Assuming that the committee truly believed that the Obama presidency would signal a meaningful change in American nuclear policy, they did not have long to wait for a clear refutation of that thesis. Having learned in advance that Obama would be visiting Japan ahead of last week’s APEC summit in Singapore, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki extended formal invitations for Obama to visit their cities. Had he done so, he would have become the first U.S. president to visit the cities since they were the victims of the world’s first nuclear attacks. However, Obama turned down the requests, citing scheduling concerns and offering vague promises to visit the cities sometime in the future.

While such a move may come as a surprise to the Nobel committee, it is decidedly less shocking to those who have been studying American nuclear policy for decades. One such man is Motofumi Asai, the President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who noted in a recent interview with The Corbett Report that, while surprised that Obama says he intends to visit Hiroshima one day, “anyhow, it is clearly not now.”

“In a very long historical term, his speech in Prague in April may be remembered as a departure from the nuclear century to the non-nuclear century,” Asai said about the nuclear rhetoric that won Obama the Peace Prize. But, he added, “I am rather sober about the prospects of a change of U.S. nuclear policy.”

Observers of the Obama administration’s actions on the nuclear front would indeed have good reason to be ’sober’ about the prospects of Obama living up to his nuclear disarmament rhetoric. As the Washington Times reported last month, the Obama administration has reaffirmed an unspoken decades-old U.S. policy to officially ignore Israel’s nuclear stockpile. This support ensures that Israel does not have to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require them to relinquish their hundreds of nuclear bombs. As the Washington Times report makes explicit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally revealed in a television interview that Obama’s rhetoric about a nuclear-free world is not meant to apply to America or its allies:

“It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran,” the Israeli leader said. “But I want to remind you that in my first meeting with President Obama in Washington I received from him, and I asked to receive from him, an itemized list of the strategic understandings that have existed for many years between Israel and the United States on that issue. It was not for naught that I requested, and it was not for naught that I received [that document].”

The report exposing Obama’s nuclear hypocrisy was printed just one week before he received the Nobel Prize for his valiant efforts to bring about a “nuclear-free world”. Even Obama’s most logical political allies have questioned the sincerity of his “commitment” to the abolition of nuclear weapons. As Joseph Gerson wrote on CommonDreams.org earlier this year:

…there appears to be less to Obama’s ‘perhaps not in my lifetime’ commitment to nuclear weapons abolition than the adoring press has let on. It is no accident that in his message to the NPT Preparatory Conference earlier this month that he made no reference to abolition. Similarly, the subject did not arise when President Obama and former Secretary of State George Shultz spoke with the press following their meeting at the White House.

Now Obama’s most fervent supporters are noting that his actual actions on nuclear disarmament so far have amounted to a series of token gestures and empty platitudes. Even basic steps like affirming a no-first strike nuclear policy have not been forthcoming. Obama’s nuclear promise, it seems, can be added to the bonfire of dashed hopes along with his broken promise to end warrantless wiretapping, his broken promises to close Guantanamo and end secret detentions, his broken promise to not use signing statements, his broken promise to allow voters time to read legislation before it gets signed, and his broken promise not to appoint lobbyists to his administration.

Sadly, this is not the first time the Nobel committee has erred so badly in its judgement of a world leader promising nuclear eradication. In 1974, Japan’s Prime Minister Eisaku Sato won the prize for his formulation of the so-called Three Non-nuclear Principles that every Japanese government has paid lip service to since they were first adopted by the Diet in 1971: that Japan will neither develop nor possess nuclear weapons, nor allow them in their territory.[16] It has since come to light that Sato himself broke the third principle when he negotiated secret agreements with the Nixon administration that allowed the U.S. to bring nuclear weapons into Japanese territory.

Now, with President Obama’s nuclear abolition rhetoric turning out to be more hot air, it seems the Nobel Peace Prize committee once again has egg on its face. Unless of course it is the intention of the committee not to reward Obama for his non-nuclear words, but to shame his administration into living up to its lofty language. Perhaps the Nobel committee is in fact using their prize as a tool for offering an ultimatum to the Obama administration: Follow through on your promises or be exposed as a fraud for all the world to see. If this is indeed the case, then Obama’s White House should be shamed into peace and disarmament. The fact that this “man of peace” is in fact every bit the warmonger his presidential predecessor was presents perhaps the largest chink in his fast-disintegrating corporate media-supplied “president of the world” armour. Those who are truly interested in bringing about a nuclear-free world can start simply enough by condemning Obama for his failure to visit Hiroshima.

A buddy of mine we called R, spent a year in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam begrudgingly helping the US launch jet planes to strafe the people and countryside of Vietnam. He joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as soon as he got his discharge papers. He and I spent many an hour talking politics, books, and women over the years. One conversation occurred when we were somewhere in California’s Central Valley on Veterans’ Day. As we sat in the shade of some trees in Salinas and sipped surreptitiously on a quart of Rainier Ale, R began talking about friends of his from his Navy days. After all, noted R bitterly, this is our day. He continued by noting how much better vets were treated after they were dead. Shit, he said, you even get a decent burial. And a freakin’ American flag to go with it. When you’re in their goddam uniform, you ain’t no better than a maltreated dog who they’re trying to kill. If you get out alive, they just want you to go away. Especially if you have an ailment that can be attributed to their war. R eventually married and helped raise two children. When he was around fifty he was diagnosed with a disease related to the war that was exacerbated by his reckless lifestyle in the years immediately following his discharge. He met an untimely death a few years ago while waiting for a transplant. He did get a decent burial. And a freakin’ flag.
There are many more men and women who were in the military with their own stories. Some have better endings than others. No one makes it through unscathed. Some just hide their scars better. That’s what a friend who did veterans counseling before he died told me. Washington’s latest wars have produced a new crop of these men and women. Although the wars may be different, the wounds are equally painful.

Often left unsaid when the media writes about returning veterans and their trouble adjusting to civilian life is how a veteran’s loved ones are affected. If one wishes to maintain the vocabulary of modern war, then the appropriate label for the lovers, partners, parents and children of the returning soldier would be collateral damage. Think of a cluster bomb. If the returning veteran is a casualty of the explosions that occur on original impact, then the veterans’ families and loved ones would be those who are the casualties that occur from the bomblets that detonate later. Of course, this scenario of injury and death is also replicated among those whom the imperial army has attacked many more times over.

Author and antiwar organizer Beverly Gologorsky wrote a book a couple years ago titled Things We Do To Make It Home. This book was recently released in paperback by Seven Stories Press. It is a beautifully wrought story of a group of Vietnam veterans, their lovers, families and friends set in the 1990s. Twenty years after their return from the jungles of Nam the world they live in is still littered with the veterans’ experience in combat. Like so many of their real-life comrades, the men in the story have left much damage in their wake. Simultaneously, there is a love that binds them all together. That same love reaches across the lines between suburb and city while it tears relationships into remnants barely held together by threads of memory. There is no blame here, despite the desire to find somewhere to place the despair and anger resulting from the demons that define the lives these men have lived. The women who have loved them despite their better sense, the hopelessness the men hide with drugs and alcohol and the children who wonder where there father really is even when he’s sitting in the same room are portrayed with an emotional and spiritual depth the reader won’t find in newspaper reports about veteran suicides and PTSD statistics. There isn’t a lot of hope in this novel, despite the optimism voiced by some of its characters. These are men who know they were screwed and can’t seem to figure out how to get past the war they were sent to fight. Nonetheless, they go on living life as best as they can while often unaware of the pain they cause–a pain directly related to the guilt they feel because of the injury they caused to those their commanders called the enemy while fighting Washington’s war.

I had another friend named Loren. Like so many others, he was drafted into the Army against his will. When he got his orders to go to Vietnam, he took a truck from the motor pool where he worked and ran it through several gates and a couple of parked cars in the Officer’s Club parking lot at the Colorado Army base he was stationed. He did six months in the stockade and was thrown out of the Army. He celebrated by going to a rock festival and ended up in Berkeley. His father didn’t speak to him for years, but it was worth it to Loren just to have avoided the war. After reading Things We Do To Make It Home, one wishes once again that more soldiers would follow Loren’s example and just refuse to fight.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

– “For What it’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield, 1967

The birth of “The Summer of Love” occurred on June 1, 1967, with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

On June 5, 1967, the Six-Day War began and led to Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank.

On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a spy ship was attacked by Israel while navigating in international waters. Although they were flying the American flag, 34 men were killed and 172 were wounded out of a crew of 294. After eighteen hours of enduring a failure to support the troops by the Johnson Administration, they were finally rescued.

On Nov. 8, 2009, Haaretz reported on a “classified, unreleased” portion of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s ‘Plan’ that offers elements of Netanyahu’s call for “economic peace” and adds justice and common sense.

Concerns are growing in Israel’s government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the United Nations Security Council.

The reports indicated that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has reached a secret understanding with the Obama administration over U.S. recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

This would expose that any Israeli presence across the Green Line, including east Jerusalem, is what it is under the rule of law: an illegal incursion.

The plan specifies that at the end of a designated period for bolstering national institutions the PA, in conjunction with the Arab League, would file a “claim of sovereignty” to the UN Security Council and General Assembly over the borders of June 4, 1967 during the Six-Day War, in which Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza.

During the summer of ‘67, the Republican representative from Iowa, H.R. Gross stood up in The House and said:

Is this Government now, directly or indirectly, subsidizing Israel in the payment of full compensation for the lives that were destroyed, the suffering of the wounded, and the damage from this wanton attack? It can well be asked whether these Americans were the victims of bombs, machine gun bullets and torpedoes manufactured in the United States and dished out as military assistance under foreign aid.¹

By November 1967, lawmakers were willing to spend six million USA tax dollars to build schools in Israel but during the debate, Representative Gross introduced an amendment that “not one dollar of U.S. credit or aid of any kind [should] go to Israel until there is a firm settlement with regard to the attack and full reparations have been made [and Israel] provides full and complete reparations for the killing and wounding of more than 100 United States citizens in the wanton, unprovoked attack…I wonder how you would feel if you were the father of one of the boys who was killed in that connection-or perhaps you do not have any feelings with respect to these young men who were killed, wounded and maimed, or their families.”²

Gross’s amendment failed, justice remains delayed and American tax payers continue to support the Jewish State which has reaped a more violent and insecure planet for innocent civilians.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America’s entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.³

Congressman Paul Findley said:

It is time to speak openly and honestly about Israel. But, in American politics, that is still forbidden. Pity that we cannot seem to shed our fear of Israel. We are afraid to speak out on Capitol Hill, for fear of losing the next election. They are more like trained poodles jumping through hoops than leaders!

Why this fear? How did we get here? Forty years ago to this day, June 8, 1967 the change occurred, the floodgates opened and money poured into Israel as never before. When President Johnson heard about the U.S.S. Liberty being attacked by Israel he ordered the rescue fighter planes to return to the deck. The rescue mission was aborted and the survivors have said they heard LBJ’s voice tell Admiral Giess, ‘Get those planes back on deck. I don’t care if the ship sinks, I will not embarrass Israel.’

LBJ also threatened to court martial anyone who reported what had happened. Johnson accepted Israel’s false claim of “mistaken identity” and he knew it was a lie. That is when the change began and Israel learned they could get away with murdering U.S.A. soldiers.

In June 2005, the whistle blower of Israel’s WMD program, Mordechai Vanunu told me:

When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them. Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.

In the 1970s, Israel built many fortresses and spent lots of money on equipment, but nothing on the people I saw, who were oppressed and under occupation. I got really mad and upset every time I thought about how much money they wasted, but I kept my mouth shut and kept it all to myself. After a year, I finished my training and was assigned to train more soldiers. For me it was all futility and waste; I saw these children become soldiers and thought, What a complete waste. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, I was home on leave. I returned the next day to my station near Ramallah. Soldiers with less than a month of training got called to go with me to the Jordan Valley. There weren’t enough trained troops, and we were lucky we didn’t see any fighting and got to return to base after three days. After a few months, we all went to Syria and the Golan Heights. When Kissinger coordinated the cease-fire, the Israeli army destroyed the area before leaving there…

Fast forward to 2009: Vanunu awaits another High Court date seeking the right to leave the Jewish State while Prime Minister Fayyad, is winning international support seeking a Security Council resolution to replace Resolutions 242 and 338.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, in the aftermath of the Six Day War. The preamble refers to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security.”

242 requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East and required the withdrawal of Israel armed forces from the territories occupied in the then ‘recent’ conflict.

On October 22, 1973, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 338 called for a ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War in accordance with a joint proposal by the United States and the Soviet Union for a bilateral cease fire to take effect within 12 hours.

It also called upon the parties concerned to immediately implement Security Council Resolution 242 and insisted that negotiations between the parties concerned would be aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.

Fayyad’s 2009 Plan is garnering positive responses from the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Sweden. Haaretz reported that, “Fayyad added that he presented the proposal to the U.S. administration and did not receive any signal of opposition in response.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a mediator between Israel and Syria during Ehud Olmert’s term as prime minister, has resume the role as an intermediary between the two countries. He said his government can be an “honest broker” in such talks but Netanyahu responded with reluctance over Turkish mediation due to the ongoing tension between Ankara and Jerusalem, which Patrick Seale reported on Oct 16, 2009:

Turkey’s sudden cancellation this week of a major air force exercise with Israel was a salutary wake-up call. Evidently, Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan found it necessary to cancel the drill because of the widespread hostility to Israel among Turkey’s population. He has had to take Turkish public opinion into account. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu spelled out the reasons in diplomatic terms: ‘We hope that the situation in Gaza will improve…and that will create a new atmosphere in Turkish-Israeli relations…’

To offend the Turks is no small matter. Israel cannot afford to ignore the warning or sweep it under the carpet. Turkey has for many years been Israel’s main regional strategic partner — indeed its only one since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Losing Turkey could turn out to be the worst setback Israel has suffered for a very long time.

Turkey’s army is the largest in the region; so is its industrial base. Its GDP, at over $1,000bn (in 2008) dwarfs that of the oil producers, whether Arab or Iranian, and is four times larger than Israel’s own. In recent years, Turkey has greatly improved its relations with Iran and with neighboring Arab states — Syria in particular — and is emerging as the wise ‘big brother’ of the greater Middle East. It has offered to mediate local conflicts and is attempting to spread stability and security all around it.

With the Fayyad Plan gaining steam and a ‘big brother’ like Turkey, peace in the Holy Land no longer seems to be just a pipe dream.

1. James Scott, The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship (Simon & Schuster, June 2009): 271-272.
2. Scott: 272-273.
3. ”U.S. Military Aid and the Israel/Palestine Conflict,” If Americans Knew.

Was it worth it? The answer partly depends on whether one works for or has holdings in one of the oil companies that made out well in the aftermath.

The final major prize in the war, southern Iraq’s giant Rumaila oil field, was finally awarded on November third with mixed results from an American standpoint. This is because the only successful bidders for it were BP and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the second organization, it can be assumed, will primarily support Asian interests over ones favoring Western nations.

Nonetheless, plans are moving forward by the BP-CNPC consortium to invest $US15 billion into Rumaila, the fifth biggest known single reserve of oil in the world, to almost triple production from one million barrels daily to 2.85m and, if successful, the field would be the world’s second biggest in existence. While BP will own a 38 percent stake, CNPC will retain a 37 percent share and Iraq will hold 25 percent.

Meanwhile, the US government, that invested so much in the Iraq War, is said to be disappointed in the overall outcome, particularly in that CNPC was awarded another favorable ($US3bn) deal in Iraq — rights to the Ahdeb field in Wasit province in southeastern Iraq. On account, it is by far the largest foreign player.

This being the case is probably above all vexing since the Chinese people did not have to sacrifice lots of lives and taxpayer money into the Iraq war since their focus was concentrated on strengthening the economy in their homeland all the while the USA and its NATO allies remained largely set on trying to gain control of the fossil fuels for themselves through invasion. Even so, the USA and NATO partners, despite an all-out effort to dominate the region, lost most of the reward.

“The Chinese are very aggressive here.” According to Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, “They are very eager to build up their presence in Iraq’s oil industry.” Furthermore, a CNPC-led consortium is one of the three bidders for West Qurna 1, another gargantuan field. A group overseen by Russia’s Lukoil and another conglomerate commanded by Exxon Mobil are also in the running for this field.

In consideration of its tremendous success to date, CNPC has developed, along with another Chinese oil company, a special Iraq-focused joint enterprise, called Al-Wah — an Arabic term meaning ‘the oasis’ — to expand the Chinese presence and work in Iraq. At the same time, the Chinese, along with not having to subsume any of the war costs, do not have to bear any guilt over the heavy human toll — assessed by some groups to be a million and a third Iraqis killed, along with 4,680 American military personnel and additional foreign forces from other nations.

At the same time that various organizations involved with fossil fuels are competing to obtain profitably favorable arrangements for themselves and the respective countries to which they supply fuels, leading climate change scientist around the world are putting out an entirely contrary message. They are indicating that, very quickly, global fossil fuel dependence has to greatly shrink to avoid run-away climate change that would cause much of the world’s surface to be inhospitable to life. In other words, an almost complete cessation of its use must occur fairly soon despite ever increased worldwide demand.

For example, John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the main environmental scientist for the German government, told officials from Barack Obama’s administration that U.S. carbon emissions must fall from its annual 20 tons per person to zero if there is going to be an even slight possibility for the climate to stabilize with a 2C increase.

As Stephen Leahy points out in “Four Degrees Of Devastation“: “Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.”

He goes on to add:

A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.

It is a world with a one- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, leaving hundreds of millions homeless. This will head to 12 metres in the coming centuries as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets melt, according to papers presented at the [UK international climate science] conference [recently held] in Oxford.

Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.

As Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, points out in “Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change?“, “It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions — the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades — we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.”

At the same time, his views are echoed by Lord Stern, former World Bank chief economist, who stated, “A rise of 5C would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We’ve been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don’t know what that’s like. We haven’t seen 3C for a few million years, and we don’t know what that looks like either.”

“Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet,” Lord Stern shared with a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen after which he went on to warn that the risk associated with governments not adequately addressing climate change in time to avert the brunt of the disaster would lead to horrendous consequences. According to him, these involve risking at least a third of the world’s aggregate wealth, including a minimum of a thirty percent reduction in consumption per person worldwide or, put another way, global GDP would drop to at least 70 percent of current output.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media (MSM) in the United States reveals little information about the degree that the public must radically change lifestyle habits and expectations for economic growth. Little is mentioned about the degree that climate change could have catastrophic impacts across the globe and no government or business leaders are suggesting that reduced consumption of material goods, delimitations in fossil fuel use and other major changes should be carried out very soon. Likewise, none are encouraging ecologically friendly, self-sustaining, financially vibrant communities to be strengthened, nor hinting that transnational patterns of commerce drain dollars out of the country.

In a similar vein, none indicate that these very same globalized patterns that enrich corporate tycoons exacerbate our reliance on fossil fuels due to long distance transportation of raw materials and finished products, as well as the extraordinary amounts of energy used in a massive production of lots of unnecessary merchandise. Obviously, their doing so would be run counter to their extraordinary financial gains at the expense of the poorly paid, everyday work force.

So instead, we have “a business as usual” mentality shoveled forth with bailouts for major commercial organizations, policies to purchase cars subsidized by the federal government, happy-go-lucky TV programs that focus on trivial topics and plenty of advertisements informing the populace that it ought to purchase this or that item to have the latest look in fall fashion, the best anti-aging formula or whatever else for which doing so will, obviously, raise one’s personal carbon and overall ecological footprints in most instances.

At the same time, one can assume that there are no immediate plans to direct society into a pattern of living that is regionally self-reliant (so as to avoid carbon footprints from imports derived from other areas) and restricted in terms of the types of goods available from distant locations. In light of the financial recession and the desire for ever more economic growth based on further globalization of transnational industry and fossil fuel use, quite the opposite pattern is emerging despite the disastrous implications in terms of our breaching climate change tipping points, and the fact that, at some point, fossil fuels, themselves, will no longer be available.

On account, a wise program would be to jumpstart an all out effort to put the means for alternative benign energy sources into place while using the larger portion of fossil fuels to build and install these alternatives across the landscape, as well as help communities to transition away from fossil fuel use altogether. Without a doubt, this would especially be positive in light of the fact that almost 71 percent of electricity in the U.S. is currently supplied by fossil fuels while modern agriculture, industry and transportation all have petroleum at their cores.

Meanwhile the largely consensual opinion reached at the annual conference of the U.S. contingent for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA) is that conventional crude peaked in 2005. Further, biofuels are not expected to be any sort of panacea to make up for pending large-scale oil deficits.¹

Despite the increasing number of indicators that humanity needs to change course in its fossil fuel use, the policy makers sit in their safe government offices planning new dangerous military operations for others to conduct in resource rich regions abroad regardless of the fact that the death toll is rising in these invasions and it seems highly unlikely that the Taliban or any other groups defending their homelands will be easily defeated if at all despite that ever more Pentagon funding is provided toward that aim.

Added up, the expenses to contain Iran, strive to obtain Venezuelan and newly found Cuban oil, fight for arctic fossil fuels, carry out Afghanistan and Pakistan operations, and ramp up covert or military operations via AFRICOM in Africa all together create a recipe for extreme U.S. bankruptcy and assorted other disasters. At the same time, the U.S. undertaking such endeavors merely postpone the inevitable fossil fuel shortfall, anyway, while not ensuring that the country and its citizens are prepared for the huge transition away from fossil fuels. In addition, such ever enlarging, Pentagon run ventures entail an inordinate amount of national sacrifice as money that could be used to support programs at home drains into war costs and the military’s ramped up fossil fuel use.

In relation, is there any question whatsoever as to the reason that there are proposals for greatly diminished funding of certain key social programs, including ones connected to healthcare and public education, in the homeland? How could outcomes be otherwise when 54 percent of every U.S. federal tax dollar goes to plans related to the U.S. military and another 19 percent goes to interest payments on the current federal debt, which leaves 27 percent for all other provisions (excluding the further sums to be borrowed to fund costly bailouts, war expansion plans, etc). Accordingly, the federal budget is at present almost twice the amount taken in from American taxpayers — an irresponsible and disastrous state of affairs with dire repercussions for many years ahead.

In addition, it’s difficult to imagine that, starting with Reagan, U.S. Presidents did not see the long term ramifications in their push for:

• Deregulated globalized U.S. industry, which led into greater oil use due to greater reliance on importation, along with offshoring and outsourcing of U.S. jobs so as to effectively hollow out the economic base at home and harm the average American worker. Ultimately financial contraction in the U.S. and tangentially abroad could be the only anticipated outcome.
• A lack in adequate oversight of Wall Street activities and the banking industry.
• An ever enlarging, expensive war program for obtainment of fossil fuels and other finite resources.
• Ratification of many other destructive patterns, such as the huge repeated government bailouts, and acceptance of costly no bid contracts in response to various Pentagon requests.

Just where did they think that such a set of irresponsible orientations would ultimately lead? Could none of them see the consequences, such as the federal deficit reaching a record $1.42 Trillion, representing 10 percent of the economy or the highest amount since W.W. II, along with continuing to rapidly shoot upward?

It’s hard to imagine that they were all of them so ignorant, nefarious or outright stupid so as to not see where their intended trajectories would in combination land, especially when the speed with which rapidly diminishing oil reserves would disappear is thrown into the mix. Likewise, the quest for unbridled economic growth is equally if not ever more calamitous when the long view’s taken.

It’s simply not supportable, as Michael Bond points out in these three sections from “Why Economic Growth Is Unsustainable“:

The present economy is obliged to grow annually at between 3% and 6%. Too much less than 3% for too long and the economy will collapse from lack of currency. Too much over 6% for too long and inflation will spiral out of control, rendering currency meaningless.

Below is a table that points out how long it takes for something to double, triple, etc. in size, when it increases at rates of 3%, 4%, 5% and 6% per year. For the last 15 years, the global economy has been growing at an average of about 4% per year. Note that at 4% growth the economy doubles every 19 years, and grows 10 times its size in a mere 59 years.

The second problem stems from the fact that in order to sustain 4% annual economic growth, global debt must increase at about 10% annually. Because it is annual growth, this means it is exponential rather than mathematical growth. The difference between the two is shown below.

The Global Economy is on course to collapse well before 2030 due to a looming global inability to repay annual interest. The reason why debt outpaces economic growth stems from a fault in global money supply. This fault is described in the article Money – Deadlier Than Plutonium…

Moreover, people collectively can’t keep taking and taking ever more resources from the natural world and expecting that they can keep raising ever higher the human population and the standard of living for all. It just won’t work because the world is largely limited. At the same time, it should be absolutely clear that our current economic programs for the most part do not work either. Anyone who asserts otherwise perhaps needs to be reminded that nearly half of the world comprising of over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. How could this possibly seem like any sort of a success, especially when others, parasitically siphoning the wealth towards themselves off the backs of underpaid laborers and through ravage of the natural world, individually make a financial killing in the millions and billions of dollars at the same time?

It’s a killing, all right. The signs of the social and ecological costs are all around us to see.

In truth, an expectation for relentless growth comes with a very high price tag as is well explained at “Interconnectedness of World Problems, a Conceptual Map by Fritjof Capra based on Plan B 3.0, by Lester Brown” — a vision that goes well beyond a simple, barely accurate, linear model. Likewise, the evaluation of Joel Kovel’s “The Enemy of Nature” is a well thought out, comparable assessment, as are Bill Mckibben’s “A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth” and David Model’s analysis at “The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring Unsustainable Growth.”²

Real limits in mind, this excerpt from Wikipedia’s coverage of the Carter Doctrine is particularly dicey. Simultaneously, it shows a fallacious (arrogant?) sense that the U.S.A. can enact any course of action that it pleases, is completely invincible and is impervious to any internal or external influences, whether social or environmental in nature, that would undercut its kingpin position in the world.

The Carter Doctrine:

Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

This last, key sentence of the Carter Doctrine, was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. Brzezinski modeled the wording of the Carter Doctrine on the Truman Doctrine, and insisted that the sentence be included in the speech “to make it very clear that the Soviets should stay away from the Persian Gulf.

In The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, author Daniel Yergin notes that the Carter Doctrine “bore striking similarities” to a 1903 British declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Lord Landsdowne warned Russia and Germany that the British would ‘regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.”

All the same, Mamoun Fandy of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University identifies, in “U.S. Oil Policy in the Middle East,” that the U.S. faces some key problems in its quest for oil dominance. These difficulties include:

• Controlling oil access is a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy.
• U.S. reliance on imported oil is very high.
• Oil from the Persian Gulf accounts for 10% of the oil used in the U.S.
• Dual containment of Iran and Iraq, along with a broader military engagement policy, is key to U.S. strategy in assuring the flow of oil.

Despite the absolute need to drastically and immediately rein in fossil fuel use for a number of compelling reasons, the U.S. government continues to pursue a forceful and antagonistic policy abroad aimed toward unilateral control over global energy supplies. Using a combination of outright military invasion in an expanding number of countries and threats (i.e., towards Iran and Venezuela), U.S. legislators demonstrate little noticeable remorse over the high fiscal (bankrupting), environmental and social costs of these operations. These include that “The Pentagon Is The Largest Consumer Of Oil In The World,” the number of war related deaths continue to rise, there’s depleted uranium (DU) spread across the Middle East, the war efforts and resultant obtained oil ensure that the climate change devastation to come is sped into place, inadequate funding is allocated for provision of alternative energy supplies and improvement of the electrical grid, public transportation is not sufficiently expanded, and other tragic outcomes will unfold.

There are many ways that humanity can move forward to create “the good life” as long as a plan is sound. In 1970, Henry Kissinger claimed, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” However, one group’s domination of oil and food stocks, while denying the needs of other groups, is reckless, unethical and expensive.

Frankly, we’ve had enough of resource wars. More to the point, conflicts can only get worse as fossil fuel reserves increasingly dwindle and the perception of the diminishment merely strengthens that we have to have the dregs regardless of the grave social and environmental consequences.

No, we do not. In fact, we can no longer afford to fight over material supplies — particularly the ones, like oil, that are going run out or, like food, be at risk to largely run out due to climate change effects brought on in large measure by our lust for rich energy sources.

Sometimes it’s rueful to ponder the way that the present would be different had the U.S. followed Denmark’s example on the same timetable while using the funds that were to become allocated to fossil fuel wars towards development of the self-reliant energy security as Tomas Friedman indirectly suggests in “Flush With Energy” in which he states “Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)”

Meanwhile, there’s growing public awareness that the Pentagon’s worldwide mission IS to get command over oil and gas supplies — as is explained in an elucidating report by Rick Rozoff with many outstanding factual details. Likewise, it is obvious that the IMF and WB goals are en simpatico with the mission and, as a result, are on a disastrously wrong track as “The grave ecological destruction sponsored by the World Bank,” by Eric De Ruest and Hélene Baillot, undeniably indicates.

As an aside, the first TV announcements routinely popped up, several weeks ago, to suggest that the U.S. populace ought to pitch in and cut it energy consumption by 3 percent per person. While the objective is admirable, the recommended curtailment is far too small and the diminishment process is starting around twenty OR MORE years too late. Besides, why don’t we even go a few steps further and take Walden Bello’s advise from “The Virtues of Deglobalization“:

The aim of the deglobalization paradigm is to move beyond the economics of narrow efficiency, in which the key criterion is the reduction of unit cost, never mind the social and ecological destabilization this process brings about. It is to move beyond a system of economic calculation that, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, made ‘the whole conduct of life…into a paradox of an accountant’s nightmare.’ An effective economics, rather, strengthens social solidarity by subordinating the operations of the market to the values of equity, justice, and community by enlarging the sphere of democratic decision making. To use the language of the great Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, deglobalization is about ‘re-embedding’ the economy in society, instead of having society driven by the economy.

In tandem, let’s realize, as did Shamus Cooke, that “the industrial basis for an alternative energy superstructure needs to be created. Only by doing this can we seriously address the needs of the planet. Transforming our giant auto plants — many laying idle — into producers of solar panels, windmills, electricity–producing buoy’s, high-speed trains, electric busses and cars, etc., while massively investing in new research and technology to deal with climate change, is the only realistic way to drastically change direction in the time allotted.”

The alternative path to his, of course, is the exact one that we are following. We all know to where it leads — a 4C (or even) hotter world filled with massive loss of human and other forms of life, ruinous economic consequences, devastating weather patterns, an ocean level rise that puts many coastal regions at risk, massive fresh water shortages, food shortfalls, spreading pestilence and invasive species, and an extremely tenuous future for many generations to come.

Like our ancestors before fossil fuel were discovered, we can live without its benefits. Humankind, throughout our history on this planet, has been able to adapt to widely varying circumstances. Anyone who doubts this to be the case simply needs to compare the way that Inuits live in relation to 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil.

In other words, we CAN still adjust to widely varying conditions — even ones without fossil fuel. However, we, absolutely, cannot prepare to exist in a world that has states outside of the ranges that gave rise to and support of human life. All the same, we — out of willfulness, wishful thinking or ignorance — are willing to gamble that we can, it seems.

Perhaps we find it just too hard to give up our current ways of life even though our not doing so ensures that a large portion of the Earth will likely become unable to sustain life towards the end of this century. How tragically demented and selfish of us if, indeed, this is the case!

Of course, our drastically relinquishing fossil fuel use as much as is possible right away is not an easy action to endure. Yet, it can and has to be faced despite that the happening will mean hardship, privation and myriad kinds of losses.

After all, the sorts of difficulties that will exist after we forgo fossil fuel will be minor in comparison to the horrific adversities that would definitely be present if we do not deeply cut our collective carbon footprint in the near future. If anyone thinks that this cutting action is simply too hard to bear, he should for a moment picture the harshness that severe and worsening climate change could bring. Then, it becomes quickly clear about which trouble is doubtlessly preferable.

1. A review of the ASPO-USA conference from Chris Nelder: Oil and Gas Outlook. A further assessment from Steve Connor about the views of Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA): Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast.
2. PowerPoint – Earth Policy Institute – Building a …, Derek Wall’s review of The Enemy of Nature, by Joel Kovel; A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth (), and OpEdNews – Article: The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring …

… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

      – “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

The Bush era antiwar movement has ebbed and flowed a few times since it abruptly materialized just after 9/11 and then exploded into a massive force in the months leading up to President George W. Bush’s unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This was actually the high point of mass activism. A decline began with the invasion and the bipartisan congressional declaration of support for the new war, but the movement remained huge and mounted many large national and local demonstrations for years.

The Democratic victory in the 2006 Congressional election signaled a further erosion of peace activities because of the erroneous assumption that the new Congress would end the wars. Antiwar forces were hardly visible during the 2008 campaign, despite the mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan, because many efforts we focused on electing Sen. Barack Obama, whom many Democrats considered to be a peace candidate.

The low point was reached earlier this year — a remarkable development during two ongoing wars — about the time President Obama reignited the Afghan war by ordering another 21,000 troops to the battlefield.

The hard core of the movement has remained intact, but is relatively small. The national peace organizations and coalitions are still in place, though most have become less active as their numbers fell off and funding diminished. The left wing and the pacifist sector are engaged and active, now focused on ending the Afghan war, and there will be growth as Obama continues to escalate the war.

But the mass base of the movement that confronted the Bush Administration’s wars — the Democratic voters — are standing on the sidelines, unwilling to publicly criticize the president of their choice. This is despite the fact that opinion polls report a majority of the American people now oppose the Afghan war, including some 70% of Democrats.

Over the last year or so I’ve spoken to a number of local and national peace leaders and many rank-and-file activists about the drop in antiwar numbers. Everybody has felt the decline. As an organizer for the last 15 years in New York State’s Hudson Valley region I have witnessed it close up.

For example, seven years ago in October 2002 our group at the time organized an antiwar demonstration of 2,500 people at Academy Green Park in the small city of Kingston. On the same day several buses full of local activists traveled to Washington to attend the ANSWER Coalition’s big peace rally that drew up to 100,000 people. The war hadn’t even started. It was five months away. This was the beginning stages of the largest “preemptive” antiwar movement in U.S. history.

On Oct. 17 a couple of weeks ago in the same city park, with two wars in progress, 20 co-sponsoring groups and an excellent speaker list— our antiwar rally attracted 100 people. There was no Washington protest to draw crowds away, and the anticipated rain didn’t fall. We knew half the participants by name. There were antiwar actions in some 40 cities that day, but the ones we heard from all had much lower numbers than in the past. The Capital District movement to our north brought out between 200-250 people for a well publicized and organized Albany demonstration, but a couple of years ago they attracted a crowd of over 600.

Here’s one more example. Over the years my co-organizer Donna Goodman and I have arranged for 22 bus trips to bring Hudson Valley activists to distant peace rallies, mostly in Washington. We average between three and five buses. That’s roughly 150 to 250 people. Our biggest success was in January 2003, two months before the Iraq war, when we sent seven buses to DC to join an ANSWER protest that attracted a half-million people.

Six years later this March, as President Obama was expanding the war by deploying another 21,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, we managed to bring 37 people to a demonstration in Washington. Some 10,000 people showed up for a good rally and an exciting march. We were empowered by the rally and proud to have made the effort, but it was dismaying to see how our numbers had dwindled.

In our talks with people about the movement’s decline, the main emphasis always pointed to the fact that the constituency upon which our broad peace movement reposes was disintegrating. At issue is figuring out exactly why, and then how to help rebuild our forces.

The question of “why” isn’t difficult. Since over 85% of our 3,500 Activist Newsletter readers voted Democratic last November, we decided to talk to a number of them, in person and mainly via email, as well as to movement organizers and unwavering activists. The conclusion is that the Democratic voters who have stopped showing up do so for one or more of three reasons: (1) The big majority simply don’t want to publicly oppose a war waged by a Democratic president — especially when he is under strong attack by the Republicans. (2) Some think it is a “good” war. (3) Some believe peace demonstrations “don’t do any good,” and that we’re “just talking to ourselves.” Let’s examine this point by point.

We’ve encountered point number one before. Many Democratic voters were extremely reluctant to criticize President Lyndon Johnson during the first couple of years in which he widened the Vietnam war. But by the end of LBJ’s first full term many Democrats turned on him to the point that he decided not to run for reelection. He was responsible for the passage of progressive domestic legislation far beyond anything Obama will achieve, but his war policy destroyed him.

On the other hand, Democratic voters, with the liberals in the vanguard, stuck with President Bill Clinton during his unjust and illegal bombardment of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. Clinton learned the big lesson from Vietnam: Launch a short war with few American deaths. He wisely did his dirty work in only three months. And while thousands of Yugoslavs were killed and much of the civilian infrastructure was wrecked, no American died because the war was conducted from the air beyond the reach of anti-aircraft fire. Now, of course, there are American drones assassinating people in western Pakistan. Sometimes they hit their target, sometimes a wedding party.

Bush served two terms despite his long imperialist wars, in part because he kept the U.S. deaths relatively low (the GI death toll in Vietnam was nearly 13 times greater). Bush was reelected in 2004 because the Democratic Party not only refused to oppose the war but candidate John Kerry kept telling the voters he would be much better at winning than blundering Bush. Given the choice between two pro-war candidates, the voters decided not to change war horses in mid-carnage.

There was an active antiwar movement during Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign but most peace people fell in line behind Kerry, as did United for Peace and Justice, the biggest coalition, and most moderate peace groups. ANSWER stood apart and picketed both political conventions, not just the Republican affair in New York. A week after Bush’s depressing reelection we called a local rally to get people up and running again. I opened by remarking that “98% of the American people just voted for war.” A woman in the front row interrupted, “No! We voted for Kerry!” Neither Kerry nor Obama (who made it clear in the campaign that he wanted to fight in Afghanistan) was a peace candidate, but most Democrats seemed to think they were.

The American peace movement has to win back the Democratic voters on the issue of ending the Afghan war, and bring them back into the streets to demand peace. Even if a majority of voters want an end to war, the ballot box is meaningless unless there is a candidate running on a genuine antiwar platform. We respect and support the antiwar members of Congress, such as our region’s Rep. Maurice Hinchey, but they are up against a large pro-war bipartisan majority and always get aced out. Put a million people in the streets on the same day and we’ll begin to get results; do it again and again, and maybe we’ll end a war.

This brings us to point two, the fact that some peace Democrats think the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is a good war. Government and mass media distortions have succeeding in confusing many people. The movement is partly responsible by focusing over the years almost exclusively on Iraq. Now that the Obama Administration is widening the Afghan war it is essential for the peace forces to increase their educational efforts.

We’re trying to do our part in this issue of the newsletter. The two-part article “The U.S. in Afghanistan” contains information that will be useful to our readers in assessing this war, particularly those who think it is just. The article on Afghan Women and the War is important because we’re all worried about their situation, which remains deplorable, but the women quoted in this article perceive two oppressors: the Taliban and the U.S.-NATO occupiers (Check out the CNN video link). Also, the Afghan war article by Bill Moyers (”Bring Back the Draft”) provokes some interesting thoughts.

I’ve heard point three regarding the alleged inefficacy of peace protests, and that we’re talking to ourselves, many times. The Vietnam era was filled with it, and yet — as the Vietnamese government will tell you, the peace struggle in the U.S. was an essential ingredient in ending the war and reunifying the country.

Many people think that because the mass media usually ignores our actions that what we do has no effect. Some say “we demonstrate and nothing happens.” I’ve often been told that all we do is speak to each other. Some say we’re so irrelevant the White House isn’t even listening. All this is wrong, and I’ll try to explain why.

It is important to understand that we are involved in a very long struggle for peace. We are trying to change the policies of history’s most powerful military state, which has been engaged in a hot or cold war, openly or clandestinely, without interruption since it entered World War II, 68 years ago. Many of Washington’s martial actions have been neither legal nor just. The mass media is a virtual adjunct of the government as far as foreign military policy is concerned. The U.S. is a militarist state and spends more money each year on wars past, present and future than the military budgets of every other country in the world combined. It has between 700 and 1,000 military bases circling the globe.

This is a tough nut to crack. Our side, the peace and justice side, often doesn’t win. And when we do win it sure doesn’t happen overnight. Of course the mass media ignores us, but that doesn’t invalidate our efforts. Sure, we often demonstrate and nothing happens. We’re up against big odds. It’s a matter of unceasing struggle, protest after protest, meeting after meeting, leaflet, after leaflet.

Mass demonstrations are essential. They are the collective expression of the opposition of the American people to the aggressive wars conducted in their name by their government, whether in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Yugoslavia and Nicaragua, or Vietnam and Haiti. Our mass protests are acts of public solidarity with the victims of unjust war, and help to strengthen their resistance. And mass protests in Washington, the seat of government and the Pentagon, are necessary to turn attention directly to the warmakers.

Frequently we do speak to ourselves, and it is important to do so. That’s why the great religions have been meeting once a week for thousands of years. It’s what keeps their movement together, and ours as well. In our own experience, we have found that under normal conditions, between 15% and 20% of the people at every rally or bus trip we organize have shown up for the first time, and many come back. At the beginning stages of new wars the proportion is much higher.

It’s untrue that the White House doesn’t listen because we’re irrelevant. All presidents make a show of indifference to our protests. But when we are of mass size they are supplied with detailed reports about the status of our forces. President Nixon made a big point of laughing off the peace movement, but if you read Robert Dallek’s “Nixon and Kissinger” for instance, you will understand he was obsessed with the antiwar movement and carefully calculated its impact.

It is essential for us to keep on protesting against aggressive wars or Washington will run riot with military adventurism. The only significant opposition to a bigger war in Afghanistan will come from that sector of the peace movement willing to confront the power in Washington regardless of who is president. And some members of Congress will speak up, too, and they are strengthened knowing our mass movement is out there.

I believe without doubt that in the cynical and conservative atmosphere choking our country today this movement remains our principal instrumentality against Washington’s unjust wars and imperialist escapades. Without this movement we have no voice! Let us make that voice ever louder as we rebuild the movement and go forward toward the attainment of peace.

It was the summer of 2006. I was in Crawford, Texas, home to Bush’s ranch and Camp Casey, the activist campout organized by Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in Iraq. It was the second year for Camp Casey. But this time, Bush had chosen to spend his holidays elsewhere, leaving us with more free time.

Fort Hood, the largest army base in the U.S., where most soldiers heading off to war pass through, is an hour and a half from Crawford. We decided to go there to give information to members of the military. With us were veterans of the war in Iraq and we had leaflets from the GI Rights Hotline, an organization that provides counseling to soldiers, including information on how to get out of the military.

We set up about a hundred meters from the entrance during evening rush hour as soldiers left the base. I expected to find myself in a hostile environment, but that’s not the way it turned out.

We had signs with a very simple message, “You don’t have to go.” It was enough to cause many soldiers to stop for more information, even in uniform, violating the military code and in sight of the guards at the entrance to the base. Some drove by in their cars and flashed us the peace sign. Others stopped just long enough to jot down the toll free number for the GI Rights Hotline written in large letters on the side of our van. Spouses, mothers and fathers of soldiers stopped to get material to take home.

Fort Hood has the highest suicide rate of all U.S. bases. Nidal M. Hasan, the soldier who killed his fellow troops, had spent six years, from 2003 to 2009, as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed military hospital in Washington treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He was soon set to deploy to Iraq.

Over three years have passed since I was at Fort Hood. At the time, the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. Now the Democrats have the majority. But I feel certain that if I were to go stand in front of the base with the same sign, the scene of three years ago would repeat itself.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

Some might say I sound like a demagogue. When you are used to insipid soundbytes and P.C.-fluff, the truth starts sounding like demagoguery. The fact of the matter is that the truth is extraordinarily painful in this country ruled by a peculiar Victorian fetish of the marketplace. Nowhere in the civilized world could one imagine civic leaders fear mongering the populace about the evils of “socialized medicine” without getting laughed out of the country. Unfortunately, these goons of capitalist oppression seem to have been collectively laughed out of the civilized world and into Land of the Free.

Nonetheless, the problem is not this visceral minority. The problem lies in those that pretend to befriend progress: that grand, archaic organ of political oppression called the Democratic Party. This increasingly irrelevant union of crooks, hucksters and swindlers has betrayed the American people beyond recognition. Their failure to enact meaningful health care reform must be the last straw.

From the beginning of the current “health reform” debacle, the game was rigged. Immediately, the only meaningful reform, “single payer,” was taken off the table, and progressives were told to rally behind a “strong public option” by Democratic front groups like Moveon.org and Health Care for America Now (HCAN). These two NGO’s organized numerous “rallies” in order to command a feeble subservience to the Democratic leadership ahead of their caving to corporate interests on the issue.

Meanwhile, single-payer activists were placed in the precarious position of having to advocate against the meaningless and amorphous “strong public option” and the tea-baggers all at once. In a country so dominated by trivial soundbytes, you have to be either “for or against” everything: no shades of gray, no third way. Unfortunately, many progressives got caught in the trap and started rallying behind a bill (Obama’s Health Care Bill HR 3200) that no one knew anything about. This clever catch all was meant to accomplish exactly that: institute no meaningful reform while tricking a significant portion of progressives into thinking that we were now seeing “The change we can believe in.”

Nonetheless, single-payer activists were thrown a couple bones. One was a promise of a vote on the “Weiner Amendment” on the house floor. This amendment would have replaced the current bill with HR 676: the single-payer bill. The other, more meaningful bone was the “Kucinich Amendment,” which would have lifted loopholes that prevent individual states from enacting single-payer legislation. This approach seemed more tactically sound than expecting much of an up-down vote on single-payer on the house floor. The Canadian health system was enacted province-by-province, and it seemed reasonable to expect the same here: the more “enlightened” states lead the way, attract a significant spike in businesses fleeing other states so as to cut health expenses, and gradually the states fall like dominoes.

Kucinich told a crowd in Aurora, IL this summer to focus on his amendment. He informed us that the Single-Payer vote (Weiner Amendment) was a smoke screen doomed to failure because of the lack of adequate time to organize sufficiently for the vote.

I then attended several organizing meetings and stressed the need to emphasize the Kucinich Amendment as the most tactically prescient step forward for single-payer activists. I suggested that people not bite the Weiner amendment bait. As a veteran of the NGO industrial complex, I saw the Weiner Amendment for what it was: a chance for progressive Democrats and single-payer NGO’s to claim victory (just by bringing the issue to a vote), and to thus muster some fund-raising. I could picture the fund-raising letter: “Dear Single-Payer Activist, today we scored a major victory in the House of Representatives by bringing Single Payer Health Care to a vote for the first time. But there remains a lot of work to be done in order to win the vote in the future. Please help us in this mission by donating today.”

Unfortunately, many activists bit the bait. Action alert after action alert instructed people to call their reps and urge them on the Weiner Amendment.

In the end, both the Kucinich and Weiner amendments were removed from consideration by house leadership this past week. Meanwhile, Democratic cheerleaders have been trumpeting the success at instituting a “public option” in both the House and Senate versions of the health reform bill. The proposed public option will cover about 3% of the population, while roughly 33% of Americans are un- or under-insured. Many progressive democrats inform me that this is the best we can realistically do given the conservative dynamics of the American populace. I don’t understand what American populace they are talking about. As someone who goes out to the bungalow belt of Chicago to knock on doors practically everyday, I can say with full confidence that only an insignificant wacko minority is repelled by the thought of “Medicare for all.” Perhaps we can figure out a way to leave those few people out when we finally do institute a single-payer system.

Progressive leaders have fallen to the right of the American people. Americans crave and need meaningful health care reform in line with the remainder of the civilized world. They crave and need leadership in Washington that stands for the interests of their constituents: leaders that aren’t fearful of lifting their heads above the fray, pounding their fists on the podium and declaring “It is time we shut this racket down. Let us throw the insurance companies into the dustbin of history once and for all, and end this domestic terrorism that kills 45,000 Americans a year!”

Unfortunately, to get to this point, we are going to have to purge the Congress of almost every last one of its members, and stop thinking that the Democrats or the NGO industrial complex will ever bring Americans their cherished Medicare-for-all.

Robert Jensen: I think any assessment of the current situation has to remember that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was illegal. The United States invaded the country with no legal authorization. It claimed the right to do this because of the relationship between the governing Taliban and Al Qaeda and the events of 9/11, but there were many ways that the United States could have pursued a just solution to the question of the terrorism of 9/11.

So, why would it pursue an illegal and, I would argue, immoral invasion? Here we have to remember that U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, whatever the stated reason for them, are really about energy resources. The Middle East especially is home to the most extensive reserves of petroleum. There’s a lot of natural gas in Central Asia, plus it has geostrategic importance. So let’s get rid of the idea that this is about the “War on Terror.” Does the United States want to end terrorist attacks against Americans? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that this particular war is a war on terrorism. We also should remember the phrase is a bad joke, that terrorism is a method by which people try to achieve political goals. You don’t have a war on a method. If you’re going to make war, you’re making war for specific purposes against specific people in specific places, and the “War on Terror” is simply way too obscure for that.

So with all of that background, if the United States were to pursue a just and legal path it would begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan, pay the reparations it owes to the people of Afghanistan, and attempt to work with the appropriate regional and international organizations to try to help Afghanistan transition to a decent government. The United States has no intention of doing that.

So, the proposed buildup in Afghanistan is not only immoral, it’s not only fundamentally unjust, it’s also incredibly stupid. On all counts, anyway you want to evaluate this, the United States is making crucial errors.

The fact that Barrack Obama, the alleged peace candidate in the last election, is willing to pursue this just reminds us of the limits of contemporary mainstream electoral politics with a choice reduced to Republicans and Democrats. What we should be thinking about is the whole structure of, and motivation behind, our involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia, and we should also be rethinking the whole structure of our political discourse at home.

CS: So if this is by all means a stupid endeavor to continue this occupation, why are we doing this? Who is profiting from this? What are the underlying motivations of our occupation?

RJ: Remember that just because people in power might be corrupt and immoral doesn’t mean they’re always competent in pursuing that corruption. If you look back at probably the most grotesque U.S. intervention in the post World War II period, the Vietnam War, there were corrupt and immoral reasons the United States invaded Vietnam — mostly to undermine independent development and try to dominate the third world — but in trying to carry out those objectives there were a lot of incompetent decisions made. And sometimes incompetence compounds itself, so as you get further and further into a set of bad strategic decisions, there is an instinct to want to rescue them, but unfortunately it often leads to even more bad strategic decisions.

So, why are we doing it? Well, there’s a certain amount of irrationality to these strategic decision making, even though it’s in the pursuit of a rational — albeit I would say immoral — goal, which is to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia. Why are we doing it? Are there profit motivations for private contractors, who are making a killing? Sure. Are there oil companies and gas companies that want concessions? Sure. There are always those things, but I think that the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy tends not to be the interest of any particular industry or any particular set of contractors, but the fact that the whole system is designed to perpetuate this quest for dominance. And those other factors, like the interests of Blackwater (which has changed its name to Xe Services) or ExxonMobil, just contribute to the motive force behind the policy more generally.

CS: So here we are in 2009, and we’ve entered the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan and we’ve similarly occupied Iraq since 2003, yet when you look around it’s hard to notice that we’re running on a war economy. It’s become so normalized, and from a student’s perspective it’s interesting to note that the majority of undergraduates across the country have spent all of their high school and college careers with our nation at war.

And my question is, how do you think history will judge this perpetual war? Do you believe we’ve entered into Orwell’s 1984 realm, are we living in a society where war has officially become peace?

RJ: I don’t think we have to wait for history to judge it. I think we can assess it today and it’s pretty straight forward. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a cover for other interests, and that’s all doubly true with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole project is corrupt beyond description. Yet, the propaganda industries, not just the propaganda emanating from the government, but the propaganda industries — advertising, entertainment, journalism — are all perpetuating this crazed interpretation of the War on Terror, because they all have an interest in doing that. They are all ideologically connected to the same project.

And yes, it’s Orwellian in that sense, it’s corrupt, it’s immoral, it’s illegal, it’s all these things that we’re talking about, and we don’t have to wait for history 30 years from now to make that judgment. What we have to do is recognize it, and try to organize against it. But I think what we should be doing is not just opposing this war but recognizing that the disease from which this war springs is more deeply set in the culture than ever before.

You can clearly see that on a college campus. Remember that when the United States invaded and began to destroy Vietnam, the opposition to that war started, and was always strongest, on college campuses. There was a kind of “natural,” if you’ll accept the term, resistance from students to that imposition of power from above.

Well in some sense, campuses are the most passive places when it comes to anti-war activity today. To the degree that there is an anti-war movement, it’s mostly rooted in the community. So, that tells us something about what’s happened in universities, the way universities have been turned toward a more corporate and ideologically neutered position, though campuses could potentially be centers of opposition, resistance, and struggle. Well, that’s about not just the war, that’s about what’s happened to American higher education, the corporatization of higher education.

In other words, the war is an indicator not just of the depravity of the war-makers, it’s a very important indicator of what’s going on in society more generally. And about that, I’m terrified. The direction the whole culture is heading is very scary. It’s an imperial culture in decline. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, at least in raw military terms. It remains the largest economy in the world. But it’s an affluent imperial society in decline, and such a society is very dangerous. I think we should be paying attention not only to what these wars tell us about foreign policy and military affairs, but also what they tell us about our society at a much deeper level.

CS: So are you saying that the universities aren’t actually free? Do you think that that’s affected by the politics of tenure and publishing grants?

RJ: It’s affected by the structure of financing, it’s affected by the rewards and punishments that faculty members respond to in building careers. For students, it’s about the economy that the students are going into, and how students are conditioned to believe that college is career training. It’s about trying to create the University as an allegedly politically neutral space, but of course any time you talk about political neutrality what you’re talking about is de facto support for the existing distribution of power. All of these things are part of it, and we should be concerned with it.

Is the University free? Well at some level, obviously yes. Here we are in a University office, I’m a University professor, we’re talking about things that will be on a University radio station. Of course it’s free in that sense, but it’s also a system structured in a way that is going to divert most people from the kind of conversation we’re having. So there are constraints. That’s true of any institution. There are opportunities and freedoms, and then there are constraints. I think what we should be focused on — whether we’re talking about the Universities or the media or any of the other intellectual institution — is how the freedom that exists on the surface is often masking a deeper kind of pressure toward conformity, a conformity that’s not enforced through the barrel of a gun, as in a totalitarian society, but a conformity that’s enforced in a much more complex, and in some a ways a much more effective, fashion, through the rewards and the punishments we’re talking about.

CS: I’d like to move on to your most recently published article entitled “Is Obama a Socialist?” In this article you express a deep concern for our evolving ecological crisis, specifically I’d like to refer to the following statement: “Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.” Can you explain this concept further to us?

RJ: For most of the past couple hundred years, we’ve been living really in a rather unique historical moment. First of all it’s a moment made possible by unleashing the enormous energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, the fossil fuels. That’s a blip in human history. There’s never been energy like that available to human beings before, and we’re quickly running out of it. So, all of this bonanza of consumption and material comfort is really subsidized by that energy source, and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it. All of the talk of alternative fuels and biofuels and wind and solar, that’s fine, they are all going to supply some energy, but they are not going to replace the energy we’ve been using from coal, oil, and natural gas.

The explosion of this energy is also the time in which modern industrial capitalism has emerged. It’s all based on a fantasy that is easy to understand because of all that energy. It did look like we could simply grow endlessly. But the ecological crises, and I use the plural quite specifically — multiple crises, not just global warming but levels of toxicity in the air, water, loss of top soil, the reduction in biodiversity — are part of a global pattern that is uncontroversial: We are reaching, and probably are long beyond, the carrying capacity of the planet, and we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet at a rate that is increasingly threatening, not just centuries from now, but likely in decades.

That’s all part of an era in which capitalism led us to believe we could have unlimited growth. It’s a crazy claim, and more striking is that it is a crazy claim that is considered to be the conventional wisdom. This is the kind of thing we should be worried about. We’re not having a debate about capitalism in this country — there’s no debate for the most part in the mainstream. Capitalism is taken to be the only way to organize an economy, yet it is a system of organizing an economy that is literally crazy. Well, if that doesn’t scare people, then I don’t know what will.

CS: If you are implying that if we are at a level of overreach, that there will be, that we might reach a population crash?

RJ: I think it’s inevitable. Ecological overshoot is the key concept. The planet has a carrying capacity. The planet can host only so many human beings, depending on the level at which we live. I’m not a scientist, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not trained in any of this, but reading people whose judgment I trust, and trying to synthesize the information that I can, my judgment is that we’re probably well past the carrying capacity of the planet already.

And at the level of first-world consumption, we are dramatically past the carrying capacity. That is, if you are going to expand this high energy consumption and lifestyle of the first world to the whole planet, it would be game-over tomorrow. If everybody in the world lived like you and I live, the planet would literally die tomorrow. So the only reason we can continue this system is the fact that a good portion of the world’s population is living at a dramatically lower level than we are. Even at that level, I don’t think that the world can support this many people. So we’re in a position of overshoot.

When is the crash going to come? Well in some sense the answer is it’s already here. You have half the world’s population living on less than $2.50 a day, you have hundreds of people dying every hour in Africa from easily preventable diseases, you have the beginnings of ecological crises that are manifesting themselves not only in the reduction of biodiversity but in the direct threat to human life.

When is all of this going to come crashing? Well I don’t know, because I don’t have a crystal ball and no one else does. The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart. More important is the recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we should prepare for it, in both physical terms and moral terms. My own view is that, if not in my lifetime certainly in yours, there will be a massive human die-off. That’s an antiseptic term — it means that millions upon millions of people will die in large sweeps across the planet. What do we do about that morally? What do you do if you’re living in a world in which you know that simply by virtue of the luck of where you were born, you are protected from a scourge that is literally killing millions around the planet?

Well we’re seeing small examples of that today with such things as the devastation from easily preventable diseases in Africa for instance, but what if that happens on a massive scale? I don’t think the human species has a way to cope with that. We’re not ready physically, technologically, but we’re also not ready morally. And the only way you get ready for that is by openly discussing it, but it’s still a culture that cannot come to terms with this. Everything we’re talking about today would have been unthinkable as subjects for the presidential election. No candidate could talk like this and expect to be elected, because the culture is still in such deep denial about the fundamentally unsustainable nature of our economic system and the moral implications of that.

CS: How do you think nation-states will respond to these collapse scenarios?

RJ: First of all I think we should recognize nation-states are not inevitable for the rest of human history. My own view is that were going to end up finding other ways to organize ourselves politically, because the nation-state is at the center of so much of this destruction.

How will people respond? Well I think a lot of that has to do with how the most powerful nations respond. Remember that one of the aspects of being the most affluent and militarily powerful countries on the planet is that what you do matters a lot. You can continue to pursue insane strategies in a crazy system, or you can tell the truth. And if powerful countries tell the truth, start to actively reduce their energy and other material consumption, start to take seriously the demands of justice in equalizing the distribution of wealth around the world, give up on fantasies of control and domination, well that would have a huge effect.

The developing world, which clearly doesn’t trust us and shouldn’t trust us, might be able to move into a posture of more cooperation. Democratic movements within those countries might strengthen when they know there is in fact a commitment from the powerful states to real law, real democracy, real justice, real moral principles. Well, all of that is possible. It’s not a guarantee of success. We could do everything we can imagine in the realm of just and sustainable policies and still fail. The human species does not have some magic guarantee of endless success. Other species have come and gone, and it’s quite possible — in fact, I would argue it’s probably likely — were going to go that way relatively soon. And people always say, well that’s a rather depressing fact. Well if it’s a fact, it’s a fact, but of course there’s no way to know for sure, and we can struggle to create a different future, without guarantees.

But even if it does seem to be our future, what of the time we are here? I think part of what makes one fully human is to resist that, to struggle, even with no guarantee of success. And that’s where I put my faith. Maybe it’s a faith that is going to be betrayed, but I don’t see any better option at the moment.

CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?

RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that — if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves — it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.

What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today — it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy.

CS: Given our trajectory towards this cliff, this ecological cliff, should college students be rethinking their career choices? Are we being trained properly?

RJ: Reality is going to force college students to reconsider career choices, when certain assumptions will no longer hold. The most important thing that Universities could do right now is be laboratories for experiments outside of the dominant system, which is exactly what we’re not doing.

What we’re doing is still training people to be rats in a maze. Well, what if we said, the maze is over. For now, the maze may still exist out in the world, but we’re going to spend four years here going beyond the maze, and your job as a student, and your job as a faculty member, is to experiment with alternatives. That would mean a dramatically different curriculum, that would mean a dramatically different classroom.

I would like to see that happen. In journalism education, the collapse of the commercial journalism industry — the fact that there are fewer jobs for our students in the traditional journalism institutions — gives us a kind of opportunity. It’s a disaster at one level, in that the way we’ve done things no longer works, but it’s also an opportunity to reshape those methods.

In my own experience, there is a lot of resistance to that kind of change, because it is kind of frightening. If you’ve been doing something on a model that in the past has worked, or at least appeared to work, and now people are saying that model is over, well it’s not exactly easy to jump to that position where everything is up for grabs. But that’s what Universities should be doing. Unfortunately, not only in journalism but in the University at large, I think there is a distinct lack of that spirit. There is an attempt to kind of hunker down, and make this model work, but I don’t think the model can work. I don’t think it ever worked for real education, but it’s certainly not going to work in a dramatically changing landscape.

CS: What advice do you offer UT students, or just to activists of all ages, who want to participate, want to fight the system, but feel overwhelmed by its strength?

RJ: If you feel overwhelmed, let’s recognize that that’s a rational response. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation. We’re facing a collapse economically, a collapse of U.S. power around the world, and ecological crises that defy the imagination. Well that is overwhelming. But we should also look at history and realize that this is not the first time the world has appeared to be on the brink, and people didn’t lie down and die in the past. People organized, people committed to long-term projects to create a different future, and we can still do that.

In my case, I’ve moved toward a focus on helping to build local community networks and institutions that can help people explore other alternatives. One of the groups in Austin I’ve connected with is the Workers Defense Project, a wonderful group that helps immigrant workers, especially undocumented immigrant workers, who are vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Through that work it offers a critique of the underlying power structure and a vehicle for people to build the power to change things. It’s really inspiring.

If we’re going to be effective, we’ve got to dig in for the long haul. There’s a paradox in all this. We may feel the crisis is more urgent then ever — and I do feel that, more than ever — but we have to recognize there’s no short-term solution, and we have to dig in for the long haul. That might be difficult, but it’s the only way I can see us moving forward.

This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the KVRX radio show “The Pursuit of Injustice.”

An early version was published by Energy Bulletin, October 30, 2009.

Taking a page from America’s political police force, the FBI, the British state is beefing-up an ever-growing watch list of “domestic extremists.”

As we know, that trend has taken on a Kafkaesque life of its own here in the heimat. Secrecy News reports that during a Q&A last year with the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told the panel that each day between March 2008 and March 2009, “there were an average of more than 1,600 nominations for inclusion on the [Terrorist] watch list.”

With this in mind, The Guardian published a series of extraordinary reports that revealed the mass monitoring of legal political activities by British citizens by the secret state.

Investigative journalists Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor provided chilling details how police and corporate spies “are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.”

Are these activists part of a shadowy network of al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” or environmental saboteurs intent on bringing Britain to its knees by targeting critical infrastructure?

Hardly! According to The Guardian, a “hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor ‘domestic extremists’,” one that stores this information “on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.”

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the ‘terrorism and allied matters’ committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100. (Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor, “Police in £9m scheme to log ‘domestic extremists’,” The Guardian, October 25, 2009)

That’s a lot of boodle to spy on antiwar activists, environmentalists, arms’ trade opponents and the state’s usual suspects–anarchists, socialists and labor militants.

As the journalists point out, the phrase “domestic extremism” is not a lawful term. In fact, the widespread use of the term is a demonstration of how powerful constituencies have perverted law, thus creating their own all-embracing interpretation of the role of protest in a democratic society.

Indeed, senior officers “describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups ‘that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process’.”

Needless to say, that covers a lot of ground and under these fast and loose standards, it is clear that police intelligence agencies and their political masters are seeking to criminalize long-established forms of citizen action such as demonstrations, sit-ins, public meetings and strikes.

Among the newspaper’s revelations we discover that the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), housed at a secret London office, is a giant database of “protest groups and protesters in the country.”

NPIOU’s brief is “to gather, assess, analyse and disseminate intelligence and information relating to criminal activities in the United Kingdom where there is a threat of crime or to public order which arises from domestic extremism or protest activity”.

Chock-a-block with information gathered by Special Branch officers, corporate spies and paid infiltrators attached to the Confidential Intelligence Unit, ACPO’s national coordinator Anton Setchell told the publication that intelligence collected in England and Wales is shunted to NPIOU which “can read across” all the forces’ intelligence and regurgitate what are called “coherent” assessments.

Additionally, Lewis, Evans and Taylor reported:

• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras.

• Police surveillance units known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners’ political activities. The information is added to the central NPOIU.

• Surveillance officers are provided with “spotter cards” used to identify the faces of target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism. Targets include high-profile activists regularly seen taking part in protests. One spotter card, produced by the Met to monitor campaigners against an arms fair, includes a mugshot of the comedian Mark Thomas.

• NPOIU works in tandem with two other little-known Acpo branches, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country. (The Guardian, op. cit.)

Why would British police target law-abiding citizens exercising their right to protest the depredations of the capitalist order?

Because they can! With a logic that only a policeman’s mother could love, Setchell told The Guardian: “Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police. Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.”

And there you have it: Precrime washes up on Blighty’s fabled shores!

Merchants of Death and the Secret State: Best Friends Forever!

As if to underscore the point that the business of government in the UK, in the United States, indeed everywhere, is business, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) “helps police forces, companies, universities and other bodies that are on the receiving end of protest campaigns.”

Created by the Home Office in 2004, NETCU’s Superintendent Steve Pearl told The Guardian New Labour was “getting really pressurised by big business–pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks–that they were not able to go about their lawful business because of the extreme criminal behaviour of some people within the animal rights movement.”

But as with all things relating to “security,” once our minders get a taste of what can be gleaned by deploying new technologies, mission creep inevitably follows. Seamlessly traversing the narrow terrain between “animal rights’ extremism” and environmental campaigners, Pearl told the newspaper that the Green movement has now been brought “more on their radar.”

But greens and antiwar activists aren’t the only ones making an appearance in the “domestic extremist” database. What with enterprising capitalist grifters, pardon, defense corporations, making a killing on a planet-wide scale, it should come as no surprise that the scandal-tainted arms manufacturer, BAE, would be keen to get a handle on who might object to their grisly trade.

Indeed, one of the “domestic extremists” listed on the police spotter card as “target X” was in fact “an alleged infiltrator from the arms company BAE.”

According to The Guardian Martin Hogbin “was national co-ordinator for the Campaign against the Arms Trade. He was later accused of supplying information to a company linked to BAE’s security department, but denied the allegation.”

With billions of pounds at stake, Europe’s largest arms manufacturer continues to be caught-up in a decades’ long bribery scandal that spans continents.

And New Labour under Bush’s poodle, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and current PM Gordon Brown, have done everything in their power to suppress BAE’s prosecution by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office. As the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this month:

Labour has operated a revolving door between powerful companies, financial consultants and Whitehall, under the guise of bringing entrepreneurial expertise into the civil service, giving the major companies enormous lobbying power. Following pressure from BAE, Rolls Royce and Airbus, the government put a stop to the Export Credit Guarantee Department’s attempts to introduce stronger anti-bribery measures. It took a judicial review to get them reinstated.

The late Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, famously wrote in his memoirs, “I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE.” (Jean Shaoul, “Britain: BAE Systems faces prosecution for bribery,” World Socialist Web Site, October 5, 2009)

That “revolving door” between the secret state, arms manufacturers and the police campaign against protest is spinning ever faster.

When campaigners from the Smash EDO activist group sought to shut down an arms factory near their home, they were in for a shock.

EDO, an American arms’ firm gobbled-up by defense and communications giant ITT Corp. in 2007, reportedly for $1.8 billion according to Washington Technology, pledged to “unite EDO’s business with its own sensing and surveillance capabilities.”

ITT Corp. ranked No. 11 on the publication’s 2009 “Top 100″ list of prime federal contractors with some $2.5 billion in total revenue.

ITT is a piece of work itself. According to Anthony Sampson’s book The Sovereign State of ITT, one of the first American businessmen to pay homage to Adolf Hitler after the Nazis’ 1933 seizure of power was none other than Sosthenses Behn, ITT’s powerful CEO.

During the 1970s, the firm funded the far-right newspaper El Mercurio, the CIA’s propaganda arm that was instrumental in the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Documents published by The National Security Archive, revealed the close collaboration between ITT and the CIA “to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende.”

But that’s all in the past, right? Think again!

Smash EDO avers that “EDO’s military products include bomb racks, release clips and arming mechanisms for warplanes. They have contracts with the UK Ministry of ‘Defence’ and US arms giant Raytheon relating to the release mechanisms of the Paveway bomb system.” Needless to say, the firm’s “products” have been used in facilitating imperialist massacres of civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One can see why EDO and parent ITT would be keen on gagging protesters who object to war crimes.

The Guardian reports that the firm, with the assistance of “Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden (nicknamed TLC by activists) has been accused of gagging protesters’ right to demonstrate. The former Household Cavalry officer’s favourite legal weapon is the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act. Numerous companies have hired Lawson-Cruttenden and other City lawyers to injunct protesters under the act, a law originally introduced to protect vulnerable women from stalkers.”

Under British law, protesters who defy draconian high court injunctions can be jailed for up to five years if they break the terms of the court orders.

Lawson-Cruttenden, who claims to have influenced the drafting of the law, obtained an injunction against Smash EDO in 2005 after the attorney worked with Sussex police to frame a statement that would be beneficial to his client, EDO, which claimed the demonstrators had been “intimidating and harassing” company employees.

But as documents obtained by The Guardian show, Lawson-Cruttenden “developed extensive links with many of the police forces across England and Wales to assist with the policing of injunctions”.

Although a high court judge criticized the attorney for obtaining confidential police material, after being hired by EDO he “continued to acquire secret police papers even though the high court judge in the case had ruled that he was not entitled to them, as they were irrelevant.”

Undeterred however, Lawson-Cruttenden obtained assistance from “the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (Netcu) which targets ‘domestic extremists’. The head of Netcu, Superintendent Stephen Pearl, has testified for a number of firms which have obtained injunctions.”

The Guardian revealed that private emails “show that Inspector Nic Clay and Jim Sheldrake of Netcu gave Lawson-Cruttenden the names and contact details of officers at two other police forces as he was ‘keen’ to obtain statements about the activities of the campaigners at a third firm.”

Pearl denied that NETCU had provided assistance to EDO and told the newspaper: “Let me make this quite clear: Netcu, or me, were not involved in the EDO injunction in any way.”

When his mendacious statement was exposed by a close reading of the documents, in an obvious climb-down a NETCU spokesperson claimed there had been a “misunderstanding” and that the unit “had not given evidence for the injunction.” Translation: police had “only” leaked the information to a high-priced corporate attorney who did the dirty work.

The firm lost, the injunction was lifted and the company was forced to pay court costs for the Smash EDO protesters.

Despite this minor victory the secret state, fully in cahoots with giant multinational corporations responsible for the current capitalist economic meltdown, endless imperialist wars of conquest and accelerating environmental destruction will continue to index and target citizens who object to capitalism’s systemic criminality.

I described him as well as I could and ended with the words: “He is as honest as a politician can be.”

Arafat broke into laughter, and all the others present, among them Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, joined in.

For the sake of proper disclosure: I always liked Rabin as a human being. I especially liked some traits of his.

First of all: his honesty. This is such a rare quality among politicians that it stood out like an oasis in the desert. His mouth and his heart were one, as far as is possible in political life. He did not lie when he could possibly avoid it.

He was a decent human being. Witness the “dollar affair”: when his term as Israeli ambassador in Washington DC came to an end, his wife Leah left behind a bank account, contrary to Israeli law at the time. When it was discovered, he protected his wife by assuming personal responsibility. At the time, unlike today, “assuming responsibility” was not an empty phrase. He left the Prime Minister’s office.

I liked even his most evident personality trait – his introversion. He was withdrawn, with few human contacts. Not a fellow-well-met back slapper, not one for lavishing compliments, indeed an anti-politician.

Also, I liked the way he told people straight to the face what he thought of them. Some of his expressions, in juicy Hebrew, have become part of Israeli folklore. Such as “indefatigable intriguer” (about Shimon Peres), “propellers” (about the settlers, meaning electric fans which spin noisily without going anywhere), “garbage of weaklings” (about people leaving Israel for good).

He had no small talk. In every conversation, he came to the point right at the start.

One might imagine that these characteristics would alienate people. Quite to the contrary, people were attracted to him because of them. In a world of pretentious, garrulous, mendacious, back-slapping politicians, he was a refreshing rarity.

More than anything else, I respected Rabin for his dramatic change of outlook at the age of 70. The man who had been a soldier since he was 18, who had fought Arabs all his life, suddenly became a peace-fighter. And not just a fighter for peace in general, but for peace with the Palestinian people, whose very existence had always been denied by the leaders of Israel.

The public memory, one of the most effective instruments of the establishment, is trying nowadays to obliterate this chapter. Throughout the country one can buy postcards showing Rabin shaking hands with King Hussein at the signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but it is almost impossible to find a card showing Rabin with Arafat at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony. Never happened.

As I have recounted before, I was an eye-witness to his inner revolution. From 1969 on, until after the Oslo agreement, we had a running debate about the Palestinian issue – at the Washington embassy, at parties where we met casually (generally at the bar), in the Prime Minister’s office and at his private home.

In one 1969 conversation, he objected strenuously to any dealings with the Palestinians. One sentence imprinted itself upon my mind: “I want an open border, not a secure border” (a play of words in Hebrew). At the time, his former commander, Yigal Alon, was spreading the slogan “secure borders”, in order to justify extensive annexations of occupied territory. Rabin wanted an open border between Israel and the West Bank, which he intended to give back to King Hussein. After this conversation, I wrote him that the border would be open only if there was a Palestinian state on the other side, because then the economic realities would compel both states – Israel and Palestine – to maintain close relations.

In 1975, after the start of my secret contacts with the PLO, I went to brief him (in accordance with the express wishes of the PLO). In the conversation that took place at the Prime Minister’s office, I tried to convince him to give up the “Jordanian option”, which I had always considered silly. He refused adamantly. “We must make peace with Hussein,” he told me. “After he has signed, I don’t care if the king is toppled.” Like Shimon Peres and many others, he entertained the illusion that the king would give up East Jerusalem.

I told him that I could not follow the logic of this line of thought. Let’s imagine that the king signed and was then overthrown. What next? The PLO would take over a state extending from Tulkarm to the approaches of Baghdad, in which four Arab armies could easily assemble. Was that, I asked, what he wanted?

In this conversation, too, one sentence imprinted itself on my mind: “I will not take the smallest step towards the Palestinians, because the first step would lead inevitably to the creation of a Palestinian state, and I don’t want that.” In the end he told me: “I oppose what you are doing, but I will not prevent you from meeting with them. If these meetings reveal things to you that you think the Israeli Prime Minister should know about, my door is open.” That was Rabin all over. The contacts, of course, broke the law.

After that I brought him several messages from Arafat, conveyed to me by the PLO representative in London, Sa’id Hamami. Arafat proposed small mutual gestures. Rabin refused all of them.

Consequently I was all the more impressed by Oslo. Later Rabin explained to me, one Shabbat at his private apartment, how he arrived there: King Hussein had resigned his responsibility for the West Bank. The “village leagues”, set up by Israel as pliant “representatives” of the Palestinians, were a dismal failure. As Minister of Defense he summoned local Palestinian leaders for individual consultations, and one after another they told him that their political address was in Tunis. After that, at the Madrid conference, Israel agreed to negotiate with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but then the Jordanians told them that all Palestinian matters must be discussed with the Palestinian members alone. But at every meeting, the Palestinian delegates asked for a pause in order to call Tunis and get instructions from Arafat. Rabin’s conclusion: if all decisions are made by Arafat anyhow, why not talk with him directly?

It has always been said that Rabin had an “analytical mind”. He did not have much of an imagination, but he viewed facts soberly, analyzed them logically and drew his conclusions.

If so, why did the Oslo agreement fail?

The practical reasons are easy to see. From the beginning, the agreement was build on shaky foundations, because it lacked the main thing: a clear definition of the final objective of the process.

For Arafat it was self-evident that the agreed “interim stages” would lead to an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with perhaps some minor exchanges of territory. East Jerusalem, including of course the Holy Shrines, was to become the capital of Palestine. The settlements would be dismantled. I am convinced that he would have been satisfied with a symbolic return of a limited number of refugees to Israel proper.

That was Arafat’s price for giving up 78% of the country, and no Palestinian leader, present or future, could be satisfied with less.

But Rabin’s aim was unclear, perhaps even to himself. At the time he was not yet ready to accept a Palestinian state. Absent an agreed destination, all the “interim phases” went awry. Every step caused new conflicts. (As I wrote at the time, when traveling from Paris to Berlin, one can stop at interim stations. When traveling from Paris to Madrid, one can also stop at interim stations – but they will be quite different ones.)

Arafat was conscious of the faults of the agreement. He told his people that it was “the best possible agreement in the worst possible circumstances”. But he believed that the dynamics of the peace process would overcome the obstacles on the way. So did I. We were both wrong.

After the signing, Rabin began to hesitate. Instead of rushing forwards to create facts, he dithered. This gave the opposing forces in Israel time to recoup from the shock, regroup and start a counterattack, which ended in his assassination.

Perhaps this mistake could have been foreseen. Rabin was by nature a cautious person. He was conscious of the heavy responsibility that rested on his shoulders. He had no taste for drama, unlike Begin, nor was he blessed with a vivid imagination, like Herzl. For better and for worse, he lived in the real world. He had no idea how to change it, though he knew that he had to do just that.

But these explanations are only the foam upon the waves. Deep under the surface, powerful currents were at work. They pushed Rabin off course and in the end they swallowed him.

Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology. He never rebelled against it. He carried in his body the genetic code of the Zionist movement, a movement whose aim from the beginning was to turn the Land of Israel into an exclusively Jewish state, which denied the very existence of the Arab Palestinian people and whose logic ultimately meant their displacement.

Like most of his generation in the country, he absorbed this ideology with his mother’s milk, and was raised on it throughout. It shaped his ideas so thoroughly that he was not even aware of it. At the critical juncture of his life, he fell victim to an insoluble inner contradiction: his analytical mind told him to make peace with the Palestinians, to “give up” a part of the country and to dismantle the settlements, while his Zionist genetic heritage opposed this with all its might. That manifested itself visibly at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony: he offered his hand to Arafat because his mind commanded it, but all his body language expressed rejection.

It is impossible to make peace without a basic mental and emotional commitment to peace. Impossible to change the direction of a historic movement without reassessing its history. Impossible for a leader to steer his people towards a total change (as Ataturk did in Turkey, for example) if he is not completely devoted to the change himself. Impossible to make peace with an enemy without understanding his truth.

Rabin’s inner convictions continued to evolve after Oslo. Between him and Arafat, mutual respect grew. Perhaps he would have arrived, in his slow and cautious way, at the necessary mental change. The assassin and his handlers must have been afraid of this and decided to forestall it.

Rabin’s failure will find its expression at the memorial rally next week at the very place where we witnessed his murder, 14 years ago. The main speakers will be two of the gravediggers of the Oslo agreement, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, as well as Tzipi Livni and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who belonged to the forces that created the climate for the murder. Rabin, I assume, will turn in his grave.

Will I be there? Not me, thank you very much.

Like an acquaintance of mine who helped organize the Moratorium in College Park, MD wrote in an email yesterday: who today wouldn’t take massive liberal anti war demos? Indeed. Reports this morning (October 15, 2009) from Washington indicate that Barack Obama is going to send 45,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. At this point it is not clear if this is the entire number or if it is just the number of combat forces. As the Washington Post revealed earlier in the week of October 11th, 2009, when Washington sent some 20,000 troops into Afghanistan earlier this year it did not announce that another 13,000 support troops were also sent over. If this ratio holds true that would mean that there would be closer to 70,000 more US troops in Afghanistan by the time this latest escalation is completed. These numbers would put the total amount of troops involved in the occupier’s forces euphemistically called the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) very close to 200,000.

200,000 heavily armed invaders on the ground. Untold numbers flying planes and dropping bombs. More sitting in bunkers in the North American desert launching drones aptly named Predator that kill fighters and civilians alike without an ounce of moral hesitation. An unknown number of mercenaries working under the title of contractor. Yet, there is barely a peep from the people of the nations whose men and women wage this pointless and immoral war. With the exception of a few protesters in DC and other big cities and a few thousand college students on twenty six college campuses around the United States, recent calls for protests against the war in Afghanistan and the continued occupation of Iraq went unheeded. The sight of young men and women in military camouflage and crewcuts wearing ISAF patches is becoming overly familiar to travelers in US airports. Yet, there is hardly a peep. The sight of parents crying on the television while their children are buried in caskets covered with the red, white and blue is not uncommon. If the news reports are true and at least 45,000 soldiers are preparing for their assignment to Afghanistan, these displays designed to inspire more such deaths will increase in frequency. All the while families tell themselves their children died for something like freedom when most of us know deep inside that no one but those who send them over there really know why the US military is even over there. When we the people are honest with ourselves we know it has to do with empire and conceit, but those reasons do o not make us feel good.

And there’s barely a peep. Liberals and rightwingers in Congress line up behind the Obama who lines up behind the Pentagon and the industry of war. With the exception of a very few, the consensus is that the death and destruction must continue. The comfort of the empire’s citizens must not be disturbed. It can not be said enough, the time to speak up is now. The orgy of death is set to increase. One can not add 50,000 more troops whose job is to kill and expect anything else.

ABC’s Peter Jennings called him “a journalist’s journalist.” The New York Times featured his death on its front page (usually reserved for the rich and powerful) in a Peter Flint obituary titled, “IF Stone, Iconoclast of Journalism, Is Dead at 81.” A quintessential muckraker, he described him as “the independent, radical pamphleteer of American journalism hailed by his admirers for his scholarship, wit and lucidity” over a career spanning 67 years.

He quoted Stone saying:

“I tried to bring the instincts of a scholar to the service of journalism; to take nothing for granted; to turn journalism into literature; to provide radical analysis with a conscientious concern for accuracy, and in studying the current scene to do my very best to preserve human values and free institutions.” In the spirit of author Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), he “comfort(ed) the afflicted and afflict(ed) the comfortable,” in a way few others matched or kept doing for so long.

In a 1987 interview, he deplored what he called the ascendancy of “right-wing kooks (and) the ugly spirit (of Reagan’s not so subtle message that) you should go get yours and run.” Late in life he learned classical Greek to be able to read untranslated works and write The Trials of Socrates after more than a decade of study. He criticized the accepted Plato view that he died for exhorting his fellow Athenians to be virtuous. According to Stone, he was seen as a security threat at a time Athenian democracy was imperiled.

In Izzy on Izzy, he called himself an “anachronism… an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise, subject to neither mortgage or broker, factor or patron… standing alone, without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good readers.”

They were many, loyal, and included Ralph Nader who called him “the modern Tom Paine — as independent and incorruptible as they come (as) journalism’s Gibraltar and its unwavering conscience.”

Stone called himself “a newspaperman all my life,” publishing a paper (the Progress) at age 14, working for a country weekly, and then as correspondent for two city dailies (the Haddonfield Press and Camden Courier-Post). Beginning as a high school sophomore, he did this into his third year of college (at the University of Pennsylvania), then quit because “the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me.” At the same time, he worked afternoons and evenings at the Philadelphia Inquirer “doing combination rewrite and copy desk (work), so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week — big pay in 1928.” He did everything “except run a linotype machine.”

In the 1920s as a teenager, he became radicalized, mostly from reading Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin (a noted Russian anarchist and early communism advocate), and Karl Marx. He joined the Socialist Party and was elected to its New Jersey State Committee “before I was old enough to vote.” He did publicity for Norman Thomas (1894-1968) in the 1928 presidential campaign, but then “drifted away from left-wing politics because of the sectarianism of the left.”

He also believed that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism, and he wanted to be “free to help the unjustly treated, to defend everyone’s civil liberty, and to work for social reform without concern for leftist infighting.”

Remembering them “with affection,” he praised his employers for never forcing him to compromise his conscience, even as an anonymous editorial writer. From 1932-1939, that was his job for the Philadelphia Record and New York Post, both strongly pro-New Deal papers at the time. In 1940, he came to Washington as The Nation’s editor and remained until his death, working as reporter and columnist for PM, the New York Star, New York Post and New York Compass.

In the 1950s, during the Cold War and McCarthy era, no daily paper (or The Nation) ran his byline, so when the Compass closed in 1952, he launched his own four-page IF Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and wrote:

“Early Soviet novels used a vivid phrase, ‘former people,’ about the remnants of the dispossessed ruling class. On the inhospitable streets of Washington these days, your editor often feels like one of the ‘former people.’ ”

Earlier from its 1946 inception until 1949, he was a regular on Meet the Press, first on radio, then TV. No longer, nor was he seen again on national television for another 18 years because his muckraking threatened the powerful.

It’s never easy starting out on your own, but Stone succeeded by what he called “a piggy-back launching” from the PM, Star, and Compass mailing lists as well as people who had bought his books. From them, he got 5,000 subscribers at $5 each. During McCarthy’s heyday, he got a second-class mailing permit, and was on his way after “working in Washington for 12 years as correspondent for a succession of liberal and radical papers.”

Biographer Myra MacPherson (from All Governments Lie!) said he “went from a young iconoclast in the 1930s to an icon during the Vietnam War. In the fifties, he spoke to mere handfuls who dared surface to protest Cold War loyalty oaths and witch-hunts. A decade later, he spoke to half a million who massed for anti-Vietnam War rallies. (Deservedly) He became world famous.”

Earlier, he supported Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election campaign, civil liberties for everyone, including communists, and advocated for peace and co-existence with the Soviets. He fought the loyalty purge, FBI, House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Pat McCarran’s virulent anti-communism as Senate Judiciary Committee and Internal Security Subcommittee chairmen, and Joe McCarthy.

He wrote the first article against the Smith Act for its 1940 use against Trotskyites and other leftists with suspected subversive leanings.

His idea was to make the Weekly radical by providing information readers could check out on their own. He “tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.” He wanted every issue to provide facts and opinions unavailable elsewhere in the press. He felt like “a guerilla warrior, swooping down in a surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry.”

Unlike beat reporters for major dailies or wire services, he was immune to the pressures they faced. He said Washington has lots of news. If information on some are blocked, go get others because “The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from the time to time.” And by asking tough questions, a whole lot can be learned that as an independent can be published freely without fear of employer retribution.

It’s why no bureaucracy likes independent journalism, especially radical muckrakers digging out the most sensitive material it wants suppressed. The fault Stone found with most newspapers wasn’t the absence of dissent. It was the absence of real news, the timidity of journalists to write it, and the power owners held over them.

“Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.” Most newspaper owners are businessmen, not journalists. “The news is something which fills spaces left over by advertisers.”

Most publishers aren’t just hostile to dissent, they suspect any opinions likely to antagonize readers, consumers, and mainly advertisers. As a result, most newspapers “stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons.” Even the best papers are timid. They don’t question the Cold War, arms race, or stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law. Only a few “maverick” dailies are around making it “easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express.”

Journalism was a “crusade” for Stone. What Jefferson symbolized for him was being “rediscovered in a socialist society as a necessity for good government.” During the height of the McCarthy era, he felt like a pariah but believed he stood for and was preserving the best of America’s traditions. It inspired what he did to the end.

DD Guttenplan’s American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone

Guttenplan described him as a journalistic “irritant to power for his uncanny ability to seize on the most inconvenient truths and for his vociferous opposition to the existing order.” After becoming radicalized, he was brash, forthright, anti-fascist, pro-labor, a supporter of New Deal politics, and a passionate activist for the oppressed, disadvantaged, and social justice.

In his preface, Guttenplan described the fateful December 12, 1949 moment when Stone went from prominence to a non-person in American politics and his profession. It was during an interchange with the AMA’s Dr. Morris Fishbein on Meet the Press, an ardent foe of universal single-payer health insurance he denounced as “socialistic.” Quoting Stone, Guttenplan wrote:

“Dr. Fishbein, let’s get nice and rough. In view of his advocacy of compulsory health insurance, do you regard Mr. Harry Truman as a card-carrying communist, or just a deluded fellow-traveler?”

After that, he slowly vanished, was never again on Meet the Press, couldn’t get his passport renewed after a year in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Compass, and when it closed in 1952 was blacklisted as a reporter. As he put it at age 40: “I feel for the moment like a ghost.” And as Guttenplan wrote:

“For some time he live(d) in a kind of internal exile (sitting) in (a) Washington, DC… rented office waiting for the phone to ring (and) after three years (getting no) visitor apart from building maintenance workers and the mailman… (so he gave) up the office… work(ed) from home,” and launched the IF Stone Weekly as a platform to produce radical commentaries for his readers… “slowly, almost imperceptibly, his audience return(ed)” to its final year 1971 peak 70,000 circulation level.

According to Guttenplan, Stone “rode into battle not as a paladin of the powerless or a gadfly, but as an insider, a confidential agent of the (left-wing) ‘party within a party’ that served” progressive politics in the 1930s. He later broke with Harry Truman and supported Wallace. The FBI followed him everywhere, investigated him for five years, and accumulated 6,000 pages in his file, threefold its size for Al Capone. His phone was tapped and his mail intercepted on suspicion he was a Soviet spy, that was, of course, untrue.

By 1970, he was invited in from the cold and given a special George Polk Award in journalism. He got honorary degrees from American University, Brown, Colby, and others, including a baccalaureate and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania where he dropped out before graduating.

His numerous awards included:

• Newspaper Guild of New York Honors Page One Must for his book, Underground to Palestine — written before his views about Israel changed after the 1967 war;
• The Eleanor Roosevelt Award;
• the National Press Club Journalists’ Journalist Award
• ACLU Award;
• the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the Association for Education In Journalism & Mass Communications;
• Columbia University Journalism Award; and
• on March 5, 2008, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced an annual IF Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence award and an IF Stone Workshop on Strengthening Journalistic Independence.

In his name, the annual Izzy Award is presented to “an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures.”

Three of Stone’s great quotes were:

One of several versions of his saying, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins….”

“You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.” Not Stone. His honor and integrity weren’t for sale.

In a June 19-25, 2009 Counterspin interview, Guttenplan said Stone was never ideologically rigid, and would always change his views in light of new information. He:

never pretended to be a liberal. He was an unashamed radical, and in a way, the most important way in which he matters is he shows us, he reminds us what’s possible. He reminds us what the left can do. He reminds us what our country can do. He reminds us what our government can do if we keep on its back and we make sure it delivers on its promises.

And he showed how good journalism can make a difference, the kind so lacking then and now with no IF Stone around to write it.

He “challenged power by using power’s own record against itself.” And after his hearing failed, he relied increasingly on documents to prove what he famously said:

“All governments lie, but the truth still slips out from time to time,” and it’s up to good journalists to find and report it. Stone did, what the powerful wanted suppressed in his Weekly and numerous books, including (a treasured signed used copy this writer owns of) his Hidden History of the Korean War.

Published in 1952, Monthly Review co-founders Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface:

“This book….paints a very different picture of the Korean War — one, in fact, which is at variance with the official version at almost every point.” Stone’s investigations into official discrepancies led him “to a full-scale reassessment of the whole” war.

First published, in part, in the Compass and two articles in France’s L’Observateur, its publisher, Claude Bourdet explained in his article titled, “The Korean Mystery: Fight Against a Phantom?”

If Stone’s thesis corresponds to reality (and it did), we are in the presence of the greatest swindle in the whole of military history… not a question of a harmless fraud but of a terrible maneuver in which deception is being consciously utilized to block peace at a time when it is possible.

Stone called it international aggression. So did Huberman and Sweezy writing in August 1951 (14 months into the war):

“….we have come to the conclusion that (South Korean president) Syngman Rhee deliberately provoked the North Koreans in the hope that they would retaliate by crossing the parallel in force. The northerners (who wanted a unified Korea, not war) fell neatly into the trap.” Truman was the instigator who took full advantage when they did, as Stone believed in writing:

we said we were going to Korea to go back to the status quo before the war but when the American armies reached the 38th parallel they didn’t stop, they kept going, so there must be something else. We must have another agenda here and what might that agenda be?

The same one, he later learned, we had in Vietnam that made him outspoken against it. He was the only journalist asked to speak at the first nationwide November 15, 1969 “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam War,” that half a million to Washington one month after a global event was held.

He matched his anti-war spirit with his support for the disadvantaged, the oppressed, social equity, and above all accuracy and truth, and used his journalism as a “crusade” to produce it. He wrote:

“I was heartened by the thought that I was preserving and carrying forward the best in America’s traditions, that in my humble way I stood in a line that reached back to Jefferson. These are the origins and the preconceptions, the hopes and the aspirations” behind all his writings and the legacy that’s now ours.

On June 17, 1989, he died of heart failure in Cambridge, MA and is buried there at Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaving behind his wife, Esther, of 60 years, and three children, Celia, Jeremy and Christopher. He once told his wife that “if (he) lived long enough (he’d) graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if (he) lasted long enough, from a character to public institution.” He omitted a legend, a committed radical, consummate independent, and ideological hero symbolizing what Public Affairs’ Peter Osnos called his “stubborn tenacity, ferocious independence, and extraordinary will” in pursuing truth.

Or as Guttenplan ended his book:

“IF Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world. We read and work – and wait.”

On October 5, 2009, I witnessed my mother, a 55 year old grandmother be assaulted by your Secret Service right in front of your house. It was so frightening for me, and what your protectors did in your name destroyed any faith that I had left in your willingness to listen to your citizens to end the violence being committed by our country.

My mother, Joy First, is the most peaceful, loving person that I have ever met. She has always had a completely selfless altruism that has led her to take care of others, even when it puts her own personal comfort and safety in jeopardy. As a mother and grandmother, she has always given up much for her children and grandchildren, in an effort to see us not suffer. In the past several years, my mother, Joy has extended this mothering and altruism to all of the children of the world. She has put her comfort and safety on the line countless times in an effort to stop the killing of the world’s children and grandchildren. On October 5th, my mother, Joy, went to your front door to plead with you to stop bombing and shooting of innocent children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

My mother, Joy, was joined by a group of almost 2 dozen other peaceful civil resisters who were asking you to end the senseless killing in the Middle East. Instead of engaging in civil dialogue with these resisters, someone from the house where you live with your family sent out around two dozen armed secret service agents to assault these peaceful people. So, as I was watching what I believed to be a demonstration of our American democracy, I saw the scene descend into what frighteningly became much more like a scene from an Orwellian novel than from the America I had learned about in Social Studies. And then all of the sudden, people were being dragged, and then, there was my mother, being bounced around like a ping pong ball and being pushed violently by members of your Secret Service.

I ran over to where my mother, Joy, was finally pushed on the ground, and she was sobbing as she was being helped up by her friend. Her friend was so angry that he began to yell that the Secret Service was pushing people’s mothers; they were pushing grandmothers. And I felt the anger swell up inside of me as I saw my mother crying, and I looked at the large, strong men who had been violently pushing my 55 year old mother to the point of tears. Resisters and their supporters wisely moved to a park across the street to process what had happened and decide what to do next. And in the park, I comforted my mother, as I sat next to her in shock.

I don’t mean to make this personal, but you have made this personal to me when your Secret Service attacked my mother, and you have made it personal to the families of the world when you have killed their relatives. How would you feel if your daughters Sasha or Malia witnessed their mother Michelle being assaulted by armed guards? How do you think your daughters would feel? What would it do to Michelle? What would the world say? Well then, please imagine how I felt and how my father felt when he heard when happened right in front of your house where your family lives.

Mr. President, I voted for you in November because I believed in you. I believed that you would put an end to the policies and unjust wars of the Bush administration. Since you have been in office for the past 9 months, I have listened to the excuses that people have made for your continuation of the wars, and I have felt torn between feeling sympathy for your situation and a childish expectation that you will rise to the occasion to protect the children of the world from harm. But on that day, Mr. President, you stole my youthful naiveté and innocence. I left Washington without faith in my government or in my president. It was instead replaced with fear. I am lucky that I have seen such strength and resolve in my mother and her community of peaceful resisters. So I have faith that this senseless killing will stop, but I know that it will not be by your hand.

Jennifer First

The United States has a new opportunity to change direction in Afghanistan… We believe that this time, with the leadership of President Obama … women and girls will not be left on the periphery, but placed in the central focus of our new policy.
– Feminist Majority press release¹

As an historian and teacher of women’s rights, a former feminist organizer, and one who considers herself leftist/progressive, I can only be horrified at an American foreign policy which is unleashing horrible violence on the men, women and children of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And since the policy is being carried out by Democratic President Barack Obama and his Democratic majority party, I can only be horrified at him, Nobel Peace Prize winner(!) or not, and at them. You think? Well apparently there are many who identify themselves as feminist and progressive who do not agree.

Take the Feminist Majority, for example. Here is a group dedicated, according to their website, to “women’s equality, reproductive health and non-violence.” [Emphasis mine.] They were founded by veteran feminist leader Eleanor Smeal in 1986, to represent the then 56% of American women who said they were feminists. They publish Ms. magazine, and campaign for women’s health and education, global women’s equality, women’s leadership, and gender balance in politics. Ah. How do you get gender balance in politics? Apparently by being absorbed into the Democratic party to the point where your web page sings odes of praise to the magnificence of President Obama and Vice Present Biden, and of course Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—herself not exactly a shining example of promoting “non-violence.”

The melding with the Democrats has now led to the Feminist Majority becoming an advocate for Obama “ending terrorism” in Afghanistan, with, of course, a focus on human (and women’s) rights. And the Feminist Majority, along with NOW (National Organization for Women) is also campaigning for “Afghan women and girls” by supporting the passage of Senator Barbara Boxer’s Afghan Women Empowerment Act, S229, on their websites. The bill, now in committee (foreign relations), cites the lack of rights women have had under the Taliban, and then says “Despite efforts by the U.S. government … to improve [their] lives,” Afghan women apparently still “lack access” to most of life’s necessary resources.²

It’s all very well to want to empower and improve life for and make a central focus of Afghan women. But supporting the government’s war efforts, through support of the Democratic party’s huge expansion of the Afghan war, should not be part of it. As Tom Hayden wrote last July, Afghan women will not be liberated by an “invading, bombing, imprisoning American army.” The Taliban will not change its anti-feminist fundamentalism because of that army—and the U.S.-backed Kabul government has recently passed a law insisting women obey their husbands “in sexual matters.”³ So much for empowerment. Supporting that government, and expanding that war, means supporting the Democrats’ increased funding for U.S. troops. And that is going to mean more death, destruction and chaos for said Afghan women and girls.

Becoming enmeshed in the campaigns of the Democratic Party is a huge mistake. About 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Iron-Jawed Angels⁴ which details the dramatic campaign of the radically feminist National Woman’s Party of the early 20th century. Controversially, they modeled their political drive after the British suffragists who insisted on working against the party in power which was doing nothing for its issue: women’s suffrage. Similarly, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton eventually concluded in their earlier women’s rights campaign, that being identified with a particular political party, instead of with feminist issues, would only hurt and dilute their cause. Susan B. Anthony said in 1878 that “women should stand shoulder to shoulder against every party not fully and unequivocally committed to Equal Rights for Women.”⁵ Equal rights for women will not be advanced by women being subjected to bombs and occupation.

Throughout American history “third party” issue-oriented parties on the right and left, have been absorbed into the powerful vortex of the two-party system. The most extreme example would be when the farmer and labor-led Populist party, amidst much resistance by its members, succumbed to William Jennings Bryan and was sucked into the Democratic Party—which then went down to defeat at the hands of the Republicans in 1896, arguably the time when Big Business took control of our politics for good.

I experienced party takeover of feminism personally at the commemoration of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Conference, held in 1998. Most of the speakers were (female) Democratic party operatives. During one of the speeches celebrating the wonderful feminist accomplishments of the Democratic party, I foolishly made some sort of joke to the woman standing next to me about the irony of President Clinton and feminism in light of Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, etc. She was not only indignant but also somehow totally not understanding how I could utter such disloyal perfidy. The disgraceful blind loyalty of Gloria Steinem, NOW’s Patricia Ireland and Eleanor Smeal, et. al. ad nauseam, with Clinton and against any of those pesky women who were allegedly victims of Clinton’s very nonfeminist attentions, was unbelievable to me.⁶ But these famous feminists had all very much become Democratic party insiders. Sexual harassment? Charges of rape/assault? Why believe (all of) these unreliable women? Bill Clinton was their man. Feminist equaled Democratic Party: end of story.

As long as feminists—or “progressives”—cannot imagine an American political world which is not divided into Democrat and Republican, and now there really is no difference between the completely corporate-run two parties, their issues will be totally subsumed by the parties’ only function, which is to stay in power and maintain their own gravy train, while sustaining the money behemoth which runs America.

One important function of this corporate-run political system is to maintain and expand the American empire—for corporate gain, yes, but also for pure nationalistic greed and glory. Our reasons for being in Afghanistan do not seem to be topped by working for “human rights.” “Zoya,” an Afghan woman who is an activist with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, argues that Afghan women do suffer from the Taliban, but also from U.S. and NATO bombs; in fact the latter kill many more civilians than either Taliban or “terrorists.” She says American troops must withdraw immediately, because their presence only hurts any chance for a needed radical change in the political system in Afghanistan.⁷

So if you say you are a feminist who wants human rights in Afghanistan, it’s time to step back from the thrill of being an insider in Washington; it’s time to step back and think about if maintaining empire, sustaining occupation, and killing thousands of civilians is really what your “human rights” campaign is all about.

1. Feminist Majority website, “Feminists Announce New Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls,” March 27, 2009.
2. Feminist Majority website, “Take Action Now to Help Afghan Women,” and National Organization for Women website, “Afghan Women and Girls Need Our Help.”
3. Hayden, Tom, “Pentagon Enlists Feminists for War Aims,” Huffington Post, July 18, 2009.
4. Ford, Linda, Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912-1920, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 1991.
5. National Woman’s Party Papers, Congressional Union pamphlet, 1915, Reel 22.
6. Mink, Gwendolyn, Hostile Environment: The Political Betrayal of Sexually Harassed Women, Chapter 4, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2000.
7. “Voices from Afghanistan: Afghan Women’s Activist Zoya Speaks Out on Eight Years of Occupation,” Democracy Now, October 9, 2007.

Activists in the Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) of Olympia, Wash., recently exposed an infiltrator employed by the Army. His exploits are proof that the government fears a strong antiwar movement.

Since 2006, PMR has inspired antiwar forces nationally with seven major direct action disruptions of military shipments at Washington ports. Its very effectiveness is what made it a government target. So now, Olympia activists are teaching the lessons learned about movement defense to a new generation.

And that’s as it should be. Militants can assume spies are around, and must learn to build the movement despite such obstacles.

Dirty deeds

John J. Towery, alias “John Jacob,” works on the Fort Lewis Army base near Olympia in “force protection.” He claimed to be a civilian computer technician and for two years got close to several activists in Olympia PMR, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

He passed information not only to his bosses at Ft. Lewis and the national military intelligence hub in New Jersey, but also to local police, the state patrol, FBI, Homeland Security, Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), and others.

He became an email list-serve administrator — violating the privacy of everyone on the list. He sowed dissention among activists, and tried to sabotage blockades of war equipment at the Olympia port.

Such spying is illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, but this prohibition doesn’t stop military brass from doing it anyway. In the 1970s, the Army similarly spied on the anti-Vietnam War G.I. coffeehouse movement, including Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, which were active in it.

Patty Imani, a founder of Olympia PMR, observes that it wouldn’t have been surprising to learn the FBI was involved. “Their dirty deeds are well known.”

The FBI has repeatedly attacked antiwar, people of color, labor and left movements. They have disrupted organizations, framed or entrapped activists for crimes, and even carried out political assassinations. These outrages reached their height in the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) of the 1960s and ’70s.

History shows that one end goal of infiltration is to find — or concoct — evidence for a grand jury to wield against the movement. The grand jury meets in secret and has extraordinary investigative powers that originated with the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. A grand jury indictment is required for federal criminal charges, but juries typically act as a government rubber stamp.

Mark Cook, a former political prisoner and Black Panther, spoke to student activists in Olympia about lessons he learned in the struggle. He heard about the security leaks they were experiencing before the spy was discovered, and says he saw all the same things before he went to jail. “They monitor free speech and build a ’sociogram’ (pattern) of who people associate with.” Despite being illegal, government spying is a constant that activists should expect. Cook says, “No matter how old you are, they follow you.”

Movement self-defense

Those who worked closest with Towery unmasked him. One activist made a public records request to the city of Olympia on behalf of the IWW for any communications between Olympia police and the military, on anarchists, SDS or the IWW. He received hundreds of documents.

One email with John J. Towery’s name popped up. Not knowing him, several people researched and discovered Towery was their “friend” John Jacob.

From these revelations, Patty Imani emphasizes the importance of building Olympia PMR’s defenses. She notes that Towery avoided more seasoned activists, who grew suspicious of him due to his divisive behavior. He gained the trust of a few people in key positions.

Giving him charge of the PMR email list was not a democratic decision by the group. Imani says, “If we are truly building a movement, we need to be inclusive and have democratic decision-making structures. Then we won’t be as vulnerable.”

Imani points to self-reliance as another important defense against infiltrators. Towery persuaded some contacts that his insider status was essential to PMR. But figuring out the Army’s plans can be done other ways, such as by following the media.

Here are some other lessons this writer learned during the Vietnam G.I. coffeehouse movement: act in such a way that grand juries have no ammunition; stand up to disrupters — whether they are agents or not; know the full background of anyone who has access to mailing lists or is trusted with information gathering and transmission!

The Army is supposedly “looking into the matter,” but don’t hold your breath. Better to learn from experience, expect government interference, and build the fight for social change in spite of it.

The progressive organization True Majority sent out an email today (October 9th) via its listserv. It highlighted True Majority’s support for the award. Here are their reasons as to why Obama deserves it:

1) Obama de-escalated the conflict with Russia by ending Bush’s needless missile defense programs;

2) After years of bluster and military threats from Bush, Obama successfully re-reopened dialogue with Iran, including their nuclear program;

3) In Egypt and Eastern Europe, where Bush’s government was a symbol of tyranny and empire, Obama electrified young people and reformers while pointing the way to a nuclear-free future;

4) And where Bush wanted to begin a new arms race, Obama has begun to bring sanity to the military budget by ending programs like the F-22 and missile defense.

The majority of these reasons are more about disagreeing with George W. Bush’s hawkish, imperialist policies rather than applauding any concrete, peaceful, or anti-imperialist policies of Barack Obama. I also don’t see how “electrifying” populations is a legitimate criteria for the prize. Obamania was months ago; the honeymoon is over. In terms of nuclear de-escalation, that’s great. But many political leaders have paid such lip service while few if any have delivered. And the last reason just doesn’t hold up. The United States of America continues to have the largest military budget in the entire world. It’s not even close: the U.S. accounts for 48% of the world’s total military spending and spends more than the next 45 countries combined.¹ The Obama administration has not come close to denting these figures.

I admit that the election of Obama has definitely shifted the political discourse in the country. It’s now okay to discuss left-of-center ideas and policies without worrying about right-wing “anti-American” sneers. That accounts for the “breath of fresh air” vibe since last November. But other than that, no real change has yet occurred. People’s immediate, everyday lives are not all that different from the Bush years. And that’s just in the U.S. let alone the rest of the world.

I also recognize and appreciate that Obama has engaged in multilateral diplomacy. But isn’t such diplomacy to be expected in our age of democratic governance? I didn’t know that multilateral talk was something extraordinary. If it is, then most elected leaders of the free world deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

In analyzing the evidence, it seems that Obama was given the award for some type of disingenuous reason. At best, I see it as an attempt on the part of the Nobel committee to push Obama toward more peacemaking and to once again comment on the Bush years. Both intentions may seem fine. But I believe that one possible negative consequence of this award is that people will say, Oh, see, Obama is perfect and we (the people) don’t have to push him… he’ll take care of it all on his own. That type of thinking just doesn’t work given the fact that every special interest group pushes every president in a million different ways, and the real wants and needs of everyday people are left out of the discussion. We need to stop patting Obama on the back for something he has not yet accomplished and start directly pressuring his entire administration toward more peaceful ways. That’s the whole point of democracy.

1. The Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.

Yesterday we awoke to news that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Some looked quick to see whether it was April 1. Most often folks mumbled resignedly “War is Peace.” I prefer the Vietnam era formulation that warring for peace is like fu**ing for virginity. A few wept tears of disappointment, certainly mainstream Medea Benjamin who, having recently come out definitively as a hawk, must have thought that with this adjustment the Nobel was certainly in sight. Code Pink needs a new name now. Justin Raimondo suggests Code Yellow. But I believe Whores for Wars might be better. (That would only apply to Medea and the national leadership, many of the local Code Pinkers being genuine anti- interventionists who cannot stomach the narcissistic national leadership like mainstream Medea.)

My good friend and Israeli expat Joshua was at first afraid he was having a bad dream or that the Nobel committee was working a cruel joke. After all, Joshua reasoned, Obama is war criminal, who has engineered the biggest military spending in human history, who daily drops bombs on innocents, women and children in at least three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, who supports the worst war criminals and lodges some in his administration, who destroyed in a few months the “hope” for a peace in the middle east. The western world has gone crazy, no doubt, says Joshua. And since war is now peace we might rename all organizations appropriately – United for War and Justice, War Action, and so on.

This led Joshua to predictions for future Nobels.

Next year, literature: Obama for “The Audacity of Hope” — the greatest fiction ever.

Next year, economy: Obama — creating a new statistical metric for recovery.

Next year, peace: Bush/Cheney — based on Obama’s peace prize precedent.

Year after, peace: Netanyahu — the man behind Obama’s peace in the middle east.

But to this writer we witness the second repetition of history. The US Empire’s first great colonial war on the Asian mainland in the last half century was Truman’s Korean war. This was repeated as tragedy in Vietnam at the hands of the Best and Brightest, with Johnson and Kennedy in the lead. And now the Iraq/AfPak war comes at us from Bush and Obama and Congresses both Democrat and Republic. If Vietnam was tragedy, then certainly Iraq/AfPak is farce. There were no WMD in Iraq and everyone knew it. By the military’s own admission there are about 100 Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, so the US troops are not there because of Al-Qaeda – and everyone knows it.

Now the ultimate comedic turn comes with the award to Obama of the Nobel War Prize. Perhaps the antiwar movement needs to adjust its tone from pure outrage to ridicule. After all Obama and the elite running this country are without clothes as they parade before us as men of peace, puffed up with talk of fake health care reform and assuring us of economic recovery that provides no jobs. It would be hard to make this stuff up. And through our tears at the predicament we are in, we can at least ridicule these hypocritical murderers. They deserve to be seen clearly as the cruel and absurd hollow men that they are. They march before us unknowingly naked.

If the Nobel Committee were serious, Cindy Sheehan would have won the award long ago.

Obama is a man who has yet to shut down a global gulag, who has yet to end the warring in Iraq, who has yet to oversee the return of the elected president of Haiti (deposed by US, Canadian, and French forces), who stands unflinching on the coup d’etat in Honduras, who runs cover for Israeli massacres of Palestinians and Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions (i.e., supporting war crimes), who seeks to proliferate military bases in Columbia, who has ramped up the killing in Afghanistan, and who has overseen the spillover of war into Pakistan.

Is this the criteria that is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjørn Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

So Nobel Prizes are being handed out for offering hope? Is this an effort to prod Obama along the road toward a peace-making presidency?

Didn’t Norway reward Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat Nobel Peace Prizes for giving the hope of peace in historical Palestine? Since then Israel has carried out many slaughters of the indigenous Palestinians. And yes, Palestinians have resisted with violence — sometimes lethal.

Wasn’t US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger co-awarded a 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a cease-fire in the US war on Vietnam? Hope was hung around a ceasefire destined to collapse. At least Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho had the integrity to refuse a prize where peace was based on the tokenism of hope.

There are many examples that contradict the notion that Nobel Prizes would spur the US nation toward peace. Yet the leaders of the most warring nation on the planet continue to be rewarded with peace prizes. It defies rationality.

Did Obama offer a mea culpa for US atrocities?

Did Obama seek justice for the perpetrators behind the killing of an estimated 1.3 million Iraqis based upon a concocted casus belli?

To his credit, Obama did something most unusual in acknowledging that the US was behind the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran? Did he offer an apology? Did he offer compensation?

Hoping for peace in a state based on the genocide, dispossession, and marginalization of its Original Peoples, a state whose economy was largely built through slavery, a state built through the expansionism of war with its neighbors, a state built through dominating its hemisphere through self-declared destiny, despite never managing the gumption to apologize for these past grave crimes seems rather dubious.

There are plenty of states deserving of censure. However, when one state with a long history of violence stands supremely powerful and claims itself to be a beacon onto all other states, that is where transformation must first occur in a world whose people long for a just peace.

That will require more than wishful thinking. It will require the audacity to mobilize the masses to a revolution for peace.