Here’s a big surprise: the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) surmises that the war in Iraq has led to an increased threat of terrorism, both in terms of the volume of potential attacks and the global spread of extremist groups. Who woulda’ thunk it? Once again, those initial arguments against invading Iraq are finding vindication years into the conflict, and — once again — its appears to make no difference. I feel like standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and shouting, Hey, fuckers! Those antiwar freaks were right about everything. Think there’s a chance they may be right about pulling the troops out, too? But let’s face it, these are very cynical times. People seem to have neither the energy nor the inclination to join a political fight they sense is pointless — that of convincing a bi-partisan Washington pro-war consensus that it’s time to abandon the Iraq project, shut down the permanent bases, pack up the gear, and pull out…. maybe even pay reparations for the mess we’ve made of the place. Most people think the war is stupid, not worth the cost, etc., but there’s no fire in the belly, because they’re not being compelled to a.) fight the war, or b.) pay for it. “Not my problem” seems to be the operative phrase.

Of course, this latest NIE demonstrates that, yes, it is our problem, including those of us who have had nothing to do with the military and who have enjoyed Bush’s tax cuts over the past five years of war. Like our ludicrous policies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, we are banking on a new generation of jihadist attacks. The (borrowed) money we spend in Iraq is an investment in future violence… meaning we can look forward to another wave of 9/11 type attacks just as the bills come due from this seemingly endless war. Why isn’t this treated as the scandal it truly is? Well, the press won’t stick their neck out on any story that doesn’t reflect some major center of power. If the leadership of neither party is willing to talk about an issue, the corporate media will avoid it as well. And because this is at least formally a democracy, neither party will move on something like bringing the troops home until we the people make it a political necessity for them to do so.

Maybe I’m wrong. (Has happened.) Maybe people will vote on the war this November and send the Republican congress packing out of sheer frustration. I know I intend to work towards that end, knowing that it is a minimalist approach to making a difference. (I live in a key congressional district that’s up for grabs this fall — more on that later.) Interestingly enough, the sentiments of the Iraqi people — those upon whom we have bestowed the toxic blessings of Bush-league democracy — seem to count for very little. Recent polling shows a solid majority of them want us out, while more than sixty percent support attacks on U.S. troops. (Not sure what those two statistics reflect, but they could mean that some Iraqis want us to stay so that they can shoot at us.) Seems to me that, at the very least, we should take these people at their word. But, of course, Bush is sticking to his line, now apparently relying on a fraudulent ABC television docudrama (or melomentary) to substantiate his suggestion that 9/11 was, basically, Clinton’s fault.

So much for vox populi.

luv u,

jp

This week, the Senate debated whether or not to sanction President Bush’s policy of torturing detainees. Let’s not trifle with words — torture is what we’re talking about here, not some antiseptic “alternative methods of interrogation” cooked up in the laptops of Dubya’s spin-meisters. We’re talking about grabbing people in the middle of the night and dragging them off to some “dark site” (perhaps the basement of a suburban home, who knows?) with no legal recourse. We’re talking about lashing people to boards and holding them under water. We’re talking about beating them senseless and fucking with their minds until they don’t know their own mother’s name. And we’re also talking about shipping them off to third countries where they’ll get even worse — the full spectrum of coercive technologies, modern and medieval. Some of the Republican leadership in the Senate framed this as a battle for American “values,” though they appear to have caved as of this writing. They had also raised a more practical question of leaving our military people at risk of ill-treatment and our leaders and commanders at risk of prosecution for violations of international law.

Personally, I think Bush had the advantage on this one. I think he appeals on a very visceral level to the impulses of revenge and retribution that are fairly common currency in the American body politic. Plenty of Americans — and I have known more than a few — are of the opinion that people in custody are most likely guilty, that foreigners are doubly guilty, and that the guilty deserve whatever they get. In fact, the worse their treatment the better, and if Bush can convince them that ill-treatment somehow makes them more safe, that’s better still. These base instincts are the same ones that inspire snickers at stories of prison rape, a staple of late-night television comedy monologues. Prisoner abuse constitutes the ultimate dehumanization, placing someone in a position of utter powerlessness, then systematically depriving them of dignity, basic physical security, and in some cases, life itself. Ugly as it is, prisoner abuse reflects a strand of our culture that’s as American as apple pie. Think about Abner Louima, the Haitian fellow who was beaten and sodomized with a nightstick by Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD. America’s mayor, wielding America’s nightstick. It’s in the blood, my friends.

On the other side of that same coin are the atrocities we’ve seen committed by some of our troops overseas. Once again, dehumanizing the “other” to the point where life is cheap, disposable, expendable. Back to Giuliani’s New York, remember Amadou Diallo, the unarmed black guy shot 19 times by the NYPD for attempting to pull out his wallet and identify himself; or Patrick Dorismond, another person of color shot by undercover cops when they tried to harass him into buying drugs off of them (he was resisting entrapment, apparently). This is part of the culture we bring with us to Baghdad, playing it out in the streets just as we do at home. Like the brutality of Saddam’s era, this has become part of their social burden. And now, with the Senate compromise legislation, our government will have expanded ability to circumvent common article three of the Geneva Conventions, ignore our own War Crimes Act, and gut what’s left of habeas corpus (which shysters like McCain didn’t even affect to defend). They are also protecting themselves from prosecution at some presumably more civilized point in the future. Saddam must be green with envy.

The tradition continues.

luv u,

jp

On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (which seems to have lasted months rather than a single day) my trusty hometown newspaper published a jumbo-tron sized headline on the front page: NEVER FORGET.

They were, of course, referring to the terror attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. That one moment in time — one morning in September that must remain seared into our collective memory for all time. A moment of supreme infamy, as horrific as they come. There are other moments, however, that our government would much prefer we forget. In fact, they are relying on us not to remember those particular moments.

Like the decade we spent sluicing money into what was the biggest CIA project in history up to that time — the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, when we created a virtual Ford Foundation for jihadists of the type our politicians now excoriate at every opportunity. Thanks to our largess, aspiring militants anywhere in the Muslim world could go to their local Pakistani embassy and pick up free tickets to Afghanistan on the CIA’s tab. I recall hearing about U.S. State Department officials pulling their hair out because the Reagan-era U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia kept issuing visas to highly unsavory types on the insistence of our intelligence community. It was at that moment that the seeds of Bin Laden’s (then himself a CIA asset) organization were planted.

Of course, at the same moment (the 1980s) the U.S. was actively helping a certain Saddam Hussein prosecute the war he started against neighboring Iran. We supplied strategic intelligence, supplies, helicopters, and other aid as Saddam repeatedly used chemical weapons against the Iranians, starting as early as 1982 (fully six years before the Halabja massacre). When he gassed to death 5,000 residents of that Kurdish community, our State Department put the word out that Iran was somehow responsible. When Saddam started attacking ships in the Persian Gulf, we ran escorts to protect the safety of shipping allied with Iraq — not Iran’s ships. When Saddam’s air force shot up the U.S.S. Stark and killed 30+ sailors, our leaders cursed Iran. No one in the Reagan administration, from the “Gipper” on down, gave a damn for Saddam’s victims throughout that entire war. Meanwhile, these avowed enemies of terrorism were secretly selling arms to Iran (which they considered the center of terrorism), funneling the proceeds to the Contra terror army in Central America, so they could shoot up more undefended civilian targets, like farms and clinics and anywhere their U.S. sponsors told them the Nicaraguan army wouldn’t be.

That was before 9/11. Then, of course, there was all that stuff since the day of infamy — stuff like, oh I don’t know, lying us into a major war that has now cost nearly as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks. They run away from it now, but the Bush administration and its allies in congress (of both parties) played the terror card over and over in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, making claims and insinuations about Al Qaeda links and WMDs that were wholly unsubstantiated. No investigation is needed to work that one out — it’s a matter of public record, and a performance so transparent that any five-year-old could see through it. Now, because of their actions, Iraq is in worse shape than ever, and it’s well on the way to becoming a “failed state” on the magnitude of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Their boneheaded efforts at building a hillbilly empire (their own Mayberry on the Tiber) is probably beyond any hope of even a moderately benign outcome, and we will pay for their stupidity for many decades to come.

Yeah, well… you can forget all that.

luv u,

jp

It was a real Rove moment. George W. Bush at the rostrum in front of a room full of 9-11 victim families, announcing his new policy on the disposition of detainees held in the never-ending “war on terror.” (God forbid our official enemies should declare a similar “war on air power” or “war on artillery”). Dubya pulled most of his trademark non-sequitur facial expressions ( the “by crackee” squint-smirk, the long “get it? get it?” glare) and was generally in form for this photo-op as he promised to bring the 9-11 plotters to justice for the nearly 3,000 lives lost on that awful day. And yet, as well received as his words were among that group, I wonder if anyone there pondered how Bush has brought about, by his own count, at least ten times as many deaths in Iraq — and really more like 50 times as many by the most realistic reckoning — as a result of the war of choice he initiated in the name of their fallen loved ones. I know that a good many 9-11 families are none too happy about being used in such a manner… and they can expect the memory of their loss to be invoked regularly in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections.

So what is this thing called guilt? What meaning does it have if it is only applied to those who lack the power and resources to avoid apprehension and prosecution? Recent experience suggests it has very little meaning at all except as a marketing tool — recall the Saddam trial and all of his unindicted Reagan-era co-conspirators. Actually, I had occasion to hear one of the great legal minds behind the administration’s war on terror this week. NPR’s “Day to Day” was interviewing John Yoo, author of Bush’s legal justification for torture and detention without due process. Yoo drew a distinction between “war time” and normal circumstances, arguing that it is not practical to apply the niceties of constitutional rights to combatants captured on the field of battle. Of course, what he didn’t discuss was how many of these “combatants” were pulled from their homes in, say, Lahore or Karachi, and thrown into a black hole where they were beaten, humiliated, and held without legal recourse for up to three years before being released on the admission that they were innocent all along. In Yoo’s legal world, it’s okay to hold someone like that until the end of the “conflict” (i.e. forever) — just arrest everyone you can get your hands on (or pay a bounty for) and sort them out later.

Fact is, this denial of rights is criminal in the extreme, and the Bush team knows it. That’s why they are so dead set against any international legal architecture of justice — not because they fear U.S. soldiers will be dragged off to the Hague (as they claim) but because they see themselves in the dock one day, facing charges of unlawful abduction, torture, mass murder, and the supreme crime of waging aggressive war against a nation for no legitimate reason, at the cost of many tens of thousands of lives. So as you pause for your solemn moment of silence this Monday, think not only of those who perished in the 9-11 attacks, but also of those who have died since as a result of our political culture’s thirst for blood and our own indifference to the suffering of others. Let us duly mourn our failure to stop this before so many were forced to pay with their lives (including nearly as many Americans as died on that fateful day five years ago).

And so long as your head is bowed, think of that Pet Goat Bush was reading about as the WTC burned and ask yourself why the hell this man is still being allowed to run our nation into the ground.

luv u,

jp

The smoke has barely cleared from Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and the chattering/scribbling classes are already climbing over one another to claim the “master narrative” (in po-mo language), telling us what lessons may be drawn (and quartered) from the recent bloodletting. I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard plenty of the official Israeli line — about attempting to create a “new reality” in southern Lebanon; about the international community’s responsibility to implement all provisions of the ceasefire (i.e. take up the fight that Israel could not win); about how the U.N. had ignored Israel’s warnings about the build-up of arms in Lebanon over the past six years. (Israel’s deputy U.N. ambassador Daniel Carmon even questioned on DemocracyNow! whether “all the civilians in southern Lebanon were purely innocent civilian(s).” All of this constituting a rationale for not lifting their naval blockade of Lebanese ports, not allowing even western organizations to clean up the massive oil spill the IDF created, and not entirely removing its forces from Lebanon. I think the amazing thing is that Israel can arrogate to itself the right to block shipping and aid to Lebanon without any serious international consequences. Who died and left Olmert god, anyway?

We are supposed to see the malevolent hand of Tehran and Damascus in Hezbollah’s success, but this is a very weak gambit. Sure they get money and arms from Iran… just as Israel gets much more of both from the United States. But I think Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery is right when he points out that the biggest reason for Israel’s poor performance in the second Lebanon war is the corrosive effect on the IDF of Israel’s 39-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. They no longer have the skills to fight a reasonably well-organized and adequately armed adversary because they’ve been using their tanks, missiles, and helicopter gunships mainly against civilians and lightly-armed militants, as well as stone-throwing boys. What tactical sophistication is needed in a place like Gaza, where your bulldozers, tanks, and pilotless drones can lay waste to any housing unit you care to target? There has been almost a sense of outrage at Hezbollah’s capacity to resist the Israeli invasion. They’re not fighting fair! (Translation: they’re fighting back.)

The fact is, the only meaningful military capacity Hezbollah possesses is a defensive one, as well as a largely random retaliatory one. So their real offense in this conflict has been not to crumble like so many Arab armies before them. This is getting up Dubya’s nose in a serious way, because he cannot attack Iran now without having missiles rain aimlessly down on northern Israel. It’s not just the fact that these people can repel an attack — it’s that they now have some semblance of a deterrent; a primitive variant on Mutual Assured Destruction, like the North Koreans, whose massed artillery casts a shadow over Seoul (not to mention Washington’s desire to “take them out”… and I don’t mean to dinner.) So “Project Democracy” is in trouble. Of course, Dubya’s concept of “democracy” is fully congenial to Israel’s taking 30 democratically elected Palestinian parliamentarians prisoner and the PAN evidently stealing a presidential election in Mexico.

Just try to remember: when Viktor Yushchenko rallies the masses against a fraudulent election in Ukraine, it’s a good thing. When AMLO does the same thing south of the border… not so good.

luv u,

jp