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Pentagon’s presentation of budget only off by half a trillion bucks (give or take a hundred billion)

By timmukyPosted on Posted in militarism, plus ca change, politics, warTagged No Comments on Pentagon’s presentation of budget only off by half a trillion bucks (give or take a hundred billion)
This much?

There has been a lot of hand-wringing of late about budget cuts undermining America’s Defense capabilities. Google the term “budget cuts undermine military” and you’ll come up with 2,970,000 results. That is a LOT of hand-wringing.

Is it possible that the situation isn’t nearly as dire as we have been led to believe? That the military-industrial complex that towers over the rest of the world’s combined military might might just be able to squeeze by?

Hell, yes, it’s possible. But even if you’re highly skeptical of Pentagon pronouncements, you might be staggered to learn just how off-base the House of War’s numbers are. Winslow Wheeler, who has been doing this for more than three decades, does what no one in the papers of record could be bothered to do: see if the Pentagon’s numbers add up.

And .. are you ready? They. Don’t.

His conclusion is a pretty good question.

After all the chatter, some of it still quite hysterical, about “defense cuts,” I find no cut; I find “defense spending” (defined generically) going up by $8.2 billion, from $986.1 billion to $994.3 billion.

Given the rhetoric we hear out of Washington about “devastating” cuts that fail “to adequately address threats” you have to wonder how much more than $1 trillion do these people want to spend?

Read the whole article….

A footnote: It’s slightly a case of apples and oranges, but for some time the War Resisters’ League has been pointing out the vast disparity between what the Government says and what it does in its “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart.

“Self-serving mendacities” and the American Century

By timmukyPosted on Posted in american history, militarism, politics, warTagged , No Comments on “Self-serving mendacities” and the American Century


Andrew J. Bacevich’s The Short American Century: A Postmortem is excerpted in this month’s Harper’s (subscription required, alas).

Bacevich is a West Point alum, retired colonel, self-described Catholic conservative, professor of international relations at Boston University, and the father of Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., a soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2007, aged 27. He cannot be touched by the typical slanders cast  against antiwar voices.  Like Smedley Butler and James Carroll, he offers an insider’s  critique of militarism and American exceptionalism (which of course go together rather well). He also writes astonishingly well.

As such, he’s the perfect puncturer of the myths surrounding what has come to be known as The American Century, a concept still current in some circles, like, for example, whoever wrote this.  (Bacevich reminds us that candidate Obama was wont to  invoke the American Century on the campaign trail).

The phrase “the American Century” is credited to Henry Luce, who, as Bacevich points out, slipped the eponymous February 1941 Life magazine essay between “a feature on women’s fashion … and a profile of Betty Carstairs, oil heiress, adventuress, and speedboat racer.”

I want to share a big chunk of this, without (I hope) violating the spirit of the Harper’s business model.  Here, in a couple hundred words, Bacevich puts the Good War/Greatest Generation claptrap to rest in a rather authoritative manner.

Framed as chapters in a longer narrative of liberation, these two events [WWII and the Cold War] invest the ambitions inherent in the vision of an American Century with a modicum of plausibility. Yet sustaining that narrative requires the careful selection and arrangement of facts, with inconvenient or uncomfortable truths excluded, suppressed, or simply ignored.

With regard to World War II, the many facts that don’t fit include the following: in the destruction of Nazi Germany, U.S. forces played at best a supporting role, with Stalin’s Red Army—the vanguard of a totalitarian police state—doing most of the fighting, killing, and dying;  as a result, the price of liberating Western Europe included delivering Eastern Europe to Stalin and his henchmen. Meanwhile, in its aerial bombing campaign against German and Japanese cities, the United States engaged in the conscious, intentional, wholesale slaughter of noncombatants. In the aftermath of the European war, the Allies collaborated in enforcing a massive involuntary transfer of populations—that is, a policy of ethnic cleansing. When they found it expedient to do so, U.S. officials allowed Nazi war criminals—rocket scientists and intelligence officials, for example—to escape prosecution and to enter the service of the United States. Then there is this: at no time prior to or during the war did the United States make any substantive effort to prevent or even disrupt the Nazi persecution of Jews that culminated in the “final solution.” In Washington the fate of European Jewry never figured as more than an afterthought. As much or more than the promotion of American ideals—that “sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, [and] our Constitution” that Luce dearly hoped to see—these decisions, along with the priorities they reflect, laid the basis for the interval of American primacy that followed.

He then goes on to warn that the “self-serving mendacities” underpinning the American Century are not just wrong, but also dangerous:

The way that Americans choose to remember World War II and the Cold War—evil overthrown thanks chiefly to the United States—invests the American Century with reassuring moral clarity. Fixing December 7, 1941, as the start date of the struggle for Pacific dominion, for example, saddles the Japanese aggressor with responsibility for all that followed. The high-handedness of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry in coercing Japan to open itself to the outside world, nearly a century earlier;  systematic American discrimination against Japanese immigrants, codified in insulting state and local laws;  Washington’s refusal to acknowledge a Japanese sphere of influence in East Asia,  while asserting American primacy throughout the Western Hemisphere; and, more immediately, the impact of U.S.-imposed sanctions intended to strangle Japan economically:  for most Americans, Pearl Harbor renders all these irrelevant.

Self-serving mendacities—that the attacks of September 11, 2001, reprising those of December7, 1941,  “came out of nowhere” to strike an innocent nation—don’t enhance the safety and well being of the American people.  To further indulge old illusions of the United States presiding over and directing the course of history will not only impede the ability of Americans to understand the world and themselves but may well pose a positive danger to both. No one opens an old issue of Life today in the expectation of unearthing truths with contemporary relevance. They do so to satisfy their taste for nostalgia, resurrecting memories, real or imagined, of an America that was good and getting better, a land and people overflowing with promise. Something of the same can be said of Luce’s other great creation: his vision of an American Century likewise survives as an artifact, encapsulating an era about which some (although by no means all) Americans might wax nostalgic—a time, real or imagined, of common purpose, common values, and shared sacrifice. Only by jettisoning the American Century and the illusions to which it gives rise will the self-knowledge and self-understanding that Americans urgently require become a possibility. Whether Americans will grasp the opportunity that beckons is another matter.

The book containing this essay is scheduled for publication in March.

Also, here is the most recent video clip I could find featuring Bacevich, from September, on RT, a network that, in spite of occasionally erratic production values, provocative but clumsy captions (“is it time for the US to send the sacred military cow out to pasture?”), and borderline inappropriate fashion sense of their interviewers (who are nevertheless very sharp), is still one of the best places to hear people like Bacevich talk at length. This is a terrific interview.

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in liberalism, libertarianism, militarism, plus ca change, politics, warTagged No Comments on “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Not  that it’s in any way likely, but let’s ask: What happens under President Paul?

Specifically, would there be any reduction in the number of innocent bodies crushed or blown to bits under U.S. bombs and missiles, or hacked to death by the minions of regimes we support?

Paul supports a number of positions that put him beyond the pale of progressive or even civilized thought. But his appeal is real, and cuts across ideological boundaries, because more and more Americans really do see the pointlessness or malign effects of having our military spread across the globe, at war or threatening it, in too many countries to count. Paul, as this excellent “Imagine” ad promises, will do something about that.

There is a serious effort afoot to shame or scold liberals/progressives who have good things to say about Paul. Katha Pollitt, especially, goes to town on any progressive who might consider straying. “Man-crush”–the ultimate insult. That is so grad-school in the eighties (and I know from experience!)

For what it’s worth, in Pollitt’s exasperated contempt for Paul I see echoes of her review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, a genuinely radical and important book that painted sympathetic portraits of pacifists and nonviolent activists in the years leading up to World War Two. Her main response, stated up front: “fury at pacifists.”

Because of course, World War Two produced 60 million corpses, a permanently militarized and aggressive United States, and the specter of nuclear annihilation for the planet forever. Only an asshole (or a man) would try to revisit the run-up to such a war and try to imagine alternative scenarios, right?

Is it possible that after everything we’ve learned about America’s  low, dishonest wars since the Good War ®, liberals cling to the idea that U.S. bombs and boots on the ground in foreign lands are a force for good? That establishment liberals are not dismissing Paul in spite of his non-interventionism, but because of it?

It’s a partisan thing, partly. Democrats are as good as, or better than, the other guys at starting wars. A combination of the Wilsonian streak and, in recent years, a byproduct of domestic political battles, whereby the Democrats always feel compelled to prove they’re not “soft” on communism, or terror (only the Muslim kind, of course).

Supporters of the the current administration should be forced to confront just how Paul’s positions on foreign policy and war  make conventional progressivism/centrism/liberalism (the three conflated in a bewildering way in the current president) look compromised, corrupt, and downright evil.

So, finally, to the point of all this:  a consideration of Freddie De Boer’s It’s not about Ron Paul: It’s about you, which uses the case of historic and ongoing U.S. support for Indonesian repression as a representative instance of the liberal establishment’s complicity in barbarism.

When confronting establishment progressives with the reality of our conduct and how much it has cost some of the poorest and most defenseless people on earth, the conversation never stays about our victims; it inevitably changes to those attempting to talk about them, a knee-jerk defense that progressives have made an art form. That’s why Ron Paul is so perfect, for establishment liberals. He is an open invitation to change the subject. The United States keeps killing innocent people, keeps propping up horrific regimes, keeps violating international law, keeps trampling on the lives of those who lack the power to defend themselves– but Ron Paul is a racist, and believes in the gold standard, and opposes abortion, and in general supports some of the most odious domestic policies imaginable. What I insist, and what people like Glenn Greenwald keep insisting, is that Ron Paul’s endless failings shouldn’t and can’t exist as an excuse to look away from the dead bodies that we keep on piling up. What I have wanted is to grab a hold of mainstream progressivism and force it to look the dead in the face. But the effort to avoid exactly that is mighty, and what we have on our hands is an epidemic of not seeing.

Even though De Boer doesn’t allow comments, he does share Robert Farley’s response in an update, which I think takes a useful (theoretical) look at what would be different under President Paul.

And so this brings us to assumption the second, which is that a President Paul would somehow have done something to make all those Indonesia people not dead. I suppose it’s possible that a President Paul would have refrained from supporting the Suharto coup, although it’s also certainly possible that Paul’s free market commitments would have made anti-communist activity attractive; I don’t know enough about Paul’s early career attitudes regarding the USSR, the Sandinistas, etc. I guarantee you, however, that President Paul would have lifted not a finger to assist all the Indonesians killed in the wake of the coup, or in the various statebuilding projects later engaged in by the Suharto and post-Suharto governments. President Paul might not have engaged in a direct military relationship with Indonesia, but he would not have prevented American private military firms from contracting with the Indonesians in training and advisory roles; he would not have prevented the Indonesian military from purchasing all the military equipment that it could afford from US defense corporations; he would not have prevented US corporations with interests in Indonesia from calling (publicly or privately) for violent defense of their extractive and labor interests; and he would not have supported any robust international action to condemn or isolate the Indonesian government.

I would have to point out that all the private military activity is a direct byproduct of America’s armies and navies and air forces having spent the past half century  spread out across the planet. How many of these private military contractors are ex-U.S. military? Most? Nearly all?

And yet even if Paul does make radical reductions to America’s military, Farley is right. There will still be plenty of Yanks and plenty of U.S.-made munitions, ships and aircraft. And I don’t imagine Paul would be aggressive in stopping American BUSINESSMEN from doing American BUSINESS, would he? As long as they’re not supported by the tyranny of taxation, that is.

Not that any of this has a snowball’s chance in hell of happening. Paul’s  role has been at least partly constructive in this campaign because he has asked hugely important questions and, yes, imagined an alternative. But unless he mounts a third-party run, he’ll be out of the race soon, and the entire debate on “defense” will be reduced again to the moronic question  of which party Keeps Us Safe ®. America will continue to be sucked dry by its military no matter who gets elected, and we’ll return to the alternate universe  where slight reductions in the rate of the Pentagon’s budget growth are looked upon as  brave (or treasonous)  major cuts.

 


“We’re the dark matter”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in afghanistan, iraq, militarism, rule of law, terrorism, torture, war, war on terror, wikileaksNo Comments on “We’re the dark matter”

Reading the news this week, there are at least three (not unrelated) subjects that call to mind that great line from Adventureland: “Hey, do you have an ice-pick I can jam into my ears? I can’t listen to this song again.”

  • The lack of response, from government and serious media alike, to the Wikileaks revelations about the 2006 atrocity in Ishaqi, in which U.S. soldiers executed 11 civilians, including women and toddlers, by tying their hands behind their backs, and shooting them in the head. And then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence.
  • And, to arbitrarily limit the list to three things, the USA’s Qaddafi problem, as laid out in this typically very good piece from Amy Davidson of the New Yorker, who seems to be one of the few voices in the mainstream press paying attention:

Its dealings in Libya are not the C.I.A.’s only problem; nor is the C.I.A. the only problem. The Washington Post has two new pieces in its “Top Secret America” series that one should read. The first, by Julie Tate and Greg Miller, is on the C.I.A.’s shift away from learning things and toward killing people considered dangerous (and who makes that call?), with analysts becoming “targeters.” The other, by Dana Priest and William Arkin, is about the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which has held some thousand prisoners “in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a SEAL told the Post.) The “C.I.A.” binder in Tripoli included “a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect,” the Times said. We should have at least that many—many more—for our own government.

Maybe minor, maybe not, but Davidson cites the “dark matter” quote,  not what followed. The attribution itself is kind of revealing, no? It was not “a SEAL told the Post.” No, that creepy, grandiose claim came from “a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity.” Yes, strapping. Really?

To be sure, Priest and Arkin are not the only reporters in the land to have become aroused by contact with these hunky dudes.

The humble brag about being “dark matter,” the  ever-expanding practice of extrajudicial assassination–something  even Reagan condemned– on an unimaginable (and apparently unknowable) scale. The CIA quietly and without discussion transforming its mission from intelligence to becoming “one hell of a killing machine.” Working in close coordination with the very dictators we’re demonizing for the rubes at home…. That’s bad, I guess, but…. Hey, did you check out the six-packs on these dudes!

WikiLeaks: Extreme disclosure when the “last best hope” fails

By timmukyPosted on Posted in iraq, militarism, rule of law, war on terror, wikileaksTagged , , , , , , , , No Comments on WikiLeaks: Extreme disclosure when the “last best hope” fails

Jay Rosen’s From Judith Miller to Julian Assange pinpoints when the Paper of Record switched its mission statement–from reporting the news to parroting the government line, without skepticism, without verification.

For the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be identified with some precision: it was on Sunday, September 8, 2002.

On that morning the New York Times published a now notorious story, reported by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which nameless Bush Administration officials claimed that Iraq was trying to buy the kind of aluminum tubes necessary to build a nuclear centrifuge.

Rosen weaves in material from “Now they tell us,” Michael Massing’s 2004 analysis of “the nadir” (Rosen’s phrase) in the New York Review of Books, to demonstrate just how momentous that Sunday morning was:

We know from retrospective accounts that the Bush White House had already decided to go to war. We know from the Downing Street Memo that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We know that the Bush forces had decided to rev up their sales campaign that week because ”from a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August,” as chief of staff Andrew Card brazenly put it. We know that the appearance of the tubes story in the Times is what allowed Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice to run with it on the Sunday shows, because without that they would have been divulging classified information and flouting their own rules. We also know that the tubes story was wrong: they weren’t for centrifuges. And yet it was coming from the very top of the professional pyramid, the New York Times.

.. The government had closed circle on the press, laundering its own manipulated intelligence through the by-lines of two experienced reporters, smuggling the deed past layers of editors, and then marching it like a trained dog onto the Sunday talk shows to perform in a lurid doomsday act.
.

In retrospect, it looks awfully bad, but it’s significant that the Times has put a lot of effort into examining its own behavior, and is only a little bit sorry.

Below, a 14-minute video in which Rosen expands on the print piece (nice title, btw):

As for the events of the past two weeks, it appears the Times fancies it’s doing something qualitatively different from what the government is going after Assange for. Not everyone agrees. The ubiquitous and odious Joe Lieberman has already floated the idea of prosecuting the Times:

“I’m not here to make a final judgment on that, but to me the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship,” he said. “Whether they’ve committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”

In contrast to the Times’ obliviousness, the Guardian’s Friday editorial recognizes the stakes. Although the focus here is on a free Internet, the bottom line for a nominally democratic society is the same.

In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks’ chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.

Rosen makes the connection in his conclusion, quoting Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, a Brit who evokes high (and apparently bygone) American standards of governance and transparency:

“Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails.” But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn’t driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks

On Iran, just a tiny disconnect between Arab opinion and that of the princes

By timmukyPosted on Posted in iran, militarism, politics, war, wikileaksTagged , , , , , No Comments on On Iran, just a tiny disconnect between Arab opinion and that of the princes
Not exactly trembling about Iran, are they? (source: 2010 Arab public opinion poll)

I think I gave too much credit in the previous post to the dubious notion, advanced by the Times and others, that the cables vindicate U.S. and Israeli hawkishness vis à vis Iran.

I should have just cut to the chase, as Mr. Chomsky did on Democracy Now yesterday. The dictators think one thing, and their subjects think the opposite.

So Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. The results are rather striking. They show the Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel- that’s 80. The second major threat is the United States- that’s 77. Iran is listed as a threat by 10%.

With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority- in fact, 57–say that the region would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. 80, 77, say the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. 10 say Iran is the major threat. This may not be reported in the newspapers here- it is in England- but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments, and to the ambassadors. But there is not a word about it anywhere. What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and the Israeli political leadership. These things aren’t even to be mentioned. This seeps its way all through the diplomatic service. The cables to not have any indication of that.

When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here- Clinton and the media- have drawn.

Here is the summary of the poll results.

The results (PDF).

And Chomsky’s larger point? That “what this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership”? Can’t really disagree.

That should be paired with Jack Shafer’s sharp observation in Slate yesterday:

International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week’s WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.

Secrets, lies, and the threat posed by those sneaky, rug-making Persians

By timmukyPosted on Posted in iran, militarism, warTagged , , , , , , 2 Comments on Secrets, lies, and the threat posed by those sneaky, rug-making Persians

Updated below:

The Pentagon Papers are a thing of the distant past, and the New York Times isn’t exactly giving Julian Assange the Ellsberg treatment. In fact, it gave its war-adoring soldier fanboy reporter the assignment of penning a hatchet job on Assange.

Still, the Times was on board (sort of, and selectively) with the latest wikileaks release, tens of thousands of cables showing the U.S. government in a most unflattering light. To my eyes, the most newsworthy were the ones where Hillary signed off on outright spying on diplomats from other countries, including the secretary general of the UN. Credit card numbers! DNA samples! Oh my  God! How low can you go? “Mr. Secretary General, I notice a stray gray hair there. One sec, I’ll just … Got it! See, that didn’t hurt, did it? Uh, no, I’ll just put it in this little plastic pouch for safekeeping…..”

Pretty shocking, right?

For the Times, not nearly as important as … drum roll, please … what the cables revealed about What a Major Threat Iran Represents! Especially now that we know Arab princes don’t like the Persians, and are afraid of them, and want America to stop them in their phantom nuclear weapon-making.

Three reporters cobbled together a compendium of Iran Threat-related snippets, and wove a narrative about just how hard it has been to convince the Russians and the Chinese and Italians to isolate and confront Iran–in the Tom Clancy-worthy phrase, to “cut off the head of the snake.”

That last quote was from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who has a very low opinion of Iran, for reasons the Times doesn’t quite spell out.

To its credit, the Times does actually use the phrase “Arab obsession with Iran” and briefly mentions “the uneasy sectarian division of the Muslim world, between the Shiites who rule Iran, and the Sunnis, who dominate most of the region,” but in  general takes the worries of the corrupt Gulf oligarchs at face value, as they show how RIGHT the Times has been to pursue its own obsession with Iran (which is, after all, Our Threatiest Threat.)

One would have wished for a little more context here, something like that supplied by the Guardian (bold face mine in all instances below):

Arab-Persian enmity, with a strong undercurrent of rivalry between Sunni and Shia Muslims, dates back centuries but increased markedly after the overthrow of the shah and the Islamic revolution in 1979 and is now viewed as a struggle for hegemony in the region. The conservative Sunni-ruled regimes in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states detect the “hidden hand” of Iranian subversion, sometimes where none exists.

Or better, like that offered by Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com:

The calls to attack are nominally presented as about Iran’s civilian nuclear program but seem to center around the king’s belief that Iran is uniquely “evil” and needs to be stopped to save the region. Given that the Saudi King and the Iranian Supreme Leader are extremely influential in two rival sects of Islam, the effort seems more aimed around getting the US involved in a Holy War of sorts than stopping Iran’s modest civilian enrichment program.

That Saudi Arabia is putting forth so much effort to start a major regional war along sectarian lines would be troubling in and of itself, but doubly so as the Obama Administration has just completed agreeing on the largest arms sale in US history to Saudi Arabia.

The $60 billion arms sale was couched as important for regional stability. Yet this is the exact same Saudi government that is pressing for the Obama Administration to start a major, region-wide war which would destroy any such stability. It seems then that the arms sale is more about enabling Saudi Arabia to potentially start this major war themselves.

Yes! You’d think a $60 billion arms sale to an Iranian rival–and the only crazier, more unstable, and religiously unhinged regime in the region–would merit a mention in the Times account, but you would be thinkin’ wrong.

Shockingly, the Times offers the last word to an appalling little piece of racist nonsense offered by Crown Prince bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, who is quoted in one cable as saying:

“Any culture that is patient and focused enough to spend years working on a single carpet is capable of waiting years and even decades to achieve even greater goals.” His greatest worry, he said, “is not how much we know about Iran, but how much we don’t.”

Forget about the carpet weirdness, that last line is PERFECT. Team B thinking at its best.

If you don’t know about Team B, you should spend some time googling around on the subject. Basically, it boils down to this:

Not finding evidence of Something is just more proof that that Something is there, and further, the not finding it just means that the people hiding that Something are incredibly sneaky.

This little exercise in tautology is a recipe for a long and lucrative career in the government of the United States. You are never right, but never wrong!

The track record of Team B is not so good, but these clowns stay in government no matter what. With Russia: embarrassingly wrong. With Iraq. Ditto. And now with Iran.

No matter what intelligence and inspections show, the U.S. government KNOWS those sneaky, rug-making sons of bitches are up to something. And now we have the word of a Crown Prince.

Update: FAIR goes into more detail on just how much spin the Times is putting on the cables, by comparing the Times’ selective excerpting with the cables themselves (which are not available from the Times, but can be viewed at the wikileaks site itself, or the Guardian’s.)

FAIR also has a succinct description of the Times’ behavior in all of this:

WikiLeaks document dumps are largely what media want to make of them. There’s one conventional response, which goes something like this: “There’s nothing new here, but WikiLeaks is dangerous!” But there’s another option: “There’s nothing here, except for the part that confirms a storyline we’ve been pushing.”

“a nation where No lovely thing can last”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in economy, environment, farming, food, militarism, sustainable, warTagged No Comments on “a nation where No lovely thing can last”

For what it’s worth, Wendell Berry gets a good deal of the blame and/or thanks for my move, from New York City to my wife’s family farm in central Kentucky, and for my haphazard Adventures in Farming.

For some time, I wrote a blog inspired in part by a poem of his.

So far my actual agrarian experience has not exactly resembled that enjoyed by Berry on his Henry County farm. I am not using draft horses, and, in spite of my best efforts, am surely not making the wisest use of the land and resources at my disposal. Nor am I writing with pencil and 1957 vintage Royal typewriter. My household has not one, but four computers, as well as four vehicles, all with between 140,000 and 210,000 miles on the odometer.

In darker moments, I think my rustic idyll seems more akin to that of the fictional farmer Jean de Florette, an eager, idealistic city-slicker accountant who moves to Provence from Paris, and is driven to madness, to bankruptcy, to death, by unkind weather and scheming provincials. (At this point, I am only partway to madness. Bankruptcy and death still seem to be a good way in the distance.)

Still, Berry’s ideas and attitude loom large over many of my daily actions. Sometimes I feel I should have a wristband engraved with the letters, WWWD (What Would Wendell Do?).

I came face to face with him at a Kentucky Book Fair a few years back. He signed the book I had asked him to sign, and looked up with expectation of conversation of some sort, but all I could conjure was a Ralph Kramden-esque “hummana hummana”.

It has dawned on my in recent months that I am not him, and can never be. There are some, many of his ideas and practices that I strive to adopt, but he has set the bar at a great height. I try as much as I can to be sustainable and conscious in everything I do, but realize that most of the time I fall far short. I realize he might tut-tut the fact that I like to play golf, have 6,000 songs in my ITunes, quaff a 30-pack of Old Style every week, subscribe to women’s fashion magazines. I am pretty sure he would not find much to be amused by in Zoolander or Caddyshack.

Having gotten all that out of the way, I would submit, without fear of overstatement, that he would get my vote for the Greatest Kentuckian Living (well back in the distance: a boxer from Louisville, and a girl singer from Butcher Holler). His poetry can be absolutely transcendent. (start here for a sampling); his fictional world a rival to that of Faulkner for completeness and depth; and his essays are at once uplifting and, as I have hinted here, impossibly challenging.

He will be speaking in several venues in Danville for the entire day, which is pretty thrilling to me. If child care obligations can be rearranged, I am hoping to see him at least once, if not twice.

In preparing for his visit, I have been re-reading some of his essays, and have come across some things I had not seen.

I particularly enjoyed his “Why I am NOT going to buy a computer” from 1987, which comes complete with a series of passionate reactions from readers of Harper‘s magazine, where it was reprinted in the late 80s. Berry’s answers to those reactions, also included, show the man at his most crotchety (to me, a good thing) and most caustic.

Through the genius of hypertext (an innovation Berry finds close to hilarious), that essay links to “The joy of sales resistance”, featuring one of his most contrarian, unpopular (and spot-on) ideas, that education has been turned into just another commodity.

This is another highly acerbic essay, one in which Multiculturalism, the Free Market, and Unlimited Economic Growth come in for a mauling. Though written in the early nineties, it contains what would be a great manifesto for the modern conservative movement, and a large segment of the Democratic Party (although it would surely not be recognized as satire):

Reduce the Government. The government should only be big enough to annihilate any country and (if necessary) every country, to spy on its citizens and on other governments, to keep big secrets, and to see to the health and happiness of large corporations. A government thus reduced will be almost too small to notice and will require almost no taxes and spend almost no money.

Looking for an arbitrary way to wind up this drifting meditation, here, without further comment, a poem from A Timbered Choir—The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997:

The year begins with war.

Our bombs fall day and night,

Hour after hour, by death

Abroad appeasing wrath,

Folly, and greed at home.

Upon our giddy tower

We’d oversway the world.

Our hate comes down to kill

Those whom we do not see,

For we have given up

Our sight to those in power

And to machines, and now

Are blind to all the world.

This is a nation where

No lovely thing can last.

We trample, gouge, and blast;

The people leave the land;

The land flows to the sea.

Fine men and women die,

The fine old houses fall,

The fine old trees come down:

Highway and shopping mall

Still guarantee the right

And liberty to be

A peaceful murderer,

A murderous worshipper,

A slender glutton, Forgiving

No enemy, forgiven

By none, we live the death

Of liberty, become

What we have feared to be.

“First they came, the invisible whites, and dealt death from afar”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in aerial warfare, afghanistan, batshit crazy politicians, bombing, following obama over a cliff, militarism, plus ca change, politics, priorities, warTagged , , , , , , , , 3 Comments on “First they came, the invisible whites, and dealt death from afar”
Your tax dollars at work. This drone strike killed 0.4 jihadis!— and only 19.6 innocent people. (AP Photo/Hasbunallah Khan)

“First they came, the invisible whites, and dealt death from afar.”
—Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

The murderous rocket attacks by remote-controlled drones being carried out on a nearly daily basis in Pakistan (and Afghanistan and Yemen and Somaila) should be cause for mass revulsion, shame, protests in the streets. But no. Try hard to find a candidate for office from either party criticizing them. Even the scary crazy Tea Party people are down with Obama on this one!

And, in a recent poll, only 3 percent even mention Afghanistan or “the war” (which war?)—at all— as one of America’s most important problems. So drone attacks are not exactly a red-button issue with the American voter. But … just imagine it happening to you, or to your family. Johann Hari puts it into perspective well with this simple little thought exercise:

Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses in your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don’t even admit the robot-planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don’t know, and there are no appeals against the robot.

Now imagine it doesn’t end there: these attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot-planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named “Predators”, or “Reapers” – after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won’t stop. What do you do?

You, as a typical American, even a highly educated one, say well, that is crazy.  Sure, mistakes happen in war. Heh. The United States armed forces are the best trained and most moral soldiers in the world. You know it is a fact that we are taking Every Precaution to Minimize Collateral Damage.

Are we?

That doesn’t exactly jibe with a number mentioned by Hari here, or more accurately, a ratio. Although old news, it really jumped out at me. Fifty to one.  That is the ratio cited by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus from 2006 to 2008, in a New York Times op-ed last year. According to Pakistani sources, wrote Kilcullen, the drone strikes kill “50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent–hardly ‘precision.'”

The Pentagon of course doesn’t agree with these numbers, but hmm, who to believe? (And remember Tommy Franks’ “We don’t do body counts”?) Maybe it’s 2 percent or ten or twenty percent “precision,” but any way you look at it, these drone attacks leave  a lot of bodies, and body parts, littering the ground. And you can’t blame Bush for this anymore. The drone attacks are very much the current administration’s baby.

Remember these?

Apparently, the president rarely mentions the drone attacks at all. Except on one occasion, when he cracked a joke about them. The Pakistan Daily reports on the White House Correspondents Dinner in May:

“[The] Jonas Brothers are here, they’re out there somewhere,” President Obama quipped as he looked out at the packed room. Then he furrowed his brow, pretending to send a stern message to the pop band. “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.”

What a card. Nice one, President Peace Prize! He might have mentioned that statistically, the drones would not only have taken out Kevin, Joe and Nick, but 150 members of their family and entourage, and whoever else might have been in the neighborhood.

Kilcullen’s point, and Hari’s, is still to my mind a little obtuse. Hari again:

I detest jihadism. Their ideology is everything I oppose: their ideal society is my Hell. It is precisely because I want to really undermine them – rather than pose as macho – that I am against this robot-slaughter. It enlarges the threat. It drags us into a terrible feedback loop, where the US launches more drone attacks to deal with jihadism, which makes jihadism worse, which prompts more drone attacks, which makes jihadism worse – and on and on.

I would suggest these attacks are counterproductive only if you take at face value the idea that America’s mission in its wars is to wipe out this jihadism. (I would side with Robert Pape, who has demonstrated pretty well that “The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”)

Chris Floyd, who brought Hari’s piece to my attention, thinks the creation of more terrorists is not an accidental byproduct. Seizing on the offhand remark by a “senior figure” in the CIA that the drone targeting can be pretty arbitrary, he wonders if maybe the randomness of the attacks is a feature, not a bug:

“Sometimes you’re dealing with tribal chiefs. Often they say an enemy of theirs is al-Qa’ida because they want to get rid of somebody, or they made crap up because they wanted to prove they were valuable so they could make money.”

That’s right: Barack Obama is killing hundreds of innocent civilians in Pakistan on the basis of crap made up for money. Made-up crap. For money. That’s why a child who is just as precious as your child is to a parent who is just as real a person as you are was killed this week, by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party and the entire bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States of America: crap made up for money.

And of course, it’s not just tribal chiefs making up crap for blood money: the entire aforementioned bipartisan foreign policy establishment is now and has for years been making up crap ‘so they could make money’ — for themselves, for their corporate patrons, for their government agencies, for their defense and ‘security’ stockholdings, for the perpetuation of their bloated, belligerent, pig-ignorant domination of world affairs and American society — by killing innocent people all over the world.

I woke up this morning thinking I would be writing about the horrible fact that Americans in general, and Kentuckians in particular, are appallingly blase about the ongoing destruction and desecration of irreplaceable mountains and streams via the practice of Mountaintop Removal Mining. And how sad (really, that’s the only word) it is that there are no political candidates in this state willing to confront the coal industry over this. The parallels to the drone attacks are obvious and dispiriting. Only three percent of Americans are concerned about a metastasizing war entering its second decade. The most awful aspects of our American lives are a bipartisan effort.

“I can’t stand you. Now go vote for me!”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in afghanistan, batshit crazy politicians, civil liberties, corporatism, following obama over a cliff, iraq, militarism, obama, plus ca change, politics, populism, priorities, warTagged , , , , , , No Comments on “I can’t stand you. Now go vote for me!”

Well, all righty. It’s now clear that the proliferation of Hippie-punching comments from the White House is not just a series of off the cuff remarks, not just blowing off steam, but an actual Campaign Strategy.

Blame the whiners and those who cling to their quaint literal understanding of the word Change. For it is they who are at fault for the Democrats’ impending electoral doom.

There are any number of good pieces on Firedoglake on the topic.  Jane Hamsher offers the most perceptive take on the motivation behind the strategy, and points out how self-defeating it is.

I also liked Cenk  Uygur’s rant on Ratigan, but this from Bluetexan was perhaps the most succinct.

Just so we’re clear, here are a few examples of messages that don’t appeal to me at all.

“Wake up!”

“Get over it.”

“Get in gear, man.”

“Right back at’cha. Right back at’cha.“

“That’s not reality.”

“You know who you are.”

Yes, I do.

And none of these phrases motivate me to want to vote, canvass, give money, phone bank, blog, you know, generally take time away from putting food on my family to pull the lever for Democrats in November.On the other hand, these would do the trick.

“We’ll fight to add the public option to the health care bill.”

“We’re getting out of Afghanistan.”

“We are pulling the remaining 50,000 troops out of Iraq.”

“We’re going to cut the approximately $1T annual defense budget in half and use the remainder to fund US infrastructure projects, including high speed rail.”

“We will roll back the Bush/Cheney executive power grabs.”

“We will repeal DADT.”

“We will fight for marriage equality.”

“We will reform the Senate and eliminate the filibuster.”

“We will make the Fed transparent.”

“We will legalize marijuana.”

Hope that helps.

On the other hand, these would do the trick.

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