Bush Fails Women in Afghanistan

The Taliban are back. Less than five years after British and U.S. troops drove them out of Afghanistan, they are launching increasingly audacious attacks, including an ambush of British troops in Helmand province last weekend. British soldiers were jumping from helicopters when they came under fire, beginning a battle in which 21 Taliban fighters were killed. One observer warned that British troops must regain control of Helmand or “the whole of southern Afghanistan will be lost to the Taliban insurgents.”

I could make a sarcastic remark about another great success in President Bush’s war on terror, but the situation in Afghanistan is too horrifying.

At the same time, I can’t help recalling the lunatic optimism of the president’s wife a few weeks into the Afghan campaign in 2001. “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes,” Laura Bush declared. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

Well, we’ve seen what nonsense that is in Iraq, where women dare not venture outdoors unless they are covered and the government is turning out to have a worse record than Saddam Hussein in some respects, repealing legislation giving inheritance rights to women. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s status as public enemy number one persuaded many foreigners that their defeat was all that was needed to free women from tyranny, an assumption that doesn’t stand up to five minutes’ scrutiny.

Joan Smith | Seattle Post-Intelligencer  (read more. . .)

June 16th, 2006 || PermaLink

Nightmare Scenario

In the south of Iraq, in the Basra region, the British who occupy that sector have all but given up aggressive patrol. They are holed up in their encampments on the defensive. Some reports have it that it is now too dangerous for them to fly helicopters by day. At the point when they must choose between being overrun or withdrawing, the small contingent of British troops facing unknown numbers of militia hidden in and among a hostile population should be able to evacuate the port of Basra even under fire.

The situation for American troops may be even more precarious. While our forces are still able to carry out aggressive patrolling, it nets little except to increase popular hostility, which, of course, makes it yet easier for the various insurgents and guerrilla groups to operate against us. It appears that in many places our people may have simply hunkered down to stay out of trouble. The vast construction projects of a few years ago are all but closed down, too, as the American forces appear to be doing less and less of anything but holding on and holding out.

The shortage of troops, which three years ago was a restraining factor, has become a potential disaster, with the ever-rising level of hostility to the American presence. To stay the course, to win, to realize our objectives, we need a half-million soldiers to pacify that country. If the force levels remain the same for another year and a half, this small, exhausted and overused American force may become so unglued that staying in Iraq will be come impossible. There may be no choice but retreat.

No, that’s wrong. There is another choice. Americans can try to make up for their lack of numbers with firepower. Blow what’s left of the country to smithereens. The political effects would be unspeakable and the ground troops might well still have to be extracted from their plight.

Nicholas von Hoffman | Guardian/UK  (read more. . .)

June 14th, 2006 || PermaLink

Another US Cover-Up Surfaces

According to an earlier account, Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, a 35-year-old mother of two, was killed in firing along with her 57-year-old cousin Saliha Mohammed Hassan on May 30 when they were being transported to Samarra General Hospital for Nabiha to give birth.

What was not reported, according to an Iraqi human rights investigator who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, was that both women were shot in the back of the head by U.S. snipers.

“I investigated this incident myself, and both of these women were shot from behind,” said the investigator. “Nabiha’s brains were splattered on her brother who was driving the car, since she was in the back seat.”

The U.S. military said soldiers fired on the car after it entered a “clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post” after failing to stop despite “repeated visual and auditory warnings.” The U.S. military said in a statement that “shots were fired to disable the vehicle.”

The brother of the pregnant woman, Redam Nisaif Jassim, who was driving the car, told IPS that he neither saw nor heard any warnings by the U.S. military. Two men who witnessed the incident from a nearby home also said they saw no signs of any warning.

“These kinds of killings by the Americans happen daily in Iraq,” said Jassim, “They gave no warning to us before killing my cousin and sister. Of course we know they have no respect for the lives of Iraqis.”

Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed | Inter Press Service  (read more. . .)

June 13th, 2006 || PermaLink

Iraq’s Pentagon Papers

Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Security Agency and White House who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates — so far carefully concealed from Congress and the public — about prospective or actual war crimes, reckless policies and domestic crimes: the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth — earlier than I did — before more lives are lost or a new war is launched.

Haditha holds a mirror up not just to American troops in the field, but to our whole society. Not just to the liars in government but to those who believe them too easily. And to all of us in the public, in the administration, in Congress and the media who dissent so far ineffectively or who stand by as murder is being done and do nothing to stop it or expose it.

It is past time for Americans to summon the civil courage to face what is being done in their name and to refuse to be accomplices. We must force Congress and this president, or their successors if necessary, to act upon the moral proposition that the U.S. must stop killing men, women and children in Iraq, and must not begin to do so in Iran.

Neither the lives we have lost, nor the lives we have taken, give the U.S. any right to determine by fire and airpower who shall govern or who shall die in countries we have wrongly attacked.

Daniel Ellsberg | Los Angeles Times  (read more. . .)

June 12th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Future Is Now

Momentous change is approaching in American politics. Conceivably, the turning point has already arrived, too indistinct to recognize. We are witnessing the demise of the reigning economic ideology. A deep shift of this kind is a very rare event, one that comes along only every thirty or forty years. Economic disorders accumulate that the orthodoxy cannot answer and may even have caused. Eventually, the ideological presumptions are discredited by real-world contradictions.

The last time this happened was in the 1970s, when economic liberalism foundered and collapsed. Ossified intellectually, unable to adjust to changed circumstances, the liberal order did not know how to deal with economic consequences like inflationary stagnation. As the long postwar prosperity lost its energy, so did liberal politics.

Something similar is happening now to the Republicans. Their problem is the underperforming economy, which must borrow to stay afloat and, roughly speaking, lifts only half the boats. The conservative order–inspired two generations ago by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and brought to power by Republican ascendancy–pushed government aside so business and capital would be free to generate more lasting prosperity. But their utopian promise was not fulfilled. Instead, the right’s principal product, one can say, was economic inequality.

The breakdown won’t necessarily produce an immediate shift in power. When the bottom fell out of liberal doctrine thirty years ago, what first unfolded was confusion and political paralysis, then an awkward retreat by the Democrats until they were finally displaced by the aggressive new conservatives under Ronald Reagan. But it does mean that Republicans have lost the political cohesion to advance their more extreme measures (privatizing Social Security, freeing capital entirely of taxation).

More to the point, the way is now open for alternative thinking: the new ideas that can lead to a new governing order. These ideas must be grounded in a determination to give people back their future. The strange paradox of our times is that despite America’s fabulous wealth, most people’s lives are shadowed by economic anxieties and real confinements, the wounds that market ideology has imposed. They fear that much worse is ahead for their children. Reform must re-establish this fundamental principle: The economy exists to support society and people, not the other way around. Only government can liberate them from the harsh rule of the marketplace, the demands imposed by capital and corporations that stunt or stymie the full pursuit of life and liberty in this complex industrial society. This very wealthy country has the capacity to insure that all citizens, regardless of status or skills, have the essential needs to pursue secure, self-directed lives. This starts with the right to health, work, livable incomes and open-ended education, and to participate meaningfully in the decisions that govern their lives. The marketplace has no interest in providing these. It is actively destroying them.

William Greider | The Nation  (read more. . .)

June 11th, 2006 || PermaLink

Why Good People Kill

In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a famous experiment. He told subjects to administer electric shocks to other people, ostensibly to assess the effect of physical punishment on learning. In fact, Milgram wanted to “test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.”

Quite a lot of pain, it turned out. Most of Milgram’s subjects continued to administer what they believed to be severe and agonizing shocks even when their “victims” (actually Milgram’s assistants) screamed and begged them to stop.

Milgram’s subjects weren’t sociopaths. On the contrary, most expressed extreme distress about administering progressively more severe shocks. But almost all of them did it anyway.

Milgram’s basic findings have been extended and confirmed since the 1960s. Depressingly, experimental evidence and historical experience suggest that even the gentlest people can usually be induced to inflict or ignore suffering.

There are several key factors that lead “good people” to do terrible things. The first, as the Milgram experiments powerfully demonstrated, is authority: Most ordinary people readily allow the dictates of “authorities” to trump their own moral instincts.

The second is conformity. Few people have the courage to go against the crowd.

The third is dehumanization of the victims. The Nazis routinely depicted Jews as “vermin” in need of extermination, for instance. Similarly, forcing victims to wear distinctive clothing (yellow stars, prison uniforms), shave their heads and so on can powerfully contribute to their dehumanization.

Orders, peer expectations and dehumanization need not be explicit to have a powerful effect. In adversarial settings such as prisons or conflict zones, subtle cues and omissions — the simple failure of authorities to send frequent, clear and consistent messages about appropriate behavior, for instance — can be as powerful as direct orders.

Against this backdrop, is it really surprising that ordinary, decent Marines may have committed atrocities in Haditha? All the key ingredients were present in one form or another: intense pressure from authorities to capture or kill insurgents; intense pressure from peers to seem tough and to avenge the deaths of comrades; the almost inevitable dehumanization that occurs when two groups look different, speak different languages, live apart and are separated by a chasm of mistrust.

Add in the discomfort, the fear, the constant uncertainty about the identity and location of the enemy and the relative youth of so many of our soldiers, and you have a recipe for atrocities committed not by “bad apples” but by ordinary people little different, and probably no worse, than most of us.

Of course, individuals still make their own choices. Most of Milgram’s experimental subjects administered severe electric shocks — but a few refused. If Marines are proved to have massacred civilians at Haditha, they should be punished accordingly.

Rosa Brooks | Los Angeles Times  (read more. . .)

June 10th, 2006 || PermaLink

Blame for Haditha Lies at Bush’s Feet

Of course, we are American fighting men and women, and we adhere to a higher standard of conduct, one built on discipline and leadership. I know our fighting men and women have been properly trained regarding the rules of war. The problem is leadership. And, to quote an old Russian military saying, “A fish stinks from its head.” There is a leadership deficit in the armed forces of the United States today, and it begins with the commander in chief, President George W. Bush, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. It extends to the entire U.S. Congress and onto the senior leadership of the uniformed armed services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

All of these individuals and organizations set a standard of carefree indifference to the rule of law when they ordered, or gave consent to, the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They were mute when the president and his secretary of defense waived the Geneva Convention when it came to so-called “terrorists” and “unlawful combatants.” They forgot that many who fought for the United States during the American Revolution would be classified as terrorists or unlawful combatants using the standards set forth by the Bush administration. So would the Wolverines. And in waiving American adherence to the rule of law in general, and the law of war in particular, American leadership, civilian and military, set a standard of indifference that was far too easily replicated by the men and women under them. This is why we had Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. And this is why we have Haditha.

The sad fact is that American service members in Iraq are not fighting a fight they can win. There is no standard for victory. They are deployed for six months, a year, or more, to a theater of operations that President Bush has already acknowledged will only be resolved by the next president. This means that those being dispatched to Iraq have only one mission: to survive. This is not a mission statement conducive to sound decision making and action. It is a mission statement that has all U.S. combatants reverting to a primal state where it is kill or be killed, regardless of the rules. And it is asinine in the extreme to talk about rules in the first place when the leadership of the men and women America sends into harm’s way show such a wanton disregard for rules to begin with.

There may have been a crime committed in Haditha. The facts will emerge in due course. But it should be clear to all that there is an ongoing crime taking place in Iraq, and anywhere around the world where American military forces operate according to a mandate given to them by the Bush administration. America has collectively walked away from the rule of law, and in doing so, has become the greatest perpetrator of war crimes in modern times.

The scope and scale of our crimes, as manifested in Iraq and elsewhere, are mind-boggling. The indifference of the American people is mind numbing. And the wrath of history, which will judge all of us harshly, has yet to be felt.

Scott Ritter | AlterNet  (read more. . .)

June 9th, 2006 || PermaLink