About 17 more U.S. soldiers were killed this week in Bush’s splendid little war. They were no relation to Dubya, Cheney, or anyone important, so not to worry. I had to turn my local newspaper upside-down and shake it to find any mention of the deaths – they were buried (with full military honors) in the text of an article about some other grisly aspect of the Iraq enterprise, which itself appeared on the back page of the paper’s main section. (It’s kind of a general news section… though not really. These local papers are all about local news now, with a smattering of national and international stories dropped into the cracks, plus Krauthammer’s column and other useless bilge… then there’s the “local” section.) The 17 dead don’t fit the narrative, so they must not be emphasized… or perhaps even reported, as in the case of the Winter Soldier testimonies, which never found their way into my local paper. No, this week was handed over to general Petraeus and ambassador Crocker, who offered their blandly abstruse portrait of what’s happening with Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. It’s a kind of pointillist portrait, as Seurat-like mosaic of microscopic “metrics” worked into expansive-sounding abstractions like “battlefield geometry” and strategic frameworks. Step back a few paces and you can see uncle Reagan’s smiling visage in the dots… or a death’s head, depending on the angle.

For those of you who might have thought, on the basis of their recent contrition over pre-war lapses, that the major news organizations learned a lesson or two, prepare to be disappointed. The same dynamic is still at work – no one wants to call out the sainted general, particularly since the political class is fawning over him. So the media follow suit. Brian Williams’ interview with Petraeus was a good example. Williams played footage of Saddam’s statue being pulled down – a public relations exercise that was long ago debunked as such, with the square having been cordoned off to the general public and populated with some of Chalabi’s people. To Williams, apparently, this is still emblematic of an outpouring of gratitude among Iraqis for their liberation, and he asked the general, in a voice heavy with emotion, “What happened?” Petraeus met this slow-ball with some boilerplate about how some Iraqis had “come to see” Americans as enemies and occupiers, that certain areas had to be “re-liberated”, etc. Always, we are portrayed as a force for good, occasionally falling victim to misperceptions, often as the result of our own well-meaning blunders.

In Iraq, though, the reality is quite different. It’s not hard to discern, really. A look at Nir Rosen’s work, or that of Patrick Cockburn, is instructive. The country is now basically segregated along sectarian and ethnic lines, ruled by militias, and haunted by the prospect of more conflict to come. The conclusion that we have, through our actions, destroyed that country and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its citizens cannot be obscured by technocratic happy talk. To say that matters have improved in recent months is like saying that murder and ethnic cleansing brings peace. The peace of the grave, perhaps… but nothing we should claim as a success. In any case, Petraeus and Crocker can only speak to how well the enterprise is going, not whether the enterprise is something we should be engaged in at all. Their charts, graphs, and statistics help to feed the general misimpression that the administration wants us all to focus on – that we are staying in Iraq so we can help ordinary Iraqis. The truth is quite the opposite… we affect to care about ordinary Iraqis so that we can stay in Iraq. By what the general and the ambassador say, there is apparently no circumstance (things going badly, things going well) that would allow us to leave – so it’s reasonable to conclude that the point of the whole business is to stay… and stay permanently.

We’re down to a basic policy question… the Clash question, if you will: Shall we stay or shall we go? In a democracy, that should never be left to generals or diplomats.

luv u,

jp

Is anyone as tired as I am of having the concept of “superdelegates” explained to you? I swear, if I hear one more sotto voce definition of that term on NPR, I’m going to toss my fucking radio right out the window. Enough! I know what they are, already. Enough with the profiles and interviews of superdelegates that invariably devolve into questions about whom they secretly support and whether or not they will change their minds. Knock it off, for chrissake, and report on something that’s actually happening in the world. Not so long ago, primary seasons routinely ran into the early summer months, but this year’s heavily front-loaded process put the news media into an early feeding frenzy. Now, with an insufferable three whole weeks left before the next primary, they’re behaving like a five-year-old in the back seat on a cross-country trip… or heroin addicts groping for a fix. Let’s face it, friends – you’re not going to call this one ahead of time. You’ll just have to wait for people to vote… like the rest of us. (And if I have to come back there again….!)

Idle hands do the devil’s work, I guess… and it seems the press will do anything to keep from talking about actual issues… like, if most of us want single-payer health insurance, why don’t our politicians advocate for it? And if most of us want out of Iraq, why are we still there? And if 70% of Iraqis want us to leave, what justification is there for ignoring that? This week we got to hear all about how Obama sucks at bowling. Now, there’s a useful piece of information. It took Amy Goodman to ask the freaking guy whether he thought we should comply with that 70% of Iraqis and pull out. Loaded question? Maybe, but at least it produces some useful information with respect to the presidential election. (His answer was cautious and evasive, so that’s good to know.) Hey, mainstream media: let’s put the question to the other two yo-yo’s as well. That will give you something to do… something more useful than yakking about how well (or how lame) each one came off on late night talk shows. (W.T.F., are they competing to replace Jay Leno or George Bush?)

As all this nuthin’ has been happening, Admiral McCain (retired) has been firing regular salvos at some pretty distant targets. I heard one ad tonight – a lift of Clinton’s asinine 3:00a.m. phone call commercial – that tries to position McCain as someone who will save our economy through free-market principles… like the ones we’ve been pursuing lo these past 20 years or more. This from a man who admits to knowing little about economic matters (objectively verifiable). Here’s a little free advice, admiral: if you’re going to hit them with something, don’t reach for “more of the same”, because that may not do the trick. Your good friend Dubya has very seriously bungled the economy (as he has every other aspect of his constitutional responsibility), so you might want to make sure that manly embrace is an exceedingly brisk one. Of course, the admiral is free to troll these waters undisturbed, because the press is really only interested in his biographical bus tour. Let’s hear his life story, one more time…. from the beginning. Jesus – they are just fundamentally incapable of focusing on the hard questions. It’s like PBS Frontline’s recent review of the Iraq war, talking about how Cheney was ordering shoot-downs on 9/11. Do you have to be Jim Ridgeway to ask why Cheney was giving orders in the first place when he had no constitutional authority to do so?

Never mind, PBS. Just stick to Obama’s gutter ball – that’s more your speed.

luv u,

jp

Well, it took another visit from Cheney to get the bottom to fall out of Iraq yet again. The man hasn’t lost his touch, to be sure. All kidding aside, it became a good deal more difficult this week for the administration, pro-war congresspeople, and the corporate media to act as though things are going swimmingly over there and that “life is returning to normal for ordinary Iraqis,” as John McCain suggested during his surprise (is there any other kind for prominent Americans?) visit. The escalation in violence was pretty strongly telegraphed by all the rhetoric about Iranian interference in the shape of arms and support for extremists (or “Al Qaeda”, as McCain bizarrely claimed on more than one occasion recently – you know you’re in trouble when Joe Lieberman has to step in to correct your reactionary fulminations). No doubt our trusty veep was giving Baghdad’s leaders a pep talk before they commenced their attack on what is likely the largest organized indigenous political force in the country – Al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which had only just recently renewed its unilateral cease-fire.

No doubt the bombs are falling on Basra’s poorer quarters, though there are few reporters willing to take a close look (can’t blame them). Some stories were leaking out as of Thursday or so – casualty figures from area hospitals and some anecdotal stuff about how impossibly fucked up things are there right now. Basra and southern Iraq in general were floated as one of the relative success stories (i.e. it’s not on fire!) during the course of this disastrous war, but like all conventional wisdom on Operation Iraqi Freedom, this has proven less than reliable. The fact that Basra is run by militias is nothing new – Patrick Cockburn of the Independent has been reporting on that for some time. For christ’s sake, the whole country is run by one militia or another… it’s just that we don’t like this one, not because they’re religious zealots (so are our allies), but because they are nationalists who particularly want us out.

The al-Maliki government has issued ultimatums for surrender which has thus far been ignored, and as of this writing, the militias appear to control twice as much of Basra as do the government troops – this is probably based on U.S. military data, so it may be actually kind of rosy. Al-Maliki’s latest deadline for the Mahdi Army to disarm coincides with the day that General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker are slated to give their progress report to Congress. (Amazing coincidence.) Our military is muttering to the press that they are not heavily involved in this fight, but that they will not allow the Iraqi army to lose. There is no question that they are involved, to the extent that helicopter gunships and F-18s are bombing the living hell out of some of Baghdad’s and Basra’s most miserable slums. This is, frankly, an American fight, and no one should expect Iraqis to fight it for us. We have been antagonizing Al-Sadr since Bremer’s time, because he cannot be controlled. In this respect, we have been on the same page as Saddam – not surprising, since we appear to want what he wanted… a quiescent Iraq that we can happily pump oil out of.

So hang on to your helmets – we’ve got a ways to go on this one.

luv u,

jp

Incredibly, it’s been five years since the invasion of Iraq, and there are, as yet, no signs that this war/occupation will be coming to an end any time soon. The most incredible part is this: something like two-thirds of the American people want us out of Iraq, as do a large majority of the Iraqi people (not that anyone cares what they think – shut up and be grateful, damned foreigners!). And yet we’re obviously not bringing the troops home – quite the opposite. Congress is lukewarm on the idea of a change in policy, and the administration is just plain smug about their refusal to bring this disaster to a close. Confronted with the polling data, Cheney just smirked and said that it didn’t matter. We’ve even seen Bush going around opining that there’s something romantic about being dispatched to the Afghan frontier, and that he wish he were younger so he could do it himself (my ass!). Why aren’t these people run out of town on a rail? Why is it “politically risky” to advocate a timeline for withdrawal when it’s favored by 60% of the American public?

Are you waiting for an answer? I haven’t got one I can fit in this blog entry. Let’s just mark it down to the “Cokie Effect” – pop culture conventional wisdom. It was pretty much set in stone during the Reagan years that America is right, right, always right, never ever wrong. Any politician, journalist, or public intellectual who suggests otherwise is hung out to dry, accused of hating this country, despising our troops, etc. So the impetus is on pretending that we’ve never done anyone or anything wrong, that we walk around on tip-toe, that we make war with the best of intentions, and that we have consistently been a force for good in the world. That, of course, is a lie, but a very comforting one, and no one wants to rain on the parade. It’s not a ticket to popularity, as you might have guessed. Nevertheless, some are willing to stick their necks out.

That is what makes the Winter Soldier project so remarkable. Like its predecessor organization during the Vietnam war, these are individuals who were thrown into the abyss of war and are now driven to make their stories known to the rest of us – the vast majority of Americans who remain untouched by this unspeakably brutal experience. Not surprisingly, this project has received zero – I mean zero – coverage in the corporate media. Not a single word in my local newspaper, and from what I understand, no coverage at all in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc. These folks do not fit the paradigm – Cokie would not know what to do with them at all. We want to support the troops, but hell…. not if they tell the truth about the war!! So coverage has been limited to shows like Democracy Now! and the Web. On this grim fifth anniversary, I encourage you to listen to some of this testimony, to take a look back and remind yourself of what’s being done in our name and on our dime, and to support these brave soldiers who are doing more for American democracy than Rumsfeld could ever have dreamed possible.

Oh, and happy Easter, earth mother goddess.

luv u,

jp

Yes, so perhaps you’ve heard… we’re going to have another new governor here in New York. More than a bit flabbergasting, I must admit. With the coincidence of daylight savings time starting last Sunday, I kept wondering all week if I were merely sleepwalking and that things would be less bizarre when I finally came to, but no… this was the week that was. You’ve heard way too much about the Spitzer thing, I’m sure, and I will not add any weight to that burden other than to briefly visit one event that took place last weekend. It was the annual Gridiron dinner, a “press yucks it up with the President” type of affair. Bush was there, singing a clumsily satirical version of “The Green, Green Grass of Home” (penned by someone on the public payroll, no doubt) in which he made light of some of his administration’s most monumental failings, from the circumstances surrounding the deliberate distortion of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war, to Hurricane Katrina. Spitzer was in the room, by that time well aware that his political goose was cooked, and I can only wonder what ran through his head as he listened to mister 15 percent yodeling his way to the end of a disastrous presidency, not a care in the world.

No doubt about it… the ravages of the last eight years touch Dubya very lightly indeed. I doubt he’s losing any sleep over the million or so dead in Iraq, the nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed, the countless wounded and displaced, etc., etc., to quantify merely one of his major crimes. And after all, why should he care? There’s virtually no chance he’ll be held to account for Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Haiti, or any of the other disasters on his watch, to say nothing of the current economic meltdown… no Nuremberg for him, no Hague, not even an attempt at impeachment or censure. Jesus, the news about Spitzer’s pricey dates was barely 24 hours old before the morons in our state legislature and senate began calling for his impeachment. Meanwhile, our intrepid congressional leaders won’t touch the i-word with a twenty foot pole. This may be the essential difference between the two parties.

What a media spectacle this year is turning out to be. As the final fragments of plaster fall from the edifice that is imperial America, Bush is seen gleefully tap-dancing, breaking into song, and waxing poetic on the “romance” of combat in Afghanistan. And what of the man – the anointed successor – who will inherit Bush’s wars, his recession, his crumbling federal infrastructure? Well, McCain represents nothing so much as a third Bush term, one that will carry the expanded powers of the executive to a new and dangerous magnitude of “unitary” authority. The only difference may be that, whereas Bush is as unfeeling as a hollow tin soldier, McCain passionately believes in the necessity and efficacy of war. And if he and his advisors may be taken at their word, a McCain administration will mean more foreign interventions, more military action, and more international brinkmanship with respect to countries that can actually fight back, like Russia and China.

So, with all the flashing lights and full-throated hollering the 24-hour news cycle throws at you, don’t lose sight of the only good reason to vote this fall: keeping that hothead out of the White House.

luv u,

jp