The Rag Blog

For the last quarter century, corporate America has been at war against the labor movement. After a long period in which unions were an accepted part of the economic and political landscape, most corporations adopted a much more hostile attitude toward unions. Where unions already were present, employers sought to weaken or break them. In workplaces without unions, employers were prepared to do whatever was necessary to prevent workers from organizing.

This anti-union drive has largely enjoyed the support of the government. For example, it is now a standard practice for employers to fire workers engaged in an organizing drive. A study by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, found one in five organizers will be fired during an average organizing drive (see here). Such firings are illegal, but enforcement is sufficiently slow, and the penalties sufficiently small, that most employees eagerly embrace this effective anti-union tactic.

Government policies have also supported anti-union practices in other ways. A main purpose of trade agreements like NAFTA was to make it as easy as possible to relocate factories overseas. The high dollar policy Robert Rubin initiated in the Clinton era also put US manufacturing, and its unionized workers, at a huge disadvantage. A 30 percent over-valued dollar effectively imposes a 30 percent tariff on goods exported from the United States, while providing a subsidy of 30 percent on goods imported into the United States.

As a result of these policies, much manufacturing has, in fact, been moved overseas in the last quarter century, giving the country a trade deficit of more than $700 billion annually. And the jobs lost in manufacturing have been disproportionately union jobs. While the unionization rate in manufacturing was more than 40 percent in the sixties, in 2006 it was just 11.6 percent, less than the 12 percent average for all workers, although still somewhat higher than the 7.4 percent average for the private sector as a whole.

The weakening of the labor movement is not just bad news for the workers who lose union jobs. According to polling data, there are tens of millions of workers who would like to be represented by a union at their workplace, but don’t currently have the option. The best way to get a guide as to how many workers would be in unions if they could opt to do so, in the absence of employer threats and harassment, is to look at the unionization rate in the public sector.

While public sector managers are not generally friendly to unions, they can’t fire union organizers or use the other harsh anti-union tactics that are now standard practice in the private sector. As a result, more than 36 percent of public sector employees are members of unions. Given the freedom to choose, it is likely a comparable share of private sector workers would also be in unions. This would imply an additional 30 million workers in unions.

In addition to directly benefiting the workers they represent, unions also benefit the larger workforce and society as a whole. In an industry with a strong union presence, non-union firms know they must maintain comparable wages and benefits if they are want to keep their workers from joining a union. The decline of unions has undoubtedly been an important factor in the growth of inequality in the last quarter century.

Unions have also been essential to a wide range of political initiatives over the post-war period. Programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start would not have been possible without the strong support of the labor movement. The same is true of the key civil rights legislation of the sixties. More recently, the labor movement was at the center of the effort to prevent President Bush from privatizing Social Security. It will be difficult to make much progress on a wide range of social and economic issues without the support of a strong labor movement.

Congress is currently debating a bill that would take an important step toward re-establishing the right of workers to join a union. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would require a company to recognize a union once a majority of workers have signed a card indicating they want to be represented by a union. This gets around the election process, which gives employers a chance to intimidate workers and fire the leaders of an organizing effort. (Under the EFCA, workers can still request an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.)

The EFCA would restore some meaning to the right to organize. The bill that has been passed by the House by is currently being blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. While the EFCA is not likely to become law under this Congress (President Bush would almost certainly veto the bill even if it did pass), progressives should recognize the importance of legislation. The right to organize is not the concern of just a small special interest group; it is a basic right that should concern us all. In the same vein, all progressives have an interest in seeing a strong labor movement. For this reason, the EFCA and other measures that level the playing field between labor and management should be top items on the progressive agenda.

On the two year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush stood in the middle of the still devastated Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and crowed, “This town is better today than it was yesterday, and its going to be better tomorrow than it is today.”

This is not because Bush failed to notice the boarded up homes, the overgrown empty lots, or the fact that most of the residents have not and will never return. It is not government neglect or mismanagement of funds. Speaking for a system that was built on slavery and genocide, that has white supremacy built into its structures, laws and culture, George Bush looked at all this and saw progress.

Survivors: “They was trying to wipe us out.”

Beginning the evening of August 29 and continuing for four more days the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita included sessions on the abuse of prisoners, police brutality, lack of evacuation plans and neglect of the levees, environmental racism, labor and migrant rights, schools, gentrification, and displacement and other outrages.

Nkechi Taifa opened the indictment against the U.S. Government for Crimes Against Humanity by invoking the memory of Mamie Till whose son Emmett was brutally lynched by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Mamie Till courageously insisted that the casket of her 14-year-old son, Emmett, be opened up for the world to see. She displayed his battered and water-soaked body publicly, shocking the conscience of the world.

Two years after Katrina and Rita, Nkechi insisted that the barbarity and criminality of what was-and is continuing to be done-to Black people and others in and around New Orleans still needs to be opened up for the whole world to see.

For two and a half days over Katrina’s anniversary, I visited New Orleans. Through the Tribunal, at protests, in Cooper projects, and in the Lower Ninth Ward, I heard bitter stories

Of prisoners hurling fists, broom sticks and wheelchairs against the walls of their confinement amidst rising flood waters till they collapse in exhaustion. Guards long since gone. Lights out. Water, thick and putrid with sewage, rising to their necks in the pitch black.

That still haunt

Children swept out of the arms of parents. Elderly folks stranded in wheelchairs for days as maggots and waterbugs, soaked out of the building foundations, crawl all around and over them.

That flow from-and were enforced by-a system

“You know what hurt me?” asked an older woman from Cooper Projects, as two years later tears pile out of both eyes, “When we was going through all that water, that filth, that oil, all that to get over to that bridge I see nothing but FEMA cars police lights big Army helicopters sitting in that spot. Those people sitting there not trying to help us. They was looking at us die. Come on now! That hurts. That hurts I will die saying they was trying to wipe us out.”

Protest and Anger

On August 29, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of residents and activists from around the country held commemorative events and protests around the city. Robert Green held a public memorial in the Ninth Ward where his home had been swept off the ground in twenty feet of raging floodwater. His mother died there, and his granddaughter had slipped off the roof and disappeared into the water two years before. After being abandoned to die in the storm, the authorities refused to retrieve his mother’s body from the rooftop where she was clearly visible from a distance and weeks later Green had to go in and do it himself.

Later that day, up to a thousand residents, volunteers, and activists gathered at the levee wall where it had broken and marched through the Ninth Ward. Most of its residents have not returned because of obstacles thrown up by city, state and federal government. People marched through pouring rain to Congo Square some five miles into town.

Throughout the afternoon a Day of Presence, organized by Susan Taylor, editor of Essence magazine, brought together Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, poet Jessica Care Moore, and other Black leaders and artists in front of the Convention Center where tens of thousands had been stranded without food or water for days during the storm. This, however, is downtown. Everything is cleaned up here. A “David Duke for Governor” (a notorious Klan white-supremacist) bumper sticker taunted those who gathered.

For five days, the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita pried open the crimes of the government before, during, and after Katrina with first-hand testimony from prisoners, witnesses of summary executions, victims of severe police brutality, folks still dispersed and living in trailers, people locked out of public housing and activists and experts from the ACLU, National Conference of Black Lawyers, Center for Constitutional Rights, NAACP, National Lawyers Guild, Louisiana Justice Institute, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Malcolm X Grassroots Committee.

I spoke with Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, famous for her honest and angry testimony about surviving the storm in Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke. She told me that she’s met people who were ready to kill themselves before they heard her testimony in the film. Hearing her speak the truth gave them the strength to keep struggling.

Housing and the Right to Return

One very sharp concentration of the system’s plans to “rebuild” New Orleans is the forced displacement of people, a refusal to rebuild privately owned housing, and the shuttering of public housing. Large housing projects in New Orleans, like St. Bernard, Lafitte, and C.J. Peete are completely shut down while several others, including Iberville and B.W. Cooper are mostly fenced off and unoccupied. These projects could house more than 5,000 families, and they comprise some of the least damaged housing in New Orleans post Katrina. The government used Hurricane Katrina to empty the projects and keep the people who lived there, most of them poor Black people, from returning to the city. One of these projects is going to be replaced by a golf course!

On August 31, residents of public housing, public housing advocates and others protested at the office of the executive director of the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), demanding an end to the destruction of public housing and the right of all New Orleans residents to return. In response, the HANO office closed for the day, police and National Guardsmen cordoned off the building, entered it and surrounded the Director’s office for several hours until protesters marched out of the building.

An encampment of homeless folks has sprung up across the street from Mayer Nagin’s office downtown demanding that housing be opened up to those who need it. Activists there told me that Mayor Nagin at one point offered to open up housing to the protesters, but they refused, choosing to continue sleeping in the park with others until housing is provided for everyone.

Two years after Katrina, the crimes against the people continue.

New Orleans population is less than two-thirds of what was before Katrina, yet estimates say there are now three times as many homeless people. While New Orleans moves to permanently shut down its four largest housing projects, nearby St. Bernard Parish passed a “whites only” law in the form of requiring that anyone who moves there must have a blood relative already living in the Parish, which is 93% white (the law is being challenged in court).

33,000 people are estimated to be still living in FEMA trailers, many of which are infested with dangerous levels of formaldehyde. A man who lives in a FEMA park with about 23 trailers housing 75 people told me that, of the adults, there is one woman who works26 miles away at a Wendy’s. The only town nearby is almost entirely white and the 1,500 or so people who live there don’t want the evacuees around. “My thirteen-year-old, he finished second in his class. But on awards day, they didn’t give him anything,” the man explains with pain in his voice. “He was very disappointed, you know? I know what it is. A thirteen year old don’t understand that.”

One thing that makes every resident of New Orleans I meet smile is the volunteers who have come through to rebuild. Over 14,000 volunteers, including students from over 200 colleges, have been part of rebuilding just with the Common Ground effort. They helped residents clear debris from their homes and yards in the Ninth Ward, they set up volunteer clinics and risked arrest to clean out and reopen schools-including the one Bush had the audacity to pose for a photo-op in.

Most of the volunteers have come not only from long distances, but also from very different walks of life. The ones I spoke with have been changed by the survivors they’ve met and from their close-up look at how this system treats those at the bottom. One told me, “When I was back in California there were a lot of things I worried about that really now this experience kind of gives me an appreciation for how little some of that matters.”

But despite the wonderful spirit of these volunteers, and despite the burning, fierce desire of the people of New Orleans to survive and rebuild, the system stands in the way at every turn. The system is shuttering housing when people need housing, moving jobs when people need work, creating a viciously two-tiered educational system when people need schools Everywhere you turn, the system is the problem not the solution.

There is a great challenge to everyone to step forward in political resistance, and to not let what is happening in New Orleans go down like this.

On Labor Day we customarily give a nod to America’s underpaid and overworked blue- and pink-collar workers–janitors, flight attendants, forklift operators and the like. But this year let’s go a step further and salute the most reviled and despised of the people who make our economy happen, the mere mention of whom causes the average forklift operator to spit on the floor. You are thinking, perhaps, of telemarketers, human traffickers and the fiends who answer the phone when you to try to make a claim on your health insurance. But I’m talking about our CEOs.

Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups–United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies–have issued a gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year, which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire with $10.1 million in their exclusive pension funds. The groups further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to believe, work equally hard.

And, in what they must think is their cleverest point of all, the UFE/IPS folks state: “The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That’s…204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military.” You know what we’re supposed to think here: Wow, but generals have all that responsibility! They’re responsible for national security, or at least for conducting the wars that increase the threats to our national security and thus help justify ever greater increases in our national security apparatus!

But someone has to speak up for our beleaguered CEO class, and let me begin with that spurious comparison to the top military brass. Could we put patriotic emotion aside for a moment and look at this in a hardheaded, bottom-line sort of way?

Suppose you are the general responsible for all the service people in Iraq, about 130,000, and suppose you manage to lose every single one of them in some ghastly miscalculation. With the death benefit for the family of one dead soldier running at $100,000, your mistake will cost a total of $13 billion. Sounds like a lot, I know, until you consider that a hedge fund manager or financial company CEO can lose that much in a single afternoon, without anyone even noticing. There is simply no comparison between a general and a CEO.

That’s a side issue, though. The real point, which the CEOs and their usual defenders are strangely reticent to make, is that it’s damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich. Before you start playing your air violins, consider the costs of maintaining as many as five different homes, some of them as large as 45,000 square feet, most with swimming pools, tennis courts, guest houses and wine cellars requiring constant supervision.

The poor whine about having no home at all, or maybe a two-bedroom apartment for a family of six. They should just think for one moment of the tribulations involved in running four or more mansions, each with its own full-time staff. There’s the problem of getting between them, for example. A friend of mine, of very modest means himself, consults for a billionaire couple who commute between London and Los Angeles by private jet, with their dogs following in a second private jet.

But much of what we know about the extreme costs of wealth comes from Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank’s recent book Richistan. The ultra-rich, drawn largely from the CEO class, require staffs of about forty to fifty people, including not only cooks, maids and nannies but “lifestyle managers” (to set up the entertainment schedule) and–in a throwback to the original Gilded Age–butlers. It’s the butler’s job, among other things, to deal with any issues that may arise from the proliferation of homes. For example, if the boss is in Palm Beach, Frank reports, “and wants to send his jet to New York to pick up a Chateau LaTour from his South Hampton cellar, the butler makes it happen, no questions asked.”

Nor are the ultra-rich in a position to cut back on their expenses–by, say, running down to the supermarket for a $12 bottle of Chardonnay. If they were to do so, their friends would despise them. As Frank explains, the Richistani word “affluent,” meaning someone with less than $10 million in assets, translates into English roughly as “scum.”

A mean-spirited critic of the ultra-rich CEO class might grumble that the rich should simply find a new circle of friends. But who exactly might these new friends be? If you were in the $100 million-in-assets set, you could hardly consort with the class of people for whom a pittance like $10,000 might be a transformative sum, possibly allowing Granny to get her insulin and the children to have warm winter clothes. People of that class could not be trusted not to pocket the silverware or rip out the gold fixtures in your powder room. They might even make a lunge for your throat.

The Sunday Times of London is reporting that the Pentagon has plans for three days of massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. Last week, Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, told a meeting of The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal, that the military did not intend to carry out “pinprick strikes” against Iranian nuclear facilities. He said, “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military.”

Bush has already set the wheels in motion. With Rovian timing, Alberto Gonzales’ resignation was sandwiched between two Bush screeds – one aimed at ensuring Congress scares up $50 billion more for the occupation of Iraq, the other designed to scare us into supporting war on Iran. As Gonzales rides off into the sunset, the significant questions are who will take his place and how that choice will facilitate Bush’s occupation of Iraq and attack on Iran.

One name that’s been floated for Bush’s third attorney general is Joe Lieberman, the “independent” senator from Connecticut. Lieberman, who advocates the use of military force against Iran, was the only person Bush quoted in his August 28 speech to the American Legion. Bush called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” and pledged to “confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

Gonzales greased the Bush/Cheney wheels for torturing in violation of the Geneva Conventions, illegally spying on Americans, and purging disloyal Bushies.

Similarly, Lieberman would ensure the Justice Department mounts a vigorous defense of a war of aggression against Iran. And Bush would get a two-fer: Connecticut’s Republican governor would appoint a Republican to fill Lieberman’s seat, returning control of the Senate to the GOP. A Republican-controlled Senate would direct the agenda, thereby furthering the Bush/Cheney plan.

Lieberman is closely affiliated with American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. “AIPAC leverages its power by an alliance with the Christian Right, which has adopted a bizarre ideology of ‘Christian Zionism,'” according to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole. “It holds that the sooner the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, the sooner Christ will come back. Without millions of these Christian Zionist allies,” Cole added, “AIPAC would be much less influential and effective.”

During the 2004 election, a 100% “AIPAC voting record” was Lieberman’s litmus test for an acceptable presidential candidate. As the House of Representatives was on the verge of passing a resolution that would’ve required Bush to consult Congress before attacking Iran, the AIPAC lobby stopped it in its tracks.

Bush’s WMD-hyping against Iran is déja vu in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Disaster, where he played loose and fast with the truth about Iraq’s alleged WMDs. His statement that a nuclear Iran could put the region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust” conjures up his images of a “mushroom cloud” in the hype-up to Iraq.

How inconvenient for Bush that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) just found Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is nowhere near producing significant amounts of nuclear fuel. The IAEA report says Iran “has been providing the agency with access to declared nuclear materials, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and facilities.”

Iran and IAEA agreed on a plan with a step-by-step timetable of cooperation to settle unresolved issues. The agreement said there were “no other remaining issues and ambiguities regarding Iran’s past nuclear program and activities,” and characterized the accord as “a significant step forward.”

“This is the first time Iran is ready to discuss all the outstanding issues which triggered the crisis in confidence,” said IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei. “I’m clear at this stage you need to give Iran a chance to prove its stated goodwill. Sanctions alone, I know for sure, are not going to lead to a durable solution”

In 2003, when Dr. ElBaradei reported there was no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, the White House was not pleased. And as Saddam Hussein became more cooperative with the weapons inspector, Bush became “infuriated,” according to Bob Woodward.

Bush’s vow, “We will confront this danger before it is too late,” is the Iran incarnation of his illegal preemptive war doctrine, which he inaugurated in Iraq. In a clear signal he is seeking regime change in Iran, Bush called for “an Iran whose government is accountable to its people, instead of leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.”

Barnett Rubin reported on Global Affairs blog that one of the leading neo-conservative institutions has “instructions” from Dick Cheney’s office to “roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this – they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.'”

Bush/Cheney created the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to lead a propaganda campaign to bolster public support for war with Iraq. The White House decided to wait until after Labor Day of 2002 to kick off WHIG’s mission. Chief of staff Andrew Card explained, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Five years later, they’re marketing a new and even more dangerous product – war with Iran. British military historian Corelli Barnett says “an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III.”

Our military spending has reached $1 billion every 2-1/2 days and we are borrowing $2-1/2 billion per day. Bush is mortgaging our children’s future security and wealth. We have lost more than 3,700 soldiers in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died.

We have already seen how easily Congress caves in to AIPAC. It’s up to the people. As Noam Chomsky said, “The most effective barrier to a White House decision to launch a war [on Iran] is the kind of organized popular opposition that frightened the political-military leadership enough in 1968 that they were reluctant to send more troops to Vietnam.”

For long time now, perhaps a year, I’ve been hearing (we’ve all been hearing) that the White House is planning to bomb Iran. As the neo-cons say, “Boys go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran.” It’s a strategy so seductive that John McCain set it to music.

I’ve been dismissive of these rumors, as have you. Why? Because one would have to be a madman (or Dick Cheney) to start a second war when the first one is going so fucking well.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t take into account the way decisions about these things are made; and it neglects to take into account, as well, this particular president’s view of himself in history.

As Bush this weekend was disclosed to have said to his biographer, “I made a decision to lead… One, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance, and that may be true. But the fundamental question is, is the world better off as a result of your leadership?” [The biography, by the way, is called Dead Certain. How reassuring to the rest of us.]

In the eyes of our president, an Iran with a different government is a world better off. The people of Iran, or what’s left of the people of Iran after a 1,200-target bombing campaign, will greet us as liberators. History and Joe Lieberman will judge him brave for having turned the tide in the Grand Battle Against Islamo-fascism — a battle which, as we now know, had its origins in the Vietnam war.

Still, I was inclined (you were inclined) to dismiss all this bluster as sabre-rattling. Alas, in the past week it has become more likely that those sabres are Tomahawk missiles — locked, aimed, targeted.

Here are the indications that a large bombing campaign against Iran is not only on the table, but is in fact the main dish — the turkey, if you will, of Thanksgiving 2007. I list them in order of ascending terrifyingness.

First: Robert Baer, the former middle-East CIA operative and a man who is not unconnected in the intelligence world (c.f., Syriana), says his peeps tell him we’re planning to “hit” Iran.

Second: Barnett Rubin, a scholar and one of the Serious people in the academic foreign policy establishment, says we’re already committed to an attack on Iran, and that the marketing for this attack will be ramped up after the long weekend. [In this light, Bush’s speech to the American Legion and various Cheney remarks of the last month can be seen as test-marketings. As Bush said in that speech, “We will confront this danger before it is too late.” Meaning, I suspect: “before I no longer have my finger on the button.”]

Third: the foreign press, which during the run-up to Iraq was far less blinkered than, say, the Gray Lady, has been over this weekend treating an attack on Iran as a fait accompli. See this from the Telegraph (UK) . The Times (UK) ran today a headline with the flat declaration, Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran. They quote Alex Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.” [One can’t help but recall the strategic calculus of General Buck Turgidson: “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”]

Fourth: I doubt that David Addington believes that Bush, under the AUMF, really needs the permission of congress, or of anyone. As a courtesy, of course, he’d likely, as the planes are on their way, inform a bipartisan leadership group (several Republicans plus an independent from Connecticut). But what’s sadder is that this Congress, whose Democratic leadership is talking about opposing the war but not mentioning the words “withdrawal” or “timetable”; which cowed before the FISA revisions; whose Senate this year blithely passed, 97 to zip, a resolution condemning Iran for attacking U.S. forces in Iraq — When push comes to shove, will Reid and Pelosi (and Clinton, and Obama) put their political capital where their mouth is? As the magic eight ball says, “Signs point to no.” (See Glen Greenwald’s astute assessment of the political situation.)

Fifth: Regardless of the politics, in the Gulf of Hormuz the ships are in position, and, according to one unverified account, the targets are targeted, the planes are rehearsing even as we speak. In what are purported to be the words of one Navy officer on scene: “”I don’t think it’s limited at all. We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens.”

For me (and for you), beginning a war in Iran — in the midst of the disaster that is Iraq — is the precise incarnation of Santayana’s warning: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” But for Bush and Cheney, two of the ten or twelve people who actually believe that the Iraq war is going well, this new venture would be, in their eyes– Going from strength to strength.

I’ve written to my Congressman, and to both Senators. Call me quixotic, for writing; call me naive, for encouraging you to do the same; and, at day’s end, call me cynical, for believing that public opinion here makes not one whit of difference.

For this long, hot weekend in Los Angeles, the last weekend before the full roll-out of the Iran Strike Ramp-Up [can’t you just see the CNN logo?], we’ve gone to Video Hut and rented Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. We have a 14-year-old in the house, and we thought it would be nice to provide him with some context. As we pray, against all indications, for cooler weather and a peaceful fall.

Howard A. Rodman is a screenwriter, novelist, educator. He is professor and former chair of the writing division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts; a member of the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, west; and an artistic director of the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs.

The most effective diplomats, like the most effective intelligence officers and foreign correspondents, possess empathy. They have the intellectual, cultural and linguistic literacy to get inside the heads of those they must analyze or cover. They know the vast array of historical, religious, economic and cultural antecedents that go into making up decisions and reactions. And because of this-endowed with the ability to communicate and more able to find ways of resolving conflicts through diplomacy-they are less prone to blunders.

But we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect. We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasn’t worked well in Iraq. It hasn’t worked well in Afghanistan. And it won’t work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.

To make rational decisions in international relations we must perceive how others see us. We must grasp how they think about us and be sensitive to their fears and insecurities. But this is becoming hard to accomplish. Our embassies are packed with analysts whose main attribute is long service in the armed forces and who frequently report to intelligence agencies rather than the State Department. Our area specialists in the State Department are ignored by the ideologues driving foreign policy. Their complex view of the world is an inconvenience. And foreign correspondents are an endangered species, along with foreign coverage.

We speak to the rest of the globe in the language of violence. The proposed multibillion-dollar arms supply package for the Persian Gulf countries is the newest form of weapons-systems-as-message. U.S. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns was rather blunt about the deal. He told the International Herald Tribune that the arms package “says to the Iranians and Syrians that the United States is the major power in the Middle East and will continue to be and is not going away.”

The arrogant call for U.S. hegemony over the rest of the globe is making enemies of a lot of people who might be predisposed to support us, even in the Middle East. And it is terrifying those, such as the Iraqis, Iranians and Syrians, whom we have demonized. Empathy and knowledge, the qualities that make real communication possible, have been discarded. We use tough talk and big weapons deals to communicate. We spread fear, distrust and violence. And we expect missile systems to protect us.

“Imagine an Iranian government that was powerful, radical, and in possession of nuclear weapons; imagine the threat that would pose to Israel and to the American-led balance of power, which has been so important in the Middle East since the close of the Second World War,” Burns said in a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston last April 11. “That is our first challenge.”

“Our second challenge is that Iran continues to be the central banker of Middle East terrorism,” he went on. “It is the leading funder and director of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine general command. Third, Iran is in our judgment a major violator of the human rights of its own people; it denies religious, political, and press rights to the people of a very great country representing a very great civilization. And so we see a problem that is going to be with us for a long time, and we are trying to fashion a strategy that will work for the long term.”

George W. Bush’s latest salvo, on Aug. 28, was more of the same.

“Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” he said. Bush warned that the United States and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late.”

These kinds of words, pouring out of the administration, send a clear message to any Iranian: You are in trouble. Bend to our will or we destroy you. These were the same words, with a few minor changes, that the Bush administration delivered to Saddam Hussein, who, despite numerous compromises, including letting the U.N. inspectors back into his country, was overthrown and put to death during a U.S. occupation.

And the Iranians know that without the bomb, which no intelligence agency thinks they can produce for a few years, they are now probably going to be attacked.

The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for a series of airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. The air attacks are designed to cripple the Iranians’ military capability in three days. The Bushehr nuclear power plant, along with targets in Saghand and Yazd, the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, a heavy-water plant and radioisotope facility in Arak, the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit, and the uranium conversion facility and nuclear technology center in Isfahan, will all probably be struck by the United States and perhaps even Israeli warplanes. The Tehran Nuclear Research Center, the Tehran molybdenum, iodine and xenon radioisotope production facility, the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories, and the Kalaye Electric Co. in the Tehran suburbs will also most likely come under attack.

But then what? We don’t have the troops to invade. And we don’t have anyone minding the helm who knows the slightest thing about Persian culture or the Middle East. There is no one in power in Washington with the empathy to get it. We will lurch blindly into a catastrophe of our own creation.

It is not hard to imagine what will happen. Iranian Shabab-3 and Shabab-4 missiles, which cannot reach the United States, will be launched at Israel, as well as American military bases and the Green Zone in Baghdad. Expect massive American casualties, especially in Iraq, where Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies will be able to call in precise coordinates. The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, will be shut down. Chinese-supplied C-801 and C-802 anti-shipping missiles, mines and coastal artillery will target U.S. shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers. Oil prices will skyrocket to well over $4 a gallon. The dollar will tumble against the euro. Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, interpreting the war as an attack on all Shiites, will fire rockets into northern Israel. Israel, already struck by missiles from Tehran, will begin retaliatory raids on Lebanon and Iran. Pakistan, with a huge Shiite minority, will reach greater levels of instability. The unrest could result in the overthrow of the weakened American ally President Pervez Musharraf and usher into power Islamic radicals. Pakistan could become the first radical Islamic state to possess a nuclear weapon. The neat little war with Iran, which few Democrats oppose, has the potential to ignite a regional inferno.

We have rendered the nation deaf and dumb. We no longer have the capacity for empathy. We prefer to amuse ourselves with trivia and gossip that pass for news rather than understand. We are blinded by our military prowess. We believe that huge explosions and death are an effective form of communication. And the rest of the world is learning to speak our language.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“

Add faked photos to the list of lies told by the Bush­Cheney Administration before its invasion of Iraq.

In a town hall meeting in Bloomsburg, Pa. this week, Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a 12-term congressman, said that shortly before Congress was scheduled to vote on authorizing military force against Iraq, top officials of the CIA showed select members of Congress three photographs it alleged were Iraqi Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones. Kanjorski said he was told that the drones were capable of carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical agents, and could strike 1,000 miles inland of east coast or west coast cities.

Kanjorski said he and four or five other congressmen in the room were told UAVs could be on freighters headed to the U.S. Both secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and President Bush wandered into and out of the briefing room, Kanjorski said.

Kanjorski said it was the second time he was called to the White House for a briefing. He had opposed giving the President the powers to go to war, and said that he hadn’t changed his mind after a first meeting. Until he saw the pictures, Kanjorski said, “I hadn’t thought that Iraq was a threat.” That second meeting changed everything. After he left that meeting, said Kanjorski, he was willing to give the President the authorization he wanted since the drones “represented an imminent danger.”

Kanjorski said he went to see Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a retired Marine colonel. Murtha, said Kanjorski, “turned white” when told about the drones; Murtha, a former intelligence officer, believed that such information was classified.

Several years later, Kanjorski said he learned that the pictures were “a god-damned lie,” apparently taken by CIA photographers in the desert in the southwest of the U.S. The drone story itself had already been disproved, although not many major media carried that story.

In October 2002, President Bush said in Cincinnati that “Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.” He said that he was concerned “that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” In that same speech, he claimed, “Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles-far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations-in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work.” Bush further claimed, “Surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.” Those claims were later proven false.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said that at the time the President made his speech, intelligence analysts had already discounted that threat. Nelson had told Florida Today in December 2003 that no analysts had “found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability.” Any drones that Iraq did have, John Pike, director of Global Security, a major military and intelligence “think tank,” told Florida Today, had limited range, and would not be able to target Tel Aviv, let alone the U.S.

Nelson, on the floor of the Senate in January 2004, said that the information presented by the Administration was crucial in getting him and others to authorize a pre-emptive strike.

In a four-day period after that meeting in northeast Pennsylvania, Rep. Kanjorski did not return phone calls to follow up on his statements. The Department of Defense and the CIA did not comment. Certain representatives who could confirm the meeting were unavailable.

Assisting on this story were Bill Frost, and John and Sandie Walker.

WASHINGTON — One of the most heavily criticized actions in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was the decision, barely two months later, to disband the Iraqi army, alienating former soldiers and driving many straight into the ranks of anti-American militant groups.

But excerpts of a new biography of President Bush show him saying that he initially wanted to maintain the Iraqi army and, more surprising, that he cannot recall why his administration decided to disband it.

“The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Bush told biographer Robert Draper in excerpts published in Sunday’s New York Times.

Draper pressed Bush to explain why, if he wanted to maintain the army, his chief administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, issued an order in May 2003 disbanding the 400,000-strong army without pay.

“Yeah, I can’t remember; I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” Bush said, adding: “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all this stuff” — a reference to national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley.

Spokesmen for the White House and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declined to comment about the excerpts Sunday. Bremer could not be reached for comment.

Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of Defense for policy and an architect of the Iraq invasion, said the excerpts raised interesting questions about how the pivotal decision was made.

Feith was deeply involved in the decision-making process at the time, working closely with Bush and Bremer.

In February 2003, the month before the invasion, Feith briefed Bush about plans Rumsfeld had signed off on to maintain the Iraqi army. The assumption at the time, based on information provided by the CIA, was that the army would remain intact after the invasion, Feith said.

Instead, Iraqi officers fled their posts, which were ransacked and looted. U.S. officials inherited a military that would have to be overhauled or abandoned, Feith said in an interview Sunday, and they opted for the latter.

Feith said he could not comment about how involved the president was in the decision to change policy and dissolve the army.

“I don’t know all the details of who talked to who about that,” he said.

But he said the decision warrants scrutiny.

“I know there are people out there who say one of the most significant decisions the United States made [in Iraq] was the dissolution of the Iraqi army,” Feith said. “So it’s an interesting question. But very often on these things, until everybody writes memoirs and all the researchers look at the documents, some of these things are hard to sort out. You could be in the thick of it and not necessarily know all the details.”

Feith, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, is the author of a forthcoming memoir, “War and Decision,” about his work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Draper’s book “Dead Certain” is to be released Tuesday.

Iraqis are finding it harder to be optimistic about the future these days. Not only is violence rife everywhere, but also the government of Nuri Al-Maliki seems unable to keep its own ministers in the cabinet. Operation Arrowhead Ripper is continuing in Baquba, capital of the Diyala governorate, 70 kilometres northeast of Baghdad. Meanwhile, Operation Phantom Strike has already started in towns around the governorate, in an effort to eliminate “Al-Qaeda” suspects. While US troops comb Al-Sadr City in Baghdad, members of the “Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” are assassinating their Sunni opponents.

In less than a month, Baghdad has seen two traffic bans; one lasting for three days. In Karbala, police went on alert and a traffic ban was declared on 26 August in preparation for Shia religious holidays, which are expected to bring millions of visitors to holy shrines. News reports speak of widespread clashes in Karbala 28 August, as tens of thousands gathered to attend the anniversary of Imam Al-Mahdi. At least one person was killed in the clashes, the reason for which remains unknown.

In Basra, rival Shia groups are fighting to control the city ahead of British withdrawal. Basra is close to Iran, and some say that its coasts are used for oil smuggling, an activity believed to be financing weapon purchases. Eyewitnesses in Basra told the Associated Press that fighters from the Mahdi Army occupied the joint police command as soon as British forces vacated it. The news was denied by Iraqi police. A spokesman for Moqtada Al-Sadr said that militiamen gathered at the police station, chanted slogans of victory, then “safely withdrew”.

In less than two weeks, unidentified gunmen assassinated two high-level officials of the Higher Islamic Council: the governor of Al-Diwaniya (180 kilometres south of Baghdad) and the governor of Al-Muthanna (220 kilometres south of Baghdad). Meanwhile, US troops backed by helicopters are still combing Al-Sadr City in north Baghdad, looking for bomb smugglers affiliated with Iran. Most American casualties in Iraq over the past few months were killed by roadside bombs. Prime Minister Al-Maliki had asked occupation forces not to attack Al-Sadr City without his permission.

Iraqi police said that several civilians were killed in a raid by a US helicopter in Salaheddin governorate. A statement by US forces last Monday said that two US soldiers were killed on Sunday in exchanges of fire in Salaheddin governorate, north of Baghdad. In the course of Operation Phantom Strike, US planes killed 37 members of Dawoud Al-Majmaee’s family in Diyala, including eight children and 13 women. Meanwhile, according to police sources, dozens of Al-Qaeda gunmen attacked the home of a mosque preacher in Diyala and killed him along with other members of his family before abducting 12 people, including women and children. The dead imam was a member of the anti-Qaeda “Diyala Revival Council”. In a related incident, a suicide attacker broke into a house in Al-Tagi, north of Baghdad, and killed five anti-Qaeda Sunni clan leaders.

Meanwhile, Al-Maliki has rejected all calls for his resignation, and asked France to apologise for statements made by its foreign minister. Bernard Kouchner, who visited Baghdad last week, apologised, and then went on to say that Al-Maliki would have to go. “Al-Maliki is leaving us soon,” the French minister said.

The Iraqi prime minister lashed out at Senator Hillary Clinton as well for calling his government a failure. Al-Maliki claimed that the Islamic Party, the largest of Sunni groups, was about to join the Shia-Kurdish coalition of “moderates”. Speaking at a news conference, Al-Maliki brushed aside criticism of his government, saying that the country was about to see “political and economic progress as well as improvement in services.” He even promised every citizen “land and a loan to build a house”.

Salim Abdullah, a key figure at the Islamic Party, denied that the party wanted to join the “coalition of moderates”. Speaking to reporters, Abdullah said that the Islamic Party “blesses the formation of the coalition but thinks it would be inappropriate to join.” The Islamic Party, which is led by Sunni Vice-President Tareq Al-Hashimi, turned down an invitation by the four parties of the “coalition” to participate in a united front.

On Saturday, Al-Hashimi said that he told the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) that he was willing to step aside as vice-president should the IAF asks him to do so. IAF leader Adnan Al-Duleimi said that Al-Hashimi’s resignation was out of the question for the time being. Although an agreement was reached among key Iraqi political groups last Sunday, the IAF still wants the government to resign.

Khalaf Al-Elyan, chairman of the Iraqi National Dialogue Council and a key IAF figure, said that the meeting was an attempt by the government to “appear as if it were trying to mend fences with the opposition.” Al-Elyan added that the political situation was “unclear” and that the government should resign. The IAF, he said, had no intention of returning to the government unless its demands were met. Meanwhile, key Iraqi political and sectarian groups are said to have reached an agreement 26 August night as part of an effort to break the deadlock. The agreement is to be presented to parliament when it returns from recess 4 September.

Speaking at a news conference in Baghdad 27 August, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said that he was assessing “the political crisis in the country” with a view to “determining future courses of action”. Al-Hashimi and Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, as well as northern governor Masoud Barzani, attended the news conference.

On Wednesday, March 28 at Englewood High School in the Chicago Public Schools, an unusual thing happened. Instructors in the schools ROTC (Army Reserve Officer Training Corps) agreed to debate Vietnam and Iraq war veterans about the benefits and disadvantages of military enlistment. As part of a service project for the Constitutional Rights Foundation on the pros and cons of the draft, Englewood students constructed a debate format for the panelists to argue a myriad of issues pertaining to the War in Iraq. The panelists included; Barry Romo, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Sergeant Maurice Flowers, ROTC instructor, Aaron Hughes, member of Iraq War Vets against the War, Major Harry McEwen, ROTC instructor and a soldier on active duty in Iraq who is against the war who will remain anonymous. Five Englewood students sat by the panelists and fielded a series of questions for the guests to answer. Some of the questions asked included; “Do you think enlisting in the military is a good idea, why or why not?” and “What do you think about the 3,000 plus soldiers who have died in the war so far?”

The most important exchange occurred after Major McEwen commented that every decision in life involves a calculated risk. He asserted that driving a car was one of the most dangerous things a person can do, and many more die doing that than serving in Iraq. In a passionate and angry response, VVAW’s Barry Romo disputed that logic, challenged the Major, “to compare dying in an auto accident to intentionally killing someone for no good reason is a terrible comparison.”

Students fixated on this moment and began to ask pointed questions directed at the ROTC instructors in the little time that remained. Senior Andrea Hendricks, heavily recruited by the Navy, asked the Major, “Did you serve in combat like these other men.” In a very prosaic manner, the Major answered “No, I didn’t.”Questions were then beginning to accumulate as another young woman in the audience followed up with “well don’t you think these other men might be right, being that they’ve seen what actual combat is really like?” By that point, the Major had no choice but to concede the obvious. As a teacher of predominantly low income, African American youth, I can confidently say that on this day we dealt a powerful blow to the military recruitment machine. More discussions and forums like this one in our public schools would go a long way to counter the war propaganda parceled out daily by ROTC programs across America.