One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like them.” In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned: 1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3) let the UN take the lead in international crises; 4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; 5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; 6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centers disagree; 7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known. In a highly atomized society, the public is therefore largely deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions.

Another conservative suggestion is that facts, logic, and elementary moral principles should matter. Those who take the trouble to adhere to that suggestion will soon be led to abandon a good part of familiar doctrine, though it is surely much easier to repeat self-serving mantras. Such simple truths carry us some distance toward developing more specific and detailed answers. More important, they open the way to implement them, opportunities that are readily within our grasp if we can free ourselves from the shackles of doctrine and imposed illusion.

Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to seek to induce pessimism, hopelessness, and despair, reality is different. There has been substantial progress in the unending quest for justice and freedom in recent years, leaving a legacy that can be carried forward from a higher plane than before. Opportunities for education and organizing abound. As in the past, rights are not likely to be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions - attending a few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as “democratic politics.” As always in the past, the tasks require dedicated day-by-day engagement to create - in part recreate - the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena, from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. There are many ways to promote democracy at home, carrying it to new dimensions. Opportunities are ample, and failure to grasp them is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world, and for future generations.

Noam Chomsky | Independent / UK  (read more. . .)

Once again, like Abu Ghraib, a few US soldiers are being investigated about what occurred in Haditha. The “few bad apples” scenario is being repeated in order to obscure the fact that Iraqis are being slaughtered every single day. The “shoot first ask questions later” policy, which has been in effect from nearly the beginning in Iraq, creates trigger-happy American soldiers and US-backed Iraqi death squads who have no respect for the lives of the Iraqi people. Yet, rather than high-ranking members of the Bush administration who give the orders, including Bush himself, being tried for the war crimes they are most certainly guilty of, we have the ceremonial “public hanging” of a few lowly soldiers for their crimes committed on the ground.

In an interview with CNN on May 29th concerning the Haditha massacre, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace commented, “It’s going to be a couple more weeks before those investigations are complete, and we should not prejudge the outcome. But we should, in fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of them are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly what we expect of them.”

This is the same Peter Pace who when asked how things were going in Iraq by Tim Russert on Meet the Press this past March 5th said, “I’d say they’re going well. I wouldn’t put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they’re going very, very well from everything you look at …”

Things are not “going very, very well” in Iraq. There have been countless My Lai massacres, and we cannot blame 0.1% of the soldiers on the ground in Iraq for killing as many as a quarter of a million Iraqis, when it is the policies of the Bush administration that generated the failed occupation to begin with.

Dahr Jamail | t r u t h o u t  (read more. . .)

WT: Were there moments in Iraq when you felt that what you were asked to do contradicted the purported ideals of the United States?

HV: Absolutely. We ran into some guys with some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) near a water treatment plant outside of Baghdad, and they got away. So we went back in with some reinforcements asking questions. When Saddam was in power, if you had a problem with your neighbor, you just told the police that this guy said something bad about Saddam, and they’d come arrest him with no proof, and they’d take him away and torture them.

Well, when we were in this village asking where the people were with RPGs, we get led to this little farming house. And we get out, myself and another soldier, to check their little huts and see if there’s any RPGs, explosives, multiple AK 47s — anything that would denote armed resistance towards what we were doing there.

The only thing I found was this little .22 pistol, probably something to scare off thieves. Nothing to go up against the United States Army, yet we still arrested these two young men of that family with no proof. I told my sergeant, “Sergeant, I don’t think these are the guys. I know. I had my sights on one of them. I saw his face.” He was like, “Oh, don’t worry. These are other bad guys.”

It just didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem right at all. Their mother was crying hysterically. She was at my feet, trying to kiss my feet, kissing my cheeks and my face — just pleading. It just wasn’t right. I don’t see any difference between what we did that day and what happened when Saddam was in power: just going into a house on just some words said by a guy who probably has something against this family, having no proof, arresting them on no proof, and they probably ended up at Abu Ghraib or some other prison where they were abused by some asshole MPs (military police). I don’t see any difference.

Jordan Buckley | WireTap  (read more. . .)

We are not who we believe we are and, in some sense, others perceive us more accurately than we do ourselves. The President has described a version of history - as did Clinton, by the way - beginning with World War II in which the United States is the liberator, Americans are the bringers of freedom. There is truth to that narrative, but it’s not the whole truth; and, quite frankly, it’s not the truth that matters a lick, let’s say, to the Islamic world today. Muslims don’t give a darn that we brought Hitler or the Third Reich to its knees. What they’re aware of is all kinds of other behavior, particularly in their neck of the woods, that had nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom, that had everything to do with power, with trying to establish relations that maximized the benefit to the United States and American society. We don’t have to let our hearts bleed about that. That’s the way politics works, but let’s not delude ourselves either. When President George W. Bush says, “America stands for freedom and liberty, and we’re coming to liberate you,” it’s absurd to expect people in that part of the world to take us seriously. That’s not what they’ve seen and known and experienced in dealing with the United States.

TD: And, of course, within the councils of this administration, they threw out anyone who knew anything about the record of U.S. policy in the Islamic world.

Bacevich: Because those experts would have challenged the ideologically soaked version of history that this administration has attempted to carry over into the 21st century. Only if we begin to see ourselves more clearly, will we be able to understand how others see us. We need to revise the narrative of the American Century and recognize that it has been about a host of other things that are far more problematic than liberation. There can be no understanding the true nature of the American century without acknowledging the reality of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hanoi, and Haiphong.

Andrew Bacevich, interviewed by Tom Engelhardt | (read more. . .)

In the beginning, neoconservatism was a movement of onetime liberals enraged at the wave of violence and disorder that overtook the cities in the 1960s. Riots convulsed urban America in that stormy decade, crime rates soared, student radicals seized campuses. How could anyone see all this, the first generation of neocons inquired, and still remain a liberal?

For it was all the liberals’ fault. Wafted along by their vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos caricatured them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle class vanished with it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative, the movement’s founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a liberal who’d been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives argued first and foremost for more cops.

Fast-forward four decades and we’ve come full circle. The neocons have refocused their attention on foreign policy and, in championing the Iraq war, have come to embody everything they once mocked and despised in ’60s liberals.

Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Hussein landscape, they conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.

The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s foremost neocon, and quickly put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq’s police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq’s cities after Hussein’s fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, “Stuff happens” — a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq.

Harold Meyerson | American Prospect  (read more. . .)

5. Touchscreen Voting Machines

Despite clear, copious evidence that these nefarious contraptions are built to be tampered with, they continue to spread and dominate the voting landscape, thanks to Bush’s “Help America Vote Act,” the exploitation of corrupt elections officials, and the general public’s enduring cluelessness.

In Utah, Emery County Elections Director Bruce Funk witnessed security testing by an outside firm on Diebold voting machines which showed them to be a security risk. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead Diebold attorneys were flown to Emery County on the governor’s airplane to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Florida, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho discovered an alarming security flaw in their Diebold system at the end of last year. Rather than fix the flaw, Diebold refused to fulfill its contract. Both of the other two touchscreen voting machine vendors, Sequoia and ES&S, now refuse to do business with Sancho, who is required by HAVA to implement a touchscreen system and will be sued by his own state if he doesn’t. Diebold is said to be pressuring for Sancho’s ouster before it will resume servicing the county.

Stories like these and much worse abound, and yet TV news outlets have done less coverage of the new era of elections fraud than even 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is possibly the most important story of this century, but nobody seems to give a damn. As long as this issue is ignored, real American democracy will remain an illusion. The midterm elections will be an interesting test of the public’s continuing gullibility about voting integrity, especially if the Democrats don’t win substantial gains, as they almost surely will if everything is kosher.

Bush just suggested that his brother Jeb would make a good president. We really need to fix this problem soon.

Allan Uthman | Buffalo Beast   (read more. . .)

We’ve heard a lot of rhetoric from the Bush Administration about “staying the course” in Iraq. About how it is America’s responsibility to stay as long as it takes to ensure that Iraq becomes a stable democracy. Those who’ve opposed this position-whether they have advocated an immediate withdrawal, a staged departure, or simply the preparation of a transition plan-have been branded as dolts, as advocates of a “cut and run” philosophy. What’s gotten little notice is that in Afghanistan the Administration is pursuing the very same cut and run policies that the accuse others of espousing in Iraq.

If you haven’t been paying attention to Afghanistan, you’re not alone. It hasn’t been in the news. For good reason, as things aren’t going well there. The Taliban has regained control of much of the territory they lost once the US forces arrived in 2001, particularly in the South and East. The Taliban has been conducting a guerilla campaign of “civil terror” and it’s succeeding.

On March 1st President Bush made a four-hour visit to Afghanistan. For Dubya everything was “coming up roses;” he spoke glowingly of the progress there, described it as “inspiring.” Nonetheless, the US is withdrawing 4000 troops (20 percent of the total), and drastically reducing support for infrastructure improvement. Bush tells the world that we will stay the course, but Afghans feel that we are bailing out.

What went wrong? The simple answer is everything that the President has tried. As has glaringly proven to be the case in Iraq, the Bush Administration never had a plan for Afghanistan and, therefore, never dealt with the systemic problems.

The most obvious problem has been that the US lost its focus on Al Qaeda. We didn’t apprehend Osama bin Laden and the other leaders, and we didn’t eradicate the remnants of Al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters. Now the Taliban, supported by Al Qaeda, is staging a dramatic comeback. In 2005 they killed around 1600 people, with a dramatic rise in the deaths of US troops, 91.

Lurking behind this decline is a more vexing problem. Our relationship with Pakistan is deteriorating, as is the position of their president, Pervez Musharraf. Radical elements are gaining strength in Pakistan and many observers feel that the Taliban is on the rise because it has gained new support from Pakistan.

As was the case in Iraq, we didn’t cultivate good relationships with Afghanistan’s neighbors. As a result, the borders are porous and insurgents are coming across in droves.

Bob Burnett | CommonDreams  (read more. . .)