Iraq Is Not Vietnam. But…

Many politicians and pundits have told us that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.

Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries — while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge — are far from identical.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.

War after war, decade after decade, the U.S. news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.

From the U.S. media’s fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the U.S. news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States.

We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to drag the United States into one war after another. In a country with significant elements of democracy, it matters what people think. The propaganda functions of media are crucial for the war makers.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

October 25th, 2005 || PermaLink

A (True) Conservative Case for Exiting Iraq

In a remarkable October 7 speech delivered on the House floor, Representative Ron Paul, a maverick Republican from Texas who has long been critical of Bush’s misguided approach to fighting terrorism, invoked Reagan’s legacy as part of a call for withdrawal.

We should heed the words of Ronald Reagan about his experience with a needless and mistaken military occupation of Lebanon. Sending troops into Lebanon seemed like a good idea in 1983, but in 1990 President Reagan said this in his memoirs: “…we did not appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle… In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave… yet, the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there.”

During the occupation of Lebanon by American, French, and Israeli troops between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in that country. One horrific attack killed 241 U.S. Marines. Yet once these foreign troops were removed, the suicide attacks literally stopped. Today we should once again rethink our policy in this region.

It’s amazing what ending military intervention in the affairs of others can achieve. Setting an example of how a free market economy works does wonders.

We should have confidence in how well freedom works, rather than relying on blind faith in the use of military force to spread our message. Setting an example and using persuasion is always superior to military force in showing how others might live. Force and war are tools of authoritarians; they are never tools of champions of liberty and justice. Force and war inevitably lead to dangerous unintended consequences.

John Nichols | The Nation (read more. . .)

October 24th, 2005 || PermaLink

A Foreign Policy of Free-Floating Belligerence

After the debacle in Iraq, any prudent policymaker would go slow on the military option and dust off the file called “diplomacy.”

But since no one in the highest reaches of the Administration fits that description, the BushCheneyiacs keep rattling the sabers.

Condoleezza Rice continued with the free-floating belligerence when she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 19.

In her opening statement, she went out of her way to criticize Iran and Syria. They “allow fighters and military assistance to reach insurgents in Iraq,” she said. “Syria and Iran must decide whether they wish to side with the cause of war or with the cause of peace.”

(Since April 2005, the country that has supplied the most foreign fighters to Iraq is not Syria or Iran, by the way. It is Egypt, according to The New York Times of October 20.)

Rice pointedly refused to rule out military options against Iran and Syria. Nor did she reassure the panel that Bush would ask for Congressional approval first. She said she didn’t want to “circumscribe” his powers as commander in chief.

Matthew Rothschild | Progressive (read more. . .)

October 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

Name That War

When the President’s father was exulting in the glow of victory in Gulf War I, he claimed that defeat in Vietnam was finally in the past, exclaiming, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!” How wrong he was. (By then, the Vietnam Syndrome was the way the whole Vietnam experience was summed up — as if it had been nothing more than a prolonged state of mental aberration. It’s worth noting that an Iraq Syndrome has already made its first appearance.)

Above all, the Vietnam War was never banished from the minds of our war planners and policymakers. Even when they were playing an opposites game with Vietnam (as in, for instance, their no-body-bags, no-photos-of-the-American-dead-coming-home policy), Bush administration officials had a clear case of Vietnam-on-the-brain, as did the society they represented. In 2003, while the invasion of Iraq was still ongoing, the historian Marilyn Young commented, “In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds.”

It came back, of course, because it had never strayed far; nor was this just a matter of the return of images or words in print. When we look back on these years, it will, I suspect, be clearer that Vietnam — upside-down, inside-out, in reverse — has driven the American war in Iraq. Thus, when U.S. commanders now send their troops “spilling” across the Syrian border, they do so in “hot pursuit” of insurgents — another term (from the Risen/Sanger piece) that comes straight out of the Vietnam-era, crossing-the-Cambodian-border playbook.

And it’s not just the war makers or the war fighters who have Vietnam on the brain. Even many war opponents seem to be playing by an only half-buried Vietnam script. Take the bloodbath-to-come — the future Iraqi civil war of catastrophic proportions now featured in endless speculations and in the fears of many antiwar thinkers and activists, a fantasy (which could, of course, become reality) that acts as a constraint on thoughts about any kind of speedy military withdrawal from that country. A similar bloodbath was on the minds of, and a powerful constraint on, opponents of the Vietnam War, who long accepted that an American departure from Vietnam would lead to a terrible bloodbath there. This was a paralyzing fantasy, one which somehow mitigated the actual bloodbath then underway.

Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch.com (read more. . .)

October 22nd, 2005 || PermaLink

US Military Desecrates bodies of Afghans

The burning and desecration of Taliban bodies as a technique of intimidation in Afghanistan by US troops has backfired big time. Afghanistan clergymen are hopping mad at the US, and opposition to continued US troop presence in Afghanistan is growing.

Just when you hoped that US helicopters helping evacuate earthquake victims from Muzaffarabad might make some friends for the US in that part of the world, something like this emerges.

As at Abu Ghraib, the basic problem is that the US wants to cow and intimidate the Muslim or nationalist forces threatening it and its Muslim allies. But the techniques chosen to accomplish this goal are repugnant to all Muslims, and cut down on the number of allies.

………

As for combatting the Taliban, we should stop pretending that is what the Americans are doing. When the deputy governor under the Taliban who oversaw the blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan is sitting in the new parliament, it is hard to see how the large US troop presence even matters any more.

And keeping a division in Afghanistan may end up turning the country against the US again. Isn’t that where we came in? No, maybe that was where Brezhnev came in.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment http://www.juancole.com/2005/10/us-military-desecrates-bodies-of.html(read more. . .)

October 21st, 2005 || PermaLink

What America Needs Now: A Prophetic Social Movement that Speaks Moral Truth to Amoral Power

America would be fine in the hands of people devoted to real conservative values. But this is something different, something dangerous. For America is now ruled by forces apparently not guided by any genuine values at all. One can look in vain for any juncture where they’ve made a decision that sacrificed any of their power or wealth in favor of some larger good.

And this is not just about this particular presidency, which should be understood as the creature of bigger forces. These forces – an alliance of the greediest part of American capitalism with the most power-hungry and imperialist of American politicians and with the most divisive and hypocritical of America’s religious leaders—have been gathering power for a generation and will doubtless seek to maintain their grip when its current public faces leave office.

Never in American history has so much power been in such ruthless hands.

The very soul of America is endangered. Yet not only did the presidential campaign of 2004 fail utterly to speak about this profound moral danger, but the political opposition remains virtually mute and effectively impotent in the face of these forces. (This silence and this impotence are signs of another part of America’s moral crisis, of that also-dangerous moral flaccidity into which too much of American liberalism has lapsed.)

It is essential, therefore, that those of us who do see this frightening reality stand up to take the struggle for America’s soul to a new stage—a “prophetic” stage of speaking moral truth to amoral power. Moral truth is our great weapon, for the power of these rulers rests on moral lies. Only by selling their false image of righteousness to good, conservative Americans could these forces gain power.

Andrew Bard Schmookler | Andrew Bard Schmookler http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1019-22.htm
(read more. . .)

October 20th, 2005 || PermaLink

Democracy Not

Suspicions of irregularities in the voting tallies being reported in some provinces in Iraq have provoked the Higher Electoral Commission to conduct an investigation. In six Shiite-majority provinces in the South, 95 percent or more of voters are reported as having cast votes favoring the constitution. The proportion of those voting “yes” was not in and of itself suspicious in those provinces, but the commission felt that anything over 90 percent should be looked at again.

The provinces affected seem largely to be in the hands of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and it seems to me possible that SCIRI ballot counters may have been overly enthusiastic about the constitution. Personally, I think this phenomenon is a harbinger of things to come in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.

Sunni Arab leaders warned of serious consequences if fraud were proved with regard to the vote in Ninevah. Aljazeera is reporting that there are contradictory reports for Ninevah, the third possible province in which Sunni Arabs might hope to defeat the constitution by a 2/3s margin. One report said that the “no” vote there was 55 percent, not enough to cause the 3-province veto to kick in (Sunni Arabs in Anbar and Salahuddin had already rejected it by a 2/3s majority). But Abd al-Razzaq al-Juburi, the secretary general of the Independent Iraqi Front, told the correspondent for al-Zaman that the “no” vote in Ninevah exceeded 75 percent, according to his conversations with election workers. He said that they were under enormous pressure not to speak about this issue from unidentified higher-ups. (My guess is that al-Juburi is himself exaggerating– a 75 percent rejection is too high for Ninevah.) Another official said that out of 778,000 votes cast in Ninevah, 442,000 were “no” votes, and 353,000 were “yes” votes.

It does seem likely that all three Sunni Arab-majority provinces have rejected the constitution, even if not by the margin required to defeat it, and that this outcome is the worst possible one. For the rejection to be consistent within a single bloc is a very bad sign for the future of the country.

The Washington spinmeisters who are trying to say that the mere fact of the Sunnis voting is a good thing, even if they voted against the constitution, do no know what they are talking about. Political participation is not always a positive thing. The Nazis after all were elected to the Reichstag. And Serbs consistently voted for Milosevic and other ultra-nationalists. Nobody in Washington thought it positive that Iranian hardliners came out in some numbers to vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some elections are tragedies for a nation. This constitutional referendum was one of them.

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

October 18th, 2005 || PermaLink