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Requiem for the War on Terror
Goodbye GWOT, Hello OCOs
This is the way the Global War on Terror (also known, in Bush-era jargon, as GWOT) ends, not with a bang, not with parades and speeches, but with an obscure memo, a few news reports, vague denials, and a seemingly off-handed comment (or was it a carefully calculated declaration?) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "The administration has stopped using the phrase ["war on terror"] and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously."
This is often the way presidents and their administrations operate when it comes to national security and foreign policy -- not with bold, clear statements but through leaks, trial balloons, small gestures, and innuendo.
In this case, though, are we seeing the cleverly orchestrated plan of a shrewd administration, every move plotted with astonishing cunning? Or are the operators actually a bunch of newbies bumbling along from day to day, as a literal reading of press reports on the end of GWOT might suggest? Unless some historian finds a "smoking gun" document in the archives years from now, we may never know for sure.
If the motives remain obscure, some effects of this major shift in language are already evident, though whether the result is a glass half empty or half full may lie in the eye of the beholder. In some cases, the new administration's policies still look amazingly like those of the Global War on Terror, sans the name -- most notably in Afghanistan, where President Obama is pursuing many of the same old goals with renewed force, and in Pakistan, where he is steadily widening Bush's war. Sounding a lot like Bush, in fact, Obama played the 9/11 card repeatedly in his announcement justifying his program of stepped up action in the AfPak theater of operations.
There, as Pepe Escobar of Asia Times says, "for all practical purposes, strategically reviewed or not, GWOT goes on, with no end in sight." There, Obama's "new" policies seem to justify Jon Stewart's clever label for the recent language changes: "Redefinition Accomplished."
Yet there is good news, too. Just a few years ago, Dick Cheney told America's young people that the "war on terror" would be a generations-long struggle and the defining fact of the rest of their lives. A perpetual war for peace (and the endless terrors it unleashed) was then to be the single purpose to which the United States would bend all its strength and will for decades to come. Abandoning such terrible language really does make a difference.
Unlike his predecessor, President Obama is not staking his claim to historical importance on being a "war president." Both his personal history and his laser-like focus on HEE (health, energy, education) suggest that his true passion is his domestic agenda. He may see national security as filled with distractions or potential stumbling blocks rather than as a field of glory.
Without a "war" to wage, this administration cannot so easily claim, as its predecessor did, extraordinary powers for the president. It won't be able to use the argument "we're at war" to justify poking holes in the Constitution, or to get a mindless rubber-stamp for its national security policies from Congress and the public. That will open up at least a bit more space for debate about those policies.
Spending unconscionable sums of public money on military action may, in the long run, prove far harder, too. Americans will pony up endlessly when we are at war. They are less likely to shell out so quickly for the proposed successor phrase to the Global War on Terror: "Overseas Contingency Operations." As Escobar notes, this "delightfully Orwellian" term is known to the bureaucrats by its equally Orwellian acronym, OCO.
The Bad News of Empire
The bad news is that nobody can say exactly what an OCO is. A war requires at least a convincing illusion of threat to the nation. An OCO, on the other hand, can be just about anything. It doesn't have to be over any literal seas; it merely has to aim at a target outside U.S. borders (even as close as Mexico). It doesn't have to involve shoot-'em-up military action, only an action -- kidnapping, computer hacking, whatever -- carried out by U.S. government operatives.
An OCO is, in the end, any U.S. government response to some "contingency" outside our borders. Philosophers use the word "contingent" to mean something that could happen but doesn't have to happen -- that is, something that isn't necessary. In that case, a wag might say, we're really talking about "Overseas Unnecessary Operations." But for the "serious" people who make U.S. national security policy, a contingency is undoubtedly any new event that isn't fully predictable. In other words, just about anything that occurs beyond our borders can be deemed a contingency and so require an OCO.
Of course, by that definition the U.S. government has been carrying out dozens of OCOs every day for decades. As early as 1937, Secretary of State Cordell Hull said publicly: "There can be no serious hostilities anywhere in the world which will not one way or another affect interests or rights or obligations of this country." Since the late 1940s, U.S. policymakers have assumed that there were no serious "contingencies" of any kind, anywhere on the planet, that did not affect this country's interests. In public, they substitute polite euphemisms for the pursuit of those interests like "global responsibilities" or "leader of the free world."
Their critics call it by its true name: Empire. Empires can go for many years without fighting a war. But they have to carry out OCOs all the time.
That's why the administration's new military budget is geared to switching priorities, spending less on preparations for future conventional warfare against great power enemies who have yet to emerge and more on counterterrorism -- "to deter aggression, project power when necessary, and protect our interests and allies around the globe," as Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently put it. Though proposed military cuts like the F-22 Raptor are getting most of the attention this week, a Pentagon spokesman went out of his way to stress that Gates is "going to be adding a lot of things to capabilities that we need too."
The new Pentagon budget rollout is part of a larger public relations campaign to promote a simple idea: We're no longer at war, but there's still plenty of fighting to do. There will still be the requisite number of OCOs with substantial costs to bear, not only in dollars but in blood and misery.
Will Americans Still Want the War?
Will Americans buy it? Will they give up the war, yet keep paying the sky-high bills for OCOs? The popular reaction to the end of the unmourned Global War on Terror is hard to discern, because there really hasn't been any. The obituaries dutifully appeared, were noticed by only a few, and are already almost forgotten.
That gives the Obama administration reason to hope they'll win their linguistic gamble -- that Americans will let the War on Terror die as quickly as it was born, that they are as indifferent to it as they seem to be. Polls suggest that may be a safe bet. Throughout the 2008 election year, remarkably few Americans rated terrorism as their top concern. And that was even before economic collapse pushed the subject further down the list of national priorities.
On the other hand, reports of the death of the War on Terror could turn out to be premature. Maybe most Americans just assume that it continues, whatever anyone calls it. When given a chance to name several issues of concern, three-quarters or more of polling respondents typically put terrorism on their list.
Since the 1930s, Americans have, by and large, been willing to work together for common national goals only when they believed they were at war and following the orders of a commander-in-chief. Under the rubric of "the war against...," the federal government has had its greatest successes in mobilizing public support for major programs (as Michael Sherry has shown in his fine book, In the Shadow of War).
And we Americans go willingly to war only when we're convinced that our "way of life" is gravely threatened. The number one purpose of the government is to protect that way of life -- or so the official story goes. Unfortunately, since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's day we have lived in a permanent state of national insecurity, always at war with or against someone or something, because there is always someone or something to be afraid of.
If Americans do turn out to be perfectly willing to let go of the magic word "war," the end of GWOT may lighten the shadow of war, which hovers over us and ultimately leaves us afraid of considering fundamental political change of any sort. That might prove important in the long run, even if, in the short run, it gets little notice.
By Any OCO Necessary
Sometimes President Obama sounds like fundamental change is really what he has in mind: to shift the nation's priorities from protecting what we've got to creating a new and better way of life. At other times, he talks like just another commander-in-chief of the national insecurity state, warning us about al-Qaeda and all sorts of other "threats to our nation's security and economy [that] can no longer be kept at bay by oceans or by borders." (In case you forgot, the "theft of nuclear material from the former Soviet Union could lead to the extermination of any city on earth.")
This ambiguity reflects the fine political line Obama has chosen to walk. Ending the "war on terror" may please millions of his supporters who expect him to offer genuinely new policies, foreign as well as domestic. Continued dire warnings may satisfy millions of middle-of-the-road voters who opted for him despite fears that he might undermine national security.
Satisfying both groups is no small trick. But if, with linguistic substitutions and innuendo, he can pull it off, he'll be free to carry out the empire's daily round of OCOs, large and small, without having to worry about the meddlesome vagaries of public opinion. That's one big advantage OCOs have over wars: They tend not to attract too much attention. For most inhabitants of the imperial homeland, OCOs are too distant to be noticed. If one or two (or three or four or five) go wrong, who's watching?
The daily routine of OCOs may be expensive, but as long as life in the homeland is comfortable enough, few questions are likely to be asked. Even when life grows uncomfortable for many, as today, the links between domestic economic meltdown and the costs of empire remain largely obscured. As a result, the imperial government has a relatively free hand to keep "order" around the world, by any OCO necessary.
Still, for those who would stand against the empire, the death of GWOT is one more reminder that under Obama, the glass, though usually half empty, is also half full. If we no longer say we're at war, it may be easier to see the brute fact that we are at empire, day in, day out, year around.
On the other hand, if the government no longer relies on the word "war" to scare the public into paying the bills, it may be harder to bring the national insecurity state's fear-based worldview to bear on decisions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or any of those places where OCOs are in progress all the time. That could just bring us a step closer to a different kind of politics. So Obama's gamble on banishing the word "war" could, in the long run, drain support for OCOs of all kinds, even the ones that actually are wars, regardless of his intentions.
For that to happen, Americans will have to be persistently reminded of those ongoing OCOs and their single goal: protecting the empire. After all, Americans have never much liked the idea of using their tax dollars for imperial purposes. The more the links between OCOs and the defense of empire are apparent, the more we'll be ready for the politics and policies of genuine change.
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42 Comments so far
Show AllBefore the election Chernus characterized himself as a "leftist for Obama." Now given Obama's middle to extreme right agenda from occupation in Iraq, escalation of war in Afghanistan, covert drone attacks in Pakistan claiming innocent lives, unregulated TARP fund, news reports of just how connected Summer's and Gueithner to hedge funds while filling their bank accounts, and all without a peep out of Chernus. Since we supposedly live in a free country, Chernus can call himself whatever he wants. I call him a AIPAC Plant.
Perfect...I fail to understand this reference to Obama's "passion for domestic issues" unless that is what the author sees as the purpose of the TARP and Bailout monies.....
Is it this so called passion that raises our expenditures of military hardware? Is it passion that increases the troop levels in Afghanistan? Bah!
The truth is that all the talk from Gates about cutting the F-22 will never fly as 49 states are affected by such a decision and it will never pass Congress. But then the administration can shrug its shoulders and say, "we tried". In the end this "peaceloving" President, so concerned with our citizenry, with education, with health care has raised, yet again, a bloated defense budget designed to buy munitions to combat the Chinese and the Russians.
What you said.
Plus...."Overseas Contingency Operations" this type of stuff is getting embarrasing.
Speaking of embarrassment Obama was shot down on two fronts on this first overseas trip; no troops for Afghanistan from Europe and no money from them for any bailout either.
I guess his rock star image doesnt export.
I'd say the star is dimming here.
He seems intent on making mistakes to pile on his mistakes. We'll have a different view on this, but the "we're not a Christian country will hurt him terribly and the suggestion of pursuing amnesty will cost him big time.
It seems strange that a President would intentionally try to lose the support of the folks that elected him and go against 80+% of the American people. It just makes no sense to me.
Strange you posit? Typical I respond. As the term of the very worst President in American history drew to its agonizingly slow conclusion the Democrats saw an opportunity for capturing the White House and the Congress as well. That single achievement was the goal, nothing more noble or lofty. Thus the campaigns were based upon reaching that goal and not on any grandiose desire to actually do what the speeches noted or fulfill the hope that the promises held out.
Do you not remember the scathing criticisms those of us who cautioned against the idolatry of candidate Obama received? Do you not recall the continual rejoinders to "give him more time" when some of us noted the poor choices for cabinet positions, or the increasing talk of escalation of war rather than termination thereof?
Some folks are bought off with talk of stem cell lines, or the future removal of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, or the posturing about ending torture, someday, or the closing of Guantanemo, some day. Others are clearly noting the looting of our Treasury for the benefit of exactly the same folks who supported George Bush, and who paid heavily for the election of our current incarnation.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, dammit.
A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
You win....you win!
It seems they are also intenet on finishing the looting of our treasury.
No, Thomas, most of us lose.
About time then, they should start losing, don't you think?
I saw Chernus's earlier articles on this site from the archives dating back to around the election time. It's amazing how Chernus and others want us to forget who they really are.
Professor Chernus may be happy enough (it's hard to tell from the continual "on the other hand" style of this writing) with OCO replacement for GWOT because (if I understand his argument), OCOs will be less engrossing of public opinion, giving Obama some breathing room to focus on his real passions, health, education and energy. He doesn't mention focussing on completing the process of turning over the U.S. Treasury to Wall Street, but that's a passion of another color. Anyway, I'm not as sanguine about OCOs as less troublesome than the GWOT. It's way too much like the "soft power" changes in foreign policy that come down to our playing more nicely with our enemies so we can more effectively kill them. We've had OCO-type operations ever since our government's operatives began "overthrowing" governments around the world at the time of the Spanish-American war, many carried out as "covert" wars or coups by the CIA, abetted since the 1950s by a "Washington consensus" of operatives of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the National Endowment for Democracy to bring about orange and rose and god-knows what other color "revolutions" in other countries. Empire is empire whether it is fought in big battles like those of World War I and II, or whether it's accomplished by NGOs' "economic hit men" of the World Bank and other creatures of U.S.foreign policy that destroy other countries by wrecking their economies. So I'm not too optimistic about this "Redefinition Accomplished" in allowing the Obama administration to focus on its alleged passions for health, education and energy: passions which seem in any case to center around our "health czar's" passion for the preservation and expansion of the power of health insurance companies, Education Secretary Duncan's agenda of more accountability from comprehensive tests, more charter and military schools; or Energy Secretary Chu's passion for the expansion of nuclear energy. If Obama is going to accomplish miracles of progressive reform in these areas, he's going to need all the energy he can get in fighting his own aides on domestic policy by socking away the U.S. military in OCOs that fly under the radar of public awareness.
Sioux
JERRY: Well-done deconstruction of Mr. Chernus' assessment and mind-blowing blindspots! Passion for health, education and energy, what a crock! And no mention of the bankers' bailout fest... it's amazing how selective attention can be when your mind is utterly committed to a specific (political) team!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
That which is an illegal and immoral war
By any other name would still stink.
Obama can rename the War to whatever he'd like but it's still an illegal and immoral War that Obama is expanding and has no intention of ending. He can rename combat troops anything he'd like so he can leave them in Iraq and still meet his 'end the war' line of crap. Not that I'm one of them, but at least the Republicans called things what they were.
'Don't get fooled again' - Pete Townsend
Quite so; a pile of cow manure by any other name stinks to high heaven.
A Government that wants to keep the GWOT going, or the "Long War" going, or the "war on islamo-fascism" going, or the "War against People that suck the bone marrow from babies" going has a realtively easy task. They just ensure a 9/11 happens everytime support for such wars wanes.
Having full control of the media and seeking even more with new laws to govern the internet to combat "Terrorism" and "pedophilia" in the works, the people will never know any better.
Note the reaction to trillions of dollars to bankers. There a bit of outrage but even as people are turned out to sleep in the streets , the process is ongoing with ever more in the way of "bailouts".
We have a public that consumes news as "Truth" without question. The population has been conditioned to dismiss any who question those truths as lunatics or conspiracy theorists or anarchists.
In this strange Orwellian world of ours the truly SANE are seen as insane and madness is embraced as normality.
Should there be any surprise at the notion that merely "relabeling" the troops in Iraq as something else is enough for people to conclude that Barack Obama ended the war in Iraq and brought the troops home?
Look at how many millions embraced GW Bushes "Clean Air Act".
"When Words lose their meaning , the people will lose their freedom"
Sioux Rose
GW NORTH: You hit an important bull's eye. I would only add that newspapers also dying further empowers the networks to mislead viewers with soundbytes and hyperbole, and/or smoke and mirrors. A misinformed HEAVILY ARMED population is a dangerous thing indeed. Is there a historical precedent for this particular unsavory combination?
GwNorth
As usual I agree with part of what you said, but I want to express my extreme gratitude for your not using the Sophmoric "Overseas Contingency Operations."
Your point on relabeling of troops is spot on.
I don't think Obama had much choice but to raise the MIC's budget this year or be destroyed. If he is able to end these wars and defuse other potential crises with peaceful negotiations as his strategy seems to be, the MIC may not be able to justify raising their budget in the future. If he gets elected again, he may be able to lower the MIC budget, but he faces huge and deadly opposition to lowering it particularly during conservative contrived wars.
As yes, the good old "he'd-do-it-if-he could" and "he'll-do-it-if-we-give-him-enough-chances" argument. Is anyone else buying this well-worn piece of merchandise now?
How about "he'd-do-it-if-conservatives-won't-do-a-Lincoln-Kennedys-MLK-rerun on him"? It's not like they haven't tried yet.
If we got off the couch and hit the streets like Europeans do, we could give him the moral support he needs. What good does it do to take potshots at him like Limbaugh does while disregarding the pressure he's under?
it's wearing very thin. That's for sure.
If I'm pissing off conservatives, I must be doing something right.
-Obama's "new" policies seem to justify Jon Stewart's clever label for the recent language changes: "Redefinition Accomplished."
Imagine that! You vote back in exclusively Ds and Rs to congress, the same parties that have ruled for decades and they keep on doing what you rewarded them with your votes for. Who would have thought?
The semantic change from GWOT to OCO also masks a potentially ominous change in substance and political accountability within the democratic process.
Under the US Constitution, only Congress can declare war. Uncle Sam has not formally declared war upon any nation state since the end of World War II, but the Congress has authorized the use of combat operations abroad on several occasions directly by means of AUMF resolutions, and indirectly by funding ongoing military and paramilitary operations overseas with annual appropriations.
So if the term "war" is scrubbed from the lexicon (with some potentially salutary side effects, as Ira Chernus points out), does the re-labeling of the empire's constant, comparatively low intensity warfare as "overseas contingency operations" mean that the Congressional branch of government is henceforth perpetually off the hook?
If Congress no longer has to declare war formally nor authorize warfare by means of a resolution, then what happens to the Constitution's checks and balances, and to the whole notion of popularly elected representatives being held politically accountable eventually for decision making that has run amok?
This is literally a life or death question, one having enormous long term Constitutional significance, which is being glossed over by means of artifice and semantic sleight of hand.
Bill from Saginaw
Sioux Rose
BILL: Excellent analysis and rhetorical question. Being a unitary executive means never having to ask permission.... I guess.
odoco
Excellent point Bill, and it may be the linchpin to the entire question of whether or not constitutional government can survive. If Obama is successful in continuing / expanding the theory and practice of the unitary executive, then elections become meaningless; progressives in primaries would solve nothing. Then only constitutional amendments could change the power calculus, and with MSM, the rabid right-wing press, and the intellectual disengagement of most Americans in the middle - that probably wouldn't happen.
The only solution is to put consistent, continued and escalating force on the President. Believe nothing. Words are meaningless. Rhetoric, no matter how flowery and well delivered, will be ignored. Only actions count now. Only actual progress on the questions that impact us all.
Truly an excellent point but not without a firm answer. According to a 1999 US Supreme Court ruling (Campbell vs. Clinton; co-sponsored by 17 Congresspersons including Dennis Kucinich!), Congressional funding for a specific war(that ruling was about the bombing of Serbia by the US Air Force ordered by President Clinton) is the equivalent of a Congressional Declaration/Approval of that war. If I am not mistaken, the ruling does not specifically refer to the first time that funds were appropriated for a specific war. If I am correct, then the upcoming vote on the 80+ billion dollars for Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan is another test for the Congress whether it re-declares/approves those "wars" for the successor-imperialist of President Bush. Ergo, the Congressional power over the purse string is more than just that in the case of war when, according to the current law of our land, it is also the power to declare or not to declare war by passing or rejecting appropriations.
I am truly puzzled why Dennis Kucinich, who undoubtedly will vote against the 80+ billion monstrosity, does not publicly tell his colleagues in Congress that they declare for the military actions in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan, hence that an aye vote bears just as much responsibility for the death of US service persons there as any action of the President himself does and perhaps even more so as the President is supposed to be merely the executive of what the Congress instructs him to do. Passing the 80+ billion instructs the President to continue the occupations of and the military missions in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan.
The ruling also implies that Senator Obama (and of course super-hawks Biden and Hillary Clinton) approved the war in Iraq notwithstanding his protesting that he was against that war. Yes, with his hot-air mouth but not with any courageous actions. How long will it take before the American public realizes that this apparent lion is really a loudly squeaking mouse. Mr. Obama often reminds me of King Canute who thought that he had the power to prevent the high tide from coming in. LOL by the seagulls!
Defenders of President Obama often tell me that he is boxed in by circumstances not of his own making. Probably true but he badly wanted to become President of the USA because he thought that he was the best person for that job. He knew what most of these circumstances would be. No reason to give him any slack.
The U.S. Government will always have a war on the " bad guys" i.e.any people or country that is a threat to the powerful,wealthy, elite and only the names change and whether you call them The red menace; Communists; anarchists; dictators like Castro and Chavez; terrorists; Al Qaida ( which actually translates to the toilet) or whatever other perjorative works to brainwash the sheeple nothing will change until the American public realizes that in terms of foreign policy, everything they have been told by their Government is a conspiracy against them to support the crime family that is really running the show for their benefit and only for their benefit.
Israel is the problem. Israel intends to war on Iran. Israel believes that America will join that war. Israel is wrong. American's are fed up with Israeli meddling in American affairs and will not expend vast new sums of money to engage in another unnecessary war. American's will not send their son's to die in a war of aggression by Israel. We have too many problems at home to attend to. If the Israeli's want to start wars, then their sons and daughters must pay the price of aggression, not American's. If the American Government does join that war, then do not look for America's sons to sign up to fight it. That will not happen. If Obama engages in such a war then he clearly cares more about Israel than he does about America, and he will have one hell of a time fighting it. America will not accept a draft to fight Israel's wars. This is one boundary that should not be tested considering the serious plight of working people in America today. No amount of propaganda will sell such a war. It will create deep and wide fractures within the United States at a time when unity of purpose is needed to confront the depression. Let only extremist people pay and die for their extremist causes. Israel is NOT America.
Israel is a symptom and not THE problem as you conjecture. They are as trapped in their morass as we are in ours. Your supposition reeks, frankly and heads rapidly down a spiraling path to where no civilized person wishes to go.
"War on Terror" is an oxymoron. You cannot win a war on terror as war creates terror. Looks like Barry finally figured THAT ONE out. However, instead of calling it Overseas Contingency Operations, why not be honest and call it Overseas Occupation Forever and get it over with it?
The real oxymoron: How in the hell can you have a war on yourself and terror when you are the terrorists!
"For that to happen, Americans will have to be persistently reminded of those ongoing OCOs and their single goal: protecting the empire. After all, Americans have never much liked the idea of using their tax dollars for imperial purposes. The more the links between OCOs and the defense of empire are apparent, the more we'll be ready for the politics and policies of genuine change."
Ours is the true Invisible Empire -- invisible to the vast majority of consumers of state propaganda disguised as news.
But Americans are not averse to empire, because to the vast majority, having our military bases the vast majority of countries has been business-as-usual since 1945. Every nook and cranny of the earth is our own backyard where we can shoot up the baddies -- bang bang you're DEAD! -- just the way kids once shot them in their imaginations & now do so in the murderous video military-training industry.
Saint-just,
I see in your screen name an ideology derived from those mythical people of the Catholic history and faith. And I am not one to deny you that freedom. Just don't expect me to, ...Sorry, I'm trying not to laugh... see your written words as nothing more than the blathering of some mindless broken tape recorder.
Yup, redefinition accomplished. More fancy euphemisms for imperial aggression and war crimes. Very little substantive change, but at least the new discourse is much more articulate, slick and sophisticated than Bushco Inc. It is very sad, yet predictable, that the new Emperor would still perpetuate the myth of "Al-Quaeda", how convenient. We don't need to call it GWOT, OCO, when our fearless leaders have just to mention "al quaeda" to scare everyone. The Politics of Fear is older than Machiavelli and it is one of the most powerful tools in the political arsenal. There is no such thing as Al-Quaeda boys and girls, just a lot of pissed off people bent on revenging the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents at the receiving end of Imperial Policy.
Sioux Rose
GRINGO: Well-said.
The following was written on my blog today...
Obama’s war on Pakistan- disappear, torture, mutilate, and dump
March 20, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said: … ‘We all have a concern about the Quetta shura (in Balochistan) and the activities of the Taliban in that area.’ Two and a half weeks later… April 9, Riots as Baloch chiefs found dead (in Balochistan) after being disappeared, tortured, mutilated, and dumped. Obama and Robert Gates? Two terrorists at large. It’s time to stop their wars! It’s time to end Pentagon terrorism!
What National Security is promoted for us by these acts of US government terrorism? None at all is the short answer. The picture used for this post was actually taken from a tourist site, one that was talking about visiting the market in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan. Would you like to be a tourist there now? How about then taking a package tour to see Egypt’s Pyramids?
Obama has done nothing more than continue George Dubya Bush’s wars, except to further extend them! Meanwhile, you can hardly get a liberal Democratic Party voter to do a single damn thing about it.
What a shameful country we live in with such an apthetic, compliant group of people here! But what goes around comes around. Think about it some. Your future right now looks quite grim.
the only war going on is wall st., the ivy league, washington and the pentagon against the rank and file of the world. for the benefit of the financiers, the blue-blooded 400 or so old money families who have a howard hughes like phobia of the range of our intelligence and beauty. i know who they are, and we can beat them. ignore their " power ", imprison them and take their stuff, then ignore anything they ever tried to have you feel or fear. that's all we gotta do.
the gwot is now the gwoh - global war on humanity
while we have been duly acting out our gut wrenching role of offended citizen the nwo - using the government of the us as a branch office - has set up their pawns for the next phase - that being the final push against russia and china - the last two domains in th world to have resisted the central banking debt machine of the rothschilds
while we have been busy re-arranging our life expectations burying our dead, caring for the wounded (none of which is interesting to nwo)and killing iraqi and aghan peasants numbering over 1 million - while we have been busy doing all that - the nwo has been enjoying the best of times the best of tax free times
the corporations are positioning themselves for the climate wars and the water wars that are soon to come
there is also the oil problem - but that seems to have been resolved in iraq at east for the moment
i would call the citizens to arms but they are beaten already
whipped
ah, you just gotta love the discussion of oco and almost as an afterthought throw in "even as close as mexico." i gleefully await that day. once again, we find another article where mexico gets slipped in. subliminal messaging. what this country really doesn't understand is that mexico knows all about repression and suppression and oppression by foreign countries bent on performing an "oco" or any other sugar-coated terminology. i strongly suggest that mr. obama and mr. gates, if they haven't already, do a bit of homework on the history of that country. therein lies the real reason for the great wall of america. yep, right, let's keep out illegal immigrants. what other kind are there, right, thomas more?
maybe, mr. chernus, referencing mexico was just a slip. shall i give you the benefit of the doubt? where you don't get the benefit of the doubt is in using phrases such as "linguistic gamble" and "we're no longer at war, but there's still a lot of fighting to do" and "and we americans go willingly to war only when we're convinced that our 'way of life' is gravely threatened." you should seriously consider quitting your day job and find one buttering bread.
"abandoning such terrible language really does make a difference." do you think it made a difference to army spec. israel candelaria mejias, whose flag-drapped coffin appears in a photo in today's daily, compliments of the ap? think "abandoning such terrible language" is making a difference to mr. mejias' family?
and finding a "smoking gun" years from now is still a smoking gun?
americans will buy whatever product is presented to them, thanks in no small part to the genius of our marketing combined with the stupidity of our people, to paraphrase bill mahrer. what you should have said is that americans are "indifferent" to reality.
"... are we seeing the cleverly orchestrated plan of a shrewd administration, every move plotted with astonishing cunning?" this, mr. chernus, is the only substantive thing you have to say here, and you present it only as a question. it should be running in full page ads in newspapers and on billboards across the country. of course, that might be too much of a "linguistic gamble."
mr. chernus, if you can't stick to your religious studies, then start writing with substance and meaning and conviction.
'I saw Chernus's earlier articles on this site from the archives dating back to around the election time. It's amazing how Chernus and others want us to forget who they really are.'
You got that one right, Jennifer! They all want us NOW to forget how they repeatedly coaxed and coaxed us all on, trying to get us to become 'lesser of two evil' voters like themselves.
That was their entire strategy for supposedly getting rid of the Right Wing ruling class policies that run America and the world. They built no Movement with their voting and now they got nothing except words.