Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiUS Lurching from One Quagmire to Another
Robert McNamara's life may illuminate contemporary tragedy. Just weeks before McNamara died, President Obama pressured reluctant Democrats (kudos to Reps. Mike Michaud and Chellie Pingree for resisting) to approve a strange hybrid coupling of Afghanistan war funds with billions for the International Monetary Fund.
This was war funding paired with a deceptive offering to the gods of peace, a resume of McNamara's career. This ultimate war technocrat morphed into a World Bank president. In the latter role he employed global financial institutions as the velvet glove to complement the iron fist of military power.
Today, we lurch from one quagmire to another. Echoes of the domino theory and Viet Cong fearmongering can be heard as this president prepares us for his war. He assures us: "We are not in Afghanistan to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies." All we are missing now are McNamara's kill ratios and body counts.
Even the mainstream media detect reason for caution. The New York Times has reported that the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban are burying their differences in response to U.S. military escalation. In addition, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that the most important factor behind the resurgence of the Taliban is the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan.
As for the current power of the Taliban, Middle Eastern scholar Juan Cole pointed out: "They have no air force, no artillery, no tanks. They are just small bands."
As in Vietnam, the U.S. supports reactionaries in order to prevail in the conflict it fanned. Cole points out: "The U.S. has [installed] a fundamentalist government which is rolling back rights of women through Shiite personal status law." The wife needs the husband's permission to leave home and can't refuse demands for sex.
Even in retreat, McNamara hardly modeled genuine penitence, which involves abrogating some power and wealth. His World Bank fought poverty by making unprecedented loans to Latin America, leaving nations deeply in debt and with very unequal social systems. U.S. capitalists profited. When world oil prices skyrocketed in the '70s, he lent more money - with harsh restrictions preventing government aid to the poor.
Obama now gives the secretive IMF money to bail European bankers. Western European central bankers, their own economies floundering, are unwilling to take the political risk of aiding Eastern Europe. Obama is rejecting the difficult but potentially more rewarding task of U.S.-European collaboration on bigger joint stimulus packages, international banking regulation and reform of the IMF. He aids bankers through the IMF elite even as the European economy stagnates.
If there is a lesson in McNamara's life, it is one I borrow from Amherst College professor Tom Dumm: "The United States is facing a decline, as is inevitable for imperial power. [How] that decline is to be addressed
needs to be at the heart of this presidency."
Obama's rhetoric is softer than Bush's, but he evades the requirements of habeas corpus and opposes efforts to examine abuses of the Bush "terror war." Dumm reminds us that every modern president has committed major violations of the Constitution. "These have been connected to foreign policy, but they are also implicated in the politics of globalization and the Cold War. Presidents felt frustrated either by statutory constraints, or by the slowness of Congress to approve, or by the need to wave bloody flags in order to get Congress to move.
"We believe in the Constitution, and we believe in the special fate of America. But we've not necessarily been well served by either belief during the past half-century. Obama may need to imitate another great leader who has managed the decline of an imperial power, without destroying the world. Mikhail Gorbachev led the Russian people past a system of government that no longer could be imagined to serve them."
With Dumm, I believe that the U.S. needs to learn a little humility. It must question its sense of itself as special, acknowledge that its democracy is flawed and archaic, that it has played a major role in causing turmoil in the Middle East and finally that the Washington consensus it seeks to impose on others damages not only them but even many of its most vulnerable citizens.
19 Comments so far
Show AllNow, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?
=================================
Facing the American World We Created
by Tom Engelhardt, July 24, 2009
Email This | Print This | Share This | Comment | Antiwar Forum
We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s "Gang of Eight" informed. A House investigation is now underway.
We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even "be illegal," according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)
This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA’s own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations — sometimes wiping out innocent civilians — from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never — we’re told — off the ground.
If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.
After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA’s-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap it’s day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to "look forward, not backward."
Of course, he’s not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not.
(first half of article)
(2nd part of article)
Admittedly, we’re a people who don’t really believe in history — so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?
The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we — not just the Obama administration — have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn’t been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.
As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.
In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques — known to the previous administration and most of the media as "enhanced interrogation techniques" — were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at "black sites" offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the "cleansing" of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out — and still carry out — assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined "torture" out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).
And don’t think that that’s anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It’s only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know."
(3rd part of article)
Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what’s missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category or, as with the latest CIA assassination story, a known curiosity whose full shape and depths remain to be grasped. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It’s a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.
Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place, rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared "war," made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power in the world, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.
Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.
Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don’t face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson — the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson — of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam — and Laos and Cambodia — because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H.W. Bush, "kicked the Vietnam syndrome." It still haunts us.
However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country — and they remain monstrously large — we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of… well, of us and our "safety." We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.
Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?
(end of article)
I read this articule with great interest. It seems to me that the Military-Industrial Complex is indeed alive and well in this country, and the ruling elite of this country continue to push buttons to increase their power and influence. All the while the average citizen is fed crap from the media, the Congress and I'm sorry to say President Obama, whom I had such hope for change in this country.
I wonder how long it will take for this country to explode in anger at the excesses we the average folks are expected to put up with...I guess we will really have to notice how much pain and suffering we have in this country and have that pain touch every single one of us before we revolt.
OBAMA.
Vote third party.
"The US must question it's sense of itself as special" - The teaching of specialness may be effective for individuals suffering from low self esteem, but for them and for nations, it must be discarded when the perceived need of exclusion appears, in order to maintain specialness.
Study the decline of Britain's 19th hegemonic position on the world stage.
The pound sterling was then the currency of world trade, London banks were the clearing house for international transactions, the British ruling class promoted global "free" msrkets, their investmentors could do no wrong, and their Navy ruled the world.
The national economy went into decline because of their involvement in one or two quagmires one after after another, their economic rulers outsourced their industrial base to colonies such as India and focused on placing bets on financial speculations, and their elite class started spend great efforts making the lower classes pay for the above.
Of course, the wealthy grew richer while the lower classes increasingly found the military was the employer of the last resort. The steam-aged industrial infrastructure was allowed to rot whilst no new monies were invested in building the new oil-and electricity-based infrastructure.
After WWII, the British lower classes had to live in a low-level, rationed-goods society; many were only released from this grey world when the US-directed consumer boom reached them in the 1960s.
However, during the rationing years, public health was introduced. The economic oligarch's used it to keep the working people quiet while their rulers still played at controlling their global network of military bases, colonies, client states and dependencies.
The trouble is is that a newer hegemon -the US elite- both took Britain's former leadership position in the world economy and, in addition, the US eliminated their closest industrial competitors, Germany and Japan.
During our decline, I don't a see a violent world war clearing out competitors and thus allowing the rise of another global hegemon.
This bodes badly for the average US citizen. Most of them will be increasingly impoverished while their ruler's government allows industrial and services outsourcing, financial speculation and the related serial bubbles and constant military interventions in place of economic competition and the replacement of lost jobs.
In fact, no one nation will again rule the waves (air and water), impose a new capitalist world order and thus force everyone to use their national currency as the legal tender for world trade.
Instead, we will probably experience constant national covert and over warfare over the planet's decreasing natural resources.
Citizens will have to learn to live with less truth, rights and income while the world oligarchs and corporations make profits by both investing in and promoting this world of decreasing intellectual, cultural and material resources... for the lower classes.
Bravo, nicely written piece.
The wife needs the husband's permission to leave home and can't refuse demands for sex.
This did not begin in Afghanistan but with George Wanker Bush who laid down this law to his wife, the hapless and unlamented Laura. Fortunately for her, he never made any demands for sex; so at least she was spared that. It is also probably true that Bush originally got this idea from Cheney.
this is an excerpt (my apologies for posting here) from perhaps the best "on the ground" writer Pepe Escobar on matters in the middle east and central asia concerning US imperial designs. he writes for Asiatimesonline.....
it covers the inevitable and already accelerating demise of the "petro dollar" and dollar hegemony ...as well as other matters - regardless of what washington still "dreams up" or dreams ABOUT or deludes itself to be doing.
===================
Jul 25, 2009
NEW GREAT GAME REVISITED, Part 1
Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle
By Pepe Escobar
HONG KONG - Things get curiouser and curiouser in the Iranian wonderland. Imagine what happened last week during Friday prayers in Tehran, personally conducted by former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, aka "The Shark", Iran's wealthiest man, who made his fortune partly because of Irangate - the 1980s' secret weapons contracts with Israel and the US.
As is well known, Rafsanjani is behind the Mir-Hossein Mousavi-Mohammad Khatami pragmatic conservative faction that lost the most recent battle at the top - rather than a presidential election - to the ultra-hardline faction of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-Mahmud Ahmadinejad-Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. During prayers, partisans of the hegemonic faction yelled the usual
"Death to America!" - while the pragmatic conservatives came up, for the first time, with "Death to Russia!" and "Death to China!"
Oops. Unlike the United States and Western Europe, both Russia and China almost instantly accepted the contested presidential re-election of Ahmadinejad. Could they then be portrayed as enemies of Iran? Or have pragmatic conservatives not been informed that obsessed-by-Eurasia Zbig Brzezinksi - who has US President Barack Obama's undivided attention - has been preaching since the 1990s that it is essential to break up the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing axis and torpedo the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)?
On top of it, don't they know that both Russia and China - as well as Iran - are firm proponents of the end of the dollar as global reserve currency to the benefit of a (multipolar) basket of currencies, a common currency of which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had the gall this month to present a prototype at the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in Aquila, Italy? By the way, it's a rather neat coin. Minted in Belgium, it sports the faces of the G-8 leaders and also a motto - "Unity in diversity".
"Unity in diversity" is not exactly what the Obama administration has in mind as far as Iran and Russia are concerned - no matter the zillion bytes of lofty rhetoric. Let's start with the energy picture.
Iran is world number two both in terms of proven oil reserves (11.2%) and gas reserves (15.7%), according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008.
If Iran ever opted towards a more unclenched-fist relationship with Washington, US Big Oil would feast on Iran's Caspian energy wealth. This means that whatever the rhetoric, no US administration will ever want to deal with a hyper-nationalist Iranian regime, such as the current military dictatorship of the mullahtariat.
What really scares Washington - from George W Bush to Obama - is the perspective of a Russia-Iran-Venezuela axis. Together, Iran and Russia hold 17.6% of the world's proven oil reserves. The Persian Gulf petro-monarchies - de facto controlled by Washington - hold 45%. The Moscow-Tehran-Caracas axis controls 25%. If we add Kazakhstan's 3% and Africa's 9.5%, this new axis is more than an effective counter-power to American hegemony over the Arab Middle East. The same thing applies to gas. Adding the "axis" to the Central Asian "stans", we reach 30% of world gas production. As a comparison, the whole Middle East - including Iran - currently produces only 12.1% of the world's needs.
All about Pipelineistan
A nuclear Iran would inevitably turbo-charge the new, emerging multipolar world. Iran and Russia are de facto showing to both China and India that it is not wise to rely on US might subjugating the bulk of oil in the Arab Middle East. All these players are very much aware that Iraq remains occupied, and that Washington's obsession remains the privatization of Iraq's enormous oil wealth.
As Chinese intellectuals are fond of emphasizing, four emerging or re-emerging powers - Russia, China, Iran and India - are strategic and civilizational poles, three of them sanctuaries because they are nuclear powers. A more confident and assertive Iran - mastering the full cycle of nuclear technology - may translate into Iran and Russia increasing their relative weight in Europe and Asia to the distress of Washington, not only in the energy sphere but also as proponents of a multipolar monetary system.
The entente is already on. Since 2008, Iranian officials have stressed that sooner or later Iran and Russia will start trading in rubles. Gazprom is willing to be paid for oil and gas in roubles - and not dollars. And the secretariat of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has already seen the writing on the wall - admitting for over a year now that OPEC will be trading in euros before 2020.
Not only the "axis" Moscow-Tehran-Caracas, but also Qatar and Norway, for instance, and sooner or later the Gulf Emirates, are ready to break up with the petrodollar. It goes without saying that the end of the petrodollar - which won't happen tomorrow, of course - means the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency; the end of the world paying for America's massive budget deficits; and the end of an Anglo-American finance stranglehold over the world that has lasted since the second part of the 19th century.
The energy equation between Iran and Russia is much more complex: it configures them as two scorpions in a bottle. Tehran, isolated from the West, lacks foreign investment to upgrade its 1970s-era energy installations. That's why Iran cannot fully profit from exploiting its Caspian energy wealth.
end of excerpt
============
for the rest of the article ..and I recommend reading Asiatimesonline, pepe escobar , henry ck liu, julian desallentis, mister goldman on economics, Mugambo Guru (he is very funny and sarcastic) (on money, gold, etc.) -- regularly there.
Thanks for the heads up on Escobar,I visit Asia times online and find them to have some of the best economic theorists in print. peace
Excellent article. One has to wonder how long it will be before one hears Obama echoing LBJ's claims that he can see the light at the end of the tunnel and that he and his generals believe that victory is just around the corner. An ominous sign for Obama is, as the article points out, that "the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban are burying their differences in response to U.S. military escalation." Just as the Vietnamese continued to fight in order to oust U.S. forces from its soil, so too, as the article notes, will the Taliban gather more recruits because of the "foreign forces in Afghanistan."
Perhaps it would not be surprising to see Afghan protesters holding up signs which shows LBJ's face, then Obama's, which would then say something to the effect: Just another face of American aggression and imperialism. If only the moribund antiwar movement in this country could rouse themselves to flood the country with protesters carrying these signs portraying Obama to be a warmonger who is not all that much different than Lyndon Baines Johnson.
OUR TIN-EAR DIPLOMATS, ALWAYS LOOKING FOR NEW QUAGMIRES
Whoops! Joe Biden misspoke again. He wants "to plant the roots of democracy" deep in Georgia.
Now, Georgians may or may not want to do this themselves. But when any American male suggests such a thing, he immediately conjures up the image of George W. Bush, i.e., portrays himself as an overgrown adolescent, who, as a third grader heard his elementary teacher speak about "democracy" but didn't understand her very well.
And when any prominent American woman speaks provocatively about how Iran must get its act together, she immediately conjures up Hillary Clinton's threat to "obliterate" the place-- especially when that speaking woman is Hillary Clinton herself.
sierra7
Obama couldn't have "chosen" a more numb-nuts VP than Joe Biden.
(I'm a registered non-partisan voter)
He has a perpetual habit of "non-engagement of the brain before engagement of the mouth."
That's his history.
As far as other comments, yes, we are in "decline." Remember, it took the Roman Empire more than 750 years to "decline", much longer than out whole history. Our decline will probably be accelerated because of world events which are more congruent (even if we think not) to each other which, as in the case of monetary changes and dependencies will further that change.
We, as a people are most to blame; we have been complacent and have accepted the two party system which is nothing more than, Yadda-yadda-yadda, and yooda, yooda, yooda.
When we come to the realization that a consumer led society of buying useless junk cannot cut it in history maybe we will actually literally and figuratively rise-up and overthrow the Whoredom of Washington DC....Maybe a little revolt of the states??
As far as the death squads and such, the US has been deeply involved with those shenanigans for 50 years or more.....Who monitors the "Black Budget"? Our "leaders"?????? You've got to be kidding!!
We are led by presidents that continuously violate the Constitution because the are politically greedy, unschooled in world politics, know nothing about the rest of the world and cultures, or just don't give a Damn (like RN).
There are small things we can do like a national purchasing boycott....don't buy a single thing unless what you have cannot be reworn, repaired or repurchased/sold in a local flea market.
How else do you think you are going to cut the corporate cords that are strangulating us??
And, re-register non-partisan so that the Whores in Washington cannot depend on your votes anymore...keep them guessing!
Who is driving the bus, or is it just wildly careening down the mountain side?
The bus is still being driven by a drunken George Wanker Bush. Obama is sitting right behind him, quietly saying things like, "Now, George, please slow down." Neither of them has noticed that the bus has already gone over the cliff and is in free fall. Where's Cheesedick Cheney? He wisely got off and went wherever he stashed his personal fortune. Bush takes a long swig from his bottle of Wild Turkey and loudly imitates the road runner cartoon character, "Mee Meep! Mee Meep!" This is the "special fate" of the United States.
Finally a little dose of reality in the news. Thank you John Buell for pointing out the tiny ray of sunshine in the overcast skies. I thank the two Maine reps who both stood up to Obama/Emmanuel admin. They are the better half of Maine reps.I hope it is true what they say"As goes Maine so goes the nation".
Perhaps our disgraced federal leadership, drunk on corporate profits,greed,domination and excess careening from bad policy to worse is now headed to an immoveable object that arrests the downward spiral to fascism that Obama has accelerated.
Quagmires provide endless war contracts and justifications for curtailing liberty.
Joe
Agree with Joe. Buell recognizes the role of business ("U.S. capitalists profited"), but the answer is humility. So the US must humbly serve business interests? This is ambiguous drivel.