The Rag Blog

President Bush still believes the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons – and so do the Israelis. So for journalists to assume that neither the U.S. nor Israel will attack Iran before the November election could constitute another failure of imagination. Cato’s Leon Hadar suggests questions the press should ask the presidential candidates about what they think the American response should be to various scenarios in the region – including a Gulf-of-Tonkin-like alleged provocation.

06/02/08 “Nieman” — — Since the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was issued at the end of the last year, much of the reporting and analysis in the MSM has been promoting the conventional wisdom in Washington: That a U.S. attack on Iran is now “out.”

The Bush Administration had been warning that it might use its military power to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But with U.S. intelligence agencies making it clear that Iran wasn’t developing nuclear weapons, the administration had suddenly lost its casus belli. Without one, the conventional wisdom suggested, President Bush would not be able to mobilize American and international support for an attack on Iran, which in any case would have been a very costly operation.

And yet, even as this conventional wisdom was taking hold, the following events also took place:

1. Reports from Israel during Bush’s recent to the Middle East suggested that the president made it clear he didn’t consider the NIE a reliable source of guidance as far as his policy towards Iran was concerned. It was not difficult to conclude based on reports quoting “sources” that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to be marginalizing the significance of the NIE – recalling a similar kind of disdain they exhibited towards the conclusion of the Iraq Study Group. In fact, based on Bush’s behavior then – increasing the number of U.S. troops contrary to the recommendation for establishing a timeline for a withdrawal – members of the press should be considering the possibility that he is just as likely to act against Iran as he was before.

2. The incident in the strategic Strait of Hormuz during which Iranian speedboats buzzed three US navy ships and the Pentagon said that US forces were “literally” on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats. That incident should have led journalists to put the scenario in which the United States strikes Iranian nuclear sites on the backburner – and instead consider the possibility that a military confrontation between U.S. and Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf could take place as a result of (a) a provocation by the Iranians (b) a provocation by the Americans or (c) a misunderstanding.

Saad Tawfiq told his handlers that Saddam had shut down WMD program

05/02/08 “Daily Star” — – -AMMAN: When Saad Tawfiq watched then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter tears as he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in 1995 – and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was Powell – Tawfiq’s television was able to receive international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door – waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying – immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Now in his 50s, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows – that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless, in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and in the process triggered the effective collapse of the Iraqi state, plunging it into chaos and bringing hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Tawfiq’s role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from his sister Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in Moreland Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the Midwest of the United States.

“Our Abu Mahmouds are putting pressure on me,” she told him, using the nickname they shared for Tawfiq’s secret police minder as a makeshift code for the US intelligent agent who had contacted her, “Chris.”

“Chris was very nice, very polite,” Sawsan, a small energetic woman, told AFP.

Chris wanted Sawsan’s help to discover the status of Saddam’s weapons program and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam’s Iraq, a program dreamed up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been keeping tabs on Iraq’s arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States. The American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.

“I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if something happened to me,” Sawsan said. “It was a very emotional visit back home, because I had not been there for years and I had not seen my brother for years.”

Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam’s notorious secret police dealt with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her life and that of her brother, but was determined to help rid her original homeland of a tyrant.

The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq’s weapons programs. Fearing that she would forget it, Sawsan disguised it in sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade code.

Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad’s airport on September 9, 2002. Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to do. They met secretly at night in the family garden and took walks together in the city.

The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA’s questions, which he thought showed the depths of the agency’s ignorance about country.

“I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: ‘They know you have a program,’ and I was saying: ‘There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing,'” Tawfiq said. “She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: ‘No, no, no …’ I kept swearing on the grave of my mother.”

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

“I was Saddam’s scientist,” Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. “In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!”

Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.

“Saad told me there was nothing left,” she told AFP. “That everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned its nuclear program. And he begged me to explain all that back in the States.

“I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying.”

Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were telling the truth, as the United States would discover after it had launched a bloody war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by other sources.

“To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programs were continuing,” he told AFP.

But as Saddam’s scientist lamented five years later: “You don’t have to destroy a country for that.” – AFP

I t begins to sound a bit naughty — all this talk about the need to “stimulate” the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don’t mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans.

The economy, for example, has been expanding, at least until now, and growth is supposed to guarantee general well-being. As long as the gross domestic product grows, World Money Watch’s Web site assures us, “so will business, jobs and personal income.”

But hellooo, we’ve had brisk growth for the past few years, as the president has tirelessly reminded us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the poor and the middle class. According to a study just released by the Economic Policy Institute, real wages actually fell last year. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been “decoupled” from widely shared prosperity.

I first began to sense this in the boom years of the late 1990s, when I was working in entry-level jobs for my book “Nickel and Dimed.” While the stock market soared and fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say “IPO,” my $6-to-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep.

Growth is not the only economic indicator that has let us down. In the past five years, America’s briskly rising productivity has been the envy of much of the world. But again, there’s been no corresponding increase in most people’s wages. It’s not supposed to be this way, of course. Economists have long believed that some sort of occult process would intervene and adjust wages upward as people worked harder and more efficiently.

We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also credited America’s productivity growth to “managerial . . . innovations” and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.

And what about the unemployment rate? The old liberal certainty was that “full employment” would create a workers’ paradise, with higher wages and enhanced bargaining power for the little guy and gal. But we’ve had nearly full employment, or at least an official unemployment rate of under 5 percent, for years now, without the predicted gains. What the old liberals weren’t counting on was a depressed minimum wage, weak unions and a witch’s brew of management strategies to hold wages and salaries down.

So thoroughly is the economy decoupled from ordinary experience that according to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical definition of a recession, which specifies at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. And — far removed from whatever happens on Wall Street, the Nikkei, Dax, or the curiously named FTSE — most Americans have been living in their own personal recession for years.

I could see this when I was doing research for a book on white-collar unemployment in 2004. Although the economy was officially on an upturn, I met laid-off people who’d been searching for a job for more than a year and often ended up — after selling their homes and borrowing from relatives — taking low-wage work as big-box sales clerks or even janitors.

In the months ahead, we can expect the hard times to spread. Citigroup has announced plans to eliminate 21,000 jobs; investment banks in general will shed 40,000. The mortgage industry is in a meltdown; Business Wire predicts a 37 percent increase in the number of companies planning layoffs this year. This is what a stimulus package needs to address: the persistent and growing struggles of the middle class and the working class, which is increasingly conterminous with the working poor.

There are reasons for doing so other than compassion. The chronically poor and the battered middle class have become a tripwire in the American economy — generating defaults on debts, depressed consumption and global market turmoil.

Consider how we got into the current credit crisis in the first place, through defaults on subprime mortgages. These went to plenty of affluent folks and have wreaked havoc in gated communities. But overall, subprime loans were designed for, and snapped up by, the poor. According to a recent study from United for a Fair Economy, 55 percent of subprime loans went to African Americans and 17 percent to whites. Among whites, they went far more frequently to low-income people than to the wealthy — 39 percent compared with 24 percent. Hence the subprime industry’s noble boasts about providing the opportunity for home ownership to people who might otherwise have been excluded from it.

And why were so many Americans poor enough to turn to subprime mortgages and other dodgy credit schemes? The chief reasons are low wages and job insecurity. Chronically low wages afflict about 25 to 30 percent of the population — more than twice the 12 percent the federal government counts as “poor.” And even earnings in the six-figure range can be canceled overnight when an employer downsizes or outsources, leaving a family without income or health insurance.

For years now, we’ve had a solution, or at least a substitute, for low wages and unreliable jobs: easy credit. Payday loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May cover story on “The Poverty Business,” BusinessWeek documented the stampede to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest on it: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Financiamos a todos! It wasn’t just the bottom-feeders that joined the unseemly frenzy to lend to the poor; big companies, such as Wells Fargo and Countrywide Financial, plunged right in. But somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were borrowing.

When personal finances are squeezed hard enough, you have the possibility of a genuine recession. People buy less, so growth declines to the point where even the economic overclass has to sit up and take notice. We saw the beginnings of that in the last Christmas season, which even Wal-Mart survived only through perilously deep discounting.

Not that we hadn’t been warned. A century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. But, like Wal-Mart, too many of our employers today haven’t figured out that their cruelly low wages would eventually curtail their own growth and profits.

Government intervention, whether short-term or long-term, needs to get to the heart of this problem by offering a hand to the poor and the unemployed. Until the House capitulated to Bush two weeks ago, Democrats seemed to be standing solidly behind a stimulus package that would include an increase in food-stamp allotments and an extension of unemployment benefits, both of which are screamingly obvious measures. Current unemployment benefits last just 26 weeks in most states and end up covering only a third of people who are laid off. Food stamps are in even shabbier shape, with an allotment amounting to about $1 per meal. Nothing could be more stimulating than putting money in the hands of those who will spend it quickly.

But you can’t jump-start a car that lacks a working battery. We need less titillating talk about “stimulus” and more commitment to some fundamental repairs — higher wages, a real safety net and a return to progressive taxation among them. The challenge isn’t just to prop up stock prices but to rebuild an economy in which everyone shares the good times — and no one is consigned to a permanent recession.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize.

Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates for president or the major media outlets in the United States for information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of the Union address which had everything except a “Mission Accomplished” banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates to assume a cocky swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution, of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we’re told, is virtually over. We only need “stay the course” for 10 more years.

This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration’s overarching Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President Bush’s departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration’s actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president’s rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president’s words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the “success” of the “surge,” but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of “surge success,” namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The “surge” never addressed the underlying reasons for Iraq’s post-Saddam suffering, and as such never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the “surge” offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.

Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their neighbors is about to become a victim of the “successes” of the “surge” and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already begun. The myth of Kurdish stability-born artificially out of the U.S.-enforced “no-fly zones” of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of the Oil-for-Food program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation-is rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, present-day Iraqi Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not only with each other but the region as a whole.

Ongoing Kurdish disdain for the central authority in Baghdad has led to the Kurds declaring their independence from Iraqi law (especially any law pertaining to oil present on lands they control). The reality of the Kurds’ quest for independence can be seen in their support of the Kurdish groups, in particular the PKK, that desire independence from Turkey. The sentiment has not been lost on their Turkish neighbors to the north, resulting in an escalation of cross-border military incursions which will only expand over time, further destabilizing Kurdish Iraq. Lying dormant, and unmentioned, is the age-old animosity between the two principle Kurdish factions in Iraq, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). As recently as 1997, these two factions were engaged in a virtual civil war against one another. The strains brought on by the present unraveling have these two factions once again vying for position inside Iraq, making internecine conflict all but inevitable. The year 2008 will bring with it a major escalation of Turkish military operations against northern Iraq, a strategic break between the Kurdish factions there and with the central government of Baghdad, and the beginnings of an all-out civil war between the KDP and PUK.

The next unraveling of the “surge” myth will be in western Iraq, where the much applauded “awakening” was falling apart even as Bush spoke. I continue to maintain that there is a hidden hand behind the Sunni resistance that operates unseen and uncommented on by the United States and its erstwhile Iraqi allies operating out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The government of Saddam Hussein never formally capitulated, and indeed had in place plans for ongoing active resistance against any occupation of Iraq. In October 2007 the Iraqi Baath Party held its 13th conference, in which it formally certified one of Saddam’s vice presidents, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, as the supreme leader of the Sunni resistance.

The United States’ embrace of the “awakening” will go down in the history of the Iraq conflict as one of the gravest strategic errors made in a field of grave errors. The U.S. military in Iraq has never fully understood the complex interplay between the Sunni resistance, al-Qaida in Iraq, and the former government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam may be dead, but not so his plans for resistance. The massive security organizations which held sway over Iraq during his rule were never defeated, and never formally disbanded. The organs of security which once operated as formal ministries now operate as covert cells, functioning along internal lines of communication which are virtually impenetrable by outside forces. These security organs gave birth to al-Qaida in Iraq, fostered its growth as a proxy, and used it as a means of sowing chaos and fear among the Iraqi population.

The violence perpetrated by al-Qaida in Iraq is largely responsible for the inability of the central government in Baghdad to gain any traction in the form of unified governance. The inability of the United States to defeat al-Qaida has destroyed any hope of generating confidence among the Iraqi population in the possibility of stability emerging from an ongoing American occupation. But al-Qaida in Iraq is not a physical entity which the United States can get its hands around, but rather a giant con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and the Sunni resistance. Because al-Qaida in Iraq is derived from the Sunni resistance, it can be defeated only when the Sunni resistance is defeated. And the greatest con game of them all occurred when the Sunni resistance manipulated the United States into arming it, training it and turning it against the forces of al-Qaida, which it controls. Far from subduing the Sunni resistance by Washington’s political and military support of the “awakening,” the United States has further empowered it. It is almost as if we were arming and training the Viet Cong on the eve of the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War.

Keeping in mind the fact that the Sunni resistance, led by al-Douri, operates from the shadows, and that its influence is exerted more indirectly than directly, there are actual al-Qaida elements in Iraq which operate independently of central Sunni control, just as there are Sunni tribal elements which freely joined the “awakening” in an effort to quash the forces of al-Qaida in Iraq. The diabolical beauty of the Sunni resistance isn’t its ability to exert direct control over all aspects of the anti-American activity in Sunni Iraq, but rather to manipulate the overall direction of activity through indirect means in a manner which achieves its overall strategic aims. The Sunni resistance continues to use al-Qaida in Iraq as a useful tool for seizing the strategic focus of the American military occupiers (and their Iraqi proxies in the Green Zone), as well as controlling Sunni tribal elements which stray too far off the strategic course (witness the recent suicide bomb assassination of senior Sunni tribal leaders). 2008 will see the collapse of the Sunni “awakening” movement, and a return to large-scale anti-American insurgency in western Iraq. It will also see the continued viability of al-Qaida in Iraq in terms of being an organization capable of wreaking violence and dictating the pace of American military involvement in directions beneficial to the Sunni resistance and detrimental to the United States.

One of the spinoffs of the continued success of the Sunni resistance is the focus it places on the inability of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad to actually govern. The U.S. decision to arm, train and facilitate the various Sunni militias in Iraq is a de facto acknowledgement that the American occupiers have lost confidence in the high-profile byproduct of the “purple finger revolution” of January 2005. The sham that was that election has produced a government trusted by no one, even the Shiites. The ongoing unilateral cease-fire imposed by the Muqtada al-Sadr on his Mahdi Army prevented the outbreak of civil war between his movement and that of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its militia, the Badr Brigade.

When Saddam’s security forces dissolved on the eve of the fall of Baghdad in March 2003, the security organs which had been tasked with infiltrating the Shiite community for the purpose of spying on Shiites were instead instructed to embed themselves deep within the structures of that community. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade are heavily infiltrated with such sleeper elements, which conspire to create and exploit fractures between these two organizations under the age-old adage of divide and conquer. A strategic pause in the conflict between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military on the one hand and the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade on the other has served to strengthen the hand of the Mahdi Army by allowing time for it to rearm and reorganize, increasing its efficiency as a military organization all the while its political opposite, the SCIRI-dominated central Iraqi government, continues to falter.

Further exacerbating the situation for the American occupiers of Iraq is the ongoing tension created by the war of wills between the United States and Iran. The Sunni resistance has no love for the Shiite theocracy in Tehran, or its proxies in Iraq, and views creating a rift between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade as a strategic imperative on the road to a Sunni resurgence. Any U.S. military strike against Iran will bring with it the inevitable Shiite backlash in Iraq. The Shiite forces that emerge as the most independent of the American occupier will be, in the minds of the Sunni resistance, the most capable of winning the support of the Shiites of Iraq. Given the past record of cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni resistance, and the ongoing antipathy between Sunnis and SCIRI, there can be little doubt which Shiite entity the Sunnis will side with when it comes time for a decisive conflict between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, and 2008 will be the year which witnesses such a conflict.

The big loser in all of this, besides the people of Iraq, is of course the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. Betrayed by the Bush administration, abandoned by Congress and all but forgotten by a complacent American population and those who are positioning themselves for national leadership in the next administration, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who so proudly wear the uniform of the United States continue to fight and die, kill and be maimed in a war which was never justified and long ago lost its luster. Played as pawns in a giant game of three-dimensional chess, these brave Americans find themselves being needlessly sacrificed in a game where there can be no winner, only losers.

The continued ambivalence of the American population as a whole toward the war in Iraq, perhaps best manifested by the superficiality of the slogan “Support the Troops,” all the while remaining ignorant of what the troops are actually doing, has led to a similar amnesia among politicians all too willing to allow themselves to seek political advantage at the expense of American life and treasure. January 2008 cost the United States nearly 40 lives in Iraq. The current military budget is unprecedented in its size, and doesn’t even come close to paying for ongoing military operations in Iraq. The war in Iraq has bankrupted Americans morally and fiscally, and yet the American public continues to shake the hands of aspiring politicians who ignore Iraq, pretending that the blood which soaks the hands of these political aspirants hasn’t stained their own. In the sick kabuki dance that is American politics, this refusal to call a spade a spade is deserving of little more than disdain and sorrow.

While the American people, politicians and media may remain mute on the reality of Iraq, I won’t. There is no such thing as a crystal ball which enables one to see clearly into the future, and I am normally averse to making sweeping long-term predictions involving a topic as fluid as the ongoing situation in Iraq. At the risk of being wrong (and, indeed, I hope very much that I am), I will contradict the rosy statements of the president in his State of the Union address and will throw down a gauntlet in the face of ongoing public and media ambivalence by predicting that 2008 will be the year the “surge” in Iraq is exposed as a grand debacle. The cosmetic bandage placed over the gravely wounded Iraq will fall off, and the damaged body that is Iraq will continue its painful decline toward death.

If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance, or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national nightmare for generations to come.

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) , “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007).

An advocacy group on Monday sought a criminal probe of the White House over millions of possibly missing e-mails, saying someone may have deliberately deleted them to conceal involvement in a potential crime.

In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said the White House also may have violated two federal record-keeping laws, including the Federal Records Act, which carries criminal sanctions for unlawful destruction.

CREW, which is suing the Executive Office of the President, said over 10 million e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005 are missing. The period coincides with the runup to the Iraq invasion and the leaking by at least three top White House aides of the CIA identity of Valerie Plame.

The White House referred questions on the letter to the Justice Department, which declined immediate comment.

Asked last month about the possibility of missing e-mail, the White House said there is no reason to believe that any e-mails or other data are missing.

Two years ago, the prosecutor in the CIA leak probe of the Plame affair publicly revealed that the White House had a problem with its e-mail system, and that not all e-mail for the offices of the president and vice president in 2003 had been preserved through the normal archiving process.

In its letter to Mukasey, CREW asked the attorney general to appoint a special counsel, saying the Justice Department does not have the requisite independence to conduct an investigation of the White House.

At stake is the right of future generations to look back and understand the role of White House officials in critical events, said Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director.

The economic disaster that is military keynesianism

Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month’s stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation’s economic life

The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room” — the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to the US debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defence” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the US. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — “military Keynesianism” (which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic). By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.

Fiscal disaster

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defence budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defence-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defence spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defence budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyse this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defence spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: “A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s (always well publicised) basic budget total and double it” (1). Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defence budget is “black”,” meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand — including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defence, and the military-industrial complex — but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defence jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalised either department for ignoring the law. All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defence budget, as released on 7 February 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative (2) and Fred Kaplan, defence correspondent for Slate.org (3). They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4bn for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7bn for the “supplemental” budget to fight the global war on terrorism — that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4bn to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional “allowance” (a new term in defence budget documents) of $50bn to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This makes a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5bn.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the US military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4bn for the Department of Energy goes towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3bn in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03bn outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched US military, up from a mere $174m in 2003, when the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7bn, 50% of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4bn goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing from this compilation is $1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5bn to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6bn for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays. This brings US spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year, conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism

Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defence budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU’s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US. Moreover, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world’s fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we’re doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the US and enjoys the world’s second highest current account balance (China is number one). The US is number 163 — last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the UK that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.

It’s not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On 7 November 2007, the US Treasury announced that the national debt had breached _$9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the “debt ceiling” to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defence expenditures.

The top spenders

The world’s top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each currently budgets for its military establishment are:

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration’s policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology, and have now become so entrenched in our democratic political system that they are starting to wreak havoc. This is military Keynesianism — the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the cold war. During the late 1940s, the US was haunted by economic anxieties. The great depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of the second world war. With peace and demobilisation, there was a pervasive fear that the depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR’s European satellites, the US sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated 14 April 1950 and signed by President Harry S Truman on 30 September 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the US pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: “One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living” (4).

With this understanding, US strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment, as well as ward off a possible return of the depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of 6 February 1961: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience” — the military-industrial complex.

By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in US manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.

Higher spending, fewer jobs

On 1 May 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the economic and political forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. The US economy has had to cope with growing defence spending for more than 60 years. Baker found that, after 10 years of higher defence spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a scenario that involved lower defence spending.

Baker concluded: “It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment” (5).

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all US research talent was siphoned off into the military sector (6). It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Can we reverse the trend?

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the US spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.

The pioneer in analysing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the US preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the cold war. Melman wrote: “From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000bn on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life, by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.”

In an important exegesis on Melman’s relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes: “According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over _$7.29 trillion… The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock” (7).

The fact that we did not modernise or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools, an industry on which Melman was an authority, are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed “that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in US industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States’ machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the second world war. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry.”

Nothing has been done since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment — from medical machines like _proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world’s lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: “Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone” (8).

Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the US urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defence budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defence budget as a Keynesian jobs programme.

04/02/08 “ICH” — – Two weeks ago George Bush was sent on a mission to the Middle East to deliver a horse’s head. We all remember the disturbing scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” where Lucca Brassi goes to Hollywood to convince a recalcitrant movie producer to use Don Corleone’s nephew in his next film. The “Big shot” producer is finally persuaded to hire the young actor after he wakes up in bed next to the severed head of his prize thoroughbred. I expect that Bush made a similar “offer they could not refuse” to the various leaders of the Gulf States when he met with them earlier this month.

The media tried to portray Bush’s trip to the Middle East as a “peace mission”, but that just a smokescreen. In fact, three days after Bush left Jerusalem, Israel stepped-up its military operations in the occupied territories and resumed its merciless blockade of food, water, medicine and energy to the 1.5 million people of Gaza. Clearly, Bush had green-lighted the operations or Israel’s aggression would have been seen as a slap in the face of the President of the United States.

So, what was the real purpose of Bush’s trip? After all, he has no interest in peace or in honoring his commitment to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. So, why would he choose to visit the Middle East just as his second term as president is winding down and there is no chance of success?

Sometimes personal visits are important. They leave a lasting impression; especially when the nature of the information is so sensitive that the message has to be made face to face. In this case, Bush went to the trouble of traveling half-way around the world to tell the Saudis and their friends in the Gulf States that they were going to continue linking their oil to the dollar or they were going to “sleep with the fishes”. For the last two months, various sheiks and finance ministers have been groaning about the falling dollar — threatening to break from the so-called “dollar-peg” and covert to a basket of currencies. Bush’s trip appears to have rekindled the spirit of brotherly cooperation. The grumbling has ceased and everyone is back “on board”. The regional leaders now seem considerably less bothered by the fact that inflation is gobbling up their economies and driving labor, food, energy and housing through the roof. Reuters summed it up like this:

“After a flurry of public disagreements over currency reform last year, Gulf central bankers are trying to close ranks, talking up the pegs as a source of stability and playing down the dollar’s weakness as a temporary phenomenon.”

Looks like Bush smoothed things over.

In the last two weeks, the Gulf leaders have watched nervously while the Federal Reserve has slashed rates by a whopping 125 basis points. The cuts are steadily eroding the $1 trillion of capital the sheihks have invested in US Treasuries and securities.

“Inflation is at 16-year highs in Saudi Arabia and Oman, a 19-year peak in the United Arab Emirates. Gulf policymakers are intervening directly in loans, property and commodity markets to offset rate cut.” (Reuters)

Property values have skyrocketed. Commercial property in the UAE has doubled since the beginning of 2007. The inflation-bomb has forced other Gulf states to provide food subsidies for their people and a “70% wage rise for some Emirati federal government employees.”

Disgruntled migrant workers rioted in Dubai recently, demanding to be fairly compensated for the sharp increase in prices. The Saudi riyal has climbed to a 21-year peak.

Currency traders expect another 8% rise in the dirham and riyal by April and they are predicting that interest rates will compel Central bankers throughout Gulf states to covert to either the euro or a basket of regional currencies. So far, however, the loyal Saudi princes have continued their support for the dollar.

Defending Dollar Hegemony

So, how important is it that oil continue to be denominated in dollars? Would the United States wage war to defend the dollar’s status as the world’s “reserve currency”?

The answer to this question could come as early as this week, since the long-awaited Iranian Oil Bourse is scheduled to open between February 1-11. According to Iran’s Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari “All preparations have been made to launch the bourse; it will open during the 10-day Dawn (the ceremonies marking the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran) The bourse is considered a direct threat to the continued dominance of the dollar because it will require that Iranian “oil, petrochemicals and gas” be traded in “non-dollar currencies”. (Press TV, Iran)

The petrodollar system is no different than the gold standard. Today’s currency is simply underwritten by the one vital source of energy upon which every industrialized society depends—oil. If the dollar is de-linked from oil; it will no longer serve as the de-facto international currency and the US will be forced to reduce its massive trade deficits, rebuild its manufacturing capacity, and become an export nation again. The only alternative is to create a network of client regimes who repress the collective aspirations of their people so they can faithfully follow directives from Washington.

As to whether the Bush administration would start a war to defend dollar hegemony; that’s a question that should be asked of Saddam Hussein. Iraq was invaded just six months after Saddam converted to the euro. The message is clear; the Empire will defend its currency.

Similarly, Iran switched from the dollar in 2007 and has insisted that Japan pay its enormous energy bills in yen. The “conversion” has infuriated the Bush administration and made Iran the target of US belligerence ever since. In fact, even though 16 US Intelligence agencies issued a report (NIE) saying that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons; and even though the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, found that Iran was in compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation (NPT) Treaty; a preemptive US-led attack on Iran still appears likely.

And, although the western media now minimizes the prospects of another war in the region; Israel is taking the precautions that suggest that the idea is not so far-fetched. “Israel calls for shelter rooms to be set up in a bid to prepare the public for yet another war, this time, one of raining missiles.” (Press TV, Iran)

“The next war will see a massive use of ballistic weapons against the whole of Israeli territory,” claimed retired general Udi Shani. (Global Research)

Russia also sees a growing probability of hostilities breaking out in the Gulf and has responded by sending a naval task force into the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic.

According to an article on the Global Research site: “The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva guided missile cruiser, joined up with Russian naval warships in the Mediterranean on January 18 to participate in the current maneuvers….The current operation is the first large-scale Russian Navy exercise in the Atlantic in 15 years. All combat ships and aircraft involved carry full combat ammunition loads. (Global Research)

France is also planning military maneuvers in the Straits of Hormuz. Operation “Gulf Shield 01,” will take place off the coast of Iran and will employ thousands of personnel in combined arms operations that will include simulated attacks on oil platforms.”

Exercises are scheduled to take place from Feb. 23 to March 5, and will involve 1,500 French, 2,500 Emirate, and 1,300 Qatari personnel operating on land, at sea and in the air, the ministry said…Around a half-dozen warships, 40 aircraft and dozens of armored vehicles will be in the war games, Fusalba said. (Source)

Additionally, within the last week, three of the main underwater cables which carry Internet traffic have been cut off in the Persian Gulf and three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East have been lost. Large parts of the Middle East have been plunged into darkness.

Is this merely a coincidence or is something else going on below the surface?

Ian Brockwell, of the American Chronicle said:

“On the assumption that the cables cut were no accident, we must ask ourselves who would do such a thing and why. Clearly Iran, who were most affected, would gain nothing from such an action and are perhaps the target of those responsible? … Maybe this is a prelude to an attack, or perhaps a test run for a future one?

Communication has always been an important factor in military action, and cutting these cables might affect Iran´s ability to defend itself.” (American Chronicle)

Manifestations of Intent

04/02/08 “ICH” — – – Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?

Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into the realm of nothingness?

Can you see, if not blinded by tele-trash and infotainment, by the propaganda we call news, by the lies and deceit and censorship of the corporate media, by the comforting glow of television, by the charade that is American democracy and by the myriad distractions of bread and circus, the approaching finality of American liberty and freedom, soon to be replaced by Big Brother, a surveillance society, a police state and full-fledged corporatism?

Can you sense the growing momentum of militarism and imperialism rampaging across the nation, and the globe, leaving nothing but hatred and animosity in its wake? Can you sense that imperialism and empire abroad and freedom and democracy at home are mutually exclusive, that to attain the former the latter must be sacrificed, and that inevitably the people must, for imperialism to function, be immersed in tyranny? Do you realize that we are one major shock, one major event away from catapulting our lives into the headwaters of an altogether different America?

If you are not angered, indeed enraged, by the current state of the United States, then you have not been paying attention, or you just do not care enough about the future your children will inherit, and have to live in. If you are not alarmed at where, at present, this course is invariably taking us, then you have abandoned the responsibilities of an informed citizen, preferring the comfortable warmth of ignorance to the absolute frigidity of a most ominous reality.

Indeed, it has been our passivity and acquiescence, bred of comfort, distraction and the erosion of critical thinking, that has facilitated our decent into authoritarian and corporatist waters. It has been our indifference and our “can’t happen here” mentality that is inevitably guaranteeing that it does, in fact, “happen here.” It is our inexperience with tyranny at home and our lack of exposure to authoritarian tendencies such as surveillance, secret police, torture, spying and disappearances, prevalent in many American supported states, encouraged by our government, though until recently non-existent here, that subjects us to a methodical assault by Machiavellian ideologies.

What billions of humans have first-hand experience in, oftentimes thanks to our government’s sponsorship, funding, training, backing, protection and encouragement, we have not yet fully been subjected to. The dirty little secret that the people outside our borders understand fully, and which has been kept from us, is the principle that if America wishes to maintain its empire, it must then continue acting like an empire. This, of course, means maintaining a firm grip over its vassal states, by proxy through its puppets, using the methods any aspiring empire must use, namely tyranny, oppression, and repression along with the tools at the disposal of any credentialed authoritarian.

As the empire expands and seeks more control over lands, resources and people, its methods become more and more brutal, as native peoples become more resistant, with growing imperialism and addiction to hegemony needing greater amounts of military weaponry, violence and tyranny to squash and threaten resistance movements. In order to maintain its overstretched empire, America must therefore become openly fascist, a reality that cannot be fused with the freedoms, rights, liberties and democracy of its own people. The two principles, empire and liberty, are diametrically opposed, incompatible elements in a struggle to determine the future course of the nation.

Given that historically the nation’s elite and its establishment have consistently chosen imperialism, expansion and empire building, there is no reason to believe that this hegemonic drive will decelerate. On the contrary, in a world of finite resources, eager and growing competitors, a globe that only seems to get smaller, with an ever-increasing population and with Washington enraptured in arrogance, self- aggrandizement, self-exceptionalism and greed, it is certain that the elite will invariably chose to sacrifice the Constitution, and the foundations of American society, and hence the freedoms, rights and liberties of the masses, in order to maintain and expand the realm of American hegemony. This paradigm is occurring today, in real time. The transformation is under way, right before our eyes.

For between the coup that was the 2000 general election, allowing entry into the executive branch of corporatists and authoritarians, and the first hours of the American Reichstag, or 9/11, that most catalyzing and transformative of events, the neocon Pearl Harbor, America, already a most vicious and evil empire in the decades before then, seemingly elevated its level of arrogance, unilateralism, defiance, wickedness, inhumanity and violence against the people of the world.

Whereas the 2000 stolen election introduced an era of open hostility, unilateralism and a “we will do what we want” mentality regarding the United States’ view toward world relations, including the planning and green lighting of the attacks, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle East nations, 9/11 was the shock introducing the world to an America intent on global hegemony, now open and transparent, the new normal, the maker of humanity’s new reality. The inside job of 9/11, aimed as a psychological attack on the American people, designed so the masses would become subservient and acquiescent to otherwise unpopular methods of empire building, also allowed the Pax Americana to begin its quest for hegemony on a more transparent, and thus easier, basis.

Before 9/11, as has been described above, America’s elite were forced to rely on mostly clandestine methods of hegemonic expansion, as well as to at least give the impression of following and adhering to international law, its activities kept secret from its population only to maintain control on the home front, given the unpopularity of tyranny and all its tools. This made it much harder for the empire to achieve its goals. With the end of the Cold War, with its threat of an external bogeyman gone, which was used as an excuse to justify America’s imperial aspirations, supposedly to defend freedom and democracy, new excuses had to be concocted, new enemies had to be created that would engender in the population acceptance towards a continuation of Manifest Destiny.

Hence, new methods of manipulation, such as 9/11, were implemented. The opportunity that was 9/11, a catalyzing and transformative event, allowed American fascists to continue their previous drive forward, only this time in a more open, methodical way, with the full engines of American societal and military might fully behind the endeavor to conquer the strategic lands, resources and peoples of the world in favor of American corporations, particularly the military-industrial-energy complex, and its elite. Today, much more than in the past, the criminality and control is done in full and open arrogance, not caring that the world becomes witness to an imperialism that is as systemic as it tyrannical.

9/11, for all its terror and fear inducing stupor, guaranteed compliance, passivity and even ignorant encouragement on the part of the American people. After all, an external, dark-skinned, unknown bogeyman had dared to attack the empire. It was only natural, then, that the empire fight back, even if those lands of the bogeyman were conveniently also those that had been preemptively chosen months and years before for invasion and attack due to the strategic locations and natural resources claimed by the empire itself. Under this rubric, along with the frivolous claim of bringing “freedom and democracy” to the Middle East and Central Asia, the American people were easy patsies to the maniacal ideology of American fascists in power.

What we call American-style imperialism has thus evolved, with 9/11 acting as its birth pangs, in open arrogance and unilateralism, in open state sponsored terrorism and hostility, in open defiance of and in direct confrontation with the peoples of the globe. Where once clandestine mass murder, violence, war, coups, repression, tyranny, executions, assassinations, disappearances, collective punishment, dehumanization and torture dictated the empire’s maneuvers to control the people and places of the world, with its assortment of dictators, tyrants, juntas, kings, proconsuls, ministers and elite fraudsters helping maintain and expand the fields of empire, the next stage of the empire’s temerity has brought imperialism into plain sight.

Today the world entire can see, with the exception of those living inside the empire itself, — for most citizens choose a cocktail of delusion, denial, beliefs in exceptionalism and the inherent goodness of America, an absence of reason and self-imposed ignorance in order to secure an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality – what millions of human beings have experienced for decades. American imperialism and empire building has become an accepted reality, a “new normal,” with its attempts at building and securing hegemonic power throughout the world, through threats, violence, war, economic strangulation and market colonialism, as evident as cold in winter and as real as sunrises in the east.

Transformation

What is new, and what is not fully understood by the vast majority of the 310 million people it affects, however, is that the empire has brought clandestine corporatism and authoritarian rule inside the very shores of America. It has begun importing the very essence of the imperial methods it has and continues to use abroad, most of which have been very successful in controlling its domain, and thus expanding its global hegemony.

This has been achieved by the criminal manipulation of psychology; by the induction of fear into the populace; by the mass propaganda of sacrificing liberty for security – which achieves neither – ; by conditioning the masses to think only in foggy black and white, good versus evil reasoning; by gutting of the economy, thus creating hardship, financial insecurity and a need to scapegoat (classic divide and conquer strategy); by destroying jobs and wages, slowly destroying the middle class, in essence making this group slaves to debt and predatory capitalism; by waging perpetual imperial wars designed to control resources and strategic locations and transfer trillions of dollars from average Americans toward the pockets of the establishment; by the exponential rise in militarism, the military-industrial-energy complex and the subsequent allocation of ever-expanding budgets towards the Department of War and away from other government services; by the decline of critical thinking and reasoning skills by the purposeful decimation of education; by the systemic pattern of lies, deceit, propaganda and brainwashing endemic in corporate media; by the wholesale auctioning off of all branches, departments and agencies of government to the corporate world; and by the embedding of corporatists and fascism’s enablers into all sectors of the United States government and its propaganda apparatus.

With a more than malleable citizenry conditioned for obedience and passivity, it is easy to see why corporatism rises like a phoenix in the nation of the Founding Fathers. It is inside the belly of the beast itself where the empire has declared open war against the American people, in the span of a few years unleashing a devastating assault on the rights, freedoms and liberties of every American. It has been in the last seven years where the policy of eroding the power, strength and wealth of most working and middle class Americans has had its greatest success, thereby creating an almost impotent subservient class of serfs and slaves. It is inside the bowels of the empire itself where the people are under constant attack, with the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people being gutted and eviscerated on a daily basis.

The objective, of course, is simple. Using fear mongering and scapegoating of an external enemy, a dreaded dark skinned bogeyman of unquestionable “evil”, preferably one that is unknown and different, therefore, the very object of fear, one that coincidentally inhabits the lands whose resources and locations you covet, thereby validating war and destruction and conquest and occupation, the populace is bombarded with the recipe of engendered hatred and, of course, perpetual fear. Straight out of the Orwellian playbook, then, the concocted fear of the Arab and Muslim is used both to conquer resources and land needed to expand hegemony, with the acquiescence and passivity of the people, as well as to eviscerate the freedoms of and better control the lives of the population.

A populace in constant fear of “its way of life,” of its cherished “freedoms and liberties,” which the catapulted propaganda spews mercilessly on a daily basis, making the repeated lie a certifiable truth in the eyes of tens of millions, will inevitably place unbridled faith, even if blind, on the elements of government which, by definition, are entrusted to protect and defend the people. If hundreds of millions have no problem placing blind faith in a god that has never before been seen, heard, smelled or felt, relying on the stories and language of our primitive past, refusing to use reason and critical thinking to combat myth and fables, how can we expect them to not place blind faith in a tangible unitary executive acting as father figure – or alpha male for that matter – that offers promises of security and protection in a terribly uncertain and frightening world – albeit a fictional charade at that – while preaching from the bully pulpit?

Along with an approaching economic meltdown – which inevitably causes anger, hatred, scapegoating, false patriotism, xenophobia, racism, crime, hardship, hunger, suffering, poverty, fear, division and insecurity in a large segment of the population, thereby making tens of millions easy targets willing to accept authoritarian and tyrannical rule over their lives – the use of an external enemy as convenient scapegoat the riled masses can concentrate their wrath on virtually guarantees national compliance and acceptance of the erosion of Constitutional guarantees in favor of a police and surveillance state under corporatist rule. This formula has worked wonders for many of modern history’s most ruthless authoritarians.

This combination of economic shock fused with fear of terror and of a very dangerous external enemy that wants to destroy the peoples way of life is a recipe for a successful implementation of corporatist and authoritarian doctrine throughout the nation. The anger, resentment and negative energy of the masses, most afflicted by the hardships of a severe recession or near depression, is easily corralled into an amalgam of anger that can be manipulated and channeled in whatever direction the corporatist elite chose. Under these conditions, and having a scapegoat by which hatred and anger and emotions can be directed at, the corporatist element in leadership can dictate empire’s follies and aggressiveness with reckless abandon.

Together with a spineless and colluding legislature, – nothing but a collection of fraudsters, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, professional liars, opportunists and corrupt politicians, each bending over to the thrusts of the corporatist world, their powers decimated, their significance diminished, having now become but an insignificant opinion-generating entity, firmly under the control and power of the unitary executive, unable to enforce or keep the president-emperor in check – the government in Washington has become the very entity destroying freedoms, liberties and rights and helping to build and secure the infrastructure needed for a permanent corporatist, surveillance society, a police state, an authoritarian reality.

What no terrorist organization could ever accomplish has over the last seven years been done by the same government most Americans believe incapable of wrongdoing, the same government we place blind faith and trust in, the same government we actually believe has an opposition within its ranks. Ironically, what the external bogeyman could never take away is being methodically plundered by our internal “protectors,” and with our unbridled, yet ignorant support and enthusiasm. Taking candy from a baby is a much more difficult endeavor. With the state and corporations colluding together, the masses are left to fend for themselves.

In fact, it has been the government, with the help of the corporate media, that has terrorized the citizenry in an open and continuous act of psychological warfare. It has been the government, along with the Ministry of Truth, that has instilled fear and insecurity into the population. It is they who, under any definition of terrorism, have become our terrorists, our real enemy, our internal bogeyman. Fear mongering has never been so easy and, when the collective trauma of 9/11 wears off, all that is needed to reinvigorate the senses of the masses are lies of further attack, more dehumanization of the enemy, propaganda of imminent threat and insecurity and, if all else fails, one more false flag event.

Part 2 of this article will be posted on Tuesday 05/02/08

Democracy is a beautiful thing, except that part about letting just any old jerk vote.

“The people can have anything they want.
The trouble is, they do not want anything.
At least they vote that way on election day.”
Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, early 20th century

03/02/08 “ICH” — — Why was the primary vote for former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich so small when anti-Iraq war sentiment in the United States is supposedly so high, and Kucinich was easily the leading anti-war candidate in the Democratic race, indeed the only genuine one after former Senator Mike Gravel withdrew? Even allowing for his being cut out of several debates, Kucinich’s showing was remarkably poor. In Michigan, on January 15, it was only Kucinich and Clinton running. Clinton got 56% of the vote, the “uncommitted” vote (for candidates who had withdrawn but whose names were still on the ballot) was 39%, and Kucinich received but 4%. And Clinton, remember, has been the leading pro-war hawk of all the Democratic candidates.

I think much of the answer lies in the fact that the majority of the American people — like the majority of people all over the world — aren’t very sophisticated politically, and many of them aren’t against the war for very cerebral reasons. Their opposition perhaps stems mainly from the large number of American soldiers who’ve lost their lives, or because the United States is not “winning”, or because America’s reputation in the world is being soiled, or because a majority of other Americans express their opposition to the war, or because of George W.’s multiple character defects, or because of a number of other reasons you couldn’t even guess at. Not much especially perceptive or learned in this collection.

I think there are all kinds of intelligence in this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, academic, literary, mechanical, and so on. Then there’s political intelligence, which I would define as the ability to see through the bullshit which the leaders and politicians of every society, past, present and future, feed their citizens from birth on to win elections and assure continuance of the prevailing ideology.

This is why it’s so important for all of us to continue “preaching to the choir” and “preaching to the converted”. That’s what speakers and writers and other activists are often scoffed at for doing — saying the same old thing to the same old people, just spinning their wheels. But long experience as speaker, writer and activist in the area of foreign policy tells me it just ain’t so. From the questions and comments I regularly get from my audiences, via email and in person, and from other people’s audiences as well, I can plainly see that there are numerous significant information gaps and misconceptions in the choir’s thinking, often leaving them unable to see through the newest government lie or propaganda trick; they’re unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that illuminates the present; knowing the facts but unable to apply them at the appropriate moment; vulnerable to being led astray by the next person who offers a specious argument that opposes what they currently believe, or think they believe. The choir needs to be frequently reminded and enlightened.

As cynical as others may think they are, the choir is frequently not cynical enough about the power elite’s motivations. They underestimate the government’s capacity for deceit, clinging to the belief that their government somehow means well; they’re moreover insufficiently skilled at reading between the media’s lines. And this all applies to how they view political candidates as well. Try asking “anti-war” supporters of Hillary Clinton if they know what a hawk she is, that — as but one example — she’s promised that American forces will not leave Iraq while she’s president. (And Obama loves the empire as much as Clinton.) When Ronald Reagan was president, on several occasions polls revealed that many, if not most, people who supported him were actually opposed to many of his specific policies.

In sum, even when the hearts of the chorus may be in the right place, their heads still need working on, on a recurring basis. And in any event, very few people are actually born into the choir; they achieve choir membership only after being preached to, multiple times.

When I speak in public, and when I can mention it in an interview, I raise the question of the motivations of the administration. As long as people believe that our so-called leaders are well-intentioned, the leaders can, and do, get away with murder. Literally.

“How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It’s the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It’s been 200 years at it. It’s superb.” Gore Vidal

Another interesting view of the American electoral system comes from Cuban leader Raúl Castro. He recently noted that the United States pits two identical parties against one another, and joked that a choice between a Republican and Democrat is like choosing between himself and his brother Fidel.

“We could say in Cuba we have two parties: one led by Fidel and one led by Raúl, what would be the difference?” he asked. “That’s the same thing that happens in the United States … both are the same. Fidel is a little taller than me, he has a beard and I don’t.”[1]

Speaking of political intelligence … take a little stroll with Alice through the American wonderland … just for laughs

“This war [in Iraq] is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. … it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.” — Thomas Friedman, much-acclaimed New York Times foreign-affairs analyst, November 2003[2]

“President Bush has placed human rights at the center of his foreign policy agenda in unprecedented ways.” — Michael Gerson, columnist for the Washington Post, 2007[3]

The war in Iraq “is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken.” — David Brooks, New York Times columnist and National Public Radio (NPR) commentator (2007)[4]

If this is what leading American public intellectuals believe and impart to their audiences, is it any wonder that the media can short circuit people’s critical faculties altogether? It should as well be noted that these three journalists are all with “liberal” media.

And when Hillary Clinton says in the January 31 debate with Barack Obama: “We bombed them [Iraq] for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors,” and the fact is that the UN withdrew its weapons inspectors because the Clinton administration had made it clear that it was about to start bombing Iraq …

Obama didn’t correct her. Neither did any of the eminent journalists on the panel, though this particular piece of disinformation has been repeated again and again in the media, and has been corrected again and again by those on the left. Comrades, we have our work cut out for us. The chorus needs us. America needs us. Keep preaching.

Teaching political intelligence

If you’re a high school or college teacher, you might want to look at http://www.teachpeace.com/highschoolkit.htm for teaching aids to impart a progressive outlook on US foreign policy and related issues to your students.

NOTES

1 Associated Press, CNN.com, December 25, 2007

[2] New York Times, November 30, 2003

[3] Washington Post, September 7, 2007

[4] Mary Eberstadt, ed., “Why I turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys” (2007), p.73