Now that we Americans have our own aspiring dictator, it’s easy to forget about all the other guys standing in front of their gold curtains surrounded by their generals. No one expects the Trump administration to do anything but admire and support these fellow strongmen – maybe it’s just professional courtesy – but let’s not get too nostalgic about American foreign policy under Democratic administrations.

Egypt’s current dictator, Abdel Fattah del-Sisi, deposed the nation’s first freely elected president Mohammed Morsi with American blessings and imprisoned the party’s president Mohamed Badie for life. With Obama’s complicity and continuing American financial assistance Egypt imposed crackdowns on civil liberties. Today Egypt’s current dictator saw to it that the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was acquitted of charges of murdering protesters. Meanwhile, an Al Jazeera reporter, Mahmoud Hussein, sits in an Egyptian prison. Practicing journalism should not be a crime under al-Sisi or Trump – nor should it have been under Obama, when Hussein was first imprisoned by America’s pocket dictator.

Democrats should especially refrain from weeping about “what might have been” under Hillary Clinton. People from Honduras can tell you that it would not have been pretty. In 2009 when a military coup sent leftist president Manuel Zelaya into Costa Rican exile in his pajamas, Hillary Rodham Clinton saw it as an “opportunity” and asked her Clinton Foundation buddy Lanny Davis to begin back-channel negotiations with a “better” choice for Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, who himself was shocked that the U.S. and European Union would even think of supporting a coup.

And then there’s Israel. This is a nation that has received $128 BILLION dollars of U.S. aid to-date and has been keeping Palestinians under martial law for sixty years. No administration, Republican or Democrat, has ever had any real qualms about letting Israel systematically loot Palestinian land and build settlements. At least no one has ever done anything about it. Trump now has, literally, an Israeli settler as his choice of ambassador to Israel, but disregard for the rights of Palestinians is one issue both parties agree upon.

Progressives can and should be outraged at Democrats who ally themselves with Republicans on economic issues, militarism, and surveillance. Progressive Democrats can and should “primary” traitors like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin who vote with Republicans on immigration, the environment, or to defund schools. Democrats like New Jersey’s Cory Booker, who are better friends of corporations than their own constituents, need to go into voter-initiated retirement.

Alongside all these other “litmus tests” foreign policy should be a critical criterion for choosing someone to represent you. Because a politician who harms the freedom and welfare of those in other countries will eventually betray you as well.

American Exceptionalism is an article of faith of both Republicans and Democrats, even Liberals. In the eyes of many Americans our global dominance is proof that God conferred special blessings on us. Sending American “peacekeeping forces” to drop bombs on one more country is as natural as Friday night football or fast food. Being the world’s cop is seen as a right and a responsibility – sort of an updated version of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” The world is filled with children and somebody has to be the grownup.

E.J. Dionne’s piece, reprinted from the Washington Post (“Americans are deciding for the world,” September 23rd) is no exception. Dionne begins his piece with a tip of the hat to American Exceptionalism – the Presidential election “will be a choice on behalf of the entire world” – and then he argues that we need a president who doesn’t believe in authoritarianism. But the choice of president is not nearly as important as the authoritarianism the United States cultivates – elsewhere.

We’ve never been shy about supporting dictators like Augusto Pinochet, undermining another country’s elections, or supporting military occupations – as we did in South Africa and still do in the West Bank. Our military is in more than 150 other nations. We can ensure “compliance” from those who would cross us with sanctions, bunker busters, cruise missiles, drones, or nuclear weapons. We have a permanent veto in the United Nations and we can use international organizations to pressure others into supporting our wars – or we can just ignore them altogether. We send our enemies to the International Court of Justice – but we won’t be bound by it ourselves.

There’s a pretty thin line separating autocracy from a belligerent superpower. One is a bully in his own country; the other in the whole world. So it’s hardly a surprise when a global bully starts growing them at home.

E.J. Dionne says he’s concerned that “allowing Trump to win would strengthen the autocratic Vladimir Putin in Russia and the far right in Europe with which he is now allied.” While Russian nationalism is every bit as toxic as the American variety, Russia has actually been historically opposed to fascism. Emerging fascist elements in the Ukraine and Poland, where American concern for democracy comes second to installing missile systems, alarms Russia.

If the United States were truly interested in weakening autocratic regimes – other than by turning dictatorships into failed states, as we have done with bi-partisan resolve for 25 years – we might start by holding them accountable and taking away their allowances. Let’s make it known we won’t reward military dictatorships (sorry, Egypt). We won’t reward inhuman occupations (tough beans, Israel). We won’t give you any more missiles if your family-owned state is indistinguishable from ISIS or had something to do with 9/11 (I’m talking to you, Saudi Arabia).

And we might shut down our secret gulags and black sites while we’re at it. Those are for despots and autocrats, not for supposed democracies.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The next American election is a choice between a con man who would just love to try out the knobs and dials of foreign policy and military power – and another who has already used them to make the world a more dangerous place – and who has no qualms about pushing them again. Neither of these two candidates is any less lethal than the other, nor any more dedicated to democracy for the rest of the world. Hillary Clinton demonstrated American tone-deafness best when she addressed the VFW recently: “You may wonder how anyone could disagree, but in fact my opponent in this race has said very clearly that he thinks American exceptionalism is insulting to the rest of the world.” Well, it is.

Americans do not make choices “on behalf of the world.” We make choices in our own interests that often harm the rest of the world. Like Clinton, we can feign astonishment that being a bully is unacceptable to the rest of the world – but ultimately we just don’t care what the other kids think.

And, anyway, what are they going to do about it?

The enemy it was created to fight hasn’t existed for a generation, but NATO was never about common defense. NATO has always been about making the United States the world’s only superpower.

World War II was scarcely over and the victors were salivating over the spoils. The United States had set its sights on being the world’s newest empire and this required beating the competition – the Soviet Union. In 1947 a career diplomat, George F. Kennan, formulated the policy of “Containment.” “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

President Harry S. Truman is best known for the first and last use of nuclear weapons on human beings. But he is also known for the “Truman Doctrine” – which promised to contain communism in Greece and Turkey by any means necessary. The chessboard in the Middle East had already been set up by the departing British, and in 1948 Truman put his own piece on the board by recognizing Israel. The competition between Capitalism and Communism in the Middle East was just getting started.

Dwight D. Eisenhower formulated his own “Eisenhower Doctrine” in 1957. It went a step beyond Truman and decreed that any country that felt threatened by Communism could request help from the United States. This set the stage for America as World Policeman. Shortly after this came the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Egypt nationalized the Suez canal and all the usual suspects – the U.S., Britain, and Israel – attacked Egypt. The following year the United States used Eisenhower’s doctrine to intervene in the Lebanese presidential elections of 1958, assuring Camille Chamoun’s victory. Chamoun, a Christian Maronite, supported the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

NATO was founded in 1949 under Truman’s administration. It bound a number of nations in a mutual defense pact: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. NATO was an outgrowth of the military coalition formed in World War II, whose Supreme Commander was Eisenhower. Eisenhower was also the natural choice for NATO’s first SACEUR – Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 1951 Eisenhower set up shop for NATO in Paris in temporary quarters at the Hotel Astoria. A second “Supreme Commander” was installed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1952. That same year Greece and Turkey joined NATO. In 1982, King Juan Carlos, who had been restored to the Spanish throne by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, joined NATO. These were NATO’s earliest members.

Predictably, all this was seen as a threat by the Communist world. The Warsaw Pact was formed in response to NATO five years later, in 1955 when NATO added an additional member, West Germany. The Warsaw Pact’s signatories included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. A bit later came Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The Warsaw Pact was never very strong. In 1958 Hungary tried to withdraw, only to have its independence brutally crushed. In 1962 Albania was kicked out for being closer to Beijing than Moscow, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell. The New York Times reported the Warsaw Pact’s obituary, noting that it had died at the relatively young age of 36.

But NATO kept growing even after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In 1982 the Czech Republic, formerly a Warsaw Pact signatory, joined NATO along with Hungary and Poland. In 2004 Bulgaria and the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined them. Then Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, and Croatia. NATO now represented a coalition of over 7 million soldiers from 28 countries with a combined population of almost a billion people.

But NATO was never merely a mutual aid society. Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Greece, and the Netherlands had battalion-sized units attached to U.S. Army divisions in Korea. Turkey also deployed an infantry brigade. NATO’s charter was never limited to encircling the Russian Bear, and NATO has been involved in military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, the Mediterranean, and in Africa, Today NATO is an obese 67 year-old man aiming his rifle at a enemy who vanished long ago.

But that’s not really the point of NATO in the 21st Century. NATO is a tool wholly-owned, funded, and led by the United States. In recent years many on both the Right and Left have criticized the exorbitant costs to the United States of maintaining military bases in 150+ countries, the subsidies to European nations who do not have to pay for their own defense – if “defense” is the right word. And plenty of people are aware that NATO no longer has a Soviet enemy to fight, though we have now turned our attentions to the Middle East and a region of the Pacific China now claims.

The United States needs military, economic and global coalitions like NATO, the TPP, and the G8 more than ever – if it wants to remain Top Dog.

Charles Krauthammer’s pieces never fail to annoy me. When he’s not demonizing Obama and the Left, he’s penning fairy tales about the morality of the Right.

This week’s fable is about the differences between neoconservatives and so-called “idealist” foreign policy makers. As Krauthammer tells it, conservatives (the good guys) believe in democracy and nation-building, while liberals (the evil ones) believe in developing global institutions and downplay American Exceptionalism. Krauthammer constantly savages his bête noire, Obama, for this sin. He whines that every act of Obama’s international diplomacy, from Iran to China to Cuba, has been an exercise in appeasement or in withdrawing American power – including the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which he classifies as appeasement and containment of China.

Yet after all that, for Krauthammer democracy-building is not really as important as building up and harshly wielding American power. Real power is provoking a military confrontation with China in which the U.S. is dominant.

In fact, the conservative wonks Krauthammer admires so much have never been in love with democracy or been shy about propping up dictators and butchers. The Pahlavis, the Pinochets, the Somozas, the Saudi royals and many others have always been the Chosen Ones with American administrations of both parties.

To be fair, the Wikileaks/Manning State Department cable dumps reveal just how criminally similar Hillary Clinton is to Henry Kissinger. Even in Obama’s last term, our foreign policy is still barely distinguishable from anything that preceded it. We’re still at war in seven nations. We’re still propping up autocratic regimes. The U.S. constantly builds up weaponry, employs drones to kill both “evildoer” and hapless innocent alike, operates with impunity or in violation of the Constitution, enlists help from the corrupt and rewards them amply, and lies to the American public about what it is doing.

Krauthammer’s real objection is with Obama’s tone. He is outraged that Obama can go to Hiroshima and apologize for being the only nation to unleash nuclear terror on humans. Yet – and this should make him happy – Obama has simultaneously approved an upgrade of our nuclear weapons.

Yet if there is anything redeeming about Obama’s tone, it is the implicit recognition that American Exceptionalism is crumbling – not by Obama’s hand but because the demise of our empire cannot sustain the myth. The one thing in which the United States leads (besides gun deaths and incarceration) is military spending and invading other countries. By all other measures (longevity, health, education, savings, standard of living, contentment) we are well down the list in comparison with many of our neighbors.

And so it is refreshing when – even hypocritically or obliquely – a standing president acknowledges a few of our crimes on the international stage. No doubt it infuriates people like Charles Krauthammer, who would prefer that we continue to bluster, bomb, and bully our way into Rogue Nation status. Yet Krauthammer speaks for many Americans, especially those drawn to political candidates known for blustering and bullying.

While the distinctions between “idealists” and neoconservatives are virtually non-existent, what is really crucial is what kind of people we want to be. Can we coexist with others who don’t share our love of American-style “free markets” or “Western democracy?” Do we want to be a high-tech Hermit Kingdom, building walls between nations, in a permanent state of war with most of the world? Must we deny reality and insist on American Exceptionalism – despite our failure to provide adequate healthcare, education, and economic opportunity to most of our own population? That’s hardly exceptional.

Or is it really just the human thing to let slip that we are just like everyone else? That we, as humans, are sorry for what we’ve done?

There is a lot of wisdom in Martin Luther King’s observation, which Krauthammer derides and Obama cites, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But men like Krauthammer, disposed toward violence, and lacking the patience for those long arcs, will never fully understand history – especially when only one nation is worthy of their consideration.

This was published in the Standard Times on June 2, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20160602/opinion/160609907

This morning I read two different op-eds on ISIS. Dana Milbank ponders the proper way to talk about risks and “bad guys” to children, and Chace Howland regurgitates the old line that – just like Chamberlain with Hitler – the West has been too easy on ISIS: now is the time for allies to strike.

In other words – keep a stiff upper lip and attack the “bad guys” anew.

The problem is – there’s nothing new in any of this. Worse, it shows just how narrow our thinking has become on issues of foreign policy. When you have a monstrous military, every foreign policy choice involves “defense” – no need to ponder one’s own responsibility for creating the conflict. There’s only one hammer in our tool belt, and it’s a bomb.

We’ve been at war in the Middle East almost as long as my children, now pushing thirty, have been alive. A whole generation has grown up in perpetual war, never knowing full civil liberties, seeing the decline of infrastructure, education, health, and security by the middle and working classes. The only constant during all this time has been our addiction to war.

Chace Howland sees parallels between Germany of the Thirties and ISIS. The Nazis had an ideology; so does ISIS. Check. The Nazis wanted to expand their territory; so does ISIS. Check. Ergo: they’re the same. His is a rather shallow analysis for a history teacher. Nazism was a reaction to the failures of liberal democracy in a once-advanced, highly educated and cultured nation, and was characterized by scapegoating within that democracy. In many ways, the United States is a better candidate for Nazi analogies than ISIS. We have military bases in 150+ countries. The Patriot Act has gutted most of our Bill of Rights – something that white people have only recently lost but which minorities have never completely enjoyed. And we now have presidential candidates who want to slap yellow stars on our citizens.

Yes, ISIS is powerful, but only relatively so. Its power comes from all the failed states in the Middle East that the United States and its “allies” have created. If ISIS appears strong in Iraq it is because George Bush’s and Paul Bremer’s “de-Baathification” policy destroyed the Iraqi military. If ISIS is strong in Libya, thank Obama and Clinton. If ISIS is strong in Syria, thank John Kerry. And thank all the American presidents of both parties that encouraged, funded, and armed religious militias during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States created Islamic extremism. Both Republicans and Democrats have blood on their hands. And we still seem determined to finish off Assad’s Syria. This is insanity.

We claim to be shocked at the horrific beheadings and religious repression of “apostates” by ISIS. And yet our great friend Saudi Arabia is about to stage a mass execution of a variety of “criminals,” including a well-known poet who renounced Islam and a teenager who attended a pro-democracy demonstration with his uncle. Sounds like ISIS to me. If Mr. Chace thinks the ideology behind ISIS will be exterminated by allied bombing, he is mistaken. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist oil peddlers are beloved by both Bushes and Clintons.

Which brings us to the heart of things – the Middle East is a Middle Eastern problem. Even if we bomb Raqqa and Tikrit and Mosul into powder, terrorism is not going away. We flatter ourselves to think that the US and Russia are in a “proxy war” in the Middle East – one that could be resolved by finding a nice chateau for Syria’s Assad to live out his days in. But the balance between democracy, religion – and of what kind? Western, Sunni or Shiite? – is at the heart of all this. Saudis want their own democracy, not a family-owned kleptocracy; Egyptians want their own form of democracy instead of a military junta: but the United States continues to support these repressive regimes. Kurds want their own state; religious minorities want protection from majorities. Some of the messes of colonial meddling with borders need to be cleaned up.

Drones and F16’s will fix none of this.

We like to think of ourselves – not as the world’s policeman – but as a force for good in the world. Yet we are neither. Our policing of the world has been as violent and mercurial and damaging as it is at home. As a for being a force for good, this is more wishful thinking. We will never know what it is to be a good friend and neighbor until we have learned to count every one of our own citizens as such.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 6, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20151206/opinion/151209673

The U.S. and its Western allies are at war in five countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The U.S. Special Operations Command has covert operations in 134 countries. Half the world. Today we call it a right and an obligation to be the world’s policeman. Kipling called this the “White Man’s Burden” in a poem published in American papers during the U.S. invasion of the Philippines.

Before we became a nation, our founders were busy building British Empire. Colonialism is in our national genes. Whether unabashed Exceptionalist or Neoliberal Realist, the “White Man’s Burden” has always been to “bring order and stability” to “savages,” as John Quincy Adams described it in so many words.

Today’s version of the “Burden” teaches that the West is only trying to “stabilize” and bring “democracy” to troubled nations. Authoritarian and heavily militarized nations like Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are supposed to be a solution. Model “democracies” like the U.S. and Israel are supposed to show off our best values. A letter echoing this basic notion appeared in “Israel more likely to be part of the solution, not the problem.”

The author is right about one thing: “Israel represents the West in the Middle East.” When Israel attacked Egypt during the “Suez Crisis” it signaled its willingness to join the colonial club. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is indeed “Western” in mirroring what the U.S. did to Native Americans, the Spanish and Portuguese did in Latin America, the French did in Africa, the British did in the Middle East and India, the Australians did to the Aboriginals, and Dutch and British settlers did in South Africa.

What we euphemistically call “interventions” others see as naked aggression. When others resist it can only be “evil,” not a normal human reaction. We dismiss the messages that al Qaeda and ISIL send us because they kill with knives (and not with drones), but the main reason is that we just don’t want to listen to anything anyone else has to say.

When the Christian Coalition speaks, it’s often not praying. Like their American and Israeli cousins, Muslim fundamentalists too wrap political views in the language of scripture. By dismissing political motivations, the writer ignored how Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians angers many when he wrote: “Osama bin Laden didn’t have Palestinians on his radar at all.”

Wrong.

Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” was published in the Guardian newspaper in November 2002. The 4000-word piece addresses two issues: why al Qaeda opposes the West and what it wants from it. The very first answer to the very first question addressed Palestine: “As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. a) You attacked us in Palestine…”

Bin Laden’s remaining points concerned Western adventures in the Middle East and the exploitation of the world’s resources to satisfy a Western consumer culture he regarded as immoral. The West’s coddling of Israel, its UN vetoes in support of Israel, nuclear hypocrisy, lavish military aid, and its neglect of Palestinians – all angered bin Laden and still rankle Muslims throughout the world – as Professor Brian Glyn Williams alluded to recently. But not only fighters in the Middle East sympathize. Asian, African, and Latin American countries also suffered Western colonialism and see the old South Africa reflected in today’s Israel.

The Sykes-Picot agreement carved up the Ottoman Empire among Britain, France, and Russia. Britain began subdividing its “mandate.” An old photo shows three architects of this division sitting on camels. One, T.E. Lawrence [“of Arabia”], arranged for the Wahhabist al Saud family to create an Arab kingdom. Another, Winston Churchill, had just cabled London to approve the deal. The third, Gertrude Bell, from England’s 6th richest family, drew up the map.

The West unleashed Wahhabis against the Ottomans. The West built Al Qaeda as a proxy to fight Russia in Afghanistan. “Western” Israel formed Hamas to challenge the PLO. The West decided to leave Shias to die in one Gulf War and disenfranchise Sunnis in another. The West indirectly armed ISIL.

It was the West whose “coalition of the willing” destroyed and destabilized Iraq, Syria and Libya through regime change masquerading as defense of civilians suffering state terror. The U.S. betrays its hypocrisy when it acknowledges such human suffering in Syria but none in Gaza.

The Middle East is a tough neighborhood. Israel may not be the only problem, but it is hardly a solution. 4.5 million Palestinians live – not under Israel’s Basic Laws – but under perpetual colonial-era martial law.

For Palestinians and much of the Middle East, the colonial era never really ended. Only when the West stops cultivating empire while calling it “help” will real solutions emerge.

“Improper Payments Top $100 Billion,” said the headline on July 10.

The Associated Press article discussed federal agency estimates — not necessarily proven figures — of over-payments and fraud in these agencies. As usual, the evil welfare queens and other shiftless bums had to take the perp walk. The AP reported billions stolen or wasted by Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, SNAP, Social Security, school lunches, Pell grants, and public housing assistance.

The accompanying Bloomberg News article was scarcely less enlightening. The Pentagon paid over $8,000 for a piece of ​$450 gear. The generals paid over ​$2,000 for a helicopter part that should have cost $300. Isn’t this old news?

Pieces like this, whether intentionally or not, distort an even worse truth of unimaginable waste of tax dollars. It’s easy enough to yawn at a 20-fold markup of the odd helicopter part if “national security” is at stake. We’re being trained to save our outrage for the welfare queens, and to give the corporate welfare kings a pass.

In this pairing of articles there was absolutely no mention of the Lockheed-Martin F-35 fighter jet. The plane doesn’t work properly. It crashes. It catches fire. Its designs have already been hacked by the Chinese. One potential buyer, Norway, complained that it was too expensive: A single plane costs about $10 million and its operational costs are estimated to be ​$800 million over its lifetime. The F-35 has been on and off “probation” with the Pentagon for mismanagement and cost overruns.

In 2012, a defense magazine reported that the F-35 program’s costs had soared to $1.5 trillion.

This one federal program rather puts the welfare queens to shame, doesn’t it? But who would even know when we routinely get propaganda instead of news.

This was published in the Standard Times on August 5, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140805/opinion/408050301

Lest anyone have the mistaken impression that American foreign policy changed when Bush retired to his ranch, the same neoconservative game plan for regime change throughout the Middle East continues today. Bush got his Saddam. Obama got his Ghadafy. And now Obama wants Assad and quite likely regime change in Iran as well.

According to an article in the New York Times by Mark Landler, Obama summoned his aides to the Oval Office last Friday to discuss his reasons for asking Congress for permission to wage war on Syria – not that American presidents usually feel obliged to follow the Constitutionally-mandated procedure. Landler: “He had several reasons, he told them, including a sense of isolation after the terrible setback in the British Parliament. But the most compelling one may have been that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.”

Not just the British Parliament but almost all our western allies have expressed reservations about yet more use of American military force. To be fair, the not-quite ex-colonialist nations France and England are in the process of trying to drum up renewed support for NATO “intervention” – an Orwellian term that really means “naked aggression” when you are on the ground watching bombs fall on you. The Arab League said no to an attack. Iraq – which Obama claims has reason to fear Syria – told the U.S. to butt out. And even Israel has preferred Assad to a failed state next door.

No one seriously believes that Syria is going to unleash sarin attacks in New York or Boston. Syria presents no risk for Americans. There really is no reason to attack. Not that many years ago, the U.S. was sending suspected terrorists, subjects of “extreme rendition,” to torture chambers in Syria. At least in terms of “fighting terror,” the two nations saw eye-to-eye.

Today the administration’s case for war has various, and shifting, explanations but it has primarily been sold to the public as a “humanitarian” mission. A few weeks ago we started hearing from editors simultaneously apologizing for, but insisting on, publishing the images of sarin victims. John Kerry told “Face the Nation” that only Saddam and Hitler have used sarin – not mentioning that the United States supplied Saddam with his.

An attentive reader might recall that the killing of civilians in Syria – by whatever means – is a direct result of U.S. support for Syrian rebels. Some of these rebels, like the cannibal commander Abu Sakkar, are affiliated with terrorist organizations who hate Assad because he’s an Alawite, not because he’s a despot. The Assad regime, with some justification, points out they are only fighting terror.

“Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.”

No, that was not Bashar al-Assad, but Lindsey Graham explaining that the United States has killed over 4,700 people in drone attacks. But only 10-15% of those 4,700 people were actually terrorist suspects. Which means that the United States slaughtered roughly 4,000 civilians.

So if we are shocked by the sight of gasping, contorted victims of Bashar al-Assad – assuming he actually did it and it wasn’t a “false flag” operation, as former chief of staff to Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, suggests – we should be equally shocked by our own regime’s carnage and terror. But the American press won’t show us images of the corpses of children killed by American drones and missiles.

As the French revolution demonstrated, nobody does terror quite as well as a nation-state. So when a government that itself uses terror starts talking about “red lines,” humanitarian concerns, and morality: beware. Consider our many recent wars and what they have given the world – only wrecked states, death, violence, and a police state here at home. And, of course, trillions of dollars for the American “defense” industry.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 18, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20130918/opinion/309180310

The U.S. may soon be launching its annual war, this time in Syria. And this time because the president has drawn a moral “red line” in the sand, condemning the use of chemical weapons.

But let’s examine whether the U.S. can seriously play the role of the world’s arbiter of chemically-related morality.

Roosevelt launched the nation’s first biological weapons program in 1941. From 1943 to 1969, the U.S. developed weaponized anthrax, Q fever, Malta fever, botulinum, cholera, dengue fever, and various dysentery agents.

Our chemical weapons program began earlier, in 1918, with mustard and phosgene gases, Lewisite, hydrogen cyanide, and cyanogen chloride. After WWII, the U.S. developed sarin, VX nerve agents, and Agent Orange. When it signed the Geneva Protocol, the U.S. specifically exempted itself from defoliants like Agent Orange and gases for riot control. In 1997, the U.S. signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, committing to destroy its 30,000 tons of such weapons. But then it dragged its heels for decades, not  destroying very much.

A chemical weapons depot in Tooele, Utah once hosted the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. Tooele stored 14 million tons of chemical agents, blistering agents, and nerve gas – almost half the U.S. total – and was closed only last April. Depots in Alabama and Maryland are still operational. A facility in Colorado is not expected to complete destruction of its stockpiles before 2019. Another one in Kentucky won’t be done before 2023.

The United States is the world’s leading arms dealer. Not individuals or corporations – but the government itself. 78% of the world’s arms come from U.S. government sales to foreign nations. In 2008, when Israel used phosphorus against civilians in Gaza, it came from a U.S. stockpile stored in that country. When Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurds, they were stamped “Made in the USA.” As old archives are opened and foreign policy documents leaked, U.S. culpability in historical atrocities is revealed. The German press recently reported that Chile’s dictator, General Pinochet, had stockpiles of U.S. botulinum toxins.

From Havana harbor (“Remember the Maine!”), Laos and Cambodia, to fake yellowcake and invented WMD’s in Iraq, the U.S. has seized on many pretexts to bomb, blast, incinerate, and shoot people in faraway lands – as always, most of them civilians.

At this point, no one knows for sure where the gas used against civilians in Syria originated, or who used it. Or even why the Assad regime would be using it at a time it seems to be regaining the upper-hand. But if history is any kind of a guide, “red lines” are never used as moral guides. They are usually just cynical pretexts to justify yet another war.

This was published in the Standard Times on August 26, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20130826/opinion/308260303

The slaughter of six and seven year-olds in Connecticut seems to have violated acceptable limits of violence we have lived with for decades. No one with a heart could fail to be moved by the ages of the victims, the horrific nature of their deaths by assault weapons, and that once again the shooter had untreated mental health problems. There was hardly a person with dry eyes when first hearing the news.

Politicians reassured the public. Schools announced new security procedures. First responders were praised, the victims memorialized, acts of heroism noted. Experts suggested ways to strengthen community and console children. Clergy offered prayers and assurances that the dead were in a better place. As self-appointed judges, the pundits ruled that for such violence there really can be no answer.

But I disagree. We have known for years what causes gun violence. Only if we as a nation have the political will can we stop it.

Since 9/11 nine thousand people are murdered with firearms each year. Twice that number die from gun accidents and suicides, racking up a gun-related body count of roughly 35,000 a year. Since Martin Luther King’s killing there have been roughly 1.25 million deaths involving firearms. This number is twice the carnage from all American wars combined – from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Afghanistan.

The US may no longer be first in education or standard of living, but we are first in guns. Our 280 million civilian weapons are enough to stop any invasion of terrorists, zombies, or aliens – violent fantasies that figure prominently in popular culture. We are fifth in annual numbers of firearm homicides. In contrast, India’s population of a billion has a gun homicide rate a tenth of ours. Japan, with its hundred million citizens, had only eleven murders by firearms in 2008 – compared to our nine thousand the same year.

So, to those who claim there are no answers: look across the ocean. Look across all the oceans for answers which pundits claim are unknowable. Such violence is unique in the Western world. Why is that?

From our favorite TV shows to computer games, to our military spending on endless wars – eventually we must face what a violent society we have become. Here everything is framed as a war: the War on Terror, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Christmas. Now we’ve managed to turn weapons of war on our own children. The gun lobby calls gun regulations a War on the Second Amendment.

A couple of years ago, just in time for Christmas, Activision produced an advertisement for its computer game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, with the subtitle, “There’s a soldier in all of us.” In the ad, playing to a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Let it Bleed” album, a variety of civilians – fast-food, hotel, and office workers, a young girl, and a short-order cook – blast, shoot, bomb, and kill their way through an alien landscape.

The marketing gurus had it just right. There is a soldier in all of us. One retired ATF agent explained to a journalist the “cool factor” of the Bushmaster used in the Connecticut slayings: “When I say cool, it’s because a lot of dedicated people … carried it in the military, [and] would like to shoot it. They see it from the aspect of reliving their days in the military.”

And while the President mourns children who could be his own, the drones he sends to assassinate suspected terrorists have already killed hundreds of children and innocent civilians.

Like a dark twist on Mr. Dickens, this Christmas season the weapons of wars past have come back to haunt us all. None of the comforting words and platitudes recited, and none of the bandaid legislation we will create to make armaments of war in civilian hands a bit more difficult, will change things until we realize what a violent and militaristic nation we have become. Only after we renounce our culture of violence will the terror we have unwittingly unleashed on ourselves finally end.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 23, 2012
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20121223/opinion/212230309

Dear Mr. Dionne,

In your latest piece, “The new Greatest Generation,” you write: “… And here’s the most remarkable thing: Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them… we need to recognize the contribution that this new generation of veterans can make to our nation… we don’t need to be nostalgic about the Greatest Generation. It’s right here among us.”

We are a highly militaristic nation, often given to outright worship of the military. Liberals frequently go out of their way to demonstrate they have no problem rallying around the flag and “supporting the troops.” It’s in our culture.

What I take issue with in pieces like this is that Americans should be complaining about what is asked of the military. Low-level soldiers should be too. It was shocking – and necessary – when Stanley McChrystal blasted the incoherence of the war in Afghanistan. But somebody had to do it. Your new “greatest generation” isn’t doing it for the most part.

I am of the same generation you are. In my view, the “greatest generation” is still the citizen-soldiers of WWII who fought a war that was less morally ambiguous than all the many wars that followed it. The soldiers you praise today as “the greatest generation” are largely victims of a rotten economy who have found a new profession in the military. Surely, as a professor, you have noticed the demographic tilts that have started to manifest themselves in the makeup of the military. They are no longer the sons and daughters of every American family, and they no longer represent all regions of the nation equally. In a very disquieting sense, the military has become a new class of centurion-mercenaries.

I have no doubts that many of the men and women you encounter have a part to play and skills to offer the country. But so do all the rest of us. Today is Thanksgiving, not Veteran’s Day, not Memorial Day, not Independence Day – not one of the many days we already pray at the shrine of militarism.

Since Iraq, Neoconservatives have deserved their reputation as not only wrong but criminally so. Yet somehow Charles Krauthammer has secured a permanent editorial spot in most of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, and that includes the Standard Times.

His latest piece is “Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine.” Krauthammer laments the demise of American influence and the halcyon days when, as in both 1953 and 2003, we could effect regime change any time we chose. He whines that we have fallen so far, so fast, that now we have to ask NATO to help wage wars. He’s upset that Russia has told the US to butt out of Syria and just ordered USAID “democracy builders” out of Russia itself.

Krauthammer says we need not apologize for anything we’ve done, whether Iraq or the 1953 coup in Iran that replaced an elected, secular government with a dictator, or for supporting a dictator in Egypt for 30 years; that we have selflessly intervened in the Middle East six times for no other reason than altruism; and that there must be no daylight between the US and Israel.

Krauthammer accuses Obama of being soft on the mullahs, of turning his back on the Iranian Green Revolution. But clearly a president who has thrown the harshest sanctions at Iran, unleashed crippling computer viruses on its infrastructure, and just taken the MEK (a terrorist group) off the State Department’s terrorist list, can hardly be regarded as “soft.”

The heart of Krauthammer’s argument is that, unless we force our will on the Middle East through military force and regime change, and expand military bases and influence, the resulting vacuum will be filled by angry mobs of Salafists. He forgets that Egyptians just had peaceful elections and that Libyans just threw militias out of Benghazi.

These are the same, stale Neoconservative arguments that got us into Iraq.

I was in Jerusalem with a peace group on June 4th, 2009, watching President Obama on television with a Palestinian Anglican priest. The priest’s take on Obama’s speech was essentially: “well, we’ll see.” His skepticism turned out to be justified because, despite Krauthammer’s rant, there has been no seismic shift in our foreign policy, only minor calibrations. The only real difference is that Krauthammer would engorge the Defense budget a few trillion dollars more than Obama.

To many liberals, Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo was a big disappointment, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

When the US invaded Libya, Democrats like John Kerry actually pushed for the war. So why is Krauthammer so miserable? Because it was accomplished at lower cost, with international cooperation, thereby repudiating Neocon verities. But, again, basic foreign policy never really changed. We are still in the regime change business.

What Krauthammer sees as American decline is actually the rise of other regional players, including nations like Egypt that have thrown off US-supported dictators. Turkey, an ally, is eager to do more than being a “yes man” for US policy, yet it was rebuffed by Obama after proposing a variation of a nuclear processing deal with Iran that the US had previously floated. Russia, now a global energy giant itself, is reasserting its influence in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. And neither Krauthammer nor Obama likes it.

Contrary to Krauthammer’s wishes, a superpower can’t use military power all day long. It must create real and lasting friendships. Because of the legacy of our “selfless” incursions, our list of friends in the region is rather small. We don’t yet know enough about Egypt; it doesn’t even have a constitution yet, but it did hold peaceful elections and remove both a dictator and a military junta without bloodletting. And the US-Israel relationship is as cozy as ever. In Cairo, to the students of Al-Azhar University, Obama said the same thing he said previously to AIPAC: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable.” Our relationship with Israel, which includes looking the other way at the crimes and injustices of a 63-year occupation and shielding Israel from accountability at the UN, doesn’t win many friends. But Obama hasn’t changed it.

So, for all Krauthammer’s tantrums, and for all the President’s oratory, little has altered the status quo. The US is as friendly as ever toward Israel, as tough on Iran as ever, and as ready to use drones and war as the hardliners from the Bush administration.

Krauthammer should be buying Obama a beer.

The Standard Times again is raising a cri de guerre from Lawrence J. Haas, a man who never met a war he didn’t want the taxpayers to fund. I will again make the observation that readers are being treated to more of this syndicated rightwing fare than ever before.

Haas is one of a number of neoconservatives who believe the answer to a failed policy of trying to remake the Middle East in America’s image is more of the same. The Kagans, Raymond Tanter, various Republican presidential candidate’s advisors, and others have been on the warpath lately, calling for military strikes, bunker busters, or – in the case of Haas – “surgical strikes” on Iran. Were it only true that surgeons, rather than butchers, conducted wars.

The cockamamie story of a Texan-Iranian used car salesman and his supposed contacts within the Iranian government plotting an assassination and attacks on multiple embassies, as sketched out by Attorney General Holder and Secretary of State Clinton, has never been properly explained. The Texan-Iranian is an habitual offender with a penchant for drugs and domestic abuse. The missing man, Gholam Shaakuri, whom Haas and others claim is a member of the Iranian government, actually turns out to be a member of the Mujahadeen e-Kalq, the MEK – a terrorist organization which opposes Iran from exile. I wouldn’t expect the administration to show any proof because there is none.

We’ve gone down this road many times before, with the Gulf of Tonkin, in Central America, with exiled Cubans (Bay of Pigs), exiled Iraqis (non-existent yellowcake, fabled WMDs, thanks to Chalabi and others). Pretexts for war are an American tradition. Remember the Maine?

We would do well to get a grip and not let the shrill voices of militarism dictate entry into another war – especially when the only justification is ideological. After decades of wars and drone attacks in Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and now even Kenya, the head spins, and the only thing certain is that we are bankrupting ourselves and making yesterday’s friends into tomorrow’s enemies.

This was published in the Standard Times on November 15, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20111115/opinion/111150307

There is cautious jubilation in the streets of Tripoli and Washington DC. The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is no more.

Although Muammar Gaddafi has yet to be apprehended, the end of his 40-year reign in Libya is over. We have no idea what kind of governance the rebel coalition will cobble together in the coming weeks and months and possibly years, but Liberal Hawks and the mainstream press are already having their own Mission Accomplished moment by declaring that the joint US-NATO operation, initially sold as a humanitarian mission but eventually obvious as nothing more than a regime change effort, was a resounding success. Although Elliott Abrams slammed the strategy of “leading from behind,” as an Obama staffer termed it, other neoconservatives, for example, Paul Bremer, applauded the President’s approach in Libya. Commentators argued that Obama’s strategy was finally a departure from the “Weinberger Doctrine” and that the “strategy represents a step away from […] the notion that the United States must dominate any operation where its military is involved.” Furthermore, said the President, we did it all without a single boot on the ground.

Well, not exactly. Neither the claims of a “bootless” war or the “success” of a some new strategy are true. It’s just been one more American war.

Early on it was well-known there were mercenaries on the ground in Libya. Conservatives took the president to task for lying about units on the ground “Except for Those Guys,” referring to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit and their MV-22 Ospreys. It was also known that American special forces were sent to train rebels on the use of arms dropped into Libya, that the CIA and other forces were dropped in, and the US and other NATO nations all ran these operations while lying to their own citizens. The Cato Institute mocked the president’s use of “Sneakers on the Ground.”

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Now after this hearty meal of lies we are being treated to dessert.

The United States and NATO now state they have no plans to stay in Libya. But even (maybe especially!) the servicemen who read “Stars and Stripes” are skeptical that the United States will stay out of Libya. After all, old habits die hard.

Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, wants to set the matter straight right away and argues that “Libya Now Needs Boots on the Ground.” And given the fact that we already have lots of footprints all over Libya, this is and indeed will be the reality. Libyans will soon discover that the US will be paying a lot of attention to their new coalition government, especially if Islamists are included. Already the American right wing is wetting their pants about the prospect, fearing that Obama has climbed into bed with al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, but Islamism is also a preoccupation of the Foreign Policy establishment.

So, rather than leading from behind, Obama’s Libyan adventure has been a case of leading from behind a curtain. If skeptics are right, the formation of a Libyan government and the adoption of a constitution will be every bit as slow as in Iraq. And why? Not just because of tribal tensions or rusty experience with democracy, but because the US will be there with its boots on the ground, meddling in the selection of legislators and ministers, pressuring the nascent government on oil and assets, trade agreements, military alliances, and serving as the salesman for American military hardware.

Now that’s leading from behind!

When al Qaeda murdered 3000 civilians on our shores in 2001, it was clearly an act of terrorism we felt so deeply that it created in us a blind rage and irrationality that persists today. But quickly we forgot how deeply violence affects any of us as humans as we fashioned an inept, emotional response to a group of cave dwellers we ourselves had created. With the exception of bin Laden’s assassination, we have rarely been able to strike at al Qaeda itself, so we have waged instead proxy wars against half a dozen weak nations in the Middle East — the equivalent of being beaten up by a bully, then going home to slap your little brother around.

In the last decade we have seen American jets, drones, and aircraft carriers drop hundreds of thousands of bombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya — at least, those are the nations we know about. And we Americans have defended Israel’s slaughter of over a thousand civilians in Gaza. Yet we never think of how deeply and for how many decades those who have never harmed us but whom we have harmed will hate us. And how this is the true wellspring of non-state terrorism

The real difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is highly subjective. If al Qaeda had an air force like ours, would it have been an act of terrorism to do what we ourselves are doing this week in Libya, or would we have seen it as an act of war? And, while on the topic of Libya, is the US/NATO intervention and support of Libyan “Contras” any different than Iran’s support to Muqtada al-Sadr in the early years of our second war of choice in Iraq? We call that “terror.”

When Ronald Reagan, his friends in the Argentine dictatorship at the time, and the CIA armed, funded, and organized Contras in Central America secretly, illegally, and in defiance of Congress, Reagan dubbed them “freedom fighters.” Yet the Contras were operating in opposition to a democratically elected government in Nicaragua. No matter, we only recognize democracies we choose to. Reagan was not the first.

When Hamas (which was voted in to power overwhelmingly by Palestinians, and which Israel declared war on the moment it unilaterally left Gaza) uses arms against Israel, it is deemed a terrorist organization. But why isn’t it terrorism when Israel bombs civilians in Gaza? Israel, which has disproportionate influence in American politics and is well-known for its many (and sometimes botched) assassination efforts throughout the world and its frequent human rights abuses, is our friend and of course their enemies (like Hamas) are our enemies. But Hamas poses no threat to the United States, and never has.

Please don’t misconstrue my following remarks. I don’t approve of bus bombings, the murder of the children of even the most violent Zionist settlers in Hebron, or unleashing Qassam rockets on some of my friends in Sderot or Ashkelon (who years ago actually used to go shopping in Gaza). But I don’t believe in murdering civilians. Period. But, please! Hamas is no more a terrorist organization than Israel or the United States — because each one of these parties has chosen to use violence in addition to whatever legal mandate they have, and all end up murdering civilians. Some terrorism “experts” lump Hamas in with al Qaeda (which is not a liberation organization but simply an anarcho-terror group). Yet over the years Hamas has actually been guilty of less civilian slaughter than Israel. It carries out fewer human rights abuses than the Contras ever did, and it was democratically elected, just like Netanyahu. Hamas even roots out extreme Salafist groups sympathetic to al Qaeda. If Hamas were an iceberg, its huge underwater portion (were it recognized by Israel and the United States, both of which refused to respect the results of the Palestinian elections) is its political wing. In many respects Hamas’ goal of getting Israel out of Palestine closely resembles Sinn Fein’s, whose goal was and still is getting the British out of Northern Island. Or the Kurdish independence movement, which wants to keep Turkey out of “autonomous” Kurdish areas and ultimately wants its own nation.

The bitter irony in all this is that the United States, which broke from Britain to create its own country and used a bit of terror to accomplish this, and Israel, which was founded on the Zionist goal of Jewish nationalism and whose founders actually used non-state terrorism against the British, seem to have lost any sympathy for self-determination. Both have expanded their bloated militaries into other nations. And in order to maintain their doomed empires, both regularly depend on state terror. “Collateral damage,” we are told, is unavoidable when protecting our way of life from non-state terrorists.

So terrorists come in all sorts of packages. George Bush famously listed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil.” But the true Axis of Evil consists of any nation that murders civilians. To this list we have to add the United States, Israel, and even Norway. Yes, even this tiny “peaceful” Scandinavian nation sent its jets to bomb targets in Afghanistan and Libya, almost always with civilian “collateral damage. What is”peaceful” then? What is “terrorism?”

The bottom line is: You don’t have to hijack an American Airlines flight and kill thousands to be a terrorist. The guys who do it best, do it regularly, and tax you for the privilege all have their own air forces. Yes, the best terrorists are state terrorists.

While vets are our friends and neighbors, so are the kids and under-employed adults thinking of enlisting.

Yes, we don’t want to demonize anyone. But by the same token some of us don’t particularly want friends and neighbors to go to slaughter (or to slaughter others).

Of our 1.43 million active duty military, 84% of the Army and 94% of the Marine Corps are male. 75% of the military is White, 18% Black, and the rest a mix of other ethnicities. 52% are married. 93% have a high school diploma or GED. The greatest number of soldiers are between 21 and 30. However, of the 4300 who have died in Iraq so far, more than half were 18-24 and minorities accounted for 30% of the deaths. These are all characteristics of the new “professional” military consisting of all “volunteers.”

Some of this picture — of a white, older, married male military — is skewed by the fact that many men hadn’t completely thought through staying in the Reserves which, during the height of the Iraq war, accounted for almost half of all active duty personnel. A resulting “back door draft” forced many of these men to “re-enlist” against their will because there were not enough troops to wage the Iraq war.

In a CRS study of active duty deaths since 1980, only 10% of all deaths were due to hostilities. 52.6% were accidents, 17.53% illnesses, 13.72% suicides, and 4.8% were homicides. The mortality rate in the study ranges from 0.0495% in 2000 to 0.1214% in 2007.

But for each of the 45,706 deaths since 1980, there are 7 to 10 injuries for every death.

The 55,482,849 (!!) enlistments since 1980 have also resulted in millions of Americans with mental problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse problems; and who have had difficulty in keeping their marriages, families, and jobs afloat.

Forget for a second the $1.1 trillion that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost to-date.

The human and social costs of militarization are costing us more than we know.

Thank you for printing Karen Jacob’s wonderful letter from the Midwest. Her observation that a militaristic United States is all her college-age son has known in his life really struck me. With a twenty-one year-old of my own, I remember quite clearly the CNN reports from Baghdad shortly after he was born.

Of course, to his generation we have bequeathed an additional $4 TRILLION debt, as an article buried on page A4 reports. The Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute (http://www.watsoninstitute.org/eisenhower) calculates that in just the last ten years this staggering debt – almost one-third of the total – was racked-up by wars which, by objective assessment, have been dismal failures like all our wars of choice following WWII. And these recent wars, as Jacob points out, have extinguished over a quarter of a million human lives and created private psychological hells for a large number of our returning troops.

Imagine our economic strength and health, and the respect the rest of the world would show us, if we weren’t quite as trigger-happy. Yet we cloak ourselves in the delusion that the world resents us for what we have, not for what we do. When our number one national priority is building the world’s largest military, every international nail must be pounded using our expensive military hammer. This way of thinking has to change.

During the last twenty years, particularly the last decade, we have permitted our Constitutional freedoms to be systematically eroded. The big surprise to many is that the Obama administration has been every bit as hostile to civil liberties as its predecessor. You can’t go anywhere without being x-rayed, scanned, ID’d, having to partially disrobe in front of latex-gloved inspectors, or submitting to bag inspections. Federal agencies no longer need much of a reason to spy on you, search your home, wiretap you, or infiltrate your religious and political organizations. Even local law enforcement agencies are getting into the act. America in 2011 has more than a passing resemblance to the Soviet Union of 1961.

This is what we’ve bequeathed to the next generation – a nation that has squandered its riches, destroyed the safety net that ensured a healthy middle class, neglected its own infrastructure, outsourced everything but consumerism, lost the last bits of respect anyone ever had for it, and has seen other economies and nations eclipse it in both wealth and influence.

There are those who say that everything we’ve done was the unavoidable need to to fight to protect our democracy. But as the Romans, the British, the Russians, and every other empire discovered along the way, empire is a costly addiction and one that cannot be sustained.

At some point we must recognize that democracy is not preserved by buying fleets of drones, aircraft carriers, and F16’s, hiring soldiers and mercenaries, doubling the number of spy agencies, having a thousand military bases in a hundred countries, throwing our weight around in four or five simultaneous wars, building moats around ourselves, or imposing our concept of democracy on the rest of the world while our own citizens slide into poverty.

Democracy is not about fighting to keep what we have because the accumulation of power alone has never made any people free or democratic. Democracy is about being clear about who we are as a nation, and about creating as many options as possible for citizens to lead free and productive lives. These rights were intended for human citizens, not for multinational corporations promising to share a few crumbs of their prosperity with us whenever they remember to pay their taxes. Democracy implies a commitment to “others” – to neighbors, to our communities, to those who come to join us in this grand experiment, and above all to our children.

This Fourth of July, amid all the fireworks and patriotic speeches, spend a few moments thinking about what kind of nation you want to leave to your children and grandchildren.

This is what our nation’s founders were thinking those many years ago.

Al Jazeera has a series called Empire hosted by Marwan Bishara. Recently Bishara did a segment on Hollywood called “Hollywood and the war machine” which took an unflattering look at how — long before the American press began “embedding” with the military — sleeping with the Pentagon was Standard Operating Procedure in Hollywood. Bishara interviewed outsiders Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Christopher Hitchens for his segment. Although the United States has lost almost every war following World War II, Hollywood (with incredible Pentagon meddling) nevertheless projects an image of the military as an unstoppable victor. How can this be?

At one point in the video Michael Moore describes American war movies as “war porn.” A spot-on characterization of a nation that rarely succeeds in its conquests but still likes to fantasize that it can still get it up with anyone of its choosing.

The latest Call of Duty Black Ops advertisement is absolutely, 100% correctly, titled “There’s a Soldier in All of Us.”

We have seen the enemy, and he is indeed us.

In the ad, to a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (the “Let it Bleed” album), a variety of businessmen, celebrities, fast-food, hotel, and office workers, a young girl, and a short-order cooks blast, shoot, bomb, and kill their way through some unspecified Middle Eastern country. How appropriate! We are, after all, precisely the folks who voted for these wars and donated our children’s bodies and souls to fight them. 

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Have you ever noticed that every ideological dispute and every problem to be dealt with becomes a war in the United States?

This is often the realm of the far Right’s Kulturkampf against creeping liberalism, atheism, and the like. But not exclusively. It can be just as easily attacks on civil liberties or social programs which are likened to war by progressives.

And if it’s none of the above, then it’s a Federal war on drugs, crime, terror, poverty, childhood obesity… just add your own campaign name.

We are so swamped with thousands of simultaneous wars that we don’t have time to understand or stick with any of them. We are a nation in a perpetual state of war. We can’t seem to live without it.

Foreign policy types have gone into overdrive dissecting the musings of Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic Monthly on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran as if they were passages from the Mishna. Goldberg’s career has been notable as a shill for the IDF (he was also a former solder) and he was also a notorious proponent of the Iraq war, so his conclusions on the inevitability of such an attack are not surprising, but neither is the fact that so many of his sources are anonymous. His article is a major piece of Israeli propaganda, but the U.S. has its own reasons for becoming embroiled in another war.

I have a print subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, and it’s again no surprise that on page 63 of the magazine there’s an obligatory picture of IDF jets flying above Auschwitz as if to highlight the “reasons” for Israel’s posture. The Israeli term “hasbara,” meaning “explanation” or “spin,” can be understood completely by reading Goldberg’s article. Bring on the violins.

But this 4th American war – and that is precisely what we would have if we became involved – is not about an existential threat to Israel. It is not about Ahmedinijad-as-Haman destroying the Jews of Shushan or Ahmedinijad-as-Hitler sending every Jew to a nuclear crematorium.

It’s all about the U.S. interest in Israel’s nuclear hegemony.

Otherwise, why would we play along with Israel’s policy of nuclear “ambiguity” and not press for a more consistent approach to nonproliferation in the Middle East?

If the fear really were that the Iranians were going to nuke Israel, well, they’d be nuking several million Palestinians and sending radioactive clouds over Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, too, wouldn’t they? The Iranians may be unfriendly, but they’re not stupid – and they’re not reckless, either. Persians, like Israeli Jews, still have to live in an Arab neighborhood. That’s why the Israeli protestations about a second Holocaust ring so hollow in my ears.

Yes, Iranian nukes have nothing to do with an existential threat to Israel and very little to do with the often-reported Iranian “national pride.” Iranians, from the Ayatollahs to the Green Movement, are sick of the West intervening in regional affairs, threatened in part with the Israeli attack poodle. Having nukes of their own would neutralize the West’s advantage in the Middle East. And that’s precisely the reason for Iran’s nuclear program.

Here’s Ayatollah Rafsanjani in his 2001 Al Quds speech:

“Because colonialism and imperialism will not easily leave the people of the world alone. Therefore, you can see that they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favors Israel.  Well, from a numerical point of view, it cannot have as many troops as Muslims and Arabs do. So they have improved the quality of what they have. Classical weaponry has its own limitations. They have limited use. They have a limited range as well. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.

If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality. Of course, you can see that the Americans have kept their eyes peeled and they are carefully looking for even the slightest hint that technological advances are being made by an independent Islamic country. If an independent Islamic country is thinking about acquiring other kinds of weaponry, then they will do their utmost to prevent it from acquiring them. Well, that is something that almost the entire world is discussing right now.”

Of course it is possible to interpret this as an Iranian threat toward Israel, but I think the emphasis must be on the strategic neutralization of the West’s nuclear proxy.

One question not frequently asked is: what was the U.S. involvement in Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Israel’s 2007 bombing of Syria’s al-Kibar reactor? If past is prologue, then it might be useful to examine the history. A “senior US intelligence officer” testified to Congress in 2008 on American participation of the al-Kibar bombing:

“One of the things that I’m sure also people are wondering is whether there was any discussion between us and the Israelis about policy options and how to respond to these facts. We did discuss policy options with Israel. Israel considered a Syrian nuclear capability to be an existential threat to the state of Israel. After these discussions, at the end of the day Israel made its own decision to take action. It did so without any green light from us – so-called ‘green light’ from us; none was asked for, none was given. […] We understand the Israeli action. We believe this clandestine reactor was a threat to regional peace and security, and we have stated before that we cannot allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.”

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

The facility had been under watch by the United States since 2003. Without having to read between the lines too much, it is clear that the bombing of the al-Kibar reactor was done with the assistance, permission, advance knowledge, and blessings of the Bush administration, which saw the reactor as an effort by two of Bush’s “axes of evil” to threaten “regional peace and security.”

Goldberg is correct only in his conclusion that the US will assist Israel with the attack – not for all the Israeli propaganda reasons he enumerates.

Israel’s reason is not to protect itself from an “existential threat” but to continue to amass armaments to delay the inevitable end of its Occupation of Palestine and create more “facts on the ground.”

The U.S. reason is not to preserve regional peace and security but to simply ensure continued nuclear hegemony by its proxy, Israel.

If and when the US becomes involved in the bombing of Iran – even if only by logistical support, looking the other way while Israeli F16s fly over Iraq, or providing the bunker-buster bombs Israel will use – it will not be an unwilling participant in the next war, its fourth and possibly a World War.

While foreign policy junkies were busy parsing Jeffrey Goldberg’s overhyped article in the Atlantic on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran, another article in the same issue of the Atlantic by Robert D. Kaplan attempted to repurpose one of Henry Kissinger’s old Cold War theories for use with Iran – specifically, that the only way to deal with upstart revolutionary nations like Iran is to be willing to engage with them in limited nuclear war. Kaplan writes:

We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book of a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.

What is he saying? That, should Goldberg’s wet dream not come true and that Iran does get the bomb, the United States should be willing to use its own against it – regardless of preemptive use or massive civilian casualties. Kaplan reflects a little on the implications, but seems pretty happy with the war criminal’s approach anyway:

At the time of his writing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, some analysts took Kissinger to task for what one reviewer called “wishful thinking”- in particular, his insufficient consideration of civilian casualties in a limited nuclear exchange. Moreover, Kissinger himself later moved away from his advocacy of a NATO strategy that relied on short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance the might of the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. (The doctrinal willingness to suffer millions of West German civilian casualties to repel a Soviet attack seemed a poor way to demonstrate the American commitment to the security and freedom of its allies.) But that does not diminish the utility of Kissinger’s thinking the unthinkable.

This analysis is typical of Kaplan. In 2005 he tried to sell the same stinking Kissinger fish, this time for war with China.

Couldn’t the Atlantic have hired two writers with different views for these bookended articles? More to the point: couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of real Iran experts? And couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of writers who personally had NOT served in the Israeli army?

Kaplan, a stealth neocon armed with only a BA from UConn, seems to have the ear of ostensible Liberals. Unfortunately, his influence is all out of proportion to his scholarship or the quality of the goods he’s selling. Tom Bissell’s blistering review of Kaplan’s career and work shines light not only Kaplan’s errors of judgment – but that shown by those who peddle Kaplan’s work.

According to Henry Nichols, U.S. torture and suspension of legal protections is “minor” compared to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and North Korea. Nichols, describing one of his own violent fantasies in which he throws the Guantanamo detainees in the ocean and chums the waters, demonstrates just how aberrant and repulsive torture is and the depths of the souls from which torture is even thinkable. This is the “minor” cost of torture.

Besides revealing something of the psychology of those who think torture and civilized society can somehow coexist, Nichols goes on to trowel on a bunch of nonsense about both the detainees and their rights. He still maintains they are the worst of the worst, yet are being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, even being paid for their work. Unfortunately, 99% of these detainees (who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place when the Northern Alliance picked them up, never had any connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Of the 877 housed in Guantanamo, only 3 have ever been convicted of anything.

I would like to see Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, Maj. General Geoffrey Miller, and any of the Attorneys General (or even congressmen and congresswomen) who played a role or looked the other way brought to account for their participation in illegal detentions, torture, and extreme rendition. Photos of this treatment must go on public record, along with honest assurances that this will never happen again. In addition, all remaining detainees should receive trials in civilian courts – which have actually had a better track record in convicting terrorists than secret military tribunals. President Obama is making a huge mistake in trying to sweep all this under the carpet, as his predecessor did. A Special Investigator should be appointed to get to the bottom of this dark chapter of our history.

Those, like Mr. Nichols, who scoff at the severity of U.S. torture methods, or who think “it could never happen here” delude themselves and should be given the opportunity to experience waterboarding personally before declaring it so “minor”. Torture and contravention of the Constitution has happened here. We need to confront this reality and make sure it remains anathema to our (not always observed, but at least professed) democratic values.

This was published in the Standard Times on May 19, 2009
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20090519/opinion/905190327

In a recent letter, Henry Nichols argues for keeping Guantanamo Bay open, wants to keep using torture, and complains that detainees moved to the US will be given trials on the mainland. For a former prison guard and policeman, Mr. Nichols displays an alarming contempt for the American legal system and our Constitution.

Nichols certainly favors the word “animal” to describe the detainees, but he apparently doesn’t know who they really are. According to a study of 517 detainees by Mark Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and legal counsel to two of them, only 8% of the detainees can be identified as al Qaeda fighters and only 5% had been arrested by US forces. 86% had been arrested “somewhere”, by “somebody”, for “something” – and that’s about all we have been told. Of course we want to keep really dangerous people locked up, but we really should know who they are first and what they are charged with. Many of the lawyers like Denbeaux who have defended detainees have expressed their disgust with what are basically kangaroo courts following on the heels of torture.

A recent scandal in Britain concerning US pressure on the UK to suppress reports of the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British national, point out the illusion of military justice at Guantanamo. Even if we do not presume their innocence, we still can’t claim a detainee is guilty until he has been tried in a real court system. Richard Clark, President Bush’s former counter-terrorism expert, has pointed out that several detainee cases have already been tried in the United States in real courts. The sky has not yet fallen.

Mr. Nichols then makes the amusing argument that placing these suspects in a conventional prison among the main prison population would raise costs – as if costs alone should determine whether justice is sought. Aside from the inadvisability of doing this, apparently he hasn’t considered the costs of running a completely dedicated supermax prison in Cuba.

Finally, let’s not forget: if the United States makes a practice of holding foreign nationals (and even some Americans, in violation of the Constitution) in prisons without trial – it will not be long before Americans begin popping up as inmates without rights in foreign prisons. Do we really want to go down this road?

I have jury duty in a few weeks, and as I sit in the jury room in Taunton, bored and wishing I were somewhere else, I will remember the rights that our Constitution defends. And how people like Mr. Nichols are all-too willing to destroy them without a single thought.

This was published in the Standard Times on February 11, 2009
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20090211/opinion/902110355

Today is the anniversary of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in 1776, and an appropriate date to reflect on the nature of the Iraqi insurgency. The resistance in Iraq today is not much different than that from our own history.

Armies of the 18th Century usually took a winter break, but Washington’s use of guerilla tactics allowed the Colonists to take Trenton. Other guerilla tactics, employed by hit-and-run fighters like Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” also served to weaken British resolve. Improvised weapons were also common. Marion’s sabers and muskets, for example, were created by local blacksmiths. Terrorism was used to frighten those who might be tempted to aid the British. Collaborators were murdered, tortured, or their homes were torched. After the war, collaborators were purged from their positions and many sought refuge in Canada, Britain, or the West Indies. Alliances with “foreigners” who supplied the Colonists with cash, and military experts such as the Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben who provided expertise in military tactics, created a better-funded and better-disciplined resistance.

The War of Independence ended up involving 175,000 of the approximately 400,000 men in the Colonies. Most civilians felt the sting of war, from either the loss of a family member, a home destroyed, looted, commandeered, by being shot at or harmed, or having to flee as the British invaded. The longer the British occupation dragged on, the smaller the Loyalist support.

In the end, a British force of mainly conscripts who no longer understood the sense of dying in a foreign land lost to a weaker military they had defeated in a majority of the war’s battles. But the sheer size of the occupied land made the continuing occupation impossible, and the costs of the occupation could no longer be justified.

From the British loss in India, to the American loss in Vietnam and Russia’s loss in Afghanistan, from the lessons of the Roman empire and Alexander the Great, this seems to be a lesson that has to be learned over and over: that no foreign country can occupy even the weakest country for long.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 29, 2004
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20041229/opinion/312299932