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.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
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.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
A PAUSE IN COLUMNS WHILE WRITING A BOOK
Emerson said it was the greatest honor to know that strangers actually read his words, and I very much share his sentiment.
I have been commissioned recently by a British publisher to write a book. It is an exciting opportunity, and I'm already well along.
However, with a fairly short deadline, I will have little opportunity for the next little while to write columns, but I will get back to it.
I hope readers will forgive my neglect and perhaps read the book, tentatively titled The Decline of the America Empire: The Rise of China and India.
I have been commissioned recently by a British publisher to write a book. It is an exciting opportunity, and I'm already well along.
However, with a fairly short deadline, I will have little opportunity for the next little while to write columns, but I will get back to it.
I hope readers will forgive my neglect and perhaps read the book, tentatively titled The Decline of the America Empire: The Rise of China and India.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
AS I LAY DYING
November 9, 2006
AS I LAY DYING
Sadly, little coming from America's politics can fire my enthusiasm. During my lifetime, America has busied itself with the task of burying liberalism, reminding one of October's frenetic squirrels hunting and burying acorns.
The nation is pretty much at ease with ugly imperial government. Liberalism, and I mean liberalism in the broadest, richest sense of the word, is a topic of bathroom humor.
We read and hear a great deal about the Democrats' sizable victory in mid-term elections, and I suppose after six years of Bush's near-insanity, people have a right to a little excitement, although one is sobered by the recollection that the same people returned him to office just two years ago. At least, the world can be grateful that Bush has been hobbled for his last two years.
The Democratic Party has been all but dead for years as a meaningful national alternative. The party has no recognized national leader. It has no cause, no fire in the belly. It has been largely silent for six years while Bush rampaged through the world and literally peed on American liberties like a grotesquely-smirking, small-town sheriff. No President in history has shown so little respect for human rights, and with so little excuse, yet all the would-be defenders of the Republic, whether Congressmen or the Don't-Tread-on-Me crowd, have been no where to be seen. And Democrats like Lieberman or Kerry can hardly be distinguished from Republicans.
The Democrats have been elected because Americans are now sick of Iraq. Their enthusiasms die quickly. American expectations for the wars they start are perfectly captured by the image of Bush landing on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him saying Mission Accomplished. It's a blockbuster version of the Homecoming Game with guys in uniforms and cheerleaders and flags, and there is no hint of death or decay. Anything beyond that kind of performance is welcomed like the kid who couldn't make the team.
I doubt there is widespread concern that Iraqis still huddle in homes with no reliable electricity or clean water, no jobs, and fearful to step into murderous streets. I doubt there is much guilt over having killed half a million of them. I doubt there is guilt about running a secret gulag and torturing helpless captives. I doubt there is guilt about blood-spattered holes like Abu Ghraib. Because if there were such guilt, there would have been a revolt against Bush's criminal government.
The American tendency to quickly tire of things is mightily reinforced by the depressing consciousness of having lost. Americans are conditioned in the great booming engine of Social Darwinism they call society that there is no substitute for winning, and winning in a chest-thumping way. Losing is for losers, and loser is a favorite American expression of contempt for others. They hate losing, and yet the simple fact is that many of the conflicts into which they thoughtlessly are led end up lost.
I am sure Americans are tired of images and commentary about Iraq on television, tame as they have been deliberately kept. They're tired of knowing that cute little Steve and Susie graduating high school this year can't just join up to have their college paid and be heroes in uniform without risking their health.
The greatest horror Bush has inflicted on humanity, the suppurating body of Iraq, is unlikely to be attended by Democrats. They want the White House in two years, and they do not want to be left holding Bush's "tarbaby." Instead, they will scrutinize and highlight every twist and turn of Bush's bumbling, murderous efforts as he struggles to leave Iraq. American politics are just that brutal. No wonder there are so many wars.
AS I LAY DYING
Sadly, little coming from America's politics can fire my enthusiasm. During my lifetime, America has busied itself with the task of burying liberalism, reminding one of October's frenetic squirrels hunting and burying acorns.
The nation is pretty much at ease with ugly imperial government. Liberalism, and I mean liberalism in the broadest, richest sense of the word, is a topic of bathroom humor.
We read and hear a great deal about the Democrats' sizable victory in mid-term elections, and I suppose after six years of Bush's near-insanity, people have a right to a little excitement, although one is sobered by the recollection that the same people returned him to office just two years ago. At least, the world can be grateful that Bush has been hobbled for his last two years.
The Democratic Party has been all but dead for years as a meaningful national alternative. The party has no recognized national leader. It has no cause, no fire in the belly. It has been largely silent for six years while Bush rampaged through the world and literally peed on American liberties like a grotesquely-smirking, small-town sheriff. No President in history has shown so little respect for human rights, and with so little excuse, yet all the would-be defenders of the Republic, whether Congressmen or the Don't-Tread-on-Me crowd, have been no where to be seen. And Democrats like Lieberman or Kerry can hardly be distinguished from Republicans.
The Democrats have been elected because Americans are now sick of Iraq. Their enthusiasms die quickly. American expectations for the wars they start are perfectly captured by the image of Bush landing on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him saying Mission Accomplished. It's a blockbuster version of the Homecoming Game with guys in uniforms and cheerleaders and flags, and there is no hint of death or decay. Anything beyond that kind of performance is welcomed like the kid who couldn't make the team.
I doubt there is widespread concern that Iraqis still huddle in homes with no reliable electricity or clean water, no jobs, and fearful to step into murderous streets. I doubt there is much guilt over having killed half a million of them. I doubt there is guilt about running a secret gulag and torturing helpless captives. I doubt there is guilt about blood-spattered holes like Abu Ghraib. Because if there were such guilt, there would have been a revolt against Bush's criminal government.
The American tendency to quickly tire of things is mightily reinforced by the depressing consciousness of having lost. Americans are conditioned in the great booming engine of Social Darwinism they call society that there is no substitute for winning, and winning in a chest-thumping way. Losing is for losers, and loser is a favorite American expression of contempt for others. They hate losing, and yet the simple fact is that many of the conflicts into which they thoughtlessly are led end up lost.
I am sure Americans are tired of images and commentary about Iraq on television, tame as they have been deliberately kept. They're tired of knowing that cute little Steve and Susie graduating high school this year can't just join up to have their college paid and be heroes in uniform without risking their health.
The greatest horror Bush has inflicted on humanity, the suppurating body of Iraq, is unlikely to be attended by Democrats. They want the White House in two years, and they do not want to be left holding Bush's "tarbaby." Instead, they will scrutinize and highlight every twist and turn of Bush's bumbling, murderous efforts as he struggles to leave Iraq. American politics are just that brutal. No wonder there are so many wars.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
CANADA'S EMBARRASSING FOREIGN MINISTER
October 26, 2006
CANADA'S EMBARRASSING FOREIGN MINISTER
A Man of Poor Character and Thin Talents
Were a senior member of any national government to insult a woman in public, there would be reason for concern. An apology might put the act down in the public's mind to poor judgment in the fierce heat of partisan debate. Were the senior member then to refuse admitting what he had done, despite many witnesses, surely a question of character is raised.
But reportage of Peter MacKay's sleazy remark in Parliament about Belinda Stronach has revealed other behavior far more disturbing. Apparently for months, MacKay has been glaring and making faces at Stronach. His abusive behavior continued with such intensity that her party changed her seat to one behind another member.
This is not the mooning of a lovesick pup or the melancholy of a jilted lover, although the mainline press has tended to treat it in this light fashion. This is aggressive behavior by an obsessive personality, carried out repeatedly in a public place without any concern for embarrassment or shame, behavior typical of a stalker, warning signs of a dangerous personality.
We already knew there were serious flaws in MacKay's character. There was his unapologetic, hasty breaking of a written agreement made at the former Conservative Party leadership convention. He simply brushed it off with saying politics was a blood sport, a rather odd choice of words coming from the representative of a party trying to promote itself as doing business in a new and ethical way.
Following Stronach's crossing the floor to the Liberals, MacKay busied himself doing simpering interviews about being abandoned both as deputy party leader and as lover. In fact, without MacKay's bizarre little press blitz, most Canadians would never have known about his affair with Stronach.
This, too, was commonly attributed to the freshly-jilted lover's overwrought emotion. His words and tone in these interviews seemed tailored to give that sympathetic impression, but they were quite unconvincing coming from a self-professed, blood-sport politician. What MacKay was actually doing was character assassination only slightly disguised as sympathetic pouting.
What also bothered me at the time was that no one in the press raised the important issue of a senior executive in an organization, the deputy leader of the new Conservative Party, having an affair with someone directly under his authority. This is not considered ethical in the business world, a situation fraught with many possibilities for abuse, and is often a reason for dismissal.
MacKay has shown himself unfit for high office, not because of an affair, but because of his repeated display of questionable character and personality traits, and these traits are accompanied by what can only be called a slim endowment of talent. MacKay has made blundering statements as foreign minister several times that certainly have embarrassed his boss. It really is time for him to go.
CANADA'S EMBARRASSING FOREIGN MINISTER
A Man of Poor Character and Thin Talents
Were a senior member of any national government to insult a woman in public, there would be reason for concern. An apology might put the act down in the public's mind to poor judgment in the fierce heat of partisan debate. Were the senior member then to refuse admitting what he had done, despite many witnesses, surely a question of character is raised.
But reportage of Peter MacKay's sleazy remark in Parliament about Belinda Stronach has revealed other behavior far more disturbing. Apparently for months, MacKay has been glaring and making faces at Stronach. His abusive behavior continued with such intensity that her party changed her seat to one behind another member.
This is not the mooning of a lovesick pup or the melancholy of a jilted lover, although the mainline press has tended to treat it in this light fashion. This is aggressive behavior by an obsessive personality, carried out repeatedly in a public place without any concern for embarrassment or shame, behavior typical of a stalker, warning signs of a dangerous personality.
We already knew there were serious flaws in MacKay's character. There was his unapologetic, hasty breaking of a written agreement made at the former Conservative Party leadership convention. He simply brushed it off with saying politics was a blood sport, a rather odd choice of words coming from the representative of a party trying to promote itself as doing business in a new and ethical way.
Following Stronach's crossing the floor to the Liberals, MacKay busied himself doing simpering interviews about being abandoned both as deputy party leader and as lover. In fact, without MacKay's bizarre little press blitz, most Canadians would never have known about his affair with Stronach.
This, too, was commonly attributed to the freshly-jilted lover's overwrought emotion. His words and tone in these interviews seemed tailored to give that sympathetic impression, but they were quite unconvincing coming from a self-professed, blood-sport politician. What MacKay was actually doing was character assassination only slightly disguised as sympathetic pouting.
What also bothered me at the time was that no one in the press raised the important issue of a senior executive in an organization, the deputy leader of the new Conservative Party, having an affair with someone directly under his authority. This is not considered ethical in the business world, a situation fraught with many possibilities for abuse, and is often a reason for dismissal.
MacKay has shown himself unfit for high office, not because of an affair, but because of his repeated display of questionable character and personality traits, and these traits are accompanied by what can only be called a slim endowment of talent. MacKay has made blundering statements as foreign minister several times that certainly have embarrassed his boss. It really is time for him to go.
Friday, October 20, 2006
ISRAEL, PALESTINE, AND CANADA
October 21, 2006
ISRAEL, PALESTINE, AND CANADA
Canada's Thirty-Percent Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, just made a speech at a B'nai Brith banquet. Normally, there would be nothing notable in this, but his words this time reinforced controversial statements he made while Israel savagely bombed Lebanon. He also continued driving an ugly new Republican-style wedge into Canada's national politics after calling Liberal leadership candidates "anti-Israel."
Harper said that his government supports a two-state solution in the Middle East. That is the policy of most Western governments, and there was nothing original in Harper's way of stating it. It was the kind of vague, tepid stuff we might hear from Olmert himself.
"Our government believes in a two-state solution -- in a secure democratic and prosperous Israel living beside a viable democratic and peaceful Palestinian state."
It is interesting to note the lack of symmetry in Harper's "secure democratic and prosperous Israel" versus "a viable democratic and peaceful" Palestine. I don't know why prosperity does not count for Palestinians, but as anyone who understands developmental economics knows, prosperity is key to developing modern, democratic institutions. You only get the broad middle-class which makes democracy possible out of healthy growth.
I suspect Harper was signaling, while calling for peace with two states, hardly a stirring theme for a B'nai Brith audience, that he saw no equivalency to the two sides. If not, perhaps he will explain another time what he did mean.
Harper did not define what he means by viable. Palestine, as anyone familiar with the situation knows, cannot be viable as a walled-off set of postage-stamp Bantustans, the only concept of a Palestinian state Israel has ever considered.
The key element in Harper's statement is what he means by democratic and peaceful. Those words are not so self-explanatory as they may first appear. Both these adjectives are regularly twisted in meaning, particularly by the United States.
Hamas won an honest and open election in Palestine, internationally scrutinized, but the result of that election was rejected by Harper and others, inducing chaos into Palestinian affairs, the very thing Israel's secret services likely intended when they secretly subsidized Hamas years ago to oppose Fatah. Hamas has not learned the required mantra about recognizing Israel, yet Hamas is no threat to Israel, or plainly Israel's secret services would never have assisted it in the first place.
Hamas is not well-armed, nor is it, surrounded and penetrated by Israel, in a position to become so. Israel speaks as though not recognizing Israel is an unforgivable defect, but governments often fail to recognize other governments. The United States has a long list of governments it has not recognized in the past and ones it does not recognize now. This is not always a smart thing to do, but it is not a crime, it is not even a faux pas, and it may just be a negotiating point.
Hamas has not invaded Israel, nor has it conducted a campaign of assassinating Israeli leaders - both actions Israel has repeated against Palestinians countless times. Every time some disgruntled individual in Gaza launches a home-made, ineffectual rocket, Israel assassinates members of Hamas or sends its tanks into Gaza, killing civilians. Presumably, a peaceful Palestine would be one either where there were no disgruntled people or where an efficient police-state stopped them all.
This is a preposterous expectation. It simply can never be. With all of Israel's violent occupations and reprisals, it has never been able to impose absolute peace, not even on its own territory. There have been scores of instances of renegade Israeli settlers shooting innocent Palestinians picking olives or tending sheep, and there have been mass murders of Palestinians a number of times, as at the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount. How much less able is any Palestinian authority to enforce absolute peace when Israel allows it pitifully limited resources and freedom of movement?
Realistically, the expectation for absolute peace should be interpreted as a deliberate barrier to a genuine peace settlement. Why would Israel use a barrier to peace when its official statements never fail to mention peace?
Because most leaders of Israel, probably all of them, have never given up the frenzied dream of achieving Greater Israel, a concept which allows for no West Bank and no Palestinians. Not every leader has spoken in public on this subject, but a number have. Other prominent figures in Israel from time to time also have spoken in favor of this destructive goal.
There seems no rational explanation, other than wide support of this goal, for Israel's persistent refusal to comply with agreements which could have produced peace, the Oslo Accords perhaps being the greatest example. Israel worked overtime to destroy the Oslo Accords, always attributing their failure in public to the very Palestinians who had worked hard to see the Accords born. More extreme Israeli politicians openly rejected the Accords from the start.
The crescendo statement in Harper's speech, his voice rising in force and his audience literally rising to its feet, was, "The state of Israel, a democratic nation, was attacked by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization -- in fact a terrorist organization listed illegal in this country," and "When it comes to dealing with a war between Israel and a terrorist organization, this country and this government cannot and will never be neutral."
Harper's definition of democracy appears to be the American one: those governments are democratic who agree with American policy. We know America has overthrown many democratic governments in the postwar world, including those in Haiti, Chile, Iran, and Guatemala. Today it threatens a cleanly-elected government in Venezuela and utterly ignores a cleanly-elected government in Palestine.
America shows itself always ready to work with anti-human rights blackguards when it feels important interests are at stake, General Musharraf of Pakistan and some of the dreadful Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan being current examples. There were dozens more during the Cold War, including the Romanian Dracula Ceaucescu and the Shah of Iran, put into power by a coup that toppled a democratic government. The American definition of democracy is highly selective at best.
Israel has demonstrated a similar understanding of democracy from the beginning. Israel was ready to help France and Britain invade Suez in the 1950s, an action which represented a last ugly gasp of 19th century colonialism. Israel worked closely for years with apartheid South Africa, even secretly assisting it in developing and testing a nuclear weapon (weapons and facilities were removed by the United States when the ANC took power). Savak, the Shah's secret police, whose specialty was pulling out people's finger nails, was trained by American and Israeli agents.
Harper's statement of total support for Israel in Lebanon is not in keeping with traditional Canadian views and policies. Canadians want balance and fairness. Unqualified support for Israel is tantamount to giving it a free pass to repeat the many savage things it has done, things most Canadians do not support.
Israel has proven, over and over again, it needs the restraining influence of others. Criticizing Israel does not make anyone anti-Israeli. Israel, sadly, has done many shameful things that demand criticism from those who love freedom and human rights, starting with its keeping a giant open-air prison going for forty years.
Harper should know that when Israeli leaders such as Olmert or Sharon speak of two states, they do not mean the same thing that reasonable observers might expect.
They mean a powerless, walled-in rump state in which elections must consistently support Israel's view of just about everything, a state whose access to the world is effectively controlled by Israel, and a state whose citizens have no claims whatsoever for homes, farms, and other property seized by Israel. The hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, living on property taken bit by bit since the Six Day War are there to stay. Palestinians' property rights to homes and institutions in Jerusalem, from which they are being gradually pushed, are being voided.
Israel has invaded Lebanon twice with no legitimate justification. It killed many thousands the first time and about 1,600 the last time. It flattened the beautiful city of Beirut the first time and a fair portion of the re-built city last time. It dropped thousands of cluster bombs, the most vicious weapon in the American arsenal, onto civilian areas. In effect, this action created a giant minefield, an illegal act under international treaty, with mines which explode with flesh-mangling bits of razor wire.
The Hezbollah that was Israel's excuse for invading Lebanon last time never invaded Israel. They launch their relatively ineffective Katysha rockets only when Israeli forces violate the border, which they do with some regularity in secret. Hezbollah's main function, despite all the rhetoric about terrorists, has been as a guerilla force opposed to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel has long desired to expand its borders into that region, and there are statements on record to that effect, another aspect of Greater Israel. Israel occupied southern Lebanon for many years after its first invasion, and still held on to an enclave after its withdrawal.
Democratic values are not just about holding elections now and then. Otherwise, apartheid South Africa would have deserved our support. So would Northern Ireland when it repressed Catholics for decades. So, in fact, would the former American Confederacy. These states all had elections but only some people could vote, and other people were treated horribly.
Democratic values must reflect respect for human rights, which apply to all, something about which Israel has been particularly blind. There are no rights for Palestinians. Indeed, Israel has no Bill or Charter of Rights even for its own citizens because of the near impossibility of defining rights in a state characterized by so many restrictions and theocratic principles.
The relatively small number of Arabic people given Israeli citizenship, roughly 19% of the population, descended from 150,000 who remained in Israel after 1948, mainly those who were not intimidated by early Israeli terror groups like Irgun and the Stern Gang into running away or who simply could not escape. Despite subsidized immigration to Israel, accounting for the bulk of Jewish population growth, Israeli Arabs have managed roughly to keep their fraction of the population through high birth rates. They are, however, under constant pressure, often being treated as less than equal citizens. On many occasions, prominent Israelis have called for their removal.
According to a recent study of Jewish Israeli attitudes, 41 percent think Arab citizens should be encouraged by the government to leave Israel, and 40 percent want segregated public facilities for Arabs. The survey also found 68 percent of Israeli Jews would not live in an apartment building with Arabs, and 46 percent would not let Arabs visit their homes.
Harper's dichotomy between democracy and terror, the crescendo subject of his speech, is simply nonsense. It mimics Bush's garbled words about terrorists versus American freedoms or everyone's being with us or against us. Israel is not so admirable a democracy nor is Hezbollah so terrible a group as he would have us believe.
ISRAEL, PALESTINE, AND CANADA
Canada's Thirty-Percent Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, just made a speech at a B'nai Brith banquet. Normally, there would be nothing notable in this, but his words this time reinforced controversial statements he made while Israel savagely bombed Lebanon. He also continued driving an ugly new Republican-style wedge into Canada's national politics after calling Liberal leadership candidates "anti-Israel."
Harper said that his government supports a two-state solution in the Middle East. That is the policy of most Western governments, and there was nothing original in Harper's way of stating it. It was the kind of vague, tepid stuff we might hear from Olmert himself.
"Our government believes in a two-state solution -- in a secure democratic and prosperous Israel living beside a viable democratic and peaceful Palestinian state."
It is interesting to note the lack of symmetry in Harper's "secure democratic and prosperous Israel" versus "a viable democratic and peaceful" Palestine. I don't know why prosperity does not count for Palestinians, but as anyone who understands developmental economics knows, prosperity is key to developing modern, democratic institutions. You only get the broad middle-class which makes democracy possible out of healthy growth.
I suspect Harper was signaling, while calling for peace with two states, hardly a stirring theme for a B'nai Brith audience, that he saw no equivalency to the two sides. If not, perhaps he will explain another time what he did mean.
Harper did not define what he means by viable. Palestine, as anyone familiar with the situation knows, cannot be viable as a walled-off set of postage-stamp Bantustans, the only concept of a Palestinian state Israel has ever considered.
The key element in Harper's statement is what he means by democratic and peaceful. Those words are not so self-explanatory as they may first appear. Both these adjectives are regularly twisted in meaning, particularly by the United States.
Hamas won an honest and open election in Palestine, internationally scrutinized, but the result of that election was rejected by Harper and others, inducing chaos into Palestinian affairs, the very thing Israel's secret services likely intended when they secretly subsidized Hamas years ago to oppose Fatah. Hamas has not learned the required mantra about recognizing Israel, yet Hamas is no threat to Israel, or plainly Israel's secret services would never have assisted it in the first place.
Hamas is not well-armed, nor is it, surrounded and penetrated by Israel, in a position to become so. Israel speaks as though not recognizing Israel is an unforgivable defect, but governments often fail to recognize other governments. The United States has a long list of governments it has not recognized in the past and ones it does not recognize now. This is not always a smart thing to do, but it is not a crime, it is not even a faux pas, and it may just be a negotiating point.
Hamas has not invaded Israel, nor has it conducted a campaign of assassinating Israeli leaders - both actions Israel has repeated against Palestinians countless times. Every time some disgruntled individual in Gaza launches a home-made, ineffectual rocket, Israel assassinates members of Hamas or sends its tanks into Gaza, killing civilians. Presumably, a peaceful Palestine would be one either where there were no disgruntled people or where an efficient police-state stopped them all.
This is a preposterous expectation. It simply can never be. With all of Israel's violent occupations and reprisals, it has never been able to impose absolute peace, not even on its own territory. There have been scores of instances of renegade Israeli settlers shooting innocent Palestinians picking olives or tending sheep, and there have been mass murders of Palestinians a number of times, as at the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount. How much less able is any Palestinian authority to enforce absolute peace when Israel allows it pitifully limited resources and freedom of movement?
Realistically, the expectation for absolute peace should be interpreted as a deliberate barrier to a genuine peace settlement. Why would Israel use a barrier to peace when its official statements never fail to mention peace?
Because most leaders of Israel, probably all of them, have never given up the frenzied dream of achieving Greater Israel, a concept which allows for no West Bank and no Palestinians. Not every leader has spoken in public on this subject, but a number have. Other prominent figures in Israel from time to time also have spoken in favor of this destructive goal.
There seems no rational explanation, other than wide support of this goal, for Israel's persistent refusal to comply with agreements which could have produced peace, the Oslo Accords perhaps being the greatest example. Israel worked overtime to destroy the Oslo Accords, always attributing their failure in public to the very Palestinians who had worked hard to see the Accords born. More extreme Israeli politicians openly rejected the Accords from the start.
The crescendo statement in Harper's speech, his voice rising in force and his audience literally rising to its feet, was, "The state of Israel, a democratic nation, was attacked by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization -- in fact a terrorist organization listed illegal in this country," and "When it comes to dealing with a war between Israel and a terrorist organization, this country and this government cannot and will never be neutral."
Harper's definition of democracy appears to be the American one: those governments are democratic who agree with American policy. We know America has overthrown many democratic governments in the postwar world, including those in Haiti, Chile, Iran, and Guatemala. Today it threatens a cleanly-elected government in Venezuela and utterly ignores a cleanly-elected government in Palestine.
America shows itself always ready to work with anti-human rights blackguards when it feels important interests are at stake, General Musharraf of Pakistan and some of the dreadful Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan being current examples. There were dozens more during the Cold War, including the Romanian Dracula Ceaucescu and the Shah of Iran, put into power by a coup that toppled a democratic government. The American definition of democracy is highly selective at best.
Israel has demonstrated a similar understanding of democracy from the beginning. Israel was ready to help France and Britain invade Suez in the 1950s, an action which represented a last ugly gasp of 19th century colonialism. Israel worked closely for years with apartheid South Africa, even secretly assisting it in developing and testing a nuclear weapon (weapons and facilities were removed by the United States when the ANC took power). Savak, the Shah's secret police, whose specialty was pulling out people's finger nails, was trained by American and Israeli agents.
Harper's statement of total support for Israel in Lebanon is not in keeping with traditional Canadian views and policies. Canadians want balance and fairness. Unqualified support for Israel is tantamount to giving it a free pass to repeat the many savage things it has done, things most Canadians do not support.
Israel has proven, over and over again, it needs the restraining influence of others. Criticizing Israel does not make anyone anti-Israeli. Israel, sadly, has done many shameful things that demand criticism from those who love freedom and human rights, starting with its keeping a giant open-air prison going for forty years.
Harper should know that when Israeli leaders such as Olmert or Sharon speak of two states, they do not mean the same thing that reasonable observers might expect.
They mean a powerless, walled-in rump state in which elections must consistently support Israel's view of just about everything, a state whose access to the world is effectively controlled by Israel, and a state whose citizens have no claims whatsoever for homes, farms, and other property seized by Israel. The hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, living on property taken bit by bit since the Six Day War are there to stay. Palestinians' property rights to homes and institutions in Jerusalem, from which they are being gradually pushed, are being voided.
Israel has invaded Lebanon twice with no legitimate justification. It killed many thousands the first time and about 1,600 the last time. It flattened the beautiful city of Beirut the first time and a fair portion of the re-built city last time. It dropped thousands of cluster bombs, the most vicious weapon in the American arsenal, onto civilian areas. In effect, this action created a giant minefield, an illegal act under international treaty, with mines which explode with flesh-mangling bits of razor wire.
The Hezbollah that was Israel's excuse for invading Lebanon last time never invaded Israel. They launch their relatively ineffective Katysha rockets only when Israeli forces violate the border, which they do with some regularity in secret. Hezbollah's main function, despite all the rhetoric about terrorists, has been as a guerilla force opposed to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel has long desired to expand its borders into that region, and there are statements on record to that effect, another aspect of Greater Israel. Israel occupied southern Lebanon for many years after its first invasion, and still held on to an enclave after its withdrawal.
Democratic values are not just about holding elections now and then. Otherwise, apartheid South Africa would have deserved our support. So would Northern Ireland when it repressed Catholics for decades. So, in fact, would the former American Confederacy. These states all had elections but only some people could vote, and other people were treated horribly.
Democratic values must reflect respect for human rights, which apply to all, something about which Israel has been particularly blind. There are no rights for Palestinians. Indeed, Israel has no Bill or Charter of Rights even for its own citizens because of the near impossibility of defining rights in a state characterized by so many restrictions and theocratic principles.
The relatively small number of Arabic people given Israeli citizenship, roughly 19% of the population, descended from 150,000 who remained in Israel after 1948, mainly those who were not intimidated by early Israeli terror groups like Irgun and the Stern Gang into running away or who simply could not escape. Despite subsidized immigration to Israel, accounting for the bulk of Jewish population growth, Israeli Arabs have managed roughly to keep their fraction of the population through high birth rates. They are, however, under constant pressure, often being treated as less than equal citizens. On many occasions, prominent Israelis have called for their removal.
According to a recent study of Jewish Israeli attitudes, 41 percent think Arab citizens should be encouraged by the government to leave Israel, and 40 percent want segregated public facilities for Arabs. The survey also found 68 percent of Israeli Jews would not live in an apartment building with Arabs, and 46 percent would not let Arabs visit their homes.
Harper's dichotomy between democracy and terror, the crescendo subject of his speech, is simply nonsense. It mimics Bush's garbled words about terrorists versus American freedoms or everyone's being with us or against us. Israel is not so admirable a democracy nor is Hezbollah so terrible a group as he would have us believe.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
NORTH KOREA'S BOMB
October 12, 2006
NORTH KOREA'S BOMB
You might think from all the political noise that something extraordinary happened when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion. But let's put the test, apparently a small-yield, inefficient device, into some perspective.
The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests, including 217 in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests, including 219 in the atmosphere. France, 210, including 50 in the atmosphere. The United Kingdom, 45, with 21 in the atmosphere. China, 45, with 23 in the atmosphere. India and Pakistan, 13, all underground. South Africa (and/or Israel) one atmospheric test in 1979.
From a purely statistical point of view, North Korea's test does seem a rather small event. You must add the fact that my title, North Korea's Bomb, is aimed at being pithy and is thereby unavoidably inaccurate. Having a nuclear device is not the same thing as having a bomb or warhead, much less a compact and efficient bomb or warhead. North Korea still has a long way to go.
But North Korea's test is magnified in its effect by several circumstances. First, war in the Korean peninsula has never formally ended, and American troops might well be vulnerable to even a school bus with a nuclear device. Just that thought is probably horrifying to many Americans who are not used to being challenged abroad, but I'm sure North Korea has already been warned that that would constitute national suicide.
Two, the test comes when Bush has been exploring military means to end Iran's work with nuclear upgrading technology. There is no proof that Iran intends to create nuclear weapons, but, being realistic, I think we have to say it's likely. Iran faces nuclear-armed countries, hostile to its interests, in several directions. Security of its people is an important obligation of any state.
I doubt Bush intends invading Iran - invasion's extreme advocates, neo-con storm troopers like David Frum and Richard Perle having proved totally wrong about Iraq - but that doesn't exclude some form of air attack. Iran has deeply buried its production sites, so the usual American bombers and cruise missiles will be ineffective. There has been talk of using tactical nuclear warheads, but I think there would be overwhelming world revulsion to this. The Pentagon may be considering non-nuclear ICBMs, there having been talk of arming a portion of the American fleet with non-nuclear warheads to exploit the accuracy and momentum of their thousands-of-miles-an-hour strikes for deep penetration. But Russia's missile forces are on hair-trigger alert against the launch of any American ICBM, and the time for confirming error with shorter-range sea-launched missiles is almost nonexistent.
Bombardment of Iran may now be more questionable, something we may regard as a good outcome of the North Korean test. How do you justify an attack to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in one country when you have done nothing of the kind in another that actually has them? This is even more true because Iran, while not Arabic, is Islamic, and public relations for America in the Islamic world already are terrible.
Third, what many analysts fear most from North Korea is its selling weapons or technology to terrorists. North Korea sells a good deal of its limited military technology to others, although this does not make the country in any way special, the world's largest arms trafficker by far being the United States. Many would argue that American weapons have supported terror, those used in Beirut, for example, ghastly flesh-mangling cluster bombs dropped on civilians. The answer to this fear about North Korea brings us to the simple human matter of talking. The U.S. must give up its arrogant, long-held attitude against talking and dealing with North Korea, for here it is certainly working against its own vital interests.
It is an interesting sidelight on North Korea's test that at least portions of its technology came from A. Q. Kahn's under-the-table operations in Pakistan, America's great ally in its pointless war on terror. Perhaps Kim Jong Il should volunteer troops for Iraq. This would undoubtedly change America's view of him dramatically. Cooperation won a lot of benefits for the dictatorship in Pakistan regarded by America as a rogue nuclear state just a few years ago.
All completely rational people wish that nuclear weapons did not exist, but wishing is a fool's game.
Efforts for general nuclear disarmament are almost certainly doomed to failure at this stage of human history. Why would any of the nuclear powers give up these weapons? They magnify the influence and prestige of the nations that have them. And why should other nations, facing both the immense power of the United States and its often-bullying tactics, give up obtaining them? Moreover, technology in any field improves and comes down in cost over time, and it will undoubtedly prove so with making nuclear weapons.
The entire Western world has conspired to remain silent on Israel's nuclear arms, even when Israel assisted apartheid South Africa to build a nuclear weapon. If nuclear weapons are foolish and useless, why does little Israel possess them? Why did South Africa want them? Why did the Soviet Union, despite a great depression and horrible impoverishment after the collapse of communism, keep its costly nuclear arsenal?
If Western nations can understand the dark fear that drives Israel, why can they not understand the same thing for North Korea? The United States has refused for years to talk and has threatened and punished North Korea in countless ways. When the U.S., under Clinton, did agree to peaceful incentives for North Korea to abandon its nuclear work, it later failed utterly to keep its word.
Bush has treated the North Koreans with the same dismissive contempt and threatening attitude he has so many others. How on earth was this approach ever to achieve anything other than what it now has produced?
We keep hearing that North Korea is irrational and unstable, but I think these descriptions are inaccurate. A regime that has lasted for more than half a century can be called many things, but not unstable. Soviet-style regimes were very stable. It was when such governments attempted reforms and loosened their absolute hold on people's lives that they toppled, but there seems little likelihood of a Gorbachev assuming power in North Korea.
North Korea has done some bizarre things over the last fifty years, but I do not think a careful speaker would describe the nation as irrational. North Korea has been isolated and ignored by the United States. It is American policy that frequently has been irrational, Bush's mob having been especially thick in their behavior towards the country.
I may be exaggerating when I write of bizarre North Korean acts, for since World War II, what nation has done more bizarre, damaging things than the United States? Over forty years of costly hostility and terror against Cuba? The insane, pointless war in Vietnam? The insane, pointless invasion of Iraq?
Harsh sanctions against North Korea, already advocated by the emotionally-numb Bush, are a foolish response. North Korea's rulers would not suffer any more than did Saddam Hussein under American-imposed sanctions against Iraq after Desert Storm. Only ordinary people would be driven to misery and starvation, just as they were in Iraq where tens of thousands of innocents died.
How much easier and more productive just to talk.
NORTH KOREA'S BOMB
You might think from all the political noise that something extraordinary happened when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion. But let's put the test, apparently a small-yield, inefficient device, into some perspective.
The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests, including 217 in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests, including 219 in the atmosphere. France, 210, including 50 in the atmosphere. The United Kingdom, 45, with 21 in the atmosphere. China, 45, with 23 in the atmosphere. India and Pakistan, 13, all underground. South Africa (and/or Israel) one atmospheric test in 1979.
From a purely statistical point of view, North Korea's test does seem a rather small event. You must add the fact that my title, North Korea's Bomb, is aimed at being pithy and is thereby unavoidably inaccurate. Having a nuclear device is not the same thing as having a bomb or warhead, much less a compact and efficient bomb or warhead. North Korea still has a long way to go.
But North Korea's test is magnified in its effect by several circumstances. First, war in the Korean peninsula has never formally ended, and American troops might well be vulnerable to even a school bus with a nuclear device. Just that thought is probably horrifying to many Americans who are not used to being challenged abroad, but I'm sure North Korea has already been warned that that would constitute national suicide.
Two, the test comes when Bush has been exploring military means to end Iran's work with nuclear upgrading technology. There is no proof that Iran intends to create nuclear weapons, but, being realistic, I think we have to say it's likely. Iran faces nuclear-armed countries, hostile to its interests, in several directions. Security of its people is an important obligation of any state.
I doubt Bush intends invading Iran - invasion's extreme advocates, neo-con storm troopers like David Frum and Richard Perle having proved totally wrong about Iraq - but that doesn't exclude some form of air attack. Iran has deeply buried its production sites, so the usual American bombers and cruise missiles will be ineffective. There has been talk of using tactical nuclear warheads, but I think there would be overwhelming world revulsion to this. The Pentagon may be considering non-nuclear ICBMs, there having been talk of arming a portion of the American fleet with non-nuclear warheads to exploit the accuracy and momentum of their thousands-of-miles-an-hour strikes for deep penetration. But Russia's missile forces are on hair-trigger alert against the launch of any American ICBM, and the time for confirming error with shorter-range sea-launched missiles is almost nonexistent.
Bombardment of Iran may now be more questionable, something we may regard as a good outcome of the North Korean test. How do you justify an attack to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in one country when you have done nothing of the kind in another that actually has them? This is even more true because Iran, while not Arabic, is Islamic, and public relations for America in the Islamic world already are terrible.
Third, what many analysts fear most from North Korea is its selling weapons or technology to terrorists. North Korea sells a good deal of its limited military technology to others, although this does not make the country in any way special, the world's largest arms trafficker by far being the United States. Many would argue that American weapons have supported terror, those used in Beirut, for example, ghastly flesh-mangling cluster bombs dropped on civilians. The answer to this fear about North Korea brings us to the simple human matter of talking. The U.S. must give up its arrogant, long-held attitude against talking and dealing with North Korea, for here it is certainly working against its own vital interests.
It is an interesting sidelight on North Korea's test that at least portions of its technology came from A. Q. Kahn's under-the-table operations in Pakistan, America's great ally in its pointless war on terror. Perhaps Kim Jong Il should volunteer troops for Iraq. This would undoubtedly change America's view of him dramatically. Cooperation won a lot of benefits for the dictatorship in Pakistan regarded by America as a rogue nuclear state just a few years ago.
All completely rational people wish that nuclear weapons did not exist, but wishing is a fool's game.
Efforts for general nuclear disarmament are almost certainly doomed to failure at this stage of human history. Why would any of the nuclear powers give up these weapons? They magnify the influence and prestige of the nations that have them. And why should other nations, facing both the immense power of the United States and its often-bullying tactics, give up obtaining them? Moreover, technology in any field improves and comes down in cost over time, and it will undoubtedly prove so with making nuclear weapons.
The entire Western world has conspired to remain silent on Israel's nuclear arms, even when Israel assisted apartheid South Africa to build a nuclear weapon. If nuclear weapons are foolish and useless, why does little Israel possess them? Why did South Africa want them? Why did the Soviet Union, despite a great depression and horrible impoverishment after the collapse of communism, keep its costly nuclear arsenal?
If Western nations can understand the dark fear that drives Israel, why can they not understand the same thing for North Korea? The United States has refused for years to talk and has threatened and punished North Korea in countless ways. When the U.S., under Clinton, did agree to peaceful incentives for North Korea to abandon its nuclear work, it later failed utterly to keep its word.
Bush has treated the North Koreans with the same dismissive contempt and threatening attitude he has so many others. How on earth was this approach ever to achieve anything other than what it now has produced?
We keep hearing that North Korea is irrational and unstable, but I think these descriptions are inaccurate. A regime that has lasted for more than half a century can be called many things, but not unstable. Soviet-style regimes were very stable. It was when such governments attempted reforms and loosened their absolute hold on people's lives that they toppled, but there seems little likelihood of a Gorbachev assuming power in North Korea.
North Korea has done some bizarre things over the last fifty years, but I do not think a careful speaker would describe the nation as irrational. North Korea has been isolated and ignored by the United States. It is American policy that frequently has been irrational, Bush's mob having been especially thick in their behavior towards the country.
I may be exaggerating when I write of bizarre North Korean acts, for since World War II, what nation has done more bizarre, damaging things than the United States? Over forty years of costly hostility and terror against Cuba? The insane, pointless war in Vietnam? The insane, pointless invasion of Iraq?
Harsh sanctions against North Korea, already advocated by the emotionally-numb Bush, are a foolish response. North Korea's rulers would not suffer any more than did Saddam Hussein under American-imposed sanctions against Iraq after Desert Storm. Only ordinary people would be driven to misery and starvation, just as they were in Iraq where tens of thousands of innocents died.
How much easier and more productive just to talk.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
A SUBTLE FORM OF FASCISM
October 7, 2006
A SUBTLE KIND OF FASCISM
The word fascism is used a lot, often pejoratively. The image that immediately comes to mind is Mussolini in a steel helmet, hands on hips, head tipped back, jaw thrust out. It is an image that influenced other fascists. Young Hitler was a great admirer.
It is always helpful for any discussion to define the subject carefully, a seemingly obvious principle often ignored. What exactly is fascism? Can fascism coexist to any extent with democratic institutions?
Fascism certainly is not the same thing as communism, although both these systems are represented by strongmen or tyrants and the state apparatus needed to support them. Those who like the nomenclature of the French Revolution might say that the two political extremes, right and left, almost meet somewhere in a bend of political space.
Private enterprise, of course, has been regarded as incompatible with communism, although contemporary China with its New Economic Zone begins to confuse the issue. Things have always been quite different with fascism. Fascist governments are favorable to the interests of enterprise, at least the interests of large-scale enterprises. Great private combines existed and were encouraged under Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. Fascism represents, if you will, a kind of large-scale, public-private partnership.
Fascism, much like the mental image of Mussolini, tends to be about power, generally a raw display of political and military power. These two things are welded together in a fascist state. Flags, banners, strutting, and marching feature prominently, with political occasions sometimes difficult to distinguish from military ones.
Fascism's strutting-peacock displays serve several purposes. One, with their rise to power, fascist parties brag about getting things done (the reality of entrenched fascism proves another matter altogether), as opposed to the mundane, boring inefficiency of ordinary deliberations.
This kind of promise appeals to the frustrations of many people who yearn for decisive change. Their yearnings may concern anything from building public projects to imposing moral rules.
There likely is a built-in component in human beings which finds authority attractive, at least over certain limits. Society mimics the show of power in many institutions from popes to presidents.
The display of power also intimidates enemies. Political opponents are not a common feature of fascist states, which always feature secret police, secret prisons, and heavy domestic spying, although they are sometimes allowed to exist in a neutered form for show or internal political purposes.
Aggression is closely associated with fascism. Partly the aggression is simply the result of having large standing armies and all the state and corporate apparatus associated with them. Large standing armies simply tend to get used - historians have offered this as one of the important explanations for the First World War - and the impulse to use them is undoubtedly increased by the psychology of fascism.
The psychology of fascist states tends to include penis-fixation - big guns, big flags, and big monuments. Aggression is a direct outgrowth of all the strutting, bragging, and marching.
Aggression also grows out of the fascist tendency to regard the nation as somehow specially blessed or endowed or entitled. There follows an assumed inherit right or even obligation to rule over others or at least to direct their destinies.
When you consider these characteristics, every one of them is an intrinsic part of contemporary American society. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that America is a kind of fascist state, certainly a softer-appearing one than some in the past, but then America excels at marketing, perhaps its one original intellectual gift to the world.
America does cling to ideals of human rights, something which it never fails to remind the world at international gatherings, but the truth is international gatherings are only regarded as useful for just such announcements. Despite clinging to human-rights ideals, at the very same time, America refuses to deal with others on the basis of these rights, and it often fails even to enforce the rights of selected categories of its own citizens.
This ambiguity about human rights is not so odd if you consider the many American Christians who enshrine Jesus' great commandment and the Ten Commandments and yet stand ready at a moment's notice to kill others in meaningless wars.
Genuine respect for human rights is surely more a matter of prevailing day-to-day attitudes in a society than words written on old pieces of paper.
But America is a democracy, isn't it? It certainly has many of the forms of a democracy, but when you closely examine the details, as I've written previously, American democracy resembles a badly worn wood veneer. The ugly structural stuff underneath sticks out the way elbows do in a threadbare coat.
A SUBTLE KIND OF FASCISM
The word fascism is used a lot, often pejoratively. The image that immediately comes to mind is Mussolini in a steel helmet, hands on hips, head tipped back, jaw thrust out. It is an image that influenced other fascists. Young Hitler was a great admirer.
It is always helpful for any discussion to define the subject carefully, a seemingly obvious principle often ignored. What exactly is fascism? Can fascism coexist to any extent with democratic institutions?
Fascism certainly is not the same thing as communism, although both these systems are represented by strongmen or tyrants and the state apparatus needed to support them. Those who like the nomenclature of the French Revolution might say that the two political extremes, right and left, almost meet somewhere in a bend of political space.
Private enterprise, of course, has been regarded as incompatible with communism, although contemporary China with its New Economic Zone begins to confuse the issue. Things have always been quite different with fascism. Fascist governments are favorable to the interests of enterprise, at least the interests of large-scale enterprises. Great private combines existed and were encouraged under Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. Fascism represents, if you will, a kind of large-scale, public-private partnership.
Fascism, much like the mental image of Mussolini, tends to be about power, generally a raw display of political and military power. These two things are welded together in a fascist state. Flags, banners, strutting, and marching feature prominently, with political occasions sometimes difficult to distinguish from military ones.
Fascism's strutting-peacock displays serve several purposes. One, with their rise to power, fascist parties brag about getting things done (the reality of entrenched fascism proves another matter altogether), as opposed to the mundane, boring inefficiency of ordinary deliberations.
This kind of promise appeals to the frustrations of many people who yearn for decisive change. Their yearnings may concern anything from building public projects to imposing moral rules.
There likely is a built-in component in human beings which finds authority attractive, at least over certain limits. Society mimics the show of power in many institutions from popes to presidents.
The display of power also intimidates enemies. Political opponents are not a common feature of fascist states, which always feature secret police, secret prisons, and heavy domestic spying, although they are sometimes allowed to exist in a neutered form for show or internal political purposes.
Aggression is closely associated with fascism. Partly the aggression is simply the result of having large standing armies and all the state and corporate apparatus associated with them. Large standing armies simply tend to get used - historians have offered this as one of the important explanations for the First World War - and the impulse to use them is undoubtedly increased by the psychology of fascism.
The psychology of fascist states tends to include penis-fixation - big guns, big flags, and big monuments. Aggression is a direct outgrowth of all the strutting, bragging, and marching.
Aggression also grows out of the fascist tendency to regard the nation as somehow specially blessed or endowed or entitled. There follows an assumed inherit right or even obligation to rule over others or at least to direct their destinies.
When you consider these characteristics, every one of them is an intrinsic part of contemporary American society. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that America is a kind of fascist state, certainly a softer-appearing one than some in the past, but then America excels at marketing, perhaps its one original intellectual gift to the world.
America does cling to ideals of human rights, something which it never fails to remind the world at international gatherings, but the truth is international gatherings are only regarded as useful for just such announcements. Despite clinging to human-rights ideals, at the very same time, America refuses to deal with others on the basis of these rights, and it often fails even to enforce the rights of selected categories of its own citizens.
This ambiguity about human rights is not so odd if you consider the many American Christians who enshrine Jesus' great commandment and the Ten Commandments and yet stand ready at a moment's notice to kill others in meaningless wars.
Genuine respect for human rights is surely more a matter of prevailing day-to-day attitudes in a society than words written on old pieces of paper.
But America is a democracy, isn't it? It certainly has many of the forms of a democracy, but when you closely examine the details, as I've written previously, American democracy resembles a badly worn wood veneer. The ugly structural stuff underneath sticks out the way elbows do in a threadbare coat.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
AMERICA HAS JUST LOST TWO MORE WARS
September 21, 2006
AMERICA HAS JUST LOST TWO MORE WARS
For a country which takes excessive pride in flags, uniforms, and marching bands and spends more than the rest of the planet combined on its military, the record of America's forces since World War II is depressing. In dozens of quickie invasions against weak opponents, Americans indeed have prevailed, but when faced with tough and determined enemies, they have remarkably often been defeated or stalemated.
The failure of America's military could be explained by the notion that failure is only what happens when you seek the wrong success. A poorly-governed people, as Americans certainly are, keeps being sent to wars in which they have no vital interest or commitment. Whatever the reason, the record is unmistakable.
It includes Korea after MacArthur's insane march to the Chinese border.
It includes Vietnam, where, despite the slaughter of millions, the US left in shame, abandoning desperate associates clinging to helicopter undercarriages.
It includes America's smaller-scale but long and vicious war on Cuba. The US was embarrassed by failure time and again, shamefully resorted to the terror tactics it now claims to despise, and wasted immense resources supporting thousands of hangers-on. Fidel Castro outlived two generations of American presidents and over six hundred assassination plots.
The record of failures includes the American military's confusing its humanitarian-assistance role in Somalia with Gary Cooper facing down the bad guys in High Noon, an error which gave it an ugly surprise and saw America turn and go home.
The record includes Reagan's poorly-considered landing of Marines in Lebanon. A base blown up by resisting guerrilla forces, the Marines left with a battleship hurling sixteen-inch shells into the hills, killing who knows how many innocent civilians and having achieved nothing.
Of course, in battles or war generally, victory is not always easy to determine. There were many battles in history where victory was claimed or loss assumed in error.
Higher casualties don't always mean losing a battle or even a war. The sacrifice of great numbers sometimes improves a strategic or tactical position, as General Grant in America's Civil War well understood. Vietnam's General Giap understood this also, for despite a horrific slaughter of his people, America suffered defeat.
It was an early sign of the coming defeat when body counts began to dominate American news. It is easy to kill large numbers of people, especially when you have complete air superiority and high-tech weapons, but constant killing may mean little progress against a serious opponent. Often, as in the Blitz, bombing people is completely counter-productive.
In recent weeks, body counts re-appeared in Afghanistan, much the same way opium poppies re-appeared after America's claim to victory over the Taleban (who had suppressed opium). The bodies are supposed to be Taleban, but who can tell whether a dead villager is Taleban?
Even when the body is Taleban, how do we regard that as a victory? The Taleban is a loosely-knit organization, a kind of political party and anti-invader guerilla force, bound to conservative traditions in a hardscrabble land of tough mountain people. Death does not intimidate where people typically live to forty-seven.
Except in the bizarre mind of George Bush, the Taleban is not a terrorist organization,. So when one of them is killed, does it really represent a victory? Or is it viewed by many in Afghanistan as murder by unwelcome foreigners? Clearly, this is the view of many because the Taleban is becoming stronger, surprisingly so according to expert observers.
The recent refusal of NATO countries to commit more troops and resources to Afghanistan was telling. Pressure from the US must have been immense, but the response was virtual silence. Of course, most NATO countries are simply looking after their own best interests. Many of them understand terrorism far better than does the US, having lived with it for decades, and none of them are exhibiting death-wishes or dementia.
They know Al Qaeda has been scattered to the four winds - anything but an achievement from a security point of view - and they see little point in trying to occupy Afghanistan for years. They understand the impossibility of significantly changing so ancient and poor a land. They are not taken in by American Potemkin village projects for bettering life there, after having bombed the hell out of the place. NATO countries in general do not accept Bush's tale about everyone's
security depending upon success in Afghanistan for the very good reason that it is false.
On the other hand, those supporting the US in Afghanistan are following Bush's interests, whatever those are, for I'm not sure Bush ever has had a clear grasp of what he is doing himself.
The other lost war is, of course, Iraq. American efforts there have done little but kill civilians and destroy the economy and now threaten to destroy the country itself. Even in Washington, the reality of civil war is dawning. America's real goals in the war are not going to be achieved, the major one of which was to establish a regime friendly to American policy, especially as that policy pertains to Israel. Instead, years of bloody chaos lie ahead. The outcome, who knows? Three separate warring rump states, each willing to do almost anything to gain an advantage, including taking assistance from those most hostile to American policy?
But the American loss in Iraq is far greater than this. The illegal and unjustified invasion has muddied America's reputation, aroused suspicions of its intentions, and put new geopolitical forces into play only dimly perceived at this time.
When are we going to learn how stupidly unproductive war is? And when is the US going to learn how bad it is at war despite its monstrous expenditures preparing for it?
AMERICA HAS JUST LOST TWO MORE WARS
For a country which takes excessive pride in flags, uniforms, and marching bands and spends more than the rest of the planet combined on its military, the record of America's forces since World War II is depressing. In dozens of quickie invasions against weak opponents, Americans indeed have prevailed, but when faced with tough and determined enemies, they have remarkably often been defeated or stalemated.
The failure of America's military could be explained by the notion that failure is only what happens when you seek the wrong success. A poorly-governed people, as Americans certainly are, keeps being sent to wars in which they have no vital interest or commitment. Whatever the reason, the record is unmistakable.
It includes Korea after MacArthur's insane march to the Chinese border.
It includes Vietnam, where, despite the slaughter of millions, the US left in shame, abandoning desperate associates clinging to helicopter undercarriages.
It includes America's smaller-scale but long and vicious war on Cuba. The US was embarrassed by failure time and again, shamefully resorted to the terror tactics it now claims to despise, and wasted immense resources supporting thousands of hangers-on. Fidel Castro outlived two generations of American presidents and over six hundred assassination plots.
The record of failures includes the American military's confusing its humanitarian-assistance role in Somalia with Gary Cooper facing down the bad guys in High Noon, an error which gave it an ugly surprise and saw America turn and go home.
The record includes Reagan's poorly-considered landing of Marines in Lebanon. A base blown up by resisting guerrilla forces, the Marines left with a battleship hurling sixteen-inch shells into the hills, killing who knows how many innocent civilians and having achieved nothing.
Of course, in battles or war generally, victory is not always easy to determine. There were many battles in history where victory was claimed or loss assumed in error.
Higher casualties don't always mean losing a battle or even a war. The sacrifice of great numbers sometimes improves a strategic or tactical position, as General Grant in America's Civil War well understood. Vietnam's General Giap understood this also, for despite a horrific slaughter of his people, America suffered defeat.
It was an early sign of the coming defeat when body counts began to dominate American news. It is easy to kill large numbers of people, especially when you have complete air superiority and high-tech weapons, but constant killing may mean little progress against a serious opponent. Often, as in the Blitz, bombing people is completely counter-productive.
In recent weeks, body counts re-appeared in Afghanistan, much the same way opium poppies re-appeared after America's claim to victory over the Taleban (who had suppressed opium). The bodies are supposed to be Taleban, but who can tell whether a dead villager is Taleban?
Even when the body is Taleban, how do we regard that as a victory? The Taleban is a loosely-knit organization, a kind of political party and anti-invader guerilla force, bound to conservative traditions in a hardscrabble land of tough mountain people. Death does not intimidate where people typically live to forty-seven.
Except in the bizarre mind of George Bush, the Taleban is not a terrorist organization,. So when one of them is killed, does it really represent a victory? Or is it viewed by many in Afghanistan as murder by unwelcome foreigners? Clearly, this is the view of many because the Taleban is becoming stronger, surprisingly so according to expert observers.
The recent refusal of NATO countries to commit more troops and resources to Afghanistan was telling. Pressure from the US must have been immense, but the response was virtual silence. Of course, most NATO countries are simply looking after their own best interests. Many of them understand terrorism far better than does the US, having lived with it for decades, and none of them are exhibiting death-wishes or dementia.
They know Al Qaeda has been scattered to the four winds - anything but an achievement from a security point of view - and they see little point in trying to occupy Afghanistan for years. They understand the impossibility of significantly changing so ancient and poor a land. They are not taken in by American Potemkin village projects for bettering life there, after having bombed the hell out of the place. NATO countries in general do not accept Bush's tale about everyone's
security depending upon success in Afghanistan for the very good reason that it is false.
On the other hand, those supporting the US in Afghanistan are following Bush's interests, whatever those are, for I'm not sure Bush ever has had a clear grasp of what he is doing himself.
The other lost war is, of course, Iraq. American efforts there have done little but kill civilians and destroy the economy and now threaten to destroy the country itself. Even in Washington, the reality of civil war is dawning. America's real goals in the war are not going to be achieved, the major one of which was to establish a regime friendly to American policy, especially as that policy pertains to Israel. Instead, years of bloody chaos lie ahead. The outcome, who knows? Three separate warring rump states, each willing to do almost anything to gain an advantage, including taking assistance from those most hostile to American policy?
But the American loss in Iraq is far greater than this. The illegal and unjustified invasion has muddied America's reputation, aroused suspicions of its intentions, and put new geopolitical forces into play only dimly perceived at this time.
When are we going to learn how stupidly unproductive war is? And when is the US going to learn how bad it is at war despite its monstrous expenditures preparing for it?
Friday, September 15, 2006
DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
September 15, 2006
DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
The rise now of China, Japan, Europe, and others – India, Korea, and to some extent Russia and Brazil – means the United States must be relatively diminished on the world stage, much as an only child whose mother just gave birth to quintuplets.
The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II - industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats - has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.
The American establishment's vision of the future, implicit in its behavior and policies, has been that traditional manufacturing jobs will pass to developing countries while greater value-added high-tech jobs and intellectual property rights will provide America’s economic strength.
But that is a somewhat arrogant vision, because competitors like China and India do not plan to do only lower value-added work, and they are uniquely gifted to succeed. The Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have an extraordinary reservoir of natural mathematical and engineering talent – every international competition or test shows this starkly - that is only now beginning to be harnessed. There is every reason to believe that over any substantial time the US will decline to a secondary role in high-tech. China or India each likely have something on the order of three or four times the natural mathematical endowment of the US. Their new high-growth economies and emerging modern infrastructure prepare the way for full application of this priceless talent.
There are more forces at work on the place of the American Empire than the emergence of other economic powers, important as that is. Major studies of the decline of empire – from Edward Gibbon to William Shirer - speak to the overwhelming importance of the moral dimension in a society and of the crucial role of capable and responsible leadership.
Polls show that three years after launching its pointless war in Iraq, nearly half of Americans still believed that Iraq was involved in making weapons of mass destruction. Five years after 9/11, better than forty percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Both of these ideas have been proved complete fairy tales. But the concentration of American media and their shared establishment interests with George Bush have produced a fabric of omissions and exaggerations as great as we might expect in a non-democratic society like China.
So-called liberal media, the New York Times being the best example, do almost nothing seriously to correct these misunderstandings. Indeed the Times helped drum America into Iraq, an unforgivable manipulation from people who had the resources to know better, and it did the same thing for horrific failures such as the war in Vietnam. The American people are desperately misinformed. What is the good of a ballot where grave ignorance prevails and is indeed actively promoted?
A menagerie of vitriolic radio and television commentators plus a vast apparatus of phony think-tanks, propaganda mills subsidized by right-wing interests, help greatly in the effort to confuse public understanding. The vitriolic commentators, little more truthful or civil in their speech than those doing the same job for third-world dictators, reinforce popular myths and prejudices, appealing to people’s lowest instinct to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of others. The phony think-tanks, much like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain pulling levers to generate puffs of smoke and dramatic noise, offer what passes for learned analysis. Both groups receive an immense amount of broadcast time and publication space in the United States.
Going back to the beginning, it can be argued that many parts of the American Constitution - regarded by Americans with a reverence usually reserved for scripture and a document that is close to impossible to change in any meaningful way - are seriously flawed and promote neither responsible government nor democratic principles. The right-wing commentator and think-tank crowd always play up to the quasi-religious notion that the Constitution is the most perfect political document ever conceived. A disgraced, crooked, nasty right-wing politician, Tom DeLay of Texas, always bragged of having a copy folded in his pocket, almost like a priest carrying a bottle of holy water.
The Constitution’s flaws leave little optimism for substantial political and policy change in the United States. It’s as though all important political institutions were trapped in amber. Without changing the Constitution's flaws, it is hard to see how America's destructive policies at home and abroad can be altered. There are many such flaws, but I’ll mention just a few.
One is the Electoral College. Many Americans do not understand that their vote for president technically does not count. The Electoral College, besides being remarkably anti-democratic, promotes corruption in elections with its winner-take-all provision in states. It is amazing that a country more than two centuries old and making great claims for democracy still can’t hold honest national elections, both of George Bush’s victories, but especially the first, being as dubious as something in an emerging nation.
Another ugly flaw in the Constitution is the power of the Senate. It can veto the more democratic House’s legislation. It must approve all major Presidential appointments and treaties. It is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution, for much of American history not being elected at all, but even now being elected in a staggered fashion that insulates its membership from issues of the day. Its internal sixty-percent rule for debate is plainly undemocratic. You only have to look at photos of American Senators to see the swollen, crinkled faces of arrogant (mostly) men, faces of bloated entitlement, grasping power into their seventies and eighties. They resemble the faces of heads of powerful families in the 16th century or, what is almost the same thing, Mafia godfathers. Surprisingly often sons, or other relatives, follow fathers as though they had inherited fiefdoms or money-minting American evangelism ministries.
The Senate’s two members for each state is an archaic nonsense that makes members from large states virtually unreachable demigods. The two senators from California each "represent" sixteen million people. The huge expense of mounting media campaigns in large states, where a member could never hope even to offer a live smile to most constituents, turns senators into full-time Fuller Brush salesmen soliciting funds. The expense creates two classes of constituents, those who give and the rest. Lobbyists naturally exploit the situation, meaning policy reflects virtually only the interests of the small group with meaningful access.
Dependence upon advertising means tight control over what is disseminated, with voters expected to believe the actor posing in a white lab coat on a patent medicine commercial is giving genuine information. Advertising and brief appearances on favorably-rigged talk shows generates attitudes of aloofness and celebrity dangerous to the public interest. Thoughtfulness and real debate at the national level have become uncommon.
The designation of the President as commander-in-chief has proved an unfortunate provision with effects the founders never foresaw. Many Americans do not realize that it was the Parliament of Great Britain against which the early Patriots railed. They saw the British Parliament as acting without the beneficent King’s full knowledge, understanding fully that the King’s powers were already heavily curtailed by the evolution of British parliamentary government. The idea of the King as tyrant was built up later during the Revolutionary War as a propaganda device, and it has been played on by elementary text books since.
So in America’s constitutional arrangements, command of the armed forces was granted to the new king-substitute, the President (many founders had favored a lifetime or long-term president who would be "above politics"). This authority was supposedly offset by Congress’s having the only authority to declare war. But as we all know, over the last sixty years not one of America’s many colonial wars has been formally declared. The power to declare war has become almost meaningless, but the power of America's Frankenstein armed forces taking orders from a president-commander (often not even honestly elected) is anything but meaningless.
The President does not himself suddenly launch a war, although he clearly has at hand intelligence and other agencies of limitless resources, whose leaders serve at his pleasure, capable of constructing compelling myths for what he wants done. He consults with key Senate and Congressional leaders, all under the intimidating shadow of being branded as cowards (or almost worse in America, poor patriots) in a fashion that is little different to what a late-eighteenth century monarch would have done with key parliamentary figures.
For that matter, few Americans realize that even a dictator with such dreadful power as Hitler, for the most part, did not summarily order dire events. Hitler consulted and argued with other prominent members of government concerning major turns in policy. Factions and other centers of power exist even in dictatorships. It is just the people who are not effectively consulted.
The United States, under George Bush, has spent itself silly on the military and security. It has also foolishly spent much, if not all, of its moral authority in the world - something derived from the many world institutions and arrangements established at the end of World War II when America felt generous and expansive - by going ahead with pointless destruction, ignoring world opinion, as though the very act of doing so were the same thing as bold leadership rather than the bullying it is. Bush is almost a parody of poor leadership, believing himself a convincing figure with his jaw squared, his eyebrows knit, while he mumbles what millions recognize as platitudes and bald-faced lies.
The business of Bush wearing a radio device concealed under his jacket for debates or press conferences or important meetings - an indisputable fact from pictures of his back taken at many angles - is a damning revelation of how under the American system an incompetent can serve two terms as President. It is damning, too, of the mainline media which never pursue such matters, choosing never to embarrass a man who has done a great deal of harm to the nation.
America’s history is important to understanding the attitudes of its people, although we perhaps should judge American democracy today more by its external actions which include invading pretty much any country it chooses, violating the free elections of other countries, toppling democratically-elected leaders, supporting the oppressive regimes, assassinating leaders, frequently imposing destructive economic sanctions, and generally behaving the way you would expect a bully to act who happened also to be the richest kid in town.
Even an honestly elected government which behaves without regard for those outside its territory, which treats others as though they had no rights, can hardly be called democratic in any meaningful sense.
The War in Iraq has been called by an American expert the worst strategic mistake ever made by the United States, and I believe that will prove a deadly accurate assessment. How do all those American patriot types, clutching their private arsenals in paranoid fear of government tyranny, fail to see how millions of others, like the Iraqis, view American government tyranny abroad? The enemies America has made in destroying and occupying Iraq will engage it for many years in totally needless war and terror.
The Middle East has become more unstable and less predictable for decades thanks to George Bush. All recent American policies have been almost the opposite of what would have proved appropriate and effective to a better future.
The glaring injustice of giving Israel its way in almost anything, including bombing women and children in Beirut, while the U.S. invades Muslim lands can only generate frustration and despair beyond measure. Israel has become a garrison state, a grossly inefficient economy, subsidized by the United States, that maintains a nuclear arsenal and one of the world’s most powerful armies, spending an extraordinary portion of its GDP on unproductive military and security apparatus. It is now walling itself in and preparing to carry on with little or no reference to the millions with which it shares its part of the world, except to bomb and rocket them whenever it feels rankled. This is a national vision from hell. The vision has no long-term viability without endless subsidy, an indefinite drain on American resources and the world's patience and a painful injustice for millions of the region’s people.
Condoleezza Rice's disgusting words about children and others torn apart by Israeli cluster bombs in Beirut representing the birth pangs of a new Middle East pretty much speaks for itself. Democracy? Democratic values? Human values? Nonsense. Rather, they are words about as far removed from these values as you can get.
I do not believe that any nation which ignores the serious flaws in its democracy and treatment of others can maintain the moral authority in the twenty-first century required for leadership in the world. The world generally is evolving towards democracy and respect for human rights. This is not a result of American policy, it is the natural evolution of human affairs, it is what happens as countries grow and prosper.
It is true, too, that any nation which spends so much on its military, holding dear the anti-democratic and anti-human rights values of any military, cannot maintain that same moral authority. Eisenhower’s predicted military-industrial complex is not a friendly face on the world, but it is indisputably the face of America today.
Just consider, as one tiny aspect of this, the disgraceful relationship between Vice-President Cheney and Halliburton Corporation. Halliburton has prospered mightily from Cheney’s role as a powerful advocate of war, and Cheney, the company’s former CEO, has openly prospered from Halliburton with all kinds of special payments since first running for office. It is an open disgrace, but no more of a disgrace than the way money runs American elections. The world outside America sees all this clearly, and what else can the knowledge generate but cynicism and disgust? How on earth can a man of this quality address the great principles of humanity without causing listeners to snicker? How can anyone be expected to take America’s high-sounding rhetoric seriously?
The American international structure carefully built up after World War II is beginning to crumble, although it is not always obvious yet since good appearances are carefully maintained. A prime example is the crumbling of NATO. The grass is still kept well-trimmed at headquarters, but America’s insistence on making unnatural demands on this alliance, such as those it has made in Afghanistan, are surely destroying what was once a powerful international organization.
It may be just as well, for Europe has a future more independent of the U.S., and perhaps the decline in NATO only reflects an unavoidable changing reality. Europe’s commercial know-how and technology make a natural marriage with Russia’s vast natural resources. America has for a couple of decades worked to suppress this development, especially with respect to Russian natural gas exports, but it must in the end prove a losing battle.
Britain’s Tony Blair has been exploited by the U.S. to spike European aspirations, much as Margaret Thatcher was previously. Because of a shared history with the former colonies, a good deal of residual xenophobia regarding people on the Continent, plus a sense of its own special importance engendered by memories of empire, Britain remains confused about its role in Europe, and the United States keeps playing on this confusion to avoid a more cohesive E.U. Such American policies in the long run can leave only bitterness over manipulating Europe’s affairs, and they cannot prevent what physical facts and natural self-interests dictate as destiny.
So, too, with respect to Europe’s relations with the Middle East. Israelis sometimes talk of Europe as being anti-Semitic simply because Europeans are more critical of Israel’s policies. But Europe simply sees the problem of Palestine/Israel in a clearer light than the U.S. where religious fundamentalism and other powerful factors blur vision. Europe also naturally wants to cultivate the best commercial relations with the owners of the world’s great reservoirs of crude oil, so commercial incentives add to the force of the moral view. Not only must Europe look to its future energy supplies, but the E.U. is expanding, and Western Asia is becoming a next-door neighbor.
These are just some of the reasons we can expect a decline in the relative influence and importance of the United States over the next decades. A more balanced, multi-polar world is emerging. Unfortunately, the people who seem least ready to deal with it are Americans.
DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
The rise now of China, Japan, Europe, and others – India, Korea, and to some extent Russia and Brazil – means the United States must be relatively diminished on the world stage, much as an only child whose mother just gave birth to quintuplets.
The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II - industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats - has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.
The American establishment's vision of the future, implicit in its behavior and policies, has been that traditional manufacturing jobs will pass to developing countries while greater value-added high-tech jobs and intellectual property rights will provide America’s economic strength.
But that is a somewhat arrogant vision, because competitors like China and India do not plan to do only lower value-added work, and they are uniquely gifted to succeed. The Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have an extraordinary reservoir of natural mathematical and engineering talent – every international competition or test shows this starkly - that is only now beginning to be harnessed. There is every reason to believe that over any substantial time the US will decline to a secondary role in high-tech. China or India each likely have something on the order of three or four times the natural mathematical endowment of the US. Their new high-growth economies and emerging modern infrastructure prepare the way for full application of this priceless talent.
There are more forces at work on the place of the American Empire than the emergence of other economic powers, important as that is. Major studies of the decline of empire – from Edward Gibbon to William Shirer - speak to the overwhelming importance of the moral dimension in a society and of the crucial role of capable and responsible leadership.
Polls show that three years after launching its pointless war in Iraq, nearly half of Americans still believed that Iraq was involved in making weapons of mass destruction. Five years after 9/11, better than forty percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Both of these ideas have been proved complete fairy tales. But the concentration of American media and their shared establishment interests with George Bush have produced a fabric of omissions and exaggerations as great as we might expect in a non-democratic society like China.
So-called liberal media, the New York Times being the best example, do almost nothing seriously to correct these misunderstandings. Indeed the Times helped drum America into Iraq, an unforgivable manipulation from people who had the resources to know better, and it did the same thing for horrific failures such as the war in Vietnam. The American people are desperately misinformed. What is the good of a ballot where grave ignorance prevails and is indeed actively promoted?
A menagerie of vitriolic radio and television commentators plus a vast apparatus of phony think-tanks, propaganda mills subsidized by right-wing interests, help greatly in the effort to confuse public understanding. The vitriolic commentators, little more truthful or civil in their speech than those doing the same job for third-world dictators, reinforce popular myths and prejudices, appealing to people’s lowest instinct to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of others. The phony think-tanks, much like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain pulling levers to generate puffs of smoke and dramatic noise, offer what passes for learned analysis. Both groups receive an immense amount of broadcast time and publication space in the United States.
Going back to the beginning, it can be argued that many parts of the American Constitution - regarded by Americans with a reverence usually reserved for scripture and a document that is close to impossible to change in any meaningful way - are seriously flawed and promote neither responsible government nor democratic principles. The right-wing commentator and think-tank crowd always play up to the quasi-religious notion that the Constitution is the most perfect political document ever conceived. A disgraced, crooked, nasty right-wing politician, Tom DeLay of Texas, always bragged of having a copy folded in his pocket, almost like a priest carrying a bottle of holy water.
The Constitution’s flaws leave little optimism for substantial political and policy change in the United States. It’s as though all important political institutions were trapped in amber. Without changing the Constitution's flaws, it is hard to see how America's destructive policies at home and abroad can be altered. There are many such flaws, but I’ll mention just a few.
One is the Electoral College. Many Americans do not understand that their vote for president technically does not count. The Electoral College, besides being remarkably anti-democratic, promotes corruption in elections with its winner-take-all provision in states. It is amazing that a country more than two centuries old and making great claims for democracy still can’t hold honest national elections, both of George Bush’s victories, but especially the first, being as dubious as something in an emerging nation.
Another ugly flaw in the Constitution is the power of the Senate. It can veto the more democratic House’s legislation. It must approve all major Presidential appointments and treaties. It is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution, for much of American history not being elected at all, but even now being elected in a staggered fashion that insulates its membership from issues of the day. Its internal sixty-percent rule for debate is plainly undemocratic. You only have to look at photos of American Senators to see the swollen, crinkled faces of arrogant (mostly) men, faces of bloated entitlement, grasping power into their seventies and eighties. They resemble the faces of heads of powerful families in the 16th century or, what is almost the same thing, Mafia godfathers. Surprisingly often sons, or other relatives, follow fathers as though they had inherited fiefdoms or money-minting American evangelism ministries.
The Senate’s two members for each state is an archaic nonsense that makes members from large states virtually unreachable demigods. The two senators from California each "represent" sixteen million people. The huge expense of mounting media campaigns in large states, where a member could never hope even to offer a live smile to most constituents, turns senators into full-time Fuller Brush salesmen soliciting funds. The expense creates two classes of constituents, those who give and the rest. Lobbyists naturally exploit the situation, meaning policy reflects virtually only the interests of the small group with meaningful access.
Dependence upon advertising means tight control over what is disseminated, with voters expected to believe the actor posing in a white lab coat on a patent medicine commercial is giving genuine information. Advertising and brief appearances on favorably-rigged talk shows generates attitudes of aloofness and celebrity dangerous to the public interest. Thoughtfulness and real debate at the national level have become uncommon.
The designation of the President as commander-in-chief has proved an unfortunate provision with effects the founders never foresaw. Many Americans do not realize that it was the Parliament of Great Britain against which the early Patriots railed. They saw the British Parliament as acting without the beneficent King’s full knowledge, understanding fully that the King’s powers were already heavily curtailed by the evolution of British parliamentary government. The idea of the King as tyrant was built up later during the Revolutionary War as a propaganda device, and it has been played on by elementary text books since.
So in America’s constitutional arrangements, command of the armed forces was granted to the new king-substitute, the President (many founders had favored a lifetime or long-term president who would be "above politics"). This authority was supposedly offset by Congress’s having the only authority to declare war. But as we all know, over the last sixty years not one of America’s many colonial wars has been formally declared. The power to declare war has become almost meaningless, but the power of America's Frankenstein armed forces taking orders from a president-commander (often not even honestly elected) is anything but meaningless.
The President does not himself suddenly launch a war, although he clearly has at hand intelligence and other agencies of limitless resources, whose leaders serve at his pleasure, capable of constructing compelling myths for what he wants done. He consults with key Senate and Congressional leaders, all under the intimidating shadow of being branded as cowards (or almost worse in America, poor patriots) in a fashion that is little different to what a late-eighteenth century monarch would have done with key parliamentary figures.
For that matter, few Americans realize that even a dictator with such dreadful power as Hitler, for the most part, did not summarily order dire events. Hitler consulted and argued with other prominent members of government concerning major turns in policy. Factions and other centers of power exist even in dictatorships. It is just the people who are not effectively consulted.
The United States, under George Bush, has spent itself silly on the military and security. It has also foolishly spent much, if not all, of its moral authority in the world - something derived from the many world institutions and arrangements established at the end of World War II when America felt generous and expansive - by going ahead with pointless destruction, ignoring world opinion, as though the very act of doing so were the same thing as bold leadership rather than the bullying it is. Bush is almost a parody of poor leadership, believing himself a convincing figure with his jaw squared, his eyebrows knit, while he mumbles what millions recognize as platitudes and bald-faced lies.
The business of Bush wearing a radio device concealed under his jacket for debates or press conferences or important meetings - an indisputable fact from pictures of his back taken at many angles - is a damning revelation of how under the American system an incompetent can serve two terms as President. It is damning, too, of the mainline media which never pursue such matters, choosing never to embarrass a man who has done a great deal of harm to the nation.
America’s history is important to understanding the attitudes of its people, although we perhaps should judge American democracy today more by its external actions which include invading pretty much any country it chooses, violating the free elections of other countries, toppling democratically-elected leaders, supporting the oppressive regimes, assassinating leaders, frequently imposing destructive economic sanctions, and generally behaving the way you would expect a bully to act who happened also to be the richest kid in town.
Even an honestly elected government which behaves without regard for those outside its territory, which treats others as though they had no rights, can hardly be called democratic in any meaningful sense.
The War in Iraq has been called by an American expert the worst strategic mistake ever made by the United States, and I believe that will prove a deadly accurate assessment. How do all those American patriot types, clutching their private arsenals in paranoid fear of government tyranny, fail to see how millions of others, like the Iraqis, view American government tyranny abroad? The enemies America has made in destroying and occupying Iraq will engage it for many years in totally needless war and terror.
The Middle East has become more unstable and less predictable for decades thanks to George Bush. All recent American policies have been almost the opposite of what would have proved appropriate and effective to a better future.
The glaring injustice of giving Israel its way in almost anything, including bombing women and children in Beirut, while the U.S. invades Muslim lands can only generate frustration and despair beyond measure. Israel has become a garrison state, a grossly inefficient economy, subsidized by the United States, that maintains a nuclear arsenal and one of the world’s most powerful armies, spending an extraordinary portion of its GDP on unproductive military and security apparatus. It is now walling itself in and preparing to carry on with little or no reference to the millions with which it shares its part of the world, except to bomb and rocket them whenever it feels rankled. This is a national vision from hell. The vision has no long-term viability without endless subsidy, an indefinite drain on American resources and the world's patience and a painful injustice for millions of the region’s people.
Condoleezza Rice's disgusting words about children and others torn apart by Israeli cluster bombs in Beirut representing the birth pangs of a new Middle East pretty much speaks for itself. Democracy? Democratic values? Human values? Nonsense. Rather, they are words about as far removed from these values as you can get.
I do not believe that any nation which ignores the serious flaws in its democracy and treatment of others can maintain the moral authority in the twenty-first century required for leadership in the world. The world generally is evolving towards democracy and respect for human rights. This is not a result of American policy, it is the natural evolution of human affairs, it is what happens as countries grow and prosper.
It is true, too, that any nation which spends so much on its military, holding dear the anti-democratic and anti-human rights values of any military, cannot maintain that same moral authority. Eisenhower’s predicted military-industrial complex is not a friendly face on the world, but it is indisputably the face of America today.
Just consider, as one tiny aspect of this, the disgraceful relationship between Vice-President Cheney and Halliburton Corporation. Halliburton has prospered mightily from Cheney’s role as a powerful advocate of war, and Cheney, the company’s former CEO, has openly prospered from Halliburton with all kinds of special payments since first running for office. It is an open disgrace, but no more of a disgrace than the way money runs American elections. The world outside America sees all this clearly, and what else can the knowledge generate but cynicism and disgust? How on earth can a man of this quality address the great principles of humanity without causing listeners to snicker? How can anyone be expected to take America’s high-sounding rhetoric seriously?
The American international structure carefully built up after World War II is beginning to crumble, although it is not always obvious yet since good appearances are carefully maintained. A prime example is the crumbling of NATO. The grass is still kept well-trimmed at headquarters, but America’s insistence on making unnatural demands on this alliance, such as those it has made in Afghanistan, are surely destroying what was once a powerful international organization.
It may be just as well, for Europe has a future more independent of the U.S., and perhaps the decline in NATO only reflects an unavoidable changing reality. Europe’s commercial know-how and technology make a natural marriage with Russia’s vast natural resources. America has for a couple of decades worked to suppress this development, especially with respect to Russian natural gas exports, but it must in the end prove a losing battle.
Britain’s Tony Blair has been exploited by the U.S. to spike European aspirations, much as Margaret Thatcher was previously. Because of a shared history with the former colonies, a good deal of residual xenophobia regarding people on the Continent, plus a sense of its own special importance engendered by memories of empire, Britain remains confused about its role in Europe, and the United States keeps playing on this confusion to avoid a more cohesive E.U. Such American policies in the long run can leave only bitterness over manipulating Europe’s affairs, and they cannot prevent what physical facts and natural self-interests dictate as destiny.
So, too, with respect to Europe’s relations with the Middle East. Israelis sometimes talk of Europe as being anti-Semitic simply because Europeans are more critical of Israel’s policies. But Europe simply sees the problem of Palestine/Israel in a clearer light than the U.S. where religious fundamentalism and other powerful factors blur vision. Europe also naturally wants to cultivate the best commercial relations with the owners of the world’s great reservoirs of crude oil, so commercial incentives add to the force of the moral view. Not only must Europe look to its future energy supplies, but the E.U. is expanding, and Western Asia is becoming a next-door neighbor.
These are just some of the reasons we can expect a decline in the relative influence and importance of the United States over the next decades. A more balanced, multi-polar world is emerging. Unfortunately, the people who seem least ready to deal with it are Americans.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
FLAT DADDY: WEIRD STUFF FROM AMERICA'S MILITARY
September 3, 2006
FLAT DADDY
I thought I knew every twist of American popular culture, but apparently not. It is an inventive society, and war is a creative force that brings new impulses. There's a program in the state of Maine, supported by the fun-loving, public-relations folks of the local National Guard, called Flat Daddy, unlike anything I've heard of before.
On first hearing the name, I thought the program must involve a roving jazz band, perhaps one from New Orleans, but a moment's reflection reminded me that George Bush had assisted in removing New Orleans from atlases of the United States, Jehovah taking care of the buildings and Bush taking care of the people.
Readers, I am sure, have seen street hawkers in large American cities who have life-size cardboard cut-outs of celebrities and offer to take your picture standing as though you were with someone famous. I suspect this provided the creative spark for Flat Daddy.
Flat Daddy involves taking a picture of one of "the boyz" over in Iraq, enlarging it to life-size, and mounting it on cardboard. When a family back home goes to a pizzeria or bowling alley, perhaps even to a revival meeting, they simply drag along Flat Daddy and position him (the pronoun it is not used) in a prominent place among the smiling faces. More photos are taken and sent back to Iraq and perhaps to Aunt Helen in the old folks' home. The miracle is that everyone feels part of the family despite the awkward inconvenience of war.
There were a few points left unclear by the undoubtedly fresh-faced officer enthusing over the program on the radio. Does Flat Daddy have to pay admission at the movies? Is he included in the minimum per-head table charge at restaurants?
Probably not, but when America goes to war, the nation's two strongest impulses tend to become a little confused, preening patriotic feathers and making a quick buck.
You might expect an idea like Flat Daddy to have come from Texas or the Midwest, places where beehive hair-dos and prayer in the locker room before football games are still in vogue. But, no, it came from Maine, which despite its reputation for sensible, traditional values, is where, several years ago, I observed a donut shop's gigantic, ugly over-head sign, normally given over to two-for-one breakfast specials, challenging passing cars to "HONK FOR THE TROOPS!"
At the same donut shop, there was a huge display of flags in the parking lot you might have assumed were part of the patriotic outburst, but then you noticed an attendant approaching car windows with one fist full of flags and the other grasping a huge wad of dollar bills. It reminded me of the man selling balloons on a stick at the circus decades ago. Here was a celebration of invasion as only America can do it.
What about others at the casino or sports bar who have their views blocked by Flat Daddy? The program is new, and this potential kink may not have been worked out yet, but I can't see it becoming a problem. Quibbling about something like a life-size cardboard cut-out of a smiling soldier in uniform slapped down in front of you anywhere in America could well be hazardous for your health.
You might wonder why there isn't also a Flat Mommy or Flat Sissy program, and I wondered about this myself, but many parts of America have not got past the idea that it's "the boyz" who go abroad. Never mind that White House crap about women in Iraq. In much of the U.S., the standard for female etiquette was set when Eisenhower was president.
I discovered on the Internet that people in Iraq know this program, perhaps learning about it from the drawling chit-chat between laughter and machine-gun bursts at American check points. Iraqis apparently have started their own version, necessarily rather low-tech in view of the lack of electricity and running water in so many places. After allowing the sun to bake them for a reasonable time, the bodies of Iraqi men crushed by American tanks or flattened by 500-pound bombs are gently peeled from the pavement. They are lovingly brought to what remains of the family home and propped against a wall in the basement bomb shelter, an important family-gathering place in George Bush's Iraq.
FLAT DADDY
I thought I knew every twist of American popular culture, but apparently not. It is an inventive society, and war is a creative force that brings new impulses. There's a program in the state of Maine, supported by the fun-loving, public-relations folks of the local National Guard, called Flat Daddy, unlike anything I've heard of before.
On first hearing the name, I thought the program must involve a roving jazz band, perhaps one from New Orleans, but a moment's reflection reminded me that George Bush had assisted in removing New Orleans from atlases of the United States, Jehovah taking care of the buildings and Bush taking care of the people.
Readers, I am sure, have seen street hawkers in large American cities who have life-size cardboard cut-outs of celebrities and offer to take your picture standing as though you were with someone famous. I suspect this provided the creative spark for Flat Daddy.
Flat Daddy involves taking a picture of one of "the boyz" over in Iraq, enlarging it to life-size, and mounting it on cardboard. When a family back home goes to a pizzeria or bowling alley, perhaps even to a revival meeting, they simply drag along Flat Daddy and position him (the pronoun it is not used) in a prominent place among the smiling faces. More photos are taken and sent back to Iraq and perhaps to Aunt Helen in the old folks' home. The miracle is that everyone feels part of the family despite the awkward inconvenience of war.
There were a few points left unclear by the undoubtedly fresh-faced officer enthusing over the program on the radio. Does Flat Daddy have to pay admission at the movies? Is he included in the minimum per-head table charge at restaurants?
Probably not, but when America goes to war, the nation's two strongest impulses tend to become a little confused, preening patriotic feathers and making a quick buck.
You might expect an idea like Flat Daddy to have come from Texas or the Midwest, places where beehive hair-dos and prayer in the locker room before football games are still in vogue. But, no, it came from Maine, which despite its reputation for sensible, traditional values, is where, several years ago, I observed a donut shop's gigantic, ugly over-head sign, normally given over to two-for-one breakfast specials, challenging passing cars to "HONK FOR THE TROOPS!"
At the same donut shop, there was a huge display of flags in the parking lot you might have assumed were part of the patriotic outburst, but then you noticed an attendant approaching car windows with one fist full of flags and the other grasping a huge wad of dollar bills. It reminded me of the man selling balloons on a stick at the circus decades ago. Here was a celebration of invasion as only America can do it.
What about others at the casino or sports bar who have their views blocked by Flat Daddy? The program is new, and this potential kink may not have been worked out yet, but I can't see it becoming a problem. Quibbling about something like a life-size cardboard cut-out of a smiling soldier in uniform slapped down in front of you anywhere in America could well be hazardous for your health.
You might wonder why there isn't also a Flat Mommy or Flat Sissy program, and I wondered about this myself, but many parts of America have not got past the idea that it's "the boyz" who go abroad. Never mind that White House crap about women in Iraq. In much of the U.S., the standard for female etiquette was set when Eisenhower was president.
I discovered on the Internet that people in Iraq know this program, perhaps learning about it from the drawling chit-chat between laughter and machine-gun bursts at American check points. Iraqis apparently have started their own version, necessarily rather low-tech in view of the lack of electricity and running water in so many places. After allowing the sun to bake them for a reasonable time, the bodies of Iraqi men crushed by American tanks or flattened by 500-pound bombs are gently peeled from the pavement. They are lovingly brought to what remains of the family home and propped against a wall in the basement bomb shelter, an important family-gathering place in George Bush's Iraq.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
WHY MUST THE RIGHT WING SOUND SO BRUTALLY STUPID?
July 31, 2006
WHY MUST THE RIGHT WING SOUND SO BRUTALLY STUPID?
Just when I thought he had shown a glimmer of statesmanship, Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister courtesy of just over one-third of the vote, reverted to character. Following Israel's apparently-deliberate targeting of four UN observers in Lebanon, including one Canadian, Harper thought it appropriate to ask, not why Israel killed them, but why the observers were there?
His inspired question reminded me of nothing so much as a rape-case lawyer attacking the victim with questions along the lines of why was she in such a place? at such a time? wearing such a dress?
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's official idiot-savant, gave us a memorable quote last week concerning Israeli barbarism in Lebanon: "We are witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East." I wonder what would have been press reaction in America to some high official saying, as the World Trade Center toppled in flames, "We are witnessing the birth pangs of a new America"?
Of course, Condi was keeping her eyes on the big picture, as she tends to do, the picture as viewed from high above the earth where human beings become unseen bacilli in a vast fabric of coastlines and geometric patterns, not close-up where you can distinguish blood-spattered ruins and childrens' limbs snapped like broken bird wings.
You might want to ask Condi why America's murderous assault on Vietnam, where it dropped more bombs than in World War Two, was such a miserable failure rather than the birth of anything? Or why Baghdad, after experiencing American Shock and Awe, has sewers that work only to catch run-off blood from the streets? Perhaps Condi would say they just needed a little topping-up on the bombing to complete the miracle of birth?
Her words came near to the time an Israeli source explained to the world that Israeli pilots were operating now on the principle that ten Beirut apartment blocks would be bombed for every Hezbollah missile launched. A few days after, an Israeli pilot struck gold, killing fifty-seven civilians, including thirty-seven children.
From Israel, came only Goebbels-speak: Hezbollah always hides in just such places. Left unasked and unanswered in the soulless repetitions of this point is: then what kind of a human being would still fire on them?
Israel insists that Hezbollah's missiles are a horror not to be endured.
I'll remind readers that Hezbollah's main "missile" is the Katyusha artillery rocket, not a missile at all, because it is not guided. The Katyusha was designed to be fired in large barrages from mobile, multi-tube launchers to blanket an area, but Hezbollah does not posses these - they would quickly be destroyed if they did - and uses Katyushas as single-launch rockets. Used this way, the Katyusha is a glorified firework, totally inaccurate with a short range and a small explosive charge. Ninety-nine percent of these "missiles" land in the desert or on garage roofs or in parking lots. The few times they have killed anyone were accidents.
Hezbollah has managed to fire a few clusters now in response to Israel's horrific bombardment, but apart from one dramatic incident, killing eight, they have killed few Israelis. We have heard a great deal about a new longer-range rocket, but this is just a bigger Katyusha with a bigger warhead. It also is totally inaccurate.
By comparison, Israel drops 500-pound, high-explosive bombs which are deadly accurate, being hooked into American satellite-guidance systems. It drops them from some of the world's most sophisticated fighter-bombers. An order of American 5000-pound, "bunker-busting," laser-guided bombs was rushed recently to Israel to help in the good work. Israel also uses American Hellfire missiles, mounted on helicopters or fighter planes. These really are missiles, highly accurate, in the slick words of their manufacturer's sales pitch, they feature "dual warheads for defeating reactive armor, electro-optical countermeasures hardening, semi-active laser seeker, and a programmable auto-pilot for trajectory shaping."
Israel uses some of the world's best long-range artillery pieces, and it fills their breeches with deadly depleted-uranium shells which bring the added gift of long-lived vaporized uranium after exploding. It uses American cluster bombs, the horrible things that dismembered or crippled thousands of Iraqi children. And it now appears to be using the white-phosphorus shells or bombs Americans used in Fallujah to burn flesh in much the same way they used napalm in Vietnam.
Tony Blair, known to Bush insiders as Fluffy the toy poodle, made a showy trip to Washington about his concern over events in the Middle East, the concern apparently focusing on a revolt by his own cabinet. As usual, he got nothing from Bush, except the honor of standing at a podium next to America's first certified-moron president. Blair also got to do a little choreographed turn with Bush at the end of the press conference, allowing the pair to stride out with a ceremonial flourish after somber moments of saying nothing.
British journalists apparently miffed the American crowd because they didn't follow the mindless ritual of standing up when the president is announced, it not being the practice to stand for Blair in London. Even worse perhaps was one British journalist's description of the event as a "press availability" rather than a press conference. It was undoubtedly the most informative comment of the week.
WHY MUST THE RIGHT WING SOUND SO BRUTALLY STUPID?
Just when I thought he had shown a glimmer of statesmanship, Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister courtesy of just over one-third of the vote, reverted to character. Following Israel's apparently-deliberate targeting of four UN observers in Lebanon, including one Canadian, Harper thought it appropriate to ask, not why Israel killed them, but why the observers were there?
His inspired question reminded me of nothing so much as a rape-case lawyer attacking the victim with questions along the lines of why was she in such a place? at such a time? wearing such a dress?
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's official idiot-savant, gave us a memorable quote last week concerning Israeli barbarism in Lebanon: "We are witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East." I wonder what would have been press reaction in America to some high official saying, as the World Trade Center toppled in flames, "We are witnessing the birth pangs of a new America"?
Of course, Condi was keeping her eyes on the big picture, as she tends to do, the picture as viewed from high above the earth where human beings become unseen bacilli in a vast fabric of coastlines and geometric patterns, not close-up where you can distinguish blood-spattered ruins and childrens' limbs snapped like broken bird wings.
You might want to ask Condi why America's murderous assault on Vietnam, where it dropped more bombs than in World War Two, was such a miserable failure rather than the birth of anything? Or why Baghdad, after experiencing American Shock and Awe, has sewers that work only to catch run-off blood from the streets? Perhaps Condi would say they just needed a little topping-up on the bombing to complete the miracle of birth?
Her words came near to the time an Israeli source explained to the world that Israeli pilots were operating now on the principle that ten Beirut apartment blocks would be bombed for every Hezbollah missile launched. A few days after, an Israeli pilot struck gold, killing fifty-seven civilians, including thirty-seven children.
From Israel, came only Goebbels-speak: Hezbollah always hides in just such places. Left unasked and unanswered in the soulless repetitions of this point is: then what kind of a human being would still fire on them?
Israel insists that Hezbollah's missiles are a horror not to be endured.
I'll remind readers that Hezbollah's main "missile" is the Katyusha artillery rocket, not a missile at all, because it is not guided. The Katyusha was designed to be fired in large barrages from mobile, multi-tube launchers to blanket an area, but Hezbollah does not posses these - they would quickly be destroyed if they did - and uses Katyushas as single-launch rockets. Used this way, the Katyusha is a glorified firework, totally inaccurate with a short range and a small explosive charge. Ninety-nine percent of these "missiles" land in the desert or on garage roofs or in parking lots. The few times they have killed anyone were accidents.
Hezbollah has managed to fire a few clusters now in response to Israel's horrific bombardment, but apart from one dramatic incident, killing eight, they have killed few Israelis. We have heard a great deal about a new longer-range rocket, but this is just a bigger Katyusha with a bigger warhead. It also is totally inaccurate.
By comparison, Israel drops 500-pound, high-explosive bombs which are deadly accurate, being hooked into American satellite-guidance systems. It drops them from some of the world's most sophisticated fighter-bombers. An order of American 5000-pound, "bunker-busting," laser-guided bombs was rushed recently to Israel to help in the good work. Israel also uses American Hellfire missiles, mounted on helicopters or fighter planes. These really are missiles, highly accurate, in the slick words of their manufacturer's sales pitch, they feature "dual warheads for defeating reactive armor, electro-optical countermeasures hardening, semi-active laser seeker, and a programmable auto-pilot for trajectory shaping."
Israel uses some of the world's best long-range artillery pieces, and it fills their breeches with deadly depleted-uranium shells which bring the added gift of long-lived vaporized uranium after exploding. It uses American cluster bombs, the horrible things that dismembered or crippled thousands of Iraqi children. And it now appears to be using the white-phosphorus shells or bombs Americans used in Fallujah to burn flesh in much the same way they used napalm in Vietnam.
Tony Blair, known to Bush insiders as Fluffy the toy poodle, made a showy trip to Washington about his concern over events in the Middle East, the concern apparently focusing on a revolt by his own cabinet. As usual, he got nothing from Bush, except the honor of standing at a podium next to America's first certified-moron president. Blair also got to do a little choreographed turn with Bush at the end of the press conference, allowing the pair to stride out with a ceremonial flourish after somber moments of saying nothing.
British journalists apparently miffed the American crowd because they didn't follow the mindless ritual of standing up when the president is announced, it not being the practice to stand for Blair in London. Even worse perhaps was one British journalist's description of the event as a "press availability" rather than a press conference. It was undoubtedly the most informative comment of the week.
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