|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 11, 2009 15:09:18 GMT 12
Rebecca Solnit — Writing History in the Streetsposted November 24, 2009 | TomDispatch.comWe’ve just passed through a media celebration of the media’s own role in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, hilariously parodied on The Daily Show recently; and yet, to this day, few in our world grasp that, while walls were tumbling in the Soviet Empire two decades ago, they were also cracking in the American one. Our “wall” finally began to crumble in the seasonally appropriate fall of 2008, when our economic system went over a cliff. (You can watch a version of this, or at least a measure of the human pain it caused, via these mapped U.S. unemployment figures, month by month, from January 2004 to September 2009, knowing that the latest numbers are worse yet.)
There were, of course, no celebrations, no cheering crowds, no cries of freedom then, and 20 years from now reporters will probably not be proudly or nostalgically recounting just where they were and what they were doing in that grim season when our “wall” fell. Still, it is far clearer today that the Cold War, that decades-long nuclear stand-off between two mighty imperial powers and their minions, militaries, and assorted spooks, had no winner, only losers. The other loser of the Cold War, so much stronger than the Soviet Union, remains, as in Afghanistan, intensely reluctant to leave the superpower stage. Nonetheless, you only have to note the anxiety in this country over Obama’s “bow” in Japan or the anxious, critical reporting of his trip to China to see the intensity of the conflict here between denial of, and acknowledgement of, a new American reality in the world.
TomDispatch regular and author of the remarkable A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit is both an early warning system for, and a chronicler of, the sort of change that goes astonishingly unnoticed until it suddenly startles everyone. Looking forward to the 192-nation Copenhagen climate change conference, due to open on December 7th, where possibilities seem to be receding, even as global warming speeds up, and back at the unexpected upheavals of the last two decades, she offers a typically surprising view of our world and its possibilities. (Keep in mind, by the way, that while Congress may be dragging its feet on global warming action, the U.S. Navy is already deep into preparations for an “ice-free Arctic” and the conflicts that might arise as soon as ships can float on those increasingly ice-packless waters.) — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Learning How to Count to 350Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989By Rebecca SolnitNext month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit. There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first. Activists — farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers — around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.
A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. November 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they’d execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO’s road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.
Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable — and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.
The mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier: November 09, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation. The fall of the Wall is now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about. It was not so.
“I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible” said Günter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season. Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.
There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter. From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed. As it happened, those weren’t the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn’t the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism — and framed that way, our situation didn’t look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out.
Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn’t that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism’s triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come. Its implementation on January 01, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico’s jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised — and has now delivered — a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico’s majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.
The Sucking Sound and the Turning Tide
Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, “We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.” He was ridiculed for describing the “giant sucking sound” of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did — and then on to China in a financial “race to the bottom,” while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico’s small farmers.
Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It’s a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year’s presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times. After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.
Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment — which went from 80% of its loans to about 1% — that it’s been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison. By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane.
That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as “a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix.” He charged, “What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they accuse it of already being — a global government. They want it to set more rules — their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else.”
Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn’t want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO’s “overall goal is to eliminate ‘trade barriers,’ frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures.”
That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed “Democracy,” pointed one way; the second, labeled “WTO,” pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it’s important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren’t just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil. While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategizing, outreach, and all the usual labors.
Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era
In the twenty-first century, free-trade agreements came down with their own version of swine flu, a disease likely generated on a gigantic Smithfield Farms hog-raising operation in Veracruz, Mexico, and nicknamed the NAFTA flu. NAFTA itself has been widely reviled. Presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned in Mexico’s 2006 election on promises to renegotiate it; Hillary disowned it. The plan for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was met with massive opposition in Miami in 2003. It crashed and burned in Argentina in 2005 and has since been abandoned.
Latin America went its own way while the Bush Administration locked its attention on the Middle East. Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia had a particularly rousing set of victories, while the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, astonishingly, defeated U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation's privatization of their water, and Ecuadorans are suing Chevron for environmental devastation in what could be the biggest corporate settlement in history — $27 billion.
Meanwhile, the WTO lurched from one meeting to another, safe in the Doha round from pesky protesters, if not from the dissent of developing nations. It was again besieged by activists in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico — in scale and impact another Seattle — and then further battered in 2005 in Hong Kong. The next ministerial conference of the WTO actually convenes in Geneva on November 30th, a decade to the day since the Seattle shutdown, still attempting to resolve issues that arose in Doha. Of course, in the meantime, sneakier bilateral trade agreements have taken the place of big multilateral ones, but this has hardly been the triumphant era predicted a decade earlier. Even Iraq hardly proved the hog trough the big oil and contracting corporations had anticipated.
In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone’s life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase “socialism for the rich” truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism’s triumph in 1999 were proclaiming “the end of American capitalism as we knew it” and the “collapse of finance.”
It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk. Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine’s cover story was: “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious. The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.
Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times more than a year ago:
"In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington... and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead..."
Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalization had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times put it this August:
“Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.”
The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not The Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest.
Futures that Work
There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what’s the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn’t, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like: small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a leveling that might also eliminate dire poverty.
Some of our hope for the future has to be that, one day, the ecological and the economic can be aligned so that, among other things, petroleum and coal become increasingly expensive, as well as increasingly offensive, ways to run our machines. Will we be creative enough to embrace change before crashing systems and wild weather force change on us in the form of an unbearable crisis? Decisions about the nature of that change to come must be made by the citizenry, which seems to be fairly willing to face change when it gets its facts straight, rather than by wealthier nation-states and their leaders who seem, at this juncture, more interested in protecting business than life on Earth.
To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn’t mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what’s actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren’t going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what’s poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.
Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine — from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle. The “revolution” that got us into this era of climate change, however, can’t be dated that way. It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanization made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can’t, and shouldn’t, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification.
We need a postindustrial revolution of appropriate technologies, both in the developed world and in the developing one, so that, for example, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves will be replaced not by conventional appliances but by elegant solar technologies.
There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion’s share of resources and emitting the lion’s share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, “We are winning,” had a point.
The “we” that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn’t the United States itself. As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, “The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is — as it has been for the last two decades — the United States.” The citizens of the U.S. need to revolt, again, against their nation’s failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it. That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.
Everything is going to change either as runaway climate change takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe. We’re already at 390 parts per million. Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.
Remembering how dramatically — and unexpectedly — things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.• Rebecca Solnit is the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and co-author with her brother David of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, a short anthology looking at how that watershed event has been misrepresented and reproducing some of the original documents. She's signed beyondtalk.net’s pledge to take action on climate change and she'll be out in the streets again this November 30th.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175168/tomgram%3A__rebecca_solnit%2C_writing_history_in_the_streets
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 11, 2009 16:38:04 GMT 12
Andy Kroll — The Illusion of Recoveryposted November 30, 2009 | TomDispatch.comTalk about a devastated landscape... Any which way you look, the housing numbers are relentlessly bad. For example, 23% of U.S. homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, according to Ruth Simon and James R. Hagerty of the Wall Street Journal. They possess, in the vivid lingo of the housing industry, “underwater mortgages.” Among them, 5.3 million households have mortgages that are at least 20% higher than their home’s value, 520,000 of whom have already received default notices. In the meantime, home-loan delinquencies and home repossessions are now at record highs. According to E. Scott Reckard of the Los Angeles Times, by the end of September, “one in seven U.S. home loans was past due or in foreclosure,” and the chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association expects the number of foreclosures to keep rising deep into 2010.
Worse yet, foreclosures on large rental-unit buildings are also on the rise. This means, reports Robin Shulman of the Washington Post, that not just homeowners but renters are now being swept up in the housing crisis as landlords of apartment buildings in trouble let upkeep go while maintenance problems soar. Nor are the latest figures on home prices offering much cheer. Two key price indexes released last week, write David Streitfeld and Javier Hernandez of the New York Times, “indicated that the momentum the housing market showed over the late spring and summer is faltering.”
There was, however, a rare ray of good news amid this dismal scene: Wall Street has, according to Louise Story of the Times, figured out how to make money from the mortgage mess by “buying billions of dollars’ worth of home loans, discounted from the loans’ original value” and pocketing profits while shifting “nearly all the risk for the loans to the federal government — and ultimately taxpayers.”
With this grim picture in mind and with California one of four Sunbelt states that account for 43% of all foreclosures started in recent months, we sent TomDispatch regular Andy Kroll to the Ground Zero of the mortgage crisis to see what an economic “recovery” looks like firsthand in post-meltdown America. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Housing Meltdown, Ground ZeroThe American Home-Owning Dream on Life SupportBy Andy KrollI. Rescuing the Dream
At the end of a week in mid-October when the Dow Jones soared past 10,000, Goldman Sachs recorded “just another fantastic quarter” with a $3.2 billion quarterly profit, JPMorgan Chase raked in a cool $3.6 billion, and a New York Times headline declared “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses”, I spent a Saturday evening with about 100 people camped out in a northern California parking lot. A passerby, stealing a quick glance, might have taken the crowd for avid concertgoers staked out for tickets. There was, however, no concert here — just weary, huddled souls, slouched in vinyl folding chairs, covered by blankets, windbreakers, and knit hats against a late autumn chill.
A ragged line of them wound through the lot outside the entrance to the Cow Palace, a dingy arena decades past its prime on the southern edge of San Francisco. These people, and thousands more like them who had streamed into the arena all day long from as far away as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, were unemployed, broke, bankrupt, or at their wit’s end. They were here waiting for help — for their chance to make it inside the warm arena to participate in “America’s Best Mortgage Program.”
For these homeowners, the last shot at saving their homes — and their personal version of the American Dream — lay under the glow of the floodlights in a expanse where tiers of brown and yellow seats encircled a desk-lined floor more accustomed to livestock shows and rodeos. This was, in fact, the latest stop on the “Save the Dream” tour, a massive homeowner-relief event organized by a consumer advocate group, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA).
The turnout was staggering: close to 45,000 desperate homeowners showed up during NACA's five-day stand at the Cow Palace for the chance to renegotiate their disastrous subprime mortgages or sky-high interest rates or interest-only payments. For them, this event beat any chance at a star-studded concert — and best of all, it was free.
Inside, homeowners received housing-related financial advice and met with NACA’s counselors, a stoic crew, always with coffee or energy drinks in hand and clad in red and yellow T-shirts with STOP LOAN SHARKS and SHARKS BEWARE emblazoned on their backs. Here, homeowners could have their income, taxes, and spending habits analyzed, and possibly walk away with a monthly mortgage payment that actually fit their situations. With that payment figure in hand, homeowners could then meet with representatives from their mortgage companies in the same arena and try to hammer out new terms on more affordable mortgages.
The process would save many of them thousands of dollars, defuse an explosive mortgage, even avert foreclosure. To boost morale, NACA officials occasionally ushered chosen homeowners to a makeshift lectern where each offered a glowing testimonial over a PA system to the work taking place. They spoke fervently of new fixed-interest loans and fought back tears, while thanking their counselors, friends, NACA, and — regularly — God.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” said Venus Roberts, a homeowner from Los Angeles who came away from the event with lower mortgage payments. I caught up with her in the arena’s parking lot as she was heading for the Amtrak station and a train home. A small, floral-printed suitcase in tow, Roberts had arrived early Friday morning, waited all day long, and finally spent the night in a nearby hotel. Back in line Saturday morning, she finally saw a counselor. The wait, she assured me, couldn’t have been more worth it. In the sort of reverential tone normally reserved for the miraculous, she avowed, “NACA is spreading the news that help is here.”
Not everyone was so inspired. Near the tables behind which bank representatives were arrayed I spoke with Maria Hernandez of San Jose, who was fuming about her meeting with representatives from the bank Wachovia. Hernandez, haggard and emotional, struggled for words. “It was a… what’s the word? A mockery. Yes, a complete mockery.” Wachovia, she insisted, had failed customers like her, letting desperate people wait in line for days only to send them home essentially empty-handed. (No representatives of mortgage companies were made available for comment at the event.)
So impassioned was Hernandez that a small crowd of the frustrated and curious soon gathered around her. Even Bruce Marks, NACA’s pugnacious CEO, stopped to hear Hernandez.“All this information is related to us, then we get to Wachovia, and for what?” she asked indignantly. “To just come back another day? Or have your kids in the van spend another night here?”
Most of the people I met at “Save the Dream,” though, weren’t either as elated as Roberts or as disgruntled as Hernandez; they were still in limbo, waiting in line, their futures hanging in the balance. That line began in the parking lot and, once inside, filled huge sections of the arena’s seats where thousands of bleary-eyed homeowners, some there for up to 36 hours, waited to see a counselor or to meet with Spanish-speaking advisers. Those earlier in the process sat in yet another section of the cavernous arena before an initial orientation workshop, a sort of Home Economics 101 held in an adjoining annex.
Some of the homeowners I interviewed that Saturday had already been in line for 10 or 12 hours on the previous day, and had returned before sunrise once again to take up their posts. Some had slept under blankets in their seats; others clutched rolled-up sleeping bags clearly meant for an expected camp-out that night.
As I waded through the main seating area around midday, Ed Kidwell, a burly, boisterous truck driver from Fontana, California, sporting a University of Southern California hat, stopped me. Noting my camera and pad, he wrapped a big arm around my shoulder as if we were lifelong friends reuniting. “I’m just waiting for some good news to take home to take the stress off my wife and kids,” he explained. Though dog-tired — he’d arrived in the wee morning hours — Kidwell assured me he’d do just about anything to get his mortgage fixed. As proof he offered to sing me a mortgage-themed song in the style of soul singer Sam Cooke. With a few thousand pairs of eyes trained on us, Kidwell promptly cleared his throat and belted out lyrics that featured some mix-and-match combination of the words “relief,” “modification,” “IndyMac,” and “baby.”
A man crooning about mortgage relief, retired couples camping in a parking lot for counseling appointments, 4,000 exhausted “fans” cheering announcements of 2% fixed interest rate loans as if they were so many slam dunks — after a day at “Save the Dream,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that, when it came to working class and middle class Americans, the housing market and the American economy in general hadn’t exactly improved since its implosion in the fall of 2008. Surveying the organized chaos in the Cow Palace, you might also be forgiven for thinking that all the talk of “recovery” was little more than that — unless you happened to work for Goldman Sachs. Indeed, the beleaguered faces of the desperate homeowners at “Save the Dream” brought to my mind a famous Dorothea Lange photo of a Depression-era bread line in San Francisco’s Mission District, an image captured 75 years earlier just miles from where I stood.
If you happened to be at the Cow Palace that Saturday, the daily news about the very financial players who had fueled the subprime debacle and the global economic collapse returning to their risky, overleveraged ways could seem little short of surreal. Here, after all, was a reasonable selection of what the media likes to call “Main Street” mired in debt, clinging to homes at the edge of foreclosure, struggling through a jobless “recovery.”
A “recovery,” that is, in which the true underemployment rate is 17.5%, average employee wages continue to drop, and the housing market is in shambles. The 937,840 foreclosure filings from July to September of 2009 set yet another industry record. So many people are returning to school that some community colleges have extended classes until 2 A.M. and are turning away hordes of new students. No one — not a single person — I interviewed at “Save the Dream” agreed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner or Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke that their country was on the economic rebound.
Mary McCleese, an Oakland resident, who was, at least for the moment, keeping her home thanks to NACA’s help, was typical. “If you look around, you see how many people is out of work, number one, and you see how many people is in foreclosure or lost their homes or in default because they've lost their jobs,” she said. “That tells you right there what the economy is doing.”
II. Housing Meltdown, Ground Zero
About a week before the “Save the Dream” event, I rented a car and headed east from San Francisco toward Ground Zero of the subprime mortgage meltdown. Visiting one of the hardest hit cities in the country would, I reasoned, offer another measure of whether the “green shoots” of “recovery” were truly pushing up through the overleveraged earth — better surely, when it came to ordinary Americans, than the rising price of AIG’s stock or the Dow’s ascent. While many cities can contest for the title of “most devastated by the meltdown,” including metropolitan hubs like Las Vegas and Fort Lauderdale or suburban areas like Bakersfield, California, or Mesa, Arizona, it turns out I didn’t have far to drive.
After all, Stockton, California, an arid, unremarkable city in the San Joaquin Valley, was only 80 miles away. A place for which “decimated” isn’t hyperbole but a mathematical statement of fact, Stockton, with its population of around 300,000, recorded nearly one foreclosure for every 10 houses in 2008. As other towns like to call themselves “the artichoke heart of America” or “America’s Bread Basket,” Stockton could call itself the heart of America’s subprime meltdown.
It’s an hour-and-a-half drive from San Francisco to Stockton, up through the Altamont Pass with its rows of wind turbines, then down into the Central Valley’s wide expanse and, via I-5, into the open streets of Stockton, a city that has often seemed to embody the vicissitudes of the housing crisis. In February 2008, for instance, national media outlets latched onto the story of a local man who, struck by the entrepreneurial spirit, started a business called Greener Grass Co. His service: Spray-painting the dead, burnt-out yards of foreclosed houses a hue of green so realistic that the local newspaper described the painted lawns as “good enough for a golf course or a professional football stadium.”
When I pulled into Stockton last month, more than a year had passed since CNBC had pegged it the “Foreclosure Capital of the World” — and painting lawns green was still de rigueur. Local government workers had now taken up the job. Dead lawns, the thinking went, signaled empty houses and so attracted trouble. Painting lawns, the city hoped, might dissuade people from breaking into deserted homes.
Around mid-morning, I pulled into the Little John Creek neighborhood near the airport on the city’s southern outskirts, and one of the first things I saw was an abandoned house displaying their handiwork. The green was, in fact, a sickly teal hue and had been laid down in bizarre stripes on a dead lawn on Togninali Lane. It was, to say the least, a far cry from fairways, football stadiums, or even the perfectly real turf on neighboring lots where grass grew and people lived.
Here, the houses without occupants stood out like so many missing teeth in a wide smile. On just about every street, foreclosures dotted the landscape: stucco homes with sheriff’s notices taped to front doors, FOR SALE signs askew in front yards, lawns burnt into suburban hay by the summer sun that had yet to receive their eerie coats of green. I parked near foreclosed house after house and walked up front paths and driveways to peer through windows and over backyard fences. Most of the homes were starkly empty, often gutted — “trashed out” in industry parlance — with not a trace of their former owners.
In a few, though, there were hints of lives lived and lost. A deflated basketball, a toy truck, and a skateboard sat in the backyard of a tan house with a two-car garage in Little John Creek, the back porch light still unnervingly aglow in broad daylight. At a nearby house, the front flower bed was filled with foreclosure-crisis detritus, including the business cards of realtors and mortgage specialists.
The half-dozen neighborhoods I drove or walked through in various parts of Stockton proved but repeats of Little John Creek, still littered with empty homes — “decimated” — more than a year after the financial meltdown occurred. Though Stockton’s foreclosure rate has dropped from 9.5% of the city’s houses in 2008 to 3.5% in the third quarter of 2009, that’s nothing to brag about. It remains the fourth-highest rate in U.S. metropolitan areas.
Before arriving, I had envisioned the foreclosure crisis as a somewhat localized event with the majority of such homes in a limited number of lifeless neighborhoods. In Stockton, at least, the opposite was true: foreclosed homes were salt-and-peppered around the city. They often sat singly or in twos and threes among occupied homes in still lived-in neighborhoods, in cul-de-sacs where kids played basketball, on blocks where neighbors waxed their cars on a Sunday afternoon, or down streets where friends were barbecuing in open two-car garages.
The thought of an emptied-out neighborhood may pack a more visceral punch for a story, but from an economic or social standpoint, a mix of foreclosed and occupied properties is far more damaging to those still in their homes. A report from the Center for Responsible Lending estimates that foreclosures will cost neighbors $500 billion in home value in 2009, or an average of $7,200 for 69.5 million homes. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago also found that when foreclosures increase, so, too, does violent crime in neighborhoods.
For those who have clung to their homes in hard-hit areas, the value of those investments has plummeted, while the ability to sell and so move elsewhere — to take a new job or live in a cheaper market — is now greatly hindered. In other words, a crisis like this one in a city like Stockton is not easily escaped.
III. A Bubble Grafted onto Rubble
The billboards and roadside ads lining Stockton’s streets like campaign signs repeatedly proclaim: “Mortgage Modification Works!” and “Call for Loan Modifications!” I counted five of them on one block alone, and together they created the impression that help had arrived. Yet I knew they were scams, with anonymous local phone numbers and little other identification, meant to relieve desperate homeowners in a city not lacking in desperation of whatever money they had left. The subprime meltdown, as it turns out, has been a boon for crooks preying on the vulnerable. (Not long ago, the FBI announced a nine-month mortgage fraud investigation in Florida involving 500 defendants and $400 million in loans.)
Outnumbering the scams three to one along Stockton’s main thoroughfares were glossier professional ads. At almost every intersection they urged locals to take advantage of the federal government’s recently extended $8,000 homebuyer tax credit. Never mind that this tax credit has been criticized by economists and experts alike who say it could create a new housing bubble amid the devastation. Even while the rubble of the subprime meltdown is still smoking, developers here in California’s Central Valley are already dreaming again about speculation on new homes.
At one point, I followed a succession of these tax-credit come-ons out to a subdivision called Cobblestone Bay. There, at the city’s edge, new homes with white picket fences are popping up at the edge of the undeveloped valley beyond. It was hard, having spent much of the day in foreclosure-riddled neighborhoods, to walk around this new development without a sense of déjà vu. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Cobblestone Bay was already being prepared for future foreclosure. All it lacked — for the time being — was the fake green lawns.
In fact, all the ad trails touting the $8,000 tax credit I followed led to subdivisions like this one, cookie-cutter communities lacking distinguishing characteristics that might remind you of California (rather than, say, Arizona or Florida). These were, of course, the very kinds of neighborhoods that were thrown up wherever land was cheap in the California boom construction years of 2005 and 2006, and the kinds of neighborhoods now in subprime ruin.
As my visit was ending and the sun disappearing behind the valley’s edge, I made one last stop on the outskirts of town at the ornate entrance to a subdivision called Golden Eagle. It included, as its centerpiece, an impressive five-tiered water fountain, while large wrought iron gates depicting eagles-in-flight separated Golden Eagle from the surrounding neighborhood. Except there was no Golden Eagle — just a single unfinished house on the weedy, 15-acre property. Construction equipment sat motionless on the dusty earth. A placard outside the gated entrance trumpeted grand expectations, but the new neighborhood looked stillborn.
I took down a phone number from the entrance placard and, later that week, called Golden Eagle’s developer, a man named Tom Ruemmler. He told me that he had been on the project for more than three years, and envisioned it as a luxury, energy-efficient community for the green future. Ruemmler was no rube when it came to mortgages and the housing market: in the mid-1990s, he won a multi-million dollar mortgage-fraud whistleblower suit involving a Sacramento bank whose Stockton loan office he once managed.
Who, I asked him, would buy a custom, high-end, zero-energy, hypoallergenic home in a city leveled by foreclosures where housing prices have plummeted and nearly one in six people are unemployed? “I’m dealing with a different clientele,” he responded, bridling at the question. “I’m dealing with probably one-fiftieth of one percent of the buying public.” Did he honestly think he could sell 30 of these lots to such a small percentage of people in a place like Stockton? "Now is the time to build a custom home," he insisted. “Somebody out there is going to have money that has somebody in the family that has allergies.” And out in the San Joaquin Valley, with a foreclosure on almost every block, he intended to find them.• Andy Kroll works for Mother Jones magazine and is a frequent contributor to TomDispatch. He lives in San Francisco.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175170/tomgram%3A_andy_kroll%2C_the_illusion_of_recovery
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 11, 2009 18:52:53 GMT 12
Meet the Commanded-in-Chiefposted December 03, 2009 | TomDispatch.comVictory at Last!Monty Python in AfghanistanBy Tom EngelhardtLet others deal with the details of President Obama’s Afghan speech, with the on-ramps and off-ramps, those 30,000 U.S. troops going in and just where they will be deployed, the benchmarks for what’s called “good governance” in Afghanistan, the corruption of the Karzai regime, the viability of counterinsurgency warfare, the reliability of NATO allies, and so on. Let’s just skip to the most essential point which, in a nutshell, is this: Victory at Last!
It’s been a long time coming, but finally American war commanders have effectively marshaled their forces, netcentrically outmaneuvering and outflanking the enemy. They have shocked-and-awed their opponents, won the necessary hearts-and-minds, and so, for the first time in at least two decades, stand at the heights of success, triumphant at last.
And no, I’m not talking about post-surge Iraq and certainly not about devolving Afghanistan. I’m talking about what’s happening in Washington.
A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority
You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered. It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief.
And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began in late September with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s grim review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war. It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president didn’t deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former neocon or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the U.S. military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into a conflict he had termed both “the right war” and a “necessary” one. After more than two months of painfully over-reported deliberations, President Obama has now ended up essentially where General McChrystal began.
Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted off from the moldy Vietnam archives and made spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006, applied in Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It has now been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the war — a new kind of military-led nation building (or, as they like to say, “good governance”) is to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being billed as a “population-centric,” not “enemy-centric” approach in which U.S. troops are distinctly to be "nation-builders as well as warriors."
And as for those 30,000 troops, most expected to arrive in the Afghan combat zone within the next six months, the numbers are even more impressive when you realize that, as late as the summer of 2008, the U.S. only had about 28,000 troops in Afghanistan. In other words, in less than two years, U.S. troop strength in that country will have more than tripled to approximately 100,000 troops. So we’re talking near-Vietnam-level escalation rates. If you include the 38,000 NATO forces also there (and a possible 5,000 more to come), total allied troop strength will be significantly above what the Soviets deployed during their devastating Afghan War of the 1980s in which they fought some of the same insurgents now arrayed against us.
Think of this as Barack Obama’s anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of American forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or Centcom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman’s plans to “limit” the war after the Chinese intervened.
Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a “generals’ revolt” — amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who might well have presidential ambitions, and who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed “dithering” and supporters called “thorough deliberations,” Obama dealt with the problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit for doing so, of course.) This is called “politics” in our country and, for a Democratic president in our era, Tuesday night’s end result was remarkably predictable.
When Obama bowed to the Japanese emperor on his recent Asian tour, there was a media uproar in this country. Even though the speech Tuesday night should be thought of as bowing to the American military, there is likely to be little complaint on that score. Similarly, despite the significance of symbolism in Washington, there has been surprisingly little discussion about the president’s decision to address the American people not from the Oval Office, but from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
It was there that, in 2002, George W. Bush gave a speech before the assembled cadets in which he laid out his aggressive strategy of preventive war, which would become the cornerstone of “the Bush Doctrine”. (“If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long — Our security will require transforming the military you will lead — a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.”) But keep in mind that this was still a graduation speech and presidents have traditionally addressed one of the military academies at graduation time.
Obama is not a man who appears in prop military jackets with “commander-in-chief” hand-stitched across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers, as our last president loved to do, and yet in his first months in office he has increasingly appeared at military events and associated himself with things military. This speech represents another step in that direction. Has a president ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech at West Point, no less a major address to the American people? Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.
For his American audience, and undoubtedly his skittish NATO allies as well, the president did put a significant emphasis on an exit strategy from the war. That off-ramp strategy was, however, placed in the context of the training of the woeful Afghan security forces to take control of the struggle themselves and the woeful government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to turn over a new nation-building leaf. Like the choice of West Point, this, too, seemed to resonate with eerie echoes of the years in which George W. Bush regularly intoned the mantra: “As Iraqis stand-up, we will stand down.”
In his address, Obama offered July 2011 as the date to begin a withdrawing the first U.S. troops from Afghanistan. (“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”) However, according to the Washington-insider Nelson Report, a White House “on background” press briefing Tuesday afternoon made it far clearer that the president was talking about a “conditions based withdrawal.” It would, in other words, depend “on objective conditions on the ground,” on whether the Afghans had met the necessary “benchmarks.” When asked about the “scaling back” of the American war effort, General McChrystal recently suggested a more conservative timeline — “sometime before 2013” — seconded hazily by Said Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to Washington. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates refers to this as a "thinning out" of U.S. forces.
In fact, there’s no reason to put faith in any of these hazy deadlines. After all, this is the administration that came into office announcing a firm one-year closing date for the U.S. prison in Guantanamo (now officially missed), a firm sunshine policy for an end-of-2009 release of millions of pages of historical documents from the archives of the CIA and other intelligence and military services (now officially delayed, possibly for years), and of course a firm date for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops, followed by all U.S. forces from Iraq (now possibly slipping).
Finish the job in Afghanistan? Based on the plans of the field commanders to whom the president has bowed, on the administration’s record of escalation in the war so far, and on the quiet reassurances to the Pakistanis that we aren’t leaving Afghanistan in any imaginable future, this war looks to be all job and no finish. Whatever the flourishes, that was the essence of Tuesday night’s surrender speech.
Monty Python in Afghanistan
Honestly, if it weren’t so grim, despite all the upbeat benchmarks and encouraging words in the president’s speech, this would certainly qualify as Monty Python in Afghanistan. After all, three cabinet ministers and 12 former ministers are under investigation in Afghanistan itself on corruption charges. And that barely scratches the surface of the problems in a country that one Russian expert recently referred to as an “international drug firm,” where at least one-third of the gross national product comes from the drug trade. In addition, as Juan Cole wrote at his Informed Comment blog:
“Months after the controversial presidential election that many Afghans consider stolen, there is no cabinet, and parliament is threatening to go on recess before confirming a new one because the president is unconstitutionally late in presenting the names. There are grave suspicions that some past and present cabinet members have engaged in the embezzlement of substantial sums of money. There is little parliamentary oversight. Almost no one bothers to attend the parliamentary sessions. The cabinet ministries are unable to spend the money allocated to them on things like education and rural development, and actually spent less in absolute terms last year than they did in the previous two years.”
In addition, the Taliban now reportedly take a cut of the billions of dollars in U.S. development aid flowing into the country, much of which is otherwise squandered, and of the American money that goes into “protecting” the convoys that bring supplies to U.S. troops throughout the country. One out of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted the Afghan National Army in the last year, while the ill-paid, largely illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their “well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes,” not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15%, are, as its politely put, “years away from functioning independently”; and the insurgency is spreading to new areas of the country and reviving in others.
Good governance? Good grief!
Not that Washington, which obviously feels that it has much to impart to the Afghan people about good governance and how to deal with corruption, has particularly firm ground to stand on. After all, the United States has just completed its first billion-dollar presidential election in a $5 billion election season, and two administrations just propped up some of the worst financial scofflaws in the history of the world and got nothing back in return.
Meanwhile, the money flowing into Washington political coffers from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care industries, real estate, legal firms, and the like might be thought of as a kind of drug in itself. At the same time, according to USA Today, at least 158 retired generals and admirals, many already pulling in military pensions in the range of $100,000-$200,000, have been hired as “senior mentors” by the Pentagon “to offer advice under an unusual arrangement”: they also work for companies seeking Defense Department contracts.
In Congress, a Senate maneuver which only a few years ago was so rare that the response to it was nicknamed “the nuclear option” — needing a 60-vote majority to pass anything of significance — has, almost without comment, become a commonplace for the passage of just about anything. This means Congress is eternally in a state of gridlock. And that’s just for starters when it comes to ways in which the U.S. government, so ready to surge its military and its civilian employees into Afghanistan in the name of good governance, is in need of repair, if not nation-building itself.
Airless in Washington
It’s nonetheless the wisdom of this Washington and of this military that Obama has not found wanting, at least when it comes to Afghanistan.
So here’s a question: Why did he listen to them? And under such circumstances, why should we take the results seriously?
Stop for a moment and consider the cast of characters who offered the president the full range of advice available in Washington — all of which, as far as we can tell, from Joe Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy to McChrystal’s COIN and beyond, was escalatory in nature. These are, of course, the wise men (and woman) of our era. But just a cursory glance at their collective record should at least make you wonder:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now said to be the official with the best ties to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and so the one in charge of “coaxing” him into a round of reasonable nation-building, of making “a new compact" with the Afghan people by “improving governance and cracking down on corruption”; and yet, in the early 1990s, in her single significant nation-building experience at home, she botched the possibility of getting a universal health-care bill through Congress. She also had the “wisdom” to vote in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reputedly deeply trusted by the president and in charge of planning out our military future in Afghanistan, was in the 1980s a supposed expert on the Soviet Union as well as deputy CIA director and later deputy to National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Yet, in those years, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the Soviets were done for even as that empire was disappearing from the face of the Earth. In the words of former National Security Council official Roger Morris, Gates “waged a final battle against the Soviets, denying at every turn that the old enemy was actually dying.” As former CIA official Melvin Goodman has put the matter: “Gates was wrong about every key intelligence question of the 1980s... A Kremlinologist by training, Gates was one of the last American hardliners to comprehend the changes taking place in the Soviet Union. He was wrong about Mikhail Gorbachev, wrong about the importance of reform, wrong about Moscow's pursuit of arms control and détente with the United States. He was wrong about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan...”
Vice-President Joe Biden, recently described as potentially “the second-most-powerful vice president in history” as well as “the president’s all-purpose adviser and sage” on foreign policy, was during the Bush years a believer in nation-building in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and later promoted the idea — like Caesar re: Gaul — of dividing that country into three parts (without, of course, bothering to ask the Iraqis), while leaving 25,000-30,000 American troops based there in perpetuity, while “these regions build up their state police forces.”
General Stanley McChrystal, our war commander in Afghanistan and now the poster boy for counterinsurgency warfare, had his skills honed purely in the field of counterterrorism. He was a Special Ops guy. The man who is now to “protect” the Afghan people previously won his spurs as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan. He ran the “manhunters” — essentially, that is, he was the leader of a team of assassins and evidently part of what reporter Seymour Hersh has termed an "executive assassination wing" of that command, possibly taking orders directly from Vice President Dick Cheney. His skills involved guns to the head, not protective boots on the ground.
General David Petraeus, the general leading everything, who has been practically deified in the U.S. media, is perhaps the savviest and most accomplished of this crew. He surged into Iraq in 2007 and, with the help of fortuitous indigenous developments, staunched the worst of the bleeding, leaving behind a big question mark. His greatest skill, however, has been in fostering the career of David Petraeus. He is undoubtedly an advisor with an agenda and in his wake come a whole crew of military and think-tank experts, with almost unblemished records of being wrong in the Bush years, whom the surge in Iraq recredentialized.
Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador to Kabul, in his previous career in the U.S. military served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and as the commander of Combined Forces Command Afghanistan was the general responsible for building up the Afghan army and “reforming” that country’s police force. On both counts, we know how effective that attempt proved.
And when it comes to key figures with well-padded Washington CVs like Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or James Jones, present national security advisor and former commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, a close friend of Senator John McCain, and a former revolving-door board member of Chevron and Boeing, remind me just what sticks in your mind about their accomplishments?
So, when you think about Barack Obama’s Afghan decisions, imagine first that the man considered the smartest, most thoughtful president of our era chose to surround himself with these people. He chose, that is, not fresh air, or fresh thought in the field of foreign and war policy, but the airless precincts where the combined wisdom of Washington and the Pentagon now exists, and the remarkable lack of accomplishment that goes with it. In short, these are people whose credentials largely consist of not having been right about much over the years.
Admittedly, this administration has called in practically every Afghan expert in sight. Everyone involved could now undoubtedly expound on relatively abstruse questions of Afghan tribal politics, locate Paktia Province on a map in a flash, and tell you just which of Hamid Karzai’s ministers are under investigation for corruption.
Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s here in the United States, in Washington, where knowledge is slim, egos large, and national security wisdom is deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.” He then chose as advisors — in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and over-identification with the powerful could easily be compiled — a crew who had never seen a significant change, or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with — and still can’t.
As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantanamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush’s wars will, despite promises otherwise, soon enough be made.
A stale crew breathing stale air has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of Bush’s disastrous wars, is now truly Obama’s War; and the news came directly from West Point where the president surrendered to his militarized fate.[Note on Further Reading: In preparing posts like this one, I rely on various newspapers, magazines, and websites (not all of which I see eye-to-eye with) for help, analysis, and information. I wanted to mention just three here without which most of my dispatches would be far harder to write. I’ve mentioned them many times before, but credit, when due, is worth repeating endlessly: I find Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog always lucid, intelligent, and deeply informed. It’s simply a daily must-stop for those keeping up on events in “the greater Middle East”; so is Antiwar.com, which collects more war-related information of value than any site I know, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, which has an eye for the telling piece and the sharp comment.]• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175172/tomgram%3A__meet_the_commanded-in-chief
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 11, 2009 20:32:55 GMT 12
Bill McKibben — Why Copenhagen May Be a Disasterposted December 06, 2009 | TomDispatch.comLet me be blunt about what amazes me when it comes to global warming. In the U.S., it’s largely an issue for Democrats, “progressives,” liberals, the left, and I simply don’t get that. Never have. If the word “conservative” means anything, the key to it must be that word at its heart, “conserve”; that is, the keeping or not squandering of what already is, especially what’s most valuable.
And for us humans, what’s better than our planet? It’s the only home we’ve got and — though I was one of those 1950s boys who read H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, as well as plenty of pulp sci-fi, and spent too much time dreaming about other planets and the stars — probably the only one we’ll ever have. For us, there is nowhere else. Wreck it and you wreck us.
Don’t think for a minute that global warming will destroy planet Earth. It’s already made it through worse moments than ours, and worse climate conditions than industrial civilization has to offer. Planet Earth has no sense of time. Give it 10 million, 20 million, 100 million years, and it will reconstitute itself in some fashion and spin on, life included, until our sun gives out. But the way things are going, we may not do so well.
The Soviet Union, that “evil empire,” fell after only 70 years, to everyone’s amazement. Barely the span of human life. If we — or at least our various civilizations — were to disappear in the coming century or so, after only a few thousand years on this planet, it would be no less short, no less amazing, no less unexpected. But it’s possible. That anyone doubts the existence of global warming as a threat to our existence seems no less amazing to me. That, at this crucial moment, on the eve of a gathering of the world’s nations in Copenhagen to try to pound out some kind of agreement for the abatement of greenhouse gases, opinion polls show Americans actually losing interest in global warming, or even in the belief that it’s happening at all, is depressing indeed. (Only 35% of Americans, according to a recent Pew poll, for example, think global warming is a “very serious problem,” a drop of nine points in six months.) To find “conservatives” obsessed over the fact that climate-change scientists turn out to be frustrated, careerist, even mean-spirited, and willing to simplify or fiddle with their complex figures to deal with opponents they consider dangerous idiots (“Climate-gate”) is simply to meet human nature, not a conspiracy of monumental proportions.
The most recent information is clear enough. The world is changing, and not for the better. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, possibly the best journalist now reporting on climate change (writing at Yale University’s splendid Environment 360 website), a new report by leading climate scientists, released on the eve of the Copenhagen meeting, reflects surprise at how much more quickly the planet is proceeding toward various “tipping points” than previously expected. The report, she writes, “points to dramatic declines in Arctic sea ice, recent measurements that show a large net loss of ice from both Greenland and Antarctica, and the relatively rapid rise in global sea levels — 3.4 millimeters per year — as particular reasons for concern. Sea-level rise this century, it states, ‘is likely to be at least twice as large’ as predicted by the most recent IPCC report, issued in 2007, with an upper limit of roughly two meters.” This, believe me, is not good news.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and TomDispatch regular, explains just why conservatives and everyone else around should board the global-warming express, and pull hard on the brake cord before it’s too late. You can, by the way, catch a TomDispatch audio interview with McKibben on President Obama and climate-change politics in the U.S. by clicking here. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ The Physics of CopenhagenWhy Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of CivilizationBy Bill McKibbenMost political arguments don’t really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they’re argued. They’re about human preferences — for more health care or lower taxes, for a war to secure some particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact. On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we’re on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I’m always ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of compromise.
That’s why standard political operating procedure is to move slowly, taking matters in small bites instead of big gulps. That’s why, from the very beginning, we seemed unlikely to take what I thought was the correct course for our health-care system: a single-payer model like the rest of the world. It was too much change for the country to digest. That’s undoubtedly part of the reason why almost nobody who ran for president supported it, and those who did went nowhere.
Instead, we’re fighting hard over a much less exalted set of reforms that represent a substantial shift, but not a tectonic one. You could — and I do — despise the insurance industry and Big Pharma for blocking progress, but they’re part of the game. Doubtless we should change the rules, so they represent a far less dominant part of it. But if that happens, it, too, will undoubtedly occur piece by piece, not all at once.
Moving by increments: it frustrates the hell out of many of us, and sometimes it’s truly disastrous. (I just watched Bill Moyers’ amazing recent broadcast of the LBJ tapes in the run-up to the full-scale escalation of the Vietnam War, where the president and his advisors just kept moving the numbers up a twitch at a time until we were neck deep in the Big Muddy.) Usually, however, incrementalism, whatever you think of it, lends a kind of stability to the conduct of our affairs — often it has a way of setting the stage for the next move.
We may have to wait years for the next round of health-care reform and, in the meantime, doubtless many people will suffer, but here’s the one thing we know: what we don’t do now doesn’t foreclose future progress. In fact, it may make it more likely — if, after all, people grow comfortable with the idea of a “public option,” then the next time around the insurance industry won’t be able to make actual, honest-to-God public medicine seem so scary.
Climate Change as Just Another Political Problem
When it comes to global warming, however, this is precisely why we’re headed off a cliff, why the Copenhagen talks that open this week, almost no matter what happens, will be a disaster. Because climate change is not like any other issue we’ve ever dealt with. Because the adversary here is not Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face — adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. The adversary here is physics.
Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible "with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.
And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble — because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.
Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already. We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.
So here’s the thing: When Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen, he will treat global warming as another political problem, offering a promise of something like a 17% cut in our greenhouse gas emissions from their 2005 levels by 2020. This works out to a 4% cut from 1990 levels, the standard baseline for measurement, and yet scientists have calculated that the major industrialized nations need to cut their emissions by 40% to have any hope of getting us on a path back towards safety.
And even that 17% cut may turn out to be far too high a figure for the Senate. Here’s what Senator Jim Webb (a coal-country Democrat) wrote to the president last week: "I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed in Copenhagen… The phrase ‘politically binding’ has been used. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."
In any case, the Senate has decided that it will not debate any climate-change bill until “the spring,” after health care is settled, and maybe entitlement reform, and perhaps even financial regulation. And awfully close to the next election.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are apparently prepared to offer a 40% reduction in the “energy intensity” of their economy by 2020. In other words, they claim they’ll then be using 40% less energy to make each yuan worth of stuff they ship off to WalMart. Which is better than not doing it, but more or less what the experts think would happen anyway as China’s economy naturally becomes more high-tech and efficient. It’s at best a minor stretch from “business as usual.”
Meanwhile, the Indians almost sacked their environment minister after the newspapers decided he was compromising the national interest by engaging in real negotiations about global warming.
Meanwhile, the Australian opposition last week did sack their leader for being willing to compromise on an already-compromised Emissions Trading Scheme that would have capped carbon — meaning nothing will pass.
Meanwhile…
A Challenge Unique in History
A new analysis released Thursday by a consortium of European think-tanks shows that the various offers on the table add up to a world in which the atmosphere contains 650 parts per million and the temperature rises an ungodly five degrees Fahrenheit.
What I’m saying is: even the best politicians are treating the problem of climate change as a normal political one, where you halve the distance between various competing interests and do your best to reach some kind of consensus that doesn’t demand too much of anyone, yet reduces the political pressure for a few years — at which time, of course, you (or possibly someone entirely different) will have to deal with it again.
Obama is doing the same thing with climate change that he did with health care. He’s acting with complete political realism, refusing to make the perfect the enemy of the good (or, really, the better-than-Bush). He’s doing what might make sense in almost any other situation.
Here, unfortunately, the foe is implacable. Implacable foes emerge rarely. The best human analog to the role physics is playing here may be fascism in the middle of the last century. There was no appeasing it, no making a normal political issue out of it. You had to decide to go all in, to transform the industrial base of the country to fight it, to put other things on hold, to demand sacrifice.
Yet it’s all too obvious that we’re not dealing with it that way. The president hasn’t, for instance, been on a nonstop campaign to make everyone realize the danger. When he went to China, he certainly reached some interesting agreements about cooperation on automobile technology, but that’s not the same as seeking a wartime partnership.
Nor is the senate meeting late into the night figuring out how to mobilize our country’s resources and people in the struggle to save our planet. Here’s how Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill summed up the mood: “I don’t think anyone’s excited about doing another really, really big thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad.”
Some of us have been trying hard to open some political space for world leaders to step up to this challenge. We built a worldwide movement at 350.org that managed to pull off the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” (at least according to CNN). In some places, it even sparked the desired result. Ninety-two nations, all poor and vulnerable to the early effects of climate change, have endorsed that radical 350 target.
Some of their leaders, like Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a nation made up of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, have emerged as tigers, ready to fight. No one would be surprised to see him lead some kind of walkout from the Copenhagen negotiations, since he’s declared over and over that he won’t be party to a “suicide pact” for his low-lying nation; he is, in other words, unwilling to treat global warming as a normal political issue.
We, however, couldn’t get even the most minor player in the Obama administration to come to one of the 2,000 rallies we staged across this country. None of them were interested in jumping into the space we were trying to open. If the U.S. is this willing to treat climate change as politics-as-usual, most of the other major players will simply follow suit.
They'll sign some kind of paper in Denmark — that became all but certain on Friday night when Obama announced he'd jet in for the meeting's close. European leaders and some environmental groups may then call it a “qualified success,” and on we will go through more years of negotiation. In the meantime, physics will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread.
It’s like nothing we’ve ever faced before — and we’re facing it as if it’s just like everything else. That’s the problem.• Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. His The End of Nature, published in 1989, is regarded as the first book for a general audience on global warming. He is a founder of 350.org, a campaign to spread the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million worldwide. He is, most recently, the editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (Library of America). His next book will be Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, which will be published in April. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with McKibben on President Obama and climate change politics in the U.S., click here.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175174/tomgram%3A__bill_mckibben%2C_why_copenhagen_may_be_a_disaster
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 11, 2009 21:36:37 GMT 12
Ellen Cantarow — The Great Wall of Israelposted December 08, 2009 | TomDispatch.comTry to imagine this: An American president visits Israel and in a speech given close to the vast “separation wall” Israel continues to build in part through Palestinian territory, says: “Mr. Netanyahu, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for Israel and the region, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate! Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall!”
I’m sure you recognize that set of famous lines. With the name “Gorbachev” in place of “Netanyahu,” President Ronald Reagan intoned them on June 12, 1987, in front of the Berlin Wall. Less than two-and-a-half years later, of course, that stain on Europe, that prison wall of Soviet power which, in all the years of the Cold War, was seldom long out of the U.S. news, was gone — and 20 years later we’re still celebrating. The Israeli wall, endlessly under construction, is far longer, approximately twice as high, no less militarized, and no less a dystopian wonder of prison architecture. It is also a thief. As it meanders, it steals land. It is, as the Berlin Wall once was, a stain on the human landscape. But no American president, including Barack Obama, is likely to make a Reaganesque journey to the Middle East, denounce the wall, and call for its dismantlement. It plays little part in the news in this country when the Israeli-Palestinian situation is raised. It’s hard to imagine us celebrating its fall.
In the meantime, while that grotesque wall grows, while the talk is of shuttling diplomats and diplomatic cul-de-sacs, of paths to nowhere and missing Plan B’s for the Obama administration, as well as potential Israeli strikes against Iran, those in the shadow of the wall suffer. Ellen Cantarow, who covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Village Voice back in the 1980s, recently spent time on Palestinian farmland in the shadow of the Great Wall of Israel and offers a portrait, from under the olive branches, not from the heights of diplomatic exchanges, of what it’s like, and what it takes, to live near today’s version of a mega-Berlin Wall. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Living by the Gate From HellA Portrait of Nonviolent Resistance in One Palestinian VillageBy Ellen CantarowMuch is heard of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the story of the determined, long-term nonviolent resistance of many Palestinian villagers to the loss of their lands, striking as it may be, is seldom told. Here’s my report from just one village on the West Bank.
At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel’s seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of “the wall,” begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the wall illegal, but Israel ignored the ruling. Now, it undulates through the West Bank for over 280 kilometers, clasping Israel’s major colonies and some minor ones in its embrace. The completed wall will incorporate more than 85% of the West Bank’s settler population, a de facto annexation by Israel of significant chunks of the territory it first occupied in 1967. This is the dream of Greater Israel rapidly turned into architecture. For the Palestinians, however, the wall means theft, separating many Palestinian cities and villages from their land and water.
Jayyous, with a population of 3,500, is one of those villages. It lies nestled in a mountainous northern West Bank landscape with the Palestinian city of Qalqilya just to its west. The scenery here remains one of the Mediterranean’s loveliest, a cross, let’s say, between Tuscany and parts of Yugoslavia. Greek and Roman ruins mark the village’s great age. This was one of the West Bank’s most fertile areas. Farming involving a lively variety of nut, citrus, and olive trees, as well as vegetables, flourished around Jayyous, drawing life from abundant underground wells. The aquifers beneath Jayyous and Qalqilya, in fact, constitute a West Bank treasure. Lands belonging to both the city and the village abut Israel’s pre-1967 border — the “Green Line.”
Before the wall’s advent, Qalqilya’s merchants and Israelis did regular business on either side of the border, while Jayyous’s farmers worked their land all the way up to the Green Line. Now, the monstrous, concrete version of the wall surrounds Qalqilya entirely, bringing to mind high-security prisons or ghettoes from other eras. Jayyous is segregated from most of its former land by the wall in what one could call its “barrier” form — a system of steel fences, razor wire, and patrol roads manned by Israeli soldiers.
Four thousand of the village’s olive and citrus trees were uprooted to make way for the wall. All the village’s wells and over 75% percent of the land are now sequestered behind the wall, isolated on its west — that is, “Israeli” — side. A small Israeli settler colony called Zufim sits amid Jayyous’s former wealth. Israeli plans are on the books to build up to 1,500 new housing units on the bounty confiscated from the village. The new units will destroy the only road over which Jayyous’s farmers can now travel to and from their land: there used to be six of these roads. Israel has already blocked five of them.
Sixty-five year-old Sharif Omar Khalid, known more familiarly as Abu Azzam, has spent half his life struggling to preserve Jayyous’s land. In 1980, with other farmers representing villages throughout the West Bank, he founded the Land Defense Committee, one of 18 organizations that now make up the Stop the Wall campaign. Gifted with stubborn optimism, he counts as victory an Israeli Supreme Court decision in April 2006, which pushed the path of the wall back from the south side of the village. The decision returned 11% of Jayyous’s former land — 750 dunams of the 8,600 blocked by the barrier. (A dunam is a little over a quarter of an acre.)
The wall remains, as does one of its most essential parts: the “agricultural gate.” There are two of these on Jayyous’s land — one to the north; another to the south. Almost all of the village’s farmers are forced to use the north gate. Opened by Israeli soldiers for two 45-minute intervals at dawn and dusk, the gate blocks a patrol road manned by the Israelis.
But to get beyond the gate, across the patrol road, and from there to their farmland, Jayyous’s farmers need “visitors’ permits.” Since 2003, Israel has decreed that the villagers are only “visitors” on land they have worked for generations. Obtaining the permits is an excruciating obstacle course that only begins with proof of land ownership. Abu Azzam is one of the village’s major landowners; his title goes back several generations to the time when Jordan occupied the West Bank. Being a known activist, he was periodically denied his permit until the Israeli Supreme Court finally granted him a permanent permit noting that its bearer is a “security problem.” This produces extra problems for him in his daily odyssey to his fields and back.
The Gate from Hell
The first time I saw an “agricultural gate” was in 2004 outside the northern Palestinian village of Mas’ha. It was terrible to behold. Immense steel jaws painted a bright ochre-yellow creaked open, thanks to the Israeli Occupation Forces’ finest, for about 30 minutes at dawn and again at dusk. Between those two moments, it remained locked, leaving the local farmers with no possibility of returning home for lunch or emergencies, nor even for crop-irrigation at the appropriate time (after sundown).
Each opening of the Mas’ha gate permitted a lone farmer, Hani Amer — his home locked in on three sides by the wall and on the fourth by an Israeli settlement — to make sporadic trips to his fields. At both sides of the gate lay coils of razor wire snarled in front of a barrier ditch which stretched into the distance as far as we could see. Beyond this ditch, more razor wire. Then a “military road” meant for Israeli soldiers patrolling the boundaries of an Arab world considered burdensome to the Greater Israel.
Across the military road lay yet more razor wire and another ditch before Hani Amer could finally reach his fields.
To grasp what the gate really means, though, you’d have to stay, as I did, at least a night with a farmer in Jayyous at harvest time. You’d awaken with his wife and him at 5:30 A.M., drink a cup of strong Arabic coffee, eat bread spread with jam made from fruit he grows on the land remaining to him, and then go jolting down the white, rutted, stony road on his tractor. Finally, of course, you would wait with him in a gathering line of farmers at the gate.
Now watch, in the dawn of another day in the forty-second year of occupation, in front of this steel raptor out of some mad film-maker’s imagination, as they all arrive: one on his tractor, another on a donkey laden with sacks and harvest tools, until finally a long line stands waiting. Note those ubiquitous coils of razor wire, and the ditches, and that military road, just one form of the endless wall that imprisons Palestine’s people. Watch as the soldiers turn languidly and unlock the gate, swinging its jaws wide to transform it, and the military road it bars, into a checkpoint for the brief morning opening.
As I waited and watched from Abu Azzam’s tractor this past October, I imagined the hillside on the other side of the road as it must have been decades ago, when I still reported regularly from the West Bank. The region’s steep hills were then punctuated by lines of dry-wall terracing that enclosed olive trees whose leaves billowed silver in the wind, and the darker greens of fruit trees and grapevines. The Greater Israel’s new, California-style urban sprawl, its cities that now ooze through the West Bank, were still part of an expansionist dream, not a burgeoning reality, and of course there was no wall, nor a “military road,” nor, of course, an agricultural gate.
Watch now, as each farmer with his donkey, his tractor, his work-tools, approaches the passage between the gaping steel jaws. Watch each as he moves into the military road, brings his donkey to a halt, dismounts, and offers his ID card to a stout, impassive Israeli soldier. Flanked by two other soldiers, he, in turn, calls a control tower rising in the distance and in Hebrew recites each bearer’s name and ID numbers. Take in the stoicism, the resignation, the endurance of these farmers as they accept the indignity of all this because there is no other choice. Think that they are trying to do one simple thing: harvest their olives.
But first each must move into the road, stand with head bowed or eyes averted as his fate is determined for this day, and then, if he’s approved, move forward. Beyond lie more ditches at the other side of the road, more razor wire and — at last — something that masquerades as freedom but isn’t. The farmer is now permitted to climb the hill in his vehicle. Beyond its crest he may reach his fields, for whose sake he has endured this daily torment.
And now, consider the Israeli settlers and soldiers, whose absolute rule, running the gamut from control over this gate through vigilantism against villagers like those in Jayyous, make a nightmare of this simple thing, the olive harvest. Settlers from Zufim actually uprooted olive trees in Jayyous in 2004. (Some were carted away for sale in Israel); sewage from the colony has destroyed others.
A week after my stay, according to the Israeli paper Haaretz, Jewish settlers elsewhere in the northern West Bank “clashed with Palestinians picking olives.” The settlers called the farmers trying to bring in their crops a “security” threat because they “could gather intelligence and launch attacks from the olive groves.”
Elsewhere in the area that same week, Israeli security forces stood by as settlers entered a Palestinian village “to hold a brief rally” against the harvest. (Israel’s army is now dominated from top to bottom by ultra-religious-expansionist settlers, which makes a mockery of the “settler-soldier” distinction.) Meanwhile, near an Israeli “outpost” settlement called Adi Ad, settlers “uprooted dozens of olive trees.” As I write, similar alarums reach me by e-mail daily.
Several times since October the Israeli Army has imposed curfews on Jayyous — collective punishment for the weekly anti-wall demonstrations staged by village youth here. Most of the time the curfews have been levied after the farmers were already in their fields and haven’t interrupted the harvest. But they have punished the rest of Jayyous. Collective punishment — reprisals against all for the actions of a few — is illegal under the 1949 Fourth Geneva convention.
Keeping Going
“A state gone mad,” observed Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh when, a day after visiting Jayyous, I described the scene at the gate. This particular barrier of steel, these particular patient farmers, those particular soldiers enforcing Israel’s banality of evil — they offer but a taste of the insane ingenuity that is the still-developing Greater Israel. A Dutch filmmaker who had interviewed some West Bank Jewish settlers, related this little exchange to Shehadeh: “What is your dream?” she asked one of the settlers. “My dream,” he replied, “is that my grandchildren will say someday, ‘Here, they say that once upon a time there were Arabs’.”
The evening before we all arose to go to the gate, Abu Azzam took a German visitor and me to see the local olive press where he and other farmers unload each day’s harvest. The sight of Jayyous’s olives moving up a conveyor belt and into the press, finally to emerge as a stream of oil bottled in large plastic containers, was joyous. Children ran and slid about on the slick floor, laughing; their parents dipped bread for them in the delicious, freshly-pressed oil. What human madness would inflict constant torment on such peaceful labor?
Later, Abu Azzam told me stories about his life as an activist, his marriage, and his children. Jailed by Jordan for belonging to the Communist Party and later by Israel for his attempts to preserve the village land, he says he can’t imagine anything but keeping going. “I have no other choice” is the way he puts it, with a shrug and a smile.
He recalled the moment back in October 2003 as the wall was being built, when an Israeli official tried to buy off the Jayyous activists by offering them 650 permits which would have allowed that many farmers to access their land. But the Land Defense Committee made “a team decision” not to use them. Accepting the permits would have meant recognizing the validity of the wall and the whole system of dispossession that went with it. Israeli soldiers closed the gate; it was the height of the olive, guava, and clementine harvests. Abu Azzam and other farmers cut gaps in the barrier and crept through to work their fields “without a tractor, without horses, without carriages, without anything. Only our bodies.”
More arrests followed. The farmers made a decision to stay on their land and not return to the village. “My wife was very angry,” Abu Azzam recalls. “She called me on October 21 asking me, ‘Are we divorced? Are we separated?’ I said ‘I’m resisting.’ ‘Resisting? Can you see one box of guavas, cucumbers, or tomatoes?’ ‘Enough, to be on the land is resistance’, I said.”
Since 2003 Abu Azzam and other Jayyous farmers have continued their obdurate odyssey to their lands. This determination to keep farming on the 3,250 dunams — of an original 8,050 — that the villagers still have, rather than live elsewhere in the West Bank or abroad is itself resistance. In Palestine, this “just staying” is called samid. It means “the steadfast,” “the persevering,” and eloquently expresses the oldest form of Palestinian nonviolent resistance.
“You have so many problems,” I said to Abu Azzam. “Would you ever leave?” He smiled at me indulgently. “All our life is a problem. I don’t want to be a new refugee. I am against the emigration that took place through the Israelis.”
Since 2008, Jayyous’s young people have staged weekly demonstrations against the wall. One of their leaders — Mohammed Othman — was arrested by Israeli authorities this past fall when he returned from a speaking tour in Norway. He is still in jail under indefinite administrative detention.
Jayyousi leaders have also written to high officials in Norway and Dubai imploring them to divest from companies owned by the Uzbekistan-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. In doing so, Jayyous joins growing international revulsion at, and refusal to deal with, Leviev’s companies. Their reach is vast and diverse, extending to Angola’s diamond mines, New York real estate, and Israeli settlements in whose planning and building (including Zufim) they are heavily involved. Last March, Haaretz’s Barak Ravid reported that the British Embassy in Tel Aviv “stopped negotiations to lease a floor in Africa-Israel’s Kirya Tower because of the [Leviev-owned] company’s involvement in settlement construction.” Oxfam has severed ties with him for the same reason.
On September 09, 2009, a month before my arrival, the Israeli Supreme Court handed down a new ruling moving the route of the wall again and returning an additional 2,448 dunams to Jayyous. “Because of your efforts?” I asked Azzam.
“It is because of Jayyous,” he replied. “It is a group struggle.”• Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. More recently, her writing has appeared at Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternet. This essay is part of a series on Palestinian non-violent resistance, "Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape."[Note: Another of Cantarow’s Palestinian portraits can be read by clicking here. A comprehensive U.N. account of Israel’s wall can be found by clicking here (PDF file).]www.tomdispatch.com/post/175175/tomgram%3A__ellen_cantarow%2C_the_great_wall_of_israel
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 11, 2009 22:54:07 GMT 12
State of Surge, Afghanistanposted December 10, 2009 | TomDispatch.comThe Nine Surges of Obama’s WarHow to Escalate in AfghanistanBy Tom EngelhardtIn his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media's focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway.
In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together.
What follows, then, is my own attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the U.S. has been surging, and continues to do so, as 2009 ends. Think of this as an effort to widen our view of Obama’s widening war.
Obama’s Nine Surges
1.The Troop Surge: Let’s start with those “30,000” new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent Obama’s surge, phase 2. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were “just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan” when he took office in January 2009. In March, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. Last week, when he spoke, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. If you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 actually dispatched after the March announcement, however, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were “authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year,” bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan “surge” was already underway when Obama arrived.
It also looks like at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door in recent months without notice or comment. Similarly, with the 30,000 figure announced a week ago, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed “senior military official” told De Young “that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”
Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.
2. The Contractor Surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan as if they were increasing in a void. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many former military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases. There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. Did their numbers play any part in the president’s three months of deliberations? Does he have any control over how many contractors are put on the U.S. government payroll there? We don’t know.
Private contractors certainly went unmentioned in his speech and, amid the flurry of headlines about troops going to Afghanistan, they remain almost unmentioned in the mainstream media. In major pieces on the president’s tortuous “deliberations” with his key military and civilian advisors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, all produced from copious officially inspired leaks, there wasn't a single mention of private contractors, and yet their numbers have been surging for months.
A modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after the president’s speech gave us the basics, but you had to be looking. Headlined “U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace,” the piece barely peeked above the fold on page 7 of the paper. According to Cole: “The Defense Department's latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40% between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5% in the same period... Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total...” In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.
Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corp., TPM Muckracker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 “third country nationals” among the contractors, and 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that Dyncorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan “which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years.”
3. The Militia Surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a mini-surge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq's Sunni Awakening Movement that, many believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush's 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we'll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of money.
This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will “funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security.” Think of this as a “bribe” surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy “friendship.”
4. The Civilian Surge: Yes, Virginia, there is a “civilian surge” underway in Afghanistan, involving increases in the number of “diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country.” The State Department now claims to be “on track” to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by “the early weeks of next year.” (Of course, that, in turn, means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government.) A similar civilian surge is evidently underway in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for a humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.
5. The CIA and Special Forces Surge: And speaking of Pakistan, Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog had it right recently when, considering the CIA’s “covert” (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, he wrote: “The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point.” In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af/Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that in recent months the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House “for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.”
In addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports:
“The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said..., to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”
The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a hornet’s nest with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital of Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.
In addition, thanks to The Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we now know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates “a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the “surge” there means.
6. The Base-Building Surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base-building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama's latest troop-surge announcement. A recent NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a “boom town,” shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which — especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades underway at the moment — are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.
In addition, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward observation bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. “Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy,” he wrote in early November, “and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn't going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military's building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon.”
7. The Training Surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan national army and police. Despite years of American and NATO “mentoring,” both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions — 25% of those trained in the last year are now gone — and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by next fall and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.
8. The Cost Surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan Army and more than $10 billion has gone into police training — staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country's security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works (which seems unlikely), try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-man force. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just suggested that it will take at least 15-20 years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule (“You break it, you own it”); in this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. (And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest “millions” in.)
9.The Anti-Withdrawal Surge: Think of this as a surge in time. By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting “an open-ended commitment.” With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan, emphasized in his speech, in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011, about 18 months from now. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline says it all: “McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact.” On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of promises (“…and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011”). Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right-wing began to blaze away on the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date “to the enemy,” there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful.
In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a “flurry of coordinated television interviews,” the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows “in lockstep” to reassure the right (and they were reassured) by playing “down the significance of the July 2011 target date.” The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. (“...July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [National Security Advisor] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff’.”)
How Wide the Widening War?
When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: “We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” This seems a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a minority Pashtun insurgency — Pashtuns make up only about 42% of Afghanistan’s population — and the insurgents are a relatively lightly armed, rag-tag force. Against them and a miniscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched a remarkable, unbelievably costly build-up of forces over vast distances, along fragile, extended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has, to the best of its abilities, followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan.
All of this has been underway for close to a year, with at least another six months to go. This is the reality that the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people in that speech last week, or on those Sunday talk shows, or in congressional testimony, and yet it’s a reality we should grasp as we consider our future and the Afghan War we, after all, are paying for.
And yet, confoundingly, as the U.S. has bulked up in Afghanistan, the war has only grown fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. Sometimes bulking-up can mean not reversing but increasing the other side’s momentum. We face what looks to be a widening war in the region. Already, the Obama administration has been issuing ever stronger warnings to the Pakistani government and military to shape up in the fight against the Taliban, otherwise threatening not only drone strikes in Baluchistan, but cross-border raids by Special Operations types, and even possibly “hot pursuit” by U.S. forces into Pakistan. This is a dangerous game indeed.
As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, wrote recently, “Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.” Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, the American ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175176/tomgram%3A__state_of_surge%2C_afghanistan
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 14, 2009 13:22:18 GMT 12
Martin Chulov — Is Iraq's Next Crisis Ecological?posted December 13, 2009 | TomDispatch.comWith each passing day, the transfer of power from American forces to the Iraqi government looks less like a peaceful exchange and more like a bloody descent into chaos. On December 8th, a series of bombings in Baghdad killed at least 121 people and struck two Iraqi government institutions, an appeals court and the Finance Ministry. Those institutions had only recently been relocated after a similarly devastating attack in October, that killed 155 and wounded 500, destroyed their previous buildings. Iraq’s security situation remains grim enough that one Iraqi politician said, “We can only hope that not every day will turn into Bloody Days.”
Iraqi politics, too, remain in a state of some disarray. After months of bickering, a veto handed down by Iraq’s vice president for sectarian reasons, a constitutional crisis, and an 11th-hour emergency deal, parliament finally agreed to have a national election, the country’s first since 2005, even if delayed for two months. Given the recent “successes” of nearby elections in Iran and Afghanistan, there’s no guarantee that another debacle won’t ensue when the Iraqi people head for the polls in March.
And if that process, set in motion by the U.S. invasion and occupation, doesn’t plunge Iraq into the abyss, then the next great crisis to visit the country just might. With crucial international climate negotiations heading into the final stretch in Copenhagen and a warming planet the outcome of whatever weak agreement results, Martin Chulov’s report on the great Iraqi drought couldn’t be more timely. It was written for the upcoming issue of a quarterly magazine we greatly admire, World Policy Journal, and is being posted here thanks to the kindness of that magazine’s editors. It represents the beginning of what we hope is a long relationship — with TomDispatch posting a provocative piece from each new WPJ issue. (You can, by the way, subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.)
Baghdad correspondent for the British Guardian, Chulov offers the most vivid and extensive account yet of the massive drought that is turning significant parts of what was once “the fertile crescent” into a dust bowl. This ecological crisis is itself part of a larger Middle Eastern drought, and possibly of a series of intense global droughts ranging from Australia to the American West, that may presage a new weather planet. — Andy Kroll The Dust Bowl of BabylonAre Crippling Droughts the Next Great Threat to Iraq?By Martin ChulovBAGHDAD — From his mud brick home on the edge of the Garden of Eden, Awda Khasaf has twice seen his country’s lifeblood seep away. The waters that once spread from his doorstep across a 20% slab of Iraq known as the Marshlands first disappeared in 1991, when Saddam Hussein diverted them east to punish the rebellious Marsh Arabs. The wetlands have been crucial to Iraq since the earliest days of civilization — sustaining the lives of up to half a million people who live in and around the area, while providing water for almost two million more.
The waters vanished after the First Gulf War due to a dictator’s wrath; over the next 16 years, they ebbed and flowed, but slowly started to return to their pre-Saddam levels. By 2007, with no more sabotage and average rains, almost 70% of the lost water had been recovered. Now it’s gone again. This time because of a crisis far more endemic: a devastating drought and the water policies of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria. These three nations have effectively stopped most of the headwaters of the three rivers — the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karoon — that feed these marshes.
“Once in a generation was bad enough,” says Awda, a tribal head and local sheikh in the al-Akeryah Marshlands, who also advises the Nasiriyah governorate on water issues. “Twice could well be God’s vengeance.”
In a land where fundamental interpretations of monotheistic scripts often determine the tone of public discourse, particular attention is now being paid to the biblical Book of Revelation, in which the Euphrates River drying up was prophesized as a harbinger for the end of the world. It is not doomsday yet in Iraq, but the water shortage here has not been worse for at least the last two centuries — and possibly for several millennia more. Government estimates suggest close to two million Iraqis face severe drinking water shortages and extremely limited hydropower-generated electricity in a part of the country where most households get by on no more than eight hours of supplied power per day, in the best of times.
The flow of the Euphrates that reaches Iraq is down, according to scientific estimates, by 50% to 70% and falling further by the week. From his frugal office in Baghdad’s National Center for Water Management, engineer Zuhair Hassan Ahmed has for the past decade plotted the water levels of the Euphrates and the Tigris, the latter of which bisects the Iraqi capital. The hand-etched ink graphs show a black line that marks an average “water year,” from October to May, superimposed over a green line, which shows the actual flow through the two rivers over the same time. The green line had been markedly lower than the benchmark for much of the past decade. But in 2007 — the start of a serious drought — it dipped sharply and has continued to fall.
In Baghdad, the lack of water has been an inconvenience, an eyesore, and a health hazard. Raw sewage and refuse pumped into the Tigris is not flushed downstream as rapidly as it once was. The Tigris is Baghdad’s main artery, but it is also still a working river, long traversed by small commuter ferries, industrial barges, and, in the city’s halcyon days, even pleasure boats. Giant mud islands now protrude from the once wide, blue expanse of the river, making it unnavigable for larger vessels. Further downstream, and especially along the Euphrates — which runs roughly on a parallel track west though Iraq’s bread basket — the effects of the shortage are far worse.
Between Two Rivers
Here, in the land between the two rivers that was once the heartland of ancient Mesopotamia, the water crisis has ravaged agriculture, an industry still struggling to regain its footing after three decades of deprivation and war. This was the second mooted site (the other was the Marshlands themselves) of the fabled Garden of Eden — a land so rich in soil and water that it would quench the needs of its dwellers throughout eternity. It doesn’t look quite like that now. Crops of grain, barley, mint, and dates have failed almost en masse. Further west, in Anbar province, a prized rice variety that was once sold at a premium throughout Iraq and in the markets of neighboring countries has just been harvested. Like almost all other crops, this year’s yield is a disaster.
“We blame the Turks for this,” says Hatem al-Ansari, a local Anbar rice grower who claims to have lost half his family’s life savings since January 2009 due to a lack of water to irrigate his rice. “We have been digging wells nearby, and so has the government, but it is not enough. Not even close.” Shielding his face with a black scarf from a sandstorm blowing in on an acetylene desert wind, Hatem points in the direction of the Euphrates’ upper reaches. “If you go down to the bank, you will see where the water was last year and last week,” he says. “Our water pumps can no longer reach it. It’s true it hasn’t been raining, but it’s just as true that even 30% of normal rainfall does not cripple a mighty river like this.” He had to be taken on his word. The swirling sand and dust were starting to turn the sky an ochre-orange haze and was steadily closing like a shroud on us all, making an inspection of the river bank impossible.
Sandstorms have long been a fixture of Iraqi summers — on average, there are about eight to ten each hot season. But this year they became a pandemic. Close to 40 sandstorms blew in during the five months from May to early October. Some lasted three days at a time, sheeting farms with suffocating silt, closing airports, and adding another layer of misery to a society that has been through hell.
Lack of water for irrigation, especially in Anbar, is a key problem. Iraq’s water minister, Dr. Abdul Rashid Latif, says that the government dug an extra 1,000 wells over the past two years, taking advantage of a relatively high groundwater table. But drawing on a diminishing resource during a time of drought has proved costly. “We now have only around 20% of our original reserves left,” he says. “And the thing about this water is that not much of it is being replenished.”
“The Scent of a Dying Ecosystem”
Iraq’s water numbers make for disturbing reading across the board. Government estimates put total reservoir storage at around 9% of nationwide capacity on the leading edge of a wet season that is not forecast to bring much relief. For the past two years, rainfall was some 70% lower than usual in most of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
The snow melt that usually feeds the Tigris system from the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdish north was equally deficient. There are now seven dams on the adjoining Euphrates system, most in Turkey and Syria, with plans for at least one more. And then there are the rampant inefficiencies built into Iraq’s antiquated 8,000 miles of canals and drains, which send countless millions of gallons gushing into parts of the country that have little use for the water, and no means to harness it even if they did.
Some have looked to the heavens to explain the lack of rain. Society here is deeply superstitious. Many Iraqis, from the Sunni Arabs of Anbar to the tribes of the Marshlands, believe the natural deficiencies are God-ordained — and possibly a punishment for the sectarian ravages that have torn the country apart over the last three years.
“Droughts have happened before and will plague us again,” says Awda as he surveys the vast expanse of hard-baked and cracked brown mud in front of him that used to be the Marshlands. “But not even in ’91 was the water like this. Now there is nothing.” The only water left in the maze of feeder streams that empty into this giant basin are pools of lime-colored stagnant ooze. Nothing flows. Ducks and geese sit listlessly on creek banks that have not been exposed in decades — if ever — to direct sunlight. Infestations of flies circle like Saturn’s rings around giant, steel barrels of drinking water, imported from the nearby city of Nasiriyah, that line village roads. Reeds that were once the staple of the agrarian peoples who worked this waterway through the ages jut starkly from the banks, nearly all of them yellow and hardened, looking more like medieval weapons of war than crops.
Earlier this fall, the major tributaries of the Euphrates were flowing at around 30% of their normal levels. “Look at that mark on the bank,” says Awda, pointing to a stain on a corrugated iron beam at the base of the bridge. Not long ago, he notes, this had been a high-water mark. The waterline is now at least nine feet lower. The pungent murk of the riverbed lingers in the air. “Take a deep breath,” says Awda. “That smell is the scent of a dying ecosystem.”
Two fishermen, who had launched themselves into what remained of the waterway in a bid to net carp, return to the banks with their haul — 12 fish, none bigger than 10 inches. The catch is not enough to feed their families, let alone take to market. Two years ago, the fish were fat and bountiful.
“Fishing is our staple here,” explains one local man, Sheikh Hameed from Abart village, further north of the Marshlands. “That, and hunting water birds. But they’ve all flown away. I had a stall here for many years,” he recalls, pointing to an abandoned roadside hut, where he used to sell his catch.
The white polystyrene crates that used to hold the fish on ice are now home to street cats and sand drifts. A giant water buffalo, which once spent the best part of the summer immersed in the water, is now making do with what remains. He stands motionless, buried to the midriff in a festering, black mud. The caked soil cast offers at least some respite from the heat, but with the temperature expected to hover between 118 and 124 degrees Fahrenheit for the following week, he doesn’t have long left to wallow.
“We are digging wells for our own survival,” says Sheikh Hameed. “And this in the most water-rich area of the country. This is not God’s wrath. This is the work of people.”
Tweaking the Tap
Over the past six chaotic years, new reservoirs have been built into the Euphrates system on both the Syrian and Turkish sides of the border. Iraq, as a downstream country, would have likely suffered from serious water depletion even if it had a government strong enough to assert its authority against two powerful neighbors. But with a political class struggling to win legitimacy amid a sectarian war that has torn the country apart along ancient societal fault lines, there has been little time to tend even to the bare basics of survival. Delivery of services has been close to non-existent, from the national government down to village mayors. Now, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claiming to run a credible sovereign state, work has begun in earnest on talking to the neighbors about many issues of Iraqi sovereignty, including border integrity, that have remained sidelined throughout the post-war turmoil.
“They should realize that we are an important neighbor and share many things in life,” says Dr. Rashid, who has three times led Iraqi delegations to Istanbul and Damascus to beg for more water. He has returned with promises, but little fruit for his labors. With no treaties or agreements signed with either state, however, he has little leverage. “Our neighboring countries need to get the message that it is our right to get our share of water from these two international rivers and that we should have a say in their operational procedures because we are downstream. In our discussions they have never connected the water issues with any other issues.”
There is trouble, too, from Iran, whose government earlier this year ordered the diversion back into Iranian territory of a key tributary of the Tigris — the Karoon River, which enters Iraq just north of the southern city of Basra. Until early this year, the Karoon had sent regularly a vital flush of freshwater down the Tigris and into the Shatt al-Arab waterway at the northwestern end of the Persian Gulf. The freshwater pushed back the tidal effect and allowed tens of thousands of Iraqis from the southern Marshlands to make their livelihood through fishing and farming. “There were 13 billion cubic meters of freshwater [annually] feeding into the Shatt al-Arab,” says Dr. Rashid. “Now that has gone. We have asked them to sit down and talk but they won’t even answer our requests.”
In late October 2009, Iraqi technicians finally met with their Iranian counterparts. “They were told about the effect on the people in the south who are exclusively Shias — their people,” says Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. “They were very embarrassed by this and promised to look into it.” Today, the saltwater of the relentless tides around Basra is still winning the push-me, pull-you game and, like a rampaging army, has pushed farther north up the waterway than ever before. As a result, some 30,000 locals have left their land, some of which has now been heavily salinated, leaving it of marginal agricultural value at best.
Across Iraq, entire ecosystems are under threat. So far, redress from the Turks and the Syrians has consisted only of sympathetic words, followed by the occasional tweak of the tap. “We need 500 cubic meters per second,” Dr. Rashid said in August. “We have been getting 350 meters on some days, but 150 meters on average. They have promised us more, but we have yet to see it.” In the months that followed, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey three times announced a boost in the headwater flow from the Euphrates. But by late autumn, the downstream effect had been negligible.
The giant power station in the city of Nasiriyah was still using only two of its four turbines that are normally powered by the flow of the Euphrates. One had broken down, but could not have been used anyway because, along with a second turbine, there was not enough moving water to power it. Nasiriyah was getting by on about six to eight hours of power a day — roughly the same as the rest of the country.
Throughout the summer and fall, engineers at the power station were desperately hoping the river would not fall another eight inches, to a level that would have left Iraq’s fourth-largest city without any electricity whatsoever. “We saw it rise a centimeter or two, roughly two days after every announcement from the Turks, but it would soon drop away,” says an engineer at the power station. “The figures we were being promised were not translating into tangibles.”
The Rains Cometh Not
Both Turkey and Syria have been suffering from the same rainfall deficiency as Iraq. The winter storm fronts that once formed regularly near Cyprus and swept east through Syria, Jordan, and Iraq have been rare over the past three years, as have the low-pressure systems that could usually be counted on to dip south into Turkey from the Balkans and the Russian steppe. Cloud seeding and the contentious science of rain-making have been considered in all four countries.
Jordanians, in particular, remember the 1991 winter season, when seeding was attempted near Cyprus. That year, six separate snow-bearing storm fronts swept through the country, leaving yard-deep snow drifts on the streets of the capital, Amman, for many weeks. Heavy snow also fell across the Iraqi desert plains and the Zagros Mountains. The snow melt that autumn saw the Tigris burst its banks in Baghdad. Upstream in Turkey, there is still enough reliable winter rainfall to keep the dams brimming and make cloud seeding unnecessary. Downstream in Iraq, where the water is needed most, there is neither money nor interest for such an experiment.
Even the ancient ways are starting to fail. From June to August of this year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conducted research into the status of ancient, natural subterranean aqueducts used both for human settlement and irrigation in the Kurdish north. The UNESCO results painted a bleak picture of water resources in northern Iraq, which had for centuries boasted relatively bountiful supplies, even during harsh times. The UNESCO study found that 70% of the aqueducts, known as karez, that were producing water in 2005 had since dried up and been abandoned. Of the 683 karez surveyed, most were not functioning, due largely to excessive use and ongoing drought — only 116 still delivered water. The study claimed that 36,000 people were at risk of being displaced, while tens of thousands more had already left their lands.
Figures in Iraq are always open to a degree of conjecture, but one reality is now clear: the water crisis is leading to mass migrations of people and a renewed displacement at both ends of the country, just as some order was starting to replace the bedlam of the invasion and civil war. Iraqis have been returning to their homes in mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, but now rural people, fleeing in droves from the increasingly arid provinces, are also showing up in urban centers.
The Marsh Arabs have left their lands in large numbers, according to Nasiriyah’s governor, Qusey al-Ebadi, who has yet to find ways to accommodate them. “They are nomadic people and move around during difficult times,” says al-Ebadi, “but I have never seen them coming into the cities with their animals like this.” The men of the Marshlands — now far from their ancestral lands — mill around in small groups on street corners in Nasiriyah, many searching for laboring work, looking incongruous and desperate.
The people from the Shatt al-Arab area of the southern Marshlands also need accommodating. Government estimates suggest as many as 30,000 have left their lands, all but abandoning their agrarian livelihoods. Thousands more have been pushed to the brink of survival. If the Tigris and the Karoon do not flow again toward the Shatt al-Arab, the ecosystem they have relied on is all but finished.
The water crisis could not have come at a worse time for Prime Minister al-Maliki, who has spent much of his time and energy as leader attempting to win enough authority to assert his will. His formula had been security first and stability second, followed by delivery of services. So far, he has achieved qualified approval on the first two, but abject failure on the third.
Iraq’s energy sector is in a desperate state of disrepair. In late October, a rare thunder and lightning storm that brought the first rains to Baghdad in seven months caused power to crash citywide for eight hours. Even without rain, or other disturbances such as dust or wind, most residents of the capital are getting by on no more than a half-day of regular electricity, the vast bulk supplied by coal-burning energy plants that generate power channeled by substations resembling museum pieces. What little electricity supply exists is frequently targeted by militias who boast of their intent to return the society (literally) to the dark ages. Sewer lines have only been dug in the most affluent areas and city roads are, at best, rudimentary.
With a national election looming in early March, al-Maliki knows that his current base of support across Iraq’s religious and ethnic divides is fragile. Failure to give Iraqis the essential services they have long craved — especially electricity, water, and sewerage — will likely spell his doom. Twice this fall, he has traveled to the Shia bastion of Basra to assess the plight of the Shatt al-Arab and to persuade locals that all is not lost. It is a hard sell for the people of the south, who collectively still see themselves as being as deeply deprived today as they were under Saddam.
For the prime minister to blame his nation’s neighbors for water woes is unlikely to fly. Beyond the troubles over the water supply, al-Maliki has pointedly accused Syria of destabilizing Iraq by sheltering former Baathists, who, he claims, funded two bombing campaigns that targeted three government ministries and the Baghdad municipal government headquarters in August and October. All four buildings were annihilated, with almost 300 people killed and more than 1,000 maimed. While wagging his finger at Damascus, al-Maliki has also been constantly promising patronage to the southern tribes and an entrée to state coffers if they fall in behind him. Months before a definitive election and amid an unparalleled ecological crisis, the tribes are, at best, restless. And water is near the top of their worry list.
Enough Blame to Go Around
“The government didn’t do this directly, it’s true,” says tribesman Maher al-Zubaidi, as he surveys the shrinking Euphrates in Nasiriyah. “But they tell us they are strong now and yet they can’t stand up to the Turks. Wars have started in this region for a lot less. Also, Iraq constantly cries poor, yet we read about the trade minister taking a cut from every kilo of imported grain and see enormous revenues from oil. The time has long past for them to deliver.”
The Turks, though sympathetic to the plight of their downstream neighbors, lay much of the blame at the feet of Iraqi bureaucrats who have done next to nothing to protect an already precious natural resource from atrocious water management practices. It is not uncommon to see burst water-mains spouting geysers through Baghdad’s parched suburbs or across village roads, quickly mixing with refuse and oil, turning into giant molasses-like pools. Almost all public taps invariably leak, and environmental awareness is close to nonexistent.
Publicly, Turkey will say nothing on the subject of its water dispute with Iraq, other than that it is working with both Syria and Iran to remedy the situation and has agreed to share daily technical data with both sides on flows. After recent floods near Istanbul, a limited extra release was allowed into the Euphrates system. It was soon stopped. The saga was symptomatic of Iraq’s dilemma and its lack of means to do much about it. Again, Baghdad had to make do with what its neighbors could spare on a good day. Iraq is yet to press its case for water rights under international law and, with its hand weakened by so many ongoing woes, the government does not currently hold much sway in the region.
The torpor is of no comfort to Iraq’s downstream dwellers. Back in al-Akeryah Marshlands, Awda Khasaf kicks a splintering skiff that used to ply the lowland waterways. The last six months, he says, have changed everything. “If the Turks release all the water that used to come down the Euphrates, then the Marshes will fill up again within two months and we will recover. But that is not going to happen. They caught the government off guard while it was obsessed with the war and now they have a chokehold on us. This has had a revolutionary effect. The Turks have the upper-hand and until we are strong enough to stand up for ourselves, all we can do is pray for a flood. Look at them. They are not serious about helping us. They are trying to build another dam [the Ilus hydroelectric plant planned for southeastern Turkey, on the northern reaches of the Tigris]. Only when we can stand up can we address this. For now...” He leaves the last thought hanging, possibly conjuring up the same apocalyptic vision that started our conversation: only the good Lord can save us.
In the short term, it would appear that divine intervention is Iraq’s best hope. The means to address water management effectively seem decades away. Much of the country’s infrastructure belongs in scrap yards or exhibits of nineteenth-century industrial artifacts. Re-laying water pipes nationwide for urban water delivery would likely take the better part of a generation. Desalination has been considered during cabinet meetings and projects have been offered by investors from the cash-rich Gulf states, which rely heavily, if not exclusively, on desalinated water. But Iraqi officials have so far described the costs as prohibitive. “It might work out for a small state like Abu Dhabi that doesn’t need tens of thousands of kilometers of pipeline,” says one minister. “But for us, it is a non-starter for now.”
Globalization Woes
The crisis of 2009 has revealed some domestic inefficiencies that Iraq’s farmers will struggle to reverse. Wholesalers have been able to import and distribute fresh produce at market rates that compete successfully with what domestic consumers would have paid for locally grown produce. Hundreds of tons of bananas have been flown in from Somalia, watermelons from Iran, rice from the Far East, and bottled water from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
Water woes are playing a big part in turning Iraq into a net food importer. But so are the cost-efficient alternatives introduced to the Iraqi market by companies in both developing states and Western nations, all of which are clamoring to service some 20 million people who, for the most part, have always relied on homegrown produce.
Apart from small pockets that can still harness water from the Euphrates, much of Iraq’s politically and strategically critical Anbar province is now a dust bowl. So, too, is Diyala province, north of Baghdad, which boasts some of the most fertile alluvial soil in the land. Both areas were ground zero for the Sunni militancy — Anbar the so-called triangle of death, Diyala the declared heartland of a new Islamic caliphate in 2006. The al-Maliki government had hoped to appease insurgents with the promise of prosperity. But as 2009 draws to a close, the notion seems fanciful. Family incomes are down substantially in many areas. The violence, successfully quelled throughout the past two years, is again on the rise, especially in Anbar.
Iraq’s provinces and some of its most dangerous towns have been the focus of work throughout the past five years by American reconstruction teams, especially the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which in October wound up its mission. The engineers left, claiming that 21.2 million Iraqis now had access to potable drinking water, up from just over 5 million people immediately after the invasion. Last year, in the giant Sadr City slum in Baghdad’s northeast, the Army Corps built a treatment plant which draws and purifies water from the Tigris. The net effect, the Army claims, has been an increase from 46 to 200 in the per capita liters of water per day for Sadr City residents. The bill for the project was $65 million.
In all, the engineers completed 25 large water distribution projects across the country as well as 800 smaller water sector projects that delivered potable water to many Iraqis who had no such luxury before Saddam fell. But now the engineers are gone. Gone with them is the bulk of America’s capacity to do more good works before the White House orders the last troops out late next year.
Water distribution at the micro level is undoubtedly better than it was. But in a macro sense, the efforts amount to a small splash in a large pond. Iraq has giant subterranean lakes of another precious resource — oil — under the soil at both ends of the country and appears to be betting its future on turning anticipated revenues into purchasing power and regional clout today.
Oil is Iraq’s meal ticket — a buffer against both drought and geopolitical impotence. The cabinet has been absorbed over the past six months with finding a formula that offers foreign investors enough financial incentives to bring their expertise to the badlands, while at the same time retaining control of the oil sector and the billions of petro-dollars it is likely to produce. But while the promise of future riches and power may see the waters flow again one day, on the barren plains of Iraq’s south a simpler business plan is taking shape.
Alongside the highway between Baghdad and Basra — a giant, Saddam-era, four-lane road built to move tanks and troops — a rare agricultural success story is emerging. To travel this road in 2005-06 was to almost guarantee a run-in with a militia group, or an angry burst of bullets fired from a nearby sand berm. It remained a no-go zone to most non-Iraqis until the middle of 2008. By then, scorched wrecks of tankers lined the highway along with the charred chassis of the occasional American Hummer or private security company four-wheel-drive vehicle, conspicuous by its blackened, rusting bulk.
Even today, giant scabs of charred bitumen are missing along the entire stretch to Basra, legacies of improvised bombs and aerial strikes that turned Iraq’s main arterial highway into a Mad Max-like wasteland. But now, dozens of salt farms line both sides of the road. There had always been a small salt industry, especially in the center of Iraq, near the cities of Babylon and Najaf, but with rapid water depletion turning lakes into shallow, salinated pools, dozens of small enterprises have now sprung up. Salt, piled in pyramid-style heaps, pockmarks the horizon of a barren landscape once covered in year-round sheets of water. One farmer sold his flock of goats to concentrate on salt. “I have around 190 kilos here,” he says, pointing at his pile. “It’s much more [profit] than I will get this year from dates.”
The salt is then taken to market in Baghdad, where a small export industry is tipped to develop this year. Until the oil money kicks in or its neighbors turn on the taps again, success in the salt pans is likely to be a rare high-water mark for Iraq. In the short term, it would appear that divine intervention is Iraq’s best hope. The means to address water management effectively seems decades away.[Note: This report first appeared in the winter 2009/10 issue of World Policy Journal.]• Martin Chulov is the Baghdad correspondent for the Guardian of London.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175177/tomgram%3A_martin_chulov%2C_is_iraq%27s_next_crisis_ecological
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 16, 2009 20:13:10 GMT 12
William Astore — Grinding Down the U.S. Armyposted December 15, 2009 | TomDispatch.comLast week, the U.S. Army released its suicide figures for November. Twelve soldiers on active duty were classified as “potential suicides” for the month, bringing the yearly suicide total to 147, 19 more than for all of 2008, and the fifth year in a row the rate has risen. In the same week, a Rand Corporation study was released which found, not surprisingly, “that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in the general population. The researchers also found that the longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the more likely their children were to have difficulties in school and at home.”
In fact, you didn’t have to look far that week to see signs of trouble in the military. It’s true that Major Nadil Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist who murdered 12 military personnel and one civilian, while wounding 29, at Fort Hood, Texas, had at least briefly faded from the news. In Grant County, Oregon, however, a judge sentenced 27-year-old Jessie Bratcher, an Iraq veteran, to a state psychiatric hospital in a murder case in which he had shot an unarmed civilian during what was claimed to be a post-traumatic stress disorder-induced “war flashback.”
Meanwhile, in Boise, Idaho, George Nickel Jr., another Iraq War veteran, armed with a handgun and wearing “a tactical vest with as many as 90 rounds of ammunition,” and “accused of shooting into two locked apartments before getting into an armed confrontation with Boise police officers this summer,” pleaded guilty to “the unlawful discharge of a firearm into an occupied dwelling.” Nickel, whose year in Iraq was spent disarming IEDs, “suffered a broken leg and shrapnel in his face in a roadside bomb explosion that killed three Idaho soldiers.” He is “diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.” He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Last week, across the continent, 20-year old Joshua Hunter, a military policeman accused of stabbing “his two Army buddies” to death in the apartment they shared near Fort Drum in New York state, was arraigned on second-degree murder charges. All three men had served in Iraq. Hunter’s last message at MySpace included this: "I will not be stopped until I get my revenge." According to the Associated Press, Hunter's wife said “that her husband was outgoing before he went to war, but when he returned stateside, he was an emotional wreck. ‘He wasn't in any good mental shape at all… I tried to get him to go to therapy. They prescribed him medicine and stuff, but it just wasn't enough’."
Unlike the week when Hasan struck at Fort Hood and media attention was overwhelming, stories like these are small-scale and generally local in nature, yet they have now become a regular feature of the American landscape. Most of us may only half-notice, and yet something is happening here, even if we don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones. Certainly, William Astore, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular, has a strong sense of where it may lead. — Tom Engelhardt “They’re Wasted”The Price of Pushing Our Troops Too FarBy William AstoreWhen I was on active duty in the military, an Army friend used to remind me: “Any day you’re not being shot at is a good Army day.” Today’s troops, especially if they’re “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t have enough good Army days. Many of them are on their fourth or fifth deployments to a combat zone. They’re stressed out and tired; they miss their spouses and families. And often they’ve seen things they wish they’d never seen.
But you’d hardly have known this listening to the debate over President Obama’s decision to escalate yet again in Afghanistan. Its tone was remarkably antiseptic. I can’t help recalling old wargames I played as a kid in which deploying infantry brigades to faraway places was as simple as picking up a few cardboard counters, tossing the dice, and pinning my troops to a new spot on the map. No gore splattered on my face when I rolled snake eyes after pushing my grunts too far into the Fulda Gap while playing MechWar ‘77.
As we roll the dice again in Central Asia, it’s clear that we’re pushing our Army and Marines too far. Naturally, our troops, notably the brass, will deny this. For them, it’s “Army Strong” or “Semper Fi”; only losers whine or bellyache. Well, we Americans need to recognize the limits on our troops, even if they refuse to do so.
So let me be blunt: We’re wearing them out.
Our “Wasted” Troops
Quietly, almost imperceptibly, our Army is hollowing out. Such is the predictable result of eight years of ceaseless deployments in support of ill-advised wars. Remarkably, the Army has, so far, managed to maintain its combat effectiveness, in part by its recourse to a “Stop Loss” policy — essentially a backdoor draft (only recently curtailed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) that involuntarily extended the enlistments of 60,000 troops. It has also relied heavily on the use and reuse of the Reserves and the National Guard. Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania noted last month on Meet the Press that “our troops are tired and worn out. [With respect to the] Pennsylvania National Guard, most of our guardsmen have been to either Iraq [or] Afghanistan, over 85 percent, and many of them have gone three or four times and they’re wasted.”
Signs of severe strain, of being “wasted,” are often not visible to the American public. Nevertheless, they are ominous and growing. Suicides have hit record highs in the Army. Cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression, having reached an alarming 300,000 in 2008, according to Invisible Wounds of War, a RAND study, continue to escalate, constituting a mental health crisis for the Army. Traumatic brain injuries from IEDs and other explosive shocks in our war zones, difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat, may already exceed 300,000, another health crisis exacerbated by a lack of treatment available to veterans. Divorce rates among active duty troops continue to climb. An epidemic of domestic violence and crime has been linked to returning veterans and to the difficulty of readjusting to “normal” life after months, or years, in combat zones. These are just five of the better documented signs of an Army that’s struggling to cope with wars of unprecedented length and still uncertain outcomes.
To maintain its force structure, given these kinds of symptomatic pressures, the Army has taken several questionable steps. It has boosted the maximum age of enlistment from age 35 to age 42 at a time when its operational tempo is burning out far younger men and women. It has authorized enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 for new soldiers, and reenlistment bonuses to select soldiers, also for up to $40,000. As the Army attempts to entice enlistees with big-money bonuses and benefits, it’s also accepting more recruits who lack high school diplomas; the rate of new recruits with high school diplomas declined to 71% in 2008, a 25-year low. Counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns — the sort of wars promoted by Centcom commander General David Petraeus and Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal — theoretically demand restraint, tact, and flexibility exercised at the squad level by so-called strategic corporals. What’s the likelihood that enough of today’s recruits will develop the sophistication, the so-called “soft” yet decidedly hard-won “people skills” they need to succeed as strategic corporals?
Within the officer ranks, the Army has been boosting the success rate of those promoted to major (a point at which weaker officers are typically winnowed out) to better than 95%. In the past, it hovered around 80%. As Colonel Paul Aswell, chief of the Army’s Officer Personnel Policy Division notes, “Every [Army promotion] board is going to select every officer that they can to [the rank of] major for as far as I can see right now.”
Because so many seasoned but stressed-out captains are choosing to leave the Army after their initial service commitment is up, the selection rate for major will likely remain above 90% for years to come. “[W]e really don’t think that’s healthy,” concludes Aswell. Plans to add 65,000 new recruits to the Army over the next few years only exacerbate the problem; an expanded Army necessitates even more field-grade billets. Many of these new billets are likely to remain vacant, since it takes 10 years to develop the “Iron Majors”, who, along with mid-level NCOs, form the core of the Army.
Instead of a stable pyramid, then, think of an expanded yet still exhausted service taking on a more unstable, hourglass shape: heavy at the top with long-serving colonels and generals, heavy at the bottom with “green” privates and lieutenants, but corseted at its essential core due to shortages of experienced platoon sergeants and battle-hardened company and battalion commanders.
In the military, leaders are supposed to be promoted based on demonstrated potential to fulfill the expanded responsibilities inherent in a higher grade, but here the Army is trapped in a Catch-22 situation: It has to promote virtually every eligible captain to major (and quickly) precisely because so many captains are leaving the military.
Whether at the company or field-grade level, the simple fact is that the Army is bleeding experienced officers. Ever larger numbers of promising lieutenant colonels, for instance, are now taking earlier-than-expected retirements, opening further “must-fill” rungs on the promotion ladder. I know of two highly qualified Army lieutenant colonels who, as outstanding battalion commanders, could easily have reached colonel and might perhaps even have ended up with a general’s star. Tired of repeat deployments, constant stress, and extraordinary burdens placed on their spouses and children, they chose instead to retire from active duty.
As we bleed experienced officers and promote marginally qualified ones almost automatically, it’s sobering to consider another modern drain on the military — the vast pay disparities that exist between those serving in the All Volunteer Army and civilian contractors often operating beside them in the same combat zone. Whereas an unmarried Army sergeant makes roughly $85 a day and a married captain roughly double that, a “protective security specialist” employed by Blackwater (now Xe) makes 14 times the pay of our sergeant. Of course, no one joins the Army to get rich, but such dramatic inequities are hardly conducive either to high morale or to retaining experienced military specialists who know they can sell their skills at top value elsewhere.
Indeed, the Army (and so the American taxpayer) is being forced to compete with Xe, Triple Canopy, DynCorp International, and similar private security outfits for the services of experienced non-commissioned officers (NCOs). Even a reenlistment bonus of $40,000 for a staff sergeant with interpreter/translator experience may be unpersuasive when such an NCO could double or triple his take-home pay — and perhaps decrease his stress level as well — by hiring on with a paramilitary contractor.
So what, you may ask? Well, despite what Napoleon said, an Army doesn’t march on its stomach. It marches because experienced NCOs boot it in the butt and get it moving in the right direction. NCOs are the backbone of any effective army. Lose too many and you’re done for.
“Decades More” of Dread and Death
It’s this under-compensated, over-stressed Army that we’re sending into Afghanistan to accomplish what could only be termed a herculean task. It’s not only supposed to defeat the Taliban insurgency by force of arms — something its troops are, at least, trained for — but build a nation by negotiating a complex “human terrain.” That’s Army jargon for the reality that roughly 80% of so-called nation-building operations basically add up to armed social work. Simultaneously, our troops are being tasked with training an Afghan army that, despite years of effort, exists more on paper than in the field.
By all appearances, that Afghan army is hollow. Making it solid and reliable in a few short years is truly a bridge too far for our trainers.
And if that’s an overly imposing task, no less imposing are the literal mountains of Afghanistan. One can hardly overstate the mind-numbing fatigue suffered by troops fighting at high altitude. Our soldiers typically carry nearly 100 pounds of equipment, including body armor, weaponry, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, extra batteries, night vision goggles, GPS receiver — the list goes on. Now, think of hauling yourself and 100 pounds of gear up goat paths at altitudes exceeding 10,000 feet. Think about fighting a lightly-armed, lightly dressed, fleet-footed enemy with better knowledge of the harsh terrain, and with physiologies acclimated to the thinner, drier air.
I asked an Army battalion commander to put the plight of our troops and the challenge of COIN in terms the average American could understand. His reply was sobering:
“Dread is the term most soldiers apply to their emotions in the six months leading to deployment. Not dread of the enemy, but dread of the prison-like conditions of their service [overseas]. There are no leave breaks in Paris or at the canteen. Even coming home for mid-tour leave is stressful as hell.
“Then of course you add the mental grind of constant exposure to [the] lethal threat of roadside bombs and sniper fire and hotter engagements. Or the converse that many times absolutely nothing happens for these soldiers other than traveling to, securing, and returning from endless marginally productive meetings with local leaders. [Add to that] the separation from family, the enforced celibacy and enforced sobriety and uncorrectable disruption of social lives.
“Imagine working without a break in your current job with no weekends… no social events, no wife, no bars, no permanent buildings, no funding. That’s what the grind is… Putting up with those conditions and heading out the gate every day… and grinding away at those armed social-working tasks is the new criterion of valor.
“The cost of winning an insurgency is staying at it for years, decades. In a fundamentally flawed operating environment like Afghanistan, we could be there at or above our current level of commitment for decades more.”
Decades more: So much for an 18-month timeline for our latest Afghan surge and withdrawal.
The Horrifying Legacies of War
By sending up to 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan, we’re further stressing a military that, if not entirely “wasted,” is nevertheless showing serious signs of strain. This shouldn’t be surprising. Our Army, after all, isn’t made up of rootless, robotic “universal soldiers,” but men and women who are deeply rooted within our communities. Indeed, that very rootedness may help explain their remarkable staying power over the last eight years. Sooner or later, however, such roots will be cut if we continue to send them on lost causes.
Consider our latest “surge”: What will happen to our Army if its augmented presence only alienates Afghans further? What if it ends up strengthening Taliban recruitment efforts and prolonging the war instead of shortening it? What if our enemies simply choose to wait us out? Are we truly prepared to stay for a decade, or even decades, more?
Prolonging a stalemated war will, in fact, only mean more hurt for both Afghans and Americans. The hurt to Afghans will undoubtedly be worse, for their homes are the battlefield, but our own hurt shouldn’t be underestimated. More broken bodies and shattered minds. More echoes of the horrifying violence that accompanies war.
To paraphrase William Faulkner on history’s relationship to the past: Even when war is officially declared over, it’s not dead. It’s not even past. The horrors of war endure in the hearts and minds of the people who experience them, and they dwell, to some degree, in the collective consciousness of us all.
Are we willing, then, to sit and watch as our military strives to endure what may ultimately prove unendurable? Do we really want to risk returning to the hollow army of the mid-1970s, reeling from defeat in Vietnam, that judged the American public numb to its service and sacrifices?
What if, upon returning to the American “homeland,” whether in 2012 or 2052, an exhausted, embittered, and demoralized army again judges us and finds us even more wanting? What if, as in the 1970s, some alienated soldiers come to see the public as treacherous backstabbers, with all the potential dangers that entails?
As we embrace policies and strategies that erode our army, we risk more than a weakened military; we risk breeding resentments and recriminations that could lead to a future domestic surge of militant nationalism of our very own, conceivably imperiling the foundations of our democracy.
And that’s a peril — and a price — too terrible to contemplate.• William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught cadets at the Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and applauded thousands of troops as they crossed the stage to graduate from the Defense Language Institute. A TomDispatch regular, he currently teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He may be reached at .www.tomdispatch.com/post/175178/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_grinding_down_the_u.s._army
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 27, 2009 22:51:00 GMT 12
Jo Comerford — Afghan War Costs 101posted December 17, 2009 | TomDispatch.comAshton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, put the matter this way recently: “[N]ext to Antarctica, Afghanistan is probably the most incommodious place, from a logistics point of view, to be trying to fight a war... It's landlocked and rugged, and the road network is much, much thinner than in Iraq. Fewer airports, different geography.” In other words, we might as well be fighting on the moon. In translation, this means at least one thing: don’t believe any of the figures coming out of the White House or the Pentagon about what this war is going to cost.
As Jo Comerford, executive director of the National Priorities Project points out below, the president’s $30 billion figure for getting those 30,000-plus new surge troops into Afghanistan is going to prove a “through-the-basement estimate.” As for the dates for getting them in and beginning to get them out? Well, it’s grain-of-salt time there, too. According to Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, some of the fuel storage facilities being built to support the surge troops won’t even be completed by the time the first of them are scheduled to leave the country, 18 months from now.
And keep in mind the endless, and endlessly vulnerable, supply lines on which so much of that fuel — and almost everything else the U.S. military has to have to survive — travels. Along those mountainous roads, trucks are “lost,” or Taliban-commandeered, or bribes are paid for passage, or some are simply destroyed in what can only be thought of as an underreported supply-line war. All of this adds immeasurably to the staggering expense of the project. According to August Cole of the Wall Street Journal, in fuel terms alone, to support a single soldier in Afghanistan costs between $200,000 and $350,000 a year.
And while we’re at it: don’t expect all those surging troops to make it into Afghanistan any time soon. In the heroic tales of presidential surge deliberations (based on copious White House leaks) that appeared soon after the president’s West Point speech, much was made of how Obama himself had insisted on speeding up the plan to get the extra troops in place. All would arrive, the White House said, within six months. That was quickly changed to approximately eight months. Now, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, deputy commander of American and NATO forces there, has just announced that it will take nine to eleven months (or maybe even “up to a year”), and that’s if none of the factors that could go wrong do — something not worth putting your money on when it comes to the Afghan War.
If all this leaves you with lingering worries about the success of both the surge and the war, you can put them to rest, however. NBC’s Richard Engel found a “military schematic,” a single chart from the office of the Joint Chiefs, that offers a visual representation of the military’s full surge/counterinsurgency strategy. It has to be seen to be believed. (Just click here.) It lays out as a flow chart (or perhaps overflow chart would be the more accurate description) just how our war will achieve success. What could possibly go wrong with such a plan? It’s hard to imagine. In the meantime, let Comerford give you a little lesson in the economics of the Afghan War, and what we could have done with that low-ball figure of $30 billion, had we chosen not to fight a war on the moon. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ $57,077.60Surging by the MinuteBy Jo Comerford$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind — just for a minute or so.
After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.
Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60. That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.
By the way, add up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.
But perhaps this isn’t a time to quibble. After all, a job is a job, especially in the United States, which has lost seven million jobs since December 2007, while reporting record-high numbers of people seeking assistance to feed themselves and/or their families. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 36 million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on food stamps.
On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that “safety net,” we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that's roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.
For purposes of comparison, $30 billion — remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge — is equal to 80% of the total U.S. 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels) for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Or think of the surge this way: if the United States decided to send just 29,900 extra soldiers to Afghanistan, 100 short of the present official total, it could double the amount of money — $100 million — it has allocated to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
Leaving aside the fact that the United States already accounts for 45% of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easily build, furnish and equip enough schools for the entire nation.
Continuing this nod to the absurd for just one more moment, if you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120,000 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.
One more thing, that $30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year's Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran's benefits, from hospital stays to education.
In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child. Given that the average annual salary for an Afghan soldier is $2,880 and many Afghans seek employment in the military purely out of economic desperation, this might be a wise investment — especially since the Taliban is able to pay considerably more for its new recruits. In fact, recent increases in much-needed Afghan recruits appear to correlate with the promise of a pay raise.
All of this is, of course, so much fantasy, since we know just where that $30-plus billion will be going. In 2010, total Afghanistan War spending since November 2001 will exceed $325 billion, which equals the combined annual military spending of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. If we had never launched an invasion of Afghanistan or stayed on fighting all these years, those war costs, evenly distributed in this country, would have meant a $2,298.80 dividend per U.S. taxpayer.
Even as we calculate the annual cost of war, the tens of thousands of Asian elephants in the room are all pointing to $1 trillion in total war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan. The current escalation in Afghanistan coincides with that rapidly-approaching milestone. In fact, thanks to Peter Baker’s recent New York Times report on the presidential deliberations that led to the surge announcement, we know that the trillion-dollar number for both wars may be a gross underestimate. The Office of Management and Budget sent President Obama a memo, Baker tells us, suggesting that adding General McChrystal’s surge to ongoing war costs, over the next 10 years, could mean — forget Iraq — a trillion dollar Afghan War.
At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations' military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today's dollars cost $709.9 billion — or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we're still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.[Note: Jo would like to acknowledge the analysis and numbers crunching of Chris Hellman and Mary Orisich, members of the National Priorities Project's research team, without whom this piece would not have been possible.]• Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175179/tomgram%3A_jo_comerford%2C_afghan_war_costs_101
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 28, 2009 0:24:25 GMT 12
Rebecca Solnit — Earth, Too Big to Fail?posted December 20, 2009 | TomDispatch.comJust last week, a little air armada of at least five Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles — robot planes to you — attacked an area in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, reportedly killing 15 or more people. It’s unclear whether these were all Predator drones or some were the more advanced Reapers — names that might well have come out of the sci-fi memory banks of the generation now flying them via console from hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.
Late in the spring of 2010, the first three heavily-armed Reapers will reportedly gain a new all-seeing eye, a video system capable of filming “an area, two-and-a-half miles around, from 12 different angles” and be able to provide “up to 10 video streams simultaneously to 10 different users on the ground ‘within a wide area’.” In the future, improved versions of the system will be able to provide up to 65 video streams simultaneously. The system’s name is “Gorgon Stare”. The stare of a Gorgon, of course, comes from the deepest annals of sci-fi, ancient Greek-style, and could turn a human to stone. The stares of our Gorgons are far more likely to turn stone to rubble.
So consider the irony. If you’ve seen any of the Terminator movies or their ilk, you’ve probably noticed that the machines always seem to go after us. Strange, then, that in sci-fi terms if you live in Los Angeles or Topeka, the world of the Terminator films is nowhere in sight. Only if you happen to live in the Pakistani borderlands or in al-Anbar Province, Iraq, could you be pardoned (after viewing some pirated video) if you thought that that grim movie world in which machines implacably hunt and destroy humans was indeed springing into existence over your very skies.
In the meantime, as Rebecca Solnit, who often helps end the year at TomDispatch, points out, it’s our implacably dumb machines that are doing us in. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Terminator 2009Judgment Days in CopenhagenBy Rebecca SolnitFor Isaac Francisco Solnit, born December 17, 2009It’s clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something — but what? It could be the Republican Party she’ll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can’t follow. Or maybe she was sent to destroy civilization at this crucial moment by preaching the gospel of climate-change denial, abetted by tools like the Washington Post, which ran a factually outrageous editorial by her on the subject earlier this month. No one (even her, undoubtedly) knows, but we do know that this month we all hover on the brink.
I’ve had the great Hollywood epic Terminator 2: Judgment Day on my mind ever since I watched it in a hotel room in New Orleans a few weeks ago with the Superdome visible out the window. In 1991, at the time of its release, T2 was supposedly about a terrible future; now, it seems situated in an oddly comfortable past.
What apocalypses are you nostalgic for? The premise of the movie was that the machines we needed to worry about had not yet been invented, no less put to use: intelligent machines that would rebel against their human masters in 1997, setting off an all-out nuclear war that would get rid of the first three billion of us and lead to a campaign of extermination against the remnant of the human race scrabbling in the rubble of what had once been civilization.
By the time the film was released, the news of climate change was already filtering out. Reports like Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature had told us that the machines that could destroy us and our world had, in fact, been invented — a long, long time ago. Almost all of us had been using them almost all the time, from the era of the steam engine and the rise of the British coal economy through the age of railroads and the dawn of petroleum extraction to the birth of the internal-combustion engine and the spread of industrial civilization across the planet. They weren’t “intelligent” and they weren’t in revolt, nor were they led by any one super-machine. It was the cumulative effect of all those devices pumping back into the atmosphere the carbon that plants had so kindly buried in the Earth over the last few hundred million years.
The Superdome is, of course, where thousands of New Orleanians were stranded when Katrina, the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, broke the city’s levees and flooded the place. A maelstrom of institutional failures left people trapped in the scalding cauldron of a drowned city for five days while the world looked on aghast. It was a disaster that had been long foretold, and no one had done much to forestall it. No one had repaired those crummy levees or bothered to create a real evacuation plan for the city — and, unlike the revolt of the machines in T2, the future actually arrived. Like climate change.
For many, it was a foretaste of our new era. It may not be clear what role, if any, climate change played in the generation of that particular hurricane, but it is clear that, in this era, there will be, and indeed already have been, many more such calamities: the deadly freak rainstorms in Sicily, Britain, and the Philippines this fall, the increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic in recent years, as well as in the intensity of droughts, floods, heat waves, crop failures, and the displacement of populations, as well as the massive melting of glaciers and sea ice in the cold places, rising waters in the coastal ones, and oceans going acidic with devastating effects on marine life.
This is the actual nightmarish “movie” of our times. This is what our less-than-intelligent machines have actually wrought. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is already responsible for 150,000 deaths annually. Unchecked it will kill far more, and no one’s measuring the despair in the island nations that may disappear and among those who live in, and off of, the melting arctic. Looking at the Superdome during the commercial breaks in T2, I wondered about the apocalypses already under our belts and the bumpy road ahead.
The Governor of the State with the Uncertain Shoreline
The plot of the movie, as most of you undoubtedly recall, is that the Terminator, also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the low-budget 1984 original, shows up again, sent back from the future 10 years after in the first epic. This time around, he’s not action-heroine Sarah Connor’s nemesis; he’s on the side of humanity, specifically of her son John Connor, the boy with the unambiguous initials who will grow up to lead the resistance to our extermination by machines.
Another more advanced Terminator is, in the meantime, also sent back from the future to destroy the messianic boy and his foulmouthed commando mom. The rest of the movie is a feast of shootouts, chases, explosions, and brilliantly plotted action. It was all surpassingly strange and compelling when I watched it, while wiped out with what was probably swine flu, a fever dream of the past’s nightmares that somehow didn’t manage to anticipate our waking hells.
Now, of course, the movie’s cyborg star is a major force in the real world. He’s my governor, more powerful but less charismatic than in his Terminator incarnation. Recently, he traveled to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to release the state’s 2009 Climate Adaptation Strategy, a 200-page document about the array of devastations the state faces and what countermeasures we can take. Early on, that document states:
“Climate change is already affecting California. Sea levels have risen by as much as seven inches along the California coast over the last century, increasing erosion and pressure on the state’s infrastructure, water supplies, and natural resources. The state has also seen increased average temperatures, more extreme hot days, fewer cold nights, a lengthening of the growing season, shifts in the water cycle with less winter precipitation falling as snow, and both snowmelt and rainwater running off sooner in the year.”
Looking to the future, the report predicted that there would be more fires, less water, loss of coastal lands, and up to $2.5 trillion of real estate put at risk by global warming. The Terminator, or governor, was on the island because, with even modest further rises in sea-level, it will disappear entirely. Hasta la vista, baby.
During the years the Bush Administration refused to do anything at all about climate change, Schwarzenegger arrived at the helm of a state that had already developed major innovations in energy efficiency and in creative price-structuring that took away power-company motives to push higher energy consumption. California had also sought to set new standards for carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles. The bill to do the last of these was crafted in 2002 by Fran Pavley, a newly elected state assemblywoman from Ventura County. When Obama came into office, the roadblocks were finally removed and the bill became the basis for national regulations that will make vehicles 40% more fuel-efficient by 2016. Pavley and Schwarzenegger were there at the Rose Garden signing of the regulations last May.
As Ronald Brownstein reported in The Atlantic this October:
“Ambitious new initiatives have cascaded out of Schwarzenegger’s office — including the two measures raising the renewable-power requirement on utilities, a state subsidy program to encourage the installation of electricity-generating solar panels on 1 million California roofs, and in January 2007, an executive order establishing the nation’s first ‘low-carbon fuel standard’, which requires a reduction of at least 10 percent in the carbon emissions from transportation fuels by 2020. Schwarzenegger signed a Pavley-sponsored bill imposing the nation’s first mandatory statewide reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill required the state by 2020 to roll back its emissions to the 1990 level — a reduction of about 15 percent from the current level. (By separate executive order, Schwarzenegger also committed the state to an 80 percent reduction by 2050.)”
It’d be easy to go with The Atlantic and frame the governor as a hero, but he landed in office by promising to cut vehicle taxes and has been in bed ever since with the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and the world’s fifth biggest corporation, Chevron. Even the organization that sent him to Copenhagen, Climate Action Reserve, is backed by Chevron and Shell — and the oil and coal industries have been the biggest domestic roadblocks to real climate-change measures. Nonetheless, at the Copenhagen climate conference he talked about R20, the alliance of states and provinces he’s co-founded to implement climate change measures at sub-national levels. And he has suggested that climate-change deniers like Palin are “still living in the Stone Age.”
A Magnitude Shy of What Physics Demands
Think of Schwarzenegger as the hinge between the fantasy of Terminator 2 and the reality of our predicament. Think of Obama…
Well, in T2, there’s Miles Dyson, a slender, well-spoken African-American family man who will engineer the computer technology that will create the intelligent machines that will annihilate practically everything. Sarah — Connor, not Palin — sets out to kill him, but her son shows up with his Terminator-Schwarzenegger sidekick, and they instead convince the not-so-mad scientist he’s about to do something terribly, terribly wrong. He then leads them to his workplace to destroy everything he’s ever done. When their violent erasure program sets off alarms that bring in squadrons of cops, Dyson ends up gravely wounded and holding the trigger to set off the explosion that will wipe out the technologies endangering future humanity — and himself.
Seeing this movie with its acts of self-sacrifice, now offers an occasion to ask: when’s the last time you’ve even seen a major politician who’ll put his finger to that trigger with humanity in mind, no less simply do anything that’s bad for reelection?
What if Obama would say what he has to know, what they all have to know, that saving the planet from our slo-mo, unevenly distributed version of Judgment Day requires destroying the status quo and maybe changing everything? What if he’d just learn from Schwarzenegger that you can do quite a lot and still survive politically?
As a disgusted Bill McKibben recently put it, “Obama will propose 4% reductions in [U.S. greenhouse gas] emissions by 2020, compared with 20% for the Europeans (a number the EU said they’d raise to 30% if the U.S. would go along). Scientists, meanwhile, have made it clear that a serious offer would mean about 40% cuts by 2020. So — we’re exactly an order of magnitude shy of what the physics demands.”
Bill, a normally mild-mannered guy who was overjoyed at Obama’s election, called the president’s position “a lie inside a fib coated with spin.”
Thanks to a sudden decision earlier this month by the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the executive branch to address the issue of climate-change gases under the Clean Air Act, Obama has apparently been given superpowers to act without being completely hamstrung by a reluctant Congress. Or as the Center for Biological Diversity put it, “President Obama can lead, rather than follow, by using his power under the Clean Air Act and other laws to achieve deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions from major polluters."
Will he? Probably not. After all, he’s the man who stood up in Prague last April and said: “I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” For a moment, it almost sounded as if he was going to be the action hero of our antinuclear dreams, wiping out one apocalypse that has hung over us for sixty years. And then he added that he didn’t actually expect to see the abolition of such weaponry in his lifetime, though he didn’t say why.
Now, we’re in an action movie in which the fate of the Earth is truly at stake, and the most powerful man on the planet has allowed himself to be hedged in by timidities, compromises, refusals, denials, and the murderous pressure of corporations. Those too-big-to-die corporations are the reason why the Senate is unlikely to ratify any climate-change treaty that threatens to do much of anything. Really, corporations — half-fictitious, semi-immortal behemoths endowed with human rights in the U.S. and possessed of corrosive global power — already are the ruthless cyborgs of our time. They are, after all, actively seeking a world in which they imagine that, somehow, they will survive, even if many of us and much that we love does not. Sorry poor people, young people, Africa, sorry Arctic summer ice, you’re not too big to fail.
100,000 in the Streets Vs. Three Degrees of Heat
I wish life on this planet really were like an action movie. I wish that a handful of heroic individuals could do battle with the mightiest of forces and decisively alter the fate of the world — and then we could all go home to a planet that’s safe. As we know, however, it’s going to be a lot more intricate and complicated than that. There are millions, maybe billions, of players in this one, and its running time is a lot longer than the two weeks of Copenhagen or the two hours of a movie. For our heroines, we get not the commando-siren Sarah Connor, but the sturdy, ex-middle-school American government teacher and now California state senator Fran Pavley, 61.
Really, though, if there’s going to be a superhero in our world, a friendly Terminator to go up against the villains in suits and ties, it will be civil society. Even for the betterment of humankind, civil society won’t get to shoot anyone or drive a truck through a wall. Instead, it’ll organize, educate, build, and pressure, while working to create models and alternatives. It’ll reelect Pavley and shut down Chevron.
There have already been some moments of great drama with this superhero leading the way — the civil disobedience of the Climate Ground Zero mountaintop coal campaign in Appalachia, the Climate Camps in Britain, the Kingsnorth Six climbers who blocked a coal-power-plant’s smokestack in England last October (and were exonerated by a British jury), the underwater cabinet meeting held in the Maldives this October to protest that low-lying island nation’s possible fate. All this was done in part to get people to take an interest in the fate of their planet, which is not so readily reducible to a blockbuster’s plot as we might like.
The pivotal moment just came — and went. This week in Copenhagen, the Bella Center conference, in which a new climate treaty was supposed to be negotiated, stagnated while repression around it grew furiously. It stagnated because the rich countries were unwilling to either reduce their own emissions significantly or pledge meaningful funding to help poor nations transition to greener economies. Or it stagnated because the poor countries didn’t consent to be crucified for crumbs. The United States, which just spent nearly a trillion dollars bailing out its floundering financial corporations and spends about $700 billion annually on the military, offered an obscenely inadequate $1.2 billion in aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion way down the road, but only if an unlikely quantity of factors and conditions were to align beforehand.
Outside the center, the Danish police became increasingly brutal as activists from everywhere, representing the poor, developing, and most affected nations, the Arctic, small farmers, indigenous nations, and the environment demonstrated. Inside nongovernmental groups were increasingly excluded from the discussions and then from the actual space itself. None of this prevented the conference from stalling.
On Monday, negotiators from the African nations shut down the climate talks in fury at attempts to undermine the Kyoto accords — a move designed to make the global situation worse at a meeting that was supposed to make it better. On Wednesday, hundreds of delegates inside the Bella Center protested, walking out to join the thousands already in the streets. By all reports the atmosphere was increasingly tense and repressive.
Everyone whose opinion I respect deplores what just went down in Copenhagen. There's an agreement of sorts, but it was achieved by Obama and a few powerful nations over the objections of the rest in violation of the way the process should have unfolded. Worse, it contains no binding agreements to limit climate change. The so-called agreement acknowledges that we should limit warming to two degrees Celsius, but the actual commitments, if honored, would bring the world to 3.9 degrees Celsius (seven degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Even two degrees, African negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping had said, "would condemn Africa to death." Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed pointed out that three degrees would "spell death for the Maldives and a billion people in low-lying areas." Three degrees, said Joss Garman of the British branch of Greenpeace, "would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, droughts across South America and Australia, and the depletion of ocean habitats."
All that was achieved was consensus that there's a problem and clarity about what that problem is: the refusal of the wealthy corporations and nations to do what benefits humanity and all other species. Money won. Life lost. Copenhagen is over, a battle lost despite valiant efforts, but the war continues.
The crazy thing about this moment in history is that it isn’t at all like Terminator 2, except that the Earth and our species are in terrible danger, and ruthless superhuman forces push us toward our doom. In the movie, Sarah Connor is the only human being who knows what’s coming, and she’s in an Abu Ghraib-like mental hospital for saying and doing something about it. In our reality, anyone who cares to know what the dangers are should have no problem finding out. Most of us have known, or should have known, for quite a long time. Because we’ve done so little, what a decade ago was imagined as the terrible future has actually, like the Terminator, made it here ahead of time.
The learning curve for so many of us, for so many people and even nations, has been speeding up impressively. If we had 40 years to figure it all out, we might be headed toward just the sort of victory that civil society has, in fact, achieved on so many other environmental and human-rights ideas. But there aren’t decades to spare. It needs to happen now. It should have happened even before the last century ended.
Even in my fever dream, with the Superdome just out the window, I couldn’t help noting the key axiom repeated in Terminator 2: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
So here’s the lesson: there are no superheroes but us.
And here’s the question: what are you going to do about it?• Rebecca Solnit is the author, most recently, of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, a book written as a tool for preparing for the onslaught of climate-related disasters in our new anthropocene era. She'll continue to work with 350.org and other climate action groups such as Climate Justice Action.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175183/tomgram%3A__rebecca_solnit%2C_earth%2C_too_big_to_fail
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Dec 28, 2009 3:24:07 GMT 12
A Holiday Season of Warposted December 22, 2009 | TomDispatch.comIn Nightmares Begin ResponsibilitiesWhy War Will Take No Holiday in 2010By Tom EngelhardtExcuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we’re all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day. You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly. Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War. More than eight years later... well, you know the story.
Worse yet, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates that a startling 58% of Americans, otherwise in a mighty gloomy mood, support the president’s latest “surge” in Afghanistan which will extend that war into the dismal future. And worse than that, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, from the point of view of official Washington, next year won’t really count for much. The crucial decisions on both wars will evidently leapfrog 2010. So, on that score, we might as well just mark the year off on our calendars now.
2010: pure loss. But before I go into the details, let me try this another way.
In his 1937 short story with an unforgettable title — “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” — Delmore Schwartz’s unnamed narrator imagines himself “as if” in a “motion picture theatre.” He’s watching a silent film — already then a long-gone form — “an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps.” It’s not any movie, however, but one about his parents’ awkward, uncertain courtship, and there comes a moment when his character suddenly leaps up in the crowded theater of his dream life and shouts at the flickering images of his still undecided (future) parents: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”
For just an instant, that is, he’s willing to obliterate himself, his very being, in order to stop a nightmare he knows will otherwise occur.
This unnerving fictional moment, which I want you to hold in abeyance for a while, came to my mind recently — in the context of TomDispatch.
Bombing Afghanistan Back to the Stone Age
Our endless wars are nightmares. Few enough would disagree with that, even, I suspect, among the supportive 58% in that poll or the 54% who “approve of the president’s performance as commander-in-chief.” If only we could wake up.
I was reminded of our strange dream-state recently when I reread the article that sparked the creation of what became TomDispatch. I first stumbled across it in the fall of 2001, after the Towers came down in my hometown, after that acrid smell of burning made its way to my neighborhood and into everything, after I traveled to “Ground Zero” (as it was already being called) to view those vast otherworldly shards of destruction via nearby side streets, after I spent weeks reading the ever narrower, ever more war-oriented news coverage in this country, and after I watched George W. Bush and Company mainlining fear directly into the American bloodstream, selling the eternal terror of terror and the president’s Global War on Terror that so conveniently went with it.
It was obvious that war was on the way, and that the men (and woman) who were leading us into it had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans. Somewhere in that period, probably in late October 2001, a friend sent me a piece by an Afghan-American living in California that spurred me to modest action.
His name was Tamim Ansary and he posted it online on September 16th, just five days after the attacks on New York and Washington, having listened to right-wing talk radio rev up to an instant fever pitch about “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age.” His piece went viral and finally reached me — I was hardly online in those days — by email sometime in October after the Bush administration had begun the bombing campaign in Afghanistan that preceded its invasion-by-proxy of that country.
Ansary wrote “as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden,” and yet his piece was a desperate warning against the American war to come. He wrote with passion and conviction, with knowledge of Afghanistan and a kind of imagery that was otherwise not then part of our American world:
“We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.”
It was the image of our bombs only “stirring the rubble” that stunned me. I had been reading the papers for weeks and had seen nothing like it. It seemed to catch the forgotten nightmare of the Afghan past as well as the nightmare to come at a moment when the only nightmare on the American mind was our own. Our own chosen imagery was then playing out in repeated public rites in which we hailed ourselves as the planet’s greatest victims, survivors, and dominators, while leaving no roles for others in our about-to-be-global drama — except, of course, for greatest Evildoer (which Osama bin Laden filled magnificently). It wasn’t only our foreign policy that was switching onto the “unilateral” track, so was our imagery.
Small wonder, then, that the strangeness of that single image moved me to gather the email addresses of a small group of friends and relatives, copy the piece into an email, add a note above it indicating that it was a must-read, and with that modest gesture, quite unbeknownst to me, launch TomDispatch.com.
Ansary, an Afghan who had been living here for 35 years, wasn’t thinking only of Afghan lives and nightmares, however. He had American lives and nightmares in mind as well. He wrote about Americans dying, about the dangers of Pakistan, and especially about bin Laden’s dream — to draw this country’s military into the backlands of Islam and start a war of civilizations — while pleading against an invasion that, even on September 16th, was unstoppable. Of bin Laden, he wrote:
“It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?”
In the Biggest Dreams, the Largest Miscalculations
Well, yes, as it turned out, someone did have the “belly” for just that — and far more. One thing you can still say about the various characters who made up the Bush administration, including George’s one-percent-doctrine vice president, all those neocons ominously stashed away in the Pentagon, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who, within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, was already urging aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq): they were thinking geo-strategically. They had the globe, the whole damn thing, in their sights. They were also desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do. They believed that the mightiest, most advanced military force on the planet could shock-and-awe anyone into submission, and quite unilaterally at that.
As still unrepentant Cold Warriors, even with the Soviet Union a decade gone, they were still eager to roll back Russia’s borders and influence, especially in oil-rich Central Asia, and so turn that rump empire into a second- or third-rate state of no future importance to the U.S. They were eager to encircle Iran with bases and take down the mullahs. (As the infamous neocon quip of that moment went: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”) With a president and vice president who were former energy company execs and a national security adviser for whom Chevron had named a double-hulled oil tanker, they tended to be riveted by energy flows and how to control them.
They had their minds, that is, on a very big picture — nothing less than the creation of a future Pax Americana abroad and Pax Republicana at home. And they truly believed that Pax could be established at the tip of a cruise missile. Having been shocked-and-awed themselves on 9/11, they were more than ready to return the favor, to use that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” as an excuse to do their damnedest, including, as they bragged at the time, targeting up to 60 countries, mostly in what they liked to call “the arc of instability” (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet) where terrorists were supposed to operate at will. Nothing, that is, was too grandiose for them.
They clearly saw the chance of a lifetime and grabbed it like the opportunists they were, and at first, it looked like they were right on the mark. Two "victories" were the result, each accomplished in a matter of weeks within less than a year-and-a-half of each other. The Taliban were gone in nanoseconds; bin Laden almost in their grasp and driven underground; Saddam Hussein swept into the dustbin of history. It seemed — to them above all — like a miracle of modern military power. Who could now withstand them? The answer was obvious: no one.
The rag-tag oppositional forces left in Afghanistan and Iraq were like so many flies to be swatted away. So they sent their viceroys into Kabul and Baghdad to clean things up, which, especially in the case of Iraq, meant disbanding that country's military, privatizing its economy, and opening up the oil industry of one of the most energy-rich regions on the planet to the mighty transnational (and significantly American) oil giants. In the meantime, the Pentagon would build massive military bases and prepare to garrison both countries till hell froze over. The official documents they wrote for, and sometimes in the name of, the newly “liberated” Iraqis read like fever-dream versions of nineteenth century imperial fantasies.
When reality up and bit them hard, they were already looking to the future. They were going to crush Syria, drive Iran to its knees, make OPEC and the Saudis grovel (with the help of increased Iraqi oil output), bring China to heel, and, oh yes, get the terrorists, too.
What a dream! What a miscalculation! What a nightmare for the rest of us! Hundreds of thousands (or more) now dead, millions of refugees, ongoing war, a region — those very oil heartlands — destabilized, and of course the massive draining of American resources in two major wars (and various minor conflicts) on which almost a trillion dollars has already been spent and another trillion could easily go down the drain.
And where are we eight years later? The Chinese, the Russians, the Malaysians, and others have picked up those energy dreams and, in Iraq and elsewhere, translated them into success without spending a cent on war. The Russians are back in Central Asia. The Chinese are now sending Central Asian natural gas China-wards through a newly opened pipeline. Meanwhile, the American oil giants have ended up with few of the spoils. The American Army is a wreck and two minority insurgencies with but tens of thousands of relatively lightly armed guerrillas have made a mockery of that military’s supposed power to shock and awe anybody. The latest laugh-fest being that insurgents have, according to the Wall Street Journal, hacked into the most advanced weaponry the Pentagon has, the video feeds from its latest drone aircraft, with a $26 piece of off-the-shelf Russian software. In other words, while, at the cost of multimillions, Americans were capable of looking at battlefield scenes fit for destruction from distant Langley, Virginia, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, or various secret sites in the Greater Middle East, so were Iraqi, and possibly Afghan, guerrillas and terrorists on their laptops for nada.
Eight years later, the Bush administration’s dreams of a Pax Americana and its domestic twin are in that dustbin of history along with Saddam Hussein. And all the big ideas that went with our two disastrous wars seem to have been sluiced down the drain as well. And yet, in both countries, the giant bases remain like permanent scars on the land, as do the wars. No dust heap of history for them. Not yet, anyway. Our wars are instead to proceed without rhyme or reason. And among those deciding U.S. policy, military and civilian, none (I have no doubt) have placed a call to Tamim Ansary, wherever he may be. It doesn’t pay to be right in our world.
I don’t want to claim, of course, that no reasons are offered any more in explanation of our wars: There’s Osama bin Laden, for starters, as President Obama reminded us recently. No one in our world knows where he is, or even, at this point, if he is. But if he still exists, he must be dancing a jig. With possibly fewer than 100 operatives in Afghanistan and another few hundred in Pakistan (according to the best calculations of the Obama administration), he’s somehow managed to bog imperial America down in the tribal backlands of Central (and increasingly South) Asia.
Beyond the damage inflicted on 9/11, he’s already helped drain the United States of nearly a trillion dollars in war costs and counting. His "presence" seems to insure that, sometime in the near future, the Obama administration will further compound the folly of the last eight years by attempting to completely destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan with air attacks on its restive province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership is supposedly hiding.
If back in 2002 or 2003 you had presented such a scenario — a few hundred terrorists tying us up in a trillion-dollar war — you would have been laughed out of the country; yet it’s safe to say that what’s happening now represents, for bin Laden, triumph on a level that the attacks of 9/11, no matter how televisually spectacular, could never come close to. And here’s the worst of it in this holiday season, peering into the murk of 2010, all I can see is signs of endless war. As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fuggedaboutit.
2010: A Year of No Significance
Just to take our wars one at a time:
In Afghanistan, here’s what we know. The president is surging at least 30,000 troops into that country, reportedly accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 private contractors, and an extra crew of civilian employees of the U.S. government as well. What initially was announced as a six-month surge is now expected to last 11-12 months (if things “line up perfectly,” according to the general in charge). That means the surge itself will probably still be underway next November. Fittingly, then, the Obama administration has made it clear that it won’t even consider beginning what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called a “thorough review of how we're doing” in Afghanistan until December 2010, a process that, based on the last set of presidential deliberations, could last months. Put another way, war in the present escalated form is simply what’s on the books for 2010. Period.
Moreover, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry recently assured Afghans that July 2011, the date the president mentioned for beginning a withdrawal of American forces, is not “a deadline” of any sort. According to Thomas Day of the McClatchy newspapers, he insisted, in fact, “that a strong American military presence will remain in Afghanistan long after July 2011.”
In Iraq, on the other hand, the war is officially ending. In the last months of the Bush administration, the U.S. negotiated an agreement with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to withdraw all its “combat troops” by August 2010 and the rest of its troops by the end of 2011. Ever since, on both counts, fudging has been the order of the day. To begin with, all troops are, in a sense, “combat” troops, but it soon became clear that some of those now defined as such might be conveniently relabeled “advisors” or “trainers.” This has left a good deal of flexibility as to just who has to be withdrawn by this coming August. As for “all” the troops, although next to no media attention has been paid, the weaving and bobbing has begun there, too. While visiting Iraq recently, Gates managed to sideline 2010 as a date of significance, while angling for an unending, if smaller scale, occupation of that country. Under the headline, “Gates Expects New Sanctions on Iran,” for instance, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times reported this:
“The defense secretary also spoke about America’s involvement in Iraq, saying that the administration expects that some United States forces might remain in an advisory capacity in Iraq after 2011, the deadline for all American troops to withdraw from the country. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a “train, equip and advise” role beyond the end of 2011’, Mr. Gates said. He added, ‘I suspect as we get on through 2010 and begin approaching 2011, the Iraqis themselves will probably have an interest in this’.”
So scratch 2010 when it comes to Washington’s Iraq plans, and for 2012, start imagining thousands, or even tens of thousands of American “advisors” and “mentors” (not, heaven forbid, “combat troops”) on a few of those giant bases the Pentagon built. Keep an eye, in particular, on massive Balad Air Base — since the U.S. quite consciously never helped the Iraqi military build up a real air force of its own — and the monster base complex, Camp Victory, on the edge of Baghdad. Only if those are turned over to the Iraqis would an American “withdrawal” seem a plausible reality. (Keep in mind as well that the Bush administration in its planning for the occupation of Iraq in 2003 always expected to withdraw all but perhaps 30,000 American troops who were to be garrisoned on out-of-the-way American-built bases for the long haul.)
And when Gates says such things, it’s no small matter. After all, what’s now being called “Obama’s war” might at least as reasonably be called “Gates’s war,” as might the war in Iraq that Obama is ostensibly ending. In both countries, Washington’s basic policy was set in the last months of the Bush administration when Gates, then as now secretary of defense, was already ascendant. The first 11,000 troops of “Obama’s” surge were, for instance, dispatched by the Bush administration, even if they only left for Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama presidency.
Similarly, the new Pentagon budget — a Gates-supervised document in its planning stages before Obama arrived — is larger than the last Bush-era budget, and that’s without the supplemental bill for Afghan surge funding, now estimated at $30-$40 billion (and likely to rise), that will be submitted to Congress sometime next year. The “new” military strategy for fighting our wars, counterinsurgency (or COIN), isn’t an Obama-era creation either. It’s the baby of Bush’s favorite general and Iraq surge commander David Petraeus. Advanced to the post of Centcom commander by Bush, he is now the key military figure who oversees both our wars in the Greater Middle East. In other words, in war policy the continuity between the post-Cheney Bush era and the Obama one is striking, not to say overwhelming, and given the fact that Gates and Petraeus hold such crucial posts, that’s hardly surprising, just depressing as hell.
These are men already preparing for “the next war” and, in that sense, Afghanistan is also our main laboratory for the weaponry and concepts that will animate our future conflicts. Its skies and villages are the testing grounds for endless war, American-style.
Full Drone Ahead
So here’s my fantasy this holiday season. If I could return to the movie theater of those early post-9/11 days, I’d like to stand up in that well-packed place and shout: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, impoverishment, death, and a population whose character will be monstrous.”
I’d like, that is, to obliterate TomDispatch — for without the Afghan invasion and war, the one that, all these years later, only grows wider, my website would never have existed.
And yet, here’s the saddest thing: I know full well that its future is assured as long as I care to do it. Our American way of life is a way of war. War and more war. 2010, a snap. 2011, no problem. 2012, 2013, Ambassador Eikenberry guarantees it. 2018, 2025, 2047? Don’t worry, we already have one nifty bomber (advanced battlefield surveillance system, dogfighting drone) on the drawing boards for you!
Even without the geopolitical thinkers of the Bush administration, even without the necessary set of rationales, war has a force of its own. Especially in our country, it has its own powerful set of interests, its lobbies and enthusiasts, its powerful weapons makers, its law makers, planners, and dreamers. It has its own head of steam. After a while, it seems, it doesn’t need explanations to keep itself going. It’s self-propelled.
None of what’s happening in the world of American war may make much sense any more, not even in terms Washington’s foreign policy power brokers understand, but no matter. They — and so all of us — are already in the grip of a nightmare, and nothing, it seems, can wake us. So, for the last days of this year, as for the days that preceded them, as for all the days of next year, it’s full drone ahead and damn the torpedoes. That’s our American world, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.
Perhaps, though, it’s worth keeping one modest thought in mind:
In nightmares, too, begin responsibilities.• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175184/tomgram%3A__a_holiday_season_of_war
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 4, 2010 19:37:34 GMT 12
The Year of the Assassinposted January 03, 2010 | TomDispatch.comAn American World of WarWhat to Watch for in 2010By Tom Engelhardt and Nick TurseAccording to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. We don’t name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be called the Year of the Assassin.
We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom. After all, the shock of September 11, 2001 was that “war” came to “the homeland,” a mighty blow delivered against the very symbols of our economic, military, and — had Flight 93 not gone down in a field in Pennsylvania — political power.
Since that day, however, war has been a stranger in our land. With the rarest of exceptions, like Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, this country has remained a world without war or any kind of mobilization for war. No other major terrorist attacks, not even victory gardens, scrap-metal collecting, or rationing. And certainly no war tax to pay for our post-9/11 trillion-dollar “expeditionary forces” sent into battle abroad. Had we the foresight to name them, the last few years domestically might have reflected a different kind of carnage — 2006, the Year of the Subprime Mortgage; 2007, the Year of the Bonus; 2008, the Year of the Meltdown; 2009, the Year of the Bailout. And perhaps some would want to label 2010, prematurely or not, the Year of Recovery.
Although our country delivers war regularly to distant lands in the name of our “safety,” we don’t really consider ourselves at war (despite the endless talk of “supporting our troops”), and the money that has simply poured into Pentagon coffers, and then into weaponry and conflicts is, with rare exceptions, never linked to economic distress in this country. And yet, if we are no nation of warriors, from the point of view of the rest of the world we are certainly the planet’s foremost war-makers. If money talks, then war may be what we care most about as a society and fund above all else, with the least possible discussion or debate.
In fact, according to military expert William Hartung, the Pentagon budget has risen in every year of the new century, an unprecedented run in our history. We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second. We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces, and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that’s without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs). We garrison the planet in a way no empire or nation in history has ever done. And we plan for the future, for “the next war” — on the ground, on the seas, and in space — in a way that is surely unique. If our two major wars of the twenty-first century in Iraq and Afghanistan are any measure, we also get less bang for our buck than any nation in recent history.
So, let’s pause a moment as the New Year begins and take stock of ourselves as what we truly are: the preeminent war-making machine on planet Earth. Let’s peer into the future, and consider just what the American way of war might have in store for us in 2010. Here are 10 questions, the answers to which might offer reasonable hints as to just how much U.S. war efforts are likely to intensify in the Greater Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia, in the year to come.
1. How busted will the largest defense budget in history be in 2010?
Strange, isn’t it, that the debate about hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care costs in Congress can last almost a year, filled with turmoil and daily headlines, while a $636 billion defense budget can pass in a few days, as it did in late December, essentially without discussion and with nary a headline in sight? And in case you think that $636 billion is an honest figure, think again — and not just because funding for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and actual “homeland defense,” among other things most countries would chalk up as military costs, wasn’t included.
If you want to put a finger to the winds of war in 2010, keep your eye on something else not included in that budget: the Obama administration’s upcoming supplemental funding request for the Afghan surge. In his West Point speech announcing his surge decision, the president spoke of sending 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in 2010 at a cost of $30 billion. In news reports, that figure quickly morphed into “$30-$40 billion”, none of it in the just-passed Pentagon budget. To fund his widening war, sometime in the first months of the New Year, the president will have to submit a supplemental budget to Congress — something the Bush administration did repeatedly to pay for George W.’s wars, and something this president, while still a candidate, swore he wouldn’t do. Nonetheless, it will happen. So keep your eye on that $30 billion figure. Even that distinctly low-ball number is going to cause discomfort and opposition in the president’s party — and yet there’s no way it will fully fund this year’s striking escalation of the war. The question is: How high will it go or, if the president doesn’t dare ask this Congress for more all at once, how will the extra funds be found? Keep your eye out, then, for hints of future supplemental budgets, because fighting the Afghan War (forget Iraq) over the next decade could prove a near trillion-dollar prospect.
Neither battles won nor al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders killed will be the true measure of victory or defeat in the Afghan War. For Americans at home, even victory as modestly defined by this administration — blunting the Taliban’s version of a surge — could prove disastrous in terms of our financial capabilities. Guns and butter? That’s going to be a surefire no-go. So keep watching and asking: How busted could the U.S. be by 2011?
2. Will the U.S. Air Force be the final piece in the Afghan surge?
As 2010 begins, almost everything is in surge mode in Afghanistan, including rising numbers of U.S. troops, private contractors, State Department employees, and new bases. In this period, only the U.S. Air Force (drones excepted) has stood down. Under orders from Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal, based on the new make-nice counterinsurgency strategy he’s implementing, air power is anything but surging. The use of the Air Force, even in close support of U.S. troops in situations in which Afghan civilians are anywhere nearby, has been severely restricted. There has already been grumbling about this in and around the military. If things don’t go well — and quickly — in the expanding war, expect frustration to grow and the pressure to rise to bring air power to bear. Already unnamed intelligence officials are leaking warnings that, with the Taliban insurgency expanding its reach, “time is running out.” Counterinsurgency strategies are notorious for how long they take to bear fruit (if they do at all). When Americans are dying, maintaining a surge without a surge of air power is sure to be a test of will and patience (neither of which is an American strong suit). So keep your eye on the Air Force next year. If the planes start to fly more regularly and destructively, you’ll know that things aren’t looking up for General McChrystal and his campaign.
3. How big will the American presence in Pakistan be as 2010 ends?
Let’s start with the fact that it’s already bigger than most of us imagine. Thanks to Nation magazine reporter Jeremy Scahill, we know that, from a base in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, officers of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, with the help of hired hands from the notorious private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), “plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Small numbers of U.S. Special Forces operatives have also reportedly been sent in to train Pakistan’s special forces. U.S. spies are in the country. U.S. missile- and bomb-armed drones, both CIA- and Air Force-controlled, have been conducting escalating operations in the country’s tribal borderlands. U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted at least four cross-border raids into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands unsanctioned by the Pakistani government or military (only one of which was publicly reported in this country). And the CIA and the State Department have been attempting (against some Pakistani resistance) to build up their personnel and facilities in-country. This, mind you, is only what we know in a situation in which secrecy is the order of the day and rumors fly.
In the meantime, the Obama administration has been threatening to widen its drone war (and possibly other operations) to the powder-keg province of Baluchistan, where most of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership reportedly resides (evidently under Pakistani protection) and to the fighters of the Haqqani network, linked to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, in the Pakistani border province of North Waziristan. Right now, these threats from Washington are clearly meant to motivate the Pakistani military to do the job instead. But as that is unlikely — both groups are seen by its military as key players in the country’s future anti-Indian policies in Afghanistan — they may not remain mere threats for long. Any such U.S. moves are only likely to widen the Af-Pak war and further destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan. In addition, the Pakistani military is not powerless vis-à-vis the U.S. For one thing, as Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation’s “Dreyfuss Report” recently pointed out, it has a potential stranglehold on the tortuous U.S. supply lines into Afghanistan, already under attack by Taliban militants, that make the war there possible.
Pakistan is the Catch-22 of Obama’s surge. As in the Vietnam War years, sanctuaries across the border ensure limited success in any escalating war effort, but going after those sanctuaries in a major way would be a war-widening move of genuine desperation. As with the Air Force in Afghanistan, watch Pakistan not just for spreading drone operations, but for the use of U.S. troops. If by year’s end Special Operations forces or U.S. troops are periodically on the ground in that country, don’t be shocked. However it may be explained, this will represent a dangerous failure of the first order.
4. How much smaller will the American presence in Iraq be?
Barack Obama swept into office, in part, on a pledge to end the U.S. war in Iraq. Almost a year after he entered the White House, more than 100,000 U.S. troops are still deployed in that country (about the same number as in February 2004). Still, plans developed at the end of the Bush presidency, and later confirmed by President Obama, have set the U.S. on an apparent path of withdrawal. On this the president has been unambiguous. “Let me say this as plainly as I can,” he told a military audience in February 2009. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end... I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.” However, Robert Gates, his secretary of defense, has not been so unequivocal. While recently visiting Iraq, he disclosed that the U.S. Air Force would likely continue to operate in that country well into the future. He also said: “I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continues a train, equip, and advise role beyond the end of 2011.”
For 2010, expect platitudes about withdrawal from the President and other administration spokespeople, while Defense Department officials and military commanders offer more “pragmatic” (and realistic) assessments. Keep an eye out for signs this year of a coming non-withdrawal withdrawal in 2011.
5. What will the New Year mean for the Pentagon's base-building plans in our war zones?
As the U.S. war in Afghanistan ramps up, look for American bases there to continue along last year’s path, becoming bigger, harder, more numerous, and more permanent-looking. As estimates of the time it will take to get the president’s extra boots on the ground in Afghanistan increase, look as well for the construction of more helipads, fuel pits, taxiways, and tarmac space on the forward operating bases sprouting especially across the southern parts of that country. These will be meant to speed the movement of surge troops into rural battle zones, while eschewing increasingly dangerous ground routes.
In Iraq, expect the further consolidation of a small number of U.S. mega-bases as American troops pull back to ever fewer sites offering an ever lower profile in that country. Keep your eyes, in particular, on giant Balad Air Base and on Camp Victory outside Baghdad. These were built for the long term. If Washington doesn’t begin preparing to turn them over to the Iraqis, then start thinking 2012 and beyond. Elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region, look for the U.S. military to continue upgrading its many bases, while militarily working to strengthen the security forces of country after autocratic country, from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, in part to continue to rattle Iran’s cage. If those bases keep growing, don’t imagine us drawing down in the region any time soon.
6. Will the U.S. and Israel thwart the Iranian insurgency?
Iran has long been under siege. A founding member of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” the Islamic Republic was long on his administration’s hit list. It also found itself in the unenviable position of watching the American military occupy and garrison two bordering countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, while also building or bolstering bases in nearby Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Obama administration is now poised to increase key military aid to Iran’s nemesis, Israel, and the Pentagon has flooded allied regimes in the region with advanced weaponry. Years of saber-rattling and sanctions, encirclement and threats nonetheless seemed to have little palpable effect. In 2009, however, a disputed election brought Iranians into the streets and, months later, they’re still there.
What foreign militarism couldn’t do, ordinary Iranians themselves now threaten to accomplish. In earlier street protests, young middle-class activists in Tehran chanting “Where is our vote?" were beaten and martyred by security forces. Today, the protests continue and oppositional Iranians from all social strata are refusing to retreat while, when provoked, sometimes fighting back against the police or the regime’s fearsome Basiji militia, even inducing some of them to step aside or switch sides.
A continuing cycle of ever-spreading arrests, protests, and violence in 2010 threatens to further destabilize the regime. How Washington reacts could, however, deeply affect what happens. The memory of the CIA’s toppling of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 is still alive in Iran. Any perceived U.S. interference could have grave results for the Iranian insurgency, as could Israeli actions. Recently, President Obama, evidently trying to bring the Chinese into line on the question of imposing fiercer sanctions, reportedly told China’s president that the United States could not restrain Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities much longer. Such an Israeli attack would certainly strengthen the current Iranian regime; so, undoubtedly, would pressure to increase potentially crippling sanctions on that country over its nuclear program. Either or both would help further cement the current tumultuous status quo in the Middle East.
7. Will Yemen become the fourth major front in Washington’s global war?
George W. Bush unabashedly proclaimed himself a “war president.” President Obama seems to be taking up the same mantle. Right now, the Obama administration’s war fronts include the inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a not-so-covert war in Pakistan, and a potential new war in Yemen. (There are also rarely commented upon ongoing military actions in the Philippines and a U.S.-aided drug war in Colombia, as well as periodic strikes in Somalia.) Though the surge in Afghanistan and Pakistan was supposed to contain al-Qaeda there, the U.S. now finds itself focusing on yet another country and another of that organization’s morphing offspring.
In 2002, a USA Today article about a targeted assassination in Yemen began: “Opening up a visible new front in the war on terror, U.S. forces launched a pinpoint missile strike in Yemen...” Just over seven years later, following multiple U.S. cruise missiles launched into the country and targeted air strikes by the air force of the U.S.-aided Yemeni regime against “suspected hide-outs of Al Qaeda,” the New York Times announced, “In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.” In the wake of a botched airplane terror attack by a single young Nigerian Muslim, and credit-taking by a group calling itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the usual cheery crew of U.S. war advocates are lining up behind the next potential front in the war on terror. (Senator Joseph Lieberman: "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war.") What began as a one-off Bush assassination effort now threatens to become another of Obama’s wars.
The U.S. has not only sent Special Forces teams into the country, but is now pouring tens of millions of dollars into Yemen’s security forces in a dramatic move to significantly arm yet another Middle Eastern country. At the same time, U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia — whose alliance with Washington ignited the current war with al-Qaeda — is aiding the Yemeni forces in a war against Houthi rebels there.
This is a witch’s brew of trouble. Keep your eye on Yemen (with an occasional side glance at Somalia, the failed state across the Gulf of Aden). Expect more funding, more trainers, more proxy warfare, and possibly a whole new conflict for 2010.
8. How brutal will the American way of war be in 2010?
When it comes to war, American-style, the key word of 2009 was “counterinsurgency” or COIN. Think of it as the kindly version of war the American way, a strategy based on “clearing and holding” territory and “protecting” the civilian population. Its value, as expounded by Afghan War commander McChrystal, lies not in killing the enemy but in winning over “the people.” On paper, it sounds good, like a kinder, gentler version of war, but historically counterinsurgency operations have almost invariably gone into the ditch of brutality. So here’s one word you should keep your eyes out for in 2010: “counterterrorism.” Consider it the dark underside of counterinsurgency. Instead of boots on the ground, it’s bullets to the head.
General McChrystal was, until recently, a counterterrorism guy. He ran the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan. His operatives were referred to, more or less politely, as “manhunters”. Think: assassins. With McChrystal, a general who credits his large-scale assassination program for a great deal of the Iraq surge’s success in 2007, it was just a matter of time before counterterrorism — which is just terrorism put in uniform and given an anodyne name — was ramped up in Afghanistan (and undoubtedly Pakistan as well). Though the planes may still be grounded, the special ops guys who kick in doors in the middle of the night and have often been responsible for grievous civilian casualties will evidently be going at it full tilt.
As 2009 ended, the news that black-ops forces were being loosed in a significant way was just hitting the press. So watch for that word “counterterrorism.” If it proliferates, you’ll know that the expanding Afghan War is getting down and dirty in a big way. For Americans, 2010 could be the year of the assassin.
9. Where will the drones go in 2010?
If there’s one thing to keep your eye on in the coming year, it might be the unmanned aerial vehicles — drones — flown secretly, in the case of the Air Force, from distant al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar and, in the case of the CIA, even more distantly out of Langley, Virginia. American drones are already in a widening air war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, while Washington threatens to create an even wider one. Think of these robotic planes as the leading edge of global war, American-style. While “hot pursuit” into Pakistan may still be forbidden to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the drones have long had a kind of hot-pursuit carte blanche in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands.
Perhaps more important, they can, to steal a Star Trek line, boldly go where no man has gone before. Since the first drone assassination attack of the Global War on Terror — in Yemen in 2002 — in which several men, reputedly al-Qaeda militants, were incinerated inside a car, drones have been taking war into new territory. They have already struck in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and possibly Somalia. As the first robot terminators of our age, they symbolize the loosing of American war-making powers from the oversight of Congress and the American people. In principle, they have made borders (hence national sovereignty) increasingly insignificant as assassination attacks can be launched 24/7 against those we deem our enemies, on the basis of unknown intelligence or evidence.
With our drones, there is little price to be paid if, as has regularly enough been the case, those enemies turn out not to be in the right place at the right time and others die in their stead. Globally, we have become the world’s leading state assassins — a judge, jury, and executioner beyond the bounds of all accountability. In essence, those pilot-less planes turn us into a law of war unto ourselves. It’s a chilling development. Watch for it to spread in 2010, and keep an eye out for which countries, fielding their own drones, follow down the path we’re pioneering, for in our age all war-making developments invariably proliferate — and fast.
The Element of Surprise
We know one thing: 2010 will be another year of war for the United States and, from assassination campaigns to new fronts in what is no longer called the Global War on Terror but is no less global or based on terror, it could get a lot uglier. The Obama administration may, from time to time, talk withdrawal, but across the Middle East and Central Asia, the Pentagon and its contractors are digging in. In the meantime, more money, not less, is being put into preparations and planning for future wars. As William Hartung points out, “if the government’s current plans are carried out, there will be yearly increases in military spending for at least another decade.”
When it comes to war, the only questions are: How wide? How much? Not: How long? Washington’s answer to that question has already been given, not in public pronouncements, but in that Pentagon budget and the planning that goes with it: forever and a day.
Of course, only diamonds are forever. Sooner or later, like great imperial powers of the past, we, too, will find that the stress of fighting a continuous string of wars in distant lands in inhospitable climes tells on us. Whether we “win” or not in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Yemen, we lose.
Which brings us to our last question:
10. What will surprise us in 2010?
It would be the height of hubris to imagine that we can truly see into the future, especially when it comes to war. It is, in fact, Washington’s hubris to believe itself in control of its own war-making destiny, whether via shock-and-awe tactics that are certain to work, a netcentric military-lite that can’t fail, or most recently, a force dedicated to a “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan and, in the future, globally (under the ominous new acronym GCOIN).
The essence of war is surprise. So, despite all those billions of dollars and the high-tech weaponry, and the nine areas discussed above, keep your eyes open for the unexpected and confounding, and in the meantime, welcome to the grim spectacle of war American-style as the second decade of the twenty-first century begins in turmoil.• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.• Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175185/tomgram%3A_the_year_of_the_assassin
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 6, 2010 13:16:45 GMT 12
Michael Klare — The Blowback Effect, 2020posted January 05, 2010 | TomDispatch.comYou can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world. The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves — in Afghanistan. In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals. The ironies were legion and painfully visible.
Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories. “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”
Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are: one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair. In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way: “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?... The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan's? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only ‘victory’ to be found would be ‘won’ by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their ‘treasure’ and our ‘blood’." At Foreign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in: “While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and ‘investing’ billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”
Under George W. Bush, the U.S. set out, in part, to turn the Greater Middle East into an American “lake” of energy reserves via two invasions, and you know how that worked out. The Chinese, on the other hand, only last year sent their warships abroad — to hunt pirates as part of an international flotilla in the Gulf of Aden — for the first time since the eunuch Zheng He commanded a Ming dynasty armada that reached Africa six centuries ago. Unfortunately, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, makes clear below, China’s leaders are as unlikely to learn from our deepest mistakes as they were 30-odd years ago when China’s post-Cultural Revolution leadership looked our way and made a logical but calamitous decision: that the auto industry — all those millions of individual cars burning fossil fuels — would be a crucial pillar of their future industrial development.
Right now, they may still seem to be acting out a key lesson of this American moment: Stay off the hard stuff. You know, all that advanced weaponry (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it), all those aircraft carrier battle groups, all those “expeditionary forces” ready to be sent thousands of miles from home to fight “little wars.” Once again, however, as Klare suggests, our present symbols of “power” are likely to be their paragon and the future will be a mess. It’s not enough, it seems, to make money, not war. Once you have the money, it has to be spent on something and our imaginations remain so limited.
Too bad. Here’s where you could only wish the future might be a little less predictable. No such luck, Klare tells us, when it comes to military power as the measure of greatness on planet Earth in the second decade of the twenty-first century. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ The Second DecadeThe World in 2020By Michael T. KlareAs the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all. If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects: the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.
By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it. Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space. Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.
Less normal — and so the wild card of the second decade (and beyond) — is intervention by the planet itself. Blowback, which we think of as a political phenomenon, will by 2020 have gained a natural component. Nature is poised to strike back in unpredictable ways whose effects could be unnerving and possibly devastating.
What, then, will be the dominant characteristics of the second decade of the twenty-first century? Prediction of this sort is, of course, inherently risky, but extrapolating from current trends, four key aspects of second-decade life can be discerned: the rise of China; the (relative) decline of the United States; the expanding role of the global South; and finally, possibly most dramatically, the increasing impact of a roiling environment and growing resource scarcity.
Let’s start with human history and then make our way into the unknown future history of the planet itself.
The Ascendant Dragon
That China has become a leading world power is no longer a matter of dispute. That country’s new-found strength was on full display at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December where it became clear that no meaningful progress was possible on the issue of global warming without Beijing’s assent. Its growing prominence was also evident in the way it responded to the Great Recession, as it poured multi-billions of dollars into domestic recovery projects, thereby averting a significant slowdown in its economy. It spent many tens of billions more on raw materials and fresh investments in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, helping to ignite recovery in those regions, too.
If China is an economic giant today, it will be a powerhouse in 2020. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will jump from an estimated $3.3 trillion in 2010 to $7.1 trillion in 2020 (in constant 2005 dollars), at which time its economy will exceed all others save that of the United States. In fact, its GDP then should exceed those of all the nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East combined. As the decade proceeds, China is expected to move steadily up the ladder of technological enhancement, producing ever more sophisticated products, including advanced green energy and transportation systems that will prove essential to future post-carbon economies. These gains, in turn, will give it increasing clout in international affairs.
China will undoubtedly also use its growing wealth and technological prowess to enhance its military power. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is already the world’s second largest military spender, although the $85 billion it invested in its armed forces in 2008 was a pale shadow of the $607 billion allocated by the United States. In addition, its forces remain technologically unsophisticated and its weapons are no match for the most modern U.S., Japanese, and European equipment. However, this gap will narrow significantly in the century’s second decade as China devotes more resources to military modernization.
The critical question is: How will China use its added power to achieve its objectives?
Until now, China's leaders have wielded its growing strength cautiously, avoiding behavior that would arouse fear or suspicion on the part of neighbors and economic partners. It has instead employed the power of the purse and “soft power” — vigorous diplomacy, development aid, and cultural ties — to cultivate friends and allies. But will China continue to follow this “harmonious,” non-threatening approach as the risks of forcefully pursuing its national interests diminish? This appears unlikely.
A more assertive China that showed what the Washington Post called “swagger” was already evident in the final months of 2009 at the summit meetings between presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao in Beijing and Copenhagen. In neither case did the Chinese side seek a “harmonious” outcome: In Beijing, it restricted Obama’s access to the media and refused to give any ground on Tibet or tougher sanctions on key energy-trading partner Iran; at a crucial moment in Copenhagen, it actually sent low-ranking officials to negotiate with Obama — an unmistakable slight — and forced a compromise that absolved China of binding restraints on carbon emissions.
If these summits are any indication, Chinese leaders are prepared to play global hard-ball, insisting on compliance with their core demands and giving up little even on matters of secondary importance. China will find itself ever more capable of acting this way because the economic fortunes of so many countries are now tied to its consumption and investment patterns — a pivotal global role once played by the United States — and because its size and location gives it a commanding position in the planet’s most dynamic region. In addition, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Chinese leaders proved especially adept at nurturing ties with the leaders of large and small countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that will play an ever more important role in energy and other world affairs.
To what ends will China wield its growing power? For the top leadership in Beijing, three goals will undoubtedly be paramount: to ensure the continued political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to sustain the fast-paced economic growth which justifies its dominance, and to restore the country’s historic greatness. All three are, in fact, related: The CCP will remain in power, senior leaders believe, only so long as it orchestrates continuing economic expansion and satisfies the nationalist aspirations of the public as well as the high command of the People’s Liberation Army. Everything Beijing does, domestically and internationally, is geared to these objectives. As the country grows stronger, it will use its enhanced powers to shape the global environment to its advantage just as the United States has done for so long. In China’s case, this will mean a world wide-open to imports of Chinese goods and to investments that allow Chinese firms to devour global resources, while placing ever less reliance on the U.S. dollar as the medium of international exchange.
The question that remains unanswered: Will China begin flexing its growing military muscle? Certainly, Beijing will do so in at least an indirect manner. By supplying arms and military advisers to its growing network of allies abroad, it will establish a military presence in ever more areas. My suspicion is that China will continue to avoid the use of force in any situation that might lead to a confrontation with major Western powers, but may not hesitate to bring its military to bear in any clash of national wills involving neighboring countries. Such a situation could arise, for example, in a maritime dispute over control of the energy-rich South China Sea or in Central Asia, if one of the former Soviet republics became a haven for Uighur militants seeking to undermine Chinese control over Xinjiang Province.
The Eagle Comes in for a Landing
Just as the rise of China is now taken for granted, so, too, is the decline of the United States. Much has been written about America’s inevitable loss of primacy as this country suffers the consequences of economic mismanagement and imperial overstretch. This perspective was present in Global Trends 2025, a strategic assessment of the coming decades prepared for the incoming Obama administration by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency. “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” the NIC predicted, “the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”
Some unforeseen catastrophe aside, however, the U.S. is not likely to be poorer in 2020 or more backward technologically. In fact, according to the most recent Department of Energy projections, America’s GDP in 2020 will be approximately $17.5 trillion (in 2005 dollars), nearly one-third greater than today. Moreover, some of the initiatives already launched by President Obama to stimulate the development of advanced energy systems are likely to begin bearing fruit, possibly giving the United States an edge in certain green technologies. And don’t forget, the U.S. will remain the globe’s preeminent military power, with China lagging well behind, and no other potential rival able to mobilize even Chinese-level resources to challenge U.S. military advantages.
What will change is America’s position relative to China and other nations — and so, of course, its ability to dominate the global economy and the world political agenda. Again using DoE projections, we find that in 2005, America’s GDP of $12.4 trillion exceeded that of all the nations of Asia and South America combined, including Brazil, China, India, and Japan. By 2020, the combined GDP of Asia and South America will be about 40% greater than that of the U.S., and growing at a much faster rate. By then, the United States will be deeply indebted to more solvent foreign nations, especially China, for the funds needed to pay for continuing budget deficits occasioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget, the federal stimulus package, and the absorption of “toxic assets” from troubled banks and corporations.
Count on this, though: in an increasingly competitive world economy in which U.S. firms enjoy ever diminishing advantages, the prospects for ordinary Americans will be distinctly dimmer. Some sectors of the economy, and some parts of the country, will certainly continue to thrive, but others will surely suffer Detroit’s fate, becoming economically hollowed out and experiencing wholesale impoverishment. For many — perhaps most — Americans, the world of 2020 may still provide a standard of living far superior to that enjoyed by a majority of the world; but the perks and advantages that most middle class folks once took for granted — college education, relatively accessible (and affordable) medical care, meals out, foreign travel — will prove significantly harder to come by.
Even America’s military advantage will be much eroded. The colossal costs of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars will set limits on the nation’s ability to undertake significant military missions abroad. Keep in mind that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a significant proportion of the basic combat equipment of the Army and Marine Corps has been damaged or destroyed in these wars, while the fighting units themselves have been badly battered by multiple tours of duty. Repairing this damage would require at least a decade of relative quiescence, which is nowhere in sight.
The growing constraints on American power were recently acknowledged by President Obama in an unusual setting: his West Point address announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan. Far from constituting a triumphalist expression of American power and preeminence, like President Bush’s speeches on the Iraq War, his was an implicit admission of decline. Alluding to the hubris of his predecessor, Obama noted, “We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of the economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills…. Meanwhile, competition in the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply can’t afford to ignore the price of these wars.”
Many have chosen to interpret Obama’s Afghan surge decision as a typical twentieth-century-style expression of America’s readiness to intervene anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice. I view it as a transitional move meant to prevent the utter collapse of an ill-conceived military venture at a time when the United States is increasingly being forced to rely on non-military means of persuasion and the cooperation, however tempered, of allies. President Obama said as much: “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power…. And we can’t count on military might alone.” Increasingly, this will be the mantra of strategic planning that will govern the American eagle in decline.
The Rising South
The second decade of the century will also witness the growing importance of the global South: the formerly-colonized, still-developing areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Once playing a relatively marginal role in world affairs, they were considered open territory, there to be invaded, plundered, and dominated by the major powers of Europe, North America, and (for a time) Japan. To some degree, the global South, a.k.a. the “Third World,” still plays a marginal role, but that is changing.
Once a member in good standing of the global South, China is now an economic superpower and India is well on its way to earning this status. Second-tier states of the South, including Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey, are on the rise economically, and even the smallest and least well-off nations of the South have begun to attract international attention as providers of crucial raw materials or as sites of intractable problems including endemic terrorism and crime syndicates.
To some degree, this is a product of numbers — growing populations and growing wealth. In 2000, the population of the global South stood at an estimated 4.9 billion people; by 2020, that number is expected to hit 6.4 billion. Many of these new inhabitants of planet Earth will be poor and disenfranchised, but most will be workers (in either the formal or informal economy), many will participate in the political process in some way, and some will be entrepreneurs, labor leaders, teachers, criminals, or militants. Whatever the case, they will make their presence felt.
The nations of the South will also play a growing economic role as sources of raw materials in an era of increasing scarcity and founts of entrepreneurial vitality. By one estimate, the combined GDP of the global South (excluding China) will jump from $7.8 trillion in 2005 to $15.8 trillion in 2020, an increase of more than 100%. In particular, many of the prime deposits of oil, natural gas, and the key minerals needed in the global North to keep the industrial system going are facing wholesale depletion after decades of hyper-intensive extraction, leaving only the deposits in the South to be exploited.
Take oil: In 1990, 43% of world daily oil output was supplied by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (the major Persian Gulf producers plus Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela), other African and Latin American producers, and the Caspian Sea countries; by 2020, their share will rise to 58%. A similar shift in the center of gravity of world mineral production will take place, with unexpected countries like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Niger (a major uranium supplier), and the Democratic Republic of Congo taking on potentially crucial roles.
Inevitably, the global South will also play a conspicuous role in a series of potentially devastating developments. Combine persistent deep poverty, economic desperation, population growth, and intensifying climate degradation and you have a recipe for political unrest, insurgency, religious extremism, increased criminality, mass migrations, and the spread of disease. The global North will seek to immunize itself from these disorders by building fences of every sort, but through sheer numbers alone, the inhabitants of the South will make their presence felt, one way or another.
The Planet Strikes Back
All of this might represent nothing more than the normal changing of the imperial guard on planet Earth, if that planet itself weren’t undergoing far more profound changes than any individual power or set of powers, no matter how strong. The ever more intrusive realities of global warming, resource scarcity, and food insufficiency will, by the end of this century’s second decade, be undeniable and, if not by 2020, then in the decades to come, have the capacity to put normal military and economic power, no matter how impressive, in the shade.
“There is little doubt about the main trends,” Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in awarding the Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore in December 2007: “More and more scientists have reached ever closer agreement concerning the increasingly dramatic consequences that will follow from global warming.” Likewise, a growing body of energy experts has concluded that the global production of conventional oil will soon reach a peak (if it hasn’t already) and decline, producing a worldwide energy shortage. Meanwhile, fears of future food emergencies, prompted in part by global warming and high energy prices, are becoming more widespread.
All of this was apparent when world leaders met in Copenhagen and failed to establish an effective international regime for reducing the emission of climate-altering greenhouse gases (GHGs). Even though they did agree to keep talking and comply with a non-binding, aspirational scheme to cut back on GHGs, observers believe that such efforts are unlikely to lead to meaningful progress in controlling global warming in the near future. What few doubt is that the pace of climate change will accelerate destructively in the second decade of this century, that conventional (liquid) petroleum and other key resources will become scarcer and more difficult to extract, and that food supplies will diminish in many poor, environmentally vulnerable areas.
Scientists do not agree on the precise nature, timing, and geographical impact of climate-change effects, but they do generally agree that, as we move deeper into the century, we will be seeing an exponential increase in the density of the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas layer in the atmosphere as the consumption of fossil fuels grows and past smokestack emissions migrate to the outer atmosphere. DoE data indicates, for example, that between 1990 and 2005, world carbon dioxide emissions grew by 32%, from 21.5 to 31.0 billion metric tons. It can take as much as 50 years for GHGs to reach the greenhouse layer, which means that their effect will increase even if — as appears unlikely — the nations of the world soon begin to reduce their future emissions.
In other words, the early manifestations of global warming in the first decade of this century — intensifying hurricanes and typhoons, torrential rains followed by severe flooding in some areas and prolonged, even record-breaking droughts in others, melting ice-caps and glaciers, and rising sea levels — will all become more pronounced in the second. As suggested by the IPCC in its 2007 report, uninhabitable dust bowls are likely to emerge in large areas of Central and Northeast Asia, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the Mediterranean basin. Significant parts of Africa are likely to be devastated by rising temperatures and diminished rainfall. More cities are likely to undergo the sort of flooding and destruction experienced by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And blistering summers, as well as infrequent or negligible rainfall, will limit crop production in key food-producing regions.
Progress will be evident in the development of renewable energy systems, such as wind, solar, and biofuels. Despite the vast sums now being devoted to their development, however, they will still provide only a relatively small share of world energy in 2020. According to DoE projections, renewables will take care of only 10.5% of world energy needs in 2020, while oil and other petroleum liquids will still make up 32.6% of global supplies; coal, 27.1%; and natural gas, 23.8%. In other words, greenhouse gas production will rage on — and, ironically, should it not, thanks to expected shortfalls in the supply of oil, that in itself will likely prove another kind of disaster, pushing up the prices of all energy sources and endangering economic stability. Most industry experts, including those at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, believe that it will be nearly impossible to continue increasing the output of conventional and unconventional petroleum (including tough to harvest Arctic oil, Canadian tar sands, and shale oil) without increasingly implausible fresh investments of trillions of dollars, much of which would have to go into war-torn, unstable areas like Iraq or corrupt, unreliable states like Russia.
In the latest hit movie Avatar, the lush, mineral-rich moon Pandora is under assault by human intruders seeking to extract a fabulously valuable mineral called "unobtainium." Opposing them are not only a humanoid race called the Na’vi, loosely modeled on Native Americans and Amazonian jungle dwellers, but also the semi-sentient flora and fauna of Pandora itself. While our own planet may not possess such extraordinary capabilities, it is clear that the environmental damage caused by humans since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is producing a natural blowback effect which will become increasingly visible in the coming decade.
These, then, are the four trends most likely to dominate the second decade of this century. Perhaps others will eventually prove more significant, or some set of catastrophic events will further alter the global landscape, but for now expect the dragon ascendant, the eagle descending, the South rising, and the planet possibly trumping all of these.______________________________________ • Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Owl Books). A documentary film version of his previous book, “Blood and Oil”, is available from the Media Education Foundation at Bloodandoilmovie.com.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175186/tomgram%3A__michael_klare%2C_the_blowback_effect%2C_2020
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 9, 2010 13:38:21 GMT 12
Orville Schell — What Doesn't Work in Americaposted January 06, 2010 | TomDispatch.comThese days, everyone has experienced a little moment of shock when the unimaginable became American. In my case, it was a relatively small thing in my hometown that recently reminded me I was in a different universe. New York City has always had one of the great urban public transportation systems. No one ever claimed it was a thing of beauty to look at or ride, but it got you, with remarkable efficiency and without complaint, from anywhere you happened to be to just about anywhere you wanted to go.
No longer. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the city’s bus and subway lines, finds itself (like many other transportation systems across urban America) facing a sudden financial “shortfall” — in the MTA's case, almost $400 million, which means severe cuts in service just when we couldn’t be more in need of public transportation. Whole subway and bus lines lopped off or significantly scaled back in places like the borough of Queens, which guarantees that, for many, getting to and from work, especially in the off-hours, will be a nightmare, or in some cases for late night workers essentially impossible. “The cuts,” reported the New York Times, “would eliminate two subway lines, create more crowding on subways and buses, and reduce frequency at off-peak hours. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around.”
But the prospective change that stunned me, that left me feeling I was indeed living in a new America, was the MTA’s decision to “phase out” what, when I was a kid, we used to call “bus passes.” Today’s version of these still ensures that any student can get to any school and back for free or for at most half-fare. According to the MTA’s latest plans, all students will be paying full fare on public transport by 2011.
This has one practical meaning. If you’re poor and young in New York and your family can’t afford approximately $4 a day in subway or bus fares, you’re stuck in your neighborhood, maybe at the crumbling, overcrowded school around the corner. No hope of better. The finest, most competitive schools in the city’s public school system will be left for those who can afford to get to them. It’s a small thing on the scale of this planet’s problems, but it tells you a good deal about the direction this country is heading in and even if the MTA reverses its decision under pressure, the thinking behind it goes with an America I’ve never known.
I offer this as my small addition to Orville Schell’s listing below of what works and what (mostly) doesn’t work in this formerly fair country of ours. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ The Melting of AmericaThe Story of a Can’t-Do NationBy Orville SchellLately, I’ve been studying the climate-change induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the two billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems — the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim — that arise in these mountains isn’t much of an antidote to malaise either.
If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you — the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal, something that has unexpectedly become vulnerable and perishable as it has slipped into irreversible decline. Those magnificent glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain the most ice in the world short of the two polar regions, are now wasting away on an overheated planet and no one knows what to do about it.
To stand next to one of those leviathans of ice, those Moby Dicks of the mountains, is to feel in the most poignant form the magnificence of the creator’s work. It’s also to regain an ancient sense, largely lost to us, of our relative smallness on this planet and to be forcibly reminded that we have passed a tipping point. The days when the natural world was demonstrably ascendant over even the quite modest collective strength of humankind are over. The power — largely to set an agenda of destruction — has irrevocably shifted from nature to us.
Another tipping point has also been on my mind lately and it’s left me no less melancholy. In this case, the Moby Dick in question is my own country, the United States of America. We Americans, too, seem to have passed a tipping point. Like the glaciers of the high Himalaya, long familiar aspects of our nation are beginning to feel as if they were, in a sense, melting away.
The eight years of George W. Bush’s wrecking ball undeniably helped set our descent in motion. Then came the dawning realization that President Barack Obama, who strode into office billed as a catalyst of sure-fire change, would no more stop the melting down of the planet’s former “sole superpower” than the Copenhagen summit would stop the melting of those glaciers. After all, a predatory and dysfunctional Washington reminds us constantly that we may be approaching the end of the era of American possibility. For Obama’s beguiling aura of promise to be stripped away so unceremoniously has left me feeling as if we, as a country, might have missed the last flight out.
And speaking of last flights out, I’ve been on a lot of those lately. It’s difficult enough to contemplate the decline of one’s country from within, but from abroad? That — take my word for it — is an even more painful prospect. Because out there you can’t escape an awareness that what’s working and being built elsewhere is failing and being torn apart here. To travel is to be forced to make endless comparisons which, when it comes to our country, is like being disturbed by unnerving dreams.
In the past few months, as I’ve roamed the world from San Francisco to Copenhagen to Beijing to Dubai, I’ve taken to keeping a double-entry list of what works and what doesn’t, country by country. Unfortunately, it’s largely a list of what works “there” and doesn’t work here. It’s in places like China, South Korea, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, and (until recently) the United Arab Emirates — some not even open societies — that you find people hard at work on the challenges of education, transport, energy, and the environment. It’s there that one feels the sense of possibility, of hopefulness, of can-do optimism so long associated with the U.S.
China, a country I’ve visited more than 100 times since 1975, elicits an especially complicated set of feelings in me. After all, it’s got a Leninist government which was not supposed to succeed; and yet, despite all predictions, it managed to conjure up an economic miracle that, whatever you may think about political transparency, the rule of law, human rights, or democracy, delivers big time. When you’re there, you can feel an unmistakable sense of energy and optimism in the air (along with the often stinging pollution), which, believe me, is bittersweet for an American pondering the missing-in-action regenerative powers of his own country.
As I’ve been traveling from China’s gleamingly efficient airports to our chaotic and all-too-often broken-down versions of the same, or Europe’s high-speed trains to our clunky railroads, I keep that expanding list of mine on hand, my own little version of what works and what doesn’t. Over time, its entries have fallen into one of three categories that I imagine something like this:
1. Robust, full of energy, growing, replete with promise and strength, the envy of the world.
2. Alive and kicking, but in a delicate balance between growth and decline.
3. Irredeemably broken, with little chance of restored health anytime soon.
And here then, as I imagine it, is the shape of America today in terms of what works and what doesn’t, what’s growing and what’s failing:
1. Bio-technology, developing dynamically and delivering much of the world’s most innovative technological research, thinking, and ideas; Silicon Valley, which still has enormous inventiveness, energy, and capital at its disposal; civil society which, despite the collapse of the economy, still seems to be expanding, still luring the best and brightest young people, and still superbly performing the ever more crucial function of being a goad to government and other established institutions; American philanthropy, which is the most evolved, well-funded, and innovative in the world; the U.S. military, the best led, trained, equipped, and maintained on the planet, despite the way it has been repeatedly thrust into hopeless wars by stupid politicians; the fabric of much of small-town American life with its still extant sense of cohesiveness and community spirit; the arts, both high-culture and pop, boasting a still vibrant film industry that remains the globe’s “sole superpower” of visual entertainment, and the requisite networks of symphony orchestras, ballets, theaters, pop music groups, and world-class museums.
2. Higher and secondary-school education, in which America still boasts some of the globe’s preeminent institutions, though the best are increasingly private as jewel-in-the-crown public systems like California’s are driven into the ground thanks to devastating, repeated budget cuts; a national energy system which still delivers, but is terminally strung out on oil and coal, and depends on a grid badly in need of some new “smartness”; environmental protection, which compares favorably with that in other countries, though always under-funded and so, like our extraordinary national park system, ever teetering above the abyss; the court system, overburdened and under-funded, but struggling to deliver justice.
3. The federal government, essentially busted; Congress, increasingly paralyzed and largely incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems; state government, largely broke; the Interstate highway system and our infrastructure of bridges and tunnels, melting away like a block of ice in the sun because maintenance and upgrading is so poor; dikes, water systems, and many other aspects of the national infrastructure which keeps the country going, similarly old and deteriorating; airlines, some of the sorriest in the world with the oldest, dirtiest, and least up-to-date planes and the requisite run-down airports to go with them; ports that are falling behind world standards; a railroad passenger system which, unlike countries from Spain to China, has not one mile of truly high-speed rail; the country’s financial system whose over-paid executives not only ran us off an economic cliff in 2008, but also managed to compromise the whole system itself in the eyes of the world; a broadcast media which — public broadcasting and aspects of a vital and growing Internet excepted — is a grossly overly-commercialized, broken-down mess that has gravely let down the country in terms of keeping us informed; newspapers, in a state of free-fall; book publishing, heading in the same direction; elementary education (that is, our future), especially public K-12 schools in big cities, desperately under-funded and near broke in many communities; a food industry which subsidizes sugar and starch, stuffs people with fast-food, and leaves 60% of the population overweight; basic manufacturing, like the automobile industry, evidently headed for oblivion, or China, whichever comes first; the American city, hollowing out and breaking down; the prison system, one of America’s few growth industries but a pit of hopelessness.
As you may have noted, category one is close to a full list, category two, close enough, while category three is just a gesture in the direction of larger-scale decline. Unfortunately, it seems ever expandable. You’ll undoubtedly be tempted to add to it yourself.(I have the same impulse every time I’m elsewhere and see some shiny new industrial or designer toy we don’t make or even have.) When I told a friend about this tallying obsession of mine, he suggested that it might turn out to be a great website. (See the vigorous world of the Internet in category one above.) And so it might — a kind of electronic stock market Big Board where the world could weigh in and help track all those things people find encouraging or discouraging about the U.S. and other countries.
The initial impulse for my list, however, was self-protective. I was searching for “things that work” here, the better to banish that dispiriting sense of an American decline into the sort of can’t-do-itive-ness that Congress has come to exemplify. Consider my exercise some kind of incantatory ritual — a talisman — meant to hold off the bad spirits just as, when I arrive in Beijing in winter and find the mercury near zero (an increasing rarity these last years) or stumble into a snowstorm in New York City, I’m relieved. For me, such manifestations of real winter are signs that nature may not yet have totally surrendered to us, that global warming is still being challenged, and that things may not be as far gone as I sometimes fear.
And yet that list of can-do’s remains so unbearably short and the cant-do’s grows by the trip. I’d love to be convinced otherwise, but like the ice fields of the Greater Himalaya melting before our eyes, American prowess and promise, once seemingly as much a permanent part of the global landscape as glaciers, mountains, and oceans, seems to be melting away by the day.______________________________________ • Orville Schell is the Director of the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, where he leads a project on climate change and the Tibetan Plateau. He is former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, the author of many books on China, and a frequent traveler in his various journalistic pursuits.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175187/tomgram%3A_orville_schell%2C_what_doesn%27t_work_in_america
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 11, 2010 14:46:10 GMT 12
Engelhardt and Turse — The CIA Surgesposted January 10, 2010 | TomDispatch.comThe Shadow WarMaking Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in AfghanistanBy Tom Engelhardt and Nick TurseIt was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally) seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation. It hardly mattered that the underwear bomber’s case — except for the placement of the bomb material — almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.
That would have been bad enough, but the New Year brought worse. Army Major General Michael Flynn, U.S. and NATO forces deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, released a report in which he labeled military intelligence in the war zone — but by implication U.S. intelligence operatives generally — “clueless.” They were, he wrote, "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers... Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy."
As if to prove the general’s point, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor with a penchant for writing inspirational essays on jihadi websites and an “unproven asset” for the CIA, somehow entered a key Agency forward operating base in Afghanistan unsearched, supposedly with information on al-Qaeda’s leadership so crucial that a high-level CIA team was assembled to hear it and Washington was alerted. He proved to be either a double or a triple agent and killed seven CIA operatives, one of whom was the base chief, by detonating a suicide vest bomb, while wounding yet more, including the Agency’s number-two operative in the country. The first suicide bomber to penetrate a U.S. base in Afghanistan, he blew a hole in the CIA’s relatively small cadre of agents knowledgeable on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
It was an intelligence disaster splayed all over the headlines: “Taliban bomber wrecks CIA’s shadowy war”, “Killings Rock Afghan Strategy”, “Suicide bomber who attacked CIA post was trusted informant from Jordan”. It seemed to sum up the hapless nature of America’s intelligence operations as the CIA, with all the latest technology and every imaginable resource on hand, including the latest in Hellfire missile-armed drone aircraft, was out-thought and out-maneuvered by low-tech enemies.
No one could say that the deaths and the blow to the American war effort weren’t well covered. There were major TV reports night after night and scores of news stories, many given front-page treatment. And yet lurking behind those deaths and the man who caused them lay a bigger American war story that went largely untold. It was a tale of a new-style battlefield that the American public knows remarkably little about, and that bears little relationship to the Afghan War as we imagine it or as our leaders generally discuss it.
We don’t even have a language to describe it accurately. Think of it as a battlefield filled with muscled-up, militarized intelligence operatives, hired-gun contractors doing military duty, and privatized “native” guard forces. Add in robot assassins in the air 24/7 and kick-down-the-door-style night-time “intelligence” raids, “surges” you didn’t know were happening, strings of military bases you had no idea were out there, and secretive international collaborations you were unaware the U.S. was involved in. In Afghanistan, the American military is only part of the story. There’s also a polyglot “army” representing the U.S. that wears no uniforms and fights shape-shifting enemies to the death in a murderous war of multiple assassinations and civilian slaughter, all enveloped in a blanket of secrecy.
Black Ops and Black Sites
Secrecy is, of course, a part of war. The surprise attack is only a surprise if secrecy is maintained. In wartime, crucial information must be kept from an enemy capable of using it. But what if, as in our case, wartime never ends, while secrecy becomes endemic, as well as profitable and privitizable, and much of the information available to both sides on our shadowy new battlefield is mainly being kept from the American people? The coverage of the suicide attack on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman offered a rare, very partial window into that strange war — but only if you were willing to read piles of news reports looking for tiny bits of information that could be pieced together.
We did just that and here’s what we found:
Let's start with FOB Chapman, where the suicide bombing took place. An old Soviet base near the Pakistani border, it was renamed after a Green Beret who fought beside CIA agents and was the first American to die in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It sits in isolation near the town of Khost, just miles from the larger Camp Salerno, a forward operating base used mainly by U.S. Special Operations troops. Occupied by the CIA since 2001, Chapman is regularly described as “small” or “tiny” and, in one report, as having “a forbidding network of barriers, barbed wire and watchtowers.” Though a State Department provisional reconstruction team has been stationed there (as well as personnel from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and though it “was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction,” FOB Chapman is “well-known locally as a CIA base” — an “open secret,” as another report put it.
The base is guarded by Afghan irregulars, sometimes referred to in news reports as “Afghan contractors,” about whom we know next to nothing. (“CIA officials on Thursday would not discuss what guard service they had at the base.”) Despite the recent suicide bombing, according to Julian Barnes and Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, a “program to hire Afghans to guard U.S. forward operating bases would not be canceled. Under that program, which is beginning in eastern Afghanistan, Afghans will guard towers, patrol perimeter fences and man checkpoints.” Also on FOB Chapman were employees of the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater) which has had a close relationship with the CIA in Afghanistan. We know this because of reports that two of the dead “CIA” agents were Xe operatives.
Someone else of interest was at FOB Chapman and so at that fateful meeting with the Jordanian doctor al-Balawi — Sharif Ali bin Zeid, a captain in the Jordanian intelligence service, the eighth person killed in the blast. It turns out that al-Balawi was an agent of Jordanian intelligence, which held (and abused) torture suspects kidnapped and disappeared by the CIA in the years of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. The service reportedly continues to work closely with the Agency and the captain was evidently running al-Balawi. That’s what we now know about the polyglot group at FOB Chapman on the front lines of the Agency’s black-ops war against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the allied fighters of the Haqqani network in nearby Pakistan. If there were other participants, they weren’t among the bodies.
The Agency Surges
And here’s something that’s far clearer in the wake of the bombing: among our vast network of bases in Afghanistan, the CIA has its own designated bases — as, by the way, do U.S. Special Operations forces, and according to Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill, even private contractor Xe. Without better reporting on the subject, it’s hard to get a picture of these bases, but Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal tells us that a typical CIA base houses no more than 15-20 Agency operatives (which means that al-Balawi’s explosion killed or wounded more than half of the team on FOB Chapman).
And don’t imagine that we’re only talking about a base or two. In the single most substantive post-blast report on the CIA, Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times wrote that the Agency has “an archipelago of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” most built in the last year. An archipelago? Imagine that. And it’s also reported that even more of them are in the works.
With this goes another bit of information that the Wall Street Journal seems to have been the first to drop into its reports. While you’ve heard about President Obama's surge in American troops and possibly even State Department personnel in Afghanistan, you’ve undoubtedly heard little or nothing about a CIA surge in the region, and yet the Journal’s reporters tell us that Agency personnel will increase by 20-25% in the surge months. By the time the CIA is fully bulked up with all its agents, paramilitaries, and private contractors in place, Afghanistan will represent, according to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest “stations” in Agency history.
This, in turn, implies other surges. There will be a surge in base-building to house those agents, and a surge in “native” guards — at least until another suicide bomber hits a base thanks to Taliban supporters among them or one of them turns a weapon on the occupants of a base — and undoubtedly a surge in Blackwater-style mercenaries as well. Keep in mind that the latest figure on private contractors suggests that 56,000 more of them will surge into Afghanistan in the next 18 months, far more than surging U.S. troops, State Department employees, and CIA operatives combined. And don’t forget the thousands of non-CIA “uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defense Department and joint interagency operations in the country,” who will undoubtedly surge as well.
Making War
The efforts of the CIA operatives at Forward Operating Base Chapman were reportedly focused on “collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders,” especially those in the Haqqani network in North Waziristan just across the Pakistani border. They were evidently running “informants” into Pakistan to find targets for the Agency’s ongoing drone assassination war. These drone attacks in Pakistan have themselves been on an unparalleled surge course ever since Barack Obama entered office; 44 to 50 (or more) have been launched in the last year, with civilian casualties running into the hundreds. Like local Pashtuns, the Agency essentially doesn’t recognize a border. For them, the Afghan and Pakistani tribal borderlands are a single world.
In this way, as Paul Woodward of the website War in Context has pointed out, “Two groups of combatants, neither of whom wear uniforms, are slugging it out on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Each group has identified what it regards as high-value targets and each is using its own available means to hit these targets. The Taliban/Qaeda are using suicide bombers while the CIA is using Hellfire missiles.”
Since the devastating explosion at FOB Chapman, statements of vengeance have been coming out of CIA mouths — of a kind that, when offered, by the Taliban or al-Qaeda, we consider typical of a backward, “tribal” society. In any case, the secret war is evidently becoming a private and personal one. Dr. al-Balawi’s suicide attack essentially took out a major part of the Agency’s targeting information system. As one unnamed NATO official told the New York Times, “These were not people who wrote things down in the computer or in notebooks. It was all in their heads... [The C.I.A. is] pulling in new people from all over the world, but how long will it take to rebuild the networks, to get up to speed? Lots of it is irrecoverable.” And the Agency was already generally known to be “desperately short of personnel who speak the language or are knowledgeable about the region.” Nonetheless, drone attacks have suddenly escalated — at least five in the week since the suicide bombing, all evidently aimed at “an area believed to be a hideout for militants involved.” These sound like vengeance attacks and are likely to be particularly counterproductive.
To sum up, U.S. intelligence agents, having lost out to enemy “intelligence agents,” even after being transformed into full-time assassins, are now locked in a mortal struggle with an enemy for whom assassination is also a crucial tactic, but whose operatives seem to have better informants and better information.
In this war, drones are not the Agency’s only weapon. The CIA also seems to specialize in running highly controversial, kick-down-the-door “night raids” in conjunction with Afghan paramilitary forces. Such raids, when launched by U.S. Special Operations forces, have led to highly publicized and heavily protested civilian casualties. Sometimes, according to reports, the CIA actually conducts them in conjunction with Special Operations forces. In a recent American-led night raid in Kunar Province, eight young students were, according to Afghan sources, detained, handcuffed, and executed. The leadership of this raid has been attributed, euphemistically, to “other government agencies” (OGAs) or “non-military Americans”. These raids, whether successful in the limited sense or not, don’t fit comfortably with the Obama administration’s “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy.
The Militarization of the Agency
As the identities of some of the fallen CIA operatives at FOB Chapman became known, a pattern began to emerge. There was 37-year-old Harold Brown, Jr., who formerly served in the Army. There was Scott Roberson, a former Navy SEAL, who did several tours of duty in Iraq, where he provided protection to officials considered at high risk. There was Jeremy Wise, 35, an ex-Navy SEAL who left the military last year, signed up with Xe, and ended up working for the CIA. Similarly, 46-year-old Dane Paresi, a retired Special Forces master sergeant turned Xe hired gun, also died in the blast.
For years, Chalmers Johnson, himself a former CIA consultant, has referred to the Agency as “the president’s private army.” Today, that moniker seems truer than ever. While the civilian CIA has always had a paramilitary component, known as the Special Activities Division, the unit was generally relatively small and dormant. Instead, military personnel like the Army’s Special Forces or indigenous troops carried out the majority of the CIA’s combat missions. After the 9/11 attacks, however, President Bush empowered the Agency to hunt down, kidnap, and assassinate suspected al-Qaeda operatives, and the CIA’s traditional specialties of spycraft and intelligence analysis took a distinct backseat to Special Activities Division operations, as its agents set up a global gulag of ghost prisons, conducted interrogations-by-torture, and then added those missile-armed drone and assassination programs.
The military backgrounds of the fallen CIA operatives cast a light on the way the world of “intelligence” is increasingly muscling up and becoming militarized. This past summer, when a former CIA official suggested the agency might be backing away from risky programs, a current official spit back from the shadows: “If anyone thinks the CIA has gotten risk-averse recently, go ask al-Qaeda and the Taliban... The agency's still doing cutting-edge stuff in all kinds of dangerous places.” At around the same time, reports were emerging that Blackwater/Xe was providing security, arming drones, and “perform[ing] some of the agency’s most important assignments” at secret bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also emerged that the CIA had paid contractors from Blackwater to take part in a covert assassination program in Afghanistan.
Add this all together and you have the grim face of “intelligence” at war in 2010 — a new micro-brew when it comes to Washington’s conflicts. Today, in Afghanistan, a militarized mix of CIA operatives and ex-military mercenaries as well as native recruits and robot aircraft is fighting a war “in the shadows” (as they used to say in the Cold War era). This is no longer “intelligence” as anyone imagines it, nor is it “military” as military was once defined, not when U.S. operations have gone mercenary and native in such a big way. This is pure “lord of the flies” stuff — beyond oversight, beyond any law, including the laws of war. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims that the drone war is knocking off mid-level enemies, it seems remarkably ineffective. All it may be doing is spreading the war farther and digging it in deeper.
Talk about “counterinsurgency” as much as you want, but this is another kind of battlefield, and “protecting the people” plays no part in it. And of course, this is only what can be gleaned from afar about a semi-secret war that is being poorly reported. Who knows what it costs when you include the U.S. hired guns, the Afghan contractors, the bases, the drones, and the rest of the personnel and infrastructure? Nor do we know what else, or who else, is involved, and what else is being done. Clearly, however, all those billions of "intelligence" dollars are going into the blackest of black holes.______________________________________ [Note for Readers: Check out “CIA Takes on Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines”, the Mark Mazzetti piece in the New York Times mentioned above. It’s the only one we’ve seen in the mainstream that has focused in a clear-eyed way on the militarization of the CIA. In addition, we would especially like to recommend three websites that collect, sort, analyze, and frame the onslaught of fragmented news we get on our various wars in the Greater Middle East and Central and South Asia in a way that makes our job possible: Juan Cole’s Informed Comment (his analyses have been absolutely on fire of late), the invaluable Antiwar.com, including the useful daily summaries of war news provided by Jason Ditz, and War in Context, which has an eye for the key piece and sharp comment.]• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.• Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175188/tomgram%3A_engelhardt_and_turse%2C_the_cia_surges
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 13, 2010 20:05:33 GMT 12
Dilip Hiro — Iran, 1979 and 2010posted January 12, 2010 | TomDispatch.comThe Obama administration’s Iran policy is a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum folded into a pickle. So many signals are being sent in so many directions that it’s a wonder the Iranians (or other involved parties) have any idea what’s going on. Barack Obama came into office pledging to reach out diplomatically to Iran. In fact, the administration did so in only a half-hearted way, even as the president quickly began setting deadlines for the Iranians to respond (on their nuclear program) in a way Washington considered satisfactory — or face further “crippling” sanctions. Now, the latest of these deadlines, January 01, 2010, has passed and a move towards new sanctions, especially against companies associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls significant parts of the country's economy, is evidently being prepared. But China, which holds the presidency of the Security Council for the month of January, recently rejected even a debate on the subject. Like the Russians, the Chinese are deeply involved in developing long-term energy relations with Iran, which means that no sanctions which might “cripple” that country’s economy are likely to make it through the Security Council, no matter which country has the presidency.
In the meantime, rumors, circulating for years, about an impending Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities (which is a polite way of saying Iranian military defenses of every sort) continue to fly. President Obama reportedly even used his supposed inability to hold the Israelis back as a way to urge China’s president to fall into line on sanctions. Administration officials regularly repeat versions of the Bush-era formula: “all options are on the table.” Recently, for instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen referred vaguely in public to Pentagon contingency plans for an attack on Iran (“…at the same time preparing forces, as we do for many contingencies that we understand might occur…”). However, on the subject of such a military assault he sounded unenthusiastic in the extreme. Obama's influential Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has long been emphatic in his opposition to heading down such a path. From his 2006 confirmation hearings on, he has exhibited a clear sense of just how regionally catastrophic a military operation against those nuclear facilities would be (including a potentially globally crippling spike in oil prices).
The Obama administration is now evidently considering throwing greater support behind Iran's “green movement.” This movement of dissidents regularly in the streets protesting against the present regime and a fraudulent election would, as Dilip Hiro points out, instantly be undermined by either “crippling sanctions” or an attack on the country’s nuclear facilities. All this, in other words, looks suspiciously like chaos as policy.
Hiro, an Iran expert and TomDispatch regular, has just written a new book — it’s being published this very day — that puts Iran, the United States, China, and Russia into a global context. It’s called After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World and I’m proud to say that it grew from an article Hiro wrote for this website back in 2007, “The Sole Superpower in Decline”. It offers the kind of balanced, knowledgeable assessment of our world that we’ve come to expect from him and which should put After Empire on every bookshelf. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Regime Change in Tehran?Don’t Bet on It… YetBy Dilip HiroThe dramatic images of protestors in Iran fearlessly facing — and sometimes countering — the brutal attacks of the regime’s security forces rightly gain the admiration and sympathy of viewers in the West. They also leave many Westerners assuming that this is a preamble to regime change in Tehran, a repeat of history, but with a twist. After all, Iran has the distinction of being the only Middle Eastern state that underwent a revolutionary change — 31 years ago — which originated as a mild street protest.
Viewed objectively, though, this assumption is over-optimistic. It overlooks cardinal differences between the present moment and the 1978-1979 events which led to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the founding of an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. History shows that a revolutionary movement triumphs only when two vital factors merge: it is supported by a coalition of different social classes and it succeeds in crippling the country’s governing machinery and fracturing the state’s repressive apparatus.
Two Movements, Two Moments
A short review of Iran’s 31-year-old revolution is in order. In February 1979, the autocratic monarchy of the Shah collapsed when the country’s economy ground to a halt due to strikes not only by the religiously observant merchants of the bazaar, but also by civil servants, factory employees, and (crucially) leftist oil workers. At the same time, the foundations of the modern state — the armed forces, special forces, armed police, and intelligence agencies, as well as the state-controlled media — cracked.
The street demonstrations, launched in October 1977 by Iranian intellectuals and professionals to protest human rights violations by SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, lacked both focus and an overarching set of coherent demands articulated by a towering personality. That changed when Khomeini, a virulently anti-Shah ayatollah exiled to neighboring Iraq for 14 years, was drawn into the process in January 1978. From then on, the ranks of the protestors swelled exponentially.
Today, the key question is: Have the recent street protests, triggered by the rigged presidential poll of last June, drawn one or more of those segments of society which originally ignored the electoral fraud or dismissed the claims to that effect?
The evidence so far suggests that the protests, while remaining defiant and resilient, have gotten stuck in a groove — even though on December 27, the day of the Shiite holy ritual of Ashura, they spread to the smaller cities for the first time. What has remained unchanged is the social background of the participants. They are largely young, university educated, and well dressed, equipped with mobile phones, and adept at using the Internet, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
In the capital, they are usually from upscale North Tehran, which contains about a third of the city’s population of nine million. It is home to affluent families, many of whom have relatives in Western Europe or North America. They often spend their vacations in the West; and most are fluent in English and at ease with computers.
Naturally, then, Western reporters and commentators identify with this section of Iranian society, and focus largely on them, inadvertently or otherwise.
In the autumn of 1977, too, such people predominated in the street protests against the Shah. The difference now is one of scale. Since the Islamic Revolution, there has been an explosion in higher education. Between 1979 and 1999, while the population doubled, the number of university graduates grew nine-fold, from a base of 430,000 to nearly four million. The student bodies of universities and colleges have soared to three-quarters of a million young Iranians. That explains the vast size of the protests and their sartorial uniformity.
Now, the foremost question for Iran specialists ought to be: Over the past six months have significant numbers of residents from downscale South Tehran, with its six million people, joined the protest? Going by the images on the Internet and Western TV channels, the answer is “no.” South Tehranis do not wear fashionable jeans, and any protesting women would appear veiled from head to toe and without noticeable make-up.
It is South Tehran that contains the Grand Bazaar, covering five miles of warren-like alleyways and more than a dozen mosques. That bazaar is the commercial backbone of the nation with its intricately woven strands of trade, Islamic culture, and politics. Its lead is followed by all the other bazaars of Iran. Because Prophet Muhammad was a merchant, there has been a symbiotic relationship between the commercial class and the mosque from the early days of Islam. Iran is no exception and the importance of the bazaar’s influence still cannot be overestimated. After all, it was barely a century ago that oil was first found in the country, while industrialization gained a foothold only after World War II.
So, have bazaar merchants begun to shut their shops in solidarity with the protestors — as they did during the anti-Shah movement? No again.
Leaving aside the shuttering of stores, if some bazaar traders were simply to resort to setting up their own blogs and joining the protests online, that in itself would surely draw the attention of the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei and might even lead it to consider a compromise with the reformers.
The Limits of 2010
So far the opposition has been led by the defeated candidates for the presidency — Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi — neither of whom has anything like the charisma or religious standing of a Khomeini.
Furthermore, the opposition suffers from the lack of a single overarching demand. During the 1978-1979 movement, Khomeini rallied diverse anti-Shah forces — from Shia clerics to Marxist-Leninist groups — around a maximum demand: Dethrone the Shah.
Then Khomeini managed to hold together this unwieldy alliance by championing the causes of each of the social classes in the anti-Shah coalition. The traditional middle classes of merchants and artisans saw in him an upholder of private property and a believer in Islamic values. The modern middle classes regarded him as a radical nationalist committed to ending royal dictatorship and foreign influence in Iran. The urban working class backed him because of his repeated commitment to social justice which, it felt, could only be achieved by transferring power and wealth from the affluent to the needy. The rural poor saw him as the one to provide them with arable land, irrigation facilities, roads, schools, and electricity.
Khomeini performed this superhuman task by maintaining a studied silence on such controversial issues as democracy, the status of women, and the role of clerics in the future Islamic republic.
Today, the most popular slogan of the protestors is “Death to the Dictator,” meaning Supreme Leader Khamanei. (In Persian, “Marg bur/ Diktator” rhymes well.) Yet that is certainly not what either Mousavi or Karroubi wants.
On his website, Mousavi recently demanded the release of all political prisoners and the amending of the electoral laws, along with the enforcement of freedom of expression, assembly, and the press as stated in the Iranian constitution. In short, he wants to reform the present system, not overthrow it.
As it is, there is a mechanism in the constitution for the removal of the Supreme Leader. The popularly elected 86-member Assembly of Experts has the authority to appoint or dismiss him.
That Assembly is presided over by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. As a former close aide to Ayatollah Khomeini, his revolutionary credentials are on a par with Ali Khamanei’s.
Rafsanjani backed Mousavi in his presidential bid with funds and strategic planning. Now, if he decides, he can summon the Assembly of Experts for an emergency session to debate the present crisis caused by the divisions at the top. Normally the Assembly meets only twice a year. But being a shrewd politician, Rafsanjani would first consult senior Assembly members individually to test the waters. It seems so far that he has not succeeded in gaining strong enough support for a special session.
At the grass-roots level, the numerous oppositional blogs and websites rarely deal with the big picture. They are mainly focused on highlighting the brutal repression and arguing that Khamanei’s regime has strayed wildly from its Islamic roots and its revolutionary promises of justice, freedom, and independence.
Their critique, however, covers only one major aspect of the situation. It is not enough to bring about regime change in the country. A second complimentary side would have to spell out some specifics about how the protestors want to see their vision of change realized in practice. At the very least, the opposition ought to debate the issue, which it is not doing now; or it could emulate Mousavi, who has dropped his earlier demand for a fresh presidential poll to be supervised not by the interior ministry but a non-governmental body. That gesture could, sooner or later, open the way for a compromise with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that might lead to a national unity government composed of his partisans and the opposition leaders.
One major difference between 1979 and 2010 is that the Internet provides a great opportunity for a kind of debate that was unthinkable until a decade ago. On the other hand, what the 1979 movement and the present one have in common is the idea of making political use of the Shiite religious days, the Islamic custom of commemorating a dead person on the 40th day of his or her demise, as well as of the martyr complex engrained among Shiites. It was Ayatollah Khomeini who pioneered such tactics. He consistently used the 40th day of mourning for the martyrs of the Shah’s regime to draw ever bigger, ever more enthusiastic crowds in the streets, and used the holy month of Ramadan to charge the nation with revolutionary fervor.
The attempts of today’s opposition leaders to emulate Khomeini’s example have not succeeded chiefly because their camp lacks a religious leader of his stature.
The near-fatal blow that Khomeini struck at the Shah’s regime lay in the fatwa he issued decreeing that firing on unarmed protestors was equivalent to firing at a copy of the holy Quran. Most of the Shah’s soldiers, being Shiite and often young conscripts, accepted Khomeini’s interpretation. Many of them had already lost faith in their commanders after bank employees revealed, in September 1978, that top army officers had been transferring vast sums abroad. Little wonder that, by the time the Shah left Iran in January 1979, the army’s strength had plummeted from 300,000 to just over 100,000, mainly due to desertions.
By contrast, there is little evidence so far that the present regime’s security forces — the heavily indoctrinated Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia, or the armed police — are vacillating when ordered to break up demonstrations with force. On its part, the regime, aware of the danger of creating martyrs and of the historical precedent, has taken care to make minimal use of live fire in dispersing protesting crowds.
During the 12 months of the revolutionary movement that stretched from 1978 into 1979, the indiscriminate use of live fire by the Shah’s regime led to between 10,000 — the government figure — and 40,000 — the opposition’s statistic — deaths. In the six months of the street protest this time around, the total, according to the opposition, is 106.
Nationalism as a Factor
If this interpretation of the current situation in Iran has focused solely on internal political dynamics, that doesn’t mean external forces are unimportant. Given the geo-strategic significance of Iran in the region and the world, any move by not-too-friendly Western governments against Tehran is bound to alter the domestic situation dramatically.
Were the Western powers, for instance, to succeed in ratcheting up economic sanctions against Tehran through the United Nations Security Council, the opposition would undoubtedly cease its protests and cooperate with the Ahmadinejad administration to face a common national threat under the banner of patriotism.
With a proud recorded history stretching back six millennia, Iranians have evolved into staunch nationalists in modern times. That is a simple, if overarching, fact which leaders in the West cannot afford to ignore.______________________________________ • Dilip Hiro is the author of many books on the Middle East, including “The Iranian Labyrinth”. His latest book, After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World (Nation Books), has just been published. From January 22nd to February 4th, he will be in the U.S. on his book tour.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175189/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro%2C_iran%2C_1979_and_2010
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 15, 2010 19:53:00 GMT 12
Engelhardt and Turse — Shooting Gnats with a Machine Gunposted January 14, 2010 | TomDispatch.com666 to 1The U.S. Military, al-Qaeda, and a War of FutilityBy Tom Engelhardt and Nick TurseIn his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese fighting man. In the period before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was well accepted in military and political circles that the Japanese were inferior fighters on the land, in the air, and at sea — “little men,” in the phrase of the moment. It was a commonplace of “expert” opinion, for instance, that the Japanese had supposedly congenital nearsightedness and certain inner-ear defects, while lacking individualism, making it hard to show initiative. In battle, the result was poor pilots in Japanese-made (and so inferior) planes, who could not fly effectively at night or launch successful attacks.
In the wake of their precision assault on Pearl Harbor, their wiping out of U.S. air power in the Philippines in the first moments of the war, and a sweeping set of other victories, the Japanese suddenly went from “little men” to supermen in the American imagination (without ever passing through a human phase). They became “invincible” — natural-born jungle- and night-fighters, as well as “utterly ruthless, utterly cruel and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our civilization.”
Sound familiar? It should. Following September 11, 2001, news headlines screamed “A NEW DAY OF INFAMY,” and the attacks were instantly labeled “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.” Soon enough, al-Qaeda, like the Japanese in 1941, went from a distant threat — the Bush administration, on coming into office, paid next to no attention to al-Qaeda’s possible plans — to a team of arch-villains with little short of superpowers. After all, they had already destroyed some of the mightiest buildings on the planet, were known to be on the verge of seizing weapons of mass destruction, and, if nothing was done, might soon enough turn the Muslim world into their “caliphate.”
Al-Qaeda was suddenly an organization against which you wouldn’t launch anything less than the full strength of the armed forces of the world’s “sole superpower.” To a surprising extent, they are still dealt with this way. You can feel it, for instance, in the recent 24/7 panic over the thoroughly inept underwear bomber and the sudden threat of a few hundred self-proclaimed al-Qaeda members in Yemen. You can feel it in the ramping up of the Af-Pak War. You can hear it in the “debate” over moving al-Qaeda detainees from Guantanamo to U.S. maximum security prisons. The way some politicians talk, you might think those detainees were all Lex Luthors and Magnetos, super-villains incapable of being held by any prison, just like the almost magically impossible-to-find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the wild borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Because most Americans have never dealt with or thought of al-Qaeda as a group made up of actual human beings or accepted that, for every televisually striking success, they have an operation (or several) that go bust, the U.S. can’t begin to imagine what it’s actually up against. The current president, like the last one, claims that we are “at war.” If so, it’s a war of one, since al-Qaeda and the U.S. military are essentially not in the same war-fighting universe, which helps explain why repeatedly knocking off significant punortions of al-Qaeda’s leadership (even if never finding bin Laden and Zawahiri) doesn’t seem to end the threat.
But let’s stop here and try, for a moment, to imagine these two enemies side by side in the same universe of war. What, in that case, would the line-up of forces look like?
Assessing al-Qaeda’s “Troops”
According to U.S. intelligence estimates, there are currently about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, as well as “several hundred” in Pakistan and, so the latest reports tell us, a similar number in Yemen. Members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Algeria, Mali, and Mauritania) and those based in Somalia undoubtedly fall into the same category at several hundred each. According to authorities from the Iraq Study Group to the U.S. State Department, even at the height of the insurgency and civil war in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia never had more than 1,300-4,000 active fighters. Today, it is believed to consist only of “small, roving cells.”
Combined, these groups — think of them as al-Qaeda’s shock troops — add up to perhaps 2,100 fighters, about one-fifth the number of U.S. troops now based in Italy. As the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and the failure to disrupt the underwear-bomber’s plot indicate, U.S. intelligence has long been flying blind, but even if al-Qaeda turned out to have sleeper cells with 300 additional committed members in every nation on Earth, its clandestine operatives would only moderately exceed the number of U.S. forces now based in Germany.
Al-Qaeda does, of course, have some “training camps” in the backlands of countries like Yemen, and it has civilian supporters, financiers, and other scattered allies. Over the years, and sometimes with good reason, Washington has lumped Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan with al-Qaeda and counted various militant groups, including Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamic rebels, as al-Qaeda affiliates. Add such fighters in and you would swell these numbers by many thousands.
Additionally, al-Qaeda has an arsenal of weaponry. Members have access to rocket-propelled grenades, small arms of various sorts, the materials for making deadly roadside bombs, car bombs, and of course underwear bombs.
Assessing America’s Troops
U.S. efforts to crush al-Qaeda have certainly not failed for lack of resources. The U.S. military has spent about one trillion dollars on its post-9/11 wars so far. It has an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, and a Marine Corps which, like the Navy, has its very own air force. It possesses trillions of dollars in weapons, materiel, and other assets. It can mobilize spy satellites, advanced fighter planes and bombers, high-tech drones and helicopters, fleets of trucks, tanks, and other armored vehicles. It has advanced missiles and smart bombs, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and state-of-the-art ships in all shapes and sizes.
It also has incredibly well-trained special operations forces — almost 56,000 elite troops, including Army Rangers and Special Forces, Navy SEALs and Special Boat Teams, Air Force Special Tactics Teams, and Marine Corps Special Operations Battalions, armed with incredibly advanced weaponry. It has military academies that churn out highly-educated officers and specialized training camps, schools, and universities. It has more than half-a-million buildings and structures on more than 800 bases sitting on millions of acres of prime real estate scattered around the world, including in or near lands where various branches of al-Qaeda operate.
In addition, the U.S. military has manpower — lots of it. All told, the United States has approximately 1.4 million active duty men and women under arms and another 1.3 million reserve personnel. It employs more than 700,000 civilians in support roles — from stocking shelves and serving food at stateside bases to assisting in intelligence analysis in war zones — and utilizes untold tens of thousands of private security hired-guns and various other kinds of private contractors all around the globe. These numbers would be further swelled by intelligence agents who aid military efforts, including 100,000 members of the civilian intelligence community. And then there are the allies the U.S. can draw on ranging, in Afghanistan alone, from the Afghan army and police to tens of thousands of NATO and other foreign allied troops from more than 40 countries.
Comparing the Sides: The Mark of the Beast or the Mark of Futility?
Even excluding from the U.S. side of the equation all those U.S. reserves, Defense Department civilians, intelligence operatives and analysts, private contractors and allies of various sorts, if you compare the two enemies in the current “war,” you still end up with either the Mark of the Beast or a marker for futility.
The active duty U.S. military alone enjoys a 666:1 advantage over the estimated number of al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, and Somalia. Adding in the reserves, the ratio jumps to an embarrassingly-high 1,286:1. Even if you were to factor in those hordes of nonexistent al-Qaeda sleeper agents, 300 each for 195 countries from Australia to Vatican City, the U.S. military would still enjoy a 23:1 advantage (or 45:1 if you included the reserves, now regularly sent into war zones on multiple tours of duty).
In sum, after the better part of a decade of conflict, the United States has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars on bullets and bombs, soldiers and drones. It has waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have yet to end, launched strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, dispatched Special Ops troops to those nations and others, like the Philippines, and built or expanded hundreds of new bases all over the world. Yet Osama bin Laden remains at large and al-Qaeda continues to target and kill Americans.
Open-Source al-Qaeda
Founded in 1988, bin Laden’s al-Qaeda formally issued a “declaration of war” on the United States in 1996, primarily over the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. While Washington has been hunting bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the mid-1990s, a post-9/11 Congressional resolution authorized the president to use force against that group and the Taliban. Ever since, the Pentagon has been waging one of the most ineffective campaigns of modern times in an effort to destroy it.
During these years, President George W. Bush declared himself a “war president” heading a country “at war” and living in “wartime.” In a milder way, President Obama has repeatedly declared the U.S. to be “at war” and, as in his surge speech at West Point in December, has identified the main enemy in that war as al-Qaeda. In the process, the U.S. military has unleashed tremendous destructive power on parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia causing the deaths of al-Qaeda fighters, non-Qaeda militants, and innocent civilians. Thousands of its own troops have died and tens of thousands have been wounded in the process, not to mention the losses to allied forces.
In these years, new al-Qaeda “affiliates” like al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia have nonetheless sprung to life regularly and, as in Yemen, have even been officially crushed, only to be reborn. These groups have often made up their own “al-Qaeda” membership requirements, and focused on their own chosen targets. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda wannabes and look-alikes have proliferated and the organization (or those sympathetic to it or praising it) has reportedly spurred further attacks in the U.S. and encouraged men from New York to California, Nigeria to Jordan, to join the movement, and then work, fight, kill, and die for it, sometimes in attacks on Americans.
Al-Qaeda has no tanks, Humvees, nuclear submarines, or aircraft carriers, no fleets of attack helicopters or fighter jets. Al-Qaeda has never launched a spy satellite and isn’t developing advanced drone technology (although it may be hacking into U.S. video feeds). Al-Qaeda specializes in low-budget operations ranging from the incredibly deadly to the incredibly ineffectual — from murderous car bombs and airplanes-used-as-missiles to faulty shoe- and underwear-explosives.
Of course, comparisons of the strengths of the U.S. military and al-Qaeda “at war” would be absurd, if it weren’t for the fact that the United States actually went to war against such a group. It was a decision about as effective as firing a machine gun at a swarm of gnats. Some may die, but the process is visibly self-defeating.
In the present War on Terror, called by whatever name (or, as at present, by no name at all), the two “sides” might as well be in different worlds. After all, al-Qaeda today isn’t even an organization in the normal sense of the term, no less a fighting bureaucracy. It is a loose collection of ideas and a looser collection of individuals waging open-source warfare.
You don’t sign up for al-Qaeda the way you would for the U.S. Army. If you and two friends are sitting around a table in some country and you’re angry, alienated, and dissatisfied with the state of the world, you can simply claim to adhere to the basic ideas of Osama bin Laden and declare yourself al-Qaeda in [fill in the blank]. Who then gets into your organization and how you link up, if at all, with other “al-Qaedas” is up to you.
That’s why groups like al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia are always referred to in the press as “homegrown”. What you have, then, in this post-War-on-Terror war is a massive global military force aided and abetted by allied troops, “native” forces, and all sorts of corporate contractors facing off against something fluid and “homegrown,” fierce but strangely undefined, constantly morphing and shape-shifting. Every one of its “members” could be destroyed without the “enemy” being destroyed, because the enemy is a set of ideas, however extreme or strange to most Americans.
The Pentagon, with its giant bureaucracy and its miles of offices and corridors, is the headquarters of the U.S. war effort, but there is no central al-Qaeda headquarters, not in Afghanistan or Pakistan — not anywhere. There is probably no longer even an “al-Qaeda central.” Osama bin Laden has vanished or, for all we know, may be dead. Think of it, at best, as an open-source organization that is remarkably capable of replicating by a process of self-franchising.
Isn’t it time, then, to stop imagining al-Qaeda as a complex organization of terrorist supermen capable of committing super-deeds, or as an organization that bears any resemblance to a traditional enemy military force? With al-Qaeda, the path of war has undoubtedly been the road to perdition — as we should have discovered by now, more than one trillion dollars later.
When this “war” began, George W. Bush and his followers, like Osama bin Laden and his followers, were eager to proclaim future “victory” and to say with bravado to the other side: “Bring ‘em on!” The word “victory” has long since fled Washington’s lips, along with boasts that the U.S. is a new Rome.
So far, no matter how many of its operatives may be dead, “victory” remains on the lips of those calling themselves al-Qaeda-in-anywhere. After all, they did get Washington to “bring ‘em on” and the results have been disastrous and draining for the United States. The U.S. military has killed many al-Qaeda operatives, but it cannot annihilate its appeal by “surging” in Afghanistan and making war, with all the civilian destruction involved, in Muslim lands.
It’s time to put al-Qaeda back in perspective — a human perspective, which would include its stunning successes, its dismal failures, and its monumental goof-ups, as well as its unrealizable dreams. (No, Virginia, there will never be an al-Qaeda caliphate in or across the Greater Middle East.) The fact is: al-Qaeda is not an apocalyptic threat. Its partisans can cause damage, but only Americans can bring down this country.______________________________________ • Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.• Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175191/tomgram%3A_turse_and_engelhardt%2C_shooting_gnats_with_a_machine_gun
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 18, 2010 14:57:40 GMT 12
Ira Chernus — The Wages of Fear in Israel and the U.S.posted January 17, 2010 | TomDispatch.comA country programmatically gripped by fear — yes, that’s us for more than eight years now. Fear of terrorism to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere, from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week’s devastating Haitian earthquake, which should have put our fears into perspective. But no such luck.
Since 9/11, the thought of “terrorism” has seized the U.S. by the throat. People who are terrified of flying for fear of a terrorist attack are perfectly willing to drive a car to the nearest mall without a passing worry, even though traffic fatalities indicate that this is a relatively dangerous act. There were a staggering 34,000 fatal crashes in the U.S. in 2008, 12.25 fatalities for every 100,000 Americans, and carmakers are now intent on featuring ever more immersive Internet-linked “infotainment systems” on dashboards. These are sure to up the distraction level and lead to more deaths on the highway, and yet the country is barely focused on this fact. And mind you, despite all the attention, not one American died in a terrorist attack on an airplane last year. In fact, Nate Silver of the website FiveThirtyEight.com recently crunched a few numbers and came up with the following: “the odds of being on given [airplane] departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade.”
But keep in mind that fear, wherever directed, is a remarkably profitable emotion to exploit. Just think of those controversial full-body-scan machines now being installed in airports at a cost of up to $170,000 each. One promoter of them is former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff, “who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems.” He’s part of a growing “full-body-scanner lobby” of ex-Washington politicos just made for our moment.
Every jolt of terror, in other words, is a jolt of profit for some company or set of companies. After a while, those jolts of fear become repetitive adrenaline rushes for a whole set of interests which, in the American system, soon hire lobbyists, corner senators and congressional representatives, retain law and publicity firms, and live well as long as people remain terrified.
If these last years tell us anything, it’s that money follows fear. By 2006, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security, that second Defense Department, a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy created from the terror of terror, already had a mini-homeland-security-industrial complex growing up around it; and that, in turn, was part of a global security business aimed at “thwarting terrorists” then worth an estimated $59 billion. (If we had news media worth their salt and DHS was a real beat, we would undoubtedly have more recent, far more striking figures for this.)
At the comical (but also profitable) end of this spectrum of fear were all those places like Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, and the Mule Day Parade that were put into the DHS’s National Asset Database as “potential terror targets,” opening up the possibility that they might receive DHS money to protect them. “The database,” reported the New York Times, “is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year.” Consider just the Weeki Wachee mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs in Hernando, Florida. In 2005, the St. Petersburg Times reported that the Weeki Wachee staff was “teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff's Office to ‘harden the target’” — as they attempted to access DHS anti-terrorism funds “allocated to the Tampa Bay region.” ("‘I can't imagine (Osama) bin Laden trying to blow up the mermaids’, [marketing and promotion manager John] Athanason said. ‘But with terrorists, who knows what they're thinking. I don't want to think like a terrorist, but what if the terrorists try to poison the water at Weeki Wachee Springs?’")
All of this might be dismissed as a joke, if American life weren’t filled with phantasmagoric terrors that are also money machines. Everywhere that fear rules, from the U.S. to Israel, there are people exploiting and making money off it — and it’s in the nature of the beast for them to want the gift-that-never-stops-giving to go on forever. On this Martin Luther King Day, TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus takes a deep, dark look into what fear does to Americans and Israelis alike and the ways in which it drives us all. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Martin Luther King's Legacy and Israel's FutureStepping Beyond FearBy Ira ChernusEvery year, apologists for Israel’s occupation of Palestine eagerly await Martin Luther King Day. Then they trot out these words, spoken by Dr. King shortly before his death: “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism."
King, who repeated the themes that really mattered to him — justice, freedom, human dignity, nonviolence — over and over again, mentioned anti-Semitism only once, in an informal question-and-answer session. Nobody asked him what he meant, and he never explained. (A lengthy letter of “his” expounding on the theme has been proven a hoax.) Yet, year after year, Israel’s apologists rush to use those once-spoken words as the capstone for a line of reasoning which goes something like this:
Israel uses violence in the “disputed territories” to protect its own security. If you criticize that violence, you don’t care about Israel’s security; so you don’t care if Israel ceases to exist; so you are against Zionism. And Martin Luther King himself said that that’s anti-Semitism. In other words, only anti-Semites oppose Israel’s occupation policies.
Of course it’s perverse. It’s hard to imagine King ever endorsing such an illogical justification — or any justification — for the violent abrogation of a whole people’s freedom and dignity.
Still, it bothers me that the great man actually did, even once, say that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. How could someone whose intellectual rigor I admire make such an error in reasoning, one that could easily be used, even while he was still alive, to rationalize Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands?
Yes, some people who criticize Zionism are anti-Semitic. But millions of Jews themselves opposed Zionism, especially in its early years. Jews have developed some of the most trenchant critiques of Zionism precisely because they loved their own people and saw Zionism as a threat to Judaism and Jewish values.
I don’t happen to agree with them. I respect Zionism as a movement of national self-determination. (If we accord that right to the Palestinians and every other national group, why not to the Jews?) But I’m one of many Zionists who have objected vigorously as Israel swallowed up the Occupied Territories, because in the long run military occupation is bound to increase the threat to Jews and, no less important, to Jewish values. Although King associated us with anti-Semitism only indirectly and unwittingly, his words have done us a disservice, too.
There’s no way that I, or any of the Jewish critics of Israel — Zionist or not — could be called anti-Semitic. Many non-Jews, driven by moral and intellectual concerns, have added to the thoughtful critiques of Zionism with no tinge of anti-Semitism in their words.
How could MLK not know any of this? He certainly wasn’t naïve or uninformed about foreign affairs. For years, he had been eloquently praising the rising tide of colonized people who were demanding self-determination. And when he finally decided it was “a time to break silence” and voice his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, he showed how well he could master the facts of a foreign conflict.
Though much of that 1967 speech was an eloquent denunciation of military violence in general, and especially that practiced by his own government (“the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”), a significant part of it was a detailed recounting of Vietnamese history, an explanation of how the war must have looked to the Vietnamese people. Few of us protesting the war back then knew nearly as much about what was happening or could have explained so lucidly just why the war was wrong in political as well as moral terms.
How a man who could get it so right on Vietnam could get it so wrong on anti-Zionism remains a mystery.
King, Zionism, and the Cycle of Fear
If, however, we leave aside King’s offhand comment about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and consider instead his words about the horrors of American state violence and violence in general, which reflected his most deeply held values, we can see Israel’s state violence in a new light that illuminates the deep, often unnoticed links between violence and irrational fear.
When he broke his silence on Vietnam, King denounced the “morbid fear of communism” that had turned Western nations into “arch anti-revolutionaries,” willing to “adjust to injustice.” “Our only hope today,” he preached, “lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
That, as he had learned from Gandhi and taught to millions, would require a spirit of love strenuously applied to overcome fear. King had read Gandhi; he had also visited India and spoken with many ardent Gandhians. So he grasped the spirit of these words the Mahatma wrote: “Fear and love are contradictory terms.” “In order to be fearless we should love all and adhere to the path of truth."
King agreed with Gandhi that fear was a crucial source of evil. “There is one evil,” he said, “that is worse than violence, and that’s cowardice.” He also understood the Mahatma’s view that fear was the opposite of love, the opposite of nonviolence, and so often itself the source of violence. By the last night of his life, he had embraced this Gandhian philosophy almost ecstatically. After prophesying his own death, he famously concluded: “So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man!”
King had lived surrounded by whites who were moved to violence by irrational fears of people of color. He dedicated his life to overcoming his own fear so that, through love, he could overcome the fears of his oppressors. In 1967, he finally overcame his fear of harming the civil rights movement and bravely denounced America’s war in Vietnam, which was motivated (as he saw it) by an irrational fear of communism.
King’s blind spot (and even the greatest people have them) was in not recognizing that Israel’s violence against Palestinians, too, was — and still is — similarly motivated by irrational fear. One of the great tragedies of Zionism has, in fact, been its striking inability to escape the fear that gave it birth — a fear well justified in late nineteenth century Europe, Zionism’s birthplace, at a time when anti-Semitism was indeed rampant. Today, however, with the Jewish state possessing massively preponderant military power in the Middle East, it no longer makes sense to base Jewish identity on fear, to imagine anti-Semitism lurking behind every well-meaning critique of Israeli policy.
Those of us who follow the path of the great Jewish philosopher and dissident Zionist Martin Buber, who still believe Zionism can in principle be moral, see fear as not merely unjustified but destructive and self-destructive. It fosters policies that only lock Israelis as well as Palestinians into an endless cycle of insecurity.
King apparently never recognized (or at least never said publicly) that fear, not anti-Zionism, was the true threat to the Jewish people. It’s hard to blame him. He was far too busy with more immediate concerns to spend much time studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel’s Fear
If a man as fearlessly committed to truth as MLK could make such a mistake, how much more easily can other Americans, including American presidents, fall prey to the same mistake. The current president has made a huge mistake in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now he finds himself hostage to a tragic cycle of fear.
At first, Obama came out swinging against Israeli policy like no president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon after taking office, he insisted (according to his Secretary of State) on a total, permanent halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
It was a sensible step. Settlement expansion is rapidly shrinking the size of a future Palestine to a point where a viable state will be impossible. Without a viable Palestinian state, the Middle East cauldron will continue to boil, generating anger and tensions that threaten not only the security of the region, but U.S. security interests as well. That’s why a total settlement freeze is still supported by some factions in the administration.
But Obama and his advisors apparently underestimated the pushback they would get from Israeli leaders who always have their eyes on their own political futures. No one can say what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet members really believe, but it's easy to see the political points they score by pushing the panic button over the so-called “dangers” of giving in to Obama’s demands. All they have to do is raise ever-present fears of Jewish weakness and victimization, as Defense Minister Ehud Barak did when he complained that with the Obama administration “focusing solely on settlement building… Israel felt that it was being driven to its knees and delivered to the other side.”
As Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the New York Times, Netanyahu’s message that “the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust… is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis.” Siegman observed that this fear (which he called “pathological”) "is invoked most frequently by Israelis themselves. The term for it in Israel is a ‘galut [diaspora] mentality’, the tendency of diaspora Jewry to see itself as friendless, isolated, and always at the edge of a looming pogrom.”
It’s a mentality long rooted in Zionism, and now growing in Israel, where Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston notes “a new Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you need to know… Concede nothing… Give no ground. Ever."
Another Israeli pundit brought the issue directly back to King’s insight about the link between violence and fear. Doron Rosenblum described Netanyahu and Barak as representing “two outstanding traits of Israeliness: aggressiveness and paranoia… They reflect two sides of the same coin — the fear of being considered weak and, the only thing that's worse, being considered naive.”
A year ago, two Israeli researchers released a study with numbers to back up these impressions. They found that Israeli Jews are generally moved more by fear than anything else in viewing their conflict with the Palestinians. That leads them to “a selective and distorted processing of information aimed at preserving conflict-beliefs.”
Obama Held Hostage to Fear?
Here in the U.S., Jews working to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict via a just peace also see fear as a great obstacle. Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of the pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby J Street (who has his own roots deep in Israeli life) feels fear is the biggest factor holding back the Jewish state when it comes to making a genuine peace. Yes, Israelis need security guarantees they can believe in, says Ben-Ami, meaningful guarantees that if they give up land they will get peace.
The only way to get such assurances, though, would be through good-faith negotiations. And only strong and active American leadership in the diplomatic process can make those negotiations happen. That’s why J Street and a number of other Jewish-American groups supported Obama’s call for an immediate and total freeze on settlement construction as a first step toward peace talks.
But they face stiff opposition from American Jews still stuck in what J Street Policy Director Hadar Susskind calls “the Israel closet.” Torn between thought and feeling, they remain locked into the fear they grew up with, he says. “Their heads support a strong American role in helping Israel make peace with its neighbors, but their kishkes [guts] are uncomfortable with the idea of anyone ‘telling Israel what to do’.”
Worried that Jews will look weak and pushed around, some of the biggest U.S. Jewish organizations denounced Obama’s demands on Israel. They found allies among Christian Zionists (whose influence on U.S. Middle East policy is often underrated) and, very likely, factions in the U.S. government (mostly military and intelligence) who want to placate the Israelis for their own pragmatic purposes as they try to contain the terrors of “terrorism.”
Yielding to their collective pressure, Obama backed off his stern demand, letting the Israelis off with only a promised temporary halt to just some expansion. Since he offered no cogent explanation for this retreat, he’s left us free to speculate on the political scare he got from that inside-the-beltway coalition.
It is at least likely that the president and his advisers feared the coalition’s clout as they endured a long, hot summer of attacks on their health-care reform, the one fight the administration feels it has to win. Whatever the reasons may be, Obama consigned the prospect of real peace negotiations in the Middle East to defeat, at least temporarily.
If the administration sticks to its current cautious line, it will go on holding itself — and Middle East peace — hostage to the irrational fears of others. Israelis and Americans need a lasting peace to enhance their security. Palestinians desperately need a lasting peace simply to escape their daily suffering. Yet all are trapped in the synergy of mutually reinforcing fears.
Breaking Free
The situation is, however, not hopeless. Not yet, anyway. If the administration’s political fears can be eased, it may still find its backbone on the Israel-Palestine issue. And one pivotal group could swing the balance: the U.S. Jewish community.
Just as King found the courage he needed back in 1967 when it was “time to break silence” on a terrible war, more and more Jews are breaking the silence that has ruled the American Jewish community when it comes to Israel’s share of responsibility for the continuing conflict. J Street is only the most prominent among the many recent American Jewish voices for peace. They are all joining a movement that's growing far faster than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago.
J Street’s Susskind sums up that movement — and sounds a lot like King — when he calls on Jews to “step out of the Jewish closet and say: ‘We love Israel, but that doesn’t mean we’ll remain silent when we disagree’. It’s time for all of us who grew up loving Israel and praying for peace to stop letting the mythical notion that American Jews speak with a single voice keep us from supporting Israel’s security and future by calling for peace.”
On this Martin Luther King Day, then, American Jews face a choice. They can dwell on one casual, misinformed, easily misinterpreted remark that King made and use it to justify continued Israeli intransigence and violence. Or they can remember the words in which he summed up a lifetime of nonviolence, on the last night of his life — “I’m not fearing any man!” — and call on their own government to demand at least a start toward ending the conflict: a genuine halt to all settlement expansion.
If enough American Jews, and enough of their non-Jewish allies, find that courage, Obama and future presidents will have the political cover they need to demand of Israel the steps it must take to begin a real journey toward security and peace.______________________________________ • Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175192/tomgram%3A_ira_chernus%2C_the_wages_of_fear_in_israel_and_the_u.s.
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 22, 2010 23:15:59 GMT 12
William Astore — Going Rogue in Combat Bootsposted January 19, 2010 | TomDispatch.comHere’s a bit of cheery news: Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with the nation's top defense company executives, including the CEOs of those mega-military-industrial combines Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and called for a “closer partnership.” He also made them a promise. He pledged, according to his spokesman, “to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time.”
Let’s put that pledge in context. Last week, President Obama did something common in the Bush years, something he swore never to do; he requested a supplemental $33 billion over and above the fiscal year 2011 defense budget, mainly for his Afghan surge. That sum, when appropriated by Congress, will bring the total official Pentagon budget to $708 billion dollars ($159 billion of which will be directly slated for Afghan and Iraq war costs). To put that sum in context, it’s close to what the rest of the world combined spends on military matters. And you can be guaranteed of one thing: this won’t be the last supplemental request of 2011.
By the way, if you were to add up the real “defense” budget, including funds for the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (which handles the U.S. nuclear arsenal), veterans' care, the State Department’s planned near-billion-dollar expansion of its embassy in Pakistan into a mega-command post for the region and the planned doubling of the number of personnel in its already monstrous embassy in Baghdad for a similar purpose, and many other relevant things, you would be closing in on $1 trillion per year.
Meanwhile, in December 2009, the total funds Congress has so far appropriated since 2001 only for our two wars topped $1 trillion dollars, with no end in sight, and that figure doesn’t include projected future costs ranging from care for soldiers wounded in those wars to the cost of replenishing worn out military equipment. At the war-fighting level, the Congressional Budget Office has already projected direct war costs over the next decade at $867 billion.
The Pentagon’s 2011 budget is already the highest since World War II, according to defense analyst Winslow T. Wheeler. Now, consider that the secretary of defense has just “pledged” more of the same for years to come. And note that none of this — with the possible exception of that $33 billion supplemental request — is considered particularly controversial by anyone who matters in Washington, or worth much front-page news attention. Sums that put health-care reform in the shade cause barely a stir. In other words, the Pentagon rules the roost and, as TomDispatch regular William Astore indicates, it could get a lot worse. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ A Very American CoupComing Soon to a Hometown Near YouBy William J. AstoreThe wars in distant lands were always going to come home, but not this way.
It’s September 2016, year 15 of America’s “Long War” against terror. As weary troops return to the homeland, a bitter reality assails them: despite their sacrifices, America is losing.
Iraq is increasingly hostile to remaining occupation forces. Afghanistan is a riddle that remains unsolved: its army and police forces are untrustworthy, its government corrupt, and its tribal leaders unsympathetic to the vagaries of U.S. intervention. Since the Obama surge of 2010, a trillion more dollars have been devoted to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other countries in the vast shatter zone that is central Asia, without measurable returns; nothing, that is, except the prolongation of America’s Great Recession, now entering its tenth year without a sustained recovery in sight.
Disillusioned veterans are unable to find decent jobs in a crumbling economy. Scarred by the physical and psychological violence of war, fed up with the happy talk of duplicitous politicians who only speak of shared sacrifices, they begin to organize. Their motto: take America back.
Meanwhile, a lame duck presidency, choking on foreign policy failures, finds itself attacked even for its putative successes. Health-care reform is now seen to have combined the inefficiency and inconsistency of government with the naked greed and exploitative talents of corporations. Medical rationing is a fact of life confronting anyone on the high side of 50. Presidential rhetoric that offered hope and change has lost all resonance. Mainstream media outlets are discredited and disintegrating, resulting in new levels of information anarchy.
Protest, whether electronic or in the streets, has become more common — and the protestors in those streets increasingly carry guns, though as yet armed violence is minimal. A panicked administration responds with overlapping executive orders and legislation that is widely perceived as an attack on basic freedoms.
Tapping the frustration of protesters — including a renascent and mainstreamed “tea bag” movement — the former captains and sergeants, the ex-CIA operatives and out-of-work private mercenaries of the War on Terror take action. Conflict and confrontation they seek; laws and orders they increasingly ignore. As riot police are deployed in the streets, they face a grim choice: where to point their guns? Not at veterans, they decide, not at America’s erstwhile heroes.
A dwindling middle-class, still waving the flag and determined to keep its sliver-sized portion of the American dream, throws its support to the agitators. Wages shrinking, savings exhausted, bills rising, the sober middle can no longer hold. It vents its fear and rage by calling for a decisive leader and the overthrow of a can’t-do Congress.
Savvy members of traditional Washington elites are only too happy to oblige. They too crave order and can-do decisiveness — on their terms. Where better to find that than in the ranks of America’s most respected institution: the military?
A retired senior officer who led America’s heroes in central Asia is anointed. His creed: end public disorder, fight the War on Terror to a victorious finish, put America back on top. The United States, he says, is the land of winners, and winners accept no substitute for victory. Nominated on September 11, 2016, Patriot Day, he marches to an overwhelming victory that November, embraced in the streets by an American version of the post-World War I German Freikorps and the police who refuse to suppress them. A concerned minority is left to wonder (and tremble) at the de facto military coup that occurred so quickly, and yet so silently, in their midst.
It Can Happen Here, Unless We Act
Yes, it can happen here. In some ways, it’s already happening. But the key question is: at this late date, how can it be stopped? Here are some vectors for a change in course, and in mindset as well, if we are to avoid our own stealth coup:
1. Somehow, we need to begin to reverse the ongoing militarization of this country, especially our ever-rising “defense” budgets. The most recent of these, we’ve just learned, is a staggering $708 billion for fiscal year 2011 — and that doesn’t even include the $33 billion President Obama has requested for his latest surge in Afghanistan. We also need to get rid of the idea that anyone who suggests even minor cuts in defense spending is either hopelessly naïve or a terrorist sympathizer. It’s time as well to call a halt to the privatization of military activity and so halt the rise of security contractors like Xe (formerly Blackwater), thereby weakening the corporate profit motive that supports and underpins the American version of perpetual war. It’s time to begin feeling chastened, not proud, that we’re by far the number one country in the world in arms manufacturing and the global arms trade.
2. Let’s downsize our global mission rather than endlessly expanding our military footprint. It’s time to have a military capable of defending this country, not fighting endless wars in distant lands while garrisoning the globe.
3. Let’s stop paying attention to major TV and cable networks that rely on retired senior military officers, most of whom have ties both to the Pentagon and military contractors, for “unbiased” commentary on our wars. If we insist on fighting our perpetual “frontier” wars, let’s start insisting as well that they be covered in all their bitter reality: the death, the mayhem, the waste, the prisons, and the torture. Why is our war coverage invariably sanitized to “PG” or even “G,” when we can go to the movies anytime and see “R” rated, pornographically violent films? And by the way, it’s time to be more critical of the government’s and the media’s use of language and propaganda. Mindlessly parroting the Patriot Act doesn’t make you patriotic.
4. It’s time to elect a president who doesn’t surround himself with senior “civilian” advisors and ambassadors who are actually retired military generals and admirals, one who won’t accept a Nobel Peace Prize by defending war in theory and escalating it in practice.
5. Let’s toughen up. Let’s stop deferring to authority figures who promise to “protect” us while abridging our rights. Let’s stop bowing down before men and women in uniform, before they start thinking that it’s their right to be worshipped and act accordingly.
6. Let’s act now to relieve the sort of desperation bred by joblessness and hopelessness that could lead many — notably male workers suffering from the “He-Cession” — to see a militarized solution in “the homeland” as a credible last resort. It’s the economy, stupid, but with Main Street’s health, not Wall Street’s, in our focus.
7. Let’s take Sarah Palin and her followers seriously. They’re tapping into anger that’s real and spreading. Don’t let them become the voices of the angry working (and increasingly unemployed) classes.
8. Recognize that we face real enemies in our world, the most powerful of which aren’t in distant Afghanistan or Yemen but here at home. The essence of our struggle to sustain our faltering democracy should not be against “terrorists,” with their shoe and crotch bombs, but against various powerful, perfectly legal groups here whose interests lie in a Pentagon that only grows ever stronger.
9. Stop thinking the U.S. is uniquely privileged. Don’t take it on faith that God is on our side. Forget about God blessing America. If you believe in God, get out there and start trying to earn His blessing through deeds.
10. And, most important of all, remember that fear is the mind-killer that makes militarism possible. Ramping up “terror” is an amazingly effective way of shredding our Constitution. Putting our “safety” above all else is asking for trouble. The only way we’ll be completely safe from the big bad terrorists, after all, is when we’re all living in a maximum security state. Think of walking down the street while always being subject to a “full-body scan.”
That’s my top 10 things we need to do. It’s a daunting list and I’m sure you have a few ideas of your own. But have faith. Ultimately, it all boils down to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words to a nation suffering through the Great Depression: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. These words came to mind recently as I read the following missive from a friend and World War II veteran who’s seen tough times:
"It’s very hard for me to accept how soft the American people have become. In 1941, with the western world under assault by powerful and deadly forces, and a large armada of ships and planes attacking us directly, I never heard a word of fear as we faced three powerful nations as enemies. Sixteen million of us went into the military with the very real possibility of death and I never once heard of fear, except from those exposed to danger. Now, our people let [their leaders] terrify them into accepting the destruction of our economy, our image in the world, and our democracy... All this over a small group of religious fanatics [mostly] from Saudi Arabia whom we kowtow to so we can drive 8-cylinder SUV’s. Pathetic!
"How many times have I stood in ‘security lines’ at airports and when I complained of the indignity of taking off shoes and not having water and the manhandling of passengers, have well educated people smugly said to me, ‘Well, they’re just keeping us safe.’ I look at the airport bullshit as a training ground to turn Americans into docile sheep in a totalitarian state."
A public conditioned to act like sheep, to “support our troops” no matter what, to cower before the idea of terrorism, is a public ready to be herded. A military that’s being used to fight unwinnable wars is a military prone to return home disaffected and with scores to settle.
Angry and desperate veterans and mercenaries already conditioned to violence, merging with “tea baggers” and other alienated groups, could one day form our own Freikorps units, rioting for violent solutions to national decline. Recall that the Nazi movement ultimately succeeded in the early 1930s because so many middle-class Germans were scared as they saw their wealth, standard of living, and status all threatened by the Great Depression.
If our Great Recession continues, if decent jobs remain scarce, if the mainstream media continue to foster fear and hatred, if returning troops are disaffected and their leaders blame politicians for “not being tough enough,” if one or two more terrorist attacks succeed on U.S. soil, wouldn’t this country be well primed for a coup by any other name?
Don’t expect a “Seven Days in May” scenario. No American Caesar will return to Washington with his legions to decapitate governmental authority. Why not? Because he won’t have to.
As long as we continue to live in perpetual fear in an increasingly militarized state, we establish the preconditions under which Americans will be nailed to, and crucified on, a cross of iron.______________________________________ • William J. Astore teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology (). A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), he has also taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of “Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism”.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175193/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_going_rogue_in_combat_boots
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 23, 2010 10:08:35 GMT 12
Rebecca Solnit — In Haiti, Words Can Killposted January 21, 2010 | TomDispatch.comJust before Haiti was devastated by the most powerful earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years, when, that is, it was only devastated by the hemisphere’s worst poverty, there were but one or two full-time foreign correspondents in the country. No longer.
Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island. CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning. Katie flew in later that day. By the time Diane made it out of Kabul and into Port-au-Prince, Brian had already long since hit “the tarmac.” (All but Anderson were gone again by the weekend.) Along with them, in a situation in which resources were nearly nonexistent, went at least 44 CNN correspondents, producers, and technicians, a crew of 25 from Fox, and undoubtedly similar contingents from CBS, NBC, and ABC. Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” — at a cost that can only have been obscene.
In the process, as happens on our obsessionally eyeball-gluing, single-event, 24/7 media planet, “world news” essentially became Haiti with the usual logos, tags, and drum rolls (“Earthquake in Haiti”). The three networks even briefly expanded the length of their half-hour news shows to an all-Haiti-all-the-time hour, with just bare minutes leftover for the rest of the planet. In a sense, as the earthquake had blotted out Haiti, so the news coverage blotted out everything else with an almost religious fervor and the language to match.
In place of the world came endless stories of a tiny number of riveting rescues from the rubble (“miracles”) by international rescue teams — less than 150 saved when possibly tens of thousands of buried Haitians would not be dug out and conceivably up to 200,000 had died. Along with this went the usual self-congratulatory reporting about American generosity and the importance of American troops (they secured the airport!) in a situation in which aid was visibly not getting through, in which people were not being saved.
And of course, with the drama of people pulled from the rubble went another kind of drama: impending violence — even though the real story, as a number of reporters couldn’t help but notice, was the remarkable patience and altruistic willingness of Haitians to support each other, help each other, and organize each other in a situation where there was almost nothing to share. It might, in fact, have been their finest hour, but amid the growing headlines about possible “violence” and “looting”, that would have been hard to tell.
The coverage has been beyond massive, sentimental, self-congratulatory, and not anyone’s finest hour — and a month or three from now, predictably, Haiti will still be utterly devastated and there will be but one or two foreign correspondents on hand. Anderson, Diane, Brian, Katie? They’ll be somewhere else, 24/7. Of course, much of what happened might have been far better prepared for, if any of the anchors or correspondents had read Rebecca Solnit’s revelatory book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which offers news from the past on what people, again and again, in the worst of times, actually do without the help of the authorities. The answer: generally, they take care of each other in remarkably creative ways. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ When the Media Is the DisasterCovering HaitiBy Rebecca SolnitSoon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity.They care less for human life than for property.They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.
Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.
A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”
People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.
The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.
The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer — his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.
In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.
What Would You Do?
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.
By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.
So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.
The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.
If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?
Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?
It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.
If Words Could Kill
We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.
“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier's pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.
After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.
Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.
Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.
The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.
They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?
The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control — the American military calls it “security” — rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.
Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.
In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.
A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.
A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.
Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services — like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina — to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced, and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.
Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing…. Well, you catch my drift.
Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected — or appointed — office.
Learning to See in Crises
Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”
The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.
Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse — food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment — might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.
Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.
Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:
Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”
And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”
For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”
And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”
That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.______________________________________ • At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, “A Paradise Built in Hell”, is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175194/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_in_haiti%2C_words_can_kill
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 31, 2010 12:15:23 GMT 12
Nick Turse — The Forty-Year Drone Warposted January 24, 2010 | TomDispatch.comThere’s something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations — poison gas, the early airplane, the tank — barely hit the battlefield before the enemy had developed countermeasures and was cranking up his own production line to create something similar. And this process has never stopped.
The wonder weapon of our present moment is the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, now doing our dirty work, an endless series of targeted assassinations, in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. Such weapons always come with wondrous claims. Here’s a typical one from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: “Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones.” When it comes to war, beware of any sentence that begins “never before,” and the claims of future breakthroughs or victories that go with them.
It’s easy, of course, for the editorial writers of the Journal to pen such confident sentiments thousands of miles from the war zone. They would undoubtedly feel quite differently if their hometowns and neighborhoods were the targets of such “precise” weaponry, which has nonetheless managed to kill hundreds of civilians.
Drones, of course, do just what they were meant to do, as surely as did poison gas, the airplane, and the tank early in the last century: they kill. That’s indisputable, but the promised “breakthroughs,” whether aimed at destroying enemy fortifications, enemy networks, or the enemy’s will, seldom follow so reliably. And yet once the wonder fades and the overwrought claims with it, the wonder weapons remain in our world — and (here’s the viral part) they begin to spread.
There is no evidence that the drones are breaking the back of either the Taliban (Afghan or Pakistani) or al-Qaeda in our distant wars, but plenty of evidence that they are helping to destabilize Pakistan and create intense anti-American feelings there. Now, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicated on arriving in Pakistan last week, we are thinking of giving the Pakistanis their own unarmed surveillance drones, while from Iran to China, Israel to Russia, powers everywhere are rushing to enter the age of 24/7 robotic assassination along with, or just behind, us. You might think that this would give the Pentagon pause, but a prospective arms race just gets the blood there boiling, and when it comes to Terminator-style war, as Nick Turse indicates below, the U.S. Air Force has plans. Boy, does it ever! — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ The Drone SurgeToday, Tomorrow, and 2047By Nick TurseOne moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.
What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented number” of strikes — which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike — have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of modern times.
In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized “surge” of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Today’s Surge
Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review — a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities, and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats — is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post recently reported, “The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.”
The MQ-1 Predator — first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s — and its newer, larger, and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly between 27 and 36 U.S. drone attacks as part of the CIA’s covert war in Pakistan. In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January 2010, there had already been 11 of them.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force has instituted a much publicized decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. At the same time, however, UAS attacks have increased to record levels.
The Air Force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech U.S. bases around the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves and the data streaming back from them. These sites include a converted medical warehouse at Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the Air Force secretly oversees its on-going drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad Air Fields in Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations center at Nevada’s Creech Air Base, where the Air Force’s “pilots” fly drones by remote control from thousands of miles away; and — perhaps most importantly — at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone surge — as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemenf and Somalia — come due and are, quite literally, paid.
In the waning days of December 2009, in fact, the Pentagon cut two sizeable checks to ensure that unmanned operations involving the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper will continue full-speed ahead in 2010. The 703rd Aeronautical Systems Squadron based at Wright-Patterson signed a $38 million contract with defense giant Raytheon for logistics support for the targeting systems of both drones. At the same time, the squadron inked a deal worth $266 million with mega-defense contractor General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones, to provide management services, logistics support, repairs, software maintenance, and other functions for both drone programs. Both deals essentially ensure that, in the years ahead, the stunning increase in drone operations will continue.
These contracts, however, are only initial down payments on an enduring drone surge designed to carry U.S. unmanned aerial operations forward, ultimately for decades.
Drone Surge: The Longer View
Back in 2004, the Air Force could put a total of only five drone combat air patrols (CAPs) — each consisting of four air vehicles — in the skies over American war zones at any one time. By 2009, that number was 38, a 660% increase according to the Air Force. Similarly, between 2001 and 2008, hours of surveillance coverage for U.S. Central Command, encompassing both the Iraqi and Afghan war zones, as well as Pakistan and Yemen, showed a massive spike of 1,431%.
In the meantime, flight hours have gone through the roof. In 2004, for example, Reapers, just beginning to soar, flew 71 hours in total, according to Air Force documents; in 2006, that number had risen to 3,123 hours; and last year, 25,391 hours. This year, the Air Force projects that the combined flight hours of all its drones — Predators, Reapers, and unarmed RQ-4 Global Hawks — will exceed 250,000 hours, about the total number of hours flown by all Air Force drones from 1995-2007. In 2011, the 300,000 hour-a-year barrier is expected to be crossed for the first time, and after that the sky’s the limit.
More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation, in the Bush years, from 2006 into 2009, there were 41 drone strikes in Pakistan which killed 454 militants and civilians. Last year, under the Obama administration, there were 42 strikes that left 453 people dead. A recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based independent research organization that tracks security issues, claimed an even larger number, 667 people — most of them civilians — killed by U.S. drone strikes last year.
While assisting the CIA’s drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the Air Force has been increasing its own unmanned aerial hunter-killer missions. In 2007 and 2008, for example, Air Force Predators and Reapers fired missiles during 244 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, while all the U.S. armed services have pursued unmanned aerial warfare, the Air Force has outpaced each of them.
From 2001, when armed drone operations began, until the spring of 2009, the Air Force fired 703 Hellfire missiles and dropped 132 GBU-12s (500-pound laser-guided bombs) in combat operations. The Army, by comparison, launched just two Hellfire missiles and two smaller GBU-44 Viper Strike munitions in the same time period. The disparity should only grow, since the Army’s drones remain predominantly small surveillance aircraft, while in 2009 the Air Force shifted all outstanding orders for the medium-sized Predator to the even more formidable Reaper, which is not only twice as fast but has 600% more payload capacity, meaning more space for bombs and missiles.
In addition, the more heavily-armed Reapers, which can now loiter over an area for 10 to 14 hours without refueling, will be able to spot and track ever more targets via an increasingly sophisticated video monitoring system. According to Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, the first three “Gorgon Stare pods” — new wide-area sensors that provide surveillance capabilities over large swathes of territory — will be installed on Reapers operating in Afghanistan this spring.
A technology not available for the older Predator, Gorgon Stare will allow 10 operators to view 10 video feeds from a single drone at the same time. Back at a distant base, a “pilot” will stare at a tiled screen with a composite picture of the streaming battlefield video, even as field commanders analyze a portion of the digital picture, panning, zooming, and tilting the image to meet their needs.
A more advanced set of “pods,” scheduled to be deployed for the first time this fall, will allow 30 operators to view 30 video images simultaneously. In other words, via video feeds from a single Reaper drone, operators could theoretically track 30 different people heading in 30 directions from a single Afghan compound. The generation of sensors expected to come online in late 2011 promises 65 such feeds, according to Air Force documents, a more than 6,000% increase in effectiveness over the Predator’s video system. The Air Force is, however, already overwhelmed just by drone video currently being sent back from the war zones and, in the years ahead, risks “drowning in data,” according to Deptula.
The 40-Year Plan
When it comes to the drone surge, the years 2011-2013 are just the near horizon. While, like the Army, the Navy is working on its own future drone warfare capacity — in the air as well as on and even under the water — the Air Force is involved in striking levels of futuristic planning for robotic war. It envisions a future previously imagined only in sci-fi movies like the Terminator series.
As a start, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue skies research outfit, is already looking into radically improving on Gorgon Stare with an “Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Infrared (ARGUS-IR) System.” In the obtuse language of military research and development, it will, according to DARPA, provide a “real-time, high-resolution, wide area video persistent surveillance capability that allows joint forces to keep critical areas of interest under constant surveillance with a high degree of target location accuracy” via as many as “130 ‘Predator-like’ steerable video streams to enable real-time tracking and monitoring and enhanced situational awareness during evening hours.”
In translation, that means the Air Force will quite literally be flooded with video information from future battlefields; and every “advance” of this sort means bulking up the global network of facilities, systems, and personnel capable of receiving, monitoring, and interpreting the data streaming in from distant digital eyes. All of it, of course, is specifically geared toward “target location,” that is, pin-pointing people on one side of the world so that Americans on the other side can watch, track, and in many cases, kill them.
In addition to enhanced sensors and systems like ARGUS-IR, the Air Force has a long-term vision for drone warfare that is barely beginning to be realized. Predators and Reapers have already been joined in Afghanistan by a newer, formerly secret drone, a “low observable unmanned aircraft system” first spotted in 2007 and dubbed the “Beast of Kandahar” before observers were sure what it actually was. It is now known to be a Lockheed Martin-manufactured unmanned aerial vehicle, the RQ-170 — a drone which the Air Force blandly notes was designed to “directly support combatant commander needs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to locate targets.” According to military sources, the sleek, stealthy surveillance craft has been designated to replace the antique Lockheed U-2 spy plane, which has been in use since the 1950s.
In the coming years, the RQ-170 is slated to be joined in the skies of America’s “next wars” by a fleet of drones with ever newer, more sophisticated capabilities and destructive powers. Looking into the post-2011 future, Deptula sees the most essential need, according to an Aviation Week report, as “long-range [reconnaissance and] precision strike” — that is, more eyes in far off skies and more lethality. He added, “We cannot move into a future without a platform that allows [us] to project power long distances and to meet advanced threats in a fashion that gives us an advantage that no other nation has.”
This means bigger, badder, faster drones — armed to the teeth — with sensor systems to monitor wide swathes of territory and the ability to loiter overhead for days on end waiting for human targets to appear and, in due course, be vaporized by high-powered munitions. It’s a future built upon advanced technologies designed to make targeted killings — remote-controlled assassinations — ever more effortless.
Over the horizon and deep into what was, until recently, only a silver-screen fantasy, the Air Force envisions a wide array of unmanned aircraft, from tiny insect-like robots to enormous “tanker size” pilotless planes. Each will be slated to take over specific war-making functions (or so Air Force dreamers imagine). Those nano-sized drones, for instance, are set to specialize in indoor reconnaissance — they’re small enough to fly through windows or down ventilation shafts — and carry out lethal attacks, undertake computer-disabling cyber-attacks, and swarm, as would a group of angry bees, of their own volition. Slightly larger micro-sized Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (STUAS) are supposed to act as “transformers” — altering their form to allow for flying, crawling and non-visual sensing capabilities. They might fill sentry, counter-drone, surveillance, and lethal attack roles.
Additionally, the Air Force envisions small and medium “fighter sized” drones with lethal combat capabilities that would put the current UAS air fleet to shame. Today’s medium-sized Reapers are set to be replaced by next generation MQ-Ma drones that will be “networked, capable of partial autonomy, all-weather and modular with capabilities supporting electronic warfare (EW), CAS [close air support], strike and multi-INT [multiple intelligence] ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] missions’ platform.”
The language may not be elegant, much less comprehensible, but if these future fighter aircraft actually come online they will not only send today’s remaining Top Gun pilots to the showers, but may even sideline tomorrow’s drone human operators, who, if all goes as planned, will have ever fewer duties. Unlike today’s drones which must take off and land with human guidance, the MQ-Ma’s will be automated and drone operators will simply be there to monitor the aircraft.
Next up will be the MQ-Mb, theoretically capable of taking over even more roles once assigned to traditional fighter-bombers and spy planes, including the suppression of enemy air defenses, bombing and strafing of ground targets, and surveillance missions. These will also be designed to fly more autonomously and be better linked-in to other drone “platforms” for cooperative missions involving many aircraft under the command of a single “pilot”. Imagine, for instance, one operator overseeing a single command drone that holds sway over a small squadron of autonomous drones carrying out a coordinated air attack on clusters of people in some far off land, incinerating them in small groups across a village, town or city.
Finally, perhaps 30 to 40 years from now, the MQ-Mc drone would incorporate all of the advances of the MQ-M line, while being capable of everything from dog-fighting to missile defense. With such new technology will, of course, come new policies and new doctrines. In the years ahead, the Air Force intends to make drone-related policy decisions on everything from treaty obligations to automatic target engagement — robotic killing without a human in the loop. The latter extremely controversial development is already envisioned as a possible post-2025 reality.
2047: What’s Old is New Again
The year 2047 is the target date for the Air Force’s Holy Grail, the capstone for its long-term plan to turn the skies over to war-fighting drones. In 2047, the Air Force intends to rule the skies with MQ-Mc drones and “special” super-fast, hypersonic drones for which neither viable technology nor any enemies with any comparable programs or capabilities yet exist. Despite this, the Air Force is intent on making these super-fast hunter-killer systems a reality by 2047. “Propulsion technology and materials that can withstand the extreme heat will likely take 20 years to develop. This technology will be the next generation air game-changer. Therefore the prioritization of the funding for the specific technology development should not wait until the emergence of a critical COCOM [combatant command] need,” says the Air Force’s 2009-2047 UAS “Flight Plan.”
If anything close to the Air Force’s dreams comes to fruition, the “game” will indeed be radically changed. By 2047, there’s no telling how many drones will be circling over how many heads in how many places across the planet. There’s no telling how many millions or billions of flight hours will have been flown, or how many people, in how many countries will have been killed by remote-controlled, bomb-dropping, missile-firing, judge-jury-and-executioner drone systems.
There’s only one given. If the U.S. still exists in its present form, is still solvent, and still has a functioning Pentagon of the present sort, a new plan will already be well underway to create the war-making technologies of 2087. By then, in ever more places, people will be living with the sort of drone war that now worries only those in places like Degan village. Ever more people will know that unmanned aerial systems packed with missiles and bombs are loitering in their skies. By then, there undoubtedly won’t even be that lawnmower-engine sound indicating that a missile may soon plow into your neighbor’s home.
For the Air Force, such a prospect is the stuff of dreams, a bright future for unmanned, hypersonic lethality; for the rest of the planet, it's a potential nightmare from which there may be no waking.______________________________________ • Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175195/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_forty-year_drone_war
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 31, 2010 13:23:07 GMT 12
Our Wars Are Killing Usposted January 26, 2010 | TomDispatch.comPentagon TimeTick…Tick…Tick…By Tom EngelhardtBack in 2007, when General David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in April of that year, he typically said: “I'm conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock, so we're obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can perhaps give hope to those in the coalition countries, in Washington, and perhaps put a little more time on the Washington clock.” And he wasn’t alone. Military spokespeople and others in the Bush administration right up to the president regularly seemed to hear one, two, or sometimes as many as three clocks ticking away ominously and out of sync.
Hearing some discordant ticking myself of late, I decided to retrieve Petraeus’s image from the dustbin of history. So imagine three ticking clocks, all right here in the U.S., one set to Washington time, a second to American time, and the third to Pentagon time.
In Washington — with even the New York Times now agreeing that a “majority” of 100 is 60 (not 51) and that the Senate’s 41st vote settles everything — the clock seems to be ticking erratically, if at all. On the other hand, that American clock, if we’re to believe the good citizens of Massachusetts, is ticking away like a bomb. Americans are impatient, angry, and “in revolt” against Washington time. That’s what the media continue to tell us in the wake of last week’s Senate upset.
Depending on which account you read, they were outraged by a nearly trillion dollar health-care reform that was also a giveaway to insurance companies, and annoyed by Democratic candidate Martha Coakley calling Curt Schilling a “Yankees fan” as well as besmirching handshaking in the cold outside Fenway Park; they were anxious about an official Massachusetts unemployment rate of 9.4% (and a higher real one), an economy that has rebounded for bankers but not for regular people, soaring deficits, staggering foreclosure rates, mega-banking bonuses, the Obama administration’s bailout of those same bankers, and its coziness with Wall Street. They were angry and impatient about a lot of things, blind angry you might say, since they were ready to vote back into office the party not in office, even if behind that party’s “new face” were ideas that would take us back to the origins of the present disaster.
A Blank Check for the Pentagon
It’s worth noting, however, that they’re not angry about everything — and that the Washington clock, barely moving on a wide range of issues, is still ticking away when it comes to one institution. The good citizens of Massachusetts may be against free rides and bailouts for many types, but not for everybody. I’m speaking, of course, about the Pentagon, for which Congress has just passed a record new budget of $708 billion (with an Afghan war-fighting supplemental request of $33 billion, essentially a bail-out payment, still pending but sure to pass). This happened without real debate, much public notice, or even a touch of anger in Washington or Massachusetts. And keep in mind that the Pentagon’s real budget is undoubtedly close to a trillion dollars, without even including the full panoply of our national security state.
The tea-party crews don’t rail against Pentagon giveaways, nor do Massachusetts voters grumble about them. Unfettered Pentagon budgets pass in the tick-tock of a Washington clock and no one seems fazed when the Wall Street Journal reveals that military aides accompanying globe-hopping parties of congressional representatives regularly spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on snacks, drinks, and other “amenities” for them, even while, like some K Street lobbying outfit, promoting their newest weaponry. Think of it, in financial terms, as Pentagon peanuts shelled out for actual peanuts, and no one gives a damn.
It’s hardly considered news — and certainly nothing to get angry about — when the Secretary of Defense meets privately with the nation’s top military-industrial contractors, calls for an even “closer partnership,” and pledges to further their mutual interests by working “with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time.” Nor does it cause a stir among the denizens of inside-the-Beltway Washington or the citizens of Massachusetts when the top ten defense contractors spend more than $27 million lobbying the federal government, as in the last quarter of 2009 (a significant increase over the previous quarter), just as plans for the president’s Afghan War surge were being prepared.
Nor is it just the angry citizens of Massachusetts, or those tea-party organizers, or Republicans stalwarts who hear no clock ticking when it comes to “national security” expenditures, who see no link between our military-industrial outlays, our perpetual wars, and our economic woes. When, for instance, was the last time you saw a bona fide liberal economist/columnist like Paul Krugman include the Pentagon and our wars in the litany of things potentially bringing this country down?
Yes, striking percentages of Americans attend the church (temple, mosque) of their choice, but when it comes to American politics and the economy, the U.S. military is our church, “national security” our Bible, and nothing done in the name of either can be wrong.
Talk about a blank cheque. It’s as if the military, already the most revered institution in the country, existed on the other side of a Star-Trekkian financial wormhole.
Pentagon Time Horizons
Which brings us to Pentagon time. Yes, that third clock is ticking, but at a very different tempo from those in Washington or Massachusetts.
Americans are evidently increasingly impatient for “change” of whatever sort, whether you can believe in it or not. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is patient. It’s opted for making counterinsurgency the central strategy of its war in Central and South Asia, the sort of strategy that, even if successful, experts claim could easily take a decade or two to pull off. But no problem — not when the Pentagon’s clock is ticking on something like eternal time.
And here’s the thing: because the media are no less likely to give the Pentagon a blank check than the citizens of Massachusetts, it’s hard indeed to grasp the extent to which that institution, and the military services it represents, are planning and living by their own clock. Though major papers have Pentagon “beats,” they generally tell us remarkably little, except inadvertently and in passing, about Pentagon time.
So, for the next few minutes, just keep that Pentagon clock ticking away in your head. In the meantime, we’ll go looking for some hints about the Pentagon’s war-fighting time horizons buried in news reports on, and Pentagon contracts for, the Afghan War.
Take, as a start, a January 6th story from the inside pages of my hometown paper. New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt began it this way: “The military’s effort to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top commanders, is off to a slow start, with too few volunteers and a high-level warning to the armed services to steer better candidates into the program, according to some senior officers and participants.” At stake was an initiative “championed” by Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal to create a “912-member corps of mostly officers and enlisted service members who will work on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for up to five years.”
The news was that the program, in its infancy, was already faltering because it didn’t conform to one of the normal career paths followed in the U.S. military. But what caught my eye was that phrase “up to five years.” Imagine what it means for the war commander, backed by key figures in the Pentagon, to plan to put more than 900 soldiers, including top officers, on a career path that would leave them totally wedded, for five years, to war in the Af-Pak theater of operations. (After all, if that war were to end, the State Department might well take charge.) In other words, McChrystal was creating a potentially powerful interest group within the military whose careers would be wedded to an ongoing war with a time-line that extended into 2015 — and who would have something to lose if it ended too quickly. What does it matter then that President Obama was proclaiming his desire to begin drawing down the war in July 2011?
Or consider the plan being proposed, according to Ann Scott Tyson, in a January 17th Washington Post piece, by Special Forces Major Jim Gant, and now getting a most respectful hearing inside the military. Gant wants to establish small Special Forces teams that would “go native,” move into Afghan villages and partner up with local tribal leaders — “one tribe at a time,” as an influential paper he wrote on the subject was entitled. “The U.S. military,” reported Tyson, “would have to grant the teams the leeway to grow beards and wear local garb, and enough autonomy in the chain of command to make rapid decisions. Most important, to build relationships, the military would have to commit one or two teams to working with the same tribe for three to five years, Gant said.” She added that Gant has “won praise at the highest levels [of the U.S. military] for his effort to radically deepen the U.S. military's involvement with Afghan tribes — and is being sent back to Afghanistan to do just that.” Again, another “up to five year” commitment in Afghanistan and a career path to go with it on a clock that, in Gant’s case, has yet to start ticking.
Or just to run through a few more examples:
- In August 2009, the superb Walter Pincus of the Washington Post quoted Air Force Brigadier General Walter Givhan, in charge of training the Afghan National Army Air Corps, this way: "Our goal is by 2016 to have an [Afghan] air corps that will be capable of doing those operations and the things that it needs to do to meet the security requirements of this country." Of course, that six-year timeline includes the American advisors training that air force. (And note that Givhan’s 2016 date may actually represent slippage. In January 2008, when Air Force Brig. Gen. Jay H. Lindell, who was then commander of the Combined Air Power Transition Force, discussed the subject, he spoke of an “eight-year campaign plan” through 2015 to build up the Afghan Air Corps.)
- In a January 13th piece on Pentagon budgeting plans, Anne Gearan and Anne Flaherty of the Associated Press reported: “The Pentagon projects that war funding would drop sharply in 2012, to $50 billion” from the present at least $159 billion (mainly thanks to a projected massive draw-down of forces in Iraq), “and remain there through 2015.” Whether the financial numbers are accurate or not, the date is striking: again a five-year window.
- Or take the “train and equip” program aimed at bulking up the Afghan military and police, which will be massively staffed with U.S. military advisors (and private security contractors) and is expected to cost at least $65 billion. It’s officially slated to run from 2010-2014 by which time the combined Afghan security forces are projected to reach 400,000.
- Or consider a couple of the long-term contracts already being handed out for Afghan war work like the $158 million the Air Force has awarded to Evergreen Helicopters, Inc., for “indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract for rotary wing aircraft, personnel, equipment, tools, material, maintenance and supervision necessary to perform passenger and cargo air transportation services. Work will be performed in Afghanistan and is expected to start April 3rd, 2009, to be completed by November 30th, 2013.” Or the Pentagon contract awarded to the private contractor SOS International primarily for translators, which has an estimated completion date of September 2014.
Ending the Pentagon’s Free Ride
Of course, this just scratches the surface of long-term Afghan War planning in the Pentagon and the military, which rolls right along, seemingly barely related to whatever war debates may be taking place in Washington. Few in or out of that city find these timelines strange, and indeed they are just symptomatic of an organization already planning for “the next war” and the ones after that, not to speak of the next generation bomber of 2018, the integrated U.S. Army battlefield surveillance system of 2025, and the drones of 2047.
This, in short, is Pentagon time and it’s we who fund that clock which ticks toward eternity. If the Pentagon gets in trouble, war-fighting or otherwise, we bail it out without serious debate or any of the anger we saw in the Massachusetts election. No one marches in the streets, or demands that Pentagon bailouts end, or votes 'em (or at least their supporters) out of office.
In this way, no institution is more deeply embedded in American life or less accountable for its acts; Pentagon time exists enswathed in an almost religious glow of praise and veneration — what might once have been known as “idolatry.” Until the Pentagon is forced into our financial universe, the angry, impatient one where most Americans now live, we’re in trouble. Until candidates begin losing because angry Americans reject our perpetual wars, and the perpetual war-planning that goes with them, this sort of thinking will simply continue, no matter who the “commander-in-chief” is or what he thinks he’s commanding.
It’s time for Americans to stop saluting and end the Pentagon’s free ride before America’s wars kill us.______________________________________ • Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175196/tomgram%3A_our_wars_are_killing_us
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 31, 2010 13:30:51 GMT 12
Anand Gopal — Afraid of the Dark in Afghanistanposted January 28, 2010 | TomDispatch.comWith the dawn of the Obama era, there has been much discussion of counterinsurgency, or COIN. Far less discussed, or reported on, has been the counterterror war in Afghanistan which is evidently ramping up. The truth of counterinsurgency (though you’ll seldom see it said) is that, as a strategy, it has no chance unless its underpinning is a robust program of counterterror.
You don’t know what counterterror is? Not so surprising. The truth is, if you’re not a complete news jockey, you probably don’t know much about targeted assassinations, night raids, secret detention centers, disappearances, and other acts of counter terror (which is really terror in uniform or at least under state orders). Of course, the Afghans know well enough. For them, it’s not a secret war, particularly in the southern parts of the country, where the Taliban is strongest; it’s but one particularly frightening aspect of everyday life.
It’s just we Americans who are ignorant. Our secret war is essentially kept secret from us. Our Special Forces operatives, along with the CIA (and possibly private contractors), have long been involved in the “night raids” that Anand Gopal describes below. And regularly enough, if you’re reading closely, you’ll see news bubbling to the surface about their results — like those eight students in grades 6-10, who were taken from their beds by “Americans” in a night raid in Kunar Province, handcuffed, and then evidently executed. (A statement from Afghan President Hamid Karzai says that they were “martyred” and the UN has confirmed that they were students.) Or consider the recent night raid in Ghazni Province that killed at least four Afghan villagers, including an 11-year-old. Both incidents led to angry protests; both resulted in denials by the U.S. military that the dead were anything but “insurgents” or “bomb-makers.”
In this country, the night raids and the secret U.S. military detention centers that go with them have received next to no coverage — until now. I’m proud to say that Anand Gopal, who has been reporting for the Wall Street Journal from Kabul, produces here the single most extensive report so far on American night raids in Afghanistan and the military holding areas that are the “black sites” of this moment. (His investigation, a shared project of TomDispatch.com and the Nation magazine, appears in print in the latest issue of the Nation. To catch him in an audio interview with TomDispatch’s Timothy MacBain discussing how he got this story, click here.)
Even if inherited from the Bush administration, the Afghan night raids, the accompanying killings, disappearances, incarcerations, and abuses, as well as the secret military detention centers are now, after a full year in office, Obama's. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ Obama’s Secret PrisonsNight Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the “Black Jail,” and the Dogs of War in AfghanistanBy Anand GopalOne quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.
Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan’s rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process, suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.
This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators just a few years ago.
One Dark Night in November
It was the 19th of November 2009, at 3:15 am. A loud blast awoke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni city, a town of ancient provenance in the country’s south. A team of U.S. soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of whom were sleeping in the family’s one-room guesthouse. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran towards the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot, but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted towards his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives remaining in the room, but they — both children — refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.
The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates, and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. He had spent time in Kuwait, and the Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda.
They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, U.S. forces released Rahman’s cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.
“We’ve called his phone, but it doesn’t answer,” says his cousin Qarar, the spokesman for the agriculture minister. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor, and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar’s family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were “enemy militants [that] demonstrated hostile intent.”
Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. “Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government,” Qarar says. “Rahman couldn’t even leave the city because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him.”
Beyond the question of Rahman’s guilt or innocence, however, it’s how he was taken that has left such a residue of hate and anger among his family. “Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?” Qarar asks. “They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn’t they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply.”
“I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners,” he adds. “But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don’t care if I get fired for saying it, but that’s the truth.”
The Dogs of War
Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one among a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogation.
In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.
Of the 24 former detainees interviewed for this story, 17 claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials, and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, a body tasked with investigating abuse claims, corroborate 12 of these claims.
One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, U.S. forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby U.S. base. “They interrogated me the whole night,” he recalls, “but I had nothing to tell them.” Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom U.S. forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.
The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut, and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point, they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. “They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed.” They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow 12 bottles worth of water. “Two people held my mouth open and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious. It was as if someone had inflated me.” he says. After he was roused from his torpor, he vomited the water uncontrollably.
This continued for a number of days; sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, and other times blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually, he was sent on to Bagram where the torture ceased. Four months later, he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from U.S. authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.
An investigation of Sher Khan’s case by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and an independent doctor found that he had wounds consistent with the abusive treatment he alleges. U.S. forces have declined to comment on the specifics of his case, but a spokesman said that some soldiers involved in detentions in this part of the country had been given unspecified “administrative punishments.” He added that “all detainees are treated humanely,” except for isolated cases.
The Disappeared
Some of those taken to the Field Detention Sites never make it to Bagram, but instead are simply released after authorities deem them to be innocuous. Even then, some allege abuse. Such was the case with Hajji Ehsanullah, snatched one winter night in 2008 from his home in the southern province of Zabul. He was taken to a detention site in Khost Province, some 200 miles away. He returned home 13 days later, his skin scarred by dog bites and with memory difficulties that, according to his doctor, resulted from a blow to the head. U.S. forces had dropped him off at a gas station in Khost after three days of interrogation. It took him ten more days to find his way home.
Others taken to these sites never end up in Bagram for an entirely different reason. In the hardscrabble villages of the Pashtun south, where rumors grow more abundantly than the most bountiful crop, locals whisper tales of people who were captured and executed. Most have no evidence. But occasionally, a body turns up. Such was the case at a detention site on an American military base in Helmand province, where in 2003 a U.S. military coroner wrote in the autopsy report of a detainee who died in U.S. custody (later made available through the Freedom of Information Act): “Death caused by the multiple blunt force injuries to the lower torso and legs complicated by rhabdomyolysis (release of toxic byproducts into the system due to destruction of muscle). Manner of death is homicide.”
In the dust-swept province of Khost one day this past December, U.S. forces launched a night raid on the village of Motai, killing six people and capturing nine, according to nearly a dozen local government authorities and witnesses. Two days later, the bodies of two of those detained — plastic cuffs binding their hands — were found more than a mile from the largest U.S. base in the area. A U.S. military spokesman denies any involvement in the deaths and declines to comment on the details of the raid. Local Afghan officials and tribal elders, however, steadfastly maintain that the two were killed while in U.S. custody. American authorities released four other villagers in subsequent days. The fate of the three remaining captives is unknown.
The matter might be cleared up if the U.S. military were less secretive about its detention process. But secrecy has been the order of the day. The nine Field Detention Sites are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy, but at least the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations are aware of them. There may, however, be others whose existences on the scores of military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed. One example, according to former detainees, is the detention facility at Rish Khor, an Afghan army base that sits atop a mountain overlooking the capital, Kabul.
One night last year, U.S. forces raided Zaiwalat, a tiny village that fits snugly into the mountains of Wardak Province, a few dozen miles west of Kabul, and netted nine locals. They brought the captives to Rish Khor and interrogated them for three days. “They kept us in a container,” recalls Rehmatullah Muhammad, one of the nine. “It was made of steel. We were handcuffed for three days continuously. We barely slept those days.” The plain-clothed interrogators accused Rehmatullah and the others of giving food and shelter to the Taliban. The suspects were then sent on to Bagram and released after four months. (A number of former detainees said they were interrogated by plainclothed officials, but they did not know if these officials belonged to the military, the CIA, or private contractors.)
Afghan human rights campaigners worry that U.S. forces may be using secret detention sites like Rish Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The U.S. military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.
The Black Jail
Much less secret is the final stop for most captives: the Bagram Internment Facility. These days ominously dubbed “Obama’s Guantanamo,” Bagram nonetheless offers the best conditions for captives during the entire detention process.
Its modern life as a prison began in 2002, when small numbers of detainees from throughout Asia were incarcerated there on the first leg of an odyssey that would eventually bring them to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the years since, however, it has become the main destination for those caught within Afghanistan as part of the growing war there. By 2009, the inmate population had swelled to more than 700. Housed in a windowless old Soviet hangar, the prison consists of two rows of serried cage-like cells bathed continuously in white light. Guards walk along a platform that runs across the mesh-tops of the pens, an easy position from which to supervise the prisoners below.
Regular, even infamous, abuse in the style of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison marked Bagram’s early years. Abdullah Mujahed, for example, was apprehended in the village of Kar Marchi in the eastern province of Paktia in 2003. Mujahed was a Tajik militia commander who had led an armed uprising against the Taliban in their waning days, but U.S. forces accused him of having ties to the insurgency. “In Bagram, we were handcuffed, blindfolded, and had our feet chained for days,” he recalls. “They didn’t allow us to sleep at all for 13 days and nights.” A guard would strike his legs every time he dozed off. Daily, he could hear the screams of tortured inmates and the unmistakable sound of shackles dragging across the floor.
Then, one day, a team of soldiers dragged him to an aircraft, but refused to tell him where he was going. Eventually he landed at another prison, where the air felt thick and wet. As he walked through the row of cages, inmates began to shout, “This is Guantanamo! You are in Guantanamo!” He would learn there that he was accused of leading the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (which in reality was led by another person who had the same name and who died in 2006). The U.S. eventually released him and returned him to Afghanistan.
Former Bagram detainees allege that they were regularly beaten, subjected to blaring music 24 hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked, and forced to assume what interrogators term “stress positions.” The nadir came in late 2002 when interrogators beat two inmates to death.
The U.S. Special Forces also run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram Air Base that the Red Cross still does not have access to. Used primarily for interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the “Black Jail.”
One day two years ago, U.S. forces came to get Noor Muhammad, outside of the town of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was running a clinic that served all comers — including the Taliban. The soldiers raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients) and detaining both his father and him. The next day, villagers found the handcuffed corpse of Muhammad’s father, apparently dead from a gunshot.
The soldiers took Muhammad to the Black Jail. “It was a tiny, narrow corridor, with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights. We didn’t know when it was night and when it was day.” He was held in a concrete, windowless room, in complete solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged him by his neck, and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, “I am a doctor. It’s my duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they are Taliban or from the government.”
Eventually, Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left his home village. “I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban,” he says. “I’m happy my father is dead, so he doesn’t have to experience this hell.”
Afraid of the Dark
Unlike the Black Jail, U.S. officials have, in the last two years, moved to reform the main prison at Bagram. Torture there has stopped, and American prison officials now boast that the typical inmate gains 15 pounds while in custody. Sometime in the early months of this year, officials plan to open a dazzling new prison — that will eventually replace Bagram — with huge, airy cells, the latest medical equipment, and rooms for vocational training. The Bagram prison itself will be handed over to the Afghans in the coming year, although the rest of the detention process will remain in U.S. hands.
But human rights advocates say that concerns about the detention process still remain. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that inmates at Guantanamo cannot be stripped of their right to habeas corpus, but stopped short of making the same argument for Bagram. (U.S. officials say that Bagram is in the midst of a war zone and therefore U.S. domestic civil rights legislation does not apply.) Unlike Guantanamo, inmates there do not have access to a lawyer. Most say they have no idea why they have been detained. Inmates do now appear before a review panel every six months, which is intended to reassess their detention, but their ability to ask questions about their situation is limited. “I was only allowed to answer yes or no and not explain anything at my hearing,” says Rehmatullah Muhammad.
Nonetheless, the improvement in Bagram’s conditions begs the question: Can the U.S. fight a cleaner war? This is what Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal promised this summer: fewer civilian casualties, fewer of the feared house raids, and a more transparent detention process.
The American troops that operate under NATO command have begun to enforce stricter rules of engagement: they may now officially hold detainees for only 96 hours before transferring them to the Afghan authorities or freeing them, and Afghan forces must take the lead in house searches. American soldiers, when questioned, bristle at these restrictions — and have ways of circumventing them. “Sometimes we detain people, then, when the 96 hours are up, we transfer them to the Afghans,” says one U.S. Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They rough them up a bit for us and then send them back to us for another 96 hours. This keeps going until we get what we want.”
A simpler way of dancing around the rules is to call in the U.S. Special Operations Forces — the Navy SEALS, Green Berets, and others — which are not under NATO command and so are not bound by the stricter rules of engagement. These elite troops are behind most of the night raids and detentions in the search for “high-value suspects.” U.S. military officials say in interviews that the new restrictions have not affected the number of raids and detentions at all. The actual change, however, is more subtle: the detention process has shifted almost entirely to areas and actors that can best avoid public scrutiny: Special Operations Forces and small field prisons.
The shift signals a deeper reality of war, American soldiers say: you can’t fight guerrillas without invasive raids and detentions, any more than you could fight them without bullets. Through the eyes of a U.S. soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place. The men are bearded and turbaned. They pray incessantly. In most of the country, women are barred from leaving the house. Many Afghans own a Kalashnikov. “You can’t trust anyone,” says Rodrigo Arias, a Marine based in the northeastern province of Kunar. “I’ve nearly been killed in ambushes but the villagers don’t tell us anything. But they usually know something.”
An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. Sometimes you’ve got to bust down doors. Sometimes you’ve got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but when you get the right person it makes all the difference.”
For Arias, it’s a matter of survival. “I want to go home in one piece. If that means rounding people up, then round them up.” To question this, he says, is to question whether the war itself is worth fighting. “That’s not my job. The people in Washington can figure that out.”
If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. “We were all happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and stability,” says former detainee Rehmatullah. “But now most people in my village want them to leave.” A year after Rehmatullah was released, his nephew was taken. Two months later, some other villagers were grabbed.
It has become a predictable pattern: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as they pass through the village, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards that cover the area. The Americans then return at night to pick up suspects. In the last two years, 16 people have been taken and 10 killed in night raids in this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period, they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.
The people of this village therefore have begun to fear the night raids more than the Taliban. There are now nights when Rehmatullah’s children hear the distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them, but admits he needs solace himself. “I know I should be too old for it,” he says, “but this war has made me afraid of the dark.”[The research for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.]______________________________________ • Anand Gopal has reported in Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. His dispatches can be read at anandgopal.com. He is currently working on a book about the Afghan war. This piece appears in print in the latest issue of the Nation magazine. To catch him in an audio interview with TomDispatch’s Timothy MacBain discussing how he got this story, click here.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175197/tomgram%3A_anand_gopal%2C_afraid_of_the_dark_in_afghanistan
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 1, 2010 23:14:32 GMT 12
Movie Favorites from the Secretary of Defenseposted January 31, 2010 | TomDispatch.comSeven Days in JanuaryHow the Pentagon Counts Coups in WashingtonBy Tom EngelhardtSometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.
So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan. Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”
In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller’s parting January 23rd piece on the trip:
Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s ‘trust deficit’ with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.
His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching “Seven Days in May”, the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.”
Just in case you’ve forgotten, three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban Missile crisis — of which only Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is much remembered today. (“I don’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed.”)
All three concerned nuclear politics, “oops” moments, and Washington. The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City. It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it’s worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11).
The third was the Secretary of Defense’s top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: “You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!” In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d’état against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union. The plot is uncovered and defused by a Marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas. ("I'm suggesting, Mr. President, there's a military plot to take over the government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday...")
These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time. Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots. All three would make a perfect film festival for a Secretary of Defense with 14 hours to spare. Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a “homeland” where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you. After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outré exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought is ludicrous. After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.
Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.
After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.
Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).
Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.
To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.” That’s what seven days in January really means.
Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police. Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it’s ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private contracting companies. Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.
Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the Secretary of Defense’s movie tastes: do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix. Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and other sixties “classics,” Seven Days isn’t likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the Marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there’s little left to save — and every week is the Pentagon’s week in Washington.[Note: My thanks to Chris Hellman, director of research for the National Priorities Project, and Jo Comerford, its executive director, for checking on, and crunching, some Pentagon numbers for me. A small bow as well to TomDispatch regular William Astore for first bringing up the issue of military coups at this site in mid-January and beating the Secretary of Defense to the punch with this sentence: “Don’t expect a Seven Days in May scenario.”]______________________________________ • Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.www.tomdispatch.com/post/175198/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_movie_favorites_from_the_secretary_of_defense
|
|
|
Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 3, 2010 23:51:41 GMT 12
Michael Schwartz — Will Iraq's Oil Ever Flow?posted February 02, 2010 | TomDispatch.comAmericans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest “embassy” on the planet (and still growing). We’ve generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some Americans, after the surge of 2007, even think of it as, if not a success, at least no longer a debacle. Few care to spend much time considering the catastrophe we actually brought down on the Iraqis in “liberating” them.
Remember when we used to talk about Saddam Hussein’s “killing fields”? The world of mayhem and horror that followed the U.S. invasion and occupation delivered new, even larger “killing fields” that we don’t care to discuss, or that we prefer to consider the responsibility of the Iraqis themselves. Even with violence far lower today, Baghdad certainly remains one of the more dangerous cities on the planet. The bombs continue to go off there regularly and devastatingly, while the killing, even if not of American troops who rarely patrol any longer and are largely confined to their mega-bases, has not ended, not by a long shot; nor has the anger, suspicion, and depression that go with all of this.
A striking recent article in the British Guardian by reporter Martin Chulov seemed to catch something of what the U.S. actually accomplished in Iraq in a nutshell. It describes a country in “environmental ruin” (and, let’s not forget, taxed with an ongoing drought of monumental proportions). The headline tells the story: “Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds.” The contamination from depleted uranium weapons, bombed pipelines, and other disasters of the years of war, civil war, and chaos seems centered around Iraq’s population centers and, perhaps not surprisingly, coincides with a massive rise in birth defects.
Worse yet, in all those years of occupation, the U.S., despite billions of dollars spent (or rather squandered) on “reconstruction”, never managed to deliver electricity, jobs, potable water, health care, or much else. And despite many attempts, as Michael Schwartz, returning TomDispatch regular and the author of War Without End, makes clear, Washington never even got the oil out of the ground in a country that is little short of a giant oil field waiting to be developed. A remarkable record when you think about it. — Tom Engelhardt ______________________________________ The Iraqi Oil ConundrumEnergy and Power in the Middle EastBy Michael SchwartzHow the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq’s monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves — more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran — including the quadrupling of Iraq’s capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.
The dream in those distant days was to strip OPEC — the cartel consisting of the planet’s main petroleum exporters — of the power to control the oil supply and its price on the world market. As a reward for vastly expanding Iraqi production and freeing its distribution from OPEC’s control, key figures in the Bush administration imagined that the U.S. could skim off a small proportion of that increased oil production to offset the projected $40 billion cost of the invasion and occupation of the country.
All in a year or two.
Unremitting Ambition Tempered by Political and Military Failure
Almost seven years later, it will come as little surprise that things turned out to cost a bit more than expected in Iraq and didn’t work out exactly as imagined. Though the March 2003 invasion quickly ousted Saddam Hussein, the rest of the Bush administration’s ambitious agenda remains largely unfulfilled.
Instead of quickly pacifying a grateful nation and then withdrawing all but 30,000-40,000 American troops (which were to be garrisoned on giant bases far from Iraq’s urban areas), the occupation triggered both Sunni and Shia insurgencies, while U.S. counterinsurgency operations led to massive carnage, a sectarian civil war, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, and a humanitarian crisis that featured hundreds of thousands of deaths, four million internal and external refugees, and an unemployment rate that stayed consistently above 50% with all the attendant hunger, disease, and misery one would expect.
In the meantime, the government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, fervently supported by the Bush administration and judged by Transparency International to be the fifth most corrupt in the world, has morphed into an ever less reliable client regime. Despite American diktats and desires, it has managed to establish cordial political and economic relationships with Iran, slow the economic privatization process launched by the neocon administrators sent to Baghdad in 2003, and restored itself as the country’s primary employer. It even seems periodically resistant to its designated role as a possible long-term host for an American military strike force in the Middle East.
This resistance was expressed most forcefully when Maliki leveraged the Bush administration into signing a status of forces agreement (SOFA) in 2008 that included a full U.S. military withdrawal by the end of 2011. Maliki even demanded — and received — a promise to vacate the five massive “enduring” military bases the Pentagon had constructed — with their elaborate facilities, populations that reach into the tens of thousands, and virtually no Iraqi presence, even among the thousands of unskilled workers who do the necessary dirty work to keep these “American towns” running.
Despite such setbacks, the Bush administration did not abandon the idea that Iraq might remain the future headquarters for a U.S. presence in the region, nor in the 2008 presidential election did candidate Barack Obama. He, in fact, repeatedly insisted that the Iraqi government should be a strong ally of the U.S. and the most likely host for a 50,000-strong military force that would “allow our troops to strike directly at al-Qaeda wherever it may exist, and demonstrate to international terrorist organizations that they have not driven us from the region.”
Since entering the Oval Office, Obama has not visibly wavered in the commitment to establish Iraq as a key Middle East ally, promising in his State of the Union Address that the U.S. would “continue to partner with the Iraqi people” into the indefinite future. In the same address, however, the president promised that “all of our troops are coming home,” apparently signaling the abandonment of the Bush administration’s military plans. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, on the other hand, has recently voiced a contrary vision, hinting at the possibility that the Iraqis might be interested in negotiating a way around the SOFA agreement to allow U.S. forces to remain in the country after 2011.
Dynamic Paralysis Keeps Iraqi Oil Underground
Iraqi oil, too, has been a focus of Washington’s unremitting ambition tempered by failure. Long before the cost of the war began to lurch toward the current Congressional estimate of $700 billion, the idea of using oil revenues to pay for the invasion had vanished, as had the idea of quadrupling production capacity within a few years. The hope of doing so someday, however, remains alive. Speculation that Iraq’s production could — in the not too distant future — exceed that of Saudi Arabia may still represent Washington’s main strategy for postponing future severe global energy shortages.
Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the secretive energy task force Vice President Cheney headed was tentatively allocating various oil fields in a future pacified Iraq to key international oil companies. Before the March 2003 invasion, the State Department actually drafted prospective legislation for a post-Hussein government, which would have transferred the control of key oil fields to foreign oil giants. Those companies were then expected to invest the necessary billions in Iraq’s rickety oil industry to boost production to maximum rates.
Not so long after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the administration’s proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, enacted the State Department legislation by fiat (and in clear violation of international law, which prohibits occupying powers from changing fundamental legislation in the conquered country). Under the banner of de-Baathification — the dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni ruling party — he also fired oil technicians, engineers, and administrators, leaving behind a skeleton crew of Iraqis to manage existing production (and await the arrival of the oil giants with all their expertise).
Within a short time, many of these pariah professionals had fled to other countries where their skills were valued, creating a brain drain that, for a time, nearly incapacitated the Iraqi oil industry. Bremer then appointed a group of international oil consultants and business executives to a newly created (and UN-sanctioned) Development Fund of Iraq (DFI), which was to oversee all of the country’s oil revenues.
The remaining Iraqi administrators, technicians, and workers soon mounted a remarkably determined and effective multi-front resistance to Bremer’s effort. They were aided in this by a growing insurgency.
In one dramatic episode, Bremer announced the pending transfer of the control of the southern port of Basra (which then handled 80% of the country’s oil exports) from a state-run enterprise to KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Cheney had once headed. Anticipating that their own jobs would soon disappear in a sea of imported labor, the oil workers immediately struck. KBR quickly withdrew and Bremer abandoned the effort.
In other Bremer initiatives, foreign energy and construction firms did take charge of development, repair, and operations in Iraq’s main oil fields. The results were rarely adequate and often destructive. Contracts for infrastructure repair or renewal were often botched or left incomplete, as international companies ripped out usable or repairable facilities that involved technology alien to them, only to install ultimately incompatible equipment. In one instance, a $5 million pipeline repair became an $80 million “modernization” project that foundered on intractable engineering issues and, three years later, was left incomplete. In more than a few instances, local communities sabotaged such projects, either because they employed foreign workers and technicians instead of Iraqis, or because they were designed to deprive the locals of what they considered their “fair share” of oil revenues.
In the first two years of the occupation, there were more than 200 attacks on oil and gas pipelines. By 2007, 600 acts of sabotage against pipelines and facilities had been recorded.
After an initial flurry of interest, international oil companies sized up the dangers and politely refused Bremer’s invitation to risk billions of dollars on Iraqi energy investments.
After this initial failure, the Bush administration looked for a new strategy to forward its oil ambitions. In late 2004, with Bremer out of the picture, Washington brokered a deal between U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the International Monetary Fund. European countries promised to forgive a quarter of the debts accumulated by Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis promised to implement the U.S. oil plan. But this worked no better than Bremer’s effort. Continued sabotage by insurgents, resistance by Iraqi technicians and workers, and the corrupt ineptitude of the contracting companies made progress impossible. The international oil companies continued to stay away.
In 2007, under direct U.S. pressure, virtually the same law was reluctantly endorsed by Prime Minister Maliki and forwarded to the Iraqi parliament for legislative consideration. Instead of passing it, the parliament established itself as a new center of resistance to the U.S. plan, raising myriad familiar complaints and repeatedly refusing to bring it to a vote. It lies dormant to this day.
This stalemate continued unabated through the Obama administration’s first year in office, as illustrated by a continuing conflict around the pipeline that carries oil from Iraq to Turkey, a source of about 20% of the country’s oil revenues. During the Bremer administration, the U.S. had ended the Saddam-era tradition of allowing local tribes to siphon off a proportion of the oil passing through their territory. The insurgents, viewing this as an act of American theft, undertook systematic sabotage of the pipeline, and — despite ferocious U.S. military offensives — it remained closed for all but a few days throughout the next five years.
The pipeline was re-opened in the fall of 2009, when the Iraqi government restored the Saddam-era custom in exchange for an end to sabotage. This has been only partially successful. Shipments have been interrupted by further pipeline attacks, evidently mounted by insurgents who believe oil revenues are illegitimately funding the continuing U.S. occupation. The fragility of the pipeline’s service, even today, is one small sign of ongoing resistance that could be an obstacle to any significant increase in oil production until the U.S. military presence is ended.
The entire six-year saga of American energy dreams, policies, and pressures in Iraq has so far yielded little — no significant increase in Iraq’s oil production, no increase in its future capacity to produce, and no increase in its energy exports. The grand ambition of transferring actual control of the oil industry into the hands of the international oil companies has proven no less stillborn.
Over the years since the U.S. began its energy campaign, production has actually languished, sometimes falling as much as 40% below the pre-invasion levels of an industry already held together by duct tape and ingenuity. In the Brookings Institution’s latest figures for December 2009, production stood at 2.4 million barrels per day, a full 100,000 barrels lower than the pre-war daily average.
To make matters worse, the price of oil, which had hit historic peaks in early 2008, began to decline. By 2009, with the global economy in tatters, oil prices sank radically and the Iraqi government lacked the revenues to sustain its existing expenditures, let alone find money to repair its devastated infrastructure.
As a result, in early 2009, Maliki’s government began actively, even desperately, seeking ways to hike oil production, even without an oil law in place. That, after all, was the only possible path for an otherwise indigent country with failing agriculture in the midst of a drought of extreme severity to increase the money available for public projects — or, of course, even more private corruption.
The Oil Companies Make Their Move
In January 2009, the government opened a new chapter in the history of oil production in Iraq when it announced its intention to allow a roster of several dozen international oil firms to bid on development contracts for eight existing oil fields.
The proposed contracts did not, in fact, offer them the kind of control over development and production that the Cheney task force had envisioned back in 2001. Instead, they would be hired to finance, plan, and implement a vast expansion of the country’s production capacity. After repaying their initial investment, the government would reward them at a rate of no more than two dollars for every additional barrel of oil extracted from the fields they worked on. With oil prices expected to remain above $70 a barrel, this meant, once initial costs were repaid, the Iraqi government could expect to take in more than $60 per barrel, which promised a resolution to the country’s ongoing financial crisis.
The major international oil companies initially rejected these terms out of hand, demanding instead complete control over production and payments of approximately $25 per barrel. This initial resistance began to erode, however, when the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a government-owned operation, induced its partner, BP, the huge British oil company, to accept government terms for expanding the Rumaila field near Basra in southern Iraq to one million barrels a day.
The Chinese company, experts believed, could afford to accept such meager returns because of Beijing’s desire to establish a long-term energy relationship with Iraq. This foot-in-the-door contract, China’s leaders evidently hoped, would lead to yet more contracts to explore Iraq’s vast, undeveloped (and possibly as yet undiscovered) oil reserves.
Perhaps threatened by the possibility that Chinese companies might accumulate the bulk of the contracts for Iraq’s richest oil fields, leaving other international firms in the dust, by December a veritable stampede had begun to bid for contracts. In the end, the major winners were state-owned firms from Russia, Japan, Norway, Turkey, South Korea, Angola, and — of course — China. The Malaysian national company, Petronas, set a record by participating with six different partners in four of the seven new contracts the Maliki government gave out. Shell and Exxon were the only major oil companies to participate in winning bids; the others were outbid by consortia led by state-owned firms. These results suggest that national oil companies, unlike their profit-maximizing private competitors, were more willing to forego immediate windfalls in exchange for long-term access to Iraqi oil.
On paper, these contracts hold the potential to satisfy one aspect of Washington’s oil hunger, while frustrating another. If fully implemented, they could collectively boost Iraqi production from 2.5 million to 8 million barrels per day in just a few years. They would not, however, deliver control over production (or the bulk of the revenues) to foreign companies, so that Iraq and OPEC could continue, if they wished, to limit production, keep prices high, and wield power on the world stage.
Nevertheless, the centers of resistance to the original U.S. oil policies have voiced opposition to these new contracts. Members of parliament immediately demanded that all contracts be submitted for their approval, which they declared would be withheld unless ironclad protections of Iraqi workers, technicians, and management were included. Iraq’s own state-owned oil companies demanded guarantees that their technicians, engineers, and administrators be trained in the new technologies the foreign companies brought with them, and given escalating operational control over the fields as their skills developed.
The powerful Iraqi oil union opposed the contracts unless they included guarantees that all workers be recruited from Iraq. Local tribal leaders voiced opposition unless they guaranteed a full complement of local workers, and subcontracts for locally based businesses during the development phase. Then there were the insurgents, who continued to oppose oil exports until the U.S. fully withdraws from the country, and expressed their opposition by the 26 bombing attacks they’ve launched on pipelines and oil facilities since September 2009.
Some of these same groups have successfully blocked previous oil initiatives. Unless they are satisfied, they may frustrate the government’s latest bid to make oil gush in Iraq. One warning sign can be seen in the fate of a contract signed with the CNPC in early 2009 that called for the development of the relatively small (one billion barrel) Ahdab oil field near the Iranian border. The language of the original contract met conditions demanded by local leaders and workers, but the work, once begun, generated few local jobs and even fewer local business opportunities. The Chinese instead brought in foreign workers, following the pattern established by U.S. companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. Eventually, equipment was sabotaged, work undermined, and the project’s viability remains threatened.
The end is not in sight and the outcome still unclear. Will the vast Iraqi oil reserves be developed and sent into the hungry world market any time soon? If they are, who will determine the rate of flow, and so wield the power this decision-making confers? And once this ocean of oil is sold, who will receive the potentially incredible revenues? As with so much else, when it comes to Iraqi oil, the American war has generated so many problems and catastrophes — and so few answers.______________________________________ • A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Michael Schwartz is the author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket Press), which explains how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. Schwartz's work on Iraq has appeared in numerous academic and popular outlets. He is a regular at TomDispatch.com. His email address is .www.tomdispatch.com/post/175199/tomgram%3A_michael_schwartz%2C_will_iraq%27s_oil_ever_flow
|
|