President Obama is committing another 17,000 soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, we learned this week. Characterized even by liberals as “the good war” some time back, our occupation of that sorry place has begun its eighth year. That’s reaching Iran/Iraq war duration, and lord knows that conflict went on way too long. Only 18% of Afghans are in favor of this escalation, along with 34% of Americans (predictably higher, since we’re not the ones being surged upon). So why the hell are we still in Afghanistan, anyway? I’ve heard a lot of arguments, but none seem all that convincing, frankly – no more so than the ones I heard back when Bush decided post 9/11 to descend upon the basket case his predecessors left behind years earlier, after bankrolling fanatics like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and their terror-league allies for a decade or more. In 2001, Bush Jr. traded one set of war lords for another. What’s Obama’s plan?

I think before we as an imperial nation (don’t fight it – that’s what we are) can make that decision, we need to get used to the notion that we have no right to be there in the first place, and that occupying that country does not make us safer. Yes, yes… Osama Bin Laden lived there when 9/11 took place, but the essential planning and preparation for that hideous crime occurred not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in Germany and the United States. To this day, our government still doesn’t understand the nature of these decentralized terror groups. Our C.I.A. brags about killing senior leadership and decapitating the organization, as if Al Qaeda were organized like General Motors. It’s not. Preventing 9/11-type attacks is going to take something other than an endless supply of drone-fired missiles. For one thing, it will require more creative thinking at home with respect to prevention. Those fuckers used our own ramshackle air transportation system and our own lax building standards against us on that fateful day. My guess is that they’ll try to do the same again – identify a weakness and drive a metaphorical (or not) truck bomb through it. Just the other day, I heard the owner of nuclear power plants in my part of New York State complaining about NRC requirements for hardening new reactors against plane-crash attacks. Then there’s food safety. Yikes.

There is also the supply side of the equation to consider. We’ve got to stop making more terrorists. The Iraq war has created four million refugees – more than two million of them are stuck in squalid quarters in Jordan and Syria. Most will never see their homes again, since their neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. That mass of dispossessed people provides fertile ground for future extremist attacks against us and anyone allied with us. They and the millions of Palestinians still rotting in refugee camps are understandably angry with the Middle East order we worked so hard to build. I’m not talking about the fantasy Middle East George Bush used to wax poetic about – I mean the actual one we’ve invested in over the past sixty years, through our deep involvement in regional affairs, our support for despotic regimes, our bankrolling of Israeli expansionism in the West Bank and adventures in Lebanon. For so many, we have been the enemy for many years – Bush merely sealed the deal. What we do from this point forward is crucial to any chance for peace in this already bloody century.

The best way to be safe is not to incentivize violence against yourself. Sending more troops, more drones, and more bombs is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

luv u,

jp

Not sure how I got through last week’s rant without some mention of the elections in Iraq, fledgling democracy under our protective and nurturing (right) wing. Though the official results may not be in for some time, the winner appears to be Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa party, at the expense of the more religious Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an exile group formed in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war, now enjoying close ties to both Washington and Tehran). Probably the most interesting thing about these provincial elections – something underreported in the U.S. press – is the degree to which this was a vote for an end to the U.S. occupation. The status of forces agreement that Maliki negotiated with Bush late last year pretty strongly rejects any enduring U.S. presence on Iraqi soil – no permanent bases, etc. If that agreement is acted on as drafted, we’ll be out in a matter of months. Bush essentially signed what he termed a “cut and run” pact, and Maliki is seeing some of the benefit of that. He’s also benefiting from the reduction in violence and his preference for maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity. But it can be seen as yet another referendum on Bush. Good grief.

This week, of course, was the election in Israel. Not sure what to say about a poll that puts the party founded by Ariel Sharon a narrow first, the one headed by Bibi Netanyahu second, and the one whose standard bearer is an overt racist (Avigdor Lieberman) third. Not that there was a major party peace option here – the attack on Gaza that killed 1,300 Palestinians was prosecuted by the leader of fourth-place Labor, Israel’s traditional center-left party. One is tempted to cry, as V.S. Naipaul did in a very different context, a million mutinies now! How is it that a nation of smart people can give themselves such abysmal leadership? For chrissake, Lieberman is essentially the lynchpin of the next Israeli government, with emphasis on the term “lynch”. He has advocated “execution” and transfer for Israeli Arabs, and ran on a promise to make them swear a loyalty oath. (Reminds me of that bizarre loyalty oath crusade in Catch-22, where you would have to sign one before entering the mess hall, getting your chow, sitting down at your table, etc., etc.) Where is this headed?

Of course, we have our own little problems here. I’ve heard our beloved secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, stating the new administration’s policy that we will not speak with Hamas unless they 1) renounce violence, 2) recognize Israel’s right to exist, and 3) abide by all past agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian authority. Sounds great… except that we consistently fail to ask the same of Israel. They have never renounced violence – quite the opposite, to the point where it has eroded their national character in a very sorry fashion. They have never recognized the Palestinian’s right to exist within any reasonable borders – like the 22% of historic Palestine that is not in Israel proper. Not satisfied with nearly 4/5 of a loaf, they have continued to build settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank in violation of all agreements with the Palestinians, through good times and bad. When will they abide by those agreements?

Anyway… then there’s Dennis Blair, our new director of national intelligence, and a former liaison to the murderous Indonesian government during some of its worst actions in East Timor. Read Allan Nairn’s postings on Blair to learn how he provided cover for some pretty heinous crimes back during the Clinton administration. This is change? Note to Obama: change this menace the hell out.

luv u,

jp

The Obama administration and members of congress of both parties are still sparring over the stimulus package as I write these words. Now, I’ve mostly heard from Republicans on the topic this week (because I listen to NPR), and they seem determined to characterize everything in the bill that is not a tax cut as “wasteful spending,” as “pork,” etc. Not sure they quite grasp the concept of Keynesian stimulus in this context at least. That’s the general impression I’m getting. They are philosophically welded to tax cuts – specifically, capital gains tax cuts and those that benefit the wealthy disproportionately. That’s all they ever talk about, practically. And though more than a third (now, 42%) of the stim package is just that, they’re still squawking. Their idea of “compromise” is having the other side sign on to their program. Once would hope that’s not going to happen, but with the Democrats, anything is possible (though Obama does seem to be showing a little spine on this issue lately).

Still, it’s a little frustrating to hear almost exclusively from the Republicans on this question… especially when it was their ideas that brought us to this crisis in the first place. I guess it’s back to Clinton rules again, where the opposition sets the agenda and the news media just rolls along with the current. The press is like this enormous beast with a thousand mouths and one eye. It peers through a microscope at one item – like Tom Daschle dropping out – and the mouths all start flapping away. So even though Obama goes on every major news program to talk about the financial crisis, the portion you hear is his response to the Daschle thing. They’re still obsessing about it days later (Jim Lehrer probed David Axelrod about it just Friday night), pausing only to comment on how Obama seems unable to get his message across on the stimulus package. Meanwhile, another 600,000 have lost their jobs.

Of course, this feigned outrage over Keynesian stimulus is just plain absurd. The Republicans practice it all the time, enthusiastically. They brag about it. It’s called the military budget. That baby is packed full of all kinds of high ticket items that are utterly useless, but that are nonetheless produced in Congressional districts all across the country. Essential stuff like Virginia-class submarines (about $2 billion a piece), F-22 raptors ($300 million plus a piece), and, of course, everyone’s favorite endless boondoggle, “missile defense”, which really should be named “defense contractor defense”, because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. These great Republican defenders of the public purse vote for these projects time and time again, sluicing billions of dollars into the sink hole that is military procurement, while all other human needs are neglected… including those of our military personnel!

So the next time you see one of these sorry-looking Senators stride up to the rostrum and wave the draft stimulus package around in the air, just think about all those Virginia class submarines we’ll be sending into the Hindu Kush next spring. Your tax dollars hard at work.

luv u,

jp

Obama came rolling into office bipartisan guns a-blazin’. He met with congressional Republicans. He met with conservative columnists. He courted, compromised, and curried favor, but never seriously called them out on their incessant whining about insufficient (in their view) tax relief contained within the president’s stimulus plan. Birth control provisions were dropped, tax cuts added. In the end, the stimulus package was far more modest on infrastructure related items than most economists think is demanded by a crisis of this magnitude. (100,000 jobs cut this week alone – good grief!) And yet, when it came to a vote in the House, not one Republican supported it. My first reaction to this news was, well… okay, then can we have the original package back – the one Democrats could have passed two weeks ago? What the hell – the G.O.P. acts like a dog that can’t eat all his food, so he pisses on it. So much for bipartisan good will.

Personally, I think this notion of bipartisanship is way overvalued. For one thing, the ultimate expression of it is the one-party state (and we practically have that now). Aside from that, I don’t see the point in bending over backwards to bring the G.O.P. along if it means adopting a large portion of their program – namely, the same supply-side, deregulatory, neoliberal nonsense that got us into this mess in the first place. Sure, a lot of Democrats – probably most – helped get us here as well, but they have become born-again Keynesians in the face of this almost unprecedented economic meltdown. Republicans are still selling the same old soap as before, whether it’s McCain talking or Boehner or that brown haired buy who isn’t Boehner: tax cuts. Not only that, but “fast-acting” tax cuts… which is to say the same kind as Bush passed (mostly benefiting the rich) with the term “fast-acting” stitched on to make it sound as though the savings would land in anyone’s pocket before May 2010.

They’ve got it ass-backwards, of course. We need to raise taxes on all those folks who made out like bandits over the past 25 years (and particularly since Bush’s last two rounds of tax cuts), including those Merrill execs who took multi-million dollar bonuses home from their failed company. We need to slap excess profit taxes on the oil companies retroactive to the last eighteen months or so. We need to slash the ludicrously bloated Pentagon budget, repurposing the billions mindlessly sluiced into useless aircraft carriers, Virginia-class submarines, joint-strike fighters, and missile defense, into useful projects. We should do all this and more, whether Republicans sit on their hands or not.

He’s back. New Yorkers now have a new senator, a relatively conservative Democrat named Kirsten Gillibrand whom animal rights activists have dubbed “New York’s Sarah Palin” (with some justice, as she is a gun nut / hunting freak). A bit unnerving to me was the sight of Al D’Amato on the podium at her public introduction… standing right behind her. Apparently he’s an old family friend. Gaaaack. It took us 18 years to get that asshole out of the Senate… only so that Patterson could name one of his surrogates. Some justice there.

luv u,

jp

Welcome to the third presidency of this humble blog. I started posting this screed back in 1999. (Who can doubt that cawing pterodactyls carried my postings to the server in their enormous, leathery beaks?) Certainly this is the most highly anticipated administration of the three and, I firmly believe, of the past 40 years. The phenomenal crowd at Obama’s inauguration was evidence of that. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen so many people that happy to be standing out in the cold. Expectations are high, no doubt of that…. perhaps unreasonably so. Still, it is a little hard not to feel uplifted by that spectacle, just as the sight of those people in Chicago on election night was something of a thrill. It makes you feel as though we’ve arrived at a whole different kind of place in America, even if just for a moment. Nice feeling. Though, speaking personally, an even nicer feeling was had when I saw Bush climb aboard that helicopter and fly away, far far away, to the land of yesteryear. Gone for good… and I do mean “good”. That was worth the price of my ticket.

Well, that part is over. And here comes the next thing. Untangling the unholy mess that Bush and company made of the economy is going to be the fight of the century, particularly if we are going to attempt to move the nation in a progressive direction for a difference. Will Obama’s stimulus package accomplish this? Not in and of itself. (That one-third portion of G.O.P.-appeasing tax cuts, certainly not.) But I can tell you, there must be something worth doing in there, because the Republican leadership is screaming bloody murder. You can hear the whining from outer space. Some freak G.O.P. congressman was on MSNBC complaining that infrastructure projects would take two years to get rolling and that direct aid to states in the form of unemployment benefits and food stamps would run out in two years. No shit, congressman. Any other insights you’d like to share? Clearly, these fuckers would prefer more massive tax cuts to the richest Americans, since this is the only kind of “stimulus” they seem to understand. Trouble is, they don’t work. Whether or not they agree with the Obama package, you’d think current circumstances would compel them to admit that the same old thing is not what we need right now.

We’d be well advised to keep this in mind: those who wish to undo the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society are hoping to use this crisis towards that end. And don’t think I’m singling out Republicans – there are plenty of Democrats on that bandwagon as well. As Naomi Klein has pointed out more than once, natural disasters, wars, and economic upheaval present great opportunities to roll back public goods, like social programs, public housing, etc. People are in shock and disoriented to the point where the powerful can pull the rug out on them before they even know what’s happening. You can hear the mutterings about this now. For instance, we have just witnessed massive infusions of public cash into private enterprise. That has not to any reasonable extent translated into public ownership of those companies. Instead, I keep hearing the topic of “entitlements” being raised as something that must be addressed. Is that how we are to pay the tab for A.I.G., Goldman, and CitiGroup?

So… sure, I celebrate the end of another Bush era – one particularly more noxious than the first. That said, we will need to be particularly vigilent in the months ahead.

luv u,

jp