A STRANGE, SOULLESS MAN AND HIS UTTERLY FAILED PRESIDENCY

 

John Chuckman

 

How vividly I remember the photos of Obama in Berlin during his campaign in 2008: streets literally flooded with people keen to get a glimpse of a promising young politician, expressing for us all how exhausted the world was with the most ignorant and contemptible man ever to have been a president. Reporters said a quarter of million turned out to see a man who was a junior senator and had no claim yet to being a world figure. It was intoxicating to think this bright, attractive figure might replace the murderous buffoon, George Bush, and his éminence grise, Dick Cheney, a man who might comfortably have served any of the 20^th century’s great bloody dictators.

A few years later, in 2013, an estimated 4 to 6 thousand showed up for a major speech by then-President Obama, and one is surprised even that many showed, but then there is always a set of people who just want to be able to say they saw a celebrity. After all there are inexplicable people who travel to places associated with genuine monsters, notorious murderers and torturers, and have snapshots of themselves taken standing in front as though they were at the Grand Canyon or Disneyworld.

In 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, excited at seeing Bush replaced with a promising man, just as the earlier crowd in Berlin, awarded President Obama its Peace Prize after he had been in office for less than year and had achieved nothing of substance towards peace or any other worthy goal. But the Peace Prize often is awarded in hopes of influencing and encouraging a leader rather than in recognition of genuine achievement.

In Obama’s case, the hopes and encouragement fell stillborn and lifeless, and he has proved himself one of the least worthy recipients, keeping historical company with killers like Kissinger or Begin, winners whose awards also were based on futile hopes and encouragement. Obama’s distinctions in the sphere of peace include abandoning the Palestinians to their tormenters, abandoning the Egyptians to a new tyranny, pitching the people of Syria into a bloody civil war, never speaking out about the suppression of people in places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Yemen, pitching the people of Ukraine into chaos, establishing a new hi-tech death-squad approach to the extrajudicial killing of people, not standing up to Israel over its unwarranted threats of war against Iran, and force-feeding the military-intelligence establishment so that it resembles a gigantic waddling Pâté de foie gras goose.

He has done nothing for his own people, signing not one worthy piece of legislation to better the lives of less fortunate Americans. His only major domestic legislation is a costly, almost unworkable compromise on health care that will enrich insurance companies in the only Western nation not having a form of national health insurance. He will also leave his country with an almost incomprehensible debt, a debt America’s people are not asked to pay down through taxes and other appropriate fiscal and budgetary measures, ultimately leaving all the world’s holders of dollars to be cheated through the dollar’s future decline, a scam that beggars the size of Bernie Madoff’s pyramid operation or the Nigerian industry in e-mail invitations to share in vast wealth just by providing your bank account. It is irresponsibility on a colossal scale, all of the gains from the scam having served American interests from investment bankers to the military and military contractors. Obama’s force-fed military will have all its stuffing supplied involuntarily by non-Americans who have no interest in what he has done. In truth, America doesn’t have a single honest dollar to spend on anything.

The sense of dignity Obama displayed in the early days is gone too, simply evaporated, although I am open to the suggestion that my judgment is affected by grim disappointment in his non-achievement and display of what I can only regard as a form of moral cowardice, not different in quality to that displayed by George Bush. He made some noises early on about closing America’s torture gulag, about ending its pointless wars, about pushing Israel into a decent settlement for millions of Palestinian captives, about new starts in general, but it has all blown away like so much dust on the wind. Now we have a man who almost never utters an inspiring or even meaningful word, never takes a risk to do anything worthwhile, and actually looks quite ineffectual at times. Imagine, the first black President of the United States at the funeral of a world-figure like Nelson Mandela, sitting next to his wife and flirting with the blond prime minister of Denmark, taking “selfies” during the service? It was contemptible behavior. It wasn’t the silly flirting that mattered: it was the complete lack of a statesman’s demeanor, communicating to millions of eyes the sense of a small man behaving like a hormonal teenager on a solemn international occasion.

I remember, too, another picture of Obama, taken in Hawaii where he had gone to visit during his campaign a gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, the grandmother who had raised him. The picture showed him walking profile in sandals, and the image immediately gave the impression of a self-confident, independent-minded man which I quite relished. But all sense of that image of Obama is gone, save the almost surrealistic right wing descriptions of him as a communist, a view whose origins it is difficult to imagine, although his wearing sandals a few times might qualify in the Palinesque world of American right wing politics.

Of course the American institution most accurately described as communistic is its massive military-security-police apparatus, a monstrosity whose scale and scope make the old East German Stasi seem almost quaintly amateur, although aspects of it would immediately bring a smile of recognition to the lips of retired Stasi agents: matters such as the soliciting of general public informers, the blackmailing or bribing of others to serve as informers inside groups and organizations, the interception of virtually all messages, or the scrutiny of what people are reading at the library and on-line. This all predates Obama, and he has done nothing but ardently support its growth. But I guess you just cannot do enough for these ghastly institutions to avoid being called a communist by people who share Sarah Palin’s intellectual gene pool.

During Obama’s first election campaign, there was a mindless controversy over his not wearing a flag pin on his lapel. That is the kind of seemingly insignificant detail which sets the “you can never have enough patriotism” mob to a fever pitch, bellowing voices about freedom from intolerant men with bellies sagging ponderously over their belts, comparable in intensity to prayer vigils over embryos or “support the troops” parades in small towns (who cares that they’ve invaded some unfortunate land no one ever heard of and are busy killing civilians?). Remember Jonathon Edwards, that syrupy-voiced wealthy tort lawyer running for Vice President in 2004, offering a homily in one of his speeches where he suggested American families should gather together each morning to discuss the blessings of America over their bowls of Coco Puffs? Presumably Papa Bear would lead the service before he and Mommy Bear and all the Baby Bears rushed off in gas-guzzling trucks and four-by-fours through a landscape of sprawl to their corporate cubicles and private schools.  And Edwards was regarded – ugh, foul word that it is considered in America – as a liberal.

How refreshing I thought Obama at the time of this nonsense over whether someone else’s patriotism was being adequately displayed, again a self-confident, independent-minded man who did not see the need to follow the herd of American politicians who resemble nothing so much as members of the old Soviet Politburo with red star pins on their lapels. He didn’t need to parade the obvious fact of an American running for office in America. He didn’t need to display what has become an American fetish, a voodoo charm, the totem of a secular religion, and, at the same time, a symbol, for a great many of the world’s people, of arrogant power and almost endless bloodshed. Of course, today Obama is never seen without a ridiculous flag pin. He probably has a drawer full of them in a bureau of his bedroom, a Secret Service man being solemnly tasked to keep it stocked and to drop a few (respectfully, mind you) into his pocket as back-ups for any trip. It must be the last thing Obama’s butler at the White House does each morning, too, making sure a pin is on the suit to be worn that day, the correct lapel, leveled properly, and polished. How very inspiring, like a Rotarian executive preparing for a club luncheon.

We perhaps can never know what has motivated Obama’s behavior as President. Certainly the memoirs of retired Presidents rarely enlighten us on anything of importance. Is he, as some in his own party have suggested, simply not up to the job? Of course, when they say that, they are not using the same criteria this writer does. In America, even the supposed left is never far from mounting a horse and charging up San Juan Hill. Is he merely responding to the fact of the awesome power of America’s unelected government? Is he satisfied to give them their way, enjoy the 8-year ride, and retire with full pension and benefits, avoiding that haunting nightmare of the last President who seriously challenged just a few of the establishment’s assumption, John Kennedy, in the streets of Dallas?

 

 

 

 

HURTLING INTO DARKNESS: AMERICA’S GREAT LEAP TOWARDS GLOBAL TYRANNY

John Chuckman

 

The darkness to which I refer is something largely unanticipated in political studies and even in science fiction, a field which definitely enters this discussion, as readers will see. There have been many examples of national tyrannies and even stories of global autocracies, but the Hitler-Stalin-Mussolini type of tyranny is an antiquated model for advanced states despite its applying still to many third-world places. A unique set of circumstances now works towards a dystopian future in advanced states with no need for jackboots or brutal faces on posters.

Ironically, one of the key forces which brought Europe and North America over a few centuries to the kind of liberal democracies we know today is capable of delivering a new and unprecedented form of tyranny. That force is the body of interests of a nation’s middle class – the group of capable, ambitious, and rising people who were called a few centuries back by Europe’s landed old aristocracy “the new men.”

By “middle class,” I certainly do not mean what the average American Congressman encourages, in boiler-plate speeches, the average American to believe: that every family with steady work is middle class, all other classes having been eliminated from the American political lexicon. No, I mean the people of significant means – and, although not wealthy, of considerable talent and education – who hold as a group an important set of interests in society through their holdings and valued services. It was the gradual growth of this class of people over centuries of economic growth in Western societies that eventually made the position of monarchs and later aristocracies untenable: the middle class’s interests could no longer be represented by the old orders while their importance to burgeoning economies had become indispensable. They provided the indispensable force for what we now think of as democracy in their countless demands that their interests be represented.

But there is evidence, in America especially, that something altogether new is emerging in human affairs. The real middle class, at least a critical mass of it, has been folded into the interest of the modern elites, the relatively small number of people who own a great portion of all wealth just as they did in the 17^th century, wealth today being generated by great global enterprises rather than the ownership of vast national estates. Great enterprises cannot be operated without much of the cream of the middle class: they serve in computer technology, finance, engineering, skilled management, the military officer class, and in intelligence. Their futures, interests, and prejudices have become locked-in with the interests of America’s corporate-military-intelligence establishment. They are indispensable to the establishment’s success, and they are accordingly rewarded in ways which bind their interests – health care, pension-type benefits, privileges, working conditions, opportunities for promotion, etc.

This marriage of interests between elites and the talented middle class effectively removes many of the best educated and most skilled people from being political opponents or becoming critics of the establishments for which they work. At the same time, America’s middle class in general – its small store owners, small factory owners, modest bankers, and even many professionals – has been under attack from economic competition in a globalized world for many years and has little to look forward to but more of the same. America’s legendary working class “middle class” – that brief postwar miracle of auto and steel workers and others who through unionized, unskilled labor earned long vacations, handsome pensions, home ownership, cars, and even small boats – has been battered beyond recognition, every year for decades seeing its real income fall and long-term having absolutely no prospects.

Despite the rise of a society much steeped in the illusions of advertising and marketing, most Americans likely still assume in their day-to-day affairs that their neighbors and business contacts do pretty much what they say they are doing, that while there may be an exaggeration or white lie here or there, most matters proceed according to understanding, laws, and ordinary civility. By and large for the present, they are still pretty much justified in their assumptions.

But when it comes to the level of the national government, and especially in matters of international affairs, these ordinary truths simply cease to hold, almost as though you had moved from the visible, work-a-day world to the quantum strangeness of the subatomic. Likely, it has always been the case to some degree, but the evidence mounts that we have entered a startling new reality, one which shares almost nothing with traditional civil society. America’s national government has become inured to lying and cheating the people whom it ostensibly serves, lying as consistently and thoroughly as would be the case with an occupying foreign power trying to keep a captive population pacified. Americans were lied to about Vietnam, lied to about Cambodia, lied to about the Gulf War, lied to about the invasion of Afghanistan, lied to about the invasion of Iraq, and lied to about a host of policies and interventions.

But we have reached a new level in these matters, a level where the extent of the misrepresentation almost severs the social contract between those governed and their government. America’s neo-con faction has had its agenda adopted over the last few decades, that of freely and happily using America’s great military and economic power to crush those abroad who disagree with America’s arbitrary pronouncements, creating a long crusade intended to re-order the affairs of others with no apologies to them and no honest explanation to America’s own people who pay the taxes and provide the lives of soldiers. While the neo-cons are a passing phenomenon, much as the Middle-eastern garrison state with which they are ferociously associated, the values and lessons they have successfully imparted will remain part of America’s ruling consciousness, serving yet other interests. A tool once successfully used is rarely abandoned.

Not only is there a quantitative difference now, there is a new qualitative difference. After the holocaust of Vietnam (3 million dead Vietnamese justify the term), the United States military realized that it could no longer depend upon citizen-soldiers in its colonial wars. It also realized that that it could no longer tolerate even a moderately free press nosing around its battlegrounds, thus was born the idea of an imbedded press in a professional army. Of course, in the intervening years, America’s press itself changed, becoming an intensely concentrated corporate industry whose editorial policies are invariably in lock-step over colonial wars and interventions and coups, almost as though it were an unofficial department of government. In addition, this corporatized press has abandoned traditional responsibilities of explaining even modestly world affairs, reportage resources having been slashed by merged corporate interests as well as by new economic pressures on advertising revenue, the result of changing technologies.

There is only one lens in America’s mainline journalistic kit, and that is one that filters everything through corporate American views, an automatic and invariable bias found in every image taken or written outside America’s borders. Now, some will say in response that a few newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post are exceptions here, but they couldn’t be more wrong. When a journalistic institution gains a reputation for thoroughness and detail in some of its operations, it becomes all the more able to powerfully leverage its reputation in matters which concern the establishment. If you examine the record of these newspapers for some decades, you will find absolutely without exception, their close support for every dirty war and intervention, as you will find their close support for the brutal, criminal behaviors of favored American satrapies like Israel. In a number of cases, CIA plants have worked directly for these papers as disinformation pipelines, but in all cases, reportage and editorial reflect nothing beyond what the publicity offices of the Pentagon and CIA would write themselves. It actually is a sign of how distorted American perceptions are that these papers are in any way regarded as independent, disinterested, or demonstrating consistent journalistic integrity.

The American political system at the national level makes these practices practicable. No one is genuinely responsible for anything in an open and direct fashion, secrecy is as much the norm in America as it is in any authoritarian government you care to mention, and money is the only governing principle in American politics. Openness or transparency simply does not exist, as one might expect it would, transparency being one of the hallmarks of responsible and democratic government. Without transparency, there can be no accounting for anything, and it is the sine qua non of democracy that politicians and officials be genuinely accountable to the electorate. Lastly, the things which tend to remain secret from the people today are far more likely to be pervasive, world-changing developments, far more so than in the past given powerful emerging technologies and the great concentration of power in American society. They are, in short, the very things citizens of a democracy should know about but don’t.

It has long been the case that dishonesty and secrecy have marked America’s foreign policy, as it invariably does with great imperial powers. After all, when Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and others decided in private to arrange a nasty little war with the declining Spanish Empire, one to become known as the Spanish-American War, they were hardly being honest with Americans. “Remember the Maine” was a cheap, dishonest slogan while America’s brutal behavior in Cuba and the Philippines (the first place waterboarding is known to have been used by Americans) were raw truths. So it has been time after time, so that the national government has learned that dishonesty and secrecy are successful and virtually never questioned.

During the long Cold War, America’s government became inured to these practices with its dozens of interventions and coups and long wars of terror like that waged against Cuba from Florida and New Orleans, a terror operation whose extent made bin Laden’s later mountain training place resemble a boy scout camp. Now, at least two new developments have now influenced these practices, with a third just beginning to make itself felt.  One, America, under the influence of the insider group called neo-cons, has pretty much given up pretence in its aggressive foreign policies: it has come to believe that it is able and entitled to arrange the world according to its arbitrary desires. Two, under the pretext of a war on terror, the United States government has transferred the hubris and arrogance of its foreign affairs into domestic government, no one having voted for a Stasi-like secret surveillance state, one moreover where even local authorities are endowed with armored cars, drones, and abusive powers. Three, technology is genuinely revolutionizing the nature of war, putting immense new power into the hands of elites – power which, unlike the hydrogen bomb, can actually be used readily – and nowhere is this occurring at a more rapid pace than in the United States.

The approaching reality is America’s being able to kill, highly accurately, on a large scale without using thermo-nuclear weapons and almost without using armies. With no need to recruit and support vast armies of soldiers, no need for mess halls and sanitation, no need for px’s and pensions, costs can be slashed, and there is even less need to explain what you are doing or to account for your decisions, and secrecy is promoted even more perfectly.

Today, we see the American government sending killer drones to multiple parts of the world, having already killed several thousand innocent people, with absolutely no accounting of victims or purpose, beyond flannel-mouthed stuff about getting bad guys. But even more dramatic killing machines requiring no soldiers are well along in development. A robot soldier, something resembling Dr. Who’s dreaded delaks with machine guns, already exists, with various advanced models under development equipped with every form of artificial recognition and various means of killing. Eventually, such robots will be delivered to places America wishes to secure, unfortunately without any care for the mistakes and horrors they may inflict on civilians, but America’s establishment does not care about that now as people from Fallujah or Hanoi could readily testify. A hypersonic robot plane or missile, able one day to deliver conventional explosives with precision to almost any spot on earth within an hour or two of launch is well along. Intelligent torpedoes and underwater drones are also well along. Robot tanks and ships are being developed. America’s mysterious space-plane vehicle, resembling a scale-model space shuttle, just having been tested with 500 days in orbit without any crew, has many potential uses for killing and control from space, including the launch of missiles from a position above any target, putting the reach of a fleet of them within minutes of any target on earth, a kind of early prototype Death Star if you will. We also have the advent of extremely powerful new lasers and electric rail-guns, both of which can be completely computerized in their operation. Advances in software, especially in areas like facial and voice-recognition, will enable completely automated targeting of victims almost at the press of a button.

One day, victims may well include troublesome Americans, not just unwanted foreigners. After all, the components for slipping into such a practice are virtually in place, and we know there are no qualms on the part of many of the people leading America today. In a secrecy state, people disappearing would rarely be noticed and never explained. The NSA’s unblinking surveillance on all American citizens would provide targeting information on demand.

We are not quite there yet, but in the close future, less than twenty years, the United States will operate under a military system not unlike the automated, radar-operated machine-gun towers Israel uses to pen in the people of Gaza, only it will do so on a planetary scale. Such immense power in the hands of a relatively few people anywhere and always would be a threat, but in the hands of America’s corporate-military-intelligence elites, people who already are not held accountable for what they do and feel virtually no need to explain, it is a looming threat to the peace, decency, and political integrity of the entire world.

I have no idea how the relentless march towards this brave new world can be stopped. Indeed, I am almost sure that it cannot. Americans in general no longer have anything which could be termed control over the acts of their government, and their role in elections is nothing more than a formal choice between two establishment-loyal candidates heading two parties that differ on virtually no vital matter. George Bush’s time in office proved something profound generally not recognized in the press: America does not now need a president beyond the Constitutional formalities of signing documents and making speeches. Bush was an utterly incompetent fool, but America’s national government never skipped a beat during his eight years, never skipped a beat, that is, in matters important to the establishment, which of course excludes matters like a disaster in New Orleans, concern for the welfare of the American people having long ago faded away as one for the national government.

After all, when you have lied to and manipulated a people for a very long time, how can a growing contempt for them be avoided? It cannot, in much the way a heartless conman fools an old widow into giving up her life savings. Besides, the more government focuses on the kind of matters America’s government focuses on, running for office and government service almost certainly increasingly attracts and rewards narcissists and sociopaths and repels those with broader public interests. The lack of concern and empathy becomes a self-regulated mechanism.

Barack Obama’s tenure has only demonstrated the point made by George Bush further. He has signed off on many new ways of killing people, many secret and disturbing policies, continued to wage Bush’s pointless wars, supported anti-democratic forces taking power in a number of place, including importantly Ukraine and Egypt, reinforced anti-democratic forces in many places like Bahrain, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and not lifted a finger over Israel’s decades-long suppression of democracy and fundamental rights for millions. Obama’s only claim even to helping his own people is a pathetic, costly, unworkable health-care program in which the establishment has absolutely no interest.

The argument that there is an underlying concern for humanity and for rights in the American government couldn’t be more wrong, even though those are themes in the blubbering speeches of a George Bush, a Barrack Obama, a Hillary Clinton, or a John Kerry. America’s deeds abroad are without exception now to control, whether through wars and coups and assassinations or through the cajoling and threats that go on behind the scenes at every single vote by any international body, such as the United Nations.

I do not believe the citizens of the United States any longer possess the capacity to avoid these dark prospects. They are being swept along by forces they mostly do not understand, and most are unwilling to give up on the comfortable almost-religious myths of enforceable Constitutional rights and a benevolent national government.  The world’s hope of avoiding global tyranny now lies in the rapid advance of nations such as China, Russia, India, and Brazil to counterbalance America. Europe, an obvious possible candidate to oppose America’s more dangerous and obtuse efforts, appears in recent decades to have fallen completely under America’s direction in so many areas where it once showed independence, an increasing number having been bribed or seduced or threatened to join NATO and unwilling to use the limited international agencies we have, such as the United Nations, to oppose America’s disturbing tendencies.

 

 

WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME

John Chuckman

Of course, the cozy popular myth of America’s Founding Fathers as an earnest, civic-minded group gathered in an ornate hall, writing with quill pens, reading from leather-bound tomes, and offering heroic speeches in classical poses – all resembling Greek philosophers in wigs and spectacles and frock coats – was always that, a myth. They were in more than a few cases narrow, acquisitive men, ambitious for their personal interests which were considerable, and even the more philosophic types among them were well-read but largely unoriginal men who cribbed ideas and concepts and even whole phrases from European Enlightenment writers and British parliamentary traditions.

And much of what they wrote and agreed upon involved what would prove mistaken ideas, with a lack of foresight into what the almost unchangeable concrete their words would shape. Americans today often are not aware that the word “democracy” for many of the Founders was an unpleasant one, carrying just about the same connotations that “communist” would a century and a half later. Men of the world of privilege and comparative wealth – Washington, Morris, and many others – were having nothing to do with ideas which rendered unimportant men important. That is why the country was styled as a “republic” – that most undefined term in the political lexicon, which then meant only the absence of a king with decisions made by a tight group of propertied elites.

False as they are, the very fact that there are such pleasant myths does tell us something about past popular ideals informing their creation. Now, how would any future Americans manage to weave attractive myths about a president who sits in the Oval Office signing authorizations for teams of young buzz-cut psychopaths in secret locked rooms to guide killing machines against mere suspects and innocent bystanders, often adopting the tactics of America’s lunatic anti-abortion assassins, sending a second hellish missile into the crowd of neighbors who come to the assistance of the victims of the first?

How would they weave attractive myths around the CIA’s International Torture Gulag, including that hellhole, Guantanamo, where kidnapped, legally-innocent people are imprisoned and tortured and given absolutely no rights or ethical treatment under international laws and conventions?

During the Revolutionary War, the battles were between armies, and captured soldiers were frequently granted their freedom upon their paroles, pledges of not returning to the fight. Spies were thought poorly of and often hung. Torture was uncommon and certainly not embraced as policy.

What myths can be written of two wars involving the deaths of a million or so people, the creation of millions of refugees, and the needless destruction of huge amounts of other peoples’ property, and all to achieve nothing but a change of government? Or about massive armed forces and secret security agencies which squander hundreds of billions in resources year after year, spreading their dark influence to all corners of the globe, and offering an insurmountable obstacle to America’s own citizens who might imagine they ever can rise against a government grown tyrannous? After all, polls in America show that its Congress is held in contempt by the overwhelming majority of its people, with percentages of disapproval rivaling those held for communism or Satanic rituals.

There are no myths about today’s Congressional figures. Everyone understands they are often to be found bellowing in ornate halls about points most Americans couldn’t care less about. Everyone understands that they are ready to go anywhere and say almost anything for large enough campaign contributions. That they take off on junkets paid for by groups hoping to influence votes and put faces to the exercise of future influence, trips commonly involving a foreign power trying to shape American policy. That their work is often steeped in secrecy from the voters, secrecy not governed by genuine national security concerns but by the often shameful nature of their work. That a good deal of the legislation and rules they create repress their own people’s interests and favor only special interests.

That their government regularly suppresses inconvenient truths and labels those who raise questions as foolishly addicted to conspiracy or even as treacherous. What are just a few of the events which have been treated in this fashion? The assassination of a President. The accidental or deliberate downing of at least three civilian aircraft by America’s military in recent years – an Iranian airliner, TWA Flight 800 on the East Coast, and the fourth plane of the 9/11 plot over Pennsylvania. The CIA’s past cooperation and engagement with the American Mafia during its anti-Castro terror campaign. The CIA’s use of drug trafficking to raise off-the-books income. The military’s assassination of American prisoners of war cooperating with their Vietnamese captors. Obfuscating Israel’s deliberate attack on an American intelligence-gathering ship during its engineered 1967 War. The huge death toll of locals, civilian and military, in America’s grisly imperial wars, from Vietnam to Iraq. 9/11.

I do not believe in 9/11 insider plots, but I know there has been strenuous official effort to disguise that event’s full nature. The motives? One suspects a great deal of embarrassment at demonstrated incompetence has been at work. Blowback from CIA operations in the Middle East seems more than likely. The documented involvement of Mossad in following and recording the plotters inside the United States leaves disturbing unanswered questions. One also knows that America’s establishment discovered in the wake of 9/11 the perfect opportunity for doing a great many nasty things it had always wanted to do anyway. You might say the terrorists did the military-industrial-intelligence complex a big favor. Anti-democratic measures involving surveillance, privacy in communications, secret prisons, torture, and effective suspension of some of the Constitution are all parts of the new American reality.

The FBI can record what you borrow from the public library. The NSA captures your every phone call, text message, and e-mail. The TSA can strip search you for taking an inter-city bus. Drones are being used for surveillance, and the TSA actually has a program of agents traveling along some highways ready to stop those regarded as suspicious. Portable units for seeing through clothes and baggage, similar to those used at airports, are to tour urban streets in vans randomly. Agencies of the government, much in the style of the former Stasi, encourage reports from citizens about suspicious behavior. Now, you can just imagine what might be called “suspicious” in a society which has always had a tendency towards witch-hunts and fears of such harmless things as Harry Potter books or the charming old Procter and Gambel symbol on soapboxes.

America has become in many ways a police state, albeit one where a kind of decency veil is left draped over the crude government machinery. How can a place which has elections and many of the trappings of a free society be a police state? Well, it can because power, however conferred, can be, and will be, abused. And the majority in any democratic government can impose terrible burdens on the minority. That’s how the American Confederacy worked, how apartheid South Africa worked, and that’s how Israel works today. Prevention of those inevitable abuses is the entire reason for a Bill of Rights, but if you suspend or weaken its protections, anything becomes possible.

American police forces have long enjoyed a reputation for brutal and criminal behavior – using illegal-gains seizure laws for profit, beating up suspects, conducting unnecessary military-style raids on homes, killing people sometimes on the flimsiest of excuses – having earned international recognition from organizations such as Amnesty International. The reasons for this are complex but include the military model of organization adopted by American policing, the common practice of hiring ex-soldiers as police, the phenomenon of uncontrolled urban sprawl creating new towns whose tiny police forces have poor practices and training, and, in many jurisdictions, a long and rich history of police corruption. Now, those often poor-quality American police have unprecedented discretion and powers of abuse.

Further, according to the words of one high-ranking general a few years back, the American military is prepared to impose martial law in the event of another great act of terror. Certainly that is an encouraging and uplifting thought considering all the blunders and waste and murder and rape the American military has inflicted upon countries from Vietnam to Iraq.

Where it is possible, power prefers to know about and even to control what is going on at the most humble level of its society, and the greater the power, the more irresistible the drive to know and control. It is essential to appreciate that whether you are talking about the military or huge corporations or the security apparatus, you are not talking about institutions which are democratic in nature. Quite the opposite, these institutions are run along much the same lines as all traditional forms of undemocratic government, from monarchs to dictators. Leadership and goals and methods are not subject to a vote and orders given are only to be obeyed, and there is no reason to believe that any of these institutions cherishes or promotes democratic values or principles of human rights. Of course, corporations, in order to attract talent, must publicly present a friendly face towards those principles, but that necessary charade reflects their future behavior about as much as campaign promises reflect future acts of an American politician.

Those at the top of all powerful and hierarchical institutions inevitably come to believe that they know better than most people, and those with any hope of gaining top positions must adopt the same view. For centuries we saw the great landed gentry and church patriarchs of pre-democratic societies regard themselves as inherently different from the population. It is no different with the psychology of people who enjoy their wealth and influence through positions in these great modern, un-democratic institutions. The larger and more pervasive these institutions become in society – and they have become truly bloated in America – the more will their narcissistic, privileged views prevail. Also, it is axiomatic that where great power exists, it never goes unused. Large standing armies are the proximate cause of many of history’s wars. And just so, the power of corporations to expand through illegality of every description, this being the source of the many controversies about failing to pay taxes in countries where they operate or the widespread practice of bribery in landing large contracts with national governments.

So far as security services go (the United States, at last count, having sixteen different ones), they may well be the worst of all these modern, massive anti-democratic institutions. Their lines of responsibility to government are often weak, and citizens in general are often regarded as things with which to experiment or play. Their leaders and agents are freely permitted to perjure themselves in courts. The organizations possess vast budgets with little need to account for the spending. They can even create their own funds through everything from drug and weapons trading to counterfeiting currency, all of it not accounted for and subject to no proper authority. And their entire work is secret, whether that work involves legitimate national security or not. The nature of their work breeds a secret-fraternity mindset of superiority and cynicism. They start wars and coups, including against democratic governments sometimes, they pay off rising politicians even in allied countries, they use money and disinformation to manipulate elections even in friendly governments, and of course they kill people and leaders they seriously disapprove of. Now, does any thinking person believe that they simply forget these mindsets and practices when it comes to what they regard as serious problems in their own country?

The record of arrogance and abuse by security organizations, such as CIA or the FBI, is long and costly, filled with errors in judgment, abuse of power, incompetence, and immense dishonesty. Owing to the black magic of classified secrecy, much of the record involves projects about which we will never know, but even what we do know about is distressing enough. And I’m not sure that it can be any other way so long as you have Big Intelligence. Apart from Big Intelligence’s own propensity towards criminal or psychopathic behavior, one of the great ironies of Big Intelligence is that it will always agree to bend, to provide whatever suppressions and fabrications are requested by political leaders working towards the aims of the other great anti-democratic institutions, the military and the corporations. This became blindingly clear in the invasion of Iraq and, even before that, in the first Gulf War.

America’s political system, honed and shaped over many decades, fits comfortably with these institutions. National elections are dominated by a two-party duopoly (being kept that way through countless institutional barriers deliberately created to maintain the status quo) , both these parties are dominated by huge flows of campaign contributions (contributions which form what economists call an effective barrier to entry against any third party seriously being able to compete), both parties embrace much the same policies except for some social issues of little interest to the establishment, and election campaigns are reduced to nothing more than gigantic advertising and marketing operations no different in nature to campaigns for two national brands of fast food or pop. It takes an extremely long time for a candidate to rise and be tested before being trusted with the huge amounts of money invested in an important campaign, and by that time he or she is a well-read book with no surprising chapters.

If for any reason this political filtering system fails, and someone slips through to an important office without having spent enough time to make them perfectly predictable, there still remains little chance of serious change on any important matter. The military-industrial-intelligence complex provides a molded space into which any newcomer absolutely must fit. Just imagine the immense pressures exerted by the mere presence of senior Pentagon brass gathered around a long polished oak table or a table surrounded by top corporate figures representing hundreds of billions in sales or representatives or a major lobbying group (and multi-million dollar financing source for the party). We see the recent example of popular hopes being crushed after the election of Obama, a man everyone on the planet hoped to see mend some of the ravages of George Bush and Dick Cheney. But the man who once sometimes wore sandals and bravely avoided a superfluous and rather silly flag pin on his lapel quickly was made to feel the crushing weight of institutional power, and he bent to every demand made on him, becoming indistinguishable from Bush. Of course, the last president who genuinely did challenge at least some of the great institutional powers, even to a modest extent, died in an ambush in Dallas.

AMERICA’S GULAG

John Chuckman

Often small things provide the most disturbing evidence for world-changing events, as when naturalists observe the quiet disappearance of some little known species. The CIA’s firing of senior officer Mary O. McCarthy is a political event of just this nature.

Ordinarily, the firing of some middling CIA officer is not an event to interest many other than John Le Carre fans and those who linger over cappuccino at the CIA’s Langely cafeteria. Not just conservative throw-backs recognize the need for secrecy in many intelligence matters.

Ordinarily, the fact that some CIA agent has broken his or her oath of secrecy would not cause much disturbance outside the unhinged James Angleton types who make up some portion of any intelligence community. Surely, out of tens of thousands of employees, this is something that happens with regularity.

But Ms. McCarthy’s case is different, and it is of interest to the world. She is responsible, reportedly by her own admission during a furious round of polygraph tests, for information supplied to The Washington Post concerning the CIA’s vast secret prison system.

This CIA-run gulag, and there is no name more fitting, does not resemble the case of a new secret weapon or of a mole planted somewhere abroad. The existence of a secret gulag goes to the heart of democratic values.

Is the population of any democratic country not entitled to be informed of so vast and creepy an enterprise? To exercise their franchise based on facts? At some point, any secret operation, if it becomes large enough and affects the lives of tens of thousands, risks undermining the very legitimacy of the government running it.

The reputation of the United States abroad has suffered perhaps irreparable damage from the excesses and stupidities of Bush’s War on Terror. So much so that Americans are now advised by their own State Department to guard their behavior and even identity when traveling abroad. Are Americans not entitled to be informed of what has caused this? Of what has been done in their name?

If you can keep tens of thousands secretly locked away and subject to torture, what prevents this number from becoming millions? Where are the limits without public information? The inherent integrity of American government officials, you say? Three-quarters of the world’s people today would laugh caustically at the suggestion.

BANGING YOUR HEAD INTO WALLS

John Chuckman

We’ve all met them, people who stubbornly hurl themselves in the wrong direction, stopping only when they violently collide with reality. It is a painful way to learn, but those afflicted with the disability seem unable to learn in any other way.

This way of learning characterizes much of America’s effort at foreign policy since World War II. I was forcefully reminded of this by a news story with its searing memories of Vietnam.

It now appears that part of the 101st Airborne Division, members of a so-called Tiger Force unit, dropped grenades into bunkers where women and children hid and shot farmers without warning. They killed blind peasants and old men. These events happened in 1967, comparatively early in the war and about a year before the well-documented mass murder by members of the United States Army at the village of My Lai. No one knows how many innocent people the Airborne slaughtered. One surviving member of the unit is quoted saying he killed so many he lost count. Although investigations were conducted, they went nowhere, and it only now that we learn of the horror.

The full story of American savagery in Vietnam will perhaps never be told. We have had other glimpses of it, as for example when former CIA Director William Colby, responding to a titanic power struggle inside the CIA, revealed Project Phoenix, a secret program for the mass murder of civilian leaders regarded as sympathetic to the enemy. There were the revelations about a number of individuals engaging in barbarism, most notably, former Nebraska Senator and Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey having been part of a butcher-civilians operation.

The so-called Tail-Wind affair, whose discovery cost some very reputable journalists their jobs, is now consigned to the ever-handy conspiracy bin, but intelligent skeptics can hardly doubt that with all the other savageries of Vietnam, a secret operation to poison-gas American prisoners of war cooperating with the enemy is totally plausible.

To this day, thousands of American veterans attend meetings or counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, the bureaucratic term for minds deranged by the horrors they saw or inflicted. War is always full of horror, but in the midst of the brutality in Vietnam, it dawned on many that the war served no good purpose and that most of its victims were civilians. The military draft sent a lot of people to Vietnam who weren’t suited to
the business of serious killing. And while the number of Americans killed was small for a long war, it still proved too many for people enjoying ice cream and beer at ballgames.

For years after Vietnam, Americans talked of the war’s lessons, but just what lessons were those? For a while, many believed the lessons might concern the values of the Bill of Rights, words so often abused as hollow marketing slogans. America’s armed forces would never again be sent to kill and torture for colonial interests.

But that was a hasty conclusion, as we see in Iraq. America perfected its technology for killing and terrifying so that at least for a small county, it is able to overwhelm fairly quickly. Relatively few American soldiers die, those that do are professionals, and the whole thing is quickly over.

Of course, there is a deep and jagged pit along this smooth-sounding path to military dominance, and it has to do with occupying and rebuilding a country, how you assume responsibility for tens of millions of new dependants. No people on earth today is less inclined or qualified for this task than Americans. You only have to look at the individualistic, selfish, and impatient nature of American society itself to understand why this should be so. The word dependant in America often is used as a term of abuse.

Recall Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of the early 1970s. Nixon was trying to pressure the North Vietnamese in Paris for a settlement, and he deliberately spread the idea that he was a madman, quite capable of doing something irrational, and that it would be better for everyone to reach a settlement before he did so. The context that gave his suggestion force included his shattering bombardment of civilians in North Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as nightmarish programs like Project Phoenix, started under him.

I’ll set aside the fact that Nixon truly was something of a madman – for, apart from his lifelong career of promoting divisiveness, intense hatreds, and suspicions, who else but a genuine madman relishes being credited as one? In the end, Nixon was outfoxed by the Vietnamese, and America lost a major war. A decade of shameful destruction, vast resources consumed, rage, and riots were for nothing.

This did not go unnoticed by the American establishment – the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, and all the other arrogant, insatiably-rapacious people who’ve given you war in Iraq. Their major lesson from Vietnam – apart from the unreliability of conscripts, the need for tight news control, and the need to improve the efficiency of killing with high-tech weapons – was that threats not acted upon were useless. This lesson comes packaged with a new release of the error-riddled Domino Theory: that a decisive demonstration of power in the Middle East would serve to stabilize the area. The Democrats’ regrettable Wesley Clark, among others, has pontificated along these very lines.

Lost in the armchair toying with other people’s lives and countries you might think is the fact that Nixon’s threat was nuclear, but actually it is not lost. Bush wants to develop and deploy a new generation of compact nuclear weapons, the implication being that these somehow would be useable, as for such wholesome crusade tasks as “bunker busting.” Please recall, the main bunker busted in the first Gulf War was the Al Firdos bunker in Baghdad packed with over four hundred civilians who were roasted alive by two “smart bomb” direct hits.

Vietnam truly was a twentieth-century version of burning witches, the witches in that case being communists rather than people who were either demented or senile as in the witch-burnings of a few centuries ago. Powerful people in the 17th century understood that witches were superstitious nonsense, but they used the phenomenon to their own purposes. We’ve almost run out of communist witches, so now the crusade has been redirected against evil spirits far less well defined, terrorists.

Not that there is no such thing as genuine terrorists. Of course, there are. Terrorism – from the Sons of Liberty and the Klu Klux Klan to black street gangs and camouflage-obsessed militia-nuts – is a rich part of American history. Please note that it has not been dealt with by blowing up whole neighborhoods of innocent people.

The communist-panic after World War II was promoted and manipulated by the America’s establishment, that ruthlessly ambitious segment of American society that does not consist solely of Republicans. American liberals today often seem unaware that Democrats like Robert Kennedy gladly played energetic and nasty roles. The establishment sought the immense bounty of new military contracts, forced access to other peoples’ resources and markets, and the swaggering sense of exercising vast power throughout the world. Note that the communist-panic began with the precipitous decline in military spending after the world war and with the opportunities for expansion represented by the sudden decline of former colonial powers.

At the end of the Cold War, there was a tendency for military expenditure to slide in real terms. America’s current terror-panic, manipulated and exploited relentlessly by Bush, and always echoed by Sharon for his own dark purposes, serves almost identical ends. The average American cannot even grasp the unholy amounts of money now changing hands to almost no good purpose.

I once described a scene in the wake of 9/11 where some Americans in a bar hooted and pumped their arms at the television image of ships equipped with cruise missiles, as though the ships or the missiles had the slightest relevance for individuals bent on killing others through their own suicides. That televised image comes pretty close to symbolizing Bush’s entire policy on terror. He has spent tens of billions of dollars, killed many thousands of innocent people, and made many Americans feel intimidated in their own country, but he has done little to end the threat of terrorism. He may even have increased its long-term prospects.

Terrorism predates modern history, and it generally comes as a result of great and oppressive injustice against a definable group of people. Short of ruthlessly repressing the group of people from whose ranks terrorists are drawn – something attempted many times, as, for example, by Cromwell in Ireland or Stalin in the Soviet Union – violence offers no effective solution.

Even Cromwellian repression fails over the long term, Ireland being a potent example. An oppressor eventually tires of repression. It may well have been some such dark thought that helped motivate Hitler in history’s greatest bloodbath, the invasion of the Soviet Union and the simultaneous start of the Holocaust (27 million and 6 million victims respectively). He demanded utter ruthlessness in these vast murderous enterprises. The people whose wealth and resources he was seizing, would not get the chance ever to become terrorists.

Bush’s policy is partway along the path of repression, a virtual copy of Sharon’s policy in Palestine, but has Sharon ended terror? Does Sharon not almost weekly become more violent and desperate, recognizing the futility of all he has done to date?

Bush’s prospects and opportunities are in some ways even more limited than Sharon’s, despite the immense and terrible power at his disposal. Although Al Qaeda was a relatively small organization – and nothing has come to light that contradicts an early conclusion that Al Qaeda, though dispersed and having some allies, was no bigger than a Chicago street gang – Bush’s tactics have created waves of sympathizers and new enemies, likely even more determined through their confrontation with such a bully. He is not opposed by a group of people confined to a tiny place like Palestine. Rather, he faces opposition in many forms in many countries with mobility across continents. You can’t just bomb it all.

The more verbal blunders Bush and his associates make – consider the idiotic statements made recently by Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a man associated directly with secret activities in places like Pakistan, to gatherings of American Christian fundamentalists – the more Bush’s efforts come to be viewed as broadly anti-Islamic. The word blunder here is only appropriate because such statements are errors in managing public affairs. They are not blunders in a more basic sense: these nasty, narrow people do believe what they are saying, and although that belief is not what launched Bush’s crusade, it undoubtedly motivates many along the way.

Terror is one response of those with terrible grievances who lack effective conventional means to fight for them, although if you listened to Bush you would think there were mobs of natural-born terrorists out there, ready to kill for no reason other than jealousy at America’s great good fortune and beneficence. As in the case of Northern Ireland, terror can only be ended by redressing the grievances, and even then, great patience and tenacity are required.

A general military action against terror is an insane concept, too destructive and unfocused to have predictable results. You cannot fight beliefs or grievances with armored divisions. You can only have vengeance that way, but vengeance can hardly be called policy and is unworthy of a great power claiming high ideals.

The example of Sharon’s brutality just couldn’t offer a clearer lesson. The Palestinians have immense grievances that virtually the entire world recognizes as legitimate. Assassinate all the leaders you please, bulldoze all the homes and shops and orchards you can, bomb and shoot civilians time after time as reprisals, the grievances not only remain, they are intensified. The ultimate danger in a situation like this is that Sharon’s frustration will drive him to move beyond Cromwell.

And so, too, Bush, but note that I use his name only as shorthand for that much bigger thing, the pitiless greed and arrogance of a large segment of America.

HOPE AGAINST HOPE

John Chuckman

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen articles about Wesley Clark making a formidable opponent for George Bush. And I agree, he likely would, but so what?

I too am sick of the sound of Bush’s voice. My radio dial is turned five words into any sound clip from this dangerous half-wit with a speech impediment, but what can be gained by replacing him with Clark?

For people in high positions, criticizing Bush now on Iraq is cheap talk. The idiotic, destructive war is done. Americans must live with its consequences and responsibilities no matter who is President. A decent alternative to Bush demands more than a few cheap words of criticism.

You might think the people writing these pieces see Clark as the embodiment of America’s silly myths about citizen-soldiers, a kind of television-age Cincinnatus, who could defeat one of the most lamentable, wrong-headed President in American history.

Clark is not a citizen soldier. He is a professional, a lifetime paid killer. And he has done a good deal of killing. His record just in the very brief and relatively small conflict in Serbia is filled with dead non-combatants, from busloads of cremated civilians to people blown apart at a downtown television station. I understand his thinking in doing these things. I just totally disagree with it.

His record there is marked also with unbelievably poor judgment. The attack he ordered against a large Russian force was deranged. Thank God, a tough old British general dared to disobey the order. Even the bombing of the Chinese embassy was never satisfactorily explained. His documented fraternization with a vicious war criminal appalled many Europeans.

Generals of any kind rarely make good democratic leaders. They have lived their entire adult lives barking orders at folks trained to respond to barking, basic military training having great similarities to obedience school for dogs. The entire purpose of much of this training is to efface individual will and initiative.

That’s why generals come from places like West Point. They are imbued with an ideology not intended for enlisted men, an ideology of officers’ class, privilege, and authority.

Any military organization functions a great deal like a Soviet-style government. Direction comes from above, the Pentagon representing the quintessence of a centrally-planned economy. Waste and inefficiency come on a colossal scale. The waste goes largely unquestioned, because patriotism covers a many evils or, at any rate, intimidates a multitude of critics.

Civilian government simply does not work that way. There is more than a tinge of wishful thinking that people who bark orders can “make the trains run on time.” It rarely turns out that way.

General-President Eisenhower, one of the better of a bad lot in American history, despite his personal charm and common-sense words, displayed many dangerous qualities. He worked with the appalling Dulles brothers, gentlemen whose thinking perhaps more closely resembled their Soviet counterparts than any democratic officials. The Bay of Pigs invasion was planned and organized under Eisenhower’s stewardship. He took many risks with the Soviet Union, including the disastrous flight of a U-2, shot down just before an important summit. A number of democratically-elected governments were toppled by Eisenhower’s government. Men like the Shah of Iran, torturer of countless thousands, were put into power over democratically elected officials. He kept the eerie, pathological Richard Nixon on the ticket when there was a sound excuse to drop him.

What most Americans recall about Eisenhower was that the nation grew in the postwar period, that he was affable, and that he had a cute nickname. Some recall his powerful words on the military-industrial complex, a fair warning that has been utterly ignored.

What do we know about Clark? He discovered what party he belonged to in a kind of epiphany at about sixty years of age. This suggests either retardation or lying, and I’m pretty sure he is a bright fellow. What a silly nonsense to believe this. Has he never voted in elections or contributed to a party? Of course, what has really happened is that only the Democrats offer Clark the opportunity to rise to Commander-in-Chief.

Clark senses Bush is increasingly vulnerable, and I believe he is right. Bush’s vulnerability will increase as the staggering costs of invading and occupying Iraq become apparent and as months of melodramatic reports of ambushed Americans continue.

What will America get for its treasure and blood? A more stable Middle East? Look at the disastrous situation of the Palestinians today and say that with a straight face. Sharon has been supported through a relentless campaign of state-terror in the name of fighting terror. The very economy of Israel is at risk owing to its trying to behave like a world power on the pocket book of a moderate-size American state. And peace remains further away than at any time in recent memory, a new poll showing Israelis voicing despair, something the Palestinians have lived with for decades.

Consider the festering resentments of tens of thousands of Iraqis bitterly suffering for years under the impact of Bush’s delusions. Crime and murder have risen to unprecedented levels in Iraq, increased by thousands of percent over what they were before Bush smashed public order. Many discontents, uncertainties, and internal rivalries have been released, and new enemies are in the making.

In Afghanistan, a costly mess remains. The figurehead president of the country, who has little reason to cause Bush grief, himself admits it will take years to gain stability. The production of opium poppies has exploded since the Taliban were pushed aside. Perhaps, American soldiers will come home as they did from Vietnam, addicted to drugs. That was, after all, one of the hidden costs of America’s insane Vietnam crusade: farm boys from every corner of America returned home using drugs they never had heard of before.

On top of all this, the American economy is sour, and I don’t mean just current GDP growth. Longer-term matters are at stake. Clinton’s surpluses have been squandered, deficits in trade and expenditure have reached intimidating levels, and the economy is under the shadow of unknowably-vast obligations abroad, including everything from billions in bribes for foreign support in Iraq to open-ended contracts for associates of Bush and Cheney.

Bush officials are shown daily to be remarkably petty and corrupt. Imagine a neocon outing a CIA agent? It’s the kind of act for which they would have nailed Clinton to a cross. But these nasty people’s lust for vengeance and getting even drives them to do about anything.

The national-security apparatus they have put into place is horrible and dangerous and can only increasingly be seen to be so as it operates.

Yes, Bush will be vulnerable. So why waste the opportunity on Clark? There have to be better people.

Unfortunately, American national politics are about as agile as the Pentagon’s bloated bulk. An American presidential campaign takes forever, often coming to resemble in cost and duration preparations for the landing at Normandy. The actual conditions at the time of the election can only be guessed at in such a lengthy process. It is one of the more foolish and costly parts of American politics, but it is the reality people must work under. So, a handsome general with no political baggage who criticizes the President about Iraq a little bit looks like a good bet.

And that is how America is run, and those who dream of something else only hope against hope.

THE WORST KIND OF LIE

John Chuckman

A few years sometimes make a big difference in human affairs. A few years ago an American President was put through the 18th century ordeal of impeachment, a vast, expensively-staged comic opera of white manes waving and grave baritones intoning, over a dribble on a dress and the lie he told to save himself embarrassment. Today we have a President who has hurled the world into two dirty, pointless wars after what undoubtedly qualifies as the longest sequence of public lies ever uttered in a free society, and yet in his homeland he remains popular and is collecting enough campaign cash to rival the Swiss bank balances of the Russian Mafia.

Leaders have always lied in times of war and when maneuvering for advantage in international affairs, American presidents, despite puffed-up claims to different moral standards, no less so than others. Usually the lies they tell are not understood until years later. The lies then often seem to become small, unimportant details in a history of big events. But Bush has lied daily, doing it so awkwardly at times that you might think everyone is aware of it, and it seems to make no difference to his political standing.

What will Bush do with all the cash he is hoarding for the next campaign? He will use it to practice the worst lying possible in a democratic society, lying that subverts the intent of democracy, replacing meaningful debate by the suggestions, half-truths, and staged images of advertising and marketing. Perhaps, I should correct that to the second-worst lying possible in a democratic society, for Bush, of course, entered office with the worst lying, claiming to have won an election he lost by any sensible reckoning.

Why are Americans not distressed at this? Because they live in an intense field, an electromagnetic haze, of marketing, advertising, and commercial propaganda twenty-four hours a day. Americans are so saturated with this stuff that they regard it as normal communication.

But it is not normal. It is deliberate and manipulative. At its very best, advertising is only ever half truth, telling a few favorable aspects of something that deserves greater scrutiny. At its worst, it is simply artful fraud and deception. But in no case is it truth or, perhaps better put since truth is a large and difficult idea, honest communication. Advertising, like its fraternal twin, propaganda, always has a purpose other than helping you understand something. This other purpose is its raison d’être. Advertising wants to separate you from your money or, in the case of politics, from your vote.

I’ve often chuckled over the way Americans used to get so upset over the idea of Communist propaganda. While Americans decried that propaganda, they themselves lived in a dense fog of advertising and propaganda. Only the American stuff isn’t quite so obvious as the ponderous old Soviet stuff, at least to anyone immersed in it. It is far more artful and effective. That friendly well-known face on TV is speaking to me, being a friend to me in my isolation and loneliness, cares about me, why he’s even recommending something good for me. What a nice man.

In America, wave on wave of these smiling frauds sell floor mops, breath mints, female hygiene, Christ, cancer treatment, hamburgers, and presidential candidates.

An interesting story from Maine, a place that prides itself on tourist billboards as having “Life the way it should be,” shows, in another sphere of life, how people, responding to the intense environment of advertising and marketing, sometimes act with no examination of their actions. An otherwise very nice person was vigorously preaching one day some years ago to an associate at work about his not using a paper-recycling container in his office, an oversight that may have involved a few dozen sheets of paper in a week.

Now this “environmentally-concerned” preacher with her spouse had just built a large, brand-new house, a five-bedroom monster for two people with no children. And where did they build it? On the fringes of a suburban area that was already suffering from exactly the kind of hopeless sprawl afflicting every other part of the United States where life is not advertised as being “the way it should be.” They built on a one-acre site along a tiny road on the edge of a forest. And how were they getting to work? Why, each drove his and her own gasoline-wasting, road-wasting, polluting SUV.

An acre of land, of course, required a large, polluting rider-mower just to keep the grass clipped. Their long driveway required lots of private plowing in the winter. The small road leading to it required the sprawled-out town to plow regularly for the benefit of a fairly small number of people. So too for garbage pick-up, and indeed for every other public service. And five bedrooms use a lot of heating oil and a lot of air-conditioning. If these people ever do have children, they will require bus service along thinly-populated roads.

But in their minds they are doing nothing irresponsible. It is that fellow at work who refuses to use a re-cycling box that is irresponsible. Of course the amount of environmental stress and strain caused by their choices is at least a hundred thousand times greater than that caused by the man without the box, but no real analysis takes place here. They are immersed in suggestions of their lifestyle having an almost quasi-sacred character to it, being fulfillment of that unexamined advertising slogan, “the American dream,” and they equally are immersed in suggestions that things like recycling boxes in every office are very good things indeed.

I said this example was from another sphere of life, but really it isn’t. The energy to do all the things necessary to support their sprawl-lifestyle, multiplied by tens of millions of other Americans just like them, has to come from somewhere. Like Iraq or Iran or Saudi Arabia. Pick your troubled part of the world and add the cost of America’s belligerent policies to keep it in line. But Americans rarely see the results of these abhorrent policies, the mutilated children, for instance, of Iraq.

And the immense pollution generated by this lifestyle has to go somewhere, but who cares just so long as you don’t see it piled up on your front lawn? It all gets taken away, to dumps, somewhere. And the smoke from the power generators? Well, they don’t build those in areas like this. The green-house gases from burning all that gasoline and fuel oil and diesel truck fuel? The wind takes it off somewhere. The road salt. The insecticide. The weed killer. Well, they do their job and you don’t see the mess.

And that is the answer that explains America’s system of paid political lies: it does its job and you don’t see the mess, at least if you are not looking, and most Americans aren’t looking.

HALL OF MIRRORS

John Chuckman

Perhaps you remember the “fun houses” that were once part of old big-city amusement parks? They were filled with mazes, frights, and surprises. Often, these included a hall of mirrors, a maze of rooms walled with mirrored doors. The confusion of reflections made the maze seem infinitely more complex than it actually was.

The relationship between political leaders and intelligence institutions is a great deal like a hall of mirrors. Looked at from a perspective above, a perspective not permitted most people, the maze may be fairly simple, but it is designed so that any individual trying to make his or her way through it is confused and set off balance.

It is unsettling, though not unexpected, to see the press in America and in the UK lost in the maze, looking for the failures of intelligence that gave us a needless war over non-existent weapons. One has no certain way of knowing whether reporters are just playing a game that continues supporting what their publications supported before the war or whether they are honestly lost, but a reasonable working assumption in all such matters is that they are playing a game.

This business is not limited to the mainstream press. There are scores of articles on the Internet’s alternative-news sites covering the same subject. In this case, one feels inclined to believe that much of it reflects real bafflement, since it so difficult to understand why they, too, should play the game.

These articles are dangerous to people’s understanding of how government at the highest level actually works, and they effectively relieve the responsible parties, President Bush and Tony Blair, of their responsibility.

There is always a pretense about intelligence agencies being independent sources of information, high-court judges, incorruptible priests, cloistered academics dedicated to a country’s interests, influenced only by the reliability of the information they gather, sift, and sort. The CIA was baptized under President Truman with buckets of such swill.

My favorite historical example of how silly this view is concerns the famous Cambridge spies. The Soviets were amazingly successful in the 1930s in recruiting highly-intelligent, idealistic, and well-connected young Englishmen who would one day rise to positions of authority in the British establishment. Perhaps no more complete penetration of an opponent’s intelligence service ever took place.

Stalin, with the purges of the 1930s, was convinced that there was a vast Western conspiracy against the Soviet Union, and Soviet intelligence made great efforts trying to support his notion. The precious time and effort of the Cambridge spies was wasted looking for what did not exist, they themselves came under suspicion as plants, and their talented handlers in some cases lost their lives at least in part for not finding evidence of the plot. Later, under the pressure of war with Germany, the situation changed and information provided by these spies was immensely helpful on the Russian front.

The whim of a leader had for a time intimidated many very clever and experienced people in Soviet intelligence from defending what they knew was the truth of their success – that is, that they had placed almost a set of high-resolution cameras well positioned in important offices of the British government.

Power is power, regardless of how it is conferred, whether elected or not. When an American President wants something produced or an attitude assumed by the intelligence services, intellectual integrity and notions of independence soon melt in the furnace of his wishes. After all, he appoints senior intelligence officials. He can decide to a considerable extent whether their day-to-day work is even regarded as worthwhile and useful. He also has a great deal to say about funding. It is impossible for a director of intelligence to long resist a President’s demands without being put in an untenable position: the appointed official of a secretive organization unresponsive to the elected President of a democratic society.

Of course, these demands generally are not given as direct orders. They are communicated in intricate and subtle ways. After all, when the CIA assassinates or attempts to assassinate foreign leaders or attempts to destabilize foreign governments, it cannot do this without approval at the highest level, yet no President wants letters on White House stationery directing such unethical activities to end up on display at the national archives.

We can assume, always, with events holding the world’s attention, as with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, that the White House orders support for the arguments it wants to make. Of course, generally, a President will not demand nor will the intelligence people produce material that is immediately absurd or embarrassingly inaccurate. It’s up to all those clever people with unlimited resources to provide something suitable, something that only detailed study might reveal as faulty.

After all, intelligence is an assembly of many bits of information, and these always necessarily contain ambiguities and gray areas. Sifting and weighting raw information to present a coherent picture is a prime responsibility for an agency like the CIA, since trainloads of raw intelligence from many sources is useless to decision-makers – that’s part of what the “central” in the agency’s name implies.

So one only has to give some bits a new emphasis or weight to make a case that would not otherwise have been made. Such adjusting of weights later can be defended as resembling one alternate scenario of a corporate plan (e.g., the unexpectedly high or low cases for oil prices). The dishonesty will be clear only to those who understand that the official view already has alternate scenarios, but with the sacred robe of national security casting its long shadow, few close questions can be expected.

The pure collection of information is often an inseparable part of other clandestine activities in an intelligence agency anyway, including misleading or destroying those regarded as opponents. Creating information for domestic consumption is an easy, perhaps almost unavoidable at times, part of this work. Despite the solemn atmosphere of honorable service cultivated at CIA headquarters, great energy and resources have always gone into nasty and brutish work – everything from paying off favored foreign leaders, counterfeiting currencies, and secretly supplying weapons to corrupting foreign elections and planting false information abroad.

The agency grew out of America’s OSS of World War Two whose leaders and activities were free-wheeling, manic, often comically adventurous, and even absurd. Read the part of Gordon Liddy’s book that has Liddy and ex-CIA agent Howard Hunt (members of Nixon’s “plumbers”) hiding for hours in a bar, peeing into partly-empty liquor bottles, amusing themselves with thoughts of patrons next day drinking the stuff. The book is valuable only for revealing more about the psychology of such people than the author may have intended. An older man I knew in Chicago, dead now, a former submariner, once described the people they sometimes had to deliver to places like Cuba – they were, he said, not the kind of people he would even want aboard his boat if it were up to him.

I mention these anecdotes only because it is important to appreciate the nature of much of the work of an agency like the CIA, work that unquestionably colors its ethics and thinking. It is not the cool, cerebral, above-the-fray campus of academics portrayed in Washington. I think Americans should never forget that it was a former CIA Director, William Colby, in striped school tie with crisp, educated voice, who tattled about a program for the organized murder of twenty thousand civilians in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix, and he knew what he was talking about because he was the one who ran the program.

But as certain people in America are so fond of saying, you don’t blame the gun, you blame the shooter.

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

John Chuckman

I read something recently about America’s Middle East initiative, the “road map,” offering Bush the chance for greatness. Verbal excess like that demands a realistic discussion of the prospects.

When Britain achieved a breakthrough for peace in Northern Ireland, it did not do so by telling the IRA that its representatives were terrorists, unacceptable to negotiate. It had not surrounded the houses of IRA leaders with tanks, blasting away until ruins remained. It did not forbid IRA leaders from attending church or travelling. Yet this is the way – along with a daily toll of reprisal killings and assassinations – Mr. Sharon prepares for peace.

For many reasons, I can only be pessimistic about the “road map.” Sharon’s immediate instinct was to reject and belittle it. Under pressure from Washington to reverse himself, he only did so with a list of qualifiers long enough to make it a different document than the one Palestinians accepted.

The fact that Mr. Sharon used, just once, the honest word occupation, normally forbidden in the Cloud-cuckoo-land of Israeli politics, and offered to trash a couple of clumps of abandoned, beaten-up trailers where the most-crazed settlers play cowboys-and-Indians with assault rifles do seem less than signs of great events to come.

Consider some of the constraints around this initiative. First, it is sponsored by a President who has just launched the United States into two meaningless, destructive wars. American forces, resources, and diplomacy now face huge, complex, and long-term obligations in Afghanistan and Iraq that did not exist a short time ago. Bush has, at the same time, threatened Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and, at least in the case of North Korea, a serious conflict may well be coming.

Second, this President’s policies have not ended terrorism, nor do I believe they ever can, which means American concerns and resources will be stretched even further. The President’s policies since 9/11 have been exactly those followed by Israel for fifty years, striking out against someone, almost anyone, wearing the right kind of headdress. Has fifty years of that solved Israel’s problems? If anything, it has only created new and desperate enemies, like the hopeless young people willing to blow themselves up to strike a blow.

Third, the plan is in the hands of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has proved ineffective at almost everything undertaken, a judgement from one who once admired him. More importantly, Powell’s stature among Bush’s intimates is so low that you suspect they have secretly uncovered he is a distant relative of Bill Clinton, the political anti-Christ of neocon America.

Bush appointed Powell to reassure the world that America had not fallen to a coup of drawling closet-fascists, but the appointment has not proved especially helpful. The insane, arrogant intensity of Bush’s inner cabinet – including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Ashcroft – does mean that any civilized foreigner with something important to say to the United States might rather face Powell, but he or she will be addressing an exalted messenger with little influence.

Powell works hard trying to overcome the zealots’ distrust, as with his recent rants and threats about everything from French ingratitude and delusions of yet finding strategic weapons in Iraq to warning Mr. Arafat about blocking the “road map.” He’s even gone back in time to the 1960s by attacking the neocons’ second-most hated figure after Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro. All this only has him clumsily climbing trees, sawing off unwanted limbs that block the Oval Office view, while the viciously dysfunctional family that hired him gazes through the windows gleefully awaiting his plunge to earth.

But perhaps the most important reason for bleakness over the “road map” is the man who is not at the discussions.

Yasser Arafat is now treated as the source of all evil in the Middle East. He is for Sharon the Middle East’s equivalent of what Bill Clinton is for America’s neocons, although in Israel the nasty game is played with real blood, and likely only Arafat’s world-stature and connections have saved him from Sharon’s assassins.

Arafat doesn’t speak English well, making it easy to give him a bad press in America, and he is indeed given a bad press. Few Americans even know that Arafat has a better analytical brain than their current President. He is a civil engineer and comes from a family that includes a remarkable brother who is a pediatrician and the founder of many medical institutions – not exactly the kind of hot-tempered, inarticulate tribal chief he is so often portrayed in America.

As with almost anyone raised to authority in his part of the world, his experience with democracy is limited to being on the receiving end of what nations boasting of democratic values – America, Britain and Israel – dish out abroad but wouldn’t dream of doing at home.

Since democracy naturally flows from a healthy, growing society, it should come as no surprise that Arafat’s democratic values are less than perfect. One form or another of authoritarianism is the way all the world’s people have been governed before experiencing the revolution of economic growth. It is the way most of the world’s people are governed still. Does that preclude us from having negotiations, treaties, and agreements with the governments of most of the world’s people?

I do not think there is the slightest question that Arafat sincerely wants peace, although the peace he wants includes the long-term interests of all parties with the injustices and grievances attending the birth of modern Israel having been reasonably settled. This runs up against the Sharon concept of peace which means absolute, unconditional security for Israel while giving little more than words to those who insist on running around in keffiahs and kaftans. One suspects Sharon’s idea of a concession is to have his tanks roll back from the center to the edge of a village recently flattened.

Of course, all of human history and the especially the discoveries of modern physics demonstrate that there are no absolute certainties in this world. Einstein, troubled about quantum mechanics, said God didn’t play with dice, but we now know he was wrong about that. Israel’s insistence on impossible absolutes always prevents genuine progress – that is, the kind of practical progress that characterizes normal human relationships and decent relations among nations.

Short of driving the Palestinians, like three-and-a-half million head of cattle, across the Jordan river – an idea which finds considerable support in Israel and in America’s loony Bible-belt – Sharon’s vision of peace appears to consign Palestinians perpetually to walled ghettos, dotted with settlements of armed, hostile fanatics and crisscrossed with no-go roads. That is a fairly accurate summary of Barak’s Camp David proposal for a Palestinian state, and nothing since has happened to increase Israel’s inclination to be large or statesmanlike – rather, quite the opposite.

Arafat correctly rejected Barak’s degrading concept of a nation, feeling humiliated after so many years of effort and so many compromises before and after the Oslo Accords. Accepting such an offer would only have seen Palestinians assassinate him and likely tipped them into civil war, hardly contributions to Israeli security. Indeed, once the insanity of civil war takes hold anywhere, normal restraints and humanity are pitched aside in a frenzy of killing and vengeance.

The second Intifadah can be understood both as a natural human reaction to decades of oppression and as an escape-valve for immense internal pressures. Israel blindly insists on seeing only terrorism.

American commentators like Thomas Friedman embroider the theme of Palestinian unreasonableness by asking why Palestinians have not followed the teachings of Gandhi and Dr. King to achieve their goals. I do not know whether this is asked from naivete or utter cynicism, but the answer is simple: the structures of these abusive situations are entirely different.

Israel, on short notice, can close Palestine completely down and has done so briefly many times. Israel simply imports guest workers or new migrants for the many daily tasks done by Palestinians. Neither Imperial India nor Bull Connor’s South could do this. Also, the afflicted people of Gandhi and King lived in many locations and were actually the large majority in many or most places. Further, Palestinians have no citizenship and no rights and no standing before Israeli courts. Even citizens of Israel have no defined rights. A nation defined by ethnic/religious identity makes a meaningful bill or charter of rights something of a logical puzzle, a puzzle Israel has not solved in over fifty years.

The possibility of bloody civil war among the Palestinians, brought on by the steps of the “road map” itself is not to be treated lightly, because the steps of every American initiative always demand concessions disproportionately from the weak side. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has only restated the obvious in refusing a harsh crack-down on militants for fear of civil war, something Arafat has understood for decades and that has always informed his resistance to Israel’s harsh, absolute demands.

Arafat has spent his adult life trying to get a reasonable settlement for the Palestinians. He has made mistakes, plenty of them, but the truth is that none of them proved as bloody and destructive as, for instance, Mr. Sharon’s brutal invasion of Lebanon. Yet, Mr. Sharon’s career of blunders and bloodshed seems not to have disqualified him as spokesman for his people. Indeed, he does more than this, he now determines who is a fitting representative for the Palestinians.

Excluding Arafat may look attractive from the limited vantage points of Israel’s volatile politics and Bush’s born-again crowd, but to an independent observer, it looks hopeless.

Israelis may be the victims of their own propaganda about Arafat the terrorist, believing that his replacement in talks can genuinely change the dynamics of the situation. How easily Israelis forget that several of their prime ministers had extensive service as terrorists on their resumes.

The achievement of peace requires genuine risks and brutally hard work from all parties, but Israel demonstrates no willingness to assume the kind of risks that ended Apartheid in South Africa and has come close to ending the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland, and Bush is someone who has never worked hard at anything in his life. The existing human and political mess in the Middle East is frozen in place by the immense protection and subsidies of the United States, and so we come full circle to the nature of the people in the present American government and the terrible new obligations they have thoughtlessly assumed. Then we have Bush’s intimate relationship with America’s delusional Religious Right whose leaders daily rant against a Palestinian state and cheerfully anticipate the promise of Armageddon from the jumbled nightmares of the Book of Revelations.

Hopes for greatness? I think not.

POLICY THROUGH ROSE-COLORED PILOT’S GOGGLES

John Chuckman

Everyone, not attached by threadbare ideology or plain old war profiteering to President Bush’s War on Terror, knows that even on its own terms, it can only fail miserably in a great waste of lives and substance. You cannot fight a war against religious faith and opposition to injustice unless you are prepared to be as utterly ruthless as Stalin, and even then, when you lie pickled in your tomb, the roots you missed destroying will grow hardy new plants, as they have in contemporary Russia. But I would never have expected stark evidence for failure to come so quickly.

Massive explosions in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, just before the arrival of Colin Powell for talks, have left a smoking mass of blood and charred bodies.

Before this, only hours after talks in Israel about easing restrictions on the Palestinians, Mr. Powell was rewarded by Mr. Sharon’s sealing Gaza. Already Sharon had dismissed the new peace plan, and already he has publicly broadcast that Israel will continue to build new settlements.

Seeking stability for America’s Middle East policies was the central purpose of the Iraq invasion. One might think Sharon would show some gratitude for the monstrously-costly invasion of Iraq, but instead something like “Well, you can’t take back the invasion now, so it’s not going to change what I do” seems to be his response.

These signs follow others. The American Proconsul for Baghdad has been sacked for incompetence as chaos still characterizes life for a city of five million souls. Reports by independent journalists – that is, those not tied to America’s propaganda consortium of major networks and newspapers – indicate a growing fierce resentment towards the liberators. My, such ingratitude.

And in a move strikingly reminiscent of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 triumphant return to Iran from exile in France, last Saturday (May 10), Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim, a noted Shia cleric and fierce opponent of Saddam Hussein, returned after twenty-three years of exile. He was greeted in Basra with far more enthusiasm than anything seen by America’s kevlar-clad warriors for peace, justice, and the American way – especially the American way. The cleric has made statements both about a widely-based elected government and an Islamic state – goals that are not entirely inconsistent since Iraq is about sixty-percent Shia.

How that will be reconciled with Iraq’s more modern elements is not clear – many Americans being unaware that Hussein was a rather secular ruler and women, for example, in Baghdad lived a more modern life than those in most other Arab capitals. Of course, there’s still the angry demands of the Kurds in northern Iraq for autonomy, a people previously betrayed by American foreign policy. Who knows what they’ll be up to if betrayed again?

The Kurds’ demands are accompanied by a background roar from Turkey against any such thing happening, but then Turkey is in the dog house for failing to permit a second front against Iraq from its territory, even after being offered billions in bribes. Still, Turkey is a key ally and is trying to join the modern world as quickly as possible, so it can’t be treated as badly as Bush is determined to treat France and Germany.

Such are the rewards of rudely elbowing your way into the intimate affairs of others. If only America’s great power were ever actually used against the world’s great injustices or to protect the weak, but all evidence since the end of World War II points the other way. It is used only to defend narrowly-defined interests, fight superstitious fears such as those it feels around communism or now Islam, and lay low anyone who seriously gets in its way. Any end to an injustice along the way is strictly coincidental.

Of course, one can only be glad the murder in Iraq is largely over, despite receiving notice of the fact from an odd man in an Armani suit and pilot’s goggles on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The likelihood of Bush understanding what he has actually achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq is not high. So too the likelihood for success of his limp effort to control Israel’s bloody excesses.

And what of the longer-term results of Mr. Bush’s mismanagement? Additional attacks against American interests will bring further suppression of American rights and freedoms, and I believe this may be supported by the almost childish fears and lack of understanding of many Americans. “Heavens, there was a terror alert while we were buying ice-cream cones at Disney World!” Of course, there will be more violent, hatred-inducing incursions abroad.

At the same time that Mr. Bush increases repressive and intrusive measures at home and destruction abroad, he insists on massive, economically-obtuse tax cuts as voter bait. This is a formula for re-creating the economic chaos of Israel, only there is no one out there able to bail the United States.

The combined effects of massive American security restrictions, secrecy, retaliation against otherwise-friendly states opposed to its destructive acts, national deficits, trade deficits, war and the resentments it generates may well depress the growth of international trade seen in recent decades, imposing still a further cost on the world.

The first part of the twenty-first century looks promising indeed. Let’s hear it for Commander Bush, giggling in goggles, while he launches us all into darkness.

IN JESUS’ NAME

John Chuckman

My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President Bush’s very-public religious confidants. Franklin’s father, Billy, served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy’s efforts were crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he’s on those White House tapes in the National Archives sharing anti-Semitic remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.

Franklin has pretty well replaced his ailing father in leading the huge Billy Graham organization. You may wonder about religious ministries being handed down like fifteenth-century dukedoms, but the practice is fairly common in America, and several of the nation’s big ministries – the type of outfits that might be characterized as Las Vegas Showstoppers for Jesus – have been handed down in this fashion. This happens in American politics, too. After all, a hand-me-down evangelist serves a hand-me-down President who ran against (and lost the popular vote to) a hand-me-down politician from Tennessee.

It’s not that Americans accept aristocracy, but in a nation of insanely-frenzied consumers, an established brand name always still has some juice worth squeezing.

The youthful Franklin seems to have been a bit of a trial for his mom and dad, reportedly exhibiting more interest in sowing oats than saving souls. He had an obsession with guns one could interpret as slightly at odds with the message of the Prince of Peace. He may just have been reflecting the quaint traditions of America’s Appalachian subculture – his home is the mountains of North Carolina – when he once cut down a tree by blasting away at it with an automatic weapon (I did not make this up). Apparently, he used to be fond of giving automatic pistols as gifts.

Well, at some point, I guess the lad realized he was burning out and going nowhere, and automatic weapons are expensive when you like to give the very best, so Franklin had something like the President’s road-to-Damascus experience. I doubt he recalled Henry the Fourth’s saying Paris was worth a mass (Henry of Navarre became King of France by adopting Catholicism). It would have weighed heavily that dad’s ready-made, super-slick organization offered a handsome, steady income, all expenses paid, especially if Franklin had come to recognize that his next-best career option might be itinerant bingo caller.

Redemption is one of America’s great ongoing themes. It’s the spiritual extension of all the plastic surgery, injections, drugs, youth-inducing potions, diets, and tales of lives changed by lotteries or get-rich-quick schemes, but it does have to be the right kind of redemption. None of your consolations of philosophy, peace of the Buddha, wisdom of the Great Spirit, or following the Prophet will do. Lives lived decently and peacefully from beginning to end are not admired because they don’t make juicy entertainment.

The approved American redemption-story template includes years of inflicting hell on others, often by abusing whisky or drugs, finally being overcome by frightful (drug-induced or otherwise) visions of going to hell yourself, and then spending the rest of your life annoying every person who crosses your path with the opinion that he or she does not know the truth. About 85% of the nation’s country-and Western singers and about 95% of its evangelists spend their declining years sharing such tales in magazines, tapes, interviews, and sermons. It’s a major industry.

This is all by way of background to Franklin’s words about his new mission. I suppose it’s possible Franklin thinks Nazareth is a trailer park somewhere in North Carolina or Texas which would account for his thinking that the people in the Middle East haven’t heard about Jesus, but, in any event, Franklin is now going to tell them about Jesus, at least his gun-totting Appalachian version. Well, almost, but Franklin has probably been advised that proselytizing for conversion from Judaism is against the law in modern Israel. With a Bush-appointed Proconsul, that kind of law shouldn’t get in the way of bringing the good word to Iraqis, although he’ll be a bit late to save the souls of those smashed and broken by American bombs.

Franklin’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse, claims that it intends only to bring relief services and not evangelism to Iraq, but how valid can this claim be? The Billy Graham organization for decades has worked only to convert people to its narrow notion of Christianity. It has been criticized even by other Christians for the nature of its work – cranking out converts like sausages in a vast Midwestern meat-packing plant. Perhaps when Franklin created his offshoot relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, it was in part a response to this kind of criticism.

Franklin’s own words on Islam over the last year hardly resemble a second Albert Schweitzer yearning to help fellow beings. His tone is militaristic and has the same nasty, parochial feel as the President’s “us and them.” One looks in vain for any generosity of spirit associated with the words of Jesus.

“We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”

Franklin here makes no distinction between the nineteen individuals responsible for 9/11 and the world’s hundreds of millions of Muslims, yet he seems never to have made the same kind of connections between criminals of other religious backgrounds and the religions themselves. Did the IRA’s outrages elicit such comments about Catholicism?

“…the persecution or elimination of non-Muslims has been a cornerstone of Islam conquests and rule for centuries.”

I suppose it would be foolish to expect any sensible perspective on history from a man of Franklin’s limited learning. The work of people calling themselves Christians in countless wars, religious persecutions, and exterminations just since the Renaissance dwarfs the volume of spilled blood in all the rest of human history. The Holocaust, the African slave trade, and the extermination of many aboriginal peoples were the work of people calling themselves Christians.

“I believe it is my responsibility to speak out against the terrible deeds that are committed as a result of Islamic teaching.”

Why should it be his responsibility to speak against these particular deeds and no others? Franklin certainly is not known as an advocate for the world’s abused and downtrodden. One does not find him shouldering this responsibility over other terrible deeds, a number of them the dirty work of his own government. No, his time goes to “crusades,” the word used for decades by the Billy Graham organization to describe its assembly-line salvation gatherings.

The denomination with which the Graham family generally has been associated, the Southern Baptists, has an ugly history in the United States. Extreme segregationists founded this denomination to keep blacks out of their churches and a century later, through the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Southern Baptists were better known for opposing Dr. King’s work than supporting it. The denomination’s official view on a woman’s role in marriage is among the most parochial in the United States. Incidentally, the Southern Baptists’ Mission Board also aims at providing aid in Iraq. Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptists, described the Prophet Muhammad not very long ago as a “demon-possessed pedophile.”

“There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism.”

These are the words of a man teaching suspicion and fear rather than understanding and brotherhood. One has to ask what such comments have to do with evangelism or Christianity, but American fundamentalists often ignore Jesus’ clear teaching on the matter and put their visions of government and secular affairs at the heart of sermons and pronouncements. This suggests that politics, and a particularly nasty kind of politics, is at least as much a driving force here as religion.

Franklin recently gave a Good Friday service at the Pentagon. Reading that, I had the absurd image of an early Christian preacher praying for Rome’s Tenth Legion. True, there were probably no Christian legionaries at the time, but the fact remains that the purpose of the Pentagon is exactly the same as that of the legions, professional killing for the state and its policies, a purpose totally incompatible with any words of Jesus.

But of course, the more apt comparison would be a few centuries later when the legions did their bloody work for a so-called Christian empire.

AMERICA’S SOVEREIGN RIGHT TO DO AS IT DAMN WELL PLEASES

John Chuckman

I read that the U.S. is claiming a “sovereign right” to try Iraqi officials as war criminals. I thought it was a nice touch, including, as it does, an allusion both to Bush’s scholarly observations on Nazis and an assertion of rights. Rights are always good, aren’t they? Even when they are the rights of conquest?

So, you attack a country for no other reason than an arrogant demand for “regime change,” overwhelm its relatively puny armed forces, kill thousands of people, and claim a “sovereign right” to bring its leaders to trial? This threatens to become the model for international affairs in the twenty-first century, the banana-republic concept applied on a world scale.

America has refused to have anything to do with the International Court for War Crimes, but then the Creator never granted international institutions that purity of essence that is America’s peculiar birthright. International institutions are corrupt. They are foreign. And they are not inclined to do things in the American way.

America, blubbering endlessly about its rights and the way it sees things, so often displaying impatience over listening to the other 95% of the human race, easily forgets the many incontestable horrors it has bestowed upon the world. General Pinochet’s murder of perhaps 15,000 Chileans plus a few Americans who got in his way gets barely a nod of drowsy recognition. The “boyz” chugging down frosty Cokes while napalming Vietnamese villages or the blood-soaked savagery of Cambodia’s rice patties are mostly forgotten. Few Americans ever caught, or cared to imagine, the screams of the Shah’s victims having their finger nails extracted.

There have been so many of these good works that a full list would resemble a reference book rather than an article. Dealing with them on American television would make evening watching a drag, so they are forgotten, and America lumbers on to its next bellowing claim that something about the world stands in the way of its full enjoyment of rights and privileges.

Of course, none of America’s chosen monsters ever saw a trial or tribunal by the United States. A few of them still live in quiet retirement. Why? Because they served American interests faithfully. If Hussein is tried, it will be precisely because he failed to do so. That’s certainly an inspiring reason for bombing the hell out of a country.

But America is doing its very best, with precision missiles and gigantic bunker-busting bombs, to be sure Hussein is murdered rather than captured. His trial, even if it does happen to fall to America as a sovereign right, would be exceedingly inconvenient for relations with the Arab world.

The United States asserts another arrogant claim, wrapped in different words, to justify its mistreatment of prisoners from Afghanistan. It ignored the Geneva Conventions, shackled hundreds of them up, flew them, blindfolded and strapped into cargo planes, to new homes in Cuba, which consist of cages far away from everything they know, with no access to lawyers or relatives, a form of slow torture used to extract information. Never mind that information gathered in this way is more likely to tell you what you want to hear than what actually is, and never mind that treating people in this way violates every principle America likes to say it holds sacred.

There is still another such claim, again expressed with altered words, to proclaim its right to determine who will govern Iraq when America’s destructive tantrum is over. After all, it has had such success in Afghanistan on which to build. After killing thousands of innocent people there, wrecking the country’s infrastructure, and sending tens of thousands fleeing their homes in terror, it set up a government whose key achievement to date is monthly assassinations.

That dire concern over women’s rights in Afghanistan, something carefully tailored to the psychological needs of soccer moms who might have had a doubt or two about bombing villages, has faded into the mountain mists. An excellent proxy measure of America’s violent achievement in Afghanistan is offered by a Canadian documentary film maker who observed that outside Kabul, virtually 100% of women still wear the burka. The figure in Kabul, the only place policed by foreign troops, is about 70% and that comes with a great deal of abuse.

With a record like that, why wouldn’t you feel justified in violently reordering the affairs of the planet? Quick success in Iraq will undoubtedly set Washington’s ideologues’ glands pumping and mouths watering. There’s already talk about blasting Syria. Clearly, Iraq’s shell game with weapons of mass destruction was continued on a grander scale, with the elusive weapons shifted to Syria for safekeeping, perhaps shipped in milk trucks by night. Hussein wouldn’t use them to protect his life. No, after defeating the United States, he undoubtedly planned to reclaim them for another diabolical plot.

The possibilities must seem endless to Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, and Co. And, indeed, regretfully for the rest of the planet, they undoubtedly are.

FRANCE’S GREAT FOLLY

John Chuckman

That great bellowing herd, sometimes called middle America, is now making noises much like those of bull walruses in mating season. The challenges issued in the form of belches and grunts are directed towards the French, a people who have the temerity to stand for principles other than the one George Bush regards as central to humanity – that is, support America or else.

But France’s great folly was not in her recent brave efforts to prevent a needless war. No, it occurred more than two centuries ago when America won her independence from the British Empire.

As probably only a few dozen people in middle America even likely appreciate thanks to hyper-patriotic history texts, America’s Revolutionary War succeeded only because the French supplied arms, cash, men, leadership, and a navy. It wasn’t just help, it was decisive.

There were two key battles in the Revolutionary War. The first was Saratoga in 1777. That stunning victory over Britain’s General John Burgoyne was only possible because of a secret French gun-running operation, much like those undertaken by the CIA today, directed by Pierre de Beaumarchais, grand adventurer and author of The Marriage of Figaro. America then was a relatively simple society with little capacity for manufacturing the weapons necessary to take on the British army.

Of course, France’s secret assistance now may be viewed as the greatest example of what intelligence people today call “blowback” in Western history. It makes the blowback of 9/11, directly attributable to the CIA’s work in Afghanistan, seem tame by comparison. For France played mid-wife to the birth of something that a little more than two centuries later would arrogantly claim the right to determine the fate of the planet.

The main importance of the victory at Saratoga lay in gaining something the revolting colonists desperately wanted: a formal treaty with France and a great bounty of loans, gifts, and military forces. Of course, France’s main interest was to hurt its great rival, Britain, but then it certainly was not America’s main interest to liberate France in 1944-5.

The deciding battle of the Revolutionary War was Yorktown in 1781, although a peace treaty was not settled until 1783. The truth is that Yorktown was overwhelmingly a French victory. Washington didn’t want to attack Yorktown, but then Washington was a terrible general who lost almost every battle he fought.

In 1781, Washington was fixated on a battle whose prospect was almost certain failure, an attack on New York. It was General Rochambeau’s foresight and planning that made Yorktown possible, but it took a lot of arguing to have Washington finally agree. One of Washington’s most trusted young generals, the Marquis de Lafayette, was given a substantial role in the action.

French Admiral de Grasse blocked a British fleet from entering the Chesapeake and evacuating the British army at Yorktown. French troops in the thousands were among the most active. French engineers guided the building of the entrenchments that sealed the fate of General Cornwallis’s army in a fortified encampment that had its back to the water and no fleet to help.

The American forces carried French arms, and what pay they received came from the French treasury. It was during this last stage of the war that Americans massively lost interest. There had never been great enthusiasm, with about a third of the population against it from the beginning and another third indifferent (contrary to myth, revolutions are almost always the work of minorities) – the real explanation, along with a stubborn unwillingness to pay taxes still evident today, behind Washington’s chronic lack of resources despite his countless pleas for help from the colonial governments. But by the late 1770s, Americans had become even more indifferent. It was around this time that M. Duportail, a French officer serving under Washington, made his famous observation about there being more enthusiasm for the Revolution in the cafes of Paris than he saw in America.

America never repaid the massive loans made by the French. Years later, when France underwent the agonies of a much more terrible revolution, then-President Washington maintained a very cool distance. Even when poor old Tom Paine was rotting in a French jail, expecting any day to be executed, Washington ignored his pleas for assistance. This was the same Tom Paine whose Common Sense and Crisis Papers were so important in stirring support for America’s revolution.

Well, despite the great chorus of gastric disturbance just south of here, I shall proudly continue wearing my beret. After all, it was the wonderful Ben Franklin who said that every man has two countries, his own and France.

A BRIEF GLIMPSE OF INSANITY

John Chuckman

The following transcript was mailed to me in a plain brown envelope. The anonymous sender scratched a note about it being found by a peace-demonstrator in a dumpster near CIA headquarters in Langely, Virginia. I have no way of authenticating it, although the tone is clearly plausible. The first part is irretrievably blurred, and it appears that a good deal more is missing.

ULTRA TOP SECRET
EYES ONLY: NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL

(THIS IS WHERE GREASE AND WHAT SMELLS LIKE SWEET-AND-SOUR SAUCE MAKE SEVERAL PAGES UNREADABLE.)

PRESIDENT: “By the way, Condi’s happy ’bout your work at the UN.”

CIA DIRECTOR: “Thank you, Mr. President. We’re only too glad to help.”

PRESIDENT: “Condi’s gettin’ transcripts twice a day. Can’t say I’m happy ’bout
what I’m hearin’, but she says it’s good stuff we can use. She
calls ’em our bank account for defendin’ democrat values.

“Ya got every one of them goddam UN ambassadors bugged?

CIA DIRECTOR: “If I may brag a little, Mr. President, we’ve even bugged the
apartment of the French ambassador’s mistress.”

PRESIDENT: “I knew you guys’d come through for me. I was kinda pissed-off ya didn’t get more stuff tyin’ al Qaedas in with Iraq. Nobody gonna tell me
different – them bastards is as tight as two liberahs in a pay
toilet.”

(LOUD, PROLONGED LAUGHTER IS HEARD FROM BOTH PHONES.)

CIA DIRECTOR: “I’m sorry about that one, Sir, but we did try our best.”

PRESIDENT: “Well, we all know Arabs is tricky about coverin’ up their trail.
I reckon they’re somethin’ like Injuns.

“I got some other stuff here needs your help.”

CIA DIRECTOR: “Yes, Sir.”

PRESIDENT: “The Iraqs are pretendin’ to destroy them El Sandwich missiles.”

CIA DIRECTOR: “Mr. President, if I may, our best information indicates the al Samouds are being methodically destroyed.”

PRESIDENT: “Well, I guess that jus’ shows I got better information on that one
than you boyz. I know Iraq is pullin’ a fast one, an’ they ain’t gonna get
away with it!”

CIA DIRECTOR: “Yes, Sir, how can we help?”

PRESIDENT: “Well, I want ya to get right in there an’ bomb them missile sites.”

CIA DIRECTOR: “If you recall, Mr. President, our last assessment rated those missiles as not being a serious threat.”

PRESIDENT: “Damn, I know that, but we still gonna bomb ’em.”

CIA DIRECTOR: “I don’t see how we could do that, Sir, without killing a lot of
Iraqi technicians.”

PRESIDENT: “It seems as ya’ll ain’t gettin’ my drift here.”

“I don’t care ’bout their piss-ass missiles. Though we ain’t exactly
gonna say that to the press.

“It is the goddam Iraqs we wanna bomb. They’re screwin’ things up for
us bad. How can I be expected to lead a war with them out there
smashin’ up missiles? I mean this is serious, an’ ya’ll gotta get right on
it!”

CIA DIRECTOR: “But, sir, if we do that, we’ll kill the UN weapons inspectors supervising…”

PRESIDENT: “Shiiit, ain’t that jus’ collateral damage? Ya gotta take risks in
war. Hell, I learned that back durin’ Nam when I went
AWOL from the Texas National Guard on a hell of a bender.

“This here’s war, an’ it won’t bother me none.

“Anyhow, it’ll serve ’em right. What the hell they doin’ over there
interferin’ in my war? You boyz get a few dozen of ’em, an’
ol’ Blix ain’t gettin’ in our way again any time soon.”

CIA DIRECTOR: “Yes, Sir.”

PRESIDENT: “Hell, we tried getting’ ’em lost on wild goose chases with those
weapons tips of yours. It didn’t do a lick of good. They still over
there nosin’ into everything. They holdin’ up my goddam war!

“An’ the Iraqs destroyin’ missiles is makin’ me look bad. I’m
mighty puked of hearin’ from Frenchies an’ all them other whiners….

“I want ya’ll to figure out the best way of doin’ it. Maybe use them drain things of yours…”

CIA DIRECTOR: “Mr. President, you mean drones?”

PRESIDENT: “Use whatever gets the job done. Get some
suggestions from the Rummy an’ the boyz

(THE TRANSCRIPT ENDS ABRUPTLY HERE.)

HATING AMERICA

John Chuckman

Recently there has been a thunderous outburst of accusations about “hating America” with lightning strokes crackling towards France and Germany. Some of this storm front rattled into Canada when a member of Parliament, upset over Mr. Bush’s relentless demand for war, made the mistake of muttering an aside about hating Americans, a statement which any thoughtful person understood immediately as frustration rather than hatred.

But how is it even possible to hate so vast and complex a thing as America?

America is sweaty, droning backwaters, and it is great institutions of research and culture. America is shameful ghettos and shantytowns, and it is Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frederick Law Olmstead. It is the hateful shouting of right-wing radio personalities, and it is Studs Terkel reminiscing on great past events. It is Know Nothings, and it is Lincoln; lynchings and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. It is “freedom-loving” Patriots who bought, sold, and beat slaves, ran Loyalists out of the country and stole their property when they didn’t just burn them out, and it is Benjamin Franklin. It is local sheriffs enjoying petty tyrannies, gangs running neighborhoods, crooked politicians fixing elections, and it is the Bill of Rights. It is a churning sea of selfishness and unprincipled grasping, a hideous noise of marketing and insincerity, and it is sacrifice and devotion to principles. America has a character historian Page Smith called, in a usage that is now dated and inaccurate but still understandable, “schizophrenic.”

One of the threads holding together the vast, chaotic, noisy battle that is America is the simplistic patriotism instilled like religious fervor with anthems, uniformed marching bands, baton twirlers, slogans, color guards, and a pledge foisted on children that has always smacked of what one expects in authoritarian societies.

Patriotic excess has at least two roots. One is the desire by those with power to hold this explosive thing called America together and to use its resources and influence to their own ends. Thus we almost never see figures like George Bush or Dick Cheney without American flag pins on their lapels and big American flags as backdrops to speeches, as though one could possibly forget what country they come from. These symbols are being used as powerful totems. You can’t sneer at the flag even when it is a pathetic mediocrity or an essentially evil figure wrapping himself in it.

The other root is the almost excruciating sensitivity many Americans feel about their national identity. This is something one expects to find in any young and raw society, but America does appear a bit slow in maturing beyond it. Undoubtedly, the discomforting nature (for some) of a highly diverse population whose composition actually keeps changing provides a retarding effect. So, too, does America’s crude social Darwinism. This is a land where it is not hard to find a lot of loneliness and anger, people ready to embrace those chest-thumping moments of presumed society.

Of course, a confident individual doesn’t need to strut or brag or threaten. Brash patriotic displays reveal a childish need for constant reassurance. This doubt and uncertainty is a theme running through American history with, for example, the highly self-conscious efforts of the Concord Group about seeing an American literature created, or with authors like Henry James, T.S. Elliot, or James Baldwin effectively fleeing either the excesses or the cultural sterility of their native land.

That is the more charitable explanation, and I believe it holds for the most part. But there also is that dark corner of the American soul with its attraction to fascism. After all, fascism represents in part a desire for certainty and predictability. Perhaps only the Hitler-tinged figures of the world feel the need for a vast dumb-show of patriotism every time they give a speech or make an appearance, and I believe what we see in George Bush who is more given over to this display than most American presidents hints at something quite dark and fearful.

Many outsiders do not understand that in American society, two or more great and divergent currents run simultaneously at all times on most issues. I refer to something more profound than the existence of two political parties, neither of which stands for any great principles. For example, many think of America as the land of casualness, lack of formality, hatred of bureaucracy, and the embrace of the individual. And in part, they are right, but only in part.

At the same time that noisy right-wing hacks blubber night and day about unlimited individualism, Americans in their ordinary lives experience some of the world’s more intense spasms of mindless bureaucracy and anti-liberalism, often the result of legislation created by the very same right-wing forces with their seemingly irresistible desire for control.

As any potential immigrant, even the spouse of an American citizen ostensibly entitled to live in the country, soon learns, the paperwork, restrictions, and bureaucratic hurdles of legal immigration to the United States are formidable, ungenerous, and costly, something that was true even before 9/11.

As anyone who has taken a mortgage in the United States knows, the transaction involves one of the largest and most complex piles of paperwork that can be imagined. Something like an inch-thick stack of legalistic documents no ordinary person can hope to understand must be signed.

As anyone who has filed income tax in the United States knows, the forms and rules must rank as among the ugliest, most complex, and indecipherable on the planet.

And, of course, there are the many intrusive, blundering public and secret agencies with which America abounds. The FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the ATF, the DEA, Homeland Security, military intelligence, naval intelligence, State Department intelligence, state and urban police security agencies, the INS…. New ones are created regularly, especially when right-wing extremists enjoy power as they do now.

Albert Einstein wrote to a friend in 1947, “America has changed…. It has become pretty military and aggressive. The fear of Russia is the means of making it digestible to the plebs.” Since Einstein was a refugee from Nazi Germany and always displayed great sensitivity to signs of authoritarianism, his words offer an important historical insight to distinct change in the external policies of the United States. What has followed is a long series of colonial wars and interventions, a remarkable portion of which have been unsuccessful and pointlessly bloody or have resulted in the establishment of tyrannies. It is not hard for a thinking person to find things to “hate” here without reflecting on any broader concepts of America.

As for what Canadians represent, I can only think of Canada fighting Hitler two years before America, suffering in World War Two about twice as many deaths per capita as Americans did. I think of America’s kidnapped diplomats in Iran and the brave Canadian diplomat who hid some of them from danger. I think of the wonderful people of Newfoundland generously, without charge, putting up hundreds American air-travelers grounded for days following 9/11. I think of the many generous gifts Canadians sent to 9/11 families. I think of Toronto sending a fleet of men and equipment to Buffalo, New York, when it was buried in seven feet of snow.

Anyone with sense would be grateful for a neighbor like that, but Canadians still have no use for your damned war.

MISSILES AIMED AT THEIR MAKERS

John Chuckman

While you can believe very little of what you read or hear on the subject of Iraq, there is some reason to believe reports that Saddam Hussein is hesitating to comply with Hans Blix’s order to destroy his al Samoud II missiles.

I understand that the actual tested range of this missile only marginally exceeds its permitted range of 95 miles, and it may seem unreasonable that anyone should expect that a rocket’s burning fuel can be designed to take it precisely so far and not a bit farther in the absence of the precision guidance systems this missile lacks. Of course, Iraq’s enemy, Israel, has highly-accurate missiles with ranges many times the range of the al Samoud II, and they are nuclear-capable. And with an American armada surrounding Iraq, threatening invasion, any leader would naturally be reluctant to give up a weapon. But I truly hope the reports are exaggerated.

The world’s diplomats have worked a small miracle so far in stopping the crazed ideologues in the White House from launching a rash, unnecessary war. And most of the world’s people support the diplomats in this. There is spontaneous revulsion at Mr. Bush’s fevered statements about Iraq.

Mr. Blix has done a hero’s work trying to establish a rational inspection regime as an alternative to war while being subjected to a storm of abuse and misinformation from the White House.

Saddam Hussein has twice subjected Iraqis to needless death and misery on a large scale with failed wars against Iran and Kuwait. True enough, in both cases, he was encouraged by the amoral foreign policies of the United States, and in the case of the war against Iran, he was more than encouraged, he was supplied with tools and weapons and had a number of his brutal acts excused and covered up.

Despite being well aware of Hussein’s tyranny, thinking people reject Bush’s ignorant comparisons to the 1930s in Europe. They understand that diplomacy and respect for international institutions are not the same thing as “appeasement” or “capitulation.” They understand that it was precisely Bush-type ideologues who refused to let the United States even join the League of Nations after World War I, that many of these same ideologues profited doing business with Hitler while Britain valiantly struggled, and that it is the same ideologues who now disparage the UN, refusing to pay their share of costs unless they see the institution reduced to approving whatever it is they demand.

But if Hussein refuses to comply with Mr. Blix’s orders he does validate one comparison with the Hitler era. Hitler insisted on bringing Germany to utter ruin when he understood that his grand scheme had failed. Germany suffered terrible, needless destruction and reprisals because of Hitler’s nihilism. And so too will the poor, already-broken people of Iraq if Hussein opposes Mr. Blix.

Hussein should not mistake thoughtful opposition to war as consent to his ignoring any orders from the weapons inspectors. Hussein actually has a chance to demonstrate genuine statesmanship now by assiduously avoiding war. For this war will not only cripple Iraq, it may, just as Hitler’s insistence on self-immolation set conditions for the Cold War, bring a hostile and dangerous new order to the entire world.

Success in a high-tech war against an insignificant opponent can only raise the bloodlust of the fanatical neocons now governing the United States and increase their contempt for diplomacy and international institutions. It can only encourage them in their inclination to treat the rest of the planet the way Israel now treats its neighbors.

This possible development represents the broadest and most serious threat to the world’s peace and freedom in our time. One almost cannot imagine what terrible responses and conflicts would be set in motion. Only applied intelligence, diplomacy, and international institutions with enough spine to resist every whim of the United States can prevent the world from tumbling headlong into an abyss. But if Hussein holds the UN in contempt, he can hardly expect the gorillas of neocon America to be restrained by that same institution.

BLACK HOLES

John Chuckman

One of the great discoveries of the late 20th century was the existence of black holes.

Their existence was implied by Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, and their necessary characteristics were worked out by Stephen Hawking and others. Eventually, a new generation of powerful visible-light telescopes and x-ray observatories gave us direct observations supporting what had only been theory.

As every kid fascinated by science knows, black holes come from stars that collapse as their fusion engines sputter out of fuel. The resulting, unimaginably-dense bits of mass have the remarkable ability to grow by capturing matter and energy entering their space-bending gravitational fields.

Modern Israel started as a bright star of an idea, a place of refuge for a horribly abused people, but many observers today might agree that the bright star appears to be collapsing into a dark mass bending the geopolitical space of the entire planet.

The world waits for Mr. Bush to launch a terrible war against Iraq. The only purpose for this war is a preemptive strike at Israel’s most tireless opponent. But the honesty of national debate in America is so distorted by massive gravitational tides, even many of the war’s opponents do not understand what it is they are opposing.

No meaningful evidence has been offered for Mr. Bush’s shrill assertions. An argument for protecting intelligence sources might be accepted as reason for not releasing details to the general public, but what is ridiculous is that no evidence has been supplied to the leaders of major NATO allies. France and Germany would not require the “report” now being quickly cobbled together for Mr. Powell were the case otherwise.

Iraq has bothered no one for twelve years, so why the sudden rush to war before weapons inspectors even complete their work? The only explanation appears to be so that the furious, temporary momentum of American public opinion generated by 9/11 can be harnessed for a war that would not be supported otherwise.

Never mind the deliberately-misleading, invented term weapons of mass destruction, there is no evidence that Iraq has strategically-significant weapons. There is virtual certainty that Iraq has no fissile materials for nuclear weapons, and we know from the previous chief weapons inspector that Iraq’s costly facilities for manufacturing fissile materials were destroyed.

There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any past dealings with al Qaeda. Indeed, it is known there was considerable animus between Hussein and bin Laden.

The notion that secret national weapons programs, if any have been reconstituted since weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, can be successful when teams of well-equipped inspectors, kept informed by intelligence agencies, roam over the Iraqi countryside, free at any time to enter any facility, truly is delusional. And delusional notions are a mighty dangerous basis for going to war.

To reassure Israel, all reasonable parties are willing to see a strict inspection regime maintained in Iraq, but this is not enough for the single-minded American President who insists on going to war and inflicting more horror on Iraqi civilians. And it is certainly not enough for Mr. Sharon who cheers Mr. Bush on and proclaims maniacally that Iran should be attacked next.

How easily people forget, or perhaps they do not care, that modern war means killing civilians in large numbers. The proportion of civilians killed to military personnel killed has grown exponentially since World War I. America’s focus on overwhelming air power and its reluctance to accept any casualties of its own only makes the trend worse. The question of going to war now is one in which Americans take little account of death, for the deaths are almost all on the other side and remain unseen by a comfortable public thinking itself informed by its heavily-biased press.

General Schwarzkopf’s well-staged press briefings with highly-edited film clips during Desert Storm left the impression that precision munitions have turned war into a neat, almost bloodless computer game. The truth is that about 95% of the munitions used in Desert Storm were not precision. Precision munitions are extremely costly, they slow operations down, and they can themselves go wrong, so they are reserved for special applications. Good old-fashioned dumb bombs and artillery are the only thing to use when you want to do a lot of killing in a hurry. Something like a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians were killed by American munitions that were not precision.

As we wait for this war, we feel the world’s economy buckling and yielding to the threats and uncertainty of a vast, destructive enterprise, to the promise of inflation and dislocation that always accompany war, and to unavoidable, crazed gyrations in the price of oil.

As we wait for this war, the President addresses an uneasy world in the cadences of a fundamentalist tent-preacher thumping his pulpit and threatening hell’s fire, offering the five and three-quarters billion people who live outside America but are still affected by its arbitrary decisions, such reassuring observations as, “The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.”

This President compounds economic uncertainty by running huge deficits and offering to keep preoccupied Americans happy with huge tax cuts – a bizarre, economically illiterate version of, “You can have it all and have it all now!”

As we wait for this war, Israel reduces the West Bank to an utterly bleak and hopeless landscape. All past commitments, as those of the Oslo Accord, are ignored. All the many past resolutions of the United Nations imposing obligations on Israel remain ignored, even while the U.S. asserts Iraq must be attacked precisely for ignoring other United Nations’ resolutions. The leader of the Palestinians is degradingly treated as a criminal virtually under a form of house arrest with whom no discussion can possibly be held.

No more worthy foes of injustice and hatred breathe than Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. They have made unmistakably clear what they see in the West Bank – a repeat in virtually every detail of South Africa’s hateful apartheid regime, but the collapsing star’s force field sucks in even the sympathetic emotions these observations should elicit from Americans.

As we wait for this war, Israel has approached the United States for another $10 billion or more in assistance, over and above the $3 billion it receives automatically each year (and, by rights, we should add the $2 billion paid annually to keep Egypt quiescent). This money is deemed necessary because Israel is run on a war-footing seemingly in perpetuity.

Israel behaves as a regional geopolitical-miniature replica of the United States, even to the extent of now building a triad of nuclear forces (land-based missiles, bombers, and submarine-based missiles – all nuclear-capable) – this in a country whose population is about the size of Ecuador’s, about one-tenth of one percent of the world’s people. The costly wastefulness of this is almost beyond description.

Bush’s War on Terror, rather than being a clearly-focused campaign against those actually responsible for 9/11, has become the label on a portfolio of grudges against all those in the world who balk at or oppose American foreign policy. The War on Terror is itself an emerging black hole sucking in resources, energy, and principles.

It’s not as though a good deal of the world does not understand what is happening. Voices of reason are heard from France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Egypt, South Africa, Russia, China, and other lands, but Bush announces he is willing “to go it alone” if necessary, meaning the entire planet, willy-nilly, must be dragged into a great vortex of destruction.

TWELVE RUSTED PIPES

John Chuckman

My head turned when I heard on the radio that a number of chemical warheads had been discovered in Iraq, the words “chemical warheads” evoking powerful suggestions and images. Shortly after first reports, one of Mr. Bush’s spokespeople termed it “significant.” Within a day, restraint was thrown to the wind, and Mr. Bush claimed the find was solid “proof” of Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with arms inspectors.

I found a picture on the Internet of the U.N. inspectors in chemical-protective suits with their discovery spread on the ground in front of them. The “chemical warheads” resembled twelve rusted, 8-inch pipes, exactly the kind of junk you could find strewn in yards piled with corroded ’49 Ford transmissions, World War II relics, winches, and bedsprings on countless rural roads across America.

The “warheads” are the remains of 122mm Katyusha-style rockets (the same type of inaccurate and relatively ineffective small rockets used sporadically against northern Israel during the bloody occupation of Lebanon) that had been designed to deliver chemical weapons.

Of course, if you’ve been conditioned by Monty Python performances like former Secretary of Defense Cohen holding up a 5-pound bag of sugar on national television and asserting its volume represented all that was necessary to wipe out a country, you might still be concerned. His presentation came around the time when the seemingly custom-minted expression “weapons of mass destruction” was introduced to blur the immense differences between chemical/biological weapons and nuclear ones.

To put the “warhead” discovery into perspective, some 20,000 such munitions were surrendered by Iraq after Desert Storm a dozen years ago. I have no idea how many artillery rounds and rockets, of 122mm and greater size, were fired by U.S. forces during that brief war, but a hundred thousand is likely a modest estimate.
The American munitions weren’t loaded with chemicals, but in their accuracy and destructive power plus the hideous aftereffects of tons of vaporized uranium left for civilians to breathe, they likely were far more lethal than the Iraqi rockets of twelve years ago could ever have been. I say this because such rockets have a very limited range and very poor accuracy. The chemicals they contain also are subject to such untoward events as sudden wind shifts blowing the stuff back onto your own troops. Moreover, any modern army is equipped to avoid contact with such material.

Even in mint condition and in the substantial numbers of pre-Desert Storm days, such rockets represent a very limited threat. Any army general would trade them all for one American W-88 thermonuclear warhead with its guaranteed ability to obliterate instantly a city or an army and render a large area uninhabitable for weeks.

But of course, these weren’t 20,000 new munitions, they were twelve rusted remnants containing nothing – threatening stuff indeed.

Iraq has experienced two furious conflicts over the last two decades. Undoubtedly, there is tons of rusted war materiel scattered over the landscape, stuff that no one has records of or cares about. And Iraqis do have other things to occupy them, things like sheer survival under America’s horrific embargo and with much of their country’s basic infrastructure still in ruins.

Whether Bush’s statements reflect careless, offhand remarks or deliberate misrepresentations, they starkly highlight why he is neither trusted nor believed by millions of thoughtful people around the world. At his level of responsibility, and with the gravest consequences of war hinging on his words, it is reprehensible of him to twist language so that rusted pipes become proof of vast destructive plots.

Not long after the pipes’ discovery, there were revelations in The Daily Telegraph and The Times (of London) that three thousand pages of documents dealing with nuclear weapons had been found in the home of an Iraqi scientist.

This information, probably leaked to re-focus public concern after the rusted-pipe caper, made attention-getting headlines, but the details proved rather pathetic reading. As it turned out, the documents concern the project for producing fissile material that the entire world knows existed before Desert Storm, a costly project that according to Mr. Scott Ritter, former chief arms inspector, was destroyed by his technicians.

It does seem that Mr. Bush is willing to grab at any flimsy argument for war, and Britain’s Mr. Blair – the leak to the British papers almost certainly coming from his government – is never far behind in making sweeping claims that he cannot support.

When I think of the situation in Iraq, I have the painful image of a huge scab that has just barely closed over a terrible, bloody wound. Mr. Bush keeps telling us that rather than let the doctors keep the wound under examination, he wants to rip away the massive scab and slash still more deeply into the remaining flesh to make sure there is no infection.

Well, I have about the same trust in Mr. Bush as surgeon as I do as statesman. Let Mr. Blix’s experts carry on with inspections, and let the man who sniggered at souls waiting on death row keep his mouth closed until the full evidence is in.

NATIONAL SANCTITY OF LIFE DAY

John Chuckman

President Bush has declared National Sanctity of Human Life Day.

I should be forgiven for greeting the news with cynicism, but at least they included the word National in the title.

The list of examples demonstrating life is regarded by Americans with considerably less than sanctity outside their national borders is painfully long. There is eloquent testimony in the flesh of tens of thousands of innocent peasants ripped by metal shards of American landmines and cluster bombs in a dozen far-off lands.

There is America’s wanton disregard of Israel’s brutal rule over the Palestinians; its years of wanton disregard of South Africa’s brutal apartheid government; and its years of wanton disregard of official murder and torture in Chile, in Iran, and in a dozen other lands with governments bestowed by America’s hysterical, witch-hunting interventions.

But even that word national must be qualified. Within the sacred precincts of the temple to freedom and human rights itself, there seems to be some elasticity in the definition of sanctity of life. I’m sure the fetuses no one wants – including the anti-abortion fanatics whose motto might well be, “We jus’ helps ’em get born, what happens after is private ‘n’ personal!” – are covered by the joyous national celebration. I think likely, too, sperm hurt by condoms and stem cells are included, but just what else is being celebrated remains mysterious.

The governor of Illinois seemed to understand the meaning of the words sanctity of life when he commuted the sentences of more than a hundred and fifty people agonizingly awaiting execution. His decision came after overwhelming evidence that the death penalty was administered with about the predictability of a flip of a coin.

The President never suffered qualms like that during his term as governor of Texas. The Texas lethal-injection assembly-line rattled right along with the highest recorded productivity in the nation, and Mr. Bush was so sure justice was being served, he was moved on more than one occasion to joke about those waiting to die.

I wonder how America’s love affair with guns fits in with the sanctity of life? There’s supposed to be about two hundred million of them, many of them handguns whose only purpose is killing people. Obtaining a handgun in many parts of America is far easier than getting a pair of eyeglasses.

There’s the little matter of the murder rate in America, the highest in the advanced world, and there’s the infant mortality rate, also the highest in the advanced world. If there is some way of interpreting the documented brutality of American police forces as life-embracing, it escapes me.

Now we learn from a UPI story that, for the first time in its murderous history, Mossad has been granted permission by an American government to use dear old America as one of its human-hunting grounds. Potential victims must qualify for that elusive category terrorists. As determined by whom? I guess it’s petty of me to ask such a question when Americans are busy celebrating the sanctity of life.

Just a few days ago, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Russian officials announcing a new approach to the Chechens described as “the Israeli way,” meaning they intend to start cold-bloodedly assassinating Chechens who are deemed terrorists. No objections were heard from the sanctity-of-life President.

Bush’s CIA recently blew up a car filled with people in Yemen based on its arbitrary determination they were terrorists. It’s wonderful the way these humanistic values are spreading around the planet. As I’ve remarked before, that word terrorist is taking on exactly the meaning of Stalin’s wreckers, a word he uttered each time he wanted to signal comrades that it was time to round up a new batch of victims. Only now the vicious game is going global.

I wonder if Israel’s new hunting privileges in America might be extended to other groups? Perhaps licenses could be sold for hefty fees or auctioned to the highest bidders. Americans could watch Russians and Chechens, Spaniards and Basques, Irish and English, Mexicans and aboriginal people, Pakistanis and Indians, Turks and Kurds, various Afghan tribes, or Muslim and non-Muslim Nigerians all hunting each other down in their streets. Now there’s an idea for celebrating the second anniversary of National Sanctity of Life Day.

Americans should be proud of the inspiring example they set for the world. Happy National Sanctity of Human Life Day, America!

BUT HE IS A MORON!

John Chuckman

Françoise Ducros, director of communications for Canada’s Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said in a private conversation that Mr. Bush was a moron for the way he pushed his obsession over Iraq at a NATO meeting in Prague that had other, important issues to treat. Most informed people on the planet would classify her observation in about the same category as “sugary cereal makes a terrible breakfast,” but it is so rare to hear even the slightest truth expressed regarding America’s pathetic chief executive that a bit of a flap has arisen.

This happened only because her private remark was reported by a newspaper founded by Canadian press baron, Conrad Black, a man who gave up his citizenship in order to accept membership in Britain’s House of Lords, something which enables him to pontificate in neo-gothic halls while costumed in a sweeping scarlet robe topped with puffs of white fluff. But his good works in Canada continue behind him, and the absurdly-biased paper he founded, The National Post, goes right on doing its duty – in this case, the reporting of an unmistakably-private remark just to embarrass Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister.

I don’t know what it is about the “neocon” crowd, perhaps it is their affinity with the flaky religious right, perhaps it is stunted emotional development, but they have this urge to crawl about sniffing into the private affairs of others. They sniff around bathroom stalls, under beds, or into the soiled contents of laundry hampers on their quest for suitable political material – the absurd impeachment of President Clinton being the century’s greatest product of their strange urge.

A stain on a dress, a few weasel-words by a President, naturally enough, anxious to avoid embarrassment, and voila, you spend a hundred million dollars, tie up an entire nation for months, and publish as official government documents, available for any young child to read, words and descriptions best suited to the fiction genre known as bodice-rippers.

One of Canada’s feeble, American-neocon wannabes, summoning every ounce of authority his pinkish, plump, baby face is capable of displaying (ever notice how many of these people resemble plump babies? Gingrich, Falwell, Robertson, Limbaugh, etc. Likely there’s a solid clue here to some unknown syndrome or genetic abnormality) demanded an apology and the dismissal of Ms. Ducros. But Prime Minister Chretien is made of sterner stuff. He was photographed in Parliament with his hand covering a yawn.

To my mind these events add considerable force to arguments for women’s greater involvement in politics. Women have demonstrated a superior ability to recognize the embarrassing nakedness of a very eccentric emperor.

Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, daughter of a former prime minister, last year made the private observation at a dinner in America that Bush “is totally an asshole.” This, again publicized by “neocons,” of course, involved precisely the word Bush himself had used himself during his election campaign to describe, not a politician who threatened the world’s peace, but a newspaper reporter whose honesty he resented. Bush refused to apologize for what was a private remark made before a live microphone. Tanaka’s remark, too, was private, but she was soon forced out of the Japanese government.

German Justice Minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, another tough, astute woman, made the observation recently that Bush’s approach to avoiding domestic difficulties through war had previously been tried by Hitler. Students of history will know that her statement was no more than dry fact, but to this day Washington’s Baby-Face-in-Chief refuses even to meet with the German Chancellor, a pathetic display for a man holding such power. Any politician with some effective intelligence would allow the matter to pass, calling upon a quality variously called grace or largesse or class, but don’t waste your time looking for that quality in America’s “neocon” crowd.

Bush’s petulance over an inconsequential remark highlights why we now are made to orbit dangerously around Iraq, a fairly inconsequential country, already beaten-down by war and embargo. Saddam embarrassed Dad, and that’s reason enough to endanger, quite literally, the future of world peace. We are to have Clinton’s impeachment re-staged on an epic scale and set to Wagnerian music drenched with blood and mysticism.

The obsession is particularly distressing acted out against a background of revelations that North Korea, a bizarre regime if ever there was one, likely has a couple of atomic bombs and certainly has a very active program for manufacturing fissile material. North Korea also has missiles that can reach several major population centers in Asia.

The obsession is acted out, too, against a background of explosive instability in the Middle East. Mr. Bush simply ignores America’s immense obligations there. He refuses to see that his Teutonic-knights war on terror, viewed by many as hopelessly infected with anti-Muslim prejudice, only makes a deadly situation more deadly.

Meanwhile, America busies herself deploying immense resources to swat a fly.

Moron indeed.

THE CASE FOR WAR

John Chuckman

Well, the evidence just keeps accumulating. I think it is a remarkable testimonial to President Bush’s restraint that he has waited this long.

After reading Tony Blair’s dossier on torture in Iraq, the impulse to launch everything the Pentagon has must have been almost irresistible.

Imagine, torture taking place in a brutal dictatorship? Good Lord, this comes as a shocking revelation.

But perhaps the President was reminded of tens of thousands tortured by America’s friends, or by Americans themselves, in Iran or Chile or Nicaragua or El Salvador or Vietnam when he paused, thinking a less-than-perfect case had been made for sending millions of pounds of high explosives and depleted uranium raining down on the people of Iraq.

Perhaps he was reminded of the way that beacon of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, Israel, has quietly tortured its captives for half a century, and, in more than a few cases, outright murdered batches of them.

Or he may have recalled reports from Amnesty International about the common brutality of American law enforcement. A prominent lawyer’s disgusting campaign to establish formal procedures for torture in America may just have slowed his hand. Or it may have been thoughts of the abysmal treatment of Afghan prisoners kept chained in Cuban cages, not to speak of the way his brutish allies in Afghanistan were encouraged publicly by the Secretary of Defense to murder prisoners en masse.

But I doubt it. Bush is simply not a wimp where other peoples’ lives are concerned. He seems capable of sustaining his equilibrium – with its quirky mix of being on a mission for God and nasty frat-boy sense of humor – even in the face of great adversity, so long as it is someone else’s adversity.

I’m sure his hand again started for the red phone when he heard recent, damning reports on the evils of Islam, coming as they did from such towering figures as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart. An outsider might be forgiven for regarding the good gentlemen’s remarks as something akin to theology lessons from the shriveled lips of retired Imperial Wizards of the Klu Klux Klan.

But the words of these men carry weight in several important Bush constituencies including Beany Baby collectors, survivalists living in abandoned Air Force missile silos stocked with tons of ammo and freeze-dried rations, and folks who take their annual vacations watching cartoons and shopping channels on satellite TV from recreational vehicles parked next to the cinder-block splendor of a Wal-Mart.

Jimmy Swaggart, for example, shares the President’s character-building experience as recovered reprobate, having had his rather arcane sexual practices with a prostitute exposed in magazines some years ago. It was the kind of publicity that hits the collection plate mighty hard. But old Jimmy’s a fighter. Equipped as he is with tear ducts capable of gushing on command and an amazing rubbery face that mimics any known expression of mock piety, once again he made the revival-tent crowds roar for more.

Jimmy came back to collect again, just as the President came back from his former, well-publicized life of rude, drunken abuse and failure to do anything worthwhile – although some might argue he succeeded only in removing the word drunken from the description. Still, in the President’s circle, people with such character credentials are regarded as authorities when it comes to recognizing evil.

And now, an amazing piece of evidence comes to light. We have a previously-obscure reporter who knows someone at the FBI whose second-cousin on his mother’s side made an important discovery. A few years back, in the course of taking rolls of souvenir snapshots of the smoldering ruins at Oklahoma City, the second-cousin happened to spot a couple of shady characters with moustaches.

She knew instinctively they were shady, because they didn’t take one souvenir snapshot of the smoking destruction streaked with blood. They just stood there talking and looking. Is that the way a real American acts? Besides these guys just didn’t look like real Americans.

Well, just to be sure, she snapped a picture of them, and, for a while, she kept it pinned to the big, pink, stuffed satin, heart-shaped bulletin board over her bed, right next to her autographed picture of Lt. Calley smiling in front of a burned-out hut in Vietnam. But eventually, word got around the trailer park, and, sure enough, her cousin from the FBI stopped by one day to ask for the picture.

Everyone at the Bureau was convinced immediately that the men in the snapshot were Iraqi agents – after all, the key to future promotion in the Bureau today is one’s ability to recognize such things – and they’ve leaked their views to the press, just as they did in their memorable struggles against Richard Jewel and Wen Ho Lee. Well, almost, but this time the New York Times or the Atlanta Constitution weren’t quite so interested, so the FBI had to dig up an obscure reporter who needed a break in life to become somebody. When they found a struggling, former reporter for her high-school yearbook at a faith-healing in Altoona, Illinois, they knew immediately they had the right person for the job of getting the story out.

This happy discovery also means America’s own son, Tim McVeigh, only did what he did under the insidious, all-reaching influence of Iraqi agents, an innocent lamb led astray by agents of the Antichrist who now strides the earth posing as the second Hitler – although there appears to be a modest disagreement in Bush circles on this exact description of Saddam since good old ‘Rev’ Falwell earlier proclaimed that the Antichrist was in fact Jewish.

The President is convinced he has the goods on Saddam. Now, he just sits back to wait for a formal casus belli. He knows Saddam will leave out a semicolon or mix a metaphor or give a pronoun an ambiguous antecedent somewhere in his thirty-thousand-page document describing Iraq’s weapons’ programs. After all, you can’t expect a bunch of damn Arab peasants to get such things right. And when the President’s team of shrieking, fanatical advisors finds the error, it will prove to the world that Saddam still tries to hide the truth the President has always understood.

FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

John Chuckman

I’ve written before that much of American foreign policy is determined by domestic attitudes and politics, in a society driven by the fantasies of adults who never want to grow up, rather than by the complex realities of the world.

How else do you explain the perverse and destructive nature of so many of America’s intervention in the world after World War II? Like big, thoughtless kids kicking at colonies of birds’ nests, destroying lives and community without noticing anything much more than the exhilarating time they’ve had doing it.

Meanwhile, where great power might really have achieved something worthwhile, generally it has gone unused. I refer to the several genocides that occurred in the last third of the Twentieth Century, not using that word genocide loosely as it often is used in America but to describe massive, blood-soaked horror inflicted on a class or type of people. Indonesia, Cambodia, and Rwanda – each of these involved upwards of half a million people being slaughtered by their own countrymen. In each case, America never lifted a finger.

The rivers of Indonesia ran red and thick with gore at the end of Mr. Sukarno’s regime, but the American government thought that was fine since it was presumed members of the Communist party that were having their throats cut en masse.

Cambodia’s agony, brought on by America’s destabilizing secret bombing and invasions during the Vietnam War, was also fine since it only demonstrated the inhumanity of Communists and the validity of the paranoid “domino theory,” it being the intervention of war-weary Vietnam that mercifully ended the “killing fields”

There is no consistency here at all. In one genocide, Communists were being killed. In the other, Communists were doing the killing. Perhaps the State Department took to heart Emerson’s line about a “foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds.” The same philosophy undoubtedly prevailed in the several instances of America’s overturning unfriendly democracies and installing friendly brutal thugs. America only likes democracies that yield acceptable results.

Consistency did show up in the attitude towards Rwanda. After all, that was Africa, and who the hell cares about Africa?

There are many perverse and not-widely-understood aspects to this relationship between foreign affairs and domestic attitudes and politics. One of the most interesting was suggested to me by an off-handed remark in a letter from a reader in Holland. Americans can’t even keep peace and order in their own cities. What makes them think they are capable of doing it anywhere else?

Indeed, and that might explain the philosophy of “we destroy, you rebuild as best you can” so characteristic of America’s interventions. The big kid can climb aboard his supersonic plane and, almost like pushing the buttons on a fancy video-game, make flashes and puffs of smoke rise from tiny structures far below with even tinier, ant-like dots running in all directions. Some Americans are capable of mustering that much interest. Besides, you get to be called a hero for doing that.

The immense arrogance of a term like “regime change” is lost on America. Much of the world, in American eyes, just resembles beat-up, ugly ghettos run by gangs that can’t speak English, anyway. Why would anyone complain if we blew some of them up? This is the world as seen by American suburbanites cruising along in shiny, four-ton SUVs from “gated communities” to gated corporate headquarters, showing no interest in the scenes that rush by between one island of security and another. All that “stuff” in between might just as well be China or Egypt or Iraq.

America is a country that has almost no experience of war, except during the Civil War, and that was a very long time ago and was pretty much limited to one region of the country. America has never seen a city reduced to the rubble of Berlin or Tokyo after World War II, peopled by phantoms flitting about desperate to find any scrap of something useful or edible. It has never had to deal with millions of displaced persons who’ve lost everything, even their identification papers. Or had to endure a siege like that of Leningrad where tens of thousands of frozen corpses were stacked like logs in the streets as the living were reduced to conditions resembling the Stone Age. It has certainly never experienced the remorseless rape and pillage of a foreign army sweeping through its towns and cities. It never had to bury millions of its own.

Even in the gigantic upheaval of World War II, America’s loss of life amounted to just over one-half of one percent of the fifty million souls who perished.

So when decisions are made to bomb the homes and factories of others, killing and maiming thousands of people far away, most Americans have no experience. It’s all a little abstract. The job of politicians to decide.

And being immersed in concerns like whether they’ll be able to find just the right doll for little Kaitlyn’s birthday, they show little inclination to imagine what it would be like to feel the ground shudder hundreds of times between the screams of bombs and dying neighbors. Hell, who wants to think about things like that after a tough day at the office?

Another interesting aspect of this relationship between foreign policies and domestic matters reflects America’s attitude towards its own national government. Basically, since the nation’s beginnings, Americans have hated having a national government. Americans would never even have won the Revolutionary War without the immense assistance of the French. Many contemporary observers tell us how indifferent Americans had become to events in the last years. M. Duportail wrote that there was more excitement about the American Revolution in the cafes of Paris than he found in America. Washington spent most of his time writing desperate letters pleading for help, letters that often fell on deaf ears.

The proximate cause of the American Revolution, Britain’s imposition of taxes designed to help pay its vast expenses in securing victory over the French in the Seven Years War (a.k.a., the French and Indian War), a war which greatly benefited American colonists, reflected the colonists’ hatred of paying taxes. And little has changed in two and a quarter centuries. There are many Americans who view Washington as the distant capital of an occupying Roman power.

They have matured to this extent since the Revolution: they are willing to pay taxes for the military, although not much else.

This strange arrangement has a profound effect on foreign affairs. With many Americans taking little interest in foreign events and little interest in national government, a great deal of “maneuver room” is afforded to the nation’s power establishment. Their actions are effectively not subject to quite the scrutiny you might expect in an ostensibly democratic country. That is one reason a country that has so many of the characteristics of a democracy is capable of the kind of shameful things abroad you might expect from oligarchs or juntas.

This effect is further enhanced by the way in which elections are financed. Those who pay the bills are heard, and they are anything but a majority of Americans. And the country’s major popular information sources are owned by a relatively small number of powerful groups whose interests tend to be with the jingoistic and imperial.

It is often only intense international pressure which prevents America from doing some truly destructive and stupid things, just as on more than one occasion during the Cold War, Washington stood fully ready to use atomic weapons. One can only hope that international pressure has been sufficient to prevent the moral and intellectual mediocrity that now occupies the White House from launching an action whose long-term consequences may be just as terrible and unforgiving as the use of atomic weapons.

THE PENTAGON’S SECRET WEAPON

John Chuckman

The following is a transcript of a recorded late-night telephone call from an anonymous source claiming high-level clearance at the Pentagon.

I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but aspects of it seem so plausible and so much in character for those now running the White House and trying to run the world that I regard it as vital enough information to bring to the public’s attention. It contains a chilling tale.

It all started immediately after September 11, indeed, the very day that Bush disappeared on Air Force One to pose for ten-thousand-dollar-a-pop campaign photos of himself staring out a window somewhere over the Atlantic while calling the executive chef on board for another bag of pretzels. It was the same day Dick Cheney went into hiding at Haliburton’s Secure Executive Golf Course somewhere on a banana plantation in Central America.

At the castle of the Republican party’s most important multi-billionaire donor – as it happens, an exact copy of mad King Ludwig’s mountainside fantasy in Bavaria – there is an underground laboratory where the withered bits of his nasty body are kept alive in vats of bubbling biological cocktails, resembling the reddish blobs of a 1970s lava lamp. The blobs are wired to a complex of supercomputers capable of instant communication with any member of the Bush cabinet. Other vats in the same laboratory maintain bubbling bits of Ayn Rand, Walt Disney, Martin Bormann, the Shah of Iran, and J. Edgar Hoover – each tank anxiously awaiting its appointment with destiny for rebirth.

This is the world’s finest private laboratory, expert in the cloning of DNA, and it received a phone call from Washington requesting immediate cooperation on a new project. Scrapings of skin taken from the president’s elbow, taken by a team of surgeons treating him for a bruise sustained while falling off his chair, were being rushed by military jet to the site, immersed in liquid nitrogen, even as the call came through.

The request was to preserve the samples of the president, as an additional line of defense against terrorism, and to begin experiments with their cloning. The thinking was along the lines of a second, third, or fourth secret government being readied to step forward in case of disaster, totally defeating the expectations of any potential attacker. Depending on the success of the tests, samples from Cheney, von Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and selected others would also be forwarded. The name of the Secretary of State Powell was conspicuously absent from the list.

Some weeks later, the Pentagon called asking for delivery of half the lab’s sample, the president apparently expressing unwillingness to again have his elbow scraped. The lab was to continue its research into cloning the president, but a new, second secret project was to start immediately. Somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon’s most secret weapons laboratory, the terrorist attack had generated a revolutionary idea.

Von Rumsfeld’s chief expert on weapons of mass destruction had hit upon an ingenious new concept. The president’s DNA would be replicated millions of times, and bits of it would be imbedded into microscopic, synthetic spores the Pentagon had been developing for years as a vector for spreading germ warfare. These spores could then be released in bombs designed to explode harmlessly in the air over a target, creating a monstrous aerosol cloud of spores for a radius of miles from the detonation.

The synthetic spores when inhaled, swallowed, or imbedded in the flesh of humans were readily taken up by the body, and the genetic material they contained would spread in the fashion of a virus. Within a matter of weeks, people exposed to these spores would begin showing characteristics of the president.

Explode enough of these bombs over any country whose behavior was unacceptable, and, without killing a single person, you could create in a matter of weeks an army of Bush-clones. Smiling, bland zombies barely capable of earning a living on their own, conspicuously displaying an unquestioning obedience to orders.

Any country thus exposed would be the Pentagon’s for the taking. Clearly, America’s dear boys in uniform would never again have to be put in harm’s way. They could just peacefully pursue their mail-order degrees in hospitality management and refrigeration-repair technology while relaxing with hot pizza and Playboy from the PX and watching Pat Robertson on cable TV in off hours.

It was a backwater politician’s dream come true, pampering the boys in the service, while conquering the world.

Indeed, the thinking ran that it would not be necessary ever again to occupy a country. Signals could be sent directly to the leaders of any successfully-treated country from the bubbling tank or from the Halibuton Secure Golf Course with instructions on just how to conduct their affairs. It was the fondest hope of the experimenters that this particular characteristic, pliability to taking orders from wealthy father figures, would be among those successfully transplanted by the spores.

If so, the possibilities were endless. America could avoid any future contamination of its precious boys to the devious ways of foreigners. Perhaps, the United States could stop issuing passports altogether, an idea much favored in Texas, and close all of its embassies abroad. With benign, pliable populations spreading across the planet, everything could be run from the tanks or the plantation.

There are concerns that certain transmitted characteristics might prove a problem. Among these is the expected severe dumbing-down of populations and their inability to articulate clear language, but there is hope that actual field tests of the spores will reveal ways to manage these difficulties. American politicians who know about the secret project actually are enthusiastic about this possible outcome so that no one has to listen to a “pukey fur’ener” again.

The Pentagon believes, at least initially, that the spores must be handled with extreme caution, comparable to that used in the handling thermo-nuclear weapons. Their accidental release on home turf could pose a grave threat, starting as the country does from so dumbed-down a state already. Again though, politicians in on the project regard this possibility as less a threat than a promising new horizon. The views from the vat on this point are not yet known.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT

Full of sound and fury signifying nothing

John Chuckman

It’s almost as though American policy in Afghanistan had followed the script for a Hollywood summer blockbuster. A potboiler-epic aimed at pleasing affluent, pimply teenage boys, dreaming dreams of power and adventure, its script mixing generous helpings of Cecil B. deMille, Steven Spielberg, explosive special effects, bad dialogue, and a lack of intelligible plot.

That may not be an exaggeration. Only reflect that America’s second-last, dangerously hare-brained president, Mr. Nixon, used to watch the movie Patton over and over again, hoping to derive inspiration in dealing with the catastrophe he himself created.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a movie. Real lives and real villages are being torn apart by a slightly-earlier generation of pimply American boys at the controls of some of the world’s most hellish weapons. Boys like that eager fellow, reportedly nick-named “Psycho” by some of his comrades, who ignored procedures to get “a kill,” his target being a group of Canadian soldiers carrying out known exercises.

(Canadians, by the way, will be grateful that the county’s modest contribution to insanity in the mountains will end soon. America brow-beat its allies into playing supporting roles, hoping to give vengeance the color of a genuine international cause. It was easier this time than it was for Vietnam owing to people’s initial, instinctive sympathy for those killed September 11. But one remembers the story of how Lyndon Johnson grabbed Prime Minister Lester Pearson, winner of the Nobel peace prize, by the lapels and tried intimidating him into contributing troops for Vietnam. Thank God, Pearson stood his ground against the Texas thug.)

In December of last year, U.S. planes mistakenly attacked a convoy of tribal elders, killing 65 people. There were reports that this ugly incident had an even uglier origin: Americans had been deliberately tricked by one of the cut-throat factions now ruling the country into eliminating some political opposition. Since then there have been many lethal attacks on the wrong people.

Now we have the report of a wedding party in southern Afghanistan blown to bits. The government in Afghanistan reports 40 killed, including the bride and groom, and 100 injured, by some trigger-happy fly-boy undoubtedly trying to clutch Psycho’s fallen laurels. (Actually this was the second wedding party attacked, the first was in eastern Afghanistan in May with 10 killed.)

I suppose we can be grateful the Pentagon much earlier gave up its disgusting stunt of dropping food-ration packets along with 500-pond bombs. Imagine bags of freeze-dried rice dropped on the bodies of the bride and groom?

Does anyone understand why American planes are still bombing Afghanistan? Oh, yes, I forgot, to destroy any elusive al Qaeda who might still be clambering the rocky slopes in sandals threatening New York. And it makes such good sense to do this with bombs from the air where you cannot distinguish a cleric from a warrior, a rifle from a hoe. Perhaps al Qaeda members are supposed to wear transponders for easy identification?

Recent stories from Britain reveal the utter contempt in which American tactics are held by senior officials there – information suppressed until now by the heavy hand of Prime Minister Tony Blair who seems keen to play dwarf armor-polisher to America’s idiot-prince. The tactics in question include American special forces in Pakistan and border areas of Afghanistan conducting searches for hidden al Qaeda by breaking into village homes with weapons blazing away, completely oblivious to the fact that this is not a part of the world where arrogant, insulting behavior is easily forgiven.

Can you imagine what a hellish storm of vengeance and terror Northern Ireland would have reaped had British troops behaved that way? In more than a quarter century of civil unrest in Northern Ireland, bad as it was, fewer people died on all sides than the number in Afghanistan killed by Americans during just a few months. You might think Americans had some valuable lessons to learn from Britain’s long, demanding experience in Northern Ireland, but the kind of Americans in Bush’s crowd already know everything, possessing wisdom magically sprung from the head of Zeus.

Not that you’d know it from America’s limp press, but it does appear that the country’s special forces, whose every member has more expensive outfits and fancy equipment than the deluxe jet-set, celebrity edition of Barbie comes with, have pretty much come up short in every significant operation so far.

Except, of course, for the massacre at Mazar-I-Sharif. Scots film maker Jamie Doran has shown parliamentarians in Europe the first portion of his documentary on the disappearance of about three thousand prisoners after their surrender. The film has terrible things to say of American participation. Hundreds of Taleban prisoners were driven in vans out into the desert by order of a local American commander, and those not suffocated by the heat were shot dead by General Dostrum’s troops while Americans casually watched.

A secret report released to the New York Times indicates that even American authorities know what a failure the war has been. It has only succeeded in dispersing anti-American terrorists throughout the Muslim world.

The actual membership of al Qaeda was always very small, far smaller than any Chicago street gang, and never bore any relation to the addled claims of Mr. Bush. They might have been dealt with handily by a set intelligent policies and diplomatic moves rather than a mindless crusade costing tens of billions of dollars.

The recent, much-publicized loya jirga, a grand council of delegates from all over Afghanistan, did little more than set up a temporary figurehead government, a kind of national fig leaf for the nakedness of the war lords who now rule most of the country. Astute readers will rightly ask how delegates could possibly have been chosen in any representative fashion from regions governed by war lords, places that are no-go areas for foreign troops.

At least now the way is clear for America, in its usual end-of-bombing fashion, to hightail it out after a decent interval. Ari Fleischer will blubber claims of having brought democracy to Afghanistan. Who knows, maybe Billy Graham will join in with prayers of thanksgiving before a joint session of Congress for all the swarthy heathens killed? Only the keen political sensibilities of George Orwell could have fully appreciated America’s second wave of destruction in Afghanistan being celebrated as an achievement.

All these developments – Afghanistan left in turmoil, war lords in control, stupid tactics creating many more angry young men seeking vengeance, the dispersal of anti-American leaders – together with the ugly new line on the Palestinians that the weak Mr. Bush has been cornered into accepting, promise little peace or security for anyone. It’s almost as though Ariel Sharon had been named special advisor to the president, and a stunning appointment it is: a man who has spent his life killing innocent people as an envoy for peace.

I reflect back to the Pentagon general who announced not so very long ago, as the forces of the Northern Alliance bravely swept across a landscape first cleared by American carpet-bombing, that this promised to be one of the most effective military actions in history. Here was a case of “pride goeth before the fall” if ever there was.

Of course, you must take account of the fact that he spoke from the perspective of half a century of costly, unprincipled, and often inept American colonial military action – the murderous shame of Vietnam, the pointless destruction in Cambodia, the almost-laughable theater of the absurd in Somalia, the marines providing live targets in Lebanon, the Army’s School of the Americas training the creatures of dictators in the fine points of torture and killing, the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner with three-hundred souls aboard (an act which also deserves rarely-given credit for the reprisal destruction of the Pan-Am Lockerbie flight), the sinking of a Japanese civilian ship, the vicious fly-boy pranks that hurled an Italian gondola full of people down a mountain, the numerous rapes and assaults by troops in Okinawa.

The general’s breast swelled with the proud reflection that Americans had been so stunningly-successful where the Russians had miserably failed. Of course, he ignored the fact that Russia attempted something quite different to what America has attempted. He also ignored the fact that the Russians worked against a vast secret war waged by the CIA, whose activities in Afghanistan are what made September 11 possible. But most of all, he arrogantly ignored the fact that the play in Afghanistan has not gone beyond the first scene of the first act.

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A final note of irony: How sound is government now in Afghanistan? In early July, just after this piece was written, the Minister for Public Works, Abdul Qadir, who also served as one of three vice-presidents, was assassinated in Kabul. Last April in Jalalabad, there was an attempt to assassinate Mohammad Fahim, Interim Defense Minister. In February, Abdul Rahman, Civil Aviation Minister, was assassinated at the airport in Kabul, other ministers being implicated in his death. Readers should note that Kabul, where two of these assassinations occurred is the most secure part of the country.

Despite their over-advertised nastiness, this is exactly the anarchy the Taleban ended before American bombing ended the Taleban. So far as we know, the Taleban had nothing to do with September 11, and they were willing to extradite Osama bin Laden and others upon America’s producing evidence of their guilt, a universally-accepted practice in legal extradition. But this was not acceptable to Mr. Bush, and, apart from its many other costly failures, his crusade in Afghanistan has not produced bin Laden.

SPINELESSNESS AS FOREIGN POLICY

John Chuckman

Mr. Bush’s speech on a Palestinian state must surely rank as one of the most pathetic utterances ever given by an American president under the exalted rubric of policy.

As foreign policy, I am perplexed to think of its having an equal in American history.

As a statement of principle, it ranks with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dredd Scott decision concerning slavery. It contains no principle, other than respect for the rights of those with power to hold others virtually as property.

Purely as a speech, it suggests Mr. Nixon’s remarks about his dog Checkers and Pat’s cloth coat, emotional ramblings to obscure hard (and, as it later proved, true) accusations of hidden political slush-funds. In Mr. Bush’s case, the hard truth is that his stewardship over America’s responsibilities in the Middle East has been disastrous.

It’s been about a third of a century since the 1967 war and its aftermath of Israel’s seizing land and assuming the self-appointed right to determine the future living conditions of the land’s residents. Now, some say that because Arabs started that war, Israel is under no obligation to return the property it always coveted anyway.

But the best scholars do not agree that the Arabs alone started that war. There is evidence of Israel’s having deliberately manipulated the situation towards achieving that end, knowing full well that it could not only easily withstand the expected assault but handsomely profit from victory.

Mr. Sharon is just one of a long series of Israeli leaders who have wanted to annex the West Bank minus its “undesirable” Palestinian population. This hasn’t been a secret, it’s just not featured in Israel’s speeches, professions, and press releases addressed at the outside world and especially those directed at American audiences.

Yes, indeed, conquerors are often under no obligation to return what they’ve conquered. But is this the relationship, that of conqueror vis-à-vis the conquered, that Israel wishes to have with its neighbors in perpetuity? One does associate the traditions of modern Judaism with larger, more decent, and more humane views than that.

I will not enter the debate over United Nations Resolution 242. Its meaning is abundantly clear. Israel is supposed to leave the territories. Only Israeli hard-liners and their unblinking American defenders seem to interpret it as meaning something else. In effect, Israel behaves as though it had been granted an indefinite League of Nations’ mandate over these lands, ruling them as a de facto empire. And in continuing to ignore existing resolutions of the United Nations, Israel threatens that important institution with the same kind of contempt that caused the death of its predecessor.

It is helpful to bear in mind that the Bush administration includes in its constituency the kind of Americans who refused to pay United Nations dues, who insisted as a compromise (with America’s population representing about 4% of the world’s) on institutional reforms pleasing to themselves, who pay for billboards advocating America’s withdrawal from the United Nations, and some who consider it a proud boast never to have set foot outside the United States.

Nor will I enter the debate over what Mr. Barak offered the Palestinians at Camp David. Again, it is perfectly clear to most what the offer amounted to, something that may more accurately be described as a kind of Yucca Mountain safe depository for undesirable human beings, complete with armed resident watchers in fortress redoubts, rather than anything resembling a state.

In almost every aspect of American foreign policy, Mr. Bush, a man who during his campaign for office actually bragged about never reading the international section of the newspaper, has set back the clock many years.

The Palestinians now are pretty much expected to start over, from the beginning, as though the past third of a century had not happened. And they have pretty well been told by America’s first court-appointed president what leader they should not elect.

Someone has nicely summed up Bush’s conditions in saying the Palestinians must become Sweden before being given any consideration by his administration. Further, even after becoming Sweden, what they can expect is what Mr. Sharon is prepared to grant, which, judging by any standards conditioned on reality, will be precisely nothing.