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In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities: Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010
Excuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we're all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day. You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly. Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War. More than eight years later... well, you know the story.
Worse yet, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates that a startling 58% of Americans, otherwise in a mighty gloomy mood, support the president's latest "surge" in Afghanistan which will extend that war into the dismal future. And worse than that, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, from the point of view of official Washington, next year won't really count for much. The crucial decisions on both wars will evidently leapfrog 2010. So, on that score, we might as well just mark the year off on our calendars now.
2010: pure loss. But before I go into the details, let me try this another way.
In his 1937 short story with an unforgettable title -- "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" -- Delmore Schwartz's unnamed narrator imagines himself "as if" in a "motion picture theatre." He's watching a silent film -- already then a long-gone form -- "an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps." It's not any movie, however, but one about his parents' awkward, uncertain courtship, and there comes a moment when his character suddenly leaps up in the crowded theater of his dream life and shouts at the flickering images of his still undecided (future) parents: "Don't do it. It's not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous."
For just an instant, that is, he's willing to obliterate himself, his very being, in order to stop a nightmare he knows will otherwise occur.
This unnerving fictional moment, which I want you to hold in abeyance for a while, came to my mind recently -- in the context of TomDispatch.
Bombing Afghanistan Back to the Stone Age
Our endless wars are nightmares. Few enough would disagree with that, even, I suspect, among the supportive 58% in that poll or the 54% who "approve of the president's performance as commander-in-chief." If only we could wake up.
I was reminded of our strange dream-state recently when I reread the article that sparked the creation of what became TomDispatch. I first stumbled across it in the fall of 2001, after the Towers came down in my hometown, after that acrid smell of burning made its way to my neighborhood and into everything, after I traveled to "Ground Zero" (as it was already being called) to view those vast otherworldly shards of destruction via nearby side streets, after I spent weeks reading the ever narrower, ever more war-oriented news coverage in this country, and after I watched George W. Bush and Company mainlining fear directly into the American bloodstream, selling the eternal terror of terror and the president's Global War on Terror that so conveniently went with it.
It was obvious that war was on the way, and that the men (and woman) who were leading us into it had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans. Somewhere in that period, probably in late October 2001, a friend sent me a piece by an Afghan-American living in California that spurred me to modest action.
His name was Tamim Ansary and he posted it online on September 16th, just five days after the attacks on New York and Washington, having listened to right-wing talk radio rev up to an instant fever pitch about "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age." His piece went viral and finally reached me -- I was hardly online in those days -- by email sometime in October after the Bush administration had begun the bombing campaign in Afghanistan that preceded its invasion-by-proxy of that country.
Ansary wrote "as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden," and yet his piece was a desperate warning against the American war to come. He wrote with passion and conviction, with knowledge of Afghanistan and a kind of imagery that was otherwise not then part of our American world:
"We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely."
It
was the image of our bombs only "stirring the rubble" that stunned me.
I had been reading the papers for weeks and had seen nothing like it.
It seemed to catch the forgotten nightmare of the Afghan past as well
as the nightmare to come at a moment when the only nightmare on the
American mind was our own. Our own chosen imagery was then playing out
in repeated public rites in which we hailed ourselves as the planet's
greatest victims, survivors, and dominators, while leaving no roles for
others in our about-to-be-global drama -- except, of course, for
greatest Evildoer (which Osama bin Laden filled magnificently). It
wasn't only our foreign policy that was switching onto the "unilateral"
track, so was our imagery.
Small wonder, then, that the strangeness of that single image moved me to gather the email addresses of a small group of friends and relatives, copy the piece into an email, add a note above it indicating that it was a must-read, and with that modest gesture, quite unbeknownst to me, launch TomDispatch.com.
Ansary, an Afghan who had been living here for 35 years, wasn't thinking only of Afghan lives and nightmares, however. He had American lives and nightmares in mind as well. He wrote about Americans dying, about the dangers of Pakistan, and especially about bin Laden's dream -- to draw this country's military into the backlands of Islam and start a war of civilizations -- while pleading against an invasion that, even on September 16th, was unstoppable. Of bin Laden, he wrote:
"It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?"
In the Biggest Dreams, the Largest Miscalculations
Well, yes, as it turned out, someone did have the "belly" for just that -- and far more. One thing you can still say about the various characters who made up the Bush administration, including George's one-percent-doctrine vice president, all those neocons ominously stashed away in the Pentagon, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who, within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, was already urging aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq): they were thinking geo-strategically. They had the globe, the whole damn thing, in their sights. They were also desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do. They believed that the mightiest, most advanced military force on the planet could shock-and-awe anyone into submission, and quite unilaterally at that.
As still unrepentant Cold Warriors, even with the Soviet Union a decade gone, they were still eager to roll back Russia's borders and influence, especially in oil-rich Central Asia, and so turn that rump empire into a second- or third-rate state of no future importance to the U.S. They were eager to encircle Iran with bases and take down the mullahs. (As the infamous neocon quip of that moment went: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.") With a president and vice president who were former energy company execs and a national security adviser for whom Chevron had named a double-hulled oil tanker, they tended to be riveted by energy flows and how to control them.
They had their minds, that is, on a very big picture -- nothing less than the creation of a future Pax Americana abroad and Pax Republicana at home. And they truly believed that Pax could be established at the tip of a cruise missile. Having been shocked-and-awed themselves on 9/11, they were more than ready to return the favor, to use that "Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century" as an excuse to do their damnedest, including, as they bragged at the time, targeting up to 60 countries, mostly in what they liked to call "the arc of instability" (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet) where terrorists were supposed to operate at will. Nothing, that is, was too grandiose for them.
They clearly saw the chance of a lifetime and grabbed it like the opportunists they were, and at first, it looked like they were right on the mark. Two "victories" were the result, each accomplished in a matter of weeks within less than a year-and-a-half of each other. The Taliban were gone in nanoseconds; bin Laden almost in their grasp and driven underground; Saddam Hussein swept into the dustbin of history. It seemed -- to them above all -- like a miracle of modern military power. Who could now withstand them? The answer was obvious: no one.
The rag-tag oppositional forces left in Afghanistan and Iraq were like so many flies to be swatted away. So they sent their viceroys into Kabul and Baghdad to clean things up, which, especially in the case of Iraq, meant disbanding that country's military, privatizing its economy, and opening up the oil industry of one of the most energy-rich regions on the planet to the mighty transnational (and significantly American) oil giants. In the meantime, the Pentagon would build massive military bases and prepare to garrison both countries till hell froze over. The official documents they wrote for, and sometimes in the name of, the newly "liberated" Iraqis read like fever-dream versions of nineteenth century imperial fantasies.
When reality up and bit them hard, they were already looking to the future. They were going to crush Syria, drive Iran to its knees, make OPEC and the Saudis grovel (with the help of increased Iraqi oil output), bring China to heel, and, oh yes, get the terrorists, too.
What a dream! What a miscalculation! What a nightmare for the rest of us! Hundreds of thousands (or more) now dead, millions of refugees, ongoing war, a region -- those very oil heartlands -- destabilized, and of course the massive draining of American resources in two major wars (and various minor conflicts) on which almost a trillion dollars has already been spent and another trillion could easily go down the drain.
And where are we eight years later? The Chinese, the Russians, the Malaysians, and others have picked up those energy dreams and, in Iraq and elsewhere, translated them into success without spending a cent on war. The Russians are back in Central Asia. The Chinese are now sending Central Asian natural gas China-wards through a newly opened pipeline. Meanwhile, the American oil giants have ended up with few of the spoils. The American Army is a wreck and two minority insurgencies with but tens of thousands of relatively lightly armed guerrillas have made a mockery of that military's supposed power to shock and awe anybody. The latest laugh-fest being that insurgents have, according to the Wall Street Journal, hacked into the most advanced weaponry the Pentagon has, the video feeds from its latest drone aircraft, with a $26 piece of off-the-shelf Russian software. In other words, while, at the cost of multimillions, Americans were capable of looking at battlefield scenes fit for destruction from distant Langley, Virginia, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, or various secret sites in the Greater Middle East, so were Iraqi, and possibly Afghan, guerrillas and terrorists on their laptops for nada.
Eight years later, the Bush administration's dreams of a Pax Americana and its domestic twin are in that dustbin of history along with Saddam Hussein. And all the big ideas that went with our two disastrous wars seem to have been sluiced down the drain as well. And yet, in both countries, the giant bases remain like permanent scars on the land, as do the wars. No dust heap of history for them. Not yet, anyway. Our wars are instead to proceed without rhyme or reason. And among those deciding U.S. policy, military and civilian, none (I have no doubt) have placed a call to Tamim Ansary, wherever he may be. It doesn't pay to be right in our world.
I don't want to claim, of course, that no reasons are offered any more in explanation of our wars: There's Osama bin Laden, for starters, as President Obama reminded us recently. No one in our world knows where he is, or even, at this point, if he is. But if he still exists, he must be dancing a jig. With possibly fewer than 100 operatives in Afghanistan and another few hundred in Pakistan (according to the best calculations of the Obama administration), he's somehow managed to bog imperial America down in the tribal backlands of Central (and increasingly South) Asia.
Beyond the damage inflicted on 9/11, he's already helped drain the United States of nearly a trillion dollars in war costs and counting. His "presence" seems to insure that, sometime in the near future, the Obama administration will further compound the folly of the last eight years by attempting to completely destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan with air attacks on its restive province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership is supposedly hiding.
If back in 2002 or 2003 you had presented such a scenario -- a few hundred terrorists tying us up in a trillion-dollar war -- you would have been laughed out of the country; yet it's safe to say that what's happening now represents, for bin Laden, triumph on a level that the attacks of 9/11, no matter how televisually spectacular, could never come close to. And here's the worst of it in this holiday season, peering into the murk of 2010, all I can see is signs of endless war. As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fuggedaboutit.
2010: A Year of No Significance
Just to take our wars one at a time:
In Afghanistan, here's what we know. The president is surging at least 30,000 troops into that country, reportedly accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 private contractors, and an extra crew of civilian employees of the U.S. government as well. What initially was announced as a six-month surge is now expected to last 11-12 months (if things "line up perfectly," according to the general in charge). That means the surge itself will probably still be underway next November. Fittingly, then, the Obama administration has made it clear that it won't even consider beginning what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called a "thorough review of how we're doing" in Afghanistan until December 2010, a process that, based on the last set of presidential deliberations, could last months. Put another way, war in the present escalated form is simply what's on the books for 2010. Period.
Moreover, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry recently assured Afghans that July 2011, the date the president mentioned for beginning a withdrawal of American forces, is not "a deadline" of any sort. According to Thomas Day of the McClatchy newspapers, he insisted, in fact, "that a strong American military presence will remain in Afghanistan long after July 2011."
In Iraq, on the other hand, the war is officially ending. In the last months of the Bush administration, the U.S. negotiated an agreement with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to withdraw all its "combat troops" by August 2010 and the rest of its troops by the end of 2011. Ever since, on both counts, fudging has been the order of the day. To begin with, all troops are, in a sense, "combat" troops, but it soon became clear that some of those now defined as such might be conveniently relabeled "advisors" or "trainers." This has left a good deal of flexibility as to just who has to be withdrawn by this coming August. As for "all" the troops, although next to no media attention has been paid, the weaving and bobbing has begun there, too. While visiting Iraq recently, Gates managed to sideline 2010 as a date of significance, while angling for an unending, if smaller scale, occupation of that country. Under the headline, "Gates Expects New Sanctions on Iran," for instance, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times reported this:
"The defense secretary also spoke about America's involvement in Iraq, saying that the administration expects that some United States forces might remain in an advisory capacity in Iraq after 2011, the deadline for all American troops to withdraw from the country. ‘I wouldn't be surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a "train, equip and advise" role beyond the end of 2011,' Mr. Gates said. He added, ‘I suspect as we get on through 2010 and begin approaching 2011, the Iraqis themselves will probably have an interest in this.'"
So scratch 2010 when it comes to Washington's Iraq plans, and for 2012, start imagining thousands, or even tens of thousands of American "advisors" and "mentors" (not, heaven forbid, "combat troops") on a few of those giant bases the Pentagon built. Keep an eye, in particular, on massive Balad Air Base -- since the U.S. quite consciously never helped the Iraqi military build up a real air force of its own -- and the monster base complex, Camp Victory, on the edge of Baghdad. Only if those are turned over to the Iraqis would an American "withdrawal" seem a plausible reality. (Keep in mind as well that the Bush administration in its planning for the occupation of Iraq in 2003 always expected to withdraw all but perhaps 30,000 American troops who were to be garrisoned on out-of-the-way American-built bases for the long haul.)
And when Gates says such things, it's no small matter. After all, what's now being called "Obama's war" might at least as reasonably be called "Gates's war," as might the war in Iraq that Obama is ostensibly ending. In both countries, Washington's basic policy was set in the last months of the Bush administration when Gates, then as now secretary of defense, was already ascendant. The first 11,000 troops of "Obama's" surge were, for instance, dispatched by the Bush administration, even if they only left for Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama presidency.
Similarly, the new Pentagon budget -- a Gates-supervised document in its planning stages before Obama arrived -- is larger than the last Bush-era budget, and that's without the supplemental bill for Afghan surge funding, now estimated at $30-$40 billion (and likely to rise), that will be submitted to Congress sometime next year. The "new" military strategy for fighting our wars, counterinsurgency (or COIN), isn't an Obama-era creation either. It's the baby of Bush's favorite general and Iraq surge commander David Petraeus. Advanced to the post of Centcom commander by Bush, he is now the key military figure who oversees both our wars in the Greater Middle East. In other words, in war policy the continuity between the post-Cheney Bush era and the Obama one is striking, not to say overwhelming, and given the fact that Gates and Petraeus hold such crucial posts, that's hardly surprising, just depressing as hell.
These are men already preparing for "the next war" and, in that sense, Afghanistan is also our main laboratory for the weaponry and concepts that will animate our future conflicts. Its skies and villages are the testing grounds for endless war, American-style.
Full Drone Ahead
So here's my fantasy this holiday season. If I could return to the movie theater of those early post-9/11 days, I'd like to stand up in that well-packed place and shout: "Don't do it. It's not too late to change your minds. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, impoverishment, death, and a population whose character will be monstrous."
I'd like, that is, to obliterate TomDispatch -- for without the Afghan invasion and war, the one that, all these years later, only grows wider, my website would never have existed.
And yet, here's the saddest thing: I know full well that its future is assured as long as I care to do it. Our American way of life is a way of war. War and more war. 2010, a snap. 2011, no problem. 2012, 2013, Ambassador Eikenberry guarantees it. 2018, 2025, 2047? Don't worry, we already have one nifty bomber (advanced battlefield surveillance system, dogfighting drone) on the drawing boards for you!
Even without the geopolitical thinkers of the Bush administration, even without the necessary set of rationales, war has a force of its own. Especially in our country, it has its own powerful set of interests, its lobbies and enthusiasts, its powerful weapons makers, its law makers, planners, and dreamers. It has its own head of steam. After a while, it seems, it doesn't need explanations to keep itself going. It's self-propelled.
None of what's happening in the world of American war may make much sense any more, not even in terms Washington's foreign policy power brokers understand, but no matter. They -- and so all of us -- are already in the grip of a nightmare, and nothing, it seems, can wake us. So, for the last days of this year, as for the days that preceded them, as for all the days of next year, it's full drone ahead and damn the torpedoes. That's our American world, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.
Perhaps, though, it's worth keeping one modest thought in mind:
In nightmares, too, begin responsibilities.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. His other most recent book is The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books). Previous books include: The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
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47 Comments so far
Show AllOne is awe struck by the fact that an intelligent and perceptive writer such as Tom Engelhardt apparently accepts without question the assertion put forth by the Bush administration that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Contrast Mr. Engelhardt's mind set with that of Canadian journalist Barrie Zwicker who inquires in his book Towers of Deception, as he watched the WTC towers being hit on television, "Where the hell is the U.S. Air Force?". In December of 2001 Mr. Zwicker wondered why bin Laden's lips rarely moved in a video tape that had been released of bin Laden on Dec. 16 of that year. Why, Mr. Zwicker thought, was no one questioning if this tape of bin Laden was authentic? He also thought it strange that neither the Pentagon nor the White House ever produced the person who had found this incriminating tape of bin Laden. Why was the media, such as people like Tom Engelhardt, not hammering the White House about that tape? Why did the media not ask about the relationship between bin Laden and the Bush families? One has to believe that if a government could fabricate a story that one of its own vessels had been under attack during the Vietnam War, then surely it is not entirely inconceivable that they could also lie about the events of 9/11/01.
Mr. Zwicker reports in his book how he did a television program in Canada in January of 2002 which raised questions about the official version of events that occurred on 9/11/01. The response that he and his producers received about that program was 99 per cent positive. Yet in this country it never seemed to have occurred to anyone in the media such as a Tom Engelhardt to dare question the official government story as to what transpired on that day. Not exactly bulldog journalism at its finest.
First words out of my mouth after the first tower fell was, "Boy was that lucky it fell straight down."
Yes - in fact, all three of them.
What kind of conspiracy theories are offered behind the 1993 WTC attack? Was it an "inside job" too? Didn't it establish a pretty solid motive?
As far as the manner that the building collapse, the only possible way for any building of such size TO collapse IS straight down following a major structural failure. A 1200 foot building isn't a flagpole or a tree. It a structural system, and columns fail and floors collapse long before sufficient angular momentum can be imparted to the entire system. About the only way to make the buildings topple like a flagpole would have been a very careful, timed (not to fast or too slow) removal of foundation support on one side of the building.
but what I find most problematic about Sept. 11 conspiracy theories is the refusal to believe that some people may have wanted to make violent strike against the imperialist USA, and that there were incredibly simple ways to do it. It is effectively, a denial of the fact of US imperialism, and a denial of the people who did it agency for their actions.
Erroll, I share your exasperation at Engelhardt and others like him who gloss over the mystery and disinformation surrounding the events of 9/11, and glibly sidestep the issue by alluding to the abiding Official Story without stopping to dwell on it.
I'm not one of those caricatured "Truthers" who jump with both feet into any political discussion to insist that the Truth of 9/11 is a be-all and end-all that must be settled before any other discussion can take place.
I'm sympathetic to reports that in the past, militant "Truthers" have interrupted and disrupted worthwhile presentations and discussions by insistently hijacking them and demanding that 9/11 take precedence over other matters under discussion.
Still, I can also sympathize with those who refuse to "back off", precisely BECAUSE of the point you raise.
Once people decide to politely shut up about the glaring fact that 9/11 Truth is still an open and important question-- including icons like Noam Chomsky-- writers like Engelhardt will be more and more easily able to rely upon the innocuous factoids of the Official Version in passing to buttress analysis of other issues.
The least Engelhardt could do is add an disclaimer, even an asterisk, to any 9/11 reference, denoting that the reference does NOT constitute acceptance of the Super-Villain Lone Nut and Nineteen Lone Nut Follower Theory to explain the crime.
Unless he HAS swallowed the Orthodox Factoid-based dogma, which would cause me to take him with a salt lick. One grain wouldn't do the trick.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Obedient Servant
Your insightful comments are well stated. Barrie Zwicker has a chapter in his book [Ch. 5] in which he takes to task such left gatekeepers as Noam Chomsky [Chomsky of all people!] for agreeing with Bush that conspiracy theories other than what was put forth by the Bush administration should not be tolerated. As Zwicker notes, one would expect Bush to make such a statement. One would not expect a person of the stature of a Noam Chomsky, who has been able to see through government propaganda in the past, to side with Bush and use the pejorative term conspiracy theory regarding those who dare to question the Official Story as to what supposedly occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.
Erroll, Buck, 666 & Y'r Obedient Servant -
Re: Department of Silver Lining on the Cloud of Doom for 2010
There are grains of truth in the Official Story of 9/11 of course. What is important is the classified stuff that the Bushies withheld from the 911 Commission despite its efforts, and the stuff the bipartisan Congressional Commission who composed the official narrative never asked for.
It is just possible that the disasterous squeeze play underway on Pakistan in the Obama administration's Af/Pak surge may inadvertantly dislodge, into the public domain, some of the key facts about what was going in in the weeks and months that immediately preceded 9/11/01. The harder the Pakistani military and the Zadari civilian regime are squeezed and whipsawed, the more likely it may be that at some point Pakistan's intelligence service (the ISI) will eventually blow the whistle on the whole fiasco and coverup.
There has been a close working relationship (colored by mutual manipulation and deep mistrust) between American intelligence and the Pakistani ISI dating back to the clandestine mujadaheen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the Carter/Reagan years. The twists and turns of this rocky relationship under George H W Bush and throughout the Clinton presidency are chronicled in painstaking detail in Steve Coll's fine book "Ghost Wars" (warning - a bit of a tough read).
When the Bush/Cheney team took over in January, 2001, not only was there a shift of top level national security emphasis away from Osama bin Laden (just ask Richard Clarke) in favor of renewed Cold War mentality towards Russia, China, and Cuba. There was also a big push to downgrade the Langley/civilian CIA side of the US national security establishment, with an enhancement of the power pecking order role of the Pentagon's intelligence assets (NSA, DIA, and the CIA's black ops wing) beholden to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Who do you suppose was providing the rich detail of insider information about how the highjackers assembled, organized themselves, rehearsed going through airport security checks, and carried out the actual teamwork activities on the morning of September 11th - details that were dished on deep background to the N Y Times, WaPO, CNN and Fox by impeccable high US government officials for publication so incredibly fast, literally while the rubble was still smoldering? That humint came from a cooperating foreign intelligence service with a snitch source or two on the inside - in all probability, the ISI.
Who do you think was doing the contemporaneous translating work on all the electronic chatter being intercepted for NSA and CIA? Probably translators provided by the ISI, and/or the Saudis or Israelis. Why, on the morning of 9/11/01 when the shit hit the fan, did Lawrence Eagleburger angrily dress down the head of the Pakistani ISI (who coincidentally was on an official visit to Washington DC to meet with George Tenet), demanding Pakistan decide whether they were "With us or against us" in the upcoming war on terror? Why was the head of the ISI then fired (sent into unexpected early retirement) within a week of his return to Pakistan? And what about that circulated news story (usually attributed to Indian intelligence) that an ISI bank account was fronting funds to Mohammed Atta?
Now of course everything sourced back to any nation's spook establishment has to be taken with a bushel of salt. Still, what if as a consequence of the internal destabilization of Pakistan which appears looming on the 2010 horizon, part of what came out into the light of day was background about the surveillance effort actually underway in the summer and fall of 2001 on the evil doers whose mug shots appeared (so suddenly) after 9/11, in all the most reliable of American newspapers and responsible US mainstream media?
I've pretty much given up believing Leon Panetta and Obama might declassify and reveal the intelligence information withheld from the 911 Commission by Bush. But who knows. If team Obama messes with the Pakistani ISI too much, perhaps the other end of that 2001 cooperative intelligence relationship may unexpectedly start to come unraveled.
Anyway, here's wishing you a happy new year.
Bill from Saginaw
Tom,
Your article is brilliantly done. Abundant facts, pertinent links, a human perspective, rational predictions. While you were quite thorough with your analysis of the measurable costs of these wars, I still feel that we are only looking at the tip of the iceberg. While no one can give us an accurate assessment of the value of love, neither can anybody give us the true costs of war. Martin Luther King said it well when he talked of our looming spiritual death. Many years have passed since his prophetic words. Sadly, I believe our country has fully embraced the militarism he warned about. We are morally bankrupt and spiritually impoverished. We have squandered our treasure, our blood, our hope. We, as a nation, are finished. These were not choices the people made. They were forced upon us by the money lenders and the cheerleaders for war. Those who profit from war, in whatever manner, must be expelled from our midst. Their bodies, beliefs, their war making ideas, must be violently vomited from our being. This would be justice, democracy in action.
I've heard the term "wake up, people" being used quite often as of late. This is the wrong analogy, I believe. Why? Because, what we are talking about now is the changing of fundamental ideas, a revolution in our economy, a long period of studious learning. We're not waking up after a good nights sleep and a few bad dreams. We would, under the most optimistic of circumstances, be waking up after a three decade coma. Our level of understanding, critical for today's dilemmas, is stuck back in the 1970's. Our maturity level, as individuals and as a nation, is still in adolescence. As a nation, we are as murderous as the worst prison inmate. As a people, we hardly see our criminal wars of aggression, the willful violations of domestic and international law, the brutal and unnecessary ill treatment, and murder of innocents. You do not just wake up and suddenly find fairness, compassion and love. The wake up analogy is totally wrong. We are multiple generations from even realizing we have a problem. Until then, the value of life means little. Those who profit from death will consolidate even more power, money, weapons of terror and politicians. Yes Tom, gloom and doom it is. Follow the money from these wars. Not all of it just disappears, you know. Root out the war profiteers who have destroyed this country and are dragging humanity into the depths of hell. Few people who have confronted these demons have lived very long on this earth.
How can you wake people up when they don't think they're sleeping?
"How can you wake people up when they don't think they're sleeping?"
Keep shining bright light in their eyes like your comment.
Great answer, Buck, and a great shining-bright-light of a comment, Wayout, that may be the way to open some eyes at least.
Personally, however, it seems to me that the fallout from all of the insanities of war and total fiscal irresponsibility are going to add to the pain that has already manifested here for so many people and their families. Having to get really creative to survive wakes one up and focuses the attention and the energy, and then one looks around and says, "How did this happen? What and who has caused this?
And then all hell may break loose and the purging and dissolution of old belief systems will demand that everything requires a fresh look and independence from those who have led us down the rubble trail.
As I see it, there is no way the citizens of the U.S. are going to get away with all the frivolous waste, the vapidness, apathy and irresponsibility that goes with "going along" and accepting without question what one is told, and buy something when one is feeling down. And that's been going on now for about 63 years. Howdy-Doody time is just about up.
Some people, of course, will pull the blankets over their respective heads, and say, "Wake me when it's over,... when I can get back to that great life I had filled with all those perks." They may have a very, very long sleep.
Human beings are marvelously resilient, resourceful and innovative when they have to be. And, I truly believe, that when it becomes that have-to-be time, then we'll graduate from junior high at last, whiz through high school and get into the university whose classical philosophies have to do with the questions and discoveries of the real meanings of life, which is not watching "Survivor" and "Lost" on television. Hello.
Anyway one can hope we make it that far and the rest of the world does too rather than Kaputnik for all.
Sounds gloomy, but the next years could turn out to be exactly what we needed to get to the next level, and then we might actually be able to understand or attempt to understand each other and identify with each other. Nothing like sharing all those we've-been-through-the-mill stories and we're still standing, and now we can make our own bread.
Interesting ride this.
/cm
But everybody knows "our" government wouldn't start a war based on false pretenses. Except for maybe the war of conquest against Mexico, the Spanish-American War, the war against Viet Nam, the war against Iraq in 1991.
Don't forget the Lusitania. Or the dicey stories about the questionable surprise of 12/7/41.
Try also to ignore the PNAC paper of 2000 which brought us the phrase "a new Pearl Harbor."
And, lastly, never look at the JCS proposal entitled Operation Northwoods.
Perhaps the only way that US militarism will ever slow or end is via bankruptcy. Of militaristic nations that stopped being militaristic, there are the examples of Germany, Japan, Soviet Union, UK and France. Germany and Japan were severely defeated and occupied. The Soviet Union went bankrupt. The UK and France never really stopped being militaristic. They just cut back their militarism to something more affordable. It is impossible than any nation or combination of nations could defeat or occupy the USA. We could go bankrupt the way the Soviet Union did, and there are many similarities now, for example, 1) a strong weapons production economy while our consumer economy withers, 2) our self-imposed iron-curtain blocking outside information from getting in, 3) our belief that our own propaganda is true, 4) massive corruption and theft of public money, 5) disregard of Constitutional government, 6) nepotism, 7) impoverishment of large portions of the population, 8) our vast internal incarceration system, 9) separatist movements in some regions like Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, Vermont, and 10) an invasion of Afghanistan in order to prop up a failing puppet government. The USA has the additional problems of 11) massive public debt, 12) our vociferous right-wing that never stops saying that the government is illegitimate, 13) an armed citizenry, 14) climate change destroying coastal cities, agricultural lands, and forests, and 15) our parasitic financial and medical sectors which suck the blood out of the nation without any sense of limit. Maybe the USA as a military super-power is doomed, and maybe that is not a bad thing.
So here we are, not quite to 2010 and in America we still have a choice--Either the red or the blue pill (if this doesn't make sense google either "The Matrix" or "The Meatrix" and it will be clearer.)
One pill offers a maze of endless illusion from which there is no escape or any desire to do so and the other shows us and our miserable and depressing state for what it (and we) truly are.
Which pill will you or I take this coming year--Tom is right "in nightmares too, begin responsibilities".
Poet
“The Game is Over In Afghanistan
America’s New War on the Americas hits the ground running in 2010 with Honduras and the new bases in Columbia. Already Pentagon press releases have set-up the Venezuelans as villains. Watch the NY Times the UK Guardian a slip story into their newspapers questioning the motive of Venezuela’s complains of US spy planes violating its sovereign air space.
With the US Secretary of State following the plans of her boss the Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the known confabulator from the Iran-Contra days, The United States of America has its Fourth Fleet threatening all the Americas, but especially Venezuela. Here, are the wars the Obama Administration can win and regain its stature with the American voter a la the Reagan Administration.
As Chile will once again be ruled with the firm hand of its oligarchy, the USAID’s plans push its goals for the same stability for Brazil and Argentina. Only the solidarity between the Mercosul or Mercosur can deter United States intervention, so a major crisis shall be implemented to break that union.
Many other interventions are right now in the works and in the planning for the decade ahead as the Peace movement is distracted entirely on the last war. As Mexico’s electrical workers are locked out, the public electrical grid privatized and the Mexican government privatizes its oil industry, the chaos in Mexico will be used to frighten the Americans in actions that are illegal as the US of A sends troops to restore order in a similar fashion to a century ago.
The difference in this coming decade is that the US Military is mostly a mercenary force and that force may be willing to mutiny in the Americas as the Pentagon runs out of money when resistance overwhelms the Americans plans.
It’s a sorry state of affairs these days as we can see the civilian control of the military is no longer possible. Robert Gates is the de facto military head of state. The War on the Americas has begun in earnest “ Matt Drayton
"It’s a sorry state of affairs these days as we can see the civilian control of the military is no longer possible."
this was the plan all along: let junior and his gang of (mostly)civilian misfits mis-manage the military and the public will cry out for the experienced career killers.
- the president's Global War on Terror -
I suggest again that we stop using the terminology created by the MIC.
There is only DAFT, the Defense against Future Terrorism.
I suggest again that to speak of separate wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is to misunderstand the situation, and to misunderstand it in a way that prevents any Progressive's progress.
There is only the war to prevent future terrorism. To get at al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, well, you've seen the news - thousands of more troops to get those pesky future terrorists.
To 'counter-terrorism' in Iraq the US forces will stay as long as someone finds a single 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' flag stuck in the ground.
Future terrorists were just found and attacked in Yemen. ("cruise missiles early Thursday against two suspected al-Qaeda sites").
It's all DAFT. Everyone can see that.
I suggest once again that Progress can be made. We must use a new strategy, though, and then we can break the curse that forces us to relive this madness over and over and over.
WAR= FUTURE TERRORISM
Bankrupt the military and all other enterprises that support the war and violence. Boycott, Sanction and Divest from the U.S. This is the only way to change the regime....Non-violent, non-co-operation! Gandhi knew the how to take down an empire!
Back to Machiavelli: The reason Americans continue to support the war effort is that it appears that Pax Americanna is "winning". US forces are gaining ground/territory from the axis of evil. The american public knows that Afghanistan will turn out like client-state Iraq and then Iran (already surrounded by American troops)destablilized by way of cyberspace/blockade will fall (didn't we just celebrate something similar in Berlin?) into the american sphere of influence in a timespan of 10 years. (In the above scenario the issue of terrorism and Iran's nuclear bombs is of course a red herring.)
So... should we whine about war (see article above) or hope that in a decade hence (as the above scenario plays out to Pax Americana's advantage) that maybe the world will come together to grapple with more important issues (eg. global warming, war, hunger, genetics etc)?
Sounds like "Lets shut up and hope for a good War".
Most Americans are there now, but I won't fall in line.
Your sarcastic cynicism aside, this is how lots of Germans felt in the summer of 1941. The Reich had subdued all of Western Europe, was at the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad with Rommel and the Afrika Corps racing for the Suez Canal. Once Suez was secured, Rommel would link up with forces heading south from Stalingrad and together they would secure all the oil the Reich war machine needed to conquer the remaining world.
Of course it didn't work out that way--what the winter of '41-'42 didn't kill off, the ferrocious resistance of Russians fighting for Mother Russia and not for Communnism proceded to smash to smitherines. A buffonish clown named Montgomery somehow managed to stop the Afrika Corps at El Alemein (and did not much of anything militarily to distinguish himself for the rest of the war), and then Patton and the Americans managed to smash what remained.
But what a lovely time it was from springtime to autumn to be in Berlin and throughout the Reich. It must have seemed like it could continue on forever--but by four years later Germany lay in ruin and they were occupied by four armies. Today in 2010 we are the Nazi's.
If there is something we want we don't ask, we take it because who's going to stop us anyway? Besides who better to organize the life of the planet than us, these inferior races don't know what's good for them but we do and we're going to bring it to them if we have to kill every last one of them to do so.
Our winter of '41-'42 is coming--I don't know where or when, but these kinds of things have been happening since the Egyptians, Greeks, Babyloninans, Romans, and so forth. We are not immune to the judgement of history, only from learning the lessons it has to teach us.
Poet
Tom's theme has the underlying thread of sacrifice, something we don't talk about very much. We are grasping to keep what's left of our 'normal' lives, hanging on with every toe and fingernail, but it's probably too late - we will have to sacrifice much more before we are bled dry so why not choose the manner and type of our sacrifice and work for peace and justice (as best we understan and remember the concepts)?
We may be powerless to avoid riding the Titanic that's America down into the cold deep, but we can speak and act every moment until the waters of cosmic justice close over our heads. If the evil-doers and greedy elite that run this country also drown, it's almost worth it.
dus7,
I appreciate your comment and agree with it in total. I am not necessarily "religous", but Father John Dear (a frequent contributor to Common Dreams) has been to our city a few times.
Each time, he says in some way: there is no doubt our American society and way of life will collapse under the weight of our military misadventures. It is our job as peace and justice workers to make sure the collapse happens as nonviolently as possible.
Lately, I have resigned myself that there is not much I can do to stop the direction the "leaders" of our country want to go. It doesn't mean I will stop trying!
However, I turn my attention more and more to community building to try and have a network in place to help one another when the sh#$ really hits the fan, because I believe we ain't seen nothing yet. It may be next year, or 5, or 10, but we cannot continue down this road without major repurcussions.
Thanks and best of luck to you as you continue to speak and act every moment!
Peace,
Rastaman
"...and a population whose character will be monstrous."
Indeed.
With Doctor Frankensteins working day and night.
Why so glum, all? Didn't you receive your personalized holiday video from OFA? Now I can return the favor and unsubscribe, withdrawing my support officially for the policies of the Obama Administration.
Tom Engelhardt writes: "Beyond the damage inflicted on 9/11, [bin Laden] already helped drain the United States of nearly a trillion dollars in war costs and counting."
Unfortunately, bin Laden only served as a handy excuse to transfer the trillion dollars from our public tax dollars (including future debt) to the hands of the people who need it the least, the corporate elite. Very little of that money went to actually restructure those countries, or to bring them 'liberty.'
For the corporate elite the war is a win-win situation. They get the free use of the general public's money to fund a war (hostile takeover); and then get the natural resources (oil in this case) that they get to keep and overcharge how much they want. They don't care about the human cost. The reason why they don't care is because they just don't care. If they cared, they wouldn't do it.
The least you can do is at least not vote for the elected officials who are handing the money over to the 'military' and defense contractors.
In fact, protecting 'national security' would require that we not support the industrial/military/congressional complex because supporting them amounts to treason. Treason is conducting activities that go against the interests of the USA. And our military is only protecting the interests of corporations, not liberty, nor the constitution, nor the interests of our country.
www.NotOneMore.US
$57,000 PER MINUTE is what it costs us in Afghanistan. ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER SOLDIER PER YEAR.
As USMC Major General Smedley Butler told us long ago, War is A Racket. And the corporate-militarists who pull the strings of their puppets in the White House & Congress and deceive and misinform and distract us via their media will continue to make trillion$ from their endless racket while the rest of us suffer and the nation goes bankrupt.
Our children and grandchildren will not forgive us for what we are doing to their futures. And they shouldn't.
"Excuse the gloom in the holiday season,"
the ho-ho-horror.
Knowledge requires Responsibility and Nightmares keep happening all day long in the so called 'holy' land-aided and abetted by USA blind allegiance to the Jewish State.
On Shabbat Hannukah, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a 23 day assault on Gaza.
The name of the campaign, Operation Cast Lead, is from a Hannukah poem and was based on the belief that military force will provide security for Israel.
During the 23 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called "self defense."
During the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, "Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault was decided upon in June 2008, the transfer of weapons was approved by Congress in September and delivered to Israel in November -prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation- for use in the raids on Gaza.
In November 2006, Father Manuel, the parish priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza warned the world:
"Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry...people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.
"Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles...Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate...Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.
"Gaza cannot sleep...the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love.
"These actions are War Crimes!"
Excerpted from The Twelve Days of Christmas and an Open Letter to The House
http://wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1523&Itemid=227”
Tom's piece very well sums up the miserable state we are in now, and all the lies and wrong turns, and our helplessness to change anything.
Still, it could be even worse. I agree with those who criticize Tom for apparently swallowing whole the official story of 9/11. i have not joined a truth group yet, but i insist that people at least admit there are too many big unanswered questions, and also stop acting like the "Osama did it from Afghanistan" story is revealed truth. It is this mindset that is enabling the military and their obomer to sell this insane terror attack.
No, Osama didn't do it from Afghanistan.
A cell of people did it from Frankfort and the USA itself. And it was such a simple plan, that funding requirements were very low and the money could be sent with little suspicion.
Jeevee
I learned, from harsh experience, that the human psyche contains both the WILL TO SUCCEED and the WILL TO FAIL. Which (or both) are we in now; what is a truly viable solution?
yes, the reason 9/11 is still critically important is that it is still being held up as the justification for everything that has followed...
if 9/11 is false, then so is the effluent in its wake...
From poet: Your sarcastic cynicism aside, this is how lots of Germans felt in the summer of 1941.
Personally I see no comparison. Is Russia going to knock down the gates of Baghdad? Then I guess Captain Canuck (a real comic book hero) is going to smash through the gates of the Peace Bridge and torch the States. (I did rather like the movie Canadian Bacon as well).
My point is that communist theory says that opportunities for revolutionary change might come once in every generation... and that you have to wait for the opportunity. This is not the time for revolutionary change. Perhaps with reference to poetry call this desideratta.
So in praxis... go in peace...then "give peace a chance".
Okay dude, here is the GW Bush dumbed-down version just for you:
1941 Nazi's thought they could do no wrong, that their cause was just, that using the military as an instrument of foreign policy was cool.
2010 American MIC (stands for military industrial complex)feels similarly about their mideast adventures. Just give us enough time, money, and bullets and we can do this thing.
1941 Nazi's couldn't have even conceived that British, American, or Russian troops could ever resist their superior weaponry or tactics--=but (as history turned out)they did just that.
2010 American MIC has similar hubris over their own power and tactics and whiz-bang new toys. How could a bunch or "rag-head" hajis defeat the drones of Creech and Balad Air Bases, or the two or three carrier task forces anchored in the Gulf or Mediterianian and poised to bring destruction from the skies?
In short the comparison was not between Russia and the US, it was between militarized Nazi Germany and Neocon militarized America. Hope this brings some clarity to your otherwise confused understanding of my original intent.
Poet
To Poet,
It is possible that the Americans lose the war in Afghanistan ("the fog of war"), nonetheless the US would continue to exist just as it did after Vietnam...unlike Nazi Germany.
Sorry, just having difficulty making the analogy between US and Nazi Germany in terms of power politics (or morality, for that matter).
then you definitely need a wake up call - or will you "just" hit the snooze button?
with respect.
Work on it: it's worth the effort.
Here's a beginning. Nazi Germany used power politics. The US uses power politics. Nazi Germany killed and tortured civilians. The US kills and tortures civilians. Nazi Germany arrested people in the middle of the night and held them without trial. The US arrests people in the middle of the night and holds them without trial. The Nazis killed many helpless prisoners. The US kills many helpless prisoners, though admittedly fewer than the all-time champs.
Or try this. Try to work out exactly what it might be about those precious scraps of democratic process that do exist in the United States makes bombing a Pakistani wedding a representative act done with the consent of the Pakistanis thus governed.
But perhaps I mistake you. Do you mean just that the US might continue to survive afterward?
But Germany has survived, hasn't it?
Nicely written piece, Tom.
However, I'd like to take your friend, Mr Ansary, to task for his claim that it was the USSR that bombed Afghanistan back into the Stone Age, etc etc..."
The USSR was actually responding to a call for help from its ally, the left-nationalist PDPA (Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan), which was trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern society, for example by building schools to teach girls to read, and hospitals to bring them modern health care, by restricting the rights of landlords to control water, and curbing the parasitic mullahs (In 1978, out of a population of some 17 million, only 35,000 worked in manufacturing while the bloated mullah caste numbered 250,000!).
The USSR eventually withdrew, leaving the Afghan people in the lurch, but the real destruction of infrastructure was carried out by the US' allies, the fundamentalist mujaheddin and the warlords of the northern alliance, many of whom now sit in the tame 'government' of Hamid Karzai.
And Mr Ansary, of course, is hardly a reliable source, since, according to your own statement, he had not lived in his homeland since 1966 (2001 - 35 years).
I'm sure most people who remember the '60s, either as direct participants or young children, remember Simon & Garfunkel's "Silent Night".
Imagine any radio station playing it today.
Even Oblahblah, my junior by a month, might have heard it once upon a time.
Silent Night - 7 o'clock news.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcGBcJKalrQ
"with respect."
I will watch the video. As for the US tearing itself up from the inside, I find this possible, but there are significant differences re:American participation in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The first might be the draft, second use of contractors, third Communism as a force in general, further consolidation of property, etc.
Anyways an interesting analogy to the Johnston era, but there remains significant differences between the two time periods.
Also, "with respect"...
Silent Night and the 7oclock news blew me away the first time I heard it as a teenager and still does every time I hear it. I wish S&G would produce an updated version. But you're right, no corporate owned radio station would play it today. This ain't the 60's or early 70's. This is Orwell's world.
I still listen to that song once in a while, and find it as mordantly poignant and powerful as it was the first time I listened to it as a callow teenager.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Let's not dismay, there's always Yemen.
HAVE AMERICANS TRADED FREEDOM FOR SAFETY?
by Paul Craig Roberts, December 26, 2009
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Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises — the closing of the Guantánamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.
In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantánamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of U.S. and international laws.
All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the U.S. government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantánamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.
Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of U.S. legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.
The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantánamo. Now the prisoners are up against two U.S. senators, a U.S. representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.
Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as "terrorists" in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantánamo detainees to be the "780 most dangerous people on earth."
The vast majority have been released after years of abuse. The 100 who are slated to be removed to Illinois have apparently been so badly abused that the U.S. government is afraid to release them because of the testimony the prisoners could give to human rights organizations and foreign media about their mistreatment.
Our British allies are showing more moral conscience than Americans are able to muster. Former PM Tony Blair, who provided cover for President Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, is being damned for his crimes by UK officialdom testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry.
The London Times on December 14 summed up the case against Blair in a headline: "Intoxicated by Power, Blair Tricked Us Into War." Two days later the British First Post declared: "War Crime Case Against Tony Blair Now Rock-solid." In an unguarded moment Blair let it slip that he favored a conspiracy for war regardless of the validity of the excuse [weapons of mass destruction] used to justify the invasion.
The movement to bring Blair to trial as a war criminal is gathering steam. Writing in the First Post Neil Clark reported: "There is widespread contempt for a man [Blair] who has made millions [his reward from the Bush regime] while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law." Clark notes that the West’s practice of shipping Serbian and African leaders off to the War Crimes Tribunal, while exempting itself, is wearing thin.
In the U.S., of course, there is no such attempt to hold to account Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the large number of war criminals that comprised the Bush Regime. Indeed, Obama, whom Republicans love to hate, has gone out of his way to protect the Bush cohort from being held accountable.
Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people. The consulting company, Accenture Plc, which based its marketing program on Tiger Woods, has removed Woods from its Web site. Gillette announced that the company is dropping Woods from its print and broadcast ads. AT&T says it is re-evaluating the company’s relationship with Woods.
Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people. Remember, the House impeached President Clinton not for his war crimes in Serbia, but for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Americans are more upset by Tiger Woods’ sexual affairs than they are by the Bush and Obama administrations’ destruction of U.S. civil liberty. Americans don’t seem to mind that "their" government for the last 8 years has resorted to the detention practices of 1,000 years ago — simply grab a person and throw him into a dungeon forever without bringing charges and obtaining a conviction.
According to polls, Americans support torture, a violation of both U.S. and international law, and Americans don’t mind that their government violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spies on them without obtaining warrants from a court. Apparently, the brave citizens of the "sole remaining superpower" are so afraid of terrorists that they are content to give up liberty for safety, an impossible feat.
With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed.
IN SHORT, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SUPPORT TYRANNY. AND THAT'S WHERE THEY'RE HEADED.
Read more by Paul Craig
=================
"....democracy eventually arrives at Tyranny....
and THE NATION THAT GIVES UP ESSENTIAL LIBERTIES FOR THE SAKE OF SAFETY, NO MATTER HOW TEMPORARY, DESERVES NEITHER SAFETY NOR LIBERTY"
........BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Americans have traded freedom (some), for profits (to a few), and less safety and less justice (for all).
But, as a group, they do not know this or do not know they have alternatives.
It ain't a bargain. It's a rip.