Someone gave a proper order to a few very current events

Chris Floyd had the honor:

The uprising in Egypt on Tuesday is of infinitely greater importance than the goon show staged by the corporate-lackey-in-chief and the great mooing herd of cud-chewers in Congress the same night. For decades, the remarkably brutal — and rottenly stagnant — dictatorship in Egypt has been one of linchpins of Washington's never-ending effort to "project dominance" over the Middle East. If the Cairo regime falls to a popular revolution, it will send shock waves all through the world-spanning tentacles of the American Empire.

So, while Barack Obama exhorted Americans to suck it up and to firmly grab their bootstraps — "The future is ours to win." and "It [the future] has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle and meet the demands of a new age." — parts of the world were then forcing the American Eagle to retract his claws.

Blowback? Yes, indeed! Expected? Yes, at least by some. Welcomed? Yes, by many, for retrenchment of this kind is both inevitable and timely. It's inevitable because the United States cannot afford to engage forever in wars of conquest and pacification, especially since these will remain wars which it will never truly win. This incapacity can be explained by the fact that both global political and military power presuppose a globally significant economic power by the country that would be a world power. Yet having economic power of this magnitude is something which America can only watch dissipate while this economic power passes eastward from its hands to China and India's. It's timely because, for decades, America's global empire garroted America's modestly democratic institutions while it has also wasted the lives of millions of Americans and millions more of those targeted by Uncle Sam's juggernaut. Americans should never forget that the United States was the Rogue State in the world, one that was too powerful to resist by most of the Lilliputians who confronted it. Fortunately, successfully resisting the Rogue Power has since become a feasible goal for those willing to fight and die for their political project. This is their moment. This is America's descent to a condition of unexceptional existence.

As his speech neared its conclusion, Obama the myth-monger (on which, see this, this, this, this, this) exclaimed, "We do big things." Indeed, America has done many big things over the course of its history. In making this claim Obama clearly meant to convey to his audiences that he was hopeful about the future. Nevertheless, America will fail spectacularly simply because it does so many things in a very big way, as Floyd suggests in his conclusion:

Poor Barack. Not that long ago, he was taking the world stage in Cairo, with a speech that offered a "new start" in relations to the regions — empty words which have long since proved to have been just another part of the vicious deceptions currently being exposed by al Jazeera. Now Cairo is ablaze with the promise of a genuine new start, driven by the needs of ordinary people, not the greeds of the elite. More than ever, Obama looks like yesterday's man, abandoned by history as it sweeps forward, leaving him mired with the goons and the loons, fighting a rearguard action to save the pomps and privileges of a rotting empire.

This article was cross-posted at FireDogLake

The McChrystal interview is now online

Rolling Stone serves the public here.

Alan Grayson’s latest bill

His bill is entitled The War is Making You Poor Act (H.R. 5353). Grayson introduced H.R. 5353 on May 20, 2010. It was referred to the Ways and Means Committee and to the Armed Services Committee the same day. The purpose of the bill:

To reduce the $159.3 billion from the discretionary overseas contingency operations funds in the President's fiscal year 2011 budget for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (without preventing use of mandatory funds from the Department of Defense budget to execute the War on Terror), and amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide individuals a 'War is Making You Poor' tax credit against the savings attributable to the overseas contingency operations reduction.

The intent of the bill is clear both from its title and its introduction: It links war-making and thus war-spending to the taxes Americans pay. By connecting the dots, so to speak, Grayson and his co-sponsors mean to make America's empire and the imperial sorties it inspires a tangible reality for the common man and woman, one that they can experience directly. Currently, only America's veterans, their relatives and friends along with the institutions charged with serving their needs are aware only part of the human cost caused by these wars, albeit only in part. This points to the bill's didactic purpose. Its intended institutional effects are also clear: It means to eliminate taxes for the lowest brackets by forcing the Pentagon and its contractors to pay for these wars out of the Pentagon's budget and the guaranteed profits most defense contractors enjoy. Together, one may hope, both will place strong constraints on the President, Congress and the security-surveillance apparatus when it comes time to looting the fisc to prepare for or to actually make a war.

Update

The following is a video of Grayson presenting his bill:

Last updated May 26, 2010 at 4:11PM

Guns? Yes! But not a cent for butter

The always interesting Chris Floyd wrote:

The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance — based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war — is one of the defining characteristics of our age.

Indeed it is. Immense is the price Americans and others pay to give substance to this illusion:

Yet the ending of the imperial wars and the dismantling of America's global military empire — and its global gulag — would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants — and inciting revenge and resistance.

Demilitarization would provide Americans with a peace dividend now that they need it most:

This would release a flood of money for any number of "new domestic initiatives," while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be bettered, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation's citizens.

Is this path a realistic one in which common Americans might place their hopes? In part, yes, Floyd argues:

This is no utopian vision. Many problems, much suffering would remain. But it would be a better society — more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more prosperous than it is now. Such an alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary humans; it would require no divine miracles, no god-like heroes to bring it about.

Whereas American demilitarization and empire disavowal may be intrinsically possible, it need not be feasible:

But such a society is precisely what our elites cannot — or, to be more accurate, will not — imagine. Because, yes, it would "erode" their "influence" around the world to some extent. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire — a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.

Nemesis follows hubris, though. Unfortunately, common Americans will suffer more from empire's dénouement than will those who now sit at its apex.

War criminals beware

The Guardian warns that:

Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister during the Gaza war, would probably face arrest on war crimes charges if he visited Britain, according to a UK lawyer who is working to expand the application of "universal jurisdiction" for offences involving serious human rights abuses committed anywhere in the world.

Neither Olmert nor Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister during the Cast Lead offensive, and a member of Israel's war cabinet, would enjoy immunity from prosecution for alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions, predicted Daniel Machover, who is involved in intensifying legal work after the controversial Goldstone report on the three-week conflict. Neither are ministers any longer.

Prosecutions of Israeli political and military figures remain likely despite the failure to obtain an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the defence minister, when he visited the UK earlier this month, he said. In the Barak case a magistrate accepted advice from the Foreign Office that the minister enjoyed state immunity and rejected an application made on behalf of several residents of the Gaza Strip.

"This needs to be tested at the right time and in the right place," Machover said. "One day one of these people will make a mistake and go to the wrong country and face a criminal process — and then it'll be a matter for the courts of that country to give them a fair trial: that's what the Palestinian victims want."

One can only hope that Olmert, George Bush, Dick Cheney and others of their ilk will one day face the finite justice to be found in this world.

Happy anniversary!

Wednesday, October 7 marks the eighth anniversary of America's Operation Enduring Freedom and Britain's Operation Herrick in Afghanistan.

Establishment essayist talks turkey about Obama’s war

Bob Herbert of the New York Times recently pointed out that:

A clash is coming [over the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy]. President Obama may be reconsidering his idea of substantially increasing the number of American troops, but no one at the higher echelons of government is suggesting that anything other than a long, hard, tragic and expensive campaign lies ahead — with no promise of ultimate victory, or even a serious definition of what would constitute victory.

According to Herbert, Americans will have another pointless war to endure, one which the elite who authorized and will prosecute the war cannot rationally justify. And, it will likely produce annoying blowback events just as it predecessors had.

Herbert continues:

The public has not been prepared for a renewed big-time, long-haul effort in Afghanistan. And if American casualties increase substantially, support for the war will diminish that much more. There is very little tolerance in the U.S. for the reality of war, which is why the images in the media are so sanitized. The public's concept of warfare, for the most part, is the product of Hollywood movies about the heroics of the so-called Greatest Generation, and video games.

This disconnect between what the public is expecting, or willing to accept, regarding the war in Afghanistan and what the White House and the Pentagon are in fact planning is vast. Americans want their politicians to concentrate on the economy here at home. After the long, sad experience in Iraq, and the worst economic shock since the Depression, they are not up for extended combat and endless nation-building in Afghanistan.

In other words, Herbert believes that American public in general wants its sitting government to produce outcomes which enhance its quality of life. How unrealistic they are! So many Americans despised the second Bush regime because of its inept war-mongering; they could not trust the McCain-Palin ticket to avoid additional disasters. The polls seemed to point to these conclusions. Why is it, then, that America's political elite cannot learn from its experiences? Why do Obama and the Pentagon believe they must compound the mistakes of their predecessors?

Why was the UN surprised?

IPS reports:

The United Nations is surprised at the continued rise in global military spending — particularly at a time when the international community is grappling with a spreading financial crisis which threatens to undermine the poverty reduction goals of the world body.

Well, unlike a nation's military apparatus, poor folk do not stage coup d'états when it perceives a political threat to its interests. Poor people are not always passive, though. They may engage in terroristic acts, mass demonstrations, food riots, etc. But their actions only draw a violent response from the overfunded local military or police.

One technique the powerful might use to reduce the poverty problem is to refuse to care about the well-being of the impoverished. This technique works only when the powerful have the means to adequately defend themselves.

Well, duh!

The New York Times reports:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

The report continues:

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world's rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

If one needed more evidence that the United States has given itself away to militarism…

The silver lining in this: If the surveillance and security believes the United States ought to address the global warming 'problem,' then Congress might actually take measures meant to address the issue.

“Someday this war’s going to end….”

An All-American war criminal died today

The man: Robert McNamara. The wars: The Second and Vietnam Wars. McNamara also augmented his resume by steering the World Bank — and thus much of the Third World — from 1968 to 1981. The result: Third World debt peonage. His punishment for all of this: He lived to be 93 in a world which knew him to be a killer.

Update (7.7.2009)
Alexander Cockburn ends his McNamara obituary with this comparison:

Like Speer, he [McNamara] got away with it, never having to hang his head or drop through a trap door with a rope around his neck, as he richly deserved.

John Chuckman, on the other hand, uses Eichmann's aura, as identified by Hannah Arendt, to damn McNamara:

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil.

He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

Update II (7.8.2009)
Robert Scheer points out that:

Much has been made of the fact that he [McNamara] recanted his support for the [Vietnam] war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.

Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America's leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.

Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."

Scheer's summary judgment: "What McNamara did was evil — deeply so."

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now discusses McNamara with Howard Zinn, Marilyn Young and Jonathan Schell.

Why read Glenn Greenwald?

Well, it is simple, really. Greenwald definitely possesses a boatload of good sense and is intellectually scrupulous, as this passage makes clear:

I'm going to leave the debate about whether Iran's election was "stolen" and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they're talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge). But there is one point I want to make about the vocal and dramatic expressions of solidarity with Iranians issuing from some quarters in the U.S.

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country — actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bombing Iran. The Wall St. Journal
published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol — with typical prescience — hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way — just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many — obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

And, to be sure, Greenwald pummels the right sort of folks by holding them accountable for what they say, write and do. He is indispensible.

The new pariah

Meet John Murtha (D-PA). He recently thought it wise to oppose President Bush's Iraq adventure. Now, though, his own party is clipping his wings and claws. There is a clearly visible object lesson in Murtha's tale for the rest of Congress.

More money and soldiers for Afghanistan

Make a mistake, then repeat

The Obama administration has indicated that it will augment America's Afghanistan and Pakistan commitments, according to The Washington Post.

Obama plans to announce a "simple, clear, concise goal — to disrupt, dismantle and eventually destroy al-Qaeda in Pakistan," said… [an administration] official, one of three authorized to anonymously discuss the strategy. The president will describe his plan in a White House speech to a group of selected military, diplomatic and development officials and nongovernmental aid groups.

Yet, as Patrick Cockburn points out:

The US troop surge in Afghanistan can probably prevent further erosion of the Afghan government's position if enough troops are deployed and money spent. But there are limits to what the US can do. The Taliban is never going to be defeated so long as it has its bases in the Pushtun belt inside north-western Pakistan. Nor is it likely that the Pakistani military will act against the Taliban so long as it sees them as one of its few allies against India. American drone attacks on Taliban and al-Qa'ida within Pakistan may kill some leaders but further anger ordinary Pakistanis. The ISI may not directly control the insurgency in Afghanistan but it can determine its intensity. This in turn gives Pakistan leverage over the US to prevent the Americans going too far in supporting India.

One of the main achievements of the surge in Iraq was that it gave the US public the impression that a victory had been won which in turn allowed the Americans to agree to withdraw their forces. President Bush was able to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government at the end of last year which included a timetable for a US pull-out which Washington had furiously rejected in the past.

The surge may play a similar role in Afghanistan. One of the main reasons for keeping American and British forces there is because it would be humiliating to withdraw. But the role of foreign military forces has always been ambivalent. They prop up the Karzai government but they also de-legitimise it as a puppet administration. Their use of firepower, originally designed for use against the Soviet army, against mud-brick compounds in Afghan villages means an inevitable flow of civilian casualties and builds support for the Taliban. And despite all these efforts Mr Obama says military victory is not feasible. The Americans are finding, as the British did in the 19^th century and the Russians in the 20^th, that the effort of keeping an army in Afghanistan is not really worth it.

Once again human beings will die so that Uncle Sam can save his face…

The comparative calm about that “other” catastrophe

March 19-20 is the anniversary day of Iraq invasion. It was six years back that the United States began its shock an awe campaign that has directly benefited only the most gruesome predators in the United States and Iraq.

Representative Kucinich calls for a Congressional investigation

The target of Kuchinich's proposed investigation according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (see also this): The Bush administration's "executive assassination group," the existence of which came to light during a recent talk by investigative Seymour Hersh.

Hersh made his allegations public during a question and answer session that followed a panel discussion which had America's Constitutional crisis as its topic.

Kucinich made his request for an investigation into Hersh's allegations in a letter he just sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

All American priorities…

We are what we do

According to a recent Bloomberg report, the future looks grim for many children now living in California:

California teachers organized protests in more than a dozen cities today as about 26,000 may lose their jobs because of spending cuts the Legislature approved last month to keep the state from running out of money.

School districts across the most-populous U.S. state have been warning thousands of teachers that they may be fired as a result of California's declining tax collections. The plan signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last month cut $8.4 billion from schools and community colleges out of $15 billion trimmed from state spending through June 2010.

It seems that the Obama stimulus lacks the funds needed to educate well the young. Yet America certainly has money to fund those things the Obama government considers important. For instance, the New York Times reports that:

The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

This is an odd response to the current situation. It is strange because one might expect that failures of this degree and number would motivate the Obama administration to abandon the militarism which generated the debacles. Why, one might ask, given the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, must the United States consider fighting two or more major wars at any given time? Why has the supposedly realistic Obama administration chosen to deepen its commitment to war-preparation and war-making? What enemies does America have that the country must always plan for war as well as to muster the will needed to make war anywhere in the world? As it turns out, every country and nearly everyone is a possible enemy:

"We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security," Mr. Donnelly [a policy 'expert' at the American Enterprise Institute] said. "The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa."

The United States of America — "…the ultimate guarantor of international security...." This pretentious assertion, one that emerges so easily from the mouths of many right-wing ideologues, concisely expresses the utter madness one can find these days in Washington, DC. The idea comes by its insanity with comparative ease since the United States currently guarantees no one's security, is effectively bankrupt and loses most of those wars it chooses to fight. America is, in fact, the major source of the insecurity which saturates the world today. The global presence of this threat, a threat which originates in Washington and serves the interests of the American elite, is just one legacy of the Bush regime's totalizing militarism, a governmental style the Obama administration has yet to repudiate.

In any case, it ought to be clear that, when it comes to spending to maintain America's empire, neither major party would fail to sacrifice military effectiveness in order to provide for the well-being of the children they allegedly represent.

The trillion dollars per year delusion

Washington's 'Project Bankruptcy'

My headlines seek to express Chalmers Johnson's recent judgment about the Pentagon. He wrote:

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

And:

It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain.

As the world has witnessed since the onset of the Wall Street-driven economic crisis, "what can't continue won't continue." Pax Americana will not prove to be an exception to this general rule. Americans can expect "our" Boys and Girls to return home — if they can afford the plane fare — in the near future.

Uncle Sam has money to burn….

The Arms Control Center produced this disturbing chart:

Chipping away at the Bush legacy

President Obama will close America's torture gulags, according to a New York Times report.