In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Warsaw Pact and eventually the Soviet Union. It caught almost everyone in the West by surprise. The CIA didn't have a clue--in part because of Robert Gates, who had dutifully politicized the intelligence throughout the 1980s. But he was just a cog in a much larger machine. More fundamentally, it happend because the CIA had been ambushed by neocons in 1976, with the help of then-CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush, producing the infamous "Team B" report, which falsely imagined a massive Soviet arms build-up. When Reagan was elected in 1980, this became the foundation of US military policy and intelligence analysis--but it was completely and utterly wrong. The Soviet Union was declining even as the Team B report was being written, and a case can be made that the aggressive posture the US assumed under its misguidance actually prolonged the Cold War by strengthening the hands of Soviet hardliners.
A succinct account of this, "Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment" by Anne Hessing Cahn, was published in the April 1993 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Cahn published a book-length account five years later, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA. I mention this for three reasons. First, because the neocon's were essentially spinning a fantasy out of whole cloth, openly disdaining facts:
Team B accused the CIA of consistently underestimating the "intensity, scope, and implicit threat" posed by the Soviet Union by relying on technical or "hard" data rather than "contemplat[ing] Soviet strategic objectives in terms of the Soviet conception of 'strategy' as well as in light of Soviet history, the structure of Soviet society, and the pronouncements of Soviet leaders."
This was directly parallel to how the neocons spun 9/11, not as a lucky shot by a marginal group of criminal terrorists who got lucky in large part due to Bush Jr.'s ineptitude and knee-jerk antipathy to anything associated with Bill Clinton, but as a signal of a new existential threat to the security of America.
Second, just as the "Team B" neocon fantasy deeply exacerbated what was actually an increasingly manageable threat, so, too, the "Great War on Terror" neocon fantasy did exactly the same thing with Al Qaeda.
Third, just as the "Team B" neocon fantasy collapsed roughly a decade later with a completely unexpected and unforseen wave of democratic revolution from below, something remarkably similar is happening in the Arab world today. The two cycles of historical folly differ in many respects that should not be overlooked or forced into pre-conceived forms to make for a neater narrative/theory. The similarities that do exist are striking enough on their own not to need any gussying up.
But my point here is not to delve deep into comparative narrative. Rather, I want to use it as a backdrop for better grasping what is unfolding right before us in Egypt today....
The US faces disaster on at least three main fronts due to utterly discredited conservative ideology, with a variety of flashpoints on mini-fronts. The Democratic establishment can't even muster an argument that 2+2=4. It doesn't poll well with independents, apparently, since independents have never been polled on it.
(1) We continue the disastrous neo-con "long war" strategy supposedly in response to 9/11, but actually planned beforehand and completely at odds with the nature of the 9/11 attacks and the danger they represent. Our "full spectrum dominance" mentality currently has us facing armed--potentially nuclear--confrontation in Korea, enmeshed in an ever-deepening conflict with Iran, backing a lawless, racist and suicidal Israeli imperialist project, and unable to sustain a stabilizing nuclear weapons treaty with Russia. We are, on all fronts, at war with the very concept of national security. The discredited notion that security comes always and only from total military victory has not had a clear record of success in the American experience since WWII, which ended more than 60 years ago.
(2) Following an undersized stimulus package conceived two years ago, we have essentially reverted to a uncordinated, spasmodic mixture of feeble economic gestures reminiscent of the failed Herbert Hoover Administration of 80 years ago. As Brad DeLong wrote Saturday, in "Foreign Policy: The Four Horsemen of the Teapocalypse":
But we are now into the "recovery," and 2010 has been a very different year. Its horsemen are of a different breed entirely. Where Keynes and his ilk were optimistic believers in the power of technocratic governments to do good, this year's horsemen are practitioners of more dismal sciences: believers that the market metes out judgments that we must suffer -- and that it is our own flawed nature that makes us believe so. In short, it has been a year for Austrian economists Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter, for plutocrat and Great Depression-era Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon -- and, above all, for Friedrich Nietzsche.
There was silence in the seminar room. Richard Kahn broke it. "Do you mean to say," he asked, "that if I were to go out tomorrow and buy a new overcoat, that it would increase unemployment?"
"Yes," said the man in the front of the room, Friedrich von Hayek, "but it would take a long and complicated mathematical argument to explain why."
That is how historian Robert Skidelsky describes Hayek's visit to the proto-Keynesian economists of Cambridge University. It was the 1930s, and Hayek had met them in London to convince them that depressions were not to be avoided or cured, but rather endured. In his thinking, they were righteous karmic payback for past sins against the gods of monetary orthodoxy. Any attempts to cut them short or make them shallower would produce only temporary palliation, at the cost of a fiercer, deeper, and nastier further depression in the future.
Hayek's fellow countryman, Joseph Schumpeter, went further: "Gentlemen!" he announced to his students at Harvard University (there were no ladies). "A depression is healthy! Like a good ice-cold douche!" If depressions did not exist, Schumpeter thought, we would have to invent them. They were "the respiration of the economic mechanism."
Agreeing with Schumpeter was Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon. In his memoirs Hoover was bitter toward many, but bitterest of all toward Mellon, whom he called the head of the "leave it alone liquidationists." Hoover quotes Mellon: "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people." Hoover opposed Mellon's policies, he said, and worked to undermine them. But what could he do? He was, after all, only the president. And Mellon was Treasury secretary.
(3) Global warming denialism is rampant among new GOP members of Congress. While the actual record of global mean temperatures over the past 150-plus years looks like this:
The conservative fantasy of "natural fluctuations" would imply something wildly different, on the order this:
There is, quite simply, no relationship between what conservatives imagine the climate record to be and what it actually is. They are delusional. And yet, the Democratic establishment, which knows better has not even attempted to mount a serious public education effort to drive the conservative lies out of the "marketplace of ideas".
Meanwhile, the UN Climate Change conference in Cancun opens to almost totaly US media blackout, and Democracy Now! reports:
If you felt that the "end" of Iraq War was a bit of an anti-climax, don't worry. You weren't alone. It's not just that tens of thousands of American troops remain in Afghanistan Iraq. Nor is it that--with a few scattered notable exceptions such as Rachel Maddow--the dominant discourse can't even dream of ackhnowledging that it was all based on fakery, deception and lies. Nor is it that (as a result) we have made nothing close to a reorientation of our international strategy, much less our self-understanding as a nation.
It's not that we've learned nothing, changed nothing. It's worse. For as one war "ends" we don't even know how to begin counting how many more wars we continue. It's simply no longer possible. War has become our continual state of being. It's not just an indefinite "long war", but a total one, in which, now, any American citizen can be killed by their government without any semblance of the rule of law. And this new state of total war was brought to you by... the "pease" candidate!
So, yes. If the "end" of the Iraq War feels anti-climatic, there's a good reason for it: Berack Obama has managed to find a way to make that ending meaningless. If Bush & Cheney had achieved this result, millions of people would have been outraged. Perhaps we would have been a minority, but we would have been.
Now? Now we are only told how much worse it could have been. Now we are told that the big question ahead of us is whether we go to war with Iran sooner... or later. Now war is our default condidition. Of course we're at war. The only question is where and how. Or perhaps the only question is "Where aren't we at war?"
Now we have an erstwhile "peace" candidate who "ends" the war by using a deceitful language of false unity that blinds us from any possibility of learning any lesson at all from our past folly:
As we do, I'm mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it's time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It's well-known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush's support for our troops or his love of country and commitment to our security.
As I've said, there were patriots who supported this war and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women and our hopes for Iraqis' future.
Oh, really? It's time to "turn the page" on the fact that the entire war was a war crime? That it was a grievous violation of international law, which cost the lives of up to a million Iraqis--whose suffering did not even merit a passing mention in the President's speech?
Oh, really? No one can doubt President Bush's support for our troops, thousands of whom died because of his lies? Tens of thousands of whom were gravely injured physically, many for life? Hundreds of thousands of whom were psychologically injured, many then cast aside with a cynically false diagnosis of a personality disorder? That's support? What rubbish!
"Support the troops" is mere Orwellian rhetoric meaning, "Don't even think of criticizing the President. Don't even think of criticizing him."
No, it's worse than that. "Support the troops" is part of a transformation of language, a transformation that's intended to make it impossible to even conceive of criticizing the President--whichever party he may be fron.
And Bush's "love of country"? And "commitment to security"?
Does anyone notice that Obama is speaking like a blithering idiot? That he's trying to erase any possible meaningful distinction? And that this is the way he vainly seeks to achieve "bipartisanship? By making all differences meaningless?
"War is peace." We knew that was the slogan of the enemy deceivers. Who knew that the enemy deceivers were us?
Unless, of course, we dare to dissent. And mark ourselves forever as the "professional left" in need of drug testing.
Thank God! At least we've got an identity to claim, after all.
Obama's speech in Cairo (transcript) was hailed around the world by virtually everyone, except, as Rachel Maddow noted, for the trogdolite right. So why not have a foreign policy that's actually consistent with its main themes and main thrust, rather than one that continues Bush/Cheney policy with a "kinder, gentler" veneer? In his speech, Obama said:
The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as if he has killed all mankind.
Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed.
Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives....
Eight people died when missiles hit a compound near Mir Ali, an al-Qaeda hub in Pakistan's North Waziristan region. Seven more died when hours later two missiles hit a house in Wana, in South Waziristan. Local officials said the target in Wana was a guest house owned by a pro-Taleban tribesman. One said that as well as three children, the tribesman's relatives were killed in the blast.
And he has continued doing this ever since. All based on a false premise (from his Cairo speech):
Now, make no mistake: We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We see no military -- we seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.
And it never will be the case, so long as we are over there killing yet more innocents. At some level, Obama has to realize that. And yet he spouts this utter nonsense, in the midst of an otherwise brilliant and inspiring speech. There has to be a better way.
This past week I covered the bold testimony of Ret. Cpl. Rick Reyes before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drawing the comparison between Reyes's anti-war testimony and a young John Kerry alerting the nation to the horrors of the Vietnam War 38 years ago. I certainly wasn't the only one to connect the dots between Vietnam and the current quagmire in Afghanistan, as you can see from this video with excerpts of Andrew Bacevich's testimony.
Bacevich, a retired Colonel who served in Vietnam and is now professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, has become one of the most vocal critics of the "Long War," as Defense Secretary Robert Gates dubbed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paraphrasing General Bruce Palmer's account of the Vietnam War, Bacevich said that our country is once again "mired in a protracted war of an indeterminate nature, with no foreseeable end to the US commitment."
The Long War, as Bacevich exclaimed, has become the second most expensive war in US history (second only to WWII). Now that we our facing trillions in debt, Bacevich urged Congress to question the reasons for escalation in Afghanistan. "We just urgently need to ask ourselves whether or not the purposes of the long war are achievable, necessary, and affordable," Bacevich claimed, "and Afghanistan is a subset of that longer set of questions." Congress needs to address questions of cost before they vote on President Obama's $83 billion war funding bill in the coming weeks. And the most direct way to follow Bacevich's lead and confront Congress is by calling your Representatives as soon as possible, urging them not to vote until we have more oversight hearings like these, and more questions answered.
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