Tag Archives: war

Political Rants

Never forget.

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Anniversaries of 9/11 come and go, it seems, and like most days of remembrance they are not all that memorable in themselves. This past Tuesday (I believe the event actually occurred on a Tuesday, if memory serves) I was up at Syracuse University, walking past a sidewalk medium that held a field of  mini-flags, one for each of the victims of the terrorist attacks. A large sign at one end admonished us to “Never Forget.” Not a very unusual experience on such an anniversary. I’m sure there are fields of flags all across the country at this time of year. Walking past it, though, it seemed like there were so few of them. They were arranged in a big rectangle, with a large space in the middle, and it looked kind of sparse. Is this what more than 3,000 flags looks like?

I think the reason it looked so empty was that there were no flags to represent the hundreds of thousands that have died since that day, and in large part because of that day. The cautionary “Never Forget” is more of a challenge to Americans than its author likely supposed. I can tell you, I will never forget September 11, 2001 – probably the most deeply horrifying day of my life. Remembering that has never been a challenge. What I think we as Americans need to work on remembering is the fact that our political leaders used that atrocity to commit other atrocities in our names. If there is any slippage of memory, it is on that particular slope.

Just remember – by the time September 11, 2001 arrived, the Bush administration was already resolved to invade Iraq and complete the project of regime change that its top foreign policy advisers had signed onto years before. There was plenty of buzz about it in the months leading up to 9/11, and when Al Qaeda struck, the Bush team didn’t miss a beat in commandeering Americans’ shock and outrage towards support of their disastrous invasion and destruction of Iraq. Seeing how easy it was to get people behind the invasion of Afghanistan, they engaged in a full-court press that we would all do well to remember.

There is a complementary notion to “Never Forget;” that is “Never Again.” In complying with the former, we must also embrace the latter.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Eyes wide open.

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I suppose if I’m going to rant about anything this week, it’s going to be the election. Election years are always nerve-wracking, like a slow-motion train wreck. They make me feel, more than ever, that we as a nation are sleep-walking into history. The notion that we can be on the knife-edge of electing someone like Mitt Romney president – that working people of any persuasion (to say nothing of retirees) would ever consider voting for that overpaid fichus tree in a suit – is simply flabbergasting.

To be certain, Obama has not acted boldly enough on the economy, on basic issues of human rights, and so on. That’s a given. But let us not forget how we got into this hole in the first place. We had eight years of Dubya Bush, during which time he and his fellow cartoon pirates started two wars, established torture as an open instrument of foreign policy, blew an enormous hole in the federal budget with two rounds of wartime tax cuts, let New Orleans be destroyed, crashed the economy into what has turned out to be a milder version of the Great Depression, and quite a bit more. They did so with the full cooperation of a Republican led congress for six full years, and effective Republican control for the remaining two. (The Dems’ razor-thin majority 2007-2009 didn’t buy them much.)

I find it hard to blame anyone for falling into cynicism with regard to the two-party duopoly we call American democracy. In too many ways, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties. But there are enough differences to make it worth the time and effort (and in some states, it will take both time and effort – I’m looking at you, Ohio!) to cast a decisive vote against Romney and the G.O.P. congress. Not that this is all one has to do to move the country in the right direction – far from it. But the consequences of doing nothing on election day are … well, we’ve seen them. (See paragraph #2.) The Republicans get worse every cycle they hold power. If they take it again this time, they will gut the remaining social safety net (frayed as it is), throw millions out of work through forced austerity, drive us into recession, start another war, build a transcontinental pipeline to carry toxic sludge to the gulf where it can be turned into diesel fuel and sold to China, and… well, you’ve heard the rest.

I’m not asking you to ignore Obama’s failings. Resist, of course. But don’t think replacing him with a clueless millionaire won’t drive us into a deeper hole. We can’t afford to take that trip again. Vote with your eyes open … but for @$%# sake, vote.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Memento mori.

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Another Memorial Day come and gone. PBS played the annual extravaganza in Washington D.C., replete with stars of stage, screen, and studio, in some respects bizarre beyond description. It always strikes me as odd that a day reserved to commemorate the dead from this nation’s wars should carry such hyper-patriotic overtones. As I watch, I keep wanting to say, “Take it down a notch – that’s the kind of talk that got them all killed.” It’s long been my contention that the very ostentatious hero-ization of our active military and veterans is, at its heart, an effort to make our pointless wars seem somehow noble and just. The laptop bombardiers crowing “hero!” most loudly are the ones who gladly see their heroes shipped off for a fifth tour of duty. Doesn’t bear close inspection.

Perhaps even stranger is the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the American war in Vietnam – like that was something to celebrate. Obama spoke to this point during his Memorial Day address at the Vietnam memorial wall, and I have to say that his central point was one that Reagan might have made twenty years ago.

And one of the most painful chapters in our history was Vietnam — most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there. You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor. You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.

Um… really, Mr. President? We’ve heard this trope before – the insinuation that people opposed to the war blamed the people fighting it, spat on them when they returned, etc. Bullshit. They were our friends, our brothers, our uncles, our fathers. A lie like this assumes that people don’t remember how close every 18-24 year old male was to being press-ganged into that war via the draft. It was not us and them; it was us and us. What’s more, many of them were at the forefront of resistance to the war. I have a local vet to thank for much of what I know about that awful conflict.

And… the “actions of a few”? What few? The people running the administration at the time? This makes it sound as though Vietnam was some noble enterprise sullied by isolated incidents of nastiness. What could be further from the truth? Vietnam was a dirty war of malevolent intent from the very beginning, not a mistake or a tragic chapter – a crime. It is a crime that should not be blamed on those forced to participate in it; but rather on those who formulated that policy that resulted in the destruction of three countries.

That’s where that “hero” jiu-jitsu comes in. Criticize the war and the pro-war pirates claim you’re criticizing the troops, as if the troops are responsible for the conflict. They were not then, and they are not today. That’s down to us … and to the scoundrels heaping praise on our military as they plan yet another pointless war.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Go, Dick.

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This is going to be brief. My back is a disaster area today, and that’s no Jonathan Harris imitation.

I was listening to President Obama speaking at the NATO summit this past week, talking about ending the Afghan War “responsibly”. And I had this impulse to say, “Thanks, Nixon!” Back in the day, old Dick was winding down his war, so to speak, standing up a colonial army (the ARVN – south Vietnamese army) and always talking about “peace with honor” after nearly a decade of mindless slaughter. They were fighting “terrorists” as well – just look at Life magazine or some other news publication from the late 1960s and you’ll see that that was one of the terms they used to describe the Viet Cong (NLF). Not so different.

Except that it was actually more brutal, as brutal and ugly as the Afghan war has been and continues to be. Vietnam and more generally Indochina was almost totally destroyed during the American war there, particularly from 1962 forward. People are still being killed by that war, by virtue of tons of unexploded ordinance, Agent Orange hotspots all over the south, and more. I don’t want to minimize that fact. For every drone strike Obama launches, there were likely 1,000 sorties over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia dropping high explosives, napalm, and cluster bombs by the ton. The fact that this likely would not be tolerated today speaks to a gradual increase in our collective humanity. If anything constrains our leaders, it’s that.

Still, even within these constraints, we can do a lot of damage. The drone strikes are a very easy option for the administration. It’s a political winner, since American lives are not put in jeopardy, and it has the vague perception of accuracy going for it, though our targets have very little to say on the subject (because they are, of course, dead). It is a very corrosive weapon, though, on both legal and moral grounds, and it is likely causing a great deal more hatred of the United States than could be propagated by the likes of those we are targeting. Like Nixon’s (and LBJ’s) Vietnam war, it is approached as a project of eliminating the “bad guys” so that there will be fewer of them. That, of course, does not work and never will. Aside from being wrong, it is strategically stupid, and it is putting us in greater danger with every attack.

Still, the alternative to our little Nixon is Reagan on steroids – a Romney administration following a neocon-powered foreign policy, with multiple additional wars on tap. That being the case, well… Nixon’s the one.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Old wine, new bottle.

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The Bush administration is over (for the most part), right? Well, not so fast. Yes, they started two disastrous wars, killing enough people to make Milosevic and Suharto blush. Yes, they shook the empire to its foundations, so much so that they spent the last two years of their tenure under the watchful eye of an imperial overseer (Robert Gates). Yes, their ludicrously ham-fisted foreign policy – coupled with monumental domestic blunders – resulted in the near-total collapse of the American economy, bringing on the first proper depression since the 1930s. But none of that means they shouldn’t be put back in charge again, right?

I think I felt the earth tremble just then. Yeah, nobody wants that … really. And yet there is a very real possibility that many of the same people who ran Bush’s foreign policy – including the most extreme of the neoconservative cadre – could have their sweaty, blood-stained hands back on the levers of imperial power this coming January. The cabal advising Mitt Romney is basically a reunion tour of the nasty little group that started the Iraq war. Ari Berman ticked through their ranks in The Nation this past week. Heading up that group is John Bolton, who could very well end up Secretary of State, but he also has an ear cocked towards Dan Senor (Bush’s former coalition provisional authority spokesperson), Eric Edelman, Cofer Black, Robert Kagan, and many other once and continuing fans of the horrendous Iraq enterprise.

Did they learn anything from their disasters? Not really. The Iraq war is still a good thing, in their estimation. But more than that – it’s important to bear one thing in mind about this crew. They are basically successors to the Reagan team on foreign policy, like Reagan: the next generation (or de-generation). They’ve been back in power once since then, and it was, if anything, worse than Reagan. Every time they come back, they are worse than before. If you thought W’s eight years were hellish, just wait.

Don’t say you’re only concerned with economics. My friend, this is economics.  The Afghan and Iraq wars blew massive holes in the federal budget and are still bleeding us dry ten years later. Romney wants to keep the Afghan deployment going and would undoubtedly get us stuck somewhere else as well. Moreover, he is planning something like a 20% increase in Pentagon spending. That will mean bleeding domestic programs even further, which will take the air out of the U.S. economy (as austerity always does – see last week.)

Elections have consequences. 1980, 2000, and 2004 showed us that. Keep that in mind as you ponder the value of your franchise (and I don’t mean the fast-food restaurants you own).

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

More of the same.

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Israel has been knocking the living hell out of Gaza again this week. This round of bloodshed began with the killing of Zuhair al-Qaissi, head of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant Palestinian group. Rockets fired into southern Israel in response were supposedly shot down by their new anti-missile system. I will reserve comment on that until I see convincing confirmation that the system worked, having lived through bogus claims about Patriot missile batteries during the Gulf War. I can say, anecdotally, that the one thing I hear repeated by defenders of the Israeli government here in the U.S. is missiles, missiles, missiles. It’s like the G.O.P. candidates talking about gas prices. A million Israelis are under the threat of missile attack, they say.

Little is said about the fact that more than a million and a half Palestinians live constantly under the far more credible threat of attack from the fourth most powerful military in the world. Well over a thousand have been killed in attacks by the IDF over the past three years. Rockets from Gaza have killed about 30 Israelis – too many, clearly, but losses at a whole different order of magnitude from what’s happening on the other side of the Green line. Palestinian deaths have equaled that number just over the past week to ten days. Add this to the fact that, even without being shot or blown up, Palestinians live like dogs in Gaza mostly because it is under a constant state of siege by Israel and a U.S.-led coalition of powerful nations. At the very least, Israelis have some kind of a life between the missiles. Palestinians, not so much.

The fact that Hamas has, in essence, broken with Syria and Iran and are aligning themselves more with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is in that country’s ruling parliamentary coalition, may seem to offer hope of some progress in this bloody standoff. The Egyptian group, a progenitor of Hamas, is no longer a militant organization; it appears to be having a moderating influence on Hamas. Prelude to a peace agreement? Don’t bet on it. If there is one thing the Israeli government fears more than anything else, it is the threat of a negotiated settlement. They prefer to settle things on the battlefield, where they hold a distinct advantage. Negotiations mean giving something up of value, like the 22% of historic Palestine that lies outside of the Green Line, including the West Bank – namely, the territory that would make up a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu, like Sharon, Shamir, and Begin before him, will never allow diplomacy to get in the way of Israel’s expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Expect more IDF attacks in Gaza as negotiations grow more likely.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Getoutistan.

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The first question I asked myself when I heard about the Koran burning incident in Afghanistan was, how could anyone make this mistake? What were the circumstances of the burning? For chrissake, everyone knows what the consequences of such an act are likely to be. When that crackpot preacher in Florida was ostentatiously threatening to burn the Muslim holy book, diplomats, generals, political leaders, clergy … people all across the country and around the world were applying pressure on him not to do this. It is deeply inflammatory – this is widely known.

My second thought was, this is not simply about burning Korans. This incident followed ten years of war and all the evils that are contained within that fact. It occurred during a stretch of weeks in which we saw cell-phone video of American soldiers laughing and joking as they pissed on the corpses of Afghans; our military personnel adopting an SS-type insignia for one of their units; our Defense Department persisting in its robotic Drone war on both sides of the Pakistani border. Now Afghans are turning their guns on our people. Is anyone really surprised?

Here’s the problem: we just cannot see this issue clearly. Even on liberal MSNBC, it becomes a question of those ungrateful Afghans, railing against their funders and protectors from the U.S. It is portrayed as a component of Karzai’s corruption, a favorite meme of the mainstream political culture, leaving aside the inconvenient fact that he was planted in the country by the Bush administration, had been an exile Afghan fixer for fossil fuel industry prior to his tenure as head of a severely ailing country. We need to get past this idea that they owe us something. The Afghans owe us nothing. We screwed them severely during the years of the Soviet war, back in the 1980s. We screwed them afterwards, leaving them to an internecine struggle that tore what was left of the country apart. Then came 9/11, which we laid at their door, though the cave-dwelling Bin Laden was only the head of an al Qaeda snake that coiled from Saudi Arabia to Germany to Florida and beyond.

Bin Laden is dead. He wasn’t even in Afghanistan. He was safe and dry in Pakistan, laughing at our folly. What the hell are we still doing there?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Thoughts, etc.

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As always, a bit pressed this week, so I’ll keep my comment brief. Moving right along…

The uncertainty principle. It can be said that the uncertainty principle is a major talking point on the center-right particularly, but certainly present across the political spectrum. Why is the U.S. job market so weak? Uncertainty. Why are global stock markets in turmoil? Uncertainty. Why does gravity hold down large rocks and trees? You know the answer. I hear this all the time – uncertainty is keeping businesses from investing in new capacity, new labor, etc. The operative question is, though, what is certainty? Since when do investors expect certainty? Don’t we all deal with uncertainty every moment of every day, particularly on the margins of society where one’s very existence is subject to it? When has that ever not been the case for either individuals or organizations? Invoking uncertainty is merely an attempt to shout down any thought of raising taxes on rich people, on profitable corporations, and so on.

Primary numbers. Cousin Rick Perry seems to have a lot of trouble with ordinal lists, even with Ron Paul trying to throw him a bone. (Note to Rick: when someone gives you an easy out, take it.) He somehow managed to draw attention away from Herman Cain’s various troubles for a large portion of a news cycle, and not in a good way. Given cousin Perry’s seemingly drunken performance in New Hampshire last week and his puzzling lapse this week, one has to wonder if he really wants that Washington job. Cain, on the other hand, seems to want it badly enough to hire legal counsel to threaten women with litigation if any one of them dares step forward with yet another allegation against the pizza king.  Now that’s the kind of message we want to send women, right? Spoken like a true CEO.

Field goal. Anyone who reads this blog knows I never, ever, ever talk about sports. This Penn State thing, though, is about as disgusting a story as I’ve heard in this vein since the Catholic Church scandal broke. Aside from the damage this has done to the victims, the most disturbing aspect of this is the culture of complicity that made it possible. Groupthink is a dangerous thing, and ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinarily beastly things, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated decades ago. 

Three modest pieces of advice to those fans of Joe Paterno who flipped cars after seeing their coach fired: 1) Don’t conform. 2) Don’t conform. 3) Don’t conform.

Great war. It’s Veteran’s day. Don’t just thank a veteran. Apologize to them for being so clueless as to let them spend the last ten years in two pointless wars we civilians would neither fight nor pay for.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Peace train.

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My brother Matt was complaining about NPR today. I guess they were talking to one of the fifty generals they have on tap; a guy named General Mills. (“What the hell, does he command Cap’n Crunch?” said Matt.) We groused about this a bit for the podcast. NPR and PBS have always been heavily freighted with retired generals, like the commercial networks and cable channels. But because they have been erroneously described as “leftist” or somehow associated with an elusive liberal elite, they go overboard to disabuse people of that notion. They fired Soundprint’s Lisa Simeone for her association with Occupy DC, apparently fearing that her defense of the 99% would cloud her journalistic objectivity about opera, which is mostly what she covers. Call them National Paranoid Radio.

I’m thinking about NPR particularly because of the president’s declaration that the Iraq war will be drawn to a close at the end of this year, despite the administration’s efforts to keep it rolling for an indefinite period of deployment. NPR was completely on board with the Iraq war back in 2002-03; they dropped the ball on anything like investigative journalism at a time when it might have mattered to get the truth out. People tend to forget that the alternative press, plus outlets like the London Independent, blew holes in the Bush Administration’s case for war well before the shooting began. Counterpunch, for instance, knocked down Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation point by point within days of its delivery. Much of what they reported is common knowledge now. NPR – like other mainstream news sources – were nowhere on this.

Now that people are beginning to think of the Iraq war as a done deal, we would do well to remind ourselves that no one – absolutely no one – has been held accountable for this major bloodletting. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice have all barnstormed the country, hawking their memoirs, bragging on their participation in committing the crime of international aggression – the worst of all crimes, per the U.N. charter, since so many smaller crimes are precipitated by it. On the hook with them are some of the nation’s most august news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and, yes, NPR.

All I’m saying is, with respect to accountability for this historic crime we call the Iraq war, it’s not over until it’s over.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Hors de combat.

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I’m not a big fan of the notion that people in custody should be abused, beaten, or killed. Once you have them restrained, if circumstances warrant it, that should be enough. Seeing Gaddafi beaten and bloodied, then expired with a bullet hole in his head was kind of sickening, frankly. Sure, he was an autocratic asshole. But he was also defeated and in custody. If the Libyans are starting their brave new future with extrajudicial killings, it doesn’t sound too promising. But then, I suppose, that would put them in the same league as their sponsors … particularly, us.

It’s been said that the Libya intervention is Iraq done the Obama way. Today kind of underlines that notion a bit. We didn’t get all arrogant about it or act unilaterally. We pushed through a UN resolution – something Bush couldn’t have had and probably wouldn’t have wanted, since his administration was actively trying to sideline the UN. Obama is a true imperial internationalist, and the product of that is the kinds of interventions you see in Kosovo and Libya and the kinds of coups you see in Honduras, as opposed to his predecessor’s far more blustering approach to wars and proxy overthrows. Sure, neither is a fly on Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, or even Reagan when it comes to mass killing. But Obama acts to sustain the empire, not destroy it. Bush apparently couldn’t care less about it.

My main concern is that we appear to be going the way of all empires. We are getting more comfortable with the trappings of imperial adventure. We are, in a sense, getting meaner as a society, more willing to mete out harsh “justice”, more attached to our bloodlust. We are, it’s also worth pointing out, falling apart from the inside out, the very bones of our civilization progressively embrittled by forced divestment and diversion of revenues to the maintenance of foreign wars, occupations, and forward bases. As Yeats wrote (later repurposed by Achebe), “the center cannot hold and things fall apart”. Our devotion to maintaining our neoliberal empire at all costs is driving us into a period of significant decline – one that cannot be ameliorated by the deaths in custody of third-tier dictators.

This is not an inevitable process. It’s a choice, and we can choose otherwise. Up to us. Imagine that.

luv u,

jp