NATO has always been a war-making institution lacking in accountability to the peoples of the nations it claims to represent. But NATO at least once claimed a defensive purpose that it neither claims nor represents any longer.

NATO has militarized the nations of Europe against the will of their people, now maintains hundreds of nuclear weapons in non-nuclear European nations in blatant violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and is threatening Russia with missile base construction on its borders.

Having fought aggressive wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, NATO remains in Afghanistan, illegally, immorally, and to no coherent purpose. The people of the United States, other NATO nations, and Afghanistan itself, overwhelmingly favor an end to NATO’s presence, while Presidents Obama and Karzai, against the will of their people, work to commit U.S. forces to at least 12.5 more years in Afghanistan.

NATO provides the United States with a pretense of global coalition and legality. Approximately half of the world’s military spending is U.S., while adding the other NATO nations brings the total to three-quarters. The head of the Pentagon, Leon Panetta, recently testified in Congress that a war could be made legal by working through either the United Nations or NATO. While no written law supports that claim, it is a claim that has served its intended purpose. NATO also serves as a false legal shield, protecting the U.S. military from Congressional oversight.

The U.S. dominated NATO holds up the past year’s war on Libya as a model for the future, with an eye on various potential victims, including Syria and Iran. In so doing, NATO serves as the armed enforcer of the exploitative agenda of the G-8, which has fled Chicago for the guarded compound at Camp David.

NATO’s interests are neither democratically determined nor humanitarian in purpose. NATO does not bomb all nations guilty of humanitarian abuses. Nor does NATO’s bombing alleviate human suffering, it adds to it. Saudi Arabia is not a target. Bahrain is not a target. Ben Ali and Mubarak were not targets. An analysis of NATO’s real motivations reveals a desire to control the global flow of oil, to support dictators who have supported U.S./NATO wars, prisons and torture operations, to back Israel’s expansionist agenda, and to surround and threaten the nation of Iran.

The killing and destruction engaged in by NATO in Libya was illegal, immoral, and counter-productive as is its aggression in Afghanistan. NATO’s wars have not brought democracy, peace, or human rights anywhere.

Libya is not a model for future NATO action. There is no model for future NATO action. NATO has lost its reason to exist if it ever had one. Veterans For Peace joins with our brothers and sisters in Europe, who are also rallying nonviolently against NATO, in calling for its elimination.

The term comes from a tactic that was commonly employed many centuries ago by all the navies of fledgling empires. Although these navies very occasionally engaged in heroic battles with each other in order to protect the citizens of their countries from invading hoards, as our history books suggest, the far more common use of mighty battleships was for theft. Sinking an enemy ship was never the intention of these engagements, and would have been seen as something of a failure. The purpose was to capture the ship, preferably undamaged, and steal anything and everything from the personal possessions of the crew to the very ship itself, which would then be recycled by the victors. After all, what could possibly be the point of sinking an expensive ship, laden to the gunnels with the riches of plundered foreign colonies, when its capture would serve exactly the same political purpose, as well as providing vast wealth?

The Royal Navy, for example, routinely operated a “prize” system right up until quite recent times; and although acts of piracy don’t form quite the same staple diet in the senior service as they used to do, prize legislation remains on British statute books to this day. Right up until the nineteenth century “prize courts” would routinely assess and divvy-up the wealth of ships that had been attacked and seized by the jolly Jack Tars. Some of the plunder was apportioned to the ship’s crew. Of course, it wasn’t an equal distribution of wealth, where the loblolly boy, say, received as much of a cut as the captain; nor was the cut in any way equal to the share gifted to the high and mighty Lords of the Admiralty, who weren’t required to do anything more dangerous for their cut than over-indulge themselves in London society. However, some small portion of the “prize” would find its way to even the lowliest cabin boy – the original “trickle-down” effect perhaps. In short, the routine day-job of the glorious Royal Navy was plunder. In fact, the only way the great sailors of Nelson’s day differed from common pirates was that the piracy of Nelson’s navy was simply deemed to be legal. It’s a similar principle to the one that’s alive and well to this day, and helping to keep investment bankers out of jail.

But even hardened cynics such as myself find it difficult not to admire the considerable skill that was often required for some of the encounters that took place between the mighty warships of Nelson’s day. In the days before modern communications these great behemoths, seventy metres long with a thousand souls on board, could only use the power of the wind to move around, so finding and engaging and defeating an enemy in thousands of square miles of empty ocean was no easy matter, and the seamanship required for these encounters was often truly amazing. Apart from some acts of genuine courage, with perhaps just a hint of insanity, these sailors also relied on a host of devious tricks and raw cunning to capture a “prize”. Apart from plenty of luck, you also needed a good brain to be an effective captain in Nelson’s day; and it’s hardly surprising, given hundreds of years of regular practice in the dark arts of subterfuge and deceit, that the roots of the British intelligence service were established in the Royal Navy.

One of the many tricks used in the days of sail was to make your ship appear friendly to the watchful telescopes of the prospective prize; and the easiest way to do this was to ensure the flags your ship were flying were not those of your own country but were either exactly the same as those of the prize, or the same as those of whichever country was friendly to the prize. This simple ruse would, of course, eventually be discovered as a trick; and, of course, every ship’s crew knew about the trick. However, it would invariably buy some invaluable time, making all the difference between success and failure, enabling the hunter to get close enough to his prey to capture him before the darkness of night might come to the hapless victim’s rescue.

This tactic is still very much alive and well, and survives in modern language usage as the “false flag” attack, to mean an attack by someone who isn’t quite who they seem to be. Variations of it include attacks perpetrated by people pretending to be enemies of the state. These attacks may be carried out by the state’s own armed forces, or by paid mercenaries, or by allies of the state. History is rich with evidence.

Take, for example, the infamous sinking of the Maine. In 1898, when the US was beginning to flex its expansionist muscles abroad, the battleship USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbour. Although there was no evidence to support it, the incident was blamed on Spain, who controlled Cuba at the time; and it had the desired effect of triggering the Spanish American war which eventually led to Spain’s eviction from the island and the installation of a US puppet regime – a model that would be successfully repeated time and again for many decades to come. Fifty-five years later something very similar happened again – this time without going to the extra expense of actually sinking any ships.

On August 4, 1964 the world was informed that another US warship, the USS Maddox, had come under sustained attack by North Vietnam. It was the event which directly led to ten years of total hell for tens of millions of people in South East Asia, and whose effects are still being felt to this day. Fifty years after the false flag event of the Maddox, declassified documents revealed that the US government was fully aware at the time that no such attack had taken place. But by then, of course, the false flag had long served its purpose.

Although the term “false flag” originated from these naval deceptions, false flag incidents have never been solely confined to the high seas. Armies have always used any number of devices to deceive their victims, and anyone who’s ever watched a Hollywood war movie is probably aware of it; for how many of these movies have included a scene where either the good guys or the bad guys dress up in the uniforms of their enemy in order to carry out some raid or another? Is that not a completely routine story-line? Although many of these movies are obviously fictitious, these deceptions, which might also be called “false flag” adventures, are based on normal military tactics which have been used by almost every army, probably since the beginning of civilisation.

However, Hollywood movies seldom reveal the true evil and cynicism of war. Therefore not many of the 99%, who obtain much of their understanding of the world in general and history in particular from the silver screen, know anything at all about the truly dark side of all armies in general, and their leaders in particular. For how many Hollywood movies tell the stories of how armies routinely slaughter defenceless people? Although they will sometimes depict the enemy of the day carrying out these atrocities, they never show the so-called “good guys” doing it – which creates in the mind of the viewer the impression that our armies never behave in such a beastly fashion. But they most certainly do.

Consider the vast number of movies that came out of Hollywood telling how the west was won – how handfuls of brave adventurers defeated marauding hoards of screaming bloodthirsty savages, which was, in fact, a complete inversion of the truth. And how many war movies told the truth about the bombing of Dresden, or of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These completely needless events took place in the closing days of World War Two, when Germany and Japan were already crushed nations. They were events which deliberately targeted hundreds of thousands of defenceless civilians, and served absolutely no military purpose whatsoever. They were war crimes, already outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Not many Hollywood movies tell us that.

It’s important to grasp this principle of war that not even Hollywood can glamorise: that our trusted leaders can and do routinely issue orders to slaughter innocent defenceless civilians, and that brainwashed young people then carry out those orders, and that society is then brainwashed into considering these young people to be heroes. Not even Hollywood can glamorise the deep cynicism of that fact.

Although the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians is a different aspect of the cynicism of war, and cannot be considered a false flag adventure, it’s important to cite it as evidence of the psychotic ruthlessness of our own trusted leaders and the brainwashed youngsters who are routinely conditioned to obey an order, any order.

My own personal first-hand experience of false flag adventures was obtained in the late seventies, in Rhodesia, where I was batting out my national service as an intelligence officer. Our army had a small unit of people called the Selous Scouts. They were considered the elite of the elite, and were supposedly originally created by a couple of junior officers serving in the Rhodesian SAS who thought the SAS wasn’t quite hard enough. I did some of my training with the Scouts. They were definitely different.

Later on, when I was operational, I was based in a small rural outpost called Rusape. For me it was a very comfortable posting and, I’m very glad to say, I managed to see out my time there without being injured and, I’m even more glad to say, without causing injury to anyone else.

Each morning, after a leisurely breakfast, I would saunter over to the operations room to see what was going on. Like almost every military operations room in the world, one wall of it was given over to a huge map of our area of responsibility. Most of the time it was just a map of rural Rhodesia, with little coloured stickers on it depicting some sort of recent “terrorist” incident – such as a landmine going off, or an attack on some isolated school or clinic. My job would be to go out to investigate these incidents and report on them. Sometimes it was very harrowing, but mostly it was a fairly pleasant way to sit out the war.

But every now and then I would turn up to the ops room in the morning and would be met with the sight of a sizeable chunk of the map covered over in hatched lines. Everyone understood that that area had been “frozen”. This meant that no army personnel or police were to go into that area. The Scouts had moved into it. For a few weeks after that life went on pretty much as normal everywhere else on the patch; but no information at all emerged from the area with the mysterious hatching; and then one morning I’d turn up for work and the hatching would have been removed from the map as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

Within a day or two of that happening the reports would start rolling in from where the Scouts had been, about “terrorist” murders at some isolated village or another, of a “terrorist” rocket attack on a small business centre perhaps, or a “terrorist” landmine blowing up a rural bus. These would all have been carried out by the Scouts, dressed up as “terrorists” and using “terrorist” weaponry.

The purpose of these attacks was a variation of that old favourite: the hard cop/soft cop routine. The Scouts’ role was to try to out-terrorise the forces working for the likes of Robert Mugabe, to try to alienate the local population from Mugabe’s men by pretending to be Mugabe’s men and committing such atrocities that the locals would be repulsed by them. Then when the soft cops turned up in the shape of government forces, the locals would feel like offering their help and support. It’s called winning hearts and minds, and was a tactic that had already been used by US special forces in Vietnam before that, and by British special forces all over the place before that: Malaya, Congo, Kenya, Aden…

Some would dismiss false flag adventures as conspiracy theory, which is, of course, a very convenient way to persuade the 99% that our trusted leaders couldn’t possibly stoop so low. But history is rich with proof that they most certainly do stoop so low, with amazing frequency. So the really important lesson to learn in all of this is that whenever a so-called “terrorist” outrage occurs, especially those outrages where the perpetrators haven’t been caught in action (and rounding up “suspects” after the event cannot be trusted either – as the “Guildford Four” and “Birmingham Six”, for example, could confirm)… always, always recall the very real world of false flag adventures.

Reforms in Myanmar have made the past experience just described less dangerous. However, from time to time these days I find myself feeling like a hypocrite when speaking about American ideals and Democracy. Democracy in the United States, seen from abroad, looks more like Communism in China. American foreign policy looks more like mafia thuggery. I’ve begun feeling like I’m misleading my students who deeply believe in American political policy and projected principles solely for the reason that the United States government is – rightly so for a change of pace – Aung San Suu Kyi’s greatest ally.

My students aren’t absent any ideas about what Democracy means. All of them were ex-political prisoners or family members of political prisoners. The youngest among them was detained just six months ago after supporting her father’s single-person protest against an obscure land-seizure case that left his family farm in the hands of a corrupt government crony. The father was arrested and the daughter went to the police station to demand his release. She was arrested when she did so. Three or four years ago they would both have been sentenced to several years in prison.

These days, as Myanmar eases into sort of becoming a fledgling democracy in its earliest stages, reforms have opened doors and minds and after nearly a week, both father and daughter were set free without any pending charges — absent their land. Human rights abuses and injustices still occur wholesale in Myanmar, yet with less frequency except in the frontier regions where westerners are banned from entering. In the United States, human rights abuses and injustices still occur, yet more frequently every day.

When I see video’s of American police brutality against Occupy protesters, people being evicted from their homes, TSA security hacks accosting four-year old children at airports and calling the child “a suspect”, TSA searches of innocent American citizens travelling on buses, trains and sidewalks, police busting down the door of an African American Vietnam Veterans home in white Plains, New York and electrocuting him, then shooting him to death, and when I read the news of the madness of war zone atrocities of murderous drones flying over half of Arabia, bombing and killing at random, American soldiers pissing on corpses, raping and rampaging death and destruction on to impoverished uneducated people with no electricity in their villages, I wonder, what the hell is Democracy?

What is the United States anymore? I hardly can recognize it from the days long ago when I had Civics class in seventh grade; the American military had just finished slaughtering 3 million people in Vietnam, untold numbers more in Laos and was unquestionably responsible for the genocide of 3 million more in Cambodia. Didn’t Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia behave this way long before Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II? No country dared, then or now, to stand up to American militarism abroad and now that it’s come home to roost in the styles of fascism on American streets and in American homes. Few Americans actually can resist the police state without their lives and livelihoods being  destroyed more than they’ve become.

When the world finally stood up to the spread of fascism in the 1940’s it was too late to save the so-called civilized world from total destruction. That the United States was the only power left not destroyed was because of geography, not superiority. Can the rest of the world stand up to the United States military and security complex?  The BRICS nations are succeeding at bringing imperial American economic might down by devaluing the dollar to 65% of the world’s currency reserve from 85% a few years ago. But as our  politicians have caved like lemmings jumping over a cliff to the security industrial complex, more and more money is being wasted to reap death, destruction, and surveillance over the world and in the United States. American militarism is out of control. Americans collectively have  become like the solitary young man standing in front of the huge tank during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1979.

What has become of the United States? The nation’s police departments behave as if they are occupying army’s hell bent on subduing the populace that pays them, even to the point of a citizen being subjected to being stripped searched not once, but twice, for failing to pay for a traffic violation. That means if your spouse, grandparents or children forget or fail to pay a parking ticket, for whatever reason, they can be arrested, strip searched and stored away in a jail and possibly even left there out of professional  neglect such as the kid in California who was doomed to spend four days in prison cell by the DEA, forced to drink his urine to survive, he was never charged with a crime.

America imprisons close to 2.5 million people at a time, year in and year out. African Americans are  disproportionately jailed per capita more than are white people. Where is the democracy? What on earth could 2.5 million Americans be doing so badly that all of them deserve to be in prison? Millions more each year are subjected to the legal system of parole and probation.  Corporations run the prisons in the United States. They lobby for tougher laws in all areas of law in order to arrest and detain more and more American citizens, because they make profits from having people in their prisons. Police and judges have been exposed as being corrupted with kickbacks and payoffs in some places in America as they’ve been caught arresting and sentencing with abandon while getting paid commissions in the form of cash. It’s probable many more have not been caught.

I tell my students to go on YouTube and search “police taser” and watch the many, many videos of American police electrocuting its citizens. They report back to me in shock and horror. They proclaim, “This never even happen in Burma!” It’s hard to teach Democracy when you come from a country where Democracy doesn’t really exist anymore.  Where the police state is the enemy of its citizens, where every form of communication is captured and stored, analyzed and used for advertising or – who knows – future blackmail? American citizens are all “suspects” to the police state. They are now subjected to drones hovering in their air space. No more laying out topless in the back yard on a sunny day or going for a romantic walk in a cornfield or forest and finding a nice cozy place to snuggle. If seen by a police drone, the police will arrive to arrest, strip search, and imprison the couple and they will inevitably be labeled sex-offenders and have their lives forever ruined. All for being in love under the clear blue sky on a pleasant summer day. Clear except for the police watching.

What does Democracy mean regarding the upcoming presidential election? There’s a choice between two people for president who swear they will give more money to the security state, cut social safety nets, privatize public education, cut taxes on the wealthy, spend more money on drug prohibition, continue to kill, torture and destroy more in Afghanistan, and in many other countries in the middle east – for what? Oil? The minority of Israel’s leaders and their insane but wealthy American supporters who are extreme warmongers and zealots hell bent of attacking Iran and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral lands? Most Israelis and Jewish Americans oppose these warmongers among them. The American corporate media is complicit in fueling the airwaves with propaganda against Iran and Islam, immigrants, and any idea left of what was once considered fascism. In today’s bizarre political world Richard Nixon would be called a  progressive.

What are Americans doing about the injustices and high-crimes and misdemeanors of American government and its Wall Street puppeteers? Mitt Romney has a car lift in his home. He’s the Republican nominee – thankfully since all of his opponents were nearly intellectually catatonic  evangelical non-Christ-like Christians. He’s a hedge fund financier – or whatever they call such crooks these days. Call them anything except guilty as charged. Barack Obama is a traitorous liar who sold himself to the American people as a new deal liberal peace-loving reformer who would ends wars, curtail the security state, and fight Wall Street – hahaha. Last time I looked, Guantanamo was still operating full steam ahead.  Americans will be at war in Afghanistan until 2024. (Hasn’t the bloodthirsty response to the September 11, 2001 tragedy been satisfied enough?) Wall Street crooks are still robbing the nation with ease. Terrorism of all kinds rules the world around us.

I want to be clear. I fear terrorism. Make no question about it. I fear police drones watching me from above, being tracked electronically and fondled by the TSA, being  harassed by police at roadblocks – but I fear it coming from Americans in America. I fear it from a psychotic night watchman like Mr. Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie. I fear it from a policeman wanting to arrest me in case my auto insurance payment is late and my insurance lapses. Or maybe I might forget to put the little sticker on my license plate that says I paid for the auto registration. I don’t deserve to be arrested, strip-searched and put in prison where I or anyone one, male or female, could be raped by other prisoners or abused by under-educated, unskilled, under-paid power tripping prison guards working for a corporation.

Maybe we should lobby local towns and cities to blood test and strip search people who want to run for office. I can’t imagine why a person who is not criminally inclined would want to do so. Call it a pre-emptive test of character. If one is willing to be blood tested and strip searched in order to be an elected politician, then they are either going to be guilty of something or they are insane. In either case, they will not be fit for office. Maybe that way we can keep the criminals and crazies out of politics. And then we can keep politics out of American society and return America to the rule of law and not the rule of the wealthy corporatists and the police. Call it the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. What a dream it was to think it could last. What a nightmare American Democracy has become.

The present struggle is directly aimed at the peaceful and happy life of our future generations on this planet.

— Dr. Nguyen Trong Nhan

The widespread employment of the defoliant and herbicide Agent Orange (AO) by the U.S. military during its barbarous war against the peoples of Vietnam should by all accounts be considered one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century.  The mass ecocidal-herbicidal campaign to utilize dioxin-containing AO against the tropical environment of Vietnam, begun in 1961 by the liberal-imperialist Kennedy administration, greatly helped facilitate the murder of between 2 and 5 million Vietnamese that was prosecuted by U.S. forces in their war.

Continuing in the traditions practiced previously by Indochina’s French administrators of violently defending colonial relations—and, indeed, vastly extending the scope of these traditions—the U.S. military came to subject the Vietnamese people to a “chemical holocaust,” as writes Fred A. Wilcox, journalist and author of Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese government statistics cited by Wilcox, 3 million Vietnamese are presently suffering from the effects of toxic weapons used by the U.S. in its neo-colonial war, with 500,000 of this total number being children.  150,000 of these minors today suffer specifically from the effects of exposure to AO 40 to 50 years ago, given the biologically persistent properties of dioxin.  As a means of considering and reflecting on these negating realities, Wilcox’s Scorched Earth is an important work, one that resists forgetting—instead attempting adequately to respond to the “call to all humans for help” made by Nguyen Quynh Loc on behalf of his children and all others victimized by AO and war.

As Wilcox reviews, the historical mass-utilization of AO aimed to suppress the Vietcong armed resistance both directly through the eradication of tropical forests that effectively served as a refuge for VC soldiers as well as indirectly by destroying agricultural communities that were suspected of nourishing the VC effort.  The AO defoliation campaign, estimated to have eradicated at least 3 million acres of vegetation, comprised a true scorched earth strategy.  Wilcox quotes Dr. Arthur Westing, one of the world’s foremost chemical experts on the TCCD-dioxin found in AO, as summarizing the general U.S. approach in the war as being characterized by “long term systematic fury inflicted… upon the environment of an enemy dependent for its survival upon a rural natural-resource-based economy.”  It is important not to forget that this highly destructive aspect of the larger counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam was merely a complement to the mass terror-bombing campaigns carried out by the U.S.—with several hundreds of times the order of magnitude of the Hiroshima bombs being dropped in incendiary and napalm forms on Vietnam, in accordance with Henry Kissinger’s maxim of “anything that flies on anything that moves.”¹

As is to be expected, the herbicide strategy directly destroyed the lives and livelihoods of those deemed to be potential VC supporters by bringing about widespread hunger in rural regions and provoking severe erosion and flooding-events through its devastation of forests.  In part, this dual AO-bombing strategy sought forcibly to depopulate rural regions in its mass-displacement of agriculturalists who then fled to Vietnam’s cities—a vision for which the reactionary public intellectual Samuel P. Huntington famously served as an apologist, thus fulfilling his role as Geheimrat, or adviser of the sovereign, as write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or “expert in legitimation,” as Antonio Gramsci or Edward Said might call him.² The “moonscapes” or “parking lot[s]” to which Wilcox likens much of the land of Vietnam ravaged by U.S. imperial administration might serve as a symbol of the overall effects of the mad war on Vietnam’s resident peoples and ecology.

To begin to understand the devastating effects of dioxin exposure on humans, it is necessary to consider some basic biology, which Wilcox provides to us.  Through experimentation on Rhesus monkeys and other animals, scientists have determined the TCCD-dioxin to be carcinogenic and fetotoxic, in addition to being possibly mutagenic, meaning that it induces mutations in DNA.  Among other effects, it acts on animals by inhibiting mitosis, or cell division.  Dioxin has been observed to remain concentrated within fatty tissues for decades—indeed, it is unknown how long it will persist in human tissues.  The toxin is also transplacental, such that it passes from mother to developing fetus.  These considerations thus help explain the emergence of the various disabilities and birth defects seen in children of Vietnamese parents who were exposed to AO by U.S. forces: lack of limbs or eyes, hydrocephaly (large head), musculoskeletal inhibition, severe intellectual impairment, and other neurological effects, to give only a few examples.

Basic reflection on these realities demonstrate the extreme hardships impelled by imperial power relations.  The photographs taken by Wilcox’s son Brendan as printed in the book are a testament to the irrevocable fate to which the U.S. has subjected these children and their families, as to its generalized destruction of the lives of millions of people in Vietnam, as in many other of the world’s societies.  The anecdotal stories Wilcox shares about the means that Vietnamese fighters took to protect themselves from the effects of AO following suspected exposure by spraying—that is, taking baths and eating green beans due to their belief in the antitoxic properties of the latter—similarly well-illustrates the extreme power inequalities represented in the Vietnam War, like other colonial wars.

Rather than be a work that examines horror triumphant, Scorched Earth also examines the litigation efforts undertaken by Agent Orange victims against Dow Chemical and other manufacturers of AO in 1984 and 2004.  The proceedings of the two cases as related by Wilcox are at once disconcerting and typical of established power.  The same Judge Weinstein who presided over both cases practiced legal positivism in denying the plaintiffs’ claims regarding the willfull destruction of human life resulting from AO exposure, perpetuating the reactionary view that the U.S. government was unaware of its effects on humans at the time of its employment, and did not in any case intend directly to harm individuals by using it as an herbicide.  A similarly absurd argument is one advanced by the chemical companies’ legal defense, which claimed that the plaintiffs’ claims, if taken seriously in a court of law, would “risk a stark lack of respect for the Executive Branch” and potentially set a precedent for interfering with its war-making capacities.

Wilcox rightly likens the outcome of this attempt at legalistic redress as being governed by a “Realm” of power, a disorienting and Kafka-esque “magic show” in which dominant social forces hold sway.  As Kafka himself might argue, the fate of the Vietnamese litigants subjected to dioxin poisoning serves as yet another example of the radical inadequacy of approaches that would pursue struggles for justice within established institutions.  It should be evident that the millions of cases of Agent Orange victims to begin with are themselves embodied condemnations of established society, responsible as it is for the “bourgeois-democratic holocaust” that was Vietnam.³  Justice for these persons and all others similarly brutalized by imperial violence cannot be achieved within existing social relations: Wilcox’s elucidation of the juridical proceedings should be seen as confirming this.

This is not to say that Wilcox himself presents his testimony on the Vietnam War within a frame that is expressly anti-racist or revolutionary—however much his findings could be seen to serve these ends.  He invokes the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson to argue against the absurdities of the chemical companies’ legal defense, likening the hegemony of these corporations to that of kings.  Beyond this, Wilcox questionably claims that the US and its allied South Vietnamese military “intended to warn” rural Vietnamese of their plans for mass-application of AO to the environment—as though this postulated intention, never actualized in reality, lessened the actual crime, if it can be said to have existed at all in the first place.  Furthermore, the listing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is glaringly absent from a brief list Wilcox assembles of the usage of chemical and other non-conventional weapons throughout history.  Imperial Japan, Saddam’s Iraq, and Nazi Germany are listed, but the advent of direct employment of nuclear arms against persons is strangely overlooked.  Moreover, Wilcox’s closing words in the book—that we onlookers “ignore” the ongoing suffering of Vietnamese “at our own peril”—seem puzzling: Is the legacy of chemical warfare in Vietnam really about us?  These lapses aside, Wilcox’s book importantly represents a broadside against prejudice, egotistical narcissism, and self-induced blindness.

Representative in this sense is Wilcox’s quoting of Professor Ken Herrmann, an ex-veteran who has dedicated time to researching the effects of AO in Vietnam, as posing the question of why the unavoidably monstrous ongoing legacy of the U.S. military’s crimes in Vietnam does not “haunt the conscience of America.”  Part of the reason for this disconcerting suspension of mind may be due to a lack of awareness, one that Wilcox hence has crucially and helpfully addressed with Scorched Earth.  Yet this absence of awareness is likely associated more broadly with prevailing society’s tendency to render invisible the lived experiences of those persons who suffer the myriad ill-effects of imperialist power-arrangements—the dismissal of the interests of those Chomsky terms “unpeople,” who are even preconsciously denied interests altogether.⁴

The task of overcoming the “bourgeois coldness” Adorno observes as perpetuating life-negating political projects is a decidedly pressing one, given the various threats to life contemporarily observed around the planet, from the endless massacres in Afghanistan to Israel’s continuous bombings of Gaza and the plight of malnourished and ill children or those subjected to radioactive exposure, whether from depleted-uranium rounds, as in Fallujah, or from the melted-down nuclear reactors of Fukushima.⁵  In his comment that the fate of Vietnam is the “toxic mirror into which avaricious corporations do not want ordinary people throughout the world to look,” Wilcox points to the potential collective power of the now subordinated multitudes, hence perhaps pointing to a future possibility that could dismantle imperial rule and so finally succeed in preventing the recurrence of anything resembling the genocidal Vietnam War.

Thus, Wilcox is mistaken to claim that “all we [observers] can do is promise that we will tell [other] people” about the tragic realities of Vietnam.  Documentation and bearing witness—“lend[ing] suffering a voice,” as Adorno advocates—surely are important projects for the present and likely futures, but they are not all.⁶  We observers of the myriad negations perpetrated and overseen by constituted power can, instead of mere spectators, be subjects and agents—actors who rather than resign themselves to world-destructiveness rebel against it, seeking to overturn it.  Against the catastrophe that “just goes on,” in the words of Walter Benjamin, and the “normality” of “death”—the reign of genocidal-imperial racism and environmental devastation, or capitalism—a conscious humanity must labor, abolishing the institutions and ideologies that perpetuate brutality and unreason.⁷

1. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “‘Losing’ the World: Amercan Decline in Perspective,” Truthout, 15 February 2012.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin, 2006).
3. Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: Verso, 1984).
4. Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 133.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models (trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 201.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973), 17-18.
7. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940 (trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003), 184; Adorno, Minima Moralia, §33.

The U.S. military created Project Agile in Vietnam in 1961, to apply data processing techniques to the task of measuring the allegiances of every individual in the numerous hamlets of South Vietnam. Files were maintained on every aspect of every person’s life. Every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the Saigon government and carry ID cards. Those apprehended without cards were imprisoned or worse. At the time of registration, a full set of fingerprints was obtained, and the individual’s political beliefs were recorded. ²  By 1966, the U.S. military began studying the potential applicability of this program to cities and communities inside the U.S.

Although the LEAA was abolished in 1982, it had already begun to introduce military hardware and tactics into the daily programs of domestic law enforcement. LEAA’s emphasis included surveillance equipment and computer systems that compiled information on individuals such as criminal activity, biographical and physical data (scars, deformities, etc.), identifying numbers, social security numbers, operators licenses, skin tones, addresses and occupations. In addition, enormous amounts of money went toward police hardware including products such as infrared equipment, anti-sniper vans, helicopters, communication systems that enabled the police to write messages through their radios, lightweight portable video tape recorders, short landing and take-off planes, and filing systems.

LEAA was not merely designed to bolster the reputation of right-wing “law n’ order” forces inside the U.S. at a time during the 60s when there was little respect for law enforcement, but rather was empowered to create a completely new law enforcement infrastructure inside our own communities. Programs created by LEAA ranged from prison and community-based halfway houses to “Watch Your Neighbor” programs on our streets. The infrastructure was designed to render law enforcement needs a responsibility of our own communities – to make us all responsible for dealing with the prevention of crimes. Virtually nothing LEAA sponsored dealt with the root causes of crime, but rather, made the citizenry part of the detain, arrest and imprison aspects of law enforcement.

Today, while the U.S. military is building and maintaining bases throughout the world, it is providing an updated armamentarium of warfare hardware to our local “law enforcement” communities. Over the last two decades, for example, San Francisco has acquired “infrared scanning devices, combat helmets, chemical protective gloves, vehicles and even a boat as discarded hand-me-downs free of charge from the Department of Defense.” The Alameda County Sheriff’s department got an 85-foot patrol boat as well as a grenade launcher. Police departments are equipping themselves with 8 and 1/2-ton bulletproof tactical vehicles. Santa Barbara Sheriffs have taken four helicopters, and the San Joaquin County Sheriffs picked up a full-tracked tank last year even though it had previously received a mobile-command vehicle that it bought with federal grant money.³ The newest additions to this stockpile of hard-core weapons will be be surveillance drones.  The Federal Data Center in Utah has been designated as the information-gathering center of the U.S. surveillance empire: it will be responsible for gathering, maintaining and disseminating information nationwide.

Military infringement into domestic law enforcement has become an essential part of our border control policies, especially in the Southwest. “During the 1978-1992 period, U.S. immigration and drug enforcement policies and practices in the U.S.-Mexico border region became increasingly militarized. Developed during the 1980s for use in Central America and elsewhere, this doctrine is characterized by broad-ranging provisions for establishing social control over specific civilian populations, and its implementation has often been accompanied by widespread human rights violations.”⁴

Author Joey LeMay points out that “Counter-terrorism efforts abroad have expanded to include counter-terrorism efforts domestically” and that military-style tactics within the police force[s] have taken root since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.  “In September 2006, the U.S. issued the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, an overview of the practices and goals that were to be implemented and accomplished to curb terroristic efforts. The document details the ideological shift of combating attacks against the U.S.:

The paradigm for combating terrorism now involves the application of all elements of our national power and influence. Not only do we employ military power, we use diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement activities to protect the Homeland and extend our Defenses, disrupt terrorist operations, and deprive our enemies of what they need to operate and survive. We have broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.

Today’s favorite police toys include sound cannons (LRAD) to SWAT Teams, pepper gas, shotgun-style Taser projectors, and focused, invisible beams of waves that cause a severe burning sensation in the skin (AIS), the list goes on and on.

Only a police force that earns the people’s trust and respect can be effective. This is certainly the case in Afghanistan where the accelerated rate of U.S. militarization of the Afghani police force resulted in the contempt and antagonism of the entire Afghan people. As a result, the U.S. was forced to modify its strategy from containment to one of counter-insurgency.

The major problem with integrating military tactics into domestic police departments is that it transforms community participation in law enforcement into acts more common to warfare: renditions; torture; isolation cells; strip searches; racial profiling; and, the numerous excesses that identify U.S. imperial actions throughout the world. To the extent that police attempt to control the American people with drones and batons, rather than with cooperation and protection, they they are doomed to failure.

Once again in our communities, there is little credibility among community members for the legitimacy of police forces, Border Patrol, Homeland Security forces, etc. Many people fear the unleashed power of the police and react strongly to the implications of greater police power. The disrespect that the American people have for law enforcement is paralleled by the public’s contempt for Congress, the so-called Supreme Court and the Presidency. Our national preoccupation with arresting and imprisoning the largest domestic population in the world is a reflection of our murderous foreign policy.  Only when democracy is restored in the U.S. will we see an end to our ever-expanding, immune, and unaccountable police force.

1. “For fiscal year 1973, LEAA was allocated $841 million in crime-fighting funds, bringing the total funds awarded to LEAA to $2.43 billion. 85% of LEAA’s funding is directed to State Planning groups, which then turn over most of it to local law enforcement application. The remaining 15% is distributed by LEAA as it wishes.” (Hiken, Marti, Ed., “A Primer on LEAA,” October 1974, Published by the National Lawyers Guild, Seattle Chapter; officially presented to the community of Seattle and the city council
2. ibid.,  “Primer on LEAA” and Wikipedia
3. Schulz, G.W. and Becker, Andrew, California Watch, “If U.S. military doesn’t want it, cops will take it,” 3-31-12, p. 1A
4. Dunn, Timothy J., “Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978-1992.  “Dunn demonstrates that U.S. immigration and drug enforcement practices in the southwestern border region have coincided with many key features of low-intensity conflict doctrine. His findings are supported extensively by material from U.S. government documents, investigative reports from mainstream and alternative presses, interviews with federal law enforcement personnel in South Texas, and reports from human rights advocacy organizations. The study reflects a concern for human rights conditions in the U.S.-Mexico border region and is informed by the belief that the ‘official’ story is usually but one version of events and should not be accepted uncritically.”

I went to turn her over and there was a little baby with her that I had also killed.  The baby’s face was half gone.  My mind just went.  The training came to me and I just started killing.  Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything.  We were told to leave nothing standing.  We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians.  They was the enemy. Period.  Kill.

— Soldier testifying to his part in the My Lai massacre, Vietnam, 16 March, 1968

So the US military and administration are terribly, dreadfully, grievously sorry for the deaths of all those Afghan villagers killed by a ‘suspected’ lone staff sergeant who’d lost the plot, had a breakdown,  suffered a brain injury.  I’m not going to address all the holes in the story that is being told, in a desperate effort to convince the public this is something that has never happened before and never will again (the Western public that is.  Afghans know better.)  Other news watchers will do a better job than me.

No.  What really angers me is the use of language I have heard so many times before.  Not really his fault, you understand.  It was just that war had got to him.  You’d got to feel sorry for him really, lost in ‘the fog of war’ as he was.  One might – if one didn’t suspect that he was not alone; that this wasn’t an isolated incident; that one hadn’t heard all the same lame excuses last week or last month about another ‘tragic’ (and ‘isolated’) event; that he (or they) weren’t doing what so many soldiers have done before: slaughter innocent civilians because they had been trained to see them as ‘gooks’, ‘ragheads’ or whatever dismissive name the current conflict is using to diminish the humanity of the people whose country they have invaded.

It happens in every war, and not once, but again and again. My Lai was not the only atrocity in Vietnam, not by a long way.  And as Jonathon and Orville Schell wrote in a letter to the New York Times*: ‘Such atrocities were and are the logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from the people.’  It applies particularly to American forces that have fought war after war in the underlying belief that in order to ‘civilise’ the savage you have to kill him (and here I would recommend you read The Deaths of Others by John Tirman).  In this well researched and thoughtful book, Tirman looks at the appalling numbers of civilians who have died in America’s wars, and the absolute uncaring apathy of the American public towards those deaths, even while they care so much about the death toll among their own ‘heroes’.  And before the rest of us pat ourselves on the back, remember that all states with an imperial or colonial past have taken this attitude towards the citizens of the countries they have invaded, occupied, conquered and stripped of resources.

The atrocity in Afghanistan a few days ago is just one of many, and it cannot be talked into forgetfulness.  One cannot excuse it by saying it is part of ‘the tragedy of war’.  No.  The tragedy is that so many refuse to see the victims as having any real presence in the event, any rights, any humanity.  Again and again we refuse to acknowledge the victims or to recognise that our ‘heroic’ soldiers have wilfully and knowing murdered innocent  people.  The ‘fog of war’ is not to blame for this deliberate blindness, and it is deliberate.  What is to blame is the arrogance of belief that some people have more right to life than others.

So – I am tired of the language of war.  I am tired of the denials, the lame excuses, the justifications, the heartfelt and unreserved apologies and the finger pointing at just one singular mad individual.  I am tired of generals saying the US forces ‘do not kill civilians’; that this orgy of killing, torture or abuse was an ‘isolated incident’; that all those killed were’ terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’; that there would be a ‘full investigation’; that ‘lessons would be learned’.

Above all, I am tired of Obama being ‘heartbroken’ at the news from Afghanistan.  The only way I could express myself over his breaking heart would be to resort to a whole page of very coarse swearing.  I could but I won’t – there is enough filth being created by US forces or ISAF or NATO in their illegal war-making around the Middle East and beyond.

So Obama’s heartbroken.  Would that he were. Would that he were burying his parents, wife, children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters and friends.  Would that his house had been bombed into a heap of rubble. Would that he was sitting under a sheet of plastic in the coldest winter weather outside the gates of Washington, with no food, no medical care and no comfort except that somewhere the other side of the world a self-important man was ‘sorry’, was offering an apology.  Would he know what heartbreak meant then?

And I am really tired of the media, the TV channels and mainstream press supinely parroting the statements they are given about isolated incidents, rogue soldiers, alleged and apparent killings by a suspected single member of the US forces.  Was it only last month they were reporting another ‘isolated incident’?  How many times do they have to report a story like this before they stop repeating the rubbish that it is a one-off, could never happen again, due to a single rotten apple that’s had a breakdown?  Will they ever get honest enough to look back at last week’s news without doing their share of copy-and-paste when writing this week’s piece?  And will they ever wonder in print how many similar incidents have gone unreported?  That perhaps this kind of thing is all too common?

And when will the public wake up and recognize that this is what war is; this is what soldiers do; this is what they are trained to do when fighting wars; that there are no heroes in war, just countless obscene and unnecessary deaths.  And when, oh when, will we learn to care about the death of people other than our own?

Label (n.)— short classifying phrase applied to a person…

— Oxford Desk Dictionary

In the stratified, hierarchical marketplace which we inhabit daily, we encounter (but do not relate to) “food servers,” “store clerks,” “flight attendants,” and so on.  As “consumers,” we may even collaborate with their supervisors in rating their “service” on a scale of 1 to 10 (rather like the product ratings provided by the readers of Consumer Reports).  Since such service jobs require the display of a “friendly” demeanor and attitude, most such encounters are emptied of any human authenticity.  Not unlike traditional caste-systems, which reinforced hierarchical relations of dominance/subordination, such social-distancing promotes detachment and indifference on the part of  “customers.”

Such labels are de-humanizing because:

1) they reduce each person to a mere occupant of  an economic status/role (“housekeeper,” “peasant,” “unemployed baker’s assistant”); and

2) they expunge the value of each individual—his/her unique personality/subjectivity—within the generic category.

The term “peasants,” often used when referring to Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, lumped countless numbers of real, distinctive individuals into a de-humanizing, low-status, category.  Any possible identification with such “civilian casualties,” on the part of Americans, was thereby further obviated.  No doubt many Americans merely shrugged when told the estimated numbers of Vietnamese “peasants” killed by the American military.

Furthermore, the mainstream media continues to hold up a distorting lens, a cognitive filter which blocks any immediacy of human comprehension or identification with “the other.”  For instance: Palestinian “terrorists,” Iraqi “insurgents,” and so on.  (Oddly, the connotation of the word “rebels” varies widely, depending on whether the U.S. military supports them or kills them.)    With the imposition of such misleading (and fear-inducing) labels, any direct understanding of such individuals’ human experiences and outlook is blocked.  Such labels, once affixed, can result in grave distortions in the perception of social reality itself.  One need only consider the blanket term “enemy,” and the historical consequences of its imposition onto real people (such as families who happened to live in Hiroshima–or Falluja).

In striking contrast, a universalizing, egalitarian ethos is once more in the ascendant worldwide.   In the past decade or so, the anti-globalization and democracy movements, facilitated by new forms of interactive media, have promoted a wider sense of human solidarity as such. (And ultimately, as the Biosphere itself reacts to global warming, with all sentient beings as such?).  A growing “empathic-humanism,” as I would define it, means not necessarily “sympathetic identification,” but rather the developing capacity to “feel-into” (and thereby validate) the diverse experiences of others worldwide—regardless not only of ethnicity and culture, but also of class, status and occupational role.

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.