Before I start this poem,
I’d like to ask you to join me in
a moment of silence
in honour of those who died
in the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon
last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
a moment of silence
for all of those who have been
harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed
in retaliation for those strikes,
for the victims in both
Afghanistan and the U.S.
And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
for the tens of thousands of Palestinians
who have died at the hands of
U.S.-backed Israeli forces
over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence
for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation
as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo
against the country.
Before I begin this poem:
two months of silence
for the Blacks under Apartheid
in South Africa,
where homeland security
made them aliens
in their own country.
Nine months of silence
for the dead in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, where death rained
down and peeled back
every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin
and the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence
for the millions of dead
in Vietnam–a people, not a war-
for those who know a thing or two
about the scent of burning fuel,
their relatives’ bones buried in it,
their babies born of it.
A year of silence
for the dead in Cambodia and Laos,
victims of a secret war … ssssshhhhh ….
Say nothing .. we don’t want them to
learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence
for the decades of dead
in Colombia, whose names,
like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off
our tongues.
Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence
for El Salvador ..
An afternoon of silence
for Nicaragua ..
Two days of silence
for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew
a moment of peace
45 seconds of silence
for the 45 dead
at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence
for the hundred million Africans
who found their graves
far deeper in the ocean
than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing
or dental records
to identify their remains.
And for those who were
strung and swung
from the heights of
sycamore trees
in the south, the north,
the east, and the west…
100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of
indigenous peoples
from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots
like Pine Ridge,
Wounded Knee,
Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers,
or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced
to innocuous magnetic poetry
on the refrigerator
of our consciousness …
So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be
the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been
Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about
what causes poems like this
to be written
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem
for Chile, 1973
This is a September 12th poem
for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem
for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem
for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem
for every date that falls
to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories
that were never told
The 110 stories that history
chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC,
The New York Times,
and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem
for interrupting this program.
And still you want
a moment of silence
for your dead?
We could give you
lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces
of nameless children
Before I start this poem
We could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.
If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence,
put a brick through
the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses,
the jailhouses, the Penthouses and
the Playboys.
If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt
fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered
You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the
second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin
at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.
________________________________
Emmanuel Ortiz works with the Minnesota Alliance for the Indigenous Zapatistas (MAIZ) and Estación Libre. He is a staff member of the Resource Centre of the Americas, the non-profit publisher of americas.org
© 2002 Idaho Indymedia Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Idaho-IMC.
Original article is at http://idaho.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/1800.php
September 12th, 2006
IRAQ WAR REPORTS
Bush Pushes Escalation Of War On Iraq:
145,000 U.S. Troops Now,
Highest # Since 2005
[Remember all that silly babbling earlier this year about how troop cuts were on the way?]
September 07, 2006 Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press
The number of U.S. troops in Iraq rose to 145,000 this week, the highest since December and 15,000 more than a month ago.
The number stood at about 130,000 in the final days of July.
September 9th, 2006
Five Years After and We Still Don’t Know
By Paul Craig Roberts
In the five years since three World Trade Center buildings collapsed into their own footprints in virtually free fall time, the convincing power of the official explanation of that day’s events has evaporated. Polls show that 36% of Americans do not believe the official account. As Lev Grossman writes in Time magazine (September 3, 2006), “Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.”
Grossman acknowledges that alternative explanations of 9/11 are more compelling than the official explanation. Grossman offers a psychological explanation for the success of alternative explanations: “a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it.”
However, Grossman’s psychological explanation fails on its own terms. Which is the grandest conspiracy theory? The interpretation of 9/11 as an orchestrated casus belli to justify US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the interpretation that a handful of Muslims defeated US security multiple times in one short morning and successfully pulled off the most fantastic terrorist attack in history simply because they “hate our freedom and democracy”? Orchestrating events to justify wars is a stratagem so well worn as to be boring. Indeed, it is the fantastic conspiracy of the official explanation that makes it unbelievable.
The scientists, engineers, and professors who pose the tough questions about 9/11 are not people who spend their lives making sense of their experience by constructing conspiracy theories. Scientists and scholars look to facts and evidence. They are concerned with the paucity of evidence in behalf of the official explanation. They stress that the official explanation is inconsistent with known laws of physics, and that the numerous security failures, when combined together, are a statistical improbability.
The call by 9/11 skeptics for an independent investigation by an international panel of experts is not a conspiracy theory. In principle there is nothing wrong with such an investigation. In practice, it might be difficult to create a truly independent panel. How many physicists, for example, have careers independent of government grants, and how many engineering firms would risk being branded “unpatriotic” and lose business by coming down on the “wrong” side of the issue?
Nowhere is there a surfeit of brave men.
I do not know what happened on 9/11, and I don’t expect to ever find out. Neither government nor media show any interest in providing us with anything except a political commission’s report.
9/11 skeptics have pointed out a large number of problems with the 9/11 Commission Report. Here is a very short list:
(1) There appears to be a very large energy deficit in the official explanation of the collapse of the two WTC towers, and no explanation for the collapse of WTC 7. What is the source of the energy that brought down the three buildings?
In the PBS documentary, “America Rebuilds,” broadcast in September 2002, Larry Silverstein, who had the lease on the World Trade Center, said that WTC 7 was brought down by a decision of the authorities on the scene: “I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”
Two striking facts jump out from this quote. One is that fire was not raging in WTC 7. The other is that “to pull” a building means to bring it down by engineered demolition. For WTC 7 to be pulled on the late afternoon of September 11, it would already have had to be wired for demolition. Why was WTC 7 wired for demolition?
Brigham Young University Professor of Physics Steven Jones has suggested that thermite, or some other powerful, high temperature, high explosive capable of slicing the powerful steel columns that comprised the WTC towers central core, provided the energy missing in the official account.
In a September 1, 2006, New York Times article, “U.S. moves to debunk ‘alternative theories’ on Sept. 11 attacks,” Jim Dwyer reports that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, disputes Professor Jones’ suggestion. NIST believes that such “enormous quantities of thermite would have to be applied to the structural columns to damage them” that engineered demolition is not feasible.
Gentle reader, note what NIST is saying. If no reasonable quantity of the explosive thermite, which is used for engineered demolition, could damage the powerful buildings, the measly energy from an airliner, a bit of jet fuel, and gravity could not have collapsed the buildings.
The fact of the matter is that there has been no investigation of why the three buildings collapsed. Bill Manning, the editor-in-chief of “Fire Engineering” got it right when he wrote in the January 2002 issue of that publication that “the ‘official investigation’ blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. . . . As things now stand . . . the investigation into the world Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to paper- and computer-generated hypotheticals.”
Manning complained about the “destruction of evidence . . . of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history” and wrote that nowhere in the ”national standard for fire investigation” is there “an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence.”
Obviously, we were not meant to know why the buildings collapsed.
This conclusion does not automatically lead to the conclusion that some elements of the US government and/or Israeli intelligence destroyed the buildings, using airliners as cover, in order to justify invasions to achieve US/Israeli hegemony in the MIddle East or US control of oil supplies. No doubt, neoconservatives in the Bush administration used 9/11 for this purpose. However, perhaps the buildings failed for reasons that involve enormous liabilities, and those liabilities were covered up with a bogus explanation.
According to news reports, insurance payments to Silverstein for the buildings were many multiples larger than the price he paid for the lease. If the reports are correct, perhaps money explains the story.
(2) The belief that Muslims pulled off the attacks is based on the concreteness of the 19 names identified as the hijackers by the FBI. The fact that the FBI attests to the identity of the hijackers is the source of the official story’s credibility.
Considering the official story’s dependence on the identity of the hijackers, how is it possible for the official story to survive for 5 years after the BBC’s report (September 23, 2001) that a number of the alleged hijackers are alive and well?
According to BBC News World Edition, “Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports. He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.”
Obviously, Waleed Al Shehri would not be alive if he had crashed an airliner into the World Trade Center. It would appear that the FBI’s confidence in the identity of the hijackers is more public relations than reality. As the FBI has been proven wrong about the identity of a number of the hijackers, how do we know the FBI is right about any of them?
There are many holes in the official 9/11 story and very little evidence in its behalf. Did the government, terrified by possible public reaction to the catastrophe and expected to have an explanation for the terrifying event, simply concoct a story?
The reason so many people doubt the 9/11 story is not because they have psychological needs for conspiracies, but because the 9/11 story is not believable.
Paul Craig Roberts , was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington ; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice
September 8th, 2006
Howard Zinn: War is Not a Solution for Terrorism
If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war.
By Howard Zinn
9/5/06
There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.
The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.
I remember John Hersey’s novel, “The War Lover,” in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.
The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations — the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — and were forced to withdraw.
Even the “victories” of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.
The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence — the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.
Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism” is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.
The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.
This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a “suspected terrorist” is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable.”
So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in “accidental” events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.
For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by “accident.” Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.
If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.
-Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University and the author of “A People’s History of the United States.”
September 6th, 2006
Killing in the Name of Democracy
By James Bovard
09/01/06 “Lew Rockwell” — – President George W. Bush perpetually invokes the goal of spreading democracy to sanctify his foreign policy. Unfortunately, he is only the latest in a string of presidents who cloaked aggression in idealistic rhetoric. Killing in the name of democracy has a long and sordid history.
The U.S. government’s first experience with forcibly spreading democracy came in the wake of the Spanish-American War. When the U.S. government declared war on Spain in 1898, it pledged it would not annex foreign territory. But after a swift victory, the United States annexed all of the Philippines. As Tony Smith, author of America’s Mission, noted,
Ultimately, the democratization of the Philippines came to be the principal reason the Americans were there; now the United States had a moral purpose to its imperialism and could rest more easily.
William McKinley proclaimed that in the Philippines the U.S. occupation would “assure the residents in every possible way [of the] full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of a free people, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.” He also promised to “Christianize” the Filipinos, as if he did not consider the large number of Filipino Catholics to be Christians. McKinley was devoted to forcibly spreading American values abroad at the same time that he championed high tariffs to stop Americans from buying foreign products.
The “mild sway of justice” worked out very well for Filipino undertakers. The United States Christianized and civilized the Filipinos by authorizing American troops to kill any Filipino male 10 years old and older and by burning down and massacring entire villages. (Filipino resistance fighters also committed atrocities against American soldiers.) Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died as the United States struggled to crush resistance to its rule in a conflict that dragged on for a decade and cost the lives of 4,000 American troops.
Despite the brutal U.S. suppression of the Filipino independence movement, President Bush, in a 2003 speech in Manila, claimed credit for the United States’s having brought democracy to the Philippines:
America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.
Perhaps Bush believes that subservience to the U.S. government is the highest freedom that any foreign people can attain. His comments illustrated the continual “1984”-style rewriting of American history.
Latin American interventions
Woodrow Wilson raised tub-thumping for democracy to new levels. As soon as he took office, he began saber-rattling against the Mexican government, outraged that the Mexican president, Victoriano Huerta, had come to power by military force (during the Mexican civil war that broke out in 1910). Wilson announced in May 1914,
They say the Mexicans are not fitted for self-government; and to this I reply that, when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government.
This is almost verbatim what Bush has said about Iraqis and other Arabs. And as long as a president praises self-government, many Americans seem oblivious when he oppresses foreigners.
Wilson summarized his Mexican policy: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!” U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Walter Hines Page explained the U.S. government’s attitude toward Latin America:
The United States will be here 200 years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space until they learn to vote and rule themselves.
In order to cut off the Mexican government’s tariff revenue, Wilson sent U.S. forces to seize the city of Veracruz, one of the most important Mexican ports. U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of Mexicans (while suffering 19 dead) and briefly rallied the Mexican opposition around the Mexican leader.
In 1916, U.S. Marines seized Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. After the United States could not find any Dominican politicians who would accept orders from Washington, it installed its own military government to run the country for eight years. The previous year, the U.S. military had seized control of Haiti and dictated terms to that nation’s president. When local residents rebelled against U.S. rule in 1918, thousands of Haitians were killed. Tony Smith observes,
What makes Wilson’s [Latin American] policy even more annoying is that its primary motive seems to have been to reinforce the self-righteous vanity of the president.
World War I and II
After Wilson took the nation into World War I “to make the world safe for democracy,” he acted as if fanning intolerance was the key to spreading democracy. He increasingly demonized all those who did not support the war and his crusade to shape the postwar world. He denounced Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and others, declaring, “Any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger which he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” Wilson urged Americans to see military might as a supreme force for goodness, appealing in May 1918 for “force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make Right the law of the world.” As Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented,
Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.
Again, the parallels with Bush are almost uncanny. And many of the same intellectuals who currently praise Wilson for his abuses in the name of idealism also heap accolades on Bush’s head.
The deaths of more than 100,000 Americans in World War I did nothing to bring Wilson’s lofty visions to Earth. The 1919 Paris peace talks became a slaughter pen of Wilson’s pretensions. One of his top aides, Henry White, later commented, “We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.” Thomas Fleming, the author of The Illusion of Victory, noted, “The British and French exploited the war to forcibly expand their empires and place millions more people under their thumbs.” Fleming concluded that one lesson of World War I is that “idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue. It only sounds that way.” But it did not take long for idealism to recover its capacity to induce political delusions.
During the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. military interventions in Latin America were routinely portrayed as “missions to establish democracy.” The U.S. military sometimes served as a collection agency for American corporations or banks that had made unwise investments or loans in politically unstable foreign lands. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler bitterly lamented of his 33 years of active service,
I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
Franklin Roosevelt painted World War II as a crusade for democracy — hailing Joseph Stalin as a partner in liberation. Roosevelt praised Stalin as “truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia” — as if the lack of bona fide elections in Russia was a mere technicality, since Stalin was the nation’s favorite. Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one of the “freedom-loving Nations” and stressed that Stalin was “thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.” Harold Ickes, one of Roosevelt’s top aides, proclaimed that communism was “the antithesis of Nazism” because it was based on “belief in the control of the government, including the economic system, by the people themselves.” The fact that the Soviet regime had been the most oppressive government in the world in the 1930s was irrelevant, as far as Roosevelt was concerned. If Stalin’s regime was “close enough” to democracy, it is difficult to understand why Roosevelt is venerated as an idealist.
Cold War interventions
Dwight Eisenhower was no slacker in invoking democracy. In 1957, he declared,
We as a nation … have a job to do, a mission as the champion of human freedom. To conduct ourselves in all our international relations that we never compromise the fundamental principle that all peoples have a right to an independent government of their own full, free choice.
He was perfectly in tune with the Republican Party platform of 1952, which proclaimed,
We shall again make liberty into a beacon light of hope that will penetrate the dark places…. The policies we espouse will revive the contagious, liberating influences which are inherent in freedom.
But Eisenhower’s idealism did not deter the CIA, dreading communist takeovers, from toppling at least two democratically elected regimes. In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup that put the shah in charge of Iran. In 1954, it aided a military coup in Guatemala that crushed that nation’s first constitutionally based government.
The elected Guatemalan government and the United Fruit Company could not agree on the value of 400,000 acres that the Guatemalan government wanted to expropriate to distribute to small farmers. The Guatemalan government offered $1.2 million as compensation based on the “taxed value of the land; Washington insisted on behalf of United Fruit that the value was $15.9 million, that the company be reimbursed immediately and in full, and that [President Jacobo] Arbenz’s insistence on taking the land was clear proof of his communist proclivities,” as America’s Mission noted.
Yet, at the same time, the federal government in the United States was confiscating huge swaths of private land throughout American inner cities for urban renewal and highway projects, often paying owners pittances for their homes. There was no foreign government to intervene to protect poor Americans from federal redevelopment schemes. The fact that the U.S. government got miffed over a 1954 Guatemalan government buyout offer helped produce decades of repressive rule and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan civilians.
Since the Eisenhower era, U.S. government bogus efforts to spread democracy have sprouted like mushrooms. Especially with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, all limits were lifted on how many democratic cons that the U.S. government could bankroll abroad. The U.S. government is currently spending more than a billion dollars a year for democracy efforts abroad. But Thomas Carothers, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy and Rule of Law Project, warns that Bush policies are creating a “democracy backlash” around the globe.
The greatest gift the United States could give the world is an example that serves as a shining city on a hill. As University of Pennsylvania professor Walter McDougall observed, “The best way to promote our institutions and values abroad is to strengthen them at home.” But there is scant glory for politicians in restraining their urge to “save humanity.” The ignorance of the average American has provided no check on “run amok” politicians and bureaucrats.
James Bovard [send him mail] is the author of the just-released Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. He serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.
September 2nd, 2006
It’s the American Way or the Highway:
Your Extinction Will Quell Your Moral and Intellectual Confusion
By Jason Miller
9/1/06
Persistently ticking off the precious seconds in humanity’s “Countdown to Extinction”, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists has advanced to seven minutes of midnight. Yet despite nuclear terror unleashed on Japan, an arms race of monumental proportions, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and widespread nuclear proliferation, somehow humanity has managed avoid nuclear apocalypse for 60 years. Perhaps the virtual certainty of “mutually assured destruction” will freeze the hands of the Doomsday Clock and continue humankind’s stay of execution.
As if the possibility of nuclear devastation was not enough of a concern, Donald Rumsfeld recently informed us that those who oppose the Iraqi Occupation and the abrogation of Constitutional law lack courage and are confused morally and intellectually. “Terrorism” is an existential threat to the “civilized world” and the Bush administration is justified in all of its “counter-terrorism” measures, according to Rumsfeld. Remember, if nuclear war does not annihilate us, the “terrorists” will.
As you ponder the threat of “terrorism”, do not forget to consider that the many invasions mounted by the United States military and the IDF have killed millions more innocent civilians than the asymmetrical warfare waged by over-matched victims of imperial oppression.
Killing civilians is a war crime, whether the murderer dons a uniform and flies a multi-billion dollar plane to make a “precision strike” or wears civilian clothes and creates crude road-side bombs to blow up passers-by. (And ordering such murders is a war crime too, Mr. Rumsfeld).
And on the subject of courage, Rumsfeld has sent over 2600 US soldiers to their deaths yet has not spent a minute engaged in combat.
Who did the Secretary of Defense say lacked courage and was morally and intellectually confused?
Soul searching often yields resolutions to dilemmas posed by “moral and intellectual confusion”. Perhaps his transaction with Mephistopheles rendered Monsieur Rumsfeld immune to such dilemmas.
Self-Inflicted Pain
Nuclear devastation rendering the world virtually uninhabitable, unfathomably cruel war crimes annihilating innocent human beings, and the impending coastal inundation, droughts, violent weather, and ecological disasters of Climate Change are harrowing potentialities and realities with which we humans cope on a daily basis.
The sad irony is that the common denominator amongst these dire threats to the perpetuation of life on Earth is that we created them.
Unfortunately, the species blessed with frontal lobes and opposable thumbs is threatening extinction of life on Earth in still another way. While less immediate, the consequences of humankind tenaciously clinging to the prevailing socioeconomic order will be as disastrous as nuclear war, the escalation of the murder of civilian populations or Climate Change. Quite simply, humanity’s present course down a blind alley will inevitably lead us to a dead end, literally.
Dream the American Dream
And while not the sole culprit, the United States bears much of the responsibility for this additional threat to the perpetuation of the human species. This nation shamelessly spawned, practices, champions, and proliferates many of the socioeconomic dynamics responsible for the incredible strain we humans are putting upon the Earth as we tax this planet far beyond its capacity.
Seemingly destined to become the “asylum for mankind” Thomas Paine foresaw, the United States freed itself from a tyrant, created a constitutional republic, absorbed waves of immigrants, abolished the heinous institution of chattel slavery, ceded rights to working people, recognized the right of women to vote, instituted numerous social service programs, and made notable progress in extending civil rights to minorities. In spite of the genocide of Turtle Island’s indigenous people, the brutal treatment of its Black population, and various other significant transgressions, the United States made remarkable moral progress over the course of its relatively brief existence.
Regrettably, as the United States was marching toward fulfilling its rich promise, the enemies of social justice and human rights were licking their wounds and plotting the restoration of power to the de facto aristocracy. Men like Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush’s have presided over a perverse and tragic turn of events as powerful corporate entities and a relative handful of wealthy individuals have hijacked most of the social, economic, and political institutions of the United States. The lunatics are indeed running the asylum. And the betterment of humanity is not even on their radar screen.
Utilizing the public education system and the corporate media, CEO’s, major shareholders of massive corporations, obscenely wealthy individuals, and political heavy hitters in the United States and Israel work tirelessly to keep the “other” 99% of the population spending, consuming, and manifesting the American Way.
Subjecting the rest of the world’s citizens to its perverse mélange of predatory capitalism, militarism, self-absorption, narcissism, hubris, avarice, and acute paranoia, the corporatocracy of the United States of America uses its unprecedented military and economic power to ram the American Way down their collective throats.
Cultural genocide and the establishment of ruthless oligarchies be damned! “Free markets”, a win at all costs mentality, obsessive hedonism, perpetual war, and the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of human beings are the United States’ gifts to the world.
Contrary to the tripe peddled by revisionist historians and the corporate media, the world’s “benevolent” superpower has not been spreading an enlightened and democratic socioeconomic system around the globe.
Reality Intrudes….How Rude!
In his essay entitled Greed, Julian Edney provides a thought-provoking analysis of the impact the American Way has had on the populace in its country of origin.
Consider this excerpt:
Modern analysts Cook and Frank show free market competition has become so stark that we are becoming a winner-takes-all society (17). In a giant economy, aggressive acquisition, greed, where so widespread and popular as to be celebrated, has resulted in colossal differences, so that, as much as we are accustomed to reproaching the Europeans for their inequalities, we are now caught in a lie. We have become more unequal. The United States is the wealthiest nation. But its 20.3 percent child poverty rate ranks worse than all European nations (18).
Historians Will and Ariel Durant (19) estimated in their survey that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in America has become greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome.
And sample some of Henry Giroux’s insight from his article The Politics of Disposability (which recently appeared in The Toronto Star):
The bodies that repeatedly appeared all over New Orleans days and weeks after it was struck by Hurricane Katrina also revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. The deeply existential and material questions regarding who is going to die and who is going to live in this society are now centrally determined by race and class. Katrina lays bare what many people in the United States do not want to see: large numbers of poor black and brown people struggling to make ends meet, benefiting very little from a social system that makes it difficult to obtain health insurance, child care, social assistance, cars, savings, and minimum-wage jobs, if lucky, and instead offers to black and brown youth bad schools, poor public services, and no future, except a possible stint in the penitentiary. As Janet Pelz in the Sept. 19, 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer rightly insisted, “These are the people the Republicans have been teaching us to disdain, if not hate, since President Reagan decried the moral laxness of the welfare mom.”
Despite the United States presenting the American Way as an offer the rest of the world can’t refuse, increasing numbers of nations and groups are successfully resisting. Since opposition threatens their relentlessly acquisitive agenda, the US power elite demonize leaders like Hugo Chavez and nations like Iran. In reality, those who reject the dictates of the American Empire are worthy of respect for refusing to bend over for an unlubricated fist-fuck.
Anyone up for a little game of human extinction?
Aside from the obvious moral depravity and numerous social injustices associated with our greed-driven socioeconomic paradigm, there is a particularly grave pragmatic consequence from which no human being can escape. The American Way is a path to extinction, particularly as the citizens of populous nations like China and India race to satiate themselves in the orgy conspicuous consumption. The Earth cannot sustain 6.5 billion people living the “American Way”.
How can we measure the sustainability of life on Earth? One means at our disposal is to examine ecological footprints. Each nation has an ecological footprint which (according to Wikipedia) is the amount of land and water area a person or a human population would need to provide the resources required to sustainably support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology.
To gain perspective on how unsustainable the American Way truly is, consider that the average US citizen exerts 52 times the ecological pressure as the average Somali. At 9.57 hectares per capita, the United States has the world’s largest ecological footprint. (Bangladesh’s .5 represents the other end of the spectrum). If every nation had the same global footprint as the United States, we would need 5 Earths to support global consumption!
As we rapidly deplete non-renewable resources (like oil) and use renewable resources more quickly than nature can replenish them, we are in a state of ecological overshoot. Deforestation, diminishing supplies of groundwater, and the depletion of fish populations are but three examples of disappearing renewable resources.
Wildlife extinction is another deeply disturbing aspect of ecological overshoot. World-renowned for his expertise on humanity’s impact on the environment, University of Minnesota professor David Tillman compared the rate of the emergence of new species with the current rate of extinction:
“That’s sort of a 1 million to 4 million year process, and yet we are causing species to be lost at rates of 100 to 1000 times faster,”
Blinded by hubris, narcissism, and technology, many people perceive themselves to be separate from nature and the people existing “outside” of their insular worlds. The reality is that we are each inextricably linked with the rest of the Earth’s inhabitants (be they human, animal, or plant) in a complex web of life.
Albert Einstein challenged us to break the shackles of the illusion of separateness and embrace interdependence:
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.”
Hopeful Signs on the Horizon
While it is likely to be some time before moral and humane movements supplant the ignoble Duopoly that is bought and paid for by corporate and Israeli interests, they do exist and are gaining momentum. (1)Populists and Proutists represent two such movements. A rising tide of democratic socialism in South America demonstrates that nations in the “developing world” are freeing themselves from the yoke of the American Empire, but Goliath will not fall quickly or easily.
As people of conscience search for ways to create viable alternatives to the brutal inhumanity of corporatism, many are finding that grassroots efforts offer an effective means of chipping away at the deeply entrenched status quo. Partners Dr. Timothy Wilkin and William Brandon Shanley are shining examples of two US Americans who work tirelessly to counteract the deleterious effects of predatory capitalism.
Tim Wilken is a physician and scientist who has devoted himself to the betterment of humankind. His stated goal is to strive for a world free of hate and violence. In the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, Wilken seeks to employ his strengths and efforts to bring about a more humane and sustainable world.
Towards that end, he has done pioneering work in the field of synergy which Dr. Wilken defines in this way:
We believe that we must learn to work together. This means we must become synergic humans. Synergy means working together—operating together as in Co-Operation— laboring together as in Co-Laboration—acting together as in Co-Action. The goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult task than can be accomplished by individuals working separately. We are committed to a world where I win, you win, others win and the Earth wins. Win-Win-Win-Win.
Dr. Wilken maintains a Website devoted to synergy at http://www.synearth.net/ in an effort to teach humanity:
How to work co-Operatively with each other. How to nurture the earth and the children of the earth. How to be a part of tomorrow’s solutions rather than part of the today’s problems.
Collaborating with Wilken in his quest to better the lot of humanity is William Shanley. Shanley brings a wealth of experience to the partnership. He has worked extensively in the media industry, including stints as a writer for CNN and as an independent producer of documentaries. He interviewed Presidents Reagan and Carter in preparation for his documentary called The Made for TV Elections with Martin Sheen and worked for President Carter. He also edited and contributed to Lewis Carroll’s Lost Quantum Diaries.
Together Wilken and Shanley recently launched an entity called Give-Get Nation at www.givegetnation.net On the Give Get Nation Website, one can connect with others virtually anywhere in the world to give, receive, or exchange goods and services at no monetary cost. Demonstrating that people can act on their values, seek fulfillment of their needs and behave altruistically without the impediment of spiritually toxic influences like money, banks, or stock exchanges, Give-Get Nation provides a refreshing alternative to the “orthodox” economic marketplace.
Registration costs nothing but a few moments of one’s time. Participating in Give-Get Nation affords people the opportunity to attempt to give or get goods or services according to their capacities, desires, or needs, at no profit or cost.
Wilken and Shanley stated that Give-Get Nation:
“organizes the world’s unlimited surplus product, labor, intelligence and spiritual capital and makes it available to everybody for free. Think of us as the National Human Values Trust.”
Give-Get Nation is in its infancy, but it is brimming with promise. Its selfless approach to exchanging goods and services offers a spiritually fulfilling alternative to the rat race that rapacious capitalism’s wage slaves perpetually run. As membership increases and transactions begin to mount, growing numbers of people will rise to Einstein’s challenge by widening their circles of compassion. And perhaps most importantly, the exchange of surplus goods will help push the Earth toward sustainability. (Give-Get Nation is indeed anathema to predacious capitalists).
Readers often email me asking what they can do in the face of the seemingly omnipotent forces of greed and malevolence which orchestrate many aspects of our lives. Opportunity is now pounding your door off its hinges. Become an active member of Give-Get Nation. It is free, legal and subversive to corporate domination. (What more could you ask for?)
Besides, Give-Get Nation represents a significant shift in values and priorities. Remember that the human species has already caused the premature extinction of many of Earth’s inhabitants. If we humans do not collectively change our values, WE HUMANS could be the next species to disappear.
(1) http://populistamerica.com/
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He writes prolifically and his essays have appeared widely on the Internet. He welcomes constructive correspondence at willpowerful@hotmail.com or via his blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
September 2nd, 2006
Another miserable milestone for Bush’s war
By Rupert Cornwell
08/28/06 “The Independent” — – A miserable milestone was passed the other day. America’s (and Britain’s) disastrous war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the US involvement in the Second World War. Yes, this conflict has outlasted a war that ended with total victory over Nazi Germany. Hitler declared war on the US on 11 December 1941. Exactly 1,244 days later, on 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered. The US invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003, and this weekend it is 1,267 days later, with no end in sight.
Sticklers among you will have noted that the interval between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender on 2 September, 1945 was 1,364 days. But even that record will tumble at the start of December. And if you do measure Iraq against the longer American war with Japan, the contrast is even starker. Victory in the Pacific was even more conclusive than in Europe. It produced no post-war entanglement with the Soviets and no Berlin airlift. The Iraq war unfolded the other way round: Baghdad fell barely three weeks after the invasion. Since then, however, it’s been downhill all the way.
Yes, US casualties have been lighter, some 2,620 dead at the latest count, and four times as many seriously wounded. Adjust for respective populations, and Israel’s loss of around 116 soldiers in the Lebanon war translates into 5,800 US dead in barely a month. As for Iraqi civilians, more of them are getting killed per month than all the American troops lost since the very start of the war.
But forget the statistics,the endless terror alerts, the war in Lebanon and the looming showdown with Iran. Iraq is the issue that America keeps returning to. It haunts George Bush and - barring Democratic screw-ups - it will probably send his Republican party to defeat in the mid-term elections this November.
Joe Lieberman’s loss in the Connecticut Senate primary this month was just one straw in the wind. One of the seemingly most impregnable Democrats in the land could not even retain his own party’s support. He was beaten because of his support for the war by a businessman with a simple campaign mantra: “Bring the Boys Home.”
Republicans, of course, pretended to love it. They raised the shade of George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam war candidate thrashed by Nixon in 1972. Once again, they said, the Democrats had turned into a party of left-wing pacifists who could no more be trusted to fight the terrorists than to “see the job through” in Iraq.
Sadly, this argument that worked so well in 2002 and 2004 works no longer. Even the wilfully blind can see that Iraq is a disaster. Bush, who yields to no one in that category, lambasted the Democrats for pusillanimity. But even he could not bring himself to use the word “progress” apropos of events in the country that he once claimed would be a beacon of peace and democracy for the entire Middle East.
Nor does the terror card have the force it once did. True, the President’s ratings went up slightly after the foiled UK airliner bomb plot (but they could hardly have sunk much lower). Far more revealing, Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican who had supported the war, last week broke ranks with the White House and called for a firm timetable for withdrawal. If you’re seeking re-election to the House in November, there’s really no choice.
Bush’s problem is that two-thirds of Americans - according to a recent poll - no longer buy his argument that Iraq has become “the central front in the war on terror”. Iraq, they now realise, had nothing to do with 9/11, and the foreign fighters who are now in Iraq went there only after the 2003 invasion. They believe the Mesopotamian adventure has made them less safe. Put another way: if you start a war that lasts as long as the Second World War, you’d better have something to show for it. George Bush does not.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
August 29th, 2006
Hidden U.S. Plans for War on Iran:
Imminent Danger…and Strategic Stakes
People close to Bush are telling you—if you listen to what they are saying—that the Bush regime is undertaking serious preparations for a war on Iran in 2007. A U.S. attack on Iran may very well involve nuclear weapons, and in any event would take the initial form of a massive bombing attack, with terrible human consequences, and terrible political consequences.
The horrible destruction in Lebanon, the murder of a thousand people and the displacement of a quarter of the population of the country, has been described by Condoleezza Rice as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” And an attack—again, very possibly a nuclear attack—on Iran would be of far greater magnitude, with the prospect of much greater suffering and death.
The political consequences, in their own way, are just as terrible. In the absence of a visible, powerful movement in this country opposed to the whole Bush Regime, the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion drove even non-religious people in Lebanon into the arms of Islamic fundamentalists. Imagine what a nuclear strike on the world’s largest and most powerful Islamic theocracy would set in motion! All this would further strengthen the two poles of U.S. imperialism rampaging the world with Bibles and nukes—on the one hand—and obscurantist religious-fundamentalist forces who are setting the terms for oppositional forces in many of the oppressed nations of the world.
Neither of these two “alternatives” poses anything positive for people of the world. Part of creating conditions for the people of the world to break free of that framework—both in the imperialist countries and in the oppressed nations—is a powerful movement right here, now, against this war and against the whole Bush Regime.
On another level, bringing forward real resistance in this country - resistance that breaks out of the mold of just trying to “register our complaints” with those in power - helps create conditions, along with all-around communist ideological work by revolutionaries - for people to be open to, and to take up a real alternative model for how society can be run. Where people are envisioning and fighting for a world where the tremendous productive resources, and people themselves, are not subordinated to the dog-eat-dog process of extracting profit (including through wars against rebels and rivals), but instead are organized and mobilized to serve the needs of humanity in a way that unleashes individuality and creativity while people consciously change themselves and the world.
The Threat of War on Iran in 2007
In the August 21 issue of The New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed information leaked anonymously by people close to, or formerly close to, the Bush administration. Hersh’s piece exposed the role of the Bush administration in planning Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and that the war in Lebanon was viewed by the Bush administration as preparation, and a trial run, for a U.S. attack on Iran. Speaking of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told Hersh. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.” (our emphasis)
Hersh reports that “according to a former senior intelligence official, the Israeli plan for Lebanon was ‘the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.’” He reports that this includes, in part, “U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran.” Hersh writes that the Bush administration sees its mission as carrying out this war before it leaves office. A former senior intelligence officer told Hersh that Vice President Cheney’s office pushed Israel to move quickly against Lebanon in the framework of a timetable for U.S. moves against Iran. Hersh says this source told him that Cheney’s office “told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’”
While Bush called Hersh’s article “wild speculation” (note that he did not say it wasn’t true!), political operatives close to Bush are sending signals themselves, and interpreting Bush’s position in a way that confirms a war on Iran is a real possibility in early 2007.
William Kristol’s newspaper, the Weekly Standard, is a neo-conservative insider’s journal for the Bush Regime. In July, he laid out the case for smashing the Islamic Republic of Iran as the key link in the larger Bush/neocon agenda of establishing the U.S. as the sole, unchallenged, and unchallengeable superpower:
“Regimes matter. Ideological movements become more dangerous when they become governing regimes of major nations. Communism became really dangerous when it seized control of Russia. National socialism became really dangerous when it seized control of Germany. Islamism became really dangerous when it seized control of Iran—which then became, as it has been for the last 27 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for Syria (a secular government that has its own reasons for needing Iranian help and for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas), little state sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah. And no Shiite Iranian revolution, far less of an impetus for the Saudis to finance the export of the Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam as a competitor to Khomeini’s claim for leadership of militant Islam—and thus no Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and perhaps no Hamas either.”
On Fox News (August 22), after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon produced mixed results at best, for the U.S., as a warm-up for a war on Iran, Kristol said, “I think we could be in a military confrontation with Iran much sooner than people expect. I don’t think this is an issue that’s going to wait two and a half years until President Bush leaves the presidency. I think he will decide at some point next year—in 2007—he’ll have to make some very tough decisions about what the U.S. and the world can tolerate in terms of this regime…”
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews summed up the situation : “I keep hearing from people on the right—Robert Kagen and Bill Kristol, the guys who are the most hawkish and the most articulate in making their case and they may be right—that at the end of this administration, this hawkish administration—that was willing to go into Iraq and Afghanistan—if this president is not willing to knock out those facilities no future president is likely to do it. We’ll be stuck with a nuclear armed Iran which can rant and rave around that region, threatening Israel, Saudi and everybody else. And we’ll be stuck with it. So their argument is try the diplomatic route, try everything but in the end we have to hit ‘em.” (August 23)
The Nuclear Terror Nightmare—a U.S. Nuclear Attack on Iran
Basic facts: Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and is not threatening to use nuclear weapons against the United States. The United States does have nuclear weapons, and is not only threatening their use, but a nuclear attack appears to be a significant element of current U.S. war planning against Iran.
Seymour Hersh’s August 21 piece in the New Yorker reveals that the tactic of mass bombing of civilian infrastructure was a model and test for a U.S. attack on Iran. The strategy was to create enough terror and death that Christian and Sunni Muslim forces in Lebanon would be driven to align with the United States. U.S. military strategists are focused on death from the skies as their strategic approach to a war on Iran. Iran, of course, presents a much more formidable target than Lebanon, and even the massive air assault on Lebanon was not enough to achieve the goals of that attack.
Hersh reported that, “One of the [U.S.] military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran.” And Hersh writes that, “The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.”
Hersh’s August 21 piece also says that less extreme tactics (other than nuclear weapons) might be effective if the U.S. knew more about the location and construction of Iranian nuclear energy facilities. But according to Hersh’s sources, the U.S. does not have good enough military intelligence for those options to work. He writes that, “The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons.” It appears from Hersh’s article that some of his sources are connected with forces in or around the top ranks of elements of the U.S. military who are skeptical that any amount of bombing, even nuclear bombs, will destroy the capacity of the Iranian regime to retaliate and resist a U.S. attack, and are very concerned that the over-stretched U.S. ground forces will get even more deeply bogged down in conflict in the region. But, Hersh reports, in spite of this resistance, “[T]he idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.”
Such weapons of mass destruction would create death, destruction, and horrors far beyond what was seen in Israel’s U.S.-sponsored war on Lebanon. A former intelligence official told Hersh, “We’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years.”
Who’s NOT Gonna Stop This War…
There is a logic to an attack on Iran not only from the standpoint of the neocons and Bush, but for the “opposition” Democratic Party as well. For the neocons, a U.S. dominated Iran is key to radically reshaping the Middle East, come what may. It is a critical part of their articulated vision of the U.S. as the world’s new Roman Empire—a sole, unchallengeable superpower. For the Democrats, who may have had reservations about embarking on this adventure in Iraq, or may have regrets about how it worked out, they are—in the words of Al Gore—“lashed to the mast of our ship of state.” Like it or not, they are along for the ride because to bail now would—judged by the interests of U.S. imperialism —represent a major and destabilizing setback for U.S. imperialism.
A revolutionary understanding of the forces driving all this is explored in a very in-depth and strategic way in recent talks by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA—in particular in the talk “Why We’re in the Situation We’re In Today…And What To Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution.” That talk, and six other critical recent talks by Bob Avakian, are available for download at bobavakian.net, or revcom.us.
Nobody with any serious impact in the Democratic Party is even raising serious concerns or reservations about the potential horrors and dangers involved in a war against Iran. Look, for example, at the Democrats’ response to the House Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy’s report of U.S. intelligence on Iran. (The report was mainly written by a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to UN Ambassador John R. Bolton, who opposes any negotiations with Tehran. The New York Times wrote that “the report seems intended to signal the intelligence community that the Republican leadership wants scarier assessments that would justify a more confrontational approach to Tehran.” Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern characterized the report as a “challenge set before the Intelligence Community … to get religion, climb aboard, and ‘recognize’ Iran as a strategic threat.” [See “WMD Lies All Over Again”])
Did the Democrats in Congress immediately denounce this report as a call for concocted “evidence” justifying a war with Iran? Did they at least express worry and concern that this was the WMD hoax all over again? No. Most said nothing, but they let the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence subcommittee, Rush D. Holt, represent for the Democrats. He said, “What you have that is new here is an attempt to bring the body of information that is available into one place to present to the American people.” (Time magazine, 8/24). And the New York Times quoted Holt saying that “some in the intelligence community are a bit gun-shy about appearing to be warmongering.” (8/24).
Holt’s endorsement of the report, and concerns that the “intelligence community” is “gun-shy” about “appearing to be warmongers” might sound simply mealy-mouthed if the whole context is not taken into account. But it represents an endorsement of this whole approach by the Democratic Party. Here you have the hawks in Congress demanding that the intelligence services “get religion,” as Ray McGovern insightfully put it, and cook the books to justify war on Iran a la the role they played in the whole “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie that was used to justify the war against Iraq. In this context, Holt’s endorsement of the report—the only substantial response by congressional Democrats—aligns the Democrats with the whole “let’s create a new hoax to start a war” process. The Wall Street Journal wrote in an August 24 editorial, “Anyone who still thinks a nuclear-armed Iran won’t pose a serious, and perhaps mortal, threat ought to consult this week’s bipartisan staff report from the House Intelligence Committee.” (our emphasis).
The endorsement, or endorsement in the form of silence, from leading Democrats, is in line with the Democrats’ strategy of positioning themselves as tougher on “national security.” In mid-August, the Democratic Party ran a TV ad claiming that Iran is “developing nuclear weapons.” (The ad was withdrawn after protests by Latino organizations who objected to the ad’s association of Latino immigrants with terrorism.)
In spring 2004, Senator John Kerry told the Washington Post that the Bush Administration has not “been tough on the [Iran] issue…” (May 29, 2004), and Nancy Pelosi’s position earlier this year was that “For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology.” (Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, May 24, 2005.) And Democratic Senator Barack Obama, who many progressive people have deluded themselves into seeing as an opponent of the Bush agenda, told the Chicago Tribune in 2004 that “[T]he big question is going to be, if Iran is resistant to these pressures [to stop its nuclear program], including economic sanctions, which I hope will be imposed if they do not cooperate, at what point…if any, are we going to take military action?”
Who CAN put a HALT to all this…and HOW
In his powerful protest song “Ohio,” written in response to the National Guard murder of protesters at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970, Neil Young sang, “How can you run when you know?”
If you’ve read this far, you know. A terrible danger confronts the world—as we said in the beginning of this article, a terrible cost in human life, and a terrible political setback in terms of locking the world into a confrontation between McCrusade and Jihad.
There is no opposition to this from the Democratic Party. Kerry, Dean, Pelosi, and Obama are on record demanding that Bush get tough with Iran!
The initial call from World Can’t Wait—Drive Out the Bush Regime included the following:
“That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn—or be forced—to accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it.”
And the statement “October 5: There is a Way! There is a Day!” from World Can’t Wait says:
“Imagine if, from out of this huge reservoir of people, a great wave were unleashed, moving together on the same occasion, making, through their firm stand and their massive numbers, a powerful political statement that could not be ignored: refusing that day to work, or walking out from work, taking off from school or walking out of school—joining together, rallying and marching, drawing forward many more with them, and in many and varied forms of creative and meaningful political protest throughout the day, letting it be known that they are determined to bring this whole disastrous course to a halt by driving out the Bush Regime through the mobilization of massive political opposition.
“If that were done, then the possibility of turning things around and onto a much more favorable direction would take on a whole new dimension of reality.
“It would go from something only vaguely hoped for, by millions of isolated individuals, and acted on by thousands so far, to something that had undeniable moral force and unprecedented political impact.”
Right now, a bad dynamic is in effect—and far too many people feel paralyzed. They don’t see any “cracks” in the ruling structure. The “options” for people are still framed as choosing between McWorld and Jihad. People don’t see a force of people like themselves out there creating the “undeniable moral force” that World Can’t Wait is calling for.
But if everyone who said “I wish there was such a force” throws themselves heart and soul into the movement to Drive Out the Bush Regime, takes up building for the October 5th mobilizations—which will put the movement to drive out the Bush Regime on a whole new level—then there would be such a force. And the emergence of a massive movement determined to drive out the Bush Regime would in turn impact the situation among the rulers of this society, opening up more potential for the movement of the people to develop that would actually bring the whole Bush agenda to a HALT.
There are a thousand and one reasons calling out to people to build a powerful movement to bring the crimes of the Bush Regime to a halt, and to launch that movement onto a whole new level on October 5th. But the real, imminent danger and potential horrors of a U.S. attack on Iran, very possibly involving nuclear weapons, is reason enough for everyone with a critical mind and conscience to throw themselves whole-heartedly into that movement. Now.
August 28th, 2006
Why Bush will Choose War Against Iran
By Ray Close
08/25/06 - Like many people, I find it extremely difficult to believe that President Bush could actually do anything so crazy as to launch a military attack against Iran, and that even if he wanted to, the Congress, the Pentagon, and the American public would ever countenance such action. But I remember in the spring of 2002 writing a “Dear Friends” memo just like this one predicting that the apparent intentions of the Bush Administration to invade Iraq would certainly turn out to be nothing but a bluff, and supporting that assertion by listing all the reasons why actually doing so would lead to utter disaster. Many of my friends told me at the time that I was missing the point — regime change was DEFINITELY going to happen, and I was exaggerating the downside consequences. The problem is that today the downside risks of attacking Iran seem even more horrendous —- and yet? (As George Will said last Sunday to George Stephanopoulos — “When was the last time this president ever worried about getting approval in advance from the Congress or the public?”) It makes me nervous when my president truly believes he is carrying out the will of God.
So this is why I reluctantly believe today that Bush will indeed launch an attack on Iran before the expiration of his term of office:
1. As expected, Iran has offered to enter negotiations, but has rejected the precondition that they discontinue uranium enrichment. Iran will continue to stall indefinitely in the expectation that the U.S. cannot summon the international political and economic clout to damage Iran to any critical degree in the near future. Meanwhile, Iran remains totally and sincerely convinced (with ample justification) that the U.S. is committed to overthrowing the Teheran regime on the tactical level, and waging a broader war against Islam on the strategic level. Rightly or wrongly, Iranian leaders interpret Israeli-US joint collaboration in Lebanon as the final proof of both suspicions. Nothing will shake that conviction. We can huff and puff, but the reality is that we will not succeed in either persuading or intimidating the Iranian leadership into doing what we want them to do. This is the nub of the problem in Washington: none of the principal decision-makers — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Rice — (even Rice!) — understands and accepts this simple reality, and so all the expectations and calculations that go into the formation of U.S. policy start from a faulty premise.
2. The U.S. will fail to get the UNSC to establish (and then enforce) a regimen of sanctions that Washington considers tough enough — despite the unanimous concern of the larger powers, including China and Russia, that a nuclear Iran would be undesirable. The Bush Administration will fulminate about weakness of resolve and false friendship of its “allies”, but this will only exacerbate the divisions and further expose the enfeebled state of American political and moral leadership and the deterioration of its international credibility. Iran will watch this soap opera, smiling like a Cheshire cat.
3. Whatever sanctions are eventually applied will have zero chance of persuading Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions; most certain is the fact that Iran will continue its development program without any slowdown until it has passed the US-Israel “red line” of possessing the necessary raw material to produce a nuclear bomb whenever it chooses to do so. (As we all know, possession of an operational bomb may be as much as a decade or more in the future, but the “red line” of achieving all the necessary technology, equipment and ingredients could be crossed MUCH sooner than that — and almost certainly before Bush leaves office in January 2009.)
4. So this is the calculus facing Bush:
a. He has vowed that he will not leave office without first ensuring that Iran cannot become a nuclear power. He has probably given the leaders of Israel a similar promise — privately and perhaps explicitly. That means that he is effectively committed to attack Iran militarily before January 2009 if all other means of accomplishing the objective fail — which they will. He believes deeply that Iran poses an existential threat to our ally Israel and an extremely dangerous threat to the American people, as well. Bush also believes that Iran is determined to sabotage American hopes of establishing a “new Middle East” —- by covert support of anti-American terrorist elements such as Hizballah and Hamas — backed up by the added power implicit in its eventual possession of nuclear weapons. Given Bush’s overarching dedication to “winning the Global War on Terrorism”, the neutralization of Iran has become a sine qua non, equal if not higher on his list of priorities than “victory” in Iraq — another impossibility that he is stubbornly unwilling to recognize, even privately — much less acknowledge publicly.
b. Bush presently intends (with little faith or sincerity) to exhaust all opportunities to achieve his objectives by diplomatic means or through economic sanctions. Failing those, he will attempt to achieve his purposes by intimidation — by raising the threat of military attack. This will only stimulate more internal support for the regime inside Iran and more international opposition to U.S. policies, especially in the Muslim world. Without question, moreover, an escalating danger of US-Iranian military confrontation will greatly intensify internal and regional opposition to US objectives in Iraq. (Note: A mystifying disconnect in logic persists on this point in Bush’s mind.)
c. The best hope for avoidance of war with Iran (the catastrophic consequences of which are too numerous and wide-ranging even to catalog) will be opposition to the idea from the U.S. military and from American politicians of both parties who have an appreciation of the weakened state of U.S. defense forces. I am told, on the other hand, that Bush has been persuaded by some military advisers that STRATCOM (Strategic Air Command) has a workable plan for a comprehensive attack to be launched almost simultaneously against 1500 targets in Iran that will effectively prevent any Iranian retaliation, and will obviate the need for a major ground operation or post-conflict occupation. (The logic of this strategy apparently depends on the hope that destruction of Iran’s nuclear potential and its conventional military capabilities in a spectacular display of shock and awe will trigger an internal revolt against the present government, with moderate pro-western elements standing ready to seize power in the name of freedom and democracy. This must be another fantasy dreamed up in the twisted minds of people like Michael Ledeen and other neocon illusionists.)
5. I believe that Iran wants very much to be accepted as a respected member of the community of prosperous and influential modern states. And an Iran that was indeed a trustworthy member of that community would be an enormous benefit to America and to the world. That should be the objective of American policy, therefore — accommodating and eventually modifying the legitimate national aspirations of a self-interested and pragmatic Iran — not launching a potentially catastrophic preemptive war against a potentially powerful and influential Muslim nation of seventy million people. Coaxing Iran down a path leading toward successful achievement of international respectability and acceptance is the single most important “carrot” that we have to offer the Iranian leadership today. The potential value of that positive incentive has been completely squandered, however, by the pointless hostility and belligerence of American “diplomatic” language — starting with the “axis of evil” and proceeding downhill from there to the most recent offer of patently unacceptable ultimatums. This has greatly diminished our own bargaining power while making the job of arriving at a reasonable accommodation with Iran infinitely more difficult in every way.
6. In order of importance, however, the attraction from Iran’s perspective of moving toward desired international acceptance and respectability is completely overshadowed by two other dominant factors at this time: the need to reinforce and preserve Iran’s national pride (recently enhanced by the apparent success of its Hizballah surrogate in Lebanon) , and its conviction that the United States is an implacable enemy whose aggressive bullying must be resisted at all costs.
7. Adding up all those factors, it seems clear to me that Bush has laid out the following course for American policy, adding up to a Catch-22 from which I see no escape:
a. Continuing futile efforts to achieve Iranian capitulation through weak and ineffective economic sanctions, to the accompaniment of counterproductive vituperation and bombast;
b. Quickly followed by a period of rapidly escalating threats of military action, during which international and domestic opposition to American policy will increase dramatically, making Bush’s choices increasingly more painful and difficult in every respect;
c. A judgment by Bush that the immediate risks and costs of preemptive military action against Iran are, in the final analysis, less formidable than the risks and costs of tolerating Iranian nuclear possession — and the personal and national humiliation that would result from passive acceptance of that outcome.
d. Sometime before the end of his term, a massive air military attack on a wide range of carefully selected targets in Iran, in partnership with Israel, and against the advice of many of his advisers — justified by the conviction that a nuclear Iran would pose an intolerable threat to American national security, firm in his faith that God agrees with him on that point, and certain that history will eventually recognize and properly appreciate his courageous and visionary leadership.
Ray Close, member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He worked for the CIA for 27 years
August 26th, 2006
Morality and Fourth Generation War
by Michael S. Rozeff
Anyone who is anti-war will benefit from understanding the theory of war: why wars are fought, how they are fought, and how the peace is made and kept. The field manual of Fourth Generation war found here helps us understand many of the conflicts occurring around the world today and helps us glimpse the possible outcomes of these struggles. It applies to the war Israel is now fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. It sheds light on the difficulties that the American State and its soldiers face in fighting today in Iraq. Expect to find a document with many illustrations that explains how American soldiers should be trained to fight Fourth Generation war. But also expect a surprising emphasis on the moral level of war that connects directly to libertarian theory.
William S. Lind and experienced soldiers co-authored the Fourth Generation war field manual, which is a work in progress. He invites comment. Using the Fourth Generation model, Lind accurately assessed events in Iraq early on and predicted the current civil strife occurring there now. In his article of November 26, 2003, for example, he forecasted that “non-state forces will come to dominate” in both Iraq and Afghanistan because of basic American blunders. In his words: “In Iraq, the two fatal early errors were outlawing the Baath Party and disbanding the Iraqi army. Outlawing the Baath deprived the Sunni community of its only political vehicle, which meant it had no choice but to fight us. Disbanding the Iraqi army left us with no native force that could maintain order, and also provided the resistance with a large pool of armed and trained fighters.” Lind has continued with many insightful articles that are archived on LRC.
The rudiments
Fourth generation wars are currently defined as wars fought by non-state forces against states. (I am not sure what wars fought by non-state forces against each other are called.) The states have greater resources if one simply counts armed forces, matériel, and money. The non-state forces are weaker, yet they can win as Fidel Castro showed in Cuba. They tend to be guerillas and use guerilla tactics, so that Fourth Generation warfare is virtually guerilla warfare.
Guerilla warfare is not terrorism. “Terrorism is an enemy special operation, a single tactical action designed to have direct operational or strategic effect. Because targets that have such direct operational or strategic effect are few and are usually well-protected, terrorism normally plays a minor role in Fourth Generation conflicts – though when it does occur the effects can be wide-ranging.”
Most of the manual, through case study examples, advises Marine (or Army) forces how to integrate or interact with the local population in order not to drive them into the arms of the enemy and in order to gain effectiveness against the enemy. For example, the manual counsels against the instinct to escalate force. It advises de-escalation, being very patient, talking with locals and opponents, and not wanting to fight. It talks of withdrawing at times and not fighting every fight, not killing innocent people, and using cash for a host of issues including blood money. The recommended soldierly behaviors are many quantum leaps beyond giving chocolate bars to children or cigarettes to adults.
The moral level
Libertarians will find interesting the pervasive emphasis on the moral element of war as contrasted with the physical and mental levels. The word “moral” appears almost 50 times. The moral level of war is described as the most powerful level, the decisive level, the dominant level, and the all-important level. Battles can be won like leveling Fallujah or creating buffer zones in Lebanon while being a disaster at the moral level and thence a disaster in terms of the war’s ultimate outcome.
The term “moral” has several meanings in the manual. It does not here mean rejecting an entire war as illegitimate, unjust or immoral. It can’t because the manual is designed to nurture an armed force that supports its State. One thing it means is following the non-aggression axiom or respecting the legitimate rights of the population and the Marines’ opponents, including when they are taken prisoner. This includes but goes beyond the Geneva Convention. The authors write: “In terms of ordinary, day-to-day actions, there is a Golden Rule for winning at the moral level, and it is this: Don’t do anything to someone else that, if it were done to you, would make you fight.”
Another thing that moral means in the manual is respecting the population as persons. This rule goes beyond the non-aggression axiom. It means soldiers not acting as if they are superior. It means Marines responding to the values of the local culture. If American bases replicate American living standards and locals are not allowed on them except in service roles or if soldiers do not respect traditional values of pride and honor or if soldiers inadvertently insult local people, all these things contribute to losing at the moral level.
It is gratifying to find support for basic libertarian doctrine in a manual that distills the accumulated wisdom, drawn from the experiences of fighting men, of what works and what does not work in wars that directly involve populations. This confirms the universality and practicality of rights embodied in the non-aggression axiom. It confirms that people everywhere hold common ideas of justice and fairness that soldiers (and others) cannot violate without negative consequences.
Although the manual suggests that warfare is reverting to pre-1648 modes, in some respects it calls for movement away from unlimited warfare and a return to the rules of eighteenth century war as discussed in Guglielmo Ferrero’s Peace and War. For example, it calls for limited engagement of armed forces and occupying a foreign area only as a last resort. It recommends not destroying or disbanding the armed forces of the enemy State, not humiliating the enemy, and treating them with the honors of war. The manual recommends not using the maximum of force and engaging the enemy in more lightly armed ways.
The moral and the practical
There are very good practical reasons for all of the manual’s advice and for limiting war, the main one being that it helps to win at relatively low cost and to keep the subsequent peace. Yet at the same time, the recommendations are more consistent with libertarian theory of war and peace (see Rothbard) than existing practices. One cannot expect a libertarian condemnation of war in a war field manual, but the movement toward a lower, more humane, and more sensible level of war is a big plus.
Sound moral rules that are consistent with human nature are at the same time practical rules that enhance value creation. This holds in war as well as in peace.
Many of the manual’s examples that stress moral behavior for practical reasons of not alienating the population and turning them into fighters against Marines are also examples of rights violations. Killing and maiming innocent civilians are prime examples. Breaking into homes, terrifying people, and abusing or torturing prisoners are all rights violations.
The American mistakes of disbanding the Baath Party and Iraqi Army had practical consequences that Lind clearly pointed out. At the same time, I will stretch a point by suggesting that there were some moral problems as well. Imagine that an enemy conquered General Motors Corporation, broke it up, outlawed it, and all the employees lost their jobs. Employees do not have rights in their jobs in a free market, but an outsider who comes in and coercively breaks the agreements between them and their employer is violating rights and creating moral chaos. Neither all Iraqi soldiers nor the whole Sunni bureaucracy were guilty or equally guilty of crimes that required the punishments of losing their livelihoods. This meant a lot to them and they were performing services for the State. Of course, the Iraqi State and Sunni control over it were gone, but America then set about rebuilding a new one. I judge matters in that context. As usual, America did not create a free market. It set about hiring and retraining new bureaucratic workers and policemen to do much that was earlier done by those who had been fired. It relied on Shiites. The criteria it used are murky. It seems to have discriminated against Sunnis or those who had police or military experience. It then forcefully integrated communities by using Shiites to police Sunnis. This could do nothing but ignite strife and provide opportunities for Shiites to take revenge against Sunnis. To this day, many bombings are directed at American-trained police and many killings are attributed to various death squads. As at home, the American State went for social engineering, acted immorally, and failed to envision the consequences of its acts.
There were basically three paths that America could have followed in Iraq once it had made the mistake of conquering the country: break up the old State and reconstitute it, retain the old State, or retain the old State but shrink it or subdivide it while withdrawing as quickly as possible. The worst course, which America chose, was to break up the old State and reconstitute it. The Fourth Generation manual strongly suggests preserving enemy States which is the second path. This indeed is preferable to path one which has led to civil war. The third path, however, is best of all, although it is far from easy. Free markets, property rights, and economic prosperity are key elements in overcoming sectarian violence because they give the prospect of large material gains that outweigh the nonpecuniary gains of revenge or bloodshed. They change the game from a zero-sum game to a positive return game. De-nationalizing the oil industry and distributing shares to all Iraqis would have jump-started this process. Instead, Americans engaged in national economic planning with large contracts going to American companies.
Weakness and moral strength
One theme of the manual is there is power in weakness and that a strong force loses at the moral level when it bullies a weak movement. “We also see the power of weakness. In Fourth Generation warfare, the weak often have more power than the strong. One of the first people to employ the power of weakness was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s insistence on non-violent tactics to defeat the British in India was and continues to be a classic strategy of Fourth Generation war. Once the British responded to Indian independence gatherings and rallies with violence, they immediately lost the moral war.”
The manual needs to clarify the dictum of power in weakness. It is not always so. It depends on the moral stature of the weak. Gandhi gained this stature by non-violent tactics and by personal abnegation. Other things being equal, Al-Qaeda (which is weak) loses at the moral level when it bombs and indiscriminately kills innocent civilians, whether they are voters are not. With all things not equal, Al-Qaeda’s strategy and tactics take calculated risks. While losing temporarily at the moral level, they may gain strategically if they unnerve their opponents and drive them into bad or immoral actions of their own. By the same token, strong forces that act morally and against clear injustices against them do not lose at the moral level. They lose if they overdo matters or harm innocent people while attempting to punish their enemies. In other words, what matters are violations of the non-aggression axiom and not simply weakness and strength per se.
An unfair criticism
The manual assumes, as it must, that the American armed forces will be motivated to carry out the wishes of their superiors and go at the Fourth Generation war in a creative way, which is what such war demands. A weakness may stem from this point of view. I will make an unfair criticism since, after all, the manual is written to instruct the American combat soldier on how to fight and win a war in a foreign country like Iraq or Thailand. It does not and cannot address why the American soldier is on foreign soil in the first place. But the criticism is a point worth thinking about because it’s related to the soldier’s behavior.
Let us ask: What are the aims of the war? Why is it being fought and what is the American force supposed to accomplish? While the manual aims for a remaking of the American armed forces in which soldiers will be taught to acquit themselves in ways to assure victory in Fourth Generation wars, it is hard to tell what victory is supposed to mean. That apparently has to come from somewhere else, but what victory means and where it comes from are unclear. Yet knowing what a war aims for is very important.
It is logical that the tactics and behavior of the armed forces have to link up with the war’s aims. To teach appropriate behavior in a vacuum of aims is dubious. The soldiers need to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. The manual mentions the motivation of the enemy but doesn’t go into the motivation of the American soldier. For the Marines’ motivation, they need to know why one side is good and the other side is bad. Perhaps the divisions of sides are not clear. Then they need to know the difference between good and bad behaviors of a given side or sides as measured against some goal that the soldiers are trying to achieve. What is that goal? For example, how can soldiers treat villagers in ways to gain their cooperation against guerillas (as the manual teaches) unless they somehow know that the villagers prefer the victory and government that the soldiers stand for to what the guerillas aim to achieve or impose?
But the soldiers may not know these basic things. Early on, we are accurately told: “Once again, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions and gangs are fighting wars, in more and more parts of the world. They fight using many different means, not just engagements and battles. Once again, conflicts are often many-sided, not just two-sided. Marines who find themselves caught up in such conflicts quickly discover they are difficult to understand and harder still to prevail in.”
If they are hard to understand, the Marines will be at a loss to know who’s who, what’s what, and what to do about it. This may be an exaggeration, I readily concede, but not a point without some merit. No manual, no matter how much it improves upon the old ways, can overcome a war begun in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
Conclusion
Rather than summing up, we can apply the teachings of the Fourth Generation war model to the current Israel-Lebanon war. It’s Fourth Generation war because Hezbollah is a non-State group with some State participation and pretensions. But it is not Lebanon. Hezbollah is very weak compared to Israel. The total number of its core armed fighters is variously estimated at 300 to 3,000, although Hezbollah itself says 5,000 to 10,000.
By Fourth Generation precepts, Israel has already lost by applying too much force too widely and too indiscriminately against Lebanese targets and not Hezbollah. It has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands. Israel is using Third Generation war against a Fourth Generation enemy. Hezbollah wins simply by drawing out the battle, scoring some hits against tanks and ships, and maintaining intact most of its fighters and leadership who fade away into the countryside or hide in cities. It wins by recruiting new fighters because of Israel’s excessive use of force. Many articles and quotations already point to this outcome. It wins by gaining political support both in Lebanon proper and beyond its borders. It wins if after the war is over it engages an occupying force with guerilla tactics. Lobbing rockets into Israel does not help Hezbollah at the moral level because they are not hitting military targets. They are killing and injuring Israeli civilians. Perhaps this helps them project an image of strength and action against an overwhelming force. The United States loses because of its crystal-clear alignment with Israel. Bush and Rice immediately stand behind Israel, drag their heels, and wait. Rice holds out for lasting peace rather than a cease-fire. Obviously American leadership wants Israel to have time to continue the war and countenances the costs being imposed on the Lebanese people.
August 24th, 2006
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