Obama and another LBJ

[sidecross]

Anyone who watched Bill Moyer’s Journal and especially people like myself who are 65 years old will see the comparison between the the two and the similarity of their judgment.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/profile.html

Obama has been a great disappointment in following ‘The Too Big to Fail’ in fixing our economy, and now he stands ready to send and spend more military personnel and expense on Afghanistan.

It has not even been one year that Obama has been President, and he already has broken with the people who supported him. Obama defines tragedy.

[sidecross]

"...Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us? "

The Fifth War

by Hendrik Hertzberg

November 30, 2009

In the sixty-four years since V-J Day, the United States has fought five wars big enough to be styled “major.” Two of these, Vietnam (1962-75, by the most common reckoning) and Iraq (2003-11, with any luck), were conceived in sin. Their beginnings were fatally compromised by deceptions that congealed into lies, abetted by profound geostrategic misjudgments. In Vietnam, illusions piled on illusions. The Tonkin Gulf incident was not even an incident, since an incident, to be an incident, has to occur. The fear that Communism would spread throughout Asia and beyond if it was not stopped in Vietnam turned out to be groundless; so did the belief that the other side was motivated more by totalitarian ideology than by national feeling. The Iraq War, too, was midwifed by falsehoods and follies: the falsehoods that the Baghdad regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and that Saddam Hussein’s was a hidden hand behind Al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11, 2001; the follies that the war would be a “cakewalk” and, most seductively, that it would “transform” the Middle East. In both wars, our enemy was only sometimes a conventional army; as often, if not more so, it was an elusive guerrilla force that was frequently indistinguishable from the civilian population.

Another two of our five big-scale wars, Korea (1950-53) and the Gulf War (1991), were legitimate in their origins and (by the standards of mechanized slaughter) scrupulous in their execution. The Korean “police action”—a euphemism, but one that carried real meaning at a time when hopes for a global order of international law were fresh and high—was fought with the sanction (and partly under the flag) of the United Nations. The Gulf War, too, had the sanction of the U.N. and its Security Council. Four decades apart, the two wars shared many features, starting with the moral and temporal clarity of their beginnings. Both were fought in response to armed aggression across international borders. In both, the American Administration resisted powerful political pressures to expand its objective to include the destruction and conquest of the regime responsible for the original aggression. And, after both, the cessation of hostilities along the restored borders has held, even if its form does not quite deserve the name of peace.

The war in Afghanistan scrambles the familiar categories so thoroughly that the customary rubrics for making judgments don’t fit. As in Korea and the Gulf, we went to war to punish an unmistakable act of aggression—this time on our own soil. But the aggressor was not a state; it was a band of freelance fanatics protected by a state. The goals of our response were as clear as the morning of September 11th: to call to account those who sent the murderers and the government that harbored them. Our action had the backing of NATO, which, for the first time in its history, activated the provision of its charter that declares an attack against one an attack against all. The support of the “international community” was nearly unanimous. Even Iran lent a hand.

During the election campaign, Barack Obama and the Democrats put forth a story—a “narrative,” as political reporters now like to say—about two wars. According to the story, the “good” war was the war in Afghanistan. But it failed to fully achieve its principal goal because at the crucial moment the Bush Administration, in its obsession with Saddam, diverted resources and attention to Iraq—a “bad” war. The diversion allowed Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban leadership to slip the noose at Tora Bora—a guerrilla Dunkirk. “I don’t oppose all wars,” an Illinois state senator had famously told a rally on the very afternoon in October, 2002, that the Iraq War Resolution was introduced in Congress. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Iraq was a dumb war; Afghanistan was, or could be, a smart one.

There was considerable truth in the narrative. But it contained an almost subliminal suggestion that somehow the clock could be turned back—that the events of the Afghanistan war’s first months could be replayed, this time with a better outcome. When Obama moved into the White House, he brought the narrative with him. In August, at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, he said of the conflict, “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” By October, he had ordered in thirty-four thousand more troops, doubling the overall American deployment in Afghanistan. But he had also begun an intensive review of the entire policy.

On Armistice Day, at a full-scale meeting of his national-security team, Obama was presented with four options. According to what little has leaked out from under the closed doors, all four options called for more American troops, from ten thousand at the lower end to forty thousand at the upper. Though some in the Administration favor a smaller military footprint instead of a larger one, that was not among the choices offered to the President. For this fifth war, there was no fifth option.

The President rejected all four. He has apparently decided against anything like a quick drawdown, but he wants a map that plots an eventual way out, not just an abundance of ways further in. As he told an interviewer, there can be no “indefinite stay,” no “permanent protectorate.” And he has questions he would like answered.

So do the rest of us. Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg? Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?) Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

The President has come under heavy criticism for taking the time to ponder the imponderables. “The urgent necessity,” a respected Washington columnist wrote the other day, “is to make a decision—whether or not it is right.” Really? Does the columnist suppose that a country unable to find the patience for weeks (even months) of thinking could summon the stamina for years (even decades) of killing and dying? What Obama seems to have discovered is that this is no longer the war that began eight years ago. That war was an act of retribution and prevention. But now who are we punishing? What are we preventing? The old narrative is broken. The fifth war is becoming a sixth.


http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/11/30/091130taco_talk_hertzberg

[sidecross]

Published on Sunday, November 29, 2009 by The Providence Journal

Obama Can’t Have Both Guns and Gurneys

by John Feffer

We’re close to our spending limit on the nation’s credit card. The bank bailout, the stimulus package, the Iraq War, and the overall military budget: each is costing over $500 billion. Now the Obama administration is looking at two more hefty charges: a national health care plan and a surge in Afghanistan. It’s time to make a decision. We can’t do both guns and gurneys. After all, we’re looking at a $1.6 trillion government deficit for 2009.

That’s what our entire national debt used to be back in the early 1980s.

The last time we tried to fight a major war and launch an ambitious domestic program, we ultimately failed at both. The war was in Vietnam and the domestic program was called the Great Society. The Obama administration can still learn from the failures of the Lyndon Johnson era before it succumbs to failures of its own.

Lyndon Johnson famously believed that he could have both guns and butter. “We are a country which was built by pioneers who had a rifle in one hand and an ax in the other,” he proclaimed. “We can do both. And as long as I am president we will do both.” His hubris was not unprecedented. The other great liberal reformers of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also tried to balance their ambitious domestic programs with military engagements overseas.

Johnson’s Great Society programs, which he pushed through in his first two years of office with the help of large Democratic majorities in Congress, were ground-breaking: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Vista, landmark civil-rights legislation. Johnson was not initially determined to push guns as well as butter. As a candidate in 1964, Johnson argued that “we don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people (China) and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”

As president, however, Johnson did exactly that: committing U.S. ground forces to Vietnam in 1965. This decision ultimately doomed his presidency. By 1968, the war in Vietnam had led to considerable criticism of the president’s record and a major drop in his popularity, and Johnson decided not to run for re-election.

If not for Vietnam, the American economy would have continued at a brisk pace, and Johnson would have probably been re-elected in 1968. He not only could have continued the Great Society programs but expanded them as well. Instead, his larger ambitions for domestic reform fizzled, and we’ve been living with the Considerably-Less-Than-Great Society of his Democratic and Republican successors ever since.

As a candidate in 2008, Obama promised to refocus the U.S. military on Afghanistan. As president, he now has a chance to reverse himself and end the war. Recently, the president has appeared willing to rethink his approach to Afghanistan. If he does — and begins to rapidly draw down the Afghan War as part of an overall reduction in military spending — he can rescue his own Great Society ambitions, secure himself a second term of office, and acquire an enduring legacy as the first president to resolve the guns vs. butter dilemma in the only sustainable way possible.

The budget numbers require some hard decisions. For the health of the country — and the health of his political career — Barack Obama has to reduce the amount of money we’re spending on guns and refocus the national conversation on gurneys instead.

© 2009 , Published by The Providence Journal Co.
John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/29-4

[Isaiah Mpski]

Obama has to take a Monrovian stance on things.
You take care of things on your side of the world,I'll take care of mine.

Another battle-hardened 35,000 troops ready to quell the rapid destabilization of our neighbors to the South and Stalinistic adoptation of Democracy by marxist and criminal gangs.
What the heck?

We need a Foreign Legion.

[sidecross]

The difference between Obama and George W. Bush is that Obama has much better diction and a soothing intellectual tone, but they both reach the same bottom line.

Obama brought up the War Powers Act Resolution passed in 2001 and the fear of another ‘9/11 Attack’. Why does this sound so familiar?

The only hope we now have is the Senate and House of Representatives to stop the funding; sadly this is wishful thinking.

Those of us who voted for hope and a new change have been left out in a cold wind.

[sidecross]

Here We Go Again

by Robert Scheer

Published on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by TruthDig.com

It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama’s own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops to contain them.

The president handled that absurdity by conflating al-Qaida, which he admitted is holed up in Pakistan, with the Taliban and denying the McChrystal report’s basic assumption that the enemy in Afghanistan is local in both origin and focus. Obama stated Tuesday in a speech announcing a major escalation of the war, “It’s important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place.” But he then cut off any serious consideration of that question with the bald assertion that “we did not ask for this fight.”

Of course we did. The Islamic fanatics who seized power in Afghanistan were previously backed by the U.S. as “freedom fighters” in what was once marketed as a bold adventure in Cold War one-upmanship against the Soviets. It was President Jimmy Carter, aided by a young liberal hawk named Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s civilian point man on Afghanistan, who decided to support Muslim fanatics there. Holbrooke began his government service as one of the “Best and the Brightest” in Vietnam and was involved with the rural pacification and Phoenix assassination program in that country, and he is now a big advocate of the counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to once again win the hearts and minds of locals who want none of it.

The current president’s military point man, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, served in Carter’s National Security Council and knows that Obama is speaking falsely when he asserts it was the Soviet occupation that gave rise to the Muslim insurgency that we abetted. Gates wrote a memoir in 1996 which, as his publisher proclaimed, exposed “Carter’s never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asked in a 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he answered, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” Brzezinski made that statement three years before the 9/11 attack by those “stirred-up Muslims.”

So here we go again, selling firewater to the natives and calling it salvation. We have decided to prop up a hopelessly corrupt Afghan government because, as Obama argued in one of the more disgraceful passages of Tuesday’s West Point speech, “although it was marred by fraud, [the recent] election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and constitution.”

To suggest that the Afghan government will be in seriously better shape 18 months after 30,000 additional U.S. and perhaps 5,000 more NATO troops are dispatched is bizarrely out of touch with the strategy of the McChrystal report, which calls for American troops to restructure life down to the level of the most forlorn village. Surely the civilian and military supporters of that approach who are cheering Obama on have been giving assurances that he will not be held to such an unrealistically short timeline. Evidence of this was offered in the president’s speech when he said of the planned withdrawal of some forces by July of 2011: “Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We’ll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul.”

A very long haul indeed, if one checks the experience of Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who was credited with being as successful as anyone in implementing the counterinsurgency strategy now in vogue. In his letter of resignation as a foreign service officer in charge of one of the most hotly contested areas, Hoh wrote: “In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan … I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. … I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.”

Maybe they should have given Capt. Hoh the Noble Peace Prize.

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/02-11

[sidecross]

"...So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are."

Liberals Are Useless

by Chris Hedges

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/07

[Isaiah Mpski]

We need a Foreign Legion.
The travesty with the trial in Italy shows well what most of Europe thinks of Americans.
As soon as we abandon that half of the world,things will improve for the western hemisphere.;)
We must return home and learn from what the Chineses did.

And it is so ironic as to what would solve it all.It would simply take Israel(which is roughly the size of R.I.) to move it's country to this part of the world.That and a moral :hmm: society is all the Muhatagin(sp) wants.
Even their own history tells how they've stolen the current territory of Jerusalem and Palestine twice and when the Brits and others set them up in 1948,the land was stolen again.

You did it to US American Indians.For the most part,the jews in Israel are a bunch of inbred narcisstic psychopaths whose existance depends entirely on the support of the US.
Sorry Willow,but it's the truth.

[willoweyes]

Thanks for this post by Hedges, Sidecross--i think this is the most impassioned speech i have seen from him, and the most moving. He is right of course.

What to do? I am afraid I become more withdrawn and hopeless every day--the only news I wish to hear is the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor.

to put me to sleep at night, I dream myself up a dirt hidey-hole where I may curl up to wait it out--

for the sad truth is, one ant, even an impassioned ant such as Hedges, cannot move the vast body that is the Nest--

i think all I can hope for now is not fall into the "everybody else is doing it" trap, not forget what I know is true, believe in the Golden Rule, and be ready when the Nest shifts.

and as for you, Isaiah--it's better not to talk that way. . . .

[sidecross]

Thanks for this post by Hedges, Sidecross--i think this is the most impassioned speech i have seen from him, and the most moving. He is right of course.

What to do? I am afraid I become more withdrawn and hopeless every day--the only news I wish to hear is the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor.

to put me to sleep at night, I dream myself up a dirt hidey-hole where I may curl up to wait it out--

for the sad truth is, one ant, even an impassioned ant such as Hedges, cannot move the vast body that is the Nest--

i think all I can hope for now is not fall into the "everybody else is doing it" trap, not forget what I know is true, believe in the Golden Rule, and be ready when the Nest shifts.

and as for you, Isaiah--it's better not to talk that way. . . .

The most important thing to do is not stop thinking, and act when you feel able.

The struggle is always worth the effort and let the outcome fall where it may.

[Isaiah Mpski]

I wasn't talking about you wize goatraisers in Texas Willow.
But seriously alot of problems in the Middle East would be solved if the State of Israel was moved to Mexico.
If it was good enough fer US Indians,it'll be better for an enlightened Jew.
You have admitted twice in your own history that you have stolen the land promised to another,and when the British helped you in 48 and that makes three.
Three strikes and you're out.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Yeah Willow,your family was smart and got out when the gittin was good.
And if you're not smart enough to see that the Palestians will destroy the whole place before they'd let you guys keep it than you're thinking wrong.
It will happen if it takes ten or a hundred years.:hmm:

You know I keep comparing the Indians(maybe we are the lost tribe) to the Jewish nation,and never never ever think that the extermination of my people wasn't just as horrific as what your people went through.Probably worse.:(

As for your undertone Willow.I fear no man.And,besides that,I'm smarter than any Jew on the face of the earth.Any.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Oh Willow,
Im so sorry if I have offended you in anyway.
The JDL came knocking at my door this morning and straightened me out.
Sincerely yours,

a poor advocate.

[sidecross]

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/12/11-1

[willoweyes]

Thanks Sidecross.

My dear Isaiah, you have not offended me.

You are right about Israel's poor choice of location.

and i am a mere naturalized former shitska, the bane of Jewish women everywhere./

I was so disappointed in Obama's Nobel speech--accepting the peace prize with a speech about when war is justified to "stop evil" even Katrina Van Hueval of the Nation jumped on the bandwagon, calling it "gutsy and pragmatic." that was on NPR yest.--everyone was happy it seems.

haha.

no wonder Obama is getting gray hairs, trying to sell this crap.

might as well declare war on Chicago--there are terrorists there. . . .

they say there are 100 al queda in afghanistan. so let's send over 30,000 boys. haha. to stop evil.

all of his words were like daggers in my heart. the same words used by the Shrub--it's like that sad story of the throwing of the world series; "How could ya Joe?" how could he sell out?

[sidecross]

War is never justified as it infects everyone involved.

Let us not forget that in World War Two the ‘victors’ fire bombed Dresden as well as other civilian cities, and the U.S. has been the only country to ever use an atomic bomb on two civilian cities in Japan.

[suebee]

more than once i have heard that speaking out matters and our thoughts matter and the change in our vibration (when we actually love) matters
and so i take my small comfort from those reiterations and try to remember.

made my cheery cardboard christmas light peace sign today. it looks fantastic in my kitchen window, i imagine all my neighbors smiling.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Now wait a minute Sidey.
The US government during a fire several yrs ago couldn't account for all the radioactice materials they had stored in the mountains North and west of Santa Fe,near Los Alamos.Maybe the winds blew towards Taos that day.I don't know for sure But from my scientific and personal knowledge of the situation before I got out, I would have to say a nuclear storm has been released over N. New Mexico as well as the area to the south.

[sidecross]

Keep Your Eyes on the Peace Prize

Published on Sunday, December 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Randall Amster

We have to give Team Obama credit for a truly historic and thoroughly incredible Nobel acceptance speech. Whereas the teachings and legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi were recalled as admirable yet not "practical or possible in every circumstance," we were reminded that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon were pragmatic peacemakers, and furthermore that America consistently strives to work both with and through the United Nations "to govern the waging of war, ... protect human rights, prevent genocide and restrict the most dangerous weapons." Obviously...

King and Gandhi as impractical idealists. Reagan as supporter of dissident solidarity. Nixon as advocate for unpopular paths to better international relations. America as guardian of human rights and bulwark of the UN. It seems that the realists must have stepped aside on this one, passing the baton to an emerging voice within the Obama Administration, namely that of the surrealists. How exactly are we to debate or dialogue with people willing to rewrite history and essentially proclaim that force is humanitarianism, that soldiering is an expression of the divine, and (of course) that war is peace? The fact that a Peace Prize acceptance speech can be used to justify warfare constitutes an inversion of spirit, a torturing of logic, and a betrayal of progenitors.

Indeed, the shadow of King in particular figured prominently in Obama's oratory, with the former's teachings utilized as a nascent straw-person to justify escalating warfare:

"As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world."

Almost 45 years ago to the day, King gave his Nobel acceptance speech, and flatly contradicted Obama's reasoning and conclusion that war is a necessary practice:

"So man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment."

For his part, Obama seemed to grasp this basic point on some level, yet still found himself back in a world where war is inevitable, citing King but rejecting his teachings:

"I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.... We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.'... A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

King, however, understood that nonviolence was (and is) in fact capable of transforming even the most obdurate conflicts, and that it must be taken up as a policy of nation-states:

"I venture to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character. Here also we have ancient habits to deal with, vast structures of power, indescribably complicated problems to solve. But unless we abdicate our humanity altogether and succumb to fear and impotence in the presence of the weapons we have ourselves created, it is as imperative and urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to racial injustice."

Somehow this basic point remains lost on our President, namely that war cannot be a path to peace. For Obama, war is still the baseline of our policies and practices, despite a dearth of truly viable examples where it can even remotely be said to have "succeeded":

"The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.... So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace."

The fact that Obama follows this by reflecting on the tragic (yet unfortunately necessary) realities of war would likely not have assuaged King's insistence that there can no longer be any conception of a "negative means to a positive end" in the quest for peace:

"We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.... All that I have said boils down to the point of affirming that mankind's survival is dependent upon man's ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony."

Obama still manages to argue for the necessity of force and a kinder, gentler application of its inherently dehumanizing ramifications in the assertion of our moral superiority:

"Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions."

King had little patience for such overtures to "us versus them" thinking, no matter how well they might be dressed up in the language of human rights and security:

"We must now give an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.... We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world."

Somehow even this message of universal love still gets turned into a meditation on the intractability of injustice and the inevitability of war by Team Obama:

"Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.... We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace."

Obama wants to have it both ways, asserting that we can keep our eyes on the prize of peace even as we find ourselves constrained to wage war. King instead counseled that "peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war." I can think of no one more uniquely qualified to remind us of the stakes involved and the opportunities at hand, and to refute the ruminations of a Peace Prize-winning President who would divert our hopes for tomorrow into the failed logic of yesterday.

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., teaches Peace Studies at Prescott College, and is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is Lost In Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly 2008).

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/13-1

[suebee]

mlk, jr. was so far ahead of his time, and ours, no one currently but the dalai lama comes to my mind as even being close. isnt it ironic how all enlightened pacifists die horribly?

why dont we spend a couple bucks and send a blitzkreig (if only we could trust blackwater) into pakistan, pick up the damn nukes, and get the hell out? destroy pakistan's apparatus for making them, get the damn indians and pakis to talk, and let israel bomb the hell out of iran's sites?

hows that for enlightened?

[sidecross]

Bill Moyers: We Have a Nobel Peace President Who Won't Ban Land Mines

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Bill Moyers Journal


Posted on December 11, 2009

Many people are troubled that Barack Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize so soon after escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is now more than doubling the number of troops there when George W. Bush left office.

The irony was not lost on the President, and he tried to address it in his Nobel acceptance speech. "I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land," he said. "Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."

Granted, there's a gap here between the rhetoric and the reality. But there's always been something askew about Nobel Peace Prize, in no small part because it's given in the name of the man who invented dynamite, one of the most powerful and destructive weapons in the human arsenal.

It was rumored that after Alfred Nobel brought his version of Frankenstein into the world, he was torn by guilt over his creation, his shame said to have intensified when a French newspaper prematurely ran his obituary with the headline, "The Merchant of Death is Dead." The article vilified him as a man "who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before."

What's more, until the end of his life he corresponded with a woman named Bertha von Suttner, who had briefly worked as his secretary. Many believe that Nobel was moved by a powerful antiwar book she had written titled "Lay Down Your Arms." Whatever his reasons, when his will created the Nobel Prizes he specifically included among them a prize for peace. Von Suttner became one of its first recipients.

After Nobel's death, events turned grim, as if to mock him further. The arms race exploded beyond anything he could have imagined. From the coupling of science and the military came ever more ingenious weapons of destruction that would take even more lives in ever more horrible ways.

One of the most insidious was the land mine, that small, explosive device filled with shrapnel that burns or blinds, maims or kills. Triggered by the touch of a foot or movement or even sound, more often than not it's the innocent who are its victims -- 75 to 80 percent of the time, in fact.

As a weapon, variations of land mines have been around since perhaps as early as the 13th century, but it was not until World War I that the technology was more or less perfected, if that can be said of weapons that mangle and mutilate the human body, and their use became common.

The United States has not actively used land mines since the first Gulf War in 1991, but we still possess some 10-15 million of them, making us the third largest stockpiler in the world, behind China and Russia. Like those two countries, we have refused to sign an international agreement banning the manufacture, stockpiling and use of land mines. Since 1987, 156 other nations have signed it, including every country in NATO. Amongst that 156, more than 40 million mines have been destroyed.

Just days before Obama flew to Oslo to make his Nobel Peace Prize speech, an international summit conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, to review the progress of the treaty. The United States sent representatives and the State Department says our government has begun a comprehensive review of its current policy.

Last year 5,000 people were killed or wounded by land mines, often placed in the ground years before, during wars long since over. They kill or blow away the limbs of a farmer or child as indiscriminately as they do a soldier. But still we refuse to sign, citing security commitments to our friends and allies, such as South Korea, where a million mines fill the demilitarized zone between it and North Korea.

Twelve years ago, at the time the treaty was first put into place, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Jody Williams, an activist from Vermont who believes that by organizing into a movement, ordinary people can matter. She proved it, despite the stubborn refusal of her own country's government to do the right thing.

Last week, Jody Williams condemned America's continuing refusal to sign the treaty as "a slap in the face to land mine survivors, their families, and affected communities everywhere."

The Nobel Committee said that part of the reason it was giving the Peace Prize to President Obama was for his respect of international law and his efforts at disarmament. And twice in his Nobel lecture, the President spoke of how often more civilians than soldiers die in a war. Then he said this:

"I believe that all nations, strong and weak alike, must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I, like any head of state, reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates -- and weakens -- those who don't."

And still the land mine treaty goes unsigned by the government he leads. Go figure.


Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog.


http://www.alternet.org/politics/144525/bill_moyers%3A_we_have_a_nobel_peace_president_who _won%27t_ban_land_mines

[sidecross]

Gravel’s Lament: Fighting Another Dumb War

by Chris Hedges

Published on Monday, December 14, 2009 by TruthDig.com

I have spent enough time inside the American military to have tasted its dark brutality, frequent incompetence and profligate ability to waste human lives and taxpayer dollars. The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to understand—make the American military the gravest threat to our anemic democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.

Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting draped around our vast killing machine as the press, the two main political parties and our entertainment industry, will not halt our doomed imperial projects or renege on the $1 trillion in defense-related spending that is hollowing out the country from the inside. A plague of unchecked militarism has seeped outward from the Pentagon since the end of World War II and is now sucking our marrow dry. It is a familiar disease in imperial empires. We are in the terminal stage. We spend more on our military—half of all discretionary spending—than all of the other countries on Earth combined, although we face no explicit threat.

Mike Gravel, the former two-term senator from Alaska and 2008 presidential candidate, sat Saturday on a park bench in Lafayette Park facing the White House. Gravel and I were in the park, along with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and other anti-war activists, to denounce the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a sparsely attended rally. [Click here for video clips of speeches by Kucinich, Hedges and Nader.] Few voices in American politics have been as consistent, as reasoned and as moral as his, which is why Gravel, on a chilly December morning, is in front of the White House, not inside it.

“I suspect that from the get-go he had an inferiority complex with respect to the military,” Gravel, who was a first lieutenant in the Army, said of the president. “It is the same problem [Bill] Clinton had by not serving in the military, by not having an actual experience. You don’t have to go into combat, you just have to get into the military and recognize at the lower reaches how incompetent the military can be. So not having that experience, and only dealing with generals, who of course learn to be charming—it’s the sergeants who inflict the pain—he has this aura about the military. We have acculturated the nation to a military culture. This is the sadness of it all because that sustains the military-industrial complex.”

“Obama comes on the scene,” he added. “He is endorsed in the course of the campaign by some 19 generals and admirals. These people had no confidence in [George W.] Bush. They recognized that Bush’s unilateralism and cavalier approach to torture was injurious to the American military. They gravitated towards Obama. It turned his head. He thought he could be commander in chief and he could, he has the intelligence, but he does not have fortitude. He lacks courage.”

Time is rapidly running out. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer afford, will leave the country struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in debt by 2010. This will require the United States to auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which is inevitable, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as 2 trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it print trillions more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. A backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will tear apart the social fabric, unleash chaos and violence, and strengthen the calls for more draconian measures by our security apparatus and military.

Obama uses the veneer of intellectualism to promote the dirty politics of Bush. The president spoke in Oslo, when he accepted the Nobel Prize, of “just war” theory, although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not meet the criteria laid down by Thomas Aquinas or traditional Catholic just-war doctrine. He spoke of battling evil, dividing human reality into binary poles of black and white as Bush did, without examining the evil of pre-emptive war, sustained military occupation and imperialism. He compared al-Qaida to Hitler, ignoring the difference between a protean group of terrorists and a nation-state with the capacity to overwhelm its neighbors with conventional military force. “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” Obama insisted in Oslo. The U.S., he said, has the right to “act unilaterally if necessary” and to launch wars whose purpose “extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.” Obama’s policies, despite the high-blown rhetoric, are as morally bankrupt as those of his predecessor.

“The first time I met him I felt there was arrogance with a touch of cynicism,” Gravel said of the president. “Now the cynicism and the arrogance have overwhelmed his intelligence. Like Clinton, he is into power.”

Gravel’s shining moment as a politician occurred in 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, handed the secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. The newspaper published portions of the document, which painted a picture of a failing war at odds with official pronouncements. The Justice Department swiftly blocked further publication and moved to punish newspaper publishers who revealed its contents. Gravel responded by reading large portions of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. His courageous public release of the papers made it possible for the publication to resume. Gravel also launched in 1971 a one-man five-month filibuster to end the peacetime military draft, forcing the Nixon administration to cut a deal that allowed the draft to expire in 1973. He was a feisty and blunt candidate in 2008 who lambasted the Democratic Party and its major candidates for being in the service of corporations, especially the arms industry. His outspokenness saw him banned by the Democratic leadership from later primary debates.

“Obama has wasted an opportunity to be a great president,” Gravel lamented. “More than 50 percent of the American people do not buy into this war. He could have stood up and said ‘we are getting out.’ Forget the Congress. Forget the Republicans. Forget the hawks. Forget mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, which are hawks. He would have weathered that storm because he would have had the American people on his side. And what did he do? He caved in to the leadership of [David] Petraeus and [Stanley A.] McChrystal and adopted a scenario that is a total loser.”

“When he hugs his children at night, when he puts them to bed, he has got to begin to think there are little girls like this in Afghanistan who are being killed and maimed,” Gravel told me. “If he can’t have that kind of a thought then his arrogance knows no boundaries. I saw this in the Senate during the Vietnam War. People detach themselves from the immediacy of the crime. They vote for the money. They vote for the policy. The picture of people dying is distant. My God, if you are sitting next to me and a bomb explodes and your arm is ripped off that is not distant. It is immediate. I saw the film by Robert Greenwald, “Rethink Afghanistan.” It rips your heart out. And America under the leadership of Obama is a party to this crime. Close your eyes. Listen to the media. Listen to the pundits. Listen to the rhetoric. It is Vietnam all over again. What is the difference between our vital interests and the domino theory? We could leave Afghanistan and it would be as significant as when we left Vietnam.”

“Don’t be hoodwinked by Obama going to Dover [Air Force Base] to watch the caskets or going to Arlington to salute the graves, with his snappy salute,” Gravel says. “Adolf Hitler lionized soldiers dying. This is the old idea that it is honorable to die. It is not honorable to die in vain. People died in vain in Vietnam. They are dying in vain in Iraq and Afghanistan. And more people will die in vain because of the leadership of Barack Obama.”

“They don’t hate us because we are free,” Gravel said of the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They hate us because we are killing them.”

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/14

[suebee]

sidey!!!!!!!!!!

[suebee]

is Obama secretly plotting how to get a progressive agenda going or completely naive and succumbing to power corruption? i wont even mention the rest of the rat pack 'representing' us.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Did you see what Coburn pulled today?
I had to take my daughter to the ER because she had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic last month.
1000 $ for a doctor to see her for two or three minutes and a shot.
SB.You haven't gotten back with me as to my war in the courtroom.
I have decided to give the other side hell.
Everyday I'm going to write some grievance committee or governmental agency I can complain to about anybody on the other side.Will they(the Defendant lawyers) get tired of me bugging them or will my shots just make them more stubborn and unjust.
In a jury trial do I have to have experts to testify?
Money is getting hard to come-by.We moved our daughter to KC and that was expensive,as are hired guns.

[suebee]

you havent asked me any questions, and you said you had a lawyer.
dont waste your time "giving the other side hell" as ive said ad naseum. (waste your time writing OK's 'distinguished' senators instead.)
you cant even file if you dont have a doctor vouching for plaintiff in cali, so i would imagine OK has some requirement for an expert to 'educate' the jury on the standard of care. find one or two who can competently testify to whatever your main issues are, who have expertise/experience in those areas. you said you had a lot of experts.... this is the only time i will post here on your case, cuz its not the venue, but you obviously arent getting what im telling you in my emails.....:(

i know this is a nightmare for you and i sympathize isaiah. i do, i really do. but ive told you for two years everything i could.

[Isaiah Mpski]

I haven't gotten an e-mail or mesage from you in close to three or four months.
Haven't gotten one from our Hebrew friend just across the Red River in two years.

My computor will not let me send e-mails unless they are replys.

I do not officially have a lawyer.
I filed my and my Mother's situation Pro Se and included an expert witness who by this time can't take off from his drug rehab program he runs or the old folks he is helping deliver to a better place-we hope.

My question was,and probably a stupid one,was do I need a doctor other than myself to say there was malpractice at a jury trial.
Remember now the basic situation please.
March 2005-she has a severe reaction in Dr's office to a drug they gave her there.
July 2005-same doctors admit her to hospital and immediately begin giving her the same drug they witnessed a reaction to and leave her on it for five days,by which time,the allergic reaction to the drug-Protonix-has virtually destroyed her pancreas.Not only that but she goes into shock and stops breathing along with cardiovascular collapse.She lives on a ventilator,unconscious before passing after a very long suffering and painful period of two months.

The drug was developed in Germany,the patent sold to Wyeth in Philadelphia.I have an expert witness from Philadelphia who will testify for us for about 8k.
That is why I need to sell my oil and gas well rights.
Either that,loan it to me,backed up by acreage from the farm,and I will double your money as soon as we settle this mess.

I've told you about the relationship and the millions of dollars the Payne-Rice people have with the local bank so they have little interest in "helping" me.

Also remember the little cabin on the farm was used for several years by Oral Roberts to get away from Tulsa.Holy Cow.

My last official attorney withdrew the day after our witness list was due and two days before expert list was due.I managed to get in two experts.

The guy withdrew citing conflict of interests issue-his paralegal had worked with defendant's counsel at a previous firm.Why didn't he withdraw earlier than that?Probably because he didn't know what his paralegal was up to or...?
You said I would be better off without them and you turned out to be right but they opened up a can of worm when many of the records-income tax,medicare EOM's disappeared and of course accomplished little for the other side other than cost me the time and money it will take to replace them.
She also did stupid things like sending our experts partial records so it made it more difficult if not impossible to make sense out of the malpractice.
There are grounds there for a grievance complaint to the Bar and you can bet your million dollar home there in SF I WILL file one.

[suebee]

isaiah you last emailed me on dec 11. you didnt ask any questions. before that you emailed on nov 19 telling me you had a new attorney - schwartz or something and i emailed you back same day. you can private message me from here. the BOTH forum isnt the venue for these issues.

[sidecross]

$57,077.60 -- That's What We're Paying Each Minute for the Occupation of Afghanistan

By Jo Comerford, Tomdispatch.com

$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind -- just for a minute or so.

After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.

Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60. That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.

By the way, add up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.

But perhaps this isn’t a time to quibble. After all, a job is a job, especially in the United States, which has lost seven million jobs since December 2007, while reporting record-high numbers of people seeking assistance to feed themselves and/or their families. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 36 million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on food stamps.

On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that “safety net,” we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that's roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.

For purposes of comparison, $30 billion -- remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge -- is equal to 80% of the total U.S. 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels) for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Or think of the surge this way: if the United States decided to send just 29,900 extra soldiers to Afghanistan, 100 short of the present official total, it could double the amount of money -- $100 million -- it has allocated to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Leaving aside the fact that the United States already accounts for 45% of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easily build, furnish and equip enough schools for the entire nation.

Continuing this nod to the absurd for just one more moment, if you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120,000 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.

One more thing, that $30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year's Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran's benefits, from hospital stays to education.

In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child. Given that the average annual salary for an Afghan soldier is $2,880 and many Afghans seek employment in the military purely out of economic desperation, this might be a wise investment -- especially since the Taliban is able to pay considerably more for its new recruits. In fact, recent increases in much-needed Afghan recruits appear to correlate with the promise of a pay raise.

All of this is, of course, so much fantasy, since we know just where that $30-plus billion will be going. In 2010, total Afghanistan War spending since November 2001 will exceed $325 billion, which equals the combined annual military spending of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. If we had never launched an invasion of Afghanistan or stayed on fighting all these years, those war costs, evenly distributed in this country, would have meant a $2,298.80 dividend per U.S. taxpayer.

Even as we calculate the annual cost of war, the tens of thousands of Asian elephants in the room are all pointing to $1 trillion in total war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan. The current escalation in Afghanistan coincides with that rapidly-approaching milestone. In fact, thanks to Peter Baker’s recent New York Times report on the presidential deliberations that led to the surge announcement, we know that the trillion-dollar number for both wars may be a gross underestimate. The Office of Management and Budget sent President Obama a memo, Baker tells us, suggesting that adding General McChrystal’s surge to ongoing war costs, over the next 10 years, could mean -- forget Iraq -- a trillion dollar Afghan War.

At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations' military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today's dollars cost $709.9 billion -- or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we're still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.

[Note: Jo would like to acknowledge the analysis and numbers crunching of Chris Hellman and Mary Orisich, members of the National Priorities Project's research team, without whom this piece would not have been possible.]


Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.

© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/world/144642/%2457%2C077.60_--_that%27s_what_we%27re_paying_each_minute_for_the_ occupation_of_afghanistan

[Isaiah Mpski]

When we entered into this war,the scenario described in your post is exactly what the other side said would happen.
Not only that but I noticed the US Marshall's Service advertized for hiring 3500 more sky marshalls within the last month or so.
What else are we not being told.
It seems to me,that just like the Roman Empire fell from the inside because of foreign war and rampant injustice and immorality,we seem to be following the same path.

[sidecross]

Now I’m Really Getting Pissed Off

by David Michael Green

Hey did you hear about the iconic African-American guy who plays golf, and whose relationship with the public is in a free-fall lately?

No, as a matter of fact - I'm not talking about Tiger Woods.

You know, I've really been trying not to write an article every other week about all the things I don't like about Barack Obama.

But the little prick is making it very hard.

Like any good progressive, I've gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this president. Now I'm fast getting to rage.

How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage.

Did this clown really say on national television that "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street"?!?!

Really, Barack? So, like, my question is: Then why the hell did you help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street?!?! Why the hell did you surround yourself with nothing but Robert Rubin proteges in all the key economic positions in your government? Why did you allow them to open a Washington branch of Goldman Sachs in the West Wing? Why have your policies been tailored to helping Wall Street bankers, rather than the other 300 million of us, who just happen to be suffering badly right now?

Are you freakin' kidding me??? What's up with the passive president routine, anyhow, Fool? You hold the most powerful position in the world. Or maybe Rahm forgot to mention that to you. Or maybe the fat cat bankers don't actually let do that whole decision-making thing often enough that it would actually matter...

But, really, are you going to spend the next three interminable years perfecting your whiney victim persona? I don't really think I could bear that. Hearing you complain about how rough it all is, when you have vastly more power than any of us to fix it? Please. Not that.

Are you going to tell us that "I did not run for office to be shovel-feeding the military-industrial complex"? But what - they're just so darned pushy?

"...I did not run for office to continue George Bush's valiant effort at shredding the Bill of Rights. It's just that those government-limiting rules are so darned pesky."

"...I did not run for office to dump a ton of taxpayer money into the coffers of health insurance companies. It's just that they asked so nicely."

"...I did not run for office to block equality for gay Americans. I just never got around to doing anything about it."

"...I did not run for office to turn Afghanistan into Vietnam. I just didn't want to say no to all the nice generals asking for more troops."

Here's a guy who was supposed to actually do something with his presidency, and he's turned into the skinny little geek on Cell Block D who gets passed around like a rag doll for the pleasure of all the fellas with the tattoos there. He's being punked by John Boehner, for chrisakes. He's being rolled by the likes of Joe Lieberman. He calls a come-to-Jesus meeting with Wall Street bank CEOs, and half of them literally phone it in. Everyone from Bibi Netanyahu to the Japanese prime minister to sundry Iranian mullahs is stomping all over Mr. Happy.

And he doesn't even seem to realize it.

Did you see him tell Oprah that he gave himself "a good solid B+" for his first year in office? And that it will be an A, if he gets his healthcare legislation passed?

Somebody please pick me up and set me back on my chair, wouldya?

I am seriously beginning to worry that this cat is delusional. He has lopped off twenty full points from his job approval rating in less than a year's time, falling now below fifty percent. His party, once dominant in generic congressional election poll questions, is today almost even with hated Republicans in the public mind. Last month, Obama's inverted coattails (don't even ask where those go) got two Democrats clobbered running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. The otherwise obnoxious George F. Will (very) rightly points out that in Kentucky, "a Republican candidate succeeded in nationalizing a state Senate race. Hugely outspent in a district in which Democrats have a lopsided registration advantage, the Republican won by 12 points a seat in Frankfort by running against Washington". Wow. Obama is now wrecking state senate races! What's next? Will local Republican candidates for sheriff win office just by opposing the embarrassment in the White House who chooses abysmal policies and then refuses to fight for them, lest he should ruffle any feathers?

"For Democrats, the red flags are flying at full mast," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart in a recent AP article. "What we don't know for certain is: Have we reached a bottoming-out point?"

Au contraire, Peter. Au contraire. I think anyone more sentient than a newborn amoeba can answer that question. The first thing to note is that the economy is not coming back anytime soon, if it comes back at all. Unless, of course, you're a fat cat Wall Street banker. Then you're just fine, because the Bush-Obama administration took care of you quite nicely, thanks very much. The rest of us poor slobs out here in real-world land, on the other hand, got a "jobs summit".

I can't even begin to describe how insulting Obama conducting a "jobs summit" is to me, or what an unbelievably ham-fisted piece of public relations that was for the White House, which is increasingly showing itself not just to be sickeningly regressive, but also fully inept. I think I speak for a whole lot of Americans when I say that, one year into his stewardship over a destroyed economy that was actually atomizing for at least six months before inauguration day, I don't want my president sitting around a table, running a dog-and-pony show, pretending to kick around ideas on how to generate jobs. I wanted him to have those ideas, himself, before he was inaugurated. I wanted those to be real ideas, that produce real jobs for real Americans who are really hurting. I wanted that to be, and still be, the be-all and end-all of his presidency, not some distant fourth-place priority, behind healthcare and the White House dog selection process. And, especially not some fourth-place priority behind jive healthcare reform.

Which brings us to the second answer to Mr. Hart's question. If Democrats think they'll be screwed next November because of unemployment, wait till Congress passes this healthcare monstrosity. Or doesn't. At this point, either way they're gonna get slammed for it, and rightly so.

If they don't pass anything, they will be seen as unable to govern. This perception will be quite true because they will have failed to pass a major piece of legislation, despite having 60-40 majorities in both houses of Congress and control of the presidency. It doesn't get much better than that for a governing party in the American system. But it will be true in an even more profound sense, because the whole priority structure of the Democratic agenda is wrong. Sure, people want healthcare reform right now (especially if it were to miraculously also have the virtue of being authentic healthcare reform), but what they really want, overwhelmingly, is jobs. This choice of priorities is the equivalent of, say, invading Iraq when you've been attacked by people in Afghanistan. Surely no president would be that stupid, right? Surely any political party would realize the costs of having priorities so divorced from those of the voters, right?

On the other hand, the Democrats and their hapless president are probably in worse shape if they actually pass this legislation. Especially now that it's been stripped of nearly every real progressive reform imaginable, it has become an incredibly stupid bill, from the political perspective. It will force people who can't afford it to spend a giant amount of money on lousy insurance, without any real choice to hold down costs, and it will fund this by hacking away at the Medicare budget. No wonder an insurance industry lobbyist broadcast an email last week declaring: "We WIN. Administered by private insurance companies. No government funding. No government insurance competitor."

But here's a little riddle that any sixth-grader can easily figure out, although it seems to have eluded the brain trust at the White House: If insurance companies are winning big-time, then who is doing the losing? Something tells me that if Democrats are dumb enough to pass their own legislation, voters will provide them the answer to that puzzle in November of 2010, and then again two years later. What could be stupider than saddling thirty-five million Americans with a new monthly bill that will probably represent the second or third biggest item in their budget, in exchange for crappy private sector health insurance that is unlikely to pay out when needed, and wastes a third of the dollars paid in premiums on bureaucracy and profits anyhow? Slapping big fines on them if they don't pony up for the insurance, perhaps? Yep, that's in there too.

This bill alone could mobilize legions of people to go to the polls and vote for whichever party didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure the GOP won't be shy about reminding Americans who that is. I mean, if Democrats were searching for legislation less likely to win them votes, why didn't they just bring back slavery or the debtor's prison? Why not come out for pedophilia? It would have been so much more efficient. At least they wouldn't have spent the last year looking like idiotic bunglers who, in addition to sponsoring really unpopular ideas, also inadvertently left their testicles at the coat check and have spent the last thirty years trying to find their way back to the gala.

Ah, but wait! If you order now, there's more!

As I understand it, the bill doesn't even actually force insurance companies to cover people, at least in the sense that they can charge prohibitive amounts to those with whatever they define as pre-existing conditions. You know, like the young woman who had a policy but died when she was denied cancer treatment because she had a bad case of acne as a teenager.

This will be a total train wreck for the Democratic Party. Already, the public opposes the plan by a ratio of 47 to 32 percent. And they haven't even been handed the bill for it yet. And they haven't even had their premiums skyrocket yet. And they haven't even seen insurance corporation executives buy small countries for use as second homes with the increased compensation they will be floating in. And they haven't even found out what this does to their Medicare yet. And they haven't even seen the impact on the national debt yet. And they haven't even realized that the ‘good' parts of the bill don't go into effect until FOUR YEARS from now.

You know, elite Republicans may be sociopaths, and they may be lower on the moral totem pole than your basic cannibal, but they're not stupid. I bet they're salivating at the idea that this thing passes. I bet they'd even have Olympia Snowe vote for it if necessary, just to put it over the top. They must be laughing their asses off at this gift. All they have to do is oppose it right down the line, then say "Told ya so!" at the next election, squashing the pathetic Demognats, one after the next. Hey, even if worse comes to worse and the thing eventually becomes popular, they can always wait a decade or two and become champions of the new publically beloved healthcare system - just like they did for Medicare, Social Security, civil rights, etc.

This is President Nothingburger's great gift to America, along with doing nothing about jobs, doing nothing about the Middle East, nothing about civil liberties, nothing about civil rights, and now doing nothing at Copenhagen. Regarding the latter, the world is literally on fire, and he jets in, gives a speech haranguing the delegates that "Now is not the time for talk, now is the time for action", then splits even before the vote in order to beat the snowstorm headed to the east coast that might delay him getting home to his comfy bed. I'm not kidding. You can't make this shit up, man.

This guy is killing me, though at the same time I still can't quite figure him out.

Here's what I get: This president is a corporate hack. Like Bush or Clinton, he has constituents, alright - but you and I are not on that particular list.

Here's what I don't get: He is radically tanking, at a moment when people no longer have patience for those kind of politics anymore.

Here's what I get: This president has his fingers in many pies, as he needs to, ranging from global warming to economic implosion to two wars abroad to massive federal debt.

Here's what I don't get: Why does he bother to do these things in a way that pleases no one, and only dramatically undercuts his own political standing? Why does he refuse to make anyone his enemy, thus making everyone his enemy?

Is he just massively deluded? I wouldn't have thought so, but watching the guy give himself a very good grade for 2009 - straight face and all - during the same year he's lost twenty points off his job approval rating, and at a moment when even blacks and gays are deserting him, you know, you have to wonder.

Is he happy just to be a one-term president - just to say he's been there and done that, and then sell some more books - even if he is reviled as one of the worst in history?

Maybe. But what about the rest of us?

The rest of us, indeed. It's been quite some time since anyone in the White House ever cared about that sorry pack of rabble.

Obama looked like he could've been something different. He ain't.

So this is it, folks.

Change you can believe in?

More like bullshit you can take a bath in, if you ask me.


David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/20-8

[willoweyes]

great great article sidecross.

did anyone but me hear Katrina Van Hueval of the Nation give Obama thumbs up for his Nobel acceptance speech? WTF? as my kids say. . . .

"It will force people who can't afford it to spend a giant amount of money on lousy insurance, without any real choice to hold down costs, and it will fund this by hacking away at the Medicare budget. No wonder an insurance industry lobbyist broadcast an email last week declaring: "We WIN. Administered by private insurance companies. No government funding. No government insurance competitor."

that's pretty well the way I see it, too.

[sidecross]

Agent of Change

by Ralph Nader

The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535-475 BC) said that "character is destiny." He might have added that "personality is decisive." Where is Barack Obama in this framework?

The venerable historian, James MacGregor Burns, in his book "Transforming Leadership," drew an important distinction between "transforming and transactional leadership," and calling Franklin Delano Roosevelt a reflection of the former genre.

Given all the burgeoning crises in the United States and the world, the only global military and economic superpower (albeit in serious deficit straits) needs a transforming leader, when, at best, it has a transactional leader in the White House.

I say "at best," because President Obama displays an uncanny inability to deal. He is not even anywhere near Lyndon Baines Johnson in that regard. This lack is due more to his personality than to his character.

His is a concessionary demeanor, an aversion to conflict and to taking on entrenched power, a devotee of harmony ideology not because he doesn't believe in necessary re-directions, but because he does not project the strength of his beliefs and willingness to draw the line-here and no further-as did Ronald Reagan or FDR.

In the shark tank known as the federal Washington, D.C. Obama's personality projects weakness as someone who does not take a stand and fight, as someone inclined to rely on his rhetoric to explain his withdrawals, retreats and reversals. Some examples follow.

First, the President has been openly for single payer health insurance (full Medicare for all with free choice of physician and hospital) since before he became a politician. His friends included single payer leaders such as the stalwart Dr. Quentin Young in Chicago.

So, instead of starting with "single payer," he descends to vague policy declarations, asks Congress to come up with a specific bill, while cutting private deals in meetings in the White House with drug industry and health insurance executives.

Now months later, with Blue Dog Democrats emboldened, with his progressive wing angry and starting to rebel, a hoked up insurance bill is having many provisions eviscerated. Once the Republicans smelled his lack of resolve, his wavering on one amendment after another, they became ravenous in their demands and obstructions.

Second, Barack Obama, before he came to Washington, was also a supporter of Palestinian rights. Between election and inauguration, he proceeded to categorically back the illegal blockade and invasion of Gaza by Israel and did not object to the slaughter of 1400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, young and old. Apparently, the impoverished, pummeled people of a half-destroyed Gaza, whose many newly elected members of the Palestinian parliament were kidnapped and jailed by the Israelis two years earlier, had no right to feebly defend themselves against constant border raids and missiles by the fifth most powerful army in the world.

Third, Mr. Obama's tough talk about a reckless and greedy Wall Street is not paralleled with tough regulatory proposals. He allowed, without working his will, the banks and Banking Committee Chairman, Barney Frank to produce a weakened regulatory bill that passed the House of Representatives.

For example, regulatory provisions on the rating agencies (such as Standard and Poor's and Moody's) and derivatives were mere taps on the wrists, ridiculed by former Chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission from both parties.

Fourth, on labor and NAFTA, his campaign speeches were about the need for reform. He has started nothing there and says nothing about this promise to revisit the U.S. participation in NAFTA. He believes in the card check version of labor law reform but has not used his political capital to advance this modest reform at all.

Fifth, on climate change, where so much of the world looks for him to be a transforming leader, Mr. Obama has bought into the cap and trade morass instead of a simpler, more enforceable carbon tax. His words on this subject are often well-spoken but his rhetoric is undermined by his inaction. His opponents in Congress and the corporate sector are strengthened as a consequence.

Mr. Obama leaves Copenhagen without a deal after outlining three steps-mitigation of greenhouse gases, openness of each country's progress or lack thereof, and a very modest financial commitment from the world's biggest polluter to help the more beleaguered countries with climate change (poor countries that are recipients of the Western countries emissions.) He hardly set an example for a government whose ownership and control of GM and Chrysler could transform automotive technology.

He cannot transform his hope and change slogan into meaningful policies if he signals that he can be had on one issue after another by being desperate to get any legislation so long as he can give it the right public relations label.

Most importantly, The President cannot be a transforming leader if he turns his back on the liberal and progressive constituency that elected him because he thinks they have nowhere to go.

He must give visibility to their expectations of him, including access to many cabinet secretaries and regulatory agency heads who have been reluctant even to meet with civic leaders, unlike the open doors regularly available to the corporatists and their lobbyists.

"Personality," "character," pretty soon they become indistinguishable and very resistant to both "hope and change."

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super Wealthy Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/21-12

[sidecross]

Don't Mess with Yemen

By Patrick Cockburn, Independent UK

We are the Awaleq
Born of bitterness
We are the sparks of hell
He who defies us will be burned

This is the tribal chant of the powerful Awaleq tribe of Yemen, in which they bid defiance to the world. Its angry tone conveys the flavour of Yemeni life and it should give pause to those in the US who blithely suggest greater American involvement in Yemen in the wake of the attempt to destroy a US plane by a Nigerian student who says he received training there.

Yemen has always been a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise. The Yemenis are exceptionally hospitable, though this has its limits. For instance, the Kazam tribe east of Aden are generous to passing strangers, but deem the laws of hospitality to lapse when the stranger leaves their tribal territory, at which time he becomes "a good back to shoot at".

The Awaleq and Kazam tribes are not exotic survivals on the margins of Yemeni society but are both politically important and influential. The strength of the central government in the capital, Sanaa, is limited and it generally avoids direct confrontations with tribal confederations, tribes, clans and powerful families. Almost everybody has a gun, usually at least an AK-47 assault rifle, but tribesmen often own heavier armament.

I have always loved the country. It is physically very beautiful with cut stone villages perched on mountain tops on the sides of which are cut hundreds of terraces, making the country look like an exaggerated Tuscan landscape. Yemenis are intelligent, humorous, sociable and democratic, infinitely preferable as company to the arrogant and ignorant playboys of the Arab oil states in the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

It is very much a country of direct action. Once when I was there a Chinese engineer was kidnapped as he drove along the main road linking Sanaa to Aden. The motives of the kidnappers were peculiar. It turned out they came from a bee-keeping tribe (Yemen is famous for its honey) whose bees live in hives inside hollow logs placed on metal stilts to protect them from ants. The police had raided the tribe's village and had damaged hives for which the owners were demanding compensation. The government had been slow in paying up so the tribesmen had decided to draw attention to their grievance by kidnapping the next foreigner on the main road and this turned out to be the Chinese engineer.

Yemen is a mosaic of conflicting authorities, though this authority may be confined to a few villages. Larger communities include the Shia around Sanaa in the north of the country near Saada, with whom the government has been fighting a fierce little civil war. The unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 has never wholly gelled and the government is wary of southern secessionism. Its ability to buy off its opponents is also under threat as oil revenues fall, with the few oilfields beginning to run dry.

It is in this fascinating but dangerous land that President Barack Obama is planning to increase US political and military involvement. Joint operations will be carried out by the US and Yemeni military. There will be American drone attacks on hamlets where al-Qa'ida supposedly has its bases.

There is ominous use by American politicians and commentators of the phrase "failed state" in relation to Yemen, as if this some how legitimised foreign intervention. It is extraordinary that the US political elite has never taken on board that its greatest defeats have been in just such "failed states"', not least Lebanon in 1982, when 240 US Marines were blown up; Somalia in the early 1990s when the body of a US helicopter pilot was dragged through the streets; Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein; and Afghanistan after the supposed fall of the Taliban.

Yemen has all the explosive ingredients of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the arch-hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, was happily confirming this week that the Green Berets and the US Special Forces are already there. He cited with approval an American official in Sanaa as telling him that, "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If you don't act pre-emptively Yemen will be tomorrow's war." In practice pre-emptive strikes are likely to bring a US military entanglement in Yemen even closer.

The US will get entangled because the Yemeni government will want to manipulate US action in its own interests and to preserve its wilting authority. It has long been trying to portray the Shia rebels in north Yemen as Iranian cats-paws in order to secure American and Saudi support. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) probably only has a few hundred activists in Yemen, but the government of long time Yemeni President Ali Abdulah Salih will portray his diverse opponents as somehow linked to al-Qa'ida.

In Yemen the US will be intervening on one side in a country which is always in danger of sliding into a civil war. This has happened before. In Iraq the US was the supporter of the Shia Arabs and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs. In Afghanistan it is the ally of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara against the Pashtun community. Whatever the intentions of Washington, its participation in these civil conflicts destabilises the country because one side becomes labelled as the quisling supporter of a foreign invader. Communal and nationalist antipathies combine to create a lethal blend.

Despite sectarian, ethnic and tribal loyalties in the countries where the US has intervened in the Middle East, they usually have a strong sense of national identity. Yemenis are highly conscious of their own nationality and their identity as Arabs. One of the reasons the country is so miserably poor, with almost half its 22 million people trying to live on $2 a day, is that in 1990 Yemen refused to join the war against Iraq and Saudi Arabia consequently expelled 850,000 Yemeni workers.

It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa'ida's advantage. The real strength of al-Qa'ida is not that it can "train" a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa'ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries.

In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa'ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were "too big to fail," so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole superpower.

In Iraq the US is getting out more easily than seemed likely at one stage because Washington has persuaded Americans that they won a non-existent success. The ultimate US exit from Afghanistan may eventually be along very similar lines. But the danger of claiming spurious victories is that such distortions of history make it impossible for the US to learn from past mistakes and instead it repeats them by fresh interventions in countries like Yemen.


http://www.alternet.org/world/144892/don%27t_mess_with_yemen_

[sidecross]

Published on Saturday, January 2, 2010 by FireDogLake

Obama’s Royal Scam and The Iron Fist Of Rahm

by FireDogLake's Bmaz



Audacity To Hope

Change We Can Believe In

Rule of Law

Accountability

Freedom From Lobbyists and Special Interests

Privacy

Harm From Illegal Surveillance

Constitutional Scholar

Transparency

Predatory Business Practices

Closing Guantanamo

Withdrawing From Iraq and Afghanistan

These are but some of the major buzzwords, issues and concepts Barack Obama based his candidacy and campaign on to convince the American electorate to sweep him in to office. Mr. Obama, however, has gone significantly in the opposite direction on each and every one since taking office. As Frank Rich noted, there is a growing "suspicion that Obama's brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger's public image - a marketing scam...".

Is there support for this allegation other than anecdotal evidence? Yes, and Micah Sifry has an excellent piece out detailing the basis:

After all, the image of Barack Obama as the candidate of "change", community organizer, and "hope-monger" (his word), was sold intensively during the campaign. Even after the fact, we were told that his victory represented the empowerment of a bottom-up movement, powered by millions of small donors, grassroots volunteers, local field organizers and the internet. .... The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn't happen, in the first year of Obama's administration. The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests-banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex-sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting. .... Should we really surprised that someone with so much early support from Wall Street and wealthy elites overall might not be inclined to throw the money-changers out of the temple? .... When it came to planning for being in government, it turns out that Plouffe, along with David Axelrod, was a chief advocate for bringing in then Rep. Rahm Emanuel as Obama's chief of staff. He writes, using a baseball analogy: "Rahm was a five-tool political player: a strategist with deep policy expertise, considerable experience in both the legislative and executive branches, and a demeanor best described as relentless." (p. 372) Note that nowhere in that vital skill-set is any sense of how to work with the largest volunteer base any presidential campaign has developed in history. Rahm Emanuel came up in politics the old-fashioned way; organizing and empowering ordinary people are the least of his skills.

It is an extremely interesting piece by Sifry, and I recommend a read of the entirety. For those that have not read David Plouffe's book on the campaign, The Audacity To Win, or one of the other long form reports of the Obama 2008 campaign, Sifry lays open the hollowness of Obama's "grass roots". Use em and lose em appears to have been the Obama modus operandi. The American people were desperate for something to latch onto, and Obama and Plouffe gave them a slickly tailored package.

As Digby notes, this line by Sifry really sums it up:

Now, there is a new enthusiasm gap, but it's no longer in Obama's favor. That's because you can't order volunteers to do anything-you have to motivate them, and Obama's compromises to almost every powers-that-be are tremendously demotivating.

I think that is exactly right, and the needle in much of the activist base is moving from "demotivated" to downright demoralized and antagonistic. Yet Obama and his administration, notably Rahm Emanuel, indignantly continue to poke sticks in the eyes of the activist base and boast about it; and it is not from necessity, it is from design and pleasure.

Quite frankly, the seeds of this should have been seen coming. I have never forgotten the shudders I felt when I read two interrelated articles by Matt Stoller and David Dayen discussing how, heading into the 2008 general election, Obama was not just benefitting from, but devouring and commandeering broad swaths of Democratic base activist groups and their power, and actively working to marginalize and cripple those that didn't assimilate into his Borg.

From Stoller:

This isn't a criticism; again, Obama made his bet that the country isn't into ideological combat and wants a politics of unity and hope, and he has won at internally. In terms of the ‘Iron Law of Institutions', the Obama campaign is masterful. From top to bottom, they have destroyed their opponents within the party, stolen out from under them their base, and persuaded a whole set of individuals from blog readers to people in the pews to ignore intermediaries and believe in Barack as a pure vessel of change. ... All I'll add is that it's time to think through the consequences of a party where there is a new chief with massive amounts of power. I've been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven't, and they know what it's like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he's not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi's just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force. When you disagree with Obama, you are saying to these people ‘your favorite band sucks'.

And DDay:

There's nothing shadowy about this - it's an extension of what the Obama campaign has been doing since he entered the race. He's building a new Democratic infrastructure, regimenting it under his brand, and enlisting new technologies and more sophisticated voter contacting techniques to turn it from a normal GOTV effort into a lasting movement. The short-term goal is to increase voter turnout by such a degree that Republicans will wither in November, not just from a swamp of cash but a flood of numbers. The long-term goal is to subvert the traditional structures of the Democratic Party since the early 1990s, subvert the nascent structures that the progressive movement has been building since the late 1990s, and build a parallel structure, under his brand, that will become the new power center in American politics. This is tremendous news.

However, despite his calls that change always occurs from the bottom up, these structures are very much being created and controlled from the top down.

Stoller and DDay, although both seemed to have a nagging question or two, both thought that the gathering "Obama Nation" was a good thing and that once he took office the immense consolidated power and organization would, in fact, as Obama was jawing, be used to end the age old grip of corporate money and influence and propel good new and different policies into action. This pie in the sky was directly defied by passages in their own articles though. Not only was Obama consolidating Democratic power to serve only him from the top down, he was taking out people and groups that didn't step in to his line.

Stoller:

I have heard from several sources that the Obama campaign is sending out signals to donors, specifically at last weekend's Democracy Alliance convention, to stop giving to outside groups, including America Votes. The campaign also circulated negative press reports about Women's Voices Women's Vote, implying voter suppression. ... He has bypassed Actblue, and will probably end up building in a Congressional slate feature to further party build while keeping control of the data. ... The campaign has also, despite thousands of interviews with a huge number of outlets, refused to have Obama interact on progressive blogs. ... I'm also told, though I can't confirm, that Obama campaign has also subtly encouraged donors to not fund groups like VoteVets and Progressive Media. These groups fall under the 'same old Washington politics' which he wants to avoid, a partisan gunslinging contest he explicitly advocates against.

DDay:

But wresting away ALL the power and consolidating it is I think a misunderstanding of how inside and outside groups can be mutually reinforcing and part of a more vibrant cultural and political movement, and how the culture is moving toward more decentralized, more viral, looser networks to organize. Obama's movement, based on unity and hope, is working because politics is of the moment, a fad, Paris Hilton. To sustain that, you must institutionalize engagement, civic participation, awareness and action, even in a non-horse race year, as a necessary facet of citizenship. And there's no reason to shut down reinforcing progressive structures that can keep it fun and interesting and vital.

Shutting down Democratic and progressive structures that do not toe his line is exactly what Obama and his right hand man, Rahm Emanuel, have done since the election. As Stoller and DDay noted, they actually started even before the election and accelerated after it. The deal was sealed when, immediately after the election, Obama chose the iron fist of DLC strongman Rahm Emanuel to lead his administration, immediately dumped Howard Dean and began shuttering Dean's wildly successful fifty state apparatus.

There was only one reason to do that, and it was not to germinate a new grass roots policy force; it was to consolidate power and kill off any other voices and/or authority within the party. As Micah Sifry demonstrated, consolidation and exclusion were always a part of the Obama plan. Almost more disconcerting than Obama's singular cornering of all the power and movement is his refusal to use it to propel new policies. Not even on healthcare did Obama even attempt to truly energize and mobilize the vaunted Obama network, preferring instead to leave it up to the lobbyists, in the bag Congressmen like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman and corporate interests.

This is exactly what has made the progressive campaign and voice of Jane Hamsher, Cenk Uygur, Firedoglake and other awakening progressive movements so critical. It is crystal clear the Obama Presidency is less than it was advertised to be; the only route to correction is through power and action; assertion of independent power is the only thing they will respect and acknowledge. The change will not come through old school Washington politicians beholden to corrupt financial institutions, the insurance lobby and corporate interests. Politicians like Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

© 2010 FireDogLake
Bmaz is an attorney in Phoenix, Arizona practicing criminal defense, civil rights and civil trial law. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, both undergraduate and School of Law, and covers legal and political issues for Firedoglake and sister site Emptywheel. Bmaz is a fan of sports, music, automobiles and margaritas and can be reached at bmaz22@gmail.com

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/02-6

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See for yourself what is being done in the name of the U.S.

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/04/06-0

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Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.org makes a reverence to the book The Good Soldiers by David Finkel. I have read this book and it is a good explanation of why this insanity is so contagious.

We should put more blame on ourselves who let the military put our citizens in such a position to commit war crimes.

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To put this is context, I read The Good Soldiers by David Finkel and reading this book gives more than good reason to pull out all our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. In fact it is quite possible the video evidence came from U.S. Soldiers.

War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 by The Nation

by Robert Dreyfuss

War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, "collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

The release last week of the Wikileaks video [1], thirty-eight grisly minutes long, of US airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007 -- including two Reuters newsmen -- puts it into focus not because it shows us something we didn't know, but because we can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a hellish rain of fire.

The events in Iraq, nearly three years old, were repeated this week in Afghanistan, when trigger-happy US soldiers slaughtered five Afghans cruising along on a huge, comfortable civilian bus near Kandahar.

As the New York Times reports [2]:

"American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing and wounding civilians, and igniting angry anti-American demonstrations in a city where winning over Afghan support is pivotal to the war effort."
The Kandahar incident is only one of many, of course. Over the past year, dozens of Afghans have similarly died in checkpoint and roadside killings. Not one, not a single one, of these murders involved hostile forces. In other words, when the smoke and dust cleared, in all of the cases over the past year the bodies recovered were those of innocents.

As General McChrystal himself recently said:

"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."
My question is: if so, then why aren't the rules of engagement altered? Why is it that US forces can fire wildly at an approaching vehicle, if in none of the cases that have happened thus far were there hostile forces involved?

In the Iraq case, as revealed in the stunning Wikileaks video, a group of eight men on a Baghdad street, in plain sunlight, is shot to pieces under withering fire from above. Then, when a van carrying four or five other men arrives to pick up a wounded man who is crawling painfully along the gutter, the van too is blasted to smithereens when the airmen request permission to "engage."

An analysis by Politifact [3]takes apart Secretary of Defense Gates' callous assertion that the murders were "unfortunate" and "should not have any lasting consequences." We've already investigated this, he said, so what's the big deal?

The military's rationale for the slaughter is that US forces a few hundred yards away had taken small arms fire, and so the airmen in the copters circling above concluded that the men they'd seen carrying what they thought were weapons and RPGs -- although the "RPG" turned out to be a cameraman's telephoto lens -- were bad guys who could be shot to pieces at will. There was, of course, no evidence at all that the dozen or so Iraqis butchered were involved in what may or may not have been a shooting incident nearby. But, you know -- war is hell.

Politifact, to its discredit, defends Gates on these grounds, quoting David Finkel, a Washington Post reporter and author of The Good Soldiers, who writes in blase defense of the slaughter:

"What's helpful to understand is that, contrary to some interpretations that this was an attack on some people walking down the street on a nice day, the day was anything but that. It happened in the midst of a large operation to clear an area where U.S. soldiers had been getting shot at, injured, and killed with increasing frequency. What the Reuters guys walked into was the very worst part, where the morning had been a series of RPG attacks and running gun battles.
"More context. You're seeing an edited version of the video. The full video runs much longer. And it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight, in this case zooming in on the van and seeing those two children. The helicopters were perhaps a mile away. And as all of this unfolded, it was unclear to the soldiers involved whether the van was a van of good Samaritans or of insurgents showing up to rescue a wounded comrade. I bring these things up not to excuse the soldiers but to emphasize some of the real-time blurriness of those moments.

"If you were to see the full video, you would see a person carrying an RPG launcher as he walked down the street as part of the group. Another was armed as well, as I recall. Also, if you had the unfortunate luck to be on site afterwards, you would have seen that one of the dead in the group was lying on top of a launcher. Because of that and some other things, EOD -- the Hurt Locker guys, I guess -- had to come in and secure the site. And again, I'm not trying to excuse what happened. But there was more to it for you to consider than what was in the released video."

Finkel, who apparently is not going to write a sequel to his book called The Bad Soldiers, cavelierly dismisses the deaths of a dozen Iraqis as something that happens in the "real-time blurriness of those moments."

In Afghanistan, the repeated killings of innocent civilians has angered an embittered President Karzai, who has strongly and repeatedly condemned the killings of Afghan citizens by American troops. In a Washington Post story today, "Shooting by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan fuels Karzai's anger," the paper reports [4]:

"Twelve days before President Hamid Karzai denounced the behavior of Western countries in Afghanistan, he met a 4-year-old boy at the Tarin Kowt civilian hospital in the south.
"The boy had lost his legs in a February airstrike by U.S. Special Operations forces helicopters that killed more than 20 civilians. Karzai scooped him up from his mattress and walked out to the hospital courtyard, according to three witnesses. 'Who injured you?' the president asked as helicopters passed overhead. The boy, crying alongside his relatives, pointed at the sky.

"The tears and rage Karzai encountered in that hospital in Uruzgan province lingered with him, according to several aides. It was one provocation amid a string of recent political disappointments that they said has helped fuel the president's emotional outpouring against the West and prompted a brief crisis in his relations with the United States. It was also a reminder that civilian casualties in Afghanistan have political reverberations far beyond the sites of the killings."

But I suppose Finkel can justify that one, too.

© 2010 The Nation

Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam [5] and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.

http://www.commondreams.org/print/54885

[suebee]

this has gone on in every war/conflict ever fought for any reason. we just get to see it now thats all. stupid stupid stupid. stupid.
---------------
lets add 29 more souls to the bush/cheney reckoning with their secret energy criminal disregard of mine safety regs.

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A trillion-dollar catastrophe. Yes, Iraq was a headline warMission accomplished? The Iraq war did more than anything to alienate the Atlantic powers from the rest of the world.

By Simon Jenkins

today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home, Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another 2 million internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under western rule, production of oil – Iraq's staple product – is still below its pre-invasion level, and homes enjoy fewer hours of electricity. This is dreadful.

Some 100,000 civilians are estimated to have lost their lives from occupation-related violence. The country has no stable government, minimal reconstruction, and daily deaths and kidnappings. Endemic corruption is fuelled by unaudited aid. Increasing Islamist rule leaves most women less, not more, liberated. All this is the result of a mind-boggling $751bn of US expenditure, surely the worst value for money in the history of modern diplomacy.

Most failed "liberal" interventions since the second world war at least started with good intentions. Vietnam was to defend a non-communist nation against Chinese expansionism. Lebanon was to protect a pluralist country from a grasping neighbour. Somalia was to repair a failed state.

In Iraq the casus belli was a lie, perpetrated by George Bush and his meek amanuensis, Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein was accused of association with 9/11, and of plotting further attacks with long-range weapons of "mass destruction". Since this was revealed as untrue, the fallback deployed by apologists for Bush and Blair is that Saddam was a bad man and so toppling him was good.

The proper way to assess any war is not some crude "before and after" statistic, but to conjecture the consequence of it not taking place. Anti-Iraq hysteria began in 1998 with Bill Clinton's Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing of Iraq's military and civilian infrastructure, to punish Saddam for inhibiting UN weapons inspectors. To most of the world, it was to deflect attention from Clinton's Lewinsky affair.

Most independent analysis believed that Iraq had ceased any serious nuclear ambitions at the end of the first Iraq war in 1991, a view confirmed by investigators since 2003. Even so, Desert Fox was claimed to have "successfully degraded Iraq's ability to manufacture and use weapons of mass destruction". Whether or not this was true, there was no evidence that such an ability had recovered by 2003. Among other things, the Iraq affair was an intelligence debacle.

Meanwhile, the west's sanctions made Iraq a siege economy, eradicating its middle class and elevating Saddam to sixth richest ruler in the world, though he faced regular plots against his person. Western hostility may have shored him up, but opposition would have eventually delivered a coup, from the army or Shia militants backed by Iran.

Even had that not happened soon, Iraq was a nasty but stable secular state that no longer posed a serious threat even to its neighbours. It was contained by a no-fly zone that had rendered the oppressed Kurds de facto autonomy. It was not appreciably worse than Assad's Ba'athist Syria, and its oil production and energy supplies were improving, not deteriorating as now.

The Chilcot inquiry has been swamped with stories of the American-British occupation on a par with William the Conqueror's "harrying of the north". That any 21st-century bureaucracy could behave with such cruel and bloodthirsty incompetence beggars belief. The truth is it was blinded by a conviction in its neo-imperial omnipotence. However much we delude ourselves, the west is still run by leaders, especially generals, drenched in the glory of past triumphs: leaders who refuse to believe that other nations have a right to order their own affairs. The awfulness of Iraq in 2003 was not so grotesque as to be our business – even had we been able to build the pro-western, pro-Israeli, secular, capitalist utopia of neocon fantasy.

Germany, France, Russia and Japan did not go near this war. They did not believe the lies about Saddam's armoury and did not see any duty to liberate the Iraqi people from oppression. In his other-worldly performance before Chilcot, Blair offered only a glazed belief that he was revelling as a latter-day Richard the Lionheart.

All wars wander from their plan, since all armies are good at landings but bad at breakouts, and dreadful at occupations – known to every military manual long before Iraq. The truth is that this was always to be a headline war, fuelled by a desire to see what Bush celebrated as "mission accomplished" just when a nervous Pentagon was murmuring: "We don't do nation-building." It was a political invasion, not to win a battle or occupy territory but to score a point against Islamist militancy. That it meant toppling one of Asia's few secular regimes was another of its hypocrisies.

The overriding lesson of Iraq comes from that dejected goddess, humility. The dropping of thousands of bombs, the loss of 4,000 western troops and the spending of almost a trillion dollars still cannot overcome the AK-47, the roadside explosive device, the suicide bomber, and an aversion to occupation. Nations with different cultures cannot be ruled by seven years of soldiering. Bush and Blair thought otherwise.


The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as global policemen. It was a wild overreaction by a paranoid, overmilitarised American state to a single spectacular, but inconsequential, act of terrorism on 9/11. As such it illustrated how little international relations have advanced since the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Its exponents are still blinded by incident.

All the UN's pomp cannot stop such incidents running amok. The UN is powerless in the face of glory-seeking statesmen, goaded by military-industrial interests of unprecedented potency. We might think that after history's mightiest lesson book – the 20th century – the west would be proof against repeating such idiocy. Yet when challenged to show prudence and maturity in response to terror, it plays the terrorist's game. It exploits the politics of fear.

The west is leaving Iraq in a pool of blood, dust and dollars. It remains wedded to Iraq's twin sister in folly, Afghanistan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/31/trillion-dollar-catastrophe-iraq-war/print

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Published on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 by The New Republic

Obama Wants Us To Forget the Lessons of Iraq

by Andrew Bacevich

The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. "Now, it is time to turn the page." So advises the commander-in-chief at least. "[T]he bottom line is this," President Obama remarked last Saturday, "the war is ending." Alas, it's not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page-something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do-common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.

For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let's provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq's unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam's war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.

Yet when Saddam subsequently turned on Kuwait, he overstepped. President George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, likened the Iraqi dictator to Hitler, and dispatched 500,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf. The plan was to give Saddam a good spanking, make sure all concerned knew who was boss, and go home.

Operation Desert Storm didn't turn out that way. An ostensibly great victory gave way to even greater complications. Although, in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces did what they had been sent to do, Washington became seized with the notion merely turning back aggression wasn't enough: In Baghdad, Bush's nemesis survived and remained defiant. So what began as a war to liberate Kuwait morphed into an obsession with deposing Saddam himself. In the form of air strikes and missile attacks, feints and demonstrations, CIA plots and crushing sanctions, America's war against Iraq persisted throughout the 1990s, finally reaching a climax with George W. Bush's decision after September 11, 2001, to put Saddam ahead of Osama bin Laden in the line of evildoers requiring elimination.

The U.S.-led assault on Baghdad in 2003 finally finished the work left undone in 1991-so it appeared at least. Here was decisive victory, sealed by the capture of Saddam Hussein himself in December 2003. "Ladies and gentlemen," announced L. Paul Bremer, the beaming American viceroy to Baghdad, "we got him."

Yet by the time Bremer spoke, it-Iraq-had gotten us. Saddam's capture (and subsequent execution) signaled next to nothing. Round two of the Iraq war had commenced, the war against Saddam (1990-2003) giving way to the American Occupation (2003-2010). Round two began the War to Reinvent Iraq in America's Image.

With officials such as Bremer in the vanguard, the United States set out to transform Iraq into a Persian Gulf "city upon a hill," a beacon of Western-oriented liberal democracy enlightening and inspiring the rest of the Arab and Islamic world. When this effort met with resistance, American troops, accustomed to employing overwhelming force, responded with indiscriminate harshness. President Bush called the approach "kicking ass." Heavy-handedness backfired, however, and succeeded only in plunging Iraq into chaos. One result, on the home front, was to produce a sharp backlash against what had become Bush's War.

Unable to win, unwilling to accept defeat, the Bush administration sought to create conditions allowing for a graceful exit. Marketed for domestic political purposes as "a new way forward," more commonly known as "the surge," this modified approach was the strategic equivalent of a dog's breakfast. President Bush steeled himself to expend more American blood and treasure while simultaneously lowering expectations about what U.S. forces might actually accomplish. New tactics designed to suppress the Iraqi insurgency won Bush's approval; so too did the novel practice of bribing insurgents to put down their arms.

Yet as a consequence the daily violence that had made Iraq a hellhole subsided-although it did not disappear.

Meanwhile, once hallowed verities fell by the wayside. U.S. officials stopped promising that Saddam's downfall would trigger a wave of liberalizing reforms throughout the Islamic world. Op-eds testifying to America's enduring commitment to the rights of Iraqi women ceased to appear in the nation's leading newspapers.

Respected American generals-by 2007, about the only figures retaining a shred of credibility on Iraq-disavowed the very possibility of victory. In military circles, to declare that "there is no military solution" became the very height of fashion.

By the time Barack Obama had ascended to the presidency, this second phase of the Iraq war-its purpose now inverted from occupation to extrication-was already well-advanced. Since taking office, Obama has kept faith with the process that his predecessor set in motion, building upon President Bush's success. (When applied to Iraq, "success" has become a notably elastic term, easily accommodating bombs that detonate in Iraqi cities and insurgent assaults directed at Iraqi forces and government installations.)

Which brings us to the present. After seven-plus years, Operation Iraqi Freedom has concluded. Operation New Dawn, its name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid, now begins. (What ever happened to the practice of using terms like Torch or Overlord or Dragoon to describe military campaigns?) Although something like 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, their mission is not to fight, but simply to advise and assist their Iraqi counterparts. In another year, if all goes well, even this last remnant of an American military presence will disappear.

So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad's fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.

Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. Round one of the Iraq war produced a great upheaval that round two served only to exacerbate. As the convoys of U.S. armored vehicles trundle south toward Kuwait and then home, they leave the stage set for round three.

Call this the War of Iraqi Self-Determination (2010-?). As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won't be pretty.

One thing alone we can say with assurance:As far as Americans are concerned, Iraqis now own their war. "Like any sovereign, independent nation," President Obama recently remarked, "Iraq is free to chart its own course." The place may be a mess, but it's their mess not ours. In this sense alone is the Iraq war "over."

As U.S. forces have withdrawn, they have done so in an orderly fashion. In their own eyes, they remain unbeaten and unbeatable. As the troops pull out, the American people are already moving on: Even now, Afghans have displaced Iraqis as the beneficiaries of Washington's care and ministrations. Oddly, even disturbingly, most of us-our memories short, our innocence intact-seem content with the outcome. The United States leaves Iraq having learned nothing.



© 2010 The New Republic
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, has just been published. His other books include, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project), and The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/01

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Published on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 by The Age (Australia)

Afghan War Unwinnable Quagmire, Ex-CIA Man Says

by Dylan Welch

THE war in Afghanistan is an unwinnable quagmire and poor US intelligence is leading to the deaths of Australian soldiers, a visiting former CIA officer says.

"They're all stuck behind the wire; they don't get out ... it's like the crusades where you're stuck on your castle imagining what the natives are doing," said Robert Baer, a decorated CIA field officer of two decades experience who had spent years in the Middle East. (AFP/File/Yuri Cortez)

Robert Baer, a decorated CIA field officer of two decades experience who had spent years in the Middle East, said any chances the US and its allies had of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan had already been squandered. The Coalition was fighting an unwinnable war, he said, and this was the case because victory required reliable intelligence.

''[US intelligence agencies] have the same problem they had before 9/11. It is a system that doesn't work.''

That system sees CIA operatives and allied intelligence officers unable to gather reliable information because security concerns do not allow them to travel widely. And most do not speak the local language. ''They're all stuck behind the wire; they don't get out ... it's like the crusades where you're stuck on your castle imagining what the natives are doing,'' he said.

Describing Washington DC as a ''blank spot on the map'', he said that despite the massive growth of the intelligence agencies post September 11, 2001, there remained systemic failings.

''American intelligence after 9/11 has been unable to co-ordinate ... the FBI will not share with the CIA. CIA has operational databases which they won't share with even others inside the CIA.''

All of this led to a dysfunctional intelligence community unable to provide reliable, contemporary intelligence that could allow the Coalition to win in Afghanistan.

''Twenty-two American soldiers have been killed since Friday, and Australia has lost 21 men ... Afghanistan is a quagmire and it can only be fought with an effective counter-insurgency. It cannot be fought with Abrams tanks and F16s,'' he said.

The author of four books and a film consultant, he has previously described how the CIA's role as a provider of human intelligence - on-the-ground intelligence gathering by field officers - has been steadily degraded under poor management.

Earlier this week Mr Baer said the Australian government should confront Washington with the poor intelligence on Afghanistan that was recently released by WikiLeaks.

''The Australians should take the WikiLeaks information to the US [administration] and say: please tell us you have better information than this,'' Mr Baer said.

Mr Baer is in Australia to speak at the Australian Security Industry Association Limited conference in Sydney.

Copyright © 2010 Fairfax Media

http://www.commondreams.org/print/59921

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Petraeus Cons Obama on Afghan War

by Ray McGovern

Published on Saturday, September 25, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

One thing that comes through clearly in Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, is the contempt felt by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, toward President Barack Obama.

One of Woodward's more telling vignettes has Petraeus, after quaffing a glass of wine during a flight in May, telling some of his staff that the administration was "[expletive] with the wrong guy."

No need to divine precisely what may be the "expletive deleted." Petraeus's Douglas-MacArthur-style contempt for the commander-in-chief comes through clearly enough. But Obama is no Harry Truman, facing down a popular general who may fancy himself a future president.

Pity poor Obama. Journalists favored with an advance peek at Woodward's new book, like Peter Baker of the New York Times, report that Obama last year pressed his advisers to come up with ways to avoid a major escalation in Afghanistan.

Baker notes that at one meeting the President "implored" them. "I want an exit strategy," Obama said.

Obama implored in vain. Petraeus, then the head of Central Command, and the other generals refused to come up with an exit strategy from Afghanistan. What does that tell you? Among other things that Barack Obama is "no Jack Kennedy," either.

This Time: No Profile in Courage

The young Kennedy faced very similar pressures from an even more unreconstructed military brass. Then, as now, senior military officers were experts at "slow-rolling" politicians who favored a course of action that the Pentagon didn't like. When in May 1962 Kennedy ordered preparation of an exit plan from Vietnam, it took more than a year for the brass to draw one up.

But Kennedy knew where the buck stopped and was above "imploring." Rather, he concluded that there was no responsible course other than to order a phased withdrawal from Vietnam, despite strong opposition from the Joint Chiefs and others. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Obama's Profile in Courage Moment."] Kennedy showed he had the courage and the cleverness to outmaneuver them.

Then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later wrote that there was "a total lack of consensus" regarding Kennedy's plan to pull out 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 and the bulk of the rest by 1965. Yet, Kennedy had the courage to step up to the plate; he issued an executive order anyway, bypassing the majority of his advisers who remained strongly opposed.

McNamara summed up the situation in terms that seem eerily applicable to Afghanistan today:

"The President nonetheless authorized the beginning of withdrawal, believing that either our training and logistical support led to the progress claimed or, if it had not, additional training would not change the situation and, in either, case, we should plan to withdraw."

Of course, Kennedy's Vietnam withdrawal plan did not survive his assassination. Soon after his death on Nov. 22, 1963, the Joint Chiefs convinced President Lyndon Johnson to escalate the war in Vietnam.

‘Bristling,' Then Caving

Drawing from Woodward's book, Peter Baker reports that Obama "bristled" at what he saw as attempts by the senior military to force him into a decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

However, in the end, Obama tilted toward the position of Petraeus and the other generals in a too-smart-by-half, hybrid decision. He ordered 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while setting a "condition-based" date for beginning a withdrawal next July. As if anyone really thought then, or thinks now, that "conditions" are going to allow a significant withdrawal next summer!

Obama's critics are right about one thing. Setting that kind of deadline was worse than feckless from a military point of view - for reasons that have been adduced time and time again. Cynics are correct in describing the compromise decision as transparently political and, in the end, utterly naïve.

Conservative columnist Michael Gerson happens to be correct, for once, in suggesting, in his Washington Post op-ed on Friday, that Obama's decisions have been heavily influenced by "political calculations ... only loosely related to actual need or analysis."

"The more we know of Obama's views of the Afghan war, the less confidence he inspires," writes Gerson. Again, correct. Woodward's portrait of President Obama shows him possessed of an unusual admixture of hubris, inexperience, and naïveté.

The mix not only is Obama's personal Achilles heel; it is getting a lot of people killed and maimed. It is also lengthening the lines at "insurgent" recruiting stations and increasing the danger of terrorist attacks here at home.

Michael Gerson will not be the only one to see through Obama's obvious attempt to square a circle.

Woodward paints a personal portrait of presidential cynicism by describing a conversation between Obama and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, during which Graham asks if the July deadline is firm.

Obama is quoted in reply, "I have to say that." He then explains, "I can't let this be a war without end, and I can't lose the whole Democratic Party."

There is little doubt in my mind that Obama knows full well that the Afghanistan war is a fool's errand, and that the only way to end it is to disengage, rather than escalate. Yet he is convinced - wrongly, I believe - that the he has no real political alternative but to kowtow to the generals.

Earning Disdain

Predictably, this behavior earns Obama disdain rather than respect from the top brass, who believe the President feels "intimidated" in their presence, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal is quoted as saying, according to Rolling Stone magazine earlier this year. Generals generally know there is a huge difference between being a mere politician and a real leader.

In Obama, they see a politician first and foremost, and have concluded that his overweening determination to appear strong on defense has the result of making him putty in their hands.

The generals are helped by the Fawning Corporate Media's (FCM) abnegation of its responsibility to explore and report critically on the occupation of Afghanistan. Instead, the FCM promotes almost sickening adulation of those senior officers who "wear the uniform," with row upon row of ribbons and medals, many of whom should be sacked for sending young troops into a war they know to be unwinnable.

Petraeus Surges

Gen. Petraeus is Exhibit A. In 2006, virtually all other generals, backed by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, favored shrinking the U.S. "footprint" in Iraq as the best route to reduce the death toll and to extricate American forces. They agreed that sending more U.S. troops to Iraq would do little good.

However, in late 2006, President George W. Bush feared losing a war on his watch. So, he dumped Rumsfeld, recruited the malleable Robert Gates as the new Defense secretary, and picked out the ambitious Petraeus to implement a "surge" of troops into Iraq.

Though the death toll for both Americans and Iraqis spiked in 2007, with about one thousand U.S. soldiers dying along with tens of thousands of Iraqis, eventually the violence abated, at least somewhat.

Well-informed military analysts credited a number of factors for bringing down the violence, including many that predated the surge. For instance, the Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda extremists - and the U.S. military's decision to put many Sunni insurgents on the payroll - occurred earlier in 2006.

So did the killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and much of the de facto ethnic cleansing of the country as many Sunnis fled their former neighborhoods, turning Baghdad from a predominantly Sunni into a mostly Shia city. Despite the personal tragedies for individual Iraqis, the forced separation did cause the Sunni-vs.-Shiite violence to decline.

Also, as the U.S. occupation came under greater military pressure, American troops were given permissive "rules of engagement" that led to a number of atrocities, including the killing of civilians over the slightest suspicion that they might represent a threat.

The slaughter escalated during the "surge" with Apache helicopters unleashing 50-caliber cannon fire on "military-age males," as happened in the incident on July 12, 2007, that was captured on gun-barrel video and posted on WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010.

Grabbing Credit

Despite the variety of factors that contributed to a drop-off of violence by 2008, Washington's influential neoconservatives insisted on an explanation that credited solely the "surge" of over 20,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq in 2007. And the FCM readily went along with the neocon spin, judging Republican John McCain as "right" on the surge and Obama as "wrong" to oppose it.

So effective was the media panegyric to the surge that Obama decided to get in step by reversing himself and offering his own gratuitous praise just two months before the election in 2008. Providing a hint of his later willingness to show "flexibility" on such issues, candidate Obama reversed himself and told Bill O'Reilly the surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

The misleading, neo-con-driven narrative of the surge - and the media's brain-dead depiction of it as a smashing success - had consequences that went far beyond the presidential campaign. The myth of the "successful surge" elevated Petraeus to the hero status that he now enjoys.

The stage was set for pushing for another surge-this time in Afghanistan. And President Obama, still remembering the stinging attacks on him for his original criticism of the Iraq surge, bent to the political pressures from the neocons and the military brass.

The President tripled the number of U.S. troops there, hoping that would appease Petraeus and his Pentagon allies, including Secretary Gates who had been retained by Obama in a gesture of bipartisanship toward the Republicans.

Despite all that, the top brass still doesn't like Obama much. Nor do they hesitate to differ with him openly on such key issues as the anticipated duration of the war.

Obama and the irrepressible Vice President Joe Biden would have us focus on the July 2011 date set by Obama for the start of withdrawal. According to Woodward, in October 2009 the President told Secretary of State Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates, "I'm not doing ten years. ... I'm not doing long-term nation building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Petraeus, on the other hand, makes clear that he is a devotee of the Long War favored by his close neoconservative friends. Woodward quotes Petraeus:

"You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. ... This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

Blunt Resistance

Petraeus's surrogates have been blunter. After visiting with Petraeus in Afghanistan in August, outspoken Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway held a press conference at which he joined several of his colleagues in expressing disdain for the July 2011 target date, claiming it is "probably giving our enemy sustenance."

At the same time, the Marine general hastened to reassure supporters of the war that such "sustenance" is sure to be short-lived, and that any improvement in Taliban morale is likely to drop when "come the fall [of 2011] we're still there hammering them like we have been."

Conway warned that considerable time will be required before Afghan forces can take over from U.S. troops, saying, "I honestly think it will be a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us."

And Obama's date for beginning the withdrawal? Conway struck a condescending tone: "When some American unit somewhere in Afghanistan will turn over responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2011, I do not think they will be Marines."

Rather, it is likely that Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen will be asking for still more troops before many more months go by. They would almost certainly calculate that Obama would see little option but to acquiesce once again - or face the combined wrath of the military brass and the neocon opinion-shapers.

But didn't the generals, including Petraeus, promise Obama last November not to ask for still more? The generals probably had a good laugh, seeing the President as naïve enough to have thought he could eke leverage out of an implicit threat to cry foul if they backtracked on their assurances.

Did Obama really expect to be able to shout: "But don't you remember? You promised me last fall not to ask for any more; I've got it on tape."

Wooden-headedness

More troops will never be the answer to the Afghan quagmire. And yet politics, together with what historian Barbara Tuchman called "wooden-headedness," prevail. Tuchman pointed to what flows from "not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts":

"Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it. ... Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he had entered the policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better not to make any waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,' an academic disguise for ‘Don't confuse me with the facts.'"

No one should be surprised that Barbara Tuchman's daughter, Carnegie Foundation President Jessica Tuchman Mathews, has been inoculated against "cognitive dissonance." A January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded:

"The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."

Obama is smart enough to know that, but he lacks the courage of his convictions. Teaching law or speed-reading a teleprompter does not a president make.

Eight hundred years ago, Thomas Aquinas observed that courage is the precondition of all virtue. In other words, you can be smart and well intentioned as all get-out; but you cannot be a real leader if you have no guts.

Sure it's hard; and no one is going to make it any easier for Obama to avoid caving in to the military once again. Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak complained to the BBC on Monday that NATO has neither provided enough troops, nor trained Afghan forces quickly enough. Adding salt to NATO/U.S. wounds, Wardak said, "We have never had enough forces that were required by the principles of counterinsurgency warfare."

To reach those multiples would require a major escalation, which privately is what many generals are hoping for. And remember, it was Gen. Petraeus, who "wrote" the update to the counterinsurgency manual.

Yet, wooden-headedness prevails. On Thursday, Adm. Mullen attempted to reassure the press about Afghanistan, stating that although "this is a very, very difficult year, we've got the inputs right" and "we're starting to move forward."

For his part, Defense Secretary Gates expressed full confidence in the current approach and predicted only "some adjustments and tweaks" during a planned December war review "to try and enhance what's going on."

God help us; doesn't he know what's going on?

An earlier version of this article appeared at Consortiumnews.com

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/25-2

[sidecross]

Time to repeal Congress' blank check on wars

Barbara Lee

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress passed a joint resolution broadly authorizing the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those involved in attacking our nation and to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States. I was the only member of Congress who voted against the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" because I knew some would use it as a blank check to wage war anywhere around the world. It is safe to say that if we knew at the time what the next decade would bring, I would not have been alone.

In the nine years since Congress passed this authorization, the United States has waged two wars at a cost of more than $1 trillion. Afghanistan has now become the longest war in our history - longer than World War II or the Vietnam war. Estimates for the total direct and indirect costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by their end range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion with more than 5,700 Americans having given their lives in these conflicts. As we watch an increasing number of lives lost abroad and jobs lost at home, it is clear we cannot accept a policy of open-ended war without accepting a less prosperous, less secure country for ourselves and future generations. Every additional dollar invested in war is a dollar we take away from much-needed investments in health care, education, infrastructure and clean energy that will preserve and create high-quality jobs, as well as ensure America's future competitiveness.

Unfortunately, my prediction that the broad 2001 authorization would open a Pandora's box has come true - and not just in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Domestically, civil rights advocates have challenged the legality of the National Security Agency's warrantless electronic surveillance and wiretapping activities. The detention center at Guantanamo Bay, operated under the pretext of "all necessary and appropriate force," continues to symbolize our eroding constitutional values. United Nations officials have expressed concern over lack of accountability within U.S. intelligence-run targeted killing operations, most notably drone strikes and related civilian casualties. Further, U.S. involvement or tacit backing of military operations in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere shows that an indefinite pursuit of loosely defined global targets is opening the door to war without end. All this, and more, started with that fateful vote on Sept. 14, 2001. Encouragingly, we are hearing bipartisan calls both inside and outside Congress that America cannot afford, nor is it in our long-term national security interest, to wage endless war around the world. As long as the expansive mandate of the 2001 authorization remains in force, the politics of "victory" may result in an ever-growing U.S. military commitment.

Correcting mistakes begins with accepting them. So I have introduced bipartisan legislation for Congress to sunset and repeal the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" over a six-month period.

This legislation is not a referendum on any one U.S. operation, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. The repeal of the act is about Congress restoring its constitutional prerogative in determining and defining the commitments of our country while at war. Anything less does a disservice to our military service members, our nation, and our democracy.

Barbara Lee represents Oakland and other parts of Alameda County in the U.S. House of Representatives.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/30/EDET1FLJCL.DTL&type=printable

[sidecross]

"It matters not whom we elect. The Pentagon and the military contractors call the shots. The title "Commander in Chief" is ceremonial, like "Employee of the Month" at your local Burger King."


http://www.alternet.org/media/148367/michael_moore%3A_woodward_book_reveals_that_civili an_control_of_the_military_is_a_joke/

[suebee]

for the lifting of earth's resources; war is merely capitalism at its finest. simple greed has killed us. the meek inherit zip.