Tag Archives: war

Political Rants

On serving.

Leave a comment

This is one for the veterans. I felt I had to write about this because of a story I heard on DemocracyNow! this week about wounded and PTSD soldiers receiving less-than-honorable discharges based on behavior attributable to their injuries … and in some cases, based on virtually nothing at all. This is one of the most maddening stories I have heard this year, but I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. It’s pretty much a given in this country that many of the people who fight our wars will be discarded after they’ve sacrificed dearly on our behalf. These past twelve years have brought us back to a place we hadn’t been since the end of the execrable Vietnam war – dealing with the aftermath of a prolonged, highly destructive conflict, and doing a very poor job of it.

Why do we – in the age of magnetic yellow ribbons – still suck so badly at this? A couple of things come to mind. First, this war is not broadly shared, so any improvement in our basic humanity since the end of the last war (and I like to think there has been some) is offset by the fact that, in the absence of conscription, only a tiny fraction of American families have any skin in this fight. 

The second is an institutional/political reason. When a large institution like the United States military, as an instrument of American power, is very good at something, that’s usually because it’s deemed of great importance to those in power. The opposite is true of things they are really bad at. Our leaders look bad when many Americans are killed on the battlefield, so we’re really good at getting soldiers out alive. Once they’re out of the action, they become statistically insignificant to those in power. If they suffer, it doesn’t cost our leaders anything. If they die, no one is counting the way they do when soldiers die overseas.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to this bogus war. When my dad returned from World War II and the occupation of Europe, he evidently had PTSD – nightmares, sleeping with a gun under his pillow, etc. There was no help for him, just as there was none for those returning from Korea and Vietnam. The philosophy was, suck it up. It’s up to us to say that this is as unacceptable today as it was then.

Raise your voice about this. These people deserve better.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

High crimes and missed opportunities.

Leave a comment

Congressman Darryl Issa (“Step away from the vehicle!”) had his most excellent Benghazi hearing this week – a real blockbuster for the right. Bigger than Watergate, we’re told. A heinous coverup on the eve of a presidential election. What a scandal! Issa will leave no stone unturned, chasing down those responsible for providing false information about the nature of the attack on our consulate. After all, four people are dead – four! That’s nearly half as many as died on our side this week in Afghanistan. Nearly 1/10 the number killed in one of the more notorious drone strikes in Yemen a few years back. Nearly 0.0001% of the number of civilians likely killed in Iraq based on false testimony and obfuscation.

Sure … if you want to hold someone accountable in high places, that seems fair. Just put the Benghazi culprits in line at the Hague behind Bush and Cheney, whose deceptions led us into two wars, one of which is still raging. That, of course, will never happen. But there’s still no justification in being so selective in your enforcement of high crimes.

If you’re going to call the Obama administration on the carpet, why not do so for the unprecedented number of “signature” strikes they are conducting around the world, some of them on American citizens? Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of radical Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki, was summarily killed in a drone strike that tore up a restaurant in Yemen. Why not ask them about that, Issa? Why not call them out for killing people on the basis of behavioral profiles, not intelligence? Is it perhaps because that doesn’t bother you or your constituents? I thought so.

Sure, Obama’s foreign policy is abusive and murderous, just like all of his predecessors in my lifetime. The difference between them is a question of degree. During the Johnson/Nixon war on Vietnam, the same standard was applied as in the current drone war: if you were outside the wire in rural South Vietnam, you were assumed to be part of the Viet Cong (NLF) and therefore a target. The difference is that we killed hundreds of thousands there – probably in the million range – whereas in the current drone war, they take more of a retail approach.

Does that count for much? I suppose it counts for something. But when you split hairs over the numbers of innocents killed, you sacrifice your humanity on some level.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Guantanahole.

Leave a comment

I’m going to write about a topic I haven’t visited for some time in the vain hope that it would be corrected, now that we have left the George W. Bush administration in its deserved dustbin of history. (Save, that is, for within the W. Library, which is a central repository for the disastrous idiocy that was that presidency writ large, but I digress.) The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has re-entered the news cycle once again, owing in large part to an organized protest – a hunger strike – undertaken by more than 100 of its inmates. I have a few things to say about this shit hole, and I’ll keep it brief.

Guantanamo
Camp Joy.

First: Why the hell is this place still open? I know, I know – Congress demagogue’d the issue of closing it down and bringing some of the still-accused to the U.S. for trial and likely eventual imprisonment. (There’s a surprise – they demagogue everything!) The thing is, Obama has options, particularly with regard to those prisoners cleared for release. There are third countries they can most certainly be sent to. Obama is avoiding this option because it will garner criticism, most likely. Not a good reason at all.

Second: The hunger strike is a manufactured crisis, by all appearances. They have generally been presenting it as a difficult situation being handled by the Army as best they can, but the fact is that conditions at the prison turned decidedly worse when the Navy handed over control to the Army early this year. The prisoners were searched, their Korans pored over by investigators, and the prisioners’ communal priviliges were taken away. They are now kept in isolation 22 hours a day or so. Here’s a possible solution to the hunger strike: rotate the Army unit out and bring back the freaking Navy team that was running it before.

Third: If half of these men have never been charged with anything, have been determined to be of no danger to the U.S., why the hell are they being held … and while they’re being held, why are they being kept in prison-like conditions? Many have been there for 11 years. For chrissake, if they’re innocent, build them a freaking house in Guantanamo Bay and let them live like human beings until they are released. What kind of warped sense of justice is at work here?

Finally, if any of these men die while protesting their ill-treatment, it is going to exponentially increase Guantanamo’s value as a jihadist recruitment tool. Add that to your security considerations, Barry.

luv u,

jp

P.S. – Happy May Day. Invented in America, celebrated elsewhere. Ask why.

Political Rants

Sand and salt.

Leave a comment

Non-stop fun here in the land of the free. No coincidence that this is the week they dedicated the George W. Bush presidential library. Some of the key “decision points” of his presidency were in play this week. Let’s start with a honking big one.

Syria. Bush’s political allies (and many in the “muscular” liberal establishment) have been pushing for wider involvement in the Syrian conflict for a good long while now. This week, unconfirmed reports of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime surfaced this week, by way of the Israeli and French intelligence services, for the most part. The Obama administration intelligence services seem ambivalent and non-commital on this evidence, but not so Admiral … I mean Senator John McCain and some of his clones, who really really really wants another mid East conflict on his resume of error.

Mac is back
Mac is back!

McCain is once again proving why he would have been a catastrophic president. He affects to believe that creating a “safe zone” in northern Syria and arming the fractious opposition (which includes a strong element of jihadi fighters from the Gulf) will not lead to a broader confilct that will commit us to another long-term occupation of a Middle Eastern state, ignite a broader international war, and generally result in another Iraq-like catastrofuck. I say, let’s just drop McCain on Syria, since he’s so eager to put someone’s life on the line. And if chemical weapons are a “red line”, we should have drawn it before using white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions in Iraq. If Syria goes to the Hague, they should be in line right behind us.

Seneca Lake. A blockade by activists at the site of a salt cavern natural gas storage site being established by Inergy LLP resulted in arrests a few weeks ago. One of those arrested, Sandra Steingraber, was interviewed on the Capital Pressroom radio program this week along with her attorney. This project involves storing natural gas shipped in from outside the state in salt caverns left from old salt mining operations. Similar facilities across the nation have caused sinkholes, water pollution, etc., and now they want to site this thing on the largest of the Finger Lakes. Steingraber and her fellow protesters are fighting the good fight on this one. Pumping natural gas into geologically questionable formations beneath one of the largest fresh water lakes in the region seems like, well, not a real good idea.

Energy coporations and faulty intelligence. It’s like Bush all over again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Ten years after.

Leave a comment

It’s been a decade since the start of a war that never should have happened, and we are still waiting for some accountability. More than 4,400 Americans killed – more than the number killed on Sept. 11 2001 by 19 individuals from countries other than Iraq. (Mostly from Saudi, but you get the point.) Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands for Iraqi deaths related to the conflict – Les Roberts’ Iraq Study Group had it well north of 600,000 back in 2006, and that was adjusting for concentrated areas of losses like Fallujah. That puts us in Milosovic territory for sure, and more like Suharto-land. The Serbian leader was brought to justice; not so much Indonesia’s dictator. The difference between those two cases have less to do with the magnitude of the crimes, more to do with the magnitude of their geopolitical allies.

Mistakes were madeThat’s why I have long been a skeptic of the International Criminal Court. I have said this before, shouted it on the podcast, and I will say it again here: until they haul someone from a powerful country to The Hague, the effort will be a meaningless exercise. Iraq is an excellent test case. Given the number of deaths, given the destruction of a society, given the craven nature of the attack and the fact that it was an aggressive war – the most serious category of crime – our leaders should have been indicted at the very least. Nothing. Freaking. Useless.

Not only are the architects of the disastrous Iraq war not being held accountable, they are in fact skating from television program to television program, attempting to rewrite Iraq into a screaming success. They are, in effect, flaunting the law, daring it to come after them because they know it won’t, taunting the cowardly administration that shields them. Even worse, they are working to get us into the next conflict, in Iran, Syria, wherever. Not only aren’t they sorry about the catastrophe they brought upon Iraq and ourselves, they are only too eager to repeat the crime.

To paraphrase the president, are we really powerless in the face of such carnage? I think perhaps, but only by design. American political life demonstrates again and again how powerful the will of the people can be. Look at gay rights. Look at immigration. Our government has worked to insulate us from the experience of war by canceling the draft, borrowing the funds to keep the fighting going, etc. Perhaps we are simply not connected enough to act dramatically.

Perhaps. But nothing ever changes unless we do.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Short memory

Leave a comment

North Korea has unilaterally withdrawn from its 1953 ceasefire agreement with South Korea, cutting the emergency hotline between the two halves of this divided peninsula. The move has been roundly condemned as provocative and an indication of increasing cravenness on the part of third-generation great leader Kim Jong Un, whose government recently tested a nuclear device. As reported on NPR and other major news networks, this behavior is portrayed as almost innate, not rooted in anything other than blind aggression and dogmatic fealty to the North’s longstanding cult of personality and garrison state mentality.

All they know of us.
All they know of us.

Now, it is true that the North Korean state is an ossified, garrison state, very oppressive – a dungeon, even. I can’t defend it. But they didn’t arrive at this state of affairs without prompting. There is one thing they want: a non-aggression treaty with the United States. Because the war of 1950-53 was fought with the U.S. more than with South Korea, and that was a war of genocidal proportions, particularly for the North. The U.S. unleashed everything short of nuclear weapons on the North during that period, until no standing structures remained north of the 38th parallel. This after years of oppressive U.S. occupation of the southern half of Korea, which itself followed more than three decades of Japanese occupation.

When North Koreans talk about destruction, they know the meaning of the word. It is not an abstraction for them. After all, they share Poland’s great misfortune of being geographically located between two great powers, frequently at odds. Worse yet, they became ground zero of a growing cold war that was never hotter than it was during that three year period in the Korean peninsula. If they have nuclear weapons, it’s because they don’t want to be attacked. And if they take exception to the annual mock-invasion of the north conducted by Washington and Seoul, it is because they have a deep memory of the devastation of sixty years ago.

In America, we haven’t forgotten the Korean War so much as simply never known it in the first place, except for the dwindling number of veterans who fought there. It’s high time we stopped acting like an aggrieved empire and found a way to settle this conflict … before it explodes again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Truth about King-Father.

Leave a comment

My local newspaper (and I’m sure just about everyone else’s as well) contained a minuscule item on the cremation of the body of Norodom Sihanouk, whom the paper described as being revered by his people as the “King-Father” of Cambodia. An AP story by Denis Gray was the source of this tiny item tucked away inside the Utica OD, which opened as follows:

Cambodians bade goodbye Monday with tears, chanting and fireworks to former King Norodom Sihanouk, their revered “King-Father” who led them through half a century of political tumult that took them into the abyss of genocidal Khmer Rouge rule and back out again. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians thronged the capital for the elaborate royal cremation of the maddeningly mercurial leader whose charm often overshadowed missteps that to most of his countrymen have faded away in a fog of nostalgia for a simpler time.

Bombing Cambodia
Our gift to Sihanouk's subjects

While Gray’s story went into a bit more detail, this was most of what my newspaper carried. However, neither the original piece nor the excerpt bothered to mention the U.S. role in the catastrophe that destroyed Sihanouk’s country in the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, reading this, you’d think that their many troubles were the result of a bungling if “charming” monarch who misled his people into genocide. Gray’s piece gives only one vague hint of U.S. influence at any point, mentioning in passing that Sihanouk sided with the Khmer Rouge in opposition to “U.S.-backed government” in the early 1970s.

Talk about burying the lead! That “U.S.-backed government” was a coup regime headed by Lon Nol which we brought to power in the midst of an ever-widening war in Cambodia. Of course, we invaded Cambodia in 1970 – a fact that you’d be hard-pressed to find evidence of on a Google search, apart from a story on the World Socialist Web site. We bombed the living shit out of it from about 1969 until Lon Nol was overthrown in 1975. Then came the reign of terror, as well as countless deaths from starvation, exhaustion, and the usual outcomes of genocidal war. To read these stories, it’s as if before the Khmer Rouge arrived, Cambodia was a nation of happy, smiling people, no complaints whatsoever.

Naturally, I don’t expect them to get all of this into a 3-inch column item. But they could get a piece of the truth in there, couldn’t they?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

On accountability.

Leave a comment

I suppose I’m old enough to grumble about stuff I can’t control. And right now I’m irritated enough to take a personal swipe at some of the old white men running the country from their comfy chairs in the United States Congress. But rather than sound like John McCain, I’m going to limit myself to saying that the Senate confirmation hearing for Chuck Hagel was pretty disgraceful for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the simple fact that the man was being criticized for the high points in his career – the stuff he got right, for chrissake. The Republicans on the panel hate their old colleague because he’s not bug-fuck nuts enough.

See, this is what happens when you don’t hold people accountable. If someone had paid some kind of price for driving us into the Iraq war, maybe John McCain and others wouldn’t feel so confident about grilling Hagel on a marginal point like the “surge” strategy. Republican House Caucus (Visual Approximation)Even by their reading of it as being an indisputable success (which killed about 1,200 Americans, b.t.w.), it could only possibly be seen as a minor corrective to one of the most heinous strategic blunders in the history of the American empire, as well as a major international crime of aggression that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive displacement. If Hagel was against the “surge”, it’s only because their war had gone so badly and that they had proven themselves incapable of managing the conflict.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a huge fan of Hagel. He did the right thing by being outspoken about the war in the middle of the last decade, and I respected him greatly for it. But he will no doubt be a reliable steward of the imperial project, just as Obama has proven himself to be. People have short memories – not so very long ago, when Bush II was in his prime, American power was shaken to its very foundation by their insane foreign policy gambles. McCain himself was right on board with it all. It has taken years to emerge from the hole they dug us into, and yet because they haven’t been held accountable, they behave as though they were right all along. Again … disgraceful.

So, who’s more bug-fuck nuts, McCain or the yargle-bargle caucus in the House? The answer may surprise you.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Everything he bakes.

Leave a comment

Coming down to the wire, here. A little more than two weeks to the general election and it’s going to be a nail biter. Thing is, it shouldn’t even be close, but it very likely will be. And that’s not good news for the 47%. Or the 99%. Because we all stand to be screwed big time if it goes the wrong way.

Right now, Mitt Romney is running around the country like the freaking Candyman, promising everyone everything they want with zero cost. We’ll cut your taxes twenty percent and you’ll get to keep all of your deductions! We’ll make sure rich people pay the same percentage (key term) of taxes that they pay now! All of you middle class folks will be able to deduct 18%, no, 25%, no, 40% of your taxable income! Pick a number! We’ll do all that, raise the military budget a trillion dollars, and reduce the deficit at the same time! I’ll create 12 million jobs! No rain ever again … unless, of course, you like rain!

It is often said that incumbency has its advantages, and it certainly does, but it has many drawbacks. One is that, as president, it’s harder to go around saying what you are going to do because the first thing people wonder is, well, why aren’t you doing it now? You are, in essence, applying for the job you already have. Your performance in that job is an actuality, not an abstraction. On the other hand, if you’re the challenger, you can promise anything, make any wild claim, run against mathematics itself, and act as though you have a big vat of miracle sauce locked up in your car elevator, and that once you take the oath of office, you’ll start ladling that stuff all over everything that’s bad and make it good.

The president did much better in the second debate. Plenty for me to disagree with, to be sure, but a better performance. However, that first debate had an impact. It encouraged voters – particularly women, it seems – to feel more comfortable with the idea of a Romney presidency. I’ve said this before and I’ll likely say it again before November 6 – there is no reason to feel comfortable with the notion of John Bolton running American foreign policy. If you’re worried about the economy, think of what extremist austerity and another decade long war will do to it.

Let go of your childhood wishes. Or you may end up really eating those dishes. More on this later.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week that was.

Leave a comment

A lot of campaign noise this week. The various cable networks are completely possessed by the elections at this point. So…. I’ll try to talk about something other than the presidential race this week, just to give you a break. Let’s see how far I get.

To bomb or not to bomb. This week an old acquaintance posted an image on Facebook of Benjamin Netanyahu holding up that cartoon-like image of a bomb with a lit fuse, with the hilarious comment, “Apparently Iran is run by Boris Badinoff”. What’s not funny is that we’re still talking about this, without considering the consequences, once again. Netanyahu is channeling Bush/Cheney 2003, talking about the most dangerous regimes gaining possession of the most destructive weapons. We have seen this movie before, folks. If Bibi wants war, let him be at the head of the line. Another volunteer for the front!

Boston Klan rally. I’m sure some of you saw that group of senate staffers from Scott Brown’s office, parading around with Elizabeth Warren signs, doing cartoon Indian war hoops and chopping the air smirkingly. When you watch this video, just remember: these people are on the federal payroll. This is your tax dollars at work. And remember something else … this is the logical outcome of Scott Brown making race an issue in this campaign. By what he says, he obviously thinks Native American ancestry is something you can recognize by sight. Unsurprisingly superficial coming from this refugee from a designer shirt ad.  I hope Warren kicks his sorry ass this November.

Sacrifice. Sat in line at a medical office this morning with a guy who served in Vietnam when he was 19. He was drafted. One of the ladies who draws blood at this clinic has a son who’s been to Afghanistan, I don’t know, three times, four times. Lost count. He’s got constant headaches from concussion, has to start getting shots in his neck. How long are we going to ask these people to be the only ones in the country paying a price for our bankrupt foreign policy? If we had had a draft like the one that guy at the clinic faced, Afghanistan and Iraq probably would never have happened.

A child could see that this is unfair. So … why do we keep doing it?

luv u,

jp