The Rag Blog

I am a psychologist and writer in Lincoln, Nebraska. All of my adult life, I have worked for human rights organizations. In 1965, when I was 17-years-old, I marched for de-segregation in Kansas City. As a therapist, I have spent my career repairing the psychic damage of traumatized people, whether they be rape or assault victims, family members of murder victims, or refugees and asylum seekers. I have worked with torture victims since the 1980’s and I know that many of them are innocent of any crime whatsoever and all of them suffer irreparable damage to their lives.

In August of 2007 I made the difficult decision to return my 2006 Presidential Citation, awarded to me by then President of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Gerald Koocher. I was deeply appreciative of this honor and proud to be a member of the APA. Over the years I have enjoyed an excellent relationship with this organization. I received my first Presidential Citation in 1998 from Dr. Martin Seligman and have been the keynote speaker at the APA’s national convention. With this action, I feel as if I am betraying a good friend.

For the past few years, I have been troubled by various media and Department of Defense reports that psychologists have designed protocols and trained and supervised interrogators in the use of sophisticated methods for breaking the human spirit and destroying mental functioning. When this August, at the APA’s annual convention, members passed Substitute Motion Three instead of a ban on psychologists’ involvement in military interrogations, I felt I needed to act.

Substitute Motion Three looks fine on the surface, but the devil is in the details, and the devil always dresses in the tuxedo of lofty rhetoric. While it has been argued that this resolution bars psychologists’ participation in the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, the motion did not place a moratorium on psychologists’ involvement in all national security facilities that operate outside the law. This lack of firmness puts our profession at odds with the Geneva Conventions, Red Cross standards, Department of Defense guidelines, The U. N. Declaration of Human Rights, and the ethical codes of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association. In ratifying this document, the APA has made a terrible mistake.

With sorrow, I have concluded that the United States government is committing war crimes with the help of individual psychologists and our professional organization. Without psychologists’ presence to lend legitimacy to these interrogations, our government would find its position utterly indefensible. The behavior of psychologists on interrogation teams violates our own Code of Ethics, in which we pledge to respect the humanity of all people. As psychologists, we vow to do no harm.

I learned this lesson from my mother, Dr. Avis, who was a small town doctor in rural Nebraska in the 1950’s. She often quoted Hippocrates remark, “Make a habit of two things, to help, or at least, to do no harm.” She took her Hippocratic vows seriously. Two of them I remember specifically, “Never do anyone harm for someone else’s interest.” And, “Keep the welfare of your patient as your highest priority.” My mother gave free medical care to any one who showed up at our house or her office. Sometimes she was paid in smoked hams and sweet corn. She also taught me this, “Morality isn’t pretty words; morality is action.” I hope I am honoring my mother’s values with my decision.

When any of us are degraded, all of human life is degraded. This is not just about the prisoners; it is about who we are as people. Once we decide certain people are beyond the pale and give them less respect than we would want for ourselves if our situations were reversed, we make we ourselves vulnerable to also being treated as less than human.

I know that the return of my Presidential Citation is of small import, but it is what I can do to disassociate myself from what I consider to be a heinous policy. My belief is that psychology should be solely a helping profession. When we become anything else, we destroy ourselves.

I acted as a matter of conscience and in the hopes that the APA will reconsider its current position. We have long been an organization that respects human rights and promotes tolerance, kindness, and peace. It is my deepest hope that the APA will reclaim its reputation as a beacon of integrity and compassion.

As The Office of the Vice President continues to scheme and plot for war with Iran, which would also likely correspond with martial law at home, the American worker continues to sink deeper and deeper into a horrifying abyss of economic, moral, and spiritual slavery. Even during the worst days of the Depression, never was the American worker more crushed, more beaten, more defeated. Never was he more atomized, more alienated, more alone.

Listen to what people are talking about on TV, on the streets, and in restaurants, and it is clear the American people are pathologically disconnected from reality. This disconnection from reality is particularly pronounced in both the media and academia, where the most critical issues of our time are either completely ignored, or drowned in a barrage of hyperbole and euphemistic blather. It is as if, due to so many decades of brainwashing, Americans are no longer capable of reason, no longer capable of independent thought.

It is also becoming harder and harder to obtain a good paying job without compromising oneself ideologically due to the destruction of the public sphere. The role that the military and prison industrial complexes play in providing employment, and the role played by the media and the education system in indoctrination, pose grave questions about whether constitutional democracy and American capitalism can continue to coexist, or whether the elite will sever the marriage entirely ushering in a military form of government. The unprecedented domination of work in American society, and the cult of placing one’s career above and beyond all other considerations, has dehumanized the American people and turned them into collaborators.

In the education system, where universities are increasingly owned lock, stock and barrel by corporations (many universities are corporations), free market dogma reigns unchallenged. The education system, together with the unprecedented power of the mass media, have ushered in a brave new world where Newspeak reigns over the enlightenment, madness over empiricism, and barbarism over reason.

As Americans, we are so fond of saying how we have freedom of speech, but all too often, this simply is not so. How many students at expensive private colleges are permitted to speak out against any number of the vast myriad of unspeakable issues: the destruction of families and communities in American society, the likelihood of war on Iran, the prison-industrial complex, the use of outsourcing and offshoring to destroy unions, the current genocide being waged against black Americans, the censorship in American society? If a student wants to get good grades so as to be able to secure a good paying job later on, the rules are clear: say what you are supposed to say, write what you’re supposed to write: shut up and do as you’re told. The almost total absence of meaningful intellectual discussion in many colleges and universities, along with the unprecedented corporate consolidation of the media, has put American society in a totalitarian ideological vice. Tenured liberal professors, or even professors that secretly harbor genuinely radical views, often think things privately that they would never dream of saying in class.

The American worker is more enslaved to his employer than ever before, but instead of rebelling against this enslavement, he feels resistance to be impossible or too dangerous to risk, or he embraces it as proof of his toughness and loyalty to his country.

Public school teachers that teach poor and disadvantaged students are under enormous pressures by authoritarian administrators to keep the level as low as possible and to not intellectually challenge their students. Those who resist are marginalized, harassed, and eventually forced out. This tyranny is blindly embraced in the name of multiculturalism, and enforced by morally bankrupt liberals who view students in troubled inner city schools as incapable of serious academic work.

The liberal adage “You have to work within the system” embodies the total moral spiritual, and intellectual collapse of the American people. The Democrats “work within the system,” and consequently we have a one party system. Tenured liberal professors have worked within the system, and have gotten so good at it that they have become the system, feeding Amy Tan and The House on Mango Street to poor students so as to keep them illiterate in the name of protecting diversity.

Expensive private colleges are dominated by almost total unanimity of thought in the liberal arts and social sciences, particularly in politics and economics. What are one’s chances of getting hired for a tenure-track economics position at a four-year university when you have written polemics attacking the impoverishment of third world countries by the World Bank and IMF? Almost zero. Is this our great freedom, our great liberty of thought? This overwhelming pressure to conform ideologically in the legal system, the media, and academia, and the relentless pressures to be as obsequious and sycophantic as possible at work, is a cancer that is slowly tearing at the heart of American civilization.

Blind obedience and brainwashing through Newspeak begin in school. The media, and other social pressures complete the process. The destruction of family and community life has made resistance at work extraordinarily difficult, because the loss of a decent job that can so easily come from speaking out against unconscionable abuses of power, puts the now atomized American in a void, a zone of nothingness, a banishment into purgatory.

Americans are constantly lying to themselves about the degree to which they have allowed themselves to become ideologically compromised at work. Even more disturbing than the collapse of the New Deal is the inherently reactionary nature of so many jobs in the twenty first century United States. It is almost absurd to talk about unions if you work for the military and are assisting in the manufacturing of new weapons. Jobs in the mass media and mainstream press are often equally as dubious. The education system, viewed by liberals from the 1960’s in such an innocent light, bears at least as much responsibility as the media in the lobotomizing of the American mind.

Instead of desperately trying to ward off a looming martial law, Americans are busy trying to get ahead at work. Fascism hasn’t come to America with rallies and bonfires but in the fight for the corner office.

Take a good look at what Americans will put up with at ten dollars an hour, and it is clear that unionization and solidarity have reached their nadir in American history.

The idea of not making much money, yet waking up in the morning and feeling good about oneself is a myth if you are a public school teacher whose hands are tied by anti-literacy administrators, or a defense attorney forced to betray clients and plea bargain innocent people into jail.

There is still time for the American worker to awake and take back his country. There is still time to resist, to stand up for freedom of expression and worker’s rights. For the elite are rapidly taking us to a place where it may soon no longer be possible to resist. Once that Rubicon is crossed, there will be naught but demons all around us, the bough will be broken, and constitutional democracy will drown in a sea of death and darkness.

11/01/07 “ICH” — — Fast forward to Election Day 2008: Network anchors, cable pundits, and state and local election officials are going nuts as evening hours pass and voter turnout is hardly approaching 20 percent nearly everywhere. “What’s going on?” everyone is asking incredulously. TV and computer screens all over the planet show Americans in streets celebrating and shouting things like “We’ve had enough political corruption. We’re not going to take anymore!”

In contrast, news anchors are grim and aghast with little help from spin-fatigued and stammering Democratic and Republican spokespeople. At 2 A.M. on NBC Brian Williams sits with Tim Russett and Keith Olbermann, and sums up: “Americans have spoken and American politics have changed forever.” “It’s like the nightmare of entertainers: nobody shows up for their event,” says bemused Olbermann. Russett grimly observes, “We should have seen this coming; people have been fed up with both parties for a long time.” Meanwhile, the Internet is buzzing with talk of voiding the presidential and congressional election results, that President Bush may declare a national state of emergency, and that the Supreme Court might step in again. Did anyone think that the Constitution required a minimum voter turnout to make elections legit?

11/01/07 “The Guardian” — — Warren Buffett, the famous investor known as the “Sage of Omaha”, has complained that he pays a lower rate of tax than any of his staff – including his receptionist. Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52bn (£25bn), said: “The taxation system has tilted towards the rich and away from the middle class in the last 10 years. It’s dramatic; I don’t think it’s appreciated and I think it should be addressed.”

During an interview with NBC television, Mr Buffett brandished an informal survey of 15 of his 18 office staff at his Berkshire Hathaway empire. The billionaire said he was paying 17.7% payroll and income tax, compared with an average in the office of 32.9%.

“There wasn’t anyone in the office, from the receptionist up, who paid as low a tax rate and I have no tax planning; I don’t have an accountant or use tax shelters. I just follow what the US Congress tells me to do,” he said.

Mr Buffett also took a pot shot at hedge fund managers. He said: “Hedge fund operators have spent a record amount lobbying in the last few months – they give money to the political campaigns. Who represents the cleaning lady?”

His intervention comes amid an increasingly rancorous debate on Capitol Hill about tax. Shortly after taking office, President Bush pushed through $2 trillion in temporary tax cuts, including sharp reductions for high-earners. These expire at the end of 2010 and the White House wants to renew them.

A leading Democrat, the Harlem congressman Charlie Rangel, published alternative plans this week that would impose a 4% surcharge on people earning more than $200,000 a year, while delivering tax relief to 90 million working families.

Republicans say the net effect would be a $2 trillion tax increase that would hurt small businesses and farmers. Meanwhile, Mr Buffett’s remarks drew a robust response from the US Chamber of Commerce, which said the top 1% of US earners accounted for 39% of tax revenue – and the highest earning 25% of the population delivered 86% of the tax-take.

The chamber’s chief economist, Martin Regalia, said: “Mr Buffett has made an awful lot of money and if he wants to pay more taxes, I think that’s fine. But I think he should get his facts straight.”

He added: “There’s no question in my mind: if you were to impose [the Democrats’] tax increases, you would see the US go into a recession.”

A perfect example of the integrated threat that U.S. foreign policy and federal domestic regulations pose to the freedom, privacy, and well-being of the American people is the current telecommunications controversy.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the feds approached various U.S. telephone companies and asked them to illegally share private information about their customers. The argument, of course, was “national security” and the “war on terror,” the magic words that have come to justify all sorts of federal wrongdoing since 9/11 (e.g., torture, the invasion of Iraq, cancellation of habeas corpus, indefinite incarceration, and denial of due process).

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, the plaintiffs are alleging that some of the telephone companies agreed to cooperate with the feds, illegally and secretly sharing their customers’ private information with them. If the allegations are true, the obvious question arises, Why would these companies choose to become secret informers for the feds rather than fight to protect the rights and interests of their customers?

One possibility, of course, is that they fell for all the “national security, war on terror” nonsense, just as many other Americans did, failing to recognize that such nonsense has always been the time-honored way that governments seduce people into giving up their rights and freedoms for the pretense of security.

But there is another possibility, as former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio can attest. Unlike the other telephone-company CEOs, Nacchio refused to play ball with the feds, deciding, correctly, that the federal request was illegal and deciding, correctly, that he had a duty to protect the privacy of his customers.

What was Nacchio’s reward for such heroic action? The feds indicted him and convicted him of a federal crime, for which he has been sentenced to serve six years in a federal penitentiary. What was the heinous crime that Nacchio was convicted of? Insider trading, that heinous economic crime in which there are no victims.

In other words, the message delivered by the feds to the telephone companies after 9/11, when the federals were feeling the full force of their power, was, “You need to play ball with us, or else.” Some of the other companies, in an act of extreme cowardice, apparently folded, kneeled, kissed the rings of federal officials, and did what the feds wanted them to.

Not Nacchio and Qwest, for which they deserve the praise and accolades of every freedom-loving American.

At Nacchio’s trial, the federal judge refused to permit him to introduce evidence that his prosecution was retaliation for his refusal to go along with the federal request to violate the law and the rights of his customers. (See “Documents: Qwest was targeted,” by Sara Burnett and Jeff Smith, in the Rocky Mountain News, October 11, 2007.) The judge said the evidence wasn’t relevant. All that was relevant, the judge said, was whether Nacchio had sold some of his Qwest stock as a result of insider information he had acquired as a Qwest executive.

There are two important points to note about what is going on here.

First, as we have long pointed out, the real value of the regulated society is not any protection it provides to people. All that protection talk is just a sham. The real purpose of the regulated society is to keep the business and banking community in line — meaning in conformity with federal policy. The real purpose of the rules and regulations is to serve as a Damocles sword, ready to fall on any business or bank that refuses to go along with the feds.

The rationale behind the federal regulated society was best summed up by what a bureaucrat from the State Science Institute said to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged:

“‘Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?’ said Dr. Ferris. ‘We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against — then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.'”

Of course, the feds would argue that the law is the law and that Nacchio broke it and therefore has to pay the price. That, of course, is not the point. The point is that in the regulated society, everyone breaks the law, one way or another, which then provides the feds with the option of prosecuting anyone they want whenever they want.

Consider, for example, the IRS code. Despite never-ending railing among political candidates about how complex the code is, the feds love the complexity. Why? Because they know that no one can ever file a perfect income-tax return and especially not wealthy and influential businessmen. If the feds looked hard enough, they could prosecute anyone they wanted at any time for income-tax violations.

It’s the same with insider-trading laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, hiring illegal aliens, or a multitude of other economic crimes. If they hadn’t gotten Nacchio on insider trading, they would have undoubtedly gone after him for other things. The point is, he refused to go along with illegality and wrongdoing, and they went after him for it.

To add insult to injury, President Bush and some of his federal cohorts in Congress are seeking to give civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly chose to become federal informers. They are trying to get Congress to pass a law that would prohibit the customers of the telephone companies from suing for the companies’ allegedly wrongful (and cowardly) misconduct.

In other words, become a federal informer and we’ll protect you. Refuse to do so, and we’ll send you to jail.

What is the difference between neighborhood captains in Castro’s Cuba, who report people’s activities to their government, and U.S. telephone companies who report people’s activities to their government? Don’t they all rationalize their conduct under the same warped sense of “patriotism”?

And why are the telephone companies seeking immunity from civil liability in lawsuits brought by their customers? At trial, wouldn’t they have ample opportunity to show that the only records they turned over to the feds were those of terrorists? Why should they be let off the hook if they have illegally and secretly betrayed their customers in order to ingratiate themselves with the feds?

Another critically important point to note in all this is how U.S. foreign policy is at the root of it all. Follow the logic: With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the feds lose their official enemy — communism. Throughout the 1990s, they poke hornets’ nests in the Middle East, knowing that they are provoking anger and rage among people in that part of the world. That anger and rage ultimately erupts into terrorist blowback. The blowback is used to bludgeon American telephone companies into allegedly selling out the rights and privacy of their customers. Those who refuse are prosecuted for violating domestic rules and regulations.

Thus, while the short-term answer to all this involves a refusal to grant civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly became federal informers as well as dismissal of all charges against Joe Nacchio, there is only one long-term solution to this noxious weed — pull it out by its root by bringing an end to the U.S. government’s overseas empire and its interventionist foreign policy.

What color is your disaster? It makes a difference. A life and death difference.

Dig:

Population of San Diego fire evacuation zone: 500,000
Population of the New Orleans flood evacuation zone: 500,000

White folk as a % of evacuees, San Diego: 66%
Black folk as % of evacuees, New Orleans: 67%

Size counts, too. Size of your wallet, that is:

Evacuees in San Diego, in poverty: 9%
Evacuees in New Orleans, in poverty: 27%

The numbers would be even uglier, though more revealing, if I included evacuees of the celebrity fire in Malibu.

The President didn’t do a photo-strafing of the scene from 1700 feet this time. Instead, we have the photo op of George, feet on the ground, hanging with Arnold the Action Man. (However, I’m informed that the President was a bit disappointed that he didn’t get to wear one of those neat fireman hats like Rudi G got at Ground Zero.)

In 2005, while the bodies were still being fished out of flooded homes in New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker praised The Lord for his mercy. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did,” he said about the removal of the poor from the project near the French Quarter much coveted by speculators.

But as this week’s flames spread, no Republican Congressman cried, “Burn baby burn!” to praise the Lord for cleaning up the ‘Boo, the sin-and-surf playground of Hollywood luvvies.

In New Orleans, God’s covenant with real estate developers has been very profitable. Over 70,000 families remain, two years after the waters receded, in mobile home concentration centers far away from the N.O. re-building boom. Let’s see how long it takes to get Tom Hanks back on his beach towel.

Standing next to Governor Schwarzenegger, a smug little Bush said, “It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead” – a snide attack on the former Democratic Governor of Louisiana on whom the White House successfully dumped the blame for the horror show in New Orleans.

Mr. Bush never mentioned – and the media would never give away his secret – that 15 hours before the levees broke, the White House and FEMA knew the flood barriers were cracking, yet failed to inform the Governor and state police. Nor did Mr. Bush mention that his Department of Homeland Security’s FEMA trolls took away evacuation planning from the state and gave it to a crew of crony contractors who, for a million bucks, came up with a plan that came down to, “If a hurricane comes, get in your car and drive like hell.”

In California, plans were in place, money poured down with the flame retardant, and no one is suggesting that Mel Gibson move his swastika collection to a FEMA trailer.

Not comparable, the ‘Boo and the N.O.? You can say that again. But as a kid who grew up in the ass end of Los Angeles, I can tell you that disaster apartheid applies on the local scale as well. Look at the tarry filth of Compton and Long Beach shores versus the panicked reaction when a bit of garbage or oil sheen hits Malibu sands. (I remember, standing on the crude-covered shore of an Alaska Native village in March, 1991, the day Exxon announced it would end the clean-up from the Exxon Valdez spill. That same day, the papers showed the careful scouring that week of every pebble on Malibu beaches hit by dinky spill incident.)

Please don’t get the idea I’m slap-happy about the California inferno. My parents live in San Diego – and one of my favorite Air America hosts had to evacuate from her Del Mar hot tub, poor dear. (I’ve heard, however, that billionaires well done taste just like chicken.)

What I’m saying is: Besides the flames, there’s a class war raging in America. Or, should I say, Class Massacre. Because only one side is taking all the bullets. Malibu, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica are “incorporated communities” – islands of privilege politically fenced off from the riff-raff sea of Los Angeles. These self-incorporated Bantustans of the wealthy have their own fire departments and schools. The money islands are relieved of having to pay for the schools and hospitals of the city where their gardeners live. (I can’t tell which is the worst disaster that can befall an Angelino – a fire, an earthquake or the LA public school system.)

Now, it’s easy to say it’s just George Bush who’s the class clown of the class war. But it’s an old story. When a flood took out the tony homes at Westhampton Dunes, the Clinton Administration picked up the full tab for rebuilding these summer hideaways of investment bankers. While today, death-by-poison stalks the environment of Black townships of Louisiana (the FEMA ‘guests’ are parked in a zone called Cancer Ally), Al Gore can’t be found. But when speaking of rising sea levels that can take out the homes of his buddies in ‘Boo or the Hamptons, Gore goes ga-ga.

The one thing I’ll say in favor of that vile little Louisiana Republican cheering the drowning of public housing residents, at least he’s honest about how the system works. He’s not afraid to remind us of the gods’-honest truth: disaster response is class war by other means.

So let me not forget to report the war’s body count:

New Orleans flood deaths: 1,577.
California celebrity fire deaths: 5.

Tonight and this weekend, listen to “The Fire Next Time,” on the Palast Report, aired each week on Air America’s Clout with Richard Greene, on the Nova M network with Cynthia Black (from KPHX), on the Solution Zone with Christiane Brown (KJFK) – and live, in Chicago, this weekend, for Buzzflash.com, The Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and WCPT, Chicago’s Progressive Talk – and, on this Sunday morning on the Bree Show, KTLK Los Angeles, with host/evacuee Bree Walker, slightly charred (or is that a tan?) but undaunted.

It’s not quite signing statements, where President George W. Bush used legal means to “interpret” laws, allowing him to avoid Congressional directives, but the White House is now planning to implement as much new policy “as it can” by administrative order “after concluding that President Bush cannot do much business with the Democratic leadership.”

According to officials who spoke to the Washington Post, Bush blames Democrats for the holdup of Judge Michael Muskasey’s nomination as attorney general, the failure to pass budget bills and an inability to reach compromise on child healthcare.

Bush vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, saying Democrats hadn’t found a way to offset spending for the expansion of the program. Democrats have reservations about Mukasey because he has refused to denounce the president’s policy on waterboarding.

“White House aides say the only way Bush seems to be able to influence the process is by vetoing legislation or by issuing administrative orders, as he has in recent weeks on veterans’ health care, air-traffic congestion, protecting endangered fish and immigration,” the Post authors write. “They say they expect Bush to issue more of such orders in the next several months, even as he speaks out on the need to limit spending and resist any tax increases.”

House Democrats disagree with Bush’s assessments.

The article gave little information about Bush’s plans for administrative orders, focusing mostly on Congressional infighting and legislative disagreements between the White House and Congress.

On Wednesday, a diarist at the liberal blog Daily Kos noted that administrative orders differ from executive orders and directives, citing a University of Tulsa research document on executive power.

“Administrative Orders include numbered documents called determinations, and notices or memorandum designated by date,” the document states. “These orders often concern foreign policy decisions but may also include management decisions made by the President that concern Executive Departments.”

Recent examples of such documents, as listed by the National Archives, include “Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Significant Narcotics Traffickers Centered in Colombia,” “Memorandum on Waiver and Certification of Statutory Provisions Regarding the Palestine Liberation Organization Office,” and “Memorandum on Waiver of Limitation on Obligation and Expenditure of $1,051.6 Million in Fiscal Year 2007 Economic Support Funds for Iraq.”

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Calling it “a potential death sentence,” several hundred diplomats expressed their resentment Wednesday over a new State Department policy that could force them to serve in Iraq or risk losing their jobs.

Some diplomats may be forced to serve in the new U.S. embassy complex under construction in Baghdad, Iraq.

Some at the hourlong town hall-style meeting questioned why they were not told of the policy change directly, learning about it instead from news organizations last week.

Others pointed out the risks of such a rule, considering the dangers of a war zone, lack of security and regular rocket attacks on U.S. personnel.

One State Department worker complained she was not provided medical treatment for her post-traumatic stress disorder after she voluntarily served in Iraq.

The session was marked by angry exchanges, according to an audio recording of the meeting held at the State Department.

The sharpest comments came from Jack Croddy, a 36-year veteran of the Foreign Service.

Gary Corseri: I want to focus on your book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, with its exposition of policy-making during the Vietnam War—and we’ll consider how that process applies today. I’ll ask you about current world crises—Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Israel/Palestine. But first, I’d like to know how you come to have the authority to write about the policy-making process?

Gareth Porter: I don’t know that I have the authority—that’s subjective. I think I have the right background, though: the curiosity of the historian to figure out what actually happened—to solve mysteries or puzzles—in terms of American policy, specifically, policy towards war; and then, International Politics. I have an interest in policy on a theoretical level. I studied under Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago. Morgenthau had turned against the Vietnam War by then. I considered myself a realist, taking the idea of the Balance of Power seriously—that nation-states act in terms of power relationships. That was really the only way to understand the behavior of states in international politics. Obviously, that played a role in the way I looked at, in retrospect, the Vietnam War.

GC: Perils was published in 2005. Would you describe the theme, or themes?

GP: There are really two interrelated themes.

When I began my research, I understood that power relations had something to do with the road to war in Vietnam. But, it seemed, the pertinent literature had ignored that. I had a strong sense from my reading of Cold War history, specifically of Vietnam, and particularly my editing of a two-volume documentary history of the Vietnam War back in the late 70s—I had an intuition that the Communist world was much weaker than had been reflected in the history of the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. I began my research convinced that was a key to understanding how and why the US stumbled into war. That was my first theme: that power relations matter, that there was not a real balance of power between the US and Soviet Union during this critical period from 1954 to 1965, but, rather, a profound imbalance in which the US strategically dominated the Soviet Union. It’s clear that the Soviet Union was very much on the defensive. And the US, on the offensive, had a freedom of action the Soviets didn’t have. And that played a key role in shaping US decision-making on Vietnam.

The second theme, which I discovered as I read the documents, is that there was a big difference in the responses to Vietnam between Johnson and Kennedy on the one hand and their national security advisers on the other. I go back to Eisenhower and I concluded that he was totally opposed to intervention, but that a number of people in his administration were pro-military intervention. So, there was a conflict there as well.

GC: But Ike handled it better?

GP: Eisenhower was very strong dealing with national security issues, very self-confident. He was able to quash any pressures for war. But, in the case of Kennedy and Johnson, there were inexorable pressures from the key national security officials of their administrations to commit US forces in Vietnam.

GC: What accounts for this difference between the perspectives of the president and his own advisers?

GP: National security advisers define their role as managing US power. That’s the main thing they do, whereas the president, inevitably, has a broader range of issues. He has to put the advancement of US power interests alongside other issues. He’s much more sensitive to the costs of committing forces.

GC: And the president is always balancing his own perception of domestic politics.

GP: That, of course, is true, and it can cut both ways. In fact, what I conclude with both Kennedy and Johnson is that domestic politics was part of the pressure on them to make an accommodation with their national security advisers in taking steps towards war.

GC: Your book depicts the tension between policy-making on the one hand, and “reality” on the other. I’m not talking about the kind of reality some Bush administration hack told reporter Ron Suskind that the U.S., as an empire, had the power to define; rather, about the kind that can bite us on the ass when we’re not paying attention. For example, after 14 months of struggle with his own advisers, Johnson agrees to bomb North Vietnam. But, in the interval, two new realities had emerged which would change the outcome. Can you tell us what happened?

GP: Between the beginning of the bombing and the build-up of ground forces, the Viet Cong had become much stronger than the national security advisers had anticipated; they were able to advance much farther and faster against the South Vietnamese army. Our advisers had assumed that the Communist forces in the south were not strong enough to advance dramatically without help from the north.

Second, when the U.S. began its build-up of ground forces, the assumption was that the threat of even heavier bombing, including the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, would deter the North Vietnamese from countering. That again was a profound under-estimation of the determination and capabilities of the North Vietnamese. Basically, there were two fundamental miscalculations, based on the notion that US supremacy, at the strategic and at the conventional power level, would ensure that the United States could fight a low-level war and keep it from getting out of control.

GC: Others have written about the bureaucratic nightmare that endures through changes of administration and/or party. But, I don’t think anyone has documented the twists and turns as well. Your 403-page book has over 120 pages of notes, bibliography and index. And I think the vital role of your book lies not only in helping us to understand that murky and parlous era, but in providing a template for understanding our present crises … Can you talk a little more about how politics enters into policy-making? I’m thinking about the notion of collective responsibility.

GP: Right. That’s an idea I feel strongly about.

The assumption that diplomatic historians of the US have shared–I would say almost universally–in writing about Vietnam is that the Constitutional power of the president is absolute in making war. The idea that the president does not make the definitive decision to go to war is so outside the realm of possibility that it’s dismissed. I think there’s a perfectly logical explanation for that: diplomatic historians write within a paradigm in which it’s assumed that policy-making is guided by the Constitution, that there’s a logical relationship between legal responsibilities on the one hand and political reality on the other. That’s why it’s so difficult for them to imagine that the president is really not the critical force in powering the US towards war.

In 1962, before the Cuban missile crisis, but after Kennedy had failed to take strong action against Castro and the Soviet Union when it was discovered that there were Soviet military personnel in Cuba, the Republicans then mounted a very politically effective campaign, through the media and through Republican spokespeople to attack Kennedy for being soft on Communism and weak in the face of this alleged threat from the Soviet power on our doorstep. And, there’s no doubt that Kennedy was chastened by this. And that played a role in his taking such strong measures in the Cuban missile crisis, in a sense to risk nuclear war (although we now know that he had taken steps to make sure that would not result). Kennedy felt strong political pressure, he felt his presidency could be weakened by Republicans in a situation where they could attack him on a key issue of national security. I think that caused him to feel he had to have his own national security advisers fully on board to impress the public that he was not making any policy moves to avoid the use of force in Vietnam that did not have the full support of his top national security advisers. The same thing was true, even more so, for Johnson because he was even deeper into a situation where choices were either to face the “Who lost South Vietnam?” syndrome, or to send troops. In that situation, he felt the need, even more than Kennedy, to have his top national security advisers—the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—at least neutralized if not supporting him.

GC: That’s how politics works vis-a-vis the two-party system. But, you describe another phenomenon—the way politics are internalized inside an administration, so that Kennedy had to worry about his own people; you cite examples where Averill Harriman, for example, was practically sabotaging some of Kennedy’s efforts to open new channels of communication with the North Vietnamese. So, I wonder if you could focus on the role of the national security bureaucracy. Where do they come from? What are the origins, the operation and evolution? Most Americans do not perceive that our government works this way. How did it happen?

GP: This is the reality that dawned on me as I was researching this book. We have been virtually unaware of the extent to which the national security bureaucracy has taken on a crucial degree of power over policy; in effect, over issues of war and peace. It’s both military and civilian in character. Both are extremely important to the power we’re talking about. They’re both able to maneuver, to use methods to pressure the president, to narrow his options so it’s more likely he’ll accept their options.

We know that there are historical cases where the military leadership has been against using force—more so than civilian leadership. But in the case of Vietnam, it’s very clear: the military leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the top officials in the State Department and National Security Council officials were all leaning towards military intervention. The question is precisely the one you ask: What’s the character of this political entity which developed during the Cold War, which has sprung up as a major power center that did not exist before the Cold War and which exercises so much influence over policy? My key concern is that the national security bureaucracy does not act in the abstract interest of the US, or the American people–although I think it believes it does—but, rather, in ways that further the personal and institutional interests of the advisers themselves.

GC: The implications of which are enormous, illusion-shattering …

GP: It means that the military services are concerned with maintaining and adding to their missions in a war; and when there’s an opportunity to fight a war where they feel they can accomplish those ends, they will do so. For individuals who are heads of bureaucracies—the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security staff of the White House—they have a personal agenda to advance or expand the power of the US and to thereby add to their own status, their own prestige, their own political positions, their career c.v.’s, and various personal interests. That causes officials to push American power forward.

GC: We think that we have a balanced system, that we have checks and balances between the three branches of our government. But, in fact, the balance within the executive branch, which has become the most powerful, the most important in this age of the imperial presidency—that balance is very tenuous.

GP: Very tenuous, indeed. And, this is one of those occasions when we can skip forward, and note how the relationship between the president and his key national security advisers under the Bush administration represents a caricature of a president who is under pressure from his advisers to go to war.

Now, Bush, of course, is not Kennedy and he’s not Johnson. He’s much more willing to be manipulated. He’s a man who has no experience in foreign policy, who knows nothing about foreign policy and is really not interested in learning; therefore, he leans on his advisers far more heavily. So, even though Bush is ideologically attuned to the neo-conservatives, he is nevertheless subject to the manipulation of these officials who have their own agendas. And, we see in the case of the neo-conservatives the clearest example of a group of national security advisers who came into office with their own idea of what they wanted to accomplish—a very ambitious goal. And we have an exaggerated version of the kind of dynamics that I describe in our march to war in Vietnam.

GC: I’d like to continue to probe this bureaucratic nightmare, this meta-government. You said this began with the Cold War. I might put it back even further in the Roosevelt Administration; but, a long time ago I read that Truman had established the National Security State, and that we were no longer a republic. Do you care to dive into that?

GP: I think it’s true that the beginning of a policy of exploitation of a power advantage began in the Truman Administration. It was not so self-evident as it was during the Eisenhower Administration, where I show that in the first Indochina crisis of 1954, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were acutely aware of the great advantage that they had over the Soviet Union and China, and very clearly exploited that to pressure the Communist side—the Soviets, Chinese and Viet Minh—to accept a settlement at the Geneva Conference of 1954 that certainly did not reflect the local power balance within Indochina. But, I would say that it was during the Truman administration that we had this huge military build-up which put an enormous distance between the US and Soviet Union. It was that obvious power gap that gave the US an incentive to act more aggressively.

I think what you’re referring to is that the institutions—the military structure, the military bases network—existed essentially by the end of World War II, that we were already in most of these bases, particularly in East Asia then. So it was a result of that war that the US was able to exert the kind of power it did—particularly in East Asia, where the Pacific Ocean became virtually an “American Lake”. I agree that the problem began even before the Cold War, but then it was exacerbated as soon as the US carried out the first major military build-up before the Korean War, which accelerated during that war.

GC: If the process you describe is correct, concerning this government by bureaucracy, what does that tell us about our democracy? Is our president anything but a figurehead?

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner became the first woman elected to the presidency of Argentina on Sunday. Her victory is not difficult to explain. Her political party, under President Nestor Kirchner (her husband), led a dramatic economic turnaround that made Argentina the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere over the last five and a half years. More than 11 million people, or 28 percent of the population, were pulled over the poverty line as the economy grew by over 50 percent.

This 8.2 percent annual growth was more than twice the average for Latin America – it is more like the fastest-growing countries of Asia.

Unemployment has dropped from 21.5 percent to 8.5 percent, and real (inflation-adjusted) wages have grown by more than 40 percent.

Cristina Fernandez’s victory was thus predictable and relatively easy. But the economic recovery that drove it was not so simple, and the people who led it deserve more credit than they have generally received. They had to take on not only the conventional wisdom of the economics profession, but powerful international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Their success may have some important implications for other developing countries.

When Argentina defaulted on a record $100 billion of debt at the end of 2001, almost all of the experts predicted that this would be the beginning of a long period of punishment. The country would be shunned by international financial markets and by foreign investors, they said, and this would be very damaging. The government had better reach an agreement with the IMF, and follow its advice. And it had better play nice with the defaulted foreign creditors.

The experts could hardly have been more wrong. The economy contracted for just three months after the default, and then began to grow. It hasn’t stopped since.

Contrary to a common belief, Argentina’s expansion was not based on exports or high commodity prices: only about 13 percent of the growth during the whole expansion was due to exports.

What did Argentina do right? Most importantly, the government got its basic macroeconomic policies right. After years of seeing its domestic economy crippled by an overvalued currency that made imports artificially cheap, the Argentine central bank targeted a “stable and competitive real exchange rate.”

In other words, the authorities made sure that their currency didn’t rise too high, and didn’t swing wildly as a result of movements in financial markets. (Here in the U.S., where we have shed more than three million manufacturing jobs since 2001 – the bulk of them lost due to an overvalued dollar – we might take note.) They also kept interest rates low and made growth, rather than the lowest possible inflation, the top priority.

These policies are mostly a no-no among central bankers and economists, and Argentina had a few showdowns with the IMF, including a brief temporary default to the Fund in September 2003. But the Fund backed down, and the most of the defaulted international creditors ended up settling for 35 cents on the dollar in 2005.

Of course Argentina hasn’t gotten a lot of foreign direct investment in the last five years and it cannot directly borrow on international bond markets. But these handicaps – which if you read the business press should spell doom – turned out not to be all that important. Nor are they permanent: in time, foreign investors and lenders will find their way back to a fast-growing economy.

The lesson: just as “all politics are local,” so, too, are the most important economic policies for most countries. Getting the basic macroeconomic policies right for your own economy is a lot more important than pleasing international financial markets. That goes double for failed, unaccountable international financial institutions like the IMF. The Fund not only oversaw the train wreck that collapsed Argentina’s economy from 1998-2002, it opposed the most important policies that drove Argentina’s remarkable recovery.

The new government will face challenges, of the kind brought about by a fast-growing economy: keeping inflation in check and assuring adequate supplies of energy. But these problems are manageable. Of course there are some analysts who argue otherwise – but their forecasts over the last five years have not been very accurate.