New American Reality: An Empire beyond Salvation

Thursday, April 10, 2014 by Common Dreams
by Ramzy Baroud

US Secretary of State John Kerry couldn’t hide his frustration anymore as the US-sponsored peace process continued to falter. After 8 months of wrangling to push talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority forward, he admitted while in a visit to Morocco on April 04 that the latest setback had served as a ‘reality check’ for the peace process. But confining that reality check to the peace process is hardly representative of the painful reality through which the United States has been forced to subsist in during the last few years.

The state of US foreign policy in the Middle East, but also around the world, cannot be described with any buoyant language. In some instances, as in Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Ukraine, and most recently in Palestine and Israel, too many calamitous scenarios have exposed the fault lines of US foreign policy. The succession of crises is not allowing the US to cut its losses in the Middle East and stage a calculated ‘pivot’ to Asia following its disastrous Iraq war.

US foreign policy is almost entirely crippled.

For the Obama administration, it has been a continuous firefighting mission since George W. Bush left office. In fact, there have been too many ‘reality checks’ to count.

Per the logic of the once powerful pro-Israel Washington-based neoconservatives, the invasion of Iraq was a belated attempt at regaining initiative in the Middle East, and controlling a greater share of the energy supplies worldwide. Sure, the US media had then made much noise about fighting terror, restoring democracies and heralding freedoms, but the neo-cons were hardly secretive about the real objectives. They tirelessly warned about the decline of their country’s fortunes. They labored to redraw the map of the Middle East in a way that they imagined would slow down the rise of China, and the other giants that are slowly, but surely, standing on their feet to face up to the post-Cold War superpower.

But all such efforts were bound to fail. The US escaped Iraq, but only after altering the balance of power and creating new classes of winners and losers. The violence of the invasion and occupation scarred Iraq, but also destabilized neighboring countries by overwhelming their economies, augmenting militancy and creating more pressure cookers in political spaces that were, until then, somewhat ‘stable’.

The war left America fatigued, and set the course for a transition in the Middle East, although not the kind of transition that the likes of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had championed. There was no ‘New Middle East’ per se, but rather an old one that is in much worse shape than ever before. When the last US soldier scheduled to leave Iraq had crossed the border into Kuwait in Dec 2011, the US was exposed in more ways than one. The limits of US military power was revealed – by not winning, it had lost. Its economy proved fragile – as it continues to teeter between collapse and ‘recovery.’ It was left with zero confidence among its friends. As for its enemies, the US was no longer a daunting menace, but a toothless tiger.

There was a short period in US foreign policy strategy in which Washington needed to count its losses, regroup and regain initiative, but not in the Middle East. The Asia pacific region, especially the South China Sea, seemed to be the most rational restarting point, and for a good reason.

Writing in Forbes magazine in Washington, Robert D. Kaplan described the convergence underway in the Asia pacific region. He wrote, “Russia is increasingly shifting its focus of energy exports to East Asia. China is on track to perhaps become Russia’s biggest export market for oil before the end of the decade.”

The Middle East is itself changing directions, as the region’s hydrocarbon production is increasingly being exported there; Russia is covering the East Asia realm, according to Kaplan, as “North America will soon be looking more and more to the Indo-Pacific region to export its own energy, especially natural gas.”

But the US is still being pulled into too many different directions. It has attempted to police the world exclusively for its own interests for the last 25 years. It failed. ‘Cut and run’ is essentially an American foreign policy staple, and that too is a botched approach. Even after the piecemeal US withdrawal from Iraq, the US is too deeply entrenched in the Middle East region to achieve a clean break.

The US took part in the Libya war, but attempted to do so while masking its action as part of a larger NATO drive, so that it shoulders only part of the blame when things went awry, as they predictably have. Since the January 25 revolution, its position on Egypt was perhaps the most inconsistent of all Western powers, unmistakably demonstrating its lack of clarity and relevance to a country with a massive size and influence. However, it was in Syria that US weaknesses were truly exposed. Military intervention was not possible – and for reasons none of which were moralistic. Its political influence proved immaterial. And most importantly, its own legions of allies throughout the Middle East are walking away from beneath the American leadership banner. The new destinations are Russia for arms and China for economic alternatives.

President Barack Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia in late March might’ve been a step too little too late to repair its weakening alliances in the region. Even if the US was ready to mend fences, it neither has the political will, the economic potency or the military prowess to be effective. True, the US still possesses massive military capabilities and remains the world’s largest economy. But the commitment that the Middle East would require from the US at this time of multiple wars and revolutions is by no means the kind of commitment the US is ready to impart. In a way, the US has ‘lost’ the Middle East.

Even the ‘pivot’ to Asia is likely to end in shambles. On the one hand, the US opponents, Russia notwithstanding, have grown much more assertive in recent years. They too have their own agendas, which will keep the US and its willing European allies busy for years. The Russian move against Crimea had once more exposed the limits of US and NATO in regions outside the conventional parameters of western influence.

If the US proved resourceful enough to stage a fight in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, the battle – over energy supplies, potential reserves, markets and routes – is likely to be the most grueling yet. China is not Iraq before the US invasion –broken by decades of war, siege and sanctions. Its geography is too vast to besiege, and its military too massive to destroy with a single ‘shock and awe’.

The US has truly lost the initiative, in the Middle East region and beyond it. The neo-cons’ drunkenness with military power led to costly wars that have overwhelmed the empire beyond salvation. And now, the US foreign policy makers are mere diplomatic firefighters, from Palestine, to Syria to the Ukraine. For the Americans, the last few years have been more than a ‘reality check’, but the new reality itself.

Amber Lyon reveals CNN lies and war propaganda

Amber Lyon Blows Whistle on CNN

CNN Exposed: Emmy Winning Former CNN Journalist, Amber Lyon Blows The Whistle that CNN is paid by the US government for reporting on some events, and not reporting on others.

The Obama Administration pays for CNN content

Former CNN reporter Amber Lyon is claiming she has proof the Obama administration paid CNN to run certain stories and delete certain stories, most notably an interview with Nick Robertson who interviewed Mohammed Al Zawahiri regarding the Egyptian uprising and it being a protest for the release of the Blind Shiek, NOT based on a youtube video.

American Grafitti...

Media Madness

Chronic Biases
by RALPH NADER

March Madness comes once a year. Media Madness is year-round. What the mass media choose to cover and feature try to turn the priorities of any sane society upside down.

People of vice, war, money, spectator sports and business receive media attention – oftentimes ad nausem. People of virtue, peace, civics, health, labor and community engagement have to beg for media attention. Which of these two groups represents the most basic values of a civilized society that would restrain the excesses of the other group? You can guess!

There are many reasons for this chronic bias, beyond the power of commercial advertisers. The media believe that wrongdoing and greed and violence get readers and ratings while their opposites are dull soup.

But aren’t these opposites vital to the survival and well-being of a just society? Aren’t people who wage peace to prevent war, or demand health/safety over sickness/injury, more newsworthy when they expose people or companies that cause danger, damage and deaths?

Big-Time Greed is headline material, while Big-Time Thrift (e.g. efficiency for consumers) is boring, even when it concentrates on exposing Big-Time Greed. Aetna, Pfizer and avaricious middlemen are sometimes in the news when they exhibit gouging practices. But have you ever heard of Harvard researcher/lecturer Malcolm Sparrow, who for years has shown that at least ten percent of your healthcare spending goes down the drain due to preventable, computerized billing fraud and abuse? That amounts to $270 billion this year alone!

When news editors are asked why the media overwhelmingly cover the utterances of warmongers like William Kristol (The Weekly Standard) but ignore peace-advocates like Coleman McCarthy (The Nation and Progressive Magazine), they respond that Kristol has more influence.

But who gave Kristol influence? Why, the media who quote and interview him incessantly. Coleman McCarthy, a formerly syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, works to have colleges and high schools around the country adopt peace studies. He could give a lively interview on Meet the Press or This Week on the superiority of waging peace over waging war in advancing national security in countries around the world.

The New York Times reports the crazed outbursts of bigots such as Ann Coulter and Pam Geller, even devoting entire pages, with numerous photographs, to both of them in one October 2010 Sunday edition. Yet the great labor advocate, writer and pamphleteer, Harry Kelber, has been on top of the most important worker-management issues of our time for a mere 75 years and remains unknown to New York Times readers, even though he resides in New York City, just like the Times.

These contrasts were at work at our Control the Corporation conference –held in Washington, DC earlier this month. The all-day event consisted of several panels on timely and important topics. The panelists discussed: how to counter the impact of corporate control of the electoral process, how to hold corporations accountable for their crimes, how to protect the “commons” from the insatiable advocates of privatization, what are future actions of the Occupy movement, how to create economic models and initiatives for creating jobs and raising the minimum wage, and what are the strategies to employ for mobilizing sustained action toward a more just democratic society.

The presenters were among the most experienced and articulate activists in the country regarding these important areas of American concerns. The media were informed in advance, yet no major news reporters, feature writers or columnists showed up.

Among the many leaders in fields of corporate injustice who spoke at the conference were: Harvey Wasserman, Rob Richie, Patrick Burns, Robert Weissman, Phineas Baxandall, David Morris, Wenonah Hauter, Jamie Love, Margaret Flowers, Greg LeRoy, Gayle McLaughlin, Michael Gecan, Russell Mokhiber, Chris Hedges and David Freeman.

Ever hear of them? Do you know how much better, safer, economically-secure, freer and more influential your lives would be were these and other civic leaders given print and airtime like the scoundrels and distracters that daily fill the screens and pages of newspapers, television and radio?

Well, visit the Center for Study of Responsive Law’s website for the concise biographies of the presenters and start following the great works of those who interest you.

Should you be interested in results beyond our borders, look up Jamie Love, the economist whose tireless global travels to less-developed countries exposed the prohibitive prices of AIDS drugs ($10,000 per person per year) and led to his persuading Cipla, a drug company in India, to make and sell these drugs for $300 per person per year for AIDS patients in South Africa. More than any single person, his incisive advocacy and action coalitions broke the grip of the politically connected Big Pharma and overcame its determination that obscene profits on AIDS drugs must trump human lives.

A philosopher once said that we honor those we reward. Whom do we reward? Whom do we note? Business, sports and entertainment figures. The names of people advancing the great values of a society, like health, safety, clean elections – are largely unknown. The media like to trivialize, tantalize and entertain, but they rarely acknowledge those advancing solutions to our society’s most pressing problems. It is well beyond the time for the mass media to redefine what is important and get serious about very critical matters for this and future generations.

Wars Without End

The Costs of Empire

by HOWARD LISNOFF

 

In “The Absence of a Draft Makes Americans Feel Immune to War” (December 7, 2011), Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report makes the argument that an all-volunteer military has ushered in the “most militaristic period in American history.” While I agree with Ford that this is indeed a grotesquely militaristic environment in which we now live, I cannot agree that the existence of an all-volunteer military has caused the latter to take place.

As a war resister from the Vietnam era, I can testify to the fact that the military was at least as vicious in its conduct of the war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and early 1970s as it is conducting wars today. I make the point in my memoir Notes of a Military Resister that not a single division within the Army during that war was without a war crime attributed to it. Untold millions were killed, and the effects of that era are still being felt in the daily reality of abandoned land mines and the effects of Agent Orange. So much for an egalitarian military following the dictates of the rules of war!

The problem with militarism in the US is not the presence or absence of a military draft, but rather the hold that militarism and its trappings have on this society. Whether it’s for the purpose of nation building or the “protection” of big business interests (including military contractors) abroad, the military is the tool of choice for this nation. If the military existed for the defense of the nation, as it should have on September 11, 2001, then an argument could be make for the maintenance of a standing military force. But both the military and “intelligence” failed miserably in the months leading up to that tragedy, and the decade that followed has seen the emergence of a nation dedicated to constant warfare and an “intelligence” apparatus that uses technology to spy on anyone. The Patriot Act is but the most obvious expression of a government at war with its own people. In fact, the passage of the most recent Defense Authorization Act (signed by Barack Obama), allows the military to hold any citizen that the government deems a terrorist without that person’s access to the Bill of Rights. Chilling!

The question that begs asking is: how did this dreadful and dangerous scenario ever come to happen in the US? Readers have to go back to the administration of Ronald Reagan, The Great Communicator (actually, the Great Nincompoop), to find the seeds of this contemporary expression of endless war and militarism. Reagan made war acceptable to masses of those in the US through his conduct of the policy of low-intensity warfare.

Since this policy was directed, for the most part, against Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, most in the US felt no impact of these theaters of battle. Iraq, during the administration of George H.W. Bush, was next to lineup in the crosshairs of US policy. Oil and the projection of US power were the twin objectives of that war waged against our former ally Saddam Hussein. One day a dictator can be photographed shaking hands with US officials, and the next day he can be the target of our military might.

Following Bush, there was a bit of a hiatus in massive war making on the part of this nation. Then came George W. Bush and the hijacked general election. Osama bin Laden did the rest, allowing the opening up of the door of preemptive warfare that continues to this day in places as disparate as Somalia, Pakistan, Columbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to name a few. In the case of Iraq, as the last US troops leave, violence continues in the wake of the trashing of one of the “nurseries” of civilization.

Barack Obama carried on the policies of Bush without missing a step militarily. As the longest war in US history continues to drag on, Afghanistan, by most accounts, is in no better position as a society than it was at the onset of the war in October 2001. Women still suffer the consequences of right wing religious intolerance there. Since so little of actual democracy exists in the US today that hasn’t been bought off or privatized by massive business and military conglomerates, we’re not exactly the shining example to export our ideas of democracy anywhere else on the globe. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street protesters around the nation being bashed by the police are not the kinds of poster children for photo opts that the government wishes to use to portray democracy.

Largely absent from the Occupy movement, however, are the staggering costs of the US empire. In 2010, $680 billion of the federal budget went to the military, with an additional $37 billion going to the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan alone. A pie chart showing the slice the military takes out the US federal budget indicates that military expenditures made up 54 percent of the budget for the fiscal year 2009. Compare the latter to 30 percent of the federal budget that went to human resources in the same year.

As I’ve fought militarism over the decades from a personal and activist perspective, I’ve seen firsthand how the nation uses the symbols of freedom and democracy to negate those same principles whenever they emerge on distant shores or right here at home. The military dictatorship in Egypt is allowed to consume its own people in the face of a democracy movement while stocks of US-made tear gas are used to subdue democracy fighters.

Candidates for political office who espouse peace and an egalitarian social-economic structure at home are relegated to the status of non persons through the stranglehold that both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have on the election process. Without the support of the 1 percent that holds over 40 percent of the wealth in the US, a candidate remains an unknown and unelectable.

And the symbols that militarism uses have a great hold on the ordinary people who labor and live within the system. The flag, patriotic songs, and the glamor of military service are drummed into the psyches of children from the time they reach kindergarten age until they become adults. The cold war so easily morphed into the war on terrorism! And the consumerist ethos brings the rest of the population into the fold. Myths about the beauty of democracy at home go unquestioned even as protestors are driven from encampments in places as far flung as New York City, Philadelphia, and Oakland, California. Myths about the goodness of the nation, dubbed American Exceptionalism, fly in the face of Nicaraguan deaths during the 1980’s contra war, the hundreds of thousands lost during the twenty years of the war in Iraq with its economic sanctions (not to mention the millions of Iraqis displaced by the war), and the millions of Southeast Asians and Americans who died as a result of US intervention in the 1960s and early 1970s. Smaller military operations are not counted here.

When George Orwell wrote the classic Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, he focused his sharp criticism on totalitarian regimes that called themselves socialist. Isn’t it somewhat ironic that his main character Winston Smith could find himself equally at home here in the US in 2011 as he was in the mythical land of Oceania. There was constant and unbridled government surveillance of the citizens in Oceania. There was constant warfare. And finally, there was total subservience to the state.

Why Tax the Rich to Pay for More War?

Thursday, September 29, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Robert Naiman

 

Ordinarily, I think of myself as a card-carrying liberal. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that Liberal America had a meeting to decide on our current priorities and peace advocates weren't invited. I open my email and it's full of rallying cries about the urgency of taxing the rich. When was it decided that taxing the rich was the marquee demand of Liberal America at this juncture? Were peace advocates invited to this meeting? I see no evidence that we were.

In a different political juncture, I would be happy to march behind the banner of taxing the rich. But at this political juncture, when the war budget is half of federal discretionary spending, and when because of the Budget Control Act and the Supercommittee, we have a historic opportunity to cut the war budget - a much better prospect, at present, than our prospects for raising tax rates on rich people - I ain't marching for this dogwhistle anymore.

Suppose there were a massive government program to dump truckloads of dioxin in Lake Michigan. And suppose that - in addition to the direct effects of poisoning a major source of drinking water - this program were tremendously expensive in blood and treasure. Suppose that since October 7, 2001, more than five thousand American workers had been killed carrying out the Lake Michigan-poisoning project, with tens of thousands of American workers counted as wounded, and the real toll of wounded American workers many times higher. And suppose that the budgeted cost so far of the massive government program to dump poison in Lake Michigan were over a trillion dollars so far, with the real financial cost to society, when you count things like the future health costs of the poisoned American workers, much higher.

Would the marquee demand of Liberal America be to make Warren Buffett pay his fair share for the Lake Michigan-poisoning program? Or would the marquee demand of Liberal America be to stop dumping poison in Lake Michigan?

If we're going to use the money to kill, imprison, and otherwise oppress people in other countries who have done us no wrong, I would just as soon let Warren Buffett keep his money. Maybe he will donate some of it to a good cause. But even if he uses it to buy caviar, that would be better than continuing the war in Afghanistan, which is, on a routine basis, violating the basic human rights of the Afghan people, in addition to killing and maiming Americans for no good reason.

Item: in the November issue of the Atlantic, Matthieu Aikins makes a compelling case that the Pentagon is violating the Leahy Amendment by arming the forces of Afghan warlord Abdul Raziq, given that Raziq's forces have a history of gross human rights abuses as long as your arm. But this Pentagon activity has proceeded unmolested by the Leahy Law.
Why should we take money from Warren Buffett to pay for this? Shouldn't we just stop it?

Item: in a recent article in Truthout, Gareth Porter demolishes the claim that U.S. "night raids" in Afghanistan - that's when U.S. forces smash into people's homes in the middle of the night, shooting anyone who might appear to resist - are "precisely targeted," noting that a key target of the night raids is not insurgents, but civilians who might know insurgents, a blatant violation of the laws of war; and that moreover, people are targeted based not on their identity, but based on their phone records. So if somebody calls someone linked by the U.S. to the insurgency from your phone, U.S. forces can smash into your house, kill you and your relatives, and claim success: "Taliban killed."

Why should we take money from Warren Buffett to pay for this? Shouldn't we just stop it?
At this juncture in our history, why should we make common cause with the warmongers against the Tea Party? Wouldn't it be more righteous to make common cause with the Tea Party against the warmongers?

What's particularly striking at this juncture is this: House Democrats appear to be ahead of Liberal America on this issue right now. Seventy Representatives - mostly Democrats - have written to the debt-reduction Supercommittee, urging them to end the wars. Why isn't our email full of urgings to support the seventy Representatives in their demand that the Supercommittee end the wars?

On October 7, 2011, we'll have been at war for ten years. There will be protests around the country. Let us first end the wars. Then I will gladly march behind the banner of taxing the rich.

$42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America

(Honk if you are the least bit surprised by this. It's strangely quiet...--jef)

Friday, August 26, 2011 by Think Progress

by Faiz Shakir

Following a six-month long investigative research project, the Center for American Progress released a 130-page report today which reveals that more than $42 million from seven foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America. The authors — Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and myself — worked to expose the Islamophobia network in depth, name the major players, connect the dots, and trace the genesis of anti-Muslim propaganda.

The report, titled “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” lifts the veil behind the hate, follows the money, and identifies the names of foundations who have given money, how much they have given, and who they have given to:

THE FUNDERS	THE AMOUNT	THE RECIPIENTS
Donors Capital Fund	$20,768,600	Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), Middle East Forum (MEF), Clarion Fund (Clarion), David Horowitz Freedom Center (Horowitz)
Richard Scaife foundations	$7,875,000	Counterterrorism & Security Education and Research Foundation (CTSERF), Center for Security Policy (CSP), Horowitz
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation	$5,370,000	MEF, CSP, Horowitz
Russell Berrie Foundation	$3,109,016	IPT, CTSERF, MEF
Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund	$2,818,229	IPT,CTSERF, MEF, CSP, Clarion, Horowitz
Fairbook Foundation	$1,498,450	IPT, MEF, CSP, Jihad Watch, Horowitz, American Congress for Truth
Newton and Rochelle Becker foundations	$1,136,000	IPT, CTSERF, MEF, CSP, Clarion, Horowitz, American Congress for Truth
Total	$42,575,295

The money has flowed into the hands of five key “experts” and “scholars” who comprise the central nervous system of anti-Muslim propaganda:

FRANK GAFFNEY, Center for Security Policy – “A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is…that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.” [Source]

DAVID YERUSHALMI, Society of Americans for National Existence: “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…the Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.” [Source]

DANIEL PIPES, Middle East Forum: “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” [Source]

ROBERT SPENCER, Jihad Watch: “Of course, as I have pointed out many times, traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” [Source]

STEVEN EMERSON, Investigative Project on Terrorism: “One of the world’s great religions — which has more than 1.4 billion adherents — somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.” [Source]

These five “scholars” are assisted in their outreach efforts by Brigitte Gabriel (founder, ACT! for America), Pamela Geller (co-founder, Stop Islamization of America), and David Horowitz (supporter of Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch). As the report details, information is then disseminated through conservative organizations like the Eagle Forum, the religious right, Fox News, and politicians such as Allen West and Newt Gingrich.

Over the past few years, the Islamophobia network (the funders, scholars, grassroots activists, media amplifiers, and political validators) have worked hard to push narratives that Obama might be a Muslim, that mosques are incubators of radicalization, and that “radical Islam” has infiltrated all aspects of American society — including the conservative movement.

To explain how the Islamophobia network operates, we’ve produced this video to show just one example of how they have mainstreamed the baseless and unfounded fear that Sharia may soon replace American laws:

Click here to read the full report.

House Passes Authority for Worldwide War

House Passes Authority for Worldwide War
 

The House just passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), including a provision to authorize worldwide war, which has no expiration date and will allow this president — and any future president — to go to war anywhere in the world, at any time, without further congressional authorization. The new authorization wouldn’t even require the president to show any threat to the national security of the United States. The American military could become the world’s cop, and could be sent into harm’s way almost anywhere and everywhere around the globe.

Before the vote, the House debated an amendment that would have struck the worldwide war provision. That amendment was introduced by a bipartisan group of representatives: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Given the enormity of the proposed law, you’d expect the House to debate the amendment to strike it extensively, but that’s not what happened. The amendment was debated for a total of 20 minutes. That’s right. Twenty minutes to debate whether Congress should hand the executive branch sweeping worldwide war authority.

The vote on the amendment took place earlier this afternoon, and it failed on the House floor by a vote of 187-in favor to 234-opposed. Check the vote here.

But not to worry, all of your efforts to bring the importance of the new law and the amendment to strike it to your representatives’ attention have not been in vain — we promise. Today’s vote marks the end only of the first stage in our opposition to an authorization of endless worldwide war for the president and to be honest, we came out looking pretty good.

Though it is a bit awkward to celebrate a loss, a margin of defeat of only 47 votes on a provision that most people were unaware of as recently as two weeks ago is a big step forward. The momentum is on our side. And the Obama administration helped efforts to turn the tide when it issued a threat earlier this week to veto the NDAA if it contained such broad sweeping language for worldwide war.

Your answers to the call for action and the expedient work of a bipartisan group of members of Congress and their staff have our opposition movement very well positioned as we prepare for the next hurdle—the Senate.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled to begin its markup of the NDAA beginning on June 13. Watch for updates as we continue on this important issue.

The War You Don't See

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks
by Tom Engelhardt

 

This can’t end well.

But then, how often do empires end well, really?  They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out.  Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.


Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history.  It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast.

I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this -- truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts.  It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word.  We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory.  Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s “sole superpower.”  In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily “beyond challenge” by any and all powers for eons to come.  So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today?  Who could?

A Country in Need of Prozac

Have you noticed, by the way, how repetitiously our president, various presidential candidates, and others now insist that we are “the greatest nation on Earth” (as they speak of the U.S. military being “the finest fighting force in the history of the world”)?  And yet, doesn’t that phrase leave ash in your mouth?  Look at this country and its frustrations today and tell me: Does anyone honestly believe that anymore?

It wasn’t a mistake that the fantasy avenger figure of Rambo became immensely popular in the wake of defeat in Vietnam or that, unlike American heroes of earlier decades, he had such a visibly, almost risibly overblown musculature.  As eye-candy, it was pure overcompensation for the obvious.  Similarly, when the United States was actually “the greatest” on this planet, no one needed to say it over and over again.

Can there be any question that something big is happening here, even if we don’t quite know what it is because, unlike the peoples of past empires, we never took pride in or even were able to think of ourselves as imperial?  And if you were indeed in denial that you lived in the belly of a great imperial power, if like most Americans you managed to ignore the fact that we were pouring our treasure into the military or setting up bases in countries that few could have found on a map, then you would naturally experience the empire going down as if through a glass darkly.

Nonetheless, the feelings that should accompany the experience of an imperial power running off the rails aren’t likely to disappear just because analysis is lacking.

Disillusionment, depression, and dismay flow ever more strongly through the American bloodstream.  Just look at any polling data on whether this country, once the quintessential land of optimists, is heading in “the right direction” or on “the wrong track,” and you’ll find that the “wrong track” numbers are staggering, and growing by the month.  On the rare occasions when Americans have been asked by pollsters whether they think the country is “in decline,” the figures have been similarly over the top.

It’s not hard to see why.  A loss of faith in the American political system is palpable.  For many Americans, it’s no longer “our government” but “the bureaucracy.”  Washington is visibly in gridlock and incapable of doing much of significance, while state governments, facing the “steepest decline in state tax receipts on record,” are, along with local governments, staggering under massive deficits and cutting back in areas -- education, policing, firefighting -- that matter to daily life.

Years ago, in the George W. Bush era, I wanted to put a new word in our domestic political vocabulary: “Republican’ts.”  It was my way of expressing the feeling that something basic to this country -- a “can do” spirit -- was seeping away.  I failed, of course, and since then that “can’t do” spirit has visibly spread far beyond the Republican Party.  Simply put, we’re a country in need of Prozac.

Facing the challenges of a world at the edge -- from Japan to the Greater Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become anything but entertainment -- the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping.  It no longer invests in its young, or plans effectively for the future, or sets off on new paths.  It literally can’t do.  And this is not just a domestic crisis, but part of imperial decline.

We just don’t treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them are so obvious.  If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank.  Of course, who doesn’t know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it’s hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it’s living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history?  And who doesn’t know that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?

And if you don’t think any of this has anything to do with imperial power in decline, ask yourself why the options for our country so often seem to have shrunk to what our military is capable of, or that the only significant part of the government whose budget is still on the rise is the Pentagon.  Or why, when something is needed, this administration, like its predecessor, regularly turns to that same military.

Once upon a time, helping other nations in terrible times, for example, would have been an obvious duty of the civil part of the U.S. government.  Today, from Haiti to Japan, in such moments it’s the U.S. military that acts.  In response to the Japanese triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, for instance, the Pentagon has mounted a large-scale recovery effort, involving 18,000 people, 20 U.S. Navy ships, and even fuel barges bringing fresh water for reactor-cooling efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.  The effort has been given a military code name, Operation Tomodachi (Japanese for “friend”), and is, among other things, an obvious propaganda campaign meant to promote the usefulness of America’s archipelago of bases in that country.

Similarly, when the administration needs something done in the Middle East, these days it’s as likely to send Secretary of Defense Robert Gates -- he recently paid official visits to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt -- as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.  And of course, as is typical, when a grim situation in Libya worsened and something “humanitarian” was called for, the Obama administration (along with NATO) threw air power at it.

Predictably, as in Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands, air power failed to bring about speedy success.  What’s most striking is not that Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi didn’t instantly fall, or that the Libyan military didn’t collapse when significant parts of its tank and artillery forces were taken out, or that the swift strikes meant to turn the tide have already stretched into more than a month of no-fly zone NATO squabbling and military stalemate (as the no-fly zone version of war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq stretched to 12 years without ultimate success).

Imperially speaking, two things are memorable about the American military effort in Libya.  First, Washington doesn’t seem to have the conviction of what’s left of its power, as its strange military dance in (and half-out of) the air over that country indicates. Second, even in the military realm, Washington is increasingly incapable of drawing lessons from its past actions.  As a result, its arsenal of potential tactics is made up largely of those that have failed in the recent past.  Innovation is no longer part of empire.

The Uses of Fear

From time to time, the U.S. government’s “Intelligence Community“  or IC musters its collective savvy and plants its flag in the future in periodic reports that go under the generic rubric of “Global Trends.”  The last of these, Global Trends 2025, was prepared for a new administration taking office in January 2009, and it was typical.

In a field once left to utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp-fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, and even outright cranks, these compromise bureaucratic documents break little ground and rock no boats, nor do they predict global tsunamis.  Better to forecast what the people you brief already believe, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future lurking in the present.

As group efforts, then, these reports tend to project the trends of the present moment relatively seamlessly and reasonably reassuringly into the future.  For example, the last time around they daringly predicted a gradual, 15-year soft landing for a modestly declining America.  ("Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, [the country's] relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.")

Even though it was assumedly being finished amid the global meltdown of 2008, nothing in it would have kept you up at night, sleepless and fretting.  More than 15 years into the future, our IC could imagine no wheels falling off the American juggernaut, nothing that would make you wonder if this country could someday topple off the nearest cliff.  Twists, unpleasant surprises, unhappy endings?  Not for this empire, according to its corps of intelligence analysts.

And the future being what it is, if you read that document now, you’d find none of the more stunning events that have disrupted and radically altered our world since late 2008: no Arab lands boiling with revolt, no Hosni Mubarak under arrest with his sons in jail, no mass demonstrations in Syria, no economies of peripheral European countries imploding down one by one, nor a cluster of nuclear plants in Japan melting down.  

You won’t find once subservient semi-client states thumbing their noses at Washington, not even in 2025.  You won’t, for example, find the Saudis in, say 2011, openly exploring deeper relations with Russia and China as a screw-you response to Washington’s belated decision that Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak should leave office, or Pakistani demands that the CIA and American special operations forces start scaling back activities on their turf, or American officials practically pleading with an Iraqi government it once helped put in power (and now moving ever closer to Iran) to please, please, please let U.S. troops stay past an agreed-upon withdrawal deadline of December 31, 2011, or Afghan President Hamid Karzai publicly blaming the Americans for the near collapse of his country’s major bank in a cesspool of corruption (in which his own administration was, of course, deeply implicated).

Only two-plus years after Global Trends 2025 appeared, it doesn’t take the combined powers of the IC to know that American decline looks an awful lot more precipitous and bumpier than imagined.  But let’s not just blame our intelligence functionaries for not divining the future we’re already in.  After all, they, too, were in the goldfish bowl, and when you’re there, it’s always hard to describe the nearest cats.

Nor should we be surprised that, like so many other Americans, they too were in denial.
After all, our leaders spent years organizing their version of the world around a “Global War on Terror,” when (despite the 9/11 attacks) terror was hardly America’s most obvious challenge.  It proved largely a “war” against phantoms and fantasies, or against modest-sized ragtag bands of enemies -- even though it resulted in perfectly real conflicts, absolutely genuine new bases abroad, significant numbers of civilian dead, and the expansion of a secret army of operatives inside the U.S. military into a force of 13,000 or more operating in 75 countries.

The spasms of fear that coursed through our society in the near-decade after September 11, 2001, and the enemy, “Islamic terrorism,” to which those spasms were attached are likely to look far different to us in retrospect.  Yes, many factors -- including the terrifyingly apocalyptic look of 9/11 in New York City -- contributed to what happened.

There was fear’s usefulness in prosecuting wars in the Greater Middle East that President Bush and his top officials found appealing.  There was the way it ensured soaring budgets for the Pentagon and the national security state.  There was the way it helped the politicians, lobbyists, and corporations hooked into a developing homeland-security complex.  There was the handy-dandy way it glued eyeballs to a one-event-fits-all-sizes version of the world that made the media happy, and there was the way it justified ever increasing powers for our national security managers and ever lessening liberties for Americans.

But think of all that as only the icing on the cake.  Looking back, those terror fears coursing through the body politic will undoubtedly seem like Rambo’s muscles: a deflection from the country’s deepest fears.  They were, in that sense, consoling.  They allowed us to go on with our lives, to visit Disney World, as George W. Bush urged in the wake of 9/11 in order to prove our all-American steadfastness.

Above all, even as our imperial wars in the oil heartlands of the planet went desperately wrong, they allowed us not to think about empire or, until the economy melted down in 2008, decline.  They allowed us to focus our fears on “them,” not us.  They ensured that, like the other great imperial power of the Cold War era, when things began to spiral out of control we would indeed sleepwalk right into the imperial darkness.

Now that we’re so obviously there, the confusion is greater than ever.  Theoretically, none of this should necessarily be considered bad news, not if you don’t love empires and what they do.  A post-imperial U.S. could, of course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be exciting indeed.

Right now, though, it doesn’t feel that way, does it?  It makes me wonder: Could this be how it’s always felt inside a great imperial power on the downhill slide?  Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”?

I don’t know.  But I do know one thing: this can’t end well.

Saving the Warfare-Welfare State

The difference is over means not ends.
Sheldon Richman
April 15, 2011

Why does everyone think Washington is plagued by excessive partisanship? The contest over how to address the fiscal debacle says otherwise: Both divisions of the uniparty (Democrat and Republican) agree that the warfare-welfare state must be saved. It’s the means not the end that divides them.

Rep. Paul Ryan, who leads the Republican side, declares that his goal in seeking a balanced budget (someday) is to save the three pillars of the welfare state—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for “our children’s generation.” “I support these missions,” he says. He would “voucherize” Medicare and give states discretionary Medicaid block grants because, he says, the alternative is insolvency. He would maintain Social Security, while permitting people under 55 to put one-third of their Social Security taxes into government-guaranteed accounts. (They would still have to pay current retirees’ Social Security benefits.) His substitute for Obamacare would give a cash subsidy—he uses the Washington gobbledygook “refundable tax credit”—to “[ensure] universal access to affordable health insurance.”

So, although couched in the rhetoric of liberty and self-reliance, Ryan’s plan aims at saving the welfare state from itself, while giving insurance and investment companies more of a role, not to mention a cut of the taxpayers’ money.

Growth Path

Likewise, Ryan’s plan would leave military spending—misleadingly called “defense” spending—on its growth path, even though it has doubled in the last decade. With the government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in three overt and several covert wars, Ryan shows no inclination to question the global military policy that milks the taxpayers, wreaks destruction abroad, and creates a desire for revenge.

As former Reagan administration Pentagon official Lawrence Korb noted, “Apparently Ryan was taken in by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s claims that he has already proposed $178 billion in savings in defense spending. These were not real cuts. Gates plowed $100 billion of his ‘savings’ back into the budget for other programs while the remaining $78 billion merely reduced projected growth in the defense budget.”

Ryan’s package has other ingredients, such as cutting the top rate for the individual and corporate income tax to 25 percent, while broadening the tax base. He would also reportedly trim some corporate and agricultural welfare, but he leaves the principle in place.

Ryan thus reveals himself as not as one who has rethought the U.S. government’s current domestic and global missions and understands the need for a radical revision, but rather as one who seeks to fortify those missions by preventing insolvency and forced liquidation. The ruling establishment would have little reason to be concerned if Ryan prevailed.

Obama Response

In response, President Obama has now offered an outline — not much detail yet — of an alternative plan to cut the deficit, however, again the differences with Ryan are over means not ends. He too seeks to preserve the warfare-welfare state but would do so with fewer spending cuts than Ryan, higher taxes on the wealthy, an end to the business tax preferences he dislikes (while keeping those he approves of), and no operational changes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

On defense, Obama calls for the elimination of Pentagon waste (edgy!), however, every president does that and it never amounts to much. (The Department of Defense is routinely unable to account for billions of dollars.) Obama says the government will “have to conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions,” but how serious can he be? He’s just led NATO forces into Libya on an undefined, open-ended military adventure, while overt and covert wars continue to rage throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. He shows no willingness to rethink the unipartisan global-policeman policy that accounts for so much of the fiscal burden (over a trillion a year) and creates the need for bloated and costly “homeland security” that undermines our liberty. As Korb says, “The Obama administration already plans to spend 20 percent more on defense than was spent on defense during the Bush administration.”

Satisfying the Base

Thus we see Obama’s basic agreement with Ryan’s wing of the uniparty, though the latter would rely on the tax-funded “private” sector more than the former would. Of course each side highlights the differences to make them appear to be matters of kind rather than degree or method. This way each can keep its base rhetorically satisfied (or try). Obama’s team talks about the need for the rich to sacrifice to the middle class and poor, while Ryan’s team counters that the private sector is where the action should be. Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to end Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (they don’t), while Republicans accuse Democrats of being Marxian socialists (they’re not).

But here’s the thing: Both seek to retain the fundamental status quo in which the State parcels out favors to reigning interests while providing succor to the vulnerable in a combined spirit of charity and fear. Fear of what? In the case of the elderly, fear of their political clout at the ballot box; in the case of those shut out the economic system because of lousy government schools, occupational licensing, and cartelization via the subsidy and regulatory regime, fear of a frustration that could turn into unrest.

Globally the Obama side emphasizes the supposed humanitarian rationale for military intervention while his internecine rivals emphasize the security rationale. But they agree on the premise — that it is the proper job of the U.S. government to police the world, at least where there is oil and other things coveted by the ruling elite.

Thus The Charade continues.

Eisenhowers grim warning on 'corporate military industrial complex' rings true 50 years later

50 years later, Eisenhower’s grim warning on military profit rings true
By Daniel Tencer
Monday, January 17th, 2011

The term (corporate) "military-industrial complex" entered the American lexicon 50 years ago today, when President Dwight Eisenhower warned of its dangers in an unusually frank farewell speech to the nation.

Ike said in a televised address on January 17, 1961:

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society."

 "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

(Read Eisenhower's entire speech here.)

For years, that warning -- issued by a hero of World War II and a Republican president -- was heralded by anti-war activists as a sign that "the very structure of our society" was indeed threatened by the merger of weapon-making and profit.

And in 2011, as the US -- with some 5 percent of the world's population -- spends nearly half of all the money spent in the world on defense, the warning seems prescient to some -- and perhaps even too tame for others.

At The Independent, Rupert Cornwell argues that Ike had it right.

Adjusted for inflation, US national security spending has more than doubled since Eisenhower left office. Year after year, the defence budget seems to rise – irrespective of whether the country is actually fighting major wars, regardless of the fact that the Soviet Union, the country's former global adversary, has ceased to be, and no matter which party controls the White House and Congress.

But while Cornwell argues that things could actually be worse -- the US spends about 4 percent of its GDP on national security, compared to about a third for the Soviet Union prior to its collapse -- others argue that the US's situation has outgrown even what Eisenhower imagined.

The corporate military industrial complex "has become a 'Permanent War State,' with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future," writes Gareth Porter at FireDogLake.

Porter argues that the corporate military industrial complex suffered two significant setbacks in the years since Eisenhower -- one in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the US turned against a disastrous Vietnam War and demanded a less militarily active foreign policy, and another in the 1980s and 1990s, when the fall of Soviet communism allowed for a "peace dividend" in the form of reduced defense spending.

But that ended with two historical events, Porter argues: The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which led to the Gulf War and the expansion of US military presence in the Middle East, and 9/11, which provided "the biggest single boon to the militarist alliance."

From that point on, Porter argues, the US's military might broke free of almost all constraints:

• The CIA sought and obtained virtually unlimited freedom to carry out drone strikes in secrecy and without any meaningful oversight by Congress.

• The Pentagon embraced the idea of the “long war” – a twenty-year strategy envisioning deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of countries, and the Army adopted the idea of “the era of persistent warfare” as its rationale for more budgetary resources.

• The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest explosion of military spending since the early 1950s – and now accounts for 56 percent of discretionary federal spending.

• The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false.

But not all is lost, Porter argues: Just as US public opinion turned against defense spending in the past, so too can it turn against it today. "The only thing missing from this picture is a grassroots political movement organized specifically to demand an end to the Permanent War State," he writes.

At The Independent, Cornwell suggests a different solution.

"George H.W. Bush was the last commander-in-chief to have tasted war and its horrors. His son famously had not, and – perhaps to make up for it – gave the military everything it wanted, and more. So maybe there is only one answer. America should elect a general as commander-in-chief. Like Dwight D. Eisenhower."

vidlink

Corporations Win Big Whether Wars Are Won or Lost

Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war.
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on January 10, 2011

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

Either you are against war or you are not. Either you use your bodies to defy the war makers and weapons manufacturers until the wars end or you do not. Either you have the dignity and strength of character to denounce those who ridicule or ignore your core moral beliefs -- including Obama -- or you do not. Either you stand for something or you do not. And because so many in the anti-war movement proved to be weak and naive in 2004, 2006 and 2008 we will have to start over. This time we must build an anti-war movement that will hold fast. We must defy the entire system. We must acknowledge that it is not our job to help Democrats win elections. The Democratic Party has amply proved, by its failure to stand up for working men and women, its slavishness to Wall Street and its refusal to end these wars, that it cannot be trusted. We must trust only ourselves. And we must disrupt the system. The next chance, in case you missed the last one, to protest these wars will come Saturday, March 19, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Street demonstrations are scheduled in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. You can find details on www.answercoalition.org/national/index.html.

We are spending, much of it through the accumulation of debt, nearly a trillion dollars a year to pay for these wars. We drive up the deficits to wage war while we have more than 30 million people unemployed, some 40 million people living in poverty and tens of millions more in a category euphemistically called "near poverty." The profits of weapons manufacturers and private contractors have quadrupled since the invasion of Afghanistan. But the cost for corporate greed has been chronic and long-term unemployment and underemployment and the slashing of federal and state services. The corporations, no matter how badly the wars are going, make huge profits from the conflicts. They have no interest in turning off their money-making machine. Let Iraqis die. Let Afghans die. Let Pakistanis die. Let our own die. And the mandarins in Congress and the White House, along with their court jesters on the television news shows, cynically "feel our pain" and sell us out for bundles of corporate cash.

Michael Prysner, a veteran of the Iraq War and one of the co-founders of March Forward!, gets it. His group is one of those organizing the March 19 protests. Prysner joined the Army out of high school in June 2001. He was part of the Iraq invasion force. He worked during the war in Iraq tracking targets and calling in airstrikes and artillery barrages. He took part in nighttime raids on Iraqi homes. He worked as an interrogator. He did ground surveillance missions and protected convoys. He left the Army in 2005, disgusted by the war and the lies told to sustain it. He has been involved since leaving the military in anti-recruiting drives at high schools and street protests. He was arrested with 130 others in front of the White House during the Dec. 16 anti-war protest organized by Veterans for Peace.

"I believed going into the war that we were there to help the Iraqi people and find weapons of mass destruction," he said when we spoke a few days ago. "But it quickly became clear that these two reasons for the war were absolutely false. If you mentioned weapons of mass destruction to intelligence officers they would laugh at you. It was not even part of the mission to look for these things. If it was part of the mission I would have known because I was part of the only intelligence company in the north of the country. I thought that maybe we were there to help the Iraqi people, but all I saw when I was there was Iraqis brutalized and their living conditions deteriorate drastically. Iraqis would tell me we were worse than Saddam. I soon realized there was a different purpose for the war, that we were putting in place a permanent military occupation. It was my firsthand experience during my deployment that showed me the reality of the Iraq War and led me to begin to question U.S. foreign policy. I began to wonder what U.S. foreign policy as a whole was about. I saw that Iraq was a microcosm. The U.S. military is used to conquer countries for the rich, to seize markets, land, resources and labor for Wall Street. This is what drives U.S. foreign policy.

"When Obama was elected in 2008 the majority of the country had turned against the Iraq War," he said. "You could not be a Democrat running for office without giving lip service to being against the Iraq War. The reason people were against the war is because there was a constant, senseless death of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. It was a squandering of our resources. This has not changed, despite the rebranding of the occupation. U.S. soldiers are still being killed, wounded and psychologically traumatized, especially those on their third, fourth and fifth deployment who were traumatized in previous deployments and are being re-traumatized. There were two U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq a few days ago. The reasons that led people to oppose the war in 2003 are still in effect. All that has changed is that the U.S. has been able to recruit enough Iraqis to put in the forefront and take the brunt of the combat operations with U.S. soldiers a few steps behind. U.S. soldiers are still involved in combat. One of our members [of March Forward!], who joined our group about a month ago, is in Iraq now. He told me yesterday that he was hit harder than he has ever been hit on his nine months of deployment. Combat is still a reality. People are still being killed and maimed."

"The war is still going on," he lamented. "It is still bad for U.S. soldiers, and Iraq is completely destroyed. It is a catastrophe for the Iraqi people. To call this current operation "New Dawn," like this is a new day for the Iraqi people, ignores the fact that Iraqis have no electricity, live with constant violence, have no functioning government, have occupying forces still in their country and suffer rampant birth defects from the depleted uranium and other things. Iraq"s "New Dawn" is a horror. It will remain that way until Iraq is given justice, which is a complete and immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces and heavy reparations paid to that country."

Iraq, despite the brutality of Saddam Hussein, was a prosperous country with a highly educated middle class before the war. Its infrastructure was modern and efficient. Iraqis enjoyed a high standard of living. The country did not lack modern conveniences. Things worked. And being in Iraq, as I often was when I covered the Middle East for The New York Times, while unnerving because of state repression, was never a hardship. Since our occupation the country has tumbled into dysfunction. Factories, hospitals, power plants, phone service, sewage systems and electrical grids do not work. Iraqis, if they are lucky, get three hours of electricity a day. Try this in 110-degree heat. Poverty is endemic. More than a million Iraqi civilians have been killed. Nearly 5 million have been displaced from their homes or are refugees. The Mercer Quality of Living survey last year ranked Baghdad last among cities -- the least livable on the planet. Iraq, which once controlled its own oil, has been forced to turn its oil concessions over to foreign corporations. That is what we have bequeathed to Iraq -- violence, misery and theft.

It is not as if the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have popular support. The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows that 63 percent of the American public opposes U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. And the level of discontent over the war in Iraq is even higher. Yet we continue to accept the duplicity of bankrupt liberal institutions and a corrupt political process that year after year betrays us. Public opinion is on our side. We should mobilize it to fight back. When I and the other protesters were arrested outside the White House on Dec. 16, several of the police officers who had been deployed as military members to Afghanistan or Iraq muttered to veterans as they handcuffed them that they were right about the wars. The anti-war sentiment is widespread, and we must find the courage to make it heard.

"All these people join the military because there is an abysmal job market and tuition rates are skyrocketing," Prysner said. "Many young people are cut off from a college education. People are funneled into the military so they can make a living, have a home, health care, take care of their children and have an education. If a fraction of the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was used to meet human needs, kids would be able to go to college at affordable rates. We would be able to create jobs for young people when they get out of high school. Vast amounts of wealth, which we create, are poured into these wars and the military while people here are facing increasing hardship. We have to demand and fight for change, not ask for it."

"We supposedly elected the most progressive president we have seen in a long time and the Democrats took control of the House and the Senate, but the wars have only expanded and intensified," Prysner said. "The wars are now going into other countries, especially Pakistan and Yemen. The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. We had a seemingly progressive president. But all we got was more war, more military spending, more bombing of innocent people abroad and more U.S. troops coming home in coffins. This should eradicate and shatter the idea that convincing the Democrats to be on our side will accomplish anything. Left to its own devices Washington will continue its war drive. It will continue to dominate these countries and use them for staging grounds to invade other countries. There has been no real change in our foreign policy. If we are hurting the Democrats at this point, then fine. We need to build an independent political movement that is outside of the Establishment. This is the only way we have ever won real victories in our history."

50 Years Since Ike's Warning

The Corporate-Military-Industrial Complex
By HARRY TARG



vidlink

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience….


In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.


We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes….

Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961, farewell address).

We have become so drugged by politicians that we often fail to reflect on the power of their words. Seeing books on library shelves with titles like "Speeches of Great Americans" culls up in our minds Readers Digest, the History Channel, Sunday morning sermons, and all the hyperbole that passes for political discourse in the 21st century. Every once in a while though, a politician says something that is rich with theoretical insight and inspiration and begs for action.

When President Eisenhower gave his final address to the nation on January 17, 1961, 50 years ago, he warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" of a military/industrial complex. He originally included the word "academic" but later eliminated it, for reasons of length. He was alerting Americans to the breadth and scope of military power over the world and American society.

The President's words constituted a shocking challenge to the soon-to-be Kennedy era defense intellectuals who criticized the outgoing president's reluctance to spend more than the $40 billion he invested on the military. Even Eisenhower's direct orders to subordinates to overthrow Iran's Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala's President Jacob Arbenz in 1954 and his declaration of the Middle East as a free-world sanctuary was not interventionist enough for the 1960s theorists and practitioners of "modernization," "development," and "democracy."

Although Eisenhower warned us about the corporate military/industrial complex he could not foresee the dramatic impacts of America's drive toward empire on foreign policy and public life.

He only dimly saw the changes that would occur in the techniques of empire. The expansion of the use of CIA money and American intelligence and military forces engineered the creation of brutal military coups. Military advisors revamped armies and repressive police forces in countries threatened by revolutionary change. In the 1980s in the face of an increasingly skeptical public, the United States used "low intensity conflict," that is, covert operatives, to train anti-government reactionaries to fight against regimes out of favor in places such as Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. And then to mollify domestic critics, the U.S. initiated the privatization and outsourcing of the military as an adjunct to the more than 700 U.S. military bases in more than 40 countries that exist today. Most recently, high tech weapons, including unmanned but armed aerial vehicles, are used to kill people without endangering U.S. soldiers. Technological advances and the globalization of U.S. violence continue.

Eisenhower was unalterably opposed to the militarization of the U.S. economy. While he was willing to allot $40 billion in 1950s currency, he resisted the demands from Beltway liberals and defense contractors to double military spending. By the 1960s, half of the federal budget began to go to the military and one in ten workers derived wages from defense contracts. And that continues, but with less public criticism.

Finally, Eisenhower spoke to the militarization of American culture. The university became a research arm of the complex. Students were taught about the virtues of military "readiness," the threat of "communism," the problem of how "human nature" leads to perpetual war, and, more recently, the endless danger of "terrorism." Virtually every large corporation, producing such products as toothpaste, toys, breakfast cereal, medications, automobiles, electronics, or energy, is steeped in military contracts. The public airwaves, the Internet, movies, and sports are laced with war, violence, killing, and competition. As Eisenhower put it: "Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved: so is the very structure of our society."

What another great American, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said in reference to the military/industrial complex and the Vietnam War seven years after President Eisenhower's dramatic statement still holds today:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967.

Dwight Was Right

by Michael Moore - Thursday, September 30, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

So...it turns out President Eisenhower wasn't making up all that stuff about the Corporate military-industrial complex.

That's what you'll conclude if you read Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's War. (You can read excerpts of it here, here and here.) You thought you voted for change when you cast a ballot for Barack Obama? Um, not when it comes to America occupying countries that don't begin with a "U" and an "S."

In fact, after you read Woodward's book, you'll split a gut every time you hear a politician or a government teacher talk about "civilian control over the military." The only people really making the decisions about America's wars are across the river from Washington in the Pentagon. They wear uniforms. They have lots of weapons they bought from the corporations they will work for when they retire.

For everyone who supported Obama in 2008, it's reassuring to find out he understands we have to get out of Afghanistan. But for everyone who's worried about Obama in 2010, it's scary to find out that what he thinks should be done may not actually matter. And that's because he's not willing to stand up to the people who actually run this country.

And here's the part I don't even want to write -- and none of you really want to consider:

It matters not whom we elect. The Pentagon and the military contractors call the shots. The title "Commander in Chief" is ceremonial, like "Employee of the Month" at your local Burger King. 

Everything you need to know can be found in just two paragraphs from Obama's War. Here's the scene: Obama is meeting with his National Security Council staff on the Saturday after Thanksgiving last year. He's getting ready to give a big speech announcing his new strategy for Afghanistan. Except...the strategy isn't set yet. The military has presented him with just one option: escalation. But at the last minute, Obama tells everyone, hold up -- the door to a plan for withdrawal isn't closed.

The brass isn't having it:

"Mr. President," [Army Col. John Tien] said, "I don't see how you can defy your military chain here. We kind of are where we are. Because if you tell General McChrystal, 'I got your assessment, got your resource constructs, but I've chosen to do something else,' you're going to probably have to replace him. You can't tell him, 'Just do it my way, thanks for your hard work.' And then where does that stop?"

The colonel did not have to elaborate. His implication was that not only McChrystal but the entire military high command might go in an unprecedented toppling -- Gates; Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command. Perhaps no president could weather that, especially a 48-year-old with four years in the U.S. Senate and 10 months as commander in chief.

And, well, the rest is history. Three days later, Obama announced the escalation at West Point. And he became our newest war president.
 
But here's the question Woodward doesn't answer: Why, exactly, can't a president weather ending a war, even if he has to fire all his generals to do it? It's right there in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution: The President's in charge of the military. And so is Congress: the army can't just march over to the Treasury Department and steal the money for wars. Article I, Section 9 says Congress has to appropriate it.

In the real world, though, the Constitution's just a piece of paper. In the real world, a President who fired his top military in order to stop a war would be ruined before you could say "bloodless coup." The Washington Post (filled with ads from Boeing and Northrop Grumman) would scream about how he was the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain. Fox and CNN (filled with "experts" who work for think tanks funded by Raytheon and General Dynamics) would say he was a girly-man who had to be impeached.
And Congress (which experienced its own escalation in lobbying from defense contractors just as the Afghanistan escalation was being decided) might well do it. (By the way, if you want to listen to Lyndon Johnson talk in 1964 about how he might be impeached if he didn't follow the corporate military-industrial complex's orders and escalate the war in Vietnam, just go here.)

So here's your assignment for tonight: Watch Eisenhower's famous farewell speech. And then start thinking about how we can tame this beast. The Soviet Union had its own military-industrial complex, which is one reason they got into Afghanistan...which is one reason there's no more Soviet Union. It happened to them.

Don't think it can happen to us?

vidlink