Who Will Liberate America?

Obama, the Human Rights Hypocrite
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination.

One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights.

Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prison sites are other places to which Washington brings human rights. Obama, who has the power to murder American citizens without due process of law, is too powerless to close Guantanamo Prison.

He is powerless to prevent himself from supplying Israel with weapons with which to murder Palestinians and Lebanese citizens to whom Obama brings human rights by vetoing every UN resolution passed against Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Instead of following Washington’s human rights lead, the evil Chinese invest in other countries, buy things from them, and sell them goods.

Has any foreign dignitary ever raised “a sensitive human rights issue” with Obama or his predecessor? How is the world so deranged that Washington can murder innocents for years on end and still profess to be the world’s defender of human rights?

How many people has China bombed, droned, and sanctioned into non-existence in the 21st century?

Will Syria and Iran be the next victims of Washington’s concern for human rights?

Nothing better illustrates the total unreality of life in the West than the fact that the entire Western world did not break out in riotous laughter over Obama’s expression of his human rights concern over China’s behavior.

Washington’s concern with human rights does not extend as far as airport security where little girls and grandmothers are sexually groped. Antiwar activists have their homes invaded, their personal possessions carried off, and a grand jury is summoned to frame them up on some terrorist charge. US soldier Bradley Manning is held for two years in violation of the US Constitution while the human rights government concocts fabricated charges to punish him for revealing a US war crime. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is harassed endlessly with the goal of bringing him into the human rights clutches of Washington. Critics of Washington’s inhumane policies are monitored and spied upon.

Washington is the worst violator of human rights in our era, and Washington has only begun.

Who will liberate Americans from Washington’s clutches?

All the Countries the US is at War with after 9/11

Friday, September 16, 2011 by Institute for Policy Studies
September 11 Remembered, US at War Against the World, and the Ongoing Campaign Against Israeli Occupation.

by Phyllis Bennis

 

 

September 11 commemorations were everywhere this past weekend. My own view is that the devastating attacks of September 11 were, along with an enormous human tragedy, a huge crime, a crime against humanity. But they did not threaten our country’s existence, they did not threaten our democracy. It was the acts of September 12, when the Bush administration decided to take the world to war in response, that threatened and continue to threaten our country, our democracy, our security, and the security of much of the rest of the world. 

Many of you probably saw the piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, by one of their top editors, Bill Keller, one of the “liberal hawks,” sort of apologizing for having supported the Iraq War. I sent a letter to the Times (we’ll see if it gets in!) to say that his “hard look” back is appropriate, but not nearly hard enough. He spoke of the “monster argument” being so potent in convincing him to call for war against Iraq, but where was he in the 1970s and 1980s when Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was armed and financed by the United States?

He ignored the 1990s when the people of Iraq faced not only the continuing brutality of that dictatorship but the monster of U.S.-backed economic sanctions that killed over 500,000 children.

But most of all Keller ignored the fact that the “broad consensus” he invokes was not absolute. He names one skeptic who “joined the hawk club” after Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council — but ignores all those skeptics who watched that same speech and weren’t convinced. Some of us published articles with titles like “Powell’s Dubious Case for War” within hours of Powell’s speech on February 5, 2003. He ignores — as his newspaper so often ignored — the voices of consistent skeptics, those of us who opposed the Iraq war as a drive toward power and empire, who cheered the UN when it joined millions of people around the world who said no to war. We opposed the war then, and we were right. We still are.

Now the 9/11 commemorations have come and gone, and our country is still at war.  Sometimes it seems that one way or another the United States is at war against almost the whole world:

• Official (though undeclared) wars in and against Afghanistan and Iraq
• Official (but not really a war "because U.S. troops aren’t the ones at risk") war in Libya
• Unofficial (though sort of acknowledged) war in Pakistan
• Unacknowledged (because murder-by-drone doesn’t count as war) war in Yemen and Somalia
• Indirect and diplomatic war (through $30 billion military aid enabling Israel’s occupation and by promising another UN veto) against Palestine
• Unacknowledged and denied (through still-stealth drone campaigns) war in uncertain venues mainly in Africa, Asia and the Middle East
• Untitled (though still accurately described as the Global War on Terror) war in the whole world
• Then there’s the not-exactly-military war, like the war against the poor in the United States because of the hundreds of billions, now trillions, of tax dollars wasted on all those other wars.

It’s been a hell of an end to summer. The new census figures out this week are horrifying. Unemployment is staggeringly high, with more than 14 million people officially unemployed — which of course don’t include those who are under-employed, working two or three slave-wage jobs to survive, or who have simply given up looking. The current new jobs program is completely insufficient. What we need is a major federal jobs program, a real WPA, that we know works. Instead, we’re seeing billions diverted to continuing illegal, useless wars.

Poverty has surged to its highest levels in almost two decades, with one out of five children and one out of six people overall living below the poverty level, including lots of families where someone does have what passes for a job these days. And remember that the official “poverty line” is just over $22,000 for a family of four, no matter where they live! Imagine that for a family in New York or Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles…

And those devastating figures are far worse when we think about where our tax money is being spent. If President Obama ended the Iraq war “right away” — just the Iraq war, not even counting Afghanistan — he could bring home almost 50,000 troops and save almost $50 billion dollars. That’s enough for one million new green middle-class jobs — starting with those returning veterans.

If the president ended the war in Afghanistan “right away” — and we’re seeing every day how the U.S. occupation is causing more, not less violence in Afghanistan — he could bring home about 100,000 troops and $122 billion of our tax money. Keeping those troops in Afghanistan costs a million dollars a year each. For every soldier we bring home, saving that million dollars, we could hire that once-soldier-now-civilian plus 19 more people in good green jobs.

That’s what I wrote about in response to the celebrations about August — the first month without U.S. casualties in Iraq — but with too many Iraqi civilians still being killed, and too many billions of our tax dollars still wasted. (I also wrote a short op-ed version that went out on IPS’s OtherWords op-ed syndication service.)

THE UN IS COMING BACK TO TOWNBut the end of summer also means the UN General Assembly is coming back into session in the next couple of weeks. And Palestine is back on the agenda. After years (more than 20 years, actually) of a failed U.S.-controlled “peace process,” the question of Palestine is once again on the global agenda of the United Nations. And once again the United States is isolated with Israel, standing almost alone in the world in opposing a Palestinian initiative for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood that has long been the claimed, but never implemented, goal of U.S. policy. The fight is ostensibly over venue, not substance; the United States, we are told, supports a Palestinian state. But we don’t support them getting it in the UN. We only support it if it is created under our auspices and control. Otherwise we’ll call it “unhelpful.”

The United States has promised to veto a UN membership bid in the Security Council. But the Palestinians may avoid that by heading straight to the General Assembly where there is no veto, but where their state recognition will not include UN membership, though it would include the potentially powerful right to join the International Criminal Court. But there are a lot of negatives as well, primarily having to do with loss of representation at the UN for Palestinian refugees and support for their right of return, and many Palestinians are against this move. Developments are very uncertain, no one is sure yet what the Palestinian diplomats actually intend to do. What is clear is that we should not allow the United States to be the ones to say “no” to the Palestinian effort.

AND BACK IN THE REGION…Lots of other Middle East news. I had a letter published in the Washington Post targeting U.S.-NATO hypocrisy in Libya and objecting to their misrepresentation of the UN resolution supposedly justifying the Western military intervention there. With regional developments changing so fast, at the moment changing especially swiftly in terms of Israel’s increasing isolation and changing relationships with its one-time allies in the region, I discussed the role of Egypt’s changes in determining Israeli actions in Gaza, with The Real News Network editor Paul Jay. (This video, along with some great footage of the protests in Israel, ends rather abruptly when the east coast earthquake interrupted our interview… it’s pretty funny.)

And I collaborated with my friend Richard Falk, the great international law scholar and the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, on an analysis of the UN’s latest report on last year’s Israel attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla — in which they managed to claim Israel’s blockade of Gaza is somehow legal.

And last, as summer wanes, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is holding our annual national conference, celebrating ten years of work changing discourse and challenging U.S. policy towards Palestine and Israel, and looking forward to a (hopefully) short time left before we can fold up shop and take a vacation, because we’ve succeeded.

Half Of World’s Refugees Are Running From U.S. Wars

 (A dubious distinction if ever there was one. Yay, look how many we've driven from their homes!--jef)

Half Of World’s Refugees Are Running From U.S. Wars | America’s wars are forcing Afghans and Iraqis to flee their homes in greater numbers. According to a recent U.N. High Commission for Refugees study, nearly one half of the world’s refugees are from Afghanistan and Iraq, 3.05 million and 1.68 million, respectively. But neither the United States nor much of the developed world bears the burden of the 10.55 million refugees under the UNHCR’s purview globally. Instead, Pakistan, Iran, and Syria serve as the top host countries.

The Economist has charted the numbers:

Obama's broken promises

 (Not a well-written article, but I agree with the sentiment.--jef)

The US president blazed a path to the White House on a platform that promised a complete break with George W Bush.

by Ahmed Moor -- 20 Jun 2011

For the first time in a decade, the mainstream Republican consensus around war in the Middle East and western Asia is fractured. During a recent debate among candidates for the Republican Party's nomination for president, former Massachusetts state governor Mitt Romney declared that US troops ought to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan as soon as possible.

That sentiment was echoed by several other debate participants. At the same time, US President Barack Obama appears to be incapable of ending any of America's ongoing wars. Therefore, one of several Republican presidential candidates may be preferable to the incumbent, at least among people who would like to see an end to US-led military adventures.

Barack Obama blazed a path to the White House on a platform that promised a complete break with the George W Bush presidency. On Guantanamo Bay, rendition, corporate accountability, finance reform, habeas corpus, illegal wiretapping, domestic spying, whistleblowers, Afghanistan - and a host of other issues - the current president promised change. In reality, however, he only offered continuity and in some cases, such as the prosecution of whistle blowers and the assassination of US citizens overseas, he outstripped his predecessor's zeal.

Many people who took Obama's campaign promises at face value were disappointed by the gaping chasm between his words and actions. The president famously derided liberals' credulity and purported naiveté at a $30,000-a-plate fundraising dinner; they expected too much change too quickly, he said. But as Glenn Greenwald noted recently, the main problem isn't that change is coming too slowly, it's that the president is "doing the opposite [of changing the dynamic]". Indeed, on most meaningful counts, this president has engineered the entrenchment and growth of the Bush-era security state and imperial presidency. 

Yet, despite Obama's stellar establishmentarian credentials, he is regarded by his political opponents as a weak politician. A part of that perception is based on reality; on several occasions Obama has been roundly humiliated by Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. But a part of that perception is also based in political myth-making. Across the US political and media spectrum, members of the Democratic Party are portrayed as vulnerable, particularly on security issues. And in a political culture which somehow continues to permit sexist caricatures, the Democrats are routinely portrayed as effeminate.

Never mind the fact that Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan. Forget also the fact that he ramped up the air-wars in Pakistan and Yemen - starting one in Libya - or presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden. When it comes to perceptions in the US, Obama is still a Democrat, and Democrats are still the weaker party on national security. 

It is for that reason that that this president cannot be relied on to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Nor can he be expected to end any military engagement (with the exception of Libya, which will likely end when Gaddafi is deposed or dead) while he remains in office.

US politicians, particularly the president, are forced to contend with a perpetual election cycle. For Democrats, that means a constant hyper-sensitivity to any policies that may be construed as weakening national security. Whether the policies are actually good or bad for America is beside the point; it's the perception that matters.

In the case of Afghanistan, an increasing number of US citizens agree that troop withdrawals are in the country's interest. But if the current president initiates a withdrawal, one of his many opportunistic opponents will employ the slogan: "Barack Obama abandoned Afghanistan to al-Qaeda" - or something like it - to likely great effect.

While Obama will not be eligible to run for president in 2016 (if he wins in 2012), he will campaign for his Democratic successor - which means that the vulnerability to "weak" sloganeering will continue to restrict his ability to maneuver.

If a Mitt Romney or Ron Paul chose to end any of America's five overt or covert wars (Afghanistan; Iraq; Libya; Pakistan; Yemen), no Democrat can credibly accuse him of harming national security.

The conclusion is that if anti-war liberals hope to see a US withdrawal from Afghanistan before 2016, they are better off voting against Obama in 2012. Instead of voting for the lesser of two evils, they'll vote Republican or for a credible independent candidate.

To be sure, this is a very unlikely scenario. Part of the reason for that is that people on the left - like political partisans everywhere - usually have a very deep distrust of the other side, even when their own is adopting the same policies. Democratic strategists are aware of the left's aversion to Republican candidates and are counting on that sentiment to guide their president to victory. Alex Pareene humorously essentialises their arguments:

"A Republican president will most likely do what the last three Republican presidents have done: Starve the government of revenue, allow industries to capture regulators, launch pointless and bloody foreign misadventures, and threaten to gut the welfare state. I mean, all of those things might be happening now, with a Democrat, but they would happen so much worse with Mitt Romney, probably! So vote Obama again!"

Unfortunately, many people probably will vote for Obama again. And unfortunately, that vote will likely be for another five years of war.

We Invent Enemies to Buy Bombs--Eisenhower's Fears Came True

Friday, June 17, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists, glory-hungry politicians will use it
by Simon Jenkins

Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?

Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defense spending. He said NATO had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialize in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.

This call was echoed by NATO's chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who pointed out how unfair it was that US defence investment represented 75% of the NATO defense expenditure, where once it was only half. Having been forced to extend his war on Libya by another three months, Rasmussen wanted to see Europe's governments come up with more money, and no nonsense about recession. Defense to him is measured not in security but in spending.

The call was repeated back home by the navy chief, Sir Mark Stanhope. He had to be "dressed down" by the prime minister, David Cameron, for warning that an extended war in Libya would mean "challenging decisions about priorities". Sailors never talk straight: he meant more ships. The navy has used so many of its £500,000 Tomahawk missiles trying to hit Colonel Gaddafi (and missing) over the past month that it needs money for more. In a clearly co-ordinated lobby, the head of the RAF also demanded "a significant uplift in spending after 2015, if the service is to meet its commitments". It, of course, defines its commitments itself.

Libya has cost Britain £100m so far, and rising. But Iraq and the Afghan war are costing America $3bn a week, and there is scarcely an industry, or a state, in the country that does not see some of this money. These wars show no signs of being ended, let alone won. But to the defense lobby what matters is the money. It sustains combat by constantly promising success and inducing politicians and journalists to see "more enemy dead", "a glimmer of hope" and "a corner about to be turned".

Victory will come, but only if politicians spend more money on "a surge". Soldiers are like firefighters, demanding extra to fight fires. They will fight all right, but if you want victory that is overtime.

On Wednesday the Russian ambassador to NATO warned that Britain and France were "being dragged more and more into the eventuality of a land-based operation in Libya". This is what the defense lobby wants institutionally, even if it may appall the generals. In the 1980s Russia watched the same process in Afghanistan, where it took a dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev, to face down the Red Army and demand withdrawal. The west has no Gorbachev in Afghanistan at the moment. NATO's Rasmussen says he "could not envisage" a land war in Libya, since the UN would take over if Gaddafi were toppled. He must know this is nonsense. But then he said NATO would only enforce a no-fly zone in Libya. He achieved that weeks ago, but is still bombing.

It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defense was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a corporate military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defense establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes".

I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today's US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defense industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."

The devil makes work for idle hands, especially if they are well-financed. Britain's former special envoy to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, echoed Kennan last week in claiming that the army's keenness to fight in Helmand was self-interested. "It's use them or lose them, Sherard," he was told by the then chief of the general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt. Cowper-Coles has now gone off to work for an arms manufacturer.

There is no strategic defense justification for the US spending 5.5% of its gross domestic product on defense or Britain 2.5%, or for the NATO "target" of 2%.

These figures merely formalize existing commitments and interests. At the end of the cold war soldiers assiduously invented new conflicts for themselves and their suppliers, variously wars on terror, drugs, piracy, internet espionage and man's general inhumanity to man. None yields victory, but all need equipment. The war on terror fulfilled all Eisenhower's fears, as America sank into a swamp of kidnapping, torture and imprisonment without trial.

The belligerent posture of the US and Britain towards the Muslim world has fostered antagonism and moderate threats in response. The bombing of extremist targets in Pakistan is an invitation for terrorists to attack us, and then a need for defence against such attack. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of appeasing the complex is astronomical. Eisenhower remarked that "every gun that is made is a theft from those who hunger" – a bomber is two power stations and a hospital not built. Likewise, each Tomahawk Cameron drops on Tripoli destroys not just a Gaddafi bunker (are there any left?), but a hospital ward and a classroom in Britain.

As long as "big defense" exists it will entice glory-hungry politicians to use it. It is a return to the hundred years war, when militaristic barons and knights had a stranglehold on the monarch, and no other purpose in life than to fight. To deliver victory they demanded ever more taxes for weapons, and when they had ever more weapons they promised ever grander victories. This is exactly how Britain's defense ministry ran out of budgetary control under Labour.

There is one piece of good news. NATO has long outlived its purpose, now justifying its existence only by how much it induces its members to spend, and how many wars irrelevant to its purpose it finds to fight. Yet still it does not spend enough for the US Defense Secretary. In his anger, Gates threatened that "future US leaders … may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost". Is that a threat or a promise?

Six Wars and Counting...

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Washington Reaches for the Record Book
by Tom Engelhardt

President Obama recently reshuffled his top Washington warriors, sending CIA Director Leon Panetta, a man who knows Congress well, on to the Pentagon to replace retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In turn, the president is bringing in General David Petraeus, present Afghan War Commander, former Centcom commander, and former Iraq War commander (as well as “Bush’s general”), to run the Agency.

Whatever the local politics involved, and the Petraeus appointment ensures that the potentially popular general will be on the political sidelines for campaign year 2012, these moves catch the zeitgeist of our Washington moment. Since the bin Laden assassination, in which U.S. military special operations forces “commanded” by Panetta took out the al-Qaeda leader, a new face of American war, “where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret,” has been emerging according to Foreign Policy in Focus analyst Conn Hallinan.

With the latest news (revealed last week by the New York Times) that the U.S. has launched a significant “intensification” of its secret air campaign against Yemeni tribesmen believed to be connected with al-Qaeda, the U.S. is now involved in no less than six wars. Count ‘em, if you don’t believe me: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and what used to be called the Global War on Terror.

In anyone’s book, that certainly qualifies as a working definition of “endless” war, but that doesn’t mean endlessly the same kind of war. Let’s look at this, war by war:

Iraq: Now largely the dregs of a counterinsurgency operation, this war will not end in 2011.  At his confirmation hearings, for instance, Panetta cited the existence of al-Qaeda in Iraq as a reason for U.S. troops to remain beyond an agreed-upon year-end withdrawal date.  Should those troops actually leave, however, the war will still go on, even if in quite a different form.  A gargantuan, increasingly militarized State Department “mission” in that country, complete with its own “army” and “air force” of perhaps 5,100 mercenaries, will evidently keep the faith.

Afghanistan: This remains a full-scale U.S. Army-run counterinsurgency war, backed by a major special operations/CIA counterterror war.

Pakistan: A full-scale CIA-run drone war in the Pakistani borderlands is actually expanding.  In the post-9/11 era, this has been the first of Washington’s “covert” or "shadow" wars (which no longer means “secret” -- it’s all over the news almost daily -- but something closer to “off the books,” as in beyond the reach of any form of significant popular or congressional oversight or accountability). Panetta is calling for more emphasis on such off-the-books wars in which U.S. military operatives might, as in the bin Laden operation, temporarily find themselves under the command of the CIA.

Libya: Officially a NATO air war, this one is nonetheless partially run by the Pentagon with targeting assistance from various U.S. intelligence agencies.  It involves both direct U.S. air strikes and support for strikes by various NATO and Arab allies fronting the operation.  It is also, for Americans, a “war” in name only since, except in the case of engine malfunction, there is essentially no way the Libyans can harm a U.S. pilot.  It is also an example of another air war that, while destructive, has proven itself incapable of fulfilling its stated aims.  Months later, Gaddafi remains alive and more or less in power, while NATO flags.

Yemen: Another of those “covert” air wars, being run, according to the Times, by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, closely coordinated with the CIA out of a secret office in the Yemeni capital. 

The Global War on Terror: While the Obama administration officially discarded the Bush-era name, it expanded the war and the forces meant to fight it in places like Somalia.  U.S. special operations forces now pursue war-on-terror tasks in at least 75 countries and who knows how many CIA and other intelligence agents are involved as well.

Think of all this as a kind of mix-and-match version of war that increasingly integrates civilian branches of the government like the State Department, an ever more warlike CIA (once known as “the president’s private army”), the regular Army, Marines, and Air Force, ever-growing drone air power (split between an officially civilian intelligence agency and the military), and a secret combined military force of perhaps 20,000 special operatives.

With the face of American war changing in striking ways and at least six wars, none going particularly well, on or off the books, no one should be surprised if, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore makes clear in his latest piece, Washington as a war capital increasingly looks like a new kind of town.  In the meantime, when it comes to how many wars Americans can fight at once, Washington is reaching for the record books.

Americans Are Not Being Leveled With

The Media Distract the Public From War
By SHELDON RICHMAN

If one is to judge by the tone of the television commentators, America must be deep in a crisis. Long stretches of cable time are devoted to the breaking news. Each detail is presented as more grave and consequential for the republic than the last. The fate of the country surely hangs in the balance.

What is it? War? Fiscal crisis? Mass unemployment? A double-dip recession?

No. A congressman was caught sending lewd photographs of himself to women over the Internet.

This is what now consumes so much of the news media's attention. This is what outranks in news value continuing occupations of foreign countries, three overt and an undetermined number of covert wars, and a looming fiscal crisis. As America's imperial elite seeks to hold on to and extend its global power in defiance of economic reality, the spectacle of a congressman, Anthony Weiner of New York, appparently sharing pictures of his private parts with female strangers has taken center stage.

This betrays an odd set of priorities, to say the least. It's not that the Weiner story lacks news value. When a so-called representative demonstrates low character (lying to his wife and others) and poor judgment (leaving himself open to blackmail), his constituents are entitled to know. But that does not justify the news media's preoccupation — indeed obsession — with the story. The United States will be little different whether or not Anthony Weiner resigns his congressional seat.

During the more than weeklong scandal, some indisputably more important things have been going on. For example, just a few days ago five U.S. military personnel were killed in Iraq. Remember Iraq? That's the country the U.S. government invaded in 2003 on the basis of cynical lies about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda collusion, and has occupied ever since. Last year President Obama triumphantly announced to the American people that the war there was over as he withdrew all but about 47,000 troops. (As though that is an insignificant force.) MSNBC's Obama cheerleading section was on the scene to record the historic event. Wikipedia gives opening and closing dates for the war: March 20, 2003 – August 31, 2010. So it must be over, right?

Tell it to the families of the five soldiers. They were killed in a rocket attack from Shiite-controlled east Baghdad. That sounds like combat. That sounds like war. The American people are not being leveled with.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement between the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the U.S. military is to leave Iraq by the end of the year. Iraq's Iran-backed government and the most powerful figure outside the government, Muqtada al Sadr, have said they want U.S. forces out. But despite President Obama's reassurances, American military leaders aren't so certain it's time to leave. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, "[T]he attack could provide a new impetus for the Pentagon to push for an extension of the US military presence in the country." It quotes the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen: "[T]here is still much work to be done and still plenty of extremists aided by states and organizations who are bent on pulling Iraq back into violence." Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last month that staying on would send "a powerful signal to the region that we're not leaving, that we will continue to play a part. I think it would not be reassuring to Iran, and that's a good thing."

Gate's soon-to-be-successor, Leon Panetta, says the Iraqi government will probably ask that some American troops stay on after the deadline. If so, "that ought to be seriously considered by the president," Panetta says. But on this matter, Gates has conceded, "[W]hether we like it or not, we're not very popular there."

So the "non-war" rages on and may continue past the promised termination point. Of course Iraq is not the only serious matter being overshadowed. Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen are still deadly playgrounds for the ruling elite, and an attack on Iran cannot be ruled out. But Rep. Weiner's online sexual activities outrank all of this. Perhaps keeping the American people distracted is the mainstream media's idea of serving the country.