You’ve got to read this description of the new American embassy under construction in Bagdad (the title: ”The Colossus of Bagdad”).  This monstrous construction project is unbelievably arrogant and excessive.  It will be the largest embassy on the planet.

As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole “hyperpower,” dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul—or a khan.

This is terrific writing characteristic of TomPaine.com.  But this is not just a story about a construction project.  Rather, it is a story of the corrupt leaders of our nation.  This story makes me acutely embarrassed to be an American.  No, I don’t want to leave the U.S.  I want to change it.

Some of us of are having a discussion in another thread about military recruitment strategies. Personally, I think those of us opposed to the war should be directing our energies toward counter-recruitment rather than accepting the poverty draft as a fact of life. We should also do everything we can to support AWOL and deserting soldiers who have experienced the futility of our presence in Iraq firsthand. If you know anyone in the military who wants to get out, please give them the GI rights hotline number: 1-800-394-9544 and the GI rights web site: http://girights.objector.org
This leads me to the title of this post: a documentary about the last real revolutionary working-class social movement in this country’s history: the GI movement against the Vietnam war.
From the Sir! No Sir! website:

In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

You can watch the theatrical trailer here, the extended 12 minute trailer here, and the punkass crusade counter-recruitment spot here.

Summary: A scathing, informative chronicle of the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq, yet one that speaks with compelling plausibility of all the missed opportunities to turn things around.

Former U.S. diplomat and ambassador Peter Galbraith has been deeply and personally involved with the affairs of Iraq for over twenty years. In his new book The End of Iraq, he writes of how the Bush administration’s incompetence and mismanagement of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has led to a bloody civil war within its borders. He argues that the only realistic solution to this problem is the partition of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines into three states, and furthermore, that this division has been a long time coming and might have positive dividends both for the U.S. and for other countries in the region.

The Bush administration’s catastrophic ineptitude has long been obvious to an observer of the news, and Galbraith leaves no stone unturned recounting their blunders, some of which are truly staggering. For example, despite Bush’s State of the Union claim (later shown to be false) about how Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium “yellowcake” from Africa suitable for reprocessing into a bomb, the fact is that Iraq actually had pre-existing stores of yellowcake - under International Atomic Energy Agency seal - which the Bush administration made no effort to protect in the aftermath of its invasion, and which was subsequently stolen by looters. Apparently, although the threat of Iraqi possession of yellowcake was so serious as to merit immediate war, the actual yellowcake which Iraq possessed did not justify military protection.

Another stunning example is the al-Qaqaa munitions facility, a complex of bunkers containing hundreds of tons of high explosive which, again, was left unguarded after the invasion and subsequently stolen. Much of this explosive no doubt ended up in the hands of insurgents, where it has been used ever since to fashion roadside bombs and other weapons of destruction to be used against both American troops and other Iraqis. Vials of infectious diseases like polio and HIV, some of which had the potential to be weaponized, were also stolen from Baghdad’s Public Health Laboratory. Despite Colin Powell’s frightening pre-war incantation of Iraq’s plans to create biological weapons, these stores went unguarded for over a week after the U.S. invasion before they were taken.

Other failures, though of less military significance, had enormous cultural significance - such as the U.S. failure to protect Iraq’s museums and libraries, which likewise fell prey to looters who smashed or stole some of the most ancient archaeological remnants of human civilization. Iraq’s National Library was burned down, literally erasing over a hundred years of the country’s history. The Ministry of Irrigation, which was looted and burned, lost the plans and blueprints for thousands of canals, dams and pumping stations delivering the water Iraqis need to live. Yet American troops were ordered to protect one Iraqi government compound, and a cynic could probably have guessed which one: the Oil Ministry, naturally.

The looting and chaos which followed the invasion, and which was not planned for or mitigated, was the first of the Bush administration’s great blunders. But the second part of this one-two punch ensuring the failure of the occupation was its subsequent ham-handed attempt to restore order, in the person of L. Paul Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority administrator. Bremer was dispatched to oversee reconstruction and ended up ruling Iraq like a dictator for months, repeatedly preventing Iraqis from holding free elections because he feared the government they would elect would not be to George W. Bush’s liking. In the meantime, reconstruction was bungled and billions of dollars were squandered by Bremer’s untrained, unqualified political appointees (most of whom were chosen in preference to experienced diplomats because of their conservative political bona fides). The failure to restore even basic services like electricity for months on end cemented most Iraqis’ view of the U.S. as arrogant, incompetent occupiers.

All of these blunders and many others can be laid squarely at the feet of the Bush administration. The highly placed neoconservatives who ruled the White House had grandiose visions of rebuilding Iraq in their own image, as a secular, pro-American democracy. But their plans were conceived in dangerous ignorance of the actual political conditions in Iraq, coupled with hopelessly naive fantasies of how the Iraqis would eagerly welcome us (summed up by Dick Cheney’s comment that he expected them to greet American soldiers as “liberators”). The level of ignorance was astonishing: as recently as two months before the invasion, Galbraith recounts, President Bush not only did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, but did not know what those words even meant. He was unaware that there were multiple sects within Islam. Similarly, Bremer was given only two weeks to prepare for overseeing Iraq, whereas even routine ambassadorial assignments usually involve months of study and preparation. Of such culpably willful ignorance were the seeds of subsequent failure planted.

Today, Iraq is a bloody patchwork of fiefdoms, with Sunni-Shi’ite civil war raging in the streets and a gridlocked government unable to agree on many fundamental aspects of how power will be shared. Ironically, the biggest beneficiary has been Iran, which for twenty years trained and funded the Shi’ite politicians who now hold the majority in Iraq’s government and are steadily moving the country toward an Iranian-style theocracy. For all Bush’s bellicose rhetoric about the “axis of evil”, he has succeeded only in substantially empowering the one member of that group that probably poses America the greatest direct threat.

Galbraith meticulously details all this and more. And yet, in a way, his book is truly fair and balanced. Bizarre though it sounds, even to me, his book has made me aware of the good which the invasion of Iraq has accomplished.

I’m not speaking of absurdly trumpeted reports about how many schools we have painted, nor about how Baghdad’s security has improved because powerful American senators now need only a hundred armed guards and five attack helicopters to stroll through it. No, I’m speaking of Iraq’s oft-forgotten third ethnic group, the Kurds.

The Kurds are the largest single ethnic group in the world with aspirations of creating their own state, which after reading Galbraith’s passionate account (he is a close personal friend of many leading Kurds, including Iraq’s current president, Jalal Talabani), I strongly believe they deserve. The Kurds have been denied their own state since World War I, and have suffered brutally at the hands of many rulers - especially Saddam Hussein, who initiated the genocidal Anfal campaign against them that made extensive use of poison gas. (Galbraith personally played a decisive role in bringing Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds to light in the 1980s.) They have been repeatedly betrayed by many Western leaders, including both Ronald Reagan, who knew of but overlooked Hussein’s atrocities because at the time he was our ally in the Iran-Iraq war, and George W. Bush Sr., who promised American aid to the Kurds if they would rise up to overthrow Saddam and then failed to deliver, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam in retaliation. Even before the war the Kurds were independent in all but name, thanks to the protection of the American no-fly zone. But since the war concluded, they have made little effort to keep up even a pretense of being part of Iraq, and now rule their own territory in apparent peace and security far removed from the chaos prevailing in the rest of the country.

More so, Galbraith’s book convinced me - perhaps unintentionally - that the American invasion did not have to be a disaster. Despite the lies about Iraqi WMD put forth to scare Americans into supporting war, the Bush administration could have succeeded in the aftermath, if only they had planned for it with some marginal degree of realism. They could have rebuilt Iraq, probably not into the pro-American secular client state the neocons wanted, but perhaps a stable and peaceful state governed by power-sharing agreements similar to the ones enacted in Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Galbraith identifies several key points where an image of American competence could have set Iraq on this course, most notably in the first few days after Baghdad’s fall, when the failure to quickly provide security permitted the city to dissolve into a chaos of looting. If we had instead acted swiftly to preserve order and maintain Iraq’s existing government as much as possible, this war might have had a very different conclusion. In truth, it was the Bush administration’s hubris, its incurious and self-satisfied faith in the most wildly optimistic scenarios, that led them to plan for no other outcome and ultimately resulted in the bloody, costly occupation in which we have now become enmeshed.

In its closing chapters, The End of Iraq makes the case that partition of Iraq is now the only feasible option. In truth, I got the strong impression that it was inevitable all along, and that the American invasion only accelerated it. Iraq has never been a unified country with a national identity, such as Japan and Germany were. From the beginning, it was a state created on paper by far-removed imperialists, who drew its boundaries without regard for the mutually hostile and distrustful religious and ethnic groups they had penned in together. Only the ruthless use of force by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors held Iraq together this long. It is into this quagmire, fueled by hundreds of years of rivalry and enmities going back for generations, that America has unwittingly stepped. By pulling out now, we will substantially weaken our position in the region, but that damage was done from the beginning and staying would only make things even worse. The sooner we come to terms with the reality of the situation in Iraq and cast aside the ludicrous dreams of empire which the neocons cling to even now, the sooner we can begin crafting a solution that will prevent the senseless loss of more American and Iraqi lives and that may actually work in the long run.

From Alec Baldwin at Huffpo: 

Let’s chat about how the Army exploits economically deprived minorities and offers them careers in the military. Cash, clothes, a car. (Don’t hold your breath for that armor plating, though.) Some of these men have criminal records, which the Army, in order to meet recruitment numbers, has chosen to increasingly overlook. The Army is pitched as a chance to start your life over. To do something meaningful. To be somebody. To be a part of something where guns and aggression and codes of honor are taken out of the illegal gang arena and shifted over to “serving the American people.”

Don’t get me wrong. We need an army. Sometimes, we need to fight to uphold what we believe . . .

We’re all glad that the British sailors are back home.  Anyone following this story knows that these sailors were treated graciously by their Iranian captors.  Nonetheless, while in captivity, the British sailors admitted that they had been trespassing in Iranian waters when whey were apprehended.

But notice some of the things that have been said about the confessions of the British sailors in this piece by the Associated Press:

None of the sailors and marines freed by Iran will be punished for making apologies to the Iranians . . . The ministry said officials would examine the circumstances in which some of the 15 sailors and marines appeared in videos on Iranian state television offering regrets for entering Iran’s territorial waters, while Britain’s government has insisted they were in Iraqi waters.

Although experts said the broadcast admissions were almost surely made under duress, many British newspapers lashed out at the crew and the country’s military.

“Those were transparently cooked-up confessions. It would be wrong to criticize those people, and besides they were not betraying anything to put anyone at risk,” he said.

The consensus thus seems to be that even when the people taken captive are treated very well they can feel enough duress to confess to things that are false. 

Now let’s shift gears. Compare the above confessions to the confessions conducted through torture conducted by the United States. See here and here and here and here.  The official American position seems to be:  “We torture and they confess. What’s the big deal?”  As though confessions produced through torture are reliable.

Ergo, confessions produced in captivity, even without torture, are not reliable, at least when our allies are the victims.  On the other hand, confessions are no problem at all when they are provoked by waterboarding and other horrible forms of torture conducted by the United States at places like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan and at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

“God bless America,” those same conservatives who justify torture are so prone to say.

I wondered whether this link was pushing the boundary of good taste, so I checked with Jason and Grumpypilgrim and got their quick OK’s.  Now you know where to complain. 

If you’ve been wondering what really spurs the neocons on, click here.  If you like it, I’ll take the credit.

This video just goes to show you how vigorously the GOP is spinning our “success” in Iraq. 

Notice that McCain was wearing a bulletproof vest during his “stroll through the market.”  He also brought 100 soldiers and five helicopters to protect him while he “walked freely” through the market.

My daughters and I have started to watch some of the episodes from the Star Trek Voyager series on DVD.  We are not disappointed at all.  All of us are finding that the series contains well-written, thought-provoking, stories.

Here is a topic that might seem unrelated to Star Trek:  According to a recent poll, 29% of Americans still approve of the way that George Bush is doing his job.

Here’s the connection.  The mission and efficient operation of a Star Trek starship would not appear to be compatible with the principles of the Bush administration. 

For this reason, I would require that those 29% of Americans who continue to adore the president should no longer be allowed to own or view any more Star Trek shows. That would be hypocrisy.  Instead, I would offer them a new Star Trek series, yet to be written, that I Would Call Star Trek: Bring It On!  What follows is my concept for this new Star Trek series (told from the perspective of a hypothetical crew member):

I started noticing problems on the starship Voyager after the new captain took over.  He smirks a lot and pretends that he was a cowboy even though he wasn’t.  He spends most of his time chopping wood or playing sports hero in the holodeck while his lieutenants run the ship.

At first, there changes were subtle.  Before Officers Meetings, we were asked to acknowledge the existence of an invisible supernatural being.  A few months later, we were required to read extensively from the ancient holy book offered by the Officers, so much so that it took away time that we desperately needed to achieve our engineering goals.  And now the officers’ requirements directly conflict with our engineering protocol. For example, we were recently told that our calibrations of the celestial navigation equipment violated the official Star Trek Holy Book and that we should no longer consider the actual positions of stars to navigate, because this would be “playing God.” When we protested, we were accused of being anti-Federation.

Before the new changes, it was assumed that crew members were responsible adults and that they could make choices regarding their own bodies and lives.  After the Cowboy Captain took over, however, the medical officers refused to dispense any more birth control pills, declaring that it was “playing God” to try to determine when or whether to have children.  Accidentally pregnancies are now common on board, leading to much domestic stress and shortages of lodging quarters and some supplies.

Our new mission statement requires us to force every alien civilization we encounter to become more like us.  If they refuse, we soften them up with our weapons.  Such interventions have recently been given the title of “The New Prime Directive.”  We also have adopted a new policy justifying the attack of planets that don’t believe the teachings from our Holy Book. 

We also institute preemptive attacks on planets that have natural resources we covet.  We previously bargained for the use of natural resources that belonged to others, but we now simply take them.  Sometimes, we need to soften them up first with our shocking and awesome weapons..  When we capture aliens (we call them all “illegal aliens”), we torture them with water boarding and other ancient techniques to improve their attitude and truth telling.

We are putting most of our energy and time into developing new weapons, yet we are neglecting basic education for the children of our crew members.  As a result, the children on the starship have fallen way behind other civilizations in their math, science and critical thinking skills. We are also neglecting basic scientific research, resulting in very few new innovations for the past several years.  Several large areas of the starship have fallen into general disuse and smelly decay.  We have been told that our budget no longer supports developing each of the starships crew members to his or her fullest potential.

We have no energy conservation program here on the starship.  We blast around space using up our precious fuel without any thought to how we are going to replenish it.  In the mean time, we are finding that our life-support systems are increasingly polluted with byproducts generated by use of our engines.  After we complained about this pollution, we were told that the Cowboy Captain had invoked a new “Clear Skies” policy that (to our surprise) doubles the amount of pollution allowed in the ship’s atmosphere.  When our scientists unanimously issued a report condemning the new policy based on their research, their reports were censored and edited by Officers who had no scientific training.

I’d better stop writing at this point, because I am concerned that the officers are now monitoring my journals.

The bill to set withdrawal timetables from Iraq has passed, on its way now to the President’s desk–where it will be vetoed.  Democrats will work on this issue from now on, presumably with an eye toward using it as a campaign issue to gain more seats and hopefully hand the White House to a Democrat.  All well and good.  Bush has made a hash of this war.

What does disturb me is the trend toward thinking that cutting funding for the war is a useful tool.  Congress can’t order Bush to pull out, but it does control the purse, and as such it can–presumably–make it impossible for the President to conduct the war.  But we all, if we’re honest, know very well that that’s not how it will play out.

I am apalled at this war, but let me be clear–had Bush contented himself with going into Afghanistan and dealing with that, I would have backed him.  Perhaps he or his cronies would have made a hash of that, too, but I saw Afghanistan as a legitimate enterprise.  The Taliban were harboring Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban itself made its political feelings toward us very clear.  Also, Afghanistan is right next to Pakistan, which is and has been a seed bed of problems for some time.  Pakistan was a source for nuclear technology to rogue states, it has a big problem with extremists, and the Taliban launched their invasion of Afghanistan from there and use it to hide.  Pakistan is potentially a lot of trouble.  So I had no real problem with going into Afghanistan. 

I always thought the Iraq move was stupid and unnecessary.

But.

There is and never has been neat ways to disentangle from messes and what I dislike about the Democrat’s threat to cut funding for the war is that it uses the troops on the ground as a political football.  Bush is already doing that.  For the Democrats to join the game is one of the reasons I tend to curse both parties.

If the expectation is that when the money dries up, the troops will come home, then we all have to realize that Republicans and Democrats are engaging in a game of political chicken.  Who will flinch first.  Because as long as Bush is in charge, they won’t come home.  They’ll simply be tasked to do the job with less.  Or he’ll find the money somewhere else.  (Anyone remember Reagan?)  But it will not be the neat, tidy quid pro quo  the Democrats expect everyone to believe it will be.  And the ones who will pay for this game of chicken will be the soldiers.

The way to get out of Iraq, the best way possible, is to wait for a new administration, preferably Democrat, and then do it by open and uncompetitive means.  It will take longer.  But if the Democrats push this money thing in order to make Bush look worse than he does, then they will be no better than him, using the troops to make political points.  Perhaps their strategy will be viable–more and bloodier casualties will wash over the Republicans and sweep some more of them out of office–but it the same kind of callous politicking we’ve been accusing the Republicans of all along.

And by the way, McCain and others are correct about setting timetables.  The insurgents will just hunker down and wait.  The big losers then will be the Iraqis who really are trying to make their country work.  That may not be an argument for us to stay, but it is a consequence that has sound historical precedent–Vietnam and Cambodia to name two.

I think we’ve hashed up Iraq.  I say we because of the nature of our electorate, so whether as individuals we support this war or not, it remains a We issue.  Staying may not help.  Leaving will only help us.  Had there been a plan before the invasion or any semblence of responsible oversite during, we might have actually succeeded in something.  So I’m for gettng out.  But I believe everyone ought to know what that means and I resent the Democrats–who I voted for in the last election–playing politics with the very troops they claim to be supporting.

According to this article by Newsweek, 3,301 U.S. active-duty soldiers deserted the Army in 2006. 

Jeffry House is a defense lawyer representing many of these soldiers.  Newsweek asked House why so many soldiers were deserting.  According to House,

The common idea is that the war in Iraq is going nowhere, and it’s bogus, as I’ve been told [by soldiers] many times. In other words, there was no justifiable reason to attack Iraq in the first place. People are now telling me stuff like, “We clear out a section of Baghdad, hand it over to the government, and the next day 70 bodies would appear.” They feel like they’re helping the Iraqi government, which [they feel] actually is a bunch of death squads in disguise. So they begin to feel responsible. People can’t justify to their own selves what they’re doing there, it just seems wrong, wrong, wrong to them. I have a couple of guys who actually finished a six-year commitment. They were given an honorable discharge. They got nice medals and a nice party, and when they drive up in their driveway at home there’s somebody giving them a stop-loss document, which means you’re back in [the service] at the [military's] pleasure. People are very disheartened.

Recent comments in response to posts on Dangerous Intersection have led me to write this screed.  Screed is to be the operative word for this, for it has been born out impatience and anger.  The biggest danger we face in the long run is the basic ignorance people bring to the political discourse.  If we lose our freedoms, it will not be to some tyrannical coup pulled off by a malicious politician, but because we ourselves collectively will no longer know what the hell we’re about.

Remembering my own school days, I cannot say that the situation presently is worse–we all have a tendency to misremember our youth, claim it to be better or worse, but the only thing we can say about it is that it was differently oriented–because most of my peers did not care a bit for history then.  They plodded through their classes, primary interest focused on their own immediate desires and needs, and who cared what happened before they were born?  What has changed is that as the world shrinks and becomes daily more pressing, the buffers that protected us in our ignorance no longer operate as efficiently or even in the same way.  One of the things that makes modern foreign entanglements more significant for the individual is that the cause and effect loop is faster, more immediate, and more threatening.  Therefore, when something begs for understanding and we look to the past for examples and counterexamples, it will not do to simply trust our leaders.  Nor will it do to have merely a Hollywood understanding of the past. 

I expect this will change nothing.  But I am annoyed.

World War II is used often as a touchstone for military adventurism and the necessity of strong foreing policy.  It is also used to excuse present-day actions, to make comparisons of situations then and now, and to validate decisions taken which seem  to bear some resemblence to the past.

But the people who do this the most seem rarely to know what they’re talking about.

The world was in fact very different and America substantially so.  Let me go down a list of why comparisons–specifically between the present Middle East conflict and WWII–are simply not supportable.

One:  the entire globe was struggling to emerge from economic depression.  We personalize the Great Depression here.  An American calamity.  It was bad here, very bad, but our hagiography about our nation’s past tends to blind us to the fact that entire planet was screwed up then.  The world was in depression in the aftermath of the first world war.  The emergence of the facsist states was directly related to this central fact.  They were in many ways economic movements. They didn’t work, they depended on pillage, hence the expansionist aspect to all the fascist regimes with the exception of Spain, which was only partly facsist in the economic sense.

One thing this meant for America at the time is that we enjoyed no clear superiority economically to any other nation.  We did, in fact, have more potential, and the fundamental vitality of our economic prior to 1929 softened–yes, softened–the onset of depression somewhat, but it hamstrung us in ways that make comparisons to the present-day situation absurd.  Furthermore, no one was sure then that capitalism would survive.  We really forget this one.  The global depression put that in doubt in ways we can’t imagine now.

Two:  Along with all the other problems, we had no significant military.  Not even here.  We forget today that one of the central tenets of America since the revolution was a profound distrust of standing armies of any kind.  After WWI, we stood down.  The fleet was aging, infantry were poorly trained an equipped, and numbers were low.  WWI resulted in no occupation by us of anything significant.

Three:  There was no CIA.  Or anything even close to it.  We had embassies and some embassies employed spies, usually locals, and there were a few spies employed by the government, but this was also antithetical to our vision of ourselves.  Spying grew during WWI, but Calvin Coolidge shut it down.  His secretary of state–I forget his name–closed down Room 14 with the famous saying “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.”  The branches of the military had small intelligence units, but there was NOTHING like today’s CIA, NIA, or other intelligence organizaitons.  We did not have the information-gathering capacity in any way shape or form, and even if we did, there was little we could have done with any of it.  The so-called “super powers” of the day were Britain, France, Russia to some extent (although they were rabidly isolationist modern myths to the contrary–the Soviet threat we came to know and love developed after WWII), and the U.S., but Britain pretty much dominated the international scene.

Four: The technology of the day was, with certain exceptions, 19th Century.  Gasoline and diesel power had replaced coal in many ways (for shipping, that is) but by and large, WWII started out as a 19th Century war.  It also started out as a war among relative equals.

I could go on, but just those fundamental differences should show that comparisons cannot be made but in the most careful ways, and generally not at all. WWII was a kind of war which we may never see again.  Saddam Hussein was not Hitler.  The closest thing we have to that kind of dictator today is in North Korea, and he is incapable of doing much more than rattle his chains, his much discussed nuclear program notwithstanding.  The social and political and economic circumstances that to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan no longer pertain.  It’s both simpler and more complex than that, but in any event it is different.  An Osama Bin Laden could not have done then what he has done today, just as an emergent Hitler could not do today what he did then.

This is important, because we have a habit in this country of eulogizing and sacrilizing the past in such a way as to argue current policy points with the underlying assumption that what we did then cna apply now.  Sometimes it can, but for the most part things have changed too much for valid comparisons.  It leads us to presume before understanding, and that has led us into a horrid mess which bears virtually no comparison to anything we did in the past or had to face.

We need to get over that habit if we’re going to find viable solutions to future problems, and that means we better stop treating history–collectively–like a font of sacred text or that boring stuff about dead people.

End of screed.

If you want to sleep well and not worry about Bush’s new plans for the Middle East, don’t read this New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh: “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” 

Dick Cheney and other conservatives constantly warn us of the “China threat.”  Check out these headlines and articles:

• Chinese bid for Unocal, Pentagon worries over military spending lead to fresh discussion of Chinese ‘threat’. 
• Revving Up the China Threat 
• US exaggerates China defense - report
• Cheney, the Neocons and China 

This belligerent U.S. attitude that insists that China will inevitably ripen into our next big enemy concerns me for two reasons.

First, why can’t the U.S. work toward an upcoming era of cooperation with China, rather than assuming that we must eventually go to war because China is an emerging superpower?  This preference for aggression rather than cooperation is a xenophobic tactic that Neocons have previously used to make “enemies” out of many other countries with whom we should be working to develop strong relationships.  What is China’s sin, by the way?  China is doing the same things the United States does.  For instance, China competing economically with vigor.  China is accruing wealth.  China is testing sophisticated weapons. China is expanding its influence into parts of the world where petroleum can be found in the ground.  Yet the U.S. is paranoid about China.    If our frustration is that the Chinese practically own us (along with Japan), that is our own fault that we can’t control our own profligate government spending.  I’m not advocating being naive. Perhaps China will someday threaten American interests.  I’m suggesting that we should save harsh rhetoric if that happens. 

Second, I have a personal stake in this rhetoric.  I have two Chinese daughters (they are both adopted) and many Chinese friends and acquaintances.  I am concerned that Americans, led by our government and media, will morph into a people who will once again view Chinese people with disdain.  Don’t laugh.  Look how Americans now view people of Middle Eastern descent.  Our dysfunctional government and simplistic mainstream media are quite capable of developing similar derogatory racial attitudes toward Chinese people, including the Chinese people already living in the United States.  I don’t want to live in an America that is any more xenophobic than it already is.

But why do I say “once again,” as though the Chinese have previously been the victims of horrible racism in the U.S.?  Because the Chinese have, indeed, been victims of widespread racism for most of their existence in the United States.  A detailed work on this subject is Iris Chang’s The Chinese in America (2003).  In that work, she showed, among other things, the damage that can be caused when media and government conspire to denigrate people whose only crime was to be of a certain ethnicity or culture. [The quotes in this article are from The Chinese in America].

Chang was a Chinese American freelance historian who died at the age of 36 after a nervous breakdown following an episode of depression.  She was a fascinating person. In addition to The Chinese in America, Chang left another literary gem, The Rape of Nanking.

It was through Chang’s writings that I learned much of what I know about the Chinese in America.  More than 100,000 Chinese laborers came to America to make their fortunes during the gold rush.  They came to America because it was not easy to survive in China, especially in rural China. 

In the typical rural village, people slept on mats on dirt floors, their heads resting on bamboo pillows or wooden stools.  . .. An arm load of fuel warmed and fed a dozen people . . . most lived and died without gaining more than a dim comprehension of the world beyond their own village … the promise of gold electrified the imaginations of the impoverished Chinese.  It ignited hopes among poor people … They borrowed money from their friends and relatives, sold off their water buffalo or jewelry or signed up with a labor agency that would front of them the money for passage in exchange for a share of their future earnings in America.

In America, however, the Chinese faced different sort of challenges.  Nonwhites could not become naturalized US citizens under a 1790 statute.  Many of the Chinese didn’t actually make it to America.  Three quarters of a million Chinese men were decoyed into slavery in what was known as the “coolie” trade.  Many of them were locked into filthy receiving stations.  Chang estimates that between 15 and 45% of the “coolies” died in transit to the final work destinations.  Cuba was one of these destinations, where the coolies were made to work on sugar plantations 21 out of 24 hours each day.  Suicide was common.

But many of the Chinese workers did make it to San Francisco.  Between 1848 and 1850, San Francisco, previously a desolate area of sand dunes and hills, suddenly grew to a population of 30,000.  It was a “roaring frontier town.”  92% of California were men, and “violence was the rule.”  During the 1850s, 85% of the Chinese in California were engaged in mining.  Mark Twain wrote that the Chinese “are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness . . . a disorderly China man is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.”

The Chinese worked so hard (and successfully) at mining that, in 1852, legislators proposed that Chinese migrants be prohibited from mining.  (more…)

Who’s the best person to lecture China on a recent test that suggests China’s interest in militarizing outer space?  According to James Fallows, it’s not Dick Cheney.

Chomsky wrote that it all has to do with corporate power and oil.  Here is an excerpt from The Independent, an article entitled “The US says it is fighting for democracy - but is deaf to the cries of the Iraqis”  

Sovereignty in Iraq might well lead to a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world’s petroleum resources and independent of the US, undermining a primary goal of US foreign policy since it became the world-dominant power after the Second World War. Worse yet, though the US can intimidate Europe, it cannot intimidate China, which blithely goes its own way, even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown - the primary reason why China is considered a leading threat. An independent energy bloc in the Gulf area is likely to link up with the China-based Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council, with Russia (which has its own huge resources) as an integral part, and with the Central Asian states (already members), possibly India. Iran is already associated with them, and a Shia-dominated bloc in the Arab states might well go along. All of that would be a nightmare for US planners and their Western allies.

There are, then, very powerful reasons why the US and UK are likely to try in every possible way to maintain effective control over Iraq. The US is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis. All of this is quite separate from the expectations that matters can be arranged so that US corporations profit from the vast riches of Iraq.

These topics, though high on the agenda of planners, are not within the realm of discussion, as can easily be determined. That is only to be expected. These considerations violate the fundamental doctrine that state power has noble objectives, and while it may make terrible blunders, it can have no crass motives and is not influenced by domestic concentrations of private power. Any questioning of these Higher Truths is either ignored or bitterly denounced, also for good reasons: allowing them to be discussed could undermine power and privilege.

Here is Chomsky’s practical proposal  “work to change the domestic society and culture substantially enough so that what should be done can at least become a topic for discussion.”

Here’s Robert Sheer’s take on the new budget:

Ever since some lunatics, mostly citizens of our longtime ally Saudi Arabia, used $3 knives to hijack four planes on the same morning, President Bush has exploited our nation’s trauma as an opportunity to throw trillions of dollars at the military-industrial complex to build weaponry for a Cold War that no longer exists . . .

The Bush budget makes sense only as a slush fund for the defense industry execs and stockholders, a group also blessed by Bush’s tax cuts.

I am aghast at this budget.  I couldn’t agree more with this comment to Sheer’s article:

Bu$h Inc. is just doing what he was elected to do. I can’t believe anyone is surprised anymore. My condolences to anyone who thinks their vote still matters. The founders of this country fought for our right to vote - we’ll have to fight again to have it matter.

Ps.  Chris Kelly also weighs in with some more specifics of some of the military mega-purchases that are making the budget so lopsided.

And why should we care about this material rarely mentioned outside of science-fiction? Well, it involves recycling, our energy future, and a chance to de-proliferate nuclear weaponry and reduce the threat of “dirty” bombs. First, a brief bit of history:

Back in the 1930’s, it was discovered that isotopes of 3 elements could sustain nuclear fission chain reactions in a reactor. They are:

• A rare and hard-to-isolate isotope of Element 92, Uranium 235,
• Two hazardously manufactured isotopes of Element 94, Plutonium 239 and Plutonium 240
• The cheap and common isotope of Element 90, Thorium 232

Although all three could be used to make a nuclear reactor, in the 1940’s it was important to make a bomb. The amount of the common Thorium isotope needed just to get a reaction going was too heavy to airlift, so they focused on refining Uranium, and producing Plutonium. Both of these 2 tracks bore hideous fruit.

By 1950 we already had big facilities to make these 2 rare and expensive fissile substances, so why not just use them for power stations? (Answer: It’s just too darn easy to make wayward Plutonium into portable bombs.) Our present generation of slow-neutron reactors is reasonably efficient at getting energy out of the original isotopes, and almost as safe as the reactors now being built in Europe. But what about the 95% of the original fuel that we call radioactive waste?

The knee-jerk reation is to do with it what one does with garbage. Bury it. Originally, 10,000 years (about the time between the oldest discovered human city and the present) was considered a long enough storage time to be safe. But the no-nukes crowd managed to get Congress to up the certified unattended time-to-failure requirement for Yucca Mountain storage to a million years.

I’m not here to argue that this is a silly requirement. Just note that highly-radioactive isotopes are mutually exclusive from long-lived isotopes. I’m here to tout thorium, and the fast-neutron fission reactor that can “burn” thorium and also “burn” 90% of the radioactive “waste” that we are burying or planning to bury. Burn it to produce usable energy.

What? Look up fast neutron reactors. Here’s one wiki about them. But the point in this case, is not to produce more fuel, but to use a big reactor to produce energy from slow-neutron-reactor waste isotopes, medical waste isotopes, and from thorium. Sure, a fast-neutron reactor produces plutonium. I’m suggesting that we leave it in there to keep burning until we get useless isotopes of iron, lead, and the relatively safe and/or useful lanthanide isotopes in between those and thorium.

I’d advocate building this reactor right on Yucca mountain, where the 10% leftover waste from burning the original “waste” can still be buried. We already are shipping the waste (fuel!) there. Sure, the energy produced would have to be transported out, and long stretches of wire are expensive, both in terms of installation and parasitic losses. However, we are talking about a reactor that essentially burns dirt and garbage. Okay, thorium is not quite as cheap as dirt, but it is much cheaper than ₉₂U²³⁵.

We could set up long lines of power towers, or build a superconducting power conduit cooled by hydrogen produced at the reactor, or just package the energy by producing methane or hydrogen or some other convenient energy storage medium that can be piped or trucked out.

One caveat is that a thorium reactor has to be big. The core needs to be twice as big as for a normal Uranium fast-neutron reactor in order to keep the reaction going. Fine. What is the real-estate on top of a nuclear disposal site going for? Out in the middle of nowhere, the only objection to “big” is that it costs more to build. Once it is going, it should run for about the same operating costs as the reactor near your town. One factor that helps is that the waste used as a co-fuel reduces the size requirement compared to a thorium-only reactor.

One other issue: If we don’t get a reactor like that built before we run out of fossil fuels, we may not have the wherewithal to build it later. Fusion might bear fruit; it’s been predicted “within ten years” since the 1960’s. The best bet for commercial fusion still requires a reactor bigger than what I’m suggesting here.

This is not an original idea, but I’d like to get it out before another audience. Just fuel for thought.

Here’s a compelling article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon.  Kahneman is famous for identifying numerous human heuristics and biases in the lab. He received a Nobel prize in economics based on his decades of inspiring work. Renshon is a Harvard doctoral student.

In this article, the authors note that many built-in human heuristics and biases lead our leaders to choose war over peace. Our leaders are “predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves.”

Here’s a sample:

People are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses—only a few of which we discuss here—incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.

The excessive optimism of humans is yet another potential pitfall for leaders:

Psychological research has shown that a large majority of people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success. People are also prone to an “illusion of control”: They consistently exaggerate the amount of control they have over outcomes that are important to them—even when the outcomes are in fact random or determined by other forces. It is not difficult to see that this error may have led American policymakers astray as they laid the groundwork for the ongoing war in Iraq.

Once we’ve begun a losing cause, our biases keep us from evaluating losing situations accurately.  The authors frame this problem as the deep-seated human aversion to cutting losses.  This is akin to the sunk cost phenomenon we’ve previously discussed in the context of Iraq. 

Did you see Virginia Sen. Jim Webb’s response to the President’s State of the Union address last night?  Here’s the text.

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command. . .and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed.

And what about the recent remarks of Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska?

“There is no strategy,” he said of the Bush administration’s war management. “This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they’re real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.”

A Vietnam veteran, he fairly lectured fellow senators not to duck a painful debate about a war that has grown increasingly unpopular as it has gone on. “No president of the United States can sustain a foreign policy or a war policy without the sustained support of the American people,” Hagel said.

Until recently, the Administration and it’s many supporters (where did most of them go) slammed people who raised the above sorts of concerns as traitorous and unpatriotic. Why?  Because Bush’s (former) supporters said so. Lazy and seeking imminent satisfaction, like toddlers, they didn’t want to do the intellectual ground work.  Their reach was, indeed, greater than their grasp.

Have we learned anything about the importance of vigorously questioning our leaders?  I think that many of us have.  Many of us have learned that huddling together like timid sheep is danagerous and stupid. Many have learned that we are stonger when we treat the voices of sincere criticism with respect.  After all, if those critics are wrong, we should be able to explain why without venom; once we do this, they’ll join us.  If those critics are correct, though, we need to publicly acknowledge those criticisms and change our ways. For our own good.

Perhaps it’s because the lessons we’ve learned about communicating are so patently obvious that the President is bypassing communication alltogether in his secret dealings with Iran. 

What concerns me about Iran is that (I fear) decisions are being made without any meaningful public discussion.  Unlike Iraq, where the Administration duped America, we are edging toward disaster with Iran in silence, repeatedly provoking Iran to make the first move. The American public is not being asked what they think about going to war with Iran. 

So here’s the biggest lesson our President learned from Iraq:  When no one knows what you’re up to, there’s no critics to paint as unpatriotic.  Problem solved.

Never try to do such a foolish thing.  It could never work.  It just makes things worse.  War is a chainsaw.  Reconstituting social structures is akin to brain surgery.

So here’s a question: In what major city were the following photos taken? (These photos were sent to me by an American friend who once lived in this city).

Snowscape of the mystery city.

Major ski resort ten minutes from the mystery city.

Vali Asr Blvd.

A worker on Election Day.

Casting votes on Election Day.

Here’s some more photos of this city–Tehran.  You see, it’s not all sand and desert. 

I’m sure that many people will be surprised at how beautiful Tehran is. After all, these photos don’t show bombs going off or general chaos (which the Western media tends to depict about the Middle East).  When is the last time the Western corporate media talked up the beauty of the Middle East, where it wasn’t in an exotic travel section?  When was the last time you read that most people in Iran are not actively trying to “destroy America”?

Why would we spend so much energy trying to convince ourselves that “they” are different than us?  Is it, perhaps, that we are repulsed at destroying people en masse when they are too much like us? 

Do they have major problems in Iran?  Absolutely.   Do they have dangerous sword-rattling political leaders?  Absolutely.  Does America have those too?  It’s becoming clearer every day. 

Are there millions of peace-loving residents in Iran?  According to my friend, Absolutely.  What they want are very much the same sorts of things we want.  The existence of millions of freedom-seeking people in Iran was common knowledge prior to 9/11.  Contrary to popular hysterical belief in America, 9/11 did not change everything.

It’s time for President Bush to take many deep breaths, admit that he’s over his head and to start listening to evidence-based people at the State Department (if any of them remain).  It’s time to can the flaming rhetoric (leaders of both countries need to stop this) and it’s time for Mr. Bush to quit trying to provoke a war with Iran. 

Given the vast overlap of human needs and hopes among the citizens (if not the leaders) of Iran and the U.S., the failure to thoroughly explore cooperative co-existence demonstrates the abject lack of moral imagination. 

The following remarks were delivered by Bernie Sanders to the National Conference for Media Reform. Sanders is the junior United States Senator from Vermont.  He is an independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.  Amy Goodman describes Sanders’ speech as an “alternative State of the Union.”

The full text to Sanders’ speech