Our annual ethical dilemma has begun. The Cooper's hawk is back.
He has emigrated from his home in mountain forests somewhere north of us to hunt prey in our warmer clime. He especially likes to hunt from a perch on our back gate, for our premises attract other birds the year round. We ply them with fruit, bread crumbs and seeds and nectar feeders for the hummingbirds. They nest on our roof and in niches and corners of our house. They hatch their young, feed them, teach them to fly.
They are beautiful and welcome guests. But they are also prey for the Cooper's hawk. He is a princely bird, noble in features and stature. One of the smaller accipiters, he is a swift flier who can dart through trees in pursuit of smaller birds. His speed in flight, his aerial agility are forms of beauty, too.
He visits us every winter precisely because our feeders attract other birds. Are we thus complicit in the murder of the birds he kills for food? Last year I watched a harsh episode of nature next to the little pond beside the desert willow tree: a white winged dove -- probably accustomed to easy meals from the nearby feeder -- fell prey to the hawk and provided it with two days worth of nourishment.
That was an exception. We seldom find evidence of his bird-kills. I tell myself that he feeds far more often on rodents and other small mammals on the desert floor around us. In this part of the country, certain rodents can transmit a terrible, fatal disease to humans. Since the hawk helps control the rodent population, he is, in a sense, like the rattlesnake, a friend of man.
My wife Lois frets over the hawk's annual threat to the birds she so fondly feeds. But we need not feel guilty, say I; we are not abettors in murder. The hawk does what it must, and has a place in the natural order of things. We should be acting badly if we interfered in that order. Let hawks be hawks, sparrows be sparrows, wolves be wolves and fawns be fawns and may all, as species, survive.
I say that's just being pro-life.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Come Back, Col. Horton
Someone said of Burke Horton that if you asked him the time of day, he'd tell you how to make a watch.
He was an engineer and inventor. He was also a musician, tennis player and coach, hockey player and coach, retired military officer and an expert on small-force counter-insurgency tactics.
As an Air Force colonel working in military intelligence, he often gave President Eisenhower's daily intelligence briefing in the west wing of the White House.
I've got to assume that in the enormous labyrinth of the world's largest armed force, there were a number of counterparts of Col. Burke Horton on Sept. 11, 2001. I wonder if they were even consulted after the terrorist attacks that day.
I doubt it because our response was all wrong. Massive military force is useless against stateless terrorism, as Burke Horton knew full well. But the civilian leaders of our military, from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld down through the ranks, were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq even as they ordered a token military effort to capture the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Afghanistan.
Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority issued a report this week saying what we all knew, that bin Laden was vulnerable in December of 2001 in the Tora Bora area near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Gearing up to attack Iraq, Rumsfeld pursued the fleeing terrorist leader with a force of a mere 100 troops through the rugged mountain terrain. Of course he got away.
But the pertinent point in the report was buried: appropriate military power, "from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," it said.
The point is important because it hints at what would have been a far more effective response to 9/11 than the purely military and essentially unilateral effort that we mounted. Burke Horton would have designed something very different.
First, he would have assembled far more reliable intelligence. The entire world was sympathetic to American sensibilities in the aftermath of the attacks. Horton would have moved swiftly to use that empathy: he'd have tapped every national intelligence service to pool information about bin Laden and his whereabouts and his associates and his vulnerability.
Then he would have mounted a clandestine police action, employing elite military and intelligence units from around the world, supplemented by the very sniper teams and ultra mobile Marine divisions mentioned in the Senate report, especially including Arab-speaking experts in high-mountain maneuvering, to run down bin Laden and his band and bring them to justice.
The Bushhawks' obsession with Hussein and Iraq's enormous oil reserves blinded them to that option, if anyone even presented it to them.
What Dr. Kidglove needs in his faltering administration is another Burke Horton. When Burke was the tennis pro for my group of early bird tennis players at an indoor racquet club, not even a blizzard could keep him from unlocking the door to the club at precisely 5:30 a.m. every day. "How the heck did you get here?" I asked during a record blizzard one February day. He nodded to the corner of the office toward a pair of cross country skis. "A successful operation requires two things," he said. "Provision for every exigency, and a strong will." Burke was 77 when he skied the six hilly miles to open the tennis club door.
Would that someone as steel-willed had this president's ear.
FOLLOW-UP
Michael Graham, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer, writes:
I knew a lot of guys like Col Horton, honorable old soldiers who just wouldn't tolerate the BS the Pentagon is slinging today.
Over the weekend, I read the entire Senate report on Tora Bora. A friend of mine was there at the time and confirms that we could have had bin Laden.
But here's the problem: If we had caught him, it would have destroyed the plan to pin 9-11 on Saddam, thus destroying the "reason" to invade Iraq. Look how much money was made in that little adventure.
He was an engineer and inventor. He was also a musician, tennis player and coach, hockey player and coach, retired military officer and an expert on small-force counter-insurgency tactics.
As an Air Force colonel working in military intelligence, he often gave President Eisenhower's daily intelligence briefing in the west wing of the White House.
I've got to assume that in the enormous labyrinth of the world's largest armed force, there were a number of counterparts of Col. Burke Horton on Sept. 11, 2001. I wonder if they were even consulted after the terrorist attacks that day.
I doubt it because our response was all wrong. Massive military force is useless against stateless terrorism, as Burke Horton knew full well. But the civilian leaders of our military, from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld down through the ranks, were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq even as they ordered a token military effort to capture the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Afghanistan.
Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority issued a report this week saying what we all knew, that bin Laden was vulnerable in December of 2001 in the Tora Bora area near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Gearing up to attack Iraq, Rumsfeld pursued the fleeing terrorist leader with a force of a mere 100 troops through the rugged mountain terrain. Of course he got away.
But the pertinent point in the report was buried: appropriate military power, "from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," it said.
The point is important because it hints at what would have been a far more effective response to 9/11 than the purely military and essentially unilateral effort that we mounted. Burke Horton would have designed something very different.
First, he would have assembled far more reliable intelligence. The entire world was sympathetic to American sensibilities in the aftermath of the attacks. Horton would have moved swiftly to use that empathy: he'd have tapped every national intelligence service to pool information about bin Laden and his whereabouts and his associates and his vulnerability.
Then he would have mounted a clandestine police action, employing elite military and intelligence units from around the world, supplemented by the very sniper teams and ultra mobile Marine divisions mentioned in the Senate report, especially including Arab-speaking experts in high-mountain maneuvering, to run down bin Laden and his band and bring them to justice.
The Bushhawks' obsession with Hussein and Iraq's enormous oil reserves blinded them to that option, if anyone even presented it to them.
What Dr. Kidglove needs in his faltering administration is another Burke Horton. When Burke was the tennis pro for my group of early bird tennis players at an indoor racquet club, not even a blizzard could keep him from unlocking the door to the club at precisely 5:30 a.m. every day. "How the heck did you get here?" I asked during a record blizzard one February day. He nodded to the corner of the office toward a pair of cross country skis. "A successful operation requires two things," he said. "Provision for every exigency, and a strong will." Burke was 77 when he skied the six hilly miles to open the tennis club door.
Would that someone as steel-willed had this president's ear.
FOLLOW-UP
Michael Graham, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer, writes:
I knew a lot of guys like Col Horton, honorable old soldiers who just wouldn't tolerate the BS the Pentagon is slinging today.
Over the weekend, I read the entire Senate report on Tora Bora. A friend of mine was there at the time and confirms that we could have had bin Laden.
But here's the problem: If we had caught him, it would have destroyed the plan to pin 9-11 on Saddam, thus destroying the "reason" to invade Iraq. Look how much money was made in that little adventure.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
His Military Masters
The utter intimidation of Dr. Kidglove by the military he ostensibly commands could not be made more clear than by the story in this morning's New York Times.
Alissa J. Rubin reports from Kabul: " An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base."
Kidglove campaigned on the theme of change, promising to reverse the shameful Bush policies of torture, illegal imprisonment, Geneva Convention violations and lies.
His promises have turned into lies to equal those those Bush told, with the possible exception of the fairy tale WMDs in Iraq that have wasted the lives of thousands of United States military personnel.
The Bagram jail, Rubin writes, "consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions."
Kidglove signed an order last January to eliminate the so-called "black sites" run by the CIA, but -- oops! -- it didn't apply to this particular torture chamber because it's run by the military Special Operations forces.
Ah, but last August, our kindly torquemadas revised Pentagon policy so that detainees in these black sites could be held there no more than two weeks.
Rubin writes:
“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who was detained there and who, like some Afghans, doesn’t use a last name. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”
Mr. Hamidullah was released in October, after five and half months in detention, five to six weeks of it in the black jail, he said.
Two weeks, schmoo weeks, he's only a raghead, right?
Rubin's article refers to "tension" between Kidglove and his military commanders, to whom the President wants to give "leeway to operate."
Operate? What's that mean, "operate?"
“They beat up people in the black jail,” Hamidullah said. “They didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep." Two Afghan teen-agers held in Bagram jail for more than ten months told a reporter they had been subjected to beatings and "humiliation" by their captors.
They were detained because they were suspected of being Taliban terrorists. They weren't. They were just people. When their captors finally learned the truth, the detainees were released.
One of the freed prisoners said he was told, "'Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10 months and gave me nothing back.”
By that time his family had spent two years' income in a futile effort to learn if he was alive or dead.
Alissa J. Rubin reports from Kabul: " An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base."
Kidglove campaigned on the theme of change, promising to reverse the shameful Bush policies of torture, illegal imprisonment, Geneva Convention violations and lies.
His promises have turned into lies to equal those those Bush told, with the possible exception of the fairy tale WMDs in Iraq that have wasted the lives of thousands of United States military personnel.
The Bagram jail, Rubin writes, "consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions."
Kidglove signed an order last January to eliminate the so-called "black sites" run by the CIA, but -- oops! -- it didn't apply to this particular torture chamber because it's run by the military Special Operations forces.
Ah, but last August, our kindly torquemadas revised Pentagon policy so that detainees in these black sites could be held there no more than two weeks.
Rubin writes:
“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who was detained there and who, like some Afghans, doesn’t use a last name. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”
Mr. Hamidullah was released in October, after five and half months in detention, five to six weeks of it in the black jail, he said.
Two weeks, schmoo weeks, he's only a raghead, right?
Rubin's article refers to "tension" between Kidglove and his military commanders, to whom the President wants to give "leeway to operate."
Operate? What's that mean, "operate?"
“They beat up people in the black jail,” Hamidullah said. “They didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep." Two Afghan teen-agers held in Bagram jail for more than ten months told a reporter they had been subjected to beatings and "humiliation" by their captors.
They were detained because they were suspected of being Taliban terrorists. They weren't. They were just people. When their captors finally learned the truth, the detainees were released.
One of the freed prisoners said he was told, "'Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10 months and gave me nothing back.”
By that time his family had spent two years' income in a futile effort to learn if he was alive or dead.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
A Thanksgiving Day
It was Thanksgiving Day of 1943 -- the only one from my childhood that I can truthfully say I remember.
The Herbert Avenue gang was in the Hembergers' spacious yard, tossing a football around, and swapping tales of downing enormous quantities of turkey and trimmings and pie -- especially pie.
Many of us had big brothers fighting in the Great War, kids who had signed up the moment they turned 18, without waiting for a draft notice. One of the big brothers was "Bud" Dougherty. He had been serving aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet when it went down in 1942 in the Battle of Santa Cruz. He hadn't been heard from since and was presumed killed in action.
Bud and the Hembergers' big brother, "Speed," had been stars on an American Legion Junior baseball team that went to the national finals in Pennsylvania in 1940. They were neighborhood heroes even before they went off to war. Now they were gods.
We didn't talk much about Bud when his little brother was around. He was a sensitive boy, the youngest of the Herbert Avenue gang, and the hurt in his heart was too enormous to violate.
We talked football -- Ohio State, mostly, and the Western Hills high school team we all aspired to play for one day .
Whence cometh a wailing and shouting from up the hill, toward the street car stop.
At first it was incomprehensible but as it came closer we could make out: "He's alive! Bud's alive."
It was Bud Daugherty's sister, racing down the Herbert Avenue hill, blubbering and bellowing, "Bud's alive!"
The residents of Herbert Avenue poured into the street. They surrounded Rose Daugherty and hugged her until she caught her breath. She was heading home from work on the Westwood Avenue street car when a sailor with lots of battle ribbons took the seat beside her. "Do you know where Herbert Avenue is?" he asked. "I live there," she said. "Get off when I do."
"I've got to see a shipmate's family on Herbert Avenue," he said. "Tell them their son is OK. He was in a coma for months after his ship went down. When he came out of it, I was in the bed next to him. 'Tell my family I'm OK,' he said, when he found out I was going home."
"What was his ship?" Rose asked.
"The Hornet," the sailor said.
Through tears of disbelief she gasped, "And the sailor's name?"
"Daugherty," the young man said. "Bud Daugherty."
At that moment the streetcar came to a halt at the Herbert Avenue safety island.
Rose began her sprint down the street, shouting out the good news.
She didn't even get the sailor's name.
The Herbert Avenue gang was in the Hembergers' spacious yard, tossing a football around, and swapping tales of downing enormous quantities of turkey and trimmings and pie -- especially pie.
Many of us had big brothers fighting in the Great War, kids who had signed up the moment they turned 18, without waiting for a draft notice. One of the big brothers was "Bud" Dougherty. He had been serving aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet when it went down in 1942 in the Battle of Santa Cruz. He hadn't been heard from since and was presumed killed in action.
Bud and the Hembergers' big brother, "Speed," had been stars on an American Legion Junior baseball team that went to the national finals in Pennsylvania in 1940. They were neighborhood heroes even before they went off to war. Now they were gods.
We didn't talk much about Bud when his little brother was around. He was a sensitive boy, the youngest of the Herbert Avenue gang, and the hurt in his heart was too enormous to violate.
We talked football -- Ohio State, mostly, and the Western Hills high school team we all aspired to play for one day .
Whence cometh a wailing and shouting from up the hill, toward the street car stop.
At first it was incomprehensible but as it came closer we could make out: "He's alive! Bud's alive."
It was Bud Daugherty's sister, racing down the Herbert Avenue hill, blubbering and bellowing, "Bud's alive!"
The residents of Herbert Avenue poured into the street. They surrounded Rose Daugherty and hugged her until she caught her breath. She was heading home from work on the Westwood Avenue street car when a sailor with lots of battle ribbons took the seat beside her. "Do you know where Herbert Avenue is?" he asked. "I live there," she said. "Get off when I do."
"I've got to see a shipmate's family on Herbert Avenue," he said. "Tell them their son is OK. He was in a coma for months after his ship went down. When he came out of it, I was in the bed next to him. 'Tell my family I'm OK,' he said, when he found out I was going home."
"What was his ship?" Rose asked.
"The Hornet," the sailor said.
Through tears of disbelief she gasped, "And the sailor's name?"
"Daugherty," the young man said. "Bud Daugherty."
At that moment the streetcar came to a halt at the Herbert Avenue safety island.
Rose began her sprint down the street, shouting out the good news.
She didn't even get the sailor's name.
10 Million Child-Killers
Don't you just love our government's propensity for euphemism?
We're not a perpetual war machine; we're "a global provider of security."
The phrase was repeatedly invoked this week to defend the U.S. government's decision, announced Tuesday by the State Department, not to join a global treaty banning landmines.
The treaty prohibits the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of landmines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.
The signatories to the treaty will convene this weekend in Colombia to review its terms and compliance records. The United States will send "observers" to the conference, a State Department spokesman said, because "as a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there."
That "interest" is a U.S. stockpile of 10 million such weapons and a grim determination to retain its option to use them as it pleases. "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," the spokesman said.
Just who the hell are these "friends and allies," I wonder? All but one NATO nation, and most of our other allies, are parties to the treaty. If most of our allies are pledged not to use the damned things, why are we hoarding 10 million of them?
These antipersonnel devices (another government euphemism) are in fact child-killers. Once planted, the lethal gizmos stay in place long after the conflict that impelled their use has ended -- whereupon civilians step on them and get fragged. Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.
Our eloquent President speaks grandiosely about leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons -- a worthy, but impractical, dream at this time. But the many small, practical steps toward a more peaceful world, the things he could do right now with the stroke of a pen, go undone.
Things like signing the landmine treaty.
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."
You can't hide that behind a euphemism.
We're not a perpetual war machine; we're "a global provider of security."
The phrase was repeatedly invoked this week to defend the U.S. government's decision, announced Tuesday by the State Department, not to join a global treaty banning landmines.
The treaty prohibits the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of landmines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.
The signatories to the treaty will convene this weekend in Colombia to review its terms and compliance records. The United States will send "observers" to the conference, a State Department spokesman said, because "as a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there."
That "interest" is a U.S. stockpile of 10 million such weapons and a grim determination to retain its option to use them as it pleases. "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," the spokesman said.
Just who the hell are these "friends and allies," I wonder? All but one NATO nation, and most of our other allies, are parties to the treaty. If most of our allies are pledged not to use the damned things, why are we hoarding 10 million of them?
These antipersonnel devices (another government euphemism) are in fact child-killers. Once planted, the lethal gizmos stay in place long after the conflict that impelled their use has ended -- whereupon civilians step on them and get fragged. Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.
Our eloquent President speaks grandiosely about leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons -- a worthy, but impractical, dream at this time. But the many small, practical steps toward a more peaceful world, the things he could do right now with the stroke of a pen, go undone.
Things like signing the landmine treaty.
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."
You can't hide that behind a euphemism.
Obama's Sinai
As I contemplate, and dread, the likely announcement within days that President Obama will send another 32,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan, an improbable memory popped into my head. It was one of the great newswpaper ledes I have ever read, published in the New York Times when Albert Einstein returned to Princeton from a long sabbatical to think about the Holy Grail of his late career, a unified field theory.
"Albert Einstein," the Times said, "returned today from his scientific Sinai with a new set of laws for the cosmos."
Obama has been atop his own Sinai lately, perhaps suffering a sort of Gethsemane as well, thinking about the thorniest of his inherited problems, the Middle East wars. One hopes against hope that when he returns, his tablet will contain a single law: Thou shalt not kill.
He should announce that he is directing his generals to draw up a plan for withdrawal "with deliberate speed" from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he should dismiss Stanley McChrystal from the group of generals ordered to do so.
Americans are well aware of the arguments for ending our involvements there.
A former tennis partner wrote to me recently: "A million dollars per troop per year! Two-thirds of Afghans illiterate! And we're going to build a nation in 10 years? Give me a break! I read an article a few months ago discussing how we could get some of the Muslim nations to take up the fight there. Not being infidels they are not resented and could do a better job."
That's a plan, negotiated through the United Nations, that I have advocated, too, but as far as I can tell, the notion doesn't exist in the high command that advises the President.
I have come to believe that two forces in the United States have become so powerful that not even a President, not even a very popular President, which Obama once was, can resist them.
One is the oligarchy of finance, a cartel of Wall Street bankers and super-rich mega- corporations whose wealth is based in oil or defense or both.
The other is the military establishment, the Pentagon generals and the civilian hawks from the defense industries.
Ray McGovern, whom I consider the most authoritative voice now writing about politico-military affairs and national security, reminds us, however, that there has been, in recent history, one President who stood up to them: John F. Kennedy.
A month before his assassination, according to McGovern,"during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, 'I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win.'
A majority of his own National Security Council was opposed to withdrawal. McGovern recalls that Kennedy sent Marine Commandant Gen. David M. Shoup, “to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him.” Shoup told the President:
McGovern writes that, "Kennedy concluded there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.
"Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before he was slain. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:
"'I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are doing the fighting.
""There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.'"
Nor is Iraq. Nor is Afghanistan.
"Albert Einstein," the Times said, "returned today from his scientific Sinai with a new set of laws for the cosmos."
Obama has been atop his own Sinai lately, perhaps suffering a sort of Gethsemane as well, thinking about the thorniest of his inherited problems, the Middle East wars. One hopes against hope that when he returns, his tablet will contain a single law: Thou shalt not kill.
He should announce that he is directing his generals to draw up a plan for withdrawal "with deliberate speed" from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he should dismiss Stanley McChrystal from the group of generals ordered to do so.
Americans are well aware of the arguments for ending our involvements there.
A former tennis partner wrote to me recently: "A million dollars per troop per year! Two-thirds of Afghans illiterate! And we're going to build a nation in 10 years? Give me a break! I read an article a few months ago discussing how we could get some of the Muslim nations to take up the fight there. Not being infidels they are not resented and could do a better job."
That's a plan, negotiated through the United Nations, that I have advocated, too, but as far as I can tell, the notion doesn't exist in the high command that advises the President.
I have come to believe that two forces in the United States have become so powerful that not even a President, not even a very popular President, which Obama once was, can resist them.
One is the oligarchy of finance, a cartel of Wall Street bankers and super-rich mega- corporations whose wealth is based in oil or defense or both.
The other is the military establishment, the Pentagon generals and the civilian hawks from the defense industries.
Ray McGovern, whom I consider the most authoritative voice now writing about politico-military affairs and national security, reminds us, however, that there has been, in recent history, one President who stood up to them: John F. Kennedy.
A month before his assassination, according to McGovern,"during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, 'I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win.'
A majority of his own National Security Council was opposed to withdrawal. McGovern recalls that Kennedy sent Marine Commandant Gen. David M. Shoup, “to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him.” Shoup told the President:
“Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control.”
McGovern writes that, "Kennedy concluded there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.
"Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before he was slain. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:
"'I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are doing the fighting.
""There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.'"
Nor is Iraq. Nor is Afghanistan.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
It's Only Money
China -- actually a single Chinese very high roller -- has bought the Hummer SUV brand for a paltry $150 million.
I'd say "Good riddance" except for the fact that the buyer says he will introduce a new model -- the H4 -- that will get 25 or more miles per gallon of gasoline. Why couldn't GM have done that?
Don't ask.
Hummer's new owner is Suolang Duoji, a private entrepreneur who will personally hold 20 percent of the company. The other 80 per cent will belong to Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which is owned by Sichuan Huatong Investment Holding Co, Ltd, which is owned by Sualong Duoji.
This sort of thing smacks of one of our superbanks, the too big to fail outfits that we bailed out so they could continue to run the country by pulling the strings on Tim Geithner and Barack Obama.
And sure enough, Morgan Stanley is a financial adviser to GM during its restructuring. Morgan Stanley acknowledges receiving $10 billion in the first go-around of TARP (i.e., bailout) funds.
Morgan Stanley's "advice" to GM seems to have been, "Give away the store."
We gave 'em $10 billion for this?
I'd say "Good riddance" except for the fact that the buyer says he will introduce a new model -- the H4 -- that will get 25 or more miles per gallon of gasoline. Why couldn't GM have done that?
Don't ask.
Hummer's new owner is Suolang Duoji, a private entrepreneur who will personally hold 20 percent of the company. The other 80 per cent will belong to Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which is owned by Sichuan Huatong Investment Holding Co, Ltd, which is owned by Sualong Duoji.
This sort of thing smacks of one of our superbanks, the too big to fail outfits that we bailed out so they could continue to run the country by pulling the strings on Tim Geithner and Barack Obama.
And sure enough, Morgan Stanley is a financial adviser to GM during its restructuring. Morgan Stanley acknowledges receiving $10 billion in the first go-around of TARP (i.e., bailout) funds.
Morgan Stanley's "advice" to GM seems to have been, "Give away the store."
We gave 'em $10 billion for this?
Monday, November 23, 2009
Dr. Kidglove and the General
Ray McGovern, the former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer who has been exposing the flaws of our foreign policy for many years now, has called for President Obama to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal for insubordination. He's the NATo commander in Afghanistan who publicly insulted Vice President Biden and defied President Obama's policy initiatives in a speech in London.
McGovern is absolutely right.
McGovern recalled Harry Truman's firing of a far more experienced, far more respected and far more arrogant general -- Douglas MacArthur -- during the Korean war. Good precedent.
I'd like to see it happen again because (1) McChrystal should be fired and (2) it would be wonderful comic relief to see the Far Right go berserk.
In the Truman-MacArthur clash, Col. Robert Rutherford (Bertie) McCormick, owner and publisher of the right-wing Chicago Tribune, personally wrote a Page One editorial entitled, "Impeach Truman." The publisher called the President "addle-pated."
Harsh talk at the time, but tame compared to what would happen at, say, Fox Faux News or the editorial page offices of the Wall Street Urinal if Obama emulated Truman and did the right thing.
Unfortunately, it's a comedy we won't get to watch. Dr. Kidglove will give the general at least some of the troops he wants and we'll remain mired in another costly war we can't win.
McChrystal said the policy Biden was advocating for Afghanistan would lead to "Chaos-istan." He went on to say: "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support." That kind of talk is a NonoStan.
Here's Ray McGovern:
"No more slaps on the wrist for Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In the Truman-McArthur showdown nearly six decades ago, MacArthur had been playing a back-channel game to win the support of . . . Republican congressmen to widen the Korean war.
"Today, Gen. McChrystal is conducting a subtler but equally insubordinate campaign for wider war in Afghanistan, with the backing of CENTCOM commander David Petraeus. It is now even clearer in retrospect that the President should not have appointed McChrystal in the first place, given what was already known of his role in covering up the killing of football star Pat Tillman and condoning the torture practices by troops under McChrystal's earlier command in Iraq.
(In the London speech) "he was clearly out of line in going public at so sensitive a time. Senior generals know better than to do that; there is little doubt his outspokenness was deliberate. McChrystal should meet the same fate as McArthur, and “silently steal away.” Obama should have taken the telegenic general to the woodshed instead of inviting him to confer quietly on Air Force One.
"McChrystal's continuing defiance shines through in the gratuitous remarks by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at a NATO meeting on Nov. 17 in Edinburgh. Siding clearly with McChrystal, Petraeus, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen in the intense debate over sending more forces to Afghanistan, Rasmussen blithely announced that NATO countries will soon order “substantially more forces” there.
"As Denmark's Prime Minister (2001-2009), Anders Fogh Rasmussen was one of George W. Bush's most sycophantic supporters—particularly when it came to the war on Iraq. Although amply warned by Danish intelligence officers of the deceptive nature of the U.S. case for war, he shunned them and outdid himself cheerleading for war. He told the Danish Parliament:
'Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is not something we just believe. We know.'
"As NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen told CBS News, 'I think that Gen. McChrystal shares the same goal I do.'"
McGovern reports that Obama had been warned about Rasmussen even before he moved into the Oval office. Once again he reacted as Dr. Kidglove— "a highly educated, well-spoken wuss on many key issues," as McGovern put it. Obama "did not lift a finger to prevent Rasmussen from becoming NATO Secretary General."
The President has to live with the Rasmussen mistake. But he need not live with the insubordinate Gen. McChrystal.
He should can the man, if only to trigger a re-issue of Gene Autry's recording of "Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away."
McGovern is absolutely right.
McGovern recalled Harry Truman's firing of a far more experienced, far more respected and far more arrogant general -- Douglas MacArthur -- during the Korean war. Good precedent.
I'd like to see it happen again because (1) McChrystal should be fired and (2) it would be wonderful comic relief to see the Far Right go berserk.
In the Truman-MacArthur clash, Col. Robert Rutherford (Bertie) McCormick, owner and publisher of the right-wing Chicago Tribune, personally wrote a Page One editorial entitled, "Impeach Truman." The publisher called the President "addle-pated."
Harsh talk at the time, but tame compared to what would happen at, say, Fox Faux News or the editorial page offices of the Wall Street Urinal if Obama emulated Truman and did the right thing.
Unfortunately, it's a comedy we won't get to watch. Dr. Kidglove will give the general at least some of the troops he wants and we'll remain mired in another costly war we can't win.
McChrystal said the policy Biden was advocating for Afghanistan would lead to "Chaos-istan." He went on to say: "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support." That kind of talk is a NonoStan.
Here's Ray McGovern:
"No more slaps on the wrist for Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In the Truman-McArthur showdown nearly six decades ago, MacArthur had been playing a back-channel game to win the support of . . . Republican congressmen to widen the Korean war.
"Today, Gen. McChrystal is conducting a subtler but equally insubordinate campaign for wider war in Afghanistan, with the backing of CENTCOM commander David Petraeus. It is now even clearer in retrospect that the President should not have appointed McChrystal in the first place, given what was already known of his role in covering up the killing of football star Pat Tillman and condoning the torture practices by troops under McChrystal's earlier command in Iraq.
(In the London speech) "he was clearly out of line in going public at so sensitive a time. Senior generals know better than to do that; there is little doubt his outspokenness was deliberate. McChrystal should meet the same fate as McArthur, and “silently steal away.” Obama should have taken the telegenic general to the woodshed instead of inviting him to confer quietly on Air Force One.
"McChrystal's continuing defiance shines through in the gratuitous remarks by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at a NATO meeting on Nov. 17 in Edinburgh. Siding clearly with McChrystal, Petraeus, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen in the intense debate over sending more forces to Afghanistan, Rasmussen blithely announced that NATO countries will soon order “substantially more forces” there.
"As Denmark's Prime Minister (2001-2009), Anders Fogh Rasmussen was one of George W. Bush's most sycophantic supporters—particularly when it came to the war on Iraq. Although amply warned by Danish intelligence officers of the deceptive nature of the U.S. case for war, he shunned them and outdid himself cheerleading for war. He told the Danish Parliament:
'Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is not something we just believe. We know.'
"As NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen told CBS News, 'I think that Gen. McChrystal shares the same goal I do.'"
McGovern reports that Obama had been warned about Rasmussen even before he moved into the Oval office. Once again he reacted as Dr. Kidglove— "a highly educated, well-spoken wuss on many key issues," as McGovern put it. Obama "did not lift a finger to prevent Rasmussen from becoming NATO Secretary General."
The President has to live with the Rasmussen mistake. But he need not live with the insubordinate Gen. McChrystal.
He should can the man, if only to trigger a re-issue of Gene Autry's recording of "Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away."
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Rubber Stamping
Back in the day when city rooms had butts on the floor, even the women reporters cussed like drill sergeants, and you could believe a great deal of what you read in almost any newspaper, public relations people thought it would enhance the chance of getting their press releases published if they delivered them in person.
If a flack came in with a handout when my friend Tom Houston was running the Detroit Free Press city desk, Tom would accept the manuscript, ceremoniously open a desk drawer, take out a rubber stamp, press it on an ink pad and stamp the paper "WGAS."
He'd nod to the flack and say, "Take care of it right away."
Never mind that the initials meant "Who gives a shit?"
Can we please put WGAS stamps on:
Anything more about Sarah Palin, her stupid book, her idiotically named kids or her cockeyed views?
Jock talkers' views on Bill Belicheck's decision to go for it on fourth and two?
Any celebrity's latest diet?
Why Lou Dobbs left whatever worthless network he left, where he's going (if anywhere) and his political ambitions (if any)?
What Joe Lieberman says -- about anything?
Sports writing that calls rebounds "boards," asserts that a team "looks to" a particular outcome or refers to "student athletes" without quotation marks?
Any so-called news story that containes the phrase "moderate Democrat" and the names Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana or Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas? They're as moderate as cottonmouths in a swimmin' hole.
Any quotation of the mouthings of Mitch McConnell? Who writes this guy's lies for him? Who taught him to deliver them with a straight face?
The punditry of Charles Krauthammer?
If a flack came in with a handout when my friend Tom Houston was running the Detroit Free Press city desk, Tom would accept the manuscript, ceremoniously open a desk drawer, take out a rubber stamp, press it on an ink pad and stamp the paper "WGAS."
He'd nod to the flack and say, "Take care of it right away."
Never mind that the initials meant "Who gives a shit?"
Can we please put WGAS stamps on:
Anything more about Sarah Palin, her stupid book, her idiotically named kids or her cockeyed views?
Jock talkers' views on Bill Belicheck's decision to go for it on fourth and two?
Any celebrity's latest diet?
Why Lou Dobbs left whatever worthless network he left, where he's going (if anywhere) and his political ambitions (if any)?
What Joe Lieberman says -- about anything?
Sports writing that calls rebounds "boards," asserts that a team "looks to" a particular outcome or refers to "student athletes" without quotation marks?
Any so-called news story that containes the phrase "moderate Democrat" and the names Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana or Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas? They're as moderate as cottonmouths in a swimmin' hole.
Any quotation of the mouthings of Mitch McConnell? Who writes this guy's lies for him? Who taught him to deliver them with a straight face?
The punditry of Charles Krauthammer?
Tax Political Religionists
It is high time to rescind federal tax exemptions for the Roman Catholic church and other religious groups that scorn the constitutionally ordained separation of church and state.
The Roman church's high-handed interference in secular affairs is unrelenting and unlawful. Consider the recent revelation that the top bishop in Rhode Island has instructed his priests not to give communion to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) because he supports keeping government out of the private realm wherein women make decisions about their reproductive health. Kennedy said the bishop told him "that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I've taken as a public official," particularly on abortion.
During the 2008 presidential election, voters in heavily Catholic southern New Mexico were bombarded with robo-calls from "Bishop Ramirez" telling them that Catholics in good conscience could not vote for any candidate (read Obama) who supported a woman's right to choose.
The anti-woman Stupak amendment to the health care bill in the house -- which prohibits health insurance payments for abortion -- was inserted at the insistence of the powerful Roman Catholic bishops' national organization, in alliance with other powerful fundamentalist religion groups.
These blatant intrusions into secular affairs must be punished under the law. The Roman church and its fundamentalist allies, as they persist in violating the law that gives them exemptions from taxation, must be made to pay the appropriate penalty: loss of those exemptions.
The religious lobby has become too powerful in our political system and must be curbed, along with the military-industrial lobby, the gun lobby and all the other lobbies that send overpaid sleazes in designer suits into every legislative office in Washington with bags of money and veiled threats.
The founding fathers intended ours to be a secular government representing "we the people." Let's begin to restore that ideal.
The Roman church's high-handed interference in secular affairs is unrelenting and unlawful. Consider the recent revelation that the top bishop in Rhode Island has instructed his priests not to give communion to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) because he supports keeping government out of the private realm wherein women make decisions about their reproductive health. Kennedy said the bishop told him "that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I've taken as a public official," particularly on abortion.
During the 2008 presidential election, voters in heavily Catholic southern New Mexico were bombarded with robo-calls from "Bishop Ramirez" telling them that Catholics in good conscience could not vote for any candidate (read Obama) who supported a woman's right to choose.
The anti-woman Stupak amendment to the health care bill in the house -- which prohibits health insurance payments for abortion -- was inserted at the insistence of the powerful Roman Catholic bishops' national organization, in alliance with other powerful fundamentalist religion groups.
These blatant intrusions into secular affairs must be punished under the law. The Roman church and its fundamentalist allies, as they persist in violating the law that gives them exemptions from taxation, must be made to pay the appropriate penalty: loss of those exemptions.
The religious lobby has become too powerful in our political system and must be curbed, along with the military-industrial lobby, the gun lobby and all the other lobbies that send overpaid sleazes in designer suits into every legislative office in Washington with bags of money and veiled threats.
The founding fathers intended ours to be a secular government representing "we the people." Let's begin to restore that ideal.
Friday, November 20, 2009
A Contrarian Victory
Ron Paul, the nominally Republican congressman from Texas, is sui generis in American politics.
After nine years during which bipartisanship utterly disappeared from our government, Rep. Paul revived it yesterday in stunning fashion.
Paul, who is more libertarian than Republican, teamed with a Democrat, Alan Grayson of Florida, to sponsor an amendment to the sweeping financial overhaul legislation that aims to regulate the industry for systemic risks. It subjects the Federal Reserve to greatly intensified audits and oversight. The amendment advanced on a 43-26 vote of the House Financial Services Committee with both Democratic and Republican support. The vote reflected the widespread and bipartisan populist anger at the central bank's policy decisions and secretive methods of operation.
It was also a sharp rebuke of the Obama administation's economic policies and especially of its top two financial regulators, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council director Larry Summers.
Summers and Geithner were among President Obama's very first appointments, and among his very worst. The debate in the financial services committee gave Republicans an opening to go after Geithner's hide with particular fervor, even demanding that he be fired from the treasury post.
It stung. Geithner snapped back at them that the country's financial mess was "inherited." What hypocrisy! Sure it was "inherited" -- from a gang of Wall Street thugs including then president of the New York Federal Reserve Timothy Geithner.
At the New York Fed he operated in the very atmosphere of clubby secrecy that the Paul-Grayson amendment will terminate. It would allow Congress to order audits of all the Fed's lending programs as well as of its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates.
I hope the Paul-Grayson Odd Couple keep the pressure on this administration for all of its economic policy follies. The worst of them is what former New York Gov. Elliott Spitzer called "continuity." He elaborated:
"They have embraced the Bush Administration view that if you solve the problem of big banks everything else flows from that. They are wrong. Too big to fail is too big. They don't get it. The only two people I know who don't appreciate that are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Henry Kaufman, Mervyn King -- every major academic has said, we must get rid of too big to fail."
Public exposure of which financial institutions get big bucks from the Fed will put a significant dart in Too Big to Fail.
Perhaps the Odd Couple have a few more darts in their quiver. I hope so.
After nine years during which bipartisanship utterly disappeared from our government, Rep. Paul revived it yesterday in stunning fashion.
Paul, who is more libertarian than Republican, teamed with a Democrat, Alan Grayson of Florida, to sponsor an amendment to the sweeping financial overhaul legislation that aims to regulate the industry for systemic risks. It subjects the Federal Reserve to greatly intensified audits and oversight. The amendment advanced on a 43-26 vote of the House Financial Services Committee with both Democratic and Republican support. The vote reflected the widespread and bipartisan populist anger at the central bank's policy decisions and secretive methods of operation.
It was also a sharp rebuke of the Obama administation's economic policies and especially of its top two financial regulators, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council director Larry Summers.
Summers and Geithner were among President Obama's very first appointments, and among his very worst. The debate in the financial services committee gave Republicans an opening to go after Geithner's hide with particular fervor, even demanding that he be fired from the treasury post.
It stung. Geithner snapped back at them that the country's financial mess was "inherited." What hypocrisy! Sure it was "inherited" -- from a gang of Wall Street thugs including then president of the New York Federal Reserve Timothy Geithner.
At the New York Fed he operated in the very atmosphere of clubby secrecy that the Paul-Grayson amendment will terminate. It would allow Congress to order audits of all the Fed's lending programs as well as of its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates.
I hope the Paul-Grayson Odd Couple keep the pressure on this administration for all of its economic policy follies. The worst of them is what former New York Gov. Elliott Spitzer called "continuity." He elaborated:
"They have embraced the Bush Administration view that if you solve the problem of big banks everything else flows from that. They are wrong. Too big to fail is too big. They don't get it. The only two people I know who don't appreciate that are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Henry Kaufman, Mervyn King -- every major academic has said, we must get rid of too big to fail."
Public exposure of which financial institutions get big bucks from the Fed will put a significant dart in Too Big to Fail.
Perhaps the Odd Couple have a few more darts in their quiver. I hope so.
Monday, November 16, 2009
What's Our Line?
America's business was business when Calvin Coolidge first uttered his famous phrase. Now, however, America's business is war.
Although Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of change, he has done nothing to change that fundamental fact about the United States.
Why, in a nation that can work itself into a frenzy over a celebrity's breast popping out of her costume at halftime of a football game, is there not a tsunami of anger at this fundamental fact?
Why can a blathering ignoramus on a TV show rally thousands to protest -- protest! -- our government providing health care to its citizens, whereas few voices are raised in alarm, let alone anger, at the squandering of our human and monetary resources on preemptive wars we cannot win?
Born in the violence of armed revolution, ours is a national history steeped in violence. We love it. We love our guns. We love our gory movies and the tough guys portrayed in them. We love our war slogans and our flag-waving notions of patriotism. We love the idea that we are the best, bravest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth -- and if you don't believe that we mean well, we'll drop a few bombs on you and force peace down your throats.
Chris Hedges put it well in a piece entitled, "Quit Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad."
"Violence," he wrote, "is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.
"The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.
"The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day-about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population. . .There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don't have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin."
As a people, we choose to ignore such grim truths. Too many of us live in communities where the local economy is dependent upon the nearby military base or DoD installation. Too many of our colleges and universities have become part of the Military Industrial Complex, dependent upon government defense contracts for too much of their budgets. Too many of us believe that the wars we wage -- whether openly in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait or Afghaqnistan -- or clandestinely, virtually all around the world, somehow are necessary to preserve our freedoms. Yet we willingly forfeit our most basic freedoms in the oxymoronic belief that doing so makes us safer. The president who campaigned for change has done nothing to restore those freedoms, either; has, in fact, fought to continue the very policies of his predecessor that took them away from us.
Hedges again:
"There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about 'service.' But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality."
It is profitbale only for those who are in the business of war, and whose wealth is so powerful that even those in the highest offices of the land do their bidding. Never mind that we have exported most of our manufacturing jobs to other countries where workers are paid less; we dare not dismantle our enormous war machine because we'd lose too many jobs. We ignore the studies that demonstrate that a billion dollars invested in health, mass transit, home construction, education or tax cuts for personal consumption produce up to two and one-third times the number of jobs as the same billion spent on defense.
We justify unjustifiable wars by asserting that they will end our dependence on foreign oil, even as our military exponentially increases the petroleum consumption that already is greater than the consumption of the entire Chinese nation.
None of this makes us mad. After all, war is just business as usual.
Although Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of change, he has done nothing to change that fundamental fact about the United States.
Why, in a nation that can work itself into a frenzy over a celebrity's breast popping out of her costume at halftime of a football game, is there not a tsunami of anger at this fundamental fact?
Why can a blathering ignoramus on a TV show rally thousands to protest -- protest! -- our government providing health care to its citizens, whereas few voices are raised in alarm, let alone anger, at the squandering of our human and monetary resources on preemptive wars we cannot win?
Born in the violence of armed revolution, ours is a national history steeped in violence. We love it. We love our guns. We love our gory movies and the tough guys portrayed in them. We love our war slogans and our flag-waving notions of patriotism. We love the idea that we are the best, bravest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth -- and if you don't believe that we mean well, we'll drop a few bombs on you and force peace down your throats.
Chris Hedges put it well in a piece entitled, "Quit Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad."
"Violence," he wrote, "is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.
"The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.
"The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day-about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population. . .There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don't have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin."
As a people, we choose to ignore such grim truths. Too many of us live in communities where the local economy is dependent upon the nearby military base or DoD installation. Too many of our colleges and universities have become part of the Military Industrial Complex, dependent upon government defense contracts for too much of their budgets. Too many of us believe that the wars we wage -- whether openly in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait or Afghaqnistan -- or clandestinely, virtually all around the world, somehow are necessary to preserve our freedoms. Yet we willingly forfeit our most basic freedoms in the oxymoronic belief that doing so makes us safer. The president who campaigned for change has done nothing to restore those freedoms, either; has, in fact, fought to continue the very policies of his predecessor that took them away from us.
Hedges again:
"There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about 'service.' But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality."
It is profitbale only for those who are in the business of war, and whose wealth is so powerful that even those in the highest offices of the land do their bidding. Never mind that we have exported most of our manufacturing jobs to other countries where workers are paid less; we dare not dismantle our enormous war machine because we'd lose too many jobs. We ignore the studies that demonstrate that a billion dollars invested in health, mass transit, home construction, education or tax cuts for personal consumption produce up to two and one-third times the number of jobs as the same billion spent on defense.
We justify unjustifiable wars by asserting that they will end our dependence on foreign oil, even as our military exponentially increases the petroleum consumption that already is greater than the consumption of the entire Chinese nation.
None of this makes us mad. After all, war is just business as usual.
Like It is, As It Were
When did it become de rigueur to apologize for saying, "I told you so" -- if, in fact, one did tell you so? My parents said it to me often and they never apologized, always nursing the usually futile hope that one fine day I would wake up and heed their warnings about wrong and ill-advised ventures.
The time has come for many of us -- pre-eminently Dennis J. Kucinich, the most qualified person never to be seriously considered for the Presidency -- to say, unapologetically, "I told you so."
It was the oil, stupid. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, your sons and daughters bled and died in Iraq for oil.
Every week, when we gathered for Peace and marched silently around the federal building, one or more someones in the group carried a sign saying, "No war for oil." You spat on us, mooned us and flashed middle fingers at us. When the war for oil actually began you pasted little flags and "Support Our Troops" ribbons on your SUVs and called us traitors.
You had to believe that your sons and daughters were being sent abroad to protect us from terrorists, to bring democracy to the poor, stupid people of the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein had a great store of WMDs ready to rain upon us. "If we don't fight 'em there," you told us, "we'll have to fight 'em here." You would not, could not, believe that your kids were fighting and dying over there so that a handful of Americans stakeholders in megacorporations could become filthy rich on Iraqi oil.
Now the truth is seeping out.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador and son of the respected economist John Kenneth Galbraith, brought his clout and his membership in the Democratic party to an alliance with the Bush administration hawks to promote the war with Iraq. "It is time to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power," he prattled in the influential op-ed opages of the New York Times. "Regime change is not an end in itself but a means to an end."
When we had occupied the country, fetched Hussein from his hole in the ground and Mr. Bush had declared fatuously, "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Galbraith became a key member of the commission that crafted our puppet government in Iraq and drafted its constitution. He took good care of the Kurds, with whom he had a long history of profitable relationships.
Now the Times tells us, in another of its sorry sequence of "oopses" about its own sorry role in promoting this sorriest of American war initiatives, Mr. Galbraith did all these things while quietly building a major stake in a Norwegian oil company whose Kurdish oil rights will net Mr. Galbraith a profit of more than 100 million dollars.
But that's peanuts in the Iraq oil takeover game.
Remember the "leadership" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in forming the "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq? His own intelligence people warned him that U.S. intelligence was being "cooked to fit the policy" of going to war under whatever justification could be made to fly. But Blair risked scathing rebuke in Commons to take Britain into that war. Blair is now a fat cat in the Carlyle Group, the shadowy super-investment cartel with staggering oil interests all over the globe. British Petroleum, which owned him as PM, won the first of the enormous contracts to exploit Iraqi oil that are being awarded by our puppet government there.
Then there's our own Exxon-Mobil, whose profits during the economic meltdown that sent millions of Americans into poverty and homelessness were greater than any ever made by a United States corporation. Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell recently won the right to develop one of Iraq's most prized oil fields, the West Qurna Stage 1 field. How many Americans died to liberate that piece of the Middle East?
There are many more lucrative oil contracts to be awarded in Iraq. Virtually every key member of the two Bush Administrations has large personal holdings in Carlyle, Haliburton, big oil companies or their major suppliers.
Timmy Russert, who played the role of "journalist" on a TV entertainment called "Meet the Press," was a favorite in the Bush White House. Whenever the administration wanted to plant a particularly smelly piece of bullshit, a toady would call Timmy Titmouse and arrange for someone in the administration to appear on "Meet the Press" to answer planted softball questions.
As evidence of his good conscience, Timmy occasionally brought a Democrat onto his TV show. He invited Kucinich in February of 2003.
Quoting from the transcript of that show:
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you made a very strong charge against the administration and let me show you what you said on January 19. "Why is the Administration targeting Iraq? Oil." What do you base that on?
REP. KUCINICH: I base that on the fact that there is $5 trillion worth of oil above and in the ground in Iraq, that individuals involved in the administration have been involved in the oil industry, that the oil industry certainly would benefit from having the administration control Iraq, and that the fact is that, since no other case has been made to go to war against Iraq, for this nation to go to war against Iraq, oil represents the strongest incentive."
He told you so.
The time has come for many of us -- pre-eminently Dennis J. Kucinich, the most qualified person never to be seriously considered for the Presidency -- to say, unapologetically, "I told you so."
It was the oil, stupid. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, your sons and daughters bled and died in Iraq for oil.
Every week, when we gathered for Peace and marched silently around the federal building, one or more someones in the group carried a sign saying, "No war for oil." You spat on us, mooned us and flashed middle fingers at us. When the war for oil actually began you pasted little flags and "Support Our Troops" ribbons on your SUVs and called us traitors.
You had to believe that your sons and daughters were being sent abroad to protect us from terrorists, to bring democracy to the poor, stupid people of the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein had a great store of WMDs ready to rain upon us. "If we don't fight 'em there," you told us, "we'll have to fight 'em here." You would not, could not, believe that your kids were fighting and dying over there so that a handful of Americans stakeholders in megacorporations could become filthy rich on Iraqi oil.
Now the truth is seeping out.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador and son of the respected economist John Kenneth Galbraith, brought his clout and his membership in the Democratic party to an alliance with the Bush administration hawks to promote the war with Iraq. "It is time to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power," he prattled in the influential op-ed opages of the New York Times. "Regime change is not an end in itself but a means to an end."
When we had occupied the country, fetched Hussein from his hole in the ground and Mr. Bush had declared fatuously, "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Galbraith became a key member of the commission that crafted our puppet government in Iraq and drafted its constitution. He took good care of the Kurds, with whom he had a long history of profitable relationships.
Now the Times tells us, in another of its sorry sequence of "oopses" about its own sorry role in promoting this sorriest of American war initiatives, Mr. Galbraith did all these things while quietly building a major stake in a Norwegian oil company whose Kurdish oil rights will net Mr. Galbraith a profit of more than 100 million dollars.
But that's peanuts in the Iraq oil takeover game.
Remember the "leadership" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in forming the "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq? His own intelligence people warned him that U.S. intelligence was being "cooked to fit the policy" of going to war under whatever justification could be made to fly. But Blair risked scathing rebuke in Commons to take Britain into that war. Blair is now a fat cat in the Carlyle Group, the shadowy super-investment cartel with staggering oil interests all over the globe. British Petroleum, which owned him as PM, won the first of the enormous contracts to exploit Iraqi oil that are being awarded by our puppet government there.
Then there's our own Exxon-Mobil, whose profits during the economic meltdown that sent millions of Americans into poverty and homelessness were greater than any ever made by a United States corporation. Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell recently won the right to develop one of Iraq's most prized oil fields, the West Qurna Stage 1 field. How many Americans died to liberate that piece of the Middle East?
There are many more lucrative oil contracts to be awarded in Iraq. Virtually every key member of the two Bush Administrations has large personal holdings in Carlyle, Haliburton, big oil companies or their major suppliers.
Timmy Russert, who played the role of "journalist" on a TV entertainment called "Meet the Press," was a favorite in the Bush White House. Whenever the administration wanted to plant a particularly smelly piece of bullshit, a toady would call Timmy Titmouse and arrange for someone in the administration to appear on "Meet the Press" to answer planted softball questions.
As evidence of his good conscience, Timmy occasionally brought a Democrat onto his TV show. He invited Kucinich in February of 2003.
Quoting from the transcript of that show:
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you made a very strong charge against the administration and let me show you what you said on January 19. "Why is the Administration targeting Iraq? Oil." What do you base that on?
REP. KUCINICH: I base that on the fact that there is $5 trillion worth of oil above and in the ground in Iraq, that individuals involved in the administration have been involved in the oil industry, that the oil industry certainly would benefit from having the administration control Iraq, and that the fact is that, since no other case has been made to go to war against Iraq, for this nation to go to war against Iraq, oil represents the strongest incentive."
He told you so.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Back to Reality
I returned from a recent trip to a few favorite places feeling a slight sense of optimism about the state of the nation. I considered taking two aspirins and going to bed, but chose instead a better antidote: I read the letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in the local paper.
There is no better place to gain appreciation of the appalling collective ignorance of Americans. Here you find, repeated as Holy Writ, the craziest of the utterings of the familiar right-wing loonies -- people who still believe there are WMDs in Iraq (they're just very well hidden), Democrats in Washington mean to create death panels to kill grandma, and legislation to clean up our air and water is just a thinly-disguised plot to raise our taxes and use the money to provide abortions for wanton harlots who are in the country illegally.
Our congressman, a nominal Democrat who campaigned as a champion of health care for all and women's right to make their own decisions about reproductive health, won high praise from many letter-writers for voting for the anti-abortion amendment to the House health care bill, then voting against the bill itself. "I was voting for what my constituents wanted," he explained.
Translation: All the screaming about death panels, socialized medicine, exorbitant taxes and denial of choice -- lies, every one -- worked.
Blatant lies and distortions succeed as a political tactic only when the audience to whom they are directed is stupid enough to accept them on face value.
Thus do the carefully contrived "talking points" of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture -- right wing-funded propaganda institutes all -- turn up as Vox Populi in the pages of our local rag.
To quote Lewis Lapham:
"The quickening construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms - the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education - and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity."
Or Gore Vidal:
"Does anyone care what Americans think? They're the worst-educated people in the First World. They don't have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke."
And the fools don't even realize they're being used.
There is no better place to gain appreciation of the appalling collective ignorance of Americans. Here you find, repeated as Holy Writ, the craziest of the utterings of the familiar right-wing loonies -- people who still believe there are WMDs in Iraq (they're just very well hidden), Democrats in Washington mean to create death panels to kill grandma, and legislation to clean up our air and water is just a thinly-disguised plot to raise our taxes and use the money to provide abortions for wanton harlots who are in the country illegally.
Our congressman, a nominal Democrat who campaigned as a champion of health care for all and women's right to make their own decisions about reproductive health, won high praise from many letter-writers for voting for the anti-abortion amendment to the House health care bill, then voting against the bill itself. "I was voting for what my constituents wanted," he explained.
Translation: All the screaming about death panels, socialized medicine, exorbitant taxes and denial of choice -- lies, every one -- worked.
Blatant lies and distortions succeed as a political tactic only when the audience to whom they are directed is stupid enough to accept them on face value.
Thus do the carefully contrived "talking points" of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture -- right wing-funded propaganda institutes all -- turn up as Vox Populi in the pages of our local rag.
To quote Lewis Lapham:
"The quickening construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms - the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education - and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity."
Or Gore Vidal:
"Does anyone care what Americans think? They're the worst-educated people in the First World. They don't have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke."
And the fools don't even realize they're being used.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
The Missing Link
The late David Rosenbaum of the New York Times, one of the longest-serving true journalists in the nation's capital, was a master at reading, digesting and analyzing the important legislation in Congress.
Oh, how we need him today!
The House of Representatives has passed a massive (nearly 2,000 pages) bill designed to provide health insurance for Americans regardless of their ability to pay, and prohibit some of the worst practices of the private health insurance industry such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or family health history.
I wonder if any single legislator who voted late Saturday night for or against the bill had read and understood it the way David understood the legislation he wrote about so clearly and lucidly. I doubt it.
The media accounts don't really tell us much, either, and what they do say is suspect given today's media reliance on spin, sound bites, handouts and propaganda. So it's hard to work up much jubilation because our elected representatitives -- at last! -- at last! -- seem to have taken a meaningful step toward giving our citizens the kind of health care that citizens of most other civilized democracies have long taken for granted.
I share the feelings of my friend and sometime contributor, Mort Persky: "Lord, I hope it's a good bill that leads to an even better bill, but gotta be highly skeptical."
Until we can flyspeck the thing, neither he nor I will know if it's a "good bill," nor will our fellow citizens. The mindless lemmings of the right will parrot Limbaugh and Beck and Boehner and other Republican meatheads, prattling about "government takeover" and what-all, as if they actually knew something about the bill. But their vacuous barnyard leavings don't matter.
What matters is whether some of our elected representatives actually read every line of the legislation, and its Senate counterpart when that emerges, with as much thought, care and objectivity as David Rosenbaum once did. If that were to happen, perhaps another Republican mind or two would see what Rep. Joseph Cao, a first-term Republican from New Orleans, saw: that the importance of health care transcends party politics. He voted "yes" last night. Thirty-nine Democrats, including one who represents my district, voted against health care for all. There are like-minded Democrats in the Senate.
Will any of them see the light of reason? Most of them won't even bother to read and analyze what they're ranting against.
Would that David were still around to tell them.
Oh, how we need him today!
The House of Representatives has passed a massive (nearly 2,000 pages) bill designed to provide health insurance for Americans regardless of their ability to pay, and prohibit some of the worst practices of the private health insurance industry such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or family health history.
I wonder if any single legislator who voted late Saturday night for or against the bill had read and understood it the way David understood the legislation he wrote about so clearly and lucidly. I doubt it.
The media accounts don't really tell us much, either, and what they do say is suspect given today's media reliance on spin, sound bites, handouts and propaganda. So it's hard to work up much jubilation because our elected representatitives -- at last! -- at last! -- seem to have taken a meaningful step toward giving our citizens the kind of health care that citizens of most other civilized democracies have long taken for granted.
I share the feelings of my friend and sometime contributor, Mort Persky: "Lord, I hope it's a good bill that leads to an even better bill, but gotta be highly skeptical."
Until we can flyspeck the thing, neither he nor I will know if it's a "good bill," nor will our fellow citizens. The mindless lemmings of the right will parrot Limbaugh and Beck and Boehner and other Republican meatheads, prattling about "government takeover" and what-all, as if they actually knew something about the bill. But their vacuous barnyard leavings don't matter.
What matters is whether some of our elected representatives actually read every line of the legislation, and its Senate counterpart when that emerges, with as much thought, care and objectivity as David Rosenbaum once did. If that were to happen, perhaps another Republican mind or two would see what Rep. Joseph Cao, a first-term Republican from New Orleans, saw: that the importance of health care transcends party politics. He voted "yes" last night. Thirty-nine Democrats, including one who represents my district, voted against health care for all. There are like-minded Democrats in the Senate.
Will any of them see the light of reason? Most of them won't even bother to read and analyze what they're ranting against.
Would that David were still around to tell them.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Forest Evashevski, Football Coach
Forest Evashevski came to Iowa in the 1950s with a Michigan background and the Delaware winged-T offense.
He took over a downtrodden program whose last great memory was the 1939 season when Nile Kinnick was an all-American.
Michigan State, Ohio State and Michigan, in one order or another, were the top dogs in the Big Ten back then. Evy beat all three of them in his first two seasons as head coach of the Hawkeyes.
Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coach, should have known what was coming when Evy snatched three of the best Ohio high school stars, including an end named Jim Gibbons, in his very first season of recruiting. Gibbons caught the game-winning touchdown pass in Iowa's upset victory over an OSU team that had national championship aspirations.
Two years later two of Iowa's most promising recruits were suspended after two young women who were not students filed sexual assault charges against them. Ultimnately the charges were dismissed when defense lawyers produced records of previous convictions of the complainants on prostitution charges -- in Columbus, OH.
I was a young sportswriter when Evashevski, the newly-hired Hawkeye coach, made his first speaking visit to eastern Iowa. Thinking to be helpful, I told him about a high school freshman the local folk thought would blossom into a very special player. "I've been in touch with Kenny's Dad," Evy replied. "I think he'll play at Iowa some day."
Play indeed. Kenneth Allen Ploen led Iowa to the Rose Bowl, where he was the most valuable player in a one-sided victory over Oregon State.
Evashevski seemed to be a step ahead of everybody -- including the fiery-tempered Hayes. Twice Evy outfoxed Hayes by installing entirely new offensive and defensive schemes just for the Ohio State game.
I learned of Forest Evashevski's death, at age 91, on the same day that I watched an Iowa football team remain undefeated through nine games by making an improbable comeback to beat Indiana 42-24.
Kirk Ferentz, who coaches the Hawkeyes these days, attributed his team's success to its "mental toughness."
Surely Evy was smiling in his new grave.
He took over a downtrodden program whose last great memory was the 1939 season when Nile Kinnick was an all-American.
Michigan State, Ohio State and Michigan, in one order or another, were the top dogs in the Big Ten back then. Evy beat all three of them in his first two seasons as head coach of the Hawkeyes.
Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coach, should have known what was coming when Evy snatched three of the best Ohio high school stars, including an end named Jim Gibbons, in his very first season of recruiting. Gibbons caught the game-winning touchdown pass in Iowa's upset victory over an OSU team that had national championship aspirations.
Two years later two of Iowa's most promising recruits were suspended after two young women who were not students filed sexual assault charges against them. Ultimnately the charges were dismissed when defense lawyers produced records of previous convictions of the complainants on prostitution charges -- in Columbus, OH.
I was a young sportswriter when Evashevski, the newly-hired Hawkeye coach, made his first speaking visit to eastern Iowa. Thinking to be helpful, I told him about a high school freshman the local folk thought would blossom into a very special player. "I've been in touch with Kenny's Dad," Evy replied. "I think he'll play at Iowa some day."
Play indeed. Kenneth Allen Ploen led Iowa to the Rose Bowl, where he was the most valuable player in a one-sided victory over Oregon State.
Evashevski seemed to be a step ahead of everybody -- including the fiery-tempered Hayes. Twice Evy outfoxed Hayes by installing entirely new offensive and defensive schemes just for the Ohio State game.
I learned of Forest Evashevski's death, at age 91, on the same day that I watched an Iowa football team remain undefeated through nine games by making an improbable comeback to beat Indiana 42-24.
Kirk Ferentz, who coaches the Hawkeyes these days, attributed his team's success to its "mental toughness."
Surely Evy was smiling in his new grave.
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