Open Left - War on Terrorism

Bipartisanship And Truth

Paul Rosenberg — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Glenn repeats his citation of this passage from a NYT story:

The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.'s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.

then invokes critiques of this passage by Billmon and Digby, continuing:

to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda." And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence: "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture." As Sullivan notes: "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"

Indeed. Jimmy Carter asked, "Why not the best?" Why can't Obama--and all of us--ask, "Why not the truth?" He wants bipartisanship? Fine. But why must bipartisanship require lies? And not just individual ones, but the whole Orwellian package that makes truth-telling virtually impossible? Why can't Obama simply and straightforwardly link the two together? Like this:

"We need to begin a new era of bipartisanship and truth."

What's wrong with that?
This, after all, is what Obama has an electoral mandate for. Bipartisanship in lying isn't change we can believe in. It isn't change at all. It's exactly what we've had every step of the way from 9/11 onward.

Of course we know what's wrong with that: it would mean an actual and fundamental break with Bushism. And not just Bushism, but all the long sorry history of Democratic acquiessence and enabling as well. A lot of people would have egg on their faces. And some people could go to jail. It would be a real repudiation of the failed politics of the past.

Of course, there's a deeper level to this. Honesty going forward requires honesty looking back. And Glenn gets to this in short order, taking note of the latest blanket Nuremberg defense:

Behold the excuses which former Bush DOJ lawyer and current Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith offers up today in The Washington Post on behalf of his former colleagues, as he argues not only that Bush's torture regime shouldn't be criminally prosecuted, but also that no new investigations of any kind -- including by Congress or an Executive branch truth-finding Commission -- should be pursued:
Yet another round of investigations during the Obama administration, even by a bipartisan commission, would exacerbate this problem. It would also bring little benefit. The people in government who made mistakes or who acted in ways that seemed reasonable at the time but now seem inappropriate have been held publicly accountable by severe criticism, suffering enormous reputational and, in some instances, financial losses. Little will be achieved by further retribution.

Walk into any criminal courtroom in the country where a convicted defendant is pleading for light or no punishment and that's exactly what you'll hear: "I've already been punished enough, Your Honor. My reputation has been ruined, my health is suffering, I lost my job. What more do you want to do to me?"

Greenwald goes on to conclude:

Goldsmith's principal point is that we will all suffer if further investigations are pursued against these high government officials, because government lawyers will "become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment." Actually, the reason we have criminal laws and punishment for violations is precisely because we want to deter lawbreaking and incentivize people to obey, not flout, the law. Government lawyers should be cautious, not reckless, in advising what can be done. In a country that lives under what we once adorably called "the rule of law," the solution -- if we want government agents to be more aggressive in their "counter-terrorism" behavior -- is to change the laws to allow that more aggressive action, not to create, as Goldsmith and so many others favor, a system of justice where Executive branch officials are literally free to break our laws with impunity.

Now, the standard Versailles narrative says that anything like this is not just impossible, but unthinkable. Any form of legal accountability would be retribution. (Note: not "seen as retribution by critics". After all, "fair and balanced" only goes so far.) Obama must choose. It's the only pragmatic thing to do: jettison justice in order to find what Bush would call "a new way forward." Which is, of course, Newspeak for "the same old way backwards into the exact same moral muck as those who attacked us on 9/11."

But what if Obama said good-bye to all that? What if he insisted on holding himself to a higher standard, and insisted that the only meaningful way to do this also required upholding the law for past violations as well? What if he said something like this:

In order to move forward and make a fresh start, we need to have a renewed commitment to truth--and that requires truth-telling about the past as well. We must hold those accountable who broke the law, and who lead us astray into un-American practices that have disgraced America's good name around the world. They have done uncalculable harm to America, regardless of their intentions. And a large part of the reason for this is because they acted in secret, and covered their actions in lies. They must be held accountable for this--both to show that world that we are serious about our values, and to ensure that this does not happen again.
There are those who will say, "This is unconscionable. This political revenge-seeking. We cannot move forward together, while the Democrats are launghing political attacks."
But this is exactly backwards. If we uphold these past violations, even tacitly by refusing to investigate thoroughly and prosecute where called for, then we will be laying the groundwork for perpetuating the same sorts of violations ourselves. We cannot abide that. We cannot allow anyone--within this Administration or without--to think that we hold ourselves above the law. We must hold those who came before us accountable, precisely because that creates the demand that we be held accountable as well. This is the only way to begin earning your trust from the very beginning.
Of course we are also sensitive to the possible charges of partisanship and ideologicl warfare. Which is why I am placing this entire investigation and any prosecutions that follow in the hands of a Reagan-era Justice official and prominent conservative constitutional lawyer, Bruce Fein. He will have the full support of my Administration, but he will be totally autonomous in his actions.

Bipartisanship and truth. Now that would be change we can believe in.

Why Conservatives Can't Govern (The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, Pt 2)

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 22:28:31 GMT

In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.
The War On Terror(ism) And Rosenberg's Three Styles of Adult Reasoning

As previously explained, Piaget was the pioneer in the scientific study of cognitive development, with a primary focus on reasoning about the physical world. One of the ways he did this was by presenting problems involving processes which can demonstrate differing levels of reasoning. Some of these have formal structures that can be directly translated into other domains, such as geopolitical conflict. This is what Shawn Rosenberg did. He administered both sets of tests and showed that people tended to demonstrate the same level of cognitive complexity both in physical science querstions and in international affairs questions.

With this basic finding in mind, we turn to eight results of Rosenberg's research that are important for us. Some of this will be repetitious of the first diary, but it's new material for most people, and I trust it will be more helpful than annoying. I will also present-for reference, but without explanation-a table that organizes how Rosenberg's schema presented in Table K-1.1 in the last diarey applies to international relations.

First, I cannot emphasize enough the associational, non-rational nature of sequential thought. It involves conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection." Because it is non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change it. With the aid of modern mass communications, it is possible to shape the entire consciousness of nation by manipulating sequential association. Indeed, this is what mass advertising does on a daily basis. It is what Hitler strove for so successfully, and what even much more innocuous political campaigns do as well.

In addition, Rosenberg explains, these relationships "are mutable," they can either be extended, based on "share[d] recognized overlapping events" or changed, when the sequence does not play out as expected. Because it is a pre-logical mode of thought, "the relations of sequential thought engender expectations, but do not create subjective standards of normal or necessary relations between events." People who think this way can be quite unbothered by the fact our current enemies-Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, etc.-were once allies against other enemies.

Second, sequential thought is a perfect fit for the most basic and powerful forms of propaganda, which tend to drive out critical thinking in a crisis-precisely when they are needed most. The perpetual repetition of certain sequences of words, images, claims and accusations-particularly when they are strongly charged with emotion-creates a political reality that may have little or no relation to actual reality. By endlessly repeating such associational sequences, an atmosphere can be created in which it is difficult, if not impossible to assert the opposite, no matter how strong the evidence may be . Because communication is intended to communicate, not just reflect the individual's thinking, when the entire culture becomes distorted by such techniques, it becomes increasingly difficult for systematic (or even linear) thinking to assert itself.

This is precisely what happens in the grip of war fever, or in response to an atrocity-such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The failure of systemic thought just when it is needed most is precisely what the terrorists were counting on-though of course they would never have put it that way. Nonetheless, it is precisely that failure which Sun Tzu warns against, and which we must do everything possible to avoid.

Third, although systematic thinking represents the highest level in Rosenberg's schema, it has its own shortcomings. In particular, Rosenberg notes, it suffers from dichotomies-frequently generating two different sorts of systematic approach that cannot be reconciled. Rosenberg hypothesized a fourth level of thinking, but considered it too rare and undeveloped to study.

Fourth, as indicated in Table K-1.2, immediately below, the very nature of international conflict-even including the nature of the sides involved-is seen very differently by those at different levels. If we accept that systematic thinking yields a better, more complete view of reality, then its description is the one we should prefer, even knowing that it, too, is imperfect.

Table K-1.2 Rosenberg's 3-Level Typology With Respect To International Conflict
Derived from Reason, Ideology and Politics, pp. 185-189.*

I. General Structure of Conflict

Basic Understanding of Conflict
	1-Particular event or sequence of events. Leader/country trying to act & being blocked. 2-Opposition between sides pursuing incompatible aims. 3-Understood in context of international relations.
Sense of Aims
	1-Little sense of aims of blocking country in relation to first country. 2-Incompatible aims between sides. 3-Multiple and possibly conflicting interests/aims on both sides.
Nature of Sides
	1-Clashing leaders/countries with transient involvement of others 2-Two opposing hierarchically-structured alliances 3-Multi-sided conflict. Each side may be alliance of countries, single country and/or interest group within nation. Sides are complexly structured with possible internal conflicts at various levels.
Sense of Conflict in Scope and Duration
	1-Little sense of enduring or general qualities 2-Considered long-term, with general and enduring enemies and alliances 3-Not necessarily long-term or general; may exist along one dimension, but not others.
Role of Third Parties
	1-Only considered in terms of specific actions 2-Considered as members of alliance, in hierarchical structure 3-Because view is systemic, "third party" concept is poor fit.*
II. Unfolding Dynamics of Conflict
Sense of Conflict
	1-Specific situation of one leader/country wanting something and not getting it. 2-Clear sense of cause-one or both sides pursuing its ends without regard for the other. 3a-Accidental perturbation of integrated international order. 3b-Exchange between national systems involving both foreign and domestic concerns.
Who Produces Conflict
	1- Without sense of cause, this is vague or arbitrary.* 2- Individual sides, who are held accountable. Usually, one seen as victim, the other as offender. 3a- Systemic imbalance. 3b- Exchange between national systems, involving internal as well as external factors.
How Conflict Develops
	1. One event simply follows on the next. 2- Specific actions happen for explicable reasons (see Explanation of Actions). 3- Systemic process. *
Explanation of Actions
	1- None. 2- One side's explained in terms of inherent nature, other side's in terms of response. 3a- Each side's actions result from systemic disturbance. 3b- Each side's actions are both initiatives toward the other and expressions of internal affairs.
III. Resolution of Conflict
Concept of conflict resolution.
	1-Does not think of conflict resolution per se. Resolution is simply what happens 2-Resolution when both sides are satisfied. 3- Conflict resolution consists of establishing a cooperative and orderly exchange between the conflicting parties.
Possibility of conflict resolution
	1- Not considered. (See above). 2- Not likely: Given conception of conflict as exchange between opposed sides with incompatible aims, joint satisfaction is unlikely. 3. Here's How: Cooperative and orderly exchange is achieved by altering the conditions of exchange and/or by establishing mutual understanding of aims and methods.
Further thoughts on conflict resolution
	1- None. 2- Usually, resolution depends on the final domination (and subsequent incorporation) of one party by the other. 3- Altered conditions of exchange achieved by imposing new regulation (e.g. international law). Mutual understanding achieved by education.
Bottom Line:
	1- Que Sera Sera.* 2- Might makes right.* Since joint satisfaction is unlikely, the strong shall prevail. 3- Justice. Mutual accommodation offers only lasting solution, Domination seen as illegitimate by victim, therefore inherently unstable.

Key: 1-Sequential reasoning. 2-Linear reasoning. 3-Systemic reasoning.

* Asterisks mark statements based on a gloss of the text. All other statements are quotes, condensations or paraphrases of specific passages.

Fifth, again referring to Table K-1.2, we see that the Bush Administration draws on a combination of linear and sequential thinking in formulating its "war on terror." At the most basic level, when the world was told that they must choose sides in the "war on terror," this seemed to indicate a linear level of thinking across all the categories under "General Structure of Conflict."

However, as we look more closely we discover distinct indications of sequential thinking in every one of the categories. Consider:

The Bush Administration inattention to terrorism before 9/11 strongly indicates that the basic nature of the conflict was not perceived so cleanly or clearly, but was a matter of a "particular event or sequence of events. Leader/country trying to act & being blocked."

There was certainly "little sense of aims of blocking country (or in this case, Al Qaeda) in relation to first country"-as seen in Bush's statement that the attacks came from those who "hate our freedom," ignoring and denying the existence of legitimate grievances which the terrorists exploit. From the very befinning, the Administration gave free reign to supporters who bashed attempts to understand such grievances. Indeed, the Vice-President's wife, Second Lady Lynne Cheney was intimately connected with the most ambitious attack on such understanding that was launched within weeks of 9/11.

Clearly, Bush wanted the "war on terror" to involve "two opposing hierarchically-structured alliances," a resurrection of his father's alliance in the Gulf War versus the "axis of evil." But as all major allies except Tony Blair objected, Bush was quite willing to make this personal, attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq (a secular nationalist regime, the arch-enemy of al Qaeda) and finishing the job his father left undone. This fits perfectly into "clashing leaders/countries with transient involvement of others."

With talk of a conflict lasting generations, and justifying a return to Cold War-levels of military spending, the "war on terror" certainly appeared to be "considered long-term, with general and enduring enemies [the 'axis of evil'] and alliances." Yet, the "axis of evil" had no known connection to al Qaeda or each other-indeed Iran and Iraq were still sworn enemies, just as al Qaeda was an enemy of both. Thus, the very foundations of Bush's concept of the enemy involved sequential conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection."

Finally, the Bush Administration clearly wanted third parties to line up under its leadership, or else be cast as part of the "axis of evil." However, the willingness to contemplate war with Iraq without any Arab or meaningful European support indicated a decidedly ad-hoc approach to third parties and alliances.

There is more mixture from this perspective than there is through the lens of another developmental perspective I've also explored on my own-but didn't want to include here for reasons of managability-but the end result is much the same: in the end, the lowest level of cognition tends to dominate. The points above demonstrate that sequential thinking drives the underlying policy, while linear thinking constructs a "plausible" façade. But it is really plausible only if effective outside criticism is paralyzed by a climate of conformity, fear and intimidation, as indeed it has been, virtually uninterruted for over six years now, with potentially disastrous results for the long-term future of our country. We also see what's missing entirely-systematic thinking-which brings us to our next point.

Sixth, we can see that the Bush "war on terror" clearly misses significant insights from a systematic viewpoint. Perhaps most significantly: (1) Both sides have "multiple and possibly conflicting interests/aims." (2) Conflict is multi-sided, with sides "complexly structured with possible internal conflicts at various levels." (3) Conflict is "not necessarily long-term or general," it "may exist along one dimension, but not others." Failure to recognize such complexities is precisely what lead us to create our current enemies in our fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan-a fight we found enormously satisfying after our experience in Vietnam, but which has now backfired even more disastrously than the Vietnam War did.

Seventh--very importantly for our current situation-Rosenberg found that systemic thinkers could be remarkably prophetic. One topic he specifically explored was terrorism and the Middle East. The experiments were done in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden was a little-noticed US ally. The adversary was Moamar Gaddafi, whose name is barely mentioned anymore. Yet, in response to the question of whether US bombing of Libya would stop the terrorism, one subject systemic thinker replied:

No, I expect it will simply exacerbate the situation. If the support of terrorism is critical to Gaddafi's political position, he will continue to support it unless he is convinced Reagan might respond with a full scale invasion. Even then, he may continue his support, if somewhat more discreetly. In any case, the terrorism will go on without Gaddafi. (Emphasis added.)

Prompted with the question, "Why is that?" the subject continued:

There is a real impasse here. There is a conflict over territory, over Israel and the American position on that issue. I don't think we understand their view of the problem well at all. And we will have to if any meaningful rapprochement is to take place.

Obviously, we have not been acting at this level of insight.

Eighth, all the above is based on regarding Bush's "war on terror" as a response to terrorism. But of course, there is very good reason to regard it as something else entirely-as some combination of the unfolding of the neocon's plan for unilateral world domination, and the Christian Zionists plan for precipitating Armageddon, with a healthy dose of neoliberal disaster capitalism thrown into the mix. While both the neocon and the Christian zionist theocon views play a role, they are also clearly incompatible with one another. The neocons want to assure American dominance for the next century. The Christian Zionists want to destroy the world. These two outlooks can only co-exist in a framework of sequential thinking, where neither consistency nor logical contradiction matters. Thus, whether we take Bush's "war on terror" seriously on its own terms, or see it as a cover for other agendas, the same level of thinking dominates.

One final thought about Rosenberg's schema. If we apply it to the terrorist attacks of September 11, we would expect sequential thinkers to retaliate against similar-looking perceived threats. Invading Iraq makes perfect sense to this sort of mindest, regardless of any other considerations. We would expect linear thinkers to retaliate against Al Qaeda itself-the logical, linear cause of the attacks. Invading Iraq is a distraction from the war on terrorism to this mindset, made worse by the fact that it complicates our relationships with our Arab allies. Finally, we would expect systematic thinkers to be primarily concerned with altering the conditions that allowed Al Qaeda (and other terrorists) to flourish in the first place. Rebuilding Afghanistan would have been a top short-term priority toward this long-term goal. Getting serious about Palestinian statehood would have been another top priority. (And would have lead to an immediate, very serious response to the fall 2002 announcement of an Arab League proposal to recognize Israel's right to exist as part of a global settlement-a proposal that's been marginally in the news again over the last month or two, but that has generally been ignored, because it's so wildly at odds with anything the Bush Administration is actually interested in.0 These are not idealistic, humanitarian priorities. They are straightforward pragmatic necessities, blindingly obvious from a systematic perspective.

Two Other Brief Examples: The "War on Drugs" and Abortion

I'd like to supplement the above exhaustive look at a single example with a few other observations about other examples, which I would like to deal with thematically, using a single example in each case to stand in for a number of other different examples.

First of all, a common movement conservative practice is to divide the world up into good and evil, and declare war on evil in a fashion that has no clear foundation in even a single simple causal explanation that one would find in linear thinking. The foundation of such an approach in Lakoff's Strict Father morality is fairly straightforward, but Lakoff's argument is largely separable from the argument here. (Lakoff does argue that there is a set of logical entailments involved, and I don't dispute this. But these entailments act primarily to structure the issue landscape, which is a different subject entirely from what I am discussing here, which is how arguments are presented within that landscape. )

Here my focus is simply on the fact that a good-vs-evil framework drives the argumentative assumptions, so that logic can be dispensed with almost entirely. A "war on drugs" means that we need not ask about why people might want to take drugs in the first place. Nor do we need to ask if the war on drugs might cause more problems than it solves. Nor do we need to ask if there might be other high-priority problems we ought to pay more attention to. These are all examples of systematic thinking that might lead us to question the "war on drugs" project-much less, of course, the obvious racism involved. But we don't even have to go there to see enormous problems with the "war on drugs" if we engage in systematic thinking as a matter of course.

When liberals-or even just reality-based professionals, such as criminologists, public health experts, etc.-try to raise such systematic concerns, they sequential response is simply to label them as "soft on crime," as "pro-drug," as lacking "family values," or something similar. It is simply inconceivable from within the sequential thinking framework that someone might agree with the assessment "drugs are destructive" and yet want to take a significantly different approach to dealing with them. It is even more inconceivable that someone might agree on the wisdom of reducing and controlling drug use without thinking that drugs are inherently evil, but only that they are inherently risky, and that the risk alone is reason enough to take prudential action.

The example of abortion follows a related logic. Abortion is particularly similar in light of the fact that there is really no such thing as "pro-abortion activists." The same activists interested in preserving the right to abortion are even more interested in the more basic issue of reproductive rights and empowering women to effectively exercise those rights. And the most effective way to do this is not to get pregnant in the first place unless and until one wants to have a child. Thus, the reproductive rights position is inherently structured by the logic of systematic thinking-even though an individual supporting reproductive rights may not have worked through all of this. (This is not to deny that abortions sometimes become necessary even though the woman wants to have a child. But, hey, this is a brief example. We can discuss it all you want in the comments.)

Of course, such activists can and have identified areas in which they logically should be able to work with anti-abortion activists-such as preventive measures that can help reduce the need for abortions. But these efforts have generally born little fruit, in large measure because the other side tends not to think systemicatically, and because they aren't really interested in abortion per se, but rather with forced childbirth. What's more, they have a deep investment in their activism as a moral crusade-hence the comparisons to the Holocaust-which, of course, means they can't possibly cooperate with the other side.

Gay Marriage And Kegan's Schema

The issue of gay rights is particularly useful for considering as a way of illuminating the power of Kegan's schema. The Level 3/Level 4 divide is all about making the transition from accepting the socially-defined rules, roles and relationships as fundamentally unquestionable life-defining facts to regarding them as a set of suggestiuons, about which one is free to make up one's own mind. The notion that a gay couple getting married on the other side of the state somehow threatens my marriage seems absurd to me on its face-but that's because I'm not a Level 3 thinker. I don't subconsciously define myself in terms of the roles, relationships and social expectations of the society in which I live. Like all Level 4 or Level 5 thinkers, these things are all objects for me, not self-defining subject.

But, of course, as Kegan notes, there is nothing new about the breakdown of traditional society in the West. It's been going on for hundreds of years. And, indeed, our capacity to create new forms as old ones come under stress is one of our most important adaptive mechanisms. Rather than destroying families, the capacity to create families in new forms is one of our most important conservative capacities, if by "conservative" we mean preserving continuity, connectedness with past, future, and present community, and stabilizing and bringing order to the flux of social relations.

Indeed, this is precisely the point of Level 4-it is not about wantonly destroying the orderly constructs of Level 3 life. It is about creating new forms, or improvising with existing ones, to meet the crush of contingencies that incerimental cultural change is simply too slow to handle. And as such, gays and lesbians function very much as pioneers who have a good deal to teach the rest of us, since they have been forced to take the lead in such improvisation and creation.

This is very much the point of Judith Stacey's book, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age, published 11 years ago. From this perspective, supporting gay rights is not just something moral for us straight folks to do-it is a matter of supporting those who are on the forefront of creating new ways of being in the world that already are, and increasingly will be enormously beneficial for all people.

And don't look now, but with their incredibly high divorce rates, the folks in red states like Oklahoma could use all the help they can get on this count from their gay brothers and sisters.

Conclusion

Obviously, there is much, much more that could be said, but I think the point has been established-to a very significant extent, movement conservative ideas are simply incapable of working in the real world because they are simply too primative. Furthermore, the primative nature of these ideas gets in the way of realizing that there is a substantially higher degree of agreement between liberals and conservatives. When liberals say or do things that conservatives find threatening or offensive, it is often because they are not hearing what the core intention of liberals is. This, in turn, suggests that liberals could be doing a lot better job of communicating to conservatives. And, as the next diary in this series will argue, that ain't the half of it....

There Is No War On Terror(ism)-There Is A War FOR Terror(ism)

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:41:30 GMT

(1) There can be no war on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, or at most a strategy of assymetric warfare. A "war on terrorism" makes as much sense as a "war on sneak attacks" or a "war on blitzkriegs."

(2) There can be no war on terror. War is terror.

Thus, it is obvious, from a moment's reflection, that the dominant political narrative of the past six years is-and has to be-a lie.

Al Qaeda was a specific organization that attacked us on 9/11. As a non-state actor, there could be no war on al Qaeda, either. We could, however, obliterate them from the face of the earth-either the smart way or the dumb way-if we had any interest in doing so. We did not.

Since I began front-paging last weekend, I've been working off of an underlying theme-that opposition to the Iraq War-however important-is not the key to a genuine realignment, but only one part of the puzzle. I wrote several diaries about the importance of economics, and this is, in a way, yet another one of them, because it's about empire and neo-feudalism. But it moves the two subjects substantially closer together.

The thesis here is simple: We are not fighting to defeat terror(ism), but to spread it. We just want 100% market share, that's all. And until the Democrats are willing to stand up and say this, in no uncertain terms, our realignment will not be complete. So if you think stabbing MoveOn in the back was bad, we have much, much farther to go than just putting that shit to rest.

Impossible as this may seem, there is a precedent for it-the abolition of slavery. Although the Republican Party originally emerged in opposition to the political power of slave states, it was not clearly committed to abolition when Lincoln won the presidency in 1860. And yet, five years later, when the Civil War ended, so, too, did slavery. Many things came together to make that transformation possible, but the key dynamic, without which all else would have failed, was that the forces of slavery were put on the defensive, and ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of a white northern power structure that was still deeply stained by its own racist assumptions. And this is the key for us as well-we must place the forces we face on the defensive, and do so so decisively that they, too, ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of those in high places who share certainly deeply-held prejudices in common with them.

I take as my text a recent story on Alternate that updates a story that Project Censored selected as the #1 censored story for 2002-2003-a story for which I was one of five people who wrote about it.
The War On Terror As Big Lie

On September 11, 2002, USA Today published a remarkable story
in which it revealed that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made-within weeks of 9/11-and that the decision had been made "by osmosis" :

Iraq course set from tight White House circle
By John Diamond, Judy Keen, Dave Moniz, Susan Page and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.
Before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Bush will make his case for "regime change" in detail and in public for the first time. But he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end.
How did Bush make the decision, perhaps the most consequential of his presidency?
USA TODAY interviewed officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, Congress and elsewhere to explore what factors were weighed and whose voices were heard. The process underscores Bush's confidence in his own judgment and his hard-line policy instincts. It shows his reliance on a tight circle of aides, his penchant for secrecy and his preference for unilateral action. And it illustrates how his approach has complicated his efforts now to win support from allies and members of Congress who felt they weren't adequately consulted before.
Among the key findings:
The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."
"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen - that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."
Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.
The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn't seen as helpful.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls that "stunning."
"If we are about to make a decision that could risk American lives, we need full and accurate information on which to base that decision," he says in a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the committee and CIA Director George Tenet.

It's remarkable that five years after that story broke, all of Versailles persists in pretending that it doesn't exist, even though much more damning details-placing the decision to invade Iraq months before 9/11-have since come to light. And yet, within a period of several weeks, I and several other writers all wrote even more extensive accounts of how the so-called "war on terrorism" was actually a war for global dominance that had been years in the making. Several of us traced it back to a 1992 "Draft Defense Policy Guidance" that was disavowed when parts of it were leaked to the press, but which clearly foreshadowed later documents, most notably the September 2000 PNAC report, Rebuiding America's Defenses.

On September 27, Richard W. Behan updated the story, placing it squarely inside the "Big Lie" frame. Here's how it began:

"The Mega-Lie Called the 'War on Terror': A Masterpiece of Propaganda"
By Richard W. Behan, AlterNet. Posted September 27, 2007.
The fraudulence of the "War on Terror" is clearly revealed by looking at the pattern of actions that preceded and followed its launch.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie ... The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state." --Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie that is "big enough" to confirm Joseph Goebbels' testimony. It is a mega-lie, and the American people have come to believe it. It is the "War on Terror."
The Bush administration endlessly recites its mantra of deceit:
The War on Terror was launched in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is intended to enhance our national security at home and to spread democracy in the Middle East.
This is the struggle of our lifetime; we are defending our way of life from an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms. We must fight the enemy in the Middle East, or we will fight him in our cities.
This is classic propaganda. In Goebbels' terms, it is the "state" speaking its lie, but the political, economic, and military consequences of the Bush administration lie are coming into view, and they are all catastrophic. If truth is the enemy of both the lie and George Bush's "state," then the American people need to know the truth.
The military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were not done in retaliation for 9/11. The Bush administration had them clearly in mind upon taking office, and they were set in motion as early as Feb. 3, 2001. That was seven months prior to the attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and the objectives of the wars had nothing to do with terrorism.
This is beyond dispute. The mainstream press has ignored the story, but the administration's congenital belligerence is fully documented in book-length treatments and in the limitless information pool of the internet. (See my earlier work, for example.)
Invading a sovereign nation unprovoked, however, directly violates the charter of the United Nations. It is an international crime. Before the Bush administration could attack either Afghanistan or Iraq, it would need a politically and diplomatically credible reason for doing so.
The terrorist violence of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a spectacular opportunity. In the cacophony of outrage and confusion, the administration could conceal its intentions, disguise the true nature of its premeditated wars, and launch them. The opportunity was exploited in a heartbeat.
Within hours of the attacks, President Bush declared the United States "… would take the fight directly to the terrorists," and "… he announced to the world the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them." Thus the "War on Terror" was born.
The fraudulence of the "War on Terror," however, is clearly revealed in the pattern of subsequent facts:
? In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorist. Offers by the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden were ignored, and he remains at large to this day.
? In Iraq, when the United States invaded, there were no al Qaeda terrorists at all.
? Both states have been supplied with puppet governments, and both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in strategic proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.
? The U.S. embassy nearing completion in Baghdad is comprised of 21 multistory buildings on 104 acres of land. It will house 5,500 diplomats, staff and families. It is ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy in the world, but we have yet to be told why.
? A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate shows the war in Iraq has exacerbated, not diminished, the threat of terrorism since 9/11. If the "War on Terror" is not a deception, it is a disastrously counterproductive failure.
? Today two American and two British oil companies are poised to claim immense profits from 81 percent of Iraq's undeveloped crude oil reserves. They cannot proceed, however, until the Iraqi Parliament enacts a statute known as the "hydrocarbon framework law."
? The features of postwar oil policy so heavily favoring the oil companies were crafted by the Bush administration State Department in 2002, a year before the invasion.
? Drafting of the law itself was begun during Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, with the invited participation of a number of major oil companies. The law was written in English and translated into Arabic only when it was due for Iraqi approval.
? President Bush made passage of the hydrocarbon law a mandatory "benchmark" when he announced the troop surge in January of 2007.
When it took office, the Bush administration brushed aside warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their anxiety to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq was based on other factors.

Later in his article, Behan makes a key point, which is also universally overlooked:

Other nations have suffered criminal acts of terrorism, but there is no precedent for conflating the terrorists with the states that harbor them, declaring a "war" and seeking with military force to overthrow a sovereign government. Victimized nations have always relied successfully on international law enforcement and police action to bring terrorists to justice.
But the Bush administration needed more than this. War plans were in the files. They needed to justify invasions. Only by targeting the "harboring states," as well as the terrorists, did they stand a chance of doing so.

This really should be the final nail in the coffin for any remaining doubts that the "War on Terror(ism)" is a put-up job. And once you admit that, what's really going on becomes painfully obvious, painfully fast, as in Bill Maher notes:

New Rule: Stop Saying Iraq is Another Vietnam, it's Another Enron
Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He's fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there.... just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.
Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled "The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers," just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for. In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question....
Donald Vance, a Navy veteran, was working for an Iraqi-owned outfit called the Shield Group Security Company. Vance said he witnessed Shield Group selling guns, land mines, and rocket-launchers to Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry workers. Vance described Shield Groups as "a Wal-Mart for guns." Vance reported this to the FBI, and instead of a pat on the back, he got 97 days at Camp Cropper, a military prison outside of Baghdad. In fact, Saddam's Hussein's old crib. Vance was placed in solitary confinement, subjected to head-banging music blaring from dawn to dusk, and interrogators screaming the same questions over and over again in his face.
Also testifying at the hearing along with Vance was Barry Godfrey, a former KBR employee (KBR+Halliburton=Cheney) who claimed that he was fired after complaining to his supervisors about fraudulent overcharges.
Also testifying was Bunnatine Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the former highest-ranking civilian contracting official at the Army Corps of Engineers, so I'll dispense with the "Greenhouse having gas" joke. But Greenhouse was removed from her position when she tried to crack down on "casual and clubby contracting practices" at the Army Corps of Engineers....
Meanwhile the Bush administration has not litigated a single case against a contractor alleged to have defrauded the US Government in Iraq. Apparently, like terrorism, this isn't a law enforcement issue either.

But this is just one piece of the puzzle. In her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein lays out the case that what we are seeing in Iraq is just one facet of a sustained war against mixed economies that benefit all members of society on behalf of what she calls a "corporatist" economic order that produces fabulous wealth for a tiny few inside the bubble, and a Hobbesian existence for those outside. The method of choice for waging the war is where her title comes from-democratic majorities would never agree to such changes, which is why they are imposed when societies are in a state of shock, whether due to military coup, invasion, or natural disaster. And the reason for this is quite simple: in the wake of the Great Depression mixed economies were almost universally embraced as the common-sense way to ensure economic and political stability. No more 1929s and no more Hitlers, please!

If September 11, 2001 was a tremendously effective way to shock America, just as September 11, 1973 had shocked Chile, then Klein provides a way to frame that shock as part of a largr pattern, and in doing so, to step outside it, and begin constructing a larger counter-narrative. In doing so, Klein also strongly suggests that terror(ism) is very much what is being fought for, not against.