What Bush Doesn’t Know

Interviews over the past few days have shown that subway riders in New York almost instinctively understand what the president does not - that the war in Iraq is not making us safer here at home.

“No, in fact I think it makes us less safe here,” said Edmond Lee, a salesman who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “We went over there with no real plan. No real thinking about what we’d be able to do.”

He said he was concerned that “what happened in the London Underground might happen here.”

Memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center are still etched, as if with acid, in the minds of New Yorkers. Very few people are dovish when it comes to the war on terror. But Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq is another matter.

“Our soldiers being over there make it worse here,” said Michael Springfield, a 32-year-old engineer from Brooklyn.

One of the people encountered in the subway was Andy Dommen, a musician from Germany who was pushing a shopping cart filled with luggage. He made the fundamental distinction between Iraq and Al Qaeda and said the war in Iraq was a distraction that “was taking the public eye off” other important problems, namely the fight against terror.

“Messing up other countries,” said Mr. Dommen, “doesn’t make the world or America safer.”

There is still no indication that the Bush administration recognizes the utter folly of its war in Iraq, which has been like a constant spray of gasoline on the fire of global terrorism. What was required in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was an intense, laserlike focus by America and its allies on Al Qaeda-type terrorism.

Instead, the Bush crowd saw its long dreamed of opportunity to impose its will on Iraq, which had nothing to do with the great tragedy of Sept. 11. Many thousands have paid a fearful price for that bit of ideological madness.

Bob Herbert | NYTimes (read more. . .)

July 25th, 2005 || PermaLink

Britain’s Amazing Disconnect

I grew up in Oldham, once the constituency of Winston Churchill and center of the spinning mills of Lancashire and its neighbor, Yorkshire. It was in this territory that William Blake coined his description of ”the dark Satanic mills.” I remember well the men marching off to the mill like the matchsticks figures in L.S. Lowry’s evocative paintings, carrying their lunch in tin boxes, while the women stayed at home, scrubbing every day the front steps of their little row houses. There wasn’t a non-English face to be seen, apart from the odd Ukrainian refugee.

We all knew that this was the tail end of the Industrial Revolution — that the mills could not keep on spinning in the face of cheap Asian competition. But protectionism was muscular. This way of life had to be defended at all cost. Desperate mill owners, determined to cut their costs, decided in the early 1960s to run night shifts, and to man these, they sent agents to remote Pakistani villages to recruit workers. Never mind that Pakistan had its own burgeoning and highly competitive textile industry. Just as the British a century and a half before had cut off the thumbs of Bengali weavers to allow Lancashire’s textile exports a competitive edge in British-ruled India, the natural laws of economics were there to be interfered with and manipulated.

Over the next 20 years, the Pakistani trickle into Lancashire and Yorkshire became a flood. Any protest movements that arose — precursors of Live8 — that lobbied the government to reduce its textile trade barriers so that the most competitive Third World producers could thrive were rebuffed. We were told by government policymakers that too much was invested in Britain’s textile industry for it to be allowed to wither on the vine.

One politician, Enoch Powell, the ex professor of Greek and Conservative Cabinet minister, terrified everyone when he went on a campaign to end immigration, foreseeing that British streets one day would be like ”the River Tiber, foaming with much blood.” But, as William Deedes, a former Cabinet colleague, wrote recently, his rabid style of speechmaking ”forced everyone in authority to make light of all the problems Commonwealth immigration was creating.”

Not even Pakistani cut-rate night shift labor could keep the mills competitive. Gradually, Britain was pushed by its commitments to free trade to dismantle its protection of textiles. During the 1990s these northern cities were hollowed out, unemployment rose to catastrophic levels, and there were ugly race riots with Pakistani second- and third-generation youths pitting their petrol bombs against the police. It is in this world the suspected suicide bombers have grown up. Cause and effect, you might say.

The British in their dealings with the empire and its leftovers have not just once but too often shied away from making the causal links. The British are in Iraq, partly out of loyalty to their old ally America, but partly because that are still trying to shape the politics of the oil-rich Middle East, as they have tried to do for a century. But all they have done is stir the pot of hatred and bigotry, and now it’s clear that the chickens have not been boiled but have come home to roost.

Jonathan Power | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

July 24th, 2005 || PermaLink

Eight Days in July

The second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal’s early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated “Mission Accomplished.” On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that “we found the weapons of mass destruction.” On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to “bring ‘em on.” But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing ‘em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration’s repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson’s charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.’s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.’s; he had a W.M.D. “program.” Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium “should never have been included” in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.’s or even W.M.D. programs, but about “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.’s, and we’re still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America’s prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not.

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn’t have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

Frank Rich | NYTimes (read more. . .)

July 24th, 2005 || PermaLink

The link to London: The true, terrible state of Iraq

Baghdad.

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm has ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?
Their lives cannot repay us - their death could not undo -
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
– Rudyard Kipling, “Mesopotamia”

Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mesopotamia denouncing those responsible for Britain’s disastrous expedition in the First World War to what became Iraq, was written in 1917. By the time the war ended at least 31,000 British and Indians were buried somewhere in the country.

The difference between Britain’s disastrous foray into Iraq then and the results of the invasion 88 years later is that those responsible have no need “to sidle back to power”. They never lost it either in Britain or the US. It is nevertheless extraordinary to see Donald Rumsfeld, author of so many American failures here in Iraq, still holding his job as Secretary of Defence.

But there is a price to be paid in blood for keeping in power those responsible for past disastrous decisions in Iraq. It makes it much more difficult to seek a way out of the savage war that is now engulfing that country.

This is because past policies have to be portrayed as successful when they were dismal failures. The true terrible state of Iraq is glossed over. Just before the presidential election last year the White House imported Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister, to stand beside President Bush and say that only three or four out of 18 Iraqi provinces were dangerous. I ran this comforting thought past a group of Iraqi lorry drivers, none of them shrinking violets, who laughed sourly and said that the real figures were the exact opposite. Only the three Kurdish provinces in the far north were safe.

A current slogan of the powers-that-be in Washington and London is that we should “stay the course in Iraq”. Perhaps one needs to live in Baghdad to know that there is no course. “The Americans are making it up from day to day,” a senior Iraqi official told me. “They make a mistake and then try to correct it by making a bigger mistake.”

Patrick Cockburn | CounterPunch (read more. . .)

July 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

Off Course in Iraq

Most chilling of all are the prospects for Iraqi women. As things now stand, their rights are about to be set back by nearly 50 years because of new family law provisions inserted into a draft of the constitution at the behest of the ruling Shiite religious parties. These would make Koranic law, called Shariah, the supreme authority on marriage, divorce and inheritance issues. Even secular women from Shiite families would be stripped of their right to choose their own husbands, inherit property on the same basis as men and seek court protection if their husbands tire of them and decide to declare them divorced.

Less severe laws would be imposed on Sunni women, but only because the draft constitution also embraces the divisive idea of having separate systems of family law in the same country. That is not only offensive, but also impractical in a country where Sunnis and Shiites have been marrying each other for generations.

Unless these draft provisions are radically revised, crucial personal freedoms that survived Saddam Hussein’s tyranny are about to be lost under a democratic government sponsored and protected by the United States. Is this the kind of freedom President Bush claims is on the march in the Middle East? Is this the example America hopes Iraq will set for other states in the region? Is this the result that American soldiers, men and women, are sacrificing their lives for?

………

Mr. Bush owes Americans a better explanation for what his policies are producing in Iraq than tired exhortations to stay the course and irrelevant invocations of Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Most days, the news from Iraq is dominated by suicide bombers and frightening scenes of carnage. Occasionally, the smoke clears for a day or two to reveal the underlying picture. That looks even scarier.

NYTimes Editorial (read more. . .)

July 21st, 2005 || PermaLink

George W. Strangelove and the Triumph of Nuclear Faith

The silver-spooned cowboy in the Oval Office just presented a fine new saddle to the nuclear horseman of the apocalypse.

It was a gift worthy of hell. “President Bush agreed yesterday to share civilian nuclear technology with India, reversing decades of U.S. policies designed to discourage countries from developing nuclear weapons,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The lead was more understated in the New York Times: “President Bush, bringing India a step closer to acceptance in the club of nuclear-weapons states, reached an agreement on Monday with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to let India secure international help for its civilian nuclear reactors while retaining its nuclear arms.”

No matter how the story was spun, it could only be read in the world’s capitals as further proof that U.S. nuclear policies are grimly laughable — thanks to policymakers in Washington who simultaneously decry and promote nuclear proliferation. And nowhere will the hypocrisy-laced ironies be more appreciated than in Tehran.

More than 50 years after the U.S. government launched its “atoms for peace” program, faith in the peaceful atom is alive and well — in Iran. While a large proportion of the American public distrusts nuclear power, Iranians routinely echo the positive themes that the industry and its supporters have labored to promote ever since President Dwight Eisenhower pledged “to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by showing that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

Touting the use of nuclear fission to generate electricity, American presidents have strived to make sharp rhetorical distinctions between atomic power and nuclear weapons technologies, despite their extensive overlap. Such reassuring distinctions now have wide credibility in Iran, as I found last month during conversations with Iranian political campaigners, clerics, bazaar merchants, shoppers, teachers and students. Almost all gave notably similar responses when asked whether their country should acquire nuclear energy.

The replies — often tinged with indignation that the atomic prerogative would even be questioned — reflected why nuclear development was a non-issue in Iran’s latest presidential campaign. The Iranian public appears to believe what nuclear-power boosters loudly proclaimed to the world for several decades — that nuclear energy can be safe and distinct from the capacity to build nuclear weapons.

If nuclear power plants are good enough for the United States, the prevailing logic goes, then Iran is certainly good enough for nuclear power plants. Present-day Iran, with its eagerness to use nuclear reactors to generate electricity, is a success story for generations of pro-nuclear politicians in Washington.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

July 20th, 2005 || PermaLink

The Crock of Appeasement

The warmongers, imperialists, and just plain greedy who wish to use up US troops to gain their ill-gotten goods love to use the word “appeasement.” Anyone who stands against their expansionist ambitions will be tagged with this term. In the lexicology of the Rabid Right, it evokes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to negotiate with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It is certainly the case that Hitler was a genocidal maniac and not the sort of man with whom one could usefully negotiate. But not all negotiation is equally fruitless. Before that incident, by the way, “appeasement” had a positive connotation, of “seeking peace.”

The rightwing use of the term appeasement, however, turns it on its head. Taken seriously, the doctrine of “no appeasement” on the right would mean we are stuck in perpetual war, always doomed to be on the offensive, always dedicated to gobbling up more of other people’s territory and wealth even at the expense of living in constant dread of being blown up and being forced to give up the civil liberties which had made American civilization great.

It would never be possible to negotiate a truce with any enemy. That would be appeasement. It would never be possible to compromise. That would be appeasement. It would never be prudent to withdraw troops from a failed war. That would be appeasement. In other words, the rightwing doctrine of “no appeasement, ever” actually turns you into Hitler rather than into Churchill.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment (read more. . .)

July 19th, 2005 || PermaLink