The Rag Blog

05/27/07 “Salt Lake Tribune” — — Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops – today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

What exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some – the members of the “the-surge-is-already-working” school of thought – even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. “The long war is an unwinnable one,” I wrote in an August 2005 opinion piece in The Washington Post. “The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do.”

Here was my own version of duty.

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others – teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks – to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as “the will of the people.”

To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove – namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.” It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech into little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier – brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought that I was doing the same. In fact, while was he was giving all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Washington outlined in explicit language its plans to engage in sequential wars in the Middle East, Southwest and Northeast Asia and the Caribbean. Under the offensive military doctrine of ‘Pre-emptive Wars’ and the ‘Global War against Terrorism’, the United States’ pursuit of military conquest was backed by Israel, Great Britain and several newly incorporated client states from Eastern Europe. The White House’s grandiose scheme of world conquest was orchestrated and pre-maturely celebrated by top Zioncon (Zionist Conservative) officials embedded in the Pentagon, White House and the National Security Council.

The imperial wars of conquest however were stopped literally dead in their tracks at their starting point: Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequent to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, a formidable mass armed resistance emerged from the underground, aided by widespread civilian support. Large majorities of public opinion, major religious communities, trade union militants , small business associations and neighborhood-based community organizations actively and passively opposed the US-led occupation forces at every turn, providing logistical support and intelligence to the armed and non-violent resistance. Similar developments took place at a later stage in Afghanistan. Despite draconian military measures, including the bombing of population centers, systematic mass round-ups of civilians followed by brutal torture, the US military failed to consolidate its rule via puppet regimes. As the resistance grew, Washington’s efforts to foment ethnic-religious sectarian warfare and territorial fragmentation failed. By late 2006 it was clear that the imperial army’s only territorial conquest was the bunkers in the so-called ‘Green Zone’. In 2007 Washington escalated its troop commitments in a desperate effort to fend off impending defeat and to recover massive loss of domestic support.

From a world historical perspective, the Iraqi and Afghan resistance has successfully stymied Washington’s pursuit of world domination through a series of offensive wars. The success of the national liberation movements led to the over-extension of the US imperial armed forces – weakening efforts to launch programed ground wars against Iran, Syria and elsewhere. The prolonged resistance led to wholesale domestic opposition in the face of never-ending US casualties and skyrocketing financial costs.

The demoralization of the US infantry and National Guard prevented Washington from following up its failed coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with a direct military invasion.

The prolonged and deteriorating war in Afghanistan, with the advances of the re-grouped guerrilla fighters especially among the civilian population, has led the US-controlled colonial coalition to engage in indiscriminate bombing of civilians – adding to the growth of the anti-colonial resistance.

The success of the resistance movements in Iraq and Afghanistan and the appeal of their examples has encouraged new formidable anti-colonial struggles, led by Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia as well as having stiffened the resolve of Iranian leaders to resist US demands to unilaterally suspend their nuclear programs. Further abroad, the weakening of US global military interventionist capacity has taken the heat off of progressive governments in Venezuela and revolutionary Cuba. The consolidation of the Venezuelan nationalist-populist government has had a powerful demonstration impact throughout Latin America, encouraging new anti-imperialist movements and dissident governments in Ecuador and beyond. In an all out battle of ideas, programs, foreign aid and solidarity, Bush is losing out to President Chavez: Unable to launch a full-scale military invasion, to eliminate the Chavez government, Washington has failed to match Venezuela’s vast petrol subsidies and promising alternative integration proposals: ALBA has prevailed over ALCA.

It is hardly surprising not a single corporate newspaper reported the death of the Constitution. Go to Google News and type in “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive” and hit enter. Google returns ten paltry results, not one from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or related corporate media source. Google Trends rates the story as “mild,” that is to say it warrants nary a blip on the news radar screen. Of course, another death blow to the Constitution, already long on life support, is hardly news. Few understand we now live in a dictatorship, or maybe it should be called a decidership.

“The Bush administration has released a directive called the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. The directive released on May 9th, 2007 has gone almost unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media. This is understandable considering the huge Ron Paul and immigration news but this story is equally as huge. In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a ‘Catastrophic Emergency’ the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this directive would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency,” writes Lee Rogers for Global Research. “The language written in the directive is disturbing because it doesn’t say that the President will work with the other branches of government equally to ensure a constitutional government is protected. It says clearly that there will be a cooperative effort among the three branches that will be coordinated by the President. If the President is coordinating these efforts it effectively puts him in charge of every branch. The language in the directive is entirely Orwellian in nature making it seem that it is a cooperative effort between all three branches but than it says that the President is in charge of the cooperative effort.”

In short, Bush may now declare himself absolute ruler at any moment and Congress can like it or lump it. Naturally, this act of betrayal is of so little importance and consequence, the corporate media believes you are better served knowing Justin Timberlake is in love.

“This directive on its face is unconstitutional because each branch of government the executive, legislative and judicial are supposed to be equal in power,” Lee continues. “By putting the President in charge of coordinating such an effort to ensure constitutional government over all three branches is effectively making the President a dictator allowing him to tell all branches of government what to do.”

With a couple of keystrokes, you too can read the hidden history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, America’s late, unlamented occupation government in Iraq.

May 18, 2007 | I’m a political scientist, and I’ve spent many hours rooting through documents to study the bureaucracies that once, not so long ago, ran various British colonial outposts in the Middle East. Back in the days when occupation governments dealt in paper, there was always a chance that you’d find a surprise in these cobwebbed mountains of folders, ledgers and official reports. There were sometimes notes scribbled in pencil in the margins of books, and it was not unheard of to open a dusty old volume and have a personal letter fall out. Through such fortunate mistakes researchers could piece together the unofficial, off-the-record history of empire.

When I started studying the massive archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government that ruled Iraq from April 21, 2003, to June 28, 2004, I expected my experience to be different. I didn’t think any letters would fall in my lap, because the archive is paperless. The first archive of occupation created during the IT era, the CPA’s virtual history can be found online at www.cpa-iraq.org, on thousands of pages that each begin “Long live the new Iraq!”

But I forgot to factor in the ubiquity of human error, and of Microsoft Word. It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the CPA.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name “Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report” suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors. I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I’d downloaded. For an academic like myself it was a small treasure trove, and after I’d stopped hooting and hollering it took some time before I could convince my startled son that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Posting sloppily edited documents on an official Web site pales in comparison to some of the CPA’s other mistakes. Its worst miscalculation was probably dissolving the Iraqi military on May 16, 2003, which jump-started the insurgency by sending 400,000 trained soldiers into the streets without jobs. In one of the best deconstructions of the CPA yet written, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s describes the enchanted, ideologically blinkered world of the CPA workers in the Green Zone, and recounts how their bubble began to deflate as the insurgency mounted and as the harsh reality outside the high walls of the Zone began to intrude. A close look at the deletions in just one of the improperly redacted Word documents from the waning days of the CPA reveals how the enchanted mind-set worked, just before the spell wore off.

The document that my son accidentally undeleted, Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report, was dated March 28, 2004. Its content is dry and unremarkable — it charts the value of the new Iraqi dinar, for example, and summarizes public-sector economic reforms. The only truly interesting parts of it, in fact, are the deletions, which are on another topic altogether.

WASHINGTON — In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would “follow us home” from Iraq — a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that “these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. “

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have “come together” to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.”

Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed — and expanded on — Bush’s much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.

Spokespeople for McCain and Romney say the candidates were expressing their deep-seated convictions that terrorists would benefit if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. The spokesmen say that even if Iraq had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have infiltrated Iraq as security has deteriorated since the invasion, and now pose a direct threat to the United States.

But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq .

Michael Scheuer , the CIA’s former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, said the comments of some GOP candidates seem to suggest that bin Laden is controlling the insurgency in Iraq, which he is not.

LOVABLE MOP-TOP ORGY PARTICIPANTS

On July 26, 1968, Mick Jagger flew from Los Angeles to London for a birthday party thrown in his honor at a hip new Moroccan-style bar called the Vesuvio Club—“one of the best clubs London has ever seen,” remembered proprietor Tony Sanchez. Under black lights and beautiful tapestries, some of London’s trendiest models, artists, and pop singers lounged on huge cushions and took pulls from Turkish hookahs, while a decorative, helium-filled dirigible floated aimlessly about the room. As a special treat, Mick brought along an advance pressing of the Stones’ forthcoming album, Beggars Banquet, to play over the club’s speakers. Just as the crowd was “leaping around” and celebrating the record—which would soon win accolades as the best Stones album to date—Paul McCartney strolled in, and passed Sanchez a copy of the forthcoming Beatles single “Hey Jude/Revolution,” which had never before been heard by anyone outside of Abbey Road Studios. Sanchez recalled how the “slow, thundering buildup of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club”; the crowd demanded that the seven-minute song be played again and again. Finally, the club’s disc jockey played the flip side, and everyone heard “John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out ‘Revolution.’ ”“When it was over,” Sanchez said,“Mick looked peeved.The Beatles had upstaged him.”

“It was a wicked piece of promotional one-upsmanship,” remembered Tony Barrow, the Beatles’ press officer. By that time, the mostly good-natured rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones had been ongoing for several years. Although the Beatles were more commercially successful, the two bands competed for radio airplay and record sales throughout the 1960s, and on both sides of the Atlantic teens defined themselves by whether they preferred the Beatles or the Stones. “If you truly loved pop music in the 1960s… there was no ducking the choice and no cop-out third option,” one writer remarked. “You could dance with them both,” but there could never be any doubt about which one you’d take home.

Much of this was by design. With their matching suits, moptops, and cheeky humor, the Beatles largely obscured their origins as working-class Liverpudlians; by contrast, under the influence of their wily manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones cultivated a decadent, outlaw image, even though they mostly hailed from the London suburbs. “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes,” someone remarked, “and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by Andrew.”

Many in the media were quick to notice the two groups’ contrasting styles. When the Rolling Stones arrived in the United States, the first Associated Press (AP) report described them as “dirtier, streakier, and more disheveled than the Beatles.” Tom Wolfe put things more sharply: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.” Since these comparisons proved useful to everyone, both the bands and the journalists collaborated on the charade. In the early 1960s, Keith Richards remarked, “nobody took the music seriously. It was the image that counted, how to manipulate the press and dream up a few headlines.” Peter Jones, who wrote about both bands for the Record Mirror, recalled being in a “difficult position” because he was expected to “gloss over” the Beatles’ tawdry indiscretions.“It was decreed that the Beatles should be portrayed as incredibly lovable, amiable fellows, and if one of them, without mentioning any names, wanted to have a short orgy with three girls in the bathroom, then I didn’t see it.”

Whether one preferred the Beatles or the Stones in the 1960s was largely a matter of aesthetic taste and personal temperament.Though clichéd and sometimes overdrawn, most of the Beatles/Stones binaries contain a measure of plausibility: the Beatles were Apollonian, the Stones Dionysian; the Beatles pop, the Stones rock; the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral. But in the United States, during the watershed summer of 1968, the Beatles/Stones debate suddenly became a contest of political ideologies, wherein the Beatles were thought to have aligned themselves with flower power and pacifism, and the Stones with New Left militance. Though both of these immensely talented bands helped to construct images of youth culture that generated powerful confidence, self-awareness, and libidinal energy among their listeners, neither of them ever articulated, or proved willing to defend, a coherent political cosmology. The supposed “ideological rift” between the two bands was nearly as stylized as the contrasting costumes they wore on The Ed Sullivan Show.

To the graduates, their families, the faculty and staff of Hampshire College: Congratulations. I would particularly like to salute the Baldwin Scholars graduating today. James Baldwin delivered the commencement address here at Hampshire twenty-one years ago. That day, he said: “The reality in which we live is a reality we have made, and it’s time, my children, to begin the act of creation all over again.”

In that spirit, I welcome you to the Republic of Poetry. The Republic of Poetry is a state of mind. It is a place where creativity meets community, where the imagination serves humanity. The Republic of Poetry is a republic of justice, because the practice of justice is the highest form of human expression. This goes beyond the tired idea of “poetic justice,” because all justice is poetic.

In the words of Walter Lowenfels, “everyone is a poet, a creator, somewhere, somehow…It’s in the sense of helping to create a new society that we are poets in whatever we do. And it is our gesture against death. We know we are immortal because we know the society we are helping to build is our singing tomorrow.”

You, the graduates of Hampshire, are the poets of this republic. I do not mean that you must act like a stereotypical poet. You do not have to borrow money from your friends and pretend to be in a coma the next time you see them. You do not have to wear a coat three sizes too large so you can shoplift books. You do not have to drink until you lose control of your bladder. You do not have burst into tears at the sight of a mayonnaise jar because you love the letter M. You do not have to lock yourself in the bathroom and refuse to come out because your haiku is too short. You do not have to speak in riddles like Woody Allen’s fictional poet, Sean O’Shawn, considered “the most incomprehensible and hence the finest poet of his time.”

I know you can build your own Republic of Poetry, because I have seen it. I saw it in Chile, where the citizens overcame seventeen years of military dictatorship to rebuild their democracy, ultimately electing a socialist woman president. (If the people of Chile can survive nearly two decades of General Augusto Pinochet and take their democracy back, then we can take our democracy back too.)

Chile is a nation of poets, and in Chile poetry is inseparable from the struggle for democracy. When I visited Isla Negra and the home of the great poet Pablo Neruda, I remembered an incident that took place there after the military coup of September 11, 1973 (the first 9/11). I wrote a poem about it called, “The Soldiers in the Garden.”

After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda’s garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.

The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the soldiers
vanish from the garden.

In the Republic of Poetry there is no war, because phrases like “weapons of mass destruction,” “shock and awe,” “collateral damage” and “surge” are nothing but clichés, bad poetry by bad poets, and no one believes them. They bleed language of its meaning, drain the blood from words. You, the next generation, must reconcile language with meaning, restore the blood to words, and end this war.

At the beginning of the last century, governments used other words to justify and celebrate war. There was the Latin phrase: Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori (how sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s country). The poet Wilfred Owen, who died at age twenty-four in the First World War, knew better. Here he describes the effects of poison gas at the front:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

You must always call “the old Lie” by its name. If you do, then you will build this republic on the highest ground. Remember: Your language is powerful precisely because it is not the language of power.

The Republic of Poetry has no borders. In this republic no human being is illegal. In this republic no one is thrown on the other side of the fence after building the fence. Every time the fence goes up, you must tear it down.

In this republic, there is no official language, because all languages are poetic. En la República de la Poesía se habla español. Listen to the voice of Jorge the church janitor, an immigrant from Honduras, in this poem I wrote for him:

No one asks
where I am from,
I must be
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped this floor.
Honduras, you are a squatter’s camp
outside the city
of their understanding.

No one can speak
my name,
I host the fiesta
of the bathroom,
stirring the toilet
like a punchbowl.
The Spanish music of my name
is lost
when the guests complain
about toilet paper.

What they say
must be true:
I am smart,
but I have a bad attitude.

No one knows
that I quit tonight,
maybe the mop
will push on without me,
sniffing along the floor
like a crazy squid
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.

This little drama did not take place at a church in Alabama. This took place at a church in that bastion of liberalism, Harvard Square. We must keep our own churches, and houses, clean. Speaking of which, let us thank the janitors of Hampshire College.

In the Republic of Poetry, everyone has shoes. Here we have Jack Agüeros and his “Psalm for Distribution:”

Lord,

on 8th Street
between 6th Avenue and Broadway
there are enough shoe stores
with enough shoes
to make me wonder

why there are shoeless people
on the earth.

Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.

You, the next generation, have to fire the Angel in charge of distribution. To accomplish this, you may have to fire the president, or a senator, or a governor; you have that right in a democracy. However, they are also representatives of a larger economic system. You must radically transform that system so that everyone has shoes, so that everyone has the opportunity to realize his or her full human—that is to say, poetic—potential. Walter Lowenfels sums it up: “When the tragedy of the world market no longer dominates our existence, new gradations of being in love with being here will emerge.”

Any republic should be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable people. Make sure that compassion is the guiding principle of your republic, the pulse of your poetry. Walt Whitman, the bard of prisoners, prostitutes, and slaves, insists that, “whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to/ his own funeral dressed in his shroud.”

To dwell in the Republic of Poetry you must continue to read and ask questions. You graduate today, but in fact, you should never stop being a student, never stop asking, doubting, dissenting, or the republic dies. This was never more true than today, in the age of the Illiterate Presidency.

In the Republic of Poetry your vote counts, because the voting machines actually work. In this republic your dollars pay for schools and hospitals instead of bullets and bombs, because every poem by our greatest poets is scientific proof that living is better than dying.

Now, for those graduates who think there are no more assignments, I have news: The Republic of Poetry is hard work. Poets re-write what they have already re-written, and stay up all night to do it. We are insomniac zombies. In fact, I am presently working on a screenplay called, “Night of the Living Dead Poets’ Society.”

Such will be the case for you, too, if you want to live in a more democratic—and thus, poetic—world. Marge Piercy captures the joy of sitting through one more meeting with yet another committee:

This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,
to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-head oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.

In the Republic of Poetry, the poet is the true self, whoever that may be. The poet within us rebels against conformity, decorum and obedience, saying the unsayable before the moment passes. I give you Julia de Burgos, who confronts herself—the false self—in this poem:

Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice,
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me,
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

(…)

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair; the sun paints me.

(…)

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social “what will they say.”

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.

The Republic of Poetry is a place where, as Walt Whitman says, “your very flesh shall be a great poem.” It is a place where you are your own greatest creation, your own most inspired invention. It is a place where you make of your life an epic poem. You may discover that medicine is your poetry, or law is your poetry, or education is your poetry, or journalism is your poetry, or music is your poetry, or poetry is your poetry.

The Republic of Poetry is a place of miracles. You carry the engine of miracles with you everywhere, in your head, and don’t even realize it. Pablo Neruda fell down, hit his head, and had an epiphany:

How often in my mature years,
in travels, in love affairs,
I examined every hair,
every wrinkle on my brow,
without noticing the grandness
of my head,
boned
tower of thought,
tough coconut,
calcium dome
protecting
the clockworks,
thick wall
guarding
treasures infinitesimal,
arteries, incredible
circulations,
pulses of reason, veins of sleep,
gelatin of the soul,
all
the miniature ocean
you are,
proud crest
of the mind,
the wrinkled convolutions
of undersea mountains
and in them
will, the fish of movement,
the electric corolla
of stimulus,
the seaweed of memory.

You who believe in this republic will be accused of daydreaming and utopianism. To these crimes you must plead guilty as charged. Tell them: Yes! I did it! I was daydreaming of a more just world instead of something more age-appropriate and consumer-oriented, like a $200 pair of Nikes.

This is Eduardo Galeano on the subject of utopia: “She’s on the horizon…I go two steps closer, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”

A century ago, when your father’s grandfather was a child, the eight-hour workday was utopian; the eradication of polio was utopian; the end of lynching and segregation in the South was utopian. The next generation writes the poetry of the impossible.

You will make the impossible possible. Yet, no change for the good ever happens without being imagined first. The last poem today is about the bread of the table, the bread of poetry, the bread of justice, the bread of this republic. It’s called, “Imagine the Angels of Bread:”

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

Did the U.S. military use cluster bombs in Iraq in 2006 and then lie about it? Does the U.S. military keep the numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their use than any other type of weaponry?

These are just two of the many unanswered questions related to the largely uncovered air war the U.S. military has been waging in Iraq.

What we do know is this: Since the major combat phase of the war ended in April 2003, the U.S. military has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of air-delivered cluster bombs in Iraq — the very type of weapon that Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, “the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use.” We also know that, according to expert opinion, rockets and cannon fire from U.S. aircraft may account for most U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths and that the Pentagon has restocked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these weapons in recent years.

Unfortunately, thanks to an utter lack of coverage by the mainstream media, what we don’t know about the air war in Iraq so far outweighs what we do know that anything but the most minimal picture of the nature of destruction from the air in that country simply can’t be painted. Instead, think of the story of U.S. air power in Iraq as a series of tiny splashes of lurid color on a largely blank canvas.

Cluster Bombs

Even among the least covered aspects of the air war in Iraq, the question of cluster-bomb (CBU) use remains especially shadowy. This is hardly surprising. After all, at a time when many nations are moving toward banning the use of cluster munitions — at a February 2007 conference in Oslo, Norway, 46 of 48 governments represented supported a declaration for a new international treaty and ban on the weapons by 2008 — the U.S. stands with China, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia in opposing new limits of any kind.

Little wonder. The U.S. military has a staggering arsenal of these weapons. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the Army holds 88% of the Pentagon’s CBU inventory — at least 638.3 million of the cluster bomblets that are stored inside each cluster munition; the Air Force and Navy, according to Department of Defense figures, have 22.2 million and 14.7 million of the bomblets, respectively. And even these numbers are considered undercounts by experts.

A cluster bomb bursts above the ground, releasing hundreds of smaller, deadly submunitions or “bomblets” that increase the weapon’s kill radius causing, as Garlasco puts it, “indiscriminate effects.” It’s a weapon, he notes, that “cannot distinguish between a civilian and a soldier when employed because of its wide coverage area. If you’re dropping the weapon and you blow your target up you’re also hitting everything within a football field. So to use it in proximity to civilians is inviting a violation of the laws of armed conflict.”

Worse yet, U.S. cluster munitions have a high failure rate. A sizeable number of dud bomblets fall to the ground and become de facto landmines which, Garlasco points out, are “already banned by most nations on this planet.” Garlasco adds: “I don’t see how any use of the current U.S. cluster bomb arsenal in proximity to civilian objects can be defended in any way as being legal or legitimate.”

In an email message earlier this year, a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman told this reporter that “there were no instances” of CBU usage in Iraq in 2006. But military documents suggest this might not be the case.

Last year, Titus Peachey of the Mennonite Central Committee — an organization that has studied the use of cluster munitions for more than 30 years — filed a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the U.S. military’s use of cluster bombs in Iraq since “major combat operations” officially ended in that country. In their response, the Air Force confirmed that 63 CBU-87 cluster bombs were dropped in Iraq between May 1, 2003 and August 1, 2006. A CENTAF spokesman contacted for confirmation that none of these were dropped on or after January 1, 2006, offered no response. His superior officer, Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy, the Deputy Director of CENTAF Public Affairs, similarly ignored this reporter’s requests for clarification.

These 12,726 BLU-97 bomblets — each CBU-87 contains 202 BLU-97s or “Combined Effects Bombs” (CEBs) which have anti-personnel, anti-tank, and incendiary capabilities or “kill mechanisms” — dropped since May 2003 are, according to statistics provided by Human Rights Watch, in addition to almost two million cluster submunitions used by coalition forces in Iraq in March and April 2003.

Asked about CBU usage by the Air Force in Iraq in 2006, Ali al-Fadhily, an independent Iraqi journalist, commented: “The use of cluster bombs is a sure thing, but it was very difficult to prove because there were no international experts to document it.” In the past, however, international experts have actually had a chance to examine some locations where a fraction of the bomblets that coalition forces used have landed.

On a 2004 research trip to Iraq, for instance, Titus Peachey visited numerous sites which had experienced such strikes. At a farm in northern Iraq, he was shown not only impact craters from exploded bomblets on a farmer’s property but also unexploded bomblets, by a team from the Mines Advisory Group, a humanitarian organization devoted to landmine and bomb clearance. While “the de-miners expressed frustration that the farmer had planted his field before it had been cleared,” Peachey explained that this was a common, if dangerous, practice in such situations. The U.S. used similar ordnance in Laos during the Vietnam War, he pointed out, noting:

“The villagers of Laos waited more than 20 years for clearance work to get started in their fields and villages. During that time they had no choice but to till soil that was filled with bombs. Otherwise they could not eat. In Iraq, the several visits that we made confirmed this very same dynamic. People could not afford to wait until clearance teams made their farms safe for cultivation. They had to take great risks in order to survive.”

Evidence of these risks can be found in U.S. military documents. Case in point: a June 2005 internal memorandum from the U.S. Army’s 42d Infantry Division which describes how a 15-year old Iraqi boy, working as a shepherd, “was leading the sheep through north Tikrit, near an ammo storage site, when he picked up a UXO [unexploded ordnance] from a cluster bomb. The UXO detonated and he was killed.” Asked to pay $3,000 in compensation for the boy’s life, the Army granted that his death was “a horrible loss for the claimant,” his mother, but concluded that there was “insufficient evidence to indicate that US. Forces caused the death.”

Iraqi documents also chronicle the effects of air-delivered cluster munitions. Take a September 2006 report by the Conservation Center of Environment & Reserves, an Iraqi non-governmental organization (NGO), examining alleged violations of the laws of war by U.S. forces during the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. According to its partial list of civilian deaths, at least 53 people were killed by air-launched cluster bombs in the city that April. An analysis of data collected by another Iraqi NGO, the Iraqi Health and Social Care Organization, showed that, between March and June 2006, of 193 war-injured casualties analyzed, 148 (77%) were the result of cluster munitions of unspecified type.

Air War, Iraq: 2006

While cluster bombs remain a point of contention, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of other types of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure — 177 bombs in all — does not include guided missiles or unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a CENTAF spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition fixed-wing aircraft or any Army or Marine Corps helicopter gunships; nor does it include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.

It isn’t amazing that 61% of Americans think the US should never have invaded Iraq. [- Courtesy NYT/CBS.]

What is amazing is that 35% still think it was a good idea.

It isn’t amazing that 76% (including 51% of Republicans) of Americans say that the increased US troop levels in Iraq have had no impact or are making things worse.

What is amazing is that 20% think that things have gotten significantly better.

It isn’t amazing that 63% of Americans support a timetable for US withdrawal ending in 2008. What is amazing is that so many do not.

It isn’t amazing that 13% want to cut off money for the Iraq War immediately, or that 69% want further funding to be tied to the meeting of specific benchmarks.

What is amazing is that %15 want the war funded with no conditions at all.

(By the way, that only 13% want to cut off all funding immediately goes a long way toward explaining the vote on the supplemental in Congress).

It isn’t amazing that 72 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraq.

What is amazing is that 23 percent approve. (Are these the horror movie fans in the Republican base?)

It isn’t amazing that 65 percent disapprove of Bush’s management of foreign policy.

What is amazing is that 25 percent approves. (They should be asked specifically of what they approve. The rest of us want to know.)