Power Generation in Liberty (Zucotti) Park

William Blum has a lot to say about the conduct of American foreign policy and the deceit with which we communicate our international behavior to our citizens. To say we are duplicitous does not quite explain the true situation. We describe how we are doing God’s work abroad and then hide the numbers and details of those who have died and suffered as a consequence of carrying out His wishes–but it’s all in the best interests of “spreading democracy.”  Blum has an excellent bullshit detector and that’s why I read his blog with some regularity. Ordinarily, you don’t go to his website if you are searching for an uplifting message about America, but in his most recent blog, he actually has one! It’s all about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and, as explained therein, Blum is pleasantly surprised and uplifted by their message and their persistence in delivering it.  My son and I had a similar experience when we visited Zucotti Park   a few weeks ago (now renamed by the OWS movement as Liberty Park–its original name) and absorbed the culture of those promoting these ideas.

When you think about the major protest activities we have historically engaged in, against the wars we have entered, beginning with the Vietnam war, they have all been time-limited by the event that initiated them. When the war ended, protests stopped and everybody went home–issue over, if not forgotten, though that event in particular left a deep national scar. Sometimes, as in the case of the war in Iraq, we don’t even wait for it to end before putting it out of our mind–we simply don’t have a way of dealing with wars we start without a good reason. Bury it in a file but in which file cabinet does it belong? The OWS movement is different; it addresses another kind of issue, something that is more inter-generational, more longitudinal in scope and more fundamental, like the backbone to our culture. Yet it began with too much subtlety for us to detect and it remains an insidious force waiting to be full fleshed out. Yes, it’s neoliberalism that we are against,  and while it may have started as an economic change of course, it has become far more than an economic blueprint for a more divisive future–it has crept into every pore of our cultural being and has overtaken the central values of our society. And the politics of neoliberalism are draining to our culture–we get exhausted too easily imagining what the country was like before. Multinational corporations now effectively run governments, in fact they own them.

With the current economic meltdown, we’re beginning to perceive the real core of the problem as an encompassing social, spiritual and economic disaster–a long national nightmare of sorts.  The financial disaster that led to the “Great Recession” (let’s face it, for young people the unemployment picture is at depression levels) was initially viewed as something we could do nothing about–we were too “financialized” to confront the political and social power that controlled our government and made the rules. But the OWS movement has been courageous enough to put up the first STOP sign and begin the process of inoculating the country against this festering contagion of corruption and economic despair.  We can all hope that the movement will continue to grow until its mass reaches a critical threshold such that the  majority of Americans will recognize  we cannot continue with a system that dehumanizes us with too much poverty and too few opportunities to develop and grow as humans–there must be a better way. And so there is! But as the long struggle begins to right our ship, it is only beginning to take shape in our brains and not through identifiable objects around us.

It may have started off as a lack of good paying jobs and high unemployment, but, like the Populist movement of the 1870s, it will hopefully grow until we create a more democratic country, something like the one we quit on in the 1970s. We must radically change our system of government to make it more responsive to our social needs. Then too, we have the additional urgency of saving the planet we live on. We will not do away with our financial system, but one hopes to tame it and make it subservient to the needs of society, rather than the other way around. The neoliberal experiment is over. It didn’t work. It produced too much poverty, destroyed our national creativity, hollowed out our economy  and is completely indifferent if not hostile to the environment–that is just one more arena for corporate exploitation. Those for whom the country does work seem to be the least deserving and least imaginative members of our culture–they must become the new workers in a revised  economy that works better for all of us, including them, though they don’t see it that way right now. It’s more than just hitting the restart button. We can no longer tolerate a system in which our national assets are sold off at fire-sale prices, as employees are stripped of their retirement–that is robbery–we are now confronted with the new robber barons, who are far more sinister than the predecessors for whom they are named. They are on automatic pilot and will not cease until we stop them. One of the best things we can do to tame Wall Street is impose a small tax on every stock market exchange which will not only raise money but also inhibit the rapid, electronic stock exchanges that continue to pose a risk to our economy. America is not broke. In fact the Institute for Policy Studies has outlined several changes in our tax and subsidy policy that could create seven times the amount of money that the failed Super Committee was trying to achieve. And most of us wouldn’t know the difference. The idea that we are broke is simply another example of how the neoliberals have fashioned a corrupt tax code with advantages to the super rich and subsidies to industries that are generating huge profits, for providing energy that does not reflect the true cost of doing business. A sensible Congress could solve these issues simply and effectively.

Each and everyone of us, including the ultra-rich, have a stake in what the OWS movement achieves;  the movement or one of its eventual evolutionary outcomes will hopefully allow us to move peacefully towards a more equitable, better educated and more responsive civil and political society. So far, we have to give the OWS credit for articulating their views effectively and staying on message. “We are the 99 percent” resonates deeply with Americans and you will note that neither political party has much to say about the OWS movement, though Obama’s speech in Kansas yesterday sounded like he was getting ready to jump on the OWS bandwagon.   All Republicans and many Democrats are hoping the OWS movement will be wiped out during a long winter: I am betting that it won’t.

Today, we have the finest congress that money can buy, but it is incapable of responding to simple human needs, like a jobs bill. When my son and I were in Liberty Park, New York, we saw  the elderly and many senior citizens expressing the same kind of hope we see in the OWS movements that have spread throughout major cities in America and in many other countries. Eventually, the movement will have to transition to a more political agenda, but it still needs growth and consistency. The non-violence of the OWS movement, in contrast to the violent tactics of the police, serve as one message that registers with successful templates of past movements, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s actions against British rule in India, Martin Luther King’s leadership in the Civil Rights movement and César Chávez’s protests against treatment of farm workers in California. But those movements are long gone. Now we see a new one emerging that harnesses the energy of youth and has multiple modes of expression, driven in part by the intolerable lack of access to education amidst threats of eliminating of our social safety net. It is not that we can’t afford these things–we are still the richest country in the world.

Like the great populist movement of the 1870s, the OWS movement may take years to develop and along the way, it needs to find a means of effective communication, public education and financing. Like the forces it wants to displace, the OWS movement may have to become inter-generational. The fact that so many young people are burdened with student loans they cannot repay and faced with debts they cannot meet, is a hidden but important organizing feature even if it is one of the more subtle themes of the movement. That is one issue that struck me about young people in Zucotti Park and you can see this issue raised time and time again on the wearethe99percent web site–many of these students have been kept out of advancing their college education because it is too costly and they already have a large college-derived debt burden. Aren’t we telling young people that in today’s complex world a college education is the equivalent of a high school diploma sixty years ago? If so, shouldn’t that be freely provided, just as the high school education was at that time? We have bailed the too big to fail out–now we need to bail out the “too small to notice” to keep the promise of America healthy. Will the educational and communication  needs of the OWS movement be met through the internet communications and the social media, television coverage of the “peoples mic,” or massive public demonstrations? It wil likely involve all them just as it does today. A set of educational tools–teach-ins to discuss and educate how to respond when confronted with police brutality in order to consistently promote the theme of non-violence that seems to be an attractive and compelling part of the OWS movement, but the movement needs to be propagated on a larger scale. The OWS movement has captivated all age groups including that of William Blum and now it needs to ramp up.

I have written previously about Blum. He has authored an indispensable book, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” which is the handbook of our international wars, many of which the government didn’t want you to know about. This is an indispensable reference for understanding the duplicitous nature of our country.  At no time in history have humans ever been able to establish a true democracy. The neoliberals who own our current, inequitable fantasy of a democracy have been trampling on our limited form of democratic government as they try, in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin, to trample further on the fragmented democracy that was originally founded within our shores. A populist movement, like that of the latter half of the 19th  century, is what one hopes might come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is best to seek this new level of democracy without having obvious  external enemies. So before we turn China into a foe rather than a trading partner, let’s formulate new ideas about how to bring about this new, true democracy, something the world has never known. For a vacation from this exercise, we could think about a strategy to save the planet. At some point, planetary rescue and a future of hope from all the OWS movements need to come together to finance a new, more democratic society.

RFM

Iran Hostage Crisis U.S. Embassy Nov 4, 1979

It is the DNA of our foreign policy apparatus that forces us, perhaps in sync with some kind of diplomatic circadian rhythm, to periodically promote the idea that Iran is secretly building a nuclear bomb, in addition to the fact that they are the greatest satanic threat to world peace since the rise of fascism in Europe. Though we don’t officially use the term anymore, GW Bush’s characterization of Iran as part of the axis-of-evil is still emblematic of how we view and diplomatically treat Iran today. We can’t say enough bad things about the country and we are always looking for ways to tighten the sanctions against them we have already imposed (we are going to strengthen our sanctions since the British closed their embassy in Tehran terminated Iran’s foreign office in London). Yes the Iranian regime is a brutal dictatorship and no we don’t want them to develop a nuclear weapon. In fact, we want to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But ever since radicals overthrew the Shah and took our embassy members as hostages (we installed the Shah by overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossadegh in 1953, as a favor to British oil interests and what eventually became BP (British Petroleum) and is now bp (beyond petroleum)), we cannot shake the fact that we once had the Middle East oil situation fairly well worked out, with rulers who generally did our bidding, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait until Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic in 1979. We just can’t accept the humiliation we suffered in that episode and we want and need the current regime to topple. It’s obvious that the United States will not be happy until Iran goes through a change in leadership and we would obviously prefer someone more compliant with our own interests compared with the today’s intolerable situation: we demand regime change. But the reactionary posture we unavoidably display towards Iran, and refresh with predictable synchrony, is aided by our partner in sinister delusions, Likudian Israel, who shares in this paranoia and regularly feeds us information reinforcing our satanic interpretation of the country. But a definite pause was recently injected into the conversation about Iran: a recent report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the watchdog of non-weapons nuclear technology transfer, claimed “the possible existence of undeclared nuclear facilities and material in Iran.” This was new because the same agency had reported in 2007 that there was no evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran (see below). But, that’s all it took. A lead story in the New York Times the day after the IAEA report came out advanced the idea that “United Nations weapons inspectors [IAEA] have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.” You know that when the New York Times comes out with a forceful article like that, the story has legs and war chants begin, typically originating on Faux News (I didn’t check). Yet, later on the same day, the Times came out with a second, more cautionary report admitting “It is true that the basic allegations in the report are not substantially new, and have been discussed by experts for years. Many of them appear to be those first uncovered in the laptop stolen in 2004, said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program.“

I do not remember how many stories I have chased down, trying to discover the facts about these reports as they surface, but one always winds up debunking them as one fictional account after another, each fabricated or over-hyped to bring more sanctions against Iran and rally public opinion about the possibility of war, or at least initiating an air strike against their supposed nuclear facility–of course that would mean we knew where it was, which we don’t. The first story goes back to at least 2004 (I think I said it was 2001), when a “stolen laptop” was obtained that outlined Iran’s nuclear operations at the time, claiming they were developing a bomb. But that laptop was suspect from the time it first surfaced. For one thing it was in English and for another the government refused to have an independent agency check the dates and history of the computer to learn more about its past. After chasing that story down and a few other misfires, I got very tired of the misinformation campaign that our own government had developed, with the able assistance of Israel, such that I stopped looking into each and every threat. I believe that Iran is a suppressive, ruthless dictatorship that does not tolerate dissent, as we witnessed a few years ago in the streets of Tehran. I do not believe that a theocracy can ever achieve democracy. And, while I don’t put Israel in the same class as Iran, I believe that any government nurtured by a religious doctrine will always be in conflict with democracy. Our government has so inculcated us with misinformation about Iran that we are incapable of having a rational discussion on the subject of their intentions.

On many fronts, Iran has cooperated with us. For example we were allowed to land planes and fly over Iran territory when we first went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11.  During the Bush administration, Iran offered to put everything on the table for negotiation with us and Bush refused, presumably because he got more mileage out of Iran as part of the axis-of-evil rather than choosing to have Iran as a negotiating partner. For GW Bush, America needed enemies in many places, but most of all in the Middle East. Why turn an enemy into a friend, when it’s proven that you get more national mobilization ratings out of enemies compared to what you can expect from your partners. But, with the new threat that Iran might be developing a nuclear bomb, based on the most recent IAEA report, and given the election year hype that is bound to come out of this charge (it was a topic in the most recent Republican Presidential debates), I looked into this issue, beginning with my traditional sources of information, including Gordon Prather, a former nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In December 2007, I wrote a piece about the Bush administration and their false claims about the nuclear bomb plans of Iran, based on Prather’s reports and his inside information. I have not found anything by him on this most recent issue, at least not at the www.antiwar.com site where he usually posts his comments. However, the recent IAEA report, because of its departure from previous claims about Iran, requires another round of investigative effort and here is what I think is the likely explanation: To begin with, Syemour Hersh has reported on this issue in his New Yorker blog and reminds us that the two most recent reports from our own people, the National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.)–a summary of all of our intelligence agencies–concluded that, since 2003, Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program. From Hersh’s November 18 article in the New Yorker:

• “I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron [mass spectrometer],” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.“

To better understand the recent IAEA report, it is perhaps worth noting that the agency has had a relatively recent change of leadership. Until his retirement two years ago Mohammed ElBaradei was the I.A.E.A.’s Director General; he was so popular that he was asked to stay on for three consecutive terms (he is currently running for the Presidency of Egypt in their ongoing elections). Although disliked by Washington, his international reputation was one of objectivity and fairness and for his work, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, perhaps as a direct slam against the GW Bush administration who was constantly beating the war drums against Iran at that time. ElBaradei’s replacement is Yukiya Amano of Japan. The evidence points to the idea that Amano is more to the liking of Washington and that he resonates far better with the DNA of our foreign policy urges than ElBaradei ever did. What points us in this new direction–a change of leadership in the IAEA as the source of the problem, has come from an indispensable source of information: Wikileaks published a classified U.S. Embassy cable from Vienna, site of the IAEA headquarters, which revealed the following (taken from Hersh’s article):

• “According to the cable, which was obtained by WikiLeaks, in a meeting in September, 2009, with Glyn Davies, the American permanent representative to the I.A.E.A., said, “Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the group of developing countries], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every strategic decision, from high-level personnel.“ appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

William Blum

No matter what you believe about the objectives and methods used to conduct American Foreign policy, especially since WW II, you need to check in periodically for an oil and filter change with author William Blum, whose most famous book is “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II“; I didn’t know the full scope of our outrageous foreign policy intrusions around the globe until I read Blum’s book. Americans were not supposed to know about these things. Thanks to a few insightful journalists, we have slowly assembled the story of our past. When you mate Blum’s book with Chalmers Johnson’s Trilogy, including “Blowback,” it is hard to feel good about what we are doing, in almost any region of the globe. Conducting America’s business abroad you say?  Granted, American Imperialism is not the old fashioned colonialism that we lightly denounced; what we have is a military imperialism in which we establish bases and “com” divisions that are responsible for maintaining American Hegemony throughout the world, including North America. Indeed, we are hoping that AFRICOM, which is currently centered in Stuttgart Germany, will find a base home in Libya once the dust settles down.  We discovered a long time ago that the easiest way to exploit a country is to make sure you have an obliging dictator in charge (if not do the installation work yourself), allow him and his entourage to accumulate some wealth and then grab all you can until some revolution comes along, which you then denounce as anti-democratic or communist, or nowadays, theocratic. That mobilizes forces at home and buys you some more time to pursue your exploitation in God-granted perpetuity. Does anyone really believe that we will be out of Iraq or Afghanistan in our lifetime? We have already committed ourselves to “the long wars” and not even a serious recession/depression can prevent our military from maintaining a global commitment which rhymes with support of the global economy and the Neoliberalism that got us there. In the meantime, we march ever more steadily towards a theocracy ourselves, as the Republican slate for the Presidency is shaping up to be dominated by fundamentalist wackos.

You only have too look at our astonishing record in Haiti, including this story if you believe we are out to improve the lot of some other country. If you’ve forgotten the rules or the history, Blum maintains a blog at www.killinghope.org where you can access much of our past Foreign adventurism since the close of WW II and, in his most recent blog, he challenges your understanding of what we are doing in Libya. If you are not fully informed, be prepared to see a long list and since we cannot fully access the involvement of the CIA, whose actions are largely outside the scope of conventional journalism, we can expect that the list Blum provides, if anything, is shorter than the real thing. Fortunately,  Wikileaks seems to be filling in at least some of the gaps. Blum’s most recent blog describes an alternative view of our engagement in Libya. One of the statements on his blog is the following that summarizes the disparity between what we say we are (to ourselves and others  who will listen) and how we actually behave when the rubber meets the road:

• “It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: “You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was ‘to be as rich and as wise as an American’. What happened?”

That is my impression–going fresh into countries in which we had a good reputation, based on the history we have composed about ourselves, a sense of replenishing idealism,  the movies we made and the books we wrote about our history and aspirations. But when idealism clashes with corporatism, you know who wins and that’s what happened to America. So, once the true nature of our policy was known–to exploit resources and install and support dictatorships, one after the other, without ever supporting conditions more favorable to a democratic government, it becomes much easier to understand why so many in the Middle East and around the world hate Americans and distrust our intentions.  There is an additional element to all this: what the Michele Bachmann’s and her ilk have given us is the complete absence of those that hate us making a distinction between the actions of our government and the American people. Thanks to them foreigners hat us and our government!  The Arab Spring surely aroused American sentiments in their souls towards those seeking our idealistic sense of freedom. I think the Arab Spring had something to do with the ignition process in Madison. But the polls show that we are deeply mistrusted throughout the Middle East. Why, if going after Gaddafi was to protect civilians, haven’t we done the same for Syria, where the brutality of Assad seems to be far greater and has been carried out against peaceful demonstrators, not revolutionaries? As for Libya, it is a general principle, as Blum points out, that a country leader has the right to overthrow an insurrection. You can never eliminate the oil factor and what about finding a home for AFRICOM?

I have quoted Blum previously on his alternative message to the inductees into our Armed Forces. Who can argue? Do we have a mercenary army recruited out of the economic despair we create in neighborhoods where there is little hope of regional employment and unemployment is generational?

While you’re at it check out the faces of those protesting against the Canadian tar sand oil pipeline. It’s still going on. You are welcome to visit DC and get arrested, meet Bill McKibben (350.0rg) and Naomi Klein, who will help lighten the load. This looks pretty significant to me, but what will Obama do? It’s his call and his alone. I imagine the decision is already made, don’t you? And, if so, which way will Obama move? Many of the demonstrators were staff members for Obama’s 2008 campaign. He has already relaxed the tougher clean air standards that the EPA was going to implement.

RFM

• From Engelhardt’s summary of the poll: “In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 61% of Americans interviewed considered “things in the nation” to be “on the wrong track,” 66% did “not feel confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.” (Seven percent were “not sure,” and only 27% “felt confident.”)  But here was the polling question you’re least likely to see discussed in your local newspaper or by Washington-based pundits: “Do you think America is in a state of decline, or do you feel that this is not the case?” Sixty-five percent of respondents chose as their answer: “in a state of decline.”

These kinds of numbers in the 50, 60 and 70% for questions asked about our county’s  future, have been present in polling data for many years and stretch back at least as far as the early GW Bush years. Engelhardt’s point is that the country cannot sustain itself with this kind of public opposition and Chalmers Johnson’s point would be that we can’t financially afford it. According to Johnson, we should look forward to following the British lead, as they gave up their empire (turned things over to us and thought we would be the new Romans and they would be our Greeks) and more or less created a soft landing for themselves. Everyone abroad realizes we are sick at home and the polling data now consistently  shows that the majority of us feel similarly, we just lack the national leadership to provide a new pathway, though I must confess, the soft landing idea gets harder and harder to imagine. The Republicans want to destroy our social fabric so that we will be better at fighting new wars (Republicans haven’t forgotten Iran, even though the Arab Spring has momentarily displaced their attention), while the Democrats want to keep fighting the wars we have but also keep a modest level of support for our citizens. Perhaps this will end, or should I say begin, with the mayors of each city, who are learning the hard way, as they are/will be the first responders, that they must begin to organize for the coming challenges of global warming. Katrina was the starting point for many cities of the world and already in America, Seattle, Chicago and New York have initiated plans to deal with the coming crisis, in a serious planning-ahead manner. It will take a nation of wise people and a wise government, not the fools we have now that pose as leaders, to understand the gravity of what we have in front of us during this century of dealing with a problem we created for ourselves. For more information on what cities in America are doing, you can find an illustration from a King County Washington meeting whose website is here.

RFM

In the aftermath of bin Laden’s death, we continue trying to stabilize the small country of Afghanistan, with its population of 29 million, while destabilizing a much larger, very complex country such as Pakistan, with a population of 162 million, and a country that comes equipped with a nuclear arsenal. The latter fact is probably one reason why we will never leave the region. One can already see that there are far better questions we should be addressing about the entire region, especially in light of the Arab Spring, which, if properly viewed, is an opportunity to visualize, though not necessarily shape, a new Middle East that will be less appealing to al Qaeda and other radical Islamic recruiting efforts such the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why not focus on those issues?  William Pfaff writes about two different doors that Americans can walk through in the aftermath of bin Laden’s death. One road, the high road as I call it, can now be easily rationalized by recognizing that we achieved our basic objective in Afghanistan: al Qaeda has been dismembered and separated from the Taliban. By removing our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq (as candidate Barack Obama promised to do as a Presidential candidate), and committing ourselves to participate in the internationally organized reconstruction efforts needed in those two countries, we can at long last begin the process of our own analysis which can lead to only one conclusion–that we had no idea what we were doing in those countries and too often didn’t know who we were actually fighting. What would happen in those countries if we provided continuous electricity in Baghdad and decent paying, year-round jobs in Afghanistan, through the process of helping to develop their economy? Was it our intention when we invaded Iraq to strengthen the regional hand of Iran and convert the country from a Sunni to a Shiite-dominated government? When we helped the Afghanistan war lords throw out the Russians, by giving them Stinger missiles,  did we think that our reward would be the Taliban, al Qaeda, bin Laden and 9/11? Bin Laden’s action against America seems to be largely driven by our occupancy of holy cities in Saudi Arabia after Gulf War I. For every action we have carried out in the Middle East, no matter how deeply we have been drained of blood and treasure, our wars have to make sense and that is why we need the military: they are the only homogeneous force that can make sense of our many wars, because they just about force every officer and all enlisted men and women to believe in the national propaganda,  even though the military never wanted to invade Iraq itself. So, what will it be President Obama–endless war or the beginning of an endless peace? We need the latter to begin soon so that we can initiate the emergency preparations we will need to carry out for the coming global warming crisis that has now touched the entire globe–we are only on the threshold of what will be a global horror show if we don’t act quickly and effectively: we have already missed the opportunity to make serious adjustments to our immediate future and we will have to learn to live through the predictable and unpredictable actions of a warmer planet for at least the next fifty years. Global warming conditions are a full century ahead of schedule. We finally did what we set out to do in Afghanistan and never should have done what we did in Iraq. Let’s call it even, all go home, get to work to save the planet and stop creating a dangerous planetary future for our children! A healthy planetary future for all children should be something we can all agree on: or can we? Pushed off of any possible discussion about the impact of bin Laden’s death was news of the marital infidelity of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so the analytical future for America has been postponed.

RFM

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden is dead, but bin ladenism is likely to have a long planetary half-life, particularly in America, where the Faux News-inspired habit of not looking more longitudinally for the root causes of any issue, will surely help propagate his “ism” for now and well into the future. So far, no one seems to doubt that he has been killed, though I don’t share in the habit of doing an Irish Jig on news of someone’s death, no matter how detesting his behavior. It seems as though the news surrounding bin Laden’s death begins and ends with his killing, body identification and rapid burial at sea. Americans are fascinated by the details of the military operation, but seem to be tone deaf about the broader implications of his demise. Should the war in Afghanistan be canceled?

Understandably, the United States was not about to provide a land site in which bin Laden’s remains would reside, out of fear that such a site might serve as a stimulus to merge his “ism” into deity (if only Ronald Reagan had been buried at sea). Bin Laden might make it anyway. It seems certain that our government couldn’t tolerate capturing bin Laden alive; after a few iterations of his capture, it was eventually agreed that, on the night of his assassination, he was not armed and apparently did not resist, during the brief incursion into his home/office near Islamabad, Pakistan. But when you realize that 9/11 has so distorted our legal system, such that the innocents among the captured prisoners held in Guantanamo (apparently the majority) cannot even be granted habeas corpus rights (despite the Supreme Court ordering access to this fundamental rule of facing your accusers and demanding to know whether the government that incarcerated you has the right to detain you), one can imagine the horror show that would have followed bin Laden’s capture and his permanent internment, without the possibility of ever coming to trial. It is hard to imagine how our government would have handled a live bin Laden. Would we have respected Pakistani sovereignty and turn bin Laden over to them? Would he have to be extradited from Pakistan? We do have an extradition treaty with Pakistan, but could we successfully enforce it? Would the Pakistanis agree, knowing that bin Laden would face the death penalty? Fear of all of these problems, plus the possibility that he would escape if handed over to Pakistani authorities, made it a virtual nightmare to think of bin Laden as a living, articulate witness, daily emphasizing the disintegration of our own rule of law. A quick death and burial at sea was the only out for the American incursion into bin Laden’s den. I think of bin Laden as a mass murderer with rational motivations. And, let’s not forget that many of bin Laden’s demands were quietly met by the GW Bush administration, as I discuss below.

On the day after the 9/11 terrorist attack against the U.S., President George W. Bush addressed the nation and announced that “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” But bin Laden was always very open and clear about his motivations for striking at the homeland of America and this was reported by the FBI to congress. Bin Laden’s objectives included 1) opposition to U.S. military forces in the Persian gulf area, most notably Saudi Arabia and the occupation of Islamic holy cities; 2)  U.S. support of corrupt Middle Eastern countries and 3) U.S. support for Israel’s brutal occupation and the ongoing assault on civilians in Iraq. But for Bush, one announcement is about all it takes and he virtually never came back to dwell on that issue. Of course, he didn’t have to mention it further because he let Faux News do it for him and they obligingly carried on with Bush’s propaganda. Bush even rejected out of hand detailed public health studies which showed that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed and millions of its citizens had been displaced by the American invasion. If we attempted to engage our frontal lobes (yes it does take more energy to do this because the brain does not store energy, so it must derive glucose from the blood stream, which is intelligently designed to increase blood flow to those areas that need it, like those areas which are active; the process has some inertia, but like other issues in physics, once you start the activity and blood flow, it’s a lot easier to maintain it) in a little exercise of longitudinal thinking, we might ask whether our policies in the Middle East had something to do with bin Laden’s attack and whether our actions since have helped to produce a lot of new little, medium-sized or full adult-sized bin Laden’s eager to take his place, with their sites fixated on American targets and interests. Didn’t bin Laden also have something to do with the creation of an internal military force that we refer to as Homeland Security? And, aren’t your pretty tired of having your pants fall down when going through airline security? Like it or not, bin Laden had an amazing impact on our country and enticed us into activities which we really can’t afford. There probably is such a thing as a bin Laden pothole in America. Maybe more than one.

Although it was never a subject of much headline news in America, Bush acted fairly quickly after 9/11 to remove troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (April, 2003), thus meeting one of bin Laden’s major demands (number one in the above list); bin Laden consistently railed against U.S. occupation of the Islamic holy city sites of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Indeed this was the primary reason that he fell out of favor with the ruling Saudis, because when Iraq invaded Kuwait, bin Laden offered to expel Iraqi occupation forces and was outraged when the Saudis turned to the U.S. for help, rather than accept bin Laden’s assistance. That is when he moved his operations to Sudan, followed by Afghanistan.

So this brings me to an outrage that should be shared by all of us: it has to do with the number 2 item in the above list–U.S. support for corrupt Middle East dictatorships.  This began in the early 1950s, when the CIA displaced the democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran and replaced him with the Shah, who turned out to be a brutal dictator. Every Arab knows this story, but few Americans do. The current Arab Spring revolts have introduced us to an exciting new option for the citizens of many Middle East countries and each of them are now competing for Arab favor. By pressuring for democratic change, the spring revolt is providing a pathway towards eventual irrelevance of bin Ladenism and al Qaeda. If Islamic fundamentalists compete for votes in the awakened democracies of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Omar and with significant demonstrations in many other Middle East and North African countries, they will almost surely lose out to the more idealistic, populist, uprising of modernity, though that outcome is, at the moment, far from certain. The problem for the U.S. during this Arab Spring is that if we had a demonstrated history of supporting democracy in other countries, we could be of welcome assistance to these revolts, by perhaps leading through example or loaning them our democratic compass. But we lost that compass back in the 19th century: our behavior in these countries, indeed, our behavior throughout the world, of propping up dictators to serve as more reliable business partners and providing us with better oil security, has stripped us of any credibility with the democratic forces behind the Arab revolt. As one reads about reactions throughout the Middle East, we frequently hear young Arab leaders, once they learn that Americans are trying to influence one or another group, quickly ignore or purge that group because of their deep suspicions about our intentions. In other words, we don’t have the right cards to play in the Arab Spring revolts and we are forced to sit on the sidelines. It is true that Obama is trying to support some revolts, such as that in Egypt, but because of our history in supporting non-democratic, often brutal governments in the Middle East, he is unable to right our ship of state in a single sweeping turn. But, I hope he doesn’t give up. The truth is, there is too much history running against us and young Arabs are too knowledgeable and sophisticated to feel comfortable with us as allies. Our hands are tied, and perhaps for the first time since the end of WW II, our influence has been rejected. From day to day, we don’t really know what’s going on in any of these countries except we know that Egypt is central to the success of this revolt. Whether America can finally sober up, and remake our compass of democracy is a challenge not only for how we treat revolts that take place along other shores, but we also have a lot of rebuilding to do with our democracy here at home, badly shattered by guess what–bin Ladenism. The repressive Patriot Act and the sweeping powers implemented in our Homeland Security laws tend to make our government look more like the ones that young Arabs are revolting against. With bin Laden gone, can we take a deep breath and reform our own democracy and begin to live within our means and within our constitution? We have finally met the face of the future of bin Ladenism and it is the face of America. We are two countries, attempting to live under one roof. Externally, we are a military empire and internally we try to emulate a democracy. We cannot be both at the same time. We are going to have to decide and decide very soon, whether we will be a military dictatorship or whether we can find our way back to a true democracy and live within the dictates of our own constitution. That would mean than only Congress can declare war and from time to time, the entire budget needs to be reviewed by congress, including the black budgets of the military and the CIA. The fact that no one is yet talking about these kinds of outcomes is a fresh reminder about the inertia of the American brain for longitudinal thinking.

RFM

RFM

Civil War Image from Library of Congress

When I was a high school student, our history teacher told us, flat out, that the Civil War was caused by the issue of “states’ rights” and that it had nothing to do with slavery: end of debate.  This came as a bit of a shock because I had always believed through other learning experiences and just sitting around the dinner table, that slavery was the driving force for the Civil War without which it would never have been fought. In time, I came to appreciate that my high school teacher was an advocate of the “lost cause” ideology, based on a belief system that emerged in the South after the war, in an attempt to cleanse themselves of the humiliation associated with being a slave society as they conjured  up many alternative formulations for denial of the real cause. The “lost cause” people generally prefer the name “War Between the States” over the use of the “Civil War.” Although the “lost cause” dialog, as an alternative explanation for the war, has largely disappeared from public and social discourse, you have only to raise the issue of the Civil War to learn that many advocates of “lost cause” issues still cling to them as an alternative way of viewing the conflict. We will all hear more about these “lost cause” issues this year, because 2011 is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War (1861-1865). Undoubtedly, this year we will see a new intensification of major battle reenactments, as eager participants put on Union or Confederate garb, load muskets and re-stage the battles that made the Civil War the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history, with more than 620,000 soldiers killed together with an unknown number of civilians. More soldiers died because of the poor colonial medicine techniques that were used to treat their wounds than were killed on the battlefield. The practice of blood-letting and treating soldiers with calomel (mercury chloride) was commonplace, but the worst medical sin of all, was that of failing to operate under aseptic conditions.  One of the spin-offs of the Civil War was that of stimulating the evolution of American medicine into its modern form with science as the basis for medical therapies and diagnostic procedures. But that’s another story.

A few days ago I watched on C-Span, part of a symposium held in the South where a university professor from Mississippi was arguing passionately for many of the “lost cause” issues which evoked rounds of enthusiastic applause from the audience. These issues are not dead in Dixie.  Like the Dixie flag that honors the war and still flies in the South, the “lost cause” believers will be coming out of the woodwork this year, so we should all be prepared. Prepared that is to counter “lost cause” arguments with facts. No one does this better or more succinctly than sociologist James W. Loewen, writing in the Washington Post. This would be a good article to print and have on the coffee table this year for surprise “lost cause” visitors, who could come from anywhere. There are many “lost cause” issues that have been advanced to soften the blow after the South lost the war. In addition to the most prominent “states’ rights” issue (which no one ever clearly defines, but which Loewen debunks by pointing out the the secessionist states were actually opposed to states’ rights because they did not want to give away to the Northern states the right not to have slaves, including their perceived constitutional obligation of the North to meet Southerner’s demands that runaway slaves be returned); in addition,  there were arguments about tariffs and taxes, and many other reasons for the war in which the attempt was made to make the North look like an unnecessary aggressor towards the less populated and less industrialized South. The fact that most white Southern families did not actually own slaves (slaves were owned by about 1/3 of households in the Southern secessionist states, so why would the South commit itself to war if slaves were owned by a minority of homeowners?). One of the other prominent issues was the argument that slavery as an institution was just about dead by 1860, so why not let it die a natural death instead of inducing a bloody conflict (in fact, slavery was not on its last legs–in 1860 the South produced nearly 75 percent of all U.S. exports; Loewen points out that slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation at that time). Other issues of course included white supremacy arguments, which in general seemed to be supported by early “brain science” (see Broca’s Brain) and argued for a scale of human intelligence, with white males sitting at the top. If this kind argument was not applied, and blacks were given things like voting rights, two Southern states, Mississippi and South Carolina, which were black-majority states, would surely have their subhuman slaves rise up and exterminate the whites. Though the Civil War ended slavery, it did not end enslavement of blacks, particularly in the South, where forced labor camps replaced slavery with much the same result. Those types of enslavement did not end until the beginning of WW II. Information on the post-Civil War enslavement is available in Douglas Blackmon ‘s book “Slavery by Another Name ” (a summary of which can be read/watched on Bill Moyers Journal); the author discusses how post-slavery enforced labor camps created a new form of slavery in the South that re-enslaved thousands of blacks who became indentured laborers. Blackmon has compiled strong documentation that Southern states, which had Slave Codes that regulated the behavior of slaves before the civil war, formulated new codes after reconstruction that allowed them to bring back slavery in a new form–forced labor camps. For example “vagrancy” and “loitering” were code words used to capture or intern runaway laborers and put them back in labor camps.  It has been said that the bricks which made the city of Atlanta after the Civil War, were entirely produced in slave labor camps.

As for the issue about why the South seceded, it can by crystallized by the Dec 24, 1860 “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” that came out the South Carolina secession convention of that year. This declaration included (from Loewen’s article) “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and further claimed that Norther states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Thus, slavery, not states’ rights gave birth to the Civil War. Though the Civil War ended slavery, that was not the North’s objective when the war began. The North went to war to hold the union together (if the Confederates had won the war, the remaining United States might well have lost the War of 1812 and become, once again, a British Colony). Abolition of slavery came as a result of the war, but that was not its precipitating motivation. On Aug 22, 1862, Lincoln wrote to the New York Tribune and said: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it be freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” Of course Lincoln’s position on slavery was well known and he concluded in the letter: “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” A month later, Lincoln put out his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and, when signed, freed all the slaves in America. Of course, as we know today, that was only one chapter in a never-ending story about race relations that still leaves the country with a blemished record on civil rights and the continued perpetration of laws that act prejudicially against blacks and other minorities. The idea of America as a “shining city on the hill” is a bit incomplete.

When the North won the Civil War in 1865, it remained a fragile nation  with an uncertain future. The initial problem in 1861 was winning a war that turned out to be the most costly conflict that America has ever faced. But in 1865, when the victors had defeated the South and eliminated slavery, the confrontation which had to be immediately addressed was how to end Slave Power now that slavery itself had ended. Slave Power was created at the founding of the American nation, when slavery was written into our constitution. The end of the war was also the end of the Constitution of 1787, such that the paramount issue of the day was what new form of government would replace our constitution and what were the new rules by which American civil life would proceed. Although most of us know the names of those who founded our nation through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, few of us remember the names of those that rewrote our national rules of behavior through the amendments that followed immediately after the war, including the critical Fourteenth Amendment. The shocking assassination of Lincoln at the close of the war put Andrew Johnson in the Presidency, who supported the return of Slave Power. The names of Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thadeus Stevens of Pennsylvania are unknown to us today, yet they were as important to the reformation of the American constitution at the end of the Civil War as the Founding fathers were at the end of the Revolutionary War. If you are interested in reading further about the forces that confronted and helped reshape the nation at the end of the Civil War, I recommend Garrett Epps book, “Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.”

RFM

Most if not all of those who claim we have started to win the war are in the military, or speaking for the administration, or perhaps worst of all, they are reporters “embedded” with U.S. Troops. An embedded reporter has the protection and safety of traveling with the US military, but also carries the liability that he/she will be talking to individuals preselected by the military who will give a viewpoint compatible with the military mission: it would be silly to expect otherwise. The alternative reporting arrangement is that of the “non-embedded” reporter, a far more dangerous situation in which the reporters go it alone, make their own arrangements and see Afghans and other observers who may have a completely different interpretation of the war and often do. These are the Afghans and Pakistanis with whom embedded reporters don’t get to interview. Being a non-embedded reporter has serious risks, both to your own well-being and the possibility that you have latched onto an informer for the Taliban that might be exaggerating tales from the crypt: you can get the mirror image story of the embedded reporter: thus, either version can be misleading and the reader has no way of sorting things out. But, given the greater risk imposed by the non-embedded reporting conditions, one expects to see fewer of them. Because of that we have a much higher expectation from non-embedded reporters, though we often scrutinize their reporting far more than we do those coming from traditional embedded sources. After all the embedded source gives us the party line and isn’t that always easier to swallow? It’s better to hear that you’re winning rather than get the disquieting message that your losing, have lost or can’t win.

Reporters such as Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley have been non-embedded on several trips into Afghanistan and Pakistan; it was Scahill who uncovered the actions of the Blackwater mercenaries in his book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” ; he is a frequent guest on Democracy Now and writes for The Nation. Both Scahill and Rowley were interviewed on Democracy Now. He recently wrote an article for The Nation entitled “Killing Reconciliation”. In contrast to what is reported by the embedded media and what we hear as the official military version of our progress in Afghanistan, Scahill and Rowley report that we are losing the confidence of the Afghans because our war of insurgency is killing too many civilians and making too many new enemies. Our killing operations are mostly done by Special Forces during nighttime raids, with some participation from NATO. In reading Scahill and Rowley’s interview, you can’t help but think of Vietnam, where our “counterinsurgency” strategy amounted to killing civilians and burning their huts on pretenses that no one could ever really corroborate. These are not detective stories, they represent the hidden brutality of war, but in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, they have been sterilized in a way that makes these acts invisible. The counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam was carried out by ordinary soldiers and led to the murderous Me Lai incident in Vietnam in 1968. Today, in Afghanistan, it is generally the more secretive US Special Forces, sometimes in concert with NATO troops that carry out these raids and quite often they refuse to acknowledge their operations.

Scahill reports that the Independent National Reconciliation Commission is a group whose mission is to encourage the Taliban to lay down their weapons and support the government. One person who did that in March 2008 was Mullah Sahib Jan, a militant Taliban imam who was fighting in the Logar province. When he turned in his weapon, the Mullah escorted fifty other Taliban fighters who all agreed to quit fighting and support the Karzai government. When he surrendered, the commission assured him that US-led NATO forces would stop conducting night raids and killing civilians. Sahib Jan warned that if the killing of civilians did not stop, he would withdraw his support for the government and the “foreign forces.” After his surrender, Sahib Jan took a government position as a religious adviser to the reconciliation commission. If you were an “embedded reporter” you would probably have your story already–a well known, fierce Taliban fighter surrenders together with his group and joins the government: surely victory over the enemy cannot be far behind. But as non-embedded reporters, Scahill and Rowley followed the story much further and uncovered Sahib Jan’s final outcome, something that would probably be impossible for the embedded reporter. In January 2009, about nine months after his conversion, Sahib Jan’s bullet-riddled body was found outside his mud-brick compound in a Logar village. According to local officials and his family, he was killed in a night raid by US Special Operations Forces at about 1:00 in the morning. The Special Forces group broke open the door, separated Sahib Jan from his family and killed him outside of his home. The US does not admit to the incident and claims to have no record of the operation. However an eyewitness to the killing claimed that he was told by US forces that Sahib Jan was killed because “he shot at them.” The morning after the raid, the eyewitness to the killing was arrested by US forces and taken to a prison where he was held for four months before being released. The head of the reconciliation commission reported to Scahill that a false report was circulated that Sahib Jan was a Taliban, though when he was killed by US forces, he was working for the reconciliation commission. Officials within the reconciliation commission have complained that US-led night raid killings have been stepped up and are killing former Taliban members who had already entered into the reconciliation program. Members of the commission have said that night raids by US forces are killing the reconciliation process which had achieved some success. The accelerated night raid killings are creating a new recruiting tool for the Taliban insurgency. Thus, according to Scahill, “there is an enormous disconnect between the image projected by the US and Afghan governments and reality. On the ground the Taliban seem to be gaining traction and increasing membership despite, or perhaps because of, intensified US-targeted killing operations and night raids.”

Scahill’s interviews with Taliban members reveal that, as older members are killed by US military night raids, they are replaced by younger, more militant insurgents and that the Taliban and Haqqani networks for recruiting have increased their influence into the Pashtun heartland communities that would not otherwise be supporting them. When senior Taliban are killed, they are replaced by younger, more strident militants; whereas at one time, the loyalties for the Taliban were divided between Mullah Mohammed Omar or the Quetta-based Taliban, new divisions are now forming without that traditional allegiance. We never really understood the Vietnam war when it was going on and when we were defeated, it was astonishing to detect the panic conveyed by watching helicopters dumped from aircraft carriers into the ocean to make room for more people. We didn’t think of embedded and non-embedded reporters in those days. It seemed like every reporter was going out with the military, at least based on the video footage that came into our television sets. This is largely true for the press coverage of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reporters obligingly prevent us from seeing the carnage and the reality of warfare. The sanitized version we get from embedded reporters prevents us from seeing reality until the helicopters get dumped into the ocean at the very last moment of the war. If we have fooled ourselves into believing we are leaving behind a stable Iraqi government as we depart, the prospects of achieving something similar in Afghanistan seem very remote at the moment. Wikileaks provided us with cables from Afghanistan Ambassador Karl Eikenberry from Kabul: in KABUL 001892 of July 13, 2009, Eikenberry reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “unable to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state building.” In Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, we have allied ourselves with the most uncertain partner we can find, a product of the Bush administration. Maybe Wikileaks can tell us someday how Karzai was vetted for his present position as the anti-nation building president of Afghanistan. Everyone deserves better, but most of all the people of Afghanistan deserve better. Or, did they get just what they want in a leader of a country that has never had a leader before?

RFM

In 2008, our diplomatic services reported that Russia had invaded neighboring Georgia over conflicts that had developed in pro-Russian Southern Ossetia. In Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, American officials embedded themselves into the offices of President Mikheil Saakashvili and his young inexperienced militarily advisers; Saaskashvili had hoped the United States would help Georgia shake off its Soviet past and stand up to Russia’s regional influence; it seemed as if the American diplomats in Tbilisi were going to help shape things so Georgia got what it wanted.

Wikileaks has published more than a quarter million cables related to the brief war between Russia and Georgia, and through that access we have a better understanding about the naive nature of American diplomacy, particularly when the ideologues are in charge. Two trouble spots within Georgia were Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regions that remained pro-Russian after the break-up of the Soviet Union and received Russian support, including the presence of  troops. But because the diplomats in Tbilis wanted to curry favor with Saakashvili, they swallowed his interpretation of the conflict with Russia and as a result got it all wrong. The misinterpretation of  the Russia-Georgian war of 2008 has been corrected through information provided by Wikileak material, which also illustrattes out how the right-wing press was in lockstep with whatever came out of Washington during the Bush II years. Thanks to Wikileaks, clarity has been added to our understanding of this war, which carried the risk of a potential confrontation between the United States and Russia, something that Saakashvili tried to promote. The truth is that the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008 was not because of Russian aggression, but because of Georgian’s bloody attack on Ossetia. Although Georgia was the aggressor in the conflict, American diplomats sent cables claiming that Russia started it all.

In the fall of 2008, as the region slipped into war, the diplomatic cables from Tbilis dominated American perceptions and Saakashvili’s line became America’s interpretation of the rapidly unfolding events: he claimed that Georgian troops were on high alert in case of an attack, but in reality Georgia launched a heavy artillery-and-rocket attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia on August 7, 2008. This action immediately put Georgia and Russia into a conflict and Russia responded by invading Georgia two days later.  Saakashvili stated that his actions were defending citizens of Georgia and claimed that Georgian troops took no aggressive action until fired upon by the Ossetians; he also bragged that at one point Georgian troops had full control all of South Ossetia and that it was Russia, not Georgia who initiated the hostilities. The American cables at that time which supported Saakashvili’s claims, did so without seeking independent confirmation. Yet other observers on the ground in the area did not report any firing from Ossetians and explained that it was the Georgian army who were brutally aggressive. But the information that came to GW Bush was enough to announce on the world stage that Ossetia and Russia were the aggressors (remember the GWB didn’t require much evidence to arrive at a decision–he was “The Decider”). When the Russians invaded Georgia, Saakashavili announced that they were attempting to replace his regime, hoping to draw the Americans into a more active role. As a result, the American Press was full of stories about Russian aggression, restarting the Cold War and trying to flex its muscles in the region. None of the mainstream media ever got it right.

While this rage in the American press was going on, I had my doubts about the story and started reading up on the topic, eventually writing an article on August 14th, 2008 about the “Russian invasion;” “What is the Russian /Georgian conflict all about?” and found that it was not difficult to see the conflict in a different light.  I looked at several independent sources such as FAIR (which I highly recommend), Democracy Now (which is always very good) and I listened to broadcasts from independent reporters who were in the area at the time (many of whom were on antiwar.com out of Austin Texas). The ideologues of the Bush administration, aided by very faulty, uninformed cables coming through the U.S. Embassy in Georgia, painted a completely errant picture of the conflict and the entire administration drew a conclusion of Russian aggression that was all nonsense. Of course as an ally of Georgia and suuporter of their armaments program, Bush had very little choice but to back Saashkaveli–but to do so on completel false claims, just to fool the American press and people was the issue that concerned me–that and the needless loss of lives through a Georgian invasion that we totally unnecessary. But even today, the right wing insists that Russia was the bad guy in that conflict, though you don’t hear much discussion about it anymore. However, had it not been for the lack of resources, since our were all  tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am not at all certain whether GW Bush might have taken the bait and initiated military actions in or near Georgia, though I hope that even he would not have risked an open military conflict with Russia, particularly since we avoided one all during the Cold War.  I will be forever grateful to Wikileaks, as we learn more about our deeply flawed government and its many errors in foreign policy issues. Remember the ugly American? We haven’t made him any prettier. Wikileaks simply confirms what Americans should have known about the control of our foreign policy–it is handled exclusively by those who still believe in global American hegemony. Once the dust has cleared, in the long run, perhaps Wikileaks will serves this country better than we might realize.

RFM