Barack Obama has now declared -- on Fox News, no less -- that George W. Bush's escalation of the flagrant war crime in Iraq has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." He also proclaimed his "absolute" belief in the "War on Terror," and pledged, once again, "never to take a military option off the table" (not even the nuclear option) against the "major threat" of Iran.
In short, he continued his relentless campaign to purge himself of any of that weak-sister "anti-war" taint that got attached to him in the early days of his campaign -- which was, of course, responsible for his phenomenal rise in the first place. He rode that wave to national prominence -- trading on the desperate hopes of millions of Americans that the ungodly criminal nightmare in Iraq might finally end -- but it was obvious long ago that he was never going to dance with the ones that brung him. Once it was clear that he might really make it all the way to the top of the greasy pole, he began a dogged campaign to prove to our ruling elite that he would be a "safe pair of hands" for the imperial enterprise.
We've seen this in, among other things, the shameful FISA vote, the bellicose threats to launch incursions into Pakistan (a policy which the Bush Administration is already implementing, with the usual deadly results for civilians), the ritual and repeated assertions of his willingness to attack Iran, and the foolhardy promise to shepherd Georgia's entry into NATO -- a mirror-image of Dick Cheney's stance, and a policy guaranteed to ratchet up tensions with Russia and quite possibly spark not only a new Cold War but a hot war of horrendous proportions if Georgia pulls its future NATO treaty partners into another conflict with Moscow.
But it is Obama's surrender on the Iraq War front -- or rather, the anti-Iraq War front -- that is most striking, and most disheartening. On the very night that John McCain was putting the "success" of the surge at the center of his campaign, Obama was openly, cravenly laying down one of his chief weapons at the feet of Bill O'Reilly. Obama's cheerleading for the surge -- "beyond our wildest dreams!" -- surpassed anything that McCain himself has claimed for the escalation.
Obama also emphasized the obscene and morally depraved position that has become the Democrat's standard line on Iraq: that the lazy, no-good Iraqis "still haven't taken responsibility" for running "their own country." The arrogance and inhumanity of this position is staggering, almost indescribable. The United States of America invaded Iraq, destroyed its society, slaughtered its citizens, drove millions from their homes, occupied the country and made itself the ultimate master and arbiter of the conquered land -- but still the Iraqis are condemned for "not taking responsibility for their own country."
Not a single Iraqi attacked America. Not one. America's action has killed more than a million Iraqis. But it is the Iraqis who are now "responsible."
Not only has Obama validated McCain's position on the surge, but his and the Democrats' stance on the Iraqis' "responsibility" also completely buys into the Bush Faction's lie that the "government" of Iraq -- installed at the point of foreign guns, with a "constitution" based upon the arbitrary directives of an occupying power -- is somehow legitimate. This stance too validates the "success" of the entire war: "Hey, they've got a legitimate government there now, so they need to take responsibility for their own country."
This bears repeating: the Democrats' position on Iraq fully accepts -- and even celebrates -- the Bush Administration's fundamental claims for the war. The war has established a legitimate, democratic government in Iraq, Bush and the Democrats both say. The "surge" has succeeded "beyond our wildest dreams" in "securing" Iraq, Bush and the Democrats both say. When "conditions on the ground" are right, America should withdraw its "combat troops" from Iraq, leaving behind an unspecified number of troops for training Iraqi security forces, conducting counterterrorism operations and providing security for other American personnel and reconstruction projects, Bush and the Democrats both say.
Where then is the actual difference -- the evidence for genuine "change" -- between these two positions? While the Democrats will occasionally assert that instigating the war was a "mistake" -- because we should have been fighting more wars elsewhere -- they steadfastly refuse to denounce it as an illegitimate and criminal action. And, as we have seen, they agree almost entirely with Bush on the results that the war has produced. The rhetoric is different, of course, and each side denounces the other in the usual partisan bickering -- but the fundamental agreement is undeniable.
And now Obama has made it explicit: a success "beyond our wildest dreams."
II. But let's put the disturbing implications of Obama's stance aside for a moment, and deal with the facts of his statement. Is the surge really a "success"?
Well, yes, it is. The "surge" -- which in addition to an influx of troops included the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, the walled ghettoization of vast swathes of the city, and the arming and funding of violent sectarian militias across the land -- certainly succeeded in extending the duration of the murder, suffering and chaos engendered by America's armed and belligerent presence in Iraq.
So it is indeed a great "success" ... in the same way that, say, Albert Speer's miraculous efforts to keep the Nazi war machine going from 1943 to 1945 -- resulting in the deaths of millions of people, including the worst ravages of the Holocaust -- was a "success."
I. Jim Lobe at Antiwar.com brings fresh news of what has become, proportionately, the most savage, brutal and ruinous front in the global campaign of military aggression known as the "War on Terror": Somalia.
We have been tracking the situation in Somalia here since American military and security forces and their Ethiopian proxies invaded the country in December 2006, in a "regime change" operation to overthrow the first quasi-stable government Somalia had seen in 15 years. As we noted earlier this year:
Not a word has been said in the presidential campaign about this ongoing atrocity, this open culpability in yet another vast war crime. Naturally one doesn't expect any comment or concern from John McCain, whose robotic neo-connism can only applaud this violent projection of American dominance in yet another Muslim land. (As neoconnist Michael Ledeen once famously proclaimed: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." This is about as perfect an encapsulation of the mindset of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment as can be imagined. For another example, see the "liberal" Thomas Friedman here.)
But neither has there been a single criticism or condemnation -- or even a mention -- of the murderous operation in Somalia by the Democratic candidate: a man whose own father was a black African Muslim like those being slaughtered with American backing today. Of course, Barack Obama has taken some pains to distance himself from the African side of his heritage -- perhaps understandable in a country where his own running matebrags about being from a "slave state" and not long ago expressed wonderment at the fact that an African-American politician (in fact, Obama himself!) could be so well-spoken and even "clean." And it goes without saying that an aspiring leader of the Terror War would want to renounce even more firmly any association with his Islamic background. Still, you would think that sheer partisan self-interest alone would entice the Democrats to bring up the subject of Somalia, pointing to it as yet enough botched and bloody catastrophe of Bush's foreign policy.
Then again, perhaps they know there is no political mileage in the issue. After all, who cares? No Americans have died in the operation (although some Americans were "rendered" to Ethiopia's notoriously draconian prisons). And after the initial barrage of refugee bombing and village destroying, America's direct involvement has been limited to the occasional lobbing of missiles into civilian homes -- and whatever secret missions are being carried out by U.S. covert operators and the death squads that clean up after them. And as the entire sordid enterprise has long been ignored by the mainstream media -- except for a rare story now and then, almost always shorn of any context or mention of America's instrumental role in the war -- it would require a great deal of background and explanation to make a denunciation of U.S. policy in Somalia comprehensible to a deliberately misinformed and blithely unconcerned American electorate. Who has time for that kind of boring stuff, when there are bumper stickers and sound bites to propagate?
There's also one other little point: the hearty he-man Terror Warriors at the top of the Democratic ticket obviously support America's actions in Somalia. If they did not, they would have condemned them long ago.
II. Lobe reports on a major new study that confirms what we have been saying here for months: the American-backed "regime change" in Somalia has created one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters -- and has radicalized much of the ruined country, incubating the very extremism and terrorism that the invasion was ostensibly -- ostensibly --designed to quash.
(The "War on Terror" has created so many vast new fertile fields for extremism and terrorism on all its fronts that a cynic might be forgiven for suspecting that the creation of more terrorism is, in fact, one of its principal aims. After all, who have been the chief beneficiaries of modern terrorism? Those who have reaped immeasurable riches and vastly augmented authoritarian power from "counter-terrorism." If the "War on Terrorism" had not arisen -- just in time to replace the Cold War -- something else would have had to been invented to keep the loot and power flowing to (and from) the war machine. Of course, if we are sliding into a new Cold War with resurgent Russia and ever-burgeoning China, then we may see the War on Terrorism start to diminish in importance. But for now, terror is still trumps in the loot-and-power game.)
Lobe points us to a report issued this week by Enough, a human rights group created by a cooperative effort between the International Crisis Group and the Center for American Progress. Written by Ken Menkhaus, a leading American expert on the region, the report -- "Somalia: A Country in Peril, a Policy Crisis" -- presents the stark reality of this Terror War atrocity:
Over the past 18 months, Somalia has descended into terrible levels of displacement and humanitarian need, armed conflict and assassinations, political meltdown, radicalization, and virulent anti-Americanism. Whereas in the past the country’s endemic political violence—whether Islamist, clan-based, factional, or criminal in nature—was local and regional in scope, it is now taking on global significance....Indeed, the situation in Somalia today exceeds the worst-case scenarios conjured up by regional analysts when they first contemplated the possible impact of an Ethiopian military occupation.
The whole world absent-mindedly turns its back on these crimes; the victims have reached the extremity of their disgrace: they are a bore. – Albert Camus, The Fastidious Assassins.
The "War on Terror" is a brutal and criminal enterprise launched by George W. Bush and fully supported by John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom have pledged not only to continue its deadly operations but to expand them to new killing fields. Iran, Pakistan, Russia's "soft underbelly" in the Caucasus – these and other regions have been moved into the cross-hairs of the voracious war machine that drives the foreign policy of both parties. And of course, the countless "covert ops" carried out by the plethora of secret armies and agents of Washington's hydra-headed "security organs" will likewise continue unabated. Three nations have already been destroyed (or driven into further ruin) by the Terror War: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. More than a million innocent people have been murdered, either by direct military action by American forces and Washington's various proxy armies and hired killers, or indirectly, in the savage internal conflicts spawned by the vast state terror of invasion and occupation. A million people slaughtered, millions more left dispossessed, orphaned, suffering, grieving, lost: these are monstrous crimes on a scale that make the depredations of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden look like child's play.
Yet almost the entire American political and media establishments – and most of the public as well – approve, even applaud this monstrous engine of depravity, though they may disagree on a few tactics or targets here and there in the overall operation. Despite the fact that the corridors of power in Washington are flooded with the viscera of disemboweled children – murdered in the name of every American – this campaign season is just "business as usual," the same old horse race, the same fevered attention to polls, veep picks, gossip and posturing, to the exclusion of all else. "Hey, get those guts off my Guccis; we're trying to shoot a commercial here!"
It is an extraordinary situation. Those who lived in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia might find it familiar: the broad acceptance of a system of barbarous criminality as a normal state of affairs, the ordinary – even laudable – circumstances of life in which one simply gets on with things. The victims – the boring victims – whose blood and anguish feed the system are always somewhere else: in a camp, a secret prison, some faraway land.
We live in despairing times. And the presidential campaign – which has turned many "dissidents" into fierce partisans of political forces that will, by their own proud admission, continue to feed the Terror War machine that has dishonored and degraded us all – only deepens the despair.
But despair is a condition, not a response. The only worthwhile response to our historical moment, it seems to me, is rebellion, in the profound sense in which Camus uses the term: a highly individual act which nonetheless expresses a universal value – our common humanity and the inviolability and integrity of every human being. Rebellion is the adamant – and forever flawed and conflicted – resistance to everything that threatens this integrity.
What is a rebel? A man who says no; but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself. A slave who has taken orders all his life, suddenly decides he cannot obey some new command…He [says] "there are certain limits beyond which you shall not go….The slave asserts himself for the sake of everyone in the world when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something inside him that does not belong to him alone, but which he has in common with other men – even with the man who insults and oppresses him….
Revolt does not occur only amongst the oppressed but…can also break out at the mere spectacle of oppression in which someone else is the victim. In such cases there is a feeling identification with other individuals. And it must be made clear that it is not a question of psychological identification – a mere subterfuge by which the individual contrives to feel that it is he who has been oppressed. It can even happen that we cannot countenance other people being insulted in a manner that we ourselves have accepted without rebellion…Nor is it a question of a community of interests. Injustice done to men whom we consider enemies can, actually, be profoundly repugnant to us. Our reaction is only an identification of destinies and a choice of sides. Therefore the individual is not, in himself, an embodiment of the values he wishes to defend. It needs at least all humanity to comprise them. When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men…
Claiming the unity of the human condition, [rebellion] is a force of life and not of death. Its most profound logic is not the logic of destruction; it is the logic of creation. Its movements, in order to be authentic, must never abandon any of the terms of the contradiction which sustains it. It must be faithful to the yes that it contains as well as to the no…The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness. …The consequence of rebellion is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death. …Every rebel, by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, undertake to struggle against servitude, falsehood and terror.
…The most extreme freedom, the freedom to kill, is not compatible with the motives of rebellion…The object of its attack is exactly the unlimited power which authorizes a superior to violate the forbidden frontier…The rebel demands undoubtedly a certain degree of freedom for himself; but in no case, if he is consistent, does he demand the right to destroy the existence and freedom of others… Murder and rebellion are contradictory. If a single master should, in fact, be killed, the rebel in a certain way is no longer justified in using the term 'community of men' from which he derived his justification. If the world has no higher meaning, if man is only responsible to man, it suffices for a man to remove one single human being from the society of the living to automatically exclude himself from it.
[Yet] if rebellion exists, it is because falsehood, injustice and violence are part of the rebel's [own] condition. He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion [against absolutes] and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder [the inevitable product of slavish adherence to an absolute exalted beyond our common, particular humanity]. But nor can he agree to kill and lie, since the inverse reasoning that would justify murder and violence would also destroy the reasons for his insurrection. Thus the rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all – he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly…. In any case, if he is not always able not to kill, either directly or indirectly, he can put his conviction and passion to work at diminishing the chances of murder around him. His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows which surround him, and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, towards the light of good.
….The longing for rest and peace must, itself, be thrust aside; it coincides with the acceptance of iniquity…On the contrary, let us sing the praises of our times when misery cries aloud and disturbs the sleep of the surfeited rich. Maistre has already spoken of the "terrible sermon which the [French] Revolution preached to kings." [Rebellion] preaches the same sermon today and in a still more urgent fashion, to the dishonoured elite of the times. This sermon must be heard. In every word and in every act, even though it be criminal, lies the promise of a value which we must seek out and bring to light. The future cannot be foreseen and it is possible that the renaissance is not impossible…. Resignation is, quite simply, rejected here: we must stake everything on the renaissance.
…Rebellion…is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all [people], which eludes the world of power.
Now let's talk turkey. Get down to brass tacks. Cut to the chase. Lay it on the line. Tell it like it is. In other words, let's talk money; viz., how our society has been deliberately and institutionally structured to employ money as a means of social and political ordering on behalf of the razor-thin sliver of the wealthy elite (and the many courtiers and sycophants who feed avidly on their crumbs).
I know the police cause you trouble; They cause trouble everywhere. But when you die and go to heaven, You won't find no policeman there.
-- Goebel Reeves, "Hobo's Lullabye"
Glenn Greenwald tells a harrowing tale of police-state tactics in Minneapolis, with armed security forces conducting Baghdad-like raids on the houses of activists, terrorizing many and arresting some for thought crimes -- such as "planning to cause a riot" -- and other bogus charges. The sweeps -- guided and aided by the federal government -- are designed to "ensure domestic tranquility" during the imminent Republican convention in the city. As Greenwald points out, not one of those who were shackled, arrested and hauled out at gunpoint had committed any crime whatsoever.
Heinous indeed, and entirely worthy of the anger that Greenwald marshals in his reports from the scene. But we must disagree with him on one crucial point: his repeated declaration that these incidents are "extraordinary." On the contrary, there is nothing at all remarkable about them. They are all of a piece with the similar tactics employed to cleanse the city of Denver of any unseemly expressions of old-fashioned, long-gone American liberties during the Democratic convention, where any protests that escaped the grotesque official "cage" set aside for them were strangled by militarized police and mass arrests.
Such tactics are not confined to major political events with "national security" implications -- i.e., the presence of afflatus-bloated muckity-mucks who must be spared the slightest confrontation with their crimes and complicities. They are now simply part and parcel of modern American society. Greenwald might be mistaken in regarding the Minnesota Monster Mash as "extraordinary," but he is certainly correct when he notes its deeper implications:
As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.
Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.
After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest -- especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march -- gets what they deserve.
Isn't it that mentality which very clearly is the cause of virtually everyone turning away as these police raids escalate against citizens -- including lawyers, journalists and activists -- who have broken no laws and whose only crime is that they intend vocally to protest what the Government is doing? Add to that the fact that many good establishment liberals are embarrassed by leftist protesters of this sort and wish that they would remain invisible, and there arises a widespread consensus that these Government attacks are perfectly tolerable if not desirable.
True enough. But Arthur Silber, among a few others, was there long ago, in numerous essays over the past few years. Of special note in this regard is a remarkable series sparked by the tasering of Andrew Meyer in 2007 -- a damning and revealing incident that quickly became a national joke ("Don't tase me, bro!") and, for the "left," a national embarrassment to be flushed away as soon as possible. But from this incident -- and the reactions to it -- Silber opened a seam of insights into a thoroughly corroded national consciousness. He also provides copious factual detail on the growing use of tasers as a means of social control (and official murder) by state authority -- a cancerous repression that has only spread and worsened in the ensuing months. From Silber (see original for links):
See the connection, and the similarity: the United States launches criminal wars of aggression against nations which constitute no serious threat to it, and which are known to constitute no serious threat -- for the sole purpose of gaining compliance, that is, of installing governments in other countries that will act in accordance with our demands. This has long been the purpose of our interventionist foreign policy: to ensure that other countries act in accordance with our orders, even when genuine issues of national defense are altogether absent. America is God. God's Will be done. Even after the catastrophe of Iraq, leaders of both political parties threaten war against Iran, another nation that does not threaten us, because Iran dares to thwart our will.
Is it any wonder then that, within our own borders, law enforcement will use potentially lethal weapons in the absence of any serious threat -- simply to gain compliance? When the state decides that your behavior matters, you will obey. Yes, you may engage in debate -- within the parameters established by the state. Yes, you may ask questions -- if the state approves them. If you dare to step outside the boundaries set by the state, you will be brought into line, by force as required -- and by possibly lethal force. The United States government murders a million innocent people who never threatened it; of what significance is the life of a single student, especially since he's a "troublemaker" anyway?
We all know that if, say, Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chavez had put on the kind of display we've seen in Minneapolis and Denver, the entire American media-political establishment would be in full condemnatory cry about such "anti-democratic repression." But of course, there is nothing extraordinary about this blatant and brutal hypocrisy, either; Americans have long exempted themselves from the legal and moral standards they apply to others. (Others who fail to kowtow properly to the Washington line, that is; only they are subject to condemnation for failing to meet these lofty standards. Meanwhile, those those who play ball with the Beltway barons -- such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, to name a few -- are allowed to get away with murder. Literally.)
What happened in Minneapolis is neither extraordinary nor surprising. It is simply what happens in a police state, one in which the Leader claims the power to ignore every law, to order torture, murder and wars of aggression as he sees fit, to declare anyone on earth an "enemy combatant" (on criteria that he alone decides) and detain them, without charges, for as long as he wants -- and is never resisted in any of these egregious acts of tyranny by the political "opposition." Instead his crimes and authoritarian encroachments are continually excused, countenanced, justified, immunized, ignored or fully supported by the "opposition," whose leaders refuse to take any legal action against the multitude of state crimes, but instead say openly that their main goal is simply to seize power for their own co-opted and corrupted elite faction.
There are probably any number of names one could call such a system -- but a constitutional Republic is not one of them. Or as I put it last year:
The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.
The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.
Work of Evil: Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario in Somalia there are indeed some good points throughout this (sparsely documented) strategy paper, particularly on page 9, but since menkhaus introduces that section by stressing that the primary element of an "effective response" to the somali crisis is an "[b...
Work of Evil: Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario in Somalia Like Grandma Jefferson I struggle to read these pieces Chris, such is the abject moral shame that we should be feeling for our part in the hidden, 'boring' slaughter of our fellow man.
What's a middle-aged guy in London to do? Where do I sign up?
Work of Evil: Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario in Somalia Yes, there was a great deal askew with the Menkhaus report, especially the way he danced around and tried to excuse or justify the US involvement. The earlier report I quoted, by Prendergast, was more forthright in this regard. Still, the facts prese...
Work of Evil: Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario in Somalia it's strange that menkhaus can one moment write of the u.s. cultivating the (orwellian) warlord ARPCT, which helped 'precipitate' divisions among the mogadishu group, yet in the next paragraph then claim that
[quote]To its credit, the U.S. governmen...
Work of Evil: Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario in Somalia [i]No Americans have died in the operation[/i]
so far as we know, however, don't forget that there were reports that january of captured u.s. special forces soldiers, mentioning that at least one of which had died of either injuries or illness. (see...
Work of Evil: Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario in Somalia I don't know anymore how the world goes on, with all the misery and slaughter we levy upon it. All I can say is, we will all pay for this, and everything we have done, not from some fictitious "divine retribution", but from the forces of rage and ang...
Swing Blades: Don Rumsfeld Bats Both Ways
Tuesday, 10 October 2006
In February 2003, I wrote a column for the Moscow Times detailing Don Rumsfeld's personal – and profitable – connection with North Korea's nuclear program. Today Greg Saunders at This Modern World notes (from aGuardian story from May 2003), that the Bush Administration continued to shove money toward Rumsfeld's corporate cronies, allowing them to help accelerated North Korea's nuke push – even as the Dear Leader (theirs, not ours) was kicking out weapons inspectors and withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
What I wrote more than three years ago unfortunately still holds true today. The nuclear blast test that North Korea conducted this week is not only the result of the Bush Administration's incompetent and sinister diplomatic philosophy – which seems to consist solely of provoking unfriendly regimes into countermeasures which can then be used as excuses for war-profiteering "regime change" assaults – but also stems from the overwhelming lust for loot that lies behind the noble rhetoric of the third-rate goons of the Bush Gang.
Swing Blades (Originally published in the Feb. 28, 2003 edition of The Moscow Times; the version here excerpted from the book, Empire Burlesque.)
It's a well-known fact – oft detailed in these pages – that the boys in the Bush Regime swing both ways. We speak, of course, of their proclivity – their apparently uncontrollable craving – for stuffing their trousers with loot from both sides of whatever war or military crisis is going at the moment.
That's why it came as no surprise to read last week that just before he joined the Regime's crusade against evildoers everywhere (especially rogue states that pursue the development of terrorist-ready weapons of mass destruction), Pentagon warlord Donald Rumsfeld was trousering the proceeds from a $200 million deal to send the latest nuclear technology – including plenty of terrorist-ready "dirty bomb" material – to the rogue state of North Korea, the Swiss paper Neue Zurcher Zeitung reports.
In 1998, Rumsfeld was citizen chairman of the Congressional Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, charged with reducing nuclear proliferation. Rumsfeld and the Republican-heavy commission came down hard on the deal Bill Clinton had brokered with North Korea to avert a war in 1994: Pyongyang would give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for normalized relations with the United States, plus the construction of two non-weaponized nuclear plants to generate electricity. The plants were to be built by an international consortium of government-backed business interests called KEDO.
Rum deal, said Rummy: those nasty Northies would surely turn the peaceful nukes to nefarious ends. What's more, even the most innocuous nuclear plant generates mounds of radioactive waste that could be made into "dirty bombs" – hand-carried weapons capable of killing thousands of people. The agreement was big bad juju that threatened the whole world, Rumsfeld declared.
Of course, that didn't prevent him from trying to profit from it. Even while he was chairing commission meetings on the "dire threat" posed by the Korean program, Rumsfeld was junketing to Zurich for board meetings of the Swiss-based energy technology giant, ABB, where he was a top director. And what was ABB doing at the time? Why, negotiating that $200 million deal with North Korea to provide equipment and services for the KEDO nuclear reactors, of course!
Yes, nuclear proliferation is ugly stuff – but you might as well squeeze a few dollars from it, right? A smart guy always plays the angles – and, as the hero-worshiping American media never stop telling us, Rumsfeld is one smart guy.
In fact, he's so smart that he's now playing dumb. A Pentagon spokesman says Rumsfeld "can't recall" discussing the Korean deal at ABB board meetings. And his erstwhile ABB corporate colleagues say that it's possible the subject never came up. Of course it didn't; going into the nuclear business with a Communist tyranny that very nearly launched a nuclear war against the West just four years before, in a deal that involved high-level negotiations with the governments of the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union – that's certainly the kind of thing that would be handled by a couple of junior executives in a branch office somewhere. Nothing for the bigwigs – especially hard-wired government players like Rumsfeld – to trouble their pretty heads about. A perfectly reasonable explanation.
And so Rumsfeld joins the roster of Bush Regime boardroom honchos who once trumpeted their "business savvy" as selling points for their aspirations to national leadership but now claim to have been "hands-off" figureheads who had no idea what their companies were up to. Bush, in his sinkhole of insider trading and stockholder scamming at Harken; Cheney, making fat deals with Saddam Hussein (yes, after the Gulf War) and muddying up the corporate books at Halliburton; Army Secretary Thomas White, gaming the power grid and stealing millions for Enron in the manufactured California "energy crisis" – all of them went from mighty moguls to mere "front men" the instant their corruption was brought to light. None of it was their fault; nothing ever is.
Whatever happened to Bush's much-trumpeted "era of responsibility?" These guys are not only chiselers, hustlers, hypocrites and war profiteers – they're a bunch of gutless wonders as well. So you'll pardon us if we are just the tiniest bit cynical about the "moral arguments for war" and other such buckets of warm spit this gang is now forcing down the world's throat.
Postscript And what became of that 1994 pact with North Korea? UN inspectors entered the country to make sure the weapons program was put on ice. Pyongyang signed a number of lucrative deals with various politically-connected Western firms, like ABB, to build the promised energy plants, while waiting for the normalization of relations with the United States to begin – a move which many thought would set North Korea on a course toward China-style "moderation" of its monolithic regime.
But normalization never came. Clinton, pressured by rightwing forces (such as Rumsfeld's commission) who opposed any truck whatsoever with godless commies, did his usual folding number, with much windy suspiration of forced breath – and no action. The KEDO companies pocketed Pyongyang's cash but dithered about the actual construction. Pyongyang – while not exactly a font of smiling cooperation itself – concluded that the pact was being deep-sixed. This suspicion was confirmed when Bush took office, calling Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "pygmy" and declaring the county part of the "Axis of Evil."
Pyongyang then accelerated its weapons program, kicked out the UN inspectors, and is now threatening to unleash a nuclear war if Bush, a la Iraq, makes a "pre-emptive strike."
A dicey situation, sure – but at least Don Rumsfeld made some money out of it.
Almost all of the requirements of this piece of legislation have hereby been declared null and void :
The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public law 107-243, 116 Stat. 1497-1502) was a law passed by the United States Congress authorizing what was soon to become the Iraq War. The authorization was sought by President George W. Bush. Introduced as H.J.Res. 114, it passed the House on October 10 by a vote of 296-133, and by the Senate on October 11 by a vote of 77-23. It was signed into law by President Bush on October 16, 2002.
The Resolution cited several factors to justify action:
* Iraq's noncompliance with the conditions of the 1991 cease fire, including interference with weapons inspectors * Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, and programs to develop such weapons, posed a "threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region" * Iraq's "brutal repression of its civilian population" * Iraq's "capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people" * Iraq's hostility towards the United States as demonstrated by the 1993 assassination attempt of former President George H. W. Bush, and firing on coalition aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones following the 1991 Gulf War * Members of al-Qaida were "known to be in Iraq" * Iraq's "continu[ing] to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations," including anti-United States terrorist organizations * Fear that Iraq would provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against the United States * The efforts by the Congress and the President to fight the 9/11 terrorists and those who aided or harbored them * The authorization by the Constitution and the Congress for the President to fight anti-United States terrorism
The Resolution required President Bush's diplomatic efforts at the UN Security Council to "obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions." It authorized the United States to use military force to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq." Before being permitted to use force, the President determined that further diplomatic efforts alone would not satisfactorily protect the United States or ensure Iraq's compliance with UNSC resolutions.
Members of the Senate who voted against:
Daniel Akaka (D-HI) Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) Barbara Boxer (D-CA) Robert Byrd (D-WV) Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) Jon Corzine (D-NJ) Kent Conrad (D-ND) Mark Dayton (D-MN) Dick Durbin (D-IL) Russ Feingold (D-WI) Bob Graham (D-FL) Daniel Inouye (D-HI) Jim Jeffords (I-VT) Ted Kennedy (D-MA) Patrick Leahy (D-VT) Carl Levin (D-MI) Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) Patty Murray (D-WA) Jack Reed (D-RI) Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) Paul Wellstone (D-MN) Ron Wyden (D-OR)
IN this new study, "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq," gives a 95% certainty to the figure of 601,027 since 2003. The Defense Department until 2004, eschewed any effort to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people a day. Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said "30,000, more or less" had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since 2003.
Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years
To ?win? may mean to achieve success in an effort or venture. A ?venture? is an ?undertaking? that is dangerous, daring, or of uncertain outcome; or a ?business enterprise? involving some risk in expectation of gain.
Nobody seems to know what we ever were, or are, undertaking or what our business was, or is, in Iraq. I feel like we have a business enterprise that is somehow related to oil, but I am not holding my breath for old George W. Bush to admit this.
To ?win? may also mean to achieve victory. But to be victorious, you have to have some kind of specific goal, and old George?s goal seems to be ?stay the course? which means stay forever, though recently he has said to ?be flexible?. So I do not know what our goal is.
To ?win? may also mean to achieve or attain by effort. I have no doubt that we are making an effort, but at what!
To ?win? may also mean to ?win concessions in negotiations?. But here you still have to have some specifics goals which your opponent can concede to.
To ?win? may also mean to reach with difficulty. I do not know what we are going to reach, but it will probably be difficult.
The question still remains whether the U.S. deserves to win in Iraq. Even if we knew what ?win? was, one may still question the deserving part. I challenge anyone to list what the U.S. has done to make it worthy of winning in Iraq, or to merit winning in any way. But first, tell me what ?win? is and be real specific.
I think we need to have a public ass-kicking for George W. Bush.
Three nations have already been destroyed (or driven into further ruin) by the Terror War: Iraq, Afghanistan, and 
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