License to lie

Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq’s oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a “global experiment in behaviorism”: If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior. “The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.” This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration’s first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to “dissuade nations abroad from challenging” America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.

The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a “default” — a fallback, driven by the “realization that the American mainland is indefensible.” America couldn’t really do anything — so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind’s book. “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,” Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: “It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”

This bizarre statement, in which might not only makes right but actually makes reality, recalls the infamous words of the anonymous Bush official who told Suskind for a New York Times Magazine article that the Bush administration made its own truth by acting, which those in the impotent “reality-based” community would have to come to terms with. Behind it is the notion that America is both omnipotent and infallible. No matter what it does, it is always right, and even if it makes a mistake it is impervious to harm. This quasi-theological mind-set, which as Suskind shows tracks perfectly with Bush’s religio-patriotic fervor and Karl Rove’s political strategy, allowed Cheney and Bush to believe that they could send 130,000 U.S. troops into the heart of the Arab world without negative consequences.

Gary Kamiya | Salon  (read more. . .)

June 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

Their Barbarism, and Ours

We hear that of course the U.S. tries to avoid killing civilians — as if that makes killing them okay. But the slaughter from the air and from other U.S. military actions is a certain result of the occupiers’ war. (What would we say if, in our own community, the police force killed shoppers every day by spraying blocks of stores with machine-gun fire — while explaining that the action was justifiable because no innocents were targeted and their deaths were an unfortunate necessity in the war on crime?)

Meanwhile, routinely absent from the U.S. media’s war coverage is the context: an invasion and occupation fundamentally based on deception.

“The Bush strategy for victory is about to begin,” author Beau Grosscup said Tuesday. “U.S. and Iraqi forces have surrounded the city of Ramadi. Food and water have been cut off. Next is the ‘Shock and Awe’ strategic bombing of the city, to be followed by ‘mop-up’ operations: ground troops, snipers and aerial ’support.’”

Grosscup, a professor of international relations at California State University in Chico, added: “It is the hallowed ‘Fallujah’ model, intended to bring ’stability’ by flattening the city with civilian death and destruction. It is a ‘clean’ way to victory, one supported by Rep. Jack Murtha, who would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq but continue to engage the ‘enemy’ from far away and from 15,000 to 30,000 feet above with air power. By October 2004, this ‘clean war’ had killed close to 100,000 Iraqi civilians and thousands more since. But, as any enthusiast of strategic bombing would say, it is the price of victory and somebody has to make the ultimate sacrifice. Terror from the skies, anyone?”

Norman Solomon | huffingtonpost  (read more. . .)

June 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

Cut-and-Run Liberal, and Proud of It

I want to be perfectly clear about this. We liberals really do want to cut and run.

I admit it. We are cut-and-run liberals, just as Karl Rove alleges. More than that, I am proud of it and encourage more Americans to join us.

We are liberals/progressives and, damn it, we want to cut and run.

We want to cut and run from the borrow and spend, borrow and spend economics of the GOP that have piled an additional $4 trillion in debt onto our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

We want to cut and run from the unholy alliance between the GOP and energy companies that has left us at the mercy of a bunch of medieval Islamic tribal leaders who run their own countries like feudal states and treat their own people — especially their women — worse than Americans treat farm animals.

We want to cut and run from a national health care system designed by and for giant health care and pharmaceutical interests, that enriches a few while leaving 45 million Americans without affordable health insurance.

We want to cut and run from a government that, over the past six years, has become not only increasingly closed to public scrutiny and accountability, but overtly hostile and suspicious of citizens who insist on either.

We want to cut and run from a style of governance that not only plays on fear and petty prejudices, but cultivates and exploits them for cheap political gain. From the cynical, dishonest, purposeful pitting of majority populations against minority groups on the grounds that they don’t share “American values,” and later denying responsibility for the entirely predictable destructive consequences of those tactics.

Stephen Pizzo | News for Real  (read more. . .)

June 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

A Negotiated Solution to the Iranian Nuclear Crisis is Within Reach

The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology’s only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.

A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. “For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources,” Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals”.

Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: “They were an allied country.”

In 1976 the Ford administration “endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb”, Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.

The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton’s harsh sanctions, followed by Bush’s threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.

Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about Washington’s intentions.

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

June 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

A Long Road Ahead in Iraq

Rather than engage in a serious debate about America’s future course in Iraq, President Bush and the Republican Congress have again opted for sound bites and partisanship. Yet all the choreographed posturing and a one-week flurry of good news cannot blot out the larger picture of dubious trends and dismal prospects. Not only is the glass less than half full. The water level, viewed over months rather than days, is not noticeably rising.

Take the police. It is meaningless to talk about Iraq’s taking charge of its own security when the police forces that patrol its cities and run its prisons are rife with sectarian militias and death squads that would sooner wage a civil war than prevent one.

While Mr. Bush holds out visions of Iraqi security forces standing up so that Americans can stand down, Iraq’s deputy justice minister more candidly told The Washington Post last week that “we cannot control the prisons; it’s as simple as that.” He added that “our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad.”

A new interior minister can change that only if backed by a new configuration of political power, no longer subject to vetoes by parties like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq that run some of the very militias that must be curbed.

Consider also the level of sectarian violence, a clear indicator of whether Iraq is moving toward national unity or sectarian conflict. In May 2003, there were five recorded incidents of sectarian violence. In May 2004, there were 10. In May 2005, there were 20. Last month there were 250. This is a very discouraging trend, as is the predictable response: thousands of families fleeing their homes.

New York Times | Editorial  (read more. . .)

June 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

When Will the Mainstream Media Get It Right?

Facts have never gotten in the way of the Bush Administration. Too often, it lives and dies by the big lie, repeated over and over again. Reporters call this “spin,” because the word “lie” makes them uncomfortable. But whatever name they give it, they should always provide evidence (call it verifiable fact or context) that measures the spin against what is known. Providing this contrast, after all, is the news media’s job.

What’s happening in Washington this week is clear. After weeks of utter chaos on the ground in Baghdad — kidnappings, sectarian mass murders, bombs and the flight of the middle class to neighboring countries — the Iraqi government filled its Cabinet and U.S. troops killed a very evil guy, Musab al-Zarqawi. It is good news and it does provide an inkling of hope. But now the Bush Administration wants to cash in politically by renewing its historical assault on Democrats as wimps and defeatists and by making the news of Zarqawi’s death partisan.

The problem with this spin is that most of the facts don’t support either the Administration’s vision of reality in Iraq or its renewed efforts to tie Iraq to the broader war on terror (and, by extension, 9/11). That information, too, is part of the news – an important part if the American public is to make sense of what’s really going on.

Jerry Lanson | CommonDreams  (read more. . .)

June 18th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Peace Race

The peace majority is real.

A CBS poll finds that 80 percent of Democrats believe the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, and more than 60 percent want US troops home as soon as possible. A Washington Post/ABC poll finds that 70 percent of Independents feel the war was not worth it, and 33 percent of Republicans agree. Even 72 percent of our troops believe US forces should leave Iraq in the next year.

So what are so many Democratic politicians so afraid of? And how do we translate this majority into a politics of change for the 2006 elections and beyond? How do we send a message from the grassroots – the people outside of the beltway – that ending this war matters, and that the time to show moxie and conviction is right now?

VotersForPeace has initiated the Peace Voter Pledge along with 18 other antiwar organizations – including United for Peace and Justice, itself a coalition of 1,400 local groups.

The pledge is focused on the Iraq war as well as potential armed conflicts such as that with Iran, and – using language crafted by The Nation in its cover editorial last November – it reads: “I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign.”

Linda Schade, spokesperson for Voters For Peace, points to a nationwide poll indicating that 67 percent of Democratic voters support or strongly support the wording of the pledge; 59 percent of Independents and a stunning 25 percent of Republicans support it as well.

“The Peace Majority is now here. Peace Voters are the new Soccer Moms,” Schade said.

Peace Voters see how the war is undermining our security and causing a tragically unnecessary loss of life, while also depleting needed resources for healthcare, education, and the rebuilding of America.

Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation  (read more. . .)

June 17th, 2006 || PermaLink

License to lie

Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq’s oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a “global experiment in behaviorism”: If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior. “The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.” This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration’s first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to “dissuade nations abroad from challenging” America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.

The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a “default” — a fallback, driven by the “realization that the American mainland is indefensible.” America couldn’t really do anything — so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind’s book. “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,” Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: “It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”

This bizarre statement, in which might not only makes right but actually makes reality, recalls the infamous words of the anonymous Bush official who told Suskind for a New York Times Magazine article that the Bush administration made its own truth by acting, which those in the impotent “reality-based” community would have to come to terms with. Behind it is the notion that America is both omnipotent and infallible. No matter what it does, it is always right, and even if it makes a mistake it is impervious to harm. This quasi-theological mind-set, which as Suskind shows tracks perfectly with Bush’s religio-patriotic fervor and Karl Rove’s political strategy, allowed Cheney and Bush to believe that they could send 130,000 U.S. troops into the heart of the Arab world without negative consequences.

Gary Kamiya | Salon  (read more. . .)

June 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

Their Barbarism, and Ours

We hear that of course the U.S. tries to avoid killing civilians — as if that makes killing them okay. But the slaughter from the air and from other U.S. military actions is a certain result of the occupiers’ war. (What would we say if, in our own community, the police force killed shoppers every day by spraying blocks of stores with machine-gun fire — while explaining that the action was justifiable because no innocents were targeted and their deaths were an unfortunate necessity in the war on crime?)

Meanwhile, routinely absent from the U.S. media’s war coverage is the context: an invasion and occupation fundamentally based on deception.

“The Bush strategy for victory is about to begin,” author Beau Grosscup said Tuesday. “U.S. and Iraqi forces have surrounded the city of Ramadi. Food and water have been cut off. Next is the ‘Shock and Awe’ strategic bombing of the city, to be followed by ‘mop-up’ operations: ground troops, snipers and aerial ’support.’”

Grosscup, a professor of international relations at California State University in Chico, added: “It is the hallowed ‘Fallujah’ model, intended to bring ’stability’ by flattening the city with civilian death and destruction. It is a ‘clean’ way to victory, one supported by Rep. Jack Murtha, who would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq but continue to engage the ‘enemy’ from far away and from 15,000 to 30,000 feet above with air power. By October 2004, this ‘clean war’ had killed close to 100,000 Iraqi civilians and thousands more since. But, as any enthusiast of strategic bombing would say, it is the price of victory and somebody has to make the ultimate sacrifice. Terror from the skies, anyone?”

Norman Solomon | huffingtonpost  (read more. . .)

June 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

Cut-and-Run Liberal, and Proud of It

I want to be perfectly clear about this. We liberals really do want to cut and run.

I admit it. We are cut-and-run liberals, just as Karl Rove alleges. More than that, I am proud of it and encourage more Americans to join us.

We are liberals/progressives and, damn it, we want to cut and run.

We want to cut and run from the borrow and spend, borrow and spend economics of the GOP that have piled an additional $4 trillion in debt onto our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

We want to cut and run from the unholy alliance between the GOP and energy companies that has left us at the mercy of a bunch of medieval Islamic tribal leaders who run their own countries like feudal states and treat their own people — especially their women — worse than Americans treat farm animals.

We want to cut and run from a national health care system designed by and for giant health care and pharmaceutical interests, that enriches a few while leaving 45 million Americans without affordable health insurance.

We want to cut and run from a government that, over the past six years, has become not only increasingly closed to public scrutiny and accountability, but overtly hostile and suspicious of citizens who insist on either.

We want to cut and run from a style of governance that not only plays on fear and petty prejudices, but cultivates and exploits them for cheap political gain. From the cynical, dishonest, purposeful pitting of majority populations against minority groups on the grounds that they don’t share “American values,” and later denying responsibility for the entirely predictable destructive consequences of those tactics.

Stephen Pizzo | News for Real  (read more. . .)

June 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

A Negotiated Solution to the Iranian Nuclear Crisis is Within Reach

The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology’s only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.

A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. “For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources,” Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals”.

Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: “They were an allied country.”

In 1976 the Ford administration “endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb”, Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.

The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton’s harsh sanctions, followed by Bush’s threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.

Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about Washington’s intentions.

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

June 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

A Long Road Ahead in Iraq

Rather than engage in a serious debate about America’s future course in Iraq, President Bush and the Republican Congress have again opted for sound bites and partisanship. Yet all the choreographed posturing and a one-week flurry of good news cannot blot out the larger picture of dubious trends and dismal prospects. Not only is the glass less than half full. The water level, viewed over months rather than days, is not noticeably rising.

Take the police. It is meaningless to talk about Iraq’s taking charge of its own security when the police forces that patrol its cities and run its prisons are rife with sectarian militias and death squads that would sooner wage a civil war than prevent one.

While Mr. Bush holds out visions of Iraqi security forces standing up so that Americans can stand down, Iraq’s deputy justice minister more candidly told The Washington Post last week that “we cannot control the prisons; it’s as simple as that.” He added that “our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad.”

A new interior minister can change that only if backed by a new configuration of political power, no longer subject to vetoes by parties like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq that run some of the very militias that must be curbed.

Consider also the level of sectarian violence, a clear indicator of whether Iraq is moving toward national unity or sectarian conflict. In May 2003, there were five recorded incidents of sectarian violence. In May 2004, there were 10. In May 2005, there were 20. Last month there were 250. This is a very discouraging trend, as is the predictable response: thousands of families fleeing their homes.

New York Times | Editorial  (read more. . .)

June 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

When Will the Mainstream Media Get It Right?

Facts have never gotten in the way of the Bush Administration. Too often, it lives and dies by the big lie, repeated over and over again. Reporters call this “spin,” because the word “lie” makes them uncomfortable. But whatever name they give it, they should always provide evidence (call it verifiable fact or context) that measures the spin against what is known. Providing this contrast, after all, is the news media’s job.

What’s happening in Washington this week is clear. After weeks of utter chaos on the ground in Baghdad — kidnappings, sectarian mass murders, bombs and the flight of the middle class to neighboring countries — the Iraqi government filled its Cabinet and U.S. troops killed a very evil guy, Musab al-Zarqawi. It is good news and it does provide an inkling of hope. But now the Bush Administration wants to cash in politically by renewing its historical assault on Democrats as wimps and defeatists and by making the news of Zarqawi’s death partisan.

The problem with this spin is that most of the facts don’t support either the Administration’s vision of reality in Iraq or its renewed efforts to tie Iraq to the broader war on terror (and, by extension, 9/11). That information, too, is part of the news – an important part if the American public is to make sense of what’s really going on.

Jerry Lanson | CommonDreams  (read more. . .)

June 18th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Peace Race

The peace majority is real.

A CBS poll finds that 80 percent of Democrats believe the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, and more than 60 percent want US troops home as soon as possible. A Washington Post/ABC poll finds that 70 percent of Independents feel the war was not worth it, and 33 percent of Republicans agree. Even 72 percent of our troops believe US forces should leave Iraq in the next year.

So what are so many Democratic politicians so afraid of? And how do we translate this majority into a politics of change for the 2006 elections and beyond? How do we send a message from the grassroots – the people outside of the beltway – that ending this war matters, and that the time to show moxie and conviction is right now?

VotersForPeace has initiated the Peace Voter Pledge along with 18 other antiwar organizations – including United for Peace and Justice, itself a coalition of 1,400 local groups.

The pledge is focused on the Iraq war as well as potential armed conflicts such as that with Iran, and – using language crafted by The Nation in its cover editorial last November – it reads: “I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign.”

Linda Schade, spokesperson for Voters For Peace, points to a nationwide poll indicating that 67 percent of Democratic voters support or strongly support the wording of the pledge; 59 percent of Independents and a stunning 25 percent of Republicans support it as well.

“The Peace Majority is now here. Peace Voters are the new Soccer Moms,” Schade said.

Peace Voters see how the war is undermining our security and causing a tragically unnecessary loss of life, while also depleting needed resources for healthcare, education, and the rebuilding of America.

Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation  (read more. . .)

June 17th, 2006 || PermaLink