The most massive and brutal crime committed on this planet during the past decade has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And we're seeking to wash the blood off our hands without so much as an "Out, damn spot!" Nowadays "looking forward, not backward" is supposed to take care of everything, even as the crimes continue. What that takes care of is the leading perpetrators who begin to sense that the coast is clear and creep out of their holes to declare, as did Karl Rove this week, that their biggest mistake was not more aggressively attacking those who pointed out their crimes.
If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking....
....we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics even after you start to feel better.
And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic grows louder by the day....
This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation--if it can be called that--about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable--Saddam Hussein--became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost....
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity-about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.
Due to its scarcity, safety may be the most precious commodity of all in a warzone. And since scarcity raises prices, it's the rich and well connected who can afford the most security -- or at least the perception of it. No one knows this as well as Fidelis Cloer, a salesman who has spent nearly twenty years selling high-priced, German-made luxury armored cars to kings, presidents, dictators and officials in some of the world's most unstable and dangerous regions. Cloer is the subject of the documentary Bulletproof Salesman, co-directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, the duo behind the documentaries Gunner Palace and The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair. The film follows Cloer as he enters Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, confident that he'll find plenty of eager customers for his cars amidst the chaos. But as the war grinds on and the insurgent weapon of choice switches from guns to increasingly powerful IEDs, Cloer realizes that he can't do business in an environment where he's being both outmatched by insurgents and undercut by low-cost competitors.
Watch my ReThink Review of Bulletproof Salesman and my discussion with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks about the defense industry and its political influence below.
Bart Stupak is supposed to be holding a press conference at 11 AM, and Chris will be blogging about it (afterwards, he said last night, but that could change, I suppose). Details are murky and confusing, but it now seems that Stupak is the only person in the world who can get a bill through the Senate with neither a fillibuster blocking him, nor recourse to reconciliation. Who knew?
This could, of course, blow everything up. If Stupak language really could become law, I don't think they'll be able to hold enough pro-choice votes in the House to pass the bill. And if they do, the damage to the party will make it one of the most costly "victories" in a very long time.
I don't mean to diminish the importance of this. To the contrary, I want to use this occassion to underscore a point I've made before, but haven't pounded on repeatedly the way I maybe should have: My problem with much of how people have related to health care reform is the way they've focused on it as if it were the be-all and end-all of progressive politics. To extend my metaphor of the last diary, they've not only assumed a can-opener with respect to health care reform, but they've also assumed it was part of a Swiss Army Knife for dealing with all our other ills as well.
Obviously not.
There are major demonstrations today marking the 7th Anniversary of invasion of Iraq (United for Peace and Justice, Cindy Sheehan/Peace of the Action, ANSWER March on Washington) and the immigration reform "March for America" tomorrow. These issues have been largely invisible here at Open Left, and we're not alone in that. Neither has figured prominently on progressive blogosphere's radar screen over the past several months, and that narrowing of focus is not a sign of health on our part. Whatever happens this weekend, let us hope that one thing comes out of this: an end to the period in which we have looked to Washington and taken our cues from what is happening there. That is not how the left blogosphere was born and built, and it is not how it can best serve the common good of our nation today. We need to be bigger than that... much, much bigger.
On Friday afternoon, I posted the following announcment online:
CONTEST: Obama Calls War on Iraq "A New Dawn" -- What Do You Call It? (Limit 8 Words)
I'll start the entries:
Operation Funnel Unlimited Cash to Killing (OFUCK)
The winner will be announced on an aircraft carrier with a banner! Plus job offer possible for video editing work to insert "rename" in place of "end" in campaign speeches.
Winner gets signed copy of Daybreak, latest issue of Humanist magazine, a bucket of snow, and anything else I can find.
**
Perhaps not the most tempting offer ever, but here it is Saturday afternoon and I'm scrolling through hundreds of creative and provocative contest entries, and I'm keeping the contest open and hunting for more prizes, so that more people can enter. I'd also like to encourage people to post comments on their choices thus far for winning entries.
Here are some that have caught my eye (not a list of finalists, just a sampling):
It's October 23, 2002, and you're Jay Bybee, the man in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice. John Yoo and a bunch of other lawyers willing to claim that absolutely anything is legal work for you. But you'd much rather be a judge. That would be a cushy job, a lifetime job, a job with a book of the Bible named for it, a job where you would get to decide which crimes to legalize rather than being told by someone else, a job where you might eventually even get to rule on the legality of some of the crimes you were presently engaged in committing. At the moment, however, if you want to become a judge you're going to have to follow instructions, and that means legalizing the greatest crime of them all. Millions may die in the process, but you will get that nomination and you will become a judge.
This week, hearings began in the official UK inquiry into Britain's role in promoting the Iraq War, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, hence known as the Chilcot inquiry. It's a weird feeling following them, since they take for granted a framework of facts that utterly demolishes the Versailles picture of the last 8 or 9 years--beginning with the fact that Bush was keen to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11--but at the same time (at lest so far) they're a form of damage control for the British, apparently calculated to air all the dirty linen that's already been seen, plus only a tiny bit more that's traceable to those at the top. Above all, Tony Blair's conduct must remain unwise, but nothing worse, no matter what the facts may be.
The chief result so far has simply been to confirm, somewhat clarify and fill out some of the information released over four years ago in the Downing Street Memos. At the same time, it's very much an establishment affair. So however embarrassing the basic facts may be, the proverbial stiff upper lip is preventing the mouthing of certain basic truths too uncomfortable for official Britain to bear, even as it nonchalantly skewers the official Versailles line with almost every breath. As a result, so far at least, one might well subtitle the Chilcot inquiry "Where the Poodles Wasn't." Thus, on Thursday, Julian Borger reported for the Guardian:
Chilcot inquiry: Tony Blair decided on Iraq war a year before invasion - envoy Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 20.25 GMT
Tony Blair's government decided up to a year before the Iraq invasion that it was "a complete waste of time" to resist the US drive to oust Saddam Hussein, opting instead to offer advice on how it should be done, the former British ambassador to Washington said today.
Sir Christopher Meyer, testifying to the Chilcot inquiry into Britain's role in the war, made it clear that once the Bush administration decided to take military action, the Blair government never considered opting out or opposing it.
He said that the timing of the invasion was dictated by the "unforgiving nature" of the military build-up rather than the outcome of diplomacy or UN weapons inspections, which had not been given sufficient time. British officials were left "scrabbling for the smoking gun" - evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - as preparations continued.
Meyer, ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, described a critical moment in March 2002, as Blair was preparing a visit to George Bush's Texas ranch.
New instructions were brought to the embassy by the prime minister's foreign affairs adviser, Sir David Manning.
The message from Downing Street was that the 11 September attacks and the subsequent US determination to oust Saddam were established facts, "and it was a complete waste of time ... if we were going to work with the Americans, to come to them and bang away about regime change and say: 'We can't support it'."
He rejected the suggestion that British policy changed to stay in line with Washington. "I wouldn't say it was as extremely poodle-ish as that," Meyer said, arguing Blair had long been a "true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein".
Of course, believing that Saddam Hussein was wicked is like believing that the Sun rises in the East: (A) Neither belief is the least bit controversial or unusual. (B). Neither belief is justification for war under international law. And thus we are treated to the spectacle of discussing Tony Blair and his minister's long train of dissembling while struggling alternatively with, against, and in support of George Bush and his administration's long train of dissembling, all the while laying down fresh layers of further dissembling simultaneous with revealing unavoidable scattered bits of truth.
In short, they are all poodles now, for in order not to be, they would inevitably have to call for Bush and Blair's indictment as war criminals at the Hague.
In other non-news from the Chilcot inquiry, we learn that Bush wanted to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11, and we get further fleshing out how things changed after 9/11, until Britain finally agreed. Still, what's non-news for the rest of the world is still forbidden knowledge in Versailles, so it's worth taking note of, if for no other reason.
This week Random Lenghts News published a story I wrote on the emerging evidence about the role of torture in producing phony evidence for the Iraq War, and reality of how deeply entwined we are in the modern practice of torture. I've covered some of this on Open Left before, but I felt this telling of the story was well worth sharing.
Torturing Truth To Get To War?
"I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions." -- Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), speech to the US Senate, June 9. 2009.
For more than a month now, former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on a media blitz pushing the cause of torture under a more sanitized name. At the same time, more and more holes have been poked in his rosy view of the effectiveness of physical and psychological coercion. There's even evidence that getting bad intelligence to justify invading Iraq may have been part of the point, almost from the very beginning.
On April 22, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) released a report, "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," which concluded that harsh treatment "increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies." It also included testimony that torture was used in an attempt to establish a non-existent operational link between Iraq and al Qaeda. On May 13, Ali Soufan, formerly a top FBI interrogator, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture and borderline torture) "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda."
That same day, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, wrote in the Washington Note, "What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."
Over the last two days, so many different revelations have exposed aspects of the role torture played in attempts to tie Iraq to al Qaeda, thus justifying the Iraq War, that there is no longer any reasonable doubt about the intention involved. This is why we tortured. Not the only reason, to be sure, but a very important one--and one not even covered by the farcical "torture memos". Rachel Maddow provided a very compelling summary of the evidence last night, before discussing the latest developments with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side:
In light of these latest developments, Obama's attempt to continue covering up Bush Era crimes is no longer tenable. His promises of "openness and transparency" cannot be squared with covering up what clearly are high crimes and misdemeanors. Torture is against the law, it's against international law, so is making war on another country. So we have two grave crimes linked to one another. Failing to investigate and prosecute torture is itself a violation of our treaty obligations--another violation of international law, and hence a violation of our own Constitution, which declares such treaties to be the "law of the land."
There is no doubt about it. America is a rouge state. Bush made it so, and under Obama's failure to take corrective action, it remains so. We have only barely begun the struggle to reclaim our democracy, and our republican form of government. We have no more than a toehold, a foothold at best. The promise of "change we can believe in" has become the single greatest obstacle to actually delivering change we can believe in. We cannot move forward without understanding our past, and how we have gotten where we are today. A democratic republic cannot be built on silences and lies.
We have been told repeatedly that concern for the truth will get in the way of Obama's important agenda. But everything Obama wants to do is already a compromise, and its being compromised further and further every day. The idea that surrendering in advance on the most basic responsibilities of upholding the rule of law will somehow make Obama politically stronger and more able to solve other important problems that confront the nation is palpably false. Bill Clinton tried a similar trade-off when he took office, and it ended up empowering the GOP as it had not been empowered since the 1920s. Retreat from responsibility is not the way forward. It is not now. It cannot ever be.
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are those who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass
We knew the "what" waterboarding. Now we know the "why" and now we know the "when." When? The Senate Armed Services Committee report: the Bush administration started planning torture before the memos authorizing it, before there were detainees to torture.
Why? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld insisted interrogators had missed something, because no prisoner had yet confirmed any operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. We tortured to backfill for a phony war and a nonexistent Iraq-al Qaeda connection.
And Dick Cheney still thinks he is the victim.
That's it in a nutshell, folks. Torture wasn't supposed to save us from a ticking time-bomb. Heck "24" was barely starting its first season. Torture was supposed to get al Qaeda operatives to fess up to a non-existent link with Iraq, so we could have the war the neo-cons had been itching for for years, instead of this unwanted distraction by bin Laden and friends. Others--such as Ron Suskind on Rachel Maddow the same day--have made the same argument, and have explicated recent revelations in more detail-as Countdown itself did in the body of the program-but Olberman's introduction was blunt, powerful and to the point.
Which makes it that much easier to graft it onto a larger narrative, one in which even Iraq was only supposed to be a minor opening act, and in which terrorism played a role so tiny it wasn't even a speaking part. The real enemies were China, any other rising regional power, futuristic weapons deployed by persons unknown, and the American people, who would never spring for such extravagant military spending without benefit of a new Pearl Harbor. This was the future foreseen by the neocon think-tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in its September 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses".
How did Senators John McCain and and Joe Lieberman spend the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war? Did they apologize for cheerleading the Bush administration's pernicious lies that led our country into and have kept us mired in Iraq? Did they show remorse for a war that took the lives of over 4,000 US soldiers and up to 1 million Iraqi civilians, while costing us $3 trillion when all is said and done? No, instead these Senators brought us the sequel to their twisted buddy comedy, escalating the war in Afghanistan.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed yesterday, McCain and Lieberman urged the Obama administration to go all in after completing its policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The "minimalist" or "reductionist" path would be, in their view, "dangerously and fundamentally wrong, and the president should unambiguously reject it." As with the Iraq war, McCain and Lieberman believe it's in our national interest to win in Afghanistan at all cost, which they even define as establishing "a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary."
How do McCain and his ideological Benedict Arnold of a sidekick propose achieving such a lofty goal? Well, that part they don't get into. No need to be bogged down with the specifics; suffice it to say our country needs a broad counterinsurgency and we need it now! The maximalist approach, which is ironic, considering McCain and Lieberman criticize and fear-monger about those who use "loose rhetoric about a minimal commitment in Afghanistan." The thing is though, and I never ever thought I'd write these words, McCain and Lieberman are absolutely right.
--Remarks on March 19, 2009, in a park in which people are living in Richmond, Va., in front of offices of the Federal Reserve--
From outside the United States it's easy to imagine that everyone inside the United States is doing well. If you live in a country occupied by U.S. soldiers, as over 150 countries are around the world, if you live with extreme poverty and disease, if the United States provides your country's government with shiny expensive weapons, if the Americans you come into contact with treat you with contempt, and if the images you have of the United States come from Hollywood, it would be understandable to think that everyone in the homeland of the empire is doing well.
It is March, again. Just as I have been for years, in this month I am haunted by the hate we, humans, propagate. March 19th is the sixth anniversary of "unnecessary wars". The phrase is not mine alone. Public servants, Ambassadors, and former Presidents have proclaimed as I have. Foreign Secretaries and domestic Diplomats deem the war was a mistake. Then there are the people.
