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...
Outer Darkness: The Gulag Cancer Grows, State Terror Intensifies
Saturday, 24 May 2008
I. The United States government is holding some 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to "harsh interrogation techniques" (to use the prim locution for "torture" used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).
Many of these captives are stuffed into holding pens in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, which is still in operations despite the momentary torture-photo scandal of 2004 -- and despite Bush's earnest promise to Iraqis to tear down that hated symbol of Saddam's torture. Other captives are crammed into the holds of prison ships floating around the world. Still others languish in the torture chambers of the Bush Administration's Terror War allies -- despotisms, tyrannies, brutal kingdoms -- having been "renditioned" there by American agents, sometimes after being kidnapped, or sold into captivity by bounty hunters, or snatched up in mass sweeps or random grabs or simply for having the wrong name, the wrong face, the wrong color, the wrong religion.
In any civilized country, such facts would provoke banner headlines, marathon television debates, investigations, prosecutions and widespread public revulsion. It might have done so even in the United States not all that long ago. But the most recent encapsulation of these horrors -- from Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, speaking earlier this week on Democracy Now -- has caused scarcely a ripple. Even that is putting it too strongly; in the mainstream media, the news has been greeted with the usual iron curtain of silence.
And this even though Stafford -- who has served as the lawyer for more than 50 prisoners at Guantanamo (ironically, one of the few places in the American gulag where captives now have limited access to very circumscribed legal help) -- offers a genuine revelation in his interview, one that cries out for more investigation from, say, a network or newspaper with large-scale resources. And that is the fact that the Bush Administration is shipping captive from different parts of the world to Iraq, where they are beyond the scrutiny of the press -- or those pesky attorneys with their silly concerns about the rule of law:
Well you know, one thing that my charity, Reprieve, out of London, we've been trying to do is track down the real ghost prisoners in this process. And if you look at Guantanamo Bay, 270, roughly, as you mentioned, prisoners in Guantanamo, but according to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they're in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there's a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn't get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy—I mean the media—and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can't get any sort of legal rights.
And when you look around the world, there's a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we've identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we've got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there's a bunch of proxy prisons—Morocco, Egypt and Jordan—where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you'd like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.
As Smith rightly notes, the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay -- for all its iconic status -- is actually an effective diversion from the large-scale atrocities going on across the Bush Gulag. (And the Bush Administration is trying to turn into an even greater diversion, with show trials of several Gitmo inmates scheduled for the height of the presidential campaign -- although, again, those law-and-order whiners keep getting in the way, most recently forcing a postponement of the first show trial from its intended June start date.) The most extensive -- and most secretive -- aspects of the Gulag are taking place in the outer darkness, in furtive hidey-holes in Iraq and elsewhere.
II. Iraq continues to be the heart of this darkness, the worm of war crime that corrupts all. The reality of the war continues to be woefully underreported – but at least some glimpses of this particular quadrant of the imperium's hell do make it into the papers. For example, the Washington Post reports – on page 10 – on the "surge" in U.S. airstrikes on the heavily-populated civilian precincts of Sadr City in Baghdad, and all around Iraq. As you read the excerpts, remember that there is no reason for American forces to be in Iraq at all, that they were sent there under false pretenses to carry out an act of aggression on behalf of predatory elites who have enriched themselves and their cronies on the blood money of the war:
From an Apache helicopter, Capt. Ben Katzenberger's battlefield resembles a vast mosaic of tiny brown boxes. "The city looks like a bucket of Legos dumped out on the ground," the 26-year-old pilot said. "It's brown Legos, no color. It's really dense and hard to pick things out because everything looks the same."
He uses a powerful lens to zoom in on tiny silhouettes, trying to identify people with "hostile intent" among hundreds of ordinary citizens in Baghdad. In recent weeks, Katzenberger and other pilots have dramatically increased their use of helicopter-fired missiles against enemy fighters, often in densely populated areas. Since late March, the military has fired more than 200 Hellfire missiles in the capital, compared with just six missiles fired in the previous three months.
The military says the tactic has saved the lives of ground troops and prevented attacks, but the strikes have also killed and wounded civilians, provoking criticism from Iraqis.
On Wednesday, eight people, including two children, were killed when a U.S. helicopter opened fire on a group of Iraqis traveling to a U.S. detention center to greet a man who was being released from custody, Iraqi officials said….
"It's not Hollywood and it's not 110 percent perfect," said Col. Timothy J. Edens, the commander of the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, of the accuracy of his unit's strikes. "It is as precise as very hardworking soldiers and commanders can make it. These criminals do not operate in a clean battle space. It is occupied by civilians, law-abiding Iraqis."
Those civilians include people like Zahara Fadhil, a 10-year-old girl with a tiny frame and long brown hair. Relatives said she was wounded by a missile on April 20 at approximately 8 p.m. in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City. The U.S. military said it fired a Hellfire missile in Zahara's neighborhood at that time, targeting men who were seen loading rockets into a sedan.
Her face drained of color and her legs scarred by shrapnel, Zahara spoke haltingly when asked what she thought of U.S. troops.
"They kill people," she said. Lying in bed, she gasped for air before continuing. "They should leave Iraq now."
Iraqi police said on Thursday a U.S. helicopter airstrike killed eight civilians, including two children, but U.S. forces said the six adults killed were militants suspected of links to a bombing network…
Colonel Mudhher al-Qaisi, police chief in the town of Baiji, north of the capital, said a U.S. helicopter fired at a group of shepherds in a vehicle in a farming area on Wednesday night. "This is a criminal act. It will make the relations between Iraqi citizens and the U.S. forces tense. This will negatively affect security improvements," Qaisi told Reuters.
The U.S. military said the incident happened when American soldiers, hunting members of a bombing network, tried to detain the occupants of a vehicle. "Coalition forces engaged the target vehicle's occupants, killing five terrorists, after the terrorists exhibited hostile intent and failed to comply with instructions to surrender. Two children in the vehicle were also killed," it said….
Reuters pictures showed relatives of the dead standing beside corpses covered by white sheets outside a mosque in Baiji, an oil refining town 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad. "There were two boys, one was eight and the other was 11," said police Major Ahmed Hussein. United Nations officials have expressed concern at the number of civilians killed in airstrikes in Iraq…
The Washington Post continues:
Hassan Ali Kreidy, 54, a barber in Sadr City, felt the power of the Apaches' missiles on April 28 when one ravaged his shop and a handful of other businesses. The apparent target of a strike was a car parked in front, he said.
"What can you say? We are all helpless," said Ahmed Abdul Rahim, who owns a cellphone store that was also damaged. "What have we done to deserve this? Our stores are now in danger. None of us are safe here."
At the Martyr Sadr Hospital late last month, several patients said they were wounded in U.S. airstrikes. Their accounts could not be corroborated; some may have been wounded by errant rockets fired by militiamen. Hussein Amane Kareem al-Obeidi, 37, a day laborer, lay with a bloody tube sticking out of his right nostril and two others draining fluid from his stomach. They were attached to sacks lying on a filthy floor. One was filled with urine, the other with blood. He said he was at home on May 1 when a missile landed nearby, damaging nine homes. His mother, standing at his bedside, cursed the U.S. military.
"They are occupiers and they consider whoever is in the city to be an enemy to them!" she said. "They came for the destruction of the country and this is what they are doing."
In such cases, American officials point to the principle of "force protection;" a large proportion of airstrikes are attributed to helping out ground forces under fire. And of course there is always the goal of "killing terrorists." But again, we must stress this point: none of those American forces should be in Iraq, putting their own and others' lives in danger.
And we should also note here what we've said often before: under the plans offered by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for partial "withdrawals" of "combat troops" from Iraq – while leaving an unspecified number of forces in the conquered land for "counterterrorism operations," "training Iraqi security forces" and "force protection" for American personnel and assets remaining in Iraq – these kinds of air raids on civilian areas will inevitably increase, with more innocent deaths as a result.
Consider too the tragic warping of young minds thrust into the role of imperial enforcers in a criminal action:
Katzenberger, of Kansas City, Mo., fired his first missiles last month. Arriving in Iraq last winter on his first deployment was nerve-wracking, he said. "You've been building up for this for three years and now you're going to get to do what you were trained to do," he said. "You get this bit of excited rush feeling, like right before you get out of the locker room before a game. We got in the helicopter and started flying up and you start looking down and you're like -- wow. I'm in Iraq now. This isn't back in Texas where we were just training. People down there are going to try to shoot me. This is for real. Game on."
….Firing his first missile in Baghdad was sobering. "I know I can do this," he told himself. The target was in sight and permission from ground commanders had been granted. "I've done this before. But you better not screw this up. If you mess up, people get hurt."
Katzenberger said pilots adhere to strict rules of engagement. They occasionally get reports of what happened on the ground after they fire the missiles. After that, "we never hear about it again," he said. "It leaves you a little sense of wondering. You kind of get that detached feeling."
"You get that detached feeling." Here we see the agonizing spectacle of a young man deadening his soul, trying his best to stifle his humanity --- "I know I can do this" – so that he can kill another human being, somewhere down there in the jumble of brown Legos, "where everything looks the same."
How crime compounds on crime in this nightmare Terror War. Young Americans twist their souls in knots in order to kill and maim – and torture -- their fellow creatures, all to gorge the bestial urges of a gang of gilded thugs for more power, more loot, more blood to prove their apish dominance.
And still it goes on. And still none of our "leaders" will rise up and use the powers given to them by the Constitution to bring this torment of gulags and aggressive war to an end. And still the people sit in their homes (those who still have them, that is) and do nothing, raise no objections, bring no pressure to bear, make no outcry against the crimes being done in their name. ***
Chris, You are a brilliant thinker, a talented writer and a hopeless romantic too. The last infuriates me.
""You get that detached feeling." Here we see the agonizing spectacle of a young man deadening his soul, trying his best to stifle his humanity --- "I know I can do this" – so that he can kill another human being, somewhere down there in the jumble of brown Legos, "where everything looks the same.""
This man hasn't had to "deaden" his soul. He hasn't tried his best to "stifle his humanity". He joined the forces long after the illegal invasion of Iraq began, presumably after completing university. He is a well-educated volunteer who chose to become a helicopter pilot, knowing full well he would be sent to an Arab country where he could missle-murder arabs with impunity, while never even getting his palms soiled.
OneworldGoverningRulingElites make Zombies so that war can happen and continue on into the future since it is a brain synapse in the collective unconscious of our species.
My father was one of those zombies. He was a Huey Helicopter pilot and he set-up the secret service bases across Thailand for the IndoChina Wars during the 1960s.
Now upon flying for the CIA, Air America, during the latter 1960s and into the 1970s, he became disgusted with how "mercenary" war had become.
After suffering a couple of massive coronary attacks and his health suffering immensely from his POW days of WWII - yes he was shot down at age 22, and remained a POW (tortured) for the remainder of the war in Germany where he was shot down during his first flight over - he did not live out his winter years in a state of peace.
A study has finally been concluded and it proves that in military families the homicide rate for children is higher than in "ordinary" families.
As soon as someone decides to become a military government mule they have given up the right to an imagination and therefore they are a ZOMBIE.
Detachment is a zombie tactic since it is this state of brain dead sub-human that must be programmed in order for a once upon a time sane human to harm their own.
My father's mother said about him when he returned from WWII: "He was damaged goods." My mother when she passed last year said: "WWII was the war to end all wars."
Until a 51% majority of human beings realize in the collective unconscious -- a military of zombies and wars created by OGRES are nightmares sold as a dreams and branded as life -- we are doomed to remain ignorant in the conscious choices of our "super conscious."
And so we get more and more of the educated helicopter pilot who can't see that he is a murderer and worse, nothing more than a zombie for OGRES who are cannibals dressed up in suits of the 21st Century.
Quite the roundup, Chris. I gotta agree with arthurdecco above, though. These kids that are over there now are stone-cold killers, and their feelings should be last on anyone's list of concerns. I just blogged on this topic the other day here: http://www.nostate.com/77/fuck-the-troops/
It's poverty and economic hopelessness that drives many to volunteer, the children of the poor & working poor, coming from the cannon-fodder classes that the neoc***s love to decimate, and these people tend to be "super" patriots, steeped in the jingoistic flag-waving lockstep bullshit mythology about freedom and democracy, and "defending" the Merkun way of life, from bith. The point made is how this demonic junta is destroying our people too, because the troops weren't all born stone-cold killers, they had to be warped into that. And as the statistics show us, tens of thousands are returning as PTSD haunted, suicidal wrecks, precisely because they really aren't equal to the atrocities they're ordered commit once deployed.
And everything done by them, and this nation,to Iraq and it's helpless people, is a war crime, a crime against humanity, because as we all keep saying, they shouldn't be there at all. That they were duped by lies into joining up doesn't change that.
I have no empathy for someone who goes over there to "serve his(her) country" and I don't really care, to be honest, about the fact that the US Military pulls disproportionately from poor people. It's not a secret what the US Military does: travel to other nations, and kill people. That's what they do. They kill. They murder. It's only not called "murder" because of the excuse of "war."
Those who enlist willingly are fools. Draftees are another matter but how heavily used is the draft these days?
If you're poor, you have a lot of other options besides joining the US Military.
And on top of that there are moral choices: ordered to "clear" a house of Iraqis, what do you do?
Ordered to shoot anyone who moves, what do you do?
Only a god-damned fool would be in that situation. And I'm not fond of giving fools their due. Just because they're ignorant fools from poverty-stricken backgrounds doens't make them Noble Fools. They're as guilty as Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney IMO.
We all make choices. We all must stand by our choices, and therefore we must choose wisely.
Okay - 200 Hellfire missles fired from March through May according to WaPo, a major uptick in the air campaign to coincide with the increased detention sweeps through Sadr City as the surge winds down. Some Hellfires from Apache helicopters, some from Predator drones.
Someone please calculate the economic cost, per Hellfire, of this use of hi tech weaponry against a sniper or a guy planting an IED. Then let's do an accurate body count to calculate the human cost.
Capt. Ben Katzenberger, the pilot who trained for three years for this mission before starting his first tour of duty in occupied Iraq tells the reporter "But you better not screw this up. If you mess up, people get hurt." Col. Edens, his unit commander, is quoted assuring us stateside civilian shock and awe afficianados "It's not Hollywood and it's not 110% perfect."
No shit. And when you don't mess up, people get hurt.
Although I was drafted into the Army infantry during the Vietnam era, I tend to agree with Evan Rhood's stark moral judgment: if you volunteer for today's military, you know you're training for today's imperial missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other, less publicized combat zones sprouting up in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in the global war on terror. The first waves of reserves that were activated and sent could validly claim they never dreamed they would be called upon for this. But after five years, there ain't no excuses now.
I quibble only with Evan's equation that "They're as guilty as Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney IMO." Not quite. Capone was still more culpable than his thug underlings, and those who were merely aiders and abettors.
Bill, I thank you for agreeing with me where you did. Where you disagree is a quarrel of degree, and I have noted your inclination to find degrees of guilt where they don't really exist.
You like to find Big Bad Men who are Supremely Bad because that makes you feel like you got a Kingpin when you get them. The sad truth is that EVERY PERSON INVOLVED is equally culpable. EVERYONE.
There are no degrees of guilt. If you further murder-for-empire, you are culpable. End of story.
Your perspective is a product of American Liberalism, Bill. You and other Liberals try to parse things in a pseudo-intellectual fashion, and you try desperately to blame One Big Kingpin for the acts of underlings.
It really boils down to moral choices, Bill.
I'd love to hear you extrapolate the argument further, to explain how Private Joe Sixpack is LESS guilty than Don Rumsfeld when Pvt Sixpack is the one killing innocent Iraqis, and Rumsfeld is just sitting in an office somewhere.
Grandma Jefferson said: "It's poverty and economic hopelessness that drives many to volunteer, the children of the poor & working poor, coming from the cannon-fodder classes that the neoc***s love to decimate..."
With all due respect, this helicopter pilot, Katzenberger, of Kansas City, Mo., wasn't poor and economically hopeless when he joined the war machine, GJ.
They don't let poor people learn how to fly multi-million dollar penis replacements that kill people.
(and Mr. Floyd, surely you can crack back at me with something more effective than that tepid crack about the quality of an American edumacation. wink)
"There are no degrees of guilt. If you further murder-for-empire, you are culpable. End of story."
Evan, I think this is a bit too broad. You further murder-for-empire by simply paying your taxes, but I don't think you'd assign equal culpability to your average taxpayer and, say, Cheney. Or would you?
Also, regarding the moral agency of your typical troop, for me I think it sort of depends on whether I'm inclined to call this prevalent inhuman/belligerent/authoritarian personality trait a mental disease that in some ways overshadows or debilitates intellectual choice. And I haven't decided yet. Say it is... should that carry any weight, regardless?
I represent two clients at Guantanamo. Some time in the next five weeks the supreme court will rule on the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act...that is the law that took away the Writ of Habeas Corpus for the gitmo detainees and just about anyone else the executive declares is an "enemy combatant." I am sharing the article I just wrote for In These Times about how one Bush lawyer... now a professor at Columbia law school managed to keep my client at gitmo for now more than six years...even though he was found not to be an enemy... http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3692/a_kinder_gentler_torture/
We can pray for peace and it mean something for mankind. Thoughts change basic structure ans become material through good works. This school ground we call earth could be a better place without profiting on or fellow man pain. Thank you for all you do. Keith Richard Radford Jr.
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