The Rag Blog

I used to feel like a fool for not being rich.

I’d see friends taking great vacations, hiring nannies, buying fabulous cars and wearing expensive jewelry.

And I’d wonder, what’s wrong with me that I’m not rich? During the dot.com bubble in the ’90s, especially, it seemed like everyone else knew a money secret.

But not now.

Right now, I’m feeling rich – not so much for what I have but for what I don’t have.

I don’t have a subprime mortgage. I don’t have any credit card debt, either. And I don’t owe more on my house than I can sell it for.

With our economy tanking big-time now, that makes me part of the nouveau riche.

In fact, I was made for the coming recession. I’m so used to not being rich, I’m hardly going to notice. I stopped buying things I couldn’t pay for a long time ago because I couldn’t stand the pain in my stomach when I’d open a credit card bill.

In fact, if my household economy were in the same shape as America’s right now, I’d be sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding my gut and rocking back and forth because I’d be on the verge of puking.

Bush inherited a robust economy and a $127 billion surplus – and he’s squandered it all like he was playing the slots in Atlantic City, betting the rent, the food, the furniture and our grandchildren’s future in the process.

He lost it all and racked up a record $5 trillion debt in the process. China owns us.

Consider what my own household economy would be like if I ran it like Bush has run America. The facts and figures are from Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia:

* He gave multi-trillion-dollar tax breaks to the rich. (I could go on a spending spree if I didn’t pay taxes! Like, I could buy a really cool-looking, expensive toilet with the money I saved by not helping the village maintain the sewer system.)

* He engaged in a ruinous war of choice in Iraq – a trillion-dollar war that’s being “paid for” off-budget. (I know! I could start a fire on the lawn of some guy my father hated and feed the flames with borrowed money.)

* He failed to invest in our decaying infrastructure, like levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis. (So what if the roof is leaking! My husband does a heck of a job bailing water with a bucket.)

* He failed to invest in basic technological research and failed to fund the education of engineers and scientists to compete with the new world brain trust in China and India. (I could create an empty slogan for my kids, kind of like “No Child Left Behind”! Much cheaper than helping them pay for college and med school.)

We’re just now opening the bill for all this prolifigate spending. And we’re starting to feel the pain.

Some are losing their homes in mortgage defaults; many are thinking twice about the price of gas before taking a road trip; the poor are showing up in greater numbers at the food pantry.

And it’s going to get much worse – for a long time. The gap between the middle and upper classes has become a chasm.

But me, I’m rich. At least for the moment. I can afford Rimadyl for my dog Huck’s arthritis, I’ve got food in the freezer, and my 10-year-old car is paid for and running.

All the rest might be stuff I want, but it’s not stuff I need.

During the Great Depression, my mother’s family ate dandelion greens for salad with their dinner. Sometimes, dandelions were their dinner. They’re a little bitter, but they go down well with oil and vinegar. And they’re very nourishing.

That’s just a little tip to keep in mind should the day come when the cost of lettuce is too dear in your household, too.

Martin Luther King will be honored today throughout America as a champion of racial justice and racial harmony. That is a pivotal legacy for the United States of America, which for 87 long years was built on the lawful enslavement of one race by another, and for another century practiced the lawful Apartheid of Jim Crow.

But he was not the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize only because of his work on civil rights and integration. He was also a profound thinker in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi on peace. Not peace in the abstract, but peace as a practical political tool. Not only peace as a social movement but peace as a method in international relations.

King critiqued the typical use of “peace” by politicians as a distant ideal toward which they are working, even while they bomb and massacre and slaughter. In his Christmas Sermon, December 24, 1967, King made this point:

‘ And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.

What is the problem?

They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.’

The reply to such an assertion from politicians, generals and others is that peace as method (rather than as distant ideal) is impractical. That the enemy is deadly and determined and will slaughter us if we attempt to deal with him through the method of peace.

But King came to this conclusion at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had the US targeted with thousands of nuclear warheads. He came to this conclusion when the Vietnam War was raging. He was not naive. He was not a babe in the woods. He was not an impractical dreamer. He was a seer, and he saw the end of war.

He saw the end of war not because war could never achieve any good. He recognized that it had in recent history accomplished what he called a “negative good,” of, say, keeping us from having to live under the jackboot of a tyrant. But the sheer destructiveness of contemporary warfare began to raise doubts in his mind, even as a young man in the late 1950s, as to whether this instrumental use of war to achieve a negative good was any longer possible.

Let us just review American wars since King began to have those doubts. There was Vietnam, where the US lost 58,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded, where it spent billions and as a result suffered from an inflationary spiral, and where it lost. It did not lose, as the Right fondly imagines, because of a stab in the back by weak-kneed civilian politicians.

The US lost in Vietnam because it fought on the wrong side of history, because it took up a French colonial project of suppressing Vietnamese Left Nationalism. The US killed perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese peasants, which surely counts as a genocide, all to no avail, because the war was poorly chosen. Ironically, Dwight Eisenhower had told the French to give up on a similar fruitless war in Algeria, because he could see that it could not be won and risked pushing the Algerians into the arms of the communists. Three or four years later Kennedy began getting us more deeply involved in precisely the same sort of war, succeeding the French. My guess is that it was because the North Vietnamese had already embraced communism; if they had been bourgeois nationalists like the Algerians, even Washington would have had more sense than to get involved. But what that generation of Cold Warriors could not see was that “communism” could often just be a banner for nationalism.

Then there were Reagan’s covert wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Afghanistan. Reagan won temporarily in Nicaragua, at the price of running nun-killing death squads. But if you check, you’ll see that Daniel Ortega is president of Nicaragua, and left-leaning regimes of the sort Reagan attempted to destabilize are in power in Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil. Reagan’s covert wars in Latin America caused a lot of trouble, harmed a lot of people, and had no long term success. In part that is because politics wells up from social and economic conditions, and is not just the creation of some individual an imperial power installs in power.

As for Reagan’s Jihad in Afghanistan, it clearly was a world-historical blunder. Had the communists stayed in power in Afghanistan, their regime would probably have just evolved after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 into a Kazakhstan-style state. Not a democracy, but stable enough and with schooling for all and an investment in development.

Instead, Reagan and his Saudi and Pakistani allies funneled the lion’s share of their covert war aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most radical of the Mujahidin leaders. They forced the Soviet Union out, and destroyed the Afghanistan communists, but the ultimate result was a) the rise of al-Qaeda and b) the rise of the Taliban.

Reagan won the Afghanistan war, but it was a Pyrrhic victory that came around to bite the US on the posterior on September 11.

So you have to ask whether any of these wars — Vietnam, Nicaragua, or Afghanistan– should have been fought. Either we lost, or the victory was temporary, or we contributed to a blowback that hit our society on 9/11.

And of course, then there is the Iraq War.

But first, let’s consider what King said about the negative good a war might have accomplished in the past. It is from “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Strength to Love, 1958:

‘ More recently I have come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations.

Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system.

But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.

If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. ‘

And given the dismal record of the failure of US wars since King wrote that in 1958, he may well have been prescient.

The Iraq War failed for many reasons, but one important cause was that contemporary warfare is too destructive to achieve political and nation-building goals. The destructiveness of the US war helped to provoke the various Iraqi insurgencies. The killing of 17 civilians at a protest in Falluja in April of 2003 was the beginning of the end of Falluja. In November and December of 2004, the US military damaged 2/3s of the city’s buildings and emptied it of its population, except for the unknown number it killed (hundreds? thousands?)

And for all the subsequent frantic US military actions, the US has not put humpty dumpty back together again, and almost certainly cannot.

The narrative of the warmongers is that war has become ever more precise, ever more useful in achieving specific diplomatic and political goals.

Need to remove a dictator? Well here is some Shock and Awe.

Need to restore human rights? Here, destroy this city to save it.

Fighting terrorism? You just need a hundred thousand more troops with more M16s!

But actually the nonviolent means of dealing with the Saddam Hussein regime turn out to have been completely effective. The United Nations inspections had actually worked, something that no one in the United States or Britain seems to want to acknowledge, even with all we now know. The inspections really did force Saddam to dismantle his WMD programs and destroy his stockpiles. The economic sanctions were useless for regime change. But as a means of destroying Saddam’s power to menace his neighbors, they were completely effective. Too effective, to the extent that they ended up harming children and civilians.

The 2003 Iraq War was not necessary if its goal was to remove the Saddam regime as a threat to US or regional security. Iraq had been disarmed and contained.

And, the 2003 Iraq War was not effective if the goal had been to restore civil society and bring democracy. Iraq lacked the essential social and political prerequisites for such a transition, and the US military is a military, not a police force.

Let us consider whether King wasn’t right in 1958, and whether contemporary warfare isn’t too destructive, too blunt an instrument to achieve even negative good any longer.

Far more al-Qaeda operatives have been busted through good police work than were ever captured on a battlefield. And, the brutality of the Iraq war has created hundreds of little Bin Ladens, as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak predicted it would.

Three main sorts of security challenges face the United States.

There is the rivalry with other nuclear powers, where war cannot be used as a tool of diplomacy because it would be far too destructive.

There is conflict between the US and small weak third world annoyances such as Iran. What the Iraq War should have taught us is that elective war is a horrible policy tool for dealing with such conflicts.

And there is the problem of terrorism, which cannot be fought with big conventional militaries. The attempt to do so just provokes insurgencies that grow potentially even more formidable.

Bush and Cheney keep imagining that they are in 1928 or 1942 or 1947. Their mindset is that of the first half of the twentieth century. They are men of the past.

Martin Luther King was a man of the future. He saw clearly that humankind has a choice. It is the choice between continuing to wage war, and surviving as a species. King was also a man in a hurry. He did not have much time. Neither do we.

It is time to wrap up the Iraq War and to, as carefully and deliberately as possible, end the US military presence in Iraq. It is not a Japan or a Germany after WW II, both of which feared the Soviet Union and so could put up with foreign bases as protection. Iraqis fear no one, such that they would accept permanent bases. The Middle East is a postcolonial region inhospitable to the humiliations of foreign domination, which its peoples struggled hard and long to end.

And it is time to take the elective war option off the table, with regard to Iran, and to the Sudan, and to Somalia, and all the others on the Neoconservative hit list.

War does not work. It is too destructive. It creates too much blowback, as with Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. It leaves too much of the city destroyed, that it meant to save, as with Falluja. It cannot midwife rights or democracy, it is too gross, too indiscriminate, too brutal for that purpose. It produces Abu Ghraib and Falluja, not Monticello.

20/01/08 “ICH” — — The Roman emperors provided bread and circuses for their people. The American empire does the same, though lately with less bread. They’re making up for it in the circuses department. I’m talking about the election charade.

It’s so sad to see otherwise intelligent people falling prey to this circus.

The election campaign began on the heels of the November 2006 election, a year earlier than prior custom. For about four days the mainstream corporate media admitted election results reflected the American people’s desire for a prompt end to the Iraq war and occupation. Then the war was dropped like a hot potato. The media under-report it and the election is a great way to change the subject.

The owners and rulers of America are timid about who they feel they can allow to be president. They are OK with war hawk H. Clinton, though she’s not their first choice. They tried but failed to manufacture Fred Thompson out of thin air.

TV debates are controlled to the last degree. Talking heads ask the official questions all of which are carefully screened. A striking example is the question to Clinton about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site that was changed to asking her if she likes to wear fur. You can’t make up this stuff.

The TV networks sidelined candidates who are too threatening. No Kucinich, Paul or Gravel. Can’t have any anti-war candidates they just represent 75 percent of the people on this most important issue.

The circus goes on; something to dull the mind of us “great unwashed.” No point in reminding us of the mass killings of the innocents the brown-skinned victims of American planes, bombs and taxes. The ruination of our boys and girls ” killed or injured in body and spirit. For example, on Jan. 10, the Associated Press reported: “U.S. bombers and jet fighters unleashed 40,000 pounds of explosives on the southern outskirts of Baghdad within 10 minutes Thursday in one of the biggest air strikes of the war.”

The election campaign is big business. It’s good for the economy. So this will go on until fall.

In the meantime all the legal, military, intelligence and police props are in place “ for martial law, with a president who said the Constitution is a g——-d piece of paper. (Nice talk.) What if there is a terrorist attack in October or November, after all the profit is taken from the election business? If there is an emergency, there just may not be an election.

This should be seen as a possibility by intelligent and progressive commentators, if not corporate media prostitutes. How disappointed I am Ralph Nader, who saved my wife’s life when our car was totaled, by having forced seat belts and air bags on the auto industry, is jumping into the fray. He should be warning the people about further war and frank dictatorship.

It’s a lot like Germany in the 1930s.

In the meantime, avert your eyes from the TV. Close them and listen. Listen with your heart. You will hear the screams of the dead ones and the injured. Stop them! Stop them from killing us!

20/01/08 “ZNet” — — One of the most telling signs of the political naiveté of liberals and the Left in the United States has been their steadfast faith in much of the worldview that blankets the imperial state they call home. Nowhere has this critical failure been more evident than in their acceptance of the premise that there really is something called a “war on terror” or “terrorism”[1]—however poorly managed its critics make it out to be—and that righting the course of this war ought to be this country’s (and the world’s) top foreign policy priority. In this perspective, Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than Iraq ought to have been the war on terror’s proper foci; most accept that the U.S. attack on Afghanistan from October 2001 on was a legitimate and necessary stage in the war. The tragic error of the Bush Administration, in this view, was that it lost sight of this priority, and diverted U.S. military action to Iraq and other theaters, reducing the commitment where it was needed.

Of course we expect to find this line of criticism expressed by the many former supporters who have fled from the sinking regime in Washington.[2] But it is striking that commentators as durably hostile to Bush policies as the New York Times’s Frank Rich should accept so many of the fundamentals of this worldview, and repeat them without embarrassment. Rich asserts that the question “Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?” A repeated theme of Rich’s work has been that the Cheney – Bush presidency is causing “as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties.” Even in late 2007, Rich still lamented the “really bad news” that, “Much as Iraq distracted America from the war against Al Qaeda, so a strike on Iran could ignite Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s thriving base and the actual central front of the war on terror.”[3]

Other expressions of faith in something called the “war on terror” abound. Thus in a long review of several books in which she urged “[r]evamping our approach to terrorism” and “recapturing hearts and minds” around the world, Harvard’s Samantha Power, a top lieutenant in the humanitarian brigade, wrote that “most Americans still rightly believe that the United States must confront Islamic terrorism—and must be relentless in preventing terrorist networks from getting weapons of mass destruction. But Bush’s premises have proved flawed….”[4] Most striking was Power’s expression of disappointment that “millions—if not billions—of people around the world do not see the difference between a suicide bomber’s attack on a pizzeria and an American attack on what turns out to be a wedding party”—the broken moral compass residing within these masses, of course, who fail to understand that only the American attacks are legitimate and that the numerous resultant casualties are but “tragic errors” and “collateral damage.”[5]

Like Samantha Power, the What We’re Fighting For statement issued in February 2002 by the Institute for American Values and signed by 60 U.S. intellectuals, including Jean Bethke Elshtain, Francis Fukuyama, Mary Ann Glendon, Samuel Huntington, Harvey C. Mansfield, Will Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Novak, Michael Walzer, George Weigel, and James Q. Wilson, declared the war on terror a “just war.” “Organized killers with global reach now threaten all of us,” it is asserted in one revealing passage. “In the name of universal human morality, and fully conscious of the restrictions and requirements of a just war, we support our government’s, and our society’s, decision to use force of arms against them.”[6] The idea that “killers with global reach” who are far more deadly and effective than Al Qaeda could be found at home doesn’t seem to occur to these intellectuals. And like Power, they also make what they believe a telling distinction between the deliberate killing of civilians, as in a suicide bombing, and “collateral damage”-type casualties even in cases where civilian casualties are vastly larger and entirely predictable, though not specifically intended.[7] Throughout these reflections, the purpose is to distinguish our murderous acts from theirs. It is the latter that constitute a “world-threatening evil…that clearly requires the use of force to remove it.”[8]

In the same mode, Princeton University international law professor Richard Falk’s early contributions to The Nation after 9/11 found a “visionary program of international, apocalyptic terrorism” behind the events. “It is truly a declaration of war from the lower depths,” Falk wrote, a “transformative shift in the nature of the terrorist challenge both conceptually and tactically….There is no indication that the forces behind the attack were acting on any basis beyond their extraordinary destructive intent….We are poised on the brink of a global, intercivilizational war without battlefields and borders….” Some weeks later, in a nod to “just war” doctrine, Falk argued that the “destruction of both the Taliban regime and the Al Qaeda network…are appropriate goals….[T]he case [against the Taliban] is strengthened,” he added, “to the degree that its governing policies are so oppressive as to give the international community the strongest possible grounds for humanitarian intervention.”[9]

Peter Beinart, a liberal-leaning former editor of the New Republic and the author of the 2006 book The Good Fight: Why Liberals—-and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, wrote in the aftermath of Cheney – Bush’s 2004 re-election: “Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism. Global jihad will be with us long after American troops stop dying in Falluja and Mosul. And thus, liberalism will rise or fall on whether it can become, again, what [Arthur] Schlesinger called ‘a fighting faith’.”[10]

Even David Cole and Jules Lobel, authors of a highly-regarded critique of Cheney – Bush policies on “Why America Is Losing the War on Terror,” take the existence of its “counterterrorism strategy” at face value; this strategy has been a “colossal failure,” they argue, because it has “compromised our spirit, strengthened our enemies and left us less free and less safe.” The U.S. war in Iraq “permitted the Administration to turn its focus from Al Qaeda, the organization that attacked us on 9/11, to Iraq, a nation that did not. The Iraq war has by virtually all accounts made the United States, the Iraqi people, many of our allies and for that matter much of the world more vulnerable to terrorists. By targeting Iraq, the Bush Administration not only siphoned off much-needed resources from the struggle against Al Qaeda but also created a golden opportunity for Al Qaeda to inspire and recruit others to attack US and allied targets. And our invasion of Iraq has turned it into the world’s premier terrorist training ground.”[11]

Elsewhere, appearing at a forum in New York City sponsored by the Open Society Institute to discuss his work, David Cole made the remarkable assertion that “no one argued” the post-9/11 U.S. attack on Afghanistan was “not a legitimate act of self-defense.” No less remarkable was Cole’s statement shortly thereafter that the United States’ “holding [of prisoners] at Guantanamo would not have been controversial practice had we given them hearings at the outset,” because, as Cole explained it, such hearings “would have identified those people as to whom we had no evidence that they were involved with Al Qaeda and then they would be released.”[12]

Cole’s first remark ignores the UN Charter, which allows an attack on another state in self-defense only when an imminent attack is threatened, and then only until such time as the Security Council acts on behalf of the threatened state. But given the absence of such urgency and the absence of a UN authorization, and given that the hijacker bombers of 9/11 were independent terrorists and not agents of a state, the October 2001 U.S. war on Afghanistan was a violation of the UN Charter and a “supreme international crime,” in the language of the Judgment at Nuremberg.[13] Would Cole have defended Cuban or Nicaraguan or Iraqi bombing attacks on Washington D.C. as legitimate acts of self-defense at any juncture in the past when the United States was attacking or sponsoring an attack on these countries? We doubt it. Cole also seems unaware that the United States attacked after refusing the Afghan government’s offer to give up bin Laden upon the presentation of evidence of his involvement in the crime.[14] Furthermore, the war began long after bin Laden and his forces had been given time to exit, and was fought mainly against the Taliban government and Afghan people, thousands of whom were killed under targeting rules that assured and resulted in numerous “tragic errors” and can reasonably be called war crimes.

Given the illegality and immorality of this war—now already well into its seventh year—the killing of people in Afghanistan cannot be regarded as “legitimate”—and neither can the taking of prisoners there under any conditions. Cole’s second remark also ignores the modes of seizure of prisoners, some turned over in exchange for cash bounties; or their treatment in Afghanistan, en route to Guantanamo, and in rendition facilities, apart from delays in or absence of “hearings at the outset.” Last, Cole is wrong even on the alleged general agreement on the legitimacy of this act of “self-defense” in Afghanistan. Despite the domestic hysteria in the United States at the time, a number of lawyers here contested its legitimacy .[15] Furthermore, a series of opinion polls in 37 different countries by Gallup International in late September 2001 found that in no less than 34 of these countries, majorities opposed a U.S. military attack on Afghanistan, preferring instead to see the events of September 11 treated as crimes (i.e., non-militarily), with extradition and trial for the alleged culprits. The three countries where opinion ran against the majority in the other 34 were the United States (54%), India (72%), and Israel (77%). Otherwise, it appears that significant and sometimes overwhelming majorities of the world’s population were opposed to the U.S. resort to war.[16]

What War on Terror?

But talk of the “failure” of the war on terror rests on the false premise that there really is such a war. This we reject on a number of grounds. First, in all serious definitions of the term,[17] terror is a means of pursuing political ends, an instrument of struggle, and it makes little sense to talk about war against a means and instrument. Furthermore, if the means consists of modes of political intimidation and publicity-seeking that use or threaten force against civilians, a major problem with the alleged “war” is that the United States and Israel also clearly use terror and support allies and agents who do the same. The “shock and awe” strategy that opened the 2002 invasion-occupation of Iraq was openly and explicitly designed to terrorize the Iraq population and armed forces. Much of the bombing and torture, and the attack that destroyed Falluja, have been designed to instill fear and intimidate the general population and resistance. Israel’s repeated bombing attacks, ground assaults, and targeted assassinations of Palestinians are also designed to create fear and apathy, that is, terrorize. As longtime Labour Party official Abba Eban admitted years ago, Israel’s bombing of Lebanon civilians was based on “the rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that afflicted populations [i.e., civilians deliberately targeted] would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities.”[18] This was a precise admission of the use of terrorism, and surely fits Israeli policy in the years of the alleged “war on terror.” Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has also acknowledged an intent to attack civilians, declaring in March 2002 that “The Palestinians must be hit and it must be very painful: we must cause them losses, victims, so that they feel the heavy price.”[19]

The United States and Israel actually engage in big-time terror, like strategic bombing, helicopter attacks, torture on a continuing basis, and large-scale invasions and invasion threats, not lower-casualty-inflicting actions like occasional plane hijackings and suicide bombings. This has long been characterized as the difference between wholesale and retail terror, the former carried out by states and on a large scale, the latter implemented by individuals and small groups, much smaller in scale, and causing fewer civilian victims than its wholesale counterpart.[20] Retail terrorists don’t maintain multiple detention centers in which they employ torture (at the height of its state terror activities in the 1970s the Argentinian military maintained an estimated 60 such centers, according to Amnesty International;[21] the United States today, on land bases and naval vessels and in client state operated facilities, uses dozens of such centers).

Furthermore, retail terror is often sponsored by the wholesale terrorists—notoriously, the Cuban refugee network operating out of the United States for decades, the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan contras, Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola in the 1980s, backed by both South Africa and the United States, the South Lebanon Army supported by Israel for years, and the Colombian rightwing death squads still in operation, with U.S. support. Thus, a meaningful war on terror would surely involve attacks on the United States and Israel as premier wholesale terrorists and sponsors, a notion we have yet to find expounded by a single one of the current war-on-terror proponents.

In short, one secret of the widespread belief that the United States and Israel are fighting—not carrying out—terror is the remarkable capacity of the Western media and intellectual class to ignore the standard definitions of terror and the reality of who does the most terrorizing, and thus to allow the Western political establishments to use the invidious word to apply to their targets. We only retaliate and engage in “counter-terror”—our targets started it and their lesser violence is terrorism.

A second and closely related secret of the swallowing of war-on-terror propaganda is the ability of the swallowers to ignore the U.S. purposes and program. They never ask: Is the United States simply responding to the 9/11 attack or do its leaders have a larger agenda for which they can use 9/11 terrorism as a cover? But this obvious question almost answers itself: Documents of the prior decade show clearly that the Bush team was openly hoping for another “Pearl Harbor” that would allow them to go on the offensive and project power in the Middle East and across the globe. In the rightfully infamous words of the Project for the New American Century (2000), “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[22] The huge military forces that have been built up in this country conveniently permit this power-projection by threat and use of force, and their buildup and use has had bipartisan support, reflecting in large measure the power and objectives of the military establishment, military contractors, and transnational corporations. The military buildup was not for defensive purposes in any meaningful sense; it was for power-projection, which is to say, for offense.

In this connection we should point out that at the time of 9/11 in the year 2001, Al Qaeda was considered by most experts to be a small non-state operation, possibly centered in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan, but loosely sprawled across the globe, and with at most only a few thousand operatives.[23] It is clear that such a small and diffuse operation called for an anti-crime and intelligence response, not a war. Of course a war could be carried out against the country which was their principal home, but given the lags involved and the threat that a war, with its civilian casualties and imperialist overtones, would possibly strengthen Al Qaeda, the quick resort to war in the post-9/11 period suggests covert motives, including vengeance and taking advantage of 9/11 for power-projection. And while a war could be launched against Afghanistan and an attack made on Al Qaeda headquarters, this was hardly a war on terror. Nor could the huge military buildup that ensued have been based on a fight in Afghanistan or against tiny Al Qaeda.[24]

It is also notable that there has been no attempt by the organizers of the war on terror to try to stop terrorism at its source by addressing the problems that have produced the terrorists and provided their recruiting base. In fact, for the organizers and their supporters in the “war on terror,” raising the question of “why” is regarded as a form of apologetics for terror, and they are uninterested in the question, satisfied with clichés about the terrorists envy, hatred of freedom, and genetic or religious proclivities. This is consistent with the view that getting rid of terror is not their aim, and that in fact they need the steady flow of resisters-terrorists which their actions produce to justify their real purpose of power projection virtually without limit. Failure to end terrorism is not a failure of the “war on terror,” it is a necessary part of its machinery of operation.

In short, the war on terror is an intellectual and propaganda cover, analogous—and in many ways a successor—to the departed “Cold War,” which in its time also served as a cover for imperial expansion. Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire (and many others) were regularly subverted or attacked on the ground of an alleged Soviet menace that had to be combated. That menace was rarely applicable to the actual cases, and the strained connection was often laughable. With that cover gone, pursuing terrorists is proving to be an admirable substitute, as once again a gullible media will accept that any targeted rebels are actual or potential terrorists and may even have links to Al Qaeda. The FARC rebels in Colombia are terrorists, but the government-supported rightwing paramilitaries who kill many more civilians than FARC are not and are the beneficiaries of U.S. “counter-terrorism” aid. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, on the other hand, which does not kill civilians, is accused of lack of cooperation in the U.S. “counter-terrorism” program, and is alleged to have “links” to U.S. targets such as Iran and Cuba, which allegedly support terrorists.[25] Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and other torture-prone states are “with us” in the war on terror; states like Venezuela, Iran and Cuba are not with us and are easily situated as terrorist or “linked” to terrorist states.

If Al Qaeda didn’t exist the United States would have had to create it, and of course it did create it back in the 1980s, as a means of destabilizing the Soviet Union. Al Qaeda’s more recent role is a classic case of “blowback.” It is also a case of resistance to power-projection, as Al Qaeda’s terrorist activities switched from combating a Soviet occupation, to combating U.S. intervention in Saudi Arabia, Palestine and elsewhere. It was also spurred by lagged resentment at being used by the United States for its Soviet destabilization purposes and then abandoned.[26]

While U.S. interventionism gave Al Qaeda a strong start, and while it continues today to facilitate Al Qaeda recruitment, it has also provoked resistance far beyond Al Qaeda, as in Iraq, where most of the resistance has nothing to do with Al Qaeda and in fact has widely turned against it. If as the United States projects power across the globe this produces resistance, and if this resistance can be labeled “terrorists,” then U.S. aggression and wholesale terror are home-free! Any country that is willing to align with the United States can get its dissidents and resistance condemned as “terrorists,” with or without links to Al Qaeda, and get U.S. military aid. The war on terror is a war of superpower power-projection, which is to say, an imperialist war on a global scale.

The issue of who terrorizes whom is hardly new. Back in 1979, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism featured the U.S. terror gulag in great detail, and even had a frontispiece showing the flow of economic and military aid from the United States to 26 of the 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in that era. Herman’s The Real Terror Network of 1982 also traced out a U.S.-sponsored terror gulag and showed its logical connection to the growth of the transnational corporation and desire for friendly state-terrorists who would produce favorable climates of investment (recall Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s statement to U.S. oil companies back at the time of his 1972 accession to power: “We’ll pass laws you need—just tell us what you want.”[27]). But these works were ignored in the mainstream and could hardly compete with Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, which traced selected retail terrorisms—falsely—to the Soviet Union. This fit the Reagan-era “war on terror” claims, which coincided with the Reagan era support of Israel’s attack on Lebanon and subsequent “iron fist” terrorism there, Reagan’s support of the Argentine military regime, Suharto, Marcos, South Africa, the Guatemalan and Salvadoran terror regimes, Savimbi, the Cuban terror network, and the Nicaraguan contras.

This historical record of U.S. terrorism and support of terrorism occasionally surfaces in the mainstream, but is brushed aside on the ground that the United States has taken a new course, so that long record can be ignored. In a classic of this genre, Michael Ignatieff, writing in the New York Times Magazine, claimed that this was so because President George Bush said so! “The democratic turn in American foreign policy has been recent,” he wrote, adding that at long last, the current George Bush has “actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right.”[28] This capacity to ignore history, and the institutional underpinning of that history, complements the mainstream media and intellectuals’ ability to take as a premise that the United States is virtuous and in its foreign dealings is trying to do good or is just defending itself against bad people and movements who for no good reason hate us. As noted, the amazing definitional systems in use are de facto Alice-in-Wonderland: Terrorism is anything I choose to target and so designate.

Two novelties of the Bush era projection of power and wholesale terrorism are their brazenness and scope. Past U.S. employment of torture, and of gulags in which to hold and work-over alleged or possible terrorists or resisters, were more or less sub rosa, the cruelties and violations of international law and U.S. involvement kept more or less plausibly deniable. The Bush team is open about them, calling for legalization of torture and their other violations of international law, which they rationalize by heavy-handed redefinitions of “torture” and claims of the inapplicability of international law to their new category of “enemy combatants.”[29] Bush also brags in public about the extension of the U.S. killing machine to distant places and the extent to which declared enemies have been removed, implicitly by killing, obviously without hearing or trial. On September 17, 2001, Bush signed a “classified Presidential Finding that authorized an unprecedented range of covert operations,” the Washington Post later reported, including “lethal measures against terrorists and the expenditure of vast funds to coax foreign intelligence services into a new era of cooperation with the CIA.”[30] And in his State of the Union speech of 2003, Bush asserted that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists” had been arrested across the globe “and many others have met a different fate—Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”[31] As Chris Floyd has pointed out, this represents the work of a “universal death squad,”[32] the authorization and accomplishments of which were barely acknowledged in the mainstream media.

U.S. state-terrorism has also been broadened in scope and is a facet of globalization. In accord with the principles of globalization, there has been a major increase in the privatization of terrorism. Blackwater Worldwide is only the best known of mercenary armies in Iraq that now outnumber regular armed force members, and who are free from some of the legal constraints of the armed forces in how they treat the local population. The global American gulag of secret prisons and torture centers to which an unknown number of people have been sent, held without trial, worked over and sometimes killed as well as tortured, is located in many countries: The “spider’s web” first described by a Council of Europe investigation identified landings and takeoffs at no fewer than 30 airports on four different continents;[33] and earlier research by Human Rights First estimated that the United States was operating dozens of major and lesser known detention centers as part of its “war on terror”: These included the obvious cases of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, the U.S. Air Force base at Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, and other suspected centers in Pakistan, Jordan, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and on U.S. Navy ships at sea.[34] Still others are operated by client and other states at the torture-producing end of the “extraordinary rendition” chain (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco). Given the vastness of this U.S. enterprise, surely we are talking about tens-of-thousands of prisoners, a great many picked-up and tortured based on rumor, the inducement of bonus payments, denunciations in vendettas, and accidents of name or location.[35] We know that a great majority of those imprisoned in sweeps in Iraq were taken without the slightest information on wrong-doing even on aggressor-occupier terms.[36] There is strong anecdotal evidence that suggests that the same is true in Afghanistan.

Another notable feature of the “war on terror” is the extent to which this mythical war has been advanced via the UN and the “international community,” the UN’s work in particular serving as an extension of U.S. policy. This has been in marked contrast to their treatment of open aggression and violations of the UN Charter’s prohibition of aggressive war. Time and again the United States and Israel have violated this fundamental international law during the past decade, and they are clearly the global leaders in state-terrorism that many observers believe to be the main force inspiring a global resistance and spurring on various forms of Islamic terrorism, including Al Qaeda. But instead of focusing on the causal wars and state-terrorism, following the U.S. lead the UN and international community have focused on the lesser and derivative terrorism, and taken the “war on terror” at face value. In other words, they have once again assumed the role of servants of U.S. policy, in this instance helping the aggressor states and wholesale terrorists struggle against the retail terror they inspire.

We can trace this pattern at least as far back as October 1999 (almost two years before 9/11), when the Security Council adopted Resolution 1267 “on the situation in Afghanistan.” This Resolution deplored that the “Taliban continues to provide safe haven to Usama bin Laden,” and it demanded that the “Taliban turn over Usama bin Laden without further delay to appropriate authorities in a country where he has been indicted.” 1267 also created the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee to manage this effort to squeeze the Taliban and anyone linkable to either of them.[37] At the time, bin Laden had been indicted by a U.S. Federal Court for his alleged involvement in the August 1998 suicide bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing some 250 people; Al Qaeda had also been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State. “The international community has sent a clear message,” President Bill Clinton announced. “The choice between co-operation and isolation lies with the Taliban.” But the Taliban complained that “This unfair action was taken under the pressure of the United States….So far, there has not been any evidence of Osama’s involvement in terrorism by any one”—essentially the same retort that the Taliban made to Bush White House demands after 9/11 that the Taliban surrender bin Laden.[38] 1267 thus extended key components of the 1996 U.S. Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s category of states designated “not cooperating with U.S. anti-terrorism efforts” beyond U.S. borders to the level of internationally-enforceable law.

Only four days after 1267, the Council adopted companion Resolution 1269 “on the responsibility of the Security Council in the maintenance of international peace and security.” 1269 condemned the “practices of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation,” and stressed the “vital role” of the UN “in combating terrorism.”[39] Similarly, Resolution 1373, adopted shortly after the 9/11 attacks and just days before the United States launched its war to remove the Taliban, greatly expanded the UN’s involvement in the U.S. “war on terror,” creating the Counter-Terrorism Committee to manage the fight against terrorism and criminalizing all forms of support for individuals and groups engaged in terrorism. Like 1267 and, later, 1540 (April 24, 2004), which created a committee to prevent “non-State actors” from acquiring “weapons of mass destruction,”[40] the Security Council adopted each of these resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, on the basis of which the Council is to supposed to respond to “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.”

All of this vigilance with respect to “terrorism,” and the notion that “non-State actors” and “terrorists” of the Al Qaeda variety deserve this intense UN concern, stands in dramatic contrast with the treatment of literal aggression, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and genocidal actions such as the U.S.-U.K.-UN “sanctions of mass destruction” that killed possibly a million Iraqi civilians during the years between the first and second wars against Iraq, ca. 1991-2003.[41] Yet, in his report In larger freedom (March, 2005), Kofi Annan argued that “It is time to set aside debates on so-called ‘State terrorism’. The use of force by States is already thoroughly regulated under international law. And the right to resist occupation must be understood in its true meaning. It cannot include the right to deliberately kill or maim civilians.”[42]

But these comments contain a major falsehood and reflect serious pro-state-terrorism and anti-resistance bias—there is no “thorough” regulation of state-terrorism, and in fact there is none at all, as evidenced by the fact that the United States and its allies have been able to attack three countries in a single decade (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq) without the slightest impediment from Kofi Annan’s United Nations,[43] but also in each case with the UN’s ex post facto assent. Note also Annan’s failure to suggest that states should not have the “right to deliberately kill or maim civilians,” a concern that he exhibits only as regards resisters to state violence and occupation. This despite the fact that in their recent and ongoing wars the United States and its allies have killed, maimed, starved, and driven from their homes vastly more civilians than has Al Qaeda or all of the world’s retail terrorists combined. Note also that within the targeted countries, political leaders have been captured by these aggressors, and subjected to trial by tribunals—but never the leadership of the great powers. In pursuing their enemies to the farthest reaches of the earth, they continue to enjoyed complete impunity.[44]

Concluding Note

In sum, the war on terror is a political gambit and myth used to cover over a U.S. projection of power that needed rhetorical help with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and Cold War. It has been successful because U.S. leaders could hide behind the very real 9/11 terrorist attack and pretend that their own wars, wholesale terrorist actions, and enlarged support of a string of countries—many authoritarian and engaged in state terrorism—were somehow linked to that attack and its Al Qaeda authors. But most U.S. military actions abroad since 9/11 have had little or no connection with Al Qaeda; and you cannot war on a method of struggle, especially when you, your allies and clients use those methods as well.

It is widely argued now that the war on terror has been a failure. This also is a fallacy, resting on the imputation of purpose to the war’s organizers contrary to their actual aims—they were looking for and found the new “Pearl Harbor” needed to justify a surge of U.S. force projection across the globe. It appears that Al Qaeda is stronger now than it was on September 11, 2001; but Al Qaeda was never the main target of the Bush administration. If Al Qaeda had been, the Bush administration would have tried much more seriously to apprehend bin Laden, by military or political action, and it would not have carried out policies in Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere that have played so well into bin Laden’s hand—arguably, policy responses that bin Laden hoped to provoke. If Washington really had been worried at the post-9/11 terrorist threat it would have followed through on the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations for guarding U.S. territory (ports, chemical plants, nuclear facilities, airports and other transportation hubs, and the like).[45] The fact that it hasn’t done this, but instead has adopted a cynical and politicized system of terrorism alerts, is testimony to the administration’s own private understanding of the contrived character of the war on terror and the alleged threats that we face.

Admittedly, the surge in power projection that 9/11 and the war on terror facilitated has not been a complete and unadulterated success. But the “war on terror” gambit did enable this surge to come about, and it should be recognized that the invasion-occupation of Iraq was not a diversion, its conquest was one of the intended objectives of this war. That conquest may be in jeopardy, but looked at from the standpoint of its organizers, the war has achieved some of the real goals for which it was designed; and in this critical but seldom appreciated sense it has been a success. It has facilitated two U.S. military invasions of foreign countries, served to line-up many other states behind the leader of the war, helped once again to push NATO into new, out-of-area operations, permitted a further advance in the U.S. disregard of international law, helped bring about quasi-regime changes in some major European capitals, and was the basis for the huge growth in U.S. and foreign military budgets. While its destabilization of the Middle East has possibly benefited Iran, it has given Israel a free hand in accelerated ethnic cleansing, settlements, and more ruthless treatment of the Palestinians, and the United States and Israel still continue to threaten and isolate Iran.

20/01/08 “ICH” — — A humanitarian crisis is underway as the Gaza Strip’s only power plant began to shut down on Sunday, and the tiny coastal territory entered its third full day without shipments of vital food and fuel supplies due to Israel’s punitive sanctions.

The Gaza Strip’s power plant has completely shut down on Sunday because it no longer has the fuel needed to keep running. One of the plant’s two electricity-generating turbines had already shut down by noon.

This will drastically reduce output to 25 or 30 megawatts, down from the 65 megawatts the plant produces under normal conditions. By Sunday evening the plant will shut down completely, leaving large swaths of the Gaza Strip in darkness.

Omar Kittaneh, the head of the Palestine Energy Authority in Ramallah, confirmed that by tonight, the one remaining operating turbine will be powered down, and the Gaza power plant will no longer be generating any electricity at all.

“We have asked the Israeli government to reverse its decision and to supply fuel to operate the power plant”, Dr. Kittaneh said. “We have talked to the Israeli humanitarian coordination in their Ministry of Energy [National Infrastructure]. We say this is totally Israel’s responsibility, and that reducing the fuel supplies until the plant had to shut down will affect not only the electrical system but the water supply, and the entire infrastructure in Gaza – everything.”

After months of increasingly harsh sanctions, Israel imposed a total closure on the Strip’s border crossings, even preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid. The Israeli government says the closure is punishment for an ongoing barrage of Palestinian homemade projectiles fired from the Gaza Strip.

“Famine”

180 fuel stations have shut down after Gaza residents to buy gas for cooking.

A Palestinian economist Hasan Abu Ramadan said the current humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip will be deepened by the blockade on fuel and food supplies. He warned that Gaza Strip could go from a situation of deep poverty to all out famine, disease, and malnutrition.

Abu Ramadan said that more than 80% of the Strip’s 1.5 million residents have been surviving with the help of food aid from international organizations such as UNRWA for Palestinian refugees.

International condemnation

Most international actors in the region believe there already is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, the Undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs John Holmes, who said at a press conference at UNHQ in New York on Friday that “This kind of action against the people in Gaza cannot be justified, even by those rocket attacks”.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon expressed particular concern, in a statement issued later on Friday through his spokesperson, about the “decision by Israel to close the crossing points in between Gaza and Israel used for the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Such action cuts off the population from much-needed fuel supplies used to pump water and generate electricity to homes and hospitals”.

The UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories, John Dugard, also issued a much sharper statement on Friday, saying that Israel must have foreseen the loss of life and injury to many nearby civilians when it targeted the Ministry of Interior building in Gaza City.

This, and the killings of other Palestinians during the week, plus the closures, “raise very serious questions about Israel’s respect for international law and its Commitment to the peace process”, Dugard said. He said it violates the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention, and one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law: that military action must distinguish between military targets and civilian targets.

Tumult ruled, yet memories of the time are often more distortion than reality.

The coming year will be chock-full of 1968 commemorations. Deservedly so, because that was a pivotal year in which the convulsions of a decade converged and the country slouched over the edge of a precipice.

It was, after all, the year of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite’s televised farewell to victory in that wretched war, the My Lai massacre (unknown until the next year), Eugene McCarthy’s presidential run, Columbia University’s uprising, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to run for a second full term, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, scores of subsequent riots, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Chicago Democratic Convention riots, the Miss America protest in Atlantic City, Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and election, and, for good measure, the first manned voyages in the Apollo program — not to mention Prague Spring, the French student uprising, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and, in Mexico City, the massacre of protesting students and the black power salutes of Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

All this happened and deserves the most sober reflection — and the repudiation of some commonplace errors.

First, the error of headline entrancement. One wrong way to remember 1968 is to see it as pure spectacle, nothing more than the star-studded sum of bright revolutionary lights and photogenic flames. It’s right to see the year as a sequence of shocks, but wrong to overlook what deserved to shock the nation but didn’t. Among less-heralded events worthy of recall, consider Feb. 8, when, in Orangeburg, S.C., two college students and one high-school student protesting outside a segregated bowling alley were shot dead by local police, and another 27 wounded. In the home state of Strom Thurmond, Gov. Robert E. McNair, evidence free, blamed “black-power advocates” and worried aloud that the state’s “reputation for racial harmony had been blemished.” The police were acquitted after a federal trial, but in another trial, a local jury sent civil-rights organizer Cleveland L. Sellers Jr., who had been present at the bowling alley two days earlier, to prison for “riot.”

Second, the error of overzealous revulsion, with the uprisings, protests, drugs and all-around freakiness of that year seen as so many passages to Gomorrah. In this cultural trope, a splendid, disciplined social order broke down under the pressure of such unbridled indulgences as LSD, unisex hair styles, open cohabitation and pornography. Flat factual errors escort this version. (To take but two examples: Violence in Chicago was said to be the fault of demonstrators, when it was far more the doing of police, including agents provocateurs; and, also contrary to myth, not a single bra was burned outside the pageant on the Atlantic City boardwalk, though under- and other garments were tossed into a “Freedom Trash Can,” and a living sheep was crowned Miss America.)

It is an even bigger distortion to condemn the sex, drugs and all-around weirdness of that year as “the indulgences of an elite few” — the words were Newt Gingrich’s at his moment of triumph in 1995. That position altogether mistakes the full dimension of a convulsion at work from coast to coast, in the armed forces and the community colleges and high schools as well as in the Ivy League, even on the assembly lines.

But 1968 was also a year of wishful thinking, rife with an error repeated even now in the shrines of the unreconstructed left: worship of the enemy’s enemy. Under the pressure of either/or thinking, the assumption grew that the baddest guys of the left must be the best. Darlings of the left, such as Che Guevara and the Black Panthers’ Huey Newton, were celebrated in blissful ignorance or willful denial of their harsh, authoritarian ways. All manner of drugs were extolled or condoned indiscriminately. Everything that had the look of arid establishment was condemned. When all intellectual standards were rejected as elitism, all professionalism as rank imposition, all institutions as prisons, all laws as oppression, rational thought was battered, and honorable men and women suffered unjustly.

The right way to remember the year 1968 is to give its complications their due. History is the most crooked of timbers. The egalitarianism of the civil-rights movement and a spirit of cultural adventure commingled with a whole melange of joyful and desperate reactions against white supremacy, senseless war, empty materialism and supine obedience. The result was a mutiny against all establishments, usually for good and sufficient reason, although ends were frequently violated by means.

Still, it remains true that many millions then, and in subsequent generations, freed themselves to become what they could and to restore the dignity of the American spirit. To appreciate the immensity of the upheaval is to give credit to the enduring power of the American Revolution, to its appeals for people to take control of their own lives to pursue both happiness and virtue. One may rue the overindulgences while still recognizing that the movements of the time were preludes to a necessary enlargement of democracy, freedom and moral seriousness. The good of this immense effort outweighs the bad, though — as with so many laudable efforts — it reminds us of unfulfilled promises.

In the thick of many vast differences, it’s early indeed in 2008 to tell what still reverberates 40 years on. But if nothing else, the caucus results from Iowa suggest that ideals are alive and that America strains to be reborn from the brink of calamity.

To amend one of William Blake’s proverbs, the road of excess, having trampled the ground of innocence, might yet lead to the palace of wisdom.

AHOMA, Calif. – A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America has just awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to a company that employs a top aide to former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract.0119 01

The company winning the contract was QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America (QNA), a major British-owned defence and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia. On Jan. 7, QNA’s Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, signed a five-year, 30-million-dollar contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office known as CIFA.Since 2003, CIFA has been the Pentagon’s lead domestic intelligence agency and is one of the largest employers of private contractors within the U.S. intelligence community. In 2004, it was reprimanded by Congress for spying on U.S. antiwar and religious activists opposed to the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policies.

QNA’s contract was awarded just two months after QinetiQ hired Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defence for intelligence and a longtime Rumsfeld aide, as its vice president for strategy. Cambone is the most senior of a savvy group of former high-ranking Pentagon and intelligence officials hired by QinetiQ to manage its expansion in the 50-billion-dollar U.S. market for intelligence outsourcing services.

While he was at the Pentagon, Cambone oversaw CIFA and was deeply involved in the Pentagon’s most controversial intelligence programmes. It was Cambone, for example, who reportedly issued orders to Major General Geoffrey Miller to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators in Abu Ghraib in 2003. With Rumsfeld, he also set up a special unit within the Pentagon that alienated the CIA and the State Department by running its own covert actions without seeking input from other agencies.

The new CIFA contract comes on the heels of a series of QinetiQ deals inked with the Pentagon in the booming new business of “network centric warfare” — the space-age technology-driven intelligence and warfighting policies established by Rumsfeld and Cambone during their six-year tenures at the Pentagon. Other Cambone-pioneered programmes that QinetiQ has won include military drones and robots, low-flying satellites and jamming technologies.

Cambone’s appointment at QinetiQ reflects the “incestuous” relationships that exist between former officials and private intelligence contractors, said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and a long-time observer of U.S. intelligence.

“It’s unseemly, and what’s worse is that it has become normal,” he said in an interview. The problem, he added, “is not so much a conflict of interest as it is a coincidence of interests — the intelligence community and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical.”

QinetiQ was created in 2001 when the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) split up the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA), its equivalent to the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One part of the company remained inside the MoD, but the other half was sold to the private sector and became QinetiQ. In February 2003, 33 percent of QinetiQ’s shares were acquired by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund with close ties to the Bush administration.

With the infusion of capital from Carlyle (which sold its shares in 2006), QinetiQ went on a U.S. buying spree. In November 2004, for example, it acquired Foster-Miller, which builds what it calls “mobile platforms” for the U.S. military, including the Talon robot, a battery-powered machine loaded with night-vision cameras and sensors that can fire both machine gun bullets and anti-tank weapons. The five other companies it acquired hold contracts with a range of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites, and the Department of Homeland Security.

With 1.5 billion dollars in defence revenue in 2006, QNA is now the 11th largest U.S. intelligence contractor. QinetiQ officials were not available for comment on Cambone’s appointment or any other matter. As for the former undersecretary of defence, “Stephen Cambone is not interested in an interview at this time,” said Sophie Barrett, QNA’s spokesperson.

QinetiQ’s main reason for hiring Stephen Cambone was the fact that he had the unprecedented job of commanding the full spectrum of defence intelligence agencies controlled by the Pentagon. He also oversaw CIFA, which he helped set up in 2003 and transformed into one of the U.S. government’s largest collectors of domestic intelligence. Despite occasional criticism from the U.S. Congress for spying on ordinary U.S. citizens, it has thrived at the Pentagon during the administrations of both Donald Rumsfeld as well as Robert Gates, the current secretary of defence.

Cambone was also deeply involved in Rumsfeld’s so-called “transformation” policies at the Pentagon, which fused data flowing from those agencies into the Pentagon’s high-tech war machine. The decisions he made greatly reduced the Pentagon’s acquisitions of large weapons systems like aircraft carriers and radically increased its purchases of space-age war technologies as communications systems, sensors, robots, low-flying satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

It is precisely these technologies that QinetiQ produces. Its work for CIFA, the company said in the release announcing the deal, reflects QinetiQ’s role “as a pioneer in planning and executing the protection of government personnel, critical infrastructure and sensitive defence programmes.”

QinetiQ is the largest supplier of UAVs and robots to the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. It developed the Zephyr, the world’s most advanced UAV, a solar-powered drone that can transmit data and pictures continuously for periods up to three months. QinetiQ also specialises in a jamming technology (called “interference protection”) that protects satellite systems from outside activity. And the company is a major supplier of acoustic microsensors designed to track the movements of “insurgents” or “illegal immigrants”.

For QinetiQ and Cambone, therefore, this is a match made in heaven. Cambone’s insights into “national security affairs and priorities,” said CEO Duane Andrews, a former top Pentagon aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, will help shape QinetiQ’s ability “to rapidly deliver solutions to the complex challenges that face our defence and intelligence customers.”

In other words, there was a natural fit between QinetiQ’s products and Cambone’s inside knowledge of the future plans and strategies behind the U.S. intelligence enterprise.

Tim Shorrock (www.timshorrock.com) is a longtime contributor to IPS and has been writing about U.S. foreign policy for 25 years. His book on the outsourcing of U.S. intelligence will be published in May by Simon & Schuster.

FERNDALE- Scott Ritter, one of the former United Nations inspectors who didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, denounced the Bush administration for going to war with WMDs as the primary rationale in March 2003.

Now he fears the United States is on the brink of war with Iran. Ritter points to a military buildup in the region, the so-called threats to the U.S. Navy from Iranian speed boats last week and a U.S. Senate resolution that labels elements of Iran as a terrorist organization.

“It’s like filling up a house with gasoline and flicking matches at the door,” Ritter said. “Sooner or later it will connect.”

Ritter spoke to the Daily Tribune via telephone Friday while on the road in Colorado. He and media critic Jeff Cohen were driving to meet with school and church groups in Boulder and Denver this weekend for U.S. Tour of Duty, a series of public forums aimed at starting a national dialogue about global engagement.

The tour will bring Ritter and Cohen, a former Detroit resident who refers to mainstream media as the “weapons of mass distraction,” to First United Methodist Church of Ferndale, 22331 Woodward Ave., from 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 26.

The local tour stop is sponsored by the Huntington Woods Peace, Citizenship and Education Project. Spokeswoman Linda Ashley said the church can hold 700 people and she urges area residents to attend.

“We think Iran and U.S. foreign policy is a real important topic,” Ashley said. “This is a unique forum that gives our community the chance to participate in a national discussion.”

Ritter said he will present factual data that the country is heading toward another military conflict in the Middle East.

“I draw heavily on the words of the Bush administration and people can draw their own conclusion,” he said.

To him, President George W. Bush has been waging a war of words with Iran for years. He points to the president saying “all options are on the table” regarding Iran and its alleged nuclear program in 2005 and then calling Iran “a threat to world peace” last week.

“The president isn’t talking about sending Condoleezza Rice to Iran as an option,” Ritter said. “We’re not on the path of peaceful resolution through diplomacy.”

His conclusion: “What’s really going on is a road map for global domination. The war in Iraq initiated a long-term strategy neo conservatives have been formulating to divide the world into spheres of influence and dominate them economically, militarily and diplomatically.”

Wouldn’t some savvy, headline hungry reporter be following the story if that were the case? Cohen says not if they work for corporate media.

A former on-air commentator and senior producer at MSNBC, Cohen was assigned to Phil Donohue’s show before it was canceled in February 2003. He says he obtained a memo criticizing Donohue for seeming to delight in presenting guests who were anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.

“It’s because we practiced journalism and had opposing views that were terminated,” Cohen said.

After the show’s cancellation, Cohen said MSNBC issued ordered that every anti-war guest needed to be countered by two pro-war guests.

“That was their quota system to shift the debate for pro-invasion forces,” according to Cohen, who has a book out called “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”

Where does he get his news? Cohen said his home page opens to www.commondreams.org, which bills itself as a news center for the “progressive community.”

“The good news in the realm of media is that amazing things are happening with independent journalists,” Cohen said. “They are filling a huge vacuum left by corporate media that practice jingoism when it comes to war and tabloidism in general.”

Cohen and Ritter scoffed at the USA Today headline in Friday’s edition proclaiming “75 percent of Baghdad secure.”

The article says data given by the military to the newspaper provides a clear snapshot of how security has improved in Baghdad since 30,000 additional American troops arrived in Iraq last year.

“The average citizen will say things are working, but the small print shows it’s a smoke and mirrors game,” Cohen said. “It’s really quieter in Baghdad because of ethnic cleansing, concrete walls, checkpoints and al-Sadr declared a cease fire. We haven’t defeated them or got them on our side. USA Today is a misrepresentation of reality.

BAGHDAD (AP) — In the depths of a strangely cold winter in the Middle East, Iraqis complain that the lights are not on, the kerosene heaters are without fuel and the water doesn’t flow — and they blame the government.

And with the war nearing its fifth anniversary, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is feeling the discontent as well from the most powerful political centers in the majority Shiite community.

It’s a pincer movement of domestic anger that yet again could threaten al-Maliki’s hold on his Green Zone office.

“Where’s the kerosene and the water?” asked Amjad Kazim, a 56-year-old Shiite who lives in eastern Baghdad. “We hear a lot of promises but we see nothing.”

Little kerosene is available on the state-run market at the subsidized price of $0.52 a gallon. But the fuel can be found on the black market, where it goes for more than $3.79 a gallon.

Overnight temperatures since the first of the year have routinely fallen below freezing when normally they only dip into the upper 30s Fahrenheit.

An average household needs at least 1.32 gallons a day to stay warm, which translates into a monthly expense of $150, or half what an average Iraqi earns.

“I have had no electricity for a week, and I cannot afford to buy it from neighborhood generators,” said Hamdiyah Subeih, a 42-year-old homemaker from Baghdad’s Shiite Baladiyat district. “I would rather live in Saddam Hussein’s hell than the paradise of these new leaders.”

Even during the shortages of last summer’s heat, most Iraqi’s were counting on electricity for air conditioners, fans and refrigeration about half the day. Now it’s off for days at a stretch in many areas and on only a few hours daily on average, residents say.

“My children are so happy when the power comes back on they dance,” said Marwan Ouni, a 34-year-old college teacher from Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown north of Baghdad. “For me, the nonstop power cuts have made my life tedious. It’s depressing.”

That’s the view from below, despite a considerable reduction in violence across the country. The view among those who hold power here is growing equally bilious.

Stinging criticism late last week from Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of parliament’s largest Shiite bloc, was a stark break with the past. And a threat by Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric who once supported al-Maliki, not to renew an expiring six-month cease-fire he imposed on his feared militia could upend recent security progress.

In admonishing tones, al-Hakim called on the government and parliament not to be “entirely focused on political rivalries at the expense of the everyday problems faced by Iraqis.” He also demanded that lawmakers quickly adopt key legislation divvying up the country’s oil wealth and setting the rules for provincial elections to be held later this year.

He spoke of administrative and financial corruption, saying Iraqis were now forced to pay bribes to get business done with ministries and government agencies.

“It makes one’s heart bleed … it’s a violation of man’s freedom and dignity,” he told tens of thousands of supporters in Baghdad on Friday.

Al-Hakim’s harsh words carry considerable weight because his party, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, is al-Maliki’s most important backer after al-Sadr pulled ministers loyal to him from the Cabinet last year and took his 30 lawmakers out of the Shiite bloc.

Al-Hakim’s focus on the daily hardships of most Iraqis finds a ready audience among those struggling to keep warm through one of the coldest winters in years — it snowed across Baghdad for the first time in living memory on Jan. 11. And al-Sadr’s huge following among more radical Shiites could close the pincer on al-Maliki.

Don’t buy the hawks’ hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.

As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the “surge” is working.

In President Bush’s pithy formulation, the United States is now “kicking ass” in Iraq. The gallant Gen. David Petraeus, having been given the right tools, has performed miracles, redeeming a situation that once appeared hopeless. Sen. John McCain has gone so far as to declare that “we are winning in Iraq.” While few others express themselves quite so categorically, McCain’s remark captures the essence of the emerging story line: Events have (yet again) reached a turning point. There, at the far end of the tunnel, light flickers. Despite the hand-wringing of the defeatists and naysayers, victory beckons.

From the hallowed halls of the American Enterprise Institute waft facile assurances that all will come out well. AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us that the moment to acknowledge “democracy’s success in Iraq” has arrived. To his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn’t be clearer: “We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it.” In an essay entitled “Mission Accomplished” that is being touted by the AEI crowd, Bartle Bull, the foreign editor of the British magazine Prospect, instructs us that “Iraq’s biggest questions have been resolved.” Violence there “has ceased being political.” As a result, whatever mayhem still lingers is “no longer nearly as important as it was.” Meanwhile, Frederick W. Kagan, an AEI resident scholar and the arch-advocate of the surge, announces that the “credibility of the prophets of doom” has reached “a low ebb.”

Presumably Kagan and his comrades would have us believe that recent events vindicate the prophets who in 2002-03 were promoting preventive war as a key instrument of U.S. policy. By shifting the conversation to tactics, they seek to divert attention from flagrant failures of basic strategy. Yet what exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: not much.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that “Iraq is sovereign,” that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an average of 12 hours each day — six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels. Reports of widespread fraud, waste and sheer ineptitude in the administration of U.S. aid have become so commonplace that they barely last a news cycle. (Recall, for example, the 110,000 AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets intended for Iraqi security forces that, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot account for.) U.S. officials repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the paralyzing squabbling inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption within Iraqi ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide services, then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.

Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in Baghdad. By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents — an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops — U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: “We’re paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?”

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state Colin Powell’s now-famous “Pottery Barn” rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of “kicking ass” will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won’t be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, “part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative,” thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war — and leaving it to the next president — was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might “snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.” Not to worry: The “victory” gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

Such success comes at a cost. U.S. casualties in Iraq have recently declined. Yet since Petraeus famously testified before Congress last September, Iraqi insurgents have still managed to kill more than 100 Americans. Meanwhile, to fund the war, the Pentagon is burning through somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion per week. Given that further changes in U.S. policy are unlikely between now and the time that the next administration can take office and get its bearings, the lavish expenditure of American lives and treasure is almost certain to continue indefinitely.

But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest? What has the loss of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and the commitment of about $1 trillion — with more to come — actually gained the United States?

Bush had once counted on the U.S. invasion of Iraq to pay massive dividends. Iraq was central to his administration’s game plan for eliminating jihadist terrorism. It would demonstrate how U.S. power and beneficence could transform the Muslim world. Just months after the fall of Baghdad, the president declared, “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.” Democracy’s triumph in Baghdad, he announced, “will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran — that freedom can be the future of every nation.” In short, the administration saw Baghdad not as a final destination but as a way station en route to even greater successes.

In reality, the war’s effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac. Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown the United States to be the “stronger horse.” In fact, the war has revealed the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.

Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor — no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush’s successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

According to the war’s most fervent proponents, Bush’s critics have become so “invested in defeat” that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war’s perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.

Austin — Some 30 Austin activists, dressed all in black, stood in near-freezing drizzle in front of the Texas state capitol building for over an hour beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 18, to express their disgust with George Bush’s War in Iraq. The event was part of Iraq Moratorium’s ongoing “Third Friday” demonstrations against the war.

The effort was organized by MDS-Austin, CodePink and Texas Labor Against the War. These three groups have emerged as an effective working coalition that has energized a dormant but wide-spread anti-war sentiment in the capital city of Texas. In December the three groups brought over 50 spirited Christmas carolers together at the same location to greet rush hour drivers with anti-war songs.

At the Jan. 18 event CodePink had planned to line the sidewalk with footwear symbolizing the Iraqi dead. The weather didn’t permit the “In Their Shoes” display, but it didn’t keep away the crowd.

The revitalization of the Austin movement began when MDS printed and began to distribute red and white yard signs saying “Peace. Bring the Troops Home Now.” Close to 3,000 of the signs have been distributed in the Austin area and are also used as placards at demonstrations, providing some visual continuity to the movement here.

MDS leader Alice Embree said, “The Iraq Moratorium has been extremely valuable in providing an on-going vehicle for the anti-war community to grow, to coalesce. And the visibility of MDS’ signs as you drive around the city provides a connection between the activists and the larger community.”