The Rag Blog

What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush’s “surge” in Iraq? The decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress.

The American people’s attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government, which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference.

The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly.

The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and apparently faces no meaningful opposition.

Harman’s bill is called the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.”When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.

We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract.

Who will be on the “extremist beliefs” list? The answer is: civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration’s wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration’s use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration’s spying on Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group–such as environmentalists opposing politically connected developers–is also a candidate for the list.

The “Extremist Beliefs Commission” is the mechanism for identifying Americans who pose “a threat to domestic security” and a threat of “homegrown terrorism” that “cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts.”

This bill is a boon for nasty people. That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door–just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence. Moreover, “our” elected representatives will never admit that they voted for a bill and created an “Extremist Belief Commission” for which there is neither need nor constitutional basis.

That boss who harasses you for coming late to work–he’s a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can’t fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce. Every kind of quarrel and jealousy can now be settled with a phone call to Homeland Security.

Soon Halliburton will be building more detention centers.

Americans are so far removed from the roots of their liberty that they just don’t get it. Most Americans don’t know what habeas corpus is or why it is important to them. But they know what they want, and Jane Harman has given them a new way to settle scores and to advance their own interests.

Even educated liberals believe that the US Constitution is a “living document” that can be changed to mean whatever it needs to mean in order to accommodate some new important cause, such as abortion and legal privileges for minorities and the handicapped. Today it is the “war on terror” that the Constitution must accommodate. Tomorrow it can be the war on whomever or whatever.

Think about it. More than six years ago the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. The US government blamed it on al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report has been subjected to criticism by a large number of qualified people–including the commission’s chairman and co-chairman.

Since 9/11 there have been no terrorist attacks in the US. The FBI has tried to orchestrate a few, but the “terrorist plots” never got beyond talk organized and led by FBI agents. There are no visible extremist groups other than the neoconservatives that control the government in Washington. But somehow the House of Representatives overwhelmingly sees a need to create a commission to take testimony and search out extremist views (outside of Washington, of course).

This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice (sic) Department declared that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these “patriotic” views are extremist.

The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates.

Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks to 2007’s greatest failure–the Democratic Congress–there is to be an “Extremist Beliefs Commission” to secure inmates for Bush’s detention centers.

President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause the “untamed fire of freedom” to “reach the darkest corners of our world.” Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is being extinguished.

The light of liberty has gone out in the United States.

Imminent Threat

The binary worldview of “us” versus “them,” cultivated and nurtured by institutional leaders and perpetuated by corporate-state propaganda ministers, is sacrosanct orthodoxy. Those in positions of power would have us believe that there are forces of Cold War proportion out in the exterior waiting for the moment to strike and impose their mores upon the “American Way of Life.” Again and again they tell the public that “they” want to break “our” will; that “they” hate “us,” what “we” stand for, “our” freedoms, “our” way of life. Leaders incessantly declare that there are fanatics (mainly Muslim) who want to enforce their mode of existence onto Americans, that “they” want to establish, and export, a Caliphate (the Islamic form of government representing the political unity and leadership of the Muslim world); that America is in a never-ending state of threat. They unabatedly contend that “we” must fight “them” over there, so that “we” do not have to fight “them” over here.

Indeed, there are lunatics of the ultra-orthodox strain, fanatical perverts of many religions who are bent on creating a utopia of their own through wanton violence and destruction. Both inside and outside our borders, homegrown or not, radical groups can summon the ability to wreak havoc. However, we have been misled, for some time now, about the magnitude and true reality of happenings outside, and inside, the country. Most radical groups in the exterior are sparse, disconnected factions comprised of Third World populations in a deep political and economic crisis that most often “eclipse religion.”[1] What many have been led to believe—that there are killers on the prowl everywhere waiting to strike at us because we are an industrialized, “democratic” nation-state with “free” institutions and massive wealth—is certainly not the imminent threat. Our leaders consistently drag out the boogie-men to terrorize us and divert our attention from the real menace. That is, the political and economical fundamentalist class, a “Radical Establishment,” within our institutions backed by military might and nuclear primacy.

In this “Global War on Terror,” State controllers have manufactured an equal, an entity of their quotient. In order to produce and sustain their dominion over society and expand their frontier buffers in Cold War fashion, they must confront equivalence. The government, its concomitant apparatus of corporate-military-industry and their benefactors vie for, and maintain, a defense budget larger than that of the Cold War to fight an “enemy” not of Cold War proportion.[2]

In 2001 Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute, explained:

Whether one considers active troop strength, reserve troop strength, heavy tanks, armored infantry vehicles, airplanes, helicopters, or major warships, the United States and its allies possess a preponderance of the warriors and the tools of war, greatly exceeding the troop strengths and the number of weapons platforms in the hands of all potential adversaries combined. Beyond this numerical dominance, the United States and its allies possess important additional advantages of superiority in weapons technology as well as in communications, intelligence, logistics, training, maintenance, and mobility.[3]

More recently, retired US Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich exclaimed in his 2005 study The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, that “the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era… Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.” Thus, Bacevich said, “The primary mission of America’s far-flung military establishment is global power projection…”[4]

The Radical Establishment, these Chicken Hawk “Civilian Militarists,” demand, command, and employ extremes (economical, military and political) to achieve their goals of domination and exploitation so as to sustain their positions as beneficiaries of empire.[5] They try to manipulate and seduce us into embracing and supporting acute measures to achieve their desires. They try to convince us to cede rights for safety. They try to convince us that more surveillance equates to security and is for the public good. They try to convince us that more bombs, bullets, death and destruction will bring everlasting peace, freedom and independence. They consider themselves to be “noble heroes,” “righteous protectors of the weak…” while dispensing immense devastation to those that are, in fact, infinitely weaker—those that have minute economical, political, and military power, if any at all.[6]

The Radical Establishment and Its War of Terror

During the Cold War the late social historian E.P. Thompson described how “extremism… generate[s] its own internal contradictions.” In this calculated “Long War,” the Radical Establishment demands “absolute antagonism, which can only be resolved by… extermination.”[7] In their quest to exterminate via extremes, they have inverted the nation’s self-prescribed principles to match their doctrine. Freedom is tyranny; life is death; security is surveillance; protection is control; democracy is dictatorship. By way of endemic perception and pathological pursuit these extremists embody their concocted antagonist of Cold War dimension. Liberty and autonomy are vanishing, slowly eroding under the torrential weight of elitist-extremist conduct. They see threats to their established power in every corner of our own society and the world at large.[8]

Many of these extremist ideologues would have us believe that violent conduct is confined to the “barbarous other” in the exterior, that America is discharged from atrocity, because it does not commit atrocity. It acts in the name of all that is good, moral and sacred. To question that, then, would be to question all that is good, moral and sacred. This is, essentially, a great fallacy.

Many institutional radicals lobby for and sanctify acts of aggression and butchery, but do not sell them as such. The fundamentalist class—official and governmental, corporate and private—surrounds itself with elections, laws, and Constitutional authority to achieve its objectives.[9] The Radical Establishment claims itself to be the harbinger of justice, virtue and democratic tenets. Individual acts of vigilanteism and destruction equate to terrorism, but collective acts of aggression and demolition by technologically superior “democratic” nation-states do not.

Nineteen hijackers take control of passenger aircrafts and slam them into the economic and military hubs of the American empire, the total fallout is deaths in the thousands; yes, this is indeed terrorism. The United States retaliates by launching a full scale invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result: over a million civilian casualties (nearly three hundred times more than that of 9/11) and the upending of people’s means of survival; this is not considered terrorism.[10]

A foreign nationalist shoots down coalition soldiers and posts the horrendous act on the internet for the world to see; yes, this is indeed terrorism. Corporate mercenaries contracted by our government are caught on video opening fire on civilians without provocation, justification and hesitation; this is not considered terrorism.[11]

A suicide bomber kills several coalition soldiers, while at the same time killing innocent bystanders; yes, this is indeed terrorism. A jingoistic bombardier barrages civilians, hitting not one single “suspected terrorist”; this is not considered terrorism.[12]

Killing innocent civilians is wrong; forcing unwanted modes of existence is wrong; change by way of gunpoint is wrong; terrorism, oppression, manipulation, torture, atrocity, imperialism, and exploitation—all this is wrong. Extremism begets extremism; terrorism breeds terrorism, whether it is individual or collective. These types of extremities do not make anyone safe. They exacerbate problems and decimate the defenseless. It is an endless cycle of stupidity and senselessness, a never ending confrontation that the Radical Establishment packages and sells to us as our necessity when it is really their desire.

As historian and World War II veteran Howard Zinn recently explained, “There are societies that do not pretend to be ‘civilized’—military dictatorships and totalitarian states—and execute their victims without ceremony. Then there nations like the United States, whose claim to be civilized rests on the fact that its punishments are legitimized by a complex set of judicial procedures.”[13] He continued, “Terrorism is the killing of innocent people in order to send a message… So long as our government engages in terrorism,” the terrorism of war, “claiming always that it is done for democracy or freedom or to send a message to some other government, there will be more” terrorism and terrorists that follow its example. “Individual acts of terrorism will continue and they will be called—rightly—fanaticism. Government terrorism, on a much larger scale, will continue, and that will be called “‘foreign policy.’”[14]

The pertinent question Zinn asked was, “Isn’t it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through [the terror of war] doesn’t work, that it only leads to more terrorism?”[15]

The most recent report by the main advisory department to the Bush Administration, National Counterterrorism Center, concluded, “Terrorist attacks against noncombatants nearly doubled in Iraq… and were up sharply in Afghanistan, with those two countries alone accounting for a 29 percent increase in terrorism worldwide… The two countries where large numbers of American combat troops are deployed are also where terrorism is rising fastest. Terrorist attacks are up 91 percent in Iraq and 53 percent in Afghanistan.”[16] The answer to Zinn’s question is, then, unfortunately, “No,” it is not clear by now. Nothing has been learned or taken into account. Addicted to the status quo, everywhere are “hideous threats to established power…”[17] Measures, however extreme, must be taken to assert and reassert domination, quail the loss of legitimacy, and maintain a clenched fist over society and the globe.

“War is a Racket”

In 1935 Smedley D. Butler, retired Brigadier General of the United States Marines, stated:

WAR is a racket…. A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes… Out of war nations acquire additional territory… This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill… This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.[18]

With the national debt at $9 trillion, and climbing at a rate of approximately $1.5 billion a day, the now Democratic-led-Congress continues to appropriate tax payer money in the billions for continued warfare.[19] The Defense Department persistently siphons these funds to private-military-industrialist coffers to maintain the errand of global domination and continued bid for empire.

We, and the entire world, are less safe today and in fantastically bad shape because of these extremist death dealers who have plunged us into a “Long War” for profit. The Radical Establishment was repeatedly warned of the “potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion… before the [Iraq] war began.”[20] In 2006, it was confirmed—via National Intelligence Estimate—by the National Intelligence Council that “the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism.”[21] In January of 2007, the Council again concluded, “Iraqi society’s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of the security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism…”[22] The Administration attributes the current drop in violence to its much touted strategy of “troop surge.” Yet, as the Council has cautioned, “even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation…”[23]

With the implementation of the doctrine of Preemptive War, the fundamentalist class has instigated a spike in the radicalization of foreign populations, terrorist activities and the manufacture and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.[24] States, some with nuclear arsenal, have taken a protective posture; both they and the global hegemon have itchy trigger fingers, one poised to strike at the other in “defense.” In addition, they have sent our youth to kill and be killed. The Armed Forces is now devastated, overstretched and virtually incapable of responding to factual threats, as 2007 passed as the “deadliest for US troops.”[25]

The Radical Establishment has caused us to become the most hated nation-state on the face of the earth, not because of our “freedoms,” wealth and “democracy,” but because of their reckless conduct, their willingness to play Russian roulette with our lives.[26] As Noam Chomsky has expressed, for these Radical Civilian Militarists, “It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today is only that the stakes are enormously higher.”[27] Their “rational calculation” has amounted to the implementation of their methods of fair dealing without regard for the realistic consequences for us. They are transporting and applying their “civilized” system of “stabilization” without care for the fallout.

Extremism and Long War

These extremists in positions of authority personify the manufactured body they tell us must be destroyed. They are forcing their inverted notions of peace, freedom, civilization and democracy upon communities abroad by way of the most savage means—all in the name of benevolence, morality, and righteousness for our ears. Indeed, under the cover of pleasant oratory they are terminating innocent life; they are the force of Cold War proportion, thrusting their systems of management and modes of production onto others. Tutelage in dictatorial democracy, unfettered, predatory global commerce, and State clientelism are the way toward progress and tranquility. Consequences are secondary.

Their extremities have produced Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, war without end, more death and destruction than that of 9/11; terrorism, torture, unresponsive leadership, divisiveness, xenophobia, hate, fear, death, destruction and the expansion of neo-liberal economic ethos (a disastrous form of capitalism) of profit over the needs of people. Backed by military might and nuclear primacy, they will stop at nothing to achieve their ends and sustain their positions of power, their dominion over society and the globe via full spectrum dominance—land, sea, air and space.

This is their path toward sustaining the status-quo. Statist radicals would have us believe that our interests are synonymous; they are not. They wish to conjure sentiments of hate, fear, xenophobia, inertia, insecurity, anxiety, and pessimism so that they may capitalize on those emotions for their own ends. They want us to be aloof and divided; they want us to remain busy, struggling to survive. They want us to believe that invading Third World countries and toppling their structures and enforcing dictatorial democracies is right, just and for the benefit of security. They want us to become accustomed to the “normalization of war.”[28] They want us to see bombing underdeveloped nations as defensive; they want us to believe that the expenditure of American lives and resources is glorious, correct and beneficial when all this is wrong and to our detriment. The deified statement that “‘we’” must fight ‘them’ over there, so that ‘we’ do not have to fight ‘them’ over here,” so frequently uttered by the Radical Establishment, serves to divert our attention from the fact that “they” are already here, and pitch themselves as our “noble heroes.”

© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com

George Aleman III is an MA student in history. He is also a writer, activist and musician. His writings have appeared in Z Magazine, Dissident Voice, Third World Traveler and Axis of Logic.

This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a “live link” to the article. Thank you!

Endnotes

As the US election season draws ever nearer, the attention of political commentators, professional pundits and the corporate media is currently focused on which Democratic Party candidate will face off against the Republican choice to succeed George W Bush.

The progressive community in the US has likewise been focused on this contest to see who will lead the Democratic Party in 2008 elections. It is hoped that whoever wins this contest will lead them and the US people out of the darkness of a Republican administration, an administration, they observe, which has destroyed US standing in the world over the last eight years.

Whether it is the disaster that is the war in Iraq, whether the disrespect with which the current administration has treated the UN and international law or whether it is the astounding ignorance that it has shown in denying the irrefutable scientific evidence that climate change is the result of human activity, the common consensus among those who would happily label themselves “progressive” is that the only hope for the US in 2008 is a Democrat incumbent. Judging by the polls, this will be Hillary Clinton.

But there is a fly in the ointment. It is a word of caution arrived at via a cursory examination of recent US history – a history of war, military intervention, the subversion of human rights and democracy and economic imperialism which has been every bit as brutal and ignoble under Democratic Party administrations as under administrations led by their Republican counterparts.

Towards the end of the second world war, with Japan to all intents and purposes a defeated nation, then president Harry S Truman, a Democrat, ordered nuclear strikes against Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If this wasn’t enough, he also sanctioned the decimation of Korea and the deaths of 3 million people between 1950 and 1953.

It was a Democrat, JFK, who ordered the first US troops into Vietnam in 1963, who sanctioned an attempted armed intervention in Cuba and who initiated the embargo against the Cuban people which continues to this day.

It was Democrat Jimmy Carter, currently the world’s favourite ex-president, who initiated the doctrine of military intervention in the Middle East, who covertly provided sanctuary and funding to Pol Pot and his followers in Thailand, who poured millions into development of the neutron bomb and who sanctioned Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor in 1976, which led to the massacre of a quarter of a million East Timorese.

Then there’s Bill Clinton, that star of the Democrats, the man who, to the millions who recall his tenure in office with misty eyes and warm hearts, walks on water.

Tell that to the millions of single mothers forced to leave their kids at home while they went to work long hours to make ends meet under the Clinton welfare-to-work programme, which set in motion a transfer of wealth from poor to rich of which Ronald Reagan would have been proud.

Tell that to the Cuban people, who found their country further isolated as a consequence of the Helms-Burton Act penalising any US trading partner that also trades with Cuba, a law signed by Clinton in 1996. And tell that, finally, to the Iraqi people who saw their nation decimated for 13 years under US orchestrated, UN sanctions, sanctions in which half a million children perished, an infanticide which Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described as a “price worth paying.”

As for John Kerry, the so-called liberal from Massachusetts, he fought an election campaign in 2004 around his combat record in Vietnam, one of the most immoral and criminal wars ever waged, along with pledges to prosecute the war in Iraq even more vigorously than Bush. He also pledged to maintain US support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its repression of the Palestinian people.

Such is the human material in which so many who would describe themselves as progressive or liberal place their hopes for a new dawn in US politics.

But no-one anywhere should be under any illusions as to the true nature of this country which proclaims itself the land of the free.

The American revolution was not fought in the interests of liberty, as the official history would have us believe. It was fought in the interests of a white, property-owning class which decided that its continued prosperity would be better served by taking political power from the British.

After the successful colonisation of the continent’s indigenous population, which ended towards the end of the 18th century, and after solving the problem of slavery after the civil war by moving three million Africans from chattel slavery to wage slavery on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, where they remain to this day, the same ruling class turned its attention to the rest of the world.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had already taken care of its neighbours to the south, but to the beneficiaries of an economic system predicated on expansion, this wasn’t enough.

This is why the first world war proved such a godsend. In its wake, as a gesture of appreciation for Washington’s belated help, the British allowed the US access to the Middle East for the first time.

The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France carved up this imperial prize, handing control of Iraq’s oilfields to Britain, which brought the US in to share in the spoils as a junior partner. This arrangement lasted until after the second world war when, with Britain’s economy in tatters, the US assumed the mantle of imperial master over all.

The skilful and cynical use of repressive client regimes throughout the region post-WWII in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel achieved two things – maintenance of US economic and strategic control and the illusion of non-intervention and influence.

At various times, the mask slipped, but, overall, it was a policy that worked to keep the flow of petroleum and petrodollars going without interruption.

Beyond the Middle East, US overt and covert military interventions have taken place in every corner of the globe. From Africa to south-east Asia, from the jungles of Colombia and Vietnam to the streets of Chile, US power has been utilised with the aim of forming a world in the service of the US ruling class and its economic interests.

In the US itself, this thirst for profits has created a society in which over 44 million men, women and children are without health care, in which 35 million are mired in poverty, in which over 2 million people, more than any other nation on earth, are in prison and in which juveniles can be legally executed.

Both Democrats and Republicans have labelled next year’s presidential election the most important modern history. In terms of stemming the tide of US imperialism and its savage consequences at home and abroad, it means nothing.

Meaningful change will require more than just a change of government in the US. It will require a change in the system of government.

A court hearing has been set next week for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich in his effort to secure a spot on the Texas primary ballot, a judge said Thursday.

The hearing is in response to a lawsuit Kucinich filed Wednesday against the Texas Democratic Party, which informed the candidate that he would not be on the ballot because his application was invalid. Kucinich refused to sign a loyalty oath to support the eventual Democratic nominee for president.

Kucinich, along with country music star Willie Nelson, filed a lawsuit to get Kucinich on the ballot in Texas. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel set a Jan. 11 hearing in the case.

The civil lawsuit was delivered late Wednesday afternoon to U.S. District Court for the Western District of the United States, Kucinich spokesman Andy Juniewicz said later Wednesday.

The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order to stop the Texas Democratic Party from certifying to the Texas Secretary of State a list of candidates and to restrict the secretary of state from accepting any list that doesn’t include the name of a qualified candidate who refuses the loyalty oath.

The party must certify candidates by Monday, although the court could order them to certify a candidate after that date, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for Secretary of State Phil Wilson.

Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, also wants the court to declare that the oath requirement violates the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment in the Constitution.

“He’s right to challenge a blind loyalty oath to the Democratic Party because it’s un-American,” Willie Nelson said in a news release from the Kucinich campaign.

In the coming year, we will see a deluge of observances of the 40th anniversary of 1968. TV specials, t-shirts, conferences, websites and reunions will mark this defining year in U.S. history, and try to define its legacy. I certainly respect the movement activists who fought for a better world in the 1960s, and we still have much to learn from them. But I am also troubled that successful social movements are being situated only in a decade that is (for young people) in the distant past.

I was only six years old in 1968, and came into activism in the early 1980s. Today I’m teaching in a relatively progressive college, watching a new generation of antiwar and social justice activists come of age. Many of the students are learning about movements of the ’60s and early ’70s, and are finding plenty of books, websites and other sources about Vietnam, civil rights, women’s liberation, and other movements.

But recently I’ve gotten some questions about the upsurge of activism that took place in the 1980s. Students want to know more about Ronald Reagan, Rambo, and the Iran-Contra Scandal. But when they try to find any relevant information, it’s simply not there. For one class I searched the web to find photos and stories of the anti-apartheid and Central America solidarity movements, and was shocked by how little I found. A library search was even less useful.

There are specific reasons why the generation of 2008 knows more about 1968 than about 1988. The problem is partly technological, because the period before the Internet took off in the 1990s was simply not recorded or archived as it happened. The problem is also cultural, since the 1960s have been so ingrained into the popular consciousness that its memory (or at least the accepted version of its memory) has not been lost.

But there is a “black hole” in public memory after Woodstock and before the Web. The late ’70s and the ’80s were not as cool as the ’60s, but not as digitized as the ’90s. True, we didn’t invent tie-dye, but we did have punk Mohawks. We didn’t give Hendrix or the Dead to the world, but we did have the Clash and Grandmaster Flash. We can compare Papa Bush to Baby Bush, or Cheney, Gates and Rumsfeld to…Cheney, Gates and Rumsfeld. And we can tell you how much Mitt Romney reminds us of Max Headroom.

The implicit message of much of the 1968 nostalgia is that the world needs a massive political mobilization and countercultural revolution in order to create any real social change. Pundits are, for example, constantly comparing the current movement against the Iraq War to the much larger movement against the Vietnam War. In the ’80s, movements were definitely smaller and less vibrant than in the ’60s, and the mood was more conservative and apathetic. In other words, the 1980s were more like today.

Nevertheless, the ’80s movements had some notable successes that resonate today, and can provide some positive inspiration. Activists were able to persevere against great odds and win victories (or partial victories) that remain very relevant in the 2000s. Several examples come to mind, but there are certainly many more.

Successes of the ’80s

* Anti-apartheid. The African American community joined with student groups to form a powerful movement to end government and corporate collusion with the apartheid (racial separation) regime in South Africa. In the mid-’80s, they held rallies and sit-ins to pressure campuses and city councils to divest from companies doing business on the backs of black South Africans. By kicking out the U.S. buttress supporting apartheid, they can claim part of the credit for the final collapse of the white dictatorship, and the 1994 election that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power.

*Central America solidarity. The peace movement opposed U.S. support for the right-wing death squad regime in El Salvador fighting leftist FMLN rebels. It also opposed aid to the right-wing Contra rebels fighting the Sandinista revolutionary government in Nicaragua. The powerful movement against “another Vietnam” won a congressional cut-off of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (forcing the Reagan Administration to use surreptitious means to fund the rebels). Through the Witness and Sanctuary programs, the solidarity movement gave a human face to Central American refugees. It did not prevent the invasions that toppled nationalist governments in Grenada and Panama, but did help to prevent full-scale U.S. invasions of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

* Nuclear freeze. When medium-range missiles were stationed in Europe by the Carter Administration, an enormous global movement erupted against the growing threat of nuclear war. The widespread sentiment later pressured President Reagan to make an agreement with Soviet leaders to slowly withdraw the Euromissiles. The European movement against the nuclear arms race fueled the growth of Green parties opposing corporate globalization–long before anti-globalization was cool.

*Anti-nuke. The nuclear power plant accidents at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl galvanized horror and opposition to civilian nuclear energy. Huge rallies, concerts and local site occupations effectively halted construction of new atomic reactors and uranium mines in the U.S. (though construction continued in some other countries). Reviewing the anti-nuke literature of that era can remind us that more radioactive waste would not be a solution to global warming.

*Act Up. In the early stages of the HIV epidemic, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) began to use creative direct actions to create public awareness, using the slogan “Silence = Death.” The activism was obviously unsuccessful in halting the epidemic, but after Reagan it helped direct some government resources toward medical research, and may have slightly alleviated the homophobic ostracism that patients received. Act Up became the most visible example of the larger LGBT movement (remaining active to the present), and sparked more organizing in the community.

*Clinic defense. When the fundamentalists of Operation Rescue harassed, blocked, and sometimes attacked women entering abortion clinics, feminists around the country rallied to escort the women. The pro-choice movement successfully defended many women’s rights to a safe and legal abortion, yet many poor, rural and young women lost access to that right.

Whether it was pro-choice, Act Up, Witness, Sanctuary, anti-nuke or divestment, the ’80s movements did not rely on lobbying or presidential elections to pressure for change, but took direct action on a grassroots level. Before the Internet, we had to organize through mailings, phone trees, and something called face-to-face contact (not to be confused with Facebook). By relying on listserves and on-line petitions, we sometimes forget the powerful combination of personal organizing and direct action.

Why Study the ’80s?

When a historical era is ignored and not accurately taught, the vacuum will inevitably be filled with lies. The late Carter Administration activated the doctrine for Middle East interventions, yet today Carter is hailed as peacemaker. The Reagan-Bush Administration rationalized the secrecy and militarism we now see in the Bush-Cheney Administration (with some of the same leading figures), yet today Reagan is credited for ending the Cold War. Most of our current crises can be traced to the policies of the 1980s, and studying the lessons of that era can help guide decisions we make today: “Same Shit, Different Century.”

Vietnam Syndrome. After the U.S. lost the Vietnam War in 1975, the American public was reluctant to intervene in another debacle. The late Carter and Reagan Administrations defined this reluctance as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and began treating the “disease” with fearmongering, Rambo movies, and a series of interventions against Iran, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, etc. We can anticipate a healthy “Iraq Syndrome” following the current disastrous war, but should not relax if the U.S. withdraws from Baghdad. For example, there are direct parallels between support for right-wing death squad governments in El Salvador in the ’80s and in Colombia today, and between the destabilization of socialist governments in Nicaragua in the ’80s and in Venezuela today.

Scare tactics and lies. If you think that “War on Terror” scare tactics are harmful to civil liberties today, you shoulda’ seen the anti-Communist hysteria of the late Cold War. Instead of possibly building a single dirty bomb, the “Evil Empire” had thermonuclear missiles aimed at our cities, with both sides always on a hair-trigger alert. After the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and Iranians ousted the Shah in 1979, the “Carter Doctrine” created the Central Command to defend Middle Eastern oil fields for U.S. corporations. Since anti-Communism was not as potent an excuse as it had been earlier in the Cold War, the media and Hollywood resorted to a demonization of Muslims, which proved more effective to psych-up Americans for war.

Military pressure and democracy. Reagan followed Carter in 1981 with a massive military build-up, which his supporters credit for bringing down the Soviet Union ten years later. Yet media histories largely overlook the movements of Polish Solidarity workers and Soviet “national minorities” who internally cracked the Soviet bloc. We forgot that peoples are perfectly capable of overthrowing their own dictators, without being undermined by outside military intervention. This lesson, had we learned it, may have later proven useful in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

War with Iran. From the moment of the Iranian Revolution and seizure of hostages in the U.S. Embassy, Washington has tried to topple the Shi’ite government in Tehran. In the current Iran hysteria, how many Americans realize that the U.S. has already been at war with Iran? In 1987-88, the U.S. Navy actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, by escorting tankers carrying Iraqi oil, attacking Iranian oil rigs, sinking Iranian boats, and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner. A war with Iran is not a hypothetical future possibility, but a continuation of a long-simmering conflict.

Iran-Contra Scandal. Reagan armed both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, providing naval escorts and intelligence for Iraq, while selling missiles to Iran. Col. Oliver North secretly sold the missiles to Iran, to raise funds for the Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Henry Kissinger advised Reagan to “bleed both sides” in the Iran-Iraq War, much like Bush in Iraq today arming both the Shi’ite-led government and Sunni militias. The secrecy of the Reagan years also laid the basis of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11. Some activists saw Reagan’s “shadow government” as a Republican aberration, while others saw it as an inevitable outcome of imperial expansion — much the same debate as we have about Bush and Iraq today.

Jihadists in Afghanistan. Carter armed the Islamist mujahedin rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan, triggering the Soviet invasion in 1979. Carter’s national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski knew he was drawing the Soviets into their own “Vietnam,” which they lost within a decade. Part of the U.S. aid went to the northern Afghan groups that later controlled and fought over Kabul in 1992-96. But most U.S. aid went to Pashtun jihadist groups supported by the Pakistanis and Saudis, who sent in a young engineer named Osama bin Laden. In this way, the U.S. helped lay the groundwork for Taliban rule in 1996, and the jihadist “blowback” in 2001, when Bin Laden successfully drew another superpower into the Afghan quagmire.

Military rule in Pakistan. Much as Reagan backed Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq as a key ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Bush has backed Pervez Musharraf as a key ally against the Taliban. But in both cases, undermining democracy in Pakistan has only exacerbated the regional crisis. Benazir Bhutto has lost her life under Musharraf’s watch, just as Zia executed her father, also a former prime minister. In the 1980s, Pakistani intelligence aided the jihadists who would later become al-Qa’ida (though you wouldn’t learn this by viewing the new film Charlie Wilson’s War). If you’re looking for “9/11 Truth,” stop looking for phantom missiles shot at the Pentagon in 2001, and start looking at the real missiles that the Pentagon sent to Afghanistan two decades earlier. The true “conspiracy” was part and parcel of U.S. imperial history, not outside of that history.

Failures of ’80s movements

Like the ’60s movements, the ’80s movements made some critical mistakes. The peace movement floundered as U.S. interventions targeted Middle Eastern countries, where there were few leftist “good guys” like the ANC or FMLN, and even fewer Christian “good guys” like Archbishops Tutu or Romero. As we expressed solidarity for popular revolutions, we didn’t adequately support civilians caught between two “bad guys,” particularly in the 1991 Gulf War.

We had also hoped that an independent leftist alternative to the superpowers was possible in countries such as Nicaragua and East Germany. Yet their peoples were overawed by the West’s military power and were drawn to its consumerism, leading to conservative victories in 1990 elections. It wasn’t until recently that progressives won electoral victories in Latin America, and could again criticize capitalism in Eastern Europe.

Movements in the 1980s had trouble integrating class and anti-imperialist politics with racial/ethnic “identity politics” and the “new social movements” (feminist, LGBT, environmental, cultural, etc.). Like in the 1960s and today, white straight males held social advantages that prevented the growth of progressive movements. When activists turned to more domestic issues in the early Clinton Administration, and another upsurge of activism began against WTO globalization in the late Clinton years, these problems were carried forward.

Revisiting the ’80s

Mindful of these and other failures, veterans of 1980s movements have never drawn much attention to our experiences. We’ve been reluctant to tell the stories of the ’80s, lest we sound like the ’60s movement veterans who rest on the laurels of their past glories. But it has become important to revisit our memories of the ’80s, as the media focuses on memories of 1968.

It’s time to look in the basement and garage for those old boxes crammed with treasures found nowhere on the Internet. Dust off those old glossies and xeroxed newsletters and ‘zines, and warm up the scanner. Get those stories and images on the web or, better yet, set up websites where people can post their own memories, and apply past lessons to the present day. Assign students to interview 1980s activists and community organizers, and search for documents in library archives to summarize and put on-line. Hold reunions of old activist groups, and videotape them to capture the stories and strategies for new generations.

But ultimately, neither 1968 nor 1988 can really provide models for the generation of 2008. Today’s generation shouldn’t have to recycle the images of by-gone eras, or follow the templates of past student groups. Instead of always chanting the golden-oldie slogans from the Vietnam era or the WTO rallies, they can be creating their own new forms of protest, more appropriate to these wired times. But it always helps to have a fuller view of the past, to figure out what to keep and what to discard.

For those of us who experienced the 1980s, we should study our past in order to renew our own involvement in social change, to keep trying to make the world a better place. And we’d better hurry up to define our own history, before Tom Brokaw produces a special on the “’80s Generation.”

The unimaginable has happened, to the displeasure of arrogant Europe. Africa, thought to be so poor that it would agree to anything, has said no in rebellious pride. No to the straitjacket of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), no to the complete liberalisation of trade, no to the latest manifestations of the colonial pact.

It happened in December at the second EU-Africa summit in Lisbon, where the main objective was to force the African countries to sign new trade agreements by 31 December 2007 in accordance with the Cotonou Convention of 2000 winding up the 1975 Lomé accords. Under these, goods from former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are imported into the European Union more or less duty-free, except for products such as sugar, meat and bananas that are a problem for European producers. The World Trade Organisation has insisted that these preferential arrangements be dismantled or replaced by trade agreements based on reciprocity, claiming that this is the only way African countries can continue to enjoy different treatment. The EU opted for completely free trade in the guise of EPAs. So the 27 were asking African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to allow EU goods and services to enter their markets duty-free (1).

The president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, denounced these strong-arm tactics, refused to sign and stormed out. South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki immediately supported his stand and Namibia also decided not to sign (bravely, since an increase in EU customs duties would make it impossible for Namibia to export or continue to produce beef). Even French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who made unfortunate remarks at Dakar in July 2007 (2), supported the countries that were most strongly opposed to these agreements, saying he was in favour of globalisation but not the despoliation of countries that had nothing left (3).

The EPAs aroused wide public concern. Social movements and trade union organisations south of the Sahara mobilised against them. And the revolt against them bore fruit: the summit ended in failure. The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, was forced to back down and accept the African countries’ call for further discussions. He has promised to resume negotiations in February.

This crucial victory is another sign that things are improving for Africa. In the past few years, the bloodiest conflicts have been settled, leaving only Darfur, Somalia and East Congo. Democratic progress has been consolidated and local economies prosper under the guidance of a new generation of leaders, despite social inequalities.

The fallout from a combination of rising inflation and global recession seems inevitable: how can the world’s economies survive it?

The world economy has had several good years. Global growth has been strong, and the divide between the developing and developed world has narrowed, with India and China leading the way, experiencing GDP growth of 11.1% and 9.7% in 2006 and 11.5% and 8.9% in 2007, respectively. Even Africa has been doing well, with growth in excess of 5% in 2006 and 2007.

But the good times may be ending. There have been worries for years about the global imbalances caused by America’s huge overseas borrowing. America, in turn, said that the world should be thankful: by living beyond its means, it helped keep the global economy going, especially given high savings rates in Asia, which has accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves. But it was always recognised that America’s growth under President Bush was not sustainable. Now the day of reckoning looms.

America’s ill-conceived war in Iraq helped fuel a quadrupling of oil prices since 2003. In the 1970s, oil shocks led to inflation in some countries, and to recession elsewhere, as governments raised interest rates to combat rising prices. And some economies faced the worst of both worlds: stagflation.

Until now, three critical factors helped the world weather soaring oil prices. First, China, with its enormous productivity increases – based on resting on high levels of investment, including investments in education and technology – exported its deflation. Second, the US took advantage of this by lowering interest rates to unprecedented levels, inducing a housing bubble, with mortgages available to anyone not on a life-support system. Finally, workers all over the world took it on the chin, accepting lower real wages and a smaller share of GDP.

That game is up. China is now facing inflationary pressures. What’s more, if the US convinces China to let its currency appreciate, the cost of living in the US and elsewhere will rise. And, with the rise of biofuels, the food and energy markets have become integrated. Combined with increasing demand from those with higher incomes and lower supplies due to weather-related problems associated with climate change, this means high food prices – a lethal threat to developing countries.

Prospects for America’s consumption binge continuing are also bleak. Even if the US Federal Reserve continues to lower interest rates, lenders will not rush to make more bad mortgages. With house prices declining, fewer Americans will be willing and able to continue their profligacy.

The Bush administration is hoping, somehow, to forestall a wave of foreclosures – thereby passing the economy’s problems on to the next president, just as it is doing with the Iraq quagmire. Its chances of succeeding are slim. For America today, the real question is only whether there will be a short, sharp downturn, or a more prolonged, but shallower, slowdown.

Moreover, America has been exporting its problems abroad, not just by selling toxic mortgages and bad financial practices, but through the ever-weakening dollar, in part a result of flawed macro- and micro-policies. Europe, for instance, will find it increasingly difficult to export. And, in a world economy that had rested on the foundations of a “strong dollar,” the consequent financial market instability will be costly for all.

At the same time, there has been a massive global redistribution of income from oil importers to oil exporters – a disproportionate number of which are undemocratic states – and from workers everywhere to the very rich. It is not clear whether workers will continue to accept declines in their living standards in the name of an unbalanced globalisation whose promises seem ever more elusive. In America, one can feel the backlash mounting.

For those who think that a well-managed globalisation has the potential to benefit both developed and developing countries, and who believe in global social justice and the importance of democracy (and the vibrant middle class that supports it), all of this is bad news. Economic adjustments of this magnitude are always painful, but the economic pain is greater today because the winners are less prone to spend.

Indeed, the flip side of “a world awash with liquidity” is a world facing depressed aggregate demand. For the past seven years, America’s unbridled spending filled the gap. Now both US household and government spending is likely to be curbed, as both parties’ presidential candidates promise a return to fiscal responsibility. After seven years in which America has seen its national debt rise from $5.6tn to $9tn, this should be welcome news – but the timing couldn’t be worse.

There is one positive note in this dismal picture: the sources of global growth today are more diverse than they were a decade ago. The real engines of global growth in recent years have been developing countries.

Nevertheless, slower growth – or possibly a recession – in the world’s largest economy inevitably has global consequences. There will be a global slowdown. If monetary authorities respond appropriately to growing inflationary pressure – recognising that much of it is imported, and not a result of excess domestic demand – we may be able to manage our way through it. But if they raise interest rates relentlessly to meet inflation targets, we should prepare for the worst: another episode of stagflation.

If central banks go down this path, they will no doubt eventually succeed in wringing inflation out of the system. But the cost – in lost jobs, lost wages, and lost homes – will be enormous.

01/03/08 “ICH” — – -NEW YORK–What would you do if you learned that Bush Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of Americans and throw them into concentration camps?

For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It’s entirely possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are exactly what the government says they are — tools for fighting terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is it?

History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won freedoms. They’re Democrats as well as Republicans.

As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years, another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest “all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, jail them in military prisons and try them before kangaroo tribunals that “will not be bound by the rules of evidence.”

“For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation,” Hoover wrote in a 1950 memo. “These names have been compiled in an index, which index has been kept up to date.”

Capitalizing on anti-communist hysteria at the start of the Korean War, Hoover asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000 people, 97 percent of them American citizens, in order to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”

Hoover was a lunatic. Truman ought to have fired him on the spot. Instead, in September 1950 Congress took his advice and passed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman signed it. In fact, he declared such an emergency three months later. No one knows why, but the president never actually followed through with mass arrests. Hoover’s “subversives” — people suspected of left-wing political sympathies — remained free. He was wrong. There were no acts of sabotage.

It wasn’t the first time the government went “crazy.”

Between 1919 and 1921 the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI) carried out the Palmer Raids, named for Alexander Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general. The BOI rounded up 10,000 lefties, anarchists and foreigners on a list compiled by a young J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Many were tortured. Five hundred fifty were deported.

Palmer’s clampdown accomplished nothing. On September 16, 1920, a bomb attributed to anarchists went off on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding over 400.

Crazy … like a fox.

During the 1960s and 1970s the CIA — in violation of its charter, which limits the agency to acting overseas — cooperated with local police departments across the country to compile a list of 300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the Vietnam War.

On April 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 52. Reagan targeted 400,000 people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council’s “secret government within a government,” as Congressional investigators later described it, planned to cancel the 1984 presidential election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.

“Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad,” The Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987.

People who hate The People never sleep. In 2006 Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of combat troops on the soil of the United States. For the first time in 128 years, the president can declare martial law in case of a hurricane, riot or terrorist attack. In May 2007 Bush attached a National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the National Defense Authorization Act. In case of a “national emergency” — the president could declare it without consulting anyone — he could suspend the Constitution and appoint an unelected provisional government under a “national continuity coordinator.”

To an optimist, America’s brushes with fascism seem like comforting evidence that the system works. Despite it all, even taking into account grotesqueries such as the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, the First Amendment remains in force. Few Americans feel threatened by government tyranny. Few worry about getting shot by trigger-happy soldiers or being detained in concentration camps (unless they’re flood victims in New Orleans).

So why does a democracy need fascist schemes like Reagan’s Rex-84 Alpha Explan (a FEMA plan to put American protesters against a planned war against Nicaragua into camps)? Because American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove that’s becoming increasingly transparent.

Threats of repression are rarely carried out. They don’t need to be.

If potential opponents are afraid, there’s little need for concentration camps. The threat of repression (and actual crackdowns, explained away as exceptional excesses and brushed off with a token apology) creates a chilling effect on people who might pick up a rock instead of a sign.

A dog doesn’t have to bite everyone every day to earn a fearsome reputation. Mount cameras all over the place, and you don’t need to have anyone actually watching on the other side.

In a country whose legal framework authorizes the government to kidnap, torture and murder them, opponents of U.S. policy must decide whether getting out of line — anything from a letter to the editor to direct action — is worth the risk of getting kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

BAGHDAD — Dr. Ahmed Farid heard it from his family and saw it with his own eyes: his old neighborhood in Baghdad is safer, maybe secure enough to move back from the city of Basra.

Since his family left the capital city in fall 2006, one of the most brutal periods since the war began, he’s worked two medical jobs to cover rent and food. His children study in crumbling school buildings with 55 students to one teacher. Basra is close to his wife’s family, but violence is boiling and Shiite Muslim power struggles continue.

Still, he won’t return to Jihad, his Baghdad neighborhood, just yet. It’s the place where he was a target for kidnappers, his daughter woke daily from panicked nightmares and he’s not sure he can find a job.

“I think of going back,” he said after visiting his old neighborhood during Eid ald Adha celebrations last month. “But I can’t guarantee I will find the comfort, security and accommodations I have here.”

Farid, like millions of other Iraqis who fled the bombs and ambushes in 2006 and 2007, is choosing between the rising costs of displacement and the painful memories of home. For 2008, those choices will become even more difficult as Iraqi officials work to woo them back to their neighborhoods, whether services and security are ready or not.

An estimated 2 million Iraqis are living in neighboring countries; another 2.4 million have fled their homes but remain scattered around Iraq. Former residents of Baghdad make up nearly 60 percent, according to estimates.

As violence dropped in the final months of 2007, thousands of people who’d fled their homes returned, especially in Baghdad. Statistics about how many have come home vary, but Iraq’s Ministry of Displacement and Migration estimated in early December that 30,000 had returned from other countries, along with 10,000 who’d gone home from other parts of Iraq.

That success also will be 2008’s challenge, as uneasy peace and overtaxed services and utilities leave the country unprepared for mass returns.

Abdul Samad Rahman Sultan, Iraq’s migration minister, said the government would need help from other countries and aid organizations to make it possible for people to return. He said the government hoped to resettle people in the neighborhoods they’d left.

“The focus will be on returning them to their original living places, or perhaps to other residences inside their old neighborhoods,” he said.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that goal would be difficult to meet, and he predicted violence as homeowners and squatters battle over property. Petraeus warned that some people will have to resign themselves to never being able to reclaim their homes.

“That is not ideal, not right, not legal, not a lot of things, but it is reality,” he said last week. “This is just going to remain a very, very tough issue for some time.”

Coalition forces will offer some aid, but Petraeus said he didn’t have ground forces capable of organizing returns, settling property debates and maintaining safety. Those solutions will have to come from Iraqis, he said.

Dana Graber Ladek, a displacement specialist in Iraq for the International Organization for Migration, said fewer people had left their homes in 2007 compared with 2006 as security improved and neighborhoods that used to have both Sunni and Shiite Muslim residents became more homogenous.

Iraqis also had fewer options to leave because of restrictions from nearby countries that couldn’t handle droves of jobless refugees.

Ladek said that for those who didn’t come home this year conditions would worsen as costs rose and savings dwindled.

Middle-class Iraqis — “teachers, doctors, nurses and shopkeepers” — who ran out of money are the biggest group of returnees, Staffan de Mistura, a United Nations envoy in Iraq, said in December, when he warned against a mass return.

The moves already have started in some neighborhoods, such as Khadhraa, a wealthy Sunni-majority district in western Baghdad. Iraqi national police Lt. Col. Raad Ismaeel said his unit had guided the return of about 150 families, including many Shiites. The only return-related violence so far involved a displaced Shiite family that wasn’t originally from the neighborhood.

“Those who are returning are opening their arms to their neighbors. They were living in misery when they were displaced,” Ismaeel said. “Imagine someone who owns a house in a high-class neighborhood paying rent and being displaced again and again. They were desperate to come back.”

For all the improvements in Khadhraa — a 225-member citizen militia, a dozen checkpoints, newly paved roads, functioning telephone service — not everybody is convinced, Ismaeel said. So many people lost family members, property and jobs that they won’t come back unless the government helps them start over and offers consistent water, electricity, food and — most importantly — security.

“I hope refugees will talk to people living here, be convinced to come back, even if there’s no room and people have to stand on the bus,” Ismaeel said. “No matter what, they will not want to leave again.”

(Gumbrecht reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. McClatchy special correspondents Mohammed al Dulaimy and Hussein Khadim contributed to this report.)

The bi-partisan co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, jointly published an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times which contains some extremely emphatic and serious accusations against the CIA and the White House. The essence:

[T]he recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

More strikingly still, they explicitly include the White House at the top of their list of guilty parties:

There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations.

To underscore the seriousness of their accusations, Keane and Hamilton end with this:

What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the (sic) greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

It’s hard to imagine a more serious scandal than this. As I noted the other day, it is a confirmed fact that Alberto Gonzales and David Addingtion — the top legal representatives of George Bush and Dick Cheney, respectively — participated in discussions as to whether those videotapes should be destroyed. The White House refuses to disclose what these top officials said in those meetings. Did they instruct that the videos should be destroyed or fail to oppose their destruction? The NYT previously quoted one “senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter [who] said there had been ‘vigorous sentiment’ among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.”

Thus, we have evidence that “top White House officials” vigorously argued that these videos should be destroyed. The number one aides to both the President and Vice President both participated in discussions as to whether they should be, almost certainly with the knowledge and at the direction of their bosses.

And now we have the 9/11 Commission Chairmen stating as explicitly as can be that the mere concealment (let alone destruction) of these videos constituted the knowing and deliberate obstruction of their investigation into the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history. Combined with the fact that the videos’ destruction almost certainly constitutes “obstruction of justice” with regard to numerous judicial proceedings as well, we’re talking here about extremely serious felonies at the highest levels of our government.

Both legally and politically, it’s hard to imagine a more significant scandal than the President and Vice President deliberately obstructing the investigation of the 9/11 Commission by concealing and then destroying vital evidence which the Commission was seeking. Yet that’s exactly what the evidence at least suggests has occurred here.

What possible justification is there for the White House to refuse to say what the role of Addington, Gonzales, Bush and Cheney was in all of this? Having been ordered by Bush’s new Attorney General not to investigate, are the Senate and House Intelligence Committees (led by the meek Silvestre Reyes and the even meeker Jay Rockefeller) going to compel answers to these questions? In light of this Op-Ed, do Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee think the White House should publicly disclose to the country the role Bush and Cheney played in the destruction of this evidence? If there are any reporters left who aren’t traipsing around together in Iowa, it seems pretty clear that this story ought to be dominating the news.

The decision by the New York Times to put William Kristol on their op-ed page exposes all that is wrong with the Mainstream Media.

Kristol’s introduction into the MSM is what phlegm is to the flu- a symptom of a far worse pathology.

Andy Rosenthal – NYT editorial page editor – reacted to criticism of the Time’s decision by claiming not to understand “this weird fear of opposing views.”

Actually, Mr. Rosenthal, I suspect the fact that you’re hiring a proven idiot and a liar has more to do with the anger you’re seeing.

For example, Kristol apparently did not know how visceral the split between Shia and Sunni Moslems was; he nevertheless encouraged Bush in kicking out the UN inspectors and rushing to war. He continued to insist that WMDs were in Iraq long after it was evident there were none. He maintains that he and the Bush administration were victims of bad intelligence even after it became obvious that Bush and Cheney were the progenitors of that bad intel, and he himself pedaled it credulously. Worse, he fiercely advocated a nuclear strike on Iran, and then slinked away without apology when the NIE showed how tragic that course of action would have been. His foreign policy errors are exceeded only by his domestic fiscal prescriptions. I could go on. And on. Mr. Kristol’s record clearly shows he has been wrong (when facts turn out to contradict preceding statements, that’s not a “different perspective” Sir — that’s an error) on nearly every prognostication and recommendation he’s made for well over a decade.

Now, it’s obvious the Times believes adding conservatives will expand their readership and help deal with Murdoch and the WSJ. Well, it’s worth a try, I guess. But if that’s your game, Mr. Rosenthal, you’d be better off hiring a competent conservative, not this blatherer.

By the way, my guess is you’ll lose more liberals and progressives than you’ll gain conservatives with this strategy. In fact, you’ll probably lose some conservatives. Times readers are intelligent and value opinion informed by fact and dedicated to accurately reflecting the context and reality of the world we find ourselves in. Counterfactual assertions grounded in strident ideologies such as those Kristol regularly spews out have little appeal to thinking readers — whether conservative or liberal.

But again, the fact that Kristol has escaped from Faux News into the MSM is really an indicator that the MSM has become a business driven by the bottom line, not a profession driven by ethics. It shows clearly that “balance” has become the sine qua non of journalism. Thus, if the Times piles a ton of bullshit on one side of the scale, and a ton of verifiable, factual data on the other, balance is achieved and the new business of journalism is satisfied. Especially if readership increases.

But wait, you say. Conservatism is a legitimate perspective that must be represented. Really? We’ve been running close to a forty year experiment with conservative governance, with only a partial break during the Clinton years, and the results are in.

See, the conservative mantra of weak governments, low taxes, and reliance on the magic markets to deliver all good things by serendipity, simply hasn’t worked, and is need of a much stronger defense than anything Kristol can mount.

Conservatism and it’s mutant step-child, neo-conservatism, is an odd mix of competing ideological assertions without foundation, and the results of our continuing experiments with it are a toxic brew of unintended consequences, and consequences that are the opposite of those advertised. They preach fiscal conservatism but produce record debt; they advocate freedom, but shred the Bill of Rights; they espouse values but produce record breaking greed, graft and corruption.

Weak government and reliance on the magic markets has brought us global warming, unprecedented corruption, wealth inequities equal to that experienced in the Gilded Age, the most expensive — and least effective — health care system in the developed world, and a mortgage and credit meltdown that borders on criminal. It has also brought us record debt, and an evisceration of our constitutional form of governance, and an unprecedented loss of freedom that would make our Founders weep – all the more tragic in that it was done in defense of freedom. Finally, Mr. Kristol’s unique brand of neo-conservatism has resulted in the greatest foreign policy blunders in our nations’ history, trillions of dollars wasted, and more than 100,000 deaths, nearly 4000 of them Americans.

Those are the facts, Mr. Rosenthal. Making “balance” more important than accuracy, insight and reality is unlikely to win the Times many readers, and it will certainly lose you many more. Signing up champions of this discredited philosophy makes little sense — signing up an advocate who has gotten everything wrong for a decade or more makes less.

Unless of course this is another of the Grey Lady’s liberal plots to discredit conservatism. Giving a man like Kristol a forum and making this idiocy transparent might be the best way to show the folly of its tenets.

I cancelled my subscription after the Judith Miller fiasco, the Plamegate incident and your failure to cover the Downing Street memos. I figured three stikes and you’re out. But in the past year, I’ve been buying the Times at news stands with increasing frequency. Everyone deserves another chance, I told myself.

You just blew yours.

At any rate, goodbye and good luck. You’ve consigned your once great paper to something less valuable than bird cage liner and fish wrap.