More Inconvenient Truth
The only thing more depressing than listening to our political and pundit classes soundbite their ways around the subject of the war in Iraq without every addressing the core issue of America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, is listening to their plans to reform the American healthcare system. Blah, blah, yak, yak, nothing ever changes, and the core problem with healthcare in America is never mentioned:
And these health insurance companies are — they’re just — they’re the Halliburtons of the health industry. I mean, they really — they get away with murder. They charge whatever they want. There’s no government control. And frankly, we will not really fix our system until we remove these private insurance companies. I mean, they literally have to be eliminated. They cannot be allowed to exist in this country.
Takes Michael Moore to say it because, unlike all of the people running the country, he’s not on the payroll of the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations. Also, he has no illusions about the limitations of free-market capitalism:
We have an economic system, as I’ve said before, it’s unjust, it’s unfair, it’s not democratic. And until, ultimately, that changes, until we construct a different form of economy in a way that we relate to capital, I don’t think that — I think we’ll continue to have these problems, where the have-nots suffer and the haves make off like bandits.
This is the heart of our conundrum: our economic system is killing us, but the people in charge are all winners in that system, so nothing ever changes.
June 22nd, 2007 || PermaLink
Blaming the Victim
I know it’s important for dems, and especially female candidates, to sound pro-military and tough on terror, but Hillary Clinton’s attempt to whitewash American crimes in Iraq while laying all the blame on Iraqi leaders is shameful, craven, and the last straw for this voter.
The American military has done its job. Look at what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein, they gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions that are important for their own people.
Note to Senator Clinton: the mess in Iraq is 100% our fault. It will continue to worsen for as long as we are unwanted invader/occupiers. The Iraqi government can’t do anything to improve the situation — the problem is our presence. All Iraqis know that the reason we invaded and the reason we’re never leaving is the oil.
It’s the US government that’s failing to make the tough decisions, failing to even ask the tough questions.
June 21st, 2007 || PermaLink
Oil vs Peace
I’ve written before that the reason we invaded Iraq and will likely do the same to Iran is oil:
The real reason for the war was that Iraq under Saddam was too unstable to trust with the stewardship of America’s lifeblood. The continuing reason for the war is that we need to create some sort of stable government — democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, whatever — so that Dick Cheney’s “prize” will continue flowing into our gas tanks at less than $3 a gallon.
James Kuntsler takes this point further, making the case that arguing to bring the troops home is disengeuous unless we also argue for a total transformation of America’s car-based suburban culture:
We’re involved in Iraq because we don’t want to begin thinking about modifying our behavior at home. We are desperate to preserve our access to Middle East oil because that is the only way we can keep running our society the way we’re used to running it. Mostly, we don’t want to face the tragic misinvestments we’ve made in the infrastructure of happy motoring, and we don’t want to face the inconvenient truth that there really isn’t any combination of alt.fuels that will permit us to keep running all the cars the way we like to run them. Either we keep getting the oil or say goodbye to the American Dream Version 2.K.
But few Americans, and no electable politicians, are willing to discuss much less implement an end to car-based culture.
What cracks me up is their juvenile belief that being there is somehow optional for us, that we can keep on running Wal Mart and Walt Disney World without paying any price for it in the costs of policing the Middle East.
Does this mean we stop working for peace? No, but it underscores the fact that our problem is multi-dimensional:
I’d like to hear talk about drastically reforming our zoning laws to discourage any more suburban development or a pitch to allow some of our tax money to fund a US passenger rail revival. I’d like to see a candidate refuse to attend a Nascar race on the grounds that it’s an unconscionably stupid fucking waste of energy resources. I’m waiting for one of these birds to tell the American people the truth: you can’t have it both ways. you can’t get our military out of the Middle East without changing the way we live.
June 20th, 2007 || PermaLink
A Culture of Atrocity
Even since the publication of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges has been one of our clearest voices on the dangerous logic of war-think. Here’s everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq summed up in one paragraph:
This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—to murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.
This is the reality that legislators and their constituents must accept as inevitable when they give their approval to any war. However urgent the “threat,” and however high-minded the hoped-for outcome, war always reduces to a series of ever-worsening crimes against humanity.
In for a “good cause,” in for the soul-sapping atrocities.
June 19th, 2007 || PermaLink
The American Crazies
When historians look back on the staggering incompetance of the Bush years they will surely conclude that if not for Tony Blair much of the insanity would never have happened. Especially regarding the whole sorry mess in Iraq, if Tony Blair and the British had stood with rest of the world instead of with Bush, it’s unlikely the invasion would ever have happened.
Though we can’t fix the past we can hope that Blair’s replacement, Gordon Brown, has the sense to, as Anatole Kaletsky writes, “break with the American Crazies”:
There is now strong evidence that President Bush didn’t even know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims when he decided to attack Iraq - and that dissenting opinions were simply blocked by Mr Cheney before they could reach the President’s desk.
The State Department had prepared to send hundreds of diplomats and private sector construction experts with Arab-language skills and Middle East experience to help to rebuild Iraq. But less than a month before the war started, all these people were “stood down” on orders from Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as their Middle East experience would bias them towards an “Islamist” and defeatist worldview. The peremptory disbandment of the Iraqi Army and the Baath party, now regarded as the worst mistake of the immediate postwar period, was decided at the “highest level” in Washington and was then imposed against the advice of the US military governor Jay Garner, who quickly understood the anarchy that this would unleash.
The list of misjudgments and mistakes could go on and on, but my point should by now be obvious. The question Mr Brown must now ask himself is whether he can still allow himself to remain publicly allied to a US Administration that is so recklessly belligerent in its diplomatic conduct, so demonstrably incompetent in warfare and so irresponsibly dangerous to the peace of the world.
June 18th, 2007 || PermaLink
Oil Wars
As the situation in Iraq continues its tragic decline, the war’s advocates have reduced expectations for “progress” to one item: if the Iraqi government can just pass a new law that would privatize most of its oil production, then its American masters would proclaim a huge victory for the surge. But it’s hardly a sure thing that Iraqi lawmakers will enact the new law since it means signing over their country’s primary resource to foreign corporations:
The law would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry, all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil companies.
The Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields, leaving two-thirds of known — and all of its as yet undiscovered — fields open to foreign control.
The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country. The vast majority of Iraq’s oil would then be left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the country’s economic development.
This has been the main reason for the war from the very beginning. Way back before 9/11, Dick Cheney was convening secret meetings with energy bigwigs in which Middle Eastern oil was understood as not just a prize, but an imperative. Give Cheney some credit for recognizing that if the American Way were to continue mindlessly motoring on, it would need absolute control of the world’s major petroleum resources.
So it was that within hours of the attacks on 9/11, Bush and his supporters were already planning the invasion of Iraq. Too bad about the non-existent WMD, too bad that the “wave of liberating democracy” thing didn’t work out, but the point was always getting control of Iraq’s oil and that mission is almost accomplished.
June 15th, 2007 || PermaLink
The American Way
Joe Lieberman says we should invade Iran because we have “incontrovertible evidence” that someone in Iran is supplying weapons to Iraq, and some Iraqis are using those weapons to kill Americans.
Given the “incontrovertible evidence” of Iraqi WMD that turned out to be false, we have good reason to just ignore all such nonsense from war hawks. But even if it’s true that Iran is sending weapons to Iraq, how does that justify invading a sovereign nation?
To absorb the full force of how criminally insane Lieberman’s statement was, suppose we adopted the following proposition:
“The United States should launch airstrikes against any country which is supplying weapons or other support to insurgents in Iraq.”
Who would we have to bomb?
Of course we would have to bomb Syria. There’s no question that Syria could be doing more to stop the flow of weapons and fighters across the Syrian-Iraqi border. They could, for example, construct a 20-foot high electrified fence along the entire border, with a shark-infested moat. Since they aren’t doing this, we’d have to bomb them. But we would also have to bomb Saudi Arabia and Jordan, who could also be doing more to stop the flow of fighters and money from their territory to Sunni insurgents.
But, to be fully consistent, we couldn’t stop there. We would also have to bomb the United States.
Because, as it turns out, we are now intentionally sending weapons to Iraqi factions that will inevitably end up aimed at Americans:
With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.
They do it: a crime so bad to warrant the destruction of a nation.
We do it: the American Way.
June 14th, 2007 || PermaLink
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