The Rag Blog

[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]

When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I’m afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety — the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.

The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.

Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world — and I use “get on in the world” in the very broadest sense — well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.

Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed…. intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war — and what a very strange wartime it has been.

When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq War had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the President, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked “Mission Accomplished,” had declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today — “Words in a Time of War” — surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era’s most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the President uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The President has lost control of those words, as of so much else.

At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003 fits handily into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier — a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the television audience — the event and its staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of victory — the first being the pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, also staged — an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004 election. The President was the star, the sailors and airmen and their enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.

However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl’s famous film spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a “disciplined grasp” of the “symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse” — as your Rhetoric Department’s website puts it — surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is radical — unprecedentedly so — in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.

I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial “unnamed Administration official” and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official” told him:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante’s welcome above the gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from “Bush’s Brain” — for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname — these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the “reality-based community” — those such as we — are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be “truth” — in quotation marks — for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?

Of course I should not say “those such as we” here, for you, dear graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades — though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the “reality-based community” may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.

The Dirtied Face of Power

I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of — I hope — permitted rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters — for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival — but by the votes of Supreme Court Justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.

In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the President shortly achieved this first success in “creating his own reality.” To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.

This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of it: Nineteen young men with box cutters seized enormous transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide attacks in a single day — often these multiple attacks from Baghdad don’t even make the front pages of our papers — it is easy to forget the blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame, on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.

The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box cutters in the hands of nineteen young men, nor airliners at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way of talking — the propaganda of the deed, indeed — then that day the television was the indispensable conveyer of the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena in which America’s weakness and vulnerability could be dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror — as Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs — terror is about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about “dirtying the face of power.”

President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic “over-determined” decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of the neoconservative project to “remake the Middle East”; and of realpolitik, in the form of the “vital interest” of securing the industrial world’s oil supplies.

In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation’s leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation’s prestige, to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the President, when asked by Bush’s speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq War, responded: “Because Afghanistan was not enough.” The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror — the burning towers collapsing on the television screen — had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first “war cabinet” meeting at Camp David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the “lack of targets” in Afghanistan and wondered whether we “shouldn’t do Iraq first.” He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our television screens, and soon.

In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks, though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy these multi-million dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs, improvised explosive devices, worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare and one should note here with some astonishment how successful it has been these last half dozen years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neo-conservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare “uni-polar moment.” It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy, and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.

The U.S. Marine Corps is investigating three inactive reservists for wearing their uniforms at protests and for critical statements they made. They face the stain of an “other than honorable” discharge. Whether it affects their veterans benefits would be up to the VA. WASHINGTON — Going on a mock patrol can get you in real trouble with the U.S. Marine Corps.

In a case that raises questions about free speech, the Marines have launched investigations of three inactive reservists for wearing their uniforms during antiwar protests and allegedly making statements characterized as “disrespectful” or “disloyal.”

Two of them were part of the guerrilla theater squad of 13 Iraq Veterans Against the War who roamed Capitol Hill and downtown Washington in March, clad in camouflage and carrying imaginary weapons, to mark the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war.

Adam Kokesh, 25, a graduate student at George Washington University, faces a hearing Monday in Kansas City, where the Marines will recommend an “other than honorable” discharge from the Individual Ready Reserve. He was previously honorably discharged from active duty after fighting in Fallujah and receiving the Combat Action Ribbon and the Navy Commendation Medal.

Upon learning he was being investigated for wearing his uniform during the mock patrol, Kokesh wrote an e-mail to the investigating officer, Maj. John Whyte. The combat veteran discussed his service and his critique of the war, and asked the officer, “We’re at war. Are you doing all you can?” He concluded with an obscene recommendation about what Whyte should go do.

This earned him the count for a “disrespectful statement.”

Appeal to Congress

Liam Madden, 22, who spent seven months on the ground in Iraq, last fall helped launch the Appeal for Redress, a Web site where military personnel can directly appeal to Congress to support withdrawal of troops. Madden, of Boston, is accused of wearing his camouflage shirt at an antiwar march in January.

He also is accused of making disloyal statements during a speech in February in New York, when he says he wasn’t wearing his uniform.

These statements, as summarized by the Marines in legal documents: “Sgt. Madden spends several minutes explaining the ‘war crimes’ of the Bush administration. Sgt. Madden claims that the war in Iraq is a war ‘of aggression’ and one of ’empire building.’ Sgt. Madden explains that the president of the United States has ‘betrayed U.S. military personnel’ engaged in the Iraq conflict.”

The identity of the third Marine under investigation could not be immediately verified.

Papers drawn up by Marine lawyers indicate the corps sees it as a matter of enforcing clear regulations.

The case also raises a fundamental question of interest to the roughly 158,000 men and women in the Marines’ and Army’s Individual Ready Reserve: Are they civilians — free to speak their minds — or not?

In legal documents sent to the reservists, the Marines cite well-known military regulations against wearing uniforms for political activity. Against Kokesh they say a Marine may not insult an officer. Against Madden they cite a military law that covers disloyal statements.

GALESBURG, Illinois (June 2) – Caisha Gayles graduated with honors last month, but she is still waiting for her diploma. The reason: the whoops of joy from the audience as she crossed the stage.

The school said the five students can still get their diplomas by completing eight hours of public service work, answering phones, sorting books or doing other chores for the district.

Gayles was one of five students denied diplomas from the lone public high school in Galesburg after enthusiastic friends or family members cheered for them during commencement.

About a month before the May 27 ceremony, Galesburg High students and their parents had to sign a contract promising to act in dignified way. Violators were warned they could be denied their diplomas and barred from the after-graduation party.

Many schools across the country ask spectators to hold applause and cheers until the end of graduation. But few of them enforce the policy with what some in Galesburg say are strong-arm tactics.

In Galesburg, the issue has taken on added controversy with accusations that the students were targeted because of their race: four are black and one is Hispanic. Parents say cheers also erupted for white students, and none of them was denied a diploma.

Earlier this week, the American Friends Service Committee asked me to speak about finding hope in hard times as part of an interfaith service to conclude their “Eyes Wide Open” display in Chicago’s Grant Park. The display arranged 3,438 soldiers’ boots to commemorate U.S. military people killed in Iraq, along with life sized pictures of Iraqi civilians and a collection of numerous civilian shoes to remember hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed in Iraq since 2003. I asked the audience to join me in recalling experiences I had while imprisoned at the Pekin Federal prison for “crossing the line” at Fort Benning, Georgia.

May 1, 2004, marked the first anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. I was in a prison library trying to write an article about that boastful declaration when several women prisoners urged me to hurry over to a TV room for the breaking news on CNN. “Kathy, you gotta come and see this,” they said, their eyes widened with alarm. “It’s awful, what’s going on over there in Iraq.” CNN was showing the first pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib, images now indelibly embedded in peoples’ memories all over the world: the hooded man; the pyramid; the man on a leash; the man and the dog.

The women I knew in prison could readily identify with shame and fear felt by prisoners in Abu Ghraib. They understood all too well what it meant to feel humiliated, isolated and out of control. But the tears they shed that morning were fueled by their fundamental patriotism. “What’s happening to our country?” they asked.

In response, several women told the warden that they wanted to gather together on the oval track, each day, at sunrise and at sunset, for a special time of prayer. The warden agreed to this, and so began an extraordinary prayer circle.

Here are some of the prayers I recall: “I want to pray for my kids. I ask God to please look after them. And I just want to hold up the children in Iraq, because I know they’re suffering a lot.”

“I want to pray for my children and also for the children of the guards working in this prison.”

“Lord, I pray for all of the children of all of us here, and I pray for all of the U.S. military people in Iraq who are separated from their children.

“It’s so hard for parents and children to be far apart. I just want to pray for every family separated by this war and especially for the kids whose parents won’t ever come home.”

“I pray for parents who’ve lost their kids.”

Over the days and weeks, the prayer circle steadily grew. By the time I left the prison, close to one hundred women were regularly gathering to pray for peace, for freedom, and for an end to war.

I’ve done time in maximum security and minimum security prisons in the United States, and I still don’t know where they keep “the bad sisters,” but I surely know something about criminality. The most dangerous criminals in the United States today are those who profit from and prolong the war in Iraq.

Nobel economist Dr. Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the war in Iraq, if it continues another eight years, will ultimately cost the U.S. economy 2.2 trillion dollars. It’s shocking to think of what we’ve lost in dedicating this expenditure to war, rather than to domestic and foreign aid which could save millions of lives lost to hunger and illness, or, say, to renewable energy development which might save hundreds of millions from economic and environmental disasters now clearly on the horizon. Who are the criminals?

Many people argue that the troops are stabilizing conditions in Iraq. When I hear earnest concerns for Iraqi civilians, I can’t help but wonder why these concerns were so absent when economic sanctions against Iraq directly contributed towards the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under age five. Have we now a new slogan? “No Iraqi child left behind!”

A May 8th, 2007 “Save the Children” report stated that in 2005, in Iraq, 122,000 children didn’t reach their fifth birthdays. Conditions can’t have improved in 2007 as we learn from the World Health Organization that 80 percent of Iraqi families have home sewage facilities that contaminate their water sources, and 70 percent of families don’t have regular access to clean water; as a result diarrhea and respiratory infections now account for two thirds of the deaths of children under age five. Twenty one percent of Iraqi children are now chronically malnourished. (New York Times, April 18, 2007). The report also notes that 70 percent of Iraqis who die in hospitals after violent injuries would have survived if the hospitals were adequately equipped.

From 1996 through 2003, Voices in the Wilderness delegations delivered duffel bags filled with medicines and medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals during the years when the US and the UK insisted on maintaining brutal economic sanctions against Iraq. The U.S. Treasury Department accused us of acting criminally. Recently, the New York Times noted that Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil company, paid $20 million dollars “under the table” to Saddam Hussein’s government in return for obtaining lucrative contracts, all in violation of the economic sanctions. (May 8, 2007) Condoleeza Rice, then a member of Chevron’s Board of Directors, chaired the corporation’s Public Policy committee when Chevron initially began paying the illegal surcharges. This was the committee charged with oversight of international contracts.

During a period when the Treasury Department hauled Voices in the Wilderness into court several times and ultimately fined us $20,000 dollars, (a sum we have refused to pay), they never went after Chevron.

We don’t want to see a single executive that has profited from economic and military war against Iraq go to jail. But we do want to see them rehabilitated.

The women in prison did what they could in response to feeling overwhelmed by the war in Iraq. They prayed for a kinder and saner world and in the very act of uttering prayers they helped build a more sane perspective on the horrific harms and risks incurred by ongoing war in Iraq.

When I left the Pekin prison, Sherrie, a prisoner trusted and esteemed by prisoners and guards alike, drove me to the bus station. As we passed the high security prison for men, where the median sentence length is 27 years, she placed her hand on mine. “I know you care a lot about those people over there in Iraq. At least our boys aren’t over there,” said Sherrie, an African American woman. “Our boys are all in there.” I don’t know if Sherrie’s words can be backed up demographically. But over the past few years I’ve puzzled over her words and I think I finally understand what she meant. I think she meant that even the darkness of spending decades in a prison is preferable to the risk of killing or being killed in a foreign war to protect criminal interests of an empire.

This summer, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate will be asked to appropriate another $145 billion dollars to pay for ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Analysis of the Department of Defense Budget Materials shows that tens of billions of dollars will be spent on Humvees, Armored Security Vehicles, Bradley vehicles, Stryker vehicles, and Abrams tanks. The earliest expected date for delivery of these items is in 2009, by which time the U.S. people are becoming quite determined that U.S. troops should be home. (see www.vcnv.org for analysis of Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental Spending, Fiscal year 2008).

I have in front of me two documents of despair, of disillusionment with the American political system that allows this criminal war to continue. Andrew J. Bacevich in his Washington Post op-ed column and Cindy Sheehan in her statement on her blog express despair over the failure of the Democrats placed in power by an antiwar electorate to take firm measures to end the war in Iraq. Sheehan declares, as she announces her departure from the spotlight that “hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike,” adding, “It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years”

Professor Bacevich, now sharing Sheehan’s personal grief, calls his earlier hopes that he and others might force the country to change course “an illusion,” noting that “responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party.” “Money,” he notes bitterly, “maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent. This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.”

If there is a positive aspect to this despair, it is this very realization: the system is the problem. It has not so much “failed” us as we have failed to understand what Sheehan and Bacevich are concluding: it isn’t designed to work for us but for but for them.

For those who can’t bring themselves to say that the war is not a “mistake” but a crime. For those who can’t call for immediate withdrawal in accordance with the wishes of the American and Iraqi people but talk about “benchmarks” for a gradual withdrawal. For those who want to shift the onus of the U.S. failure in Iraq to Iraqi politicians for their delays and bickering, and the Iraqi people for their bewildering Islamic sectarianism.

It serves those who vote in bipartisan fashion to further vilify and isolate Syria and Iran—the fools who do not know the first thing about Islamic history and the divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, secularists and Islamists. It serves those lining up to embrace the fear-mongering Islamophobic neocon agenda for more confrontation with the Muslim world. It serves those who fear AIPAC more than the consequences of a strike on Iran. It serves the Democrats who want to keep an attack on Iran on the table, but assure President Bush that his impeachment is off the table because it’s just too radical a prospect for them to consider.

This is indeed the way the system works.

“I am deemed a radical,” writes Sheehan, “because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside” Having seen Sheehan speak on several occasions, I think rather she’s been deemed radical because her understanding of the war is too honest for the system’s hacks and political opportunists (including some who affect a liberal antiwar posture) to endorse. They cannot.

Nancy Pelosi cannot say, “This is an imperialist war to reconfigure the Middle East, allow the U.S. to control the flow of oil from the region, dot it with huge permanent U.S. military bases, advance Israeli aims in the region, and intimidate all potential rivals for decades. It is wrong, a clear violation of international law.” Harry Reid can’t say, “The lies of these war planners are so obvious. We need hearings now about the Office of Special Plans. We need to find out who forged the Niger uranium documents and who undercut our intelligence professionals in pushing that completely false case presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. We need to move on impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.”

That sort of honest talk is not normally allowed by the system to the “loyal opposition.” Only under circumstances of extraordinary duress, when it feels its very existence threatened, does the system make some concessions to the people it doesn’t work for. In the early ’70s our outrage over the war in Vietnam, compounded by disgust about the evolving Watergate Affair, forced Congress to cut off war funding (through the Case-Church Amendment passed on June 19, 1973), produced a wave of investigations that exposed the vicious Cointelpro Program, and produced the Freedom of Information Act. We’re not yet back to that level of outrage, but the number of people questioning the system itself — the money-driven “Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics” — is growing. As the Democrats drag their feet, ignore their mandate to end the war, and collude with moves against Iran and Syria bound to produce disastrous repercussions, disillusionment will no doubt mount, as it should.

“To be radical,” wrote Marx, “is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man, the root is man himself.” In other words, radicalism means thinking clearly about how and why people in general are oppressed by the “money” to which Bacevich alludes. By those who use their unconscionable wealth (= political power) to pursue their boundless “interests”—sacrificing other people’s children to do so. But Marx in the same work notes how people oppress themselves with delusional thinking. He refers to religion but might as well be speaking of delusions about contemporary American “democracy” when he writes, “The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.”

Corporate media—and even some alternative websites, are blaring with headlines about Cindy Sheehan “quitting” the anti-war movement. It is true that Sheehan has stepped down as the consummate symbol of the ordinary, salt-of-the-earth American mother crusading against the empire for the end of the war that brought about her son’s meaningless death. But it is not true that Cindy is “quitting.” After years of sacrifice, incomprehensible losses, and several hundred stages of burnout, she has walked away from a role and the symbolism inherent within it, but even more significantly in my opinion, and reverberating through her article “Letter To The Democratic Congress,” she has rejected the Democratic Party and its pretense of offering an alternative to the politics of empire.

Last night I watched Keith Olbermann begin his “Countdown” show with the story of Sheehan’s “quitting” the anti-war movement, even including some quotes from her, but mentioning nothing about her leaving the Democratic Party. How could he do otherwise when he devoted the next twenty minutes of the program to interviewing Al Gore and communicating unmistakably to the viewers that the former Vice-President is unequivocally our “savior”? What else could we expect from corporate media?

Yesterday, I received emails which described Sheehan’s departure as “sad” and “unfortunate”, suggesting that she had been “worn” down. I understand the intent of these comments, but I emphatically disagree. Could we all please look more deeply into Sheehan’s decision?

What is it exactly that Cindy Sheehan walked away from? What did she “quit”? Certainly, it was not her feelings and opinions about the empire and its endless wars. What she resoundingly rejected was “hope”—that cousin to denial that so many “progressives” want to hang onto above and beyond all manifestations of reality to the contrary. One reason we treasure her and the one quality that has endeared her to us is her unmitigated courage and fortitude in standing toe-to-toe with the empire. Yet, many of us fail to see the courage in her decision to walk away from her most recent expressions of that courage and demonstrate courage on a deeper level. It is one thing to confront the empire with the Democratic Party and a throng of progressives invested in the Party and the rigged electoral process standing behind oneself in “support”, and it is quite another to turn around and face those so-called supporters and insist they are part of the problem.

What Cindy is saying is simply, “I no longer choose to embrace the teddy-bear illusion that I live in a democratic republic in which the rule of law and the Constitution prevail. I am no longer willing to believe that a two-party system exists in this empire, and I refuse to continue to ‘hope’ that one wing of the one-party system will ever significantly challenge or extricate itself from the other wing. I will not live in denial, even if it brings me adulation, inspires others to resist the empire, or nurtures within me a feeling of doing the right thing. I will open my eyes, and my mouth, and I will buy OUT of the current paradigm.”

Many of you reading these words have made the same decision Cindy has made, and many of you have also been called “quitters” or “purveyors of doom and gloom.” Others of you have not bought out of the illusion that the federal government, the Democratic Party, or some political, environmental, or spiritual movement can save the earth and its inhabitants, and you are still “hoping.” And of course, from the earliest origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition to Barack Obama’s “The Audacity Of Hope”, the culture is replete with moralizing aphorisms that instruct us not to give up hope. Yet, as any recovering addict will testify, it is only when we give up all hope that we can awaken with clarity and a deeper consciousness to the reality of our situation.

I do not mean to minimize the brutal losses beyond the pale that Cindy Sheehan has incurred. No other word than “tragic” can be applied to the loss of her son, the loss of her marriage, the enormous debt she is now facing—including her own personal hospital bills for a heat stroke, and the countless sacrifices she has made in order to speak truth to power and awaken the entranced citizens and politicians of empire. Has she been “worn down”? Unquestionably, and so have many of us who would not have otherwise walked away from empire and its delusional political process. American capitalist/consumerist/corporatist culture is so toxic, so seductive, so addictive, so soporific that few of us are capable of seeing through it without terrible, sometimes traumatic, loss and persecution.

WASHINGTON (June 1) – Detailed plans for the new U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad appeared online Thursday in a breach of the tight security surrounding the sensitive project.

Computer-generated projections of the soon-to-be completed, heavily fortified compound were posted on the Web site of the Kansas City, Mo.-based architectural firm that was contracted to design the massive facility in the Iraqi capital.

The images were removed by Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. shortly after the company was contacted by the State Department.

“We work very hard to ensure the safety and security of our employees overseas,” said Gonzalo Gallegos, a department spokesman. “This kind of information out in the public domain detracts from that effort.”

The 10 images included a scheme of the overall layout of the compound, plus depictions of individual buildings including the embassy itself, office annexes, the Marine Corps security post, swimming pool, recreation center and the ambassador’s and deputy ambassador’s residences.

U.S. officials said the posted plans conformed at least roughly to conceptual drawings for the new embassy, which is being built on the banks of the Tigris River behind huge fences due to concerns about insurgents’ attacks.

Dan Sreebny, a spokesman for the embassy in Baghdad, declined to discuss the accuracy of the posted images.

BAGHDAD, 29 May 2007 (IRIN) – Escalating fighting and sectarian violence are forcing hundreds of families in Iraq to flee their homes on a daily basis, aid agencies say.

According to a report released on Sunday by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), an estimated 822,810 Iraqis are now displaced within their country.

Muhammad Abdul-Yassin, 39, was forced to leave his home nine months ago after continuous fighting near his home and being targeting by militias. He said he had to change his place of residence more than four times.

“There are no safe places in Iraq. Militants or insurgents find you wherever you are,” Abdul-Yassin said.

“Each time we arrived in a new camp, dozens of other families arrived with us. Most of the places are full to bursting and some of the displaced families are forced to sleep rough on the ground without tents until aid agencies can give them some protection and food. In the camp where we are staying now, we were forced to sleep in the open air for three days and drink dirty water because the aid agencies couldn’t reach us,” he said.

Contaminated water

“Displaced families in Anbar, Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf and all the southern provinces are suffering from a shortage of potable water,” a spokesperson for the Iraq Aid Association (IAA) said. “Some are drinking contaminated water and children can be seen nearly starving, requiring urgent water and food.”

The UNHCR report confirmed the above, adding that there was an urgent need for shelter, food and non-food supplies, as well as jobs.

Aid agencies say they face difficulties accessing IDPs many of whom face severe water shortages.

Unemployment

Unemployment remains the main cause of growing poverty among IDPs, according to Professor Jamal Obeidi, a displacement expert from Baghdad University and an analyst in the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

“If at least one person from each [displaced] family was working, they would have been earning money and been able to buy food for their families, despite the insecurity. The lack of jobs has put these families in the worst conditions,” Obeidi said.

Income and employment are reported as priority issues for 65 percent of IDPs, according to the UN-affiliated International Organisation of Migration (IOM).

Lack of food

Forty seven percent of displaced families in Iraq have no access to the national food programme, according to the country’s Ministry of Trade and the UNHCR.

“Lack of security has prevented families getting to warehouses and many others have moved to southern provinces which have been tardy in registering the newly displaced. Some areas cannot cope and lack food to give to the population,” said Maruan Muhannad, a senior official in the Ministry of Trade.

Obeidi recommended to the Ministry of Trade that it organise convoys to deliver food parcels directly to IDPs in displacement areas. “They could take the warehoused food which has no owner, fill a convoy and deliver directly to such families.”

“Our children are sick because they do not receiving enough food. They are eating badly because we cannot get our share of the national food programme since we got displaced a year ago and have lost our documents,” said May Kareem, 34, a displaced mother of three who lives on the outskirts of the capital.

It’s no news that George W. Bush and his handlers don’t know much about history, but their latest stab at pretending otherwise is among their most ludicrous.

At a press conference on Wednesday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that President Bush thinks Iraq will develop along the lines of “a Korean model,” and defined that to mean a situation in which the United States “provides a security presence,” and serves as a “force of stability,” for “a long time.”

Let’s set aside for a moment whether the comparison is valid—much more on that to come—and ask why on earth Bush would make it. Huge numbers of U.S. troops have been in South Korea for 57 years. Do Bush and Snow really mean to suggest that U.S. troops will still be stationed in Iraq in the year 2060 and beyond?

Now back to the merits—or rather demerits—of the analogy. In 1950, the United States beat back North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, became embroiled in a Chinese-assisted guerrilla war, fought the Communists to a stalemate, and, in 1953, after suffering 54,000 combat deaths, negotiated a truce (but not a formal peace). Ever since, American troops—at present, 37,000 of them, stationed at 95 installations across the Korean peninsula—have remained on guard at the world’s most heavily armed border.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew its regime (which posed a hypothetical threat), and, in the four years since, has kept about 150,000 troops in the country to kill terrorists (who weren’t in Iraq before the war), to train the Iraqi army (which the Bush administration, for still-mysterious reasons, dismantled at the occupation’s outset), and to keep a “low-grade” sectarian civil war (which erupted amid a vacuum of authority) from boiling over.

In the half-century-plus since the Korean armistice of 1953, just 90 U.S. soldiers have been killed in isolated border clashes in Korea. In the mere four years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, more than 3,000 American servicemen and women have been killed, and the number rises every day.

To sum up, we intervened in South Korea as a response to an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to contain Communist aggression. We intervened in Iraq as the instigator of an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to expand unilateral American power. We remained in South Korea to protect a solid (if, for many years, authoritarian) government from another border incursion. We are remaining in Iraq to bolster a flimsy government and stave off a violent social implosion.

In other words, in no meaningful way are these two wars, or these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might follow “a Korean model”—if the word model means anything—is absurd.

At times during Wednesday’s press conference, Snow seemed to recognize this absurdity. Take these passages from the transcript:

Q: So you’re not suggesting that U.S. troops would be there for over 50 years in a—

Snow: No, no, I’m not. I don’t know. It is an unanswerable question, but I’m not making that suggestion.

Q: You’re not suggesting that there’s a parallel between the Korean model today and the Iraqi model today, in terms of U.S. force posture?

Snow: No, what I’m saying is you get to a point in the future where you want it to be a purely support role. But no, of course, we’re in active combat …

Q: [W]hen you talk about this Korean model, would that kick in whether things are going poorly after the surge or going well after the surge? I mean, do you have to maintain a stability of some sort?

These days, Donald Buswell’s job is not as exciting or dangerous as it once was. For the past few months, his working hours have been spent taking care of some 40-plus wounded soldiers at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston medical center. The work is sometimes menial, even janitorial, but he doesn’t mind. After all, Buswell has been where these men are — three years ago, he too was recovering from wounds received in a battle zone in Iraq.

“I truly consider this an honor,” Buswell told his dad not long ago.

Still, it’s not exactly where Buswell expected to be after 20 years of well-respected service in the Army.

Since joining the Army in 1987, he had risen to the rank of sergeant first class, serving in both Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Korea. He ended up with shrapnel scars and a Purple Heart and, back in the U.S. after his last tour in Iraq, a job as intelligence analyst at Fort Sam Houston.

He couldn’t have foreseen that one e-mail could derail his career and put him on his way out of the Army. One e-mail, speculating about events that millions of people have questioned for the last six years, was all it took.

Sgt. Buswell wants to know: What really happened on 9/11? And he said so in his e-mail. In the few paragraphs of that August 2006 message — a reply not to someone outside the service, but to other soldiers — Buswell wrote that he thought the official report of what happened that day at the Pentagon, and in the Pennsylvania crash of United Airlines Flight 93, was full of errors and unanswered questions.

“Who really benefited from what happened that day?” he asked rhetorically. Not “Arabs,” but “the Military Industrial Complex,” Buswell concluded. “We must demand a new, independent investigation.”

For voicing those opinions in an e-mail to 38 people on the San Antonio Army base, Buswell was stripped of his security clearance, fired from his job, demoted, and ordered to undergo a mental health exam.

(He was also ordered not to speak with the press. Information for this story came from documents, conversations with Buswell’s family members and friends, and sources within Fifth Army who asked not to be named.)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (May 31) – An Iraq war veteran could lose his honorable discharge status after being photographed wearing fatigues at an anti-war protest.

Marine Cpl. Adam Kokesh and other veterans marked the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq in April by wearing their uniforms – with military insignia removed – and roaming around the nation’s capital on a mock patrol.

After Kokesh was identified in a photo cutline in The Washington Post, a superior officer sent him a letter saying he might have violated a rule prohibiting troops from wearing uniforms without authorization.

Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, responded with an obscenity.

Now, a military panel has been scheduled to meet with Kokesh on Monday to decide whether his discharge status should be changed from “honorable” to “other than honorable.”

“This is clearly a case of selective prosecution and intimidation of veterans who speak out against the war,” Kokesh said. “To suggest that while as a veteran you don’t have freedom of speech is absurd.”

Kokesh is part of the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who have left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligations.

His attorney, Mike Lebowitz, said Kokesh’s IRR status ends June 18. He said at least three other veterans have been investigated because of their involvement at demonstrations.

Kokesh, 25, enlisted in the Marines while still attending high school in New Mexico. He was a reservist in an artillery unit, assigned to the November Battery, 5th Battalion, 14th Regiment of the 4th Division based out of Pico Rivera, Calif., near Los Angeles.

Kokesh said he had reservations about Iraq even before the United States invaded, but wanted to go there to help rebuild schools and mosques after Saddam Hussein ‘s regime was toppled. He even learned Arabic.

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday.

The comparison was offered as the Pentagon announced the completion of the troop buildup ordered by Bush in January. The last of about 21,500 combat troops to arrive were an Army brigade in Baghdad and a Marine unit heading into the Anbar province in western Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Perry Wiggins, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there are now 20 combat brigades in Iraq, up from 15 when the buildup began. A brigade is roughly 3,500 troops. Overall, the Pentagon said there are 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. That number may still climb as more support troops move in.

The administration warns that the buildup will result in more U.S. casualties as more American soldiers come into contact with enemy forces. May already is the third bloodiest month since the war began in March 2003. As of late Tuesday, there were 116 U.S. deaths in Iraq so far in May – trailing only the 137 in November 2004 and the 135 in April 2004. Overall, more than 3,460 U.S. service members have died.

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Bush has cited the long-term Korea analogy in looking at the U.S. role in Iraq, where American forces are in the fifth year of an unpopular war. Bush’s goal is for Iraqi forces to take over the chief security responsibilities, relieving U.S. forces of frontline combat duty, Snow said.