What drives oil prices? Everyone has a theory that suits their ideological niche—Democrats blame lack of regulation, Republicans blame too much regulation, and the rest of us wonder why prices aren’t higher than they are already. Earlier this month, Congress got an earful from a variety of oil experts on both sides of the ideological divide (and on a variety of paychecks), and the upshot is—it’s all of those things, and more.
Really, what can and should politicians do about high gas prices in the U.S.? We’ve had plenty of Congressional hearings, firmly establishing the facts that a) much, but not all of oil’s price can be ascribed to unregulated ‘speculation,’ and b) the larger point is that global demand is going to keep rising. The UN’s International Energy Agency estimated recently that China and India will account for up to 70 percent of new demand from now until 2030, when the IEA projects the need for Asia’s new power-players to import 20 million barrels’ worth of oil a day between the two.
Karl Rove was on Fox News the other day saying that he knew people in the oil industry and they had told him that only a small part of the price of oil’s increase was due to speculation, but really it was about supply and demand. Congressional hearings, on the other hand, say that the so-called “Enron loophole” which allows unregulated trading in energy markets contributes 25-50% of the current record price increases. But all the speculation in the world won’t change the basic fact that global demand keeps growing, which of course is why people are speculating in the first place. It used to be that gold was considered an inflation hedge—nowadays, it’s a better bet to put your money into oil instead. (By the way, small investors, the minimum amount of crude oil you can buy at a time is 1000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, so start saving those pennies.)
Merely saying “supply and demand” doesn’t cover the whole of it—American gas demand is actually down and supply is actually up, and prices continue to rise, past $4 a gallon at the pump. As we learned in the 1970′s, when our domestic production peaked, the United States no longer controls the price of oil. And because even the crude we pump out of American soil is priced according to the global market, it doesn’t matter if Americans curb their consumption, which is actually what we’ve been doing for the past year. This is a great deal for oil companies with vertical monopolies, because they just pass the high global cost of oil onto consumers without having to buy their own crude on the open market. That’s why, even though the cost of extracting oil is definitely going up, the speculative rise in price lead to record oil company profits.
Now that we created the globalized world, we have to live in it, and that means facing up to the reality that cheap oil is gone. As I wrote almost exactly three years ago, the point about ‘peak oil’ is not that oil will run out, but that it will become increasingly more expensive to extract in terms of both money and energy. And now that crude prices are never going below $100 a barrel, all sorts of ‘unconventional deposits’ are becoming economically (if not environmentally) feasible, such as all that shale oil extraction which is ruining everything it touches near Fort McMurray in Alberta.
Is there a responsible way to stave off $5 gas at the pump come September?
There is, sort of. If you look at the news coverage of crude oil increases, there are always two things cited as contributing factors: growing global demand and political instability threatening supply. It’s no coincidence that an energy-intensive lifestyle and war are two of our major exports. Let’s look at how demand is structured first.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the major factors in the increase of demand is the rapid industrialization of countries like China and India, whose depressed labor markets have become newly available (thanks to globalization) to make large amounts of stuff for export, which takes even more oil to get to the industrialized countries which used to make the same products. And as I’ve said before, the price of oil will continue to climb as long as Americans drive their SUVs to Wal-Mart.
Break down the chain of events implied by this example—driving an SUV or minivan necessitates a certain amount of refined gasoline, of course, and Wal-Marts tend to be located in suburban towns (made possible by the Federal Highways Act and oil company subsidies), or exurban, smaller communities which are rapidly losing their manufacturing base to factories in China and India. Wal-Mart itself is largely responsible for this phenomenon. A memorable scene from CNBC’s documentary about the world’s largest retailer, “The High Cost of a Low Price” shows the buyers explaining to an entrepreneurial couple who came down to Bentonville to hawk their latest tchatchkeh that there is simply no way they can sell their item at Wal-Mart stores if the insist on manufacturing it in the United States (there are price targets which must be met). Of course, most of the items sold in Wal-Mart are actually made from oil in whole or part, from all the plastic to various industrial solvents and chemical process components. Not to mention the raw oil has to be moved from refining stage to processing stage to factory to consumer, all of which involve the consumption of even more oil as fuel. Even the agricultural products you can buy at a Super Wal-Mart invovle petroleum-based fertilizers and diesel-powered machinery, thanks to the Green Revolution in the 1970′s, which saved the world’s food supply at the cost of installing agriculture’s dependence on plentiful oil (the Rockefeller Foundation, itself built on windfall oil profits, bankrolled that research). Transportation only accounts for two-thirds of our petroleum usage—and only 19.5 of 42 gallons in each barrel of crude end up as regular gasoline; 9.2 gallons become diesel.
China’s exports, for example, have increased tenfold from 1992-2005. There are no available figures (please let me know if you have any) for exactly how much oil is involved in America’s burgeoning trade deficits like the one we’ve been accruing with China, but I can say with certainty that they are a major factor in the rising global demand for oil. It’s no coincidence that the Clintons have a long history with Wal-Mart and that Hillary (a former Wal-Mart board member) became the health-care industry’s darling by stealing Mitt Romney’s corporate health care plan. Whether or not you think the Democrats who were pushing it were betraying their constituency at the time, the promises of globalization (or at least as it was sold to the working class Democratic base) have certainly been exposed as folly. Not only are jobs, but entire industries are leaving, and they aren’t being replaced. And underpinning all of this is a dependence on advances in transportation, which makes cheap labor affordable in the larger scheme of things by letting developing countries export back to developed countries. But some analysts are wondering whether fuel costs are challenging the structure of globalization, which, like everything else the United States has built, relies not only on petroleum, but cheap petroleum.
Globalization is designed to address those market inefficiencies which have made the middle class possible. Let’s start with labor costs: the wages and job security which made America the envy of the world in the post WWII boom years were unsustainable in a globalized world, in two important ways: a) taxes were much, much higher for rich people back then, and b) organized labor and the industrialization required by World War II enjoyed a brief and fruitful affair. Workers got higher wages, health coverage, pension plans, and the promise of a career. To be fair, I don’t think corporations should be handling any of these things, because look how they’ve screwed up wages (stagnant, while productivity has soared), health coverage, pension plans, and job security. The problem, of course, is that the so-called ‘golden straightjacket’ of globalization, the neo-liberal regime imposed on developing countries, is to have the government privatize these functions and leave everything to the market. “When America sneezes,” they used to say, “the rest of the world gets a cold.” Through the World Bank and the IMF, we’ve elevated our Reaganite ‘pro-market’ policies to (what used to be called) a social disease.
Post-war America (and correspondingly, the American-built global marketplace) was built on the assumption that we could rely on extracting cheap domestic oil indefinitely. European drivers pay twice what we pay for gas, so they have smaller cars and avail themselves of government-built public transportation. Which, as we all understand, is totally un-American. We need to have highways and suburbs and three-car families and two hour commutes and cheap plastic knick-knacks because these are God-given rights. That’s why we consume so much oil (and everything else) per capita—it’s not just because we can, it’s a matter of national pride. Recognizing the consequences and costs of our lifestyle, however, is probably more un-American than taking a national rail service to a soccer match. This is the land not only of Manifest Destiny, but of white flight. America doesn’t like to deal with problems directly; we’d rather just get in a fast car and keep moving until we lose them in the rear-view mirror. And for a long time, it worked for many people.
Conservatives seem to think that no matter how much demand grows, we should be able to keep extracting more and more oil from the earth in order to preserve our way of life. Unfortunately, even if we increased our domestic oil production, we’d still need to import large amounts of oil because our production peaked over thirty years ago. Take, for example the folly of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Any day now, Jon McCain will flip-flop and declare that he is for oil exploration in ANWR, the same way he just came out for off-shore drilling. In many ways the ANWR issue is a bellweather for your concept of America, because allowing companies to go in there today would mean Americans would see the oil start flowing in 2013 and hit a peak of just under 900,000 barrels per day (about 5% of our current daily consumption) somewhere around 2025. The question is, do you want to put America in the position of needing 900,000 more barrels of oil a day in 2025, no matter the cost to the environment?
Of course, the dynamics of demand are only half the story. Global demand has certainly risen greatly in the last ten years, but that isn’t what’s been fueling the sharpest upturns in the price of oil. Demand has been rising arithmetically worldwide, according to the IEA’s web site:
But prices rose exponentially:
This rise in demand is totally fueled by globalization; demand in developed countries is actually shrinking. Supply is up, too:
So if supply is increasing and our consumption is shrinking, why are Americans paying $4 and more at the pump? It’s simple: war is the answer. We export conflict; much as real and projected increases in global demand for oil drive speculation, real and projected disruptions in the flow of oil come to bear on prices as well. This phenomenon is concentrated in three countries: Iran, Iraq, and Nigeria. You’ll notice that the price of crude drops during the beginning of the Iraq war by about $7 during the month of March 2003, when it seemed as though Bush’s plan for $20 gasoline through sheer force of personality (and depleted uranium) might actually work. But soon after it became clear that “Mission Accomplished” was a bit premature, crude began its inexorable climb.
When it comes to Iran, which sits atop the world’s second-largest proven reserves, U.S. policy, though less violent, is just as much responsible for driving up the price of oil. But our embargoing and sabre-rattling are always directly quoted as causes for any jump in the price of oil, even when we do it by proxy. Consider this snippet from earlier this month, when the price of oil sustained its largest single-day increase in history:
“It’s Iran — all Iran,” said Bernard Picchi, a senior managing director at Wall Street Access. “Iran is the bête noire of the Bush administration, the last remaining member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ that has not been militarily or diplomatically neutralized,” Picchi said in emailed comments. Comments from Israel’s transport minister, reportedly a close adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that an attack on Iranian nuclear sites looked “unavoidable” has driven buying to a fever pitch, according to Michael Fitzpatrick, an analyst at MF Global. Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz* was quoted by Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper as saying that if Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, Israel will attack.
By the way, Shaul Mofaz is actually Persian himself, one of the few ‘Oriental’ Jews in Israel’s power elite.
And Nigeria? The oil companies have been engaged in a “low-intensity conflict” with Nigerians for many years; lately even these multinational corporations’ white-collar Nigerian workers are ready to strike, not to mention the rebels who want their Nigeria’s oil to actually, you know help Nigeria. Last year, Chevron (who, with Shell, represent the western oil interests in Nigeria) were dragged into U.S. court for some of their routine murders of Nigerians in the name of petroleum extraction:
United States (US) District Court Judge in San Francisco, Susan Illston, ruled that Chevron was directly involved in the alleged attacks by acting in consonance with Nigerian government security forces, paving the way for a trial which the company had made spirited attempts to avoid for eight years. The lawsuit was brought against Chevron eight years ago in San Francisco Federal Court by nine Nigerian plaintiffs for alleged deaths and other abuses in the two incidents in 1998 and 1999. The plaintiffs assert claims ranging from torture to wrongful death.
According to information made available to THISDAY, Judge Illston “found evidence that CNL [Chevron Nigeria Limited] personnel were directly involved in the attacks; CNL transported the GSF [Nigerian government security forces], CNL paid the GSF; and CNL knew that GSF were prone to use excessive force.”
Of course, there’s one more component to how our foreign policy has raised the price of oil—the massive debts and global ill-will incurred by Bush’s war-mongering have driven the dollar into a downward spiral. Now, it is entirely possible, that if we stop threatening Iranian democracy, withdraw troops from Iraq, make Chevron and Shell pay for their crimes in Nigeria, enact a real alternative transportation energy policy, start drilling in North Dakota, and rebuild our railway system, we could get through this oil crisis. Or, there may actually be an oil speculation bubble to burst (although I think it’s pretty unburstable, barring some major advance in alternative fuels). Let’s see what Obama actually does in office.
I missed the anti-war rally last weekend. I’d call it a peace rally, but nobody’s really for ‘peace’ anymore; the majority of the country still thinks the war in Afghanistan was justified, and they’re even receptive to bombing Iran. Even the majority of the country who is now against the Iraq war isn’t really against it for the right reasons (as I see them), but because the terrorists are on track to kill up to 4,000 American soldiers by years’ end.
I used to be a big believer in rallies. I remember marching against Newt Gingrich and the “Contract on America” when I was 14. But as I got older and continued my study of politics, I realized that mass protests weren’t as effective as people used to think they were. Sure, if we had a responsive democratic government, there might be an impact, but unfortunately, we Americans live in the worst democracy money can buy.
If you believe in the war, and are able-bodied, the only moral course is to volunteer. At the same time, the only moral course of action for any soldier asked to kill or help kill is desertion. I know these sound like opposing concepts, but see if you can keep them both in your head at the same time while I explain.
Who is responsible for war? Everybody has their favorite culprit—Mel Gibson and his family blames me and mine, conservatives blame foreigners, liberals blame conservatives, charismatic Christians blame the Devil, and so forth.
The War in Iraq, which happened while the whole world was watching, gets pinned on all kinds of people. It’s a terrible chicken-and-egg problem—it’s deceptively easy to blame George W. Bush, because he was nominally in charge of the war. But those who live to delve a bit deeper have unearthed a treasure trove of culprits, from Dick Cheney to Curveball to the Project for a New American Century to Hillary Clinton to Bill Clinton.
There are all kinds of interesting philosophical questions about where the buck stops, because in this case, it isn’t necessarily what you did that caused (or helped cause) the war, but who you were and when you did it. When Hilary and Edwards falsely tied Saddam to Al-Qaeda, it was forgivable in the eyes of the protestors, but when Bush and Cheney did it, it’s totally unforgivable. When Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, it was prudent; when Bush bombs Iraq, it’s genocide, never mind that roughly equal numbers of Iraqi civilians were killed under both presidents. Conversely, when Barack Obama says he was against the war from the beginning, it gets discounted because he wasn’t really in a position to do anything about it as a state senator. And no one will ever really be taken to task for continuing to fund the war even though defunding it is the only way to stop the war legally.
Usually, when it comes to morality, the distinctions are a bit clearer; if you commit act X, you are responsible for its consequences. So, in the end, who is ultimately responsible for war?
The truth is so simple, it hurts. War is the fault of the soldiers. Soldiers on both sides. I figured this out using the “but-for” test, which I learned in a class on the Philosophy of Law; if it hadn’t been for a certain action, the result would never have happened. In the causal chain of events, the but-for test helps you figure out the last moment something (usually an injury of some kind) could have been averted.
As I’ve said before, war is a game cowards play with other people’s lives. Today wars are giant abstract board games, from the view of the commanders. The modern military keeps abstracting commanders further and further from he troops they command, reducing them to marks on a chalkboard or dots on a computer screen; and the politicians who engineer war are even more insulated from the reality of war.
But at the most basic level, war is impossible without soldiers. If there were no combatants, politicians would be revealed for what they are—loudmouthed invalids who would rather see you die in uniform than live up to the ideal of the public trust. Without soldiers, Bush can say anything he wants and have no less capacity to kill people with a word than the next citizen. Without soldiers, elites on both sides are can scream at each other all they want without piling up corpses.
It’s true that war didn’t always work this way; back when organized violence was more of a cottage industry, leaders used to actually lead their troops into battle. I’m reminded of the Genesis song “One for the Vine” which starts:
Fifty thousand men were sent to do the will of one.
His claim was phrased quite simply, though he never voiced it loud,
I am he, the chosen one.
In his name they could slaughter, for his name they could die.
Though many there were believed in him, still more were sure he lied,
But they’ll fight the battle on.
Often people will accuse one another of situational ethics, which means that they view the morality of an act based on its context rather than on principle. War is the ultimate case of situational ethics;murder is wrong unless someone in a uniform tells you to do it. And because the state is telling you to kill, it won’t hold you responsible for that killing—they’ll probably give you a medal for killing enough people. On the other hand, if you get captured by another state, all bets are off and you may be held accountable for the deaths you caused in any number of ways, from being held as a POW to being summarily executed.
As a pacifist and a conscientious objector, I refuse to make a distinction between the battlefield and civilian life, for the simple reason that there is no place on earth exclusively reserved for war. Even if you’re in uniform, you’re still waking through someone else’s town or field or community.
The crux of war is the act of killing. Anyone who demands death but doesn’t do the killing themselves is at best a pansy and at worst a deserter. Call me an AWOL wallflower, but that is the uncompromised truth. This is why, for example, the machismo surrounding 9/11 drives me crazy. Susan Faludi, whose recent book examined the impact of 9/11 on gender in America, The Terror Dream, notes how a search for father-figures and manly men like firefighters and soliders created a new wave of misogynistic backlash against the recent cultural gains of feminism. It always mystified me how an ineffectual preppy like GW Bush was suddenly revered as a strong, manly leader—Laura Bush has literally killed more people than her husband if you look at the world in terms of proximal causes. If the President doesn’t lead the charge up San Juan Hill anymore, what’s the difference if they’re macho or not?
As I’ve mentioned before, putting a woman in charge doesn’t cause peace—just ask Maggie Thatcher or Golda Meir. And neither do apparently limp-wristed men; I have it on good authority that Vladimir Putin, who is killing people left and right, was beaten up and teased by the people he was assigned to intimidate as a KGB agent. Napoleon was short and had gynecomastia. Richard the Lion-Hearted was rumored to be homosexual.
I don’t bring up these examples or characterizations to be sexist or homophobic—on the contrary, I mention these things because this ridiculous fiction that projecting strength will bring about peace (or war) is killing people. Elites play at war because they can, no matter what they look like.
You can’t be a puppet-master without puppets. I can rail about how person X should be killed, but unless I have influence over someone with the means to do so, it doesn’t matter. In the perverse logic of war, killing someone in cold blood based on what they’re wearing isn’t just acceptable, it’s demanded.
I’ve mentioned before that my cause is averting civilian deaths; people with guns can shoot each other in the head for all I care. I know that sounds flip—and most of the people serving in the world’s armed and irregular forces are my generation, in some cases even my former schoolmates. And while that makes it hard to blame the soldiers, it doesn’t lessen their fault. It’s the simplest categorical imperative—if everyone refused to kill, there’d be no way to force them, and no war.
The complement to the willingness to kill for your country is the willingness to die for it (if all you want to do is kill, you’re just a garden—variety sociopath). And so, there will never be peace until the last person willing to die for their country is killed.
We’re constantly admonished to “support the troops,” who in turn are in uniform because they’re “protecting our freedom.” Neither statement makes sense. If you were really supporting the troops, you’d be one; if getting into uniform had anything to do with protecting freedom, you wouldn’t be compelled to kill. Killing Iraqis only makes us less safe, and machismo is hardly a requirement for war-mongering.
To blame the war on the gum-flappers, the elites for whom war is a game, dishonors both the soldier who does the actual dirty work and the conscientious objector for whom killing is abhorrent. At the moment of death, all that truly matters is whose finger was literally on the trigger.
Politicians don’t kill people, guns don’t kill people. Killers kill people. Let the buck stop there and the chips fall where they may.
Dear readers, you may be wondering what I’ve been up to, since lately dispatches are few and I never call anymore. Well, I’ve been working on a book. If you want a copy of the proposal, e-mail me and I’ll send it to you. For the purposes of this website, the proposal is to be distributed under the terms of the Godfather Intellectual Property License: If you want to take a look at the book proposal I’ve spent the last three years working on, you may do so free of charge as long as it never redistributed in an incomplete form (i.e., without my name on it). However, in return, know that someday—and that day may never come —I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.
If that’s too much for you, you may enjoy this little video clip I did for MediaChannel a few weeks ago (during this blog’s autumn vacation):
Did I mention I hate what the web does to video? No? Never mind. Let’s just say that as an editor, I deeply resent the reduced frame rate of web video, because all that time I spend making sure the cuts are exact within a thirtieth of a second is essentially wasted. Sigh.
Good For the Gander!
Remember how I used to complain about torture? Well, I have put those fears to rest. The President himself has assured me that the United States does not torture. We merely apply psychological or physical pressure, nothing that leaves marks (never mind that these exact techniques rendered Jose Padilla unfit to stand trial).
Donald Hebb—who worked my old alma mater—helped the CIA figure out that basically, you can drive anybody crazy with a bare minimum of equipment:
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars a year. Many have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research — the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr. Frank Olson, who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere. But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American form of torture: psychological torture. With funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done—drugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none of the above.
For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs.
Ironically, Hebb was the one pioneered research into the physical manifestations of thought patterns in the brain, but as Dana Perino said, “The bottom line is, we don’t torture.” Principally because torture, as we are now defining it, isn’t supposed to leave marks.
And whom do we torture er, ‘legally and successfully interrogate,’ again? Only the most important suspects are tortured in the name of national security, as the television keeps reminding us. We’re talking high value targets here, the Justice Department assures us. Which brings me to point here: if these techniques are truly legal and effective, the next Attorney General really needs to use them on Alberto Gonzalez.
You’re probably thinking, who’s Alberto Gonzalez, and what’s his connection to Bin Laden? Well, in keeping with the ‘eat your own dog food’ principle, it’s important for Gonzalez, if he truly steered the United States government away from committing war crimes (i.e., torture) on a systematic level as he claims, ought to be able to let those same safe, effective techniques help him jog his memory. You may recall the countless (OK, 64) times he said he didn’t recall things during Congressional testimony. What he needs is a little help from his friends, and afterwards, he can testify to Congress about those techniques as part of their ongoing torture investigation. I mean, don’t you think his testimony will be enhanced by a little real world experience?
They Love That Dirty Water
The comic book villain potential of Erik Prince is truly awesome, as noted by the Daily Show—a wealthy, secretive ex-Marine who runs a wildly corrupt mercenary outfit above the law. But while it’s easy to blame Blackwater for the awful things that they do (routinely), let’s look at why Bush needs Blackwater so much in the first place.
Private contractors are needed to protect high-value targets, like American State department employees or drive fuel trucks from Kuwait. Now, Iraqis, including lawmakers and police, get killed all the time. But private contractors—mercenaries— who occupy the kind of legal grey zone that lets you shoot first and ask questions later.
When you can’t distinguish between civilians and assailants, you have to get aggressive, otherwise, you’ll get hit. And we can’t afford that kind of PR. When a Congressional delegation visits Iraq, you need the kind of security detail that plays offense as defense, no matter how many civilians you kill. The Iraq body count website is full of civilians who got shot travelling too close to Americans on the highway.
Running an occupation requires a certain amount of brutality, because the citizens there are never going to view your troops as legitimate. In fact, the only time you get suicide bombers is when you have a foreign military presence. And the kind of targets Blackwater protects are huge gets for an insurgency, because it makes foreign higher-ups wary of visiting the troops.
If you want to wage war, you have to kill as many people as possible—that’s why soldiers make bad peacekeepers. An occupation like the one we’re running in Iraq requires war crimes. And that is just one more reason we need to leave.
Not So Noble
Videos like this one make me ashamed of our side of the global warming debate:
First of all, I appreciate using a chart and all, but this guy needs to stop talking to people who agree with him, because it’s affecting his ability to make an argument.
The biggest flaw in the argument is the assumption that whatever measures we take will work. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible for us to curb or almost stop global warming. After all, the Montreal Protocol was able to repair the damage to the ozone layer within a relatively short time. However, it is apparent that Al Gore is in fact a pollyanna who’s sugarcoating the situation.
I say this because Al Gore, Nobel and all, is not calling for a reduction in greenhouse gas production. He’s not even calling for a freeze in greenhouse gas production. He’s calling for a reduction in the amount of projected emissions growth. In other words, he believes that the planet can absorb much more carbon without catastrophic effect.
But the range of scientific projections for global climate change scenarios include all sorts of catastrophies, and we’re discovering new ways global warming is going to fuck us every day. I saw a documentary on volcanoes which posited that the 300% increase in volcanic eruptions in the Ring of Fire (home to the majority of the world’s volcanoes, actually) in the past few hundred years may be connected to sea level increases, which put greater pressure on the underground magma chambers causing more eruptions.
If it were truly a moral issue, as simple folk like the guy in this video want us to believe, the answer is simple: stop using gas. I don’t have a car myself for exactly this reason. However, all kind of things I purchase use gas, from transportation to plastic extrusion. The most obnoxious parts of An Inconvenient Truth by the way, re the ones with Gore looking pensive while being chauffeurred around in a stretch limousine.
The reason we don’t get off gas, as the president says, is because we’re addicted, and he should know. The Bush family oil company, Zapata, literally put the “Z” in “Pennzoil” when they merged with Penn Oil. We could raise the CAFE miles-per-gallon standards from the thirties to the thousands (effectively banning gasoline-powered cars)—I just saw a Chevy commercial for a fully electric vehicle, and BMW has ads for a hydrogen-powered car, too. We could even bring back American automobile jobs by following the German model, requiring in-country conversions for all gasoline-powered engines to renewable fuels within a certain time-frame. But then again, transportation only accounts for about 60% of petroleum consumption in developed countries and is actually the minority of petrol use in developing countries, according the Department of Energy’s “Outlook 2000” projections.
When Gore buys “carbon offsets” from a solar plant in India to ‘make up’ for his jet-fuel usage, he isn’t being as clever as he thinks. Then again, neither is his audience; scientists have basically been convinced already. Over the last 20 years, I’ve watched scientific opposition to the threat of global warming wane to the point that the few remaining holdouts have shifted so far from their original position on the issue you can tell they’re just being obstinate.
I’ve watched global warming skepticism (which is important to have, by the way) move from “there is no global warming” to “there may be global warming, but it isn’t human-caused” to “there may be human caused global warming, but it’s insignificant” to “there may be significant human-caused global warming, but let’s wait another generation before we act.” As more data is uncovered (starting with the ice-core samples from Antarctica) the connection between human activity and climate changes since the Industrial Revolution becomes less and less ambiguous.
If Gore is serious about maintaining greenhouse gas emission levels, which is what cap-and-trade is supposed to do, then he should really start talking more about adapting to a world scarred by global climate change instead of pretending we can stop it by flying around the world “raising awareness.”
And this brings me to my second point: let’s grant the other side the benefit of the doubt and pretend that taking action to solve global warming through government expenditure will be bad for the economy (which is patently ridiculous). If regulation is supposed to cause a massive worldwide depression, why is it assumed by the idiot in the above video that taking the same measures while actually saving the planet won’t lead to the same thing anyway? For free-market zealots, it doesn’t matter if government programs work, they’re illegitimate and should therefore be opposed prima facie. (Cf. Bush’s SCHIP veto.)
So you’re not going to peddle this outside of those who have already bought it beforehand, buddy.
Speaking of people who aren’t scientists but pretend they’re just as smart; I’d like to address those people who have glommed onto the fact that the sun has a sunspot cycle which has an effect on the global temperature. Please note—sunspots are not the same as human-caused global warming. They are a separate cofactor in a large and complex system. Climate scientists already know about sunspots. It’s not like there are IPCC researchers who caught the Fox News global-warming-is-a-hoax show and said, “Oh my god! We forgot about sunspots! Erase all the equations from the chalkboard—we have to start again from square one!”
“Forcings,” as scientists refer to them, mean that there are inputs which push a system toward a certain outcome. That’s why the worst of all possible worlds is one where the sunspot-fueled skeptics and the human climate change proponents are both right, and both factors contribute to our suffering. If humans force a natural process to go off the rails, it’s not necessarily a safe assumption to think that we can right the process by contributing as much repair as harm caused. The curve has been irreparably changed.
If you want to talk about the issue with global warming skeptics, you need to talk about the strategic value of renewable energy. I wonder sometimes if Germany is leading renewables research because they remember the Axis was finally brought down by a gasoline blockade. Fossil fuels are strategic resources. Renewables are even more strategic. Everyone has much easier access to them than to oil or natural gas, which, as I’ve pointed out here before, is a major cause behind wars. Even giving our enemies renewable energy helps us, as we are no longer an oil exporter.
Save Arts Education
Has it occurred to these people who are flogging all this increased math and science education spending that the real, enduring legacy of America is cultural—the domain of the liberal arts majors? Even when the DVDs are made in China, they’re still of Hollywood movies. Our culture is the ultimate export. Al-Qaeda sends its video dispatches using American-made software on former Defense Department networks. Can’t we just be satisfied with that and call it a day on all sides?
No, we need to ramp up our math and science programs because lead exposure and television are lowering the collective IQ of American youth.
Now, I didn’t go to college in the U.S., but Elephant is always telling me it’s America’s last real stronghold, our university system. It has become the model for the rest of the world (at least, in terms of secular education). We’ve kind of mortgaged everything else—we’re not the strongest, richest, smartest etc. anymore. Being on top is tough that way, because unipolarity in a system as large as the entire world is very difficult to maintain in the long term. Harvard University, on the other hand, was here before the United States and will probably be here after it, too.
Back to our moron brood—wouldn’t you rather live in a country with more defective three-chord country songs and angsty poems than defective bridges and automobiles? Think of the future, people. Think of the children, so they won’t have to.
R.I.P., Dean Johnson
Dean Johnson, lead singer of the New York band The Velvet Mafia died in Washington last week. It isn’t clear what the immediate cause of death was, but Dean was HIV positive; I don’t know whether his death was a direct consequence.
In high school, my friend was a trumpet player in the Velvet Mafia’s “Mormon horn section,” which was code for the fact that the horn players wee mostly straight, while rest of the band was gay. Dean himself was a giant drag queen who would come out onstage in six-inch heels and sing sort of retroish NEw Wave rock songs about David Geffen and picking up boys on the PATH train.
My friends and I would go see him at CBGB’s a lot. We’d be in the front row; I’d be yelling at Dean—”Dean, have my love child!” or “Freebird!” or something else in drunken teenager, and my other friend, who was literally joining the John Birch Society, would hoot and cheer along. We were the band’s most dedicated groupies—not that we were gay or really had much contact with Dean for that matter, but we were very supportive.
It’s so strange to think that CB’s went only a few months before its legendary owner, Hilly Kristal, and then a few weeks later Dean went, too. The New York of my youth is dying out. The Lower East Side where my new, out-of-towner friends drink is so different from the place where I hung out as a handily-mustachioed underage drinker, even though they share the same latitudes and longitudes. No more Second Avenue Deli, no more Rocky Horror at the Village Cinemas, no more squatters and most of all, no more cheap anything.
Dean is gone and we’ll never get him back. And so, in some ways, is New York City.
Welcome to another edition of actual casual asides, seasoned as usual with gotchas and I-told-you-sos.
Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls…
The United States and our allies have no rational interest in disclosing how many people we’ve killed in Iraq and Afghanistan if that number is inclusive of civilians. “We don’t do body counts,” said General Franks. We may publish figures of enemy killed and captured (we actually don’t take prisoners anymore for the most part), in order to show how effective and accurate our troops are in combat.
Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages at police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.
More than 1,000,000,000 bullets a year, to the point where it literally puts the squeeze on so-called “homeland security.”
How many people can you kill with a billion bullets a year? Let’s run some projections:
The Jack Bauer all-time low (2.57 shots per death): 389 million (more than the populations of the U.S. and Canada combined)
The Amadou Diallo standard (41 shots per death): 24.4 million (comparable to the whole Iraqi population)
The A-Team standard (infinite shots fired with no casualties): 0 deaths, billions of fools pitied.
The practical upshot of all this analysis is that B. A. Baracus may well have been the latest incarnation of the Buddha.
Who Would Jesus Go Down On?
The essential friction of theocracy is that nobody can live up to all that bullshit all the time. Theocracies are, in fact, the ultimate expression of religion’s desire to normalize its social conventions and taboos. We’d like tot hink that there are some concepts which are universal, but in reality, each religion and ideology merely has different standards for who is allowed to break that taboo and when.
Murder is taboo unless you’re killing an unbeliever or for revenge; homosexuality is inexcusable for laity but tolerated among priests; it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eyes of a needle than for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven, unless that man is a televangelist.
So another bunch of Christian Patriots are caught same-sex canoodling, which isn’t so shocking, but in these two cases, the public found out because Florida GOP congressman Bob Allen and Indiana Young Republican Glenn Murphy managed to involve the police in the debacle.
Bob Allen’s arrest for solicitation is one thing, because it allegedly involved what he thought were two consenting adults… and a $20 payment from Allen so that he might perform oral sex on an undercover cop. But Glenn Murphy allegedly raped a guy in his sleep after a YR party where the victim’s sister bade the Murphy to stay over after drinking too much.
The best part of these scandals is the inevitable excuse proffered by the newly fallen Republican angels:
Now Karl Rove resigns ‘to spend more time with his family.’ The whole country is wondering why he’s leaving now, and nobody can figure it out… or can we?
Proud of being gay? Am I supposed to have a Guys Under 5’8″ Pride Parade? How can one be proud of one’s genetics? We’re firmly assured that gay people are born that way – being proud of it is as silly as being proud of your hair color. So, what gives? What, exactly, are they being proud of? Their ability to engage in lewd behaviour without being arrested? Their ability to strong arm the political establishment into helping them seem mainstream? Pride goeth before the fall, good people – you might want to think on that a bit between now and the next pride parade – especially as things like this are going to turn more and more people hostile to public displays of homosexuality.
I submitted the following comment under the pseudonym “Martin Luther” which I was surprised to see approved by the blog’s moderator:
Exactly! It's like those damn Irish with their so-called St. Patrick's Day Parades. You didn't choose to be Irish, so stop blocking traffic! Who do they think they are? Honestly, the Irish weren't even considered 'white' until a few dozen years ago. These palefaced Papists' pathetic attempt to convince mainstream Protestant America that they're the same as everybody else is so transparent it makes me want to vomit green.
Have you seen these parades? I've seen them in New York and Boston. Talk about lewd displays of public indecency! Drunkenness, lasciviousness, brawling, and public urination! And the worst part is, since the Irish seem to have infiltrated the police and firehouses, they just stand idly by while Europe's red-headed step-children run amok!
US actress Mia Farrow has offered her freedom in exchange for that of a respected rebel figure in Sudan. Suleiman Jamous, a co-ordinator for Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), has been confined to a UN peacekeeping base near Darfur for more than 13 months.
Although he needs urgent surgery, the 62-year-old faces arrest if he leaves.
In a letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Ms Farrow has offered to take his place, saying his continued absence was an “impediment” to peace.
“Before his seizure, Mr Jamous played a crucial role in bringing the SLA to the negotiating table and in seeking reconciliation between its divided rival factions,” she said.
“I am therefore offering to take Mr Jamous’s place, to exchange my freedom for his in the knowledge of his importance to the civilians of Darfur and in the conviction that he will apply his energies toward creating the just and lasting peace.”
War is a game cowards play with other people’s lives. Making peace is truly courageous.
The foreign policy spat between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton couldn’t have been scripted better for the mainstream media. It’s also the reason why watching politics in America drives me crazy. The great triangulation has begun. Lyndon Johnson had the Texas two-step, and the Clintons have the Sister Souljah moment. It’s one of their ways of letting the Reagan Democrats know that even though they’re voting Democratic, it won’t be for a real progressive.
Some have speculated that the first female president or prime minister must be even more hawkish than her male predecessors; look at the examples of Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc, or Boudicca. And so Hillary continues in this tradition, eager to send other people’s sons and daughters to die, in part to show that they have equal mettle to the the monsters of the patriarchy. But let’s not pretend that the other front-runners, Obama and Edwards, are that much better.
Of course, if you actually have diplomatic experience, your viewpoint is automatically invalidated. Sorry, Bill Richardson, but as your YouTube video demonstrated, you are overqualified to lead America’s fantasy charge to regain unipolar geopolitical power. How dare you have a valid point about foreign policy? You think that just because you are the only candidate besides Biden with actual foreign policy experience that you can expect to be taken seriously?
According to the Hillary Clinton theory of electable foreign policy, people don’t want a diplomat who has actually had real and fruitful negotiations with dictators by practicing that long-forgotten tool—statecraft. People want idle threats, unilateralism not only in military strikes but in diplomacy. Recently Hillary ridiculed Obama for saying he would meet dictators without preconditions, which is accepted diplomatic practice, something Richardson knows and has always maintained.
The reason Hillary Clinton is so dangerous is that she doesn’t get why the rest of the world hates the US. It’s not because we torture people or don’t have a fair wage for workers. It’s because we push our weight around. From a New York Times Interview where she talked about Iraq:
[T]he choices that one would face are neither good nor unlimited. We’re in a very difficult situation that has been made worse by the failures of the administration. So what will be inherited is not completely clear, but likely to be: Continuing sectarian violence; no real resolution of the political disagreements on the ground among the Iraqis; an unsettled if not unstable region, trying to figure out what the roles they want to play in regard to Iraq might be; a beachhead of Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda operatives; the Turks being concerned about what is happening among the Kurds.
There’s a long litany of very difficult challenges. What I’m hoping is that with the slight change in policy that I am detecting in the Bush administration, that perhaps some progress could be made over the next nearly two years. Certainly, the willingness to engage Iran and Syria could possibly lead to some changes that would be beneficial to the overall structure of the situation we confront.
The surge, which is ongoing, and obviously if we’re going to do it we hope it is more successful than perhaps I think it could be.
I’m going to root for it if it has any chance of success, but I think it’s more likely that the anti-American violence and sectarian violence just moves from place to place to place like the old Whac a Mole. Clear some neighborhoods in Baghdad, then face Ramadi. Clear Ramadi, then maybe it’s back in Fallujah. It’s just difficult without a consensus on the part of the Iraqis, that they’re going to deal with it in some concerted effort, that we will have any long-lasting impact on the level of sectarian violence.
So come January of 2009, of course, a lot of it depends on what is actually happening on the ground.
At the same time she acknowledges these challenges, she is actively proposing two things as part of her Iraq plan: for there to be large-scale troop-withdrawal, and for the U.S. Army to continue fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) while training the Iraqi military. Sounds like the same mission with better photo ops, but less personnel to carry out the missions.
Either you believe in the mission or you don’t. Because if you make a half-hearted commitment to a strategic goal, you’re basically sacrificing the resources you’ve decided to donate to a lost cause. As the Democratic party’s second-staunchest Iraq hawk behind Lieberman, I think she never really lost the faith in some sense. She just thinks she can get away with conveniently crafted promises doomed to failure.
The problem with having it both ways is that you end up with the worst of both worlds—a commitment to force to project power, continuing a troop presence but reducing the force-protection for those troops. If we scale back U.S. troop presence, the remaining troops will have an even bigger target on their backs—the occupiers are almost gone, Iraqis will say, let us drive them out on helicopters like in Saigon Ho Chi Minh City. How many casualties will it take before ‘the generals’ Democrats boast about consulting request additional troops?
Only Biden has the guts to specify a number of troops he thinks should be left behind—20,000—but let’s use percentiles instead. If there are currently 162,000 troops in country, Biden’s plan allows 12% to remain there. But let’s look at it this way: even the most pacifist candidate would agree to leaving behind Marines to guard the diplomatic missions in Iraq. So we can establish a baseline: security personnel for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, to be the largest embassy in the world once construction is finished. A fully functional Death Star Embassy is said to employ 1,000 diplomatic staff.
If we use the combat to supply ratio for the surge analysis by GlobalSecurity.org, which is a ratio of 3:1 combat to supply personnel, we can start pricing our options.
A Marine bodyguard for each diplomatic mission member in the Baghdad embassy alone might mean 1,333 troops guarding a truck-bomb proof compound, or less than 1%. Season as necessary with increased civilian or military personnel to taste. But on the other hand, we have 14 ‘enduring’ bases in Iraq. Not permanent bases. No administration member has ever called them permanent. Our Base at Guantanamo bay isn’t permanent, either. None of our bases are, officially. If we maintain these bases only as diplomatic missions, let’s say, how many troops might that require?
The military doesn’t publish stats about this stuff, but from the closing of Camp Doha in Kuwait, we can estimate a camp large enough to inconvenience the local population is 3,000-5,000 soldiers’ worth. 14 camps means between 42,000 and 70,000 soldiers, an overall troop reduction of 74% to 57%.
Are hawks in the Democratic party calculating that reducing the number of troops by three-quarters is enough to placate the American public, which has only recently turned against the war en masse? My guess is yes, considering the rhetoric of the liberal interventionist hawks.
Her interview continues:
I think we have remaining vital national security interests in Iraq, and I’ve spoken about that on many different occasions. I think it really does matter whether you have a failed province or a region that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda. It is right in the heart of the oil region. It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.
So I think we have a remaining military as well as political mission, trying to contain the extremists.
Here’s the heart of the matter. Liberal interventionalism (which isn’t quite neo-conservativism, but not far either) holds that since democratic capitalism needs the lebensraum, liberal capitalist states reserve the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any non-liberal-democratic state as they see fit, militarily or otherwise.
If we want to look at benchmarks for hawkishness, why don’t we start with comparing Mrs. Clinton and the rest of the candidates to her husband’s regime?
As the election grows slightly nearer, people have begun to pick apart the candidates’ actual foreign policy proposals, and it turns out that as we had feared, most of them are not interested in leaving Iraq. It’s the classic problem of internal inconsistency for the purpose of pandering to idiots.
As I’ve written here before, it was only ten years ago that the Democrats had Republicans over the barrel when it came to terrorism. All this criticism about how Clinton managed the threat from al-Qaeda (at which he did a better job than the Presidents Bush, but not by much) seems to gloss over his actual successes in the War on Terror, namely the targeting and containment of right-wing militias after the Oklahoma City bombing.
How did the Clinton administration do it? To hear Hillary tell it, they should have sent in the Army to clear out nests of terrorists, bombing training camps and secluded compounds in Michigan’s breakaway Upper Peninsula.
So what changed? Mainly, the skin color of the perpetrators, which gave the issue to Republicans. Why? Because the Republican party is a well-known haven for (white) racists. Americans know that Republicans want to hurt brown people and they’re not going to let some namby-pamby notion of equality or multiculturalism get in the way of KILLING US SOME GODDAMN RAGHEADS! U!S!A! U!S!A!
Honestly, I wish these people would just return to fucking their siblings and/or pets and leave foreign policy to people who understand it. Because when the great wave of reactionary knee-jerk armchair murderers go to the polls, they’re shopping for vengeance, not viability.
At any rate, today we’re going to look at the recent pair of articles in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy: Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney!
Far from a bare-knuckles brawl, Romney’s multilateral vision sounds like the kind of speech Hillary might give if the country was still 50-50 on the war in Iraq. His policy suggestions actually sound better than Obama’s—and the reason for that is the Romney knows that we need to repair the damage the Iraq war has generated worldwide. He’s just not willing to abandon the mission in Iraq (or Guantanamo, most disturbingly).
When reading Obama’s piece, it strikes me that for all his rhetoric about being the 21st century incarnate, his actual foreign policy as detailed in the essay seems awfully 20th. when he talks about ‘renewing Americas leadership’, it seems like he’s just talking about a chrome job: “a new vision of leadership in the 21st century—a vision that draws from the past but is not bound by outdated thinking.”
Obama’s self-identified foreign-policy heroes are FDR, Truman and JFK. “Kennedy modernized our military doctrine,” he notes proudly. It makes you wonder—where will Obama’s Bay of Pigs be? Who gets to be interned this time around? And of course, who gets the bomb dropped on their cities this century?
Although it’s well-practiced and mostly rational, Obama’s argument is supported by some grade-A liberal interventionalist bullshit. The most egregious example is the following statement:
“[W]e must lead the world by deed and example.”
A fine sentiment, and one I stand behind entirely. It’s too bad Obama doesn’t. there’s an easy way to prove him wrong, and it’s called the substitution game.
Would America allow foreign military bases on its own soil? Shouldn’t China be able to set up a base on San Nicholas so they can maintain control of the vital shipping lanes into Los Angeles and to check potential American military aggression? Would he let Raul Castro bomb Miami if a Cuban exile paramilitary group was planning a coup in a Dade County training complex?
Last year, Obama, Clinton, Dodd and Biden all voted to unilaterally violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by giving ‘dual-use’ nuclear technology to India, a non-signatory who is known to have offensive nuclear weapons. You’ll notice that Obama is always careful in his rhetoric about the NPT, calling for it to be ‘updated.’ I sincerely hope he doesn’t mean that it should be retroactively changed to whitewash his actions.
If we’re going to lead by example, shouldn’t we welcome UN nuclear inspectors to our uranium-enrichment facilities and start dismantling our nuclear weapons program?
To be fair, Obama has said, and I think it is actually very brave and laudatory, that he would rule out the offensive use of nuclear weapons.
Americans know that we have one big bad-ass army and by dint of our superior military power, we have become the world’s cop. Both Romney and Obama pay lip service to multilateralism while reserving the right to act unilaterally.
Speaking of which, let’s look a little more closely at Obama’s Iraq plan:
The best chance to leave Iraq a better place is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political soution. And the only effective way to apply this pressure is to begin a phased withdrawal of U. S. forces, with the goal of removing all combat brigades by March 31, 2008—a date consistent with the goal set by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. This redeployment could be temporarily suspended is the Iraq government meets the security, political, and economic benchmarks to which it has committed. But we realize that, in the end, only Iraqi leaders can bring eace and stability to their country. At the same time, we must launch a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative to help broker an end to the civil war in Iraq, prevent its spread, and limit the suffering of the Iraqi people. To gain credibility in this effort, we must make clear that we seek no permanent bases in Iraq. We should leave behind only a minimal over-the-horizon military force in the region to protect American personnel and facilities, continue training Iraqi security forces, and root out al Qaeda.
The rhetoric apes the Bush Administration’s with a dove-friendly changes in phrasing, but the rhetoric is fine. The concrete proposals, however, stick out like a sore thumb. As I’ve pointed out before, the whole benchmark nonsense combines the worst of all possible incentives and outcomes. The only way to ‘broker peace’ and delegitimize al-Qaeda is to use our withdrawal as a bargaining chip. Unilateral withdrawal doesn’t help as much as you’d think in promoting political progress.
Of course, if you consider what we have done to Iraq in the past twenty-five years, you’d understand a) that Bush has already “made it clear” rhetoric-wise that we don’t seek permanent bases in Iraq, and b) we have no credibility either way. when you say you wan to leave troops behind to do the exact same thing they’re supposedly doing now but with less support, you’ve put yourself into the “Iraq was just mismanaged” camp, right along with Hillary Clinton.
Here’s an idea: you don’t need to be in Iraq to train the Iraqi military. Of course, because the ranks of the new armed forces and police are full of terrorist and Islamofascists, training them anywhere is somewhat risky, but why don’t we train them SOMEWHERE ELSE, like one of our dozens of military bases, and withdraw to the U.S. embassy?
Obama’s project goals for the new American century sound awfully familiar—he just apes Rumsfeld’s rhetoric abut updating the armed forces, and demands that we expand the military. Romney’s article says almost exactly the same thing; Obama, however, says ne need to recruit 92,000 more soldiers, and Romney says we need 100,000 more. Do 8,000 troops define the momentous differences between neoconservatism and neoliberalism?
As we all know, talk is cheap. But that’s all we have to go on at this point. Politicians don’t live up to their promises, but analyzing what they’re promising can a least tell us towards which group this particular round of pandering is directed.
Obama’s far from finished with the textbook foreign policy bullshit:
When we send our men and women into harm’s way, I will clearly define the mission, seek out the advice of our military commanders, objectively evaluate intelligence, and insure that our troops have the resources and support that they need.
Great. WHAT ABOUT AN EXIT STRATEGY? Every president has handed us the same lines preceding every military incursion.
At the heart of the battle over America’s foreign policy are a few really tough questions: Can America do anything it sets its mind and armed forces to? Is America allowed to break international law because might makes right, or should America be permanently excepted from the international legal obligations we expect of any other country? Is there any justifiable excuse for opposing America’s unilateralism—and what can other countries do about it?
There are some candidates for president who do want to join the world community as an equal. But because jingoism is more popular than religion or ideology in American politics, these people can make a case for a moral foreign policy all they like, but they’ll never be judged ‘electable’ by the media.
There are two excellent reasons Obama called Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy “Bush-Cheney lite.” First of all, it’s true—she and Biden are the ‘neoliberal’ hawks on the Democratic ballot, the ones who find themselves largely aligned with the principles of the Project for the New American Century. The second and more interesting reason is that Barack Obama is, in foreign policy terms, Bill Clinton-lite.
But that’s a hell of a lot better than what Clinton, Romney, or Bush would do.
Sometimes I wonder how many times I can restate essentially the same points about Iraq. I’ve been doing it for over four years now. I suppose I should derive some satisfaction from the fact that the majority of Americans are now against the war. Unfortunately, that’s like the majority of Americans being against the Big Bang—which they are. It’s way, way too late. All we can do now is try for a strategic withdrawal and hope the last helicopter out of Baghdad gets out safely.
Since I’ve started this Vietnam analogy, let’s keep going, shall we? And all the while, we must ask: does Bush really see the “War on Terror” as the new Cold War?
The Reverse Domino Effect
The second law of thermodynamics tell us that chaos spreads more easily than order. During the Cold War, we were afraid that relatively disordered states would reorganize under Communism because of influence by their neighbors, the so-called Domino theory.
We all know, however, that disorder and destabilization, or in other words, societal breakdowns, are easier to export than political reorganizations, or construction. Consider the problem of refugee camps—millions of people living in poverty, much of it somewhat abruptly imposed. Refugee camps are natural hotbeds of foment, be it criminal, political, or both.
Damascus now has an Iraqi quarter, and Iraqi refugees have also started taking up residence in the Palestinian refugee camps. Why is this important? Because in May, a harbinger event occurred in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. A new terrorist group calling itself Fatah-al-Islam (variously spelled ‘Fateh-el-Islam”) or “Army of Islam,” got into a major firefight with Lebanese military forces, after police tried to apprehend a gang of bank robbers who turned out to be ‘terrorists’ retreated to the Palestinian refugee camps, where Lebanese armed forces are prohibited from entering.
Now, what’s significant about Fatah-al-Islam isn’t that they’ve turned to bank robbing; terrorist groups have been financing their activities by robbing banks for a very long time. What’s significant is that Fatah-al-Islam is robbing Lebanese banks in 2007. I predict that this is the beginning of a bold new age of free-for-all terrorism reminiscent of the 1970s, when you had what Wallerstein would call “anti-systemic” gangs—Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The days when someone like Carlos the Jackal might have had contacts with Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna and the Front de Libération du Québec and the Irish Republican Army. Back when people thought terrorism was sexy. (By the way, is anyone else upset those Matt Damon adaptations of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series have nothing to do with Carlos or Vietnam?)
If you haven’t seen the amazing documentary The Weather Underground, you never got to hear actual former members explain why white middle-class kids turned to terrorism in the 1960s (the same way middle-class Arabs turned to terrorism in the last few years). Brian Flanagan, former Weatherman, said something like (I’m quoting from memory) “The only way I can explain it is that the Vietnam war made us crazy… When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things.”
What Bush II has done, as I have been warning since the invasion of Afghanistan, is to reboot the cycle of displacement, violence and frustration which transformed the Mekhtab-e-Khidamat (a support organization for mujahideen from around the world who wanted to fight in Afghanistan) into Al-Qaeda.
I’ve written before about the tragic stupidity of the ‘flypaper’ theory, where war-mongers informed us that the war in Iraq was actually making America safer by drawing the world’s jihadists to Iraq instead of the United States. I countered that we were running the world’s largest, most advanced terrorist training camp, the way the Soviets had ‘trained’ the ‘Afghan Arabs’ like Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri who would eventually become the first generation of global jihadists.
Al-Qaeda started with the private contributions of middle- and upper-class Muslims, buttressed by what was essentially protection money from the Saudi royal family. But as all terrorist groups did, they migrated to more conventional crime (drug smuggling, kidnapping, and financial fraud).
But bank robbery just isn’t Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi; outright armed theft is a bit harder to reconcile with sharia than declaring it OK to sell intoxicants (like heroin) exclusively to infidels, which is how they managed the opium problem in Afghanistan. Bin Laden may be a lot of things, but he used to carry himself a bit differently.
The ranks of terrorist organizations are more likely full of ordinary street criminals than ideologues. At this point, though, there’s a more serious problem: Gangs of criminals are being given ideological ‘cover’ by the rising sentiment of ‘al-Qaedaism,’ or at least that incredible decrease in America’s standing across the globe.
And how lucky for these glorified thugs that the Bush administration is now tarring all opposition to our armed forces as ‘al-Qaeda,’ because now a whole new class of criminals have been given a political agenda, at least in public. Now there is a whole new generation of ‘Afghan Arabs,’ young men who feel like now is the time to take up arms in defense of Islam and/or to do some killing, looting, raping, what-have-you.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how the U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan are ‘force multipliers’ for terrorists in a literal, rather than figurative sense. The flypaper theory turned out to have caught more flies with vinegar than with honey—and they’re breeding.
So, who is behind this new wave of terrorism? Let’s look at the history of Fatah al-Islam. From a profile in a Turkish paper:
Fatah al-Islam announced its creation last November after breaking away from Fatah Al-Intifada, a splinter group of the mainstream Fatah movement. In its foundation statement, it introduced itself as an Islamic group seeking to liberate Palestine and restore Muslim sanctities captured by Israel. …Experts believe the group is ideologically but not operationally linked to Al-Qaeda and is played by Lebanese and Arab parties to achieve political gains.
Its leader Shaker Abssi, a Palestinian born in Areha in 1955, is a former colonel pilot.
Syrian authorities arrested Abssi in 2000 and sentenced him to three years in prison on charges of smuggling weapons, ammunition to Jordan and vice versa. No sooner had he been released than he went to Iraq following the US-led invasion. In Iraq, Abssi fought along with groups loyal to Al-Qaeda and made friends with a number of Al-Qaeda leaders there.
…Abssi went to Lebanon in 2005 with a group of youths he met in Iraq and stayed there around a year before getting into trouble with the Lebanese army in May 2006.
There is speculation that various governments (Lebanon, syria, Iran, Israel, the United States) are supporting or otherwise manipulating Fatah al-Islam because it represents a counter-balance to the now more mainstream groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. (Hamas itself was started with support from Golda Meir’s Israeli government who thought that its radical Islamism would be a good counterbalance to the secular PLO.)
Hamastan and Fatahstan
Divide and conquer—it’s the foundation of many a colonial empire. It isn’t even 20th-century thinking, it’s more like 19th-century thinking. The British were masters of this craft; consider Iraq, which is a fairly good (if late) example. By using the minority Sunnis the brokers between the two larger ethnic groups (Kurdish and Shiite) and forcing Iraq to accept the Hashemite (a Sunni) as its new King, they were able to ‘balance out’ factional movements.
I’ve been writing here that Americans really need to wise up about he fact that we’ve been trying to provoke a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait, and that we really have to stop acting so surprised that it finally happened.
Well, not only have we achieved our goal, but our cup runneth over; the huge Iraqi refugee population and our strengthening of Iran have paid off in spades, recently in a set of violent incidents around the Middle East.
Now we have Hamastan and Fatahstan, Hamas taking over the Gaza strip and the successor to the PLO, Fatah, taking the West Bank. The civil wars we have been trying to provoke for decades are just getting started. Sunni vs. Shia, Religious vs. Secular, Old Guard vs. Young Turks.
Now, even for those who are s cynical as to belive that the inevitable deaths of civilians in the crossfire is a good thing, why don’t we rework the equation in our favor by depriving these groups of a common enemy to unite against? when Israel bombed Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, they got even the Sunni and Christian Arabs, their traditional enemies, to start chanting ‘we are all Hezbollah” in the streets all over the world.
Again, what America needs is strategic withdrawal. we are way , way overcommitted here, and our obnoxious presence is just about the only bargaining chip we have left. (Elephant once said we’re just going to end up trading Israel for Taiwan as part of a global retreat over the next century.)
The Dark Side of the Net
I was looking through my stats today, and I noticed that someone had come here from the United Kingdom looking for the phrase “fuck the soldiers.” Now, I knew I’d never written those words in that sequence, so I was curious enough to do the same search myself. It turned out I had written “fuck with the soldiers” at some point, which got me in the top ten results.
The other results had to do mostly with the petition by MySpace users to have the group “Fuck the soldiers” removed from the social networking site.
JUNE 2, 2004 – Specialist Carlos Arellano was on patrol in Baghdad’s Green Zone on April 23 when he discovered a pot plant growing innocently on the street. He asked one of his fellow soldiers to snap a photo of him kneeling next to the plant. The photo was forwarded to High Times’ Grow America by a friend of Arellano’s via email. … Bloom quickly learned that Arellano was not only a soldier, but he was also a rapper named “Singe,” who’s first CD, The Epidemic, was released on StashBox Records several months before Arellano, in the Army Reserves, was called up to active duty and sent to Iraq. “Coded in the photo was a message that we couldn’t ignore,” Bloom says. “While Carlos is a hero defending his country in Iraq, when he comes home and smokes a joint, he’ll be a criminal.”
Whenever I see a story about a soldier that’s more than a month old, I immediately check to see if that soldier had been killed in action.
Robert Arellano said Wednesday his brother Carlos may have known he wouldn’t return home from Iraq. Carlos Arellano, a Marine corporal, had survived two previous tours of duty in Iraq, although he was wounded on the second. But Carlos seemed different before he left his family’s Rosemead home for his third tour, his brother said. “I think Carlos knew he was going to die this time,” said Robert Arellano, 27, a Marine of nine years.
Cpl. Carlos Arellano died Friday when a suicide bomber in a car set off a blast in Haqlaniyah, Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Also killed in the blast was Lance Cpl. Brandon Dewey, 20, of San Joaquin.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the people dying on both sides are my generation, and that people in the military aren’t politically or ideologically or culturally homogeneous. If you get a chance to see Soundtrack To War, the 2005 documentary about the music soldiers listen to in Iraq, you should. they run it on VH1 every once in a while.
Anyway, while I was searching for Carlos Arellano, I found his MySpace page. Someday, it will be in a museum, and I don’t mean that facetiously at all. It’s a perfectly preserved artifact, a life frozen in time.
Guards staged one of the largest bank robberies in Iraqi history, making off with a stunning $282 million dollars in cash from a private bank in central Baghdad, Aswat al-Iraq reports in Arabic. Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Interior Ministry source told Aswat al-Iraq that, “Three guards working for the Dar al-Salam Bank located on Sa’adoun Street in central Baghdad were able to attack the bank . . . stealing a sum of up to $282 million dollars, and fled in an unknown direction after implementing the operation.”
…The New York Times confirms that the stolen money was denomiated in US dollars, not Iraqi dinars.
…and speculated that the perpetrators of the robbery may have been linked to militias, citing the ease of the getaway in a city thick with checkpoints.
While the sum of $282 million is massive, especially by Iraqi standards, it would fund less than one day of US expenses for operations in Iraq.
And it looks like the fighting between the Lebanese military and Fatah al-Islam has just started up again:
Four Lebanese soldiers have been killed after the army resumed heavy shelling of a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli where fighters from the Fatah al-Islam group have been holed up for weeks. The bombardment on Thursday came a day after more than 150 people left the Nahr al-Bared camp amid fears that the army was preparing an assault.
“Today’s bombardment is a first step in the final battle against the terrorist group whose fighters have refused to surrender to the army,” an army officer told the AFP news agency.
But a military statement denied that the bombardment was part of a final assault on the camp.
The thrashing of Iraq continues. Today is Memorial Day, when America traditionally celebrates the deaths of its military men and women by going to the beach and wearing funereal shades of white and so forth.
Speaking of symbolic dates, I propose a new slogan for the anti-war marchers for the summer season: “Out By September 12th!” A meme I’ve been hearing lately is the plaintive cry, “when will it finally be September 12th already?” Elephant says he despises this idea and that it plays into the White Houses’ propaganda.
I disagree. I think our conception that “9/11 changed everything” lead us to change the wrong things. Or maybe it was our refusal to see that things had already changed before 9/11 in way we hadn’t considered before. At any rate, as I’ve argued here before, we went about applying plenty of 20th century thinking (state-to-state war) to the problems of the 21st (transnational terrorist movements) with little success.
At any rate, September 12th this year happens to fall on the night before Ramadan, which is the holiest month in the Muslim calendar and traditionally a month of heightened insurgent attacks. why don’t we start September 12th 2007 as though we’ve learned something from the last six years?
Missing The Point, Searching Off-Target
The efforts of the Army to locate the three missing soldiers is a perfect example of why the American war effort is doomed.
The U.S. says the search continues for Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, who were taken after the May 12 raid on an outpost in the Mahmoudiya area of Iraq. The attack killed four U.S. soldiers and one Iraqi soldier; the third missing soldier was found dead in the Euphrates River on Wednesday. The Defense Department says hundreds troops in Iraq have been searching non-stop 24-hours a day to find the missing men. The hunt is going on three weeks now, and has resulted in the detention of hundreds of Iraqis. According to reports, about 100 are still in custody.
Would that our soldiers showed the same concern about the people they are supposedly there to protect, the Iraqi people. We’ve already spent millions upon millions of dollars looking for these soldiers. One soldier searching for his lost comrades told Fox News “It’s not about us, it’s about the families.” He vowed to bring the bodies of his colleagues back to the U.S. “alive or dead.”
That’s actually what’s entailed in the Rule of Law; we’re not willing to call in the infantry to search for the killers of a family’s sole breadwinner or a war orphan, but when three of our boys in uniform go missing, every member of the force takes it upon themselves to provide some kind of justice, or at least vengeance.
If we went through the same thing for every missing Iraqi, we’d have something—a police force. But we’re not going to do that, and neither should we have to. As I’ve pointed out before, only a government which is sustained by its own troops and police can be legitimate, and therefore effective.
We’ve ‘wrongfooted‘ the right people, and it’s causing that ‘creative violence’ to be directed against those ‘right’ people who want what we want—democracy and stability. Our CPA and its cronies swindled literally billions of dollars from the Iraqi people. The current government is currently unable to pass an oil law which would make money available to starving hopeless people nationwide, but did make sure that the law includes a Big Oil monopoly on extracting the world’s second-largest reservoir of the best crude on earth. So at least we know their hearts are in the right place.
The insurgents, on the other hand, know that no one is coming to look for them when they die, so they can focus their money and energy into low-cost, high-impact munitions like IEDs.
The only people who would launch a search effort for a missing Iraqi civilian of any kind would the Iraqi police. Our presence makes it impossible to build a real police force, because currently the meagre recruits are being bolstered mostly by insurgent infiltrators. Being an agent of a puppet regime makes you a collaborator, in the eyes of many Iraqis. There’s no way the Iraqi army can actually “stand up” while we make joining in the government an issue of popular loyalty. If the majority of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave, and the can’t get that no matter whom they vote for in the elections, then the government is, in a certain sense, an enemy of the people.
I was talking to a friend today about Iraq and he mentioned that those who were calling for a quick withdrawal were acquiescing to the genocide that will happen once we leave.
“That’s not necessarily genocide,” I said. “Genocide is 1.5 million Iraqis who died during the sanctions.” As for the number of Iraqis civilian casualties because of this war, the Lancet study estimated a range of 400,000 to 900,000. I accept that range as being 95% probable, which is what the authors were saying.
Let’s pretend that the army only spent $10 million dollars on three weeks of round-the-clock search patrols on account of these missing soldiers, just to make the math easier. There’s no reason any government should spend $40-90 billion on police investigations on the nation’s equivalent of an FBI murder division in a country with 26 million people. That’s the equivalent of one policemen making the country’s national median income for every six Iraqis.
In the meantime, shortages of capacity within the training regime have actually led to a temporary freeze on police recruiting throughout Iraq, Weighill said, though he characterized the hold as a positive sign. “There’s no shortage of volunteers,” he said. “In fact, we’ve had to… place a three-month moratorium on recruiting simply because we don’t have the capacity and the training establishments at the moment to deal with the numbers that are volunteering to join the police.”
The thing the Defense Department doesn’t like to mention is that Iraqi police stations and training facilities keep getting blown up by insurgent infiltrators, which is another reason for the shortage of available facilities. That and the superior, early ‘Police Academy’ movies have yet to dubbed into Arabic.
Most states are founded by some kind of ‘creative violence.’ Theirs is going to come after we leave no matter when we do, and because we’re crippling their institutions, the longer we stay and destabilize the country, the longer the ensuing period of creative violence will be later on.
Liberalism, at least in the international relations sense of the word, is founded on a sort of paradox; nations supposedly founded on the equality of humankind may then claim just cause to pursue wars in other countries they feel are not their equals. But each government ought belong to the people, no matter whom the people choose, unfortunately. And I say this not just out of principle, but practicality. The people will always ultimately get their way. The people of Iraq and the people of the United States both oppose the American troops’ presence in increasingly equal proportions.
The military is not engineered for this assignment. I’ve been thinking about “force multipliers,” the technological superiority which enables our soldiers to maintain a force presence as though there were 3 or 4 times as many soldiers on the ground. Our modern military is built around these things, like more maneuverable tanks, farther-reaching night vision, deadlier and more accurate weapons and so forth. But what we don’t have are force multipliers that enable our troops to speak Arabic fluently, or enable our troops to instantly distinguish between insurgent and civilian, which are the skills they actually need right now.
Even when he says something halfway decent, I can’t help but take issue with the San Diego Congressman. I’m talking about the following statement he made at the Reagan Library debates:
MR. VANDEHEI: Congressman Hunter, Kenyu Thomas (sp) from Honolulu, Hawaii, wants to know if you watched Al Gore’s environmental documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” (Laughter.) REP. HUNTER: No, I didn’t watch it. But, you know, I think that global warming and the need to be energy independent gives us a great opportunity. I think we should bring together all of our colleges, our universities, the private sector, government laboratories and undertake what for this next generation will be a great opportunity and a great challenge to remove energy dependence on the Middle East and at the same time help the climate. I think we can do that.
We need to take taxes down to zero for the alternative energy sources.
We need to make sure that all the licensing from our laboratories goes to the private sector, goes to the American manufacturing sector for these energy systems. I think we can do it.
Duncan, I was with you until the last paragraph. This is the kind of speech a Democrat might have given, and I think it’s really great to hear this becoming a bipartisan issue, because moving renewable energy to the middle- (and fore-) ground makes it possible for something to be done about it.
Hunter is right to separate the issue of global warming and building a renewable domestic energy supply, because the latter issue has broader implications even if you don’t believe in global warming.
But the Democrats and Hunter, because they are American politicians running for public office in America, have in their proposals one fatal flaw: keeping the patents in the United States.
It’s actually more important for China to switch to renewable energy than it is for Americans. That’s only partly because China has 1.3 billion people. It’s also vital because China is undergoing its own Industrial Revolution—the same kind that set us off in this carbon-spewing, gas-guzzling direction in the first place. China is building a huge amount of coal-powered electric plants and buying cars for families that never had anything worse than a bicycle. China, and the rest of the world, need to build their infrastructure right from the ground up, because it’ll be prohibitively expensive to fix later, if these things are even fixable. Every dollar invested in fossil fuels pushes us backwards and slows down renewable energy’s progress.
That’s the technological aspect, but the meat of this issue are the geopolitical implications of fossil fuels. You may not believe that Iraq was invaded because it sits atop the world’s second-richest oil field, but consider, for a moment, Darfur. 70% of Sudan’s oil exports go to China, who actually trade weapons for oil, thus arming the Janjaweed militias who have been carrying out a genocide against the Darfuris. China’s oil needs are gigantic, and burgeoning. But what if they didn’t need Sudan’s oil?
Notice how politicians who talk about this always have to make it an issue of “dependence on foreign oil” (I would have just said ‘oil’, but I can understand why they need to tar foreigners with our excesses). The United States gets most of its oil from North America anyway; according to a PBS website:
Where does America get all the oil it needs? The U.S. imports roughly half the total — over ten million barrels of crude oil a day. Canada is the top source, at nearly 1.8 million barrels. Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela are numbers two through five, each exporting more than one million barrels a day. Angola, Iraq, Colombia, Kuwait and Algeria round out the top ten; each exports between 273,000 to 641,000 barrels a day.
Oil prices and supply are global phenomena that affect the U.S. (see: price of gas, unrest over). Just reducing our oil dependence is a fine idea, especially considering we consume more than three times as much oil per year and 12 times as much per person as China does, but keeping those innovations to ourselves doesn’t help us as much as we seem to think.
Paradoxically, higher oil prices mean that more countries (although this mostly applies to Canada) can now consider producing dirtier oil that wasn’t economically feasible to extract before, like tar sands. At any rate, demand will outpace local production and countries will have to look elsewhere to import oil.
Renewable energy, on the other hand, has the potential to give every country its own energy security. I’m not going to pretend it will bring about world peace, but it will eliminate one of the major contributing factors in wars all over the world. Oil wars are a global problem and they have a global solution. (And once each country is energy independent, we can move on to potable water filtration.)
Competing for limited resources rather than sharing the intellectual property to make the world self-sufficient is a surefire way to incite more oil wars. Remember, World War II was won when the Allies cut off Germany’s gasoline supply; the strategic value of self-sufficiency cannot be overstated. So let’s release those renewable energy patents to the whole world! It can only help us; being selfish in this case is a fine way to ensure self-destruction.
As I mentioned earlier, the Democrats don’t have enough backbone to do.. well, nothing, and let the Iraq war end in 180 days. So, they’re going to continue to fund the war in some fashion, likely by insisting on “benchmarks,” which is now the catchphrase du jour
. As with everything else about the American occupation of Iraq, this latest approach to the war, even though it seems to have good intentions and supposedly will help end it, is fatally flawed. As with the rest of our war planning, it has a certain crucial false premise—that the United States has the right to be in Iraq in the first place.
A small aside—I am so sick of politicians talking about Iraqis as though they owe us something. If they owed us anything, we have long ago exacted our price in Iraqi blood.
You might just think that’s the anti-war pinko in me speaking, but this actually has nothing to do with my political beliefs and everything to do with my political education. It’s basic political science which, if you have not yet studied, I will try to distill for you now:
There is one crucial requirement for something to be considered a government, and that’s a monopoly over the use of violence within a given territory. As a corollary to that principle, whoever controls the troops on the ground controls the ground in question. There’s one other basic requirement for a government to function properly—legitimacy in the eyes of the people, also known as consent of the governed.
The relevance here is that the Iraqi government is sustained not by the Iraqi army, but by the U.S. army. As long as that remains the case, it will always be an illegitimate regime. As I’ve often said, I feel the same about American troops on Iraqi soil as I do about British troops on American soil.
Those of you who are stuck in the 20th century (a time of state-to-state conflicts, realpolitik, and a smattering of genocides), consider the example of Vichy France. As usual, I will lazily rely on Wikipedia to give a short summary:
On June 10, 1940, the National Assembly, faced with imminent military defeat by Germany, gave full power to Marshal Philippe Pétain. In 1940, Pétain was known mainly as a World War I hero, the winner of Verdun. As last President of the Council of the Third Republic, Pétain suppressed the parliament and immediately turned the regime into a non-democratic government collaborating with Germany. Vichy France was established after France surrendered to Germany on June 22, 1940, and took its name from the government’s administrative centre in Vichy, southeast of Paris. Paris remained the official capital, to which Pétain always intended to return the government when this became possible. While officially neutral in the war, Vichy actively collaborated with the Nazis, including, to some degree, with their racial policies.
What I’m trying to say here is that our presence in Iraq doesn’t just destabilize the country, as many have long noted, but it delegitimizes the government. And it is in that context that we need to talk about the fallacy of benchmarks.
The Iraqi parliament does not have operational control of U.S. troops, and never will, despite the promises that we’re working with the Iraqi army and so forth. and it is here that the Vichy analogy shines through; anyone working with the current Iraqi government is branded as a collaborator with the same occupying force which has caused, at last count, over 2 million deaths in their 20-year quest to control Iraq.
In the same way the buildings Coalition contractors have constructed are already falling apart, benchmarks are incapable of telling us anything beyond irrelevant numbers. Not only are the numbers for show, but so is the effort those numbers represent. Progress in building corrupt or otherwise illegitimate institutions might be quantitative progress, but it’s qualitative regress.
Furthermore, and this would be true even if the benchmarks were relevant, the mechanism we’ve set up for benchmarks makes no sense. The incentives are misaligned, and purposefully so. The only things benchmarks can do is certify failure. Consider—the reward for institutional progress is the extension of the occupation, which the majority of Iraqis and now parliament is against. The reward for failure is delivering on the only promise the Iraqi parliament cannot presently enforce, which is the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Al-Qaeda and Iran both want the occupation to continue because they believe, with an uncertain degree of prescience, that the war effort is dealing a mighty blow to U.s. interests. As I’ve noted before, the popular mythology of the mujahideen is that they brought down the USSR with their efforts in Afghanistan, and they are looking forward to doing the same thing in Iraq.
So benchmarks are out, I say. A much better solution is a (short) timeline for withdrawal, which has been used in every de-occupation since time immemorial. We’re talking defunding-the-war kind of short—no more than 180 days. A timeline says, “you have x amount of time to get your shit together and after that, it’ll be your country again, for better or worse.”
On CNN, I heard some moron complaining that a timeline would be an invitation for insurgents to kill as many Americans as possible before the withdrawal date. As opposed to what they’ve been doing for the past few years, which was, apparently, to hold back from trying to kill as many American soldiers as they could because they hoped the occupation would be successful.
Already, the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the sectarian militias who opposes (at least officially) attacks on civilians, is demanding a timeline for withdrawal as part of a n overture towards peace negotiations. A spokesman told Al-Jazeera:
“We, the Islamic Army in Iraq, are ready to negotiate, but only with the US congress. “They are the representatives of the American people, and the Iraqi resistance represents the Iraqi people. We are ready to establish a dialogue with them, not with the arrogant US administration.”
Al-Shammari said no talks have taken place so far with US officials and that Washington must recognise Iraqi armed groups as the only genuine representatives of the Iraqi people before such a meeting can be considered.
This Al-Shammari knows what no one wants to admit: those who control the troops on the ground control that ground. And he also knows that the militias hold the real political power in a war zone.
Some of you may be wondering, what do neocons have to say about timelines for withdrawal? Fredrick Kagan demonstrates, again, how little he really understands about politics and war, in an op-ed on CBS:
[M]any honestly believe that rapid withdrawal is the best course of action. Their arguments generally come down to two points: success is already beyond our reach, and setting timelines is the best way to force the Iraqis to take the difficult steps required to achieve a political settlement to this conflict. There is an inherent contradiction in these positions that war opponents must work out before acting on them, but, more importantly, neither proposition is true.
The notion that the war is already lost, articulated most recently by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, rests on the belief that Iraq has descended into a spiral of sectarian violence from which it cannot recover. In this view, the traditional hatred between Sunni and Shia became ungovernable after Al-Qaeda’s destruction of the Golden Mosque of Samarra in February 2006.
Actually, and this is why Kagan will never understand what the hell he’s talking about, the Iraq war was lost before it began. It isn’t that the inevitable civil war we’d been trying to provoke for over a decade finally came to pass. It’s that the war itself is illegal and illegitimate, and so is any resulting failed state, as long as we maintain a real military presence to sustain the Iraqi government.
Kagan continues,
Such beliefs are incompatible with the notion that American-imposed deadlines or timetables would force the Iraqi government to make necessary compromises. If the war is lost, it is because the Maliki government is unwilling to make those compromises and, presumably, is willing to engage in mass killing, if necessary, to achieve its aims. Alternatively, Iraq’s government might be too weak to control the violence, in which case the issue is not the pressure they face to make the right decisions, but their inability to do so. Either way, it is hard to see how using the threat of withdrawing American forces would help the situation.
These descriptions aren’t alternatives, they’re both true. What’s even more true is that the armed forces of another country are not capable of helping the situation no matter what, be they American or Iranian. We are dragging everybody else down with us, and a lot of people are getting pretty tired of it.
Today is this blog’s fourth birthday, and as you can see, I’ve done a bit of a redesign. The old design was intentionally cluttered, because that’s how my desk looks. But I figured that, as I say at the bottom of all my e-mails, “non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitam,” which means not to multiply entities beyond necessity. It’s Ockham’s Razor (a.k.a. Occam’s Razor), a principle devised by a 14th-century English monk. Today, we say, “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
I’m No Liberal
Not that I think ‘liberal’ is a dirty word, as the right has managed to convince America. It’s just that from my ideological perch to the left of both parties, I’m free to point out hypocrisy on either side. So today, just to let everyone know where I stand, it’s time for some internecine sniping.
I’d like to think that I take no prisoners, but I have my own agenda here. Leftists don’t win victories by leaning on conservatives—that’s how liberals get want they want. Leftists win favorable policy outcomes by leaning on liberals.
Let’s look, for example, at Hilary Clinton. I was doing just that, watching a somewhat unfortunate jump cut from her speech on the Senate floor in October 2002 voting for the war “with conviction” to the speech she gave last week explaining why she wants to “sunset” the AUMF.
It looked as though in a split second, the proud erect Senator in 2002 got four inches shorter. Four-and-a-half years ago, she was upright and proud to do her liberal inverventionalist duty in liberating the Iraqi people. In 2007 she looks browbeaten, slouching under the weight of the unpopularity of that very vote. She looks as though she’s literally kowtowing to anti-war voters, expaseratedly explaining why we should pass a non-binding resolution on a non-withdrawal plan which would keep a few score troops in Iraq instead of just… well, doing nothing, and defunding the war by this summer. How easy is that, Congress? It could not physically be any easier to bring the troops home this summer! And then you can come to the American people and say, “you elected us to stop the war and we did it—now give us the chance to finish fixing everything Bush screwed up.”
But of course the Democrats aren’t going to defund the war. they’re going to cave, and the reason is that the party is infested with moderates.
Clinton, and here I mean either one of them, is a self-proclaimed “moderate,” but in international relations terms, both the Clintons and the Bushes are ‘liberals’ who believe in interventionalism and the right of the more powerful countries to use military force to influence the internal affairs of another country.
Nowadays nobody even knows what ‘liberal’ and conservative’ mean anymore. Even conservatives are confused—here’s Charles Krauthammer last week:
The decision to go to war was made by a war cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Nor could the most important non-American supporter of the war to this day — Tony Blair, father of new Labor. …Everyone has the right to renounce past views. But not to make up that past. It is beyond brazen to think that one can get away with inventing not ancient history but what everyone saw and read with their own eyes just a few years ago. And yet sometimes brazenness works.
I was going to try and figure out if there was some hidden nuance to Krauthammer’s position, but when I Googled “Krauthammer neoconservative” I came up with the following gem from a column he wrote in 2005:
The current practitioners of neoconservative foreign policy are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.
Charles, you should really get back in touch with yourself… don’t be so remote. OK, so you can’t call “current practitioners” neoconservatives, which I guess proves that neoconservatism is just a crazy theory no rational person could believe is for real. These are not the droids you are looking for, American people!
Only kidding, Dr. Krauthammer; the next line does merit repeating:
They have no history in the movement, and before 9/11 had little affinity to or affiliation with it.
As if that was the problem.
Olmert, Blair Out—What About Bush?
Parliamentary forms of government are better at some things than others. Ironically, they’re often more representative than the American system (which was built as a reaction to the then-less democratic Westminster parliament) because of the way recall works differently in the two systems.
The institution of parliament is more democratic because it was based on the aristocracy, but evolved actual democratic features over time. The American system (I call it the Funkadelic model to distinguish it from parliament) happens to be stuck in a curious sort of amber when it comes to democracy. A few improvements and the extension of suffrage aside, it’s very hard to recall your elected officials in our government. As Paul Q. Hirst (himself an Englishman) once wrote,
The effectiveness of legislative bodies cannot be assessed in terms of their ‘representativeness’, in the sense of purporting to represent the wills or interests of a constituency from which is derived the mandate or membership of the body. Ironically, doctrines of parliamentary and popular democracy both involve this concept of ‘representation’: it serves to legitimate the claim of legislative bodies to be ‘sovereign’, unlimited in their right to make rules because they are the authentic expressions of majority will.
In other words, the presumption that elected officials represent ‘the people’ also gives them complete license to ignore the people while they legislate. In a parliamentary system, elections can be called at any time and a vote of no confidence is much easier and more frequent than an impeachment.
So Blair is stepping down because he’s no longer effective as a leader, and George Bush is a lame duck. If Prime Minsters can’t get legislation passed, they have to resign; Bush is just getting started with the vetoes. Likewise, Bush, his wife and his dog could be the only ones in the country supporting his war policy and we’d still have troops, as Barney himself has said.
By the way, Fox News raised the specter of a lawsuit by the President if the Democrats don’t come up with the war funding—hilarious!
Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, meanwhile, has been hit with his own 9/11-Commission-like report by the Israeli government that basically accused him of carrying on as though he were president Bush. An editorial in Ha’aretz said, matter-of-factly,
We already knew the facts We did not need to wait to read in the report that Olmert was hasty, acted without proper judgment and was led into things to know that Olmert is the very last type of leader Israel needs today.
We did not need to wait for the long list of investigations into corruption and unethical behavior to know that in January last year a money- and real estate-loving lawyer took over – someone who particularly loves his rich friends.
We did not need to see the long line of suspects and interogatees that reached a peak under Olmert to feel that the State of Israel is gradually being transferred to the hands of cynical gangs with a low standard of management and leadership.
We did not need to wait because all this evil and disease did not start with Olmert, and not even with Sharon. They only brought it to a new level.
So why do we want Olmert to quit and the Knesset to be dissolved now? For one simple reason: the opportunity exists.
Sound familiar? If only the Democrats could get their act together, I’d have more respect for ‘liberals.’ More on this later.
Snowballs In Hell
Mark your calendars, I agree with President Bush and disagree with just about everyone on the left on something, and that is hate crimes legislation.
I know it seems like blasphemy (which I have no problem with), but hate crimes legislation is legally dubious. More importantly, it’s not a good idea. And it demonstrates, by the way, one of the problems with Bill Clinton-style liberalism as I see it.
I’m against hate crimes legislation for several reasons, but let’s start with equal protection under the law. As a matter of fact, my position on civil unions is fairly analogous here—civil unions and hate crimes legislation are actual examples of those ‘special rights’ we keep hearing about from the right. Instead, I firmly support gay marriage and keeping assault and attempted assault felonies, no matter who the victim or the perpetrator are. There’s also the argument, which I believe has some merit, that hate crimes are also unconstitutional in the sense that they comprise ‘double jeopardy,’ being tried once for the crime of actual assault, and once for being a racist, which is not, technically illegal.
But there’s a much better reason for opposing hate crimes legislation than its legal merits, which, as Orcinus points out, are now enshrined in legal precedent anyway. Likewise, not all crimes are hate crimes, but I’d certainly say that assault is almost always a ‘hate’ crime of one type or another. And I would be remiss not to point out that a large portion of the bill as it stands has to do with directing federal resources to combat hate crime, which I think is a very good idea. The problem with hate crimes is its punitive philosophy.
For defendants, the upshot of all this legislation is increased jail time if you are found guilty of assault, attempted assault, murder, etc. and you are found to have committed the crime as the result of a particular set of biases. That’s about as much thought goes into it—racist should get extra jail time, and balance is restored, right? It’s not only liberals who have this “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” mentality, but you’d think they know better. The question is—does putting racists in jail for a few more years help the larger problem of racism in America?
Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of sad, stooped middle-aged men on the subway who have just gotten out of prison. Prison tattoos are distinctive; the faded ink, the crooked lettering, and particularly the location are dead giveaways. Often I’ll see a guy adjust his shirtsleeves to hid someone’s name or initials crudely inked on the top of their hand between the thumb and forefinger. I have to cop to feeling nervous every time I see someone walking down the street with a tear tattoo—it means they killed someone in prison. Several tears mean more than one victim.
Let’s take a hypothetical case. One teenager beats up a teenager of another race in a street altercation. Bias prosecutions usually don’t just work on the basis of offender-victim racial comparisons prima facie, but let’s say the aggressor has a copy of The Turner Diaries or Message To The Blackman In America in his bag when the police pick him up. So the DA turns assault into aggravated assault with bias to prove that the county is serious about preventing hate crimes, and the kid who might have otherwise turned his life around in college or the army or wherever now gets sent away for a long time, to a suitable secure prison. Since he’s in for hate crimes, his only practical protection option is the Aryan Brotherhood, who are always recruiting. The problem is, in order to join the Brotherhood, you have to kill someone, and you can be killed for trying to leave—”blood in, blood out.” The Brotherhood operates both in and out of prison, by the way. So whereas you might have had a curious teenager who grows out of this kind of thing, now you have a dangerous racist career criminal for life.
By focusing on punishment as opposed to rehabilitation, hate crimes legislation commits the same fallacy as the War on Drugs. No matter how long you lock up one dealer, it won’t stop the societal problem, and you can get drugs just as easily in prison as outside. People who enter prison clean often leave addicts of one kind or another. Also, I don’t mean to be crude, but going to prison for violent homophobia is its own reward, no matter how long you get sent away.
Getting tougher on crime by increasing prison time may have created the burgeoning corrections industry in the U.S., but it’s not clear whether society, victims, or criminals are being helped by it. Harsher punishments evoke a gut reaction, but their value is overrated and often destructive.
For example, in some countries, both rape and murder are punishable by death. what ends up happening is that every rape becomes a rape-murder, because there’s no distinction between them. Likewise, the death penalty itself (the harshest sentence the state can grant) doesn’t do anything to suppress the murder rate in states that have it. That’s because most murders are either crimes of passion (unplanned), or planned beforehand, which almost always means they’re committed by someone who thinks they won’t get caught in the first place.
Now, the double jeopardy argument could be sidestepped by having hate crimes offenders take mandatory counseling or community service and so forth. But that’s not what these bills do—instead, they just harden racists and add to racial tension in this country. Look, I do not endorse hate crimes or hate criminals, but when something isn’t going to work it isn’t going to work.
Now, James Dobson and all those people who want Bush to veto the bill before Congress as promised are the last people I want to protect, but freedom of conscience is more important than even the kulturkampf.
Ignoramus In The Morning
Speaking of racism, I did want to mention the broader implications for society as a result of the probable end of Imus’ TV and radio career. They’re all good, by the way.
Treach said it best: “If you’ve never been to the ghetto, don’t ever come to the ghetto. ‘Cause you wouldn’t understand the ghetto.” I always begin by taking people at their word, so let’s, for a moment, assume that Imus was just trying to appropriate black vernacular to point out that… um… well, to say something of import about the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team. Was this just a gaffe? Does Imus deserve to lose his show over it? After all, he didn’t do anything illegal.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. What matters is the translation into ‘white’ English, or what the uninitiated call ‘context.’ Would anyone have an issue with Imus being fired for saying,
IMUS: “Those young women from Rutgers are some violent criminals and/or porn stars. They have tattoos.” Sidekick: “Some black prostitutes.”
Imus: “Those are some distinctively black prostitutes there, I’m going to tell you that.”
As a general rule, if you don’t know what you’re saying, you probably shouldn’t talk about it.
Now, can we reasonably conclude that Don Imus is a racist? Can we conclude from a single, off-handed reference that Imus harbors a deep-seated suspicion or animosity towards a particular ethnic group? Or should we really look at the balance of the man’s record before we pass a final judgment? The answer to all of these questions is yes.
Now, Imus got himself into real trouble by digging deeper and deeper every time he talked about it. Viz, his appearance on Al Sharpton’s radio show, where he told a black journalist, bizarrely,
Let me tell you, I’ll bet you I’ve slept in a house with more black children who were not related to me than you have.
So Imus got fired and is now suing CBS for breach of contract. He maintains, as commentators have been saying all along, that part of his job description (and apparently his actual contract) stipulates that he be “controversial.” This is a far cry from protecting the free speech of someone censored by a corporation for speaking truth to power, for example. This guy is a paid provocateur, and he wants his $40 million.
Imus aside, the incident has prompted a growing debate in this country about the acceptance of these kinds of slurs, even extending to black rap artists like Snoop Dogg. Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote back when this all started,
Now that Imus is officially out, the question is will Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the civil rights leaders, black professional and women’s groups march on say a company such as Koch Records and demand that they pull Snoop Dogg’s forthcoming album, The Big Squeeze? They should, and that means ignoring Snoop’s loud protest that he’s no Don Imus. He’s not, he’s worse.
While Imus’s “nappy headed hos” slur has been plastered all over creation, the “B” “H,” and expletive-laced rant that Snoop unleashed against Imus, has barely got a squint of mention.
…
In a perverse sense, though, they got it right. Imus paid the price for his bile. On the other hand, Snoop and his buddies simply have upped the price for their records, and profit from them. As long as the outcry from civil rights groups, and blacks remains feeble, scattered, and disjointed, they will continue to jingle the cash registers while self-righteously defying anyone to compare them to Imus.
Imus demeaned a basketball team; Snoop and his pals have demeaned a whole generation of young blacks, and especially young black women, and blacks have let them get away with it. That’s why Imus is their Frankenstein.
And in the time since that piece was written, civil rights groups did infact march on record company offices and Russel Simmons pledged to work to bleep some more words from the “cleaned-up” versions of rap singles and videos.
Look, even Snoop knows he fucked up. His punishment is to hear white suburbanites call him “my nizzle” for the rest of his life. The word everyone here is trying to avoid, by the way, is commodification. Rappers are marketing a product not just to black audiences, but to white audiences, who make up the majority of sales. They’re making a buck off presenting black culture in a certain light.
Rappers protest that they are just reflecting the reality of the streets, and they’re right. Geoffrey Canada noted that what hip-hop has become influenced by prison culture. When it comes to which rappers get picked up and promoted by record companies. We must also realize that ss long as there are gangsters, and likely long afterwards, there will be gangsta rap.
At least this is about corporate speech; thankfully no one has yet suggested the government get involved. Imus would have had to flash a breast, which is really hard to get kicked off for doing on the radio (Howard Stern has been trying for years). If you want your obscenity, you’ll probably have to leave the planet—extraterrestrial radio, and/or the global sewage drain that is the internet. That’s where Imus and his fans are going to end up. Mainstream culture will have moved on.
What’s at stake here are ‘community standards’ for acceptable speech. These are goalposts which are constantly being moved, and so it’s always going to thin out these dinosaurs like Imus or Howard Cosell at or near the point where public patience wears thin for this kind of crap. It’s particularly prevalent with white male sportscasters, because sports are a traditional bastion of privilege which is still accessible to otherwise marginal whites; as I outlined in a post I wrote entitled The Angry White Men,
A side note about white supremacist movements: Of course, the those most likely to suffer from this minor shift of political balance-of-power are the whites at the periphery of power, the working class whites of the type who are drawn to white power movements. These movements seek to regain that colonial advantage which would let their race’s weakest to enjoy their previous advantages over other races’ strongest.
There has always been speech considered ‘beyond the pale’ of network radio and television. Think of it as a national ‘community standard,’ not exactly legally defined, but we know it when we see it, to paraphrase that famous obscenity ruling. The standards for punishment are similar to the distinction between criminal and civil lawsuits. To bring all of this full circle, the civil courts are where to take hate crimes stuff, because that’s how our courts are set up to handle things like bias crimes.
C-SPAN is getting better and better with the Democrats putting the investigations front and center. I have to say it’s thrilling to watch Republicans squirm after years of this bullshit going the other way.
Kucinich, bless him, is even going after Dick Cheney with articles of impeachment. I am a big fan of this approach, because I have always maintained that we’re gonna need to get Cheney out of the way before we impeach the President.
But honestly, we need to impeach people for the right reasons, otherwise we’re no better than Kenneth Starr. Let’s not make it a witch-hunt and address the issues head on. We have a lot to choose from, so let’s make it the right choice, OK?
And let’s make it a real issue so the GOP candidates duking it out for the privilege of being the loser in ’08 have to comment about it on national television.
Speak Into The Lamp, Mr. Attorney General
What’s funny about the whole Gonzales-attorney firings scandal is that the firings themselves weren’t illegal, especially not after the Bush administration pushed through that law which specifically cleared such actions. It’s kind of like Whitewater all over again—a shady deal with no underlying illegality.
Democrats are applying a mob-busting technique in their investigative approach. Move the fridge and the roaches will scatter.
As always, the cover-up is worse than the crime. Gonzales probably lied to Congress. But let’s say he didn’t. Let’s say these Bush administration guys, like Gonzales and Scooter Libby and the rest of that bunch aren’t lying when they pull the memory defense.
It seems, from the available evidence, that all this politically motivated nonsense is just standard operating procedure in the White House. These guys are screwing people on their shit list all day—you think they remember who they talked about screwing at 3:15 on a particular Tuesday afternoon? Of course not! They screwed sixteen other people that day.
Republicans may protest that I’m not being fair, that I’m not giving the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. Well, I have a proposal I think will be mutually agreeable: we need to have the GAO bug the White House. Every staff member’s office, phone, and computer should be monitored. I mean, you know the Democrats are going to keep launching these investigations—wouldn’t it be nice to have full documentation at your fingertips to avoid embarrassing gaffes?
Now, I hear what you’re saying—if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Others may be wondering, this bugging operation sounds expensive. Why doesn’t Congress get off its ass and just torture the answers out of them? Sorry, but torture has been legally restricted to matters of national security… oh, wait.
The Lyric is “Barbara Ann,” Jackass
Do any of the people running for President understand what war with Iran actually entails? Both Democrats and Republicans have basically threatened to go to war with the Islamic Republic, from Hilary and Obama’s “no option is off the table” to McCain’s “Bomb Iran” bit at the VFW.
Let’s start with McCain’s sentiment. If our plans involve trying to disarm Iran’s nuclear capacity, we should look at the history of this sort of thing and learn from it, because Iran has.
Jonathan Pollard is serving a lifetime sentence for passing (among other things) information on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program to Israel, which took this information and bombed Osirak, Iraq’s nuclear reactor facility in 1981, ultimately putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Saddam’s reach.
Since then, Iran started building their nuclear facilities deep underground, so as to avoid such crippling air strikes. Essentially, you have to use “bunker buster” nuclear warhead to get at these installations—and the Iranians have built dozens of dummy facilities to fool satellite reconnaissance.
Did you understand what I just said? Attacking Iran means nuclear war. Now, is there a candidate from either party who has enough guts to take a stand against global thermonuclear war? I can really only think of Kucinich, who is just crazy enough to impeach Dick Cheney as discussed above, so he’ll never get that all-important moderate wing of the Democratic party on his side.
That’s just the bombing part—Iran is four times the size of Iraq and has more than two-and-a-half as many people. But there’s also another big problem: Iran controls Hezbollah, the world’s best rained and financed terrorist gourp, who have largely stayed away from the U.S.—if Iran gives Hezbollah the go ahead, we’ll have a different kind of world war on our hands. And to top it all off, it will prove to the world that we don’t hate Arabs, we hate all Muslims, be they Arab, Afghan or Persian.
Going to war with Iran, whom we have already immeasurably strengthened by taking out Saddam and impoverishing their traditional rival Iraq, means starting World War III, unless you consider the Cold War “World War III.”
It’s funny, as I started typing this, the Antibalas song “World War IV” started playing on my Rhythmbox. Were the lyrics prophetic for 2000, or is it just that shit never changes?
This tune is called World War IV.Everyone’s wondering, what happened to World War III? …The war makers of this world are so crafty that they can have World Wars without people realizing they’re even going on, people can just sort of disappear. Everything happens silently.
…We have all these war criminals going around. There’s a big war criminal in the United States named Bill Clinton. And Madeleine Albright, right, who’ve been trying to starve people to death in Iraq, and Cuba, and North Vietnam.
So that’s World War IV, it’s the president of Mexico trying to starve all the different groups of Mayas in Chiapas to death…
It’s the New York City Police officers’ war against black people who come out of their houses with their wallets in their hands.
It always unnerves me when American politicians pretend to care about Iraqi civilians, especially those who voted to endorse the genocidal sanctions which killed 1.5 million people.
Free Speech and McCain Feingold
I think, based on the partial birth abortion ban decision, that the Supreme Court will overturn McCain-Feingold on free speech grounds. Personally, I have never thought the act went far enough in addressing the problem of legalized corruption, and now that the Democrats are going to have to come up with a replacement, I humbly offer the following:
All media purchasing by the candidate is banned, other than a website, dramatically driving down costs. Any advertising will be bought by completely separate 527-style groups which will be unregulated except for the following: a) No communication or financial support can be shared with the campaign or campaign workers, and b)The SEC awards a $100,000 fine to anyone who can provide proof of libel in political advertising against a named candidate or party, to be paid by the offending 527. That way all the candidate is legally allowed to focus on is grassroots organizing and their message.
Four years into the occupation in Iraq and it's still going on, despite the mounting frustrations of all involved. My writing on the subject has begun to resemble a post-mortem on a still-living body. I felt like I was beating a dead horse in 2005
Being philosophically-self aware is a very special kind of hell. The simpler your thinking, the more complicated your life becomes. While other people have no problems with the inherently self-contradictory, people like me get stuck on little details like how the entire world has obviously gone totally batshit.
I had this problem with the war in Iraq, for example. I just don't understand how people could have thought this was going to turn out well, for any number of reasons. I've been thinking a lot about this because with the primaries rolling around, we've seen a lot of tragically hilarious backpedalling from candidates trying to figure out on which side their bread is buttered, electorally speaking. Not to mention the whole litter of bloggers and pundits who have rejoined reality.
I summed up how I feel about The Kerry-cum-Hillary defense with a text-only cartoon I posted here in April 2004:
So, here we are three years later, and we have to wade through this same bullshit again? It's funny, as I started typing this, the Antibalas song "World War IV" started playing on my a{http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/”>Rhythmbox}a. Were the lyrics prophetic for 2000, or is it just that shit never changes? block| This tune is called World War IV. Everyone's wondering, what happened to World War III? …The war makers of this world are so crafty that they can have World Wars without people realizing they're even going on, people can just sort of disappear. Everything happens silently. …We have all these war criminals going around. There's a big war criminal in the United States named Bill Clinton. And Madeleine Albright, right, who've been trying to starve people to death in Iraq, and Cuba, and North Vietnam. So that's World War IV, it's the president of Mexico trying to starve all the different groups of Mayas in Chiapas to death… It's the New York City Police officers' war against black people who come out of their houses with their wallets in their hands. |block
Frightening to think, if we're not careful, it'll be Giuliani-time again, only this time all across the country. At any rate, let's compare the two Democratic hopefuls who both voted for the war: Hilary Clinton and John Edwards.
Up until today, I thought that Hillary Clinton's foreign policy was stupid. Well, in preparation to write this piece, I read the speech she gave on the floor of the Senate before she voted to authorize the war. Now I know her foreign policy isn't stupid, it's totally insane. Here's a good indicator: block| If we try and fail to get a resolution that simply, but forcefully, calls for Saddam's compliance with unlimited inspections, those who oppose even that will be in an indefensible position. And, we will still have more support and legitimacy than if we insist now on a resolution that includes authorizing military action and other requirements giving some nations superficially legitimate reasons to oppose any Security Council action. They will say we never wanted a resolution at all and that we only support the United Nations when it does exactly what we want.
I believe international support and legitimacy are crucial. After shots are fired and bombs are dropped, not all consequences are predictable. While the military outcome is not in doubt, should we put troops on the ground, there is still the matter of Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons. Today he has maximum incentive not to use them or give them away. If he did either, the world would demand his immediate removal. Once the battle is joined, however, with the outcome certain, he will have maximum incentive to use weapons of mass destruction and to give what he can't use to terrorists who can torment us with them long after he is gone. We cannot be paralyzed by this possibility, but we would be foolish to ignore it. And according to recent reports, the CIA agrees with this analysis. |block
"What's so crazy about that?" I hear you cry. I'll tell you; the very next two sentences of her speech:
block| A world united in sharing the risk at least would make this occurrence less likely and more bearable and would be far more likely to share with us the considerable burden of rebuilding a secure and peaceful post-Saddam Iraq. |block
<b>WHAT?!?</b> Lady, you should fire those speechwriters. First you say that peace is working, and the only way to make Saddam a threat is to go to war with him. Then you say that if the whole world seems to be against him, this will make the likeliest outcome of the war 'less likely and more bearable' somehow.
It's as though Hillary thought that terrorists are a national army with a limited budget. If we give them more targets to hit, you know what'll happen? They'll hit more targets! The resources of terrorists are directly tied to public perception of the United States' foreign policy. the more people we kill in Iraq, the more money the terrorists get from sympathizers. Not that this is a direct metaphor, but it's also like trying to keep yourself mosquito-bite free by catching one and making an example of it for the rest of the insects.
On to Edwards.
I might pillory these people for voting to authorize the war, but I can't really assign the whole blame to two out of 200 senators from the minority party.
The changing popularity of the war has necessitated a national version of the Texas-Two-Step.
How many wounds, how much suffering there is in the world! Natural calamities and human tragedies that cause innumerable victims and enormous material destruction are not lacking.
…
I am thinking of the scourge of hunger, of incurable diseases, of terrorism and kidnapping of people, of the thousand faces of violence which some people attempt to justify in the name of religion, of contempt for life, of the violation of human rights and the exploitation of persons.
…
Suffering, evil, injustice, death, especially when it strikes the innocent such as children who are victims of war and terrorism, of sickness and hunger, does not all of this put our faith to the test?
With so much death and destruction going on in the world, you simply can’t get upset about every horrible thing that happens to innocent people—it’s too emotionally exhausting. So people pare down their concerns by giving a shit about a limited amount of people.
Ah, but how to choose? Should you restrict your sympathies to those of the same race, creed, religion? The nation of Quebec or Red Sox Nation? There’s so much to choose from!
Of course, you could privilege all human life equally, without regard to where they’re from or their personal beliefs. But that would make you some kind of monster, declaring that the lives of enemy civilians are worth no less than your country’s soldiers. You’d have to be a real commie pinko secular humanist baby-eating lesbian Wiccan or something! Who could say such things?
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. —Eugene V. Debs
I know I have my biases; everybody chooses something. I picked armed vs. unarmed—people with guns can shoot each other to death for all I care.
OK, so why am I going on about this? Watch the following clip from the O’Reilly Factor (via Crooks and Liars):
O’Reilly was ready to punch Geraldo Rivera because of all the fatal drunk driving accidents in this country, one of them was committed by an illegal immigrant. I know how he feels—whenever I see people between 15 and 35 responsible for an automobile accident, I’m the first to demand the minimum age for drivers licenses be set at 55—stay alive!
Benedict Anderson, who I seem to write about a lot on this blog, explained how O’Reilly came to this in his 1983 book, Imagined Communities; the idea of ‘countries’—the whole national project that has been going on since 1648—is based on a fabricated concept of nationhood. The nation, said Anderson, is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,” Anderson goes on to say that what creates a nation is a national literature, which in this day and age can be said to include TV, films and radio.
So, O’Reilly, if we can tar all illegal immigrants with the actions of one drunken restaurant worker, why stop there? I’ve never seen a demographic profile more dangerous than straight white guys.
What About the Seven Cities of Gold? Phoenix, Tuscon, Las Vegas…
Since today seems to be logical consistency day, let me loosely relate a conversation I had with a conservative-minded family member last week:
Cuz: Possession is nine-tenths of the law!
D. J.: Exactly—that’s why I don’t understand why Americans are so upset about immigration.
Cuz: Because they’re trying to take over the country!
D. J.: Exactly my point. If we took the West from the Indians by force, what’s the problem with somebody else trying to take it from us? I think it’s a question of respect.
Cuz: Respect?
D. J.: Sure. They don’t respect the Mexicans because they’re trying to sneak across the border. If they’d come with guns and disease-bearing blankets—Americans would have to respect that.
Jesus Was A Black Man
I don’t really go for Jesus; I’m not really sure he even existed. But I will say that if he was real, Jesus was definitely black. Now, if you do a little research into this theory, you’ll likely end up at some site that will try to convince you that Africans are the real Jews and Jews are actually Europeans. It’s kind of the mirror-image of the theology of the Christian Identity religion. I don’t endorse any of these movements or their theories (I speak a little Aramaic and I know what the Cohen modal haplotype is, so I’m not the best audience).
Facts notwithstanding, I have decided to fully endorse the idea that Jesus was black. Why? I only need one reason:
Oh, Christopher Hitchens. I used to be your biggest fan. I hate Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton just like you. I even forgave your support of the war in the early days of the invasion, because I knew you sympathize with the plight of Kurdistan.
But you don’t return my e-mails or call. And then there was the Slate editorial on March 19th, which consisted of a series of anticipated questions on the fourth anniversary of the biggest foreign policy blunder in American history since Vietnam. I hope it’s not the final straw.
I could write a book in response, but I think I’ll settle for answering some of Hitchens’ questions:
Was the president right or wrong to go to the United Nations in September 2002 and to say that body could no longer tolerate Saddam Hussein’s open flouting of its every significant resolution, from weaponry to human rights to terrorism?
Wrong, for several reasons. First of all, in a purely operational sense, if the United Nations can continue to tolerate China’s rights violations, it could have continued to tolerate Saddam’s. Secondly, inspections had yet to reveal that Hussein was not in possession of WMDs,
Before I mention the third reason, I’d like to point out that Hitchens’ doesn’t take the easy way out and say “Was The United States right or wrong to go to the UN,” he asks about the president specifically. Bush’s appeal to the U.N. was a cynical ploy to cover his intent to go to war no matter what, as the Downing Street memos revealed.
Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?
Here we have the classic problem of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Hitchens won’t accept Saddam’s word about WMDs because he suspected Iraq of systematic deception. But it turns out that the war has destroyed our credibility in the same way Saddam’s had been destroyed by… er, complying with the ban. But grudgingly so! Always beware those with grudges.
It occurred to me, recently, that in karmic terms, we seem to have achieved the same credibility in the international community we gave Saddam before the invasion.
Back to our mutual friend. The pretense of this question is a little off, too. Hitchens admits later that he wasn’t willing to give any inspections under Saddam any credit no matter what they said. It’s the same kind of cynicism that belies every action that the Bush White House undertakes when it comes to the U.N., including nominating a representative to said body. They don’t care for the the premise of the U.N. in the first place, so any overtures on our part are lip service by definition.
If you don’t believe in inspections, you don’t get to use them as a pretext for war. Same thing goes for the weapons ban—keeping the programs in cold storage but destroying the stockpiles of existing weapons is precisely what the ban is designed to do while in effect.
Also, Hitchens seems to think that Hussein Kamel’s testimony upon defecting to signify Saddam wasn’t complying with the UN resolution, while I took the testimony to mean that they had, in fact, destroyed their stocks. I guess the jury’s out on that one.
Actually, Hitchens makes an excellent response to his own question that I’ll use to string him up with later, so I’ll quote it now (emphasis mine):
Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD.
As I wrote back in 2004, war proponents are really treading a dangerous path by making such arguments. The worst-case scenario is that the WMD charges were accurate. If Saddam was hiding WMDs and we can’t find them, then the very thing we were trying to prevent from happening: the transmission of WMDs to non-state actors, i.e., terrorists.
You know, I can’t resist skipping to the last question:
So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?
Mr. Hitchens, if you truly believe Saddam retained unnaccounted-for WMDs, then you cannot answer this question in the affirmative. And for those who think I’m being hysterical over a minor point, I’ll let another one of Hitchens’ Q & A’s do the talking:
Was the terror connection not exaggerated? Not by much.
Now, I’m not the first to jump on my fellow former ISO member for the following obvious bullshit:
The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
But I will claim to be the first to offer the following defense: couldn’t it be, oh ye narrow-minded folk, that Hitchens is very specifically referring to the year 2005, only? Because they clearly did link Iraq and al-Qaeda explicitly in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. I suppose it also depends on how you define “had a hand.”
But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.
How on earth was this supposed to ‘forestall the next one?’ I’d get angrier, but in the wake of manifest disproof by way of the London Underground bombings, pretentions about the Iraq war being some kind of terrorist deterrent are pretty much moot—and tragic.
At any rate, just how much of the global jihadist movement was Saddam controlling or funding? And if eliminated, wouldn’t the deaths of Iraqi civilians motivate other Muslims to action as they had for Bin Laden?
Often I wonder about the civilian casualties of the invasion of Afghanistan, who far outnumbered those of 9/11 in a country a fraction of our size. I always thought the relative significance assigned to each set of deaths was a fair indicator of the difference in the price of life. This is the point I never understood about our strategy in the War on Terror. Hitchens himself notes,
A few points of interest did emerge from Powell’s presentation: The Iraqi authorities were caught on air trying to mislead U.N inspectors (nothing new there), and the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a very dangerous al-Qaida refugee from newly liberated Afghanistan, was established. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on.
I don’t think Hitchens realizes ‘the full significance’ of Zarqawi’s presence in Kurdish Iraq. Here Zarqawi is a refugee from state-sheltering by the Taliban regime, being ‘harbored’ by those freedom- and American-loving Iraqi Kurds in a region which, due to the presence of U.N. military personnel (No-fly Zone), Saddam had no control over?
The way you view the issue of Zarqawi in Kurdish Iraq is a good indicator of whether or not you can justify the war. If you think it is possible to quash al-Qaeda by toppling governments, then the relative chaos of the no-fly zone is intolerable because it provides places for refugees from the War on Terror to set up camp with little interference.
If you think the very idea of quashing al-Qaeda by toppling governments seems to be contradicted by the fact that Zarqawi was able to escape to a zone where government control had broken down due to U.S. interference with local politics, well, you see where I’m going with this. And speaking of local politics—in light of his previous comment about how war in Iraq was supposed to be a magical talisman against ‘the next attack,’ shouldn’t Hitchens concede the point merely based on the daily suicide bombings against civlians in Iraq?
Was a civil war not predictable? Only to the extent that there was pre-existing unease and mistrust between the different population groups in Iraq. Since it was the policy of Saddam Hussein to govern by divide-and-rule and precisely to exacerbate these differences, it is unlikely that civil peace would have been the result of prolonging his regime.
If you want to start an analysis along these lines, why don’t you assign the blame where it belongs? It was the British who instituted the system Hitchens is describing. Only then, it was called ‘divide and conquer,’ not ‘divide-and-rule.’ It was a favorite strategy of the Empire to employ a minorty as an administrative class to maintain balance in multi-ethnic colonies.
Perhaps war supporters should have brought up some of the many examples of multi-ethnic states with colonial borders who didn’t try to dissolve into component nations after the deposition of a dictatorship in the last fifty years. Oh, wait—there aren’t any.
Finally,
Indeed, so ghastly was his system in this respect that one-fifth of Iraq’s inhabitants—the Kurds—had already left Iraq and were living under Western protection.
If you want to start measuring ‘ghastly’ by the fraction of population fleeing the country…
