Bush did it!

Nice one, George:

We can say that the administration’s war on Iraq is about nothing more than gaining control of oil fields for the profit of oil companies and others, and no one bats an eye. A majority of Americans firmly believe this. They believe that our “elected representatives” in government are prepared to kill thousands of men, women, and children in order to grow richer and more powerful. And why shouldn’t they? We’ve seen this “realpolitik” played out again and again.

But propose that these same unethical people ordered a hit on the extremely liberal Paul Wellstone, a senator who voted against the war resolution, and you suddenly find yourself accused of indulging in paranoid conspiracy theories.

...Personally, I think it’s crazy not to suspect foul play. And the more I learn about how liberal Wellstone was, the more I wonder. Do I know it wasn’t an accident? Of course not. Do I know that Bush and Co. are capable? Of course.

It’s rather funny that we are so enamored with movies and television programs about the Mafia, those charismatic folks who routinely torture and murder to control their empires, yet we can’t see that they are exactly the type of people who are at the highest levels of government.

Anyway, I’m paranoid if I say that President Bush is out to get me, yes, but if I say President Bush is a scumbag capable of ordering a hit on a political enemy and that he is out to get America -- to kill the American democratic experiment -- I’m merely stating the obvious.

Report on urban warfare points to US plans to destroy Iraqi cities

Patrick Martin of the WSWS reports,

A new report on urban warfare by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff is a blueprint for the use of America’s overwhelming military and technological supremacy to brutalize and terrorize a far weaker opponent into submission. It suggests that in any invasion of Iraq, American military planners are prepared to use massive firepower to destroy Iraq’s major cities.

At the same time, the military brass would prefer to treat cities like Baghdad and Basra as targets to be devastated from afar, rather than as prospective combat zones. The document emphasizes the obstacles which urban combat places before an attacking force, raising as cautionary examples such bloody urban battles as Stalingrad, Hue (Vietnam) and Grozny (Chechnya).

The report, dated September 16, 2002, was made available on the web site of the New York Times, which described the document in an article October 21. The study...is entitled “Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations.” (In Pentagon terminology, “joint” designates an operation combining air, naval, ground and special operations forces under a single command).

The Times article is fundamentally dishonest, portraying the new strategy as aimed at bypassing cities, avoiding combat losses and minimizing civilian deaths. A careful reading of the report suggests the opposite conclusion: despite occasional lip service to such humanitarian concerns, it makes a case for using advanced weaponry on a massive scale—with an inevitably catastrophic impact on the civilian population—as a substitute for the perils and difficulties of house-to-house ground combat...

Making a Killing

"Amid the military downsizing and increasing number of small conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War, governments turned increasingly to private military companies – a recently coined euphemism for mercenaries – to intervene on their behalf in war zones around the globe. Often, these companies work as proxies for national or corporate interests, whose involvement is buried under layers of secrecy. Entrepreneurs selling arms and companies drilling and mining in unstable regions have prolonged the conflicts.

"A nearly two-year investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has also found that a handful of individuals and companies with connections to governments, multinational corporations and, sometimes, criminal syndicates in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East have profited from this war commerce – a growth industry whose bottom line never takes into account the lives it destroys.

"Read more on this subject in ICIJ’s 11-part series, 'Making a Killing: The Business of War.'"

The Death Of The Internet?

"The Internet’s promise as a new medium -- where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged -- is under attack by the corporations that control the public’s access to the 'Net, as they see opportunities to monitor and charge for the content people seek and send," alleges Jeff Chester. "The industry’s vision is the online equivalent of seizing the taxpayer-owned airways, as radio and television conglomerates did over the course of the 20th century..."

Exasperated Cities Move to Curb or Expel The Homeless

How 'bout this for a solution: when homelessness becomes a problem, just make it illegal!

CIA Concerned US War on Terror is Missing Root Causes

Agence France Press is reporting, "The US Central Intelligence Agency has warned that US counterterrorist operations around the world may not eliminate the threat of future deadly attacks because they fail to address the root causes of terrorism, according to newly released documents."

"While we are striking major blows against al-Qaeda -- the preeminent global terrorist threat, the underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist," it said.

"Several troublesome global trends -- especially the growing demographic youth bulge in developing nations whose economic systems and political ideologies are under enormous stress -- will fuel the rise of more disaffected groups willing to use violence to address their perceived grievances," added the agency.

I thought this "root causes" explanation made you an apologist for terrorism. Guess not, considering that even the CIA is looking at things that way...

Hannity vs. Scoobie

Scoobie Davis had a nice little encounter with everyone's favorite "Democratic Fascist," Sean Hannity, last Friday. An excerpt:

SCOOBIE: ...You have to put your resources towards viable candidates, such as getting rid of George, er, I’m sorry, Jeb Bush, who was responsible for purging tens of thousands of minority voters from the polls back in 2000 through this felony—

HANNITY: Can I ask you—what is it about all these liberals; they’re so filled with vitriol. They so filled with animosity. Sir, no such thing happened. It’s an absolute lie and it’s even a bigger disgrace that you repeat the lie.

SCOOBIE: BBC journalist Greg Palast—

HANNITY: BBC, now we’re quoting the Brits, okay.

SCOOBIE: He did a study and he found how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush used the felony voter purge to get tens of thousands of eligible voters off the voter rolls and these people didn’t have access to any kind of ballot once they were at the polls—

[HANNITY DISCONNECTS SCOOBIE]

HANNITY: First of all, that’s untrue. It’s never been proven...

Oh, really? The Choicepoint scandal unearthed by Palast has been thoroughly documented. Had the lemmings in the mainstream American press properly contexualized, or paid even the slightest attention to, this issue, then Merchants of Truth like Hannity wouldn't be able to hide behind such hazy concepts as "unproven".

War on Iraq will heighten risk of further al-Qaida attacks

We already know this, but reinforcement is always welcome:

A US-led war on Iraq would heighten the risk of further terrorist attacks by al-Qaida, according to a report.

The report by the Oxford Research Group warns the civilian death toll in Iraq would reach 10,000 from conventional warfare alone.

The Baghdad regime is bent on survival at any cost and would in retaliation use "all available military means", the report says.

This would include chemical and biological weapons, which could in turn trigger a nuclear response from the US and Britain.

The report states a US-led attack is likely to "increase support for organisations such as al-Qaida and to prove counter-productive to peace and stability in the region".

The report, by Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, says: "The United States has sufficient forces to ensure regime destruction but the regime's replacement by occupying forces or by a client regime, even if the war is not greatly destructive, should be expected to increase regional opposition to the US presence...

Bush's Lies And Simple Truths

Robert Jensen observes that, "A few weeks ago Jim McDermott, a courageous congressman from Washington state, traveled to Baghdad in pursuit of peace and was sharply criticized, particularly for his comment that George Bush 'might mislead' the American public to build support for an attack on Iraq. He got only one thing wrong -- the 'might.'

"George Bush HAS misled the American public. He IS misleading the American public, and we can assume he WILL continue to mislead the public. In fact, the entire Bush administration has been misleading the public, sometimes by misdirection, sometimes by fudging the facts, and sometimes by straightforward, outright lies..."

Unasked Questions

Jock Gill has compiled a list of "The Fascinating Unasked Questions of the Bush Administration and the News Media."

Russian Disaster

Mike Golby has been closely following the Russian hostage disaster. Check Sunday's post, and today's.

Wellstone

"All right, Democrats. This is a terrible thing, a blind shot from an unfeeling Providence. However, to quote Joe Hill, don't mourn. Organize! There is now no excuse for timidity, no rationale by which anyone should stay home. Drown the polls with voters. Everywhere. The odds are now pretty good that the WH is going to get the control that it wants. If you want to memorialize Paul Wellstone, do it with a Democratic Senate."
- Battlin' Bob

"It's just too much. Tomorrow I'll organize. Today I just want to curl up and cry."
- Lenora

The Nation ran a good profile of Wellstone last May. Josh Marshall has some appropriate comments. Don Hazen has weighed in. Tapped has collated some of the best commentaries on Wellstone's life and career. Cursor.org has archived their coverage. And, finally, the Star Tribune has an entire tribute page dedicated to Wellstone.

Beyond the above, there's not much to say. I've been surprise by how much this news has affected me today. It's just devastating.

U.S. unprepared for terror attack

From the AP:

The next terrorist strike against the United States could be more deadly and disruptive than the September 11 attacks, former top government officials, academics and business leaders warn in a new report.

"America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil," said the task force chaired by former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colorado, and Warren Rudman, R-New Hampshire. The report was released late Thursday.

So, considering this additional piece of evidence, somebody again want to explain to me how a war on Afghanistan made the American people safer? Instead of bombing, couldn't our efforts and resources have been used more fruitfully?

Imposing an agenda on the Maryland sniper

"Is John Allen Williams-Muhammad an Islamic warrior on a jihad against American infidels?" asks Justin Raimondo. "I don’t think so, although subsequent revelations may well prove me wrong. Instead, I tend to believe the scenario I sketched out in my recent speech to the St. Louis College Libertarians was all too dead-on accurate:

In Rome, they fed people to the lions, and staged extravaganzas of sadistic cruelty as popular entertainment: today, the same sadistic streak is the leitmotif of our culture, as violence for its own sake preoccupies the American imagination – not only on television, but in real life. Last month, within an eight week period at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, five murders were committed by Special Operations soldiers returning from Afghanistan – they killed their wives, brutally beating, strangling, and mangling them, as if possessed by some demonic force. An investigation into the 'causes’ of this phenomenon is now underway, but permit me to advance my own theory: that the violence unleashed in America’s foreign wars is rebounding back here, in our own country.

Read more.

Spending Spree

Allan Fram of the AP reported yesterday,

The government ran a $159 billion deficit in the 2002 fiscal year the Bush administration said Thursday, punctuating one of the federal budget's worst nosedives ever just 12 days before elections for control of Congress.

The figure was not a surprise and largely reflected an ongoing shortfall in federal revenue collections. But it was nonetheless breathtaking for its contrast with the $127 billion surplus – the second largest ever – shown by the government's books just a year before.

A $286 billion swing in just one year is nuthin'. Just wait until the $272 billion war kicks in. Then you'll see a deficit worth quivering over...

~2 Weeks to Go

Bush Enlists Government in GOP Campaign

My tax dollars are going to help elect Republicans. Wonderful...

President Bush has harnessed the broad resources of the federal government to promote Republicans in next month's elections. From housing grants in South Dakota and research contracts in Florida to Air Force One rides and photos in the White House driveway, Bush has made Republican success on Nov. 5 a government-wide project.

More than 330 administration appointees, some of whom were told by White House officials that they needed to show their Republican credentials, have taken vacation time and are being flown by the party to House and Senate campaigns in states where control of Congress will be decided. The appointees will organize volunteers, work the phones and go door to door...

Enough Already

Go here for more images.

Pentagon Sets Up Intelligence Unit

Oh, this is classic...

When the CIA isn't saying what you want to hear, what do you do? Set up your own intelligence unit.

Update: More on the "Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency" here.

Back to Ok. City

Politically, this story could be the equivalent of striking gold (err, or oil) for the war-hungry Bush administration.

The FBI is under pressure from the highest political levels in Washington to investigate suspected links between Iraq and the Oklahoma bombing.

Senior aides to US Attorney-General John Ashcroft have been given compelling evidence that former Iraqi soldiers were directly involved in the 1995 bombing that killed 185 people.

The methodically assembled dossier from Jayna Davis, a former investigative TV reporter, could destroy the official version that white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were solely responsible for what, at the time, was the worst act of terrorism on American soil.

Instead, there are serious concerns that a group of Arab men with links to Iraqi intelligence, Palestinian extremists and possibly al Qaeda, used McVeigh and Nichols as front men to blow up the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

After all, the Atta-Prague link has evaporated, the public is anxious about a military campaign, and there are significant roadblocks at the UN. The thinking is probably that something needs to be pinned on Iraq soon.

While this story has popped up before, on several occasions actually, it is now prime for the picking. Time to lean on the CIA, dredge up some evidence, and launch the missiles. That's a prediction, at least.

Cashing in on Paranoia?

We specialize in escape hoods, radiation detectors, gas masks, full body protection suits, and potassium iodide tablets...these products are no different than safety devices already commonplace in most homes, such as fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and first-aid kits. We are enabling people to alleviate their fears by doing something smart and productive: preparing to overcome that which they most fear.

From a story in last week's Washington Post: "A new store called Safer America opened Thursday a few blocks from the World Trade Center with shelves filled with emergency-preparedness gear, from radiation detectors and to survival kits."

(NB: via Post-Atomic)

Stalinist Tactics

Campus-watch.org, that New McCarthyite website started up by Daniel Pipes and his brethren over at the Middle East Forum, has basically branded any academic who responded to its creation with critical remarks as "apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam."

Utterly deplorable.

Remember, it's a business...

Nice catch by Lying Media Bastards:

"This is a commercial enterprise. This is not PBS. We're not here as a public service. We're here to make money. We sell advertising and we do it on the premise that people are going to watch. If you don't cover the miners because you want to do a story about a debt crisis in Brazil at the time everybody else is covering the miners, then Citibank calls up and says 'you know what? We're not renewing the commerical contract.' I mean it's a business."
-- CNN anchor Jack Cafferty (American Morning, 8/5/02)

How to shut up your critics with a single word

Robert Fisk writes in today's Independent:

Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer – there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."

Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan – a close personal friend of Mr Sharon – believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".

You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them. The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone – people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children – in an attempt to shut them up...

Heroism, Hype, and Danger

According to this site, these are the 10 most dangerous jobs in the US:

1. Timber cutters
2. Airplane pilots
3. Construction laborers
4. Truck drivers
5. Farm occupations
6. Groundskeepers
7. Laborers
8. Police and detectives
9. Carpenters
10. Sales occupations

If you'll notice, police work is not even in the top 5. Considering all the adulation cops received following 9/11 for risking their lives to do their job, one might wonder why we don't heap praise on those workers who take an even greater risk, and likely with much less pay: farmers, timber workers, truck drivers, etc.

Tim Wise wrote an interesting article on this last January: "Heroism and Hype: Selling the Police in America."

American Empire for Dummies

Bill Blum delivered a speech recently in Boulder, Colorado. Here's an excerpt:

Well, if I were to write a book called The American Empire for Dummies, page one would say: Don't ever look for the moral factor. U.S. foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA. Clear your mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of seeing beyond the clichés and the platitudes.

I know it's not easy for most Americans to take what I say at face value. It's not easy to swallow my message. They see our leaders on TV and their photos in the press, they see them smiling or laughing, telling jokes; see them with their families, hear them speak of God and love, of peace and law, of democracy and freedom, of human rights and justice and even baseball ... How can such people be moral monsters, how can they be called immoral?

They have names like George and Dick and Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdullah in the bunch. And they even speak English. Well, George almost does. People named Mohammed or Abdullah cut off arms or legs as punishment for theft. We know that that's horrible. We're too civilized for that. But people named George and Dick and Donald drop cluster bombs on cities and villages, and the many unexploded ones become land mines, and before very long a child picks one up or steps on one of them and loses an arm or leg, or both arms or both legs, and sometimes their eyesight. And the cluster bombs which actually explode do their own kind of horror.

But our leaders are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... if that's a distinction worth making. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the Empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home - the ones who make it back - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. Our leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things.

God Bless Capitalism

'Smarter' bombs?

Scott Peterson writes in today's CSM, "In every war since Iraq, the US used more 'smart' bombs. So why do civilian casualty rates keep rising?" On Slate, Fred Kaplan asks, "How Smart Are Our Smart Bombs?"

Israel's Justification for Killing Palestinians

Kathleen Christison responds to Yossi Alpher.

Making our voices heard

There's a grim assessment of the current situation from me right below. Paul Loeb has a more optimistic, and likely more practical, take on things: "If enough of us take public stands, we may yet avert going to war with Iraq."

I fully believe that the decision to attack Iraq has been made and a very significant amount of internal momentum has built up within the military and foreign policy circles to virtually guarantee that an assault will come to fruition. That, however, need not be taken as a signal to give up all hope of preventing the slaughter. Mass action is needed to at least try to prevent the war; to make voices of dissent known; to, as Michael Albert likes to stress, "raise social costs". Success may be unlikely, but that should not preempt efforts. It would be much better to act and fail, than to not act at all. So contact your elected officials. Write your local paper. Get out into the streets. Sing an anti war song. Talk to people. Do something.

War, Come Hell or Highwater

As this story made crystal clear, the Bush administration has been consulting with the UN in order to stall for time and promote a facade of restraint and multilateral concern. It's all just window dressing to hide the fact that war has been a foregone conclusion for months now.

Quite blatantly, the war preparations are in full swing: troops are mobilizing, shipping containers have been booked, the suntan lotion's been ordered, carriers are moving into place, and now we hear, via today's NY Times, that the "American military is training furiously and polishing a plan for attacking Baghdad."

Do not be fooled: the appeal to the UN is a front; it's meaningless. If the Bushies can scare up more support, great. But that's largely irrelevant. The decision has been made and the policy has been put into motion: we're going to war, come hell or highwater.

Iraq's just the first step; or the "post-Saddam pivot"

"While President Bush has portrayed a U.S. invasion of Iraq as a blow against terrorism," writes Warren P. Strobel, "his most hawkish advisers have a much more ambitious goal in mind: redrawing the political map of the Middle East."

Top Pentagon and White House officials have discussed how the ouster of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and installation of a U.S.-backed democracy in Baghdad could trigger democratic change in neighboring Iran and put pressure on the Saudi monarchy, say U.S. officials and analysts close to the administration.

And they have mulled a "post-Saddam pivot" that would make Syria — also on the U.S. list of terrorist-sponsoring states and a longtime enemy of Israel — the next focus of U.S. action in the Middle East, said the officials, most of whom requested anonymity.

...They envision Saddam's overthrow and a sustained U.S. military presence in Baghdad triggering political change across the region. Control of Iraqi oil fields would lessen U.S. reliance on oil from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf monarchies.

Reminder: John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid of the Boston Globe reported the same thing last month.

A Massive Scandal About to Break?

David Lazarus reported in yesterday's SF Chronicle:

The betting in energy circles is that Enron's erstwhile big cheeses are in deep trouble now that the company's former top trader has pleaded guilty to manipulating the California power market.

But that may not be the half of it.

Sources close to the matter say Timothy Belden, who previously ran Enron's trading office in Portland, Ore., is prepared to implicate a number of other industry players in what could shape up to be one of the biggest conspiracies in U.S. corporate history...

Atta-Prague Link Severed

Hopefully, this report will once and for all kill the Mohammad Atta-Prague story that's been floated around since god knows when to justify bombing Iraq with impunity. Nevermind the fact that the general details have been known since at least early May...

Bush on Economy: 'Saddam Must be Overthrown'

...that's the Onion's take on current affairs. Also see this.

Plutocracy by some other name

"You can't understand what's happening in America today without understanding the extent, causes and consequences of the vast increase in inequality that has taken place over the last three decades, and in particular the astonishing concentration of income and wealth in just a few hands," writes Paul Krugman in this week's NY Times Magazine. "To make sense of the current wave of corporate scandal, you need to understand how the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the imperial C.E.O. The concentration of income at the top is a key reason that the United States, for all its economic achievements, has more poverty and lower life expectancy than any other major advanced nation. Above all, the growing concentration of wealth has reshaped our political system: it is at the root both of a general shift to the right and of an extreme polarization of our politics."

He goes on to compare current times with the 1920s, a time when America

was a nation in which vast privilege -- often inherited privilege -- stood in contrast to vast misery. It was also a nation in which the government, more often than not, served the interests of the privileged and ignored the aspirations of ordinary people.

Those days are past -- or are they? Income inequality in America has now returned to the levels of the 1920's. Inherited wealth doesn't yet play a big part in our society, but given time -- and the repeal of the estate tax -- we will grow ourselves a hereditary elite just as set apart from the concerns of ordinary Americans as old Horace Havemeyer. And the new elite, like the old, will have enormous political power.

Kevin Phillips concludes his book Wealth and Democracy with a grim warning: ''Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime -- plutocracy by some other name.'' It's a pretty extreme line, but we live in extreme times. Even if the forms of democracy remain, they may become meaningless. It's all too easy to see how we may become a country in which the big rewards are reserved for people with the right connections; in which ordinary people see little hope of advancement; in which political involvement seems pointless, because in the end the interests of the elite always get served.

Check the whole article out, then mosey on over to inequality.org for some additional reading.

Update: The sources for the Krugman article are available here.

War would crush Iraqi cities (and Iraqis, too)

Citing a number of UN sources, Anthony Shadid writes in today's Boston Globe,

A US-led attack on Iraq would probably devastate the country's tattered and already overwhelmed infrastructure, shutting down power to hospitals and water treatment plants, cutting off drinking water almost immediately to millions of residents in Baghdad and possibly elsewhere, and pouring raw sewage into the streets within hours, aid workers and specialists say.

Unlike the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraq's infrastructure was largely intact despite an eight-year war with Iran, the country's water, sewage, and electricity systems today are far more vulnerable, UN reports show. Even without a conflict, those services stand on the brink of collapse, a result of 12 years of sweeping UN sanctions, the aftermath of the Gulf War, and the government's questionable spending priorities, aid workers say.

They warn that the onset of a conflict, regardless of its duration, could create a humanitarian crisis.

''It's going to be horrendous for lots and lots of people,'' said a senior aid official in Baghdad and veteran of several other conflicts. ''People will be far more vulnerable to a future attack than before. They are much weaker, and they have little resilience.''

As this report makes clear, and contrary to what the Ministry of Homeland Propaganda says, Attaq Iraq would not be a war solely against "Saddam".

War Buildup

The US Navy is sending an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf a couple of months ahead of schedule. You know what that means, I presume...

Western Consumer Demand Fuels Resource Wars in Poor Nations

Jim Lobe reports today,

Consumer demand in Western industrialized countries for sophisticated electronic equipment and luxury goods earned at least US$12 billion last year for rebels groups, rapacious governments, and warlords in resource-rich developing nations around the world, according to a new report released by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. Thursday.

The 91-page report, 'The Anatomy of Resource Wars,' found that local conflicts over control of diamonds, tropical hardwoods, and other minerals like coltan, which is used in the production of cell phones and other electronic equipment, have killed or uprooted more than 20 million people, most of them in Africa, over the past decade.

"From Colombia to Angola to Afghanistan, people are dying every day because consumer societies import and use materials irrespective of where they originate," according the author, Michael Renner...

Update: "The Anatomy of Resource Wars" report is available, in its entirety, here (as a PDF file).

Tell (or Leak) the Truth

Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was a guest on CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown last night. Atrios points to this closing exchange, which is exceptionally relevant today:

BROWN: We've got about a half a minute left. Do you think there is -- is it your view then that there is some hidden agenda here [with the administration's push for war on Iraq]?

ELLSBERG: Well, I feel confident that the reasons being given for this war by the president, the vice president and the secretary of defense, they can't be right. They're contradicted by everything that comes out from the Senate Intelligence Committee, from the CIA and so forth. So we have to look for other reasons.

That's, by the way, part of the job. That's what I did when I worked for presidents. They -- the message of my book and of the Pentagon Papers, unfortunately, is that officials, like me and my bosses, lie and conceal far more than any outsider can even imagine.

But there is another side to that. It's possible to tell the truth. The message I would like to get to people inside right now: if they feel that what the president and the vice president and the secretary of defense are deceptive of the public, are not founded on the evidence that they know passing across their desks or they know, by expertise, I would like them to consider doing what I wish I'd done in 1964 and 1965, rather than waiting five years, as I did until 1969.

They should consider going to Congress and the press and telling the truth with documents. They shouldn't do what I did, wait until the bombs are falling. That's why I think the message in my book is urgent. So urgent, in fact, that I decided to put the first chapter on the Internet tonight on Ellsberg.net. You don't have to buy the book to read that.

That tells us what is happening right now. It's about the week that Congress passed the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution, having now that -- this is the time to read it, when they've just passed the second one.

Is it all about oil?

Peter Grier of the CSM looks at whether the proposed Iraqi war is all about oil. "Cheap oil may not be the prime US motive in confronting Hussein," he concludes, "but it could be the outcome."

US Media & the Bali Blast

No surprise, here: "Even After 9/11, Media Bungled the Bali Blast"

This development did not go unnoticed, either.

Minimum Wage Doesn't Pay The Rent

From the AP:

Nowhere in the country could a minimum wage employee afford to pay rent on a two-bedroom home, an advocacy group said Wednesday. And in three-quarters of the country, even two full-time, minimum wage jobs couldn't pay for such housing.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition, in its annual "Out of Reach" report, found that the average U.S. employee must make nearly three times the federal minimum wage, or about $14.66 an hour, to afford a modest two-bedroom rental and still pay for food and other basic needs.

About one-third of the nation's households are renters, said the Washington-based advocacy group. In the four years since the coalition began its study, the gap between wages and rents has widened, both during times of economic expansion and recession.

If this bothers you, then perhaps you'd like to read some other "not-so shining facts of life in the nation that...shows the world 'the way life should be.'"

Al Qaeda Just as Strong as Pre-9/11

Reuters reports, "CIA Director George Tenet said on Thursday al Qaeda has reorganized and become as serious a threat to the United States as it was in the months before last year's Sept. 11 attacks." The story continues,

Tenet, in a joint hearing before the congressional intelligence committees, also said the CIA and the FBI could not be flawless all the time in fighting the terror threat.

"The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11," Tenet told the committees. "It is serious, they've reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks."

"You see it in Bali, you see it in Kuwait," he said, referring to attacks this month on American troops in Kuwait and the bombing in Bali that killed more than 180 people. "They plan in multiple theaters of operation, they intend to strike...again."

The United States launched a war on terrorism last year with a military campaign in Afghanistan to destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which it blamed for the hijacked plane strikes that killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

So, according to this, the "war on terror" has been a complete, utter failure. Gee, nice to know...

Recall these comments.

Why We Need to Attack Iraq

Explained here.

Not the War We Needed

Good article by Barbara Ehrenreich in this month's edition of The Progressive. Here's her conclusion:

Whatever motivates current U.S. foreign policy--oil, domestic politics, or the Oedipal rage of a lackluster son--it isn't likely to make us any safer. The war in Afghanistan, combined with Bush's meek stance toward Sharon, has already convinced Muslims throughout the world that their lives have no value to America's leaders. An invasion of Iraq and the attendant "collateral damage" will harden the impression that the United States is pursuing its own kind of jihad--against the Islamic world. Inevitably, a generation of young Muslims in Riyadh or Cairo or Hamburg will seek martyrdom by taking out some of us.

So here we are, caught inside the horror film we know so well from the screen. 9/11 awakened us briefly from our fantasies of sex and murder and weight loss to the existence of an implacably hostile Other. But like the partying teens in the movies, the people in charge can't seem to figure out a way of responding that doesn't recklessly escalate the danger.

Beyond Petroleum?

"The high-profile print and TV ads run by BP—such is its newfound aversion to the product it has depended on for more than a century that it no longer even calls itself British Petroleum—trumpet the company's investments in solar energy. TV ads feature man-and woman-in-the-street interviews with consumers who muse about the virtues of a world in which fossil fuels are bit players. It's a little like McDonald's running ads in which Eric Schlosser, author of the exposé Fast Food Nation, discusses the horrors of ground beef..." (more)

Perfect Together

Yes, it's been said before, but Amy Wilentz is right when she observes, "Sharon and Hamas have the same agenda: the destruction of peace. The extremes dance to each other's music, and Sharon must be fully aware that after smashing peace each time it rears its ugly head, he will be left to deal with Hamas. Hamas has just been one of his tools for getting rid of the Palestinian Authority and everything it stands for. Once that's done, Hamas will be easier to run under: It has no standing, no international legitimacy, no Western friends. He can just blow it away."

Build it, and they will die

As usual, Geov Parrish hits the nail on the head:

The fact that the United States spends an enormous percentage of its enormous wealth perfecting and mass-producing ways to kill people is significant for how we aren't spending that money instead. There are plenty of worthy needs to be addressed at home, to be sure -- universal health care? repairing decaying infrastructure? education? -- but using the world's most powerful economy to promote minimal health and housing and education standards and job opportunities globally would also do far more than any army could to enhance our security, by drying up the grinding global poverty and hopelessness that is the wellspring for terrorism and war.

Instead, our self-perpetuating militarism is in many ways creating the new doctrine of Imperial America. American neo-imperialism is fueled by two elements central to human nature: our belief that we are a uniquely virtuous nation, and our inability to not use technology or tools that we have available to us.

Humans don't have a good track record resisting temptation, and the temptation, for America's leaders at the moment, is to use the overwhelming muscle at their disposal to force the rest of the world -- all of it -- to behave exactly to our liking. (In certain religions, the notions of yielding to temptation and evil are closely intertwined, but never mind.) At home, political support for the spending that enables America's bullying has been further fueled by 9/11 -- which, in turn, would never have happened if the U.S. had either kept more to itself or behaved more benevolently overseas. Paradoxically, our belligerence is becoming the greatest threat to our own security; we are manufacturing new enemies, one by one, as quickly as we can churn out any Pentagon munition. And as 9/11 (and Israel's entire history) demonstrate, with enough enemies, no army can fully protect us.

Whether America's overseas coercion is either benevolent or helpful -- and the record is at best mixed -- is ultimately beside the point. War should be a last, not a first, resort. More pointedly, the democracy that Democrats and Republicans alike like to proclaim us as standing for and as exporting is impossible in the absence of self-determination, and America at the moment is not interested in anyone else's self-determination. We'd like to be doing all the determining ourselves, thank you very much. Why? Because we can. And humans, when they can do something, usually do.

Fighting Terrorism with the Wrong Weapons

Ahmad Faruqui suggests that,

We need to rethink the premises of our policy against terrorism. Like other criminal problems, terrorism has a supply side and a demand side. We have focused exclusively on the supply side, and deployed military force to eliminate the existing terrorist networks. This is an incomplete cure at best. As Israel has found out over the past three decades, killing terrorists will not eliminate terrorism. For every terrorist that is killed, another one is created.

This is not to say that we should condone murder by terrorists. We should continue to prosecute terrorists to the fullest extent of the law. However, without condoning terrorism or letting terrorists go free, we should also focus our energies on preventing future terrorists from being created. We should seek to understand the political problems that are leading large numbers of young people throughout the Muslim world to become terrorists. We should find a way to communicate with these people. We may never be able to convince the likes of Osama bin Laden, but may be able to reach large numbers of their existing and future followers. Then we would be able to develop political solutions that will draw people away from a path where they are willing to sacrifice their lives, in order to take other lives. Only then will the demand for terrorism diminish.

And Paul Rogers concurs:

...if we respond [to terrorism] solely by trying to redouble efforts to destroy al-Qaida and its associates, the effect may be simply to strengthen their support.

What we are still failing to do is to understand the root causes of the support for such movements. To seek to understand is not to condone in any shape or form, but it does raise the possibility of recognising the reasons for their enduring support and, in turn, offering some prospect for undercutting it.

The problem is that this different angle of vision would go right to the heart of policy towards Israel as well as the wider issues of the Western control of the Gulf region. The Bush administration is not remotely prepared to entertain such a consideration – it has to come from elsewhere.

The Untold Story

"The Florida election fiasco ridiculed the cardinal principle 'one person one vote' -- so why does public television refuse to broadcast the story?"

Deafening Silence

The infamous Washington sniper — who has killed nine people by now and wounded two others — has done little to trigger a U.S. debate on more effective gun control measures.

...In light of the Bush Administration's strong effort to go after Saddam Hussein, many people around the world are confused about one question: Why is the United States so focused on weapons of mass destruction — if its politicians do not even have the willpower and determination to go about the business of protecting the citizens in its own capital?

...It therefore doesn’t do for the U.S. government to aggressively pursue regime change in Iraq, all the while ignoring — and even indirectly promoting — the global scourge of small arms violence. Especially when the effects of small arms violence can be seen on the home front — as the incidents in the Washington-area make plain.

It is shameful enough that the U.S. government isn’t doing more to protect its own citizens from gun violence. It’s even worse when U.S. policies contribute to a problem of global dimensions.

Read on...

Getting Closer to a Police State

Military surveillance on the ground; now from the air. MSNBC has more on the latter development here.

Is it fair to say that the Posse Comitatus Act is now dead?

Update: Kurt Nimmo elaborates on "Predators, Snipers and the Posse Comitatus Act."

Z

Z Magazine is going online in full. For some months Z will be available free online, simultaneously with print publication, graphics and all, thereafter by subscription. We are working out the details, honing the design, etc. The October Issue, is now available.

Leaning on the CIA

David Corn writes,

If there is the slightest truth to this report, it ought to trigger an outcry and a scandal. Imagine rigging intelligence to shape the outcome of a debate that determines whether American lives are lost (and Iraqi lives are taken) overseas. How foul and sinister can a bureaucrat get? An article of this sort should cause members of the House and Senate to rush before microphones and declare they will not rest until they determine if the allegations hold up. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should be fired if they are unduly leaning on nothing-but-the-facts analysts. But, as of yet, the Times story has caused no public ripples. I called both the House and Senate intelligence committees and inquired if either intended to investigate whether Bush officials have attempted to doctor intelligence to improve the administration's case for hitting Saddam. Neither responded.

Columbus: Hero or Butcher?

The debate over the legacy of Christopher Columbus pops up every year around this time...

For the Prosecution: Ward Churchill & Howard Zinn

For the Defense: Dinesh D'Souza & Michael Berliner

Who's gonna pay?

According to the Congressional Budget Office, a war on Iraq would cost $9-13 billion just to get started, $6-9 billion per month, $5-7 billion to return troops following the hostilities, and $1-4 billion per month for a good, ol' fashioned military occupation. So, with the economy in dire straights, who's going to pay for this war?

Congressman Peter Stark has an answer:

School kids will pay. There’ll be no money to keep them from being left behind - way behind.

Seniors will pay. They’ll pay big time as the Republicans privatize Social Security and rob the Trust Fund to pay for the capricious war.

Medicare will be curtailed and drugs will be more unaffordable. And there won’t be any money for a drug benefit because Bush will spend it all on the war.

Working folks will pay through loss of job security and bargaining rights.

Our grandchildren will pay through the degradation of our air and water quality.

And the entire nation will pay as Bush continues to destroy civil rights, women’s rights and religious freedom in a rush to phony patriotism and to courting the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.

Stark goes on, "what greatly saddens me at this point in our history is my fear that this entire spectacle has not been planned for the well being of the world, but for the short-term political interest of our President."

Blood Money

The AP reported on Thursday, "The House overwhelmingly approved a compromise $355.4 billion defense bill yesterday brimming with money for new destroyers, helicopters and missiles and granting President Bush most of the Pentagon buildup he requested after last year's terrorist attacks."

...$355.4 billion to, presumably, kill threatening Arabs, Muslims, and Iraqis while providing guys in suits with expensive toys to play out their power fantasies. A harsh statement, yes, but I think, an accurate one.

Just imagine what we could do with all that money if we weren't throwing it into "that great cess-pool of corporate welfare also known as the Pentagon budget."

US Double Standards

In this week's edition of The Nation, Stephen Zunes writes,

The effort by the Bush Administration and Congress to portray the planned invasion of Iraq as simply an effort to enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions reaches a new low in double standards. A survey of the nearly 1,500 resolutions passed by the Security Council, the fifteen-member enforcement arm of the UN in which the United States and the four other permanent members wield veto power, reveals more than ninety resolutions currently violated by countries other than Iraq. The vast majority of these violations are by governments closely allied to the United States. Not only have the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies not suggested invading these countries; the United States has blocked sanctions and other means of enforcing them, and even provides the military and economic aid that helps make ongoing violations possible...

If the United States can unilaterally claim the right to invade Iraq because of that country's violations of Security Council resolutions, other council members could logically claim the right to invade states that are also in violation; for example, Russia could claim the right to invade Israel, France could claim the right to invade Turkey and Britain could claim the right to invade Morocco. The US insistence on the right to attack unilaterally could seriously undermine the principle of collective security and the authority of the UN, and in so doing would open the door to international anarchy.

Can you guess which nation leads with the most number of violations?

The Mideast: A Century of Conflict

"NPR News is presenting this special [7 part] series on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to bring context and perspective to the story, and to help listeners understand the complex situation in the Mideast, the history, and the consequences of the confrontation. To accomplish this, NPR has gone to leading historians of the region to document the deep and conflicting roots of today's Middle East.

"The Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting over control of the same piece of land for nearly a century. They are also fighting over each significant episode in that history. Each side has its own version of events. The series, reported by Diplomatic Correspondent Mike Shuster, is NPR's attempt to revisit the significant episodes of that history and give both Palestinian and Israeli historians an opportunity to explain how they see it differently."

The Singleton Society

"Forget marital breakdown, high rates of divorce, and the number of children born outside of marriage," writes Frank Furedi, a British sociologist at the University of Kent at Canterbury. "Endless discussions about the 'crisis' facing the family distract attention from trends that are likely to have a far greater impact on how we live. The truth is that adults are not only finding it difficult to sustain marriage, but just about all forms of intimate relationships."

Read on...

Demography vs. Democracy

Uri Avnery explores the tension between the competing democratic and demographic trends in Israel.

Bias in the Blogosphere

I bet you've been waiting for someone to apply the Chomsky/Herman Propaganda Model to the 'blogosphere', huh? Well, if interested, check it here.

Q&A on the War[s]

Michael Albert and Steve Shalom offer "45 Questions and Answers Regarding Intervention in General, 9-11 and Afghanistan One Year Later, and Iraq on the Verge of War."

The Relevance of Yesterday's US Hypocrisy Today

"You may feel disgusted by the hypocrisy of US plans to make war on Iraq and sickened at the inevitable slaughter of thousands of people. But if you could only vaguely recall the details of how deep the hypocrisy goes, then read on..."

War on the Horizon

Paul Rogers is right when he offers,

In Washington among the neo-conservatives, the views of the rest of the world do not seem to be of any relevance at all. In a sense, they might as well not exist. The United States has overwhelming military power; this readily assures the only appropriate system for the world and its security, namely a Western-controlled and globalised liberal market – end of story.

The only problem with this is that 96% of the world’s people are not American. This may not be too fair a point as so many Americans themselves reject the neo-conservative agenda, but the wider issue is that it is being comprehensively rejected in so many quarters around the world. For the moment, though, the hawks are in charge and are not prepared to accept any opposition. This is a daunting prospect and it is hardly surprising that the unease is so widespread among those experienced international civil servants who had hoped to be a part of a more cooperative international order.

But he fails to mention something equally relevant: the neocon agenda is supposed to have a counterweight. And that counterweight should be the Democratic Party. But, alas, no. Instead, we have the Weenie Party, a group of hapless twits who cannot even muster the courage to dissent on such a fundamental issue as whether to invade a country "preemptively" because...well, simply because the hawks want to.

Oh, maybe you haven't heard: war on Iraq by a score of 296-133. Pathetic. At least we know who to hold accountable one year from now when this blows up in everyone's and, yes, I mean everyone's face. The question I now pose is this: once the crap hits the fan, who do we throw out of office first, the Bushies or the 296 weasles listed here?

Update: Add 77 to this tally since the Senate has thrown its hat into the ring, too.

The Goal of the US

Jay Bookman, author of that influential piece on the PNAC report, responds to some questions from readers in an online forum. Worth checking out.

Of particular interest, Bookman cites this 1996 article from Foreign Affairs which lays out the case for a "benevolent global hegemony." If you want to know where the neocon hawks constructing US foreign policy are coming from, take a look at that out, too.

Leaving the Door Open for Extremists

"The war against terrorism has entered a much more critical and complex phase that now involves helping to rectify the gross political and economic imbalances in the region," writes Ahmed Rashid. "It is going to need even greater commitment by the international community to meet this challenge, not less. This first anniversary is thus a time not to wallow in self-congratulations but to address the problems ahead." He elaborates,

Political instability in the region [Central Asia] is just what Al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups want. An unstable Pakistan or a war between India and Pakistan that leads to Islamabad’s defeat could give the fundamentalists the opportunity they want to establish an Islamic state in Pakistan. The collapse of one or more Central Asian regimes, in the absence of democratic alternatives and a seething economic malaise, could give the Islamic extremists the opportunity to set up new terrorism command and control centers.

What is clearly needed is for the West to persuade these regimes that the war on terrorism also means that they have to change their ways.

The ideas of “nation building” or “a Marshall Plan for the region”—which are anathema in Washington—are essential if the West is to prevent further instability and catastrophe.

The wider implications of such a strategy would be profoundly bene-ficial for improving relations between the West and the Muslim world. However, none of this is likely to happen if the United States pushes ahead with its desire to attack Iraq without international support and while the Middle East is in flames. The Arab and Muslim world will erupt in anger, and terrorism may then become the only platform for many other groups to conduct a war against the United States.

Israel May "Transfer" Palestinians During the War on Iraq

On Counterpunch, Will Youmans discusses the stirrings for ethnic cleansing that have been floating around Israeli political dialogue recently. Glad to see someone else picking up on this dangerous development. I wrote about it here.

Update: Helena Cobban of the CSM weighs in on the same issue of ethnic cleansing.

Smearing Chomsky

Lawrence McGuire writes,

I just read a recent article in The Nation, "The Left and 9/11" (September 23, 2002) by Adam Shatz, which purports to be a measured analysis of the differences between the so-called 'Left' in the United States over the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. In reality the article is a clever misrepresentation of Chomsky, and of others who share his view of U.S. foreign policy.

Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to smear Chomsky. I counted eight in Shatz's article.

On Campus Watch

This story seemed to be hot about a week ago, but I failed to post anything then. So, a little late, here are two good articles on the recently established Campus-Watch.org:

"Thought crime on campus"
by John Sugg

"Campus Watch: Middle East McCarthyism?"
by Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah

Afghanistan One Year Later

Rahul Mahajan writes,

To this day, few are willing to criticize the war in Afghanistan. In fact, some self-proclaimed spokespeople for the antiwar movement have recently suggested that the "left" -- which is to say the peace movement, the global justice movement and most of the progressive grassroots activists in the country -- still handicaps itself by its opposition to that war. The official story remains that, whatever has come after, the war on Afghanistan remains the one shining success in the "war on terrorism."

One year later (the bombing started on Oct. 7, 2001), many of the results are in, and it's time for a critical look at some of those "successes."...(more)

Justin Podur also contributes some thoughts on 10/7.

Refuting Bush

A consortium of folks affiliated with the Institute for Public Accuracy go line-by-line to refute Bush's speech last night from Cincinnati.

Update: Robert Jensen claims Bush's speech sidestepped legitimate questions about a proposed invasion "with cynical attempts to manipulate emotion," while Robert Fisk reminds us of several details Bush wants us to forget.

Blogburst

Ack! I forgot all about the blogburst! Anyway, it's a little bit late now and, frankly, I just don't have the time to do much about it. So, to compensate, check out the Open Letters site, as well as Skippy's original letter and an update.

Weapons of mass distraction

"A new breed of computer games is teaching today's teenagers how to wage, and win, the war against terror," writes Wagner James Au in Salon. Related comments here.

Dead or Alive?

Osama was thought to be dead. Now, it appears that he may be alive...

Umm, you do remember who Osama is, right?

The West's Battle for Oil

Neil MacKay, author of the Sunday Herald article that broke the story about the now infamous PNAC report, has dredged up another document which sheds more crucial light on the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq. Not surprisingly, MacKay finds the driving factor to be oil:

Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century describes how America is facing the biggest energy crisis in its history. It targets Saddam as a threat to American interests because of his control of Iraqi oilfields and recommends the use of 'military intervention' as a means to fix the US energy crisis.

...One of the most telling passages in the document reads: 'Iraq remains a destabilising influence to...the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.

'This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader...and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.

'The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.'

...It says the 'central dilemma' for the US administration is that 'the American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or inconvenience'. With the 'energy sector in critical condition, a crisis could erupt at any time [which] could have potentially enormous impact on the US...and would affect US national security and foreign policy in dramatic ways.''

The main cause of a crisis, according to the document's authors, is 'Middle East tension', which means the 'chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption'. The report says the US will never be 'energy independent' and is becoming too reliant on foreign powers supplying it with oil and gas. The response is to put oil at the heart of the administration -- 'a reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy'.

Random Thoughts on "Anti-Americanism"

Good article by Gary Leupp:

"Anti-Americanism"? A vapid, tendentious, Orwellian concept. Not an "ism," really, but an epithet and tool of demonization. We should expunge it from our vocabularies, as the civilized among us have expunged some other words.

(via High Water)

All Too True...

On "Semitism"

"The monstrous transformation of an entire people by a formidable and feared propaganda machine into little more than militants and terrorists has allowed not just Israel's military but its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible history of injustice, suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people with impunity. Gone from public memory are the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with its 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind...

"In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power it seems deranged to keep asking the Palestinians, who have no army, air force, tanks or functioning leadership, to renounce violence, and to require no comparable limitation on Israel's actions. It certainly obscures Israel's systematic use of lethal force against unarmed civilians, copiously documented by all the major human rights organizations. Even the matter of suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be examined from a viewpoint that permits a hidden racist standard to value Israeli lives over the many more Palestinian lives that have been lost, maimed, distorted and foreshortened by longstanding military occupation and the systematic barbarity openly used by Sharon against Palestinians since the beginning of his career.

"There can be no conceivable peace that doesn't tackle the real issue, which is Israel's utter refusal to accept the sovereign existence of a Palestinian people that is entitled to rights over what Sharon and most of his supporters consider to be the land of Greater Israel, i.e., the West Bank and Gaza."
-- Edward Said

Doc Nebula has apparently run across me via a link on Skippy’s blog. Based on my post “Killing the Future, Mostly of Palestine,” it seems, he finds much of what I posit here to be “alarmingly thought free.”

First off, I do not consider myself a “liberal” in any contemporary sense. Sure, I guess I would claim to be a “liberal” in the Enlightenment sense, but virtually everyone appropriates that mantle nowadays. I consider myself a radical, and freely admit that. Even though I may agree with liberals on many issues, I prefer not to be labeled as such. Call me left wing, call me a radical – both of these labels are fine. A minor distinction, perhaps, but still worth pointing out.

I can’t provide a direct link to Doc’s blog entry on me, although you can check out what he has to say by clicking here and scrolling down to his 4 October 2002 entry entitled “Semitism.”

Here is a quick, mostly unorganized response:

[Bill]...dislike[s] it when anyone says anything mean about Palestinians, whom my fellow left wingers, in apparent knee jerk reaction to the current conservative and populist biases against Arabic culture, have embraced as oppressed, patriotic heroes and cultural martyrs.

I don’t think this is an adequate representation of what I say in my post. I also do not think I have ever “embraced” the Palestinian people as “patriotic heroes and cultural martyrs.” They’re people – not terribly different from you and me, I presume. I do believe that they are suffering and living under brutal conditions, but this realization doesn’t necessarily lead to romanticism.

The one point I find interesting here is that Doc willingly admits that there are “current conservative and populist biases against Arabic culture.” Such abstractions seem ironic: were anyone to outwardly show a bias against “Jewish culture,” the charge of anti-Semitism would probably follow within nanoseconds.

In a casual remark, Doc says, “I like Israel and think Palestinians should shut up and go away.” This seems to hint at an approval for ethnic cleansing.

Getting to my point of view, I would admit that I am more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people because I view them as being, more or less, the principle victims – and this is important – whose narrative is largely muted in dominant representations of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Hence, I suppose you could say I view most of my “reporting” in this sense as a corrective. I do not mean to downplay suffering of the Israeli population, but perceive the Israeli point of view – one in which Israeli lives are privileged and, in some ways, valued more than the Palestinians – as being the hegemonic representation of things. So, as a crude example: suicide bombs go off in Tel Aviv killing 15 civilians and you’re bound to see it on CNN. 15 kids get strafed by the IDF, and it’s more likely that it will be scarcely mentioned (if at all).

In other words, I freely admit that I do not present things in a “balanced” format. I merely try to be fair in my representation of the facts.

I’m not going to address Doc’s two rhetorical questions because I think they fundamentally distort the conflict. There’s not much insight to tease out of a thought experiment which tries to compare the actions, responsibilities, and motives of IDF troops vs. “Palestinian terrorists” or a “mob” of Palestinians vs. Israeli civilians.

The one point I would stress is that when the Israelis claim a monopoly on force in the conflict, the IDF must be held accountable. The threat of terrorism – however real or imagined it may be – cannot be used to justify blatant human rights violations.

Now, is terrorism a threat to the Jewish population of Israel? Yes, definitely. But I find it unconvincing that the incursions by the IDF, the vastly disproportionate use of force, and the security apparatus which serves to tighten the grip around the Palestinians make Israelis safer. Such actions only serve to irritate inflamed relationships, produce more bitterness, and fuel the likelihood of violent backlash.

I also view the IDF as being an occupying force, not “uniformed peacekeeping troops.” They’re in place to enforce order; they are not there to mediate between opposing factions, but rather to impose Israeli dominance. At bottom, the conflict seems to be defined by this inequality of force: while the IDF is in place to defend the Israeli population, the Palestinians do not have a standing army or police force to “protect” their people or land, and that places them at a distinct disadvantage.

For Doc, it all seems to come down to this:

My fellow liberal lefties seem to quite ardently believe that when Palestinian terrorists attack civilian targets with lethal weapons of indiscriminate effect, they are behaving patriotically and heroically. In contrast, when uniformed peacekeeping troops retaliate for those terrorist attacks, or even fire in self defense on fanatical mobs attempting to swarm their position, they are unconscionable war criminals who should be perfunctorily tried and then summarily hung.

Okay, that may be an overstatement; most of my fellow bloggers do, as a nominal afterthought, condemn Palestinian suicide bombers. Yet still, the vast and overwhelming impression I get is that the left wing of blogdom these days somehow, even while condemning Palestinian terrorism, views the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces as being somehow every bit as bad, if not actually worse.

This is a common criticism, and one I cannot adequately respond to because, at a fundamental level, it’s just not the way I look at things.

That may sound amazingly banal, but I try not to put the deaths of innocents on a scale of significance where some are better/worse than others. The IDF actions are not, in any real sense, comparable to suicide bombings. I tend to work from the a priori assumption that suicide bombings are morally repugnant, and feel most sane folks will view them that way. In that respect, as in my general view of the conflict, I see the construction of a narrative of suicide bombings – one in which I have a slight role in, too – to be largely uncontested. There are people who justify the bombings and find them to be "acts of liberation," yes, but I do not see that as a persuasive or significant sentiment in the culture deserving much attention. In contrast, it is my estimation that the actions of the IDF go without proper contestation, especially in American media.

My fellow left wingers all seem to think that, assuming the awful and intransigent and bloodthirsty Israelis would just open their eyes and embrace that most reasonable of all positions, why then, the Palestinians would fall to their knees and go ‘lawsamercy, you Jews are our brothers after all!’. There would be a big group hug, everyone would dance and sing in the streets, two disparate cultures would embrace and learn from each other, the very heavens would open and manna would pour down and the Millennium itself would be fairly begun.

No, I don’t believe that. This is a conflict which, because of Israel’s role in displacing much of the Palestinian population, coupled with the Arab coalition’s militant response since 1948, is remarkably problematic. There is plenty of fault, historically, on both sides. The problem I have is that the Palestinian people seem to be suffering in a vastly disproportionate manner: here, I will admit that I view the nakbah as being the root issue of the conflict.

Ultimately, why do I like Israel, and dislike Arabic culture so much? Because Israel, and Judaism, are cultures of tolerance and permissiveness and individual freedom and democracy. Arabic culture, and Islamic culture, are based on intolerance, conformity enforced by instant, barbaric punishments, misogyny, autocracy, and violent repression. Jews, as far as I can see, raise their children to be tolerant and to not pick fights. Arabs, and especially Palestinians, raise their children to hate all non-Arabs (and some fellow Arabs) so virulently that they are willing to kill themselves, or send their loved ones off to horrible fiery deaths, in order to take a few of the enemy with them.

This is a monolithic analysis which, I fear, bares little resemblance to reality, and more to stereotype and caricature (if not outright racism). In general, it seems like Doc concurs with Bernard Lewis; I prefer Edward Said’s take.

On the points I haven’t covered, you’ll have to decide whether I disregard them because I find them to be generally irrelevant, or because Doc has painted me into a corner from which I cannot defend myself. Also, whether or not my offerings are “alarmingly thought free” is another point of contention I shall leave up to the reader. Beyond the above, I shall hold my tongue.

Silence of the Cams

William Powers ran across an unnarrated video of the recent DC IMF protests at Washingtonpost.com and liked what he saw. Writes Powers, "If there's a bias in this piece, for or against the protesters, I didn't see it. They are neither demons nor heroes. The same goes for the cops. There is a genuine pathos to every character in this little drama. It looks and feels like life, more like life than any narrated TV report I've ever seen, or any newspaper article purporting to capture such an event. And it has none of the thudding obtuseness that characterizes most TV and newspaper writing. Beside this two-minute video, the next day's newspaper stories on the same event felt abstract and unreal."

I agree with him; it's riveting stuff.

Pulling No Punches

When I want hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners reporting on current events, I can usually find it over at the WSWS. One need not be a Trotskyite to find resonance in their analyses. For example, see this and this.

What Did Israel Know?

Quick like a panther to his prey, Justin Raimondo has pounced on this bit of information from yesterday. Check his column here.

Damn Radicals!

Conservatives of the Horowitz type complain that radicals have taken over our institutions of higher learning every day, it seems. One might wonder why they aren't concerned that radicals have hijacked our government and steered it down a course of self-destruction.

A new exodus for the Middle East?

Famed Israeli (revisionist) historian Benny Morris has written a controversial piece in today's Guardian. Ian Katz prefaces it with these comments:

The radical Israeli historian who did more than any other to force his country to face up to its responsibility for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 war now believes the Middle East might be at peace if David Ben-Gurion had expelled all the Palestinians.

In an about-turn that will horrify his former Iiberal allies, Benny Morris argues in the Guardian that "perhaps, had [Ben-Gurion] gone the whole hog, today's Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan". He adds: "Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographic and demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of Palestine."

Mr Morris's remarks will be highly controversial, both because of his stature as one of Israel's leading so-called "new historians" and because the idea of "transfer" - expelling all Palestinians - has recently gained currency among Israeli rightwingers.

According to American Samizdat, the two articles "make it clear that Zionism has always argued for the destruction and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I don't see how the Jews can say that Hitler's ethnic cleansing of the Jews was an abomination while the Jew's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians would make for a better world. There is no difference. Both are unacceptable."

Highly charged, abrasive remarks, for sure. Be sure to read both the Katz and Morris pieces above.

American Taliban

As expected, John Walker Lindh got sentenced to 20 years in prison today. He apparently gave a tearful mea-culpa before the gavel dropped.

I just realized I haven't blogged anything on this before. That's probably because this case never made sense to me; I couldn't fully comprehend why people in this country (led by the media) were in an uproar over his alleged 'crimes'.

Yeah, yeah...I know: the symbolism of fighting for the Taliban, the treason bit, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I don't buy it. This was basically a lynching, in my eyes.

Bloggers of the Left, Unite!

James Crabtree writes in the recent New Statesman, "Blogs are becoming the medium of choice for politically attuned members of the digital generation. Like talk radio, they are dominated by the political right. Why has the left ceded this potentially influential medium without a fight?"

How to Enrage Billions in a Single Sentence

According to Matt Drudge, Jerry Falwell calls Mohammed - yes, that Mohammed - "a terrorist" on CBS' "60 Minutes" this coming Sunday night: "I think Mohammed was a terrorist. I read enough…by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to decide] that he was a violent man, a man of war,” Falwell tells CBS. “In my opinion…Jesus set the example for love, as did Moses, and I think Mohammed set an opposite example.”

Nice...real nice, Jerry.

Blogburst, Now

Skippy's right. A blogburst 4 days from today will only have a limited effect; the "debate" over Iraq will probably be over by then (err. if it isn't already...). What is needed is one now. So write your representatives, your local paper, your Grandma, etc. Do something, soon...

Couldn't have put it better myself...

"The most surprising thing about the push for war is that it is so profoundly reckless. If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein's rule, the unreliability of Baghdad's missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty limited, whereas the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. A general Middle Eastern conflagration and the collapse of more pro-Western Arab states would lose us the war against terrorism, doom untold thousands of Western civilians to death in coming decades, and plunge the world economy into depression."

Read on...