Enough With the ‘One God’ Stuff

But monotheism posits one omnipotent, lonely sucker all by himself — “the sky god” as Gore Vidal once called him. The first five books of the Hebrews’ Bible reveal, not surprisingly, that the sky god is often angry, jealous, vengeful, and even murderous — regularly toying with, manipulating and punishing the puny beings he creates to worship and amuse him. Not surprisingly, he’s a self-absorbed ascetic who invents for his “children” bizarre, impossible-to-comply-with rules governing a multitude of tiny details of daily life. Sometimes he goes berserk about minor infractions; frequently he ignores major violations of his own rules. He’s the original bad father, threatening awful punishments, with no wife, lover, siblings, friends, co-workers, neighbors or relatives to reign him in.

Early Christians and then Muslims added to monotheism the great creative innovation of the promise of eternal life. A person gets to live forever if, and only if, that person closely follows the sky god’s rules. This made monotheism much easier to sell, especially when coupled with the offer of extra credit toward salvation for converting others. It also made monotheism fantastically effective in motivating, inspiring, controlling and ruling people. Fueled by the monotheists’ inexhaustible missionary zeal, in nearly 2,000 years this peculiar ideology has spread throughout much of the globe.

Here in the high-tech futuristic 21st century, the punitive, vengeful, sky god is as strong and legitimate as he’s been in a long time. Modernity, it turns out, was no cure for monotheism. If anything, it increases extremism, especially — but never only — among the dispossessed. And now in the Middle East we have the volatile blend of pissed-off Jews, Muslims, and Christians, each convinced they possess an a iron-clad mandate from their one and only angry god. Mixed in as well are many weapons, lots of oil, and the dangerous, born-again idiocy of George W. Bush and other prominent Republicans. All this is concentrated on the turf that monotheists everywhere see as their origin, their home, their “holy land.”

James Foley | AlterNet  (read more. . .)

September 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

The Torture Battle Royal

President Bush’s torture policy has provoked perhaps the greatest schism between a president and the military in American history. From the outside, this battle royal over his abrogation of the Geneva conventions appears as a shadow war. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Hamdan v Rumsfeld in June, deciding that Bush’s kangaroo court commissions for detainees “violate both the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and the four Geneva conventions”, the struggle has been forced into the open.

On September 6 Bush made his case for torture, offering as validity the interrogation under what he called an “alternative set of procedures” of an al-Qaida operative named Abu Zubaydah. Bush claimed he was a “senior terrorist leader” who “ran a terrorist camp” and had provided accurate information about planned terrorist attacks. In fact, Zubaydah was an al-Qaida travel agent (literally a travel agent), who, under torture, spun wild scenarios of terrorism that proved bogus. Zubaydah, it turns out, is a psychotic with the intelligence of a child. “This guy is insane, certifiable,” said Dan Coleman, an FBI agent assigned to the al-Qaida taskforce.

Bush’s argument for torture is partly based on the unstated premise that the more sadism, the more intelligence. While he referenced Zubaydah, he did not mention Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, described by the FBI, according to the New Yorker, as “arguably the US’s most valuable informant on al-Qaida”, who is wined, dined and housed by the federal witness protection programme.

On September 15 the Senate armed services committee approved a bill affirming the Geneva conventions, sponsored by three Republicans with military backgrounds - John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The former secretary of state Colin Powell, Bush’s “good soldier,” released a letter denouncing Bush’s version. “The world,” he wrote, “is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” and Bush’s bill “would add to those doubts”. That sentiment was underlined in another letter signed by 29 retired generals and CIA officials. General John Batiste, former commander of the 1st army division in Iraq, appeared on CNN to scourge the administration’s policy as “unlawful”, “wrong”, and responsible for Abu Ghraib.

Sidney Blumenthal | Guardian / UK  (read more. . .)

September 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

Bush’s Use of ‘Evil’ Comes Home to Roost

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez referred to US President George W. Bush as “the devil” in his speech before the UN general assembly on Wednesday, complaining that the stench of sulphur still hung in the air at the podium. Chavez crossed himself at the mention of Bush, a folk Catholic way of fending off Satan.

Bush himself opened the way for these sorts of comments with his 2002 State of the Union address, where he mysteriously allowed the Neoconservative lightweight David Frum to put into his mouth the phrase “the axis of evil” in referring to Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Critics at the time complained that they weren’t an axis.

But the real problem is that “evil” is not a political term, it is a theological one. The president of a civil republic has no business trafficking in the rhetoric of evil. Besides, the best ethical theory sees evil as an attribute of acts, not of persons or countries. “Iran” is not “evil.” Iran’s governing officials may occasionally do evil things, but they are actions, not essences. If you call a person or a country “evil” you are demonizing them.

Having made Iran a demon, Bush refused to talk to it. At the time he put Iran in the axis of evil, reform President Mohammad Khatami had presided over candlelight vigils in Iran for the United States in the aftermath of the al-Qaeda attacks, and had called for people to people diplomacy and a “dialogue of civilizations.” President Khatami has his flaws, but he was not and is not “evil.”

So, having theologized international relations and turned them into moral absolutes, it is natural that Bush is subsequently paralyzed.

Bush started it. He started talking about other countries and leaders as “evil.” He bears the responsibility for this importation of the absolute into our political discourse.

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

September 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

Torture Is Torture

Colin Powell’s strongly worded rejection of torture should have embarrassed and chastened the White House, but this is a president who refuses to listen to critics of his “war on terrorism” - even critics who helped design and lead it.

There should be no need to spell out the practical reasons against torture, but, for the record, they are legion. As Powell and others have argued, if the United States unilaterally reinterprets Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to permit torture, potential adversaries in future conflicts will feel justified in doing the same thing. Does the president want some captured pilot to be subjected to the tortures applied in the CIA prisons?

And, as has been pointed out by experts, torture works - far too well. Torture victims will tell what they know, and when their knowledge is exhausted they will tell their torturers what they want to hear, even if they have to invent conspiracies. The president says that torturing al-Qaeda kingpins foiled serious plots against America, but how do we know those plots were real? How can we be sure that some of the detainees at Guantanamo aren’t shopkeepers or taxi drivers who were snatched because Khalid Sheik Mohammed ran out of real terrorists to implicate and began naming acquaintances so he wouldn’t get waterboarded again?

But we shouldn’t have to talk about the practicalities of torture, because the real question is moral: What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?

Bush’s view of the world is based on the idea of American exceptionalism: that this country is unique, that its ideas and values are not just worthy or admirable but superior to any others. This attitude annoys the rest of the world to no end - a lot of other countries think they’re pretty special, too - but accept for the moment that the American system is in fact the best of all systems and that the great experiment begun by the Founding Fathers was a signal event in the history of mankind. Accept, if you will, Bush’s view that the United States is steadfastly blessed by a loving God.

What do you imagine God might think about torture, Mr. President?

Eugene Robinson | Washington Post  (read more. . .)

September 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

Deadly Harvest: The Lebanese Fields Sown with Cluster Bombs

The war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.

The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon’s farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.

In a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys. “I know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him,” said his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father’s bed in the hospital.

At least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent monitors.

Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. “In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs,” he said. “What we did there was crazy and monstrous.” What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.

Patrick Cockburn | lndependent/UK  (read more. . .)

September 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

War Is Horrible, but . . .

One scarcely commits the dreaded sin of moral equivalence, however, by observing that few wars present such a stark contrast, in which only the children of God fight on one side and only the children of Satan fight on the other. One reason why war is so horrible is that it invariably drags into its charnel house many―again, the children are the most undeniable examples―who must be held blameless for any actions or threats that might have incited the war.

Even if we set aside such clear-cut innocents and consider only persons in the upper echelons of the conflicting sides, it is rare to find all angels on one side and all demons on the other. In World War II, for example, the Allied states were led by such angels as Winston Churchill, who relished the horrific terror bombing of German cities; Josef Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers of all time; Franklin D. Roosevelt, of whose moral uprightness the less said the better; and Harry S Truman, who took pleasure in annihilating hundreds of thousands of defenseless Japanese noncombatants first with incendiary bombs and ultimately with nuclear weapons. Yes, the other side had Adolf Hitler, whose fiendishness I have no desire to deny, but the overall character of the leadership on both sides sufficiently attests that there was enough evil to go around. As for the ordinary soldiers, of course, everyone who knows anything about actual combat appreciates that once engaged, the men on both sides quickly become brutalized and routinely commit atrocities of every imaginable size and shape.

So, it is far from clear that war is always or even typically “not as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent.” On many occasions, refusal to resort to war, even in the face of undeniable evils, may still be the better course. When World War II ended, leaving more than 62 million dead, most of them civilians, and hundreds of millions displaced, homeless, wounded, sick, or impoverished, the survivors might well have doubted whether conditions would have been even more terrible had the war not taken place. (The dead were unavailable for comment.) To make matters worse, owing to the war, the monster Stalin had gained control of an enormous area stretching from Czechoslovakia to Korea; and soon, because of the defeat of the Japanese Empire, the monster Mao Zedong would take complete control of China and impose a murderous reign of terror on the world’s most populous country that cost the lives of perhaps another 60 million persons (as many as 77 million, according to one plausible estimate). It is difficult to believe that the situation in China would have been so awful even if the Japanese had succeeded in incorporating the Chinese into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Robert Higgs | Lew Rockwell.com  (read more. . .)

September 18th, 2006 || PermaLink

Why we can’t win the “war on terror”

Having defined terrorism, given a history of it and established that terrorists are quite “normal” — even exceptionally idealistic — in their psychology and goals, Richardson then turns to the most important and provocative part of her book: a powerful critique of America’s reaction to 9/11. She argues that the 9/11 attacks did not change the world — “rather it was our reaction to September 11 that changed the world.” And not for the better.

Richardson points out that the terrorist attacks were spectacularly successful, but they hardly emerged out of a void. Muslim rage, driven by U.S. policies ranging from coziness with autocratic Arab regimes to support for Israel, as well as by socioreligious frustrations that U.S. policies had nothing to do with, had been building for years. Americans thought the attacks came out of the blue because we are insular, are ill-educated about the world in general and the Middle East in particular, and — with that touching, maddening innocence and assumption of national superiority that have bemused observers from Henry James to Graham Greene — were unable to conceive why others might hold legitimate grievances against us.

Rather than try to educate Americans — teaching them, for example, that superpowers throughout history have been hated, or about the complexities of our Middle East policies — the Bush administration “retreated to simplistic formulas of good and evil.” By so doing, Richardson argues, it squandered a crucial opportunity to “educate the American public to the realities of terrorism and to the implication of the United States’ global preeminence.” (She does not point out that the likelihood of the Bush administration, which regards U.S. hegemony as given by divine fiat, doing this is somewhere between zero and none.)

As for our reaction, its effects have been little short of catastrophic. By invading Iraq, we created the very terrorist boogeyman we feared. And by declaring an unwinnable “war on terror,” we escalated the conflict unnecessarily, elevated Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to a bad eminence they did not deserve, and condemned ourselves to certain defeat. As Richardson points out, all a terrorist has to do is set off one bomb somewhere to make us “lose” the war on terrorism. This is making things much too easy for them.

Gary Kamiya, review of What Terrorists Want, by Louise Richardson in Salon | http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/15/richardson/

September 17th, 2006 || PermaLink