The Rag Blog

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I’m going to guide you to some excerpts of that address — exactly 40 years ago tonight.

See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush’s speech that were just released minutes ago:

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war–a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year–or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside. And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnaped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces. It means bringing to the villagers an effective civilian government that they can respect, and that they can rely upon and that they can participate in, and that they can have a personal stake in. We hope that government is now beginning to emerge.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: This forward movement is rooted in the ambitions and the interests of Asian nations themselves. It was precisely this movement that we hoped to accelerate when I spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in April 1965, and I pledged “a much more massive effort to improve the life of man” in that part of the world, in the hope that we could take some of the funds that we were spending on bullets and bombs and spend it on schools and production.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post up about supporters of this insane Iraq “Surge” idea. His notes that Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the architects of this surge plan, argues for a necessarily large increase in the number of American troops in Iraq. In fact, Kagan states pretty plainly that the surge won’t work unless many thousand more troops than are currently available are deployed to the region.

The president must request a substantial increase in ground forces end strength. This increase is vital to sustaining the morale of the combat forces by ensuring that relief is on the way. The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.

Glenn then makes a connection that’s patently obvious. If you are one such young Americans, and you support Bush’s war and Kagan’s plan for its escalation, you should enlist to serve your country in Iraq. And not only for the sake of rhetorical consistancy.

At this point, to continue supporting a policy that has caused such a cataclysmic loss of life, American, Iraqi and otherwise, one would have to think that “victory” in Iraq was the single most important cause of our time. After all, it would have to be worth several thousand American lives and, at best, several hundred thousand Iraqi lives.

I do not personally believe this, nor did I think that any such victory was attainable at any point during Bush’s Iraqi Adventure. So I did not support the war, because why should Americans or Iraqis die for something that isn’t truly essential for our survival, or that wasn’t even possible?

But if I did believe this, well…I’d only have a few options:

(1) Go off to war.

(2) Admit to myself and anyone else who asked that I’m a coward, willing to send other men to die for what I think is important but unwilling to potentially sacrifice my own life or the lives of close friends and family members.

(3) Find a way to aid the war effort significant enough to substitute for my presence on a battlefield.

The so-called right-wing “chickenhaws,” young men or the parents of young men who strongly support Bush’s war but refuse to serve, tend to go with #3. They claim that their writing about the war and bringing issues to the public’s attention compensate for their absence from the field of battle.

Everyone knew what Bush was going to say before he made his address tonight. And the ‘surge’ which Democrats hoped to block had already begun with advance elements of the 82nd Airborne already in Baghdad to arrange for arrivals of 17,500 more troops. “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home,” Bush said. But the Iraqis are responsible for running their own government, and if they don’t shape up, that’s it for them.

Bush made clear he is embarking on a straightforward pacification program in Baghdad, made possible by an occupation run by American troops. This is to be an American military occupation. Maybe with a façade of Iraqis, but run by Americans, just as yesterday, American GIs ended up running the show in Haifa Street fighting.

As Bush has said in the past, Americans know what the word victory means, So, whatever happens, no matter what anyone says, we have to win the war. “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States,” Bush said.

Observers grasp wildly for explanations as to why Bush does what he does. No matter what one thinks of the President, when push comes to shove, it’s hard to believe he really wants to drag out the war so it can be handed over to a successor in 2008; or that he is such a psycho that he can’t stop calling defeat victory. The Bushes doubtless don’t consider their family legacy to be made of such stuff.

There may well be a much more sinister game at play here. That centers around the emergence of Henry Kissinger over the last year as an outside advisor to Bush and other top officials in Washington.

Gareth Porter, the historian who ran the Indochina Resource Center in the early 70s, points out in a January 11 article on Asia Online that “although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is actually weak and unstable.“

To listen to Bush’s speech on Wednesday, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied large swathes of Iraq with the help of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That the president of the United States can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is shameful.

The answer to “al-Qaeda’s” occupation of neighborhoods in Baghdad and the cities of al-Anbar is then, Bush says, to send in more US troops to “clear and hold” these neighborhoods.

But is that really the big problem in Iraq? Bush is thinking in terms of a conventional war, where armies fight to hold territory. But if a nimble guerrilla group can come out at night and set off a bomb at the base of a large tenement building in a Shiite neighborhood, they can keep the sectarian civil war going. They work by provoking reprisals. They like to hold territory if they can. But as we saw with Fallujah and Tal Afar, if they cannot they just scatter and blow things up elsewhere.

Bush could not help taking swipes at Iran and Syria. But the geography of his deployments gives the lie to his singling them out as mischief makers. Why send 4,000 extra troops to al-Anbar province? Why ignore Diyala Province near Iran, which is in flames, or Babel Province southwest of Baghdad? Diyala borders Iran, so isn’t that the threat? But wait. Where is al-Anbar? Between Jordan and Baghdad. In other words, al-Anbar opens out into the vast Sunni Arab hinterland that supports the guerrilla movement with money and volunteers, coming in from Jordan. If Syria was the big problem, you would put the extra 4,000 troops up north along the border. If Iran was the big problem, you’d occupy Diyala. But little Jordan is an ally of the US, and Bush would not want to insult it by admitting that it is a major infiltration root for jihadis heading to Iraq.

01/10/07 “Information Clearing House” — — Is the surge an orchestrated distraction from the real war plan?

A good case can be made that it is. The US Congress and media are focused on President Bush’s proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative allies prepare an assault on Iran.

Commentators have expressed puzzlement over President Bush’s appointment of a US Navy admiral as commander in charge of the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The appointment makes sense only if the administration’s attention has shifted from the insurgencies to an attack on Iran.

The Bush administration has recently doubled its aircraft carrier forces and air power in the Persian Gulf. According to credible news reports, the Israeli air force has been making practice runs in preparation for an attack on Iran.

Recently, Israeli military and political leaders have described Israeli machinations to manipulate the American public and their representatives into supporting or joining an Israeli assault on Iran.

Two US carrier task forces or strike groups will certainly congest the Persian Gulf. On January 9 a US nuclear sub collided with a Japanese tanker in the Persian Gulf. Two carrier groups will have scant room for maneuver. Their purpose is either to provide the means for a hard hit on Iran or to serve as sitting ducks for a new Pearl Harbor that would rally Americans behind the new war.

Whether our ships are hit by Iran in retaliation to an attack from Israel or suffer an orchestrated attack by Israel that is blamed on the Iranians, there are certainly far more US naval forces in the Persian Gulf than prudence demands.

Bush’s proposed surge appears to have no real military purpose. The US military opposes it as militarily pointless and as damaging to the US Army and Marine Corps. The surge can only be accomplished by keeping troops deployed after the arrival of their replacements. Moreover, the increase in numbers that can be achieved in this way are far short of the numbers required to put down the insurgency and civil war.

I’ve always been a Californian. Born and raised in rural Shasta County, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Californians, you could say that despite my British and Irish bloodlines, the sun runs through my veins. So when I told friends and family I’d be moving to Seattle last year, I received a lot of blunt skepticism. “You’ll never handle the weather,” they assured me. I scoffed at their warnings – for all the fog San Francisco gets, it might as well be the Pacific Northwest, I argued. However, after my first full month here qualified as the rainiest month in this history of Seattle, then newspapers dubbed a local December storm as the most destructive seen in fifteen years, I’m beginning to eat my words. If the Giants hadn’t re-signed Barry Bonds, I’d be starting to wonder if I’d made a big mistake.

In the Bay Area, the weather represents either a minor annoyance or something to celebrate. Days range from slightly wet to a bit windy to absolutely gorgeous, and almost every one of them is a day on which you could ride your bike to work.

After moving up to Seattle, however, the month of November quickly taught me things work a little differently up here. For thirty days and thirty nights, I don’t remember much sunshine. I do, however, remember a wide variety of weather I’d never seen before. Raining sleet. Sleeting hail. Sideways rain. Big, soft snowflakes that suddenly turned to raindrops, then right back to snow again. Ice rain. Rain Ice. All told, more than 15 inches of wet stuff fell from the sky during those thirty days.

As part of legislation submitted to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations, the new Democratic majority in Congress has a plan to improve information sharing within the Homeland Security Department.

H.R. 1, the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007, submitted by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) would enact several dozen antiterrorism recommendations made by the commission. These include recommendations regarding cargo screening, transportation security, critical infrastructure protection and the national incident management system.

The 23-section bill addresses several sections of IT-related items, including information sharing. The bill directs the Homeland Security secretary to integrate intelligence components of the department — ranging from the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other units — into a new information-sharing environment (ISE) to be administrated by the Homeland Security undersecretary for intelligence and analysis.

An ISE, as defined by the legislation, is an approach that facilities the sharing of terrorism information. The approach may include any methods determined necessary and appropriate for carrying out the intent of the legislation.

The legislation directs the secretary to appoint knowledge management officers, and establish an internal training program and business processes for information-sharing. It also requires that the establishment of a “comprehensive IT network architecture” that will connect all of the databases within the Department of Homeland Security to each other, promoting internal information-sharing,” according to a summary distributed by Thompson’s office.

The legislation also would establish intelligence fusion centers in border states, specifically to enhance so-called border intelligence capabilities. It increases DHS’ involvement in other state and local fusion centers, to provide them with intelligence, assistance and appropriate training.

Now that portions of the secret information regarding the “Security and Prosperity Agreement Partnership” (aka the NAFTA super highway) is gradually getting out to more and more Americans, it raises even more questions how this all will turn out, especially if Americans don’t wake up to what is going on in our government.

I have had several readers contact me asking for more details on what they have recently learned, both by telephone and letter, and they didn’t have to twist my arm to continue giving additional information. An observation in the question of why President Bush has fought tooth and nail to keep from ever building a border fence between Mexico and the United States is because he’s giving us instead a secret highway that crosses an eliminated former U.S. border n this does away with any so-called “illegal immigrants” to worry about. It just facilitates the clear invasion of America by illegal aliens and the massive importation of Chinese goods into Mexican ports and then through America to Canada.

Think of all the American farms and communities that will be destroyed by eminent domain to make room for the “super slab.” Thousands of American jobs would be lost by our truckers and longshoremen, for example, in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California who average making $140,000 a year, plus factory workers.

What illegal goods such as drugs, guns, foodstuffs, etc., will be sent through America with only a Mexican inspection on sovereign Mexican territory in Kansas City. How many terrorists will use this easy entry into America?

It’s all called pushing the New World Order to arrive at a form of government modeled after the European Union.

Did you notice that during our recent election, stopping terrorism, illegal immigration, the dangers presented by this NAFTA highway were not even mentioned? Does Congress even care if our nation is destroyed? They were on notice due to U.S. Representative Virgil H. Goode’s (R-Va.) filing House Concurrent Resolution 487 that had a grand total of only three co-sponsors. That tells you a lot in itself.

This week has seen the latest example of the US power elite bombing a broken-backed country in the name of the global ‘war on terror’. The phantom menace of ‘Al Qaeda’ has again provided a pretext for the further destruction and destabilization of struggling state, this time Somalia, in order that the Western elite power-mongers can move in and control its valuable resources.

The Bush Administration is essentially asking us to expect to believe that it is bombing a country in an attempt to kill three terrorists– Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 225 people, and accomplices Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Talha al-Sudani.

The Somali government has today claimed that four more airstrikes have been carried out, killing more innocent people. The US has denied this. Also today, a senior Somali politician said US troops were needed on the ground to fight a Muslim extremist threat.

Monday’s strike reportedly killed around 200 people, including Canadian and British citizens.

Critics of the action have said it could misfire by creating strong Somali resentment and feeding Islamist militancy. Analysts fear that US interfering and backing of one Somali faction against another could ignite an Iraqi-style insurgency across a swath of East Africa.

Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc the left has been in crisis worldwide. The rise of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements and of the Zapatistas could not hide the fact that the left no longer had credibility for most people.

But in the last few years Latin America has begun to inspire hope for change. The Venezuelan revolution has provided a radical challenge to US dominance, and president Hugo Chavez proclaims socialism as the ultimate goal.

In Bolivia president Evo Morales has nationalised natural gas and oil and pushed forward constitutional changes despite reactionary opposition.

Cuba defies predictions of collapse or chaos as Fidel Castro lies ill.

In Venezuela and Bolivia – for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall – governments based on working class and popular movements have taken power and begun to construct an alternative social and economic order.

The state is not dead, as the neoliberals claimed, and it is possible to defy international capital and wring major concessions from it.

Cuba – never fundamentally Stalinist despite its dependence on the Soviet Union – has survived and begun to work with Venezuela and Bolivia to create a new type of socialism.

But is Venezuela socialist, or at least beginning a process of transition to socialism? Most readers of Socialist Worker would say no. But eight years ago, when Chavez was first elected, few took his “Bolivarian revolution” seriously.

It is undeniable that Chavez’s government has done more to challenge capitalism and promote popular interests than any regime in the past 20 years.

To understand Venezuela, it is necessary first to understand Cuba. The Cuban revolution was not made by the old Communist Party, but by Fidel Castro and the 26 July Movement.

When the guerrillas triumphed on 1 January 1959, they did not talk about socialism or Marxism-Leninism, or even class struggle – but about social justice, economic independence from the US and Latin American liberation.

It was over two years later, in 1961, that Fidel first used the term socialism.

The Cuban revolution was radicalised by confrontation with the US and the dynamic of the popular movement.

But it would be grossly misleading to suggest – as many Marxists do – that Fidel and the leadership were simply driven forward by the people.

There was a meeting on the weekend of December 9-10 in Cochabamba in Bolivia of major South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn’t read that wire service report, I’ll read a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

The South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of major nations, and there was the two-day summit of what’s called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the AP report, left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, the South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

There is one — has been one point of hostility in South America. That’s Peru, Venezuela. But the article points out that Chavez and Peruvian President Alan Garcia took advantage of the summit to bury the hatchet, after having exchanged insults earlier in the year. And that is the only real conflict in South America at this time. So that seems to have been smoothed over.

The new Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa proposed a land and river trade route linking the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, suggesting that for South America, it could be kind of like an alternative to the Panama Canal.

Chavez and Morales celebrated a new joint project, the gas separation plant in Bolivia’s gas-rich region. It’s a joint venture with Petrovesa (PDVSA, Petroleos de Venezuela, SA. Pronounced “pedevesa”), the Venezuelan oil company, and the Bolivian state energy company. And it continues. Venezuela is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East, by some measures maybe even comparable to Saudi Arabia.

There were also contributions, constructive, interesting contributions by Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, and others. All of this is extremely important.

This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there have been real moves toward integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. There have been attempts at independence, but they’ve been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support. Because there was very little regional cooperation, they could be picked off one by one.

That’s what has happened since the 1960s. The Kennedy administration orchestrated a coup in Brazil. It was the first of a series of falling dominoes. Neo-Nazi-style national security states spread across the hemisphere. Chile was one of them. Then there were Reagan’s terrorist wars in the 1980s, which devastated Central America and the Caribbean. It was the worst plague of repression in the history of Latin America since the original conquests.