With aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, ever new act-of-war sanctions being put in place, and calls to bomb Iran crescendoing in Washington, some of us had foolishly thought that this year’s King birthday observances might see a few prominent clerics calling attention to King’s condemnation of US wars, long taboo in mainstream military-oriented America.

Organized religion in America has, for forty-five years, cooperated with the  understanding that no one shall mention that the great civil rights leader and national hero had denounced his government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

The buildup to war on Iran, the daily toll of human lives from military action in many Muslim nations, the invasions of Afghanistan , Iraq, Panama, Dominican Republic, etc., the CIA criminal and anti-democratic civil war creating activities, the continuation of the Vietnam war for eight years after King’s murder, all needed the silent cooperation of clergy that King condemned as betrayal.

King’s betrayers also betray those millions of innocents, who, in their own beloved countries, fall in harms way of heavily armed Americans and remain undefended by a US clergy busy praising and expressing love and gratitude for what King did for them, while it blackballs the King who worked to do the same for his equally loved brothers and sisters in countries under US attack.

Do all these many thousands of clergy imagine that no one significant will ever notice these betrayals? Do any of the elderly ministers, who knew King personally, not feel some bites of conscience?

It’s hard to believe that Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Andrew Young, who had held the dying King in their arms and went on to high political office within the establishment, did not have to grit their teeth to be able to hold themselves back from speaking of King’s condemnation of US wars at the unveiling of the King Monument last year.

Sincere antiwar scholars have long accepted that clergy adheres to a strictly conformist role in a society ruled covertly and overtly by the investment community consensus on Wall Street and the military-industrial complex through their control of all three branches of the government, of all important sources of information with power to disinform, of the Pentagon and of the vast secret functions of the CIA.

The sudden tempestuous 1967 King caused problems for religious leaders, implicating them in complicity for having never challenged pathetic lies justifying mass murder that King was exposing. Ensconced in the national body politic, they have stonewalled on. Even today, to our knowledge, not a single congregation in the nation endorses King’s condemnation of US wars.

Antiwar activists are always searching for clergy who have followed in the footsteps of King during his last year that provoked a national controversy long since carefully blacked out of public awareness. This writer feels fortunate to know Father Paul Mayer, who worked with King, endorses the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and was recently in Occupy Wall Street’s Freedom Park making sure people knew of King’s condemnation of US wars and predatory investments.

I am also lucky to have had the chance to chat briefly with Rev. Jeremiah Wright before hearing him speak at the Monthly Review 50th Anniversary, where he eloquently expounded on reasons solidly based on history and King’s teaching, why every sensitive person aware of the violent death of millions should want to consider what Wright was repeatedly shown crying out in video, “God damn America for its crimes against humanity.”

But the most educating King learning experience was spending an hour-and-a- half with Riverside Church Head Minister William Sloan Coffin in 1982, while working under his guidance in the church tower’s International Liaison Office in support of the UN 2nd Special Session on Disarmament.

Rev. Coffin’s life had been intertwined with King’s, and his trip to Hanoi as invited negotiator for the release of US POWs had antedated King’s own involvement. Rev. Coffin had been jailed many times and finally convicted of conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet resistance to the draft.

Coffin was a musician and former CIA officer in its Russian Department. I had performed on the first cultural exchange with the Soviet Union and shared his passion for the language. He was interested that I had been in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis and on two other State Department run tours in Latin America during CIA and Pentagon actions in a half dozen countries in turmoil. I remember being struck by his insight as he reviewed the history of organized religion as so often being on the side of repression and automatic opposition to revolution, noting that the revolutions of France, Mexico, Russia, Spain, and China had been anti-clerical for the people’s memory of the church having been hand maiden to conquering empires who produced the suffering that was the fertile ground for revolution in the first place.

So impressive to hear this from a minster famous for physically interfering with government crime in the name of Jesus, who never doubted the role of the  Christian church in caring for society, but was keenly aware that modern empires had used and perverted the church into materialism and as accessory to domination by powerful criminal elements.

I never saw him again, as I as spent most of the next  twenty years in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand (and returned a Buddhist).

During six years in Korea, I applied King’s teaching and discovered things were not as I had been led to believe by President Truman and from conversation in church courtyards.  Koreans, including Korean Christians, all know that American business interests had had President Theodore Roosevelt snub Koreans and recognize the Japanese occupation of Korea; that President Wilson had formally recognized Korea as Japanese territory (in all, making possible a brutal 40 year occupation); that Americans had not fought the Japanese in Korea, coming in rather when Koreans had already accomplished their own politically democratic free Korea; that after unconscionably cutting the nation in two, had brought Singman Rhee in from Washington, who would set up a hated government, whose police and special forces would massacre (now fully UN documented) a couple of hundred thousand unionists, socialists, communists often along with their families in the South in the years before the army of the Northern government invaded and with little opposition overran all of the South, uniting Korea in the five weeks before the US invaded, bringing death to three million and flattening every city but one in the North and South; that a severely militaristic North Korea is the result of it having been bombed so mercilessly, threatened with the atom bomb, and strangled with tight international sanctions and economic blockades for nearly 60 years, while under continual barrage of anti-communist propaganda in Western media; that Rhee fled for his life after the war, and a series of military dictatorships prevailed under a heavy US Army presence until the mid 1980s; that in spite of all this deadly result, many Korean Christians and their clergy feel the need to accept the international media version of American righteous protection of Koreans from communism.

Working as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra (founded by Ho Chi Minh) in Hanoi, during most of the 1990s, I  learned something of the human side of what the Vietnamese call the American war after the French war of recolonization paid for by US taxpayers.

All the musicians had lost family. “Killed by the Americans” they would smile in Buddhist equanimity when asked. Between preparing Beethoven and Brahms I got to know the most soft spoken, heroic, charming and fun to be with people in the world. If many of Americans recognize their complicity, why should not clergy, who turned their back on King’s revelations.

I cringe when I think of the Grimm fairy tale nature of the anti-Vietnamese propaganda heard over so many years. Do clerical stomachs not turn like ours do as candidates for public office are acclaimed as heroes for having “served” in Vietnam?

On the opening day of the US bombing of Baghdad in 2003, I marched in a London street protest. The next day as our flight on the way to India detoured well away from Iraq, we could see flashes on the horizon — Iraqis being killed and maimed supposedly to depose a Saddam Hussein who had been supported by the CIA for two decades. Had to ask myself is bull being sold as to why the US is bombing or invading this or that small country because clergy leaders deny the necessity to study history carefully, as King came to do to help his people.

This idea of clergy not properly protecting us from deception even of the crudest historically ass-backwards kind was still fresh in my mind as I read the three Calcutta English language newspapers, and watched BBC Asia, which interestingly is quite a bit to the left of BBC London or New York, because it has to compete with local channels serving a citizenry less gullible after suffering a century of racist colonialism. (The British, including clergy, back in England feed on the same outlandish nonsense excusing and justifying the colonial behavior of their armies abroad just as America’s clergy accepts absurd excuses for American neocolonial wars abroad).

At a dinner party thrown for the patrons of the concert series, I was introduced to an Anglican minister stationed in India. Revved up as I was from watching floods of videos and photos of piles of bodies of civilians, headless children, body parts and clothing strewn everywhere, (images not being seen in America), I thought to comment inquisitively, how the war, with British pilots bombing, must be weighing heavily on him, as one responsible for moral leadership. He looked at me puzzled, a little annoyed, and answered to the effect that a minister’s job had absolutely nothing to do with war or preventing it, that church and politics don’t mix. Altercation proceeded:

“Church and its government’s homicide surely don’t mix either – you bless the troops shipping out to kill.”

“Its the job of a priest, rabbi or minister.”

“It’s a political act of acquiescence or complicity in homicide .”

I thought to myself, yes, of course, Western establishment-entrenched religious leaders must be the same throughout the world. Wasn’t I in India, where pastors took tea with wealthy faithful, both well acclimatized to a multitude of the landless being starved so that a profit might be turned from what would have been their land to cultivate (predatory investments King spoke of). Charity, rather putting an end to the legalized starving of the poor, is the usual clergy-led Christian response.

When I was a kid, I tired of listening to sermons about the hem length of ladies skirts and such, when the headlines of the newspapers I delivered were about millions of people starving to death. It caused me to visit my schoolmates houses of worship looking in vain for better Christianity.

As an adult, I have, on many occasions,  confessed feeling as an American drenched in the blood of millions only to hear my minister or priest trying to help me be at peace with it.

Official clergy enjoy prestige as the guardians of morality, family and community values but unlike King are careful not to answer why Americans and Christians from other nominally white nations, are killing Afghanis in Afghanistan, for ten years designating Taliban as the enemy as were the Vietcong in King’s day.

The average cleric would most likely talk no differently than the average American, either in some agreement with an outrageous lie justifying war on Afghanis, or fielding a disarming remark to deflect such an uncomfortably serious and aggressive question, “Look, nobody likes war’ or the more fundamental oxymoron, “War is war’ and “God will receive the victims.’

By praising exceptional clergy King cut at the majority, “surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”

Even on King’s birthday  the whole Baptist community leadership and the NAACP focused solely on domestic injustice, while the wars that King condemned as perpetuating domestic injustice rage on, unspoken of. Is this not an obvious repudiation of King’s guidance?

Do all these pastors and church officials think King was wrong when he taught, in the maturity of the increased awareness of his final year, the futility of trying to improve America while America is destroying other nations, using up social and material resources to conquer abroad for accumulation of capital by investors?

A prominent New York church, where King once denounced his government for crimes against humanity, held a special King birthday event in which the personable minister opening the service, though having on other occasions decried today’s wars, spoke of “that awful war” (in Vietnam) as if that is what King had spoken against and not described it as being a part of the bloody wars and calculated violence presently still going on for financial interests. Misleadingly listed in the program was hearing a recording of “Beyond Vietnam” (in which King had detailed US crimes.) We heard only a carefully selected few minutes long snippet calling for improving society along general principles of social well being that would not have offended supporters of today’s wars or even war criminals or war profiteers.

King had told us, “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady.”  We have seen  a pattern of suppression,  the presence of U.S. military advisers in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. “Look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the country. This is not just.”

If antiwar activists would relentlessly quote from King’s Beyond Vietnam sermon nonstop, it would make it difficult for majority clergy to go on ignoring King’s condemnation of US wars. According to Howard Zinn clergy opposition would make it difficult for US wars to be continued and would make network entertainment/news hailing Vietnam and Iraq military ventures as glorious prosecutable as hate crimes.

“It is pretty exciting,” said another young American soldier in Iraq. “We are going down in the history books, you might say.”¹

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of “The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.” The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly … how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up … a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter … drum roll, please … Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it.² How much will the United States pay the people of Iraq?

On December 14, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq war. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul — as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect — to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr. Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth?

Barack H. Obama believes only in being the President of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part VI

• If the US really believed in 2002-3 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, why did they send in more than 100,000 troops, who were certain to be annihilated?
• In a letter released August 17, 2006, 21 former generals and high ranking national security officials called on President George W. Bush to reverse course and embrace a new area of negotiation with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The group told reporters Bush’s “hard line” policies had undermined national security and made America less safe.
• Throughout most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Latin America taught its flocks of the poor that there was no need to do battle with the ruling elite because the poor would get their just rewards in the afterlife.
• The US overthrew the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because the Sandinistas “intended to create a country where there was only a colony before.” — Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer
• “[George W.] Bush said last week that part of the purpose of the Indonesia trip ‘is to make sure that the people who are suspicious of our country understand our motives are pure’.”³
• “Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.”⁴
• President Obama should accompany the military people when they inform parents that their child has died in the latest of America’s never-ending wars. And maybe ask George W. to come along as well.
• During the Vietnam War some University of Michigan students created a brouhaha when they threatened to napalm a puppy dog on the steps of a campus building. The uproar of indignation at their cruelty was heard nationwide. Of course, when the time came they didn’t do it, having successfully made the point that people cared more about napalming a dog than they did about napalming people.
• “It’s a lie and an illusion that we have an inefficient government. This government is only inefficient if you think its job is, as stated in the Constitution, ‘to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’ These objectives are beyond our government’s talents only because they are beyond its intentions.” — Michael Ventura
• “Get some new lawyers” – US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (which Albright championed) was illegal under international law.
• The two countries of the world, along with the United States, which have the greatest national obsession with baseball are two of the main targets of US foreign policy: Venezuela and Cuba.
• The Cuban Five case: This is the first case in American history of alleged spying and espionage without a single page from a secret document. The government never presented any evidence of a stolen official document or any attempt to steal an official document. This is the first spy case without secrets from the government.⁵
• “If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a ‘suspected terrorist’ is inside, the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is ‘inevitable’. So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians.” — Howard Zinn
• “The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose limited sanctions on North Korea for its recent missile tests, and demanded that the reclusive communist nation suspend its ballistic missile program.” (Associated Press, July 15, 2006) … Internet commentator: “Test some missiles that land harmlessly in the ocean? Unanimous condemnation. Fire some missiles at targets on land, kill hundreds of people, and destroy hundreds of civilian targets including power plants, airports, roads, bridges, TV stations, etc., all in violation of the Geneva Convention? Hey, no problem.”
• For some nine years, American B-52 bombers relentlessly dropped tons of ordnance on a southeast Asian country (Vietnam) that still cultivated rice fields using draft animals.
• “The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: ‘The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc’.” — Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament.⁶
• Washington … Propagandistan
• The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish a home, rolled over Rachel Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same US media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. — Norman Solomon
• American sovereignty hasn’t faced a legitimate foreign threat to its existence since the British in 1812.
• There are two major patterns in foreign policy: the rule of force or the rule of law. On February 8, 1819 the US decided, after a very long debate in the House, to reject the rule of law in foreign policy. The vote was 100 to 70 against requiring the Congress to approve illegal invasions of other countries or peoples. This pertained to the “Seminole War”, actually the invasion of Florida. Since then every president has had the right to “defend America”, code words for the use of force against whomever he chooses. — Kelly Gelgering

Happy New Year. Here’s what to look forward to:

January 22: Congress passes a law requiring that all persons arrested in anti-war demonstrations be sterilized. House Speaker John Boehner declares it is “God’s will”. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says she supports the law but that she has some reservation because there’s no provision for a right of appeal.

February 15: Ron Paul assassinated by man named Oswald Harvey.

February 18: Oswald Harvey, while in solitary confinement and guarded round the clock by 1200 policemen and the entire 3rd Army Brigade, is killed by man named Ruby Jackson.

February 26: Ruby Jackson suddenly dies in prison of a rare Asian disease heretofore unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

March 6: US President Hopey Changey announces new draconian sanctions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, declaring that they all possess weapons of mass destruction, are an imminent threat to the United States, have close ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban, are aiding Islamic terrorists in Somalia, were involved in 9-11, played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor, do not believe in God or American Exceptionalism, and are all “really bad guys”.

April 1: Military forces overthrow Evo Morales in Bolivia. US State Department decries the loss of democracy.

April 2: US recognizes the new Bolivian military junta, sells it 100 jet fighters and 200 tanks.

April 3: Revolution breaks out in Bolivia endangering the military junta; 40,000 American marines are sent to La Paz to quell the uprising.

April 8: Dick Cheney announces from his hospital bed that the United States has finally discovered caches of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — “So all those doubters can now just go ‘F’ themselves.” The former vice-president, however, refuses to provide any details of the find because, he says, to do so might reveal intelligence sources or methods.

April 10: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, General Electric, General Motors, AT&T, Ford, and IBM merge to form “Free Enterprise, Inc.”

April 16: Free Enterprise, Inc. seeks to purchase Guatemala and Haiti. Citigroup refuses to sell.

April 18: Free Enterprise, Inc. purchases Citigroup.

May 5: The Democratic Party changes its name to the Republican Lite Party, and announces the opening of a joint bank account with the Republicans so that corporate lobbyists need make out only one check. In celebration of the change the new party calls for eliminating the sales tax on yachts.

May 11: China claims to have shot down an American spy plane over the center of China. State Department categorically denies the story.

May 12: State Department admits that an American plane may have “inadvertently” strayed 2,000 miles into China, but denies that it was a spy plane.

May 13: State Department admits that the plane may have been a spy plane but denies that it was piloted by a US government employee.

May 14: State Department admits that the pilot was a civilian employee of a Defense Department contractor but denies that China exists.

June 11: Homeland Security announces plan to collect the DNA at birth of every child born in the United States.

July 1: The air in Los Angeles reaches so bad a pollution level that the rich begin to hire undocumented workers to breathe for them.

August 6: The Justice Department announces that six people have been arrested in New York in connection with a plan to bomb the United Nations, the Empire State Building, the Times Square subway station, Madison Square Garden, and Lincoln Center.

August 7: Charges are dropped against four of “The New York Six” when it is determined that they are FBI agents.

August 16: At a major demonstration in Washington, the Tea Party demands an end to all government expenditures. They also warn Congress not to touch Social Security or Medicare.

August 26: Texas executes a 16-year-old girl for having an abortion and a 12-year-old boy for possession of marijuana.

September 3: The Labor Department announces that Labor Day will become a celebration of America’s gratitude to its corporations, a day dedicated to the memory of J.P. Morgan and Pinkerton strike breakers killed in the line of duty.

September 12: The draft is reinstated for males and females, ages 16 to 45. Those who are missing a limb or are blind can apply for non-combat roles.

September 14: Riots breaks out in 24 American cities in protest of the new draft. 200,000 American troops are brought home from Afghanistan, Iraq, and 25 other countries to put down the riots.

September 28: The Tea Party calls for giving embryos the vote.

October 19: Cops the world over form a new association, Policemen’s International Governing Society. PIGS announces that its first goal will be to mount a campaign against the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty, in those countries where the quaint notion still dwells.

November 8: The turnout for the US presidential election is 9.6%. The voting ballots are all imprinted: “From one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote.” The winner is “None of the above”.

November 11: US prison population reaches 2.5 million. It is determined that at least 70 percent of the prisoners would not have been incarcerated a century ago, for the acts they committed were then not criminal violations.

December 3: Supreme Court rules that police may search anyone if they have reasonable grounds for believing that the person has pockets.

December 16: The Occupy Movement sets up a tent on the White House lawn. An hour later a missile fired from a drone leaves but a thin wisp of smoke.

1. Washington Post, December 18, 2011.
2. William Blum, Rogue State, p.304.
3. Washington Post, October 22, 2003.
4. The Black Commentator, June 8, 2006.
5. Read more.
6. Washington Post, April 3, 2006.

You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.

The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy –- it’s a lesson about our national character. Because of you, we are ending these wars in a way that will make America stronger and the world more secure.

— President Barack Obama, Address to Troops at Fort Bragg, December 14, 2011

The lies of war are forgotten as easily and readily as the wrappings of Christmas or the resolutions of a new year.  Like a child still in diapers, the lessons of war must be learned again and again until finally they are taken to heart.

The lies of the war in Iraq are so easily buried that six out of seven Republican candidates for president of the United States have publicly pledged to go to war in Iran based on the identical unsubstantiated claims that led us to war in Iraq.  The lessons of that ill-fated war, the largest strategic blunder since Vietnam, are so readily put behind us that even before that colossal disaster officially ended, six of seven Republican candidates pledged his and her allegiance to the same neoconservative brain trust that guided us into the snake pit.  And the White House is not far behind.

Those of us who remember the war in Vietnam and the years we committed to ending it will find the bipartisan rationalizations of the Iraq War all too familiar and profoundly disturbing.

The lie that drove the Vietnam War was the Domino Theory:  If we lose one nation to the red menace of communism, then we will lose them all.  On that basis, three generations of western powers (Britain, France and America) chose a little country on the doorstep of China as their playground of war.

It required over three million lives to prove that a child’s game was not a legitimate basis for a foreign policy.  It only made sense because it fit on a bumper sticker and because our leaders were dominated by military minds in search of power, glory and the spoils of empire.

The great postwar lie of Vietnam was that we lost the war because we were never fully committed.  The politicians in Washington held our generals back.  Between 1965 and 1968 we dropped over a million tons of missiles, bombs and rockets on North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but we were never fully committed.  We sprayed 12 million gallons of the deadly chemical defoliant Agent Orange over wide swaths of Southeast Asia but we were not fully committed.  At the height of the war in 1968 we deployed over half a million soldiers, including the first conscripts since the Korean War, but we were not fully committed.

Short of nuclear bombs, we were as committed to that unjustifiable war as any nation could have been yet the lies of war survive.  The lies of war take on mythological characteristics and believing them becomes a ritual of patriotism.

Little wonder we commit the same strategic mistakes, the same errors in judgment, the same acts of criminal inhumanity, the same ultimately desperate and self-destroying measures over and over again.

In the wake of Vietnam, America’s leaders were confined to small-scale interventions until George Herbert Walker Bush, former Director of the CIA, conspired to wage war in Iraq.  Though the Gulf War was short-lived, its military success inspired President Bush to announce: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

Forever was not a long time as his eldest son was to initiate two wars that brought the specter of Vietnam back into focus.  One was the ongoing ten-year war in Afghanistan and the other was a return to his father’s war in Iraq.

Few will recall the lies of the father but the lies of the son are too fresh to be so soon forgotten.  They include not only the infamous weapons of mass destruction but also the later claim that virtually all the world believed the lie.  For the record, we lost our appeal before the United Nations Security Council to justify military action on the basis of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  The International Atomic Energy Agency thoroughly debunked our claims and the measure was withdrawn when it became clear that the Council would vote overwhelmingly against our cause for war.

Members of the Bush administration falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was a party to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.  They falsely claimed that Iraq harbored and worked with Al Qaeda operatives.  These claims were so clearly and demonstrably false that even President Bush was forced ultimately to disavow them.

The lies of war had served their purpose.  Once the first bombs lit up the Baghdad skyline, supporting the war became a matter of patriotism.

The next lie was that our actions had nothing to do with Iraqi oil and everything to do with establishing democracy in the Arab world.  That lie was exposed when our first action was to protect the oil fields.  Well before an Iraqi government could be established we contracted Iraqi oil to the highest corporate bidders.  Mission accomplished.

The lies of war are really not that difficult to detect.  It only requires an open mind, an appetite for facts, and a willingness to think.

The lies of the Iraq War will survive unless those of us who witnessed them, from the soldiers who sacrificed to the citizens who supported and opposed them, unless each of us vows to accept the truth and pass that horrid account forward to future generations.

We can be grateful that a president elected largely on the promise of ending the Iraq War has officially done so, though we remain mindful that thousands of American-hired mercenaries remain behind to guard the largest diplomatic embassy on earth.

We understand at our stage of development that a president cannot apologize for the harm done in the name of our nation.

We understand the wisdom of separating the war from the warrior.

We know the president cannot inform our soldiers that they were fighting the wrong war for the wrong reasons.

But when the president announces that we have created an opportunity for the Iraqis to thrive and prosper as a democratic nation, he is not only being disingenuous; he is perpetuating the lies of war.  When the president declares that our fight in Iraq was for Iraqi freedom and international justice, he is paving the way for another unjust war in America’s future.  He is attempting to bury the specter of Vietnam.

Leaving Afghanistan for another day, we should all agree that the Iraq War was wrong from its inception.  It was never about democracy.  It was never about justice.  It was always about oil and strategic advantage.

Wrong is wrong.

If Barack and Mitt are the best the political elite can come up with, we can only conclude that the entire American ruling class is suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia — fearing commies-turned-Muslims under their beds, shedding tears over the odd child hit by a stray bullet in, say, Syria, while joyously bombing hapless Afghans, Iraqs and Libyans into the Stone Age, wiping out hundreds of thousands in the process.

Obama said Saturday that the US now must tackle its “greatest challenge as a nation” — rebuilding a weak economy and creating jobs — with the “same urgency and unity that our troops brought to their fight”. More like: with the “same cold-blooded disrespect for human life …” Is it possible Obama will promote a Swift-like “modest proposal” to unemployment, and exhort Americans to eat their children?

Despite overwhelming evidence that the chaos and destruction the US brings the world has induced only hate and disgust for America and its values, he preened himself for helping murder Gaddafi and for pretending to withdraw US troops from Iraq: “This week, we had two powerful reminders of how we’ve renewed American leadership in the world.”

Of course, there is an explanation for this raving. The chaos is caused by the logic of profit in the economy, and the rhetoric — by the need to control the political process to ensure profit’s uninterrupted flow. But Obama’s fine rhetoric is not even convincing Americans anymore, as Occupy Wall Street and demonstrations across the country show. As for Congress; just 6 per cent of registered voters think sitting members deserve re-election — the lowest percentage since CBS News Polls began 20 years ago.

What is the poor — literally, at this point — voter to do? There are stirrings, even in the ruling class. Warren Buffett is spreading a chain letter calling on citizens to demand “a constitutional amendment which would make all sitting members of Congress ineligible for re-election anytime there is a deficit of more than 3 per cent of GDP.” If only it were that simple.

As analyst William Cook puts it, “Representatives no longer serve the citizen seeking their consent to govern, they are servants of the corporations and lobbies that control the economic system. Presidents no longer lead, they are the obedient lackeys of their corporate overseers.” If Buffett’s amendment passed, it would merely bring in another crop of time-servers, with no noticeable effect except higher unemployment and more poverty.

Oblivious to the obvious, Libertarian Ron Paul is battling it out with the Mitts in Republican cuckoo-land to slash both the budget deficit and taxes. At least Paul wants less war. He is determined to end what he calls the “welfare-warfare state”, undeterred by the plight of the record 46 million Americans on food stamps (whose welfare expenditures are a crucial stimulus to local economies), and the fact that his very own campaign manager in 2008 died of pneumonia in 2011 from lack of medical insurance.

Then there is the perennial Ralph Nader, who is bowing out from a full-scale campaign so far, and working with left Democrats to field primary challengers to Obama in the desperate hope to move him to the left.

What about a third-party/ independent presidential campaign? The Green Party always fields someone, and Nader ran many times in the past as both the Green candidate and as an independent. There is a new such campaign this year — an Internet campaign called Americans Elect, intending to nominate “a competitive, nonpartisan ticket” that “answers directly to voters”. A Republican must team up with a Democrat. Give me a break.

It is impossible for such a dark horse to actually win, given the Republicrat control of the media and corporate financing of elections. However, American third-partiers, or rather non-partiers, have a venerable history in the US. Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive Bull Moose) captured 27 per cent of the vote in 1912, and Progressive Robert La Follette — 27 per cent in 1924. Billionaire Ross Perot created his own Reform Party, running on a confusing mix of balanced budget, war on drugs, gun control, trade protectionism and environmentalism, to gain almost 20 per cent of the vote in 1992.

If, say, the Green candidate miraculously takes off, s/he will at best be a spoiler, like Republican Party-pooper Roosevelt in 1912 (allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win), Ross Perot in 1992 (allowing Democrat Bill Clinton to win) and possibly Nader in 2000, whose 2.74 per cent of the vote might have been the cause of Al Gore’s loss to George W Bush.

Whichever Republicrat takes over in January 2013 will continue the failed policies of yesteryear as the US people continue to sink into poverty. But the end is already in sight, as the American long spring continues to gain momentum, both on the ground and in the ether. Ipads can distract from reality, but they are also a powerful tool to fight it, as Egyptians found out this January.

The bottom line is, of course, to dismantle the “reality of corporate control”, as Cook puts it. He rightly argues that “the rights of citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness require the government to ensure these rights”, which means universal health care, freedom from want; in short, a government that serves the people, not the corporations. While this may sound trite, it is the stark truth. “Rights before privilege.”

There is strong US precedent for this. In 1944, shortly before he died, president Franklin Roosevelt presented Congress with a new Bill of Rights, which included “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”, as well as farmers’ and businessmen’s rights “to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition by monopolies”. Of course, Congress being Congress, it dismissed out of hand this parting gift of FDR.

Another stark truth is that real change in America requires the defeat of America in its imperial wars. This uniquely happened in 1975, when the last helicopters carried panicked remnants of the US puppet regime in Saigon to safety. It resulted in a shift towards détente, exposure of CIA black-ops, limits on US promotion of regime-change and assassination, and on the presidential right to launch undeclared war. Alas, this reversal was short-lived. Memories are short. Rhetoric (then, it was the folksy Reagan) and the ease of spinning circles around do-nothing Congress (a truly worthy whipping boy) have brought us to the current impasse.

Obama’s attempts to paint Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as triumphs of “American leadership” ring hollow as the economy continues to sink under the weight of its military might. In 1944, America was on top of the world, and FDR’s wistful reminder of the dark 1930s was easily brushed aside. His vice president from 1941-44, Henry Wallace, ran as a Progressive Party candidate in 1948 largely on FDR’s wish list, but his third-party campaign of racial equality and socialism was greeted by boycotts and rotten eggs, and netted him only 2.4 per cent of the vote. America’s long journey into the imperial wilderness had begun in earnest.

To resuscitate FDR’s dashed dreams today means acknowledging, even welcoming, defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, as their peoples throw off their American shackles. Any thought that Libya will save the Yanks’ bacon is a pipedream. The smoke of civil war there will remain in the air for a long time to come, as a constant reminder of the follies of such imperial games.

The American pacifist Gene Sharp, author of Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential (2005), is credited with ushering in the so-called Coloured Revolutions in countries as disparate as Yugoslavia and Egypt during the past two decades. Ahmed Maher, one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement that sparked the Egyptian revolution, was inspired by Sharp, and is returning the favour by advising “our brothers”, the Occupy Wall Streeters, on Twitter. It is a nice touch that Sharp’s techniques for facing down police states (Congress be damned) are now being turned on the American police state itself, as the “99 per cent” of Americans try to pick up where FDR’s Bill of Rights left off.

The Afghan war is expanding even further, not only with increasing drone attacks in neighboring Pakistani territory but because of U.S. threats to take far greater unilateral military action within Pakistan unless the Islamabad government roots out “extremists” and cracks down harder on cross-border fighters.

Washington’s tone was so threatening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to assure the Pakistani press October 21 that the U.S. did not plan a ground offensive against Pakistan. The next day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai shocked Washington by declaring “God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan…. If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.”

At the same time, Washington has just suffered a spectacular setback in Iraq, where the Obama Administration has been applying extraordinary pressure on the Baghdad government for over a year to permit many thousands of U.S. troops to remain indefinitely after all American forces are supposed to withdraw at the end of this year.

President Obama received the Iraqi government’s rejection from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki October 21, and promptly issued a public statement intended to completely conceal the fact that a long-sought U.S. goal has just been obliterated, causing considerable disruption to U.S. plans. Obama made a virtue of necessity by stressing that “Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”

This article will first discuss the situation in Afghanistan after 10 years, then take up the Iraq question and what the U.S. may do to compensate for a humiliating and disruptive rebuff.

The United States is well aware it will never win a decisive victory in Afghanistan. At this point, the Obama Administration is anxious to convert the military stalemate into a form of permanent truce, if only the Taliban were willing to accept what amounts to a power sharing deal that would allow Washington to claim the semblance of success after a decade of war.

In addition, President Obama seeks to retain a large post-”withdrawal” military presence throughout the country mainly for these reasons:

• To protect its client regime in Kabul led by Karzai, as well as Washington’s other political and commercial interests in the country, and to maintain a menacing military presence on Iran’s eastern border, especially if U.S. troops cannot now remain in Iraq.

• To retain territory in Central Asia for U.S. and NATO military forces positioned close to what Washington perceives to be its two main (though never publicly identified) enemies — China and Russia — at a time when the American government is increasing its political pressure on both countries. Obama is intent upon transforming NATO from a regional into a global adjunct to Washington’s quest for retaining and extending world hegemony. NATO’s recent victory in Libya is a big advance for U.S. ambitions in Africa, even if the bulk of commercial spoils go to France and England. A permanent NATO presence in Central Asia is a logical next step. In essence, Washington’s geopolitical focus is expanding from the Middle East to Central Asia and Africa in the quest for resources, military expansion and unassailable hegemony, especially from the political and economic challenge of rising nations of the global south, led China.

There has been an element of public deception about withdrawing U.S. “combat troops” from Iraq and Afghanistan dating from the first Obama election campaign in 2007-8. Combat troops belong to combat brigades. In a variant of bait-and-switch trickery, the White House reported that all combat brigades departed Iraq in August 2010. Technically this is true, because those that did not depart were simply renamed “advise and assist brigades.” According to a 2009 Army field manual such brigades are entirely capable, “if necessary,” of shifting from “security force assistance” back to combat duties.

In Afghanistan, after the theoretical pull-out date, it is probable that many ”advise and assist brigades” will remain along with a large complement of elite Joint Special Operations Forces strike teams (SEALs, Green Berets, etc.) and other officially “non-combat” units — from the CIA, drone operators, fighter pilots, government security employees plus “contractor security” personnel, including mercenaries. Thousands of other “non-combat” American soldiers will remain to train the Afghan army.

According to an October 8 Associated Press dispatch, “Senior U.S. officials have spoken of keeping a mix of 10,000 such [special operations-type] forces in Afghanistan, and drawing down to between 20,000 and 30,000 conventional forces to provide logistics and support. But at this point, the figures are as fuzzy as the future strategy.”

Estimates of how long the Pentagon will remain in Afghanistan range from 2017 to 2024 to “indefinitely.”

Obama marked the 10th anniversary with a public statement alleging that  “Thanks to the extraordinary service of these [military] Americans, our citizens are safer and our nation is more secure”— the most recent of the continuous praise of war-fighters and the conduct of these wars of choice from the White House since the 2001 bombing, invasion and occupation.

Just two days earlier a surprising Pew Social Trend poll of post-9/11 veterans was made public casting doubt about such a characterization. Half the vets said the Afghanistan war wasn’t worth fighting in terms of benefits and costs to the U.S. Only 44% thought the Iraq war was worth fighting. One-third opined that both wars were not worth waging. Opposition to the wars has been higher among the U.S. civilian population. But it’s unusual in a non-conscript army for its veterans to emerge with such views about the wars they volunteered to fight.

The U.S. and its NATO allies issued an unusually optimistic assessment of the Afghan war on October 15, but it immediately drew widespread skepticism. According to the New York Times the next day, “Despite a sharp increase in assassinations and a continuing flood of civilian casualties, NATO officials said that they had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency as enemy attacks were falling for the first time in years…. [This verdict] runs counter to dimmer appraisals from some Afghan officials and other international agencies, including the United Nations. With the United States preparing to withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of this year and 23,000 more by next October, it raises questions about whether NATO’s claims of success can be sustained.”

Less than two weeks earlier German Gen. Harald Kujat, who planned his country’s military support mission in Afghanistan, declared that “the mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States. But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed.”

According to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a critically important “long term commitment” and “we’re going to be there longer than 2014.” He made the disclosure to the Senate Armed Services Committee September 22, a week before he retired. In a statement October 3, the Pentagon’s new NATO commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, declared: “The plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. And so, while some folks might hear that we’re departing in 2014… we’re actually going to be here for a long time.”

Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, departing head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told the AP October 8:  “We’re moving toward an increased special operations role…,whether it’s counterterrorism-centric, or counterterrorism blended with counterinsurgency.” White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said in mid-September that by 2014  “the U.S. remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta strongly supports President Obama’s call for an “enduring presence” in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

Former U.S. Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last year for his unflattering remarks about Obama Administration officials, said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations October 6 that after a decade of fighting in Afghanistan the U.S. was only “50% of the way” toward attaining its goals. “We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” he said. “Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”

Washington evidently had no idea that one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world — a society of 30 million people where the literacy rate is 28% and life expectancy is just 44 years — would fiercely fight to retain national sovereignty. The Bush Administration, which launched the Afghan war a few weeks after 9/11, evidently ignored the fact that the people of Afghanistan ousted every occupying army from that of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn to the British Empire and the USSR.

The U.S. spends on average in excess of $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, not to mention the combined spending of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but the critical needs of the Afghan people in terms of health, education, welfare and social services after a full decade of military involvement by the world’s richest countries remain essentially untended.

For example, 220,000 Afghan children under five — one in five — die every year due to pneumonia, poor nutrition, diarrhea and other preventable diseases, according to the State of the World’s Children report released by the UN Children’s Fund. UNICEF also reports the maternal mortality rate with about 1,600 deaths per every 100,000 live births. Save the Children says this amounts to over 18,000 women a year. It is also reported by the UN that 70% of school-age girls do not attend school for various reasons — conservative parents, lack of security, or fear for their lives. All told, about 92% of the Afghan population does not have access to proper sanitation.

Even after a decade of U.S. combat, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people still have no clear idea why Washington launched the war. According to the UK’s Daily Mail September 9, a new survey by the International Council on Security and Development showed that 92% of 1,000 Afghan men polled had never even heard of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the U.S. pretext for the invasion — and did not know why foreign troops were in the country. (Only men were queried in the poll because many more of them are literate, 43.1% compared to 12.6% of women.)

In another survey, conducted by Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and released October 18, 56% of Afghans view U.S./NATO troops as an occupying force, not allies as Washington prefers. The survey results show that “there appears to be an increasing amount of anxiety and fear rather than hope.”

Perhaps the most positive news about Afghanistan — and it is a thunderously mixed “blessing” — is that the agricultural economy boomed last year. But, reports the October 11 Business Insider, it’s because “rising opium prices have upped the ante in Afghanistan, and farmers have responded by posting a 61% increase in opium production.” Afghani farmers produce 90% of the world’s opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Half-hearted U.S.-NATO eradication efforts failed because insufficient attention was devoted to providing economic and agricultural substitutes for the cultivation of opium.

Another outcome of foreign intervention and U.S. training is the boundless brutality and corruption of the Afghan police toward civilians and especially Taliban “suspects.” Writing in Antiwar.com John Glaser reported:

“Detainees in Afghan prisons are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, according to a study released October 10 by the United Nations. The study, which covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces, found ‘a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment’ during interrogation by U.S.-supported Afghan authorities. Both U.S. and NATO military trainers and counterparts have been working closely with these authorities, consistently supervising the detention facilities and funding their operations.”

In mid-September Human Rights Watch documented that U.S.-supported anti-Taliban militias are responsible for many human rights abuses that are overlooked by their American overseers. At around the same time the American Open Society Foundations revealed that the Obama Administration has tripled the number of night time military raids on civilian homes, which terrorize many families. The report noted that “An estimated 12 to 20 raids now occur per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” The U.S. military admits that half the arrests are “mistakes.”

Meanwhile, it was reported in October that in the first nine months this year U.S.-NATO drones conducted nearly 23,000 surveillance missions in the Afghanistan sky. With nearly 85 flights a day, the Obama Administration has almost doubled the daily amount in the last two years. Hundreds of civilians, including nearly 170 children, have been killed in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas from drone attacks. Miniature killer/surveillance drones — small enough to be carried in backpacks— are soon expected to be distributed to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

So far the Afghanistan war has taken the lives of some 1,730 American troops and about a thousand from NATO. There are no reliable figures on the number of Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The UN’s Assistance Mission to Afghanistan did not start to count such casualties until 2007. According to the Voice of America October 7, “Each year, the civilian death toll has risen, from more than 1,500 dead in 2007 to more than 2,700 in 2010. And in the first half of this year, the UN office reported there were 2,400 civilians killed in war-related incidents.”

At minimum the war has cost American taxpayers about a half-trillion dollars since 2001. The U.S. will continue to spend billions in the country for many years to come and the final cost — including interest on war debts that will be carried for scores more years — will mount to multi-trillions that future generations will have to pay. At present there are 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan plus about 37,000 NATO troops. Another 45,000 well paid “contractors” perform military duties, and many are outright mercenaries.

Washington is presently organizing, arming, training and financing hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops and police forces, and is expected to continue paying some $5 billion a year for this purpose at least until 2025.

The U.S. government has articulated various different objectives for its engagement in Afghanistan over the years. Crushing al-Qaeda and defeating the Taliban have been most often mentioned, but as an October 7 article from the Council on Foreign Relations points out: “The main U.S. goals in Afghanistan remain uncertain. They have meandered from marginalizing the Taliban to state-building, to counterinsurgency, to counterterrorism, to — most recently — reconciliation and negotiation with the Taliban. But the peace talks remain nascent and riddled with setbacks. Karzai suspended the talks after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the government’s chief negotiator, which the Afghan officials blamed on the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. The group denies it.”

There is another incentive for the U.S. to continue fighting in Afghanistan — to eventually convey the impression of victory, an absolute domestic political necessity.

The most compelling reason for the Afghan war is geopolitical, as noted above — finally obtaining a secure military foothold for the U.S. and its NATO accessory in the Central Asian backyards of China and Russia . In addition, a presence in Afghanistan places the U.S. in close military proximity to two volatile nuclear powers backed by the U.S. but not completely under its control by any means (Pakistan, India). Also, this fortuitous geography is flanking the extraordinary oil and natural gas wealth of the Caspian Basin and energy-endowed former Soviet Muslim republics such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

In Iraq, the Obama Administration’s justification for retaining troops after the end of this year was ostensibly to train the Iraqi military and police forces, but there were other reasons:

• Washington seeks to remain in Iraq to keep an eye on Baghdad because it fears a mutually beneficial alliance may develop between Iraq and neighboring Iran, two Shi’ite societies in an occasionally hostile Sunni Muslim world, weakening American hegemony in the strategically important oil-rich Persian Gulf region and ultimately throughout the Middle East/North Africa.

• The U.S. also seeks to safeguard lucrative economic investments in Iraq, and the huge future profits expected by American corporations, especially in the denationalized petroleum sector. Further, Pentagon and CIA forces were stationed — until now, it seems — in close proximity to Iran’s western border, a strategic position to invade or bring about regime change.

Under other conditions, the U.S. may simply have insisted on retaining its troops regardless of Iraqi misgivings, but the Status of Forces compact governing this matter can only be changed legally by mutual agreement between Washington and Baghdad. The concord was arranged in December 2008 between Prime Minister Maliki and President George W. Bush — not Obama, who now takes credit for ending the Iraq war despite attempting to extend the mission of a large number of U.S. troops.

At first Washington wanted to retain more than 30,000 troops plus a huge diplomatic and contractor presence in Iraq after “complete” withdrawal. Maliki — pushed by many of the country’s political factions, including some influenced by Iran’s opposition to long-term U.S. occupation — held out for a much smaller number.

Early in October Baghdad decided that 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in a training-only capacity was the most that could be accommodated. In addition, the Iraqis in effect declared a degree of independence from Washington by insisting that remaining American soldiers must be kept on military bases and not be granted legal immunity when in the larger society. Washington, which has troops stationed in countries throughout the world, routinely insists upon legal exemption for its foreign legions as a matter of imperial hubris, and would not compromise.

The White House has indicated that an arrangement may yet be worked out to permit some American trainers and experts to remain, perhaps as civilians or contractors. Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a staunch opponent of the U.S. occupation, has suggested Iraq should employ trainers for its armed forces from other countries, but this is impractical for a country using American arms and planes.

Regardless, the White House is increasing the number of State Department employees in Iraq from 8,000 to an almost unbelievable 16,000, mostly stationed at the elephantine new embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone quasi-military enclave, in new American consulates in other cities, and in top “advisory” positions in many of the of the regime’s ministries, particularly the oil ministry. Half the State Department personnel, 8,000 people, will handle “security” duties, joined by some 5,000 new private “security contractors.”

Thus, at minimum the U.S. will possess 13,000 of its own armed “security” forces, and there’s still a possibility Baghdad and Washington will work out an arrangement for adding a limited number of “non-combat” military trainers, openly or by other means.

In his October 21 remarks, Obama sought to transform the total withdrawal he sought to avoid into a simulacrum of triumph for the troops and himself: “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops…. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Heads held high, proud of success — for an unjust, illegal war based on lies that is said to have cost over a million Iraqi lives and created four million refugees! It has been estimated that the final U.S. costs of the Iraq war will be over $5 trillion when the debt and interest are finally paid off decades from now.

If President Obama is reelected— even should the Iraq war actually end — he will be coordinating U.S. involvement in wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Uganda (where American 100 combat troops have just been inserted). Add to this various expanding drone campaigns, and such adventures as Washington’s support for Israel against the Palestinians and for the Egyptian military regime against popular aspirations for full democracy, followed by the backing of dictatorial regimes in a half-dozen countries, and continual threats against Iran.

Washington’s $1.4 trillion annual military and national security expenditures are a major factor behind America’s monumental national debt and the cutbacks in social services for the people, but aside from White House rhetoric about reducing redundant Pentagon expenditures, overall war/security budgets are expected to increase over the next several years.

The Bush and Obama Administrations have manipulated reality to convince American public opinion that the Iraq and Afghan wars are ending in U.S. successes. Washington fears the resurrection of the “Vietnam Syndrome” that resulted after the April 1975 U.S. defeat in Indochina. The “syndrome” led to a 15-year disinclination by the American people to support aggressive, large-scale U.S. wars against small, poor countries in the developing third world until the January 1991 Gulf War, part one of the two-part Iraq war that continued in March 2003.

According to an article in the October 9 New York Times titled “The Other War Haunting Obama,” author, journalist and Harvard emeritus professor Marvin Kalb wrote: “Ten years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.”

This fear of losing another war to a much smaller adversary — and perhaps suffering the one-term fate of President Lyndon Johnson who presided over the Vietnam debacle — evidently was a factor behind President Obama’s decision to vastly expand the size of the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan and why the White House is now planning a long-term troop presence beyond the original pullout date.

Today’s combat directly touches the lives of only a small minority of Americans — military members and families — and much of the majority remains uninformed or misinformed about many of the causes and effects of the Iraq/Afghan adventures. Obama may thus eventually be able to convey the illusion of military success, which will help pave the way for future imperial violence unless the people of the United States wise up and act en masse to prevent future aggressive wars.

In the past, however, many theorists of imperialism of varying political persuasion, ranging from Max Weber to Vladimir Lenin, argued that imperialism unified the country, reduced internal class polarization and created privileged workers who actively supported and voted for imperial parties.  A historical, comparative survey of the conditions under which imperialism and democratic institutions converge or diverge can throw some light on the challenges and choices faced by the burgeoning democratic movements erupting across the globe.

The Nineteenth Century

During the 19th century, European and US imperial expansion covered the world.  In tandem, democratic institutions took root, the franchise was extended to the working class, competitive parties emerged, social legislation was passed, and the working class increased its representation in the legislative chambers.

Was the simultaneous growth of democracy and imperialism a spurious correlation reflecting divergent and conflicting underlying forces, one favoring overseas conquest and another promoting democratic politics? In fact, there was a great deal of overlap between pro-imperialist and democratic politics and not simply among the elites.

Throughout the 19th and especially in the 20th century, important sectors of the labor and social democratic parties and numerous prominent leftists and revolutionary socialists, at one time or another, combined support for workers’ demands and imperial expansion.  None other than Karl Marx, in his early journalistic writings in the New York Herald Tribune critically supported the British conquest of India as a “modernizing force” breaking down feudal barriers, even as he supported (with criticism) the European revolutions of 1848.

The ruling classes, the driving force of imperialism, were divided. Some saw the democratic reforms, “citizenship”, as a means of raising mass conscriptions for imperial wars; others feared that the democratic reforms would enhance social demands and undercut the accumulation of capital and rule by the elite.  Both were right.  Along with greater popular participation came virulent modern nationalism, which fueled empire building.  At the same time  mass access to democratic rights led to heightened class organizations, which threatened or challenged class rule. Within the ruling classes, democratic institutions were seen as an arena to peacefully resolve conflicts between competing sectoral elites. But once they took a mass character they were perceived as political threats.

Imperial and class-based parties competed for voters among the newly enfranchised urban workers and rural poor.  In many cases, imperial and class allegiances “co-existed” within the same individuals.  The question of which of the two – imperialist or class consciousness – would become ‘operative’ or ‘salient’ was, in part, contingent on the success or failures of the larger competing political projects.

In other words, when imperial expansion succeeded in easy conquests resulting in lucrative colonies (especially settler colonies) democratic workers embraced the empire.  This was the case because empire enhanced trade; namely, profitable exports and cheap imports, while protecting local markets and manufacturers.  These in turn expanded employment and wages for substantial sectors of the working class.  As a result, labor and social democratic parties and trade unions did not oppose imperialism.  Indeed many supported it.

In contrast, when imperialist wars led to prolonged bloody and costly conflicts, the working class shifted from initial chauvinist enthusiasm to disenchantment and opposition.  Democratic demands to ‘end the war’ led to strikes challenging unequal sacrifice.  Democratic and anti-imperialist sentiments tended to fuse.

The conflict between democracy and imperialism became even more apparent in the case of an imperial defeat and military occupation.  Both the defeat of France in the German-French war of 1870-71 and the German defeat in the First World War led to massive democratic socialist uprisings (the Paris Commune of 1871 and the German revolution of 1918) attacking militarism, ruling class domination and the entire imperial capitalist institutional framework.

The Imperialism and Democracy Debate and “History from Below”

Historians, especially practitioners of the fashionable “history from below”, exaggerated the democratic values and struggles of the working class and understated the prolonged and deep felt support among important sectors for successful imperial expansion and conquest.  The notion of ‘inherent’ or ‘instinctual’ class solidarity is belied by the active role of workers in imperial conquest as soldiers, overseas settlers, merchant mariners and overseers.  Imperial collaborators and empire loyalists were numerous among English and French workers and, especially later, within the US labor movement.

The theoretical point is that the pre-eminence of democratic over imperial consciousness and action among workers is contingent on the practical material outcomes of imperial policies and democratic struggles.

Workers and Imperialism

Empire building makes demands on workers to produce more for less in order to export and invest profitably in colonized regions.  This led to capital-labor conflict, especially in the initial phase of imperial expansion.  As imperial rulers consolidated their control over the colonized countries they intensified exploitation of markets, labor and resources.  Imperial exports destroyed local competitors.  Profits rose, wages increased and workers turned from initial opposition toward imperialism to demanding a share of the increasing income of the export oriented manufacturers.  Labor leaders and trade unionists approved of the policies of ‘imperial preference’, which protected local industries from competition and privileged monopoly control of colonial markets.  They did so because imperial policies protected jobs and raised living standards.

Workers who were active in social struggles, blacklisted or jailed, voluntarily moved or were exiled to colonized countries.  Once settled overseas, they were given privileged access to better paying jobs as overseers, skilled employees or promoted to managerial positions.  Imperial based militant workers, once overseas, became colonial collaborators.  Many encouraged former workmates, relatives and friends to join them as successful settlers or contract workers.  The ‘domestication’ of workers and the reconciliation of democratic and imperialist sentiments was a cause and consequent of successful imperialism.

Empire Loyalism:  Not by Bread Alone

While material benefits accruing to workers from “successful imperialism” are one factor enhancing workers’ imperial consciousness, this was reinforced by symbolic gratification, the sense of being a member of the “leading country in the world” where “the sun never sets on the empire”, was equally important.  It is rare to find a country where the majority of workers express “solidarity” with the exploited miners, plantation workers or displaced peasants and indigenous small landholders in the ‘colonies’.  The stronger the hold of the colonial power, the greater the ‘colonial opportunities’, the longer the colonial ties, the deeper the economic penetration, and the stronger the sense of imperial superiority among the imperial states’ workers.

It is not surprising that the British workers, the unions and Labor Party raised few objections to the savagery of the imperial opium wars against China, the imperial-induced genocidal famines in Ireland in the 19th century and India in the 20th century.  Likewise, the French workers’ parties – Socialists especially – were in the forefront of the post WWII colonial wars against Indo-China and Algeria only turning against them in the face of imminent defeat and internal disintegration.

In the same vein, US successful colonial wars against Cuba and the Philippines, its invasions of Caribbean and Central American countries were supported by the American Federation of Labor and many ‘ordinary workers’, even as a minority of radicalized workers opposed these wars.  The ‘partial turn’ of labor against US colonial wars occurred during the Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, and was a result of prolonged losses and high economic costs with no victory in sight.  It should be added that US workers, in opposing the imperial wars, expressed no solidarity with the national liberation and workers movements of the colonized countries.

Imperialism and the “True Democrats”

To argue, as some on the Left have, that imperialism does not co-exist with “true” democracy, is to argue that the last 150 years have been devoid of free elections, party competition and citizens’ rights, however abbreviated, especially over the past decade.  The reality is that imperial intervention and expansion has drawn precisely from citizens’ sense of “obligation” to uphold the democratic institutions, which has enabled imperial leaders to elicit legitimacy and active citizen support or compliance in waging bloody, even genocidal, colonial wars.

If democracy has not usually been an obstacle to imperial expansion – indeed a facilitator under certain circumstances – under what conditions have workers and citizens movements turned against imperial wars?  What has been the political response of the ruling class when the majority of the electorate has turned against imperial wars?  In other words, when the democratic institutions no longer function as vehicles for imperial policies, what gives?

From Imperial Democracy to Imperial Police State

The past ten years provide important lessons on the relation between imperialism and democracy in the United States.

Beginning with the controversial political circumstances surrounding known terrorists’ gaining access to the US and subsequently hijacking the airplanes on 9/11/2001, the US government launched two major colonial wars and numerous overt ‘clandestine’ ground and air attacks in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and other countries.  The “global war on terror”, launched under the Bush regime, and implemented by non-elected senior militarist–Zionist officials in co-operation with NATO and Israel was supported by the democratically elected Congress.  For that matter the vast majority of the electorate, influenced by an immense propaganda campaign of fear, media manipulation and lies endorsed the wars on terror.

Given the unprecedented scope and breadth of the wars, (a global war on terror), the vast increase in military spending and the huge outlays for an all encompassing internal repressive (security) apparatus (Homeland Security), a new executive-centered police state was constructed which superseded the existing democratic institution and rights of citizens.

The trajectory of imperial politics moved from early military successes to problematic prolonged occupation.  This led to escalating resistance, growing state expenditures , a deepening fiscal crises , social decay and rising political opposition.

As in the past, contemporary imperial wars that are prolonged, costly and with no decisive victory in sight, have led to citizen disenchantment, followed by increased open rejection.  The wage and salaried majorities who voted for imperial policymakers and backed their enabling legislation, including laws (Patriot Act) which suspended basic civil and constitutional rights, have turned away from the imperial agenda.  Today the democratic majority prioritize their class, economic interests, especially in the face of a prolonged recession and unemployment and underemployment of close to 20%.  Beginning in 2008-2011 endless wars and prolonged crises have set in motion a conflict between democracy and imperialism.

In other words, the democratic majority has become an obstacle to the implementation and pursuit of imperial wars.  Imperial military activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. did not lead to quick victories, the conquest of lucrative export markets and take-over of natural resource.  Jobs were not created and no benefit accrued to employees and workers in the imperial country.  High expenditures for arms undercut public investments in labor-intensive employment in critically overdue infrastructure projects.  The small number of dangerous jobs in occupied countries was unattractive and too risky for the unemployed.

In other words, unlike most previous imperial-colonial wars, none of the plundered wealth was used to secure workers loyalty to the empire.  The burden of empire progressively undercut wage and salaried workers’ living standards.  Over time, regressive taxation gradually eroded any sense of chauvinist grandeur or superiority.  Instead citizens of the empire developed a political inferiority complex.  Faced with determined Islamic opposition and China’s rising economic power, exaggerated bellicosity among a minority and critical introspection among the majority took hold.  Popular consciousness of “something basically wrong” in Washington and Wall Street took over.  The earlier war chants and mindless flag-waving, as the armies of Empire marched to Afghanistan and Iraq, were replaced by angry defeatism directed at misleaders.  Over 80% of the public now articulates a negative view of Congress, rejecting both war parties.  Similar negative views are held toward the White House, the Pentagon and Homeland Security.

After a decade of war and four years of economic crisis, mass protests erupted.  The “Occupy Wall Street” movement puts new options on the table, displacing the imperial agenda with a powerful denunciation of the militarist-financial elite.

The executive rulers, especially the judicial, intelligence and police apparatuses increasingly implemented arbitrary police state measures.  Tens of millions are subject to surveillance by Homeland Security.  The police state intercepts billions of faxes, e-mails, web sites and taps telephone calls.  The link between imperialism and democracy broke at the point where declining empire no longer could secure the electorate’s support or compliance.

More and more bizarre terrorist plots were fabricated by the intelligence agencies.  The Iranian bomb plot against the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington was the most primitive and crude effort to regain public support for imperial militarism in the Gulf region.  Apart from the politically influential, but infinitely small, pro-Israel Zionist power configuration, US public opinion is not distracted from its domestic agenda, its quest for jobs at home and opposition to Wall Street.

As the conflict between imperialism and democracy intensifies, the previous ‘consensus” fractured.  The White House and Congress opt for imperialism backed by a profoundly anti-democratic police state.  The majority of the electorate presses forward, utilizing their remaining democratic rights to change the political agenda from empire toward a social republic.

Conclusion

We have argued that empire and democracy have been complementary in times of ascendant imperialism.  We have shown that when wars of conquest have been short and inexpensive, and when the results have been lucrative for capital and job-creating for labor the democratic majorities joined in support of imperial elites.  Democratic institutions flourished when overseas empires provided markets, cheap resources and raised living standards.  Workers voted for imperial parties, held positive opinions of executive and legislative officials, and applauded the colonial war veterans (our troops).  Some even volunteered and joined the military.  With vast citizen support for empire, the state more or less ‘abided’ by the constitutional guarantees.  But the marriage of democracy and imperialism is not ‘structural’.  It is contingent on a series of variable conditions, which can cause a profound rupture between the two, as we are witnessing today.

Prolonged, losing, costly imperial wars that increasingly erode living standards for over a generation have undermined the consensus between imperial rulers and democratic citizens.  Early signs of this potential divergence were evident during the latter period of the Korean War, when public opinion turned against President Truman, architect of the Cold War and the US invasion of Korea.  More evidence emerged during the Vietnam War.  Faced with a prolonged, losing war, which imperiled the lives and opportunities of tens of millions of draft age Americans, millions in civilian life and the military opted to end the war and question imperial interventions.  The repressive state was still not organized sufficiently to terrorize and contain the democratic upsurge of the 1970’s.  The end of the Vietnam war represented the high point in democratic America’s quest to counter imperialism and rebuild the republic.

Subsequent small, quick, low cost and militarily successful imperial interventions in Panama, Grenada, Haiti and elsewhere did not provoke any conflict between imperialism and democracy.  Nor did imperial clandestine and surrogate wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and the Balkans elicit any significant democratic opposition since they were low cost (in lives and funding) and were not accompanied by any sharp cuts in social expenditures and incomes.

The onset of the current Afghanistan, Iraq, and global offensive wars were seen by some imperial strategists in the same light: Quick, low cost victories with few domestic costs.  One highly placed pro-Israel official in the Pentagon even argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “self-financing” via an oil grab.

The 21st century wars turned out otherwise:  They followed the Korean-Vietnam pattern, not the Central American/Caribbean pattern.  Immensely costly, the 21st century wars have not led to quick victories and, worse still, occurred in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, without the manufacturing and market boom of the 1950’s/1960’s which had cushioned the retreat from Korea and Vietnam.

The divergence between imperialism and democracy has become acute.  Democratic dissent has increased and the police state has become more prominent and direct.  Imperialism increasingly relies on “fabricated domestic and external terror plots” to augment the powers of the repressive machinery and rule by fiat.  White House exhortations ring hollow.  The public puts less and less credence in their rulers’ claims of ‘justifiable’ arbitrary detentions, massive surveillance and extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens (and even their children).

We now face long-term, large-scale dangers, inherent in imperial democracies.  Not because of “internal contradictions” but because sooner or later imperial powers meet their match in the form of protracted struggles by anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.  Only when imperials wars take their toll on the wage and salaried majority, does the rupture between democracy and imperialism take place.  Then, and only then, are democratic forces set in motion to create a democratic republic, with social justice and without empire.

The present danger is that imperial structures are deeply embedded in all the key political institutions and are backed by an unprecedented vast and sprawling police state apparatus, called Homeland Security.  Perhaps it will take a major external political-military shock to ignite the kind of mass democratic uprising needed to transform an imperial police state into a democratic republic.  A growing sense of isolation and impotence affects the ruling regime in the face of overseas military defeats and unyielding, deepening domestic economic crisis.  The danger is that these fears and frustrations could induce the White House to attempt to regain popular support by attacking Iran under a manufactured pretext.

A US/Israeli assault on Iran will result in a world-wide conflagration.  Iran could and would retaliate.  Saudi and Gulf oil wells would go up in flames.  Vital shipping lanes would be blocked.  Gas prices would skyrocket while Asian, EU and US economies crash.  Iranian troops with their Iraqi allies would lay siege to the US garrisons in Baghdad.  Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the Moslem world will take up arms.  US forces would surrender or retreat.  The war would shatter the US Treasury.  Deficits would spiral out of control.  Unemployment would double.  This likely sequence of events would trigger a massive democratic movement and a decisive struggle between an emerging republic struggling to give birth and a decaying empire threatening to drag the world into the inferno of its own demise.

First, Congressman Ron Paul, during a presidential debate last month, expressed the belief that those who carried out the September 11 attack were retaliating for the many abuses perpetrated against Arab countries by the United States over the years. The audience booed him, loudly.

Then, popular-song icon Tony Bennett, in a radio interview, said the United States caused the 9/11 attacks because of its actions in the Persian Gulf, adding that President George W. Bush had told him in 2005 that the Iraq war was a mistake. Bennett, of course, came under some nasty fire. FOX News (September 24), carefully choosing its comments charmingly as usual, used words like “insane”, “twisted mind”, and “absurdities”. Bennett felt obliged to post a statement on Facebook saying that his experience in World War II had taught him that “war is the lowest form of human behavior.” He said there’s no excuse for terrorism, and he added, “I’m sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of love for my country.” (NBC, September 21)

Then came the Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, who for some time had been blaming US foreign policy in the Middle East as the cause of anti-American hatred and terrorist acts. So we killed him. Ron Paul and Tony Bennett can count themselves lucky.

What, then, is the basis of all this? What has the United States actually been doing in the Middle East in the recent past?

• the shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981
• the bombing of Lebanon in 1983 and 1984
• the bombing of Libya in 1986
• the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987
• the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988
• the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989
• the massive bombing of the Iraqi people in 1991
• the continuing bombings and draconian sanctions against Iraq for the next 12 years
• the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998
• the habitual support of Israel despite the routine devastation and torture it inflicts upon the Palestinian people
• the habitual condemnation of Palestinian resistance to this
• the abduction of “suspected terrorists” from Muslim countries, such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Albania, who were then taken to places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they were tortured
• the large military and hi-tech presence in Islam’s holiest land, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region
• the support of numerous undemocratic, authoritarian Middle East governments from the Shah of Iran to Mubarak of Egypt to the Saudi royal family
• the invasion, bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, 2001 to the present, and Iraq, 2003 to the present
• the bombings and continuous firing of missiles to assassinate individuals in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya during the period of 2006-2011

It can’t be repeated or emphasized enough. The biggest lie of the “war on terrorism,” although weakening, is that the targets of America’s attacks have an irrational hatred of the United States and its way of life, based on religious and cultural misunderstandings and envy. The large body of evidence to the contrary includes a 2004 report from the Defense Science Board, “a Federal advisory committee established to provide independent advice to the Secretary of Defense.” The report states:

Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.

The report concludes: “No public relations campaign can save America from flawed policies.” (Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 2004)

The Pentagon released the study after the New York Times ran a story about it on November 24, 2004. The Times reported that although the board’s report does not constitute official government policy, it captures “the essential themes of a debate that is now roiling not just the Defense Department but the entire United States government.”

Homeland security is a rightwing concept fostered following 9/11 as the answer to the effects of 50 years of bad foreign policies in the middle east. The amount of homeland security we actually need is inversely related to how good our foreign policy is.

— Sam Smith, editor of The Progressive Review

The Lies That Will Not Die

In his September 22 address at the United Nations, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad mentioned the Nazi Holocaust just twice:

“Some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fines or ransom to the Zionists.”

“They threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military action.”

That was it.

By the term “questions the Holocaust” the Iranian president has made clear repeatedly over the years what he’s referring to. He has commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a tragedy which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many historians and others of all political stripes who think the total was probably less. This has nothing to do with the Holocaust not taking place.

But, as usual, the Western media pretends that it doesn’t understand.

The New York Post (September 22) referred to the Iranian president as “the world’s foremost Holocaust denier, the would-be genocidist Ahmadinejad”.

Agence France Presse (September 22) stated: “The Iranian leader repeated comments casting doubt on the origins of the Holocaust.”

The Washington Post wrote of “Ahmadinejad’s speech suggesting larger conspiracies were behind the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 attacks caused delegates to walk out.” (September 23)

And Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (September 23) included this amongst the radio program’s news headlines: “For the third straight year, Ahmadinejad sent delegates to the exits after questioning the Nazi Holocaust.”

Without further explanation of that incendiary term — and none was given — what can “questioning the Nazi Holocaust” mean or imply to most listeners other than that Ahmadinejad was questioning whether the Holocaust had actually taken place?

Once again I must point out that I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad ever saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. For the record, in a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”

Indeed, I do not know if any of the so-called “Holocaust-deniers” actually, ever, umm, y’know … deny the Holocaust. They question certain aspects of the Holocaust history that’s been handed down to us, but they don’t explicitly say that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. (Yes, I’m sure you can find at least one nut-case somewhere.)

Another enduring lie about Ahmadinejad is that he has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re “wiping Israel off the map”, besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.” (Associated Press, December 12, 2006) Obviously, the man was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.

Carl Oglesby

The president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1965-66, died September 13, age 76. I remember him best for a speech of his I heard during the March on Washington, November 27, 1965, a speech passionately received by the tens of thousands crowding the National Mall:

The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war — those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.

He insisted that America’s founding fathers would have been on his side. “Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution.” He challenged those who called him anti-American: “I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”

We are dealing now with a colossus that does not want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not cooperate with those who want to change it. Those allies of ours in the government — are they really our allies? If they are, then they don’t need advice, they need constituencies; they don’t need study groups, they need a movement. And if they are not [our allies], then all the more reason for building that movement with the most relentless conviction.

It saddens me to think that virtually nothing has changed for the better in US foreign policy since Carl Oglesby spoke on the Mall that day. America’s wars are ongoing, perpetual, eternal. And the current war monger in the White House is regarded by many as a liberal, for whatever that’s worth.

“We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality,” war correspondent Michael Herr recalled about the US military in Vietnam. “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”

Items Of Interest From a Journal I’ve Kept For 40 Years, Part V

• A Bush administration regulation on Sept. 30, 2004 said Americans cannot buy or smoke Cuban cigars even in countries where the cigars are legal, such as Canada, Mexico, Europe, indeed most of the world. The same goes for Havana Club rum and other Cuban products.
• April 26th, 2007 posting from the courageous but anonymous Iraqi woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile. In her final dispatch, she wrote: “There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends. … And to what?”
• “God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.” — John LeCarre (London Times, January 15, 2003)
• Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq admonished his troops regarding the results of an Army survey that found that many U.S. military personnel there are willing to tolerate some torture of suspects and unwilling to report abuse by comrades. “This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we — not our enemies — occupy the moral high ground,” he wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site. (Washington Post, May 11, 2007)
• “To most of its citizens, America is exceptional, and it’s only natural that it should take exception to certain international standards.” — Michael Ignatieff, former Canadian politician and Washington Post columnist
• It is easy to understand an observation by one of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, knowing it to be defenseless, he noted, “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” — Noam Chomsky
• “It is easier for an American member of Congress to criticize an American president than to criticize an Israeli Prime Minister; it is easier for them to criticize an unjust and unwarranted US war than one launched by Israel.” — Jeffrey Blankfort
• Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, re: his visit to Cuba in 2006: “What really stood out for me was hearing first hand from people working in the medical services just how appalling the US blockade is. When you meet people who are treating eye disorders and blindness on a huge scale and they describe how difficult it is to get the equipment they need except through indirect routes because of the blockade you get a feel for the scale of the injustice that is being imposed on Cuba.” Livingston might have added that the “indirect routes,” even if available, are much more expensive.
• In 1965 when UN Secretary-General U Thant tried to open back-channel ties to the North Vietnamese, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk called him off by shouting: “Who do you think you are, a country?” (Washington Post BookWorld, January 7, 2007)
• George W. Bush: “Years from now when America looks out on a democratic Middle East, growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima” in World War II. (Associated Press, November 11, 2006)
• The National Endowment for Democracy was US Government initiated, and although ostensibly “independent,” has been continually funded by the US Congress, and its Board has included top level actors in the US Government’s foreign policy apparatus, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, former National Security Council Chair Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.
• CBS News, September 9, 2006: Senator Jay Rockefeller says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq. Does Rockefeller stand by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn’t invade? “Yes. Yes.” says Rockefeller. “He wasn’t going to attack us.”
• William Appleman Williams, in his 2007 book Empire as a way of life: Analyzing US history from its revolutionary origins to the dawn of the Reagan era, Williams shows how America has always been addicted to empire in its foreign and domestic ideology. Detailing the imperial actions and beliefs of revered figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this book is the most in-depth historical study of the American obsession with empire, and is essential to understanding the origins of our current foreign and domestic undertakings.
• Compare Washington’s reaction in recent years to popular uprisings alleging electoral fraud in the Ukraine and Georgia to its reaction to the same in Mexico in 2006 when the right wing Felipe Calderon was declared the winner in a very questionable manner.
• Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, in his talk at the United Nations, September 20, 2006, sharply criticized US president George W. Bush’s foreign policies and Bush himself. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett suggested that the Chávez comments were beyond the pale of diplomatic protocol at the UN. “Even the Democrats wouldn’t say that.” However, the Guardian reported that “Delegates and leaders from around the world streamed back into the chamber to hear Mr Chávez, and when he stepped down the vigorous applause lasted so long that it had to be curtailed by the chair.”
• Only the imperialist powers have the ability to enforce sanctions and are therefore always exempt from them.

King would have loudly repeated the U.S. media suppressed arrogant and bragging 1989 confession of David Rockefeller cohort Zbignieu Bzrezinski¹, appointed Presidential Advisor to President Carter:

Brzezinski:  ”According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid [funding, arming and training] to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Questioning Interviewer: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Bzrezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?

Interviewer: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Bzrezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? … the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems … ?

(Actually, according to eminent Middle East journalist Robert Fisk, what Bzrezinski called a “pro-Soviet regime in Kabul” was an overwhelmingly popular women liberating and educating government. And the hill tribe war-lords backed and led by the CIA and US allied secret services of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were executing teachers of girls. CIA backed war-lord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was known for spraying acid on women dressed in Western fashion.)

King might have even gone back further to describe the British and French murderous military occupation and colonial exploitation of all Arabian lands after World War II, long since replaced by armed American economic and political hegemony.

Commenting on 9/11 in 2001, Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermonized, “The American chickens have come home to roost.” King might well have pointed out that the Vietnamese suffered the equivalent of a 9/11 from American bombing every month for fifteen years, and never spoke of vengeful justice for their millions of victims.

As Americans continue to mourn their own innocent victims, the world is watching for some sign of equal compassion for the immeasurably more numerous innocent victims of America’s wars in poor nations since end of WW II.

Martin Luther King Jr. not only had such compassion but awoke to a determination to speak out against this massive destruction of lives caused by powerful investor conspiracies of war to protect what King called “unjust overseas predatory investments in vulnerable poorer nations all around the world.”

Public awareness of a dynamic Gandhi-like leader King’s reminding the world of its capability to make war unacceptable has been suppressed in investor owned media for 43 years.  In 1967, that conglomerate media, led by the NY Times, denounced King as unpatriotic. King was soon assassinated and the war in Vietnam went on for another ten bloody years.

There is now an International Campaign for Awareness of King’s Condemnation of U.S. Wars and the “unjust overseas predatory investments they are meant to maintain” at this website.

1. Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998

It is a moment flooded with nostalgia for those who cut their political teeth 40 years ago during the Vietnam war, though it is hard to even recognise the State of the Union 40 years on. The “War on Poverty” of LBJ has been replaced by a “war on terror”. Today’s America has a black president, yet is mired in recession, and promises only falling living standards, collapsing infrastructure, and more and more violations of civil rights.

Though Jewish Americans are still an essential part of today’s much less flamboyant and less powerful anti-war movement, the pro-war movement is now loudly pro-Israel, unlike the earlier pro-warriors. This reflects the new times, where Israel is no longer just a naughty, temporary occupier of Palestinian land, but America’s most devoted ally, a respected (or rather feared) imperialist in its own right, and a key player in orchestrating the US wars in the Middle East.

At the same time as the mayors called for an end to the endless wars, Congress censured Obama over his new undeclared war against Libya, now in its third month, though stopping short of denying him funds. Neither the mayoral nor congressional resolutions have any teeth. But, with his generals breathing down his neck, the astute Obama was able to use these two protests to protect his rear as he announced his plans to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by September 2012, including 10,000 by the end of this year: “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

Obama’s announcement brings to mind another parallel with Vietnam — Nixon’s announcement in 1972 during his re-election campaign that “peace is at hand”, that he too would wind down the war after negotiations with the enemy, provided that the people gave him his second term. He went on to win one of the largest majorities of any US president in 1972. After winning the election, he was able to convince Karzai (excuse me, Thieu-Ky) to agree to a deal with the Taliban (excuse me, the Communists), which culminated in a memorable evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon by helicopter in 1975, finally freeing Vietnam of its American occupiers. It was not a pretty “plan”, but it worked.

Just as the majority of Americans by the late 1960s had turned against the war in southeast Asia even at the risk of “losing” Vietnam to the Communists, so 56 per cent of Americans today want an immediate pull-out from Afghanistan, though 56 per cent also predict there will be no stable government there and that the Taliban could well return to power. But, like 40 years ago, Americans have lost interest.

The parallel is not exact. Obama would have pulled out of Afghanistan in 2009 if the generals had let him. “Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn’t be done,” Bob Woodward quotes an aide in Obama’s Wars. As expected, the surge was a spectacular failure, more like a surge of sitting ducks. Chief warrior Stanley McChrystal was fired in disgrace last year and his equally gung-ho replacement David Petraeus has been shunted off to the CIA, where he has already been told to continue the war by covert means. The remaining generals are furious but are putting on a brave face, with Hillary taking about “reaching out” to the Taliban, no doubt counting on winning their “hearts and minds”.

Obama, while disappointing those who expected him to slay the dragon, drive the money-changers out of the temple, and bring peace on earth, is nonetheless a wily politician worthy of his predecessor Nixon. Like Nixon, he knows perfectly well that it’s time to move on and he’s playing to the crowd: “We are starting this drawdown from a position of strength,” he told Americans solemnly. This pretense and the assassination of Bin Laden will almost certainly give him a second term.

The draw down is none too soon, as defections from the ranks of the coalition started last year with the Netherlands and are continuing, with Canada, German and Italy having deadlines (which, it’s true, shift depending on electoral strategies and US arm-twisting). Britain is already reducing its contingent and a delighted French President Nicolas Sarkozy immediately declared French troops would be home by next summer.

“The war is lost. Reaching out to the Taliban is in no way a demonstration of a ‘position of strength’, but a clear sign of America’s weakness,” writes commentator Boris Volkhonsky, though he admits Obama has handled a difficult problem well, calling his speech “an astute recognition of the fact”. Indeed, the only public criticism of Obama is coming from crackpots such as Senator John McCain who said that Obama is denying military commanders in Afghanistan the ability to finally defeat “a battered and broken enemy”. President Hamid Karzai described the announcement that American troops would depart as “a moment of happiness for Afghanistan”.

A major difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan is the plan to maintain bases in Afghanistan after pulling out. Afghanistan’s neighbours Russia (almost-neighbour), China, Iran, Pakistan — even the puppet government in Kabul — vow that this will not happen. As if on cue, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad invited Karzai and Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari to Tehran this week to a conference on terrorism and for one-on-one talks. Apart from US plans for Afghanistan, Zardari’s talks dealt with completing the Iran-Pakistan gas “Peace Pipeline” project, which is strongly opposed by the US. But the US should hardly be surprised at this budding friendship: the downside of the surge and assassination of Bin Laden is that Pakistan can finally extricate itself from its deadly American embrace without any apologies.

As for Karzai, he sees the writing on the wall, and is eager to survive a few more years, which means courting his neighbours to take the place of the hated Americans. All of them have indicated they will support him. His trip to Tehran should also come as no surprise. The US will almost certainly have to abandon its freshly paved military bases in the north of Afghanistan, prepared as part of the Bush-era “Blackwill plan” to split Afghanistan in two. This neocon fantasy would cede the south to the Taliban with the understanding that they can play at creating a “greater Pashtunistan” if they let the US keep the predominantly Tajik north. Neither Karzai nor Zardari will go along with this. Neither will China, Russia nor Iran. It is very unlikely the Taliban will either.

Iranian Defense Minister Ahmed Vahidi visited Kabul just last week and told Afghanistan’s Vice President Mohammed Fahim, “The great and brave nation of Afghanistan is capable of establishing its security in the best possible form without the interference of the trans-regional forces.” Signing a bilateral security cooperation agreement with his Iranian counterpart, Afghanistan’s Defence Minister Abdulrahim Wardak gushed, “We believe that joint defence and security cooperation between Iran and Afghanistan is very important for establishing peace and security in the region.”

The most important — and very disturbing — parallel between these American wars is in the perception and the reality of who “won”. The popular perception is that the US lost Vietnam and that it has lost in Afghanistan. But this is misleading, as the US achieved “victory in defeat” in both cases.

In the case of Vietnam, it destroyed any possibility of successfully developing a strong socialist country as a catalyst in the non-imperial transformation of southeast Asia. Like Cuba’s Fidel, Ho Chi Minh was well-educated and highly respected by his people and — just as important — by both the Soviet and Chinese leaders. Without the US invasion of Vietnam, all of southeast Asia would most likely today be communist (in more than just name). The world would look very, very different.

Similarly, in the Middle East, the US, following Britain’s imperial lead in the Middle East, cultivated the passive and inward-looking Wahhabis and the anti-communist Saudi monarchy, who let the imperialists run roughshod over the region for over a century, all the time providing the West with precious oil. Together with Saudi Arabia, the empire undermined its secular challengers in Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (still a work-in-progress), and the Islamist challengers in Algeria and post-revolutionary Iran, ensuring that they do not become models for the region — and threats to the empire.

Like Vietnam in 1975, Iraq and Afghanistan now lie in ruins. Egypt is fatally compromised after four decades of neoliberalism and rampant corruption under US tutelage. Iran’s Islamists have miraculously survived a decade of war with Iraq under US sponsorship, and two more decades of sanctions and subversion by the US, Israel and the gang, but the harsh, austere regime there is not much of a model for, say, Egypt with its Westernised elite and many intimate ties with the decadent West. Without the wars and subversion by the US (not to mention Israel), all of the Middle East would most likely today be united as a latter-day Islamic caliphate, sharing the oil wealth as Islam requires and telling the empire to go to hell.

So even if the helicopters have to evacuate Karzai and the last US diplomats from Kabul in the near future, the flag-wavers and their neocon henchmen can still celebrate “victory”; in a sense, they are right.

For openers, Bobby Kennedy was about as “leftist” as Douglas MacArthur.  In truth, he, like his brother John, was a shrieking anti-Communist.  The Kennedys were not only rock-ribbed Cold Warriors, they were fairly paranoid about it—confusing progressivism with Bolshevism—which is why they believed, ludicrously, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist, and is why they (John as president and Bobby as Attorney General) had King’s telephone tapped.

How much of an anti-Communist was Bobby Kennedy?  Consider:  During the early 1950s Bobby served as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Yes, that Joseph McCarthy.  His witch-hunting senate committee ruined the careers of scores of Americans through the use of smears and innuendo.  It’s a fact.  Bobby (“Don’t get mad….get even”) Kennedy was Joe McCarthy’s boy.

It was only after family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, advised his son to jump off the McCarthy bandwagon (alas, “Tail-Gunner Joe” had become an embarrassment, having degenerated into a clownish, alcoholic demagogue) that Bobby sought a new vocation.  It was only after Papa Joe urged him to abandon Commie-hunting and focus on another boogie man that Bobby Kennedy decided to make America’s labor unions his next victim.

Obviously, there were many corruption targets to choose from.  He could have gone after Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, defense fraud, payola in the record industry, etc., but because Joe Kennedy had no ties, no loyalties, no connections of any kind to the working class—indeed, he held the common working man in contempt—organized labor became Bobby’s new whipping boy.  Best to leave those slender, well-groomed gentlemen in the three-piece suits alone, and go after the stocky guys in the watchmen’s caps and mackinaws.

As for Bobby’s celebrated social conscience, that’s another… well, exaggeration.  In his award-winning history of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes), Tim Weiner reports that it was Bobby himself who spearheaded the plan to murder Fidel Castro.  It was Bobby Kennedy who not only initiated the assassination plot, but who—following one ignominious failure after another—flogged the hare-brained operation to keep it going.  After all, he was the president’s brother.  Who was going to tell him to back off?

All those bizarre reports that we’ve heard about—the exploding cigars, the LSD-laced coffee, the chemical additives to cause Fidel’s beard to fall out (!), bribing trusted Castro associates to poison him, hiring out-of-town Mafia hit men to murder him outright—those were all sanctioned by Bobby.

Based on documents released via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), as well as material gleaned from numerous first-person interviews (Legacy of Ashes has a staggering 150 pages of notes), Weiner made the case that Bobby Kennedy was obsessed with killing Fidel Castro, that he ate, drank and breathed Castro assassination fantasies.

It’s also been documented that Bobby Kennedy bullied Lyndon Johnson into continuing the Vietnam war.  According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream), Bobby insisted to LBJ that President Kennedy would have done everything in his power to keep Southeast Asia from falling to the Communists, and that it was therefore incumbent upon Johnson to honor his dead brother’s legacy by not abandoning the war.  He pressured LBJ to remain in Vietnam, arguing that pulling out would be the act of a coward and traitor.

It was only after the Vietnam war had become toxically unpopular and been deemed unwinnable that Bobby, who was now seeking the 1968 presidential nomination, reversed his position and declared himself America’s “peace candidate,” harshly criticizing Johnson for his hawkishness.  So much for Bobby’s principles… and so much for Brother John’s “legacy.”

While Bobby Kennedy obviously had some good qualities, it’s a mistake to regard him as heroic—as a combination of Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Che Guevara.  Bobby was no hero.  He was a hardboiled player.  If we insist on making comparisons, he was a combination of Lee Atwater, John Gotti, and Henry Kissinger.

That novel is now in bookstores. It was worth the wait. Yes, it is a war novel, but it is also a war novel that has aged like good moonshine forgotten in a jug out in grandpa’s barn. Not necessarily smooth, but much easier to swallow now than when it first came out of the still. Much of this could be related to the stretch of time between the distillation fifty years ago and its consumption now. After all, perspective often takes away those sharp, biting edges that framed our perception back then. Yet, like good moonshine no matter how ancient, Babbs’ story still occasionally bites and stings as its going down. Time hasn’t made the war he writes about any less horrific. It’s only made the telling of it easier.

The novel, titled Who Shot the Water Buffalo, takes place in the year 1962. This was well after the United States had replaced the French in their colonial role but well before the rapid escalation of the war after 1965. The reference to water buffaloes is of dual meaning. Apparently, the soldiers’ name for the water tanks containing fresh water on the makeshift bases were known as water buffaloes. There is a scene in the novel where one of those gets shot up. The second meaning is more ominous, at least for the US troops engaged in their “advisory” role. Guerrilla fighters would hide behind water buffalo in the fields and shoot at South Vietnamese and US troops. This created a scenario where US troops would wantonly shoot water buffalo. In one instance, an old farmer is killed without any indication that he was shooting anything at anyone. As any student or participant in that (and most other subsequent war) the practice of shooting unarmed civilians was an all too common occurrence.

The story itself is a story about men at war. Drinking and bravado. Fear and just plain idiocy. Comradeship and testosterone-fueled brawls. The arrogance of imperialism and the embarrassment of men who question the propriety of their task. Babbs writing is rhythmically attuned to the lives of men who wonder as to the rationale of their being sent to a foreign land to kill some of its inhabitants in the name of the others. Like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 or the writing of John Sack on Vietnam, Who Shot the Water Buffalo illustrates the brutal futility of America’s recent wars and hints at the damage these wars have done not only to the nations where they occur but to the psyches of the US troops who fought them and the nation they served. Babbs characters share the cynicism of the invader in that they know their mission is most likely a losing cause. At the same time, they are unable to understand the commitment of the forces they oppose.

Who Shot the Water Buffalo opens with an innocence tinged with a cynicism that grows ever more pervasive as it goes on. In Babbs’ telling, the pointlessness of the operation is already apparent to the men involved. So is the brutality. So is how it will end.. The lies of America’s wars are all here. The lies the invaders tell themselves about the honor of their mission and the lies the locals live pretending they appreciate that effort. The lies that politicians and generals use to keep the gravy train and the war going. And of course the ultimate lie that war makes things better.

The Indochinese died before their time in far greater number (to say the least) than the American invaders. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations killed at least 3 million in Vietnam, Laos , and Cambodia. Much of Vietnam and its not-so sovereign neighboring territory were bombed and burned “back to the stone age” by the American “liberators.”

“War” is a curious term for such one-sided imperial slaughter, which turned Vietnam into a lethal “basket case” (the Pentagon’s own language) while many Americans enjoyed lives of historically unprecedented mass affluence in relative freedom at home.

Not long after the full and direct attack receded, the Christian U.S. president Jimmy Carter proclaimed at a news conference that we owed no debt to Vietnam because “the destruction was mutual.” It was a remarkable comment, thoroughly uncontroversial in the dominant U.S. political and media culture, which renders invisible and officially unworthy the victims of American and U.S.-allied violence. The 3 million prematurely dead Indochinese met their demise on the wrong side of the imperial guns and the wrong side of the imperial cameras. They did not and do not officially exist or matter according to the Orwellian rules of the dominant national and mass media culture.

Flash forward to the aftermath of the death of the former U.S. Cold War terror tool Osama bin Laden. Over the last two days, we have been fed images of al Qaeda’s criminal act of 9/11/2001, when bin Laden’s extremist warriors killed 3000 Americans on U.S. soil. The wounds of what the evil others from the Middle East did to us have been re-opened for public viewing like no time in recent years. There’s nothing said in the dominant mass media and politics culture about the vastly larger number of Arabs and Muslim killed on their soil by the U.S. and its aliens and clients (including the CIA-backed Osama back in the 1980s) before and since 9/11.

Last Monday night on the “Public” Broadcasting System’s News Hour, Madeline Albright applauded the death of a terrorist who had “killed not only Americans but a lot of other people.” The end of the already irrelevant criminal bin Laden should occasion no tears, of course, but a reasonably civilized culture would be more than a little skeptical about righteous expressions of concern for innocent victims from a woman who as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State said the following on national television about the killing of more than half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions: “this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” The standard statistic for the number of Iraqis killed by the sanctions (1991-2003) is 1 million, considerably more than the 3000 Americans who died in September of 2001. Never mind: the Iraqis died on the wrong side of the imperial culture and are thus invisible. Along with other and related aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East (chiefly America’s sponsorship and protection of Israeli oppression and bloody dictatorships across the region’s arc of U.S.-backed despotism), those officially unworthy casualties were part of why a major Islamo-terrorist attack on the U.S. seemed likely well before 2001. The Islamist “blowback” (a CIA term that the left author Chalmers Johnson turned into a book title and prediction in 2000) was all too predictable.

Also unsurprising was Washington ’s exploitation of the predicted “blowback” as a pretext to launch an ambitious military campaign in the oil-rich Middle East and particularly in Iraq (second only to Saudi Arabia in petroleum reserves). The morning the Twin Towers fell in lower Manhattan, I sat mesmerized in front of my television, thinking that a large number of innocent people would be losing their lives in the Arab and Muslim worlds at the hands of a vengeful Empire (an empire that no longer seemed to face any relevant deterrent on the global scale) in coming months and years. I had no idea how big the body count would be. The brilliant British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk estimates “up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan ” thanks to U.S. wars since 9/11. It’s a reasonable guess. Many, perhaps most of that half million have died indirectly, through health problems created by the American invasions’ terrible impact on daily life. But many –far more than the American death count of 9/11 – have been directly slaughtered by U.S. forces, both uniformed and contracted-out.

The American petro-imperial revenge machine reached its mass-murderous apex, perhaps, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in April of 2004. That’s when the Marines responded to the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries with a quasi-genocidal assault that included the criminal bombing (including hyper-lethal cluster-bombing), mortaring, napalming, gassing, and shooting of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and the targeting of ambulances. U.S. snipers boasted of killing anyone they could get in their sites and U.S. soldiers tossed grenades into civilian homes. The assault considerably out-did al Qaeda’s 9/11 death count. An American video game (“Fallujah – Operation al-Fajr”) was subsequently released to celebrate and profit from the Fallujah slaughter. The game’s players join U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in their attack on the Jolan district in Fallujah. Kuma Reality Games used detailed satellite imagery of Jolan in making the popular game. Publicity material for the game enticed purchasers with the opportunity to “dodge sniper fire and protect civilians.”

Along the way we have seen well-documented mass torture and rape in the imperial American charnel houses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base, not to mention the capture and sending of often innocent accused terrorists to torture chambers in Egypt and other U.S.-allied states.

U.S. military personnel have routinely and preposterously justified disgraceful actions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia as “revenge for 9/11” – a frequent motivational theme in the preparation of U.S. troops to kill “Hajis” during the basic training that precedes deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. American troops, officers, intelligence operatives, and pilots have been conditioned to take out their hatred for Osama bin Laden on innocent men, women, and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Ethiopia .

The indiscriminate killing of civilians in the name of 9/11 retribution has continued into the age of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who refused to apologize for the deadly bombing of dozens of women and children in the Afghan village of Bola Boluk even as he offered a formal apology to New Yorkers for an ill-advised Air Force One flyover that reminded some city residents of 9/11.

It is well understood in elite circles that the lethal, mass-murderous (dare we say “monstrous”?) U.S response to 9/11 has increased the Islamist terror threat to Americans and others by deepening the Arab and Muslim worlds’ alienation from the U.S. and the West. The Wall Street Journal reported last Monday that Al Qaeda had 200 members on the eve of 9/11. Today the group is larger and “more far-reaching than before the U.S. sought to take it down.” Independent offshoots have emerged in Yemen , Somalia and elsewhere. “New terrorist leaders,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera writes, “include Nasir al-Wahishi, who leads Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has been involved in several terrorist plots, including the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day in 2009.”

This makes perfect sense in light of U.S. Middle East policy, which continues under Obama to rest on alliance with military despotism and Israel and on the related threat and use of direct military force. The increase of the terror threat by the U.S. “war on terror” (now speaking of its greatest victory) might seem paradoxical and dysfunctional from America’s perspective but it keeps alive the threat of future Islamist attacks that can be used again to fuel and the military-media industrial complex’s seemingly insatiable thirst for the profits and diversions of endless war.

As the beautiful sleek looking but deadly French Mirage fighter bombers fire missiles to impose an innocuous sounding “No-fly zone” Arabs remember the French use of murderous aircraft against the civilian population of French ‘Protectorate’ of Arab Syria,

As the French proudly bombard ‘protectively’ in a North Africa it once owned and exploited, we remember the triple genocide in French Indochina. First, during the brutal racist occupation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; second, as the Vichy French Colonial Army running its colonies for the Japanese Imperial Army aided the confiscation of rice for export to Japan while a million Vietnamese starved to death; third, as fresh French troops, brought back into Vietnam in U.S. ships, murdered Vietnamese for eight years, beginning almost immediately after the joyous street celebrations in Paris as it was liberated from Nazi occupation.

We can also appreciate the past inhumanity of France thinking of the sad history of French genocide in Haiti five times over. Firstly, by the enslavement of Africans; secondly, by working them to death in Haiti to make France rich; thirdly, for the genocidal punishment of the Haitian slave revolution; fourthly, for the cruel life-costing reparations forced on Haiti; lastly, for French refusal to return that huge sum of extorted money even now as Haitians suffer earthquake devastation, poverty, U.S. exploitation and foreign occupation

Opportunist France, CNN and CIA have encouraged and aided rebellion in  eastern Libya, which, until 1951, had a separate history as Cyrenaica*, France has led other paragons of virtuous political hegemony in hailing democracy as the right of those  rebelling in Libya.

But democracy and even more important, freedom, was for centuries denied the non-white population of the world.

The once colonially occupied and still neo-colonially exploited billions of non-white human beings remember that while French and English people proudly practiced parliamentary democracy they denied freedom and democracy to all their millions of colonial subjects at gun point.

It is obvious to just about everyone that It is the petroleum deposits in Libya which are crying for freedom from African control. To free Africa of its wealth has always brought military intervention from  industrialized and dehumanized nations.

Having control of their own oil wealth has enabled Libyans, along with neighboring Algerians, to enjoy the highest standard of living in Africa (South Africa has a wealthier but unevenly available standard),

Few are fooled by the French or any other of today’s now neocolonialist powers (which just happen to be basically white).

It is the oil in Libya which must be free — free from African control. Ergo the pretext of humanitarian goals.

*  In 1934, Italy adopted the name “Libya” (used by the ancient Greeks for all of North Africa, except Egypt) for its colonies of Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania, both having been run separately by Italian governors. Italy had conquered both from the Ottoman Turks in 1911. From 1943 to 1951, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were under British administration, while the French controlled Fezzan and the United States maintained the large Wheelus Air Base.

A drastically new way, Shibata wrote, not a tweak here and there, so besides this real enough fear of radiation, there is also the long term challenge of living with less energy, but there is hardly anyone anywhere who is ready to power down. Most dismiss the concept outright. We’re conditioned to want more, not less. Confusing technology with fuel, knowledge with gas, they believe science will find a way to accommodate us all. Surely someone will come up with a car powered by wheezes, sneezes, farts and recycled wet dreams, etc.

This modern world is a mirage. It is a bleep and aberration in mankind’s history. With all of its gadgetry and convenience, our contemporary setting has only been enabled by an incredibly cheap source of energy, petroleum, but oil supply has peaked, so Bush steered us towards ethanol. To convert food into fuel, corn into beaucoup mileage, was supposed to be the answer, all those starving to death be damned! Like Bush, Obama touts nuclear energy while fighting oil wars. Without juice, this show’s over. If there’s black gold under your land, gentlemen, the U.S. will be the first to offer advice and inhumanitarian assistance, its cruise missiles ablazing.

Twenty nine percent of Japan’s electricity comes from nuclear power. As with so many calamities of the last century or so, energy is at the heart of it. The United States’ oil embargo against Japan precipitated war between these nations. Eighty percent of Japanese oil import had come from America, then the world’s leading oil exporter. Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 200,000 Japanese within four months, with many more dying from cancer later. These traumas spawned, among other nightmares, an imaginary dinosaur wading in from the sea to destroy Japanese cities, yet after World War II, an occupied Japan was nudged towards nuclear power by the United States. The only country to suffer from nuclear bombs then became the world’s second leading generator of nuclear energy, after only the U.S. At the Fukushima Power Plant, all six of the distressed reactors were designed by General Electrics. As oil dwindles, nuclear power was supposed to pick up some of the slack, but as is becoming clear, yet again, there are inherent risks.

Newspapers worldwide have remarked on the stoicism, dignity, discipline and civility of the ordinary Japanese in response to their overlapping tragedies. It would be reasonable to conclude that these traits will allow Japan to cope and move forward better than most societies. When cities and infrastructures are destroyed, it’s the human capital, above all, that will rebuild them, but national traits are always difficult to discuss. They are all relative, many people will insist. A society can function any which way it wants to, appropriate to its culture and environment. To imply that there’s a better way in any arena is to be intolerant, chauvinistic or racist.

Two days ago, many American newspapers featured on their front pages a photo of a Chinese mob jostling with each other to buy iodized salt, which they thought would protect them from nuclear radiation. One couldn’t help but contrast this chaotic scene with Japanese lining up orderly for hours outside supermarkets and gas stations. Without passing too many value judgments, it is fair to speculate if China would fare as well during a crisis similar to what’s happening in Japan?

During the Lunar New Year celebration of 2010, Japan sent to Vietnam a chrysanthemum. Within minutes of its display in Hanoi, the tree was completely denuded, plucked of all its flowers by a mob. This appalling display of every man for himself, I just want my own flower and to hell with the lovely sight, provoked severe commentary from a few Vietnamese intellectuals. “Like a pack of monkeys,” someone even concluded.

The most forthright racial or ethnic judgments are often blurted within one’s own community, but we can all benefit from more candor and courage in discussing group traits, however, as long as they are not made with genocidal malice. I will say that the Vietnamese have little respect for public order. They don’t stand in lines or stop at red lights. Soon as they step out of their front doors, they litter, even in hallways outside their apartments. Yet in war, a true crisis, Vietnamese can work together so efficiently and with such self sacrifice that they have often been compared by foreigners to ants. This is not exactly a compliment, as is made clear by this passage from French novelist Jean Lartéguy: “This frenzied activity by sexless insects seemed directed from a distance, as if, somewhere in this colony, some huge queen was to be found, a sort of monstrous central brain which served as the collective consciousness of these ants.” Fearful of being overrun, perhaps, many Europeans have attributed sexlessness to the most populous race. No sex, yet so many children!

Back to the Chinese: the sense of public order, or civility, if you will, increases as one travels from mainland China to Hong Kong, to Taiwan, to Singapore. The same Chinese gene, but they comport themselves quite differently in these diverse places, so culture is not racially encoded. People can certainly be taught how to behave better, or be allowed or encouraged to act much worse than even monkeys.

And where is America in regard to all this? Where is she heading? On television, political pundits routinely insult and cut each other off. American teens strut around with T-shirts decorated with knives, guns, hand grenades and skulls. Web comments to Youtube videos and news stories seethe with racial hatred. (The election of our first black president, even one who does nothing for blacks whatsoever, or any other poor folks, for that matter, has provoked a frightful racial backlash. This, sadly, will turn out to be Obama’s most enduring legacy.) Caged fighting is being staged everywhere, in small towns, on military bases, even by churches. It’s all in jest, you say, it’s just goofy fun, which is what Rush Limbaugh considered Abu Ghraib, by the way. We are a fun and goofy people, if a tad violent.

As America attacks yet another oil-producing country, as she hijacks Libya’s revolution, many Americans are transfixed by March Madness. When Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, we were also staring at a bouncing ball for hours on end. Until the televisions go black, I suppose, most of us will pretend that nothing outside our doors has really changed. Belief in the trumpeted recovery means a yearning for life circa 2007, before the crash. As this ebbs and ebbs, we’ll find out what we’re really made of.

The objective of every football play is to gain real estate. For tactical reasons, a soccer player often passes a ball backward, sometimes even to his own goalie, but in football, there is only the forward thrust. In fact, a backward pass is illegal. Gaining yards is so important that it defines the success of every play, and of every player who touches the ball. A running back had a successful day if he gained 100 yards, even if he never scored and his team lost. In no other sports are statistics kept of yards gained. A soccer or basketball player can dribble the length of the field or court without tallying anything, but in American football, each yard must be counted.

This nearly continent-size country has always defined itself by rapidly expanding, by gaining yards and miles. Settle the coast, then foray inland. Move the natives out of the way. Get rid of them. Kill them. Half of Mexico was swallowed up, then Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, on and on, until now, America has at least 700 military bases in 130 countries. That’s a lot of yards gained. Granted, there are no people that have not engaged in territorial warfare with their neighbors, but the relentless reach of the United States is unprecedented.

Much more than land, America invades minds. There is scarcely a brain alive that’s not constantly titillated and harassed by American culture. Worldwide, people wear hats and shirts with American words and slogans they don’t understand. They listen to American lyrics and babble English words, even to themselves. In Vietnam not too long ago, a woman asked if I liked the song, “Aleet Beeper.” What she meant was “Careless Whisper.” Whatever its title and whatever it meant, she liked that song. Also in Vietnam, I saw “POLO” stickered onto a Japanese motorbike. This man had Americanized his modest rice cooker, since America is glamorous and cool, much more so than Japan or anywhere else, for that matter.

Humans are warm but machines are cool. Notice the ubiquity of “cool” to denote anything positive in American English. Americans aspire to become hard, tough, and efficient machines that feel no pain. More specifically, they identify with their car, that carapace that enwraps them daily and gives them personality and status. Spending more time with his car than anything or anyone else, the American’s best friend is his automobile. Nowadays, it can even speak and tell him where to go. Year in and year out, car commercials dominate the Super Bowl. Becoming anthropomorphic, they can drive themselves and chat to each other. One can say that the main objective of each Super Bowl is to sell more wheels.

Clueless of the rules, foreigners still tune in to the Super Bowl, since empire exudes not just power, but a kind of sexual allure. The alpha male also demands vigilant attention. He is dangerous and you can’t hide from him. By his cold-blooded calculations or whims, a person in the remotest place may just die in his sleep, killed by a plane or drone, even without knowing why. A recent report revealed that only eight percent of Afghan men had even heard of the attacks on 9/11 of 2001, America’s pretext for invading their country.

Even more than usual, war lurked behind this Super Bowl. Before Christina Aguilera botched “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Lea Michele sang “America the Beautiful,” so there were two national anthems, so to speak. Troops with flags were arrayed behind these singers. As Aguilera fluffed and mumbled, we caught a glimpse of a grinning George W. Bush. Our war-criminal-in-chief would appear again later, as would Condi Rice. After Aguilera’s last note, military jets roared overhead. During the game, we were suddenly introduced to Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, a decorated veteran of our invasion of Afghanistan. He stood with other soldiers beyond the end zone, waving. As has become customary, the announcers thanked all of “our troops” worldwide “for all that they do.” Earlier, there was a shot of American soldiers watching the Super Bowl in Afghanistan.

America is beautiful, but so is every other country. None can match her in mass media allure, however, in collective hypnosis. In a 1997 article for the US Army War College, Major Ralph Peters sums up America’s cultural edge, “Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.” And, “The films most despised by the intellectual elite–those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex–are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand.”

America is seductive. In fact, the further one is from America, geographically, culturally or economically, the more alluring she can become. Without an actual experience of her, America is pure fantasy, a fabulous rumor.

One of history’s oddest ironies is the name Mỹ Lai, which means “half-American” in Vietnamese. Mỹ is “American.” Lai is “of mixed race.” If a person is “Mỹ lai,” he is half-American. Further, Mỹ in Vietnamese also means beautiful. In colloquial Vietnamese, America is the beautiful country, and Americans, beautiful people. In the half-American village, of a country that called America “beautiful,” American troops killed around 500 unarmed civilians on March 16th of 1968. Nearly all were women, children and the elderly. America seduced, then killed. During one of Israel’s episodic massacres of Arabs—there have been so many, I can no longer remember which one—I saw a photo of a dead child wrapped in a Mickey Mouse blanket. Murdered by an American bomb, she would be buried with her beloved American icon. An American talking rat accompanied her to eternity.

Watching the Super Bowl, Americans and foreigner alike can come away with these clear messages: Fun is not free. We must kill constantly so cars can be sold. We are a virile and vital nation, at least on television. The seats at his spectacle are way out of reach to you, even those who dwell right here, in the cartoony belly of the beast, but your seats at home are free, as long as they haven’t been bombed. Lastly, you can never be like us, the beautiful creatures you see on our shows and movies, but you’re free to stare, stare and stare.

Investigating corruption and abuse of power, Hoang Hung made plenty of enemies in high places. His best know article is about how officials in Long An, after receiving bribes from developers, kicked hundreds of farmers off their lands to make way for golf courses. After his death, a colleague quoted Hoang Hung, “We’re soldiers on the media battlefield. We must dare to speak the truth, dare to fight for social justice in spite of harassment from many quarters.” Fifty years old at his death, Hoang Hung was too young to participate in the Vietnam War. His father, however, was a Vietcong who died in battle.

The Vietnamese Communists won the war so they could eventually open the country to Capitalist sweat shops and golf courses. No wonder Hoang Hung was pissed. To make room for a rich man’s game, hundreds of Vietnamese became landless. Though Vietnam is smaller than California, it has more than twice the population. The deltas and coastline are packed with people. There, even a lawn is an alien concept, and as popular as soccer is, there are few grass fields. Vietnamese grow rice and vegetables, not grass. The last thing Vietnam needs is golf courses, but of course they aren’t built for the locals.

According to George Carlin, America doesn’t need these vast, high maintenance fields either. From a 1992 skit, “It is time to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless […] Think of how big a golf course is. The ball is that fucking big! What do these pinheaded pricks need with all that land? There are over 17,000 golf courses in America. They average over 150 acres apiece. That’s 3 million plus acres, 4,820 square miles. You could build two Rhode Islands and a Delaware for the homeless, on the land currently being wasted on this meaningless, mindless, arrogant, elitist, racist […] and a boring game.”

In any case, whoever killed Hoang Hung was a pro. The assassin knew that he tended to work late and often slept in his second floor home office. Waiting until the lights were out, the killer managed to climb onto the balcony without being detected just after midnight. He then entered the darkened room where his target was sound asleep inside the mosquito netting. After the attack, there were photos published in the Vietnamese press of the scorched bed and the near-naked victim lying in the hospital, where he suffered for ten days before dying. Make no mistake about this: Hoang Hung was killed as a warning to other journalists. Make too much noise and you will be roasted alive like this man.

In the 60’s, South Vietnamese monks immolated themselves to protest against the government. Their action was effective because it was a horrendous spectacle. It was visual. At the same time, South Vietnam’s best novelist, Nhat Linh, also committed suicide in protest, but he did it by ingesting poison in private. Whereas the image of a burning monk has become iconic, Nhat Linh’s death caused no international ripple whatsoever. It wasn’t visual. There is nothing to show.

Everywhere now, not least America, writers are becoming more invisible by the day, in any case. With so much mass media all the time, it would not matter if an American writer became a living torch in Times Square. They’d just hose his ashes into the gutter and point the camera at the naked cowboy. The Vietnamese Communists have also figured out that serious writers are mostly irrelevant in this cultural climate. They used to lock up poets—one, Nguyen Chi Thien, was imprisoned for a total of twenty-seven years—but now they pretty much leave poets alone. Though many are still blocked from publishing, poets are no longer jailed. To imprison a poet is to shine a spotlight on him. No one pays attention to poets anyway, no matter what they write. From the perspective of tyranny, it would be foolish to flesh out this nothingness.

Journalists, however, are a different story. They can still reach the masses. America has solved this problem by consolidating her media outlets. There are countless newspapers and TV stations here, there seems to be many voices speaking, but nearly all are manipulated by the same puppet master. As everyone sits in the dark, the spotlight is fixed on a tiny ring where there’s much flailing over next to nothing. Should anyone still manages to get out of line, however, America can always snuff him out, just like the Vietnamese did. Invading Iraq, we bombed the office of Al Jazeera and shelled the Palestine Hotel, killing three journalists. We also arrested Al Jazeerra’s al Sami al-Hajj and kept him in Guantanamo for six years without charge. In 2005, an American tank shot at a car carrying Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, injuring her and killing intel agent, Nicola Calipari.

On the American fringe, independent voices are free to write as they please, but even the best among them can only appear in little read webzines. Many write almost exclusively on their own blogs. Needless to say, they have almost no impact on the general public. In too late late capitalism, those who seek to tell the truth don’t need to be burnt. They are already being drowned out by nonsense.

Five years later I was still protesting Vietnam, although long gone from the State Department. Then came Cambodia. And Laos. Soon, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Then Panama was the new great threat to America, to freedom and democracy and all things holy and decent, so it had to be bombed without mercy. Followed by the first war against the people of Iraq, and the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. Then the land of Afghanistan had rained down upon it depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous bombs, and other witches’ brews and weapons of the chemical dust; then Iraq again. And I’ve skipped a few. I think I hold the record for most times picketing the White House by a right-handed batter.

And through it all, the good, hard-working, righteous people of America have believed mightily that their country always means well; some even believe to this day that we never started a war, certainly nothing deserving of the appellation “war of aggression”.

On that same snowy day last month Julian Assange of Wikileaks was freed from prison in London and told reporters that he was more concerned that the United States might try to extradite him than he was about being extradited to Sweden, where he presumably faces “sexual” charges.¹

That’s a fear many political and drug prisoners in various countries have expressed in recent years. The United States is the new Devil’s Island of the Western world. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, political prisoners were shipped to that god-forsaken strip of French land off the eastern coast of South America. One of the current residents of the new Devil’s Island is Bradley Manning, the former US intelligence analyst suspected of leaking diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Manning has been imprisoned for seven months, first in Kuwait, then at a military base in Virginia, and faces virtual life in prison if found guilty, of something. Without being tried or convicted of anything, he is allowed only very minimal contact with the outside world; or with people, daylight, or news; among the things he is denied are a pillow, sheets, and exercise; his sleep is restricted and frequently interrupted. See Glenn Greenwald’s discussion of how Manning’s treatment constitutes torture. ²

A friend of the young soldier says that many people are reluctant to talk about Manning’s deteriorating physical and mental condition because of government harassment, including surveillance, seizure of their computer without a warrant, and even attempted bribes. “This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on his behalf.” ³ A developer of the transparency software used by Wikileaks was detained for several hours last summer by federal agents at a Newark, New Jersey airport, where he was questioned about his connection to Wikileaks and Assange as well as his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ⁴

This is but a tiny incident from the near-century buildup of the American police state, from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the crackdown against Central American protesters in the 1980s … elevated by the War on Drugs … now multiplied by the War on Terror. It’s not the worst police state in history; not even the worst police state in the world today; but nonetheless a police state, and certainly the most pervasive police state ever — a Washington Post study has just revealed that there are 4,058 separate federal, state and local “counterterrorism” organizations spread across the United States, each with its own responsibilities and jurisdictions. ⁵ The police of America, of many types, generally get what and who they want. If the United States gets its hands on Julian Assange, under any legal pretext, fear for him; it might be the end of his life as a free person; the actual facts of what he’s done or the actual wording of US laws will not matter; hell hath no fury like an empire scorned.

John Burns, chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times, after interviewing Assange, stated: “He is profoundly of the conviction that the United States is a force for evil in the world, that it’s destructive of democracy.” ⁶ Can anyone who believes that be entitled to a full measure of human rights on Devil’s Island?

The Wikileaks documents may not produce any world-changing revelations, but every day they are adding to the steady, gradual erosion of people’s belief in the US government’s good intentions, which is necessary to overcome a lifetime of indoctrination. Many more individuals over the years would have been standing in front of the White House if they had had access to the plethora of information that floods people today; which is not to say that we would have succeeded in stopping any of the wars; that’s a question of to what extent the United States is a democracy.

One further consequence of the release of the documents may be to put an end to the widespread belief that Sweden, or the Swedish government, is peaceful, progressive, neutral and independent. Stockholm’s behavior in this matter and others has been as American-poodle-like as London’s, as it lined itself up with an Assange-accuser who has been associated with right-wing anti-Castro Cubans, who are, of course, US-government-supported. This is the same Sweden that for some time in recent years was working with the CIA on its torture-rendition flights and has about 500 soldiers in Afghanistan. Sweden is the world’s largest per capita arms exporter, and for years has taken part in US/NATO military exercises, some within its own territory. The left should get themselves a new hero-nation. Try Cuba.

There’s also the old stereotype held by Americans of Scandinavians practicing a sophisticated and tolerant attitude toward sex, an image that was initiated, or enhanced, by the celebrated 1967 Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), which had been banned for awhile in the United States. And now what do we have? Sweden sending Interpol on an international hunt for a man who apparently upset two women, perhaps for no more than sleeping with them both in the same week.

And while they’re at it, American progressives should also lose their quaint belief that the BBC is somehow a liberal broadcaster. Americans are such suckers for British accents. The BBC’s Today presenter, John Humphrys, asked Assange: “Are you a sexual predator?” Assange said the suggestion was “ridiculous”, adding: “Of course not”. Humphrys then asked Assange how many woman he had slept with. ⁷ Would even Fox News have descended to that level? I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He would then have known precisely how to reply to such a question: “You mean including your mother?”

Another group of people who should learn a lesson from all this are the knee-reflex conspiracists. Several of them have already written me snide letters informing me of my naiveté in not realizing that Israel is actually behind the release of the Wikileaks documents; which is why, they inform me, that nothing about Israel is mentioned. I had to inform them that I had already seen a few documents putting Israel in a bad light. I’ve since seen others, and Assange, in an interview with Al Jazeera on December 23, stated that only a meager number of files related to Israel had been published so far because the publications in the West that were given exclusive rights to publish the secret documents were reluctant to publish much sensitive information about Israel. (Imagine the flak Germany’s Der Spiegel would get hit with.) “There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel,” said Assange. “In the next six months we intend to publish more files.” ⁸

Naturally, several other individuals have informed me that it’s the CIA that is actually behind the document release.

The right to secrecy

Many of us are pretty tired of supporters of Israel labeling as “anti-Semitic” most any criticism of Israeli policies, which is virtually never an appropriate accusation. Consider the Webster Dictionary definition: “Anti-Semite. One who discriminates against or is hostile to or prejudiced against Jews.” Notice that the state of Israel is not mentioned, or in any way implied.

Here’s what real anti-Semitism looks like. Listen to former president Richard Nixon: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality. … most of our Jewish friends … they are all basically people who have a sense of inferiority and have got to compensate.” This is from a tape of a conversation at the White House, February 13, 1973, recently released. ⁹ These tapes, and there are a large number of them, are the Wikileaks of an earlier age.

Yet, as the prominent conservative Michael Medved pointed out after the release of Nixon’s remarks: “Ironically, though, no American did more to rescue the Jewish people when it counted most: after the 1973 Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack destroyed a third of Israel’s air force and killed the American equivalent of 200,000 Israelis, Nixon overruled his own Pentagon and ordered immediate re-supply. To this day, Israelis feel gratitude for this decisiveness that enabled the Jewish state to turn the tide of war.” ¹⁰ So was Richard Nixon anti-Semitic? And should his remarks be kept secret?

In another of his recent interviews, Julian Assange was asked whether he thought that “a state has a right to have any secrets at all.” He conceded that there are circumstances when institutions have such a need, “but that is not to say that all others must obey that need. The media has an obligation to the public to get out information that the public needs to know.” ¹¹

I would add that the American people — more than any other people — have a need to know what their government is up to around the world because their government engages in aggressive actions more than any other government, continuously bombing and sending young men and women to kill and die. Americans need to know what their psychopathic leaders are really saying to each other and to foreign leaders about all this shedding of blood. Any piece of such information might be used as a weapon to prevent yet another Washington War. Michael Moore has recently written:

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a Wikileaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

And, dear comrades, let us not forget: Our glorious leaders spy on us all the time; no communication of ours, from phone call to email, is secret from them; nothing in our bank accounts or our bedrooms is guaranteed any kind of privacy if they wish to know about it. Recently, the FBI raided the midwest homes of a number of persons active in solidarity work with Palestinians, Colombians, and others. The agents spent many hours going through each shelf and drawer, carting away dozens of boxes of personal belongings. So what kind of privacy and secrecy should the State Department be entitled to?

Preparing for the propaganda onslaught

February 6 will mark the centenary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The conservatives have wasted no time in starting the show. On New Years Day a 55-foot long, 26-foot high float honoring Reagan was part of the annual Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. To help you cope with, hopefully even counter, the misinformation and the omissions that are going to swamp the media for the next few months, here is some basic information about the great man’s splendid achievements, first in foreign policy:

Nicaragua

For eight terribly long years the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Ronald Reagan’s proxy army, the Contras. It was all-out war from Washington, aiming to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the Sandinista government — burning down schools and medical clinics, mining harbors, bombing and strafing, raping and torturing. These Contras were the charming gentlemen Reagan called “freedom fighters” and the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers”.

El Salvador

Salvador’s dissidents tried to work within the system. But with US support, the government made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds of protestors and strikers. When the dissidents took to the gun and civil war, the Carter administration and then even more so, the Reagan administration, responded with unlimited money, military aid, and training in support of the government and its death squads and torture, the latter with the help of CIA torture manuals.

US military and CIA personnel played an active role on a continuous basis. The result was 75,000 civilian deaths; meaningful social change thwarted; a handful of the wealthy still owned the country; the poor remained as ever; dissidents still had to fear right-wing death squads; there was to be no profound social change in El Salvador while Ronnie sat in the White House with Nancy.

Guatemala

In 1954, a CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military-government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims — indisputably one of the most inhumane chapters of the 20th century. For eight of those years the Reagan administration played a major role.

Perhaps the worst of the military dictators was General Efraín Ríos Montt, who carried out a near-holocaust against the indians and peasants, for which he was widely condemned in the world. In December 1982, Reagan went to visit the Guatemalan dictator. At a press conference of the two men, Ríos Montt was asked about the Guatemalan policy of scorched earth. He replied “We do not have a policy of scorched earth. We have a policy of scorched communists.” After the meeting, referring to the allegations of extensive human-rights abuses, Reagan declared that Ríos Montt was getting “a bad deal” from the media.

Grenada

Reagan invaded this tiny country in October 1983, an invasion totally illegal and immoral, and surrounded by lies (such as “endangered” American medical students). The invasion put into power individuals more beholden to US foreign policy objectives.

Afghanistan

After the Carter administration provoked a Soviet invasion, Reagan came to power to support the Islamic fundamentalists in their war to eject the Soviets and the secular government, which honored women’s rights. In the end, the United States and the fundamentalists “won”, women’s rights and the rest of Afghanistan lost. More than a million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees; in total about half the population. And many thousands of anti-American Islamic fundamentalists, trained and armed by the US, on the loose to terrorize the world, to this day.”To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom,” declared Reagan. “Their courage teaches us a great lesson — that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors.” ¹²

The Cold War

As to Reagan’s alleged role in ending the Cold War … pure fiction. He prolonged it. Read the story in one of my books. ¹³

Some other examples of the remarkable amorality of Ronald Wilson Reagan and the feel-good heartlessness of his administration:

Reagan, in his famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing”, which lifted him to national political status: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

“Undermining health, safety and environmental regulation. Reagan decreed such rules must be subjected to regulatory impact analysis — corporate-biased cost-benefit analyses, carried out by the Office of Management and Budget. The result: countless positive regulations discarded or revised based on pseudo-scientific conclusions that the cost to corporations would be greater than the public benefit.”

“Kick-starting the era of structural adjustment. It was under Reagan administration influence that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural adjustment — featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending — that has plunged country after country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief at the time was honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, ‘adjustment is particularly costly in human terms’.”

“Silence on the AIDS epidemic. Reagan didn’t mention AIDS publicly until 1987, by which point AIDS had killed 19,000 in the United States.”

– Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman¹⁴

“Reagan’s election changed the political reality. His agenda was rolling back the welfare state, and his budgets included a wide range of cuts for social programs. He was also very strategic about the process. One of his first targets was Legal Aid. This program, which provides legal services for low-income people, was staffed largely by progressive lawyers, many of whom used it as a base to win precedent-setting legal disputes against the government. Reagan drastically cut back the program’s funding. He also explicitly prohibited the agency from taking on class-action suits against the government — law suits that had been used with considerable success to expand the rights of low- and moderate-income families.”

“The Reagan administration also made weakening the power of unions a top priority. The people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board were qualitatively more pro-management than appointees by prior Democratic or Republican presidents. This allowed companies to ignore workers’ rights with impunity. Reagan also made the firing of strikers an acceptable business practice when he fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Many large corporations quickly embraced the practice. … The net effect of these policies was that union membership plummeted, going from nearly 20 percent of the private sector workforce in 1980 to just over 7 percent in 2006. ”

– Dean Baker¹⁵

Reaganomics: a tax policy based on a notion of incentives which says that “the rich aren’t working because they have too little money, while the poor aren’t working because they have too much.”

– John Kenneth Galbraith

“According to the nostrums of Reagan Age America, the current Chinese system — in equal measure capitalist and authoritarian — cannot actually exist. Capitalism spread democracy, we were told ad nauseam by a steady stream of conservative hacks, free-trade apologists, government officials and American companies doing business in China. Given enough Starbuckses and McDonald’s, provided with sufficient consumer choice, China would surely become a democracy.”

– Harold Meyerson ¹⁶

Throughout the early and mid-1980s, the Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan — the so-called “yellow rain” — and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The “yellow rain”, it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.¹⁷

Reagan’s long-drawn-out statements re:  Contragate (the scandal involving the covert sale of weapons to Iran to enable Reaganites to continue financing the Contras in the war against the Nicaraguan government after the US Congress cut off funding for the Contras) can be summarized as follows:

• I didn’t know what was happening.
• If I did know, I didn’t know enough.
• If I knew enough, I didn’t know it in time.
• If I knew it in time, it wasn’t illegal.
• If it was illegal, the law didn’t apply to me.
• If the law applied to me, I didn’t know what was happening.

1. Sunday Telegraph (Australia), December 19, 2010
2. December 15, 2010, “The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention“. See also his attorney’s account of Manning’s typical day; and Washington Post, December 16, 2010
3. The Guardian (London), December 17, 2010
4. New York Times, December 19, 2010
5. Washington Post, December 20, 2010
6. Diane Rehm show, National Public Radio, Dec. 9, 2010
7. The Guardian (London), December 21, 2010
8. Information Clearing House, December 23 2010, WikiLeaks to Release Israel Documents in Six Months
9. Washington Post, December 12, 2010
10. From Medved’s radio show, December 14, 2010; Nixon: The Anti-Semitic Savior of Israel
11. Al Jazeera, December 22 2010, Frost Over the World: Julian Assange interview
12. March 21, 1983, in the White House
13. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, p.17-18. Also for the five countries listed above, see the respective chapters in this book
14. June, 2004; Mokhiber is editor of Corporate Crime Reporter; Weissman, editor of the Multinational Monitor, both in Washington, D.C.
15. April, 2007; Baker is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC
16. Washington Post columnist, June 3, 2009
17. Killing Hope, p.349

Author and historian Edward Morgan doesn’t go that far in his recently published study of the 1960s and the media, but he does raise interesting and pertinent questions regarding the nature of the fifth estate’s (and its fictional counterpart in Hollywood) representation of that period’s popular struggles then and now. According to Morgan, it’s not that the media didn’t cover the movements against racism and imperial war in the period known as The Sixties. It’s how they covered them. Of course, one might argue that any coverage was better than the almost complete lack of media attention most progressive grassroots movements experience today.

Like many other historians that focus on the period, Morgan accepts an understanding that the mainstream media sees the Sixties historically as being divided into two primary periods. First, there were the “good” Sixties. This was when African-American and white Americans battled racist laws and those who upheld them in America’s south. Their tactics were nonviolent and their cause was morally unimpeachable. A complementary part of this history puts men like the Kennedy brothers and Lyndon Baines Johnson at the front of this struggle against segregation and for racial justice. Morgan points out that this retelling ignores the very real facts that the mainstream media was not as supportive of the anti-racist movement during that period as it claims it was now. Furthermore, both the Kennedys and LBJ were forced by events to support civil rights legislation that was opposed by the very powerful Southern wing of their political party. They did not carry the torch of civil rights until it was politically necessary.

The “bad” Sixties, then, were composed of Black Panthers, urban riots, radical students fighting police and blowing up buildings, and so-called hippies like Charles Manson. Morgan calls these elements “media outsiders” and contends that the portrayal of these “outsiders” as such was related to the media’s role in defining the parameters of dissent–parameters which had been transgressed repeatedly by 1968. In addition, it was the combination of those parameters, the “outsiders” desire to get their message across to the broader public, and the media’s portrayal of those attempts as spectacle that combined to limit the appeal of those whose protests targeted the roots of the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. In other words, truly radical and anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist debate was considered foreign by the mainstream media (liberal and conservative) and would be treated as such, no matter what.

Morgan provides example after example. Martin Luther King Jr was a true hero of the media until he publicly spoke out against the US war on the people of Vietnam. Betty Friedan and her Feminine Mystique was palatable once one finished reciting the standard jokes about feminists. The more radical elements of the women’s movement, on the other hand, were portrayed (and consequently perceived) as men-hating witches and lesbians. The Beatles were positively presented until they made it known that they took LSD and considered themselves to be part of the counterculture. And so on.

Behind the delightfully vivid discussions of iconic and not-so-iconic events, people and movements that occurred during the period we call the Sixties is Morgan’s underlying premise that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive. Acknowledging that this premise goes counter to the standard tale we are told by those who rule the United States, Morgan points out that “capitalism and its companion political theory, liberalism, are grounded in a view of humans as essentially self-interested beings” who need political society and its laws only to curb the excesses that such self-interest might create.  Democracy, on the other hand, “rests on a foundation different from the self-interested individualism of capitalism.”

It’s not that humans are not self-centered; it’s that they are so much more than that. It is the latter actuality, argues Morgan, that informed the popular grassroots movements of the Sixties and continues to inform similar movements today. Likewise, it is the former supposition that informed (and informs) those in power and their media accomplices. Therefore, there was bound to be a conflict between those popular movements that depended on participatory democracy and the established power structure. After all, the fundamental impetus of grassroots democracy is that the people have the power, not some representatives chosen from the power elites or the corporate interests they represent.

If one considers this when studying media representations then and now (of the Sixties and today), it becomes clear that the media understood its role to be one of protecting the powers that be. Although this was occasionally difficult, especially when the images presented were impossible to reinterpret in a manner favorable to the power elites, in general the corporate media was able to perform its task. When images were impossible to explain away, the media merely explained them in such a way that the overall structure of power was unperturbed, while regressive elements that conflict with the necessities of corporate America were rendered to the (often well-deserved) dustbin of history.

No better example comes to my mind than the video of Birmingham police and their dogs attacking civil rights protesters. The time for legal apartheid had come to an end in the United States and the media was doing its part by pointing to reactionary politicians and police in the US South as the only racists in the nation. By doing so, the deeper question of racism’s role in building the modern US economy and its continued existence throughout the US could be whitewashed away.

When the riots in Watts and other US cities proved otherwise, as did Malcolm X and groups like the Black Panthers, however, true to their role, these phenomena were presented in the media as spectacle without context. This rendered them meaningless or, even worse, criminal. As noted above, this scenario replayed itself over and over (and does to this day).

When it came to the war in Vietnam, those who portray(ed) it as a colossal mistake and not an imperial exercise were (and are) given play in the mainstream media, while those who understand things differently are not.

What Really Happened to the 1960s is a look at the role the media played in the presentation and interpretation of the struggles of the 1960s. Simultaneously, it is a consideration of the meaning of democracy in a society where the media is owned by corporations and elites who consider democracy antithetic to their hegemony. The nature of democracy is an important element of this book. Indeed, the need to struggle to regain some democracy in the world is an important element of this book. It is Morgan’s contention that understanding how corporate media helped and hindered the democratic movements of the Sixties will help us develop today’s grassroots movements. His text does an excellent job of developing that understanding.

This was not unusual, for there is no place like Vietnam. Within my lifetime, Ho Chi Minh’s nationalists had fought and expelled the French, whose tree-lined boulevards, pink-washed villas and scaled-down replica of the Paris Opera, were facades for plunder and cruelty; then the Japanese, with whom the French colons collaborated; then the British who sought to reinstall the French; then the Americans, with whom Ho had repeatedly tried to forge an alliance against China; then Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who attacked from the west; and finally the Chinese who, with a vengeful nod from Washington, came down from the north. All of them were seen off at immeasurable cost.

I walked down into the rain and followed the children through a labyrinth to the Young Flower School, an orphanage.  A teacher hurriedly assembled a small choir and I was greeted with a burst of singing. “What are the words of the song?” I asked Tran, whose father was a GI. He looked gravely at the floor, as nine year olds do, before reciting words that left my interpreter shaking her head. “Planes come no more”, she repeated, “do not weep for those just born … the human being is evergreen.”

The year was 1978. Vietnam was then being punished for seeing off the last American helicopter gunship, the war’s creation, the last B52 with its ladders of bombs silhouetted against the flash of their carnage, the last C-130s that had dumped, the US Senate was told, “a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, destroying much of the ecosystem and causing a “foetal catastrophe”, the last of a psychosis that made village after village a murder scene.

And when it was all over on May Day, 1975, Hollywood began its long celebration of the invaders as victims, the standard purgative, while revenge was policy.  Vietnam was classified as “Category Z” in Washington, which imposed the draconian Trading with the Enemy Act from the first world war. This ensured that even Oxfam America was barred from sending humanitarian aid. Allies pitched in. One of Margaret Thatcher’s first acts on coming to power in 1979 was to persuade the European Community to halt its regular shipments of food and milk to Vietnamese children. According to the World Health Organisation, a third of all infants under five so deteriorated following the milk ban that the majority of them were stunted or likely to be.  Almost none of this was news in the west.

Austerity, grief at the millions dead or missing and an incredulity that the war was no more became the rhythms of life in a forgotten country. The “democracy” the Americans had invented and life-supported in the south, which once accounted for half of  Amnesty’s worldwide toll of tortured political prisoners, had collapsed almost overnight. The roads out of Saigon became vistas of abandoned boots and uniforms. “When I heard that it was over,” said Thieu Thi Tao Madeleine, “my heart flies.”

Still wearing the black of the National Liberation Front, which the Americans called the Vietcong, she walked with a limp and winced as she smiled. The “Madeleine” was added by her French teachers at the Lycee in Saigon which she and her sister Thieu Thi Tan Danielle had attended in the sixties. Aged 16 and 13, “Mado” and “Dany” were recruited by the NLF to blow up the Saigon regime’s national intelligence headquarters, where torture was conducted under tutelage of the CIA.

On the eve of their mission they were betrayed and seized as they cycled home from school. When Mado refused to hand over NLF names, she was strung upside down and electrocuted, her head held in a bucket of water. They were then “disappeared” to Con Son Island, where they were shackled in “tiger cages”: cells so small they could not stand; quick lime and excreta were thrown on them from above. At the age of 16, Dany etched their defiance on the wall: “Notre bonjour a nos chers at cheres caramades.” The words are still there.

The other day, I returned to Vietnam, whose agony I reported for almost a decade. A poem was waiting in my room in the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. Typed in English, it was a “heartfelt prayer” for “the stones [of life] getting soft”, and ended with, “I’m still living, struggling … please phone.” It was Mado, though I prefer her Vietnamese name, Tao. We had lost touch; I knew of her work at the Institute if Ecology, her marriage to another NLF soldier and the birth of a son against all the odds of the damage done to her in the tiger cages.

Through the throng of tourists and businessmen in the Caravelle lobby navigated diminutive Dany, now 57. Tao was waiting in a taxi outside. Five years ago, Tao suffered a stroke and lost the use of her voice and much of her body, but these have now returned and although she needs to take your arm, she is really no different from when she told me her heart “flies”. We drove past the sentinels of the new Vietnam, the hotels and apartment blocks under construction, then turned into a lane where wood smoke rose and children peered and frogs leapt in the beam of our headlights.

The walls of Tao’s home are a proud montage of struggle and painful gain: she and Dany at the Lycee Marie Curie; the collected exhortations of Ho; the letters of comrades long gone. It all seemed, at first, like flowers preserved between the pages of a forgotten book. But no: these here the very icons and inspirations of resistance that new generations must recreate all over again, for while battlegrounds change, the enemy does not. “Each time we are invaded,” she said, “we fight them off. At the same time we fight to keep our soul. Isn’t that the lesson of Vietnam and of history?”

I was once told a poignant story by a Frenchman who was in Hanoi during the Christmas 1972 bombing. “I took shelter in the museum of history,” he said, “and there, working by candlelight, with the B52s overhead, were young men and women earnestly trying to copy as many bronzes and sculptures as they could. They told me, ‘Even if the originals are destroyed, something will remain and our roots will be protected’.”

History, not ideology, is a living presence in Vietnam. Here, the experience of history forged a communal ingenuity and patience to the extreme human limits. The NLF leadership in the south was an alliance of Catholics, liberals, Buddhists and communists, and most of those who fought in the northern army were peasant nationalists. With its structures and disciplines, communism was the means by which Vietnam’s protracted wars of independence were fought and won. This is appreciated by Vietnamese today who idly refer to “the communist period” as if the party was no longer in power. What matters here is Vietnam. Visit the museums in Hanoi and it is clear that the word Ho Chi Minh never stopped using was “independence”: “the right you never surrender”. In retirement, President Dwight Eisenhower wrote that had his administration not delayed (sabotaged) the national elections agreed at the United Nations conference on Indochina in Geneva in 1954, “possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for Ho”.

I thought about this on the journey back from Tao’s. More than 20 years of war would not have happened. As many as three million people would have lived. No babies would have been deformed by Agent Orange. No feet would have been blown off by the cluster bombs that were tested here. On the overnight train to Danang, I could tell the bomb craters that joined together, leaving not even Pompeiis of war, except perhaps on a distant rise the gravestones of the anti-aircraft militia. They were often young women like Mado and Dany. In Hanoi, I took a taxi to Kham Thiem Street which I first saw in 1975, laid to waste by B52s which had struck every third house. A block of flats where 283 people died is now a monument of a mother and child. There are fresh flowers; the traffic thunders by.

Sitting in a café with these unnecessary ghosts, I read that Britain’s military chief, General Sir David Richards, had called for Nato “to plan for a 30 or 40 year role” in Afghanistan. Nato is said to spend $50 million for every Taliban guerrilla it kills, and cluster bombs are still a favourite. The general expressed his care for the Afghan people. The French and Americans also said they cared for the “gooks” they killed in industrial quantities.

When I was last in Vietnam 15 years ago, making a film, my only brush with officialdom was the Ministry of Culture’s concern that the footage I had shot at My Lai, where hundreds of mostly women and children were slaughtered, might offend the Americans. In Saigon, the War Crimes Museum has been re-named the War Remnants Museum. Outside, tourists are offered pirated copies of the Lonely Planet guide, with its tendentious devotion to an American sense of “Nam”.

Perhaps the Vietnamese can afford to be generous, but the reason, I think, runs deeper. Since Dai Thang, “the great victory”, the policy has been to end a seemingly endless state of siege. Colour and energy have arrived like breaking waves; Hanoi, with its mist-covered lakes and boulevards once pocked with air-raid shelters, is now a gracious, confident, youthful city. There is the kind of freedom that ignores, navigates and circumvents the old Stalinist strictures. The newspapers take officials to task and damn corruption, but then, occasionally, there is the bleakest of headlines: “Alleged agitator to face trial”. Cu Huy Ha Vu, 53, has been charged with “illegal actions against the state”. Such is an ill-defined line you dare not cross.

Bill Clinton came to lunch at my hotel in Hanoi. He runs an AIDS charity that does work in Vietnam. In 1995, as the first modern-era American president to visit Vietnam, he “normalised relations”. That meant Vietnam was allowed to join the World Trade Organisation and qualify for World Bank loans provided it embraced the “free market”, destroyed its free public services and paid off the bad debts of the defunct Saigon regime: money which had helped bankroll the American war. The reparations agreed by President Richard Nixon in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were ignored. Normalisation also meant that foreign investors were offered tax-free “economic processing zones” with “competitively priced” (cheap) labour.

The Vietnamese were finally being granted membership of the “international community” as long as they created a society based on inequity and exploited labour, and abandoned the health service that was the envy of the developing world, with its pioneering work in paediatrics and primary care, along with a free education system that produced one of the world’s highest literacy rates. Today, ordinary people pay for health care and schools, and the elite send their children to expensive schools in Hanoi’s “international city” and poach scholarships at American universities.

Whereas farmers in difficulty could once depend on rural credit from the state (interest was unknown), they must now go to private lenders, the usurers who once plagued the peasantry. And the government has welcomed back the Monsanto company and its genetically-modified seeds. Monsanto was one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange, which gave Vietnam its chemical Hiroshima. Last year, the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal by lawyers acting for more than three million Vietnamese deformed by Agent Orange. One of the justices, Clarence Thomas, worked as a corporate lawyer for Monsanto.

In his seminal, Anatomy of a War, the historian, Gabriel Kolko, says that the party of Ho Chi Minh enjoyed “success as a social movement based largely on its response to peasant desires”. He now says that its surrender to the “free market” is a betrayal. His disillusion is understandable, but the need to internationalise a war-ruined country was desperate, along with building a counterweight to China, the ancient foe. Unlike China, and despite the new Gucci emporiums in the centre of Hanoi and Saigon, the Vietnamese have not yet gone all the way with the brutalities of “tiger” or crony capitalism. Since 1985, the rate of malnutrition among children has almost halved. And tens of thousands of those who fled in boats have quietly returned without “a single case of victimisation”, according to the EU official who led the assistance programme in 1995. In many parts of the country, forests are rising again and the sound of birds and the rustle of wildlife are heard again, thanks to a re-greening programme initiated during the war by Professor Vo Quy of Vietnam National University in Hanoi.

For me, keeping at bay the forces that pour trillions into corrupt banks and wars while destroying the means of civilised life is Vietnam’s last great battle. That the party elite respects, perhaps fears, a people who, through the generations, have devoted themselves to throwing off oppressors is evident in the state’s often ambivalent responses to unauthorised strikes against ruthless foreign employers. “Are we in a Gorbachev phase?” said a journalist. “Or maybe the party and the people are watching each other for now. Remember always, Vietnam is different.”

On my last day in Saigon, I walked along Dong Hoi, no longer a street of hustlers and beggars, bar girls and shambling GIs looking for something in the cause of nothing. Then, I would stroll past the Hotel Royale and look up at the corner balcony on the first floor and see a stocky Welshman, his camera resting on his arm. A greeting in Welsh might drift down, or his take-off of an insane colonel we both knew. Today, the balcony and the Royale are gone, and Philip Jones Griffiths died two years ago. He was perhaps the most gifted and humane photographer of any war. Single-handed, he tried to stop a “search and destroy” operation that would kill a huddled group of women and children, eliciting from an American artillery offer the memorable response: “What civilians?” One of his finest photographs is a Goya-like picture of a captured NLF soldier, terribly wounded and surrounded by the large boots of his captors, yet undefeated in his humanity. Such is Vietnam.

It has been more than six decades since America fought a defensive war. Peace organizations going along with honoring veterans of previous wars in poor countries after WW II appear NOT to be against war in principle, rather only against the current wars we are losing. Calling for peace while permitting our now permanent war military establishment to turn all national holidays into celebrations hailing all U.S. wars, past and present, is contradictory.

What does it take? Peace activists are weary of quoting Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, General Smedley Butler, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Zinn, and the voices of today’s dissenters who are wise to the homicide for lies and money that has be going down for the last sixty-five years.

Tired of calling attention to Mohammed Ali having led the country in an inspiring way by refusing to eventually become a veteran of mass murder.

Tired of gritting our teeth watching militarized Network News promoting war to our children and gullible citizens.

Tired of the hypocrisy of religious leaders backing present wars. Evangelists on TV carefully avoiding the theme of Jesus’ nonviolence teachings because they conflict with the mainstream ‘patriotic’ mindset of permanent self-righteous counter-terror on terror. In the United States there is a separation of Jesus and state; of Moses’ Fifth Commandment and state; separation of Buddhist meditation and war; separation of the teachings in the Qur’an and what is going on in America.

How can any knowledgeable veteran march in parades that in reality are like an ‘Honor Warriors of Immoral and Illegal Wars Day’, ‘Honor the Pentagon Day’, ‘Honor the CIA Led Assassins Day’, ‘Honor Lying Presidents Day,’ ‘Honor War Mongering Media Day’ ’Honor Clergy Who Blessed War Day?’

How can antiwar groups allow themselves to be intimidated by traditions that are now long used to support foreign policies of war on the Third World.

Cannot every citizen of antiwar persuasion have the courage to honor Americans who fled to Canada, rather than those who dishonored themselves and became veterans of crimes against humanity?

How can a veteran like this writer be a traitor to our deceived dead buddies, disgracing them by honoring on Veterans Day their having been suckered into dying while killing innocent foreign brothers and sisters in their very own homes.

Enough! Away with our hypocrisy and shaming ourselves in embarrassment, unable to confront ignorance, fear and manipulation by media for the amoral and homicidal bankers who own the government.

Citizens against war! Don’t show indiscriminate respect for all veterans. We veterans know that many of us even followed criminal orders on top of participating in unjust wars in places like Vietnam.

Veteran! Denounce your veteranship if you know you ‘served’ killing innocent people in a dishonorable, illegal, undeclared war. Be determined to know, to learn, how you were duped, tricked, hyped into ‘service’ in dishonorable wars costing the lives of millions of innocent human beings.

And if you think there was anything moral in the particular war you fought in after World War Two, study encyclopedia Britannica articles and read CIA files released under the Freedom of Information Act. Read Pentagon published material. Read only what is documented to order to unlearn what the TV networks, radio and tabloid newspapers sold you on.

On Veterans Day, remember the informed and strong willed who cried “Hell no, I won’t go!”  Be conscious of our own ‘Damn, I shouldn’t have gone!’ regret.

Speaking out against the glorifying of war intention of Pentagon-fed corporate media programming on Veterans Day should come easy for veterans who have had the courage to brave death in the confusion of unjustified imperialist wars.

Am I, as a veteran, going to march unwanted in another egotistical display of honor for ourselves while phony wars go on? Wars of killing anyone designated a suspected insurgent against our occupation of his country – labeling him or her a terrorist just like we used to label a targeted person communist?

We did our ‘service’ in helping put the equivalent of thousands of 9/11s on the heads of people in poor countries that never attacked the U.S. None of these poor countries ever got back at us until 2001. If the Vietnamese and all the other small nations we invaded since World War Two can forgo justice and getting revenge, why can’t our big deal exceptionally great America?

Politically awakened veterans must teach our pro-war fellow veterans some history, not to mention morality, ethics, humanity and true patriotism. Not the patriotism of scheming bankers and their Military Industrial Complex, their media and their secret CIA, but defense of the nation from war profiteers’ patriotism.

No! No Veterans Day for me. Instead, a day for veterans to mourn participation in killing, maiming and damage done invading the lands and lives of others.

Let knowledgeable, compassion-motivated veterans turn the tables on the war industry and recreate Veterans Day into VETERANS MOURN KILLING DAY.

If anyone cannot see at least the logic in the all the above, we seven would like to know. The seven being Jay Janson and his six bunk-mates buried in North Korea, who would be pissed if someone tried to ‘honor’ their being tricked into dying trying to kill Koreans in Korea.

Before they died, they knew they had been suckered. All six did not want to kill Koreans, even go to Korea, which they knew nothing about. Nothing about our dictatorship in the South’s massacre of tens of thousands of men, women and even their children during the years BEFORE the Koreans of their northern government swept the South, welcomed by many, the southern government conscripts deserting or refusing to fight.

My six buddies would understand why today there is a unrelentingly severe military dictatorship in the northern part of Korea, knowing what we did in both northern Korea and southern Korea, flattening almost every city, town and village from the air, threatening to drop the Atomic bomb on Koreans still fighting us, more than a million of them dying north of the line dividing the Korea nation, and all this happening AFTER Korea had already been unified in six quick weeks.

Would that my six bunk-mates could know of Communist (capitalist) China today and the nearly peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Know it was not necessary for them and two-and-a-half million Koreans to die for a political Cold War confrontation with a USSR that would cease to exist anyway.

For them and others to have died fighting millions of so called communists in small countries that were former Japanese or French colonies is sad. That my buddies and many millions of good people could be alive today but for successful lies spread in media. Were they alive, I would tell them of how Korea was divided by the U.S. and how, after the First World War, President Wilson officially recognized the Japanese claim that Korea was Japanese territory by the right of conquest.

We seven were veterans of what exactly? Veterans of blind service to those who invest in and promote wars for profit? Of an undeclared war on a poor country?

Forget it! Better VETERANS MOURN KILLING DAY! And I have some friends who are veterans of the only legal war, World War II, that would be glad to join in because they know Rockefeller, Ford, du Pont, and just about every big U.S. industrialist invested heavily into building up Nazi Germany (while my dad sold apples on a street corner in depressed and jobless America.)

Come on, Americans, especially fellow veterans! It’s normal to mourn any death, isn’t it? We can have a day to mourn violent death instead of praising those who brought it overseas in our name.