As to the consequences of a US withdrawal, we are entitled to have our personal judgements, all of them as uninformed and dubious as those of US intelligence. But they do not matter. What matters is what Iraqis think. Or rather, that is what should matter, and we learn a lot about the character and moral level of the reigning intellectual culture from the fact that the question of what the victims want barely even arises.
Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state says that Iran in 2003 offered to help stabilize Iraq and to cut off aid to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Hamas. Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of “talking to evil.” As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).
Because Khatami kept promising that his reforms would make Iranians better off, and because the US rejected all his overtures and left him with no achievements to show for them, the Iranian electorate turned against the reform movement and put Mahmud Ahmadinejad into power, a loud-mouthed braggart of a sort that Cheney’s Likudniks could then build up into a bogey man to frighten Americans with. Cheney created Iran as a menace.
According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 — more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent — some 696,074 Americans — were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.
These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged.
Marijuana isn’t a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug’s legal status do not claim it to be. However, pot’s relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
According to federal statistics, about 94 million Americans — that’s 40 percent of the U.S. population age 12 or older — self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. America’s public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.
And the future? Humans went from one-on-one fighting to massing armies of people. The next step was massing machines to kill people and then to kill masses of people with indiscriminate weapons. What we could use now are weapons that self-destruct before they are used, like the F-22 if it is effectively mothballed, followed by weapons that self-destruct in the computer design stage before they are built. That would save lives and money. Eventually, the reverse process could take us all the way back to not even thinking about weapons.
Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) | Foreign Policy in Focus
Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush’s escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.
The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. “He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the “surge” tactic. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’” She repeated his words: “‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”
Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we’d need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels — and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide — as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.
According to the UN report, it gets even worse when we include the vast quantities of land needed to give us our steak and pork chops. Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning the world’s forests. Today, 70% of former Amazon rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as “sinks,” absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and burning these forests releases all the stored carbon dioxide, quantities that exceed by far the fossil fuel emission of animal agriculture.
When historians examine the Bush administration, one of the few positives they will recall is its ability to set the parameters for debate. The Iraq War is perhaps the best example. You hardly hear anyone discussing the trail of lies, deception and plausible deniability the administration used to present and defend its case. Instead, the opposition seems stuck in the quagmire of having to provide a solution to a problem that they did not create. A pretty ironic situation created by the administration and party that preached “personal accountability.”
The media has been complicit in allowing the president to get away with establishing baselines for the debate. They ask questions using the false premises already laid out by the administration. Through a combination of repetition by administration officials and the mainstream media, and the absence of real challenges to these premises by Democrats, the nation winds up hearing about “the way forward” instead of a real and honest debate.
I’m not sure why Democrats have been so reluctant to challenge what the administration presents. When I see the so-called debates on Sunday morning political shows, I am always struck more by what’s not said than what is said. False premises lead to false options that result in bad decisions.
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For the love of one's country
is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear
with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part
of the patriot game.
— Dominic Behan
It was eye for an eye
in the land of the blind
When desert storm blew back
Across the shining seas
and spacious skies
Brought down the purple towers
Cut short the amber waves
Forever fouled the fruited plains
When desert storm blew home
We stopped
One broken hearted people
We huddled in the howling silence
Trembled in that awful still
Until, too soon,
The star-spangled
jingo dance began
The bully speech
and the heavy hand
The schoolyard line
drawn in the sand
And the call to arms, to arms,
and patriot storms
In the land of the blind,
it was eye for an eye
It was tooth for a tooth
and the torture of truth
When the old gray men
again called the tune
Ours is the one true creed,
they said
Ours are the noblest of the dead
Only our suffering counts as real
Only their suffering will heal
this unfair
and so unwanted wound
And oh, we stopped
One nation, terror torn in two
Minds heavy with
the growing madness
Wary of Orwell's
whispered warnings
Of war without end,
the ministry of spin
Destroy the village now
to save it
Imprison love
for freedom's sake
Until all talk of peace is treason
Peace is treason,
As we torture the truth
With tooth for a tooth
Now it's cry for a cry
and tear for a tear
And sword for a sword
and fear for a fear
We'll do it to them
because they did to us
We'll do it again
and again if we must
We must, if we can,
vain foolish men
It goes round and comes round
and goes round again
History falls
through the cracks in our walls
Reason fails
and love . . . love pales
Until we stop
One sorry hopeful sorry planet
Soul-sick of it all
So weary of the same old
blame scold
And no, pampered prince,
this is no new war
Not new the cratered cities
Not new the blackened dawn
Not new the wailing lovers
Not new the friendly-fired spawn
Not new the burning cross
Not new the blood-soaked
cemetery lawn
The wasted and forsaken youth
The tooth for a tooth,
The torture of truth
The eye for an eye
In the land of the blind
Unless, until,
Oh will we stop.
Michael Sky
October, 2001