Terrorism or simply war?

Gregory Clark, in an editorial in today's Japan Times, writes:

..."terrorist" has become a omnibus word that allows governments to try to suppress enemies at will. It has replaced "communist," and is much more useful.

With "communist," there had to be at least some proof of leftwing leanings before setting out to exterminate people. With "terrorist," not even this restraint is needed. When those being suppressed try to fight back, governments can say this indeed proves how those people all along were indeed "terrorists" who deserved to be exterminated

Unless, of course, the people fighting back are opposed to someone we dislike. Then they are called freedom fighters, with every right to use whatever means possible to survive. The governments that chide Pakistan for cross-border support to anti-Indian guerrillas in Kashmir were full of praise when the same Pakistan supported Afghanistan guerrillas opposed to the former pro-Moscow regime in Kabul.

Most of what is now called terrorism is, in fact, civil war. Such wars are inevitable when disputes within the nation cannot be solved through negotiation, elections or some other peaceful means. Americans should know; they had a civil war more than a century ago and are still talking about it.

In most civil wars, usually one side will lack a formal government and army. So it has no choice but to use unconventional means to pursue its struggle -- guerrilla warfare, suicide bombings, surprise attacks, sabotage, support from across borders, etc. The fact it uses such means is hardly a proof of illegitimate "terrorism." On the contrary, the willingness of people in the antigovernment forces to suffer extreme hardship to fight for their cause could well be a proof of sincerity and even legitimacy.

The same logic can also operate at the international level. People in dispute with a much stronger foreign enemy will inevitably feel they have no choice but to use unconventional means. Japanese hawks should know, since they once felt they had to rely on a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and kamikaze attacks to settle a dispute. The Americans should know, too, since they once had to use guerrilla warfare, surprise attack and sabotage in their war of independence against Britain. But none of this necessarily adds up to global "terrorism," even if the people targeted think otherwise.

This is especially true in the Middle East where dissidents come together more on the basis of shared religion rather than the tribalistic nation-state. Use of unconventional means to wage disputes is inevitable.

Someone should tell U.S. President George W. Bush that he got it right at the beginning, when in the wake of Sept. 11 he said "This is war." Islamic militants had declared a war on the U.S. in response to what they saw as a de facto U.S. war against the Islamic world.

The U.S. now has to decide how to wage that war. It can risk the enormous trauma and expense of trying to crush its kamikaze, guerrilla-minded Islamic enemy, with the struggle probably lasting for decades if other Islamic forces decide to join in. Or it can try to answer some Islamic grievances. But either way, spare us the "terrorist" label.

Nothing extraordinary here; just points that deserve reiteration.

Iraq: What do you think?

"Isn't it funny how people say they'll never grow up to be their parents, then one day they look in the mirror and they're moving aircraft carriers into the Gulf region?"

Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified

"Impossible Histories," the Edward Said article I brought up a few months ago, is now available online. Worth reading, even (especially?) if you think Bernard Lewis is a god and Islam is a threat to humanity.

The Third World versus the West

Uh-oh. I thought we weren't allowed to make such arguments following 9/11:

the resentments underlying the present wave of international terrorism and our reactions to it could aggregate into a prolonged revolutionary epoch sustained by the under-privileged against the over-privileged in order to force the latter to face up to the world’s growing inequalities.

We in the West must, of course, protect ourselves physically against attack, but decisive military victory against dispersed and often unidentifiable groups is notoriously hard to achieve. Therefore we must also be politically inventive in removing the grounds for extremism. In any case, to rely entirely on force where there is patently a need for reform would be to the disgrace of the developed world and, in the long run, probably hazardous in an age of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons.

Such anti-American drivel!

Israel, Iran, and the Palestinians

The AP reported yesterday that "German authorities today returned to Israel a consigment of Israeli-manufactured military equipment that they insist was bound for Iran." Hmm. That's odd. I thought those evil Iranians were shipping arms to the Palestinians...

What War Looks Like

In the upcoming issue of the Progressive, Howard Zinn writes:

In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something missing. The talk is about strategy and tactics, geopolitics and personalities. It is about air war and ground war, weapons of mass destruction, arms inspections, alliances, oil, and "regime change."

What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with "national security" but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical care and peace...

Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note that an attack on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law. We note that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for war--else we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point out that the country that possesses by far the most "weapons of mass destruction" is our country, which has used them more often and with more deadly results than any nation on Earth. We can point to our national history of expansion and aggression. We have powerful evidence of deception and hypocrisy at the highest levels of our government.

But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should we not go beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John le Carré has one of his characters say: "I despise experts more than anyone on earth.")

Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk for a moment and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will not be known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war memorial?

Retool The Coming Holiday!

Back in Business

Back online and, with having had to resort to television and a few newspapers to get a glimpse of current events, I can fully attest to the fact that I don't know much of what's going on in the world right now. Still, I found some of this stuff relevant, for a variety of reasons:

*Eric Alterman vs. Alex Cockburn

*Something expected (nay, predicted) :

Distortions and lies are par for the course throughout Let Freedom Ring because, without them, Hannity wouldn't be able to make the continual stream of over-the-top accusations against liberals: They "loathe and ravage so many of our core values and traditions"; they "told us global warming and gays in the military were top priorities, well above securing our nation"; and "after we defeat our last foreign enemy, we will still face threats to our freedom, largely from left-wing extremists in our own country."

On "Hannity and Colmes," Hannity often seems to roll over the timid Colmes with his bluster. When his words are frozen on the page, though, there is no disguising what they are: poorly argued propaganda."

*"The growing clamor for ethnic cleansing"

*"Media Images of 'Hunks' Spur Body Anxieties in Men"

*"Project Censored presents the 10 big stories the mainstream news media ignored in 2001"

*"Accusations that big business is hijacking the earth summit and pushing its own agenda of free trade and privatisation in developing countries overshadowed the first official day of the conference yesterday."

The above is mostly random stuff that I've run across. It's not indicative of what's been going on over the past week (saber rattling on Iraq, mostly), just what caught my eye.

Blogging Breach

My blogging activity is going to run pretty dry for the next few days as I am in the process of moving. Until I can get hooked up to the net and settle into a groove, don't expect much here for a week or so (hopefully).

Till then, toodles...

After Victory

In the conclusion to his review of Michael Oren's recently published book, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Tony Judt observes:

Short of forcibly expunging the Arab presence from every inch of soil currently controlled by Israel, the dilemma facing Israel today is the same as it was in June 1967, when the aging David Ben-Gurion advised his fellow countrymen against remaining in the conquered territories. A historic victory can wreak almost as much havoc as a historic defeat. In Abba Eban's words, "The exercise of permanent rule over a foreign nation can only be defended by an ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness that are incompatible with the ethical legacy of prophetic Judaism and classical Zionism." The risk that Israel runs today is that for many of its most vocal defenders, Zionism has become such an "ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness" and not much more. In that case, Israel's brilliant victory of June 1967, already a classic in the annals of pre-emptive defensive warfare, will have borne bitter fruits for the losers and the winners alike.

The subtext here: the occupation needs to end.

Counselor West?

A random tidbit: Cornel West is gonna be in the next two Matrix films!?!?

I, too, couldn't believe this, but apparently it was reported in the Washington Post a week and a half ago:

[Cornel West] even surfaced down in Sydney for the filming of "Matrix 2" and "Matrix 3," where he morphed into a character called Counselor West. He got a part in the movies, you see, at the invitation of Larry and Andy Wachowski, the movies' writer-director team, who'd read West's early philosophical writings and wanted to incorporate him into the script....

(NB: Originally noted by Nick Danger, via Instapundit.)

Wise vs. D'Souza

There's an illuminating debate on affirmative action between Tim Wise and Dinesh D'Souza from 1996 available here (via Real Player). It's two hours long, but if you have the time, it's worth checking out. Leave it on in the background as you surf the web...

Needless Deaths of the Past...and Future?

HRW has dusted off a report from 1991 on "Needless Deaths in the Gulf War" and posted it on its Iraq background page. This excerpt from the report's introduction surely resonates with the current climate:

...U.S. and other allied spokespersons claimed at every turn that the effort to minimize damage to civilians had succeeded. Though occasionally acknowledging that some civilian casualties were inevitable, the impression was created by statement after statement and television image after image that, so far as the allied performance was concerned, it was a near-perfect war, with as little harm to civilian life and property as humanly possible.

This impression was reinforced by a deliberate policy on the part of the United States and its allies to manage the news of the war in a manner designed to suggest that all feasible precautions in fact had been taken to avoid harm to civilians. Restrictions placed on journalists attempting to cover the war and the selective presentation of information about the conduct of the war, in part through elaborately rehearsed military briefings, left the press unable to probe the extent of the precautions actually adopted. Parallel curbs on the foreign press imposed by Iraq exacerbated the difficulty of penetrating the veils that blocked the view of the actual conduct of the war.

Anyway, it might be worth the while to browse the report in order to brush up on what happened the last time we grappled with Saddam, and as a sort of conjecture of what might lie ahead. Or, as I noted yesterday, what may already be in progress. Who knows.

Media Silence on Quecreek

The WSWS reports further on the media silence in regards to the background to the Quecreek mine disaster. Recall these comments.

How Islam Bashing Got Cool

"Islam-bashing, it appears, is suddenly not just acceptable, but almost fashionable among conservatives. This isn’t a matter of commentators criticizing Muslim extremists. These are remarks that attack Islam, Muslims, the Qur’an, and the Prophet Muhammad as pervasively and inherently bad..."

(NB: link via unknown news)

The War's Already Begun

This article from the Asia Times argues that the war in Iraq is already on:

At the beginning of this year, when US President George W Bush started talking ever more in earnest about taking out Saddam Hussein and signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake a comprehensive, covert program to topple the Iraqi president, including authority to use lethal force to capture him, the US and putative ally Britain had approximately 50,000 troops deployed in the region around Iraq.

By now, this number has grown to over 100,000, not counting soldiers of and on naval units in the vicinity. It's been a build-up without much fanfare, accelerating since March and accelerating further since June. And these troops are not just sitting on their hands or twiddling their thumbs while waiting for orders to act out some type of D-Day drama. Several thousand are already in Iraq. They are gradually closing in and rattling Saddam's cage. In effect, the war has begun.

DEBKAfile has been reporting the same thing recently: "The US campaign to oust Saddam is therefore unfolding already, albeit in salami-fashion, slice by slice, under clouds of disinformation and diversionary ruses."

Times Takes Flak on Iraq

Conservatives are railing against the NY Times for some of its coverage on the march to war in Iraq, according to Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. "The charge," writes Kurtz, "is being led by the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnist Charles Krauthammer, who argue that the Times is using its front page to mobilize opposition to a U.S. attack on Iraq."

Josh Marshall has some relevant comments on this here.

"Anyone can sparkle in the afterlife, for a price"

This is a weird story from the Chicago Tribune:

A company based in suburban Elk Grove Village has accepted its first deposit for manufactured diamonds made from carbon captured during the cremation process so that loved ones--family members or even pets--could be mounted into a ring, pendant or other jewelry.

A small number of U.S. funeral homes, including four in the Chicago area, have signed up to offer memorial diamonds produced by Life Gem. The cost will depend on the size of the gem, starting at $4,000 for a quarter-carat.

...Life Gem says the diamonds will take about eight weeks to produce. The company is selling blue diamonds and plans to offer other colors. A .25-carat gem is $4,000 (the company requires a minimum order of two stones), and a 1-carat gem is $22,000. Life Gem said it will make only as many stones as are ordered. The company applied for a U.S. patent on the process in March.

The notion of having a constant reminder of her husband that dangles from her neck comforts Jacki French of Joliet. She said she cringed when her husband, Jack, announced that he'd like his ashes scattered in the woods where he often played as a boy.

..."There is a strong human need to have something tangible because memories fade and float away," said Kyle Nash, a grief counselor for physicians at the University of Chicago.

Interesting, I suppose.

Chemical Weapons, the US and Iraq: What's Missing

It was page one of the New York Times Sunday (August 18), picked up extensively by the international media, a featured story on America On Line. "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas," shouted the headline. Senior military officers revealed that the Reagan administration had provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance in waging decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The assistance was given at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraq had already employed chemical weapons and would likely continue to do so.

This of course raises obvious questions about the current Bush administration's near-frenzied demonization of Saddam Hussein, particularly for his alleged chemical and biological weapons (CBW) threat. Readers can be forgiven if they think this is a revelation of some sort. It isn't.

The story may add a new detail or two about the precise nature of US tactical assistance to the Iraqis, but the basic story has long been known. Strangely, the Times story leaves out the most significant part -- the furnishing of chemical and biological materials by the United States to Iraq which markedly enhanced Iraq's CBW capability.

...At the risk of sounding like I'm blowing my own horn, I must point out that I wrote a story on this very subject in 1998, which was published in several "alternative" magazines, distributed widely on the Internet to this day, and won a Project Censored award in 1999. As far as I know, the American mainstream media has never covered this story, and if the Times article is any guide, the censorship will continue...

Read on: Bill Blum, "Chemical Weapons, the US and Iraq: What the New York Times Left Out."

Also on this topic, recall Chris Floyd's contribution from a few months back:

Whatever the facts, the charge that Hussein "gassed his own people" has been the bloody shirt repeatedly waved by George W. Bush in his frantic bid to build support for an invasion of Iraq. Such an action, we are told, puts a nation beyond the pale of civilization and sends it hurtling into the abyss of ultimate evil. Any state that would "gas its own people" is, we're told, a rogue state, a terrorist state.

What then to make of the revelations last week that the United States "gassed its own people" during the Vietnam War? The Defense Department has admitted that the Pentagon sprayed more than 4,000 U.S. sailors with various substances, including the deadly nerve gas sarin and a gruesome biological toxin, in a four-year operation (1964-68) called Project SHAD, the New York Times reports.

Ah, the ironies...

Retire the "War on Terror" Rhetoric

In the July/August 2002 edition of Foreign Affairs, Grenville Byford contends that victory in the war on terror will be possible "only if the United States confines itself to fighting individual terrorists rather than the tactic of terrorism itself." He goes on to relate that,

...American anger does not stem from the fact that it [9-11] was terrorism. Americans would be just as furious if the carnage had been inflicted by the Afghan air force instead of a shadowy subnational group. And their outrage does not relate solely to the death of civilians. If it did, greater distinction would be made between the attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon, and certainly between both of these and the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. No, what matters is quite simple: America was attacked and Americans were killed. The details of how it happened are horrifying but relatively unimportant.

This means that rather than proclaiming itself to be engaged in a necessarily nebulous war on terrorism, the United States should instead accept that it is dealing with a less grandiose and more specific question of national security. Its challenge is to protect itself in the future while demonstrating that attacks on Americans will be met with an implacable response. The government must show that it will brook no opposition in extirpating those responsible and anyone who helps them. If the country's enemies wish to surrender, they can have a fair trial. If not, they will be killed.

To accomplish its objectives, the United States will need the active help of some countries and the passive acquiescence of others. Such cooperation will not come from goodwill alone, nor will it emerge in response to peremptory commands. It will generally have to be purchased, in the usual coin of international politics. In other words, just as America is not about to give a blanket endorsement of how the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Israelis, and others handle their local "terrorist" problems, so the rest of the world is not about to do the same for America. Acknowledging this fact frankly would be useful; it would stave off a great deal of hypocrisy, confusion, and resentment while focusing attention on the real bargains that need to be cut.

Americans now realize that they have enemies and must deal with them seriously. The "moral clarity" in the rhetoric of the "war on terrorism" is more apparent than real. It takes a one-dimensional view of a multidimensional problem, and the sooner that rhetoric is retired the better. Interests first, ends second, means third -- this is how America thinks. It should be how it talks as well.

What Mr. Byford fails to acknowledge is that the awkward, ridiculous rhetoric surrounding the war serves a very nice purpose in masking our own imperial motives. I'd doubt that anyone in the White House or Pentagon wants anyone else to know what they are really thinking, in regards to foreign policy maneuvers over the past year, or, hell, the past half-century.

The Powell Manifesto


The Powell Manifesto - How a Prominent Lawyer's Attack Memo Changed America
by Jerry Landay

The liberal left, and the funders who support it, are only now realizing the magnitude of the agitprop organization that New Conservatism has fielded against it since the 1970s.

Liberals have focused on single issues, with projects funded only on a short-term basis. The right coordinated its activism on a focused agenda, and waged a culture war along a broad front.

Its huge constellation of attack groups is generously funded for the long term. Liberals who seek to re-energize their movement need to study the history of the culture warriors of the right who succeeded in shouldering the nation rightward. One little-known strand of the story involves a powerful memorandum written by a renowned corporate attorney on the threshhold of his historic Supreme Court career. Mediatransparency.org has commissioned a special report on the role played by Lewis F. Powell.

Horowitz, MLK, and the "Reparations Buffoons"

Well, the shoe finally dropped and David Horowitz has lashed out against the reparations rally.

I'm always amused when conservatives of his ilk drop approving references to Martin Luther King, Jr. when, in all likelihood, Dr. King would be fighting tooth-and-nail against the contemporary color-blinded conservative approach to race (as he fought the conservative "you're demanding too much, too quickly" stance back in the 50s/60s, as well as the Old Right's blatant bigotry). Anyway, Horowitz writes:

When Martin Luther King gave his speech in Washington, he was disenfranchised; he could not eat at lunch counters reserved for whites or sit in buses when whites were standing; or use facilities other than those designated "for colored only." What exactly are Charles Ogletree and Randall Robinson, two men of Harvard, two counselors to presidents, and both the recipients of six-figure incomes owed by America? What are they owed by the ordinary Americans who must pay the taxes for reparations and who in their vast majority had ancestors who either had nothing to do with slavery, or gave their lives to end it? Or dedicated themselves to fighting segregation and discrimination?

If Horowitz knew anything about the civil rights movement, he would concede that, after having won substantial victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts of 1964/65, King made an explicit turn towards addressing the economic inequalities coded by race within America. Of course, this is a no-no in American politics, which is why every time his birthday rolls around the general applause for the "I Have a Dream" man stops at the year 1965. Still, in many ways, the issues King began to champion towards the end of his life resonate with those that the reparations movement is trying to raise, however clumsily.

It’s also absurd that Horowitz uses Charles Ogletree and Randall Robinson as “stand ins” for the black community. This is just done to turn attention away from the core issue: the very real racial “disparities” in income, housing, health, education, etc. that Horowitz briefly mentions, and tries to whitewash, earlier in the article. He also erroneously states that these “Reparations Buffoons” are going after “ordinary Americans” when it is very explicit that their legal grievance is with the US government, which was complicit in the promotion and protection of slavery – as encoded by law. In his 1964 book, Why We Can't Wait, King himself put the grievance this way:

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed upon unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of one human being by another. The law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures, which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of rights to war veterans, America launch a broad based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.

So, please, David, if you’re going to discuss race, leave King out of it. You’re probably making the man roll over in his grave.

Other sources: Tim Wise, in an excellent article on the “True MLK,” has addressed similar Horowitzian claims. Michael Eric Dyson has also explained how today's conservative take on race runs contrary to the very things King stood for.

The Rah-Rah Boys

Thomas Frank weighs in with this indictment of the "gurus who prophesied an unending bull market" during the 1990s. He writes:

America's current problems stem not from an excess of dissent but from the utter unaccountability of corporate apologists like Cramer, Kudlow, Glassman and the Wall Street Journal. What was and is needed in America is not the complete and final quieting of dissent but a vibrant counterpoint to the chorus of promoters who virtually monopolized economic discussion in the 1990s. What will prevent bubbles and manias and mass delusions and maybe even bad government is a new set of public thinkers willing at least to entertain the notion that capitalism might not always allocate goods fairly or efficiently; that markets may not always be synonymous with democracy; that voting and collective bargaining are expressions of the popular will every bit as legitimate as shopping and day trading.

Maybe market meltdowns are what happen to a country when commentary on matters economic becomes the exclusive province of business thinkers. When labor unions are systematically crushed. When dissent is divorced from matters economic or social and becomes instead a quality of middle-class taste preferences, of "extreme" cars and "radical" packaged goods. When management theorists take it as their duty to dazzle us with a crescendo of free-market worship. When leaders of left parties cleanse their ranks of laborites, of New Dealers, of Keynesians, of socialists. When newspapers refuse to open their columns--on grounds of laughable, self-evident dinosaurdom--to doubters and second-wavers and old-school liberals.

Today we are paying for each of these, for all of the ways in which we expunged the common sense of our parents' America from our lives. With each month's nauseating returns, we are making good the intellectual folly of the last 10 years.

FYI: Here's a different synopsis of Frank's "market populism" argument than the one I mentioned a few days ago.

Mass Graves & War Crimes?

Newsweek has apparently picked up the sniff of rotting corpses and started investigating the reports of mass graves near Dasht-e Leili in Afghanistan. Still, they find no evidence of direct US complicity in a war crime:

Nothing that Newsweek learned suggests that American forces had advance knowledge of the killings, witnessed the prisoners being stuffed into the unventilated trucks or were in a position to prevent that. They were in the area of the prison at the time the containers were delivered, although probably not when they were opened. The small group of Special Forces soldiers were more focused at the time on prison security, and preventing an uprising such as the bloody outbreak that had happened days earlier in the prison fort at Qala Jangi. The soldiers surely heard stories of deaths in the containers, but may have thought them exaggerated. They also may have believed that the dead were war casualties, or wounded prisoners who, among thousands of their comrades, simply didn’t survive the rugged journey from the surrender point to the prison.

Even though...

Pentagon spokesmen have obfuscated when faced with questions on the subject. Officials across the administration did not respond to repeated requests by Newsweek for a detailed accounting of U.S. activities in the Konduz, Mazar-e Sharif and Sheberghan areas at the time in question, and Defense Department spokespersons have made statements that are false.

Interestingly, this Newsweek report mentions nothing about Jamie Doran's documentary film, Massacre in Mazar, which broke the container/war crime story in Europe back in June. Physicians for Human Rights follows up the Newsweek story, here.

Update: According to the WSWS, the Newsweek exposé whitewashes the US role in the massacre.

Update II: Massacre in Mazar is available for viewing, here.

CNN chief claims US media 'censored' war

Rena Golden, executive vice-president and general manager of CNN International:

Anyone who claims the US media didn’t censor itself [during the Afghan campaign] is kidding you. It wasn’t a matter of government pressure but a reluctance to criticise anything in a war that was obviously supported by the vast majority of the people...And this isn’t just a CNN issue - every journalist who was in any way involved in 9/11 is partly responsible.

Dan Rather, if you recall, put it a bit less elegantly: "you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck...Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions."

Ya mean journalists internalize the demands of power, which in turn leads to a form of self-censorship? And that significantly influences media content?! Wow. I've never heard anyone make that argument before. What a shocker.

AmStudy Treasure Chest!

Warm up that Acrobat Reader! Here are a bunch of the best, most influential articles in American Studies and general Cultural Studies. From Stuart Hall to Jackson Lears, George Lipsitz to Leo Marx...you should be able to find something worth reading on this page. More goodies here, too.

War and the Powerlessness of the Majority

Stephen Gowans writes:

The campaign in the United States to end the Vietnam War, [for example,] no matter how much it was said to have been inspired by the majority recognizing the immorality of US aggression, could rely on the participation, and at the very least, the sympathy, of large parts of the US population, because the war exacted an extraordinary personal cost for many Americans. The issue of millions upon millions of Southeast Asians being destroyed, while a motivating force for the most ardent activists, was of little moment for the majority against the loss of friends and family. To this day, oceans of tears are, every now and then, cried for the 55,000 Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam, but, in the United States and throughout the Western world, not a moment's recognition is given to the vastly greater number of mostly civilian Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who were killed, for having the misfortune to live upon real estate the United States sought to dominate. In other words, the many can be galvanized to act to the extent their personal interests are directly threatened, but only then, and only where the cost is high. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, slaughtered abroad, while engendering campaigns of protest by a minority of activists, will be ignored by the majority. That the Nazi Holocaust happened, with little protest at the time, is, no matter how much Zionists would like to regard the event as inimitable and uniquely related to anti-Semitism, but a single (though particularly horrific) instance of a larger phenomenon: the majority impotently accepting massive injustice committed elsewhere with a shrug of the shoulders and the question: "What can I do about it?"

...the received wisdom holds that matters of state are best left in the hands of a small number of representatives, their appointees, and coteries of "experts," while education steers clear of promoting the idea that citizens should actively participate in the formulation of policy or the pressing of demands beyond the largely inconsequential act of casting a ballot for a representative every few years. Anything beyond this is regarded as a mildly disreputable activity to be engaged in by cranks and the constitutionally disaffected.

Yet, it is the efflorecense of robust democracy that holds out the greatest hope of severely attenuating the barbarity that has left at least one hundred million dead in the last century. "The stench of blood rises from the pages of history," remarked Joseph de Maistre. And until the majority takes control of the policy making elites claim as their exclusive domain, history will continue to be written in the blood of the powerless -- and acquiescent -- majority.

No Rush to War

Attaq Iraq?: Here are "nine critical questions"

Horowitz and Reparations. Again?

David Horowitz has been working the propaganda mill hard to counter the reparations "movement" since he gained all that notoriety from his ad flap last year. Frontpage Magazine reads, "Help me raise the $100,000 needed to fund new advertisements and distribute my booklet, Reparations and Racial Double Standards, to 300,000 students, political leaders and journalists nationwide!" Of course, he's revvin' his engines in anticipation of the big rally down in DC this weekend.

While I haven't seen Horowitz spout off yet about this specfic occasion (I'm just not looking hard enough, probably), a mountain of invective is bound to flow soon. While we all eagerly wait, let's reminisce: here's the original reparations ad (as a PDF file; HTML version here) which caused so much well-milked controversy for him. Compare and contrast with this point-by-point refutation.

I wonder what Dostoevsky would think about this...

A'tta boy, Mike! Put those homeless folks where they belong - in prison!

Class War!

Molly Ivins’ recent article on “class warfare” brought to mind Neal Gabler’s op-ed piece from the 27 January 2002 LA Times, in which he wrote,

If Americans believed there was systemic inequality, there could be class warfare. What Reaganism did--and this may have been its signal accomplishment--was convince the average American that equal opportunity already existed, and that anyone who didn't succeed had only himself to blame, not the inequities of the system. This was the grand psychological transformation, and though it played on Americans' predisposition both to credit and to reprove themselves for their own situation, it succeeded largely by steadily redirecting attention from the macro to the micro, from economics to anecdote. While the macro story was that wealth was being massively redistributed from the middle class to the upper class, the micro story that Ronald Reagan and other conservatives--and even many liberals, for that matter--kept pushing incessantly was that of the small, intrepid entrepreneur who made a million dollars out of some invention or brainstorm. There were literally thousands of these stories--Reagan loved to tell the one about the fellow who reaped a fortune by inventing a beer-can holder--and they had the advantage of being media-friendly. What they suggested was that America had reached the point at which you either decided to make a fortune or you didn't, with the promise that your own windfall might be just around the corner. This was the new economic myth that trumped economic truth…

It remains a potent idea, because people want to believe it--certainly more than they want to believe that the U.S. economy distributes its rewards unfairly. As Ronald Reagan no doubt realized, it is also a lot easier to identify with a rich entrepreneur than to understand the welter of statistics that show the more frightening face of the economy. At the same time, having convinced people that wealth is a function of brains and gumption, rather than of inheritance or influence, conservatives effectively removed the rich as a target of class warfare and replaced them with another target of ideological warfare: government. By this new reasoning, when the government claimed that it wanted to redress the inequities of the economy, it was really just angling to take more money from its citizens. Government, the only instrumentality that could possibly remedy unfairness, was a lot easier to hate than a guy who invented a beer-can holder or even a guy who invented a computer operating system and became a billionaire.

After 20 years of inspirational tales of wealth, and as many years of government-bashing, this is where we find ourselves now. Most of us believe fervently in the American Dream. Most of us believe that the rich are deserving and that, with a few breaks, we might get ours, too. Most of us believe that taxes are some kind of confiscatory scheme rather than a tool for correcting an imbalance. And most of us believe that to think in terms of class under these circumstances is to deny the ideal of individual responsibility that is the very basis of America. That's why the rich will keep getting richer, the middle class will keep losing ground, the poor will keep getting ignored, and no one will say a single word about it.

Also of note: Brian Oliver Sheppard has approached this issue with his typical, uncompromising flair on more than one occasion. Of course, he writes from an anarchist perspective.

In Your Dreams, George...



We have a better chance of seeing your likeness in a mug shot than on Rushmore, come the future...

Hey, you!

Don't forget to mail your postcard today!

'If attacked, Israel might nuke Iraq'

For me, this is one of the first points that needs to be discussed regarding the probable effects of an attack against Iraq. In an article he wrote a few months ago, Paul Rogers put it this way:

While much of their nuclear and missile capability was destroyed during the 1990s under UN supervision, there is every indication that they [the Iraqis] have been working hard to develop effective biological and chemical weapons, and delivery systems. Any attempt to destroy the regime must be expected to result in the use of such weapons. If they were effective, either against US troops or targets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Israel, then a nuclear response would be likely. This is a harsh reality that must be faced in any analysis of the consequences of a war with Iraq.

For some background on Israel's nuclear capabilities, go here.

Update: Paul Rogers has just written another informative article on Iraq, one well worth taking a peek at.

North American Environmental Success Comes at a Global Cost

A news report from the Environment News Service notes that, "The United States and Canada have had some success in improving local environments where their citizens can enjoy clean air and water and green space, but these improvements have come at the expense of global natural resources and climate, according to a United Nations sponsored study released today." It continues:

"North America's Environment: A Thirty-Year State of the Environment and Policy Retrospective," points out that each Canadian and American consumes nine times more gasoline than any other person in the world.

The report urges Canada and the United States to accept more responsibility for the environmental changes they are causing. With only about five percent of the world's population, both countries accounted for 25.8 percent of global emissions of the major greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, created by the combustion of coal, oil and gas.

Both countries need "substantial and concrete changes" toward use of automobiles that rely on more fuel efficient technologies, and toward urban development strategies that curb urban sprawl, the authors suggest.

Umm, isn't this precisely the problem that the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to address?

The Constitution's Funeral

After pointing readers to an AP story basically saying that there is/was no evidence supporting the charges against "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla, Tom Tomorrow goes into this wonderful little rant:

Do you get it yet? Do you begin to understand the implications here, when an American citizen can be arbitrarily declared a terrorist, held indefinitely as enemy combatant--with no evidence to support the charges?

Or do you believe that it's okay for the state to hold a citizen in a military facility without formal charges--as long as some law enforcement agency suspects him of, effectively, thoughtcrime? (In which case, perhaps you ought to consider moving to a country which places the same value on personal liberty that you do, such as, say, Iraq or Libya.)

Constitutional rights are meaningless if they do not apply equally to everyone, even Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson and Tim McVeigh, and even traitorous-high-ranking-al-Qaeda-dirty-bomb-plotting-except-as-it-turns-out-not-really gang members from Chicago. You either believe in our system of Constitutional protections or you don't, but there's nothing to debate here, especially when your strongest argument is, But he's a terrorist! I just know he is! There was never much doubt that Charlie Manson was a mass murderer--he still got a damn trial.

If you don't understand this, if you have learned nothing from the lessons of history, if you so blithely dishonor the gift of liberty which has been passed down to you from preceding generations...then I guess you deserve the world you will inevitably inhabit. Unfortunately, you will also drag the rest of us down with you, like a cinder block chained to the feet of a drowning man...

And--bonus rant--keep in mind that we are about to go to war with Iraq, and very probably sacrifice the lives of an untold number of young American military personnel--because if you think that Iraq is going to be a pushover like Afghanistan, you are simply delusional--keep in mind that we're heading into this with no real evidence that it is in any way necessary or justified, nothing but the word of the same administration which recently assured us that Padilla was, no question about it, a high ranking al Qaeda dirty bomber. The time to ask questions is now--because if we find out in five years, or twenty, that the half-baked justifications we were given had no more basis in reality than the Gulf of Tonkin incident, well, that's going to be a little too late for the young widows of U.S. servicemen, for the children who will grow up without without their fathers or mothers. This isn't a computer game. The price of Saddam's overthrow will be paid in American (and of course, Iraqi) lives. Is it so much to ask that we be given something more compelling than Don Rumsfeld's vague assurances that this is necessary, trust us, we know what we're doing?

And, in a related commentary in the LA Times, Jonathan Turley formally announces that John Ashcroft has moved "from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace." He continues,

We are only now getting a full vision of Ashcroft's America. Some of his predecessors dreamed of creating a great society or a nation unfettered by racism. Ashcroft seems to dream of a country secured from itself, neatly contained and controlled by his judgment of loyalty.

For more than 200 years, security and liberty have been viewed as coexistent values. Ashcroft and his aides appear to view this relationship as lineal, where security must precede liberty.

Since the nation will never be entirely safe from terrorism, liberty has become a mere rhetorical justification for increased security.

Ashcroft is a catalyst for constitutional devolution, encouraging citizens to accept autocratic rule as their only way of avoiding massive terrorist attacks.

Geesh, maybe Fran Schor is right, and we should start using the "F" word...

Send Bush a Postcard to protest Iraq war

Time's going by quickly...but here's an idea, from a friend:

President Bush is considering starting a war by invading Iraq. Many of us do not believe that this is the right thing to do. (An unknown numbers of lives, two hundred thousand American troops and sixty-billion dollars.)

In an effort to make our point of view heard, I am suggesting that encourage as many citizens as possible to mail a post card to the white House asking him not to start another war. If we all mail our cards, or letters, on the same day it will have maximum impact. Hopefully we may receive news coverage.

The important thing is to have as many people as possible engaged in the project. So I am asking you to forward this e mail to as many people as you can. This will take less that five minutes. of your time. With luck we can reach millions of people within the next two weeks.

If we all mail our cards on or about August 15 we may be in time to influence the situation. If we all reach five people with eleven forwardings it will reach forty-eight million people. The chain letter effect.

I am asking you to invest twenty-three cents and ten minutes to help stop a war.

Mail to:
George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington DC 20500

How to ensure victory in any conflict

Tom Tomorrow: "The 'war to install a puppet government with the probable lifespan of a mayfly' was an unqualified success!"

Let Freedom Ring!

"This book really nails the issue...Liberalism and Satanism are so synonomous it's amazing. Anyone who gives a damn about other people should be hung up and left in the desert for a slow death...This book is so satisfying to the central theme of today's conservative movement, I highly recommend that you read it."
- Stan Davis

The quote above is from a "member book review" of Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism contributed to the NR Book Service. I have rarely seen such eloquence in print before.

While the book is not set to be released until next week, knowing what I do about Hannity, I predict that it will be full of more invective and gross misrepresentations than even Queen Ann's recent bestseller. Mind you, this will not be an easy task for Hannity (or whoever ghost writes for him), so I am putting myself out on a limb here. Oh, and if you're that interested, feel free to greet the honorable "Democratic Fascist" on his book tour.

Life As A BlackMan - the Game

What is up with this?

The Role of MEMRI

Brian Whitaker of the Guardian takes a look at the motivating forces behind MEMRI's translations and concludes,

To anyone who reads Arabic newspapers regularly, it should be obvious that the items highlighted by Memri are those that suit its agenda and are not representative of the newspapers' content as a whole.

The danger is that many of the senators, congressmen and "opinion formers" who don't read Arabic but receive Memri's emails may get the idea that these extreme examples are not only truly representative but also reflect the policies of Arab governments.

...Unfortunately, it is on the basis of such sweeping generalisations that much of American foreign policy is built these days.

Warblogger Watch adds some related comments on MEMRI here.

Institutional Racism and the SAT

Drawing heavily on Claude Steele's research on "Stereotype Threat," Tim Wise critiques the recently announced effort to revamp the SAT, "ostensibly to make it more fair and relevant for a 21st century educational system." His conclusion:

Instead of trying to pretty up this pig, persons concerned about educational equity, true opportunity and fairness should be calling for colleges and universities to either eliminate the use of the SAT in admissions decisions, or at least to massively downplay its importance, given its irrelevance in predicting actual academic ability.

...That SAT scores have little to do with one’s ability is borne out by a number of studies and even data provided by the test-makers themselves, which indicate that only ten percent (at most) of the difference between students in terms of freshman grades can be explained by results on the SAT. Further, the correlation between SAT scores and overall four-year college grades or graduation rates, has been so low as to be essentially nonexistent, explaining no more than 3 percent of the difference between any two students.

If ETS wants to promote fairness -- and indeed they insist that they are committed to changing the unequal educational system that helps produce scoring gaps -- they must first stop promoting a test battery that replicates and reinforces that inequity. If they wish to provide tests purely for the purpose of gauging how much is being taught and learned in K-12 schools, so be it.

But so long as they release test scores prior to college admission, knowing that such scores will be used to dole out opportunities that themselves result in still more opportunities upon graduation, ETS can only be seen as complicit in the maintenance of racial and economic stratification. They are not reformers, but merely gatekeepers for the status quo...

The Pentagon's Lost Money

This brief essay covers my favorite underreported story of the past year: the total lack of financial accountability in that great cess-pool of corporate welfare also known as the Pentagon budget. According to Buddy Grizzard,

While Americans worry about the disastrous effects on our economy of the accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom and elsewhere, an even larger accounting scandal has somehow escaped the public consciousness. According to estimates, the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development cannot account for over $3 trillion allotted to them by Congress, amounting to thousands of dollars of missing money for every man, woman and child in the country.

This story hasn’t gone completely unreported. In a Jan. 29 article titled “The War on Waste,” CBS News quoted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as saying, “according to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” The article went on to quote retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, former commander of the Navy’s 2nd Fleet, as saying that while President George W. Bush’s 2003 budget proposal calls for $48 billion in new Pentagon spending, “with good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers.”

...As Americans watch their 401-K programs evaporate in the current economy, and wonder if Social Security will be there for them when they retire, it seems that another cause for grave concern has arisen due to our government’s lack of financial transparency and responsibility.

Cheney and Rumsfeld Cover-up from the past?

The San Jose Mercury News has revived the Frank Olson story:

The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window, is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history.

Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized for an experiment gone awry, and promised that the government would reveal everything about the case.

But newly obtained documents show that the Ford administration continued to conceal information about Olson -- particularly his role in some of the CIA's most controversial research of the Cold War, on anthrax and other biological weapons.

The documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information were White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, today the nation's vice president and secretary of defense...

Yeah, you read that correctly. The implication, however subtle, is that Cheney and Rumsfeld were possibly involved in the cover-up of an assassination.

For more general background on the Olson case, check out this well-written piece by Michael Ignatieff from last year's NY Times Magazine.

(NB: Mercury News link via Progressive Review)

Say it ain't so, Apu!

U.S. authorities are monitoring hundreds of Muslim and Arab small businesses across the United States looking for possible links between criminal scams and funding for militant groups overseas, The Washington Post reported in Monday editions.

More than 500 businesses, mostly convenience stores, are targeted in a probe of petty scams that authorities believe are generating tens of millions of dollars a year for terrorist organizations, the report said, citing federal officials.

The scams include skimming the profits of drug sales, stealing and reselling baby formula, illegally redeeming huge quantities of grocery coupons, collecting fraudulent welfare payments, swiping credit card numbers and selling unlicensed T-shirts, the report said...

Just imagine...those Squishees could be funding Osama's brigades!

And for all you spoilsports out there: yeah, yeah...I know Mr. Nahasapeemapetilon is neither Arab nor Muslim, but cut me some slack here.

Get Yer War On

hehehe...

Racial divide widens in US schools

Segregation in American schools is increasing, according to a new report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Amongst several of its findings, the report notes that "virtually all school districts analyzed are becoming more segregated for black and Latino students." The Guardian and BBC ran stories on the report last Saturday.

An aside: I find it interesting that while this story was reported in the US, I ran across it first in the foreign press, where it seemed to receive much higher billing.

Terror and Punishment

Following an extended hospital stay for leukemia treatment, Edward Said offers these remarks on recent developments in Israel/Palestine:

In the West…there's been such repetitious and unedifying attention paid to Palestinian suicide bombing that a gross distortion in reality has completely obscured what is much worse: the official Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely Sharonian evil that has been visited so deliberately and so methodically on the Palestinian people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his power to create the conditions for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises: a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, which doesn't make it any less terrible but at least situates it in a real history and real geography.

Yet the location of Palestinian terror -- of course it is terror -- is never allowed a moment's chance to appear, so remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate violence against a population of three million Palestinian civilians. I am not speaking only about Israel's manipulation of opinion, but its exploitation of the American equivalent of the campaign against terrorism without which Israel could not have done what it has done. (In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.) That this evil has been made consciously part of George W Bush's campaign against terrorism, irrationally magnifying American fantasies and fixations with extraordinary ease, is no small part of its blind destructiveness. Like the brigades of eager (and in my opinion completely corrupt) American intellectuals who spin enormous structures of falsehoods about the benign purpose and necessity of US imperialism, Israeli society has pressed into service numerous academics, policy intellectuals at think tanks, and ex-military men now in defence-related and public relations business, all to rationalise and make convincing inhuman punitive policies that are supposedly based on the need for Israeli security.

Somewhat related: Rittenhouse Review has a good, brief dissection of Marty Peretz’s despicable moralizing in a recent issue of TNR.

Back To Quecreek

Following Michael Novak's championing of the Quecreek miners for showing us "the heroism, toughness, and mental inventiveness of the humble people of America who at work get dirt on their faces and calluses on their hands" and Bush's trip down to PA for some back slappin', Bill Berkowitz observes that the "One item that hasn't factored into the 'compassionate conservatism' equation is the overall issue of safety of mineworkers." After all, the Bush administration has cut funding for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) by 6 percent, and Berkowitz claims that "Miners have long suffered at the hands of union-busting industry leaders. Now, with the Bush Administration in power, those industry leaders are in charge of the henhouse."

Typically, these points have not been raised in the mainstream media. The miner rescue was treated exclusively as a feel-good story that fit nicely into its soon-to-be-created Disney format. In order to relay this type of narrative, the media had to strip the story of nearly any relevant social context. So, we were constantly admonished about how "dangerous" the miner's job is, but not provided with any substantial reporting on why that is so, or how the disaster fits into the larger, historical struggle for safety and labor regulations in the mining industry. On CNN's In Depth page on Quecreek, for example, they devote one measly article to the issue of "why we burn coal." The rest of the page completely fetishizes the rescue operation.

For a foil to this type of coverage, the WSWS ran two good background articles on the mine rescue. One can be found here; the other, here.

Sharon to Campaign for Jeb?

In a recent article in TNR, Ryan Lizza commented on the remarkable efforts underway to get Jeb Bush re-elected in Florida:

It is difficult to overestimate the importance the Bush administration places on Florida. It is the largest swing state in the country, the ground on which Bush won his contested victory in 2000, and a cornerstone of the White House's reelection strategy in 2004. But more than any of these things, it is the state in which the president's younger brother Jeb is running for reelection as governor this November. No matter what else happens at the ballot box this fall, if Jeb loses to the eventual Democratic nominee--either Janet Reno or Bill McBride--it will be seen as a humiliating defeat for the president and a vote of no confidence for his administration. As a result, it seems that no federal grant, no business loan, no tinkering with federal policy that might give Jeb a political leg up is too small to merit White House attention.

Now...on cue...from a story in Wednesday's Miami Herald:

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is planning to headline a rally in Miami next month to boost U.S. public support for his embattled country.

But, with his visit coming just two months before Election Day in Florida and possibly within a day of the Democratic primary for governor, Sharon is also stepping into the middle of one of the United States' most important political campaigns.

Although they insist politics is not Sharon's purpose, Israeli officials expect Gov. Jeb Bush to stand with the prime minister at the rally -- an image that political strategists in both parties say can only help the governor in his reelection campaign.

How convenient.

Beyond the obvious point that Bush is going out of his way to get brother Jeb elected, the more important subtext to Sharon's proposed Florida visit is the much discussed attempt to lure Jewish voters away from the Democratic Party. With the American Right showing a rock-solid allegiance to Likud's plans for continued subjugation of the Palestinian population, hopefully resulting in the eventual colonization of "Eretz Israel," it will be interesting to see whether this stance is a strong enough reason for Jews to jump aboard the GOP express.

Conservatives are salivating over the prospect of a potential "double victory," and for good reason: they stand to win a substantial voting block, and not from the ample reserves of non-aligned, middle-of-the-roaders. Crucially, they would be gaining votes which, historically, were sure bets for the DNC.

Questions about 9/11

Columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall has compiled a list of some of the unanswered questions since 9/11. Worth checking out.

Counting the dead

Marc Herold has penned a commentary for the Guardian today, putting his analyses of civilian casualties in Afghanistan into a broader context with some of the other studies conducted by the media and several NGOs. “In the eight months since I published my original study," Herold writes, "I have updated and corrected my database, and incorporated the civilian deaths resulting from British and US special forces attacks. My most recent figures show that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed between October 7 and July 31.” Apparently, he has completely backed off his first calculation of 3,767 killed between October 7 to December 6.

Herold goes on to conclude:

In war, counting is not value-free. To overlook or underestimate the civilian dead gives rein to the enthusiasts of precision-guided weaponry. It is an invitation to proliferation of war. The thousands of Afghan civilians who perished did so because US military and political elites chose to carry out a bombing campaign using extremely powerful weaponry in civilian-rich areas (the isolated training camps were largely destroyed during the first week).

For political reasons, it has been necessary to hide the human carnage on Afghan soil as much as possible from the western public. Given that many of the bombing attacks - such as those on civilian infrastructure (cars, clinics, radio stations, bridges) and those during November and December on anything rolling on the roads of southern Afghanistan - violated the rules of war, there are war crimes that need to be investigated. An inadequate count will make it impossible for the families of those wrongfully killed to get the compensation to which they are entitled. It will also impede international justice.

Herold’s original report came under heavy criticism once it was published. Proponents of the Afghan bombing, both liberal and conservative, excoriated him for denouncing the war but saying, in the words of Jeffrey Isaac, “nothing about how to protect the world from terrorism or secure the freedom of Afghans. He [Herold] voices concern for innocent civilians. But the alternative to the war is not the peaceful enjoyment of human rights by the Afghans.”

Flawed as his work was, it served a useful purpose in illustrating the point that nobody in the American media were at all concerned about reporting the effects of the war while the bombing was going on. Something’s very wrong when you have to turn to a relatively obscure professor from New Hampshire in order to get any sense of the casualties inflicted by our military campaign.

Drawing out the larger significance of the "Herold phenomenon" is not difficult. If we truly lived in an open society with a press remotely concerned with pursuing justice, and all sides of the story, then the information Herold tried to provide would have been readily available to anyone who kept up with the NY Times, Washington Post, or broadcast media. Instead, what we got was a media that actively lead the charge to war and seemed most concerned with whether the American flag was displayed prominently enough on their lapels, mastheads, and studios.

Extreme Ironing!



This is hilarious...

Hiroshima

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. Whether or not the a-bomb was "justified" is something we will probably never stop debating as a culture. Sample arguments include this condemnation of the bombing by William Blum and this defense of the bombing by Jamie Glazov. Both pieces do a good job representing the opposing sides.

For a more relevant take, James Carroll draws together the significance of Hiroshima with our current Iraqi preoccupation in an opinion piece in today's Boston Globe. His last two paragraphs are as uncompromising as you will probably ever see in a mainstream American publication:

If we used the nuclear weapon as much to send a signal to the Soviet Union as to end World War II, then all the wickedness unfolding from that use - not only the arms race, but the demonic new idea that national power can properly depend on the threat of mass destruction - belongs to us. If Saddam Hussein wants weapons of mass destruction for the sake of the strategic diplomatic power they will give him, he is playing by rules written in Washington. There are two ways to use the nuke - as a source of world destruction, and as a source of world power. We did the former at the end of World War II, which was the exact beginning of the Cold War. We have been doing the latter every day since. And why should Hussein not want to imitate us?

The bombing of Hiroshima was a great crime. That the United States of America has yet to confront it as such not only leaves the past with unfinished business, but undercuts the possibility of present moral clarity about the exercise of American power and leaves the earth's future tied to a fuse that we set burning 57 years ago today.

Update: Conservative columnist Lowell Ponte draws an analogy between Hiroshima and Baghdad, albeit from a perspective quite dissimilar to Carroll's.

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

The Washington Post ran a story on Saturday declaring that, "The lull in the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan has Afghans and Americans alike demanding that the U.S. military make clear what it is doing here and how much longer it plans to keep doing it."

Yeah, it sure as hell would be nice to know what we are doing over there. And, golly, it also might be nice to know a) how the war in Afganistan has lessened the threat of terrorism, b) what good the war has brought, outside of setting a dangerous precedent where a Western power swoops in to purge a political entity (the Taliban) with the applause of nearly everyone in the international community, and c) how any of this action will make Americans safer, in the long run. 'Cause frankly, I haven't seen a substantial argument address any of those three points and would welcome one which didn't have to resort to rhetoric like "It's too early to be critical; we're in this for the long haul" or "What did you expect us to do? Nothing!?".

Unemployment and the State of the Economy

There are two telling paragraphs in a story in tomorrow's NY Times about the languishing economy:

The unemployment rate remained at 5.9 percent, the same as June, as 86,000 people who might have been listed as unemployed and job hunting dropped out of the labor force instead. The number of temporary workers, which had been growing in earlier months and usually rises as the economy is beginning to improve, shrank in July.

Total employment, based on a survey of companies, rose a bare 6,000 — an almost imperceptible gain. Still, July was the third consecutive month in which employment went up instead of down.

This excerpt says much about the way labor and economic statistics are calculated. 86,000 people "drop out of the labor force," but - hallelujah! - that doesn't raise the unemployment rate. This isn't an anomalous occurence, either. As Tim Wise wrote in an Alternet piece two years ago (one well worth reading), the Federal government's unemployment rate is "hardly an accurate depiction of the joblessness picture in the U.S." He elaborated:

After all, the official unemployment rate doesn't include those who have grown so discouraged by their job prospects that they've stopped looking for work; nor does it include the many who can only find seasonal work and so they don't actively seek employment for much of the year; nor does it count those persons who are able to pull down only a handful of hours -- perhaps temping -- and instead counts these as if they were every bit as employed as the full-time salaried employee. If these persons were counted in an official unemployment/underemployment rate, the number of such folks would at least double, coming in at around 8 percent, or perhaps even as high as 10 percent. That the Labor Department does in fact keep this number -- called the U-7 rate but never reported to the general population -- is only further confirmation that the propaganda system in this land requires intentional obfuscation of the true state of economic affairs.

In general, things do not look good for the immediate or, even, long-term economic future. While the guardians of the financial community try to stem the panic, few dare to address the notion that we may very well be entering a global recession. The only silver lining I can see in all of this is that the economic calamity may finally puncture the mythology of "market populism."

UN Report on Jenin

The AP reported yesterday that the findings from the UN investigation of Israel's incursion into Jenin from late March to early April do "not back up claims of a massacre."

Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah, as always, had a response:

Israel is crowing that the report exonerates it from charges that there was a "massacre" in the camp. As we shall see, the Palestinian claims against Israel have been deliberately exaggerated and misrepresented in such a way as to diminish and obscure ample evidence that Israel committed serious breaches of international law. The most important thing about the new UN report on Jenin is that it is not an investigation into the events at the camp last April: none of the authors visited Jenin, since the UN Security Council-mandated investigation was blocked by Israel, which refused all cooperation.

...Israel not only blocked the Jenin investigation, but refused repeated requests by Annan for it to submit written testimony for inclusion in the report. Hence while having done everything possible to block, discredit and undermine an investigation into Jenin, the Israeli government is today citing the same report as vindication. The Israelis cannot have it both ways. If Israel claims that UN reports are not credible when they criticize Israel, it cannot then claim that they suddenly regain legitimacy when they appear to "exonerate" it...

Update: Today's Independent features a story critical of the UN report by Justin Huggler (who, along with Phil Reeves, wrote a damning piece on Jenin after finally gaining admittance into the refugee camp). In today's article, Huggler quotes Miranda Sissons, a co-author of the HRW report on Jenin, saying, "The UN's report is seriously flawed...It could have done much more and it doesn't move us forward in trying to establish the truth. It's a good example of the dangers of doing a report with no access to evidence on the ground." HRW also issued this statement following the release of the UN's findings.