The Rag Blog

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Jan. 28) – Mitt Romney and John McCain accused each other Monday of harboring liberal tendencies, a charge bordering on blasphemy in the increasingly caustic campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Romney struck first on the day before the winner-take-all Florida primary, criticizing the Arizona senator for his legislation reducing the role of money in politics, for his position on immigration and for his support of an energy bill that he said would have driven up consumer costs.

“If you ask people, ‘Look at the three things Senator McCain has done as a senator,’ if you want that kind of a liberal Democrat course as president, then you can vote for him,” Romney told campaign workers. “But those three pieces of legislation, those aren’t conservative, those aren’t Republican, those are not the kind of leadership that we need as we go forward.”

McCain answered swiftly, accusing the former Massachusetts governor of “wholesale deception of voters. On every one of the issues he has attacked us on, Mitt Romney was for it before he was against it.”

He added, “The truth is, Mitt Romney was a liberal governor of Massachusetts who raised taxes, imposed with Ted Kennedy a big government mandate health care plan that is now a quarter of a billion dollars in the red, and managed his state’s economy incompetently, leaving Massachusetts with less job growth than 46 other states.”

McCain later told a Jacksonville audience that Romney has been “entirely consistent. He’s consistently taken at least two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.”

The exchange reflected the stakes in Tuesday’s contest, a prelude to a virtual nationwide primary on Feb. 5.

Attacking other countries to stop them acquiring nuclear weapons repudiates a key principle of international law

27/01/08 “The Guardian” — — Five former Nato generals, including the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, have written a “radical manifesto” which states that “the West must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.”

In other words, the generals argue that “the west” – meaning the nuclear powers including the United States, France and Britain – should prepare to use nuclear weapons, not to deter a nuclear attack, not to retaliate following such an attack, and not even to pre-empt an imminent nuclear attack. Rather, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a non-nuclear state. And not only that, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of biological or chemical weapons by such a state.

Under this doctrine, the US could have used nuclear weapons in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to destroy that country’s presumed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons – stockpiles that did not in fact exist. Under it, the US could have used nuclear weapons against North Korea in 2006. The doctrine would also have justified a nuclear attack on Pakistan at any time prior to that country’s nuclear tests in 1998. Or on India, at any time prior to 1974.

The Nuremberg principles are the bedrock of international law on war crimes. Principle VI criminalises the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression …” and states that the following are war crimes:

“Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

To state the obvious: the use of a nuclear weapon on the military production facilities of a non-nuclear state will mean dropping big bombs on populated areas. Nuclear test sites are kept remote for obvious reasons; research labs, reactors and enrichment facilities need not be. Nuclear bombs inflict total devastation on the “cities, towns or villages” that they hit. They are the ultimate in “wanton destruction”. Their use against a state with whom we are not actually at war cannot, by definition, be “justified by military necessity”.

“The west” has lived from 1946 to the present day with a nuclear-armed Russia; no necessity of using nuclear weapons against that country ever arose. Similarly with China, since 1964. To attack some new nuclear pretender now would certainly constitute the “waging of a war of aggression …” That’s a crime. And the planning and preparation for such a war is no less a crime than the war itself.

Next, consider what it means to determine that a country is about to acquire nuclear weapons. How does one know? The facilities that Iran possesses to enrich uranium are legal under the non-proliferation treaty. Yes, they might be used, at some point, to provide fuel for bombs. But maybe they won’t be. How could we tell? And suppose we were wrong? Ambiguity is the nature of this situation, and of the world in which we live. During the cold war, ambiguity helped keep both sides safe: it was a stabilising force. We would not use nuclear weapons, under the systems then devised, unless ambiguity disappeared. But the generals’ doctrine has no tolerance for ambiguity; it would make ambiguity itself a cause for war. Thus, causes for war could be made to arise, wherever anyone in power wanted them to.

The generals’ doctrine would not only violate international law, it repudiates the principle of international law. For a law to be a law, it must apply equally to all. But the doctrine holds that “the west” is fundamentally a different entity from all other countries. As the former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, it holds that our use of weapons of mass destruction to prevent the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction is not, itself, an illegal use of weapons of mass destruction. Thus “the west” can stand as judge, jury and executioner over all other countries. By what right? No law works that way. And no country claiming such a right can also claim to respect the law, or ask any other country to respect it.

Conversely, suppose we stated the generals’ doctrine as a principle: that any nuclear state which suspects another state of being about to acquire nuclear weapons has the right to attack that state – and with nuclear weapons if it has them. Now suppose North Korea suspects South Korea of that intention. Does North Korea acquire a right to strike the South? Under any principle of law, the generals’ answer must be, that it does. Thus their doctrine does not protect against nuclear war. It leads, rather, directly to nuclear war.

Is this proposed doctrine unprecedented? No, in fact it is not. For as Heather Purcell and I documented in 1994, US nuclear war-fighting plans in 1961 called for an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union, as soon as sufficient nuclear forces were expected to be ready, in late 1963. President Kennedy quashed the plan. As JFK’s adviser Ted Sorensen put it in a letter to the New York Times on July 1, 2002:

“A pre-emptive strike is usually sold to the president as a ‘surgical’ air strike; there is no such thing. So many bombings are required that widespread devastation, chaos and war unavoidably follow … Yes, Kennedy ‘thought about’ a pre-emptive strike; but he forcefully rejected it, as would any thoughtful American president or citizen.”

It’s not just citizens and presidents who are obliged to think carefully about what General Shalikashvili and his British, French, German and Dutch colleagues now suggest. Military officers – as they know well – also have that obligation. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

For starters, I have become a single-issue voter. The two-front war in Iraq-Afghanistan continues to drag on; and I am thoroughly convinced that no viable Democratic nominee will stop these occupations.

The recent analysis by Allan Nairn shows that even the putative anti-war Edwards (who the press is smothering because of his anti-corporate declarations) has a backroom full of defense contractors. Clinton is a ruthless war-monger, period. Obama is employing on the sorriest, pro-Zionist, neoliberal trash on the market, i.e., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross, on his core advisory staff.

No one listens to me much, but in some fantasy world where they might, I would suggest that others follow suit with me here. In open primary states, cross over to vote in the Republican primaries for Ron Paul. In closed primary states, switch fast to Republican (like in the next few days).

Vote in the Republican primary; and vote for Ron Paul. Turnout will be dismally low for Republicans this year, because they have been demoralized by the Bush loons’ performances. Independents will vote Paul. The other Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal melee.

I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, “I won’t endorse this-n-that position” liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was anti-war before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.

Cynthia McKinney is running Green, though she hasn’t got the nomination yet. Remember Cynthia McKinney? When she broke with the DLC diktat, her own party fronted another Black woman (Denise Majette) to run against her in an open primary, and Republicans crossed over massively to vote in the Democratic primary to unseat her in a foregone Democratic Congressional district.

Two can play that game. If Cynthia McKinney runs in 2008 for President, I’ll write her in if I have to just to burn a vote for Clinton or Obama. But meanwhile, Ron Paul is on our primary ballot (North Carolina), because he is running as a Republican (we have draconian ballot access conditions here for thrid-parties, thanks to — of course — Democrats).

Ron Paul is running for President. Just what are the capabilities of a President, and what are his likely courses of action… in the unlikely event he wins?

Well, he is the Commander-in-Chief, so he can bring the troops home immediately, as well as order the military-industrial complex to radically scale back. In case anyone on the left has missed the implications of this, this would be a profoundly anti-imperial development that would take the US boot off the necks of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He is a libertarian who dislikes corporate subsidies, so he would veto the mega-billion dollar subisidies for Big Agra, Big Pharma, nuclear power company insurance policies, Weapons-R-Us, the ADM/Cargill Great Ethanol Scam,et al. He could veto the federal highway spending that is promoting sprawl. He has also stated that he opposed so-called free trade agreements.

Hello?

Don’t argue with libertarians when they are right. Many of them say that the leviathan-capitalists that dominate the world’s economy could not get as big as they are in an unfettered and unsubsidized market. Newsflash: that is actually true.

Ron Paul is a Gold Bug. For the uninitiated, that means he believes dollar-value should be pegged to a gold-standard. The implications of a return to the gold standard by the Fed are grim… for Wall Street and the military, both of which depend on massive foreign loans convered by runaway printing presses. Putting a stop to this is a Good Thing. What is the net effect?

Ron Paul may have the most outrageous personal account of race you might imagine; but what is the most horrific social catastrophe in the United States for Black and Brown folk? You guessed it: the criminal (in)justice system. The malignant growth of the American Gulag has been fueled — more than by any other cause — by the ever-more-punative criminalization of drug use and drug addiction, and the ability fo the criminal justice system to apply this criminalization with special force against African America and Hispano-Latinas. Here’s the thing. Paul opposes the criminalization of drugs. What is the net effect?

When we are at the point in history where we cannot change the electoral system, then we need to think tactically about what we can do right now. What will a Paul victory in the primaries do? Not whether a vote for Paul in the Republican primaries endorses his decentralizing philosophy on reproductive choice. President Paul will not be writing legislation. The Executive Branch decides how strongly to enforce legislation… like domestic spying fer-instance.

President Paul would close Guantanamo, halt CIA kidnappings, and gut the enforcement capacity for the PATRIOT Act.

Nominee Paul would give 2008 voters a choice between a real anti-war candidate and a phony Democratic equivocator. The intensity of anti-war sentiment in the country already forced ex-war-hawk Edwards to adopt an out-in-nine-months position to left flank his Democratic opponents.

Don’t ask yourself “what are the ideas?” If your toilet backs up, you can come up with a thousand ideas while shit-water cascades onto the floor. The question is not about ideas; it is, “What will be the net effect?”

Wanna throw a monkey wrench into a fixed electoral system? Here’s a chance.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and “Sex & War” which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Is Barack Obama the new JFK? A Washington press corps that is forever on the lookout for its next cue wants to know. (There are links below, but I don’t suggest you actually read them; they’re strictly for illustration purposes.) This doesn’t really sound like a question that wants to be taken seriously, and it isn’t. It’s an honorific–the sort of hero worship that Hugh Sidey came to be venerated for writing about every president in Time–and a cheerleader’s cry.

But it’s not entirely fatuous. JFK was the first born-for-TV president and thus the first political celebrity of the modern age. His charisma, his storybook life and family, and his gift for sounding high-minded without ultimately saying much or committing himself to anything are all mirrored in the rise of Obama. And I suspect that Obama, like Kennedy, has no very vivid sense of the hopes he conjures in his listeners or what he’s going to do about them if elected.

To the civil rights movement, Kennedy gave a little encouragement and a lot of stonewalling; to the emerging generation that would define itself around the anti-war movement, he gave escalation in Vietnam. What would Obama do with the hopes of those supporters who oppose the war, those who want affordable, accessible health care once and for all, those who want to start seeing more economic fairness in the tax code and in laws governing corporations?

Kennedy disappointed sorely, a fact that was forgiven and forgotten after he became America’s first prime-time celebrity martyr, and Obama would surely disappoint as well. But there are disappointments and there are disappointments, and I am relieved to say I don’t believe Barack Obama is any Jack Kennedy.

Take JFK’s foreign policy. No one seems to remember what an avid hawk and Cold Warrior Kennedy was. He adored toughness in all things and believed wholeheartedly in brinksmanship and political subversion in the name of combatting global communism. Vietnam was only the most consequential piece of it. JFK blustered his way from one crisis to another, starting with the Bay of Pigs and proceeding through the Cuban Missile Crisis (where he bet the farm over Soviet missiles in Cuba that would have been no closer to our borders than our missiles in Turkey already were to Soviet borders) and a few misbegotten passes at assassinating Fidel Castro with the help of the CIA. Among his less-remembered achievements was to begin arming the Central American militias that became the next decade’s death squads–again, in the name of battling communist insurgency in the region.

Enough is enough.

Like many of us, after having watched helplessly as the Bush administration trampled the Constitution and made a mockery of checks and balances over the course of five bitter years, I was hopeful when the American people elected a Democratic Congress in November of 2006. Finally, I imagined, we would have a whiff of legality and the hint of a restoration of the rule of law in the land. Perhaps we would even have congressional committees to oversee the administration’s subversions of the rule of law and investigate the wide range of abuses that it had perpetrated since 2001.

There has been a bit of movement — which is why the thousands of Americans I have met who are appalled at these abuses but feel powerless to raise their voices effectively should take heart, but not stop their fight. To some extent, these raised voices have yielded some action: Congress has in fact held numerous hearings on issues — ranging from torture to warrantless wiretapping — that had been taboo to contend with when the administration was heedlessly, and unopposed, using a hyped narrative of `the global war on terror’ to subdue American liberties. Most prominently, we got some of the bad guys out of town. Citizen-driven congressional investigations into the politicization of the Department of Justice, for example, spurred the resignations of many key Bush administration officials, including the mild-mannered gatekeeper of the first bolgia of Hell, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

And yet, where it counts most, Democratic leaders in Congress have completely abdicated their constitutional oversight role. What they are doing now reprises the worst failures of other self-paralyzed Parliaments in societies that were facing crackdowns on civil liberties and the rule of law, and their voluntary self-emasculation may go down in history as one of those turning points at which leaders cave shamefully to transformative pressure that leaves a country far less than its founded ideal. Through their actions, they are potentially causing irreparable harm to the institution of Congress itself.

At issue is the failure of White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to comply with congressional subpoenas to testify about the 2006 firings of a handful of U.S. Attorneys. We now have an America in which Congress says, “We subpoena you.” And potential criminals say, “Yeah? F— off.”

As most people know, the Bush administration asserted executive privilege on behalf of Bolten and Miers and refused to allow them to comply with the subpoenas to testify before the House Judiciary Committee last July. It is widely understood that executive privilege only protects certain conversations and correspondences with the president and is not intended to be a blanket privilege — protecting possible wrongdoers against having to appear before Congress AT ALL.

By going far beyond specific exchanges between the president and other officials, the White House essentially asserted that Congress has no power over the executive branch and could not question executive branch officials about their activities. This is an affront to our Constitution. In the shootout of this executive power grab, it effectively leaves one branch of government fatally wounded on Main Street.

Guess what? In America, Congress is not supposed to be tied up and left for dead as potential criminals walk away with impunity. Within weeks, the few brave members of the House Judiciary Committee who were apparently still sentient and still aware of their role as Americans appropriately passed a criminal contempt resolution against both Bolten and Miers.

It was then in the hands of Democratic leaders in the House to bring the resolution to the floor for a vote.

Since then, the citizens of this High Noon scenario have been hiding under the bar stools as the black hats swagger through the nation’s abandoned thoroughfare, and chaparral rolls through the streets. Democratic leaders are hiding from the call of destiny and offering nothing but delays and excuses to avoid producing any semblance of cojones.

In July, they said there would be a vote in September. In September, they said there would be a vote in October. In October, they said a vote would be “more likely” in November. In December, it appeared as if there would be a vote in December – which was then changed to January. If this was my twelve-year-old justifying an unfinished school project, she would be grounded. If it is your congressional representatives justifying an advanced case of cowardice, they should be fired.

Then, less than two weeks ago, on January 14, the Washington Post reported, under a headline, “House Democrats Target Bolten, Miers,” that the House would likely take up the resolutions in the next “couple of weeks.” With this information coming from “Democratic leadership aides,” it appeared as if — Hallelujah! — the long wait for some semblance of justice and a faint breeze of courage might be over.

But two days ago, Politico reported that the votes on criminal contempt citations had been — Say it ain’t so! — “postponed” by House Democrats. Now they were not expected “for weeks.” Moreover, after “Democratic leadership aides” asserted in October that Congress “would be able to round up the 218 votes needed to push through the resolution from Democrats alone,” a Democratic “insider” was now saying, “When we have the votes, we’ll go ahead with this. Right now, the votes are just not there.”

So let me get this straight. The Democrats in Congress cannot even get their own members together to defend the Constitution against a supremely unpopular executive who has essentially spit in their faces, eaten their lunch and the nation’s, and publicly called them out as powerless. Not to mention the fact that they are setting a precedent for the future that any executive can emasculate any Congress and defy any subpoena after having committed possibly any crime. Still they are trembling under the barstools — summoning up, perhaps, the courage to crawl out fully prone and toss their untouched guns humbly at the feet of the posse.

Remember this: each and every member of Congress took an oath — and the oath was not to some abstract government, it was an oath TO YOU — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unlike many good people across the political spectrum who are appalled at this dismantling of the three-part system the founders put in place and the besmirching of the rule of law, Congressional Republicans have clearly decided to place their allegiance to the president and their party over their allegiance to the Constitution. This is bad enough; this is, in fact, treason. But the Democrats do not even have that party allegiance as an excuse for their treachery. They would be standing up for their party, the institution of Congress, and the Constitution by passing the contempt resolutions. What more will it take to get them to act?

Those who think — as Pelosi apparently does — that they may rock the boat through a contempt citation in a way that endangers a possible Democratic victory in September are badly misreading the public mood — as well as severely misreading the historical record. If you don’t punish those who break the law at this stage of a crackdown on liberty — through contempt citations, through the use of Congress’s jail cell for those who are found guilty of contempt, and/or through the investigations of a truly independent prosecutor — you are not going to have a transparent, accountable election in November. You will have set a benchmark for impunity and you will get greater and greater crimes committed in the certainty of impunity.

If you doubt the dangers of this, think of the Gulf of Hormuz threat a few weeks ago — oops, hoax. Because the press is actually asking questions, the Pentagon’s narrative of a vicious Iranian provocation was sidelined. But it is purely naive to believe that a White House that would ignore subpoenas and impose yet another false threat scenario on the American people will conduct a transparent election in the fall, especially if it can get away with murder — the murder of the rule of law — today.

Tell your representative to move forward with contempt. And if your representatives fail to act, the punishment should not just be removal from office in the next election; they should also be subject to investigations themselves — for abetting crimes against the Constitution.

Contempt is at issue, indeed.

Naomi Wolf is the author of The New York Times bestseller “The End of America” (Chelsea Green) and is the co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign.

A”dunk” in water, said Vice President Dick Cheney in October 2006, referring to waterboarding, is “a no-brainer for me” if it can save lives. The statement set off a media uproar and soon was hedged with Orwellian qualifiers and obfuscations: America doesn’t torture, full stop. But we use tough, “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and we won’t tell you what they are. Apparently, that means that waterboarding is not torture. Watch the trick in slow motion, but with a flashier example: (1) we saw off fingers; but (2) we do not torture; ergo (3) sawing off fingers isn’t torture.

But waterboarding is torture. The technique includes strapping a prisoner to a tilted board that elevates his feet and lowers his head and stuffing cloth into his mouth while water is poured over his (usually bagged) face. It is frequently, and inaccurately, described as creating a “sensation of drowning.” Nonsense: Waterboarding is forced drowning, interrupted, for the prisoner will die if the flow of water is not cut off in time. So in defending waterboarding, Cheney is saying that near-suffocation is not torture. Presumably, interrogators may also permissibly tie a plastic bag onto a prisoner’s head until his face turns blue. In our new paradigm, non-scarring brutality that doesn’t actually kill the prisoner is legitimate. Take a left, then another left and if you pass death, you’ve gone too far.

Like other tortures, waterboarding has a history, and oh how soon we forget. An American soldier was court-martialed in 1968 when the Washington Post ran a photo of him waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner, and, in 1947, the United States prosecuted Japanese officer Yukio Asano for war crimes for the same behavior. Darius Rejali, a political scientist and noted expert on torture, explains that waterboarding is simply a variant of an old Dutch style of water choking. Dutch paymasters used it on British merchants in the East Indies as early as 1622, presumably as a sort of early kneecapping when the Brits didn’t meet sales figures. Waterboarding also appeared briefly in Algeria and Cyprus in the 1950s, and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia in the 1970s.

Rejali’s massive book, “Torture and Democracy,” is an exhaustive study of this and other “clean tortures,” or tortures that leave no permanent scars. Electrotorture, water tortures, stress and duress positions, beating, noise, drugs and forced exercises all make an appearance. The book is a towering achievement, a serious work of social science on an urgent topic that is too frequently surrounded by assumption and myth. It should be read and disseminated widely. Better hold Cheney’s copy, though – he’d probably mine the appendices for new ideas.

The book is devoted to exploding one myth in particular: that clean tortures can casually and reliably be traced to the ancients, or, failing that, to the Nazis. Rejali’s provocative thesis is that most clean tortures were actually born in democracies, especially imperial Britain and France. He persuasively argues that the rise of clean torture was a reaction to transparency and monitoring in democratic states: Torturers could carry on despite public scrutiny as long as they left no scars. Although Rejali does not discuss it, this thesis plays out daily in the American legal system. Immigration courts, for instance, handle thousands of asylum applications every year, and judges usually demand that alleged torture victims produce evidence of scarring or hospitalization. No scars means no torture, and the applicant is sent home.

To his great credit, Rejali repeatedly stresses that countries that use clean torture aren’t as awful or as culpable as traditional torturers of the eye-gouging and genital-poking variety. One suspects that most prisoners would rather be interrogated in the United States than in Syria or North Korea, where they would not only suffer but be maimed and usually killed as well. But clean torture is increasingly a problem in the developing world, too, because international human rights monitors now shine their lights into even the darkest corners.

One criticism is that Rejali pays insufficient attention to the possibility that democracies use clean tortures not to avoid detection but because the techniques are less barbaric than traditional tortures used in other countries. Forcing a sopping wet Guantanamo prisoner to do jumping jacks until he passes out in a freezing room next to blaring speakers sounds a lot like torture. But if we must quantify suffering, it’s not as bad as having one’s limbs hacked off one by one and the stumps fried with a blowtorch. For one thing, although all torture is psychologically devastating, clean torture does not create the added terror of permanent disfigurement.

But the justification of any torture assumes that it works even though it is nasty. Rejali ends the book with a devastating critique, showing that torture is actually worse than futile. Since it is done in secret, it is hard to analyze systematically, but Rejali debunks the anecdotal cases cited by torture apologists such as Alan Dershowitz, showing that claimed “ticking time bomb” victories are overblown, unsubstantiated or at best produced redundant information. Rejali also reminds us in vivid terms that prisoners will say anything under torture – Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, helped establish the since-discredited “connection” between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was cited by President Bush, George Tenet and Colin Powell as grounds for invading Iraq.

This is an unhappy subject to tackle, and at 849 pages, “Torture and Democracy” can be a fearsome book. (”This chapter covers ways of striking other human beings with whips and sticks that leave few marks.”) Rejali ends it with a poignant admission of how much his research has taken out of him, saying that he retreated to “my scotch, my accordion, my friends, and my surfboard.” But if his work has been difficult, it has also been terribly important. May it not be in vain.

Michael O’Donnell is a lawyer and writer in Chicago.

27/01/08 “ICH ” — — – What a ding-dong I am!

For months – nay, years! – I’ve been ranting about how screwed up the war in Iraq has been, and how disastrous have been its consequences.

What a fool I’ve been! In reality, it’s actually turned out pretty great.

That’s what I learned when I read William Kristol’s recent New York Times piece, “The Democrats’ Fairy Tale”. In a stroke of thoughtfulness, generosity and uncanny prescience, the Times was kind enough recently to hire Kristol to write a regular column for their op-ed page. I guess that’s because Ariel Sharon was unavailable and David Duke was on vacation.

And bless his little heart, Kristol knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Heck, he’s the one who got us into Iraq in the first place! He’s been telling us for a long time what a cool thing it would be to knock over that tin-pot Saddam Hussein crank, and damned if he didn’t convince the president to do it, despite Bush’s decades of foreign policy experience.

But it’s been a rough couple of years for Ol’ Bill, ‘cause the whole damn country went into some sort of narcoleptic, apoplectic, pathogenic tizzy about the war, crying fickle and foul at every turn and seeming like all everyone wanted was to end the darned thing. Imagine that. What a bunch of whiney little self-interested twits, squealing like a continent full of Europeans, and utterly failing to see the great wisdom of Young William’s Grand Adventure In Mesopotamia. It’s really quite nauseating, isn’t it?

In his article, Kristol really rips the Democrats, and don’t they ever deserve it. Now that Iraq appears to be marginally more peaceful than it was last year at this time, Kristol is angry because, as he puts it: “It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge – let alone celebrate – progress in Iraq”.

Bill is angry because the Democrats (and the public – but, oddly, he doesn’t mention that part) still want to end the war – even though it’s been a huge success! They should “celebrate” it, instead! Fortunately, he is clever enough to suss out the real reason for this childish intransigence. It’s not, as Hillary put it, because the Iraqis know the Democrats will shut off the supply valve of endless wasted dollars and soon-to-be casualties headed to Baghdad. As Kristol notes, “That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of … George W. Bush. The horror!”

I must admit I’ve suffered from some of the same confusion as the Dumb Dems, whom I think we can all agree are simply hopelessly naive pacifists intent on allowing our country to be taken over by Very Bad People (of less than fully white complexion) who mean us harm. You know the type I mean, like George McGovern, who flew all those bombing missions during World War II while Little Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Kristol and the rest fought … valiantly … in … Viet … oh, never mind. Anyhow, that hopeless and dangerous idealism is why, just one year before the Iraq war, every single Democrat in the Congress opposed the invasion of Afghanistan except for … well, except for … every single Democrat in Congress other than one. Okay, never mind on that one too.

Look, let’s get down to brass tacks here. Kristol just gets it. The rest of us don’t. He realizes that in the grand scheme of things – “World War IV” as his pappy likes to call it – what’s important is not the big picture, but the very narrowest.

You may think, for example, that promulgating egregious lies in order to shove your way into am Iraq war that no one else wants is stupid and counterproductive, damaging the credibility and interests of the United States, and probably accounting for the lack of allied support in a more credible war in Afghanistan. But Bill Kristol knows better.

You may think that fighting a war that massively drains military, diplomatic and financial resources away from the real enemies of the country in order to pursue a pet project that has nothing to do with those genuine threats would be idiotic and suicidal. But that’s ‘cause you’re not as smart as William Kristol.

You might believe that it was a ludicrous waste of blood and treasure to kill 4,000 Americans and one million Iraqis, while borrowing and spending a trillion bucks (fast going up to two) in order to invade a country that had neither attacked us nor threatened us. And that doing so was an extremely poor choice of resource allocation, especially when we have tens of millions of children doing without healthcare in this country. But if you were a clever neoconservative like Bill Kristol you’d know better.

You might think that wrecking our military and compromising American security over a non-problem – indeed, a problem that people like Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds and Reagans once very much created and encouraged – would be a stupid choice of priorities. But that’s only because you don’t have the foreign policy insight of someone like Bill Kristol.

And let me guess – I bet you also think that launching a war that brings chaos to a vital and volatile area, and that massively increases the power of an Iran run by radical theocrats was a really, really dumb idea. But if you were Bill Kristol you’d realize that all we need is a third war against an Islamic country, and we can clean up the whole mess all at once!

Or maybe you’re like all those American intelligence agencies, who collectively reported last year that the Iraq war was actually creating anti-American terrorists rather than eradicating them. But if you were as smart as Mr. Bill and his Kristol Ball, you’d know that they’re all just a bunch of long-haired and bearded blame-America-first left-wing Berkeley rejects running covert ops for the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies. Of course they’re going to diss the war! It’s going well, and those unpatriotic spooks can’t stand that because they hate America!

Maybe you’re angry because you think the same American soldiers whom people like George W. Bush are always hiding behind should actually have adequate armor to fight the war they’ve been thrust into, rather than their families having to hold bake sales to buy it for them. And maybe you also think they should be treated a wee bit better than they have been at Walter Reed (and far beyond) when they come home wounded, or they have to fight harder than in Anbar to get the benefits owed to them out of the military. But what Bill Kristol knows is that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs! So lighten up on that whole concern-for-the-troops thing already. (Unless you’re the president doing a photo-op, of course.)

Don’t tell me you’re chagrined at the idea that American forces may be in Iraq for another decade, or even for a full “generation”. Probably that’s just because you or someone you know might have to go fight there. People like Kristol never do, of course, so why should he worry?

Are you angry that well-connected cronies and corporations got rich off this war? That eight billion dollars in cash went completely missing in Iraq? That multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts got paid out for jobs never done? That American soldiers worked and bled and died for peanuts alongside mercenaries making four times as much salary? That we will be paying for this war in interest on loans and expensive treatment of the wounded for generations to come? Yeah? Well Bill Kristol thinks you should get your priorities straight!

Have you somehow come to the conclusion that turning one-fifth of Iraq’s 25 million people into either corpses or refugees hasn’t exactly been a great liberating service to that country? You know, sorta like when we told them to rise up but then stood by and watched Saddam mow them down. Or when we turned a blind eye to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, and even protected him from condemnation for those crimes at the UN? Bill Kristol thinks that’s because you just don’t know the true value of freedom and democracy. Oh, and you put too much emphasis on that whole not-getting-killed thing.

Are you one of those whiney liberals who believe that this war – whether one supported the idea of it originally or not – has been ridiculously mishandled from the beginning? That there were never enough troops sent in? That allowing rampant looting was stupid? That failing to have plans for the occupation of a country of 25 million people constitutes criminal negligence? That firing the Iraqi army was just as idiotic as sending thousands of armed and angry men home unemployed sounds like it would be? That purging the national government and infrastructure of all Baath Party members was a prescription for chaos? That allowing civil war between Sunni and Shiite was disastrous? Yeah, well, Bill Kristol knows better. He understands that what’s really important is that the massive levels of violence and pandemonium of these last FIVE years (count ‘em) are now possibly slightly lower than the outrageous levels they’ve long been at, and could conceivably stay that way.

Can’t you see the small picture here? Kristol can. I guess that’s why he has a New York Times column and you don’t. I guess that’s why the president listens to his advice and not yours.

Who could blame him for being angry and vituperative toward dangerously silly Democrats who don’t see the peril facing our civilization?

Such quibblers! So what if the war was sold on completely fabricated lies, was supposed to be a cakewalk but has now lasted longer than World War II, has divided the country and made the world hate us, has squandered our (borrowed) resources and broken our military, has brought instability to a volatile and crucial region and allowed a real national antagonist to double its power, has diverted our resources from the still-uncaptured guy who supposedly attacked us on 9/11, has become a factory for producing anti-American terrorists, has wiped out over a million innocent people and turned more than four million into refugees? So what if this war has now supposedly been ‘saved’ by precisely the same strategy that was vehemently rejected by the same people in the beginning?

Let’s keep our priorities straight here, people. All that really matters is that we’ve seen a possible slight improvement in levels of violence in Iraq over the last couple of months (all of which may be due to a host of possible factors, including that there aren’t many people left alive to fight there anymore). Get it?

Some people think that burning down your neighbor’s house and having your own catch fire as a result is a highly stupid and really criminal thing to do. What neocons like Bill Kristol understand, though – and what naive liberals will never get – is that what really matters is whether you can slightly diminish the rate at which the flames consume those dwellings, five years after starting the fire. That’s what’s genuinely important – not the ashes where the houses once stood.

If you understood that simple principle, you wouldn’t be complaining about this war so much. Rather, you’d be “celebrating” how well it’s going.

If you understood this logic, you’d have supported the war from the very beginning, as William Kristol did. (Which of course has nothing to do with his apparent defensiveness about it today, we can all rest assured.)

In fact, if you were as smart as Bill Kristol and the other fine folks who brought you the invasion of Iraq, you’d quit with all your smug complaints, once and for all.

And you’d realize what a great freakin’ war this really is!

In an opening speech at the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, Martin Luther King read a brief historic paper titled “Humanity and the Importance of Jazz.”

Here, in full, are his comments:

“God has brought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create – and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

“Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

“Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

“It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of “racial identity” as a problem for a multi-racial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

“Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”

Now, let’s take a closer look at what MLK had to say about jazz … point by point.

“God has brought many things out of oppression,” MLK wrote.

Yeah, racist discrimination and segregation excluded almost all African Americans from the practice of most arts and sciences before the partial triumph of the US civil rights movement in the mid 1960s. So, African Americans created their own art … jazz.

“He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create – and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations,” MLK wrote.

Jazz allows … and helps … its fans and artists to cope their environment and many different situations. After all, if these oppressed musicians … especially the greatest originators of jazz … can reach the highest level of human creativity or a level that matches the highest level anywhere and at anytime, then how can the rest of us snivel over the petty obstacles that our environment and different situations pose before us.

“Jazz speaks for life,” MLK wrote.

Well, life is a highly differentiated thing. Perhaps MLK means it speaks for all of these things that life embraces. In any case, jazz speaks “for,” not against life, whatever life is.

“The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music,” MLK wrote.

MLK jumps from jazz to blues, which jazz presupposes. Perhaps, MLK means, here, that through the blues we face or fail to face life’s difficulties and, if we’re lucky, emerged with moral courage, the essence of triumph. His point seems to be the truthfulness and the unconquerable character of jazz.

“Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence,” MLK wrote.

From blues, MLK moves on to modern jazz which, he implies, takes on more than just the “hardest realities of life.” Modern jazz through song, he says, also explores complicated urban existence, suggesting that at least some of modern jazz takes on the political and ideological rules and concepts as well as the “tradition” of moral principles so prominent in the blues. At the time of MLK’s 1964 comments on jazz, the highly political and ideological John Coltrane was the supreme “modern” jazz artist.

“When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument,” MLK wrote.

This is an extraordinary comment that takes MLK from his earlier divinity and social psychology of jazz into the aesthetics of jazz. I. Kant, the old German philosopher, says that genius is an “innate mental disposition through which nature gives a new rule to art.” MLK, here, says the say thing with less philosophical baggage. MLK’s synonym for Kant’s “nature” is earth and for Kant’s “new rule” is order and meaning that musicians create. So, according to MLK, jazz is a kind of medium through which a new or newly created order and meaning reaches us. This is not only extraordinary, it’s bold.

“It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians,” MLK wrote.

For the most part, jazz has not gotten its just credit for this historic championship, because some musicians adamantly opposed the championship. Since jazz has an overwhelmingly African American origin it came more highly recommended as a basis for the “identity among American Negroes” than other things that were of overwhelmingly Caucasoid origin … such as the caucasianation of characteristic African hair, noses, lips and other bodily features which are still fashionable as a basis of African American identity. For decades at least from the 1920s to the present, thousands of African American musicians agitated and propagandized for jazz as an identity basis to often indifferent fans. Charlies Mingus, Max Roach, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, Oscar Brown, Jr., Art Blakely, among countless others, were outstanding in this regard.

[Today, the much of the mainstream of rap and of hip hop is something of a counter-movement in art against the noble end at which jazz aims. Many degenerate and deranged African American rap and hip hop artists … many are millionaires affiliated with the reactionary and rotten GOP … routinely denounce African Americans with the the N-word and Ho-word. ]

“Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of “racial identity” as a problem for a multi-racial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls,” MLK wrote.

This reiterates the preceding point. But we may add that by “racial identity” some people mean what social class — bourgeoisie, middle class, proletariat, or lumpen — do you belong to and what ideology — bourgeois or proletariat — do you believe in. This nebulous idea of “racial identity” also meant to some people whether African Americans are entitled to entertained similar sentiments toward the people of Africa as Anglos feel for the UK, Greeks for Greece, Jews for Israel, Chinese for China, etc.

“Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these, ” MLK wrote.

Here, MLK says again what he has already said or implied. He revisits his point about the moral courage that jazz instills, especially in its audience. He is mainly concern with the universality of the aesthetical relevance and appeal of jazz … e.g., “Everybody has the Blues” and “Everybody longs for meaning.”

The essence of jazz lies in the swing rhythm. The other key characteristics of jazz are largely shared with other genres of music.

MLK does not find universality in the essence of jazz. Rather he finds its universality in the universal moral and intellectual make-up of humanity — “”Everybody has the Blues” and “Everybody longs for meaning.”

A World Out of Joint

If there is not a restoration of some balance of power, the world will sink into a maelstrom of screwed-up governance, callous disregard for the people and a state of permanent war. The chief purpose of our neocon government is to give the Empire undisputed power and to make the giant corporations the multi-billionaire kings of this lopsided world.

Quality of life counts for nothing. The general wellbeing of the billions of people in the world, their health and education are of no importance. Job security and the fair treatment of workers are of no consequence. The good life as we know it will be gone forever, and very soon, if there is no change in the direction the present trend is leading us.

Only greed and lust for power and profit on the part of the tiny minority of sociopathic men and women who run the corporations and thus control the politicians will set the rules for the governance of the world. Everything else, everything of any human value will be deleted, annulled. There is no profit? The tyrants are not interested.

Free markets and deregulation

Neoliberalism began to take hold of the economy around 1980 with Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S., both hell-bent on redirecting the economy for the profit of the already wealthy, creating free markets all over the globe and deregulating trade and money speculation so as to set no limits for the further enrichment of the greedy.

The money would have to come from somewhere. Simple. The powerless workers would have to become increasingly powerless, the lower classes would have to become less and less educated and capable of standing up for their interests. The middle classes would have to give up their secure lives so the financial elite could bathe in champagne and blithely ignore the hardship of the working classes.

The Empire is born

Since the end of World War II especially, but actually since at least a hundred years earlier, the United States has seen itself as the undisputed Herrenvolk[1] who gave itself the right to invade and plunder countries of its own choice, defenseless countries with resources that the U.S. industrialists coveted. They saw it as their innate right to exploit countries and peoples who were unable to defend themselves, economically and militarily. Americans, the Herrenvolk, struck out and conquered, ignored international treaties, ignored the force of nationalistic feelings, ignored the rights of sovereign nations to govern themselves, to run their own economy and to solve their own internal and external disputes. Feelings of national pride and human dignity were totally disregarded and this, in the long run, will no doubt be their downfall.

How long can the Empire last?

The United States is completely set on dominating the world economically and militarily and to that purpose it has over 700 military bases in over 160 countries spread all over the globe[2]. Between this global presence and the mindboggling cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, paid for by the U.S. tax payers, the treasury has run dry and now that the U.S. is trillions in debt, mostly to Japan and China, what is the future going to be like? The tax breaks for the superrich, which started in the Clinton era and have been senselessly increased during the past seven years of misrule, are of course one of the reasons for the explosive state of the U.S. economy today. Huge tax breaks during a time of increased spending on the military seems to be a political expedient totally lacking any trace of common sense, an opportunist policy that is going to backfire one day very soon.

Considering the position the United States has put itself in, beyond all intention to cooperate with the rest of the world and totally refusing to look at the true complexity of today’s situation, it does not seem likely that the United States will ever again regain its superpower status.

But will the planet survive long enough for the rest of the world, the suppressed masses, to wake up, to gather strength and to put up powerful resistance? Will ‘We the people’ have a chance to protect our human rights, get our dignity back, stand up to the tyrants? Those robots who act like Pavlov’s dog when they see profit ahead. Profit is King. We the people have to prove to those mindless lackeys of the Empire that the world is ungovernable without the support of the masses. The blatant arrogance of the present masters of the Empire will one day soon blow up in their faces, the day it becomes obvious that the United States is not the only or even the foremost powerhouse in the world. The blindness to reality of those self-assured kings will precede their fall.

Break the people’s spirit

The present power holders are all set on depriving the people of their dignity and hope for a better life, at home and abroad. Take away people’s dignity and you break their spirit. Tyrants throughout the ages have known this basic fact. Today’s tyrants see the people as being of no importance, as having no rights. Money makes might and right. Keep the people poor and ignorant, take away their human rights, their democratic rights, their right to a vote that is sure to be counted. In fact, do away with democracy as the founding fathers meant it, and every step of improvement added to the Constitution in later days, such as the rights to vote for black people and for women.[3] That is the way we are headed in the United States under the present rule of callous robots. Those tyrants maneuver endlessly to deprive the people of any true understanding of what is being taken away from them, of how they are increasingly shut out of access to oxygen and to the living life.

Where did equality go?

Human beings as equals should not be just an empty word but the word equal should be given a true and distinct meaning. Not since the days of slavery has there been less equality in the United States. And it has been very intentionally crushed. Let us finally show up the emptiness of the word. Do away with the doublespeak of our so-called leaders who talk constantly of freedom and democracy but who mean neither. Never has a word been emptier than the neocon talk of bringing democracy to Iraq and the Middle East while it is gradually being lost at home. There is no equality in the United States and there is less and less freedom.

Stifle the efforts of the tyrants

Give the people back the right to a valid education, universal health care, job security and hope for a better future. Stamp out the self-taken right of a callous minority to run the earth and selfishly deplete its resources without the slightest thought of tomorrow. Take away their mindless and imagined right to trample on everybody else’s rights to lead a peaceful life in dignity. We must restore international laws of justice and national integrity. We must restore the people’s right to lead a life worth living and put an end to the slavery that the present leaders want to condemn us to.

There is however a big BUT. In order to achieve any of these imperative changes we need a lot of courage and cooperation. We must stand up to the tyrants, show our power by the force of our numbers. But first of all people must be informed of the rights that are taken away from them. People must wake up to reality. We must put an end to the docile acceptance of the powers grabbed by an ignorant man who calls himself a ‘war president’. What war? The phony ‘war on terror’ that was so conveniently invented after September 11.

There are places in the world, especially in Latin America, where we can see a glimmer of hope. But change must come soon, before that glimmer of hope that must expand to the rest of the world gets snuffed out and drowned.

Also, several increasingly powerful nations, such as China and India and other Asian countries are rising up and challenging the global power of the United States. The unilateral superiority of the U.S. seems to already be a phenomenon of the past. With the U.S. economy foundering and its military overextended, it should be possible to deflate the propaganda balloon and make the world see the limits of U.S. power and the lack of realism behind its arrogance.

Considering the blind and deaf majority of the members of Congress, it is going to be a true challenge to get the country’s lawmakers to draw the necessary conclusions from the state of the world at this critical time and to get them to see that the Empire is already a disappearing illusion. It only exists in their wishful thinking and in their eagerness to go on putting corporate money in their pockets.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for the Empire.