The Rag Blog

As I write, on a cloudy Washington afternoon, my “Bush’s Last Day Countdown Keychain” tells me there are 433 days, 11 hrs, 50 minutes and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president leaves office. Like other citizens concerned about the fate of the Republic, I wonder what the Bush legacy will be.

Many commentators have written about how the domestic politics of this administration have left the United States more divided than ever; or perhaps the unsettled illegal immigration issue is what Bush will be most remembered for — with an unfinished barrier across the U.S.-Mexican border as the main monument to his eight years in office.

To some concerned with foreign affairs, the Bush era will be remembered most for the acceleration of America’s putative march to empire. Advocates of such a view highlight the exorbitant sums the U.S. has sunk into its land bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan, its massive sea power, and its all-volunteer professional army; the inordinately expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter being evidence that the U.S. is engaged in a ruthless effort to control the world’s oil resources); the threats of possible military action against Iran (interpreted as a desire to control the Middle East in collaboration with Israel); the growing tensions with Russia, as well as the urge to maintain and expand its foothold in former Soviet areas in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (seen as a reflection of America’s determination to remain the global hegemon); the increasing frictions with China (proof that the U.S. will not tolerate a competitor in Asia); the constant disagreements with the Europeans (a reminder on our part that we — not they — are the boss).

Indeed, there is little doubt that the military, economic, and cultural impact of the United States continues to be enormous. Calling this global footprint “imperial” is certainly tempting. But for a nation to be an empire, its leaders must have a plan or vision for how to deal with the rest of the world — as, arguably, Theodore Roosevelt and his entourage did with their “large policy” for American overseas dominance. Some historians cite these schemes as the beginning of an American-style empire that led to “the American century,” a period that now seems so long ago and so far away. (Are we not now, in fact, living in the Anti-American Century?)

Bush and Visions of Empire

The immense (but declining) global power of the United States notwithstanding, the conceptual baggage required to engage in truly imperial ambitions has simply not been a part of the Bush administration’s mindset. This remains so despite its assembly-line-style production of countless “national security” reports on a vast range of global security matters — committee-written, unreadable documents marked by a total lack of intellectual coherence or clear direction. These can, if anything, be seen as a collective “cover-up” for the administration’s obvious lack of thought beyond the here-and-now.

To be sure, no imperial plan is ever perfectly framed or implemented (as Theodore Roosevelt himself realized), but the Bush administration’s version of such now appears to have been remarkably without rhyme or reason — on, in fact, an automatic pilot, driven by a self-aggrandizing Pentagon budgetary process and “priorities” strikingly determined by shifting domestic politics (what Congressional district or crony corporation had put in the best, or most influential, bid for a base, military-style activity, or war-production plant). True, our generals remain engaged in the fearsome-sounding “Global War on Terror” by order of the White House — but this has proven a helter-skelter example of global confusion, regularly renamed by an administration clueless about what its “war” really is.

Put another way, the Bush administration was never able to define, shape, or direct in an “imperial” fashion the powerful forces, negative and positive, stemming from various segments of American society that do so much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This may have been inevitable, given the contentious nature of American democracy.) As for the once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this administration — Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their “offices”) — the only “empire” that really counted for them was the parochial world of Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf-wars about who among them would get government money for their minions and projects, overseas or at home. This was the narcissistic province that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense had the urge to dominate with their “unitary executive,” “wartime,” commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the U.S., however, mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandizement of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.

The President and His Diplomats

To make some sense of all this, let’s start at the top. With his utter lack of experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of curiosity about the outside world (with the possible exception of Mexico), George W. Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself, imperial or otherwise. In the words of commentator William Pfaff, “Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing.” The President’s major foreign-policy decision — to invade Iraq — was certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire to portray himself as a decisive commander in chief to the American electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat boy just wanted to “kick ass” overseas to show the media, voters, and possibly even himself, that he was doing something other than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.

Kicking ass — playing cowboys and Indians with the world, as little boys once did on playroom floors or in backyards — has remarkably little to do, however, with anything that might once have been defined as imperial planning or the knowledge necessary to implement such plans. For example, a year after his “axis of evil” State of the Union Address, when informed by Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis and Shiites in their country, “emperor” Bush allegedly responded that he thought “the Iraqis were Muslims.” (No way, after all, that you can tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better summarizes George W. Bush’s preparation for putative empire building than the following nugget from the 2000 presidential campaign season, as related by Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times:

“When a writer for Glamour Magazine recently uttered the word ‘Taliban’ — the regime in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and repressive version of Islamic law — during a verbal Rorschach test, Mr. Bush could only shake his head in silence. It was only after the writer gave him a hint (‘repression of women in Afghanistan’) that Mr. Bush replied, ‘Oh. I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive.'”

Given the tabula rasa in Bush’s mind regarding the world outside “the homeland” (a word his administration has regrettably contributed to the American language), it is hardly surprising that he selected as his main foreign policy advisers two people with very limited global visions of their own: Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor and, as Secretary of State, Colin Powell. (Rice herself admitted in 2000 that, as a “Europeanist,” “I’ve been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope”; and Powell’s qualifications were based on his military savvy — and loyalty — not his geopolitical perspectives. The general, as Bill Keller of the New York Times reported in 2001, was “a problem solver, not a visionary.”

As became clear after the horror of 9/11 — a foreign policy failure of the first order, if ever there was one, that no “empire” in its right mind would have allowed — Rice and Powell essentially became talking-point briefers on day-to-day events they had not foreseen and did not control. Compare them to Henry Kissinger, who held each of their positions at some point in his White House career. A cynical maneuverer who may not have been to everyone’s liking, he nonetheless worked in the realm of global strategy. In the way he attempted to play off the Soviet Union against China in relation to the Vietnam War, he was an imperial planner of the first order (if not always with the greatest success). Contrast his meaty books on Metternich and on nuclear weapons to the sole tome that Rice authored by herself — a bland monograph on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, excoriated by the scholarly American Historical Review in 1985. What her sad little historical “study” demonstrated, if anything at all, was that Rice was, from scratch, anything but a geopolitician of Soviet — or any other — affairs.

Had Rice and Powell been capable of a global imperial vision — or even of grasping essential global cause and effect — they doubtless would have advised their president that his much-desired Mesopotamian (mis)adventure was bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may have sensed this, but evidently he lacked the nerve (or was it intellectual inclination?) to ask the simple questions at White House meetings that would have been the key to any imperial decision-making process: “Why exactly are we doing this?” “Is it really in our interests to invade a third-world country thousands of miles from our shores?” Or, put another way: “How does this invasion preserve or expand the American empire”?

All the President’s Men: Cheney and Rumsfeld

According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they — and their neocon poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neocons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the U.S. — were the true framers of a Bush empire.

To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas — or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas — about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney’s former position as CEO of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.

Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand U.S. influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld’s utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there (“events” which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq — or success in that country — was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.

For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, “war” would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything — which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC’s self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts — both personal and political — to settle. “Foreign policy,” in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the Vice President and Secretary of Defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.

If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren’t the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays — the State Department and the CIA — perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world. Just as Bush “kicked ass” in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to “kick ass” among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the Intelligence Community. (Consider Cheney’s treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration’s claim about Saddam Hussein’s search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.) In toppling Iraq, the “imperial” aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy “experts” and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual U.S. national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the Secretary of Defense’s self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neocon Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it. Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq — any more than it did when George W. Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his “mission accomplished” moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was — for a while — the rest of the outside world.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The U.S., he wrote, made “foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein.”

In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, beyond George W. Bush’s national security “homeland.” That may be the President’s ultimate legacy.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.

WASHINGTON (Nov. 19) – Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by nearly 8 percent, the FBI reported Monday, as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances.

Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.

Although the noose incidents and beatings among students at Jena, La., high school occurred in the last half of 2006, they were not included in the report. Only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006 and neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish, in which the town is located, were among the agencies reporting. justice protest

Nevertheless, the Jena incidents, and a rash of subsequent noose incidents around the country, have spawned civil rights protests in Louisiana and last week at Justice Department headquarters here. The department said it investigated the incident but decided not to prosecute because the federal government does not typically bring hate crime charges against juveniles.

The Jena case began in August 2006 after a black student sat under a tree known as a gathering spot for white students. Three white students later hung nooses from the tree. They were suspended by the school but not prosecuted. Six black teenagers, however, were charged by LaSalle Parish prosecutor Reed Walters with attempted second-degree murder of a white student who was beaten unconscious in December 2006. The charges have since been reduced to aggravated second-degree assault, but civil rights protesters have complained that no charges were filed against the white students who hung the nooses.

“The FBI report confirms what we have been saying for many months about the severe increase in hate crimes,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who organized Friday’s march. “What is not reported, however, is the lack of prosecution and serious investigation by the Justice Department to counter this increase in hate crimes.” Sharpton called for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights leaders to discuss this matter.

I first heard “Alice’s Restaurant” in 1968 on Washington DC’s underground radio station WHFS. The most memorable time I heard it was in May 1970 on the day after the military murders at Kent State when a friend read it in homeroom at the junior high I attended in Frankfurt, Germany. The song’s innocence and hope echo today in the empty chambers of our empty culture where the current antiwar movement has yet to find an anthem. For those who don’t know this song by Arlo Guthrie, it is the story of a littering arrest that becomes a humorous yet pointed diatribe against the culture of war and conformity. The littering arrest itself took place on Thanksgiving Day in 1965 and the draft was in full swing-filling the growing demands of the war machine and its war of the day.

Guthrie’s song was part of a general distrust of authority making its way back into white America after a post World War Two hiatus. It was more than distrust actually. In fact, it was turning quickly into a refusal to go along with said authority. For the most part, this sentiment was most profoundly felt and expressed by the young via their music, culture and politics. In a story told several times over and with an equal number of twists, the youth counterculture of the time was a culture of opposition. Sometimes that opposition took the form of protests and direct action against authority and sometimes it wore the costume of color and danced to music enhanced by sex and drugs. As naïve as its audience and as jaded as its target, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” combined all of the counterculture’s aspects into a tale of disgust with the corporate status quo, opposition to its desire to classify us all and throw us into war, and some good ol’ fun.

What can be more traditional than Thanksgiving, after all? Despite its negative historical connotations in that it celebrates the beginning of the Europeans’ ethnic cleansing of the American continent’s indigenous peoples, most folks in the United States celebrate it. It’s not that they are celebrating their ancestors’ massacre of the native peoples; it’s that they see it as a time to gather with friends and family and have a good time. Even the homeless shelters take on a bit of a festive air this Thursday in November as merchants and individuals contribute time and money to preparing a traditional Thanksgiving meal for the residents of those often quite dismal places of refuge. Of course, the next day there is no more turkey and stuffing on the table and those without permanent shelter are still without a home. The wealthy, meanwhile, scrape several days worth of poor folks’ Thanksgiving dinners into their garbage disposals.

The second part of Arlo’s song takes place at the draft induction center formerly located on Whitehall Street in Manhattan, New York. He has received his draft notice and is reporting for the physical and mental exam that was given every inductee before he had his locks shorn and went off to boot camp and a life of military. After going through a number of tests, which are related quite hilariously by Guthrie, he is finally at the last station on his induction, where he is asked, “Have you ever been arrested?” This question naturally brings up Guthrie’s entire tale of his Thanksgiving arrest for littering in Massachusetts and the entire trial following the arrest. Because of his arrest, he is sent to the Group W bench with all the other “criminals.” There he is given another form that ends with the question: “Have you rehabilitated yourself?” I’ll let Arlo tell the rest of the story …

I went over to the sargeant, and I said, “Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, (with added emphasis and a sneer)

I mean, I mean that just, I’m sittin’ here on the bench,

I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.”

Guthrie is not drafted because of his record. And his Thanksgivings will never be the same. Neither should ours, even if George Bush shows up for a photo op in Baghdad with a plastic turkey and a couple dozen unarmed handpicked-for-their-loyalty troops. There are thousands of other troops who have deserted because they don’t want to go back to Iraq. Protesters have been arrested in Olympia and Tacoma, WA. For blocking military shipments. It’s time that those who oppose these dirty little wars join their fellow antiwarriors in the Pacific Northwest on today’s Group W bench. Who knows, we might start a movement.

Watch it here.

Having endured the Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham saga up close and personal for the last two years, most recently in the form of Mr. Brent Wilkes’ conviction on all 13 counts for the corrupt acts that he and Cunningham performed, San Diego has had a ring-side seat on modern sleaze in Congress.

Since the Dukester’s resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2005, there has been a lot of congressional activity to change how members of Congress do business with lobbyists like Mr. Wilkes and how Congress enacts those “earmarks” that Cunningham chased so assiduously to earn his bribes. Voters in San Diego County have a right to think that there is potentially a positive side to the mess; the scandal could produce reforms to retard at least some of the more painfully obvious abuses.

Sorry. It hasn’t happened, and it’s not going to.

I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for 31 years as a staffer for Republican and Democratic senators, helping them chase down pork and stay cozy with the network of lobbyists that pay huge sums to members of Congress to keep federal tax dollars flowing through the congressional pork process. Despite dozens of pages of new rules and “reforms,” and thousands of sanctimonious speeches, nothing has changed. In some ways, legislative ethics are now even worse than when felon Cunningham was selling himself in return for used cars, old furniture, prostitutes and other goodies.

Just after the November 2006 elections that brought the Democrats into the majority in Congress, the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, promised “the most ethical Congress ever.” Her delivery on part of that promise was a new set of rules for the pork process on Capitol Hill. They permit any spending bill to be ruled “out of order” (and therefore dead) unless it is accompanied by a list of earmarks in the bill. The identity of each earmark’s congressional sponsor must be displayed along with “the name and address of the intended recipient” or “the intended location” of the earmark and a certification that no member of Congress has any financial interest in the earmark. In other words, the reform sheds “sunshine” on earmarks.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

The new sunlight is more deceptive than illuminating; each earmark’s description is authored not by an objective entity, but by the earmark’s congressional sponsor. In other words, Duke Cunningham, for example, would have been allowed to explain without fear of contradiction why Brent Wilkes’ earmarks should stay in the defense budget as essential national security spending. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., can today freely articulate every reason the Boeing Company feeds her as to why a few billion more should be spent on C-17 transport aircraft the secretary of defense doesn’t want. She will not be required to explain what other defense spending will be axed to make her superfluous C-17s available, nor that they will never arrive in time to play a useful role in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sen. Boxer and all other congressional porkers would be crazy not to comply with the new “anti-pork” reforms. They are nothing less than free advertising. None of the pork in this new “reformed” system will be objectively evaluated by or honestly described to anyone. We won’t know if it is actually needed, how much it will really cost, or whether spending on something else would be a better idea.

But it gets worse. The so-called “sunshine” that the Pelosi reforms have shed on earmarks is highly selective. The new definition of earmarks excludes huge amounts of pork. The Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization Taxpayers for Common Sense found 70 earmarks that the House Appropriations Committee failed to identify in its new fiscal year 2008 Department of Defense Appropriations bill, adding to the 1,339 earmarks the committee did disclose. These unlisted 70 earmarks were fat ones: They more than doubled the legislation’s pork bill from $3 billion to $6.5 billion. When the Senate got to its version of the bill in September, it put in 936 earmarks amounting to $5.2 billion. Earlier this month, the House and Senate reconciled the differences between their two versions of the legislation and sent it to the president. It’s now law. Analysts are still sorting out the complete pork bill, but it already looks to be an amount higher than what either the House or Senate separately passed; after all, porking is an additive process.

Further, the pork process for defense spending will not be over if and when this new defense bill is enacted. There is still the supplemental spending Congress must pass to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the congressional porkers have big plans there too. They include almost $3 billion for those additional C-17s the Pentagon says it doesn’t want, but which Sen. Boxer, and many others, will jam into the bill.

In toto, there is an excellent chance that Congress will top last year’s pork bill for defense spending. For fiscal year 2007, the Republican Congress enacted 2,646 defense earmarks for $10.5 billion. Given the course the Democratic “reform” Congress is on, that will be an easy mark to beat. Should this occur, it will be done in spite of the promise from both the House and Senate Democratic leadership to cut pork spending in half.

And what about bribes? That system is alive and well also. They will surely come from the appreciative corporations for the ever-compliant porkers. Payments in the form of used cars, furniture and women will be rare —- as has always been the case; payment in the form of campaign contributions will be routine. The only difference between the Cunningham form of payment and the latter is that Congress has deemed thank you payments in the form of cash to campaigns to be perfectly legal. After all, they write the laws.

There is a simple reason why Congress has not changed any fundamentals: Senators and representatives still see their political survival dependant on their ability to “bring home the bacon.” Any reduction in spending for a congressional district will be immediate grounds for a political attack in an election. Less pork will prompt an allegation that the member of Congress either “doesn’t care” or “can’t produce.” Sitting members are deathly afraid of any such attack and behave accordingly.

Those attacks will not just come from political opponents; they will also come from local media who keep track of such things. They will also come from the voters, who think that “bringing home the bacon” is a measure of a good representative.

In the final analysis, it is not the members of Congress we should attack for their phony reforms. They are only doing what they know we want them to do. When we change, they will.

Mr. President:

I am sure that you will agree that in the aftermath of the start of the Iraq war it was a total embarrassment for this nation to have to expose to the world that your office was supplied with at best ‘flawed’ intelligence: hardly the way for this nation to stand confidently on the world’s stage and direct international affairs. Sadly I have to report to you that the same circumstance is arising in relation to what is commonly called ‘Global Warming’. There is no other issue that is so non-partisan because what is about to happen will impact every life in this country, irrespective of political affiliation or individual wealth, and also around the world. Further, there is no other issue that threatens the national security of this nation more, including Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

The IPCC has just released its fourth report and I note that Jim Connoughton states that there is, ‘no clear definition of the dangers of climate change’: let me help to clarify this on your behalf for Mr. Connoughton. Have someone check with NSIDC (after all this is a taxpayer-funded entity), regarding the scheduled disappearance of the Arctic Sea Ice: their current estimate is 2013-15 and quite frankly it could be anytime before these dates. This is not scientific theory but actual physical measurements in tandem with a trend line that points to the obvious and unequivocal conclusion. The IPCC report can in fact be largely ignored because it is based on dated data and inadequate science: matters in fact are much worse than portrayed, but then I digress.

Having established this simple fact Mr. Connoughton should then check the equally simple fact that when the sea ice disintegrates, even for a part of the year, civilization as we know it ends rather abruptly. The reason is again quite simple: the climate of the earth is dictated by this ice mass and once it is gone the climate will not be stable enough for mass agriculture. The consequence will be progressive mass starvation around the world. This fact can be confirmed throughout the entire breadth of peer-reviewed science: any dissention will only emanate from individual and extremely dubious sources.

Your good friend Prime Minister Howard should be able to confirm to you that Australia is currently being ravaged by drought as a mere precursor to the main event because the consequence of the accelerated disappearance of the sea ice is already being seen in crop failures all over the world: particularly in Australia. But then again the Governors of several southern states in the US can report to you directly that contrary to the headlines the droughts in their states are neither ‘one of the worst’, nor ‘hundred year’ events, but actually the worst since record keeping started in this country.

It is unfortunate, but for whatever reasons and there any several, the majority of the world has gradually developed a deep hatred for this country. In the aftermath of the disappearance of the sea ice, with the attendant consequences, that hatred will undoubtedly both multiply and intensify due entirely to the proportionate use of fossil fuels by the US, and its failure to respond to physical evidence of this looming catastrophe for literally billions of people around the world. The consequence to national security is patently obvious.

I fully realize that you are extremely occupied with what are considered more pressing matters on nation security and thus this letter may not reach your desk due entirely to some misguided person in the chain between you and me. I have therefore taken the liberty of copying this letter to: my Senators, Congressional Representative, the Speaker of the House, several leading media outlets, and I am sure it will travel far and wide on the Internet. A failure to elicit any structured and definitive response should be compensated by an Executive Order changing the expression ‘God Bless America’ to ‘God Help America’ as we await the revenge of literally billions around the world.

Yours sincerely as an extremely concerned citizen,

World opinion is still on the side of the people of the occupied territories. But as long as they are divided, talks are futile

11/16/07 “The Guardian” — — As the United States-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, approaches, the key question is what follows when it fails. Fiasco is looming, so what do the Palestinians do next? In their decades-long bid for justice, they have already tried everything.

The “armed struggle” of the 1970s, with its publicity-seeking aircraft hijackings, won global attention but no major concessions. The suicide bombings of the 1990s hardened Israeli attitudes and lost the Palestinian struggle much of its legitimacy. The Qassam rockets which continue to be fired from Gaza inflict damage and occasional death, but bring disproportionate retribution from the Israeli airforce.

Taking the political path has been only marginally more productive. When the Palestinian leadership in the 1980s made the historic compromise of accepting Israel’s implantation on 78% of pre-1948 “mandate Palestine”, they were rewarded with no equivalent Israeli recognition that Palestinians should control the remaining land.

There was a flicker of optimism in the dying months of the Clinton administration, when a peace deal was almost brokered between Yasser Arafat and the Ehud Barak government. Although it failed, the mood among most Israelis and Palestinians favoured a two-state solution. The line was: “Everyone knows what the outlines of a peace deal are. It just needs political decisions at the top.” But Ariel Sharon’s government put paid to that, and the Israeli definition of what constitutes a viable Palestinian state has continued to diminish.

Today no major party is willing to contemplate a reasonable concept of Palestinian independence. Instead, the ancient settlement project of Zionist dreams moves forward unabated, with the outrage of the ever-expanding wall and the annexation of east Jerusalem and its hinterland. According to the latest figures, Palestinians only control 54% of the West Bank. The rest has been taken by Israeli settlements. Meanwhile 570 closures – concrete blocks, mounds of earth and checkpoints – divide the remaining Palestinian land into mini-enclaves of anger and indignity.

Attempting to convince successive US administrations that pressure needs to be put on Israel has also not worked for the Palestinians. Even Bill Clinton confined himself to sweet-talking. He never wielded any muscle, let alone hinted at sanctions for Israel’s serial non-compliance with UN resolutions.

To expect anything tougher from George Bush is futile. Indeed, it is hard to fathom what his people are up to by proposing the Annapolis meeting. The president shows no real energy or engagement on the issue, compared with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or even his father. Does he seriously think he can get an agreement, and have one foreign policy success after the disaster of Iraq? Even if Mahmoud Abbas were to sign a meaningful piece of paper at Annapolis, the Palestinian president lacks the moral or political authority of Arafat. He is more likely to be denounced than praised by most Palestinians.

Efforts to send a message to Washington and Israel through the ballot box have also yielded the Palestinians no benefits. When voters elected Hamas two years ago in the hope of showing the world their frustration, the Israeli and US response was first to punish them and then to try to split them by pampering the defeated Fatah movement diplomatically and giving it arms. Had Fatah been rewarded with substantial Israeli concessions on lifting roadblocks and releasing prisoners, undermining Hamas might have worked. The opposite has happened. If Abbas thinks he can win new elections on the basis of an Annapolis deal, he will be disappointed. Everything suggests Palestinian voters would give Hamas more support in the West Bank than they have already.

So what options do the Palestinians have? Could non-violent resistance on a mass scale make a difference, as it did in the intifada, which started 20 years ago next month? Mary King’s new study, A Quiet Revolution, provides a timely reminder of what they achieved through courageous and disciplined mobilisation. A former activist of the US civil rights movement and now a professor of peace and conflict studies, she explains how Palestinians shook off the Israeli military occupation through a sustained campaign of boycotts and defiance. The template was South Africans’ mass democratic movement against apartheid. Of course, like Pretoria, the Israeli government highlighted the occasional Molotov cocktails and sporadic stone-throwing to demonise the entire movement as violent, but the core of the protests was unarmed civil disobedience.

The first intifada was more impressive than the much-touted “colour revolutions” of recent years, or even of the east European uprisings of 1989, with the exception of Solidarity in Poland. It did not receive US or other foreign government funding. It was not an affair of a few days against a weak and divided regime. It required months of brave activity and the endurance of mass arrests and heavy repression from opponents like defence minister Yitzhak “break their bones” Rabin who, unlike the crumbling Communist elites of 1989 or the administrations of Milosevic, Shevardnadze, and Kuchma, had no compunction in repeatedly using force.

Palestinian success in getting the Israelis to abandon their military administration of the land seized in 1967 and accept the Oslo arrangements for Palestinian self-rule did not, alas, lead to peace or a final settlement. Most Palestinians now deride Oslo. But it was a victory, and a key stage in their struggle.

Should non-violent resistance be revived on a large scale? What would the focus be? Mass sit-ins at the major roadblocks with crowds pushing through? Marches to the sites where the wall is going up? Or should the target of popular protest first be the Palestinians’ own elites? In recent months nothing has been more damaging to the Palestinian cause than the violence between Fatah and Hamas, egged on by the Israeli government, the Bush administration and a supine European Union.

The central requirement for any new Palestinian initiative is Palestinian unity. Don’t let opponents divide you. Resist international flattery. Ignore the instinct for revenge. The jury of international public opinion is still on the side of the Palestinians’ demand for justice. It may not have achieved as much as it could have, but it matters, and needs to be preserved.

Christian conservative leader Pat Robertson recently endorsed Rudy Giuliani’s presidential candidacy. The announcement gained media attention and provoked considerable commentary, but quickly dissipated as Giuliani’s protégé in strong-arm deception, Bernie Kerik, faced a 16-count federal indictment. Today, Robertson’s endorsement has all but evaporated from public discourse, reflecting its inherent meaninglessness.

Robertson’s endorsement of Giuliani drew much attention due to the odd-couple nature of their alignment. It was a political marriage few anticipated and exposes the deeper crisis faced by the Republican Party in the wake of the ongoing debacle of both the Bush administration and the Christian right. Robertson’s endorsement represents a pragmatist’s bet on “who can beat Hillary,” thus dropping any pretense to the higher moral calling that, for more than a quarter-century, fueled his opportunistic career.

Most remarkable, the two old-time artful dodgers skillfully sidestepped any mention of abortion and gay rights, issues that for Robertson and the Christian right, let alone the other Republican presidential candidates, have been cornerstone concerns during the last two presidential cycles. Equally surprising, no mention of Giuliani’s adulterous past found its way into their orgy of backslapping political revelry.

The Seventh Commandment states: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” [Exodus 20:14] Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The Scarlet Letter” in 1850. In this classic American gothic tale, the central character, Hester Prynee, gives birth to Pearl, her out-of-wedlock daughter, and refuses to name the father. Set against a grim background of the later-17th century New England witchcraft trials, Hester is found guilty of adultery and forced to wear the scarlet letter “A” on her chest.

One can only wonder why, as the electoral season gets underway, Giuliani and other Republican worthies are not being forced by their devout Christian supporters to wear Hester Prynee’s scarlet “A”?

11/18/07 “ICH” — — The people of Somalia are enduring yet another round of suffering as Ethiopian forces wreck havoc in the capital, Mogadishu. Apparently in response to an attack on one of its units, and the dragging of a soldier’s mutilated body through the city’s streets, an Ethiopian mortar reportedly exploded in Mogadishu’s Bakara market on November 9, killing eight civilians. A number of Somalis were also found dead the following day, some believed to have been rounded up by Ethiopian forces the night before.

Nearly 50 civilians have reportedly been killed and 100 wounded in the two-day fighting spree between fighters loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts and government forces and their Ethiopian allies. A report, issued by Human Rights Watch, chastised both Ethiopian troops and ‘insurgents’ for the bloodletting. Peter Takirambudde, the watchdog’s Africa director, was quoted as saying, ‘The international community should condemn these attacks and hold combatants accountable for violations of humanitarian law – including mutilating captured combatants and executing detainees.’ Of course, one cannot realistically expect the international community to take on a constructive involvement in the conflict. Various members of this ‘community’ have already played a most destructive role in Somalia’s 16-year-old civil war, which fragmented a nation that had long struggled to achieve a sense of sovereignty and national cohesion.

To dismiss the war in Somalia as yet another protracted conflict between warlords and insurgents would indeed be unjust because the country’s history has consistently been marred by colonial greed and unwarranted foreign interventions. These gave rise to various proxy governments, militias and local middlemen, working in the interests of those obsessed with the geopolitical importance of the Horn of Africa.

Colonial powers came to appreciate the strategic location of Somalia after the Berlin Conference, which initiated the ‘Scramble for Africa’. The arrival of Britain, France and Italy into Somali lands began in the late 19th century and quickly the area disintegrated into British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland. Both countries sought expand their control, enlisting locals to fight the very wars aimed at their own subjugation.

World War II brought immense devastation to the Somali people, who, out of desperation, coercion or promises of post-war independence, fought on behalf of the warring European powers. Somalia was mandated by the UN as an Italian protectorate in 1949 and achieved independence a decade later in 1960. However, the colonial powers never fully conceded their interests in the country and the Cold War actually invited new players to the scene, including the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

One residue of the colonial legacy involved the Ogaden province of Somalia, which the British empire had granted to the Ethiopian government. The region became the stage of two major wars between Ethiopia and Somalia between 1964 and 1977. Many Somalis still regard Ethiopia as an occupying power and view the policies of Addis Ababa as a continuation of the country’s history of foreign intervention.

The civil war of 1991, largely a result of foreign intervention, clan and tribal loyalties, and lack of internal cohesion, further disfigured Somalia. As stranded civilians became deprived of aid, Somalia was hit by a devastating famine that yielded a humanitarian disaster. The famine served as a pretext for foreign intervention, this time as part of international ‘humanitarian’ missions, starting in December 1992, which also included US troops. The endeavour came to a tragic end in October 1993, when more than 1,000 Somalis and 18 US troops were killed in Mogadishu. Following a hurried US withdrawal, the mainstream media rationalized that the West could not help those who refuse to help themselves; another disfiguration of the fact that the interest of the Somali people was hardly ever a concern for these colonial philanthropists. Since then, the importance of Somalia was relegated in international news media into just another mindless conflict, with no rational context and no end in sight. The truth, however, is that colonial interest in the Horn of Africa has never waned.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 provided an impetus for US involvement in the strategic region; only one month after the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz met with various power players in Ethiopia and Somalia, alleging that al-Qaeda terrorists might be using Ras Kamboni and other Somali territories as escape routes. A year later, the US established the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) to ‘monitor’ developments and to train local militaries in ‘counterterrorism’.

The US contingent was hardly neutral in the ongoing conflict. Reportedly, US troops were involved in aiding Ethiopian forces that entered Somalia in December 2006, citing efforts to track down al-Qaeda suspects. The Ethiopian occupation was justified as a response to a call by Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), whose legitimacy is questioned. TGF, seen largely as a pro-Ethiopian entity, had been rapidly losing its control over parts of Somalia to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which came to prominence in January 2006, taking over the capital and eventually bringing long-sought stability to much of the country. Their attempts engage the US and other Western powers in dialogue failed, however, as a US-backed Ethiopia moved into Somalia in December 2006. On January 7, 2007, the US directly entered the conflict, launching airstrikes using AC-130 gunship. Civilian causalities were reported, but the US refused to accept responsibility for them.

The last intervention devastated the country’s chances of unity. It now stands divided between the transitional government, Ethiopia (both backed by the UN, the US and the African Union) and the Islamic courts (allegedly backed by Eritrea and some Arab Gulf governments). Recently, the UN ruled out any chances for an international peacekeeping force, and the few African countries who promised troops are yet to deliver (with the exception of Uganda).

This situation leaves Somalia once more under the mercy of foreign powers and self-serving internal forces, foreshadowing yet more bloodshed. Our informed support is essential now because the Somali people have suffered enough. Their plight is urgent and it deserves a much deeper understanding, alongside immediate attention.

GONZO: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson.
By Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour.
Illustrated. 467 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.99.

On July 2, 1974, I started work as deputy Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone magazine. My unlikely boss was Richard Goodwin, the former Kennedy speechwriter, who invited me to join him in temporary residence at Ethel Kennedy’s home in McLean, Va. (the owner was in Hyannis for the summer). On July 3, Hunter Thompson joined us. Much of what ensued that holiday weekend is lost in the mists of history and a fog of controlled substances. There were extensive conversations about the viability of renting a truck, filling it with rats and dumping them on the White House lawn. There was also an effort to remove all the Andy Williams songs from the Kennedy jukebox and replace them with Otis Redding. But mostly I remember having a marathon conversation with Hunter about books and writers, settling finally on Joseph Conrad’s exhortation in “Lord Jim”: “In the destructive element immerse!”

This was, no surprise, one of Hunter’s favorite lines, and it led him into an astonishingly candid assessment of his own career, which was then at its peak. He had published his two brilliant “Fear and Loathing” books, and he was worried about what came next. He didn’t want to become a dull parody of himself but feared he lacked the gumption to jump the gravy train. I asked if he’d ever thought about stowing the psychedelic pyrotechnics — his “gonzo” journalism — and sitting down and writing a serious, straight-ahead novel. Well, of course he had. But, he said, “Without that,” and he glanced over at the satchel in which he carried his array of vegetation and chemicals, “I’d have the brain of a second-rate accountant.”

Hunter Thompson was always much more, and sometimes a bit less, than the sum of his ribald public persona. In compiling this oral history, Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour could easily have succumbed to the same temptation that Hunter did: to celebrate the myth, to recount a numbing parade of hilarious, drug-addled Hunter stories, and to miss the man. Happily, they have produced a rigorous and honest piece of work. “Gonzo” is a wonderfully entertaining chronicle of Hunter’s wild ride, but it is also a detailed, painful account of his self-destructive immersions; the brutality he visited upon his wife, Sandy; and the anguish of a life that veered from inspired performance art to ruinous solipsism. It’s especially good to be reminded that Wenner, in addition to being a successful media mogul and perpetual gossip item, has been a journalist of real distinction, with the ability to find talented editors like Seymour, who, I assume, did most of the actual cutting and pasting to create the book’s unflagging pace from interviews with 112 sources, ranging from Jimmy Carter to Johnny Depp. It was Wenner’s patience and indulgence that enabled Thompson to produce his very best work; Wenner’s vision made Rolling Stone, in the early 1970s, one of the most exciting publications in American history.

Hunter Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1937 and, from adolescence on, seemed intent on becoming a classic American Literary Character, part of the outlaw slipstream that produced Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, Guthrie, Mailer and Kerouac. This might have been a staggeringly banal career choice — there’s a testosterone-addled, troublemaking puer aeternus spewing fountains of self-absorbed gush in every high school — but Thompson actually turned out to have a distinctly American genius for comic hyperbole. He was the son of an insurance salesman who died when Hunter was in high school and an alcoholic mother who didn’t have a prayer of controlling her wild child. He was antsy, violent, a lover of books and guns, a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Literary Association in Louisville and of a street gang of pranksters, most of whom were sons of prominent families. In his senior year of high school, Thompson was arrested with two others after one in his group stole a man’s wallet — this, after other scrapes with the law — and thrown in jail. Douglas Brinkley, Thompson’s literary executor, recalled: “Hunter wrote his mother these very philosophical letters from behind bars. … The buddies that he was with … were waltzing because they knew the judge, … he was the poor kid on the other side of the railroad tracks with no dad. The game was fixed.” The judge gave Thompson a choice of prison or the military; he chose the Air Force. One senses that Hunter saw the experience mostly as grist for his legend. No doubt it helped solidify his politics, such as they were — a blithe populist libertarianism, unencumbered by doctrine.

Thompson’s chronological adolescence is dispatched in a few pages here, but his militant juvenility lasts the entire book. Even near the end of his life, he was terrorizing his neighbors in Aspen, Colo. The lawyer Gerry Goldstein remembers an episode involving another lawyer, John Van Ness, and later the actor Jack Nicholson: “First Hunter placed these defrosted elk hearts on John’s front doorstep, and then he started throwing these stones he’d collected onto the tin roof of John’s house and just listened as they rolled down. Then he shot off a couple of rounds from a 9-millimeter and started playing a continuous looped tape of pigs or rabbits being slaughtered — a godforsaken screeching, curdling sound. This poor little girl came to the window screaming. Apparently Van Ness was out of town and this teenage girl was house-sitting for them. From there, he proceeded to Nicholson’s house, where he engaged in the same folly.”

Thompson was able to get away with such nonsense, and with his flagrant drug use, because he had befriended the local sheriff, who had an elastic sense of justice when it came to literary perps. Indeed, about the only person in this book who successfully confronts Hunter about his behavior is — amazingly — Bill Clinton, a fellow not known for public confrontations. But at a meeting in Little Rock, just after Clinton was nominated in 1992, Thompson braces the president-to-be with a question about the Fourth Amendment and drug searches. “He leaned back and did one of these long windup Hunter kind of things where everybody is supposed to be amused by it all, and Clinton wasn’t going to have any of it,” Wenner recalls. “Clinton came back with this really tough, aggressive answer involving his brother Roger’s cocaine problem and how he had seen the horrors and destruction of drugs.”

The writer William Greider picks up the story: “Hunter got up from the table right after Clinton’s response. He just stopped asking questions. … It was like the dream had been smashed, and what was the point of going on with this?”

The structural defect of oral history is that it is easy, given a life like Hunter’s, to lose track of the reason he was special in the first place: the inimitable, hilarious whoosh of words, the cascading skeins of hyperbolic invective that came so close to replicating the disoriented epiphanies of a drug trip. The authors occasionally lay in samples of Hunter’s writing, but not really his best stuff — although the rejection letter he donated to Rolling Stone to handle the hordes of would-be imitators does sing. “You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate” you-know-what, it began. “Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again.”

“I never had any doubt that at some point he was going to commit suicide,” recalls his son, Juan. Old age is a difficult concept for a perpetual adolescent. Hemingway couldn’t handle it, and Hunter went out the same way, though more elegantly: with a pistol rather than a shotgun. His best work was pretty much complete by the time I met him, in July of 1974. Indeed, Nixon’s collapse that summer was so garish — the tearful “my mother was a saint” sayonara — that it beggared any acid fantasy that Hunter might have produced. Reality had gone gonzo. There was nothing left to do except to play his designated role as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, wandering the campus lecture circuit, swindling would-be publishers, entombed in a mausoleum of celebrity he had created for himself.

Introduction

Venezuela’s democratically elected Present Chavez faces the most serious threat since the April 11, 2002 military coup.

Violent street demonstrations by privileged middle and upper middle class university students have led to major street battles in and around the center of Caracas. More seriously, the former Minister of Defense, General Raul Isaias Baduel, who resigned in July, has made explicit calls for a military coup in a November 5th press conference which he convoked exclusively for the right and far-right mass media and political parties, while striking a posture as an ‘individual’ dissident.

The entire international and local private mass media has played up Baduel’s speeches, press conferences along with fabricated accounts of the oppositionist student rampages, presenting them as peaceful protests for democratic rights against the government referendum scheduled for December 2, 2007.

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC News and the Washington Post have all primed their readers for years with stories of President Chavez’ ‘authoritarianism’. Faced with constitutional reforms which strengthen the prospects for far-reaching political-social democratization, the US, European and Latin American media have cast pro-coup ex-military officials as ‘democratic dissidents’, former Chavez supporters disillusioned with his resort to ‘dictatorial’ powers in the run-up to and beyond the December 2, 2007 vote in the referendum on constitutional reform. Not a single major newspaper has mentioned the democratic core of the proposed reforms – the devolution of public spending and decision to local neighborhood and community councils. Once again as in Chile in 1973, the US mass media is complicit in an attempt to destroy a Latin American democracy.

Even sectors of the center-left press and parties in Latin America have reproduced right-wing propaganda. On November the self-styled ‘leftist’ Mexican daily La Jornada headline read ‘Administrators and Students from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) Accuse Chavez of Promoting Violence’. The article then proceeded to repeat the rightist fabrications about electoral polls, which supposedly showed the constitutional amendments facing defeat.

The United States Government, both the Republican White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress are once again overtly backing the new attempt to oust the popular-nationalist President Chavez and to defeat the highly progressive constitutional amendments.

The Referendum: Defining and Deepening the Social Transformation

The point of confrontation is the forthcoming referendum on constitutional reforms initiated by President Chavez, debated, amended and democratically voted on by the Venezuelan Congress over the past 6 months. There was widespread and open debate and criticism of specific sectors of the Constitution. The private mass media, overwhelmingly viscerally anti-Chavez and pro-White House, unanimously condemned any and all the constitutional amendments. A sector of the leadership of one of the components of the pro-Chavez coalition (PODEMOS) joined the Catholic Church hierarchy, the leading business and cattleman’s association, bankers and sectors of the university and student elite to attack the proposed constitutional reforms. Exploiting to the hilt all of Venezuela’s democratic freedoms (speech, assembly and press) the opposition has denigrated the referendum as ‘authoritarian’ even as most sectors of the opposition coalition attempted to arouse the military to intervene.

The opposition coalition of the rich and privileged fear the constitutional reforms because they will have to grant a greater share of their profits to the working class, lose their monopoly over market transactions to publicly owned firms, and see political power evolve toward local community councils and the executive branch. While the rightist and liberal media in Venezuela, Europe and the US have fabricated lurid charges about the ‘authoritarian’ reforms, in fact the amendments propose to deepen and extend social democracy.

A brief survey of the key constitutional amendments openly debated and approved by a majority of freely elected Venezuelan congress members gives the lie to charges of ‘authoritarianism’ by its critics. The amendments can be grouped according to political, economic and social changes.

The most important political change is the creation of new locally based democratic forms of political representation in which elected community and communal institutions will be allocated state revenues rather than the corrupt, patronage-infested municipal and state governments. This change toward decentralization will encourage a greater practice of direct democracy in contrast to the oligarchic tendencies embedded in the current centralized representative system.

Secondly, contrary to the fabrications of ex-General Baduel, the amendments do not ‘destroy the existing constitution’, since the amendments modify in greater or lesser degree only 20% of the articles of the constitution (69 out of 350).

The amendments providing for unlimited term elections is in line with the practices of many parliamentary systems, as witnessed by the five terms in office of Australian Prime Minister Howard, the half century rule of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the four terms of US President Franklin Roosevelt, the multi-term election of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in the UK among others. No one ever questions their democratic credentials for multi-term executive office holding, nor should current critics selectively label Chavez as an ‘authoritarian’ for doing the same.

Political change increasing the presidential term of office from 6 to 7 years will neither increase or decrease presidential powers, as the opposition claims, because the separation of legislative, judicial and executive powers will continue and free elections will subject the President to periodic citizen review.

The key point of indefinite elections is that they are free elections, subject to voter preference, in which, in the case of Venezuela, the vast majority of the mass media, Catholic hierarchy, US-funded NGO’s, big business associations will still wield enormous financial resources to finance opposition activity – hardly an ‘authoritarian’ context.

The amendment allowing the executive to declare a state of emergency and intervene in the media in the face of violent activity to overthrow the constitution is essential for safeguarding democratic institutions. In light of several authoritarian violent attempts to seize power recently by the current opposition, the amendment allows dissent but also allows democracy to defend itself against the enemies of freedom.

In the lead up to the US-backed military coup of April 11, 2002, and the petroleum lockout by its senior executives which devastated the economy (a decline of 30% of GNP in 2002/2003), if the Government had possessed and utilized emergency powers, Congress and the Judiciary, the electoral process and the living standards of the Venezuelan people would have been better protected. Most notably, the Government could have intervened against the mass media aiding and abetting the violent overthrow of the democratic process, like any other democratic government.

It should be clear that the amendment allowing for ‘emergency powers’ has a specific context and reflects concrete experiences: the current opposition parties, business federations and church hierarchies have a violent, anti-democratic history. The destabilization campaign against the current referendum and the appeals for military intervention most prominently and explicitly stated by retired General Baduel (defended by his notorious adviser-apologist, the academic-adventurer Heinz Dietrich), are a clear indication that emergency powers are absolutely necessary to send a clear message that reactionary violence will be met by the full force of the law.

The reduction of voting age from 18 to 16 will broaden the electorate, increase the number of participants in the electoral process and give young people a greater say in national politics through institutional channels. Since many workers enter the labor market at a young age and in some cases start families earlier, this amendment allows young workers to press their specific demands on employment and contingent labor contracts.

The amendment reducing the workday to 6 hours is vehemently opposed by the opposition led by the big business federation, FEDECAMARAS, but has the overwhelming support of the trade unions and workers from all sectors. It will allow for greater family time, sports, education, skill training, political education and social participation, as well as membership in the newly formed community councils. Related labor legislation and changes in property rights including a greater role for collective ownership will strengthen labor’s bargaining power with capital, extending democracy to the workplace.

Finally the amendment eliminating so-called ‘Central Bank autonomy’ means that elected officials responsive to the voters will replace Central Bankers (frequently responsive to private bankers, overseas investors and international financial officials) in deciding public spending and monetary policy. One major consequence will be the reduction of excess reserves in devalued dollar denominated funds and an increase in financing for social and productive activity, a diversity of currency holdings and a reduction in irrational foreign borrowing and indebtedness. The fact of the matter is that the Central Bank was not ‘autonomous’, it was dependent on what the financial markets demanded, independent of the priorities of elected officials responding to popular needs.

As the Chavez Government Turns to Democratic Socialism: Centrists Defect and Seek Military Solutions

As Venezuela’s moves from political to social transformation, from a capitalist welfare state toward democratic socialism, predictable defections and additions occur. As in most other historical experiences of social transformation, sectors of the original government coalition committed to formal institutional political changes defect when the political process moves toward greater egalitarianism and property and a power shift to the populace. Ideologues of the ‘Center’ regret the ‘breaking’ of the status quo ‘consensus’ between oligarchs and people (labeling the new social alignments as ‘authoritarian’) even as the ‘Center’ embraces the profoundly anti-democratic Right and appeals for military intervention.

A similar process of elite defections and increased mass support is occurring in Venezuela as the referendum, with its clear class choices, comes to the fore. Lacking confidence in their ability to defeat the constitutional amendments through the ballot, fearful of the democratic majority, resentful of the immense popular appeal of the democratically elected President Chavez, the ‘Center’ has joined the Right in a last ditch effort to unify extra-parliamentary forces to defeat the will of the electorate.

Emblematic of the New Right and the ‘Centrist’ defections is the ex-Minister of Defense, Raul Baduel, whose virulent attack on the President, the Congress, the electoral procedures and the referendum mark him as an aspirant to head up a US-backed right-wing seizure of power.

The liberal and right wing mass media and unscrupulous ‘centrist’ propagandists have falsely portrayed Raul Baduel as the ‘savior’ of Chavez following the military coup of April 2002. The fact of the matter is that Baduel intervened only after hundreds of thousands of poor Venezuelans poured down from the ‘ranchos’, surrounded the Presidential Palace, leading to division in the armed forces. Baduel rejected the minority of rightist military officers favoring a massive bloodbath and aligned with other military officials who opposed extreme measures against the people and the destruction of the established political order. The latter group included officials who supported Chavez’ nationalist-populist policies and others, like Baduel, who opposed the coup-makers because it radicalized and polarized society – leading to a possible class-based civil war with uncertain outcome. Baduel was for the restoration of a ‘chastised’ Chavez who would maintain the existing socio-economic status quo.

Within the Chavez government, Baduel represented the anti-communist tendency, which pressed the President to ‘reconcile’ with the ‘moderate democratic’ right and big business. Domestically, Baduel opposed the extension of public ownership and internationally favored close collaboration with the far-right Colombian Defense Ministry.

Baduel’s term of office as Defense Minister reflected his conservative propensities and his lack of competence in matters of security, especially with regard to internal security. He failed to protect Venezuela’s frontiers from military incursions by Colombia’s armed forces. Worse he failed to challenge Colombia’s flagrant violation of international norms with regard to political exiles. While Baduel was Minister of Defense, Venezuelan landlords’ armed paramilitary groups assassinated over 150 peasants active in land reform while the National Guard looked the other way. Under Baduel’s watch over 120 Colombian paramilitary forces infiltrated the country. The Colombian military frequently crossed the Venezuelan border to attack Colombian refugees. Under Baduel, Venezuelan military officials collaborated in the kidnapping of Rodrigo Granda (a foreign affairs emissary of the FARC) in broad daylight in the center of Caracas. Baduel made no effort to investigate or protest this gross violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, until President Chavez was informed and intervened. Throughout Baduel’s term as Minister of Defense he developed strong ties to Colombia’s military intelligence (closely monitored by US Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA) and extradited several guerrillas from both the ELN and the FARC to the hands of Colombian torturers.

At the time of his retirement as Minister of Defense, Baduel made a July 2007 speech in which he clearly targeted the leftist and Marxist currents in the trade union (UNT) and Chavez newly announced PSUV (The Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela). His speech, in the name of ‘Christian socialist’, was in reality a vituperative and ill-tempered anti-communist diatribe, which pleased Pope Benedict (Ratzinger).

Baduel’s November 5 speech however marks his public adherence to the hard-line opposition, its rhetoric, fabrications and visions of an authoritarian reversal of Chavez program of democratic socialism. First and foremost, Badual, following the lead of the White House and the Venezuelan ‘hard right’, denounced the entire process of Congressional debate on the Constitutional amendments, and open electoral campaigning leading up to the referendum as ‘in effect a coup d’etat’. Every expert and outside observer disagreed – even those opposed to the referendum. Baduel’s purpose however was to question the legitimacy of the entire political process in order to justify his call for military intervention. His rhetoric calling the congressional debate and vote a ‘fraud’ and ‘fraudulent procedures’ point to Baduel’s effort to denigrate existing representative institutions in order to justify a military coup, which would dismantle them.

Baduel’s denial of political intent is laughable – since he only invited opposition media and politicians to his ‘press conference’ and was accompanied by several military officials. Baduel resembles the dictator who accuses the victim of the crimes he is about to commit. In calling the referendum on constitutional reform a ‘coup’, he incites the military to launch a coup. In an open appeal for military action he directs the military to ‘reflect of the context of constitutional reform.’ He repeatedly calls on military officials to ‘assess carefully’ the changes the elected government has proposed ‘in a hasty manner and through fraudulent procedures’. While denigrating democratically elected institutions, Baduel resorts to vulgar flattery and false modesty to induce the military to revolt. While immodestly denying that he could act as spokesperson for the Armed Forces, he advised the rightist reporters present and potential military cohort that ‘you cannot underrate the capacity of analysis and reasoning of the military.’

Cant, hypocrisy and disinterested posturing run through Baduel’s pronouncements. His claim of being an ‘apolitical’ critic is belied by his intention to go on a nationwide speaking tour attacking the constitutional reforms, in meetings organized by the rightwing opposition. There is absolutely no doubt that he will not only be addressing civilian audiences but will make every effort to meet with active military officers who he might convince to ‘reflect’…and plot the overthrow of the government and reverse the results of the referendum. President Chavez has every right to condemn Baduel as a traitor, though given his long-term hostility to egalitarian social transformation it may be more to the point to say that Baduel is now revealing his true colors.

The danger to Venezuelan democracy is not in Baduel as an individual – he is out of the government and retired from active military command. The real danger is his effort to arouse the active military officers with command of troops, to answer his call to action or as he cleverly puts it ‘for the military to reflect on the context of the constitutional reforms.’ Baduel’s analysis and action program places the military as the centerpiece of politics, supreme over the 16 million voters.

His vehement defense of ‘private property’ in line with his call for military action is a clever tactic to unite the Generals, Bankers and the middle class in the infamous footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, the bloody Chilean tyrant.

The class polarization in the run-up to the referendum has reached its most acute expression: the remains of the multi-class coalition embracing a minority of the middle class and the great majority of the working power is disintegrating. Millions of previously apathetic or apolitical young workers, unemployed poor and low-income women (domestic workers, laundresses, single parents) are joining the huge popular demonstrations overflowing the main avenues and plazas in favor of the constitutional amendments. At the same time political defections have increased among the centrist-liberal minority in the Chavez coalition. Fourteen deputies in the National Assembly, less than 10%, mostly from PODEMOS, have joined the opposition. Reliable sources in Venezuela (Axis of Logic/Les Blough Nov. 11, 2007) report that Attorney General Beneral Isaias Rodriguez, a particularly incompetent crime fighter, and the Comptroller General Cloudosbaldo Russian are purportedly resigning and joining the opposition. More seriously, these same reports claim that the 4th Armed Division in Marcay is loyal to ‘Golpista’ Raul Baduel. Some suspect Baduel is using his long-term personal ties with the current Minister of Defense, Gustavo Briceno Rangel to convince him to defect and join in the pre-coup preparations. Large sums of US funding is flowing in to pay off state and local officials in cash and in promises to share in the oil booty if Chavez is ousted. The latest US political buy-out includes Governor Luis Felipe Acosta Carliz from the state of Carabobo. The mass media have repeatedly featured these new defectors to the right in their hourly ‘news reports’ highlighting their break with Chavez ‘coup d’etat’.

The referendum is turning into an unusually virulent case of a ‘class against class’ war, in which the entire future of the Latin American left is at stake as well as Washington’s hold on its biggest oil supplier.

Conclusion

Venezuelan democracy, the Presidency of Hugo Chavez and the great majority of the popular classes face a mortal threat. The US is facing repeated electoral defeats and is incapable of large-scale external intervention because of over-extension of its military forces in the Middle East; it is committed once more to a violent overthrow of Chavez. Venezuela through the constitutional reforms, will broaden and deepen popular democratic control over socio-economic policy. New economic sectors will be nationalized. Greater public investments and social programs will take off. Venezuela is moving inexorably toward diversifying its petrol markets, currency reserves and its political alliances. Time is running out for the White House: Washington’s political levers of influence are weakening. Baduel is seen as the one best hope of igniting a military seizure, restoring the oligarchs to power and decimating the mass popular movements.

President Chavez is correctly ‘evaluating the high command’ and states that he ‘has full confidence in the national armed forces and their components.’ Yet the best guarantee is to strike hard and fast, precisely against Baduel’s followers and cohorts. Rounding up a few dozen or hundred military plotters is a cheap price to pay for saving the lives of thousands of workers and activists who would be massacred in any bloody seizure of power.

History has repeatedly taught that when you put social democracy, egalitarianism and popular power at the top of the political agenda, as Chavez has done, and as the vast majority of the populace enthusiastically responds, the Right, the reactionary military, the ‘Centrist’ political defectors and ideologues, the White House, the hysterical middle classes and the Church cardinals will sacrifice any and all democratic freedoms to defend their property, privileges and power by whatever means and at whatever cost necessary. In the current all-pervasive confrontation between the popular classes of Venezuela and their oligarchic and military enemies, only by morally, politically and organizationally arming the people can the continuity of the democratic process of social transformation be guaranteed.

Change will come, the question is whether it will be through the ballot or the bullet.

OTTAWA/TORONTO – Two Americans who deserted the U.S. Army to protest against the war in Iraq lost their bid for refugee status in Canada on Thursday, and the Canadian government made it clear they were no longer welcome.

The Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear appeals from the two men, Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, over decisions by immigration authorities — backed in two subsequent court rulings — that they were not refugees in need of protection.

Opposing the war on the belief that it was illegal and immoral, the two deserted when they learned their units would be deployed to Iraq, and came to Canada.

If deported to the United States, they say they face a court martial and up to five years in prison.

During the Vietnam War, Canada was a haven for tens of thousands of draft dodgers and deserters. But Hinzman and Hughey were volunteers rather than conscripts.

Their backers urged the government to let them stay in Canada anyhow, but this met with little sympathy from Ottawa.

“Canadians want a refugee system that helps true refugees,” said Mike Fraser, spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley.

“All refugee claimants in Canada have the right to due process and when they have exhausted those legal avenues we expect them to respect our laws and leave the country.”

He declined to comment on whether active steps would be taken to deport the two men to the United States. In any case, it could still take months before they can be sent away, said Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

“They won’t be deported tomorrow; there is a process,” said Zaslofsky, himself a Vietnam War deserter. He said the immigration department would ask if the two men want to do a “pre-removal risk assessment,” which can take months.

An immigration spokeswoman, Karen Chadd-Evelyn, said such an assessment would judge whether in the United States they would be at risk of torture, death or cruel and unusual punishment or treatment.

They can also apply for permanent residence in Canada on humanitarian or compassionate grounds.

The War Resisters Support Campaign, aware of some 55 deserters who have come to Canada since 2004, said they would press for a political way to let the deserters stay.

“It’s up to (politicians) if they want to give resisters access to Canada, as they did during the Vietnam War,” Michelle Robidoux said in the group’s small Toronto office.

The small opposition New Democratic Party said it would introduce a motion calling on the House of Commons immigrations committee to hold immediate hearings on the issue.

Meanwhile, one stratagem appeared to be for resisters to use the legal system to enable them to stay longer in Canada.

One deserter who still hopes to stay is Kimberly Rivera, from Mesquite, Texas. She came to Canada in February with her husband and two small children while on a two-week army leave, after spending three months on security duty in Iraq.

One of Australia’s top defence experts says the United States-led coalition cannot win the conflicts in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Professor Hugh White, the head of Canberra’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, has told the ABC’s Correspondents Report the coalition will eventually abandon Afghanistan.

He says the US cannot succeed in Iraq, but has no escape from the tragedy its invasion has created in the strategically important Gulf region.

“I think they’re very different situations,” he said.

“But the core difficulties we face in each case are somewhat similar, and that is that the resources that the West has available, and the timeframes over which we’re prepared to bring them to bear, are just way too small to make a difference to the really deep-seated security problems, political problems, social problems, that really underpin the crises in each place.”

Professor White says the war in Afghanistan takes in two very complex, interacting problems which need to be dealt with simultaneously.

“You have the problem of trying to establish, almost for the first time in history, a strong, stable government based in Kabul that can effectively govern the whole of Afghanistan,” he said.

“That’s a huge nation-building challenge by itself.

“Then on top of that you’ve got the challenge posed by the insurgency from the Taliban, particularly in the south-east of the country.

“I think the interaction of those two would require – if the West was to prevail – an effort 10 times the size of the one we’ve got at the moment, and lasting for a generation.

“I just don’t see the West being prepared to put in that kind of scale of effort.”

Professor White predicts that the West will eventually give up on the Afghanistan conflict.

“I think there’s a strong and, I think, understandable humanitarian concern about the fate of the people of Afghanistan themselves,” he said.

“But I think that after another three or five years of the sorts of problems and difficulties and casualties that Western countries have been taking in Afghanistan, if – as I strongly suspect – there’s no sign of progress, it will be very hard for publics not to start getting very sick of them, and very sick of the operation, and very hard for governments not to start slowly but surely withdrawing down the scale of the effort.”

He says handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban and Al Qaeda would be a significant setback, but Afghanistan isn’t actually central to the ‘war on terror’.

“The reason for that is really very simple,” he said.

“As we’ve seen in Pakistan, if Al Qaeda and its affiliates can’t operate in Afghanistan, they’ll operate somewhere else.

“So the idea that keeping Afghanistan out of the hands of the Taliban, for example, is somehow critical to winning the ‘war on terror’, it seems to presuppose that Al Qaeda can’t operate anywhere else, and we know that it can.”

Iraq dilemma

Professor White says the US cannot win in Iraq, but nevertheless is unlikely to pull out.

“I think that’s the tragedy of the American position,” he said.

“I think they’re in the situation where the scale of resources that America has available, and the nature of the problems that it needs to deal with, simply preclude the United States achieving the kind of outcome that we all hope that we could find in Iraq – a stable government that controls the whole territory that governs more or less justly in the interests of all Iraqis, and so on.

“That just seems to be, to me, beyond reach.

“And even though… there may be, as some reports suggest, short-term improvements in security, for example, I think the chances of that leading to a long-term political evolution that would achieve our long-term objectives is very low.”

He says it would be “immensely difficult” for the US to to withdraw from Iraq.

“The reason for that is that unlike Afghanistan, for example, Iraq is absolutely central to core American strategic interests, and in particular, it’s central to the task of stability in the Persian Gulf,” he said.

“The key risk that the United States faces if it withdraws from Iraq is that Iran’s influence in Iraq and then into the southern shore of the Gulf – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and so on – would expand very rapidly.

“And the US – defining Iran, as it does, as a kind of inevitable adversary for American interests and policy – I think will be very reluctant to run the risk that a US withdrawal from Iraq would in effect, liberate Iran to dominate the Gulf.”

US resigned to staying in Iraq

Professor White says no matter who becomes US president in January 2009 – a Republican or a Democrat – the US is probably going to stay in Iraq for another four years, despite the high numbers of casualties.

“I think you can already see that in the way in which the debate over Iraq is evolving in the run-up to the US presidential election next year,” he said.

“I think one could say that 2006 was the year in which Americans realised that they couldn’t win in Iraq. 2007 has been the year in which they’ve realised that they can’t get out.

“Even the Democrat candidates are acknowledging that there’ll need to be substantial US forces in Iraq for many years to come.”

He says two aspects underlie that realisation.

“The first is that although Americans, of course, are very distressed by the level of casualties that they’re taking in Iraq, by the costs, the financial costs of Iraq, I think they are now kind of factored into the political debate there,” he said.

“Secondly I think the US confronts what is in fact quite a characteristic problem, and that is weighing the known costs and risks of keeping doing what we’re doing, against the unknown costs and risks of doing something radically different.

“For Americans, terrible though it seems, the costs, including the costs in lives of staying in Iraq, are known and understood and are bearable.