for, among other terrors, the King David Hotel bombing, 1946, and the Deir Yassin massacre, 1948) and an ardent supporter of Greater Israel to his death, something he repeatedly reminded President Carter of at Camp David. The Sinai is not one of the world’s hottest pieces of real estate and in return for giving it up, Israel gained peace with the only Arab country capable of being a serious threat. Moreover, the United States opened its check book to cement the peace with economic assistance to Egypt now second only to the huge amount given to Israel, and Israel received several billion dollars to relocate defences in the Sinai. An equivalent set of conditions does not apply to any of the other occupied territories.
When Israel announces a “freeze” in West Bank settlements, as it routinely feels obliged to declare for a conference such as Annapolis, it does not mean a halt to road and other construction projects already underway in the last batch of property seized from others, and it does not even mean enforcement against liebensraum-crazed settlers who always charge out with their submachine guns to grab someone else’s olive grove and start some new informal settlements with beat-up trailers, flags, and razor wire.
It is ironic that the United States seems so little concerned about the settlers, matters around ownership and property in other lands always assuming overwhelming importance in American foreign policy. Wars have been fought over it. The long dirty terror war against Castro started over just such issues. The only explanation for the vast slaughter in Vietnam was that people’s choosing the wrong economic system, the leaders in America’s rump-state ally being dictators as surely as those in the North. This behavior by Israelis is as lawless as any fleecing of foreign investors in Moscow by the Russian mafia or the uncompensated nationalization of American corporate assets in what were once commonly called banana republics, this last being the cause of a whole series of secret, violent interventions by America.
The problems involved now with returning to the Green Line, as U.N. resolutions and the needs of genuine peace require, seem almost insurmountable. How do you move more than a quarter of a million people in any reasonable time? And if the people refuse to be moved, as is very much likely to be the case with many on the West Bank? The Israeli Army recently had a difficult time with a relatively small number of settlers who lived in a hopeless colony behind razor wire in Gaza. One can only imagine what a comparable change in the West Bank would involve.
I should observe here that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is best understood as a tactic, the West Bank being a place of far greater immediate interest. Gaza has been called a giant open prison, and that description is not far from the truth. Its 139 square miles are jammed with about 1.4 million people, more than ten times the population density of Israel, and it enjoys no access by land, sea, or air without Israeli permission. No one can regard it as having any potential as an independent, viable state. The ultimate fate of Gaza in Israeli government thinking may be either to remain as an isolated, undefined entity, providing a pool of cheap labor as required, or a place to be made so uncomfortable over time that most of its people flee.
The idea of causing people to flee from a hopeless situation is an old one in Israel. We have statements going back to the late Moshe Dayan in his prime to that effect concerning the territories. As to cheap labor, the simple demographic fact is that Palestinians have birth rates comparable to certain other poor areas of the world such as West Africa. This maintains a young and growing population. Israel’s birth rates, except for the ultra-orthodox minority, compare to those in other advanced states whose populations have passed through demographic transition. No advanced Western society can replace its own population through natural increase, and that is why migration is beginning to be important in lands where once it played a small role. Gaza’s gates over the decades have been opened or closed many times to the many workers in Gaza employed in Israel according to changes in the political and security environment.
Many Israelis, not just settlers, do not want to return land recently taken from Palestinians. There is actually a wide spectrum of opinion in Israel on this matter, running from those who never want to give anything back to Arabs to those willing to return to the Green Line. Polls show this last group is not dominant and that most Israelis believe in holding onto at least some of the territories. A vision of some form of Greater Israel still holds sway over much of public opinion.
And the difficulties associated with a return to the Green Line are only heaped up with other insurmountable problems such as the right of return of Palestinian refugees early Israel terrorized into running away. United Nations’ principles supposedly assure the right of return of any people cast out in this fashion, but Israel is never going to agree with this principle because its democracy is based on an assured overwhelming Jewish majority in perpetuity.
During the same decades of adverse change in the Middle East, conditions also have changed within the United States. They have changed in several ways. First, America has become, unabashedly, an imperialist power. For many decades there was a kind of Jeffersonian fig leaf over the rise of America’s empire, which ironically began with Jefferson himself. It was always advertised as a bastion of liberty, a place of refuge, a society that embraced human rights – all arising from the revolt of a young, scrappy people against the world’s last great imperial power. But since World War II, and increasingly since the fall of the Soviet Union, Americans have started saying there’s nothing wrong with being an empire and using military muscle where they see fit. Some of the boldest words around this changing attitude, attempting to palatably market what was once considered unpalatable, come from the neo-cons who have enjoyed such great influence under the weak and ineffectual Bush. They call openly for America to assume the imperial purple of Rome on a planetary scale. You have the military power, America, use it. To hell with what the other ninety-five percent of humanity thinks or fears.
Central to the neo-con effort is a drive to make Israel what they consider more secure, the most noted neo-cons being rather intense defenders of Israel’s excesses. This security need, of course, was the major impetus behind the invasion of Iraq. It was also the impetus behind America’s support for Israel’s bloody attack on Lebanon. And it is the impetus behind all the noisy threats against Iran.
Israel is discussed by the neo-cons in terms of democracy and enlightenment in the Middle East, ignoring the fact that Israel limits its population by religious identity, which really is not quite what most of us mean by democracy. And with regard to human rights and enlightenment, holding millions in seemingly perpetual bondage is a very odd interpretation. Few Americans know that there is no such thing as a Bill or Charter of Rights in Israel. Such a document would require a great feat of imagination when your population is defined by religious identity and you hold others in bondage. While about 19% of Israel’s population is Arab, that fact alone is a source of constant unease in Israel. These people are descendents of those who refused to flee under the violence of Israel’s creation, and today in many respects they are not treated as equal citizens.
Israel has become an important component in what neo-cons see as the American Empire. It sometimes serves as a proxy actor for American interests in the region, an imperial pied-à-terre, it has been armed and equipped to resemble a miniature geo-political replica of the United States, and, perhaps most importantly, Israel has a set of ruthless policies the neo-cons would very much like the United States to adopt almost in their entirety. Under Bush, this last has come near to becoming reality.
No national American politician today speaks in anything but exquisite political correctness about the Middle East – unless he or she is talking about Iraq or Iran or Syria, in which case threats of bombs and hellfire are always deemed appropriate – never forgetting to lavishly praise Israel for its long search for peace, even when the search involves mass slaughter in Lebanon with cluster bombs or the cold-blooded murder of UN observers. Indeed, politicians of either political party today literally run a gauntlet of American Jewish organizations, attending rubber-chicken dinners wearing de rigueur yarmulkes, making pledges for Israel more solemn-sounding than anything they make about any other part of the planet.
You’d think it was a service club environment during the Cold War, and the pledges concerned the unspeakable horrors of communism, but it’s not the Cold War, and the Palestinians are not enemies, just victims fighting back with largely ineffectual means. What’s more, Israel - as it has proved so many times with its extensive and damaging spying, dirty tricks and black operations, secret projects such as those for developing nuclear weapons or assisting South Africa to do so, high-handed turns in policy, and misuse of American-supplied armaments in violation of signed agreements - is often not even a particularly good friend to the United States.
Now, American politicians do not make pledges of undying devotion out of sheer emotionalism. Emotions for American politicians generally are things only to be manipulated for effect. So why the pledges? The most important reason concerns the structure of American national politics. Lobbying is a central part of how Americans are governed, almost resembling a fourth branch of government. In addition, American politics are totally driven by money, much the way national consumer products are pushed into existence by expensive marketing and advertising campaigns. Effective advertising has been proved a profitable technique in selling products and in selling politicians. Money is literally the oxygen of American political life. Special interests supply most of this political oxygen. The better lobbyists have learned how to market their support and to lever their resources for the greatest possible effect. They use their resources to help their supporters and to hurt those who oppose them.
Every thinking American knows Israel’s lobby is today a very powerful force in American politics, no matter the endless name-calling against such a non-inflammatory and thoughtful book as Mearsheimer and Walt which only documents what people already know anecdotally. Indeed, the very size and noise of the opposition raised against that calm, scholarly, rather dull book are measures of its accuracy.
The Israeli lobby has a conventional formal face in AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), but it consists of much more than just that organization which follows along the similar lines and is subject to the same rules as hundreds of lobbies in Washington. The whole Israeli lobby involves many organizations working towards the same general goals and includes a large number of columnists and broadcasters who periodically focus on certain issues almost resembling a flock of birds landing on the same roof.
The cooperation between these group and individuals is largely informal, greatly resembling the loose structure that exists between the White House and the mainline media in the United States around foreign policy. Yes, America has freedom of the press, but that does not mean that those who actually own a press will pursue the broader public interest. It is demonstrable that they often do not. The New York Times or ABC do not call to ask the White House what they should or should not print or broadcast about Iraq or many other matters: they generally know from long association and common interests. These business organizations – and that is just what newspapers and broadcasters are, business organizations, not idealistic organizations dedicated to truth - want to keep their government sources, and they want to keep their advertisers, and they want generally to keep their credibility with establishment interests.
Israel’s total aggregate lobby has a shared informal understanding of, and intense emotional involvement with, the “King’s great matter” as Cardinal Wolsey described Henry VIII’s need for a divorce. The great matter in this case is a shared perception of Israel’s constant need for winning and appearing positive in all things from public relations to war.
One of Israel’s great supporters today in America is the Religious Right, people who are the very ones you might reasonably suspect of anti-Semitism - the authentic, virulent stuff, not the stuff of phoney accusations now routinely hurled at any critic of Israel. After all, haters are haters, and these people have leaders who rant and scream in public against anything or anyone a little different than themselves. They have a long record of being on the wrong side of nearly every important movement from civil rights to women’s rights. An earlier generation of them was among the extremely vocal against accepting Jewish refugees in the 1930s, and they were among those who flirted with Hitler and Nazism in now near-forgotten movements like the American Bund.
Perhaps nothing better represents some of the bizarre confusion associated with American policy towards Israel than the support of these people. I think we all know they are not the kind of people who would welcome a large Jewish migration to the United States even today. Their support of Israel is part of a religious mysticism in thrall to lurid nightmares from The Book of Revelations concerning the Second Coming of Christ, Anti-Christ, the “mark of the beast,” and great wars and upheavals signifying the end of time. I suspect enjoyment of this violent stew has at least something to do in part with secret cravings of anti-Semitic appetites, hardly the kind of friends for which anyone could hope. Their approach today seems to be to expedite the coming of Armageddon.
We have a great and enduring irony in that only when America pushes does Israel respond. It is an irony because the difficulty of pushing increases with the influence of the Israeli lobby, which today is almost certainly larger and better established than ever. Judging by the last half century of history, one has to say that Israel on its own has never shown much statesmanship or generosity towards its neighbors in the Middle East. Visions of Greater Israel are a large part of the explanation. The great gestures have come from others. Israel’s policy from the beginning has been best characterized by the phrase “the iron wall,” an expression coined by an early Zionist to prescribe Israel’s appropriate future posture towards Arabs.
Reports told us weeks before Annapolis that Bush had been told – by, among others, Senator Lieberman, someone who talks about Israel as though he were speaking of a neighbourhood in his Senate district – that Olmert must not be pushed at this time. His political situation is too precarious. That alone doomed any hope of genuine progress. As it proved, the conference was nothing more than a kick-off ceremony for talks that are supposed to take place over the next year between Olmert and Abbas. One hesitates to point out that were there any genuine interest in such talks, they could have occurred, without Condoleezza and without Annapolis, at any time since Arafat’s death in 2004, but Abbas has been pretty consistently ignored over that time by Israel, treated as a doorman or janitor. He has received some token gestures – a limited amount of the Palestinians own funds released and a few hundred prisoners here and there out of the nine thousand Israel illegally held – only after his convulsions with Hamas in Gaza.
Speaking of Hamas, the absence of one of the major parties to the conflict absolutely dooms the prospects of talks. Israel justifies this by saying it won’t treat with terrorists, but this is ridiculous considering the role terror played in Israel’s own founding. Judging by the number of innocent civilians killed just in recent years, I think it fair to say that the IDF qualifies as at least as great a terrorist organization as any Palestinian group or party. Something like 1,500 civilians killed with little excuse in southern Lebanon? Buildings full of civilians in Gaza blown up in efforts to assassinate one man? Punishment-slaughter expeditions like Jenin or Rafah?
Regardless, to make peace you do not have to like your neighbor. Hamas has made it clear it was ready to reach an understanding with Israel, but all such suggestions are arrogantly ignored. Such an understanding over time would have allowed Israeli and Palestinian officials to work together to solve problems. A great irony here is that Israeli secret services once subsidized Hamas to create competition for Fatah, and that is exactly what has happened now, a wasteful civil conflict has been generated between Hamas and Fatah. One feels sure Israeli leaders are more than a little amused in private at a situation they always regard with stern faces in public. Hamas is not and has never been a genuine threat to Israel’s security. The truth is that Hamas might have made a better partner in peace arrangements than Fatah with its long history of internal corruption. Of course, too, Hamas was elected in an election cleaner than that which put George Bush into office.
But you have to start by actually wanting peace. Peace is not having a neighbor who follows your every wish and whim and fulfills exactly the conditions you lay down before even talking. That isn’t peace, that’s tyranny.
Peace, following long conflict, never comes without sacrifice, but many Israeli leaders and American apologists for Israel speak as though that were not the case here. The offer Ehud Barak made to Arafat at Camp David - the offer of a perpetual Bantustan with all kinds of segregationist rules about who could travel on what road – entailed little sacrifice for Israel, unless you want to call simply accepting the idea that any Palestinians should continue to live in the West Bank and Gaza a sacrifice. And perhaps that is not an exaggeration. New settlements have been created year after year since, Israel calling the settlements “facts on the ground,” a deliberately vague phrase that could mean anything from bargaining chips to the new permanent reality. To the outside observer, it is difficult to see this growth of settlements as anything but a slow-motion version of ethnic cleansing on the relatively small part of Palestine Israel does not now call its own.
From the distance of a satellite in orbit, the settlements’ growth must somewhat resemble cancer metastasizing into a body as new clumps of buildings appear and roads and barriers form like connective webs of tissue. It is a dismal reality, and it has nothing to do with peace.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
LINCOLN WAS WRONG: THE EASE OF FOOLING MOST OF THE PEOPLE MOST OF THE TIME
November 21, 2007
NOTE: PLEASE ALSO SEE MY LATER COMMENT ON AN IMPORTANT NEW PIECE OF INFORMATION, BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT WE HAVE RECEIVED AS IT CONTAINS OUR FIRST BITS OF TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION FROM A GOVERNMENT SOURCE:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/
This year marks the forty-fourth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. What is most remarkable about this is the stunningly simple fact that, despite innumerable books and several official investigations, we still do not know what happened in 1963.
Not understanding what happened is no mere curiosity of history. It tells us something profound about the nature of government in America today, all of it running against the received notion of a free and open society.
I might not say that were the assassination a simple, straightforward matter that had occurred with few witnesses, but it was an event with many witnesses, many of whom were ignored by the Warren Commission with some of the most credible discounted. And it was anything but simple, although the conclusions of the Warren Commission are just that, simple.
At least some of the key parties involved – Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, and David Ferrie, for example – are subjects of voluminous government records about their bizarre or criminal activities, and forty-four years later, parts of these essential records remain secret.
I might not say that about the free and open society also, were there not a long history of government secrecy around the event, and at times deliberate misrepresentation. Yes, there was finally in the 1990s a big opening of files held secret for decades, but these files – at least the parts not blacked-out – tell us little of importance that is new. Indeed, to the thoughtful inquirer they only raise the issue of why most of them were ever considered worthy of being labeled secret in the first place.
Most importantly, though, a good many files still have not been released, a critical point not treated carefully by many writers on the subject. Certain CIA and FBI files on Oswald are key examples.
You must ask yourself, why, if the assassination is just a simple murder by one misfit, has there been so much secrecy? Indeed, why, if it was a simple murder, was the President’s murder not investigated in Dallas, the scene of the crime, instead of from Washington? All the evidence and most witnesses were located in Dallas. Federal agents at the hospital actually drew their guns against local police and officials to seize the President’s body for shipment to Washington, instead of allowing the perfectly normal procedure of the local jurisdiction autopsying the body. Why? Why was the autopsy conducted by the military with military doctors who were rank amateurs at shooting investigations?
There is no such thing as a free and open society where great matters of empire are concerned, and this is something no less true of the United States than any past imperial power. The people are never consulted on imperial matters, whether war, assassination, or overthrowing other governments, and they are, sadly, frequently deliberately misinformed about them, their own resources being used against them, just the latest examples being around the invasion of Iraq.
Although elements of the CIA truly hated Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover would have spat upon his grave given an unobserved opportunity, I do not subscribe, for many reasons, to the idea that an arm of the American government killed Kennedy. It is highly probable that individuals in some government agencies did understand what had happened and worked to blur and confuse the investigation afterwards. I also consider it possible that, owing to these intense hatreds, glimmers of intelligence in advance of the assassination were deliberately ignored or buried. This seems most likely in Hoover’s case.
Motives for hiding any knowledge of events are unknown, but almost certainly they have to do with hiding genuinely embarrassing or compromising information concerning secret operations and relationships. Embarrassment is more often than not, certainly more often than genuine national security, the reason for imposing secrecy in the American government.
Assassinations at this level in a large advanced society are always the result of conspiracies and complex plans, the plans providing for the certainty of success and the safe distancing of conspirators.
There are, I believe, three plausible candidates for organizing the assassination, all quite powerful groups, all selected for their extreme motives, resources, and opportunity.
The first candidate is a branch of the American mafia, a number of whose members had been deeply hurt by the Attorney General’s aggressive organized crime-fighting activities. After all, Kennedy had received handsome secret contributions in cash from the organization when he ran for office. He had also had at least the seeming cooperation of some senior mafia leaders in his efforts to assassinate Castro, and here he was letting his brother conduct a ruthless campaign against the interests of some families. A mafia family leader and the leader of the Teamsters Union at the time, a known mafia associate, are on record as having made threats against Kennedy. Some members of the Congressional investigations came to favor this candidate although they failed to prove it.
The second candidate is one of the many Cuban refugee groups armed, trained, and paid by the CIA in hopes of invading Cuba again, hurting its economy through terrorist activities, and assassinating any of its leaders. Few Americans today appreciate the extent of these government-subsidized terrorist camps then, operations that make Osama’s camp in the mountains look insignificant.
Kennedy was loathed by the most violent of these groups in his last days because he agreed not to invade Cuba as part of his settlement with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. After that pledge, Kennedy had the FBI raiding the operations of some of these previously catered-to groups as a show of good will towards the Soviets. It is in connection with these very raids that Oswald had some not-well-understood but certain connection with the FBI. These refugee groups were ruthless, angry men who didn’t hesitate to kill or cripple those in their way. They had even conducted a number of terrorist attacks in Miami.
The third candidate is Israel, whose secret efforts at developing nuclear weapons were underway at the time and had become known to Kennedy. He made it unpleasantly clear in private communications that he would not allow Israel to go nuclear, something not widely known in America. But the people running Israel considered it essential that the country become a nuclear power, and we have all seen over many decades how Israel has not hesitated to assassinate or attack where it regards its interests are involved.
Just a few years after Kennedy’s assassination, during the Six Day War, Israeli planes made a two-hour attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, a spy ship operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, killing many of its crew. Israel’s motives have never been explained adequately or investigated openly, but likely had to do either with suppressing information of atrocities in the Sinai – the Liberty being an intelligence-gathering ship – or with trying to trick the United States into entering its war against Egypt. In either case, we see ruthlessness compatible with eliminating a hostile, powerful leader.
I don’t claim to know the truth because the truth would require new evidence. And the candidates are not all mutually exclusive. One might well expect the mafia or Mossad to manipulate and use people like the violent Cuban refugees.
Each of these groups had great motives, more than adequate means, and ample opportunity. By comparison, Oswald stands out as a ridiculous figure with no motive, virtually no means, but a seeming opportunity arranged for him by others at the Texas Book Depository. He was, almost certainly, the patsy he said he was in police custody shortly before his death, having been duped by forces he didn’t understand into certain activities that would mark him before the assassination. We have ample evidence of Oswald’s lack of serious interest in things military, his having been pretty much a flop at being a Marine, and of his temperamental inclination in other directions. While he had a temper (who doesn’t?), he was not a violent man, indeed Russian observers who recalled his years in Russia said he was temperamentally incapable of murder.
If you want to understand why the Warren Commission Report is so wrong, just spend some time yourself reading it with a critical eye. You can find an old copy at a used bookstore for a dollar or two. Parts of it are laughable, much of it is fragmentary, and all of it is a prosecutor’s brief. There is no voice for the defense. Our Western traditions of law require the clash of defense and prosecution before a jury can arrive at guilt. There is no other way, although so much of the public is today conditioned by mystery books and television shows where a detective wraps everything up neatly by the end of the book or show.
Perhaps even more importantly, as few younger readers will know, the Warren Commission did no investigation. Its investigative arm was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He personally kept tight control of these investigations day by day. Hoover’s FBI committed many blunders and genuine crimes over the years of his being director, from trying to send Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, back to Germany (he hated Einstein’s free thinking) to carrying out an elaborate plan to discredit Martin Luther King with secretly recorded tapes in the hope he would commit suicide. These great men, and many other notable figures, Hoover privately regarded as dangerous communists.
Hoover more or less blackmailed many members of Congress and several presidents with his secret files obtained by spying on their private lives. After his death these files were whisked away never to be seen again. As I said, Hoover hated the Kennedy brothers, surely giving him a total lack of impartiality as an investigator. Hoover, too, spent many days at resorts and racetracks over his career paid for by mafia figures he should have been investigating. Communism, even though it never had any large presence in the United States, was always Hoover’s obsession, and Oswald had the (false) reputation of being a communist. It was not a promising arrangement for the Warren Commission from the beginning, and the poor results show.
With a few special exceptions of genuine investigative journalism and analysis, there are two general categories of books about the Kennedy assassination, both biased in their information. There are the various “theory” books which do not accept the Warren Commission and attempt to promote some particular theory of the crime based on (necessarily) incomplete evidence. Examples of these include a book on Hoover himself as suspect, one on the Secret Service having an accident with automatic weapons, and a number on various CIA figures such as Howard Hunt.
Some of these “theory” books suggest almost paranoid fantasies and have given Kennedy assassination books a bad name in general, making easy targets for those wishing to support the Warren Commission. But we must not conflate honest skepticism and lack of belief in the Warren Commission with the theories of people who promote specific concepts of how things were done. This is a trick, conflating honest doubt with unsubstantiated or far-out theories, used over and over again by those promoting our second category of Kennedy assassination books.
The second category includes books that work towards showing the Warren Commission was right, at least in its major conclusions, attempting to restate old material in new words, neglecting to tell readers clearly that they have no new evidence of any great significance with which to work their glib magic. There is an equally long series of these with some of the notable ones along the way being Edward Epstein, Gerald Posner, and, very recently, Vincent Buglosi.
In general, if you go back to examine press reviews at the time of the release of each of these books, you will find a large consensus buzz in the mainstream press about how we finally have the case resolved. That very statement has been made time and time again. This was almost embarrassingly true of Gerald Posner’s book some years ago, a book that added nothing of consequence to our understanding of the crime but used aggressive new language to restate old stuff. It is now being said of Vincent Bugliosi.
People impressed by big fat books will be impressed by Vincent Bugliosi’s recent book on the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, but in a sense its very size is a judgment against it. It is no great feat for an experienced court prosecutor to churn out a voluminous document. They do it all the time in their court briefs, taking pages of legalese to say what should take paragraphs of good, clear English.
It is fitting in more than one way that Bugliosi is a prosecutor, for his book is a prosecutor's brief, just a fatter one than the ones produced by Bugliosi's predecessors.
But size here serves another purpose, what I would call intimidation. How could you possibly argue with this massive pile (1,600 pages) of evidence and argument? The truth is that it is not hard at all to argue with it.
Bugliosi follows his predecessors who used pretty much the same evidence to reach the same conclusions which any independent-minded student of the assassination understands is impossible, that is, that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. Bugliosi had no new evidence of any significance with which to work. He simply looks at the same old stuff ad nauseam, coming up here and there with prosecution tricks to make old stuff seem fresh or different.
But a key fact of the assassination is that the existing evidence is not adequate to convict anyone, and certainly not Oswald. There is, of course, other evidence in existence which has never been released. The CIA and the FBI have files they have never opened.
We know this from many bits of evidence, including references in documents we do have and from situations about which we can positively conclude evidence must exist by the nature of things. A good example of the last is the CIA surveillance photos and recordings of Oswald, or someone pretending to be Oswald, in Mexico City. An obviously incorrect photo was released and the claim was made recordings were erased.
Oswald's connections with the FBI have never been satisfactorily examined. There are many circumstances suggesting his being a paid informant for the FBI, especially during his time in New Orleans. A letter Oswald wrote to a Dallas agent just before the assassination was deliberately and recklessly destroyed by order of the office's senior agent immediately after the assassination with no reasonable explanation.
Oswald had no motive for killing Kennedy, having expressed admiration for the President. Bugliosi cannot get around this fact, only pursuing the typical path of all his forerunners in attacking Oswald's character. There has been another series of books over the years, pretending to be biographies of Oswald but only serving to attack his character, giving assassination writers material to cite. These include works by writers who clearly had CIA connections: notably Priscilla Johnson, someone all students of the assassination know was conveniently in Moscow when Oswald was there, and the late Norman Mailer, a man who could not have written his own big, fat book on the CIA without agency cooperation.
Oswald's being promptly assassinated himself by Jack Ruby, a man associated with the murky world of anti-Castro violence, someone whose past included gun-running to Cuba and enforcer-violence in the Chicago mafia, is a gigantic fact that sticks in the throat of any author. It has never been explained satisfactorily and is not by Bugliosi.
One trouble with all such books is that we have every two decades a new generation of people, most of whom do not know enough about the case to begin to argue with such an exposition. One cannot help but believe that those who prompt the periodic publication of these books have just this fact in mind. Posner is old, stale, and forgotten. This generation gets Bugliosi.
We must always remember Bertrand Russell's profound, unanswered question after he had reviewed an advanced copy of the Warren Report: "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?" Russell's question goes to the heart of the matter, as you would expect from one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century. It has never been answered, and certainly not by Bugliosi.
It must be at least somewhat embarrassing for Bugliosi that Italian authorities recently, near the release of his book, conducted a series of tests with Oswald's ridiculous choice of weapons, a 1940 Mannlicher-Carcano, one of the last rifles in the world a determined assassin would choose. Italian Army sharpshooters could not come close to Oswald's supposed feat of loading the crude bolt-action rifle and firing it three times, let alone hitting anything while doing so.
Moreover, in other tests conducted by the Italian Army using animal parts, it was shown impossible for a bullet to emerge from Kennedy virtually intact as the Warren Commission claimed "the magic bullet" did. One thinks of the lost opportunity in 1993 to discover something new when permission was refused by the widow of the dead John Connally to extract known bullet fragments from his wrist, fragments supposedly from “the magic bullet.” The evidence was buried, literally.
Of course, when we limit ourselves to three times loading and shooting for the rifle, we are already playing the Warren Commission's own game. There were in fact at least four shots as a closely-analyzed recording clearly showed. Recent analysis at Texas A&M University showed that the ballistics evidence used to rule out a second gunman later had been misinterpreted.
The Kennedy assassination and its inadequate investigation and secrecy mark an important turning point in modern American history. Elections are still held, and more groups of people can vote today than over most of the country’s not particularly democratic history, but government in the dark world of international affairs behaves often as though there were no electorate to which it is responsible. This seems a paradox, but if you think about it, you will see its truth.
You don’t have to be an obsessive, conspiracy-minded person to be concerned about the state of affairs in America. Have Americans been told the truth about the CIA’s great failures leading up to 9/11? Have they been told about the abuse of the CIA leading up to the Iraqi invasion, including what really happened in the Plame affair? Have Americans been told the truth about 9/11 itself, including the virtual certainty that the fourth flight over Pennsylvania was shot down by the military? Have Americans been told the simple truth about the invasion of Iraq? Have all the lies that were told, including rubbish about terror and weapons of mass destruction, been corrected? Have they learned how many Iraqis their government has killed and crippled?
No, not at all, not any more than they have been told who killed Kennedy and why.
So how is this great democracy different in the dark business of international affairs compared to the autocrats with whom it so often allies itself? Not at all.
NOTE: PLEASE ALSO SEE MY LATER COMMENT ON AN IMPORTANT NEW PIECE OF INFORMATION, BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT WE HAVE RECEIVED AS IT CONTAINS OUR FIRST BITS OF TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION FROM A GOVERNMENT SOURCE:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/
This year marks the forty-fourth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. What is most remarkable about this is the stunningly simple fact that, despite innumerable books and several official investigations, we still do not know what happened in 1963.
Not understanding what happened is no mere curiosity of history. It tells us something profound about the nature of government in America today, all of it running against the received notion of a free and open society.
I might not say that were the assassination a simple, straightforward matter that had occurred with few witnesses, but it was an event with many witnesses, many of whom were ignored by the Warren Commission with some of the most credible discounted. And it was anything but simple, although the conclusions of the Warren Commission are just that, simple.
At least some of the key parties involved – Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, and David Ferrie, for example – are subjects of voluminous government records about their bizarre or criminal activities, and forty-four years later, parts of these essential records remain secret.
I might not say that about the free and open society also, were there not a long history of government secrecy around the event, and at times deliberate misrepresentation. Yes, there was finally in the 1990s a big opening of files held secret for decades, but these files – at least the parts not blacked-out – tell us little of importance that is new. Indeed, to the thoughtful inquirer they only raise the issue of why most of them were ever considered worthy of being labeled secret in the first place.
Most importantly, though, a good many files still have not been released, a critical point not treated carefully by many writers on the subject. Certain CIA and FBI files on Oswald are key examples.
You must ask yourself, why, if the assassination is just a simple murder by one misfit, has there been so much secrecy? Indeed, why, if it was a simple murder, was the President’s murder not investigated in Dallas, the scene of the crime, instead of from Washington? All the evidence and most witnesses were located in Dallas. Federal agents at the hospital actually drew their guns against local police and officials to seize the President’s body for shipment to Washington, instead of allowing the perfectly normal procedure of the local jurisdiction autopsying the body. Why? Why was the autopsy conducted by the military with military doctors who were rank amateurs at shooting investigations?
There is no such thing as a free and open society where great matters of empire are concerned, and this is something no less true of the United States than any past imperial power. The people are never consulted on imperial matters, whether war, assassination, or overthrowing other governments, and they are, sadly, frequently deliberately misinformed about them, their own resources being used against them, just the latest examples being around the invasion of Iraq.
Although elements of the CIA truly hated Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover would have spat upon his grave given an unobserved opportunity, I do not subscribe, for many reasons, to the idea that an arm of the American government killed Kennedy. It is highly probable that individuals in some government agencies did understand what had happened and worked to blur and confuse the investigation afterwards. I also consider it possible that, owing to these intense hatreds, glimmers of intelligence in advance of the assassination were deliberately ignored or buried. This seems most likely in Hoover’s case.
Motives for hiding any knowledge of events are unknown, but almost certainly they have to do with hiding genuinely embarrassing or compromising information concerning secret operations and relationships. Embarrassment is more often than not, certainly more often than genuine national security, the reason for imposing secrecy in the American government.
Assassinations at this level in a large advanced society are always the result of conspiracies and complex plans, the plans providing for the certainty of success and the safe distancing of conspirators.
There are, I believe, three plausible candidates for organizing the assassination, all quite powerful groups, all selected for their extreme motives, resources, and opportunity.
The first candidate is a branch of the American mafia, a number of whose members had been deeply hurt by the Attorney General’s aggressive organized crime-fighting activities. After all, Kennedy had received handsome secret contributions in cash from the organization when he ran for office. He had also had at least the seeming cooperation of some senior mafia leaders in his efforts to assassinate Castro, and here he was letting his brother conduct a ruthless campaign against the interests of some families. A mafia family leader and the leader of the Teamsters Union at the time, a known mafia associate, are on record as having made threats against Kennedy. Some members of the Congressional investigations came to favor this candidate although they failed to prove it.
The second candidate is one of the many Cuban refugee groups armed, trained, and paid by the CIA in hopes of invading Cuba again, hurting its economy through terrorist activities, and assassinating any of its leaders. Few Americans today appreciate the extent of these government-subsidized terrorist camps then, operations that make Osama’s camp in the mountains look insignificant.
Kennedy was loathed by the most violent of these groups in his last days because he agreed not to invade Cuba as part of his settlement with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. After that pledge, Kennedy had the FBI raiding the operations of some of these previously catered-to groups as a show of good will towards the Soviets. It is in connection with these very raids that Oswald had some not-well-understood but certain connection with the FBI. These refugee groups were ruthless, angry men who didn’t hesitate to kill or cripple those in their way. They had even conducted a number of terrorist attacks in Miami.
The third candidate is Israel, whose secret efforts at developing nuclear weapons were underway at the time and had become known to Kennedy. He made it unpleasantly clear in private communications that he would not allow Israel to go nuclear, something not widely known in America. But the people running Israel considered it essential that the country become a nuclear power, and we have all seen over many decades how Israel has not hesitated to assassinate or attack where it regards its interests are involved.
Just a few years after Kennedy’s assassination, during the Six Day War, Israeli planes made a two-hour attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, a spy ship operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, killing many of its crew. Israel’s motives have never been explained adequately or investigated openly, but likely had to do either with suppressing information of atrocities in the Sinai – the Liberty being an intelligence-gathering ship – or with trying to trick the United States into entering its war against Egypt. In either case, we see ruthlessness compatible with eliminating a hostile, powerful leader.
I don’t claim to know the truth because the truth would require new evidence. And the candidates are not all mutually exclusive. One might well expect the mafia or Mossad to manipulate and use people like the violent Cuban refugees.
Each of these groups had great motives, more than adequate means, and ample opportunity. By comparison, Oswald stands out as a ridiculous figure with no motive, virtually no means, but a seeming opportunity arranged for him by others at the Texas Book Depository. He was, almost certainly, the patsy he said he was in police custody shortly before his death, having been duped by forces he didn’t understand into certain activities that would mark him before the assassination. We have ample evidence of Oswald’s lack of serious interest in things military, his having been pretty much a flop at being a Marine, and of his temperamental inclination in other directions. While he had a temper (who doesn’t?), he was not a violent man, indeed Russian observers who recalled his years in Russia said he was temperamentally incapable of murder.
If you want to understand why the Warren Commission Report is so wrong, just spend some time yourself reading it with a critical eye. You can find an old copy at a used bookstore for a dollar or two. Parts of it are laughable, much of it is fragmentary, and all of it is a prosecutor’s brief. There is no voice for the defense. Our Western traditions of law require the clash of defense and prosecution before a jury can arrive at guilt. There is no other way, although so much of the public is today conditioned by mystery books and television shows where a detective wraps everything up neatly by the end of the book or show.
Perhaps even more importantly, as few younger readers will know, the Warren Commission did no investigation. Its investigative arm was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He personally kept tight control of these investigations day by day. Hoover’s FBI committed many blunders and genuine crimes over the years of his being director, from trying to send Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, back to Germany (he hated Einstein’s free thinking) to carrying out an elaborate plan to discredit Martin Luther King with secretly recorded tapes in the hope he would commit suicide. These great men, and many other notable figures, Hoover privately regarded as dangerous communists.
Hoover more or less blackmailed many members of Congress and several presidents with his secret files obtained by spying on their private lives. After his death these files were whisked away never to be seen again. As I said, Hoover hated the Kennedy brothers, surely giving him a total lack of impartiality as an investigator. Hoover, too, spent many days at resorts and racetracks over his career paid for by mafia figures he should have been investigating. Communism, even though it never had any large presence in the United States, was always Hoover’s obsession, and Oswald had the (false) reputation of being a communist. It was not a promising arrangement for the Warren Commission from the beginning, and the poor results show.
With a few special exceptions of genuine investigative journalism and analysis, there are two general categories of books about the Kennedy assassination, both biased in their information. There are the various “theory” books which do not accept the Warren Commission and attempt to promote some particular theory of the crime based on (necessarily) incomplete evidence. Examples of these include a book on Hoover himself as suspect, one on the Secret Service having an accident with automatic weapons, and a number on various CIA figures such as Howard Hunt.
Some of these “theory” books suggest almost paranoid fantasies and have given Kennedy assassination books a bad name in general, making easy targets for those wishing to support the Warren Commission. But we must not conflate honest skepticism and lack of belief in the Warren Commission with the theories of people who promote specific concepts of how things were done. This is a trick, conflating honest doubt with unsubstantiated or far-out theories, used over and over again by those promoting our second category of Kennedy assassination books.
The second category includes books that work towards showing the Warren Commission was right, at least in its major conclusions, attempting to restate old material in new words, neglecting to tell readers clearly that they have no new evidence of any great significance with which to work their glib magic. There is an equally long series of these with some of the notable ones along the way being Edward Epstein, Gerald Posner, and, very recently, Vincent Buglosi.
In general, if you go back to examine press reviews at the time of the release of each of these books, you will find a large consensus buzz in the mainstream press about how we finally have the case resolved. That very statement has been made time and time again. This was almost embarrassingly true of Gerald Posner’s book some years ago, a book that added nothing of consequence to our understanding of the crime but used aggressive new language to restate old stuff. It is now being said of Vincent Bugliosi.
People impressed by big fat books will be impressed by Vincent Bugliosi’s recent book on the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, but in a sense its very size is a judgment against it. It is no great feat for an experienced court prosecutor to churn out a voluminous document. They do it all the time in their court briefs, taking pages of legalese to say what should take paragraphs of good, clear English.
It is fitting in more than one way that Bugliosi is a prosecutor, for his book is a prosecutor's brief, just a fatter one than the ones produced by Bugliosi's predecessors.
But size here serves another purpose, what I would call intimidation. How could you possibly argue with this massive pile (1,600 pages) of evidence and argument? The truth is that it is not hard at all to argue with it.
Bugliosi follows his predecessors who used pretty much the same evidence to reach the same conclusions which any independent-minded student of the assassination understands is impossible, that is, that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. Bugliosi had no new evidence of any significance with which to work. He simply looks at the same old stuff ad nauseam, coming up here and there with prosecution tricks to make old stuff seem fresh or different.
But a key fact of the assassination is that the existing evidence is not adequate to convict anyone, and certainly not Oswald. There is, of course, other evidence in existence which has never been released. The CIA and the FBI have files they have never opened.
We know this from many bits of evidence, including references in documents we do have and from situations about which we can positively conclude evidence must exist by the nature of things. A good example of the last is the CIA surveillance photos and recordings of Oswald, or someone pretending to be Oswald, in Mexico City. An obviously incorrect photo was released and the claim was made recordings were erased.
Oswald's connections with the FBI have never been satisfactorily examined. There are many circumstances suggesting his being a paid informant for the FBI, especially during his time in New Orleans. A letter Oswald wrote to a Dallas agent just before the assassination was deliberately and recklessly destroyed by order of the office's senior agent immediately after the assassination with no reasonable explanation.
Oswald had no motive for killing Kennedy, having expressed admiration for the President. Bugliosi cannot get around this fact, only pursuing the typical path of all his forerunners in attacking Oswald's character. There has been another series of books over the years, pretending to be biographies of Oswald but only serving to attack his character, giving assassination writers material to cite. These include works by writers who clearly had CIA connections: notably Priscilla Johnson, someone all students of the assassination know was conveniently in Moscow when Oswald was there, and the late Norman Mailer, a man who could not have written his own big, fat book on the CIA without agency cooperation.
Oswald's being promptly assassinated himself by Jack Ruby, a man associated with the murky world of anti-Castro violence, someone whose past included gun-running to Cuba and enforcer-violence in the Chicago mafia, is a gigantic fact that sticks in the throat of any author. It has never been explained satisfactorily and is not by Bugliosi.
One trouble with all such books is that we have every two decades a new generation of people, most of whom do not know enough about the case to begin to argue with such an exposition. One cannot help but believe that those who prompt the periodic publication of these books have just this fact in mind. Posner is old, stale, and forgotten. This generation gets Bugliosi.
We must always remember Bertrand Russell's profound, unanswered question after he had reviewed an advanced copy of the Warren Report: "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?" Russell's question goes to the heart of the matter, as you would expect from one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century. It has never been answered, and certainly not by Bugliosi.
It must be at least somewhat embarrassing for Bugliosi that Italian authorities recently, near the release of his book, conducted a series of tests with Oswald's ridiculous choice of weapons, a 1940 Mannlicher-Carcano, one of the last rifles in the world a determined assassin would choose. Italian Army sharpshooters could not come close to Oswald's supposed feat of loading the crude bolt-action rifle and firing it three times, let alone hitting anything while doing so.
Moreover, in other tests conducted by the Italian Army using animal parts, it was shown impossible for a bullet to emerge from Kennedy virtually intact as the Warren Commission claimed "the magic bullet" did. One thinks of the lost opportunity in 1993 to discover something new when permission was refused by the widow of the dead John Connally to extract known bullet fragments from his wrist, fragments supposedly from “the magic bullet.” The evidence was buried, literally.
Of course, when we limit ourselves to three times loading and shooting for the rifle, we are already playing the Warren Commission's own game. There were in fact at least four shots as a closely-analyzed recording clearly showed. Recent analysis at Texas A&M University showed that the ballistics evidence used to rule out a second gunman later had been misinterpreted.
The Kennedy assassination and its inadequate investigation and secrecy mark an important turning point in modern American history. Elections are still held, and more groups of people can vote today than over most of the country’s not particularly democratic history, but government in the dark world of international affairs behaves often as though there were no electorate to which it is responsible. This seems a paradox, but if you think about it, you will see its truth.
You don’t have to be an obsessive, conspiracy-minded person to be concerned about the state of affairs in America. Have Americans been told the truth about the CIA’s great failures leading up to 9/11? Have they been told about the abuse of the CIA leading up to the Iraqi invasion, including what really happened in the Plame affair? Have Americans been told the truth about 9/11 itself, including the virtual certainty that the fourth flight over Pennsylvania was shot down by the military? Have Americans been told the simple truth about the invasion of Iraq? Have all the lies that were told, including rubbish about terror and weapons of mass destruction, been corrected? Have they learned how many Iraqis their government has killed and crippled?
No, not at all, not any more than they have been told who killed Kennedy and why.
So how is this great democracy different in the dark business of international affairs compared to the autocrats with whom it so often allies itself? Not at all.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
NIGHTMARES OF AMERICAN MEDICAL CARE
July 29, 2007
NIGHTMARES OF AMERICAN MEDICAL CARE
With the release of Michael Moore‘s new film, Sicko, it seems appropriate to offer a summary view of American healthcare. Many Americans remain unaware of the regime under which they live, until hit by illness or accident. Canadians, debating needed improvements for their system, often argue with little understanding of the bizarre realities of America’s.
As someone who has lived roughly half my life in the United States and half in Canada, and as an economist by profession, I think I can provide a vivid sketch of American healthcare.
There actually is no system.
There is private health insurance for most middle-class people, and the tradition, not a requirement, is that this is paid by your employer as an employee benefit.
Since there are about 1,500 insurance companies looking for this business, the nature and quality of the policies vary immensely.
For a privileged cut of the population - those working for the government and large corporations and legislators - the benefits are very good, and they get excellent medical care.
As you may imagine, the quality and quantity of the benefits goes down as you move down the prestige scale. For a more typical office worker, there will usually be many limits on the policy. Examples: an annual $1500 deductible; a 15-20% deductible for each procedure; and, in some cases, coverage that is as low as 60% of costs.
This is why health care is the single largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Inflation in fees and costs by the health-providing industry means that a single-day as an outpatient with some relatively minor procedure - has a full cost on the order of $7,000 when all the bills are in.
I say 'when all the bills are in' because the patient for weeks after the procedure will receive bills: from each doctor, from the anesthetist, from the hospital, from laboratories, from the ambulance company, etc. There will be items on your bill, on a long computer list, like $150 for the use of a scissors or $10 for some aspirins in a cup.
Under some insurance policies, you pay and are later reimbursed. This can still cause a cash crunch where the bills are high. Under other policies, the bill you receive will be for the residual after separate billing to your insurance.
In any case, if you do not pay the balance fairly promptly, your file will be turned over to a collection agency who will then hound you daily for the money.
There are invariably disagreements with the insurance company over specifics. You usually have an 800-number where you will often wait a long time to talk to call center about the issue. Because of the complexity of the terms of a given policy, you will have to be well-informed even to discuss your point.
On some policies, even pretty decent ones, you are required to call an 800-number before going to the emergency room to get the insurance companies permission for what you are doing. Otherwise, you will pay the emergency-room bill yourself.
But even for pretty good insurances, typically policies have lifetime limits on benefits. If you are struck with something really seriously expensive, you will reach the end of your benefits.
Note the fact that very good to excellent coverage for upper-middle class and government people effectively silences those who would be active in changing the system.
This is a key reason why the healthcare chaos never becomes a burning political issue. It also provides a lever to be used if someone, as the Clintons did, wants to reform things. Upper middle-class people were directly appealed to, being told in a barrage of ads that the excellent level of their care would be reduced, a very effective ploy.
For many of the privately insured however, benefits range from mediocre to terrible. America has more than forty million with no benefits, but a statistic never given, and more important, is the huge number of under-insured.
Note that you can approach some companies to buy your own insurance if your employer provides none. Because you are not part of pool in these circumstances, your fees will be very high. The benefits are also likely to be poor to mediocre.
The industrial sector of the U.S. has badly declined for decades, and with its decline the opportunity for decent, employer-paid insurance for most working people. The growth sector of the economy is services, and these places typically offer poor or no insurance. Of course, many of these are the infamous McJobs.
People in non-union factory or middling office jobs or much of the service industry get benefits so limited that a serious event can throw them into bankruptcy. This is how the policies, where they are available, are priced low enough for such employers to afford.
There are many other disturbing elements in this national healthcare chaos.
For example, your private health records are in the hands of private insurance companies, and this is marketing information in which they trade for profit.
It is possible for your private health-care information to disqualify you from employment somewhere else.
People with better policies hang desperately on to their jobs for fear of losing coverage in middle-age, just when you most need it.
Morality enters American health care, as some private companies will not cover procedures such as abortion.
You may have a policy with which you are quite satisfied, but for some reason, usually cost-cutting, your employer may change insurers suddenly. You will be faced with a whole new set of qualifiers, requirements, 800-numbers, deductibles, and limits. And this can happen a number of times in your career, and it is very unsettling.
Companies deeply concerned about costs will gradually work their way down from excellent policies to mediocre ones. You must adjust accordingly.
There are hundreds off details not possible to cover outside of a major essay. As an example, not many years ago, if you lost your job, you, in most cases, immediately lost your insurance. Too bad if you or your child had chronic needs. Now, there is a time-limited bridging mechanism - for which you must apply, fill out forms, and pay – that allows you to be insured until you secure your new job with new insurance.
The chaos includes often-impoverished county hospital emergency wards for the really poor. These will still try getting some degree of payment out of you according to your means. In general, the care in such places is poor. There is the Veterans’ Administration system for qualified ex-soldiers. There is Medicare for retired Americans, a system whose benefits are completely inadequate to modern needs. If you retire without a supplemental insurance – either paid by your past employer in a good job or by yourself in other cases - you may face serious problems.
There is the Medicaid system for poor Americans. It is an extremely complex system, and the extent and nature of benefits vary considerably from state to state. If you move from one state to another you can lose coverage for the services you were using before. Again, depending on the state, you may be required to make co-payments for services. You really do have to be needy to qualify for benefits, and your means are examined in detail. For some Medicaid services, officials are entitled to recover expenses from a beneficiary’s estate.
Private hospitals in the U.S. – generally the best but not always – are in various jurisdictions required to take a certain quota of non-insured patients. This quota is never generous. The cost of this effectively gets dumped onto the insured, increasing the cost of insurance.
This also leads to some bizarre results. Suppose you are an uninsured person picked up on the street by an ambulance after an accident. The ambulance will be calling ahead to the nearest hospital to see whether they can take another uninsured. If the answer is no, another hospital is called. This continues until there is a taker, however, by that time, you may expire in the ambulance, a not uncommon event.
Imagine the horrors as an uninsured person, whether a citizen or a visitor from abroad, of getting mugged in the United States? First, there is the horror of the mugging or rape or assault, and then the horrors of dealing with the Medical Kremlin.
This brief review gives you a realistic sketch of healthcare in America. If you are young and healthy, you need not be overly concerned. Of course, it is precisely the pool of young and healthy people that insurers love, because their employers pay but the employees don’t use many benefits. That is why institutions like the high-tech industry or huge multi-national corporations have such good policies. They get used comparatively little.
The entire ‘system’ segments the population into many different pools, from low risk with excellent benefits to high risk with terrible benefits. It truly is medical Social Darwinism, organized by lawyers and financiers.
An important after-thought.
The United States has about the highest rate of infant mortality of any country in the advanced world.
Average life expectancy - average for the population, not just for the privileged like Rudy - in the United States is significantly lower than in a place like Canada with a public healthcare system.
These two facts often surprise people who do not know the United States well, always thinking of it as the richest place with the biggest and best of everything. Simply not true.
NIGHTMARES OF AMERICAN MEDICAL CARE
With the release of Michael Moore‘s new film, Sicko, it seems appropriate to offer a summary view of American healthcare. Many Americans remain unaware of the regime under which they live, until hit by illness or accident. Canadians, debating needed improvements for their system, often argue with little understanding of the bizarre realities of America’s.
As someone who has lived roughly half my life in the United States and half in Canada, and as an economist by profession, I think I can provide a vivid sketch of American healthcare.
There actually is no system.
There is private health insurance for most middle-class people, and the tradition, not a requirement, is that this is paid by your employer as an employee benefit.
Since there are about 1,500 insurance companies looking for this business, the nature and quality of the policies vary immensely.
For a privileged cut of the population - those working for the government and large corporations and legislators - the benefits are very good, and they get excellent medical care.
As you may imagine, the quality and quantity of the benefits goes down as you move down the prestige scale. For a more typical office worker, there will usually be many limits on the policy. Examples: an annual $1500 deductible; a 15-20% deductible for each procedure; and, in some cases, coverage that is as low as 60% of costs.
This is why health care is the single largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Inflation in fees and costs by the health-providing industry means that a single-day as an outpatient with some relatively minor procedure - has a full cost on the order of $7,000 when all the bills are in.
I say 'when all the bills are in' because the patient for weeks after the procedure will receive bills: from each doctor, from the anesthetist, from the hospital, from laboratories, from the ambulance company, etc. There will be items on your bill, on a long computer list, like $150 for the use of a scissors or $10 for some aspirins in a cup.
Under some insurance policies, you pay and are later reimbursed. This can still cause a cash crunch where the bills are high. Under other policies, the bill you receive will be for the residual after separate billing to your insurance.
In any case, if you do not pay the balance fairly promptly, your file will be turned over to a collection agency who will then hound you daily for the money.
There are invariably disagreements with the insurance company over specifics. You usually have an 800-number where you will often wait a long time to talk to call center about the issue. Because of the complexity of the terms of a given policy, you will have to be well-informed even to discuss your point.
On some policies, even pretty decent ones, you are required to call an 800-number before going to the emergency room to get the insurance companies permission for what you are doing. Otherwise, you will pay the emergency-room bill yourself.
But even for pretty good insurances, typically policies have lifetime limits on benefits. If you are struck with something really seriously expensive, you will reach the end of your benefits.
Note the fact that very good to excellent coverage for upper-middle class and government people effectively silences those who would be active in changing the system.
This is a key reason why the healthcare chaos never becomes a burning political issue. It also provides a lever to be used if someone, as the Clintons did, wants to reform things. Upper middle-class people were directly appealed to, being told in a barrage of ads that the excellent level of their care would be reduced, a very effective ploy.
For many of the privately insured however, benefits range from mediocre to terrible. America has more than forty million with no benefits, but a statistic never given, and more important, is the huge number of under-insured.
Note that you can approach some companies to buy your own insurance if your employer provides none. Because you are not part of pool in these circumstances, your fees will be very high. The benefits are also likely to be poor to mediocre.
The industrial sector of the U.S. has badly declined for decades, and with its decline the opportunity for decent, employer-paid insurance for most working people. The growth sector of the economy is services, and these places typically offer poor or no insurance. Of course, many of these are the infamous McJobs.
People in non-union factory or middling office jobs or much of the service industry get benefits so limited that a serious event can throw them into bankruptcy. This is how the policies, where they are available, are priced low enough for such employers to afford.
There are many other disturbing elements in this national healthcare chaos.
For example, your private health records are in the hands of private insurance companies, and this is marketing information in which they trade for profit.
It is possible for your private health-care information to disqualify you from employment somewhere else.
People with better policies hang desperately on to their jobs for fear of losing coverage in middle-age, just when you most need it.
Morality enters American health care, as some private companies will not cover procedures such as abortion.
You may have a policy with which you are quite satisfied, but for some reason, usually cost-cutting, your employer may change insurers suddenly. You will be faced with a whole new set of qualifiers, requirements, 800-numbers, deductibles, and limits. And this can happen a number of times in your career, and it is very unsettling.
Companies deeply concerned about costs will gradually work their way down from excellent policies to mediocre ones. You must adjust accordingly.
There are hundreds off details not possible to cover outside of a major essay. As an example, not many years ago, if you lost your job, you, in most cases, immediately lost your insurance. Too bad if you or your child had chronic needs. Now, there is a time-limited bridging mechanism - for which you must apply, fill out forms, and pay – that allows you to be insured until you secure your new job with new insurance.
The chaos includes often-impoverished county hospital emergency wards for the really poor. These will still try getting some degree of payment out of you according to your means. In general, the care in such places is poor. There is the Veterans’ Administration system for qualified ex-soldiers. There is Medicare for retired Americans, a system whose benefits are completely inadequate to modern needs. If you retire without a supplemental insurance – either paid by your past employer in a good job or by yourself in other cases - you may face serious problems.
There is the Medicaid system for poor Americans. It is an extremely complex system, and the extent and nature of benefits vary considerably from state to state. If you move from one state to another you can lose coverage for the services you were using before. Again, depending on the state, you may be required to make co-payments for services. You really do have to be needy to qualify for benefits, and your means are examined in detail. For some Medicaid services, officials are entitled to recover expenses from a beneficiary’s estate.
Private hospitals in the U.S. – generally the best but not always – are in various jurisdictions required to take a certain quota of non-insured patients. This quota is never generous. The cost of this effectively gets dumped onto the insured, increasing the cost of insurance.
This also leads to some bizarre results. Suppose you are an uninsured person picked up on the street by an ambulance after an accident. The ambulance will be calling ahead to the nearest hospital to see whether they can take another uninsured. If the answer is no, another hospital is called. This continues until there is a taker, however, by that time, you may expire in the ambulance, a not uncommon event.
Imagine the horrors as an uninsured person, whether a citizen or a visitor from abroad, of getting mugged in the United States? First, there is the horror of the mugging or rape or assault, and then the horrors of dealing with the Medical Kremlin.
This brief review gives you a realistic sketch of healthcare in America. If you are young and healthy, you need not be overly concerned. Of course, it is precisely the pool of young and healthy people that insurers love, because their employers pay but the employees don’t use many benefits. That is why institutions like the high-tech industry or huge multi-national corporations have such good policies. They get used comparatively little.
The entire ‘system’ segments the population into many different pools, from low risk with excellent benefits to high risk with terrible benefits. It truly is medical Social Darwinism, organized by lawyers and financiers.
An important after-thought.
The United States has about the highest rate of infant mortality of any country in the advanced world.
Average life expectancy - average for the population, not just for the privileged like Rudy - in the United States is significantly lower than in a place like Canada with a public healthcare system.
These two facts often surprise people who do not know the United States well, always thinking of it as the richest place with the biggest and best of everything. Simply not true.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
HOW TERROR HAS LOST ITS MEANING
July 12, 2007
HOW TERROR HAS LOST ITS MEANING
Why does terror dominate our headlines and the attention of our governments going on six years after 9/11? The answer cannot be what George Bush says that it is: it is not the fault of people who hate democracy and freedom.
We know this for a great many reasons. One of the world’s oldest terrorist organizations, the IRA, had no interest in British government and society. It was interested only in being free of their control.
We know Bush is wrong also because the people who genuinely hate democracy and freedom - the world’s oligarchs, dictators, and strongmen - are people who hate terror themselves because it threatens their security.
Strong absolute states have no tolerance for terror. The Soviet Union never had a serious problem with terror, neither did East Germany, nor did Hussein’s Iraq.
Absolute states are also frequently supported by, or allied to, the United States, presumably for reasons other than promoting terror. We don’t need to go into the long history of the Cold War to find this. It remains true following 9/11. Contemporary examples include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt.
Bush is wrong, too, because all evidence, whether from polls or interviews or writing, shows that people living in lands without democracy overwhelmingly would embrace freedom were it available to them.
Of course, all such generalizations are statistical in nature. That is, they are about trends or tendencies that reasonably describe the overwhelming bulk of specific examples. There are always exceptions, extreme examples, what statisticians call outliers, but you cannot talk about any subject sensibly when you talk about only exceptions.
We also know, despite truckloads of publicity saying otherwise, that terror is not by any measure one of the world’s great problems. The number of people killed in the World Trade Center, the largest terrorist attack by far, was less than one month’s carnage on America’s highways. It was equivalent of about two months of America’s murdering Americans on the nation’s streets.
Terror is intended to frighten and intimidate people, its secrecy and methods calculated to make deaths, even a small number of them, more shocking than everyday deaths. But if we look at societies that have undergone horrors beyond most people’s ability to imagine, horrors greater than any modern terror, we find something very interesting.
Life in London carried on during the Blitz. Germany maintained a huge armaments production despite thousand-plane raids day and night. The people of Leningrad, despite 800,000 deaths from being shelled and starved during the German siege, managed to carry on a kind of society. People in Sarajevo made do through a long and agonizing terror. Even the seemingly-hopeless inmates of death camps often made remarkable efforts to maintain some semblance of normality.
Perhaps the greatest terror experience in modern history was American carpet-bombing in Vietnam. We know from Vietnamese war veterans that these were their most feared events. They were horrific, and the United States left Vietnam having killed something like 3 million people, mostly civilians. But it did leave, and the people it bombed so horribly won a terrible war.
Now all of these experiences, plus many more we could cite, have the elements of randomness for victims and methods that just could not be much more horrible. They all are experiences in terror in the broadest sense. What they tell us is that terror does not work, despite its ability to make people miserable.
I like the anecdote that following the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima, within weeks, wild flowers were spotted growing in the cracks of the pavement. I very much like to think of that as representing the human spirit.
Terror as we traditionally think of it is a method of redress or vengeance for those without great armies or powerful weapons, those at a great disadvantage vis-à-vis some powerful oppressor or opponent. Generally the grievances behind terrorist acts are reasonable demands that have been ignored or have even been suppressed for long periods of time.
Although sometimes, they are unreasonable demands, but in this they are no different than the grievances that often lead to wars or invasions or occupations by powerful states.
Terror generally kills innocent people, something no decent-minded person can accept, but what is always forgotten in the press and government treatment of terror as something alien and unimaginably bad is that war in the contemporary world does precisely the same thing.
We have a powerful trend over the last century shifting the victims of war from armed forces to civilians. In World War I, there were many civilian deaths, but most of went on at the front was the killing of soldiers. By the time of Vietnam, and even more so Iraq, literally most of the deaths are civilians, overwhelmingly so. The fire-bombing and nuclear-bombing of cities during World War II marked the first great shift, returning military operations effectively to the world Before the Common Era when sacking and raping cities was ordinary.
Why has this happened? The chief reason is increasingly destructive weapons capable of being used from a great distance. Those pressing the buttons not only don’t see what they are doing in any detail, but the damage of which they are capable increases every year. A single plane today can drop enough munitions to destroy utterly a small town. In 1917, a plane could carry enough munitions to destroy a small house, if the pilot were lucky about air currents and other variables.
America makes claims about using ‘smart’ weapons, but these claims are highly deceptive. First, smart weapons are costly, and most bombs dropped are still ‘dumb’
ones. The percentage used in the first Gulf War, a time when there were many press conferences glorifying precision weapons, was on the order of five percent smart weapons.
Second, smart weapons require excellent intelligence, something you cannot have under many circumstances. The infamous bomb-shelter event in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, which incinerated four hundred civilians in an instant, happened because American officials thought there were party officials hiding there, but they were wrong.
Third, even with intelligence, decisions are made which are poor ones. The Baghdad bomb shelter is an example here, too. Even were there some party officials there, killing nearly four hundred others to get them was the kind of savage decision Israel so often makes to its shame.
Fourth, smart weapons do make mistakes with chips or programming or flight controls that are faulty.
Fifth, the better the weapons get, the more the temptation to use them, and the more they will be misused by poor judgment and poor intelligence.
There is no prospect in our lifetime that so-called precision weapons can change the tendency towards killing civilians rather than soldiers.
Terrible weapons are under constant research efforts at ‘improvement.’ The United States has developed gigantic flammable-liquid bombs, the size and weight of trucks. It is busy developing compact nuclear warheads that are, in the view of the kind of people associated with George Bush, both useable and practical.
The problem with modern weapons is not only their great power and complete removal of users from ghastly results, it is their capacity to alter the psychology and morality of those possessing them.
Where great power exists, it tends to be used, sooner or later. This intuitive idea was part of the reason in the eighteenth century for opposing large standing armies. Expert historians have attributed at least part of the cause of World War I to huge standing armies and a ferocious arms race.
It is hard to think of a horrible weapon that has not been used fairly soon after its development: the flame thrower, poison gas, germ warfare, machine guns, landmines, cluster bombs, napalm, and nuclear weapons.
Imagine the psychology of politicians and war planners in Washington, sitting in air-conditioned offices, perhaps just returned from expense-account lunches, discussing developments in, say, Iraq. They don’t see or hear or smell the misery of a people without sanitation or electricity – these having been deliberately destroyed by the United States in the previous Gulf War and never repaired. These planners, looking at charts on their expensive laptops, only know from certain graphs that they have what they see as a problem and that they have the ability to reduce it or make it go away, almost like wishing away something you don’t like.
The solution comes down to such pragmatic considerations as to whether Tomahawks or B-52s or a wing of fighter-bombers will best meet the ‘need,’ and perhaps the availability of each, and perhaps even comparative benefit-cost ratios (kills per buck), also charted on their laptops.
If this isn’t the banality of evil, I don’t know what is. And when the planners decide which weapon or combination of weapons will best alter the graph, the orders go out, the buttons are pressed, and no one but the poor half-starved people living in dust and squalor have any idea of what actually happens, which people in the neighborhood have their bodies torn apart or incinerated, which houses are destroyed, which children mutilated. The people who carry out these acts see only puffs of distant smoke.
This is modern war as practiced by an advanced society.
On a smaller scale than Iraq, we’ve all read the endless reports of Israeli incursions and assassinations: an entire family wiped out on a beach by distant shelling, an apartment building full of families hit by a missile intended for one resident, pedestrians cut into pieces as a missile hits a targeted car on a crowded street. All of it is put down to stopping terror, all of it is done from a safe distance, all of it kills mainly civilians, and all of it is indistinguishable from terror.
If challenged today for a definition of terror, I doubt anyone could produce a sound one that limits the meaning to the acts of those constantly in our headlines. Rather those acts are now reduced to special cases of something a great deal larger.
Which was the more ghastly act of terror, 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq? 9/11 killed about 3,000 people and destroyed a building. The invasion of Iraq killed more than 600,000, destroyed the irreplaceable records and artefacts of an ancient civilization, and left a nation of more than 20 million desperate for work, clean water, and electricity. And it should be stressed that although 9/11 came first, there were no connections between these events, except that the one was used as an excuse for the other.
When we hear the word terror in the news, we are conditioned to think that only civilians have died, but how is it different now for news of an attack by American forces or a reprisal raid from the Israeli army? It isn’t. We know immediately that civilians die every single time. Indeed, what we often do not know is whether any “bad guys” were killed.
HOW TERROR HAS LOST ITS MEANING
Why does terror dominate our headlines and the attention of our governments going on six years after 9/11? The answer cannot be what George Bush says that it is: it is not the fault of people who hate democracy and freedom.
We know this for a great many reasons. One of the world’s oldest terrorist organizations, the IRA, had no interest in British government and society. It was interested only in being free of their control.
We know Bush is wrong also because the people who genuinely hate democracy and freedom - the world’s oligarchs, dictators, and strongmen - are people who hate terror themselves because it threatens their security.
Strong absolute states have no tolerance for terror. The Soviet Union never had a serious problem with terror, neither did East Germany, nor did Hussein’s Iraq.
Absolute states are also frequently supported by, or allied to, the United States, presumably for reasons other than promoting terror. We don’t need to go into the long history of the Cold War to find this. It remains true following 9/11. Contemporary examples include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt.
Bush is wrong, too, because all evidence, whether from polls or interviews or writing, shows that people living in lands without democracy overwhelmingly would embrace freedom were it available to them.
Of course, all such generalizations are statistical in nature. That is, they are about trends or tendencies that reasonably describe the overwhelming bulk of specific examples. There are always exceptions, extreme examples, what statisticians call outliers, but you cannot talk about any subject sensibly when you talk about only exceptions.
We also know, despite truckloads of publicity saying otherwise, that terror is not by any measure one of the world’s great problems. The number of people killed in the World Trade Center, the largest terrorist attack by far, was less than one month’s carnage on America’s highways. It was equivalent of about two months of America’s murdering Americans on the nation’s streets.
Terror is intended to frighten and intimidate people, its secrecy and methods calculated to make deaths, even a small number of them, more shocking than everyday deaths. But if we look at societies that have undergone horrors beyond most people’s ability to imagine, horrors greater than any modern terror, we find something very interesting.
Life in London carried on during the Blitz. Germany maintained a huge armaments production despite thousand-plane raids day and night. The people of Leningrad, despite 800,000 deaths from being shelled and starved during the German siege, managed to carry on a kind of society. People in Sarajevo made do through a long and agonizing terror. Even the seemingly-hopeless inmates of death camps often made remarkable efforts to maintain some semblance of normality.
Perhaps the greatest terror experience in modern history was American carpet-bombing in Vietnam. We know from Vietnamese war veterans that these were their most feared events. They were horrific, and the United States left Vietnam having killed something like 3 million people, mostly civilians. But it did leave, and the people it bombed so horribly won a terrible war.
Now all of these experiences, plus many more we could cite, have the elements of randomness for victims and methods that just could not be much more horrible. They all are experiences in terror in the broadest sense. What they tell us is that terror does not work, despite its ability to make people miserable.
I like the anecdote that following the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima, within weeks, wild flowers were spotted growing in the cracks of the pavement. I very much like to think of that as representing the human spirit.
Terror as we traditionally think of it is a method of redress or vengeance for those without great armies or powerful weapons, those at a great disadvantage vis-à-vis some powerful oppressor or opponent. Generally the grievances behind terrorist acts are reasonable demands that have been ignored or have even been suppressed for long periods of time.
Although sometimes, they are unreasonable demands, but in this they are no different than the grievances that often lead to wars or invasions or occupations by powerful states.
Terror generally kills innocent people, something no decent-minded person can accept, but what is always forgotten in the press and government treatment of terror as something alien and unimaginably bad is that war in the contemporary world does precisely the same thing.
We have a powerful trend over the last century shifting the victims of war from armed forces to civilians. In World War I, there were many civilian deaths, but most of went on at the front was the killing of soldiers. By the time of Vietnam, and even more so Iraq, literally most of the deaths are civilians, overwhelmingly so. The fire-bombing and nuclear-bombing of cities during World War II marked the first great shift, returning military operations effectively to the world Before the Common Era when sacking and raping cities was ordinary.
Why has this happened? The chief reason is increasingly destructive weapons capable of being used from a great distance. Those pressing the buttons not only don’t see what they are doing in any detail, but the damage of which they are capable increases every year. A single plane today can drop enough munitions to destroy utterly a small town. In 1917, a plane could carry enough munitions to destroy a small house, if the pilot were lucky about air currents and other variables.
America makes claims about using ‘smart’ weapons, but these claims are highly deceptive. First, smart weapons are costly, and most bombs dropped are still ‘dumb’
ones. The percentage used in the first Gulf War, a time when there were many press conferences glorifying precision weapons, was on the order of five percent smart weapons.
Second, smart weapons require excellent intelligence, something you cannot have under many circumstances. The infamous bomb-shelter event in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, which incinerated four hundred civilians in an instant, happened because American officials thought there were party officials hiding there, but they were wrong.
Third, even with intelligence, decisions are made which are poor ones. The Baghdad bomb shelter is an example here, too. Even were there some party officials there, killing nearly four hundred others to get them was the kind of savage decision Israel so often makes to its shame.
Fourth, smart weapons do make mistakes with chips or programming or flight controls that are faulty.
Fifth, the better the weapons get, the more the temptation to use them, and the more they will be misused by poor judgment and poor intelligence.
There is no prospect in our lifetime that so-called precision weapons can change the tendency towards killing civilians rather than soldiers.
Terrible weapons are under constant research efforts at ‘improvement.’ The United States has developed gigantic flammable-liquid bombs, the size and weight of trucks. It is busy developing compact nuclear warheads that are, in the view of the kind of people associated with George Bush, both useable and practical.
The problem with modern weapons is not only their great power and complete removal of users from ghastly results, it is their capacity to alter the psychology and morality of those possessing them.
Where great power exists, it tends to be used, sooner or later. This intuitive idea was part of the reason in the eighteenth century for opposing large standing armies. Expert historians have attributed at least part of the cause of World War I to huge standing armies and a ferocious arms race.
It is hard to think of a horrible weapon that has not been used fairly soon after its development: the flame thrower, poison gas, germ warfare, machine guns, landmines, cluster bombs, napalm, and nuclear weapons.
Imagine the psychology of politicians and war planners in Washington, sitting in air-conditioned offices, perhaps just returned from expense-account lunches, discussing developments in, say, Iraq. They don’t see or hear or smell the misery of a people without sanitation or electricity – these having been deliberately destroyed by the United States in the previous Gulf War and never repaired. These planners, looking at charts on their expensive laptops, only know from certain graphs that they have what they see as a problem and that they have the ability to reduce it or make it go away, almost like wishing away something you don’t like.
The solution comes down to such pragmatic considerations as to whether Tomahawks or B-52s or a wing of fighter-bombers will best meet the ‘need,’ and perhaps the availability of each, and perhaps even comparative benefit-cost ratios (kills per buck), also charted on their laptops.
If this isn’t the banality of evil, I don’t know what is. And when the planners decide which weapon or combination of weapons will best alter the graph, the orders go out, the buttons are pressed, and no one but the poor half-starved people living in dust and squalor have any idea of what actually happens, which people in the neighborhood have their bodies torn apart or incinerated, which houses are destroyed, which children mutilated. The people who carry out these acts see only puffs of distant smoke.
This is modern war as practiced by an advanced society.
On a smaller scale than Iraq, we’ve all read the endless reports of Israeli incursions and assassinations: an entire family wiped out on a beach by distant shelling, an apartment building full of families hit by a missile intended for one resident, pedestrians cut into pieces as a missile hits a targeted car on a crowded street. All of it is put down to stopping terror, all of it is done from a safe distance, all of it kills mainly civilians, and all of it is indistinguishable from terror.
If challenged today for a definition of terror, I doubt anyone could produce a sound one that limits the meaning to the acts of those constantly in our headlines. Rather those acts are now reduced to special cases of something a great deal larger.
Which was the more ghastly act of terror, 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq? 9/11 killed about 3,000 people and destroyed a building. The invasion of Iraq killed more than 600,000, destroyed the irreplaceable records and artefacts of an ancient civilization, and left a nation of more than 20 million desperate for work, clean water, and electricity. And it should be stressed that although 9/11 came first, there were no connections between these events, except that the one was used as an excuse for the other.
When we hear the word terror in the news, we are conditioned to think that only civilians have died, but how is it different now for news of an attack by American forces or a reprisal raid from the Israeli army? It isn’t. We know immediately that civilians die every single time. Indeed, what we often do not know is whether any “bad guys” were killed.
Monday, June 25, 2007
CHINA'S NEW WEAPONS
June 25, 2007
CHINA’S NEW WEAPONS
This is an excerpt from What's It All About? The Decline of the American Empire by John Chuckman published by Constable & Robinson Ltd, London. Available from Indigo Books, Canada.
In military matters, China has taken America by surprise a number of times recently, and surprises of this nature are not things with which Americans deal well, some portion of America's political establishment becoming irritable and uncomfortable. It is not clear how much of this is based on genuine analysis and how much on the kind of paranoid reaction which characterizes America's attitude towards Arabs since 9/11. There is also the distinct possibility of traces of anti-Asian prejudice which has a long history in America and in its policies. America's paranoid reaction to a number of events in the past - the rise of Japan, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism - reflect an arrogant imperial attitude of expected easy superiority which does not welcome any clouds on the horizon.
China's explosion of a thermonuclear warhead not many years ago that proved through chemical analysis of atmospheric samples to resemble America's best at the time, the W-88 warhead, lead to a McCarthy-like campaign to track down a betrayer of American secrets. Attention focused on a Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos Laboratories, and the New York Times, undoubtedly prompted by the FBI, conducted a terrible campaign of innuendo. The FBI charged the man with a ridiculous number of things, a favorite technique of political police trying to get a plea on something, but the lack of any evidence saw him released with his career ended and his reputation muddied. It seems never to have occurred that China's new army of clever scientists and engineers, always seen going about with the best laptop computers in hand much the way British businessmen in London once all wore derbies and carried umbrellas, might just have developed this technology themselves, or largely so, of course benefiting from the bits and pieces garnered from others that always support new work anywhere.
China has put a number of satellites into orbit, including a manned one, and has a very ambitious space program, including plans for landing people on the moon. The American military sees near-earth space as its most important base for future "projection of power" over the planet, its militarization of space well underway, so China represents a potential challenge not yet felt from India. The huge noise made by Republicans under Clinton's administration over the remote possibility that China may have secretly contributed to an American election gave us a heady whiff of the paranoid fears that reside in some quarters of American society.
Most recently, China launched a vehicle into space designed to destroy a satellite. An obsolete Chinese weather satellite in an orbit about 500 miles above the earth, roughly the same orbit as that occupied by many of America's fleet of spy or global-positioning satellites, was the target for this apparently successful test. The message was clear: China is now capable of destroying the satellites which are now America's eyes for war. The news was especially dramatic coming as it did not long after America's admitting that a powerful Chinese laser, or other directed-energy beam on the ground, had, a while back, swept an American spy satellite over China, temporarily blinding it.
The satellite-killer led to a lot of noisy accusations about China's aggressiveness and its militarizing space, but these claims are quite inaccurate. The United States has been militarizing space for many years, gradually and in many surreptitious ways. The space shuttle program, for example, was always a military one, the shuttles actually being very costly, inefficient vehicles for science, sometimes even leading to delays in the launch of important science projects.
America's fleet of military and spy satellites, many of whose capabilities remain secret, is used actively today as a weapon. Nations friendly to American policy are given priceless data to support their efforts while opponents are left at a serious disadvantage. This was done, as just two examples, in supporting Iraq's invasion of Iran and in supporting Israel's assault on Lebanon - both examples, by any sensible reckoning, of America's using these sophisticated machines not for defense but to support aggression it regarded as being in its own interest at the time.
Perhaps, the clearest militarization of space is America's new anti-missile missile program, a program not just of research but of deploying actual weapons. No matter how ineffective the existing American system is - it has failed many tests, and independent scientists advise us that the computer programming for such a system is truly beyond our existing ability - America's spending new billions on it has to make China and Russia uneasy. The same scientists and other experts warned some years back that a new American "Star Wars" program would start a new weapons race, and they were right. The Russians have already announced the development of a new warhead that spirals unpredictably when heading for its target. It also may put into service a mobile version of its highly-accurate Topple-M intercontinental missile.
China's response includes its ability to destroy spy satellites needed as eyes for such a system plus an increase in the number and quality of its intercontinental missiles. China's DF-31A missile is its first solid-fueled intercontinental missile, meaning it can be fired more quickly than its existing liquid-fueled ones, and it is the first Chinese intercontinental missile that can reach all parts of the United States. It could be made mobile, and a submarine-based version is under development. It should be noted that China's nuclear deterrent until now has been extremely modest, consisting of about two dozen known missiles plus some element of uncertainty as to whether there are in fact a limited number more.
China used the anti-satellite test to get America's attention for negotiations over the anti-missile missile system. They did get American attention, there being a very unpleasant reaction in Washington, but it is not clear that any kind of negotiations will follow. China's immediate offer to negotiate a treaty against the militarization of space was ignored. America's stubbornly-held view of anti-missile defense is that it is part of its overall anti-terrorist efforts, an argument which stretches credibility rather thin, especially in view of plans for basing some of these anti-missile missiles in former Soviet satellite states, plans that are highly confrontational towards Russia. There has also been talk of American anti-missile missiles being placed in Afghanistan, intended for Chinese I.C.B.M.s, again a highly provocative idea, going towards creating uncertainty in China's sense of its nuclear deterrent.
Another recent military surprise from China was the unveiling of the new Jian-10, swept-wing fighter. The project to develop this plane apparently was a closely kept secret, hence the surprise at its appearance. It is the same general type of fighter represented by America's F-16 or the Eurofighter Typhoon or Russia's MIG-29, although its capabilities are not well understood. Whether or not it meets the performance standards of these other front-line, supersonic fighters, the plane represents a remarkable technical and manufacturing achievement by the Chinese, portending also the day when China learns to compete in civil aviation. China's current military philosophy of husbanding its resources for only the kinds of projects best fitting what are deemed its greatest future needs has apparently permitted it to compete in this costly field of high-tech aviation which includes only a small number of nations.
China's new investments in its military are, like so many things about China, heavily criticized by the American establishment. The truth is they represent a small fraction of what the U.S. spends, no matter what accounting you use. Widely accepted, published data put China's military spending at about 10% of America's, although some say it may be about half again more than that through hidden spending. They may be right, but they ignore the reality of a great deal of hidden spending in America, particularly when it comes to so-called black programs, and the unquestioned fact remains that America accounts for fully half of the entire planet's military spending.
China's new spending is to a considerable extent driven by what it sees as American imperial attitudes and behavior. Recall the incident of the American spy plane flying right up against Chinese air space early in Bush's administration and being forced down by the Chinese. This was an extremely provocative act, somewhat resembling the flight of an American U-2 over Russia just days before a scheduled summit between Eisenhower and Khruschev. During the first hours of this recent, smaller crisis, the new Bush administration took a hard-line approach, making no apologies (a Chinese pilot had died bringing the spy plane down) and demanding the plane and its crew be returned immediately. After a while Bush relented, reportedly after his having consulted his much more knowledgeable father, and took a more accommodating approach. China then promptly allowed the crew to be flown home and returned the spy plane, after a bit of time, disassembled in a crate, mimicking a much earlier American exploit, one that undoubtedly had provided many laughs over the years at the Pentagon, when a defecting Soviet pilot landed one of the U.S.S.R.'s most advanced fighters in Japan. No one knows how successful the Chinese were in studying the spy plane's top-secret electronic gear, but generally such machines are destroyed by explosive devices detonated by the crew when crashing or being forced to land. Things can be learned even from demolished mechanisms. Then again, those devices don't always work.
China has not challenged American world leadership, nor has it set it as a goal to be able to do so, but this incident of the spy plane was interesting for a number of reasons, mainly in that it demonstrated China's willingness to confront America behaving aggressively in China's own backyard. Had it come to shooting, China could not have won, but much of the world's public opinion was on China's side in what clearly was reckless American behavior.
Few Americans appreciate the extent to which such high-risk behavior characterized American activity during the Cold War. Intrusive American military over-flights of the Soviet Union in the 1950s were common, indeed Krushchev was irritated and angry over the extent of these flights which Eisenhower observed once would have started a war had the Russians behaved the same way over the territory of the United States. There were also many confrontations with nuclear submarines, including a number of scrapes and collisions owing to close approaches on Soviet boats. Indeed, it has been reported, and there is some evidence from photographs for believing, that the advanced Russian submarine, Kursk, which sank during tests in 2000, sending its crew to a slow death, was the result of a torpedo fired in error by an American commander whose boat was closely observing the Kursk's maneuvers. If so, it might help explain what many regard as a rather kid-gloves approach Bush has taken towards the Russians despite a belligerent history and many differences over policy.
This is an excerpt from What's It All About? The Decline of the American Empire by John Chuckman published by Constable & Robinson Ltd, London. Available from Indigo Books, Canada.
CHINA’S NEW WEAPONS
This is an excerpt from What's It All About? The Decline of the American Empire by John Chuckman published by Constable & Robinson Ltd, London. Available from Indigo Books, Canada.
In military matters, China has taken America by surprise a number of times recently, and surprises of this nature are not things with which Americans deal well, some portion of America's political establishment becoming irritable and uncomfortable. It is not clear how much of this is based on genuine analysis and how much on the kind of paranoid reaction which characterizes America's attitude towards Arabs since 9/11. There is also the distinct possibility of traces of anti-Asian prejudice which has a long history in America and in its policies. America's paranoid reaction to a number of events in the past - the rise of Japan, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism - reflect an arrogant imperial attitude of expected easy superiority which does not welcome any clouds on the horizon.
China's explosion of a thermonuclear warhead not many years ago that proved through chemical analysis of atmospheric samples to resemble America's best at the time, the W-88 warhead, lead to a McCarthy-like campaign to track down a betrayer of American secrets. Attention focused on a Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos Laboratories, and the New York Times, undoubtedly prompted by the FBI, conducted a terrible campaign of innuendo. The FBI charged the man with a ridiculous number of things, a favorite technique of political police trying to get a plea on something, but the lack of any evidence saw him released with his career ended and his reputation muddied. It seems never to have occurred that China's new army of clever scientists and engineers, always seen going about with the best laptop computers in hand much the way British businessmen in London once all wore derbies and carried umbrellas, might just have developed this technology themselves, or largely so, of course benefiting from the bits and pieces garnered from others that always support new work anywhere.
China has put a number of satellites into orbit, including a manned one, and has a very ambitious space program, including plans for landing people on the moon. The American military sees near-earth space as its most important base for future "projection of power" over the planet, its militarization of space well underway, so China represents a potential challenge not yet felt from India. The huge noise made by Republicans under Clinton's administration over the remote possibility that China may have secretly contributed to an American election gave us a heady whiff of the paranoid fears that reside in some quarters of American society.
Most recently, China launched a vehicle into space designed to destroy a satellite. An obsolete Chinese weather satellite in an orbit about 500 miles above the earth, roughly the same orbit as that occupied by many of America's fleet of spy or global-positioning satellites, was the target for this apparently successful test. The message was clear: China is now capable of destroying the satellites which are now America's eyes for war. The news was especially dramatic coming as it did not long after America's admitting that a powerful Chinese laser, or other directed-energy beam on the ground, had, a while back, swept an American spy satellite over China, temporarily blinding it.
The satellite-killer led to a lot of noisy accusations about China's aggressiveness and its militarizing space, but these claims are quite inaccurate. The United States has been militarizing space for many years, gradually and in many surreptitious ways. The space shuttle program, for example, was always a military one, the shuttles actually being very costly, inefficient vehicles for science, sometimes even leading to delays in the launch of important science projects.
America's fleet of military and spy satellites, many of whose capabilities remain secret, is used actively today as a weapon. Nations friendly to American policy are given priceless data to support their efforts while opponents are left at a serious disadvantage. This was done, as just two examples, in supporting Iraq's invasion of Iran and in supporting Israel's assault on Lebanon - both examples, by any sensible reckoning, of America's using these sophisticated machines not for defense but to support aggression it regarded as being in its own interest at the time.
Perhaps, the clearest militarization of space is America's new anti-missile missile program, a program not just of research but of deploying actual weapons. No matter how ineffective the existing American system is - it has failed many tests, and independent scientists advise us that the computer programming for such a system is truly beyond our existing ability - America's spending new billions on it has to make China and Russia uneasy. The same scientists and other experts warned some years back that a new American "Star Wars" program would start a new weapons race, and they were right. The Russians have already announced the development of a new warhead that spirals unpredictably when heading for its target. It also may put into service a mobile version of its highly-accurate Topple-M intercontinental missile.
China's response includes its ability to destroy spy satellites needed as eyes for such a system plus an increase in the number and quality of its intercontinental missiles. China's DF-31A missile is its first solid-fueled intercontinental missile, meaning it can be fired more quickly than its existing liquid-fueled ones, and it is the first Chinese intercontinental missile that can reach all parts of the United States. It could be made mobile, and a submarine-based version is under development. It should be noted that China's nuclear deterrent until now has been extremely modest, consisting of about two dozen known missiles plus some element of uncertainty as to whether there are in fact a limited number more.
China used the anti-satellite test to get America's attention for negotiations over the anti-missile missile system. They did get American attention, there being a very unpleasant reaction in Washington, but it is not clear that any kind of negotiations will follow. China's immediate offer to negotiate a treaty against the militarization of space was ignored. America's stubbornly-held view of anti-missile defense is that it is part of its overall anti-terrorist efforts, an argument which stretches credibility rather thin, especially in view of plans for basing some of these anti-missile missiles in former Soviet satellite states, plans that are highly confrontational towards Russia. There has also been talk of American anti-missile missiles being placed in Afghanistan, intended for Chinese I.C.B.M.s, again a highly provocative idea, going towards creating uncertainty in China's sense of its nuclear deterrent.
Another recent military surprise from China was the unveiling of the new Jian-10, swept-wing fighter. The project to develop this plane apparently was a closely kept secret, hence the surprise at its appearance. It is the same general type of fighter represented by America's F-16 or the Eurofighter Typhoon or Russia's MIG-29, although its capabilities are not well understood. Whether or not it meets the performance standards of these other front-line, supersonic fighters, the plane represents a remarkable technical and manufacturing achievement by the Chinese, portending also the day when China learns to compete in civil aviation. China's current military philosophy of husbanding its resources for only the kinds of projects best fitting what are deemed its greatest future needs has apparently permitted it to compete in this costly field of high-tech aviation which includes only a small number of nations.
China's new investments in its military are, like so many things about China, heavily criticized by the American establishment. The truth is they represent a small fraction of what the U.S. spends, no matter what accounting you use. Widely accepted, published data put China's military spending at about 10% of America's, although some say it may be about half again more than that through hidden spending. They may be right, but they ignore the reality of a great deal of hidden spending in America, particularly when it comes to so-called black programs, and the unquestioned fact remains that America accounts for fully half of the entire planet's military spending.
China's new spending is to a considerable extent driven by what it sees as American imperial attitudes and behavior. Recall the incident of the American spy plane flying right up against Chinese air space early in Bush's administration and being forced down by the Chinese. This was an extremely provocative act, somewhat resembling the flight of an American U-2 over Russia just days before a scheduled summit between Eisenhower and Khruschev. During the first hours of this recent, smaller crisis, the new Bush administration took a hard-line approach, making no apologies (a Chinese pilot had died bringing the spy plane down) and demanding the plane and its crew be returned immediately. After a while Bush relented, reportedly after his having consulted his much more knowledgeable father, and took a more accommodating approach. China then promptly allowed the crew to be flown home and returned the spy plane, after a bit of time, disassembled in a crate, mimicking a much earlier American exploit, one that undoubtedly had provided many laughs over the years at the Pentagon, when a defecting Soviet pilot landed one of the U.S.S.R.'s most advanced fighters in Japan. No one knows how successful the Chinese were in studying the spy plane's top-secret electronic gear, but generally such machines are destroyed by explosive devices detonated by the crew when crashing or being forced to land. Things can be learned even from demolished mechanisms. Then again, those devices don't always work.
China has not challenged American world leadership, nor has it set it as a goal to be able to do so, but this incident of the spy plane was interesting for a number of reasons, mainly in that it demonstrated China's willingness to confront America behaving aggressively in China's own backyard. Had it come to shooting, China could not have won, but much of the world's public opinion was on China's side in what clearly was reckless American behavior.
Few Americans appreciate the extent to which such high-risk behavior characterized American activity during the Cold War. Intrusive American military over-flights of the Soviet Union in the 1950s were common, indeed Krushchev was irritated and angry over the extent of these flights which Eisenhower observed once would have started a war had the Russians behaved the same way over the territory of the United States. There were also many confrontations with nuclear submarines, including a number of scrapes and collisions owing to close approaches on Soviet boats. Indeed, it has been reported, and there is some evidence from photographs for believing, that the advanced Russian submarine, Kursk, which sank during tests in 2000, sending its crew to a slow death, was the result of a torpedo fired in error by an American commander whose boat was closely observing the Kursk's maneuvers. If so, it might help explain what many regard as a rather kid-gloves approach Bush has taken towards the Russians despite a belligerent history and many differences over policy.
This is an excerpt from What's It All About? The Decline of the American Empire by John Chuckman published by Constable & Robinson Ltd, London. Available from Indigo Books, Canada.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
THE LIKELY HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN IRAQ
May 9, 2007
THE LIKELY HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN IRAQ
Names like Haditha, Fallujah, Samarra, and Abu Ghraib are likely destined to become, at least in the Muslim world, iconic symbols for America's bloody adventure in Iraq. This will not so much represent the deliberate selecting of horrors to remember and feature, for America's entire crusade has been a horror, but the impulse to have tough summary images of complex events.
America invaded Iraq for two main reasons. First, it wished to sweep what it regarded as a chronic problem, Hussein's Iraq, off its foreign-affairs plate. Second, it wanted to remove Israel's most implacable opponent.
I would add the personal element, without emphasizing it too much, yet aware that it is important in the backrooms of history, of a man obsessed by a fairly extreme love-hate relationship with his more distinguished father, although some readers may be unaware of the times George Bush had to be stopped from going to fisticuffs with his father or of the flip way he introduced himself years ago to Queen Elizabeth as the family's black sheep. Iraq did seem to offer the magical opportunity to do what his father had avoided doing and for once in his life achieving something big on his own, a psychological force not to be completely discounted.
The invasion was not about oil. It related to oil in that continued future oil revenues promised to keep Hussein going a long time. It also related to oil in that Bush's people aimed to place those resources into hands friendlier to American policy, a straightforward extension of America's general approach to imperial rule: use locals but only the locals friendly to American purposes.
The neo-cons, a narrow group that has enjoyed great influence over Bush, expected, or so they claimed, other desirable side-effects. One was striking fear into the heart of an autocratically-ruled Middle East where resources flowed in opposition to the American policy fixation with Israel. This came to be reflected literally in the rather Hitler-like concept of Shock and Awe.
The neo-cons also proposed that an invasion could spark enthusiasm, in some undefined manner, for democratic government through the region. The desirability of this, at least for neo-cons, is predicated upon the belief that democratic government would in future be more friendly to American policy, a very naïve belief indeed.
One has to believe, for some of the neo-cons are bright people who merely lack judgment and humanity, that the democracy business was a pleasant fairy story because there is no historical record of the United States, and especially its right wing, being a genuine promoter or defender of democracy. Neither is there an historical record anywhere of bombing and strafing people into democracy. The only vaguely realistic interpretation of this notion I can imagine is that democracies can on average be more easily bribed and manipulated, activities in which the CIA engages regularly.
Insincere defenders of democracy behaving as they have in Iraq only succeed in calling into question over much of the developing world, the human-rights values of countries embracing that form of government. When the United States makes its depressingly pompous statements about democracy in the world, it is playing on the near-universal belief that democratic government is associated with positive, humanistic values. But history tells us that that is not necessarily true, and America has only once again demonstrated the fact.
It is now clear, to all but an ever-diminishing circle of Bush devotees and former drinking buddies, that the crusade has been a total failure. Yes, Hussein is gone, but America has achieved the bizarre result of having ordinary Iraqis telling reporters they would be better off were he back.
And they are right. A once prosperous and advancing country, one certain to have become a democracy in not too many more years along the natural path by which all growing countries eventually become democracies, has been torn apart and set back a very long time.
Only a new strongman is likely to hold Iraq together, a conclusion, I'm willing to bet, Bush's people have already reached in secret. But where is that strongman and how do you gracefully insert and support him with all the blubbering about democracy? Otherwise, Iraq is likely to split into three smaller states, full of resentments and eager to compete for foreign military assistance and power. In other words, America has achieved instability over the foreseeable future, something that is hardly in anyone's interest, and certainly not Israel's.
The failure is far greater and more pitiless than most Americans even suspect. A colossal fortune has been spent by Bush and his spineless Congress, and yet much of Iraq still has no dependable water, electricity, or jobs. You simply cannot build any kind of society whatever on that basis.
And the United States cannot continue to spend funds at the level it has spent them for four years, much of the shrink-wrapped pallets of freshly-printed hundred-dollar bills secretly flown-in having gone to corruption, bribery, insane private armies, and subsidizing the fortunes of American firms like Halliburton. This grotesque spending came on top of a balance of payments and general government-deficit spending that seem out of control. The excesses of the American economy have put great strain on the dollar, even raising the serious issue of its future as the world's reserve currency.
Iran's position in the region has been strengthened by the invasion, a matter presumably of considerable concern to Washington, and Shia Muslims, who dominate great swathes of the region and who also are not particularly friendly towards Washington, have been invigorated and strengthened by America's massive strategic blunder.
Terrorism - that pliable word used to describe those with whom you disagree, whose views and interests you utterly ignore, and who are driven to desperate measures because they are at the mercy of superior military power - has never had a better recruiting impetus than America's well-publicized brutality and insensitivity in the occupation. Nor has it ever had a better, more realistic and effective training ground than America's Iraq.
Those learning by doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are gaining priceless experience to share with others, experience one could never have imagined coming from bin Laden's small, isolated cluster of tents in the mountains.
Israel, its bullying hubris rising to new heights under the influence of Bush and his phantom conquests, came to think as perhaps never before that it was free to do whatever it liked. Then, in its pre-planned invasion of Lebanon, feebly excused by the kidnapping of two soldiers who were themselves likely on a questionable mission inside Lebanon, Israel ran into Hezbollah, a Hezbollah strengthened by the example and experience of those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The long-held view of Israel as an unstoppable military force evaporated. Not that Hezbollah came anywhere near to matching Israel's sophisticated weapons or its American intelligence assistance or its capacity to inflict horrific damage quickly, but Hezbollah demonstrated the kind of resistance we associate with Russia's armies stopping the Wehrmacht.
Israel has always wanted part of Southern Lebanon as part of its national territory, and its leaders are on record to that effect, always exploiting the idea of Katysha rockets hitting Northern Israel, most people being unaware that these small rockets are primitive and ineffective unless fired in the huge barrages for which they were designed and that Hezbollah only fires them when Israel violates the Lebanese border, something it has done regularly and secretly for years.
Israel's savage attack on Lebanon - leaving behind 1,500 dead, thousands of homeless and mangled, and a blanket of hideous cluster-bomblets for Lebanon's children and farmers to discover in future - proved as complete a failure as America's crusade in Iraq when viewed on Israel's own terms. I like to think the revulsion of the world's people and especially the stunned reaction within Israel have brought something of a psychological and political turnaround to the region, at least the beginnings of a turnaround.
The world is weary of Israel's relentless refusal to spend anything but words on peace. A sequence of bloody regional failures - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Southern Lebanon - just might set the stage for new a new ordering of priorities and policies. Bush's ignorant pride has been damaged, as has been Israel's, and everyone must look to something new.
And in the United States, the not-to-spoken truth that Israel's grinding injustices and America's tireless efforts to defend them had a great deal to do with 9/11 and many violent events after it may just be sinking in. Important and fair-minded people have written published on the excessive, corrupting influence of Israel on American policy.
The U.S., for the first time in years, has shown interest in talking to Syria and Iran, countries with vital interests in the area, long ignored. Perhaps, it finally means the beginning of the end for the destructive idea of Greater Israel, the beginning of some degree of justice and hope for a people, the Palestinians, long without either. Perhaps it means genuine effort towards peace, rather than the tiresome, ongoing fraud of a "peace process."
I'm hopeful, but not too optimistic. Ignorance, prejudice, the great industry of war, and jingoism are mighty powerful foes.
THE LIKELY HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN IRAQ
Names like Haditha, Fallujah, Samarra, and Abu Ghraib are likely destined to become, at least in the Muslim world, iconic symbols for America's bloody adventure in Iraq. This will not so much represent the deliberate selecting of horrors to remember and feature, for America's entire crusade has been a horror, but the impulse to have tough summary images of complex events.
America invaded Iraq for two main reasons. First, it wished to sweep what it regarded as a chronic problem, Hussein's Iraq, off its foreign-affairs plate. Second, it wanted to remove Israel's most implacable opponent.
I would add the personal element, without emphasizing it too much, yet aware that it is important in the backrooms of history, of a man obsessed by a fairly extreme love-hate relationship with his more distinguished father, although some readers may be unaware of the times George Bush had to be stopped from going to fisticuffs with his father or of the flip way he introduced himself years ago to Queen Elizabeth as the family's black sheep. Iraq did seem to offer the magical opportunity to do what his father had avoided doing and for once in his life achieving something big on his own, a psychological force not to be completely discounted.
The invasion was not about oil. It related to oil in that continued future oil revenues promised to keep Hussein going a long time. It also related to oil in that Bush's people aimed to place those resources into hands friendlier to American policy, a straightforward extension of America's general approach to imperial rule: use locals but only the locals friendly to American purposes.
The neo-cons, a narrow group that has enjoyed great influence over Bush, expected, or so they claimed, other desirable side-effects. One was striking fear into the heart of an autocratically-ruled Middle East where resources flowed in opposition to the American policy fixation with Israel. This came to be reflected literally in the rather Hitler-like concept of Shock and Awe.
The neo-cons also proposed that an invasion could spark enthusiasm, in some undefined manner, for democratic government through the region. The desirability of this, at least for neo-cons, is predicated upon the belief that democratic government would in future be more friendly to American policy, a very naïve belief indeed.
One has to believe, for some of the neo-cons are bright people who merely lack judgment and humanity, that the democracy business was a pleasant fairy story because there is no historical record of the United States, and especially its right wing, being a genuine promoter or defender of democracy. Neither is there an historical record anywhere of bombing and strafing people into democracy. The only vaguely realistic interpretation of this notion I can imagine is that democracies can on average be more easily bribed and manipulated, activities in which the CIA engages regularly.
Insincere defenders of democracy behaving as they have in Iraq only succeed in calling into question over much of the developing world, the human-rights values of countries embracing that form of government. When the United States makes its depressingly pompous statements about democracy in the world, it is playing on the near-universal belief that democratic government is associated with positive, humanistic values. But history tells us that that is not necessarily true, and America has only once again demonstrated the fact.
It is now clear, to all but an ever-diminishing circle of Bush devotees and former drinking buddies, that the crusade has been a total failure. Yes, Hussein is gone, but America has achieved the bizarre result of having ordinary Iraqis telling reporters they would be better off were he back.
And they are right. A once prosperous and advancing country, one certain to have become a democracy in not too many more years along the natural path by which all growing countries eventually become democracies, has been torn apart and set back a very long time.
Only a new strongman is likely to hold Iraq together, a conclusion, I'm willing to bet, Bush's people have already reached in secret. But where is that strongman and how do you gracefully insert and support him with all the blubbering about democracy? Otherwise, Iraq is likely to split into three smaller states, full of resentments and eager to compete for foreign military assistance and power. In other words, America has achieved instability over the foreseeable future, something that is hardly in anyone's interest, and certainly not Israel's.
The failure is far greater and more pitiless than most Americans even suspect. A colossal fortune has been spent by Bush and his spineless Congress, and yet much of Iraq still has no dependable water, electricity, or jobs. You simply cannot build any kind of society whatever on that basis.
And the United States cannot continue to spend funds at the level it has spent them for four years, much of the shrink-wrapped pallets of freshly-printed hundred-dollar bills secretly flown-in having gone to corruption, bribery, insane private armies, and subsidizing the fortunes of American firms like Halliburton. This grotesque spending came on top of a balance of payments and general government-deficit spending that seem out of control. The excesses of the American economy have put great strain on the dollar, even raising the serious issue of its future as the world's reserve currency.
Iran's position in the region has been strengthened by the invasion, a matter presumably of considerable concern to Washington, and Shia Muslims, who dominate great swathes of the region and who also are not particularly friendly towards Washington, have been invigorated and strengthened by America's massive strategic blunder.
Terrorism - that pliable word used to describe those with whom you disagree, whose views and interests you utterly ignore, and who are driven to desperate measures because they are at the mercy of superior military power - has never had a better recruiting impetus than America's well-publicized brutality and insensitivity in the occupation. Nor has it ever had a better, more realistic and effective training ground than America's Iraq.
Those learning by doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are gaining priceless experience to share with others, experience one could never have imagined coming from bin Laden's small, isolated cluster of tents in the mountains.
Israel, its bullying hubris rising to new heights under the influence of Bush and his phantom conquests, came to think as perhaps never before that it was free to do whatever it liked. Then, in its pre-planned invasion of Lebanon, feebly excused by the kidnapping of two soldiers who were themselves likely on a questionable mission inside Lebanon, Israel ran into Hezbollah, a Hezbollah strengthened by the example and experience of those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The long-held view of Israel as an unstoppable military force evaporated. Not that Hezbollah came anywhere near to matching Israel's sophisticated weapons or its American intelligence assistance or its capacity to inflict horrific damage quickly, but Hezbollah demonstrated the kind of resistance we associate with Russia's armies stopping the Wehrmacht.
Israel has always wanted part of Southern Lebanon as part of its national territory, and its leaders are on record to that effect, always exploiting the idea of Katysha rockets hitting Northern Israel, most people being unaware that these small rockets are primitive and ineffective unless fired in the huge barrages for which they were designed and that Hezbollah only fires them when Israel violates the Lebanese border, something it has done regularly and secretly for years.
Israel's savage attack on Lebanon - leaving behind 1,500 dead, thousands of homeless and mangled, and a blanket of hideous cluster-bomblets for Lebanon's children and farmers to discover in future - proved as complete a failure as America's crusade in Iraq when viewed on Israel's own terms. I like to think the revulsion of the world's people and especially the stunned reaction within Israel have brought something of a psychological and political turnaround to the region, at least the beginnings of a turnaround.
The world is weary of Israel's relentless refusal to spend anything but words on peace. A sequence of bloody regional failures - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Southern Lebanon - just might set the stage for new a new ordering of priorities and policies. Bush's ignorant pride has been damaged, as has been Israel's, and everyone must look to something new.
And in the United States, the not-to-spoken truth that Israel's grinding injustices and America's tireless efforts to defend them had a great deal to do with 9/11 and many violent events after it may just be sinking in. Important and fair-minded people have written published on the excessive, corrupting influence of Israel on American policy.
The U.S., for the first time in years, has shown interest in talking to Syria and Iran, countries with vital interests in the area, long ignored. Perhaps, it finally means the beginning of the end for the destructive idea of Greater Israel, the beginning of some degree of justice and hope for a people, the Palestinians, long without either. Perhaps it means genuine effort towards peace, rather than the tiresome, ongoing fraud of a "peace process."
I'm hopeful, but not too optimistic. Ignorance, prejudice, the great industry of war, and jingoism are mighty powerful foes.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
POLITICIANS MAKING FOOLS OF US ALL: THE CASE OF ETHANOL
April 24, 2007
POLITICIANS MAKING FOOLS OF US ALL
The Case of Ethanol as Motor Fuel
Ethanol has always been a poor choice as a fuel, but the scientific and economic considerations behind that statement don't stop politicians from claiming otherwise.
American use of ethanol blended into gasoline actually represents a hidden subsidy to corn farmers, a subsidy on top of other subsidies, because American corn production itself has long been subsidized. The American program, to be expanded now by a leader widely recognized for wisdom and insight, George Bush, subsidizes farmers hurt by the abundance of their own subsidized production.
Subsidies plus the extent of Midwestern farmland suitable for its production are why America produces such an abundance of corn. Its use in motor fuel on any scale started as a way to stretch America's fuel supply in the face of Arab anger over foreign policy.
But it does not really do this. Although numbers naturally change over time, ethanol has roughly 70% the energy content of gasoline, yet it costs about 40% more to produce and distribute. In order to deliver this economic bargain to motorists, the government forgoes taxes paid by the users of gasoline, taxes which, of course, pay for important government services.
You don't need to study economics to appreciate that as a bad bargain.
In the years since the original strategic argument, arguments for the use of ethanol in fuel have developed around its being a benefit to the environment. It is no surprise that many embrace this at first hearing: growing something for fuel just sounds cleaner and healthier than using a minerals dug out of the ground.
But this is a false argument, false at several levels. If you have a certain distance to drive, requiring a certain amount of energy, you will have to fuel up more often, and you will be paying the same or more for this privilege with ethanol as part of each fill-up.
The motorist, re-fueling his or her car, will not be aware that significant amounts of petroleum products go into growing corn before any fuel is manufactured. Tractors, harvesters, trucks, and conveyor belts don't run on alcohol, and agricultural chemicals aren't derived from it.
It will be the furthest thing from the motorist's mind that ethanol for fuel cannot be shipped by pipeline, the cheapest form of shipping liquids and gases, because ethanol picks up water on it way underground, so ethanol must use more expensive truck transport, and what do the trucks run on?
The motorist also likely will not be aware that while burning some ethanol with gasoline reduces carbon dioxide emissions, if you account for the carbon dioxide emissions of the corn's production, there is almost no net gain.
A recent, published finding that ethanol increases ozone in the lower atmosphere is also unlikely to drift through his or her thoughts while squeezing the pump handle. Ozone is a constituent of smog which affects those with respiratory problems. Ironically, ozone in the lower atmosphere is itself a greenhouse gas.
Now, corn is a staple food for many poor people, especially throughout the Americas, and it is a simple matter of supply and demand that if large quantities of corn go to fuel, poor Mexicans and others will be eating less because its bounty in the food supply will drop. In very small quantities, this effect is almost invisible, but in large quantities - and what is the use of such programs if they do not become large? - it will become painfully obvious.
Canada's Conservative government , a government whose previous environmental minister became an international embarrassment to the country, is in a desperate search for some environmental goodness to smear on its face as political war-paint and has discovered the mumbo-jumbo of ethanol.
Recently, it has run a television ad, over and over, done in fake cinema verité style showing vignettes of an odd little man with the sardonic smile of a skull asking citizens on the street about growing "our own fuel." It even features a scene of the would-be comic dancing spontaneously on the sidewalk with someone in celebration of growing your own fuel. It ends with another man announcing proudly to the astonished little man that his great hulking SUV actually uses ethanol. Will wonders never cease?
Why do governments do this kind of thing? Well, ethanol as fuel allows you to brag about doing all kinds of good things - of course, the bragging is done by stating partial truths, but isn't that what all advertising is, partial truth? - while you dish out a new subsidy to some of your constituents. And you get to advertise what you are doing at the expense of your listeners.
Ethanol-as-fuel's other great attraction is that politicians get to hide for a while from the real solutions, such as simply raising vehicle efficiency standards, which require some courage. What a sweet scam.
POLITICIANS MAKING FOOLS OF US ALL
The Case of Ethanol as Motor Fuel
Ethanol has always been a poor choice as a fuel, but the scientific and economic considerations behind that statement don't stop politicians from claiming otherwise.
American use of ethanol blended into gasoline actually represents a hidden subsidy to corn farmers, a subsidy on top of other subsidies, because American corn production itself has long been subsidized. The American program, to be expanded now by a leader widely recognized for wisdom and insight, George Bush, subsidizes farmers hurt by the abundance of their own subsidized production.
Subsidies plus the extent of Midwestern farmland suitable for its production are why America produces such an abundance of corn. Its use in motor fuel on any scale started as a way to stretch America's fuel supply in the face of Arab anger over foreign policy.
But it does not really do this. Although numbers naturally change over time, ethanol has roughly 70% the energy content of gasoline, yet it costs about 40% more to produce and distribute. In order to deliver this economic bargain to motorists, the government forgoes taxes paid by the users of gasoline, taxes which, of course, pay for important government services.
You don't need to study economics to appreciate that as a bad bargain.
In the years since the original strategic argument, arguments for the use of ethanol in fuel have developed around its being a benefit to the environment. It is no surprise that many embrace this at first hearing: growing something for fuel just sounds cleaner and healthier than using a minerals dug out of the ground.
But this is a false argument, false at several levels. If you have a certain distance to drive, requiring a certain amount of energy, you will have to fuel up more often, and you will be paying the same or more for this privilege with ethanol as part of each fill-up.
The motorist, re-fueling his or her car, will not be aware that significant amounts of petroleum products go into growing corn before any fuel is manufactured. Tractors, harvesters, trucks, and conveyor belts don't run on alcohol, and agricultural chemicals aren't derived from it.
It will be the furthest thing from the motorist's mind that ethanol for fuel cannot be shipped by pipeline, the cheapest form of shipping liquids and gases, because ethanol picks up water on it way underground, so ethanol must use more expensive truck transport, and what do the trucks run on?
The motorist also likely will not be aware that while burning some ethanol with gasoline reduces carbon dioxide emissions, if you account for the carbon dioxide emissions of the corn's production, there is almost no net gain.
A recent, published finding that ethanol increases ozone in the lower atmosphere is also unlikely to drift through his or her thoughts while squeezing the pump handle. Ozone is a constituent of smog which affects those with respiratory problems. Ironically, ozone in the lower atmosphere is itself a greenhouse gas.
Now, corn is a staple food for many poor people, especially throughout the Americas, and it is a simple matter of supply and demand that if large quantities of corn go to fuel, poor Mexicans and others will be eating less because its bounty in the food supply will drop. In very small quantities, this effect is almost invisible, but in large quantities - and what is the use of such programs if they do not become large? - it will become painfully obvious.
Canada's Conservative government , a government whose previous environmental minister became an international embarrassment to the country, is in a desperate search for some environmental goodness to smear on its face as political war-paint and has discovered the mumbo-jumbo of ethanol.
Recently, it has run a television ad, over and over, done in fake cinema verité style showing vignettes of an odd little man with the sardonic smile of a skull asking citizens on the street about growing "our own fuel." It even features a scene of the would-be comic dancing spontaneously on the sidewalk with someone in celebration of growing your own fuel. It ends with another man announcing proudly to the astonished little man that his great hulking SUV actually uses ethanol. Will wonders never cease?
Why do governments do this kind of thing? Well, ethanol as fuel allows you to brag about doing all kinds of good things - of course, the bragging is done by stating partial truths, but isn't that what all advertising is, partial truth? - while you dish out a new subsidy to some of your constituents. And you get to advertise what you are doing at the expense of your listeners.
Ethanol-as-fuel's other great attraction is that politicians get to hide for a while from the real solutions, such as simply raising vehicle efficiency standards, which require some courage. What a sweet scam.
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