Bob Cesca reports on the President’s attitude toward a war of mass destruction.  These are the actual words and emotional expressions of President Bush:

“But this — we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding [grinning] World War III [end grinning], it seems like you [begin giggling] ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge [end giggling] necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

In an alternet.org article entitled “The Mega-Lie Called the ‘War on Terror’: A Masterpiece of Propaganda,” Richard Behan sums up the evidence exposing the “War on Terror” for what it really is: a repulsive attempt to achieve world dominance through militaristic means.  The article includes a succinct chronology substantiating the author’s claims.

What is the basis for the “terror” of the “War on Terror”?  Good question: 

Impeachment will expose the fraudulence of the “War on Terror” and liberate us from the pall of fear the Bush administration has deliberately cast upon the country. Both political parties will be free to speak the truth: Terrorism is real and a cause for concern, but it is not a reason for abject fear.

We need only compare the hazard of al Qaeda to the threat posed by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. On the one hand is a wretched group of sad fanatics — perhaps 50,000 in all — clever enough to commandeer airliners with box cutters. On the other was a nation of 140 million people, a powerful economy, a standing army of hundreds of divisions, a formidable navy and air force and thousands of nuclear tipped intercontinental missiles pre-aimed at American targets.

We were a vigilant but poised and confident people then, not a nation commanded to cower in fear. We can and must regain that strength and self-assurance.

This comment is an opportunity for us to get a glimpse at sophisticated thought process driving our foreign policy.

The following is an excerpt from a speech Barak Obama is scheduled to give today in Iowa:

We hear eerie echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the way that the President and Vice President talk about Iran. They conflate Iran and al Qaeda. They issue veiled threats. They suggest that the time for diplomacy and pressure is running out when we haven’t even tried direct diplomacy. Well George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear - loud and clear - from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.

I recently discussed American foreign policy with an attorney over lunch.  Over the years, this fellow had generally shown himself to be thoughtful on many issues.  He is a meticulous lawyer, charged with parsing out bits of relevant evidence regarding the dozens of cases on which he works every day.

It eventually became clear that he fully supported the U.S. attack on Iraq, though he was agonized over how badly the “war” was going.  Why did he support the Iraq invasion?  This is where the conversation got strange:  Because of what “they” did to us (allegedly the 9/11 attacks).  It’s because of what “they” planned to do (impose Muslim culture on all Americans).  It’s because of what “they” stand for (”they hate freedom”).   Further, we simply need to make them pay.   We can’t let “them” get away with what “they” did on 9/11.  

It became clear through this conversation that, for my acquaintance, all Muslim countries are the same.  None of them can be trusted.  All of them are at least somewhat guilty for 9/11.   I challenged his over-generalizations, but my acquaintance would not back off.  For him, all Muslims are bad.  Further, it was clear to him that we couldn’t do nothing about 9/11.  Doing something (no matter what it was) is far better than doing nothing.

It has repeatedly occurred to me that without the federal government’s 6-year national license to engage in bigotry and misdirected vengefulness, the invasion of Iraq would have been extremely difficult to sell. Based upon numerous conversations I’ve had with people who supported the Iraq invasion, bigotry and misdirected vengefulness justified their support of the invasion.  For many people these things continue to justify any future U.S. military action in the Middle East.  “They” have it coming.

In “The Real Lessons of 9/11,” Gary Kamiya does a much-needed psychological analysis on those people who have supported the sustained and misdirected U.S. military violence in the Middle East.  Kamiya has really thought things through.  Kamiya’s Salon.com article is an extraordinary piece of writing.  The bottom line is that the mainstream media has not questioned the shameful emotions and ideology that justified Bush’s crusade in the minds of all too many people.  Here are a few excerpts from the article, but I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole thing:

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated.

Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was to declare a “war on terror,” of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the “front line.” The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush’s “war on terror” was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead.

Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

This one is difficult to watch because O’Reilly is so utterly condescending and so unwilling to allow his guest (Ron Paul) to speak. The debate does capture the neocon perspective (O’Reilly) and Paul’s view, to which I am sympathic. Ron Paul argues that our “troubles” in the Middle East are largely blowback for inappropriate actions the U.S. has taken for decades in the Middle East. We have been interfereing in Middle East politics in grotesque ways, installing puppet leaders and acting under the assumption that it is our oil under their sand.

Now, our policies regarding Iran are causing the Iranian government to associate all internal Iranian dissent with the United States, which has led to the squelching of dissent. We caused many of our own problems in the Middle East by ramping up tensions with our preemptory invasion of Iraq, our rhetoric and our conduct in building permanent military bases all over the region, including 14 permanent bases in Iraq alone.

The idea of Bill Maher’s post is that we should just tell President Bush that his wildest fantasies are, indeed, coming true. Will Bush ever find out that we’re lying to him?  Are you kidding?  He just told Australia’s Prime Minister that we’re “kicking ass” in Iraq.  That’s the way it is when your reality is not based on evidence.

According to Maher, here’s why we need to implement the Bush Bubble immediately: 

According to the Times of London, the Air Force has drawn up plans for massive strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. The plan doesn’t just call for eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, but for taking out its entire military in one blow. Can Bush destroy another country’s whole army? Why not? He did it to ours.

We’ll get Condi to slip him a note. “Mr. President, Iran is free!” And he’ll scribble some garbled bullshit on it, like “let freedom Purple Rain” and that will be that.

That is the opinion of Nir Rosen, independent journalist and the author of “In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.”  In this interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org Rosen comments that Iraq is still losing 50,000 people per month. 

Where are these refugees going?  To many other countries.

Syria is the most open and generous of all the countries in the region. They basically take anybody who comes in. And for a long time, they were giving them free healthcare, and they still provide free education. Well, they’ve been — they are being overburdened, as well, because the Syrian government subsidizes things such as bread. So every loaf of bread an Iraqi buys is actually being paid for in part by the Syrian government. As a result, they’re finding it more and more difficult to bear the cost.

The Jordanians basically closed their borders by the end of 2005, in part because they were being overburdened, and they also have demographic issues to worry about. Half of the small Jordanian population are Palestinian, and now you’ve introduced another million Iraqis. And this is a very fragile regime in the first place, the Jordanian dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: What does each country gain by letting in Iraqi refugees?

NIR ROSEN: Well, Jordan took in initially many of the wealthier ones, as did Egypt, and so they certainly gained a great deal of money and investment, and they required for residency a certain amount of money in the bank. But Jordan was a less friendly environment for Shias. Syria, again, is the most friendly environment for really any Iraqi; Shias, Sunnis, Christians each find welcoming neighborhoods there. Lebanon, very difficult to get to, and there’s a likelihood of being expelled by the Lebanese government, but Christian Iraqis have found that the Christians of Lebanon have been generous in protecting them. Shia Iraqis have tended to go into the Shia neighborhoods of Beirut. Egypt closed its borders more or less after about 150,000 Iraqis came in, mostly Sunni. The majority of the Iraqi Arab refugees are Sunnis, despite the fact that Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. And Sweden has taken in, I think, 40,000 or 50,000, as well. They’ve been quite generous. As you’ve said, we took in about 700, which is a laughable amount.

The interview eventually turned to Iran.  Why is the Bush administration obsessed about attacking Iran?

NIR ROSEN: Well, I think we’re dealing with a mentality on the part of our administration that nobody else is going to have the guts to take on Iran in the future, the next president, so if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it, and we’ll be vindicated in the future just like Reagan was vindicated, allegedly, for bringing down the Soviet Union. So they have this long-term view of how history will treat them, and if they don’t take down Iran, nobody else will, which is probably the case, although they can’t take down Iran, either.

Iran is not Iraq. You can bomb it, but I think you’d only basically strengthen the support for the government, as always happens when you bomb a country. We saw this in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. And they’ve been blaming Iran for everything under the sun lately, for supporting Sunni radicals in Iraq or attacking the Iranian-backed leadership in Iraq, for attacking — and then they blame Iran for supporting the Taliban, who, of course, were bitter enemies of Iran. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If you somehow haven’t yet figured out how the incessant lies of FOX led us to begin the senseless bloody occupation of Iraq, you can catch it all again. Except it’s about Iran now. This video comparing the FOX campaigns against Iraq and Iran is almost unbelievable. Is there anyone really willing to believe such disinformation a second time around? But we’re in full swing and there’s no powerful media voice blowing the whistle.

Here is a Yahoo.com story on this video comparison.

Amy Goodman had this to say about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq:

FAIR did a a study. In the week leading up to General Colin Powell going to the security council to make his case for the invasion and the week afterwards, this was the period where more than half of the people in this country were opposed to an invasion. They did a study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, ABC evening news and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. The four major newscasts. Two weeks. 393 interviews on war. 3 were anti-war voices. 3 of almost 400 and that included PBS. This has to be changed. It has to be challenged.

The question is whether enough people running mainstream media care enough to vigorously contest the current round of lies regarding Iran.

Once in a while, I tune into KJSL, a St. Louis Christian talk radio station.  I do this as part of a conscious effort to make myself listen to people with views that are dramatically different from my own.  Perhaps I will understand those views better if I take the time to listen more.

While I was driving last week, the station featured a show called “News and Views,” hosted by a man named “Dr. Larry Bates.”  The host repeatedly painted the future of the US as bleak, thanks to irresponsible financial policies by the federal government.  Because I have some sympathy with that general conclusion, I continued to listen.  It turned out that Bates was predicting the imminent financial collapse of the United States.  Although I doubted that conclusion, I continued to listen.

Bates then indicated that he is also a big proponent of religious “End Times.”  In short, he believes that Jesus will soon be returning to Earth in order to sort things out.  I have no sympathy for this religious view.  In fact, I find End Times beliefs to be irresponsible and destructive for the numerous reasons.  For example, I do not hold the Bible to be inerrant. Based on my study of the Bible, although it offers some good stories and some reasonable moral instruction, it is also rife with bad advice, contradictions and senseless violence.

“Dr. Larry Bates” wears many hats.  He claims to be an economist, publisher, editor, former member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, former bank CEO and a “nationally recognized expert on political systems and the Federal Reserve.”  Bates is also the President of First American Monetary Consultants, Inc. (FAMC), an organization that allegedly does “economic and market forecasting, in addition to offering a wide variety of other End Times services.  “News and Views” is a syndicated radio show, available dozens of radio stations across the U.S.  Larry Bates is thus well known in some circles.

After listening to Bates for only a few minutes, I learned that the United States needs to immediately and mercilessly bomb Iran because of what “those people” have done to “support terrorism.”  I also learned that we need to support Israel without question, based upon what the Bible says.  I persevered to the end of the show, saddened by and frustrated with the flimsy manner in which Bates attempted to support his conclusions. 

At the end of the show, it was announced that Bates was going to be featured at a half-day conference in St. Louis, I took the bait.  I thought it would be interesting to better understand the basis for the views of End Times (both economic End Times and religious End Times) proponents. The conference was called “Perilous Times: Significant End Time Events.”  I paid $20 and showed up at the Crystal Ballroom of the Renaissance St. Louis Grand and Suites Hotel in downtown St. Louis.  Here’s my ticket:

                              
At the registration desk, I received a folder full of information.   One of the pamphlets advised me that legalized gay marriage is a major obstacle to democracy:

When the US Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas last year that sodomy is a constitutional ‘right,’ the director of the lambda legal fund-a radical homosexual-agenda of pressure group-gleefully explained that this marks the beginning of the end to traditional marriage.

Another pamphlet advised that the United States is officially a Judeo-Christian nation.  It quoted William Penn: “Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.”  This pamphlet, printed by FAMC, “proves” that the United States is a Christian nation based upon the fact that the Constitutions of many of the states mention “God,” or “the Creator.”  As though non-Christian religions don’t believe in a “God” or a “Creator.”

There were numerous products displayed and advertised at the conference.  These products are the sorts of things you’ll need to have if you are going to be prepared for the economic and religious End Times.  If you want to prevent cancer, you need to load up on Glutathione.  The pamphlet says “your life depends on Glutathione.”  To buy it, contact FAMC, according to the pamphlet. 

What if you just want to make sure that you have access to “the most universal antibiotic” known to man, colloidal silver?  It’s a “tasteless, odorless, non-toxic, purer, natural substance consisting of submicroscopic clusters of silver particles suspended by a tiny electric charge placed on each particle.” According to the pamphlet, you drink it.  It kills all those pesky pathogens and protects all your good cells.  According to the pamphlet, it is useful for treating allergies, boils, herpes, stomach flu, lime disease, gonorrhea, bladder irritations and chickenpox.  The list goes on and on.   Colloidal silver can be used vaginally, anally or dropped into the eyes.”  You can even make your own colloidal silver out of silver wire, using the $189 generator you can buy from FAMC. 

Another pamphlet advised me of my right to participate in jury nullification whenever anyone is being prosecuted for a gun crime. That is because “corrupted, anti-gun prosecutors and judges are common.”  This information is distributed by the Fully Informed Jury Association.

After the economic collapse, you’ll need to make better use of all that expensive gasoline that all of us are going to need.  Therefore, make sure you buy the “Power Plus Mpg” additive.  Using this Power Plus, you can save 25 to $.50 per gallon.  During his talk (which I’ll discuss in detail further down), Larry Bates bragged that his 5 mpg SUV improved its mileage 50% (to 7.5 mpg) after he started using this Power Plus.  Those attending the conference were even invited to sign up as Power Plus distributors. 

Additional Pamphlets were available advising how to support efforts to find those “30,000 POWs [who] were known to be behind alive after WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf and War on Terror.”  There was also a table full of conservative-message bumper stickers.    

The nice old fellow minding that table offered me a chance to take any one of those bumper stickers for free.  (more…)

Poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. who won a National Book Critics Circle Award and who is professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush.

Here’s her letter of explanation to Mrs. Bush, published by The Nation.

It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays.  They don’t just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion.  Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process.  Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.”

Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up.  Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays.  No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays.  They are not driven by any sort of philosophy.  In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust.

What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men.   Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout “You’re GAY!”  And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust.

Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality. 

My “gut reaction” has been that disgust is a senseless, arbitrary and unworkable basis for a moral system.  There are many reasons. If disgust is a proper foundation for morality, who gets to decide what is disgusting? The conservative Christians of the United States would certainly step up to claim that right and responsibility.  After all, they claim that the U.S. is a “Christian Nation” and that they are especially inspired and guided by the Creator of the Universe.  They are also quite sure that gay sex is immoral. They never seem to tire of making that public pronouncement.  And why stop at homosexuality? Disgust could also serve as the basis for many other “moral” positions.  Therefore, whoever becomes the arbiter of morality-based-on-disgust would also attempt to educate the rest of us as to the evils of nude beaches, public breast-feeding, body piercing, abortion and euthanasia.

All of us should be wary about accepting disgust as a basis for morality, however.  Demographics are shifting and, someday, conservative Christians might be on the receiving end of moral judgment based upon disgust.  How so?  According to the dictates of other cultures American Christians do all kinds of disgusting things.  They should clean up their own act.  Christians do disgusting things like eating pork and wearing leather. Christian women expose their faces and their legs, they talk with men to whom they are not married and sometimes they kiss men in public.  Christian women are sometimes so bold as to appear in public while they are menstruating.  Christians often use their left hands and they commonly wear shoes inside of their homes.  Their homes are filthy because they often live with dogs and cats-some of them sleep with their pet animals.  They drink shameful substances such as alcohol and milk.  These sorts of “disgusting” things could justify lengthy prison sentences in many cultures.  Shame on Christians!

Whoever we choose our arbiter of disgust, then next step is obvious.  Disgust is a favorite excuse for persecuting members of out-groups.  Disgust is thus the unspoken foundation for bigotry.  European Americans have historically characterized people from Africa and China as “dirty” as the basis for depriving them of basic legal rights and human decencies.  The same thing now goes for gays, who conservative Christians commonly characterize as animalistic and unhygienic. How often have you heard this comment: “What’s next, bestiality?”

At this site, I have often argued that “disgusting” things tend to be those things that remind us that humans are animals.  According to many conservative Christians, though, we are not in the same league as animals, as evidenced by our invisible “souls.”  

We are higher than animals, evidenced by the Chain of Being.  This fits in nicely with the up/down metaphor described by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff.  In Metaphors We Live By, Johnson and Lakoff explain that “virtue, goodness and status” are all seen as “up.”  In Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993), Mark Johnson explores various metaphors for moral character (page 50).  One of the primary metaphors used for moral character is purity/pollution.

The “moral,” rational self is high, while the “lower” self is associated with the body and bodily functions.  This up/down, high/low orientation comes to be correlated with purity versus impurity.  The body, with its passions and desires, ties us to that which is dirty, polluted and computer.  The mind, as the seat of reason and will, tries to maintain its purity of rising above and trying to control the body. (more…)

It is, indeed, time, according to Chris Hedges writing at Truthdig.com:

Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon.  Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place.  The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have failed.  It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States.  It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal.  It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East. 

The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare.  American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war.  The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete.  The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests.  There is no longer any debate within the United States.  This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich.  The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high. 

This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow.  It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline.  And I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East. 

Who is Chris Hedges? He is currently

A senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, (more…)

All of your suspicions are true and you can now find them in an article that is intensely compelling and distressing.  It’s the current edition (June 28, 2007) of Rolling Stone.

It’s not every day after all that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell.  But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science–especially when it comes from international experts.  So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming

We’re going to see a big debate on it going forward,” Cheney told ABC news, about “the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man.”  We know today, he added, is “not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy is going to” solve the problem.”  Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president’s see-no-evil performance.

The Rolling Stone article argues that the White House has actively worked to distort the findings of climate scientists, playing down the threat of global warming.  This investigation by Rolling Stone goes further, however.  It reveals that

these distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, and a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on environmental quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove.  An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act-as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials-confirms that the White House is implemented in industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.

Rolling Stone traces the revolving door through which those who worked for industry polluters have joined and then left the White House. The print version of Rolling Stone offers a telling graphic regarding this industry influence in the White House.  Another graphic in the print version (page 59) Is entitled “Lie by Lie: a Guide to President Bush’s Calculated Deceptions on Global Warming.  Included in that graphic are nine fundamental lies by the White House.  For instance, in February, 2002, Bush announced “we must and we will conserve more in the United States.”  Between 2002 and 2006, however, “Bush slashed funding for federal efficiency programs by nearly one-third.”  Here’s another Bush lie (more…)

This is a lively debate, as you might expect. You’ll can view the entire debate at Truthdig.org.

Sam Harris opens the debate by arguing that there are only three types of arguments used by those defending religion:

• That a particular religion is true;
• That believing in religion is useful; or
• That atheist are immoral (and other ad hominem attacks on atheists).

Harris elaborates on each of these three types of arguments. 

Chris Hedges opens by advocating that all of us need to stop tolerating the intolerant.  He joins with Sam Harris on this point.   Hedges then moves on to argue that Harris ”conflates faith with tribalism,” holding that tribalism is not religion.  He credits monotheism with giving rise to the recognition of the individual, altruism and “the open society.”  Hedges makes the argument hard to join, however, when he asserts that “The question is not whether God exists.” 

Hedges is a sharp critic of Harris’s alleged militant stance against Islam (see the end of Part III & the beginning of Part IV).

There’s lots of discussion about sociology, politics, science and disenfranchised populations along the way.  The entire discussion is laced with references to the real world, which keeps it lively.  An issue that haunts this discussion, though, is the difficulty identifying the type of believer who is problematic.  What kind of believer is the kind about whom we need to be concerned? 

These are two highly competent spokespeople.  The debate is well worth viewing.

The imperative phrase is proclaimed on millions of bumper stickers: “Support the Troops.” 

Tell me what it means to “support the troops” and then I’ll tell you whether I support the troops.  Fair enough?  Until you can tell me what the phrase means, asking me whether I “support the troops” is like asking me to sign a blank check.  I don’t sign blank checks.

The vague phrase “Support the troops” is a challenge that is not only found on bumper stickers these days.  For instance, Bill Arkin of the Washington Post recently wrote about soldiers who are increasingly expressing frustration with the growing opposition to the war back home.  Many of the soldiers took it personally.  Arkin quotes Staff Sergeant Manuel Sahagun:

One thing I don’t like is when people back home say they support all troops, but they don’t support the war.  If they’re going to support us, support us all the way.

Arkin goes so far as to characterize the volunteer troops as “mercenaries,” suggesting that we’d be having an entirely different national discussion if we had a draft.  Arkin’s “mercenary” comment quickly caused a firestorm.  Overnight, his blog drew more than 900 comments. Arkin also drew the ire of conservatives from coast to coast.  Did he fail to “support the troops”?

“Support the troops” is a hopelessly vague phrase; it means different things to different people.  For instance, when I am asked whether I support the troops, it could mean any of the following things:

1. Do I “support the troops” in the sense that I generally support the war?

The biggest problem is that the troops are fighting the war; ultimately, the war is what the troops do. If there were no troops, there wouldn’t be a war.  Hence, I have sympathy with Sergeant Sahagun’s frustration.  How can we support the soldiers but not what the soldiers do?  The challenge of whether I support the troops does requires, then, that I consider what the Iraq war is all about. What is the war in Iraq about?  I don’t buy the Administration’s official line.   To the contrary, see this list from Iraq Veterans Against the War:

• The Iraq war is based on lies and deception.
• The Iraq war violates international law.
• Corporate profiteering is driving the war in Iraq.
• Overwhelming civilian casualties are a daily occurrence in Iraq.
• Soldiers have the right to refuse illegal war.
• Service members are facing serious health consequences due to our Government’s negligence.
• The war in Iraq is tearing our families apart.
• The Iraq war is robbing us of funding sorely needed here at home.
• The war dehumanizes Iraqis and denies them their right to self-determination.
• Our military is being exhausted by repeated deployments, involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve and National Guard.

Do I hope for the safe return of the troops to their families?  Absolutely.  Do I support the troops insofar as they are fighting a war described by the items on the above list?  Not at all.

2. Do I “support the troops” in that I agree with everything the troops are doing. 

Sorry, but I can’t wholeheartedly “support” them in this way.  Innocent people (Iraqi civilians) are dying by the tens of thousands (or maybe the hundreds of thousands), often as a result of American bombs and bullets.  (more…)

After reading Erich’s post, I thought I’d put this up.  I wrote it–most of it–some time ago, for a different venue, but I’ve added to it since, and, well, along with Erich’s it might add more flavors to the stew of memory.  So.

I have friends who thought it was a great thing when Reagan became president, who now reject any such accusation, and refuse to believe it when I remind them that they said encouraging things about him when he took office.  One quote, during a ceremony broadcast on television, that I’ll never forget: “He just looks like a real president!”

Time passes, policy comes to the fore, and most of those people no longer recall these initial bouts of near-patriotic enthusiasm.  They have conveniently forgotten.

I didn’t like Reagan’s policies.  I’m sure I would have liked him.  Everybody who met him seems to say the same thing.  When Donna Brazille can say she thought he was a decent man, despite the complete polarization of their politics, you have to admit something was going on with Reagan which is all too often more telling about politics and history than the facts attached to a particular era.

Reagan was presidential.  He had Presence.

I listen now to the talk about putting his face on the ten dollar bill with some amusement.  Reagan already has at least one airport, a couple of highways, no doubt many streets, parks, a library named in his honor.  He may be the most honored president of recent history, although I feel safe predicting that he would never have received a Nobel Peace Prize.  He’s dead now, so legally we can mint currency in his honor.  Let’s not forget that a serious movement was underway to revise the prohibition against a third presidential term on his behalf.  For Reagan personally, the two-term limit was doubtless a good thing–we can’t be sure when his Alzheimers began, but a third term in office would have made his moments of memorative slippage even more apparent.

In my opinion, one of the primary differences between Republicans and Democrats lies in who they count as Citizens.  Basically (and our current president exemplifies this more than any other I can think of since Hoover), Republicans believe people with property are the only legitimate citizens; Democrats think anyone who legally lives here is a citizen.  It’s a profound difference in action.  (One may quibble about Bush’s attempts at getting a guest worker program through Congress for all the illegal immigrants and suggest perhaps this mitigates the Republican stance on property being the determinant of citizenry, but I think not.  These people, in a very real sense, are property, and he’s just serving his constituency by trying to keep them here legally.)

And I’m not saying that the Republican Party is the Party of Money.  They are that, but not in the way most people generally deploy the accusation.  When I say they hold that only those with property are citizens, I mean that they have decided that those who have a material stake in America–those citizens with Something To Lose–are those who shoulder the most responsibility in the political health of our country.  The others they see as transient, disconnected, too easily swayed by outré  ideologies to be depended upon for sound judgement.  It is that sound judgement Republicans treasure most, and traditionally they feel that people with property represent that potential best.  (It doesn’t matter that the soundness of that judgment of late has been lacking–I believe the Republicans as a party are going through a horrible bout of fanaticism unlike any they’ve experienced before, but which the Democrats have had ample experience.  Besides, one person’s sound judgment is another’s folly.)   Because generally, those people have the better education, the broader scope, greater opportunity to be cosmopolitan, the burden of ethical necessity, and in the case of business owners, the added responsibility of community support–they know what it means to take care of others.  There is a quality of noblesse oblige in such an assessment, like the perfect picture of the feudal lord who must care for those who live on his lands and work for his estate.

In theory, anyway,  Like all generalizations, it is fatally flawed.

But we have to remember that historically, that’s where this country got its first leaders and its initial ideas about citizenship.  Jefferson wanted to see a nation of landowners–the yeoman farmer–who, by his estimation, had an investment in the country.  (His theory of land ownership is quite complex and critical of slavery because, he believed, the plantation system which slavery enabled was ultimately destructive to this form of citizenship AND environmentally.  That part certainly bore out–the trail of ecological destruction in the South that followed the migration of the plantations proved Jefferson correct, and a study of it informs every argument about slavery and the subsequent poverty and civil liberties issues of the South and, subsequently, the country as a whole.  Slavery and the economic practices it engendered left a legacy of disparity with which we are still struggling today and which makes such debates about who is a citizen all the more trenchant.)

Not a bad notion in its simplest form, property owners as citizens, since combined with that idea was the notion that property ownership was, theoretically, for Everyone.

Pity it didn’t work out that way.

But then how could it?  Wealth as a concept is based on inequity.  (more…)

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.

Howard Zinn recently spoke on patriotism on DemocracyNow:

Patriotism to me means doing what you think you’re country should be doing. Patriotism means supporting your government when you think it’s doing right, opposing your government when you think it’s doing wrong. Patriotism to me means really what the Declaration of Independence suggests. And that is that government is an artificial entity.

Government is set up–and here’s what a Declaration of Independence is about, government is set up by the people in order to fulfill certain responsibilities: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And according to the Declaration of Independence when the government violates those responsibilities, then, and these are the words of the Declaration of Independence it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government.

In other’s words the government is not holy, the government is not to be obeyed when the government is wrong. So to me patriotism in it’s best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principals for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.

So today, for instance, the highest act of patriotism I suggest, would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Simply because everything about the war violates the fundamental principles of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, not just for Americans, but for people in another part of the world. So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies which have taken trillions of dollars from this country’s treasury and used it for war and militarism. That’s what patriotism would require today.

Noam Chomsky was also part of the discussion, which can be found in its entirety here.  The participants drew in-depth comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.

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.

DemocracyNow reports that the Iraqis have always known what this war is about:

In one of the first studies of Iraqi public opinion after the US-led invasion of March 2003, the polling firm Gallup asked Iraqis their thoughts on the Bush administration’s motives for going to war. One percent of Iraqis said they believed the motive was to establish democracy. Slightly more – five percent – said to assist the Iraqi people. But far in the lead was the answer that got 43 percent - “to rob Iraq”s oil.”

The Iraqi parliament is soon expected to pass a new law, variously called “the oil law.   It seems “almost no one has been given access to the final version approved by the Iraqi Oil Committee.”

Writing for The Humanist, Kenneth Anderson, a scientist living in Baltimore, puts the cards on the table:  “Despite lofty talk of freedom and democracy, the true nature of the Iraq war may very well lie in the Iraqi oil law.”  The terms do seem to be extortionist.   According to Anderson:

The law as detailed in that draft is highly unusual for the Middle East, where other countries outlaw granting foreign companies direct interest in oil production. Under this draft hydrocarbon law, major Western oil companies would be granted Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) for up to thirty years and, in at least the first few years, would reap up to 75 percent of the profits from both developed and undeveloped oil fields. Key to these PSAs is that they would be “locked in” regardless of the government in power.

The profit margin set out in the July draft is unconscionable and we can only assume which interested party suggested such a lopsided deal. To award foreign oil companies most of the oil profits at a time when the people of Iraq would need it most could rightly be described as sociopathic plutocracy. . .

U.S. senators appeared to be just as sheltered. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 11 regarding the proposed troop “surge,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was questioned about the law. “You referred to the oil law as a remarkable law,” Senator John Sununu (R-NH) told Rice. “Well, it’s the most remarkable law that no one has ever really seen.”

Though then-Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly said in July 2003: “We did not do it for oil,” the draft oil law casts a very long, very dark shadow across those words . . .

Bush has stated quite clearly that troops won’t be withdrawn while he is in office. This is perhaps the most believable statement he has ever made.

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 p