The development of a nuclear weapon by Iran is the great, glowing, neon "red line" of American politics today, one that every single major player in the American power structure says cannot be crossed. An ironclad bipartisan consensus has formed on the issue: Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. Period. End of discussion. "All options are on the table" to prevent this from happening, George Bush has repeatedly declared, with John McCain singing along. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has hammered home the point even more forcefully: "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon -- everything."
"Everything" in a president's power includes the largest military machine in human history and the largest nuclear arsenal on earth, so this is not exactly an idle boast. In fact, the American bipartisan political consensus on Iran amounts to precisely this: putting a gun to someone's head and saying, "If you don't do what I want, I'm going to blow your goddamn brains out."
This Bush-McCain-Obama line was underscored this week by one of Obama's top foreign policy advisers, Anthony Lake, who said "the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is the biggest threat facing the world," the Financial Times reports.
Think of that: the biggest threat facing the world. Bigger than global climate change. Bigger than poverty and disease. Bigger than growing conflicts over shrinking resources. Bigger than terrorism (which was the last greatest biggest threat facing the world). Bigger than organized crime. Bigger than the Terror War operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, which continue to spawn so much death, ruin, extremism and economic turmoil. Bigger than all of these -- and all other threats facing the world -- is the prospect that Iran might, in Lake's words, "get on the edge of developing a nuclear weapon."
This is certainly a remarkable state of affairs, and one which provokes a very simple question: Why? Why is an Iranian bomb (or even the prospect of Iran "getting on the edge" of having one) the ultimate danger facing the world today -- a prospect so dire, so infinitely evil that even the most "progressive" operators in the power structure insist they would be willing to use nuclear weapons to stop it?
Nothing in the modern affairs of nations has been more exhaustively analyzed and debated than the utility and dangers of nuclear weapons, and yet the dangers posed by Iran with a bomb have been barely discussed. They are treated as a given. The core idea is that Iran cannot be trusted because the country is run by religious fanatics crazy enough to use a bomb if they had one. This is not the first time such arguments have been made. Some Americans, including Air Force generals, believed in the late 1940s that a pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union was justified by the peril of Moscow with a bomb. Twenty years later the Russians, in their turn, were so alarmed by the prospect of Beijing with a bomb that they quietly proposed to the Americans a joint effort to destroy the Chinese nuclear development effort with a pre-emptive attack.
The world's experience with nuclear weapons to date has shown that nuclear powers do not use them, and they seriously threaten to use them only to deter attack. Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all acquired nuclear weapons in spite of international opposition. None has behaved recklessly with its new power. What changes is that nuclear powers have to be treated differently; in particular they cannot be casually threatened....
We must demur slightly from this excellent analysis to note that one nuclear power has in fact used its nuclear weapons: the United States. Back to Powers:
So set aside the question of whether Iran wants an enrichment program to make bomb-grade material or only for the production of electricity... What we ought to ask, then, is why Iran wants its own production capacity for making the stuff of bombs?
What US officials say, when they say anything at all, is that Tehran wants a bomb in order to dominate the Persian Gulf region and to threaten its neighbors, especially Israel. This is a misreading of how other nuclear powers have made use of their weapons. As tools of coercive diplomacy nuclear weapons are almost entirely useless, but they are extremely effective in blocking large-scale or regime-threatening attack. There is no evidence that Iran has a different motive, and plenty of reason for Iran to fear that attack is a real possibility.
Indeed, the Bush administration, far from trying to quiet Iran's fears, makes a point of confirming them every few months. These threats are not limited to words, but are supported with practical steps....
The seriousness of American threats is confirmed by the fact that no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to them in clear, vigorous, principled language. It is as if the whole country listens to the administration's threats with breath held, wondering if Bush and Cheney really mean to do as they say, and in effect leaving the decision entirely to them. Americans may count on the President to think twice, but why would leaders in Tehran, responsible for the lives of 70 million citizens, want to depend on President Bush's restraint for their survival and safety? Bush has a history. On his own authority, without the sanction of any international body, he attacked Iraq five years ago and precipitated a bloody chain of events that shows no sign of ending. It would be natural, indeed inevitable, for any government in Tehran, seeing what has happened next door, to ask what could save Iran from a similar fate. An answer is not far to seek: nuclear weapons with a reliable delivery system could do that.
Powers then considers the possibilities of an imminent American strike on Iran:
Bush and Cheney prefer the language of flat command that implies "or else." A long list might be appended here of their frequent warnings that the United States does not trust Iran with the knowledge to enrich bomb-grade uranium and will not tolerate an Iranian bomb. Many of these warnings have been issued in the last month or two and we may expect a continuing barrage until their final days in office. The President's frustration is plainly evident: Saddam Hussein may be gone, but Iran remains defiant, and more powerful than ever. The President's male pride seems to have been aroused; he said he was going to solve the Iranian problem and he doesn't want to back down. The intensity of Bush's desire to crush this final opponent is evident in his words and his body language, but does he retain the power to carry out his threats?
From one point of view the answer seems obvious. It is too late. With the exception only of the neoconservative faithful, every close observer of the American–Iranian standoff says that the administration's threats are empty, that the United States does not have the military resources, or the political support at home, or the agreement of allies abroad, to carry out a full-scale air attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, much less to invade and occupy the country. Two of the skeptics, Gates and Mullen, are running the Pentagon, and their cautioning remarks, only a step this side of insubordination, would seem to make attack impossible. But if attack is impossible, why does Bush talk himself into an ever-tighter corner by continuing to issue threats? Does he believe Iran will cave? Are these the only words he thinks people will still listen to? Is he hoping to tie the hands of the next president? Or is he preparing to summon the power of his office to carry out the last option on the table? One hardly knows whether to take the question seriously. It seems alarmist and overexcited even to pose it when the realities are so clear. But it is impossible to be sure—Bush has a history.
Bush indeed has a history. He has a history of launching military aggression. He has a history of launching military aggression on the basis of manufactured threats. He has a history of launching military aggression without the agreement of allies abroad. He has a history of launching military aggression against the advice of "military skeptics," whom he either "retires" or sidelines or ignores when he launches the aggression. He has a history of launching military aggression regardless of the strain it puts on the armed forces or the national treasury.
And he does not need "political support at home" to launch another act of military aggression, if by "political support" Powers means popular backing from the public. Bush is not facing re-election, and never will again. And he has already been given full support from the Democratic-controlled Congress in a series of measures which fully embrace Bush's bellicose stance toward Iran, as well as the specious casus belli he has advanced.
We are indeed simply waiting to see if Bush decides to carry through with his clear intent -- and waiting helplessly, for exactly the reason that Powers outlines: because "no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to [the threat of war on Iran] in clear, vigorous, principled language." Indeed, as noted above, all of our "significant national leaders" are in lockstep on this issue, and in their willingness to do "everything in [their] power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, everything in [their] power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon -- everything."
So yes, Bush has a history of military aggression. And the United States has a history of incinerating civilians with nuclear bombs. What seems to be forgotten in all the bloodlusting furor is that Iran has a history of neither.
Stephen Cohen is right on Russia in "Wrong on Russia." After first outlining Russia's global importance and then the vast dangers of the accelerating deterioration in US-Russian relations, Cohen notes in the International Herald Tribune:
How did it come to this?
In the U.S. policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic domestic policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic opportunity. You don't have to be a Putin apologist to understand that this is not an adequate explanation.
During the last eight years, Putin's foreign policies have been largely a reaction to Washington's winner-take-all approach to Moscow since the early 1990s, which resulted from a revised U.S. view of how the cold war ended.
In that new triumphalist narrative, America "won" the 40-year conflict and post-Soviet Russia was a defeated nation analogous to post-World War II Germany and Japan - a nation without full sovereignty at home or autonomous national interests abroad.
The policy implication of that bipartisan triumphalism, which persists today, has been clear, certainly to Moscow. It meant that the United States had the right to oversee Russia's post-Communist political and economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while demanding that Moscow yield to U.S. international interests. It meant Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the Clinton administration began NATO's eastward expansion, and disregard extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty and granted NATO membership to countries even closer to Russia - despite Putin's crucial assistance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan after 9/11. It even meant America was entitled to Russia's traditional sphere of security and energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia and the Caspian.
Such U.S. behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin leader. Those U.S. policies - widely viewed in Moscow as an "encirclement" designed to keep Russia weak and to control its resources - have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism, destroy the once strong pro-American lobby, and inspire widespread charges that concessions to Washington are "appeasement," even "capitulationism." The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and effect threatening a new cold war are clear.
Yes, it's our old friend American Exceptionalism again: we are imbued with divinity (or blessed by history for the secular exceptionalists), so everyone must hew to Washington's paternalistic line -- or else Daddy spank. American elites can never comprehend the reality of the outside world because they are too busy admiring their special, exceptional selves in the mirror.
Cohen then outlines some immediate steps we could take to reverse the dangerous situation:
Three are essential and urgent: a U.S. diplomacy that treats Russia as a sovereign great power with commensurate national interests; an end to NATO expansion before it reaches Ukraine, which would risk something worse than cold war; and a full resumption of negotiations to sharply reduce and fully secure all nuclear stockpiles and to prevent the impending arms race, which requires ending or agreeing on U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Europe.
Sounds like a good plan. What do our wannabe leaders have to say? Uh oh:
American presidential campaigns are supposed to discuss such vital issues, but neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has done so. Instead, in varying degrees, both have promised to be "tougher" on the Kremlin than George W. Bush has allegedly been and to continue the encirclement of Russia and the hectoring "democracy promotion" there.
Great. Not only more of the same disastrous course -- but even more of more of the same.
As a follow-up to the two previousposts, John Pilger reports on the treatment meted out to a young Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Omer, who, despite seeing family members killed and maimed by Israeli forces, "is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel."
Here's what Israel's security organ, Shin Bet, does with moderating voices who seek peace with Israel.
Yesterday's post on the rise of racism in Israel drew this comment:
I don't think it affects your larger point, but "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is, at best, controversial. (Personally I think it's mostly crap.) Check out "A Nation on Trial" by Finkelstein and Birn in English or "Ein Volk von Moerdern" in German while Goldhagen is still fresh in your mind.
I don't speak German, but I am aware of the work by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Birn, and of the controversies surrounding Goldhagen's book. Some of the latter stem, I believe, from a misreading or over-interpretation of Goldhagen's work, which states repeatedly that is dealing with one narrow, specific aspect of the Nazi phenomenon and the Holocaust: namely, the actions of the people who actually inflicted the torments and perpetrated the killings (and those who administratively facilitated these actions). It deals with the fact that almost all of the perpetrators acted of their own free will -- very often with enthusiasm and initiative, above and beyond the call of duty -- even when, in many if not most cases, they could have refused such duties without penalty.
Goldhagen also deals with the anti-Semitism that soaked German society, the obsessive idea that there was a "Jewish problem" that needed to be solved in one way or another, and the overwhelming acceptance of the notion that Jews should be segregated and removed, in one fashion or another, from German society (which Finkelstein also acknowledges). Goldhagen states repeatedly that this pervasive anti-Semitism was not the sole and inevitable cause of the Holocaust; but he does assert that it was an indispensable element in the development of the "Final Solution" of mass deportation, mass suffering, and mass murder. Without this baseline, without the pervasive belief that Jews were somehow lesser beings, were destructive, poisonous "Others" whose very presence caused terrible harm to the German nation, then the Nazis would not have been able to move from the Nuremberg Laws (which, as Finkelstein notes, were met with overwhelming public approval) to the death-camps.
Goldhagen also makes clear that even with the pervasive anti-Semitism -- "eliminationist" in that it wished and approved the removal of Jews from the life of German society -- the mass killing and worst depredations would not have occurred if not for the war, and the savagery it unleashed. (Unleashed on all sides; the indiscriminate Allied bombing of German cities and the resulting mass civilian deaths were repeatedly cited by death-squad leaders and other officials as "justification" for their own killing of unarmed, non-combatant civilians, especially Jews, who, in the widely-accepted Nazi mythology, had somehow "caused" the war.)
The heart of Goldhagen's book are the hundreds of pages of descriptions of the activities of the perpetrators, told often in their own words, and the direct evidence of their positive attitude toward their activities -- activities which were more widely known in society than is generally assumed. As he notes, many of these testimonies have been ignored or under-utilized in examinations of the Holocaust, and thus the focus of his book is filling out this neglected niche in the vast field of Nazi-era studies. Goldhagen also makes clear, repeatedly, that these events had nothing to do with any racial, biological, national, spiritual or any other inherent quality in the German people; they arose out of a certain specific set of historical conditions.
Nor does he say, anywhere, either directly or by implication, that "the Germans are a species apart with their pathological anti-Semitism, [which] absolves them of all normal standards of moral culpability," as Birn alleges. She accuses of Goldhagen of having a "sugar-coated version of the Holocaust" (!), "which eliminates the need for people to constantly think about the ethical choices of right and wrong. " This conclusion simply cannot be supported by a reading of the book. Goldhagen repeatedly and explicitly rejects this thesis, and instead points out, over and over and over again, that the atrocities were carried out by individual moral agents, who were responsible for their actions, and who had to make constant ethical choices of right and wrong every single day -- especially given the fact, as Goldhagen demonstrates, that many if not most of the perpetrators could have stopped taking part in the atrocities at any time. Indeed, the moral culpability of individuals is in many ways the whole point of the book.
What Goldhagen is trying to do is to understand why so many Germans in that era made the choices they did to take part in such a monstrous activity. To try to understand a motive is not the same as explaining it away or absolving the perpetrator of his or her moral culpability. The latter is the argument made by apologists for the Terror War -- that you are "pro-terrorist" or "blaming the victim" or "absolving the terrorist" if you try to understand what motivates someone to take such an extreme action. It is also the argument made by apologists for Israel's manifold depredations against the Palestinians. And Finkelstein and Birn -- especially Finkelstein -- obviously do not fall into the camp of such apologists. Yet they are using a version of that discreditable argument in the case of Goldhagen's book.
Again, this is not to endorse every single conclusion that Goldhagen draws from the evidence and the testimonies he examines. Nor do I have the slightest desire to wade into what is in many ways an academic cat-fight, and one which has more to do with present-day politics than historical truth. (On the political side, I am much in sympathy with Finkelstein, who has been subjected to censorship, prejudice and banishment (from Israel) for his own scholarship; including his critiques of Goldhagen.) I don't know what Goldhagen's politics are. I don't doubt that the book has been put to partisan use, or that it contains conclusions and interpretations open to dispute or refutation. What work of history doesn't? But I am not an academic, or an intellectual, or an ideologue. What I am interested in are the historical facts that he presents, and what they say about human nature, and the patterns and dynamics of human behavior, especially in the context of large-scale actions initiated by a powerful state.
With the backing and the blessing of local government and the police, the anti-Semitic organization takes its program into the local schools, to hammer home its stern, unyielding message: Girls, do not give your bodies to the racial enemy! Do not let them seduce and defile your innocence with their devious ways!
The city's own welfare representative heads up the program of the "Anti-Assimilation Department." He shows the schoolgirls a film -- "Sleeping with the Enemy" -- which dramatizes how the filthy Semite worms his way into the affections of an innocent girl then cruelly abandons her. This "abnormal phenomenon" is plaguing several cities in the area, says the police chief; there have already been many cases of racially pure girls "joining with" Semite men. The propaganda efforts of the Anti-Assimilation Department are aimed at eliminating the sexual machinations of the "exploitative" Semites.
Even though these Semites are citizens of the country -- indeed, many of them serve in the armed forces -- the Anti-Assimilation Department's view is gaining wider and wider acceptance in the nation at large. Racial consciousness has reached new heights in the country, a recent study shows: more than half the population now favors the removal of these minority Semite citizens. And 74 percent of the nation's youth now believes that these Semites are "unclean."
Another new study shows that dozens of these Semite citizens have been killed by police, military and private security forces in the past seven years, with almost no legal repercussions for the killers.
*** A report taken from the crumbling pages of Der Stürmer or some other German paper of the 1930s? No; it all comes from Haaretz, the liberal Israeli paper, and is happening right now. The Semites now being accused as sexual predators, racial defilers, devious operators and "unclean" subhumans who should be removed from the land are the Arab citizens of Israel.
As Haaretz reports this week, the Anti-Assimilation Department of the religious group Yad L'ahim -- "which works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men" -- has taken its "Sleeping With the Enemy" program into the schools of Kiryat Gat, where the city fathers also fret about local Jewish girls "joining with Bedouin men."
The Anti-Assimilation Department says its relentless efforts to prevent sexual contact between Jews and Arabs "is not racism, because it is not mutually exploitative, "says Chaim Shalom, the presenter of the program."This is a matter of racism on their end," because it is "the exploitative Arab, the exploitative Bedouin," who pursues the Jewish girls.
The Kiryat Gal program comes in the midst of a steep rise in racism among Israelis, as Haaretz noted a few months ago, citing a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel:
"Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy," [ACRI president Sami] Michael said. The publication coincides with Human Rights Week, which begins Sunday. "We are a society under supervision under a democratic regime whose institutions are being undermined and which confers a different status to residents in the center of the country and in the periphery."
The number of Jews expressing feelings of hatred toward Arabs has doubled, the report stated...Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent support the idea that the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel and 78 percent oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government. According to a Haifa University study, 74 percent of Jewish youths in Israel think that Arabs are "unclean."
In March, a report by Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, also detailed the increasing support for "the delegitimization, discrimination and even deportation of Arabs," Haaretz notes:
The report, written by Mossawa director Jafar Farah and others, mainly examines racism against Arabs in Israel, using criteria taken from the anti-Semitism reports in Europe.
The report covers Arabs killed by the security forces and by Jewish citizens, anti-Arab incitement by leading Jewish public figures, workforce discrimination by private Jewish organizations, the barring of Arabs from public places, and the destruction of Arab property. The report particularly highlights what it calls the government's helplessness in the face of the problem.
The report lists Arab citizens killed by police, soldiers, security guards and Jewish civilians over the past seven years. It notes that only one Jewish citizen, of Ethiopian origin, was killed under similar circumstances during this period. Indictments were issued in only seven cases, the report states. In two cases, the assailants were found not guilty, and the State Prosecutor appealed the verdict in one of these cases.....
We've said it before and we'll say it again: there are no exact historical parallels, but there are resonances that can be instructive. As Arthur Silber notes (in explaining the nature of his questions and warnings about the thrust of the Obama campaign):
NO, I do NOT think Obama is Hitler reincarnated. I must note, however, that his full embrace of the U.S.'s truly insane foreign policy of aggressive, non-defensive war is not precisely unHitlerian, just as his full embrace of corporatism bears a rather disturbing resemblance to aspects of Hitler's political program. But the same could be said of every major American politician.
...What I have been getting at are very broad cultural and political dynamics, general patterns that repeat throughout history, assuming one studies and understands history. [emphasis mine] So, no, Obama is not a Hitler duplicate, but, to a readily noticeable and troubling extent, he is someone riding a similar kind of cultural wave and response, and he may well use an already existing authoritarian-surveillance state that repeatedly engages in aggressive war to wreak great destruction both at home and abroad.
I came upon the Kiryat Gal story just hours after finishing a most instructive work of history examining cultural and political dynamics: "Hitler's Willing Executioners," by Daniel Goldhagen. And no, I do not think Israel is Nazi Germany reincarnated, despite its many brutal policies; a reading of Goldhagen's book, with its copious detailing of what the hands-on perpetrators of the Holocaust -- most of them "ordinary" Germans, non-Nazis, good family men, thousands and thousands of them -- actually did, would make anyone wary of hair-trigger equations of other regimes to the Nazis.
But equation is not the issue; as Silber notes, it is resonance, pattern, the dynamics of human behavior in certain particular configurations of political, social, cultural and psychological currents. Israeli society is clearly sliding toward something similar to the "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that permeated -- saturated -- German society in both the pre-Nazi and Nazi eras. Israel has already walled off the "unclean" Arabs in horrendous ghettos where they must live degraded lives, subjected them to collective punishment and repeated military attacks, forced them from their homes, and so on. The resonances of Israeli policy with other race-based oppressions in modern history have long been painfully clear.
The increasing brutalization and coarsening of Israeli political culture has also long been evident, as well as the inexorable, apparently irresistible rise of extremist sectarian factions whose obsessions and strictures mirror those of some Islamic extremists and, yes, have strong resonances with the German anti-Semitic extremists who rose to state power in the 1930s.
There is no good destination at the end of such a road. There is no good outcome to the dynamic of eliminationism and dehumanization. It leads, quite literally, to madness and death and ruin. Israel is not the only nation on that road; the dynamic is not specific to any country, creed, race, religion or polity. It belongs to all of us, it's a danger we all face. And it requires vigilance, skepticism, action and awareness to break up these patterns as they rise among us, to derail the dynamic -- before it's too far gone and must play out, in one way or another, in the given extent and circumstances of the historical moment, to the bitter end.
A Note on "Willing Executioners" You're way off on Goldhagen. who's an ahistorical Zionist hack who talks about "unremitting" German antisemitism. If so, just how was German Jewry emancipated in the l9th century?
Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran What are they waiting for? What is going to be different in the near future that will make it possible or 'necessary' to attack?
Antifa, you are right. We've got to follow the capitalist imperialist dream wherever it may lead.
Russian Roulette: A Bipartisan Consensus for Disaster What in the hell are you talking about? Your first post is still up there. I'm looking at it right now. I went in "under the hood" of the site on the technical side just to confirm it's still there. You do understand how comments work, don't you? Go ...
Russian Roulette: A Bipartisan Consensus for Disaster BTW Chris,
I'm impressed. You simply took down my first post. I didn't use any foul language and yet you appear to be unables to tolerate any serious disagreement.I think it was complacent and I think it is lamentable that you both neglected to giv...
Russian Roulette: A Bipartisan Consensus for Disaster Chirs,
"You do understand that the Cohen article refers to America's dealings with Russia AFTER the collapse of the Soviet Union -- the political entity which oppressed the now free and sovereign East European nations to which you refer, don't you?[...
Elimination Round: Hurtling Down History's Dark Roads I wonder to what degree the "coarsening of Israeli political culture" might be an export of our own racist ghetto wars in the likes of Bed-Stuy and Dorchester.
Come to think of it, didn't the "Stern Gang" owe some of its political refinement ...
Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran And, oh, you're right about Iran not having engaged in military aggression against another nation-state, but haven't they been behind terrorist attacks abroad? Not to mention domestic repression at home. I am not disputing your opposition to an attac...
Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran Chris,
Given the irrational religiosity of Bush, I can see a fundamentalist Christian like Bush carrying out an attack regardless of rational concerns. After all, this is a supposed "war for civilization", right? And Bush is the allegedly divinely i...
Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran Andrew Bacevich writes in the July 1 2008 Boston Globe:
[quote]By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the elec...
Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran Ever since North Korea blew up that nuke they went from being part of the 'Axis of Evil' (God, our president is retarded) to being our bestest buds.
I can't imagine why Iran would want to follow suit...
Three-Stomp Blues: Vets Tell True Stories of the Terror War
Monday, 03 March 2008
I. Absence of Evidence There are many things that the American people are forbidden to know by the immensely profitable organizations that control the dispensing of information in the United States. Some things will simply not be reported, others will be distorted or sugar-coated or shellacked with fabrications until they bear only the most tangential connection to the actual events being "reported."
One of the most forbidden topics of all, of course, is the savage reality of the conflicts being fought in the name of the so-called "War on Terror." This global war – launched solely to advance a long-held, openly acknowledged militarist agenda of global domination by an authoritarian, lawless elite – has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, while corrupting and brutalizing the soldiers ordered, under knowingly false pretenses, to carry out the Dominators' sinister agenda. But the full story – and full force – of the crimes being committed every day in America's name, by American forces, at the command of America's leaders, are hidden from the American public by the American media. It is entirely possible to live your entire life as an active, engaged member of American society, diligently keeping up with the latest news from the most respectable sources, and never once have to confront this horrifying truth. The information-dispensers will not provide it for you; you have to seek it out yourself.
Fortunately, British newspapers still retain vestiges of a more active, unblinking journalism. (Although these remnants are fast disappearing, as Nick Davies notes in his grim but accurate survey of the UK press, Flat Earth News.) This week the Sunday Times gave a display of this dying art, in a remarkable report about the Iraq Veterans Against the War, and their preparations for another "Winter Soldier" gathering next week, echoing the landmark 1971 conference of disillusioned Vietnam Veterans. As the paper notes, veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan will hold a four-day conference in Washington, beginning on March 13, where they "will testify about their experiences….[and] present photographs and videos, recorded with mobile phones and digital cameras, to back up their allegations – of brutality, torture and murder."
The Sunday Times, of course, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, among many other unsavory peddlers of bellicose tripe. And the paper has long been a staunch supporter of the Iraq War. But Murdoch has always kept a much lighter hand on his Times properties, recognizing that their lofty reputation is part of the "brand value," and allowing vestiges of the professional integrity that he perverts elsewhere to linger on at these venerable institutions. And so this deeply conservative, pro-war paper was able to go to the United States and dig up home truths that the "Homeland" media would never touch.
II. "All I Saw Were Civilians" The atrocities began in Iraq at the very start, from the first days and hours when the "mission" was being "accomplished" to a chorus of hosannas from the ex-generals and the war-profiteering commentators like Richard Perle brought in by the networks to provide "expert" analysis of the victorious campaign:
Jason Washburn…fought in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 where, he says, he met little resistance. Most people were surrendering. "There were massive amounts of artillery strikes before we even invaded. We saw the results of that. Streets full of bodies – women and children – body parts, extremely indiscriminate. I’m talking about rolling through villages here, not military encampments."
He was told there was a military structure in one village. “I didn’t see it. I didn’t see any army uniforms. Or weapons. All I saw were civilians.”
Two years later – now on his third tour in Iraq, banging down doors and terrifying families in midnight "home raids" – Washburn was in Haditha the day that a group of his fellow Marines massacred 24 civilians. Washburn wasn't at the site, but he knew many of the men who took part.
"I have a lot of feelings about this incident," [Washburn said.] "A friend of mine from my first two tours was in that squad. He was the guy they gave immunity to to testify against the squad leader. The people on the ground are looking at serious prison time. Like life. The people who were giving orders were only relieved of command. And I don’t think that’s right."
Washburn says Haditha was not an isolated incident. "It’s the one that just happened to be uncovered."
And how do these orders for "irregular" action get conveyed? Through what veteran Perry O'Brien called "the three-stomp signal," which commanders use to differentiate between "the book way" and the "real way" they want things done.
"If someone is giving a briefing and they stomp their foot three times after what they are saying, it means 'disregard what I just said,''" [Perry said.]. "For instance, 'Make every effort to avoid civilian property damage,' stomp stomp stomp – [means] ignore that. The idea is that when you get back [from combat], anything that you did the book way can be spoken about – but not what was done the real way."
It isn’t just between the book way and the real way, he says; it’s become between the honourable way and the immoral way…..“The book way was we treat everyone the same…” Perry smiles and taps his foot three times. “You are ordered to do things that are clear violations of our conscience and what we know to be moral. It’s not even what’s prescribed by the Geneva conventions. It’s what every human being knows to be right and wrong."
For example, in Afghanistan, O'Brien witnessed the despoiling of corpses after wounded Afghans civilians died on the operating table after treatment by a MASH unit:
Rather than prepare the corpse for the family, O’Brien witnessed the surgeons and the medics use the body to practise on. "One doctor said, 'Come up and feel his heart! This is what a heart feels like.'"
Half the platoon, if not more, participated. Daniel Paulsen, 27, was there and corroborates this story. There are photographs as well. Someone had grabbed O’Brien’s digital camera and taken photographs of the heart and the medics walking around and poking it. These photographs were taken for fun. Eventually the chest of the corpse was closed up.
"It was a total violation of our medical oath to use a corpse for medical training," says O’Brien. "What’s particularly terrible is that these were all doctors that had practices back home – they were familiar with the law and the Hippocratic oath. There was such a huge disconnect between the way they treated Afghans and the way they treated American patients. When Americans died, the corpses became these sacred objects that were treated with tremendous care. There was this solemn funerary attitude around them. When an Afghan died, it was [as if they were] treating them like they weren’t human."
O'Brien is on the verification team vetting testimony for the conference – a process so rigorous that anyone caught" fabricating their experience or pretending to be a veteran will be handed over to the authorities and charged with violating the Stolen Valor Act, a law signed by President Bush in 2006." O'Brien says that one of the most common atrocity orders he is hearing about from confirmed testimony is "the shovel order."
"Anyone carrying a shovel or any sort of implement that could be used to bury an IED could be considered a target," he says. "After dark, you can shoot anyone who is outside. Or anyone who puts anything on the side of the road can be considered a target. You won’t find it in writing, but it’s an order indicated to soldiers."
Logan Laturi, an Army forward observer in Iraq, said that soldiers were given a green-light for this practice by a commander at a training base back in the States:
Laituri was in Fort Irwin, California in May 2006 during a pep talk at the National Training Center. He alleges that a commander made a speech to his company, and that he "made it clear to us that if an innocent person was shot he would stage a scene to protect us." The explicit message was: "We would make sure there was a weapon found at the scene." ….In 2007, [that] officer was relieved of his command after a death on June 23 last year in the vicinity of Kirkuk. He is not currently a suspect and was never charged – but two soldiers who were under his command have been charged with premeditated murder.
Last month a top army sniper testified in military court – under immunity – that he had ordered a subordinate to kill an unarmed Iraqi man, then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to back up a false claim of returned fire.
The Sunday Times story, aptly titled, "Patriot Missiles," has much more, and is well worth reading in full. Especially as it is almost impossible to conceive that such a story – 4,000 words on remorseful American soldiers talking about the atrocities they have seen or committed – will ever appear in a U.S. newspaper. The Iraq Veterans Against the War will be lucky if their entire four-day conference gets a thousand words – in total – from American "papers of record" like the New York Times and Washington Post. Indeed, it is imminently conceivable that it could pass without a single mention at all.
But the truths they tell will not disappear – just as the blowback from all this crime and moral chaos will not be deflected simply by ignoring it or wishing it away. ***
There is consistency here in the national disregard of veterans. People who can be enticed to enlist in the regular military ground forces, and those who have enlisted in their part-time components, have been treated as pawns in the war racket, to be sent ill-equipped repeatedly to kill foreign people opposed to US military actions on their soil. They are treated with no more respect when they are somehow able to leave the ranks. Cannon fodder, or ex-cannon fodder, they are nothing but chattel to a rapacious government.
Killing civilians in war is nothing new to the US. The only difference now is that US ground forces are doing more of it and US air forces less. It's a non-story to Americans (unfortunately) because the victims are foreigners. Whether they be Japanese, German, Korean, Afghani or Iraqi makes no difference. For all our "morality" imparted by our schools and churches that's where we are as a nation. The government relies on Americans' callousness toward foreigners to do its dirty deeds; they couldn't do them otherwise.
The "papers of record" aren't going to remind Americans of their immorality -- it's bad for advertising, which is their principal financial support. Better to report about how GIs saved an Iraqi dog. That's a real human interest story that will sell papers to people who will be in a good mood to buy the wares advertised therein.
As I started to write my own political blog, trying to explain to myself (and others who deign to read my stuff) how stuff REALLY works, I hit upon these small, unknown blogs, whom very few people read.
The real gems lost in a sea of shit.
It is worth it to hop onto a strange blog and discover a genius at work.
Yes, Americans see foreigners as cardboard figures who should react the way we want them to. Therefore, our leaders "supposed" that the Iraqis would throw flowers at us when our troops overthrew Hussein and destroyed their infrastructure. Of course, we know from "Red Dawn" that patriotic Americans would resist an occupying foreign force, however, we are too egocentric as a people to imagine that foreigners would likewise resist us when we are the ones who are the foreign occupiers. What a surprise! "You've got to love us, folks, because we are Americans!"
There is no doubt that after every war, our US veterans have been terribly mistreated. So when you see a homeless Vet out on the street who has lost an arm or a leg and paid the ultimate price, please reassure them by a comforting hand and the warm heart of wisdom that is sorely missing from this Bush administration’s agenda. Remember these Vets are our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. They never asked for this.
The beating heart of wisdom shines on those who know the truth about Iraq. Chris has done, and continues to do a terrific job of disclosing the absolute horrors of what this terrible Bush administration has done to it’s own citizens and to the Iraqi people. They never asked for this.
Many instances of what O'Brien describes (as well as unnecessary and invasive procedures during futile resucitation attempts) occur in American teaching hospitals every day.
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