Opinion-Columns.com

SUNNIS LAYING LOW IN IRAQ AND WAITING FOR THE PULLOUT

A changing of the guard, in the form of General Petraeus handing over the keys to General Odiermo, presages by a couple months the changing of the guard in American politics. No one can really know, in either case, what the outcome will be and/or whether it will be good for the nation.

Take your pick, the political weather is cloudy and tending toward storms in both Iraq and America.

(Reuters) BAGHDAD: General Raymond Odierno took command of U.S.-led forces in Iraq on Tuesday, faced with the challenge of ensuring that security gains do not unravel at a time when American troop levels are being reduced.

Odierno replaced General David Petraeus at a ceremony presided over by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said the two generals had formed an "incredible team" during the deployment of 30,000 extra U.S. troops to Iraq last year in the so-called "surge."

Odierno served as the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq for 15 months until February.

"He knows that we are at a pivotal moment, where progress remains fragile and caution should be the order of the day," Gates said of Odierno. The ceremony took place in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, now part of a sprawling U.S. military base.

Handovers are a time of reflection and I aim to reflect on a war I’ve never supported and criticized for nearly a year prior to the Bush plunge from the high-board.

My gut tells me we have been on the wrong side of strategic decisions from the get-go, because our president and vice-president saw this as an awarding of democracy, rather than a Yugoslav style imbroglio. Strong-men (as heads of state) leave bitter rivalries and we need not look to dictatorships for example. Our own near-shattered civic condition is the result of a near-dictatorship on the national political scene.

Near enough. Nearer than we need ever be again, if we are to prevent the unraveling of our national fiber. Much lip-service is given to coming together, to being the nation’s uniter rather than divider. But the fact is that ‘deciders’ are not all that likely to unite.

So, we came with a flawed strategy to Iraq and that complicates our decisions over what is best for that nation, as well as our own. I reflect, I opine. I am an opiner. Everyone seems to be these days . . . no license required.

Odierno and Petraeus came together last year to implement a new counter-insurgency strategy that helped drive violence down, allowing Iraq to begin seeking foreign investment to rebuild after decades of war and UN sanctions.

Petraeus leaves behind a very different Iraq from the one he faced when he took over in February 2007, when Iraq was on the brink of civil war.

Or not. We tend to see things as we would see them instead of as they are, especially from the outside of cultures, the inside of which we know very little. My personal view, standing bravely in opposition to my president and his four-star general, is that violence has gone down in Iraq because it suits the purposes of the Sunni population to get us the hell out so they can climb back in the saddle.

The Sunni minority ran Iraq until we overthrew Saddam Hussein and ushered in the majority Shiites. Remember our American Civil War? You can free the slaves, but you damned well better not walk off the stage after having done so. Exactly what we did in Lincoln’s time and it spawned a hundred years of lynchings, carpetbaggers, Jim Crow and segregation.

We somehow feel Iraqis are different in their ethnic ambitions because we don’t speak their language, move them like pawns on a chessboard and fail to understand their culture (which outdates ours by 4,000 years). Winston Churchill famously (and accurately) said, “America always makes the right decision…. after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

The coming confrontation between Sunni and Shiite is inevitable, but it will be bloodier and more destructive of the national fabric because of decisions we made in desperation.

We were desperate to show progress—any kind of progress to slow the troop deaths and injuries. Those were described as ‘insurgent attacks,’ because it was politically untenable to call them what they were. What they were was the Sunni army (which we had sent home and pauperized) showing their anger at being sent home and pauperized. Additional anger accrued to street hatreds against the new guys in power—those Islamists who followed a different rightly-guided caliph fourteen centuries ago.

How do you understand that, when you sent everyone home over at the State Department who knew what the hell was at risk?

That’s a hatred of some proportion, an aging cheese of a hatred or, as Saddam himself might have said (before the trap was sprung at his hanging) the mother of all hatreds. Those who harbor that hatred have very little interest in George Bush or his war, but every interest in his weaponry. And therein, the plot thickens.

In order to satisfy our desperation for progress, we didn’t actually make progress, but redefined the enemy instead. A paper-victory worthy of a paper-tiger. We took the guys from the streets that were bombing us, renamed them Awakening Councils, armed them to the teeth and suddenly they were no longer counted as insurgents, but became partners against al Qaeda. No wonder deaths went down, we partnered with the insurgency. That’s an easy thing to do when you don’t actually have a definition of al Qaeda forces and can move them around at will on the chessboard that the Middle East has become.

Now, of course, we’re using that lessening of violence to draw down our troops. We got into this war on false pretenses and are planning to get out by sleight of hand as well. Petraeus is leaving for a promotion. Odiermo is going to oversee our orderly withdrawal, everyone stateside will breathe a sigh of relief, the troops are going to Afghanistan and the fragile Iraqi coalition government is going to get its ass handed to it.

Iraq's Shiite-led government will also soon take control of Sunni Arab tribal units that joined forces with the U.S. military to fight Al Qaeda. Some analysts fear the tribal units, which include many former Sunni Arab insurgents, could turn their guns on the government if their demands are not met.

Which will be ever afterward known in Baghdad as National Getting Our Ass Handed to Us Day.

But America will be out, China will have the first shot at the oil, nearly 5,000 kids will have been killed under false pretenses, Cheney will be either on the rubber-chicken circuit or under indictment, Bush no longer able to chain-saw the Constitution and what’s left of the fabric of America searching for what went so terribly wrong.

But not very hard. There’s a failing economy to deal with. Iraq will quickly become last week’s story—except for Iraqis. They will likely remember for the next fourteen centuries. Islam has a long memory.

My guess is blanket presidential pardons will be served like after-dinner mints on the way out the door.

Can a president do that? Probably. This is a president who gets away with stuff.

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Media comment:

• US News and World Report-Four Challenges Petraeus Leaves Behind for His Successor in Iraq
• New York Times-Odierno Succeeds Petraeus in Iraq
• Associated Press-Bush: 'We are at war with extremists'
• Guardian-UK-The conflict continues
• Irish Times-Ireland-Violence surges in Iraq amid political stalemate as Gen Petraeus departs

 

SEVEN YEARS AFTER 9-11, TIME TO GET OVER IT

The annual national hysteria over the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is in full cry. Dedication of a remembrance garden at the Pentagon, moments of silence, disclosure of any personal tale of woe that can be dragged out of survivors is fair game.

No matter that survivors of that tragic event have been awarded (on average) some $2 million, no matter that the nation has plunged itself into an unwinnable war on their behalf, no matter that we are near bankruptcy, awash in contractor greed and fraud. Most importantly, no matter that over 4,000 American kids have died in Iraq, nearly 1,000 additional in Afghanistan and tens of thousands bear emotional and otherwise hidden wounds that will change and have changed their lives forever.

All but forgotten, is the brutal fact that we fail almost without exception to care for those who return, relegating them to the same stumbling, mumbling, suicidal lives of Vietnam vets.

Forgive me if I fail to join those who feel we have not done enough, soon enough, in sufficient quantity or quality (or whatever) for those who survived in New York and Washington. Or don’t forgive me. I don’t really give a damn, as I watch a large portion of the world implode by way of American nationalism, patriotism, ignorance and just plain revenge.

Revenge that is, as long as someone else’s kid pays the cost. Revenge as long as it doesn’t impede the trip to the mall, stock dividends or a cozy retirement.

This is the revenge war whose costs are hidden from view, whose caskets come home unmet in the dark, whose troops are 99 and 44/100^th percent of the class that didn’t graduate from Princeton. I’m sick to death of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and that Coulter witch, who rev the engines of hatred over the bodies of decent young American men and women. There isn’t a one of them who ever risked their fat asses on anything more dangerous than a cocaine high, or who wouldn’t risk a kid for a rating or another book deal.

They are trash.

The headlines today are maudlin, self pitying and organized in such a way as to perpetuate the myth of victimhood:

• From Families' Grief, a Symbol of Loss, Hope

The completion of the memorial is not the result of a large-scale government endeavor, but one led by a determined group of victims' family members who have channeled their sorrow into a ceaseless fundraising campaign.

• Lives Shaped by Loss

Children who lost a parent on 9/11 still grapple with what it means to have had a childhood so steeped in national tragedy, so riven with anguish and pain.

• Where They Were on 9/11
• A Sister's Undying Love
• Share Your Story

How about sharing the story of two million Iraqi families who have been run out of their country and threatened with death if they return? What do we say of the undying love that died—the 25 festive, hopeful Afghans at a wedding, blown to (literal) bits, including the bride? Who mourns 60 Afghan children and thirty adults, killed by mistake?

Their stories are not unique among thousands. Their stories are ordinary, among hundreds of thousands.

In case you wondered, on 9-11 they were ending a normal Baghdad day, waiting to cross busy avenues unmarked by bomb craters and barricades. They were thinking of heading home to neighbors they knew and talked with, whose kids played together and headed to the park for soccer and maybe an ice cream. They watched Saddam’s TV offerings and life wasn’t all that great under the pressures of economic boycott—but it was life.

George Bush named al Qaeda responsible and then stumbled over the targeting, missed everyone but the innocents and the not-so-innocent who came out of the woodwork for their own revenge. Muslims understand revenge, as Westerners can’t even comprehend it.

The mistakes along the way to ‘bring ‘em on’ are too many and too pathetic to recount here, but sending Darth Vader outfitted American kids (who speak no Arabic and are scared half to death) to kick family doors off the hinges and terrorize Iraqi women and kids might have been a not-entirely-thought-through message.

“Bring ‘em on,” brought ‘em on in numbers and with intent that put the lie to American shock and awe. But that’s another argument, one about which Ann Coulter no doubt has much to say. Rush never apologized to a single American family for beating the drum with his phallic cigar that brought their kid home in the middle of the night to a silent and press-not-allowed air base. Bill O’Reilly, the mouth-that-roared, skitters off home to whatever gated community can stand the smell.

And all of this in the name of patriotism. It’s Rudy Giuliani’s day, George Bush’s war, Rumsfeld’s mistaken hubris--and the world is not a better place for it.

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Media coverage;

• Edmonton Journal-Canada-McCain, Obama unite for 9/11 memorial
• Bloomberg-Obama, McCain Put Politics Aside on 9/11 Anniversary
• Scientific American-9/11: Can the lingering medical and emotional effects be measured?
• New York Times-More Asthma Among Those Near 9/11 Site
• New York Times-At Pentagon, Bush Solemnly Looks Back at 9/11

BORDER SECURITY--ACCEPTING THE FABRIC OF FEAR

We are not a fearful nation, nor (if we reject Michael Chertoff’s continuing effort to scare us to death) will we become one. That said, we are certainly and willingly Balkanizing ourselves, dividing a previously United States into a rag-tag and very unAmerican obsession with what are essentially ghosts under the bed.

Derby Line, Vermont is an unfortunate current example.

Homeland Security Comes to Vermont, Changes in Border Town Unsettle Some Residents, blares a headline from the Washington Post;

DERBY LINE, Vt. -- The changes started coming slowly to this small town where the U.S. border with Canada runs across sleepy streets, through houses and families, and smack down the middle of the shared local library.

First was the white, painted lettering on the pavement on three little side streets -- "Canada" on one side, "U.S.A." on the other. Then came the white pylons denoting which side of the border was which. After that, signboards were erected on some streets, ordering drivers to turn back and use an officially designated entry point.

And along with the signposts came an influx of American Border Patrol agents, cruising through the town in their green-and-white sport-utility vehicles with sirens, chasing down cars and mopeds that ignored the posted warnings.

‘ The changes started coming slowly to this small town’ sounds like a badly written voice-over, opener to a Grade B movie. Fade to screaming sirens and white SUVs chasing down—what?—international criminals? Not hardly. A kid on a dirt-bike, rolling through the wooded trail he’s ridden since Dad finally gave in to his pleas and let him buy a used Honda CRF 150.

“Don’t shoot, for God’s sake, that’s my kid!”

Derby Line has peacefully coexisted somehow with its American-Canadian divisions and friendships since 1791. The War of 1812 with Britain caused hardly a ripple of dissatisfaction among American and Canadian neighbors who shared church, the watching of kids and celebration of inter-marriages. The U.S. invaded Canada in that ill-begotten war, but apparently not at Derby Line. Washington, D.C. burned (partially) to the ground, but the New England area kept up a brisk trade with Canada throughout.

According to Wikipedia, the little village shared with Stanstead in Quebec is best known for the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, deliberately constructed on the international border and opened in 1904. The donors were a binational couple: Carlos F. Haskell was a local American businessman who owned a number of sawmills, while Martha Stewart Haskell was Canadian.

It’s not an accident that the line runs down the floor of the library, bisecting it’s reading-room.

The intent was that people on both sides of the border would have use of the facility, which is now a designated historic site. Patrons of the library from either side of the border may use the facility without going through border security.

Does Martha Stewart, the modern-day namesake of that Canadian woman know about this?

For longtime residents accustomed to a simpler life that flowed freely across a largely invisible border, the final shock -- and what made most people really take notice -- was a proposal by the border agents last year to erect fences on the small streets to officially barricade the United States from Canada, and neighbor from neighbor.

"They're stirring up a little hate and discontent with that deal," said Claire Currier, who grew up in this border area and works at Brown's Drug Store, which has operated on the same spot since 1884. "It's like putting up a barrier. We've all intermingled for years."

For the Department of Homeland Security, the changes are part of a gradual fortification of America's northern border that began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has accelerated in recent years.

Well, the stirring up of hatreds is an initial and necessary step toward fascism. Too strong a word? That’s because you and I and most Americans and Canadians have been used to hearing it applied to Hitler’s Germany or Italy’s Mussolini. Calm yourself for a moment before writing me a hot reply about the necessity of protecting our cities. Look up fascism. The definition is: (noun) a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism). Fits pretty well.

Europe relies on efficient police work to track down terrorists, with not always perfect, but less intrusive restraint. During the worst of the IRA terrorisms, England never walled itself off from Scotland and (thereby) Northern Ireland. The United States shares with Israel a less effective, yet far more isolating rationale of walls, barbed-wire and checkpoints.

It has served them terribly and will serve us terribly as well.

The hardening of the northern frontier is unsettling to many in the small towns along the border. For as long as most of these people can remember, the line between the United States and Canada has been little more than a historic curiosity, rather than the hard and fast demarcation that is America's southern border.

Named the Secure Border Initiative, the project calls for more than tripling the number of agents along the northern border, adding boats and helicopters, and deploying sophisticated new technology including hundreds of millions of dollars in new communications equipment, radiation detectors and three different types of camera-mounted sensors in the uninhabited wooded areas.

"It was freer before, but we live in a different world now," said agent Mark Henry, the operations officer at the Border Patrol's Swanton Sector, headquartered in Swanton, Vt. The sector encompasses about 24,000 square miles, extending from the town of Champlain, in Upstate New York, on the east all the way across to the border with Maine. The sector now has 250 agents, up from 180 three years ago, and the number is scheduled to reach 300 next year.

I would submit that we only live in a different world if we elect to live in one. To allow 19 terrorists in hijacked aircraft to change our very form of government and constitutionally protected civil freedoms of movement and protection from unwarranted inquiry is to have already abandoned the game to the enemy.

What are we but our freedoms? Just another too powerful loose cannon smashing the china (small C) in the world order.

The nations of the world, who once looked our way with hope and envy, now see us as disturbers of the peace. Disturbing the peace (the unsettling of proper order in a public space through one's actions) is an American misdemeanor that is about to become (if we continue to let it) a felony against the civilized world.

I am not merely angry at the stupidity enforced against Derby Line and Stanstead. I am outraged at what has been asked of America and how easily it has been given.

Bombed at Pearl Harbor, our entire Pacific fleet on the bottom and 2,400 servicemen killed, Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress. That wasn’t three hijacked airliners, it was a deliberate attack by 353 warplanes launched from six separate aircraft carriers. The time was ripe for demagoguery and we had some (Japanese internment camps), but we also had a president who brought the country together in purpose rather than dividing it in fear.

Cicero told us two thousand years ago that ‘endless money forms the sinews of war.’ It was true two thousand years before him, but the writing has been lost.

300 agents now in Vermont alone, eager and ignorant, chase down kids and annoy lifelong neighbors, where there were but 300 along the entire Canadian border before Bush and Chertoff.

Bush and Chertoff? Cheney and Addington? Rumsfeld and Gonzales? Are these the statesmen to whom we offer up our Founder’s sacrifice? These rank politicians risk nothing of personal wealth and power. Washington, Jefferson and their peers risked the very real probability that they would be tried for treason and hanged, their fortunes confiscated. Not possibility--probability.

We have traded a sacred heritage for a handful of beads. Not even beads, this travesty of false preservation is worth less than beads. Will the real America please stand up, less the last of us be left to turn out the lights?

"We're more visible," Henry said. "We've gotten more aircraft, more vehicles, more boats, more ATVs -- pretty much everything, we've got more. And we've got more people to man them."

"9/11 changed everything," said Border Patrol agent Fernando Beltran, the operations chief for Swanton Sector's Newport station, which includes Derby Line. "This may have been Mayberry before, but it's not anymore."

Not in my America. In my America only your ignorance is more visible.

. . . for the border agents, Sept. 11 exposed the vulnerability of America's northern frontier and the ease with which anyone -- a terrorist with a portable nuclear device, for example -- could cross into the United States from Canada using one of the multitude of unguarded back roads or forest paths, or, in a border town such as Derby Line, simply by crossing the street.

Beltran said he instructs his agents to use discretion and "common sense." It goes like this: "If a kid [on the Canada side] throws a Frisbee over here, he can come and get it. But if he got the Frisbee and kept walking down to the Arby's to get a soda, we're going to stop you."

"We can't be wrong once," Beltran added. "If we're wrong once, that could be devastating to the whole country."

No Fernando, actually it’s your being there at all that is devastating to the country. You have already been wrong a number of times, wrong to intervene in small border villages, wrong to cut the streets of that village in half, wrong to disturb the peace along the longest unmilitarized border in the world, wrong to institutionalize what should be low-tech police work.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said it effectively and correctly, if we can take a moment to listen to a word of advice from the past, rather than the fear-mongering of the present:

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Confusing the means and the ends. Sounds right. Ability to do outrunning the reason to do. That, when you sit down, shut off the TV and put your feet up, feels right as well. Guided missiles and misguided men. Bingo, Martin. And for that and the other truths of your illuminated life, they assassinated you.

Illuminate: (verb) Make free from confusion or ambiguity; make clear.

A president that our current president claims to admire, said quite famously; “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Not perhaps as catchy and bite-sized as ‘bring ‘em on’ or ‘we do not torture,’ but a better quote and a better legacy upon which to be judged.

Amazingly, the choice of legacy is not his, but ours. We must choose the Bush legacy and lose our own or choose differently and save our nation.

It is as simple as that.

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Media comment:

• Vancouver Sun-Canada-Canada needs to be proactive to counter U.S. protectionism
• United Press International-Vermont town decries security changes
• Washington Post-Taking Liberties At Homeland Security
• ASAP News-UK-Security online registration for US visitors sparks controversy
• Associated Press-Homeland Security setting up counterspy unit

“First We Take,” the Lessons of 1933 Germany

As may be apparent from the title, I am going to make comparisons to the early years of Hitler Germany, when he demanded and took various powers by entirely legal and democratic methods. Hitler ended up a dictator, but he was enabled to that ultimate goal by a population terrified by an economic maelstrom and the ever growing lawlessness across Germany.

Conservative, disheartened and increasingly desperate Germans repeatedly went to the polls and elected National Socialist (Nazi) candidates.

The Holocaust has taken Nazi Germany as ‘off the table’ of political discussion as Nancy Pelosi’s unilateral removal of impeachment and perhaps for similar reasons; sensitivity. It’s just too divisive, says Nancy, as though we were frightened children needing to hide our faces in her skirt. Never again, say the Israelis, as 800,000 Rwandans are massacred and Stalin kills (by some estimates) 25 million of his own people, Mao another 35 million and the carnage goes on, uncompared.

Forbidding the discussion of parallels is to make them invisible. Invisibility is the workplace of those who would do us wrong, not in the light of discussion and criticism, but behind closed doors, in secret session. Every attack against our constitutionally guaranteed rights, since 9-11, has been whisked behind the opaque door of ‘top secret’ and ‘national interest,’ thereby kept from the public view.

Comparison? We are denied comparison as well. Nazi, has been made yet another N-word; unspeakable in polite society and therefore far more dangerous to our civil rights and the lessons history has to teach. Author Aldous Huxley cautioned us that "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"

Unable to debate the similarity between America today and Hitler’s 1933 Germany, those who oppose authoritarian presidencies in place of constitutional balance are disarmed. Relegated to the pillow-fights of uncritical media, we stand impotent while our country is slid out from under us. If you value Nancy Pelosi’s sensitivity above and beyond the lessons of history, go turn on MTV and leave this column to the less frightened.

(Washington Post, August 16^th, U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules, by Spencer Hsu and Carrie Johnson)

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Forget 9-11 and put aside the past eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration, clear your head of various blue-ribbon panel recommendations and recognize that this ruling is made at the exit-gate, by an organization on its way out the door. It’s publicly announced by the Justice Department on a Saturday in mid-August.

With Germanic precision, Bush’s Department of Homeland Security has put the nation’s police departments on the intravenous-drip of federal money. Did you ever suspect that one day America would be called a Homeland. Did you ever in your most Orwellian dream believe that Americans would stand for that? Not only stand for it, but wave the flag?

You guys need night-vision, armored personnel carriers, automatic weaponry, training, anti-terror camps? Line right up at the fed spigot and drink deeply. It’s the nationalist thing to do, patriotic to the core, swinging into step for God and country. Nice new toys, huh? Shiny and cool, you bet. Manly and preparedness-friendly, yessir.

For the Phoenix police? For Detroit? We need armored personnel-carriers and machine-guns for Phoenix and Detroit? This, for a response to a terrorist act? Crowd control against American crowds? Gimme a break.

Now, says the Fed, we don’t want to see you lose all that great stuff and we don’t want to intimidate—not us. But, remember where those toys came from. Quicker’n a sub-prime loan, they can be taken back. 18,000 police departments that grab a part of that $1.6 billion (and more to come), lose most of their autonomy (noun: Immunity from arbitrary exercise of authority: political independence).

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

They are also, without a shred of doubt, setting groundwork and legal precedent to protect Bush administration abuses from actually sending officials to prison. Prior to January 20^th, look for Bush to provide blanket immunity for all acts against terrorism—however that term may be defined. The Reagan administration, choir-boys by comparison, suffered 61 indictments.

Bush, while still president (and, in his own mind, still able to preside by decree) will absolutely protect Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Rice and whatever smaller fish threaten to fall into the nets of American justice.

1933 Germany was a parliamentary republic and thus the Chancellor was subject only to votes of confidence. Wobbly in his hold on office, Hitler chose to burn down the Reichstag (parliament), blame it on his nearest political enemy and take immediate dictatorial control in the heat of public panic. The Bolsheviks were at the gates.

We elect our presidents for a maximum of eight years, but there are those who fear an attack on Iran and a ‘temporary’ suspension of habeus corpus and a ‘necessary’ period of martial law ‘until the terrorist threat subsides.’ Terrorists rather than Bolsheviks at the gates. Easier perhaps, than a bogus fire within the Congress of the United States.

America has already been scared half to death in preparation, but Blackwater stands ready to ‘assist’ local police, should there be any ‘outbreaks of terrorist activity.’ New Orleans was the prep event.

As in 1933 Germany, first we take the public confidence. Then we replace the democracy blamed for losing the public confidence by trains that run on time, a hustling off of dissenters, polishing the apple of modern media and possibly an additional sop such as a holiday on mortgage foreclosures. The banks will be massively subsidized for their inconvenience.

When first we have taken, then all else falls into place. Writers of columns such as this will be gone.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the administration agrees that it needs to do everything possible to prevent unwarranted encroachments on civil liberties, adding that it succeeds the overwhelming majority of the time.

Bush homeland security adviser Kenneth L. Wainstein said, "This is a continuum that started back on 9/11 to reform law enforcement and the intelligence community to focus on the terrorism threat."

Those statements, in and of themselves, ought to chill the most conservative blood.

Under the Justice Department proposal for state and local police, published for public comment July 31, law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists. They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.

Allowed to target, with no more than a suspicion of providing support to terrorists. We have by that, just given over innocent until proven guilty to its direct opposite. Would be allowed to smash down your door at 2AM and hustle you (or me) off to Guantanamo and no one the wiser.

And last week, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said that the Justice Department will release new guidelines within weeks to streamline and unify FBI investigations of criminal law enforcement matters and national security threats. The changes will clarify what tools agents can employ and whose approval they must obtain.

Clarify. Ja, ve vill clarify, but first ve vill streamline.

Critics say preemptive law enforcement in the absence of a crime can violate the Constitution and due process. They cite the administration's long-running warrantless-surveillance program, which was set up outside the courts, and the FBI's acknowledgment that it abused its intelligence-gathering privileges in hundreds of cases by using inadequately documented administrative orders to obtain telephone, e-mail, financial and other personal records of U.S. citizens without warrants.

Constitution, poof! Ve haff already crossed that bridge and who obcheckted? No von, not von obchecktion from the Reichstag, uh, Congress. Vat critics remain, ve haff means to silence critics.

Jamie Gorelick cited the recent disclosure that undercover Maryland State Police agents spied on death penalty opponents and antiwar groups in 2005 and 2006 to emphasize that the policies would require close oversight.

Ofersight, ja. Ve haff no problems with oversight.

German, an FBI agent for 16 years, said easing established limits on intelligence-gathering would lead to abuses against peaceful political dissenters. In addition to the Maryland case, he pointed to reports in the past six years that undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention; that California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and that Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.

"If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information," German said. "It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government."

Ja (chuckle), I qvote the vice-prezident; “So vat!” First ve take, then vill be plenty time to give.

Conspiracy theorist? Me? Please, that charge is so 1933.

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Media comment:

• Islam Online-Police Allowed to Spy on Americans
• Los Angeles Times-Justice Department eyes domestic spy role for local police
• Baltimore Sun-Police spying prompts hearings
• Hagerstown Herald Mail-Maryland must investigate police spying
• AlterNet-CA-Dissent Is Essential to Democracy

 

 

THE NEXT GREAT IDEA IN THE BUSH DOCTRINE OF PREEMPTIVE WAR

Along comes Walter Pincus, an able enough Washington Post staff writer to disabuse us of any intention by incumbent George Bush to release his death-grip on America’s substitution for preemption over diplomacy. If you thought (or hoped) his eye was on getting back to his cats and favorite pillow down on the ranch, you never counted on Dick Cheney, or Cheney’s attack dog, David Addington.

If one were of a more conspiracy attuned mind than I happen to be, I might would feel the rising hairs at the back of my neck, the hot breath of military coups. An election, a preemptive strike before January 20th and extraordinary measures taken temporarily on a war-footing.

Nah. Couldn’t happen. Troops in the streets? Kent State? Nah.

(Non-Nuclear Warhead Urged for Trident Missile, by Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, August 16, 2008)

A National Research Council blue-ribbon panel of defense experts is recommending development and testing of a conventional warhead for submarine-launched intercontinental Trident missiles to give the president an alternative to using nuclear weapons for a prompt strike anywhere in the world.

In critical situations, such an immediate global strike weapon "would eliminate the dilemma of having to choose between responding to a sudden threat either by using nuclear weapons or by not responding at all," the panel said in a final report requested by Congress in early 2007 and released yesterday.

. . . The panel also said that few countries, other than Russia and perhaps China, would be able to detect a sub-launched missile "in the next five years," and that because of the few warheads that would be involved, "the risk of the observing nation's launching a nuclear retaliatory attack is very low."

In its study, the panel focused on scenarios in which it said the Defense Department in the past "seriously contemplated strikes." These involved the need for an immediate conventional strike to preempt an adversary whose missile system was poised to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States or an ally...

. . . The panel also included John S. Foster Jr., a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Defense Department director of research and development and chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger;

Ah yes, and our man Foster has been quoted elsewhere as saying "National defense with maximum precision and minimum unintended damage should be an attractive challenge for scientists seeking to improve the human condition.”  Dr. Strangelove rides again.

One can hardly contemplate a more improving influence on the human condition than America's current (Bush declared) Doctrine of Preemptive War, enhanced by maximum precision and minimum collateral damage. Improving the Rumsfeld scorecard. Death to the countries and regimes of choice without killing absolutely everyone. A man who identifies that as an attractive challenge is long past the childhood habits of pulling wings off insects.

If anything might chill the reader's blood, then giving this particular president another, easier, less confrontational, less ambiguous way to attack the world, certainly fills the bill.

Promising a 'new direction for America,' Pelosi flim-flammed us into giving her the keys to the Congress. Her obscure, misunderstood and unconstitutionally ‘off the table’ argument for impeachment and against this kind of clap-trap weaponization, is that this president is on his way out. "Oh, he'll be gone in a few months, what’s the point?" The point is preserving our republic as a nation of laws. What we give or allow this president, we give or allow all presidents to come, by precedent.

Remember, without the impeachment of Bill Clinton, all presidents would have been encouraged to solicit oral sex in the halls of the White House.

The claim that in critical situations, this newest weapon of choice in the Pandora Box "would eliminate the dilemma of having to choose between responding to a sudden threat either by using nuclear weapons or by not responding at all," is bogus on its face. It tempts presidents to respond by poll (something they do entirely too much already), promotes reckless and ill-advised presidential shots from the hip to juice their numbers and discourages the hard, slogging, necessary work of diplomacy.

Presidents, due to their four-year report cards, are as short-sighted as business executives in pursuit of the ever-elusive quarterly earnings statement. The difference is that presidents cook the nation’s books, often with horrendous consequences.

This administration in particular, but perhaps all modern administrations, have apparently thrown diplomacy (and the Department of State that administers it) into the dustbin of history. I argue that such successive presidential policy has pretty much destroyed American influence on the international stage. It has been recently claimed that we have more members of military bands than total employees in the State Department.

Ruffles and flourishes, the substitute diplomacy of the new century.

That shortfall in expertise is what ties the hands of Secretaries like the thoroughly beaten Colin Powell and the current abuse victim, Condoleeza Rice. They become mere firemen, dashing around the planet, stamping down insurgencies and smoldering paper bags on the porch in Darfur, Georgia, China, Israel, Palestine--and elsewhere--too many elsewheres to list.

We don't need a quicker way to strike, we need less tendency to strike and a calmer, more resolute method by which to negotiate. In a properly run government (let alone an administration) the situation in Georgia would never have been allowed to fester. GWB found himself surprised by what everyone else saw coming, but had no mechanism to prevent. Echoes of 9-11 and Condi Rice thrown to another lion.

A well organized Department of State would have (and once had) 'sections' devoted to every nation and region of the world--long term departments devoted to in-depth knowledge of an area's history, economics, world view and political persuasion. That legacy was available from secretary to secretary, president to president. A proper Department of State would have more than ten Arab-speakers in a workforce of 34,000.

Ten Arab speakers. Can you believe it? We have plunged ourselves into the darkness and expected, demanded, smashed all the furniture seeking illumination. The Middle East is in flames and America has ten people who can speak Arabic in their diplomatic service and probably fewer qualified in Farsi (the language of Iran).

How 'bout packing in the missiles, John Foster (all that's missing is the Dulles) and beating the drum for a diplomatic service fluent in Arabic, Persian, Pashtu, Albanian, Azerbiajani, Cantonese and Mandarin? You are the living embodiment of Martin Luther King’s prescient statement that ‘we have guided missiles and misguided men.’ Spending mercilessly on weaponry, we don't have the money to speak the language of our adversaries.

We can kill, but we can't communicate.

Instead of more thoughtful approaches to getting what we want politically and economically (the goals of all diplomacy), we have presented to us on behalf of the current crew of war-profiteers, yet another study that recommends an increase in weapons. The signatories to that study are (no surprise) heavily into the weapons promotion business.

Witness The Committee for Present Danger (nearing its 60th anniversary of perceived and ever-present dangers) as an example.

After sixty years of looking for present dangers, what the hell did we expect these nit-wits would find? Peace? Look a some of the signatory members:

They include, in addition to the aforementioned John Foster, we have Norman Podhoretz (advocate of attacking Iran) and associates of the American Enterprise Institute (Richard Perle), Heritage Foundation (Richard Mellon Scaife), AIPAC (a shadow American government) and Boeing.

Boeing? Yeah, Boeing, the ‘we know why we’re here’ people. As for the rest of the weapons contractors, McCain advisor Joe Lieberman is available to haul their water.

Being the last of the major powers still standing is tough work. So is policing the world. And for those who think we shouldn't be policing the world, I would suggest it has always fallen to the powerful--Rome, England, France, Spain, now us. The Pax Americana.

That difficult work should never depend upon a single president's perceptions, because no single man or woman is up to a detailed, up to date and unbiased world-view. Condi Rice is a Russia expert and yet she screwed up the presidential advice leading to the Georgia conflict, because she had no depth on the bench to assist her diplomacy.

As a nation, we are increasingly shying away from the hard work in favor of the easier (quicker, quarterly maximization of profit) route of intimidation, conflict and bipartisanship. It's not working. That's the conclusion of the 'Freeman Study,' for which no professionals were engaged and no cost incurred.

Having said that, the smart money is on new submarine armaments.

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Media comment:

• Washington Post-Non-Nuclear Warhead Urged for Trident Missile

ROBERT GATES, THE RIGHT MAN AT A VERY LATE TIME IN THE GAME

Bob Gates has done a great many things right in his brief tenure as Secretary of Defense. Not the least of those services has been to bring a sense of appropriate mission to the Pentagon, where once the Rumsfeld mission seemed in danger of replacing the Department of State.

War, as is correctly said, is failed diplomacy. Or was it ‘diplomacy by other means?’ No matter, the result is mostly the same, except for the profit to the military-industrial chaps, who are mostly living quietly at home, shooting a few quail and musing upon the assured future of their offspring.

(David Ignatius, Washington Post, Aug 7th) Defense Secretary Bob Gates has been talking recently about how to rebuild America's national security architecture so that it fits the 21st century. The next president should think about assigning Gates to fix what he rightly says is broken.

Gates is an anomaly in this lame-duck administration. He is still firing on all cylinders, working to repair the damage done at the Pentagon by his arrogant and aloof predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. Gates has restored accountability in the military services by firing the secretaries of the Army and Air Force when they failed to respond forthrightly to problems. And he has been an early and persuasive internal administration critic of U.S. military action against Iran.

Ignatius is right on. Either cause worthy enough to secure the man an honored place in the history of a dishonorable administration. One would hope that, if the Democrats nail down the next presidency, the thrown-out bathwater will not include this particular public servant.

Amazingly for a defense secretary, Gates has been arguing against the "creeping militarization" of foreign policy. In a speech last month, he urged more funding for the State Department and other civilian agencies, saying they have been "chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long." In Washington, that's almost unheard of -- sticking your neck out for the other guy -- and it's one reason Gates' reputation has been steadily rising.

Allowing that Obama (presume, presume) will be the incomer and that he will want his own choice of Defense Secretary, Ignatius makes the intriguing suggestion that Bob Gates would be the perfect man to overhaul the raggedy, shopworn, patched-together national security apparatus.

Why not appoint Gates to head a special commission to revise the basic framework of the National Security Act of 1947? He knows all the pieces of this puzzle -- having run the CIA and worked at the National Security Council earlier in his career. A hypothetical Gates commission would have two basic missions.

• Fix the NSC structure so that it is designed to deal with today's "soft power" challenges rather than the old Cold War problems. Specifically, a Gates commission should think about how to focus money and expertise on the nation-building problems that now fall between the cracks of the interagency system.

"Over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory," Gates warned last month. "What the Pentagon calls 'kinetic' operations should be subordinate to measures to promote participation in government, economic programs to spur development, and efforts to address the grievances that often lie at the heart of insurgencies.". . a (new) report notes, there are more people serving in military bands than in the entire State Department. Changing that balance will require a different kind of NSC architecture.

If you weren’t noticing (as I was not noticing) that the State Department has shrunk to the size of a band of trumpet-players rather than orchestrating upon the world stage, it’s time to smell the coffee.

No wonder Condi Rice seems to be ever airborne to ever less purpose. She is doing everything other than piloting the plane. Some wags would follow that by saying that piloting the plane of State is her actual job and they would not be far wrong.

• Fix      the half-baked reform of the intelligence agencies. The 2004 law that      created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was meant to      deal with the intelligence failures that led to Sept. 11, but it instead      has created more bureaucracy. Gates understands very well what's wrong; he      turned down the DNI job because he knew the structure was unwieldy. Gates      has cobbled together an interim solution by working with old friends --      DNI Mike McConnell, CIA Director Mike Hayden and Pentagon intelligence      chief James Clapper. But the current arrangement is too dependent on      personalities. A sign of continuing backroom friction is the rivalry over      who will brief the presidential candidates.

The FBI was arguably at its most effective under the iron-fisted and power-mad control of J. Edgar Hoover. A small structure, closely held, with very short reporting structures served Hoover well and the lesson there is not to expand our intelligence gathering community mindlessly, but to find a better man than Hoover.

Currently, in lieu of a ‘better man,’ we have sixteen agencies, 100,000 employees and almost $45 billion annual cost. They stand around, bump into the furniture, point fingers, argue over territory and are unable to get a single agent’s concern up the chain of (?) command in time to stop 9-11 from happening. And that was back in the ‘good old days’ before Mike Chertoff became unlikely head of an agency devoted to overlaying the standing, bumping, pointing and arguing with wondering, fretting, testifying and looking foolish in case after case.

By comparison, Condi Rice’s State Department has about 5,000 stateside employees. They are outnumbered 20 to 1 by the intelligence community’s spooks, which may shine a light on why our foreign policy is so spooky and unable to effect any other than belligerent confrontation.

Bob Gates seems to think that’s an unmanageable proportion in a modern-day world. Many of us eel he’s right and the challenge is to realize that men of his capability, experience, wide-ranging relationships and trust among partisans are few and far between. Far, so far and thus far, is counted in decades rather than years.

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Media comment:

• National Review-Testing Gates
• New York Times-Gates Plans the Post-Gates Pentagon
• Associated Press-Gates: Military's priority is to defeat extremists
• New York Times-Gates Wants to Shift $1.2 Billion to Bolster War Surveillance

The End of War

Not the end of conflict, certainly not the end of fighting . . . but it is worth considering that as we blindly multiply our efforts toward a supremacy-gap between ourselves and the rest of the world in military hardware, the enemy is dissolving before our eyes. What can we possibly be thinking? More to the point, what can the rest of the world possibly think we are thinking?

HAMAS AND THE TALIBAN--WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS ON A BUDGET, WHILE WE PISS AWAY BILLIONS

Just when you think every possible outrage has been committed in the name of George Bush's policy of pre-emptive war, something more comes from the blind-side to knock the wind from an already winded American experience.

Not Saved by the Bell, but Saved by the Bill at the FBI

All the hand-wringing (a good bit of it by me) over lost freedoms, Big Brother and this administration’s Homeland Insecurity pale by comparison to bad judgment and malfeasance. Jeffersonian democracy may be against the ropes in the 10th round, but it has a far better chance of being saved by the bill than the bell.

Thanks and Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

Local Iraqi interpreters working with either the State Department, Military or private organizations in Iraq have a limited shelf-life. Their ‘use before’ date has never been very long because they have to live among the ordinary population, while keeping their jobs hidden.