In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

As befitting a militarist society, especially after deciding to rule the world after WW II, we typically allow our generals to get their way in times of conflict and they are very experienced and skilled in how to game the system to achieve  their objectives. After all, most military officers in command positions are careerists–they are in it for the long haul, whereas with Presidents, it’s two terms at best, and then you’re out. Furthermore, the military is like a one party system that favors the most confrontational approach to our conflicts and in some areas, like the Air Force, is becoming a fundamentalist Christian organization, working through the right hand of God.  Our military leaders have learned to play our Presidents like a fiddle and they always have the upper hand: cross them or diminish their requests and you run the risk of endangering our troops that are already on the ground, or you are in danger of a complete meltdown of your presidency.  Lyndon Johnson was paranoid over losing Vietnam and going down in history as the first President to surrender a country to communism (who was responsible for Cuba?).  As a result, until the time when his Presidential aspirations were destroyed, Johnson  never said “no” to General William Westmoreland during the major part of his tenure over the Vietnam War; he allowed a massive troop infusion which reached a peak during his Presidency of 535,000 American soldiers on the ground.Vietnam was America’s biggest disaster if only for the fact that it was derived out of our ideology over communism and failed to see the nationalistic fervor of Ho Chi Minh.

But the contrast to the image given to us by the news media can be gleamed from a Newsweek excerpt from Jonathan Alter’s new book “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” which appeared in May of this year as “Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room” [the following is largely based on Alter's article]. We all remember that when Obama ran as a candidate, he referred to the Iraq war as the “wrong war” and Afghanistan as the “good war.” After all that was the war against those who had actually attacked us on 9/11. As Alter points out, when Obama was first formulating his new strategy for Afghanistan, he pronounced that he didn’t want to continue with the same policies that had produced an apparent quagmire and helped to make Afghanistan into a “narco state.” Obama had become acutely aware that during both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, there had never been any key meetings by policy makers where all the issues and assumptions were laid out on the table and discussed–both wars had escalated by incrementalism. OBama was determined not to let that happen over Afghanistan, especially since he demanded that a new strategy needed to be implemented. Obama basically said that for the past eight years, the military under GW Bush got everything they asked for and it was time to put some brakes on this process and view the conflict through a different set of spectacles. As Obama began to press for the kinds of meetings in which all issues could be discussed, he had the first of 10 “AFPAK” meetings on September 13, 2009. He raised the concern that the war in Afghanistan was soon going to be longer than the war in Vietnam (11 years) and would be the longest military conflict in American history. He was well aware of the fact that whatever policy he pursued, unless it was rapid removal of all troops, the war in Afghanistan would become Obama’s war and he ran the risk of having that war not only determine his Presidency, but perhaps, as it did to Lydon Johnson’s, destroying it in the process.

But, the military knew how to get their way and they began to engage in  gamesmanship. As the AFPAK meetings evolved, the Pentagon began to leak reports in order to force Obama into adopting their strategy, which included a large troop surge and a strategy of counterinsurgency, with virtually no end in sight.  In particular, an early  report by McChrystal on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan (before he was in charge) was leaked to reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post before Obama had a chance to see his recommendations. As Alter points out in his Newsweek article, “the military ran PR circles around the neophytes in the Obama White House.”

One idea for a new policy in Afghanistan was favored by Vice President Biden, who supported the strategy of the increased use of drones and restriction of military actions to those of pursuing Al Qaeda. At a speech in London in early October, McChrystal was asked if he favored a drone war focused on Al Qaeda and replied “The short, glib answer is no.” In other words, it appeared that McChrystal was prepared to defy the President, should Obama side with Biden’s suggestion–a clear act of insubordination and an unmistakable challenge to  civilian control over the military (something in fact that happens on a regular basis, particularly for military hardware procurements).  Obama and his advisers finally got the message–they interpreted McChrystal’s remarks as those of a naive spokesperson who was actually speaking for Joint Chief of Staff Michael Mullen and General David Petraeus, who were trying to box Obama in before he had decided on a policy in Afghanistan. Petraeus appeared to have both military and political power projections and has been considered as Presidential material for  a run for the Presidency as a Republican candidate in 2012, something he has denied.

In response to McChrystal’s London speech (October 2009), Obama decided that he needed to show the military brass who was in charge. Gates and Mullen were summoned to a National Security Council, where Obama told them that he was extremely unhappy with the Pentagon’s conduct and said that [From Alter's article]  “the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were disrespectful of the process and damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.” Obama insisted that he be informed “here and now if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.” As far back as anyone could remember, the military had never been spoken to like that and it grabbed everyone’s attention. No single President since Harry Truman had ever challenged the military as directly as Obama did that day. Mullen was “chagrined” after the meeting and claims to have always supported civilian control over the military. He and Gates pledged the kind of support and commitment that Obama demanded of them and told Obama that their conduct would change. A few days later Gates would say in a speech, “it was imperative that generals provide their advice candidly but privately.” At that point, the Pentagon stopped trying to sell McChrystal’s own plan for Afghanistan and agreed to support the President’s strategy. In the November AFPAK meeting, Obama called Petraeus on his bluff–and asked directly whether he could deliver in Afghanistan what he did in Iraq, using a counterinsurgency strategy coupled to a surge in troop numbers. His answer was affirmative. Obama agreed to a troop build-up, but only if the surge could be ramped up and then down on a much shorter time frame: the military was suggesting many years of commitment for the entire process to unfold–basically an unlimited extension of the war.  Obama demanded that the process be shortened so that by 2011, one could begin to bring troops home if it didn’t work or, alternatively,  if it was hugely successful. The key to the success of this strategy was to turn over retaken territory to the Afghans. The President’s instructions to McChrystal were clear–”don’t take territory unless you can immediately turn it over to the Afghans.”  Biden asked Obama [Alter's article] “if the new policy of beginning a significant troop withdrawal by 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn’t be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes.” Obama had learned how to deal with the military. He would thereafter close each meeting by saying “and that’s my order.”

In a private White House meeting, Obama pressed Petraeus harder by asking if he could really deliver a meaningful result in 18 months and Petraeus answered “yes.” He reassured Obama that the army could train the Afghan National Army to assume the responsibility for the war in that time. Obama got all of the military leaders, including Gates, Mullen and Petraeus to sign on board for the new policy. In this way, Obama managed to turn the tables on the Pentagon. If the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in the next 18 months, then it would be proof that the military’s insistence on more troops could not get the job done and their policy of counterinsurgency with a “surge” of troops would be a failure. No one then could say Obama had not given the military what they wanted, except that it was not going to be on their timetable. Had Biden been President at that time, he probably would have fired Gates and Mullen and forced Petraeus into a position of obscurity. When Obama spoke to McChrystal by teleconference when he first assumed command in Afghanistan,  he could not have been clearer in his instructions according to Alter: “Do not occupy what you cannot transfer.” McChrystal got the message.

This finally brings us to McChrystal’s interview in the Rolling Stone, the event that brought about his firing. By openly admitting that the battle for Marja was all but lost or interminably delayed, McChrystal was conveying that the counterinsurgency he had signed onto in 2009 was horribly naive and perhaps could never succeed. His own troops were angered by the approach; they were denied access to fighting a war, rather than handing out peanut butter.  It is not clear whether McChrystal was on a drunken spree with writer Michael Hastings or whether he was sober enough to understand that his remarks would undoubtedly relieve him of responsibility for carrying out a policy that he knew could never succeed, certainly not in the time frame that he believed could be accomplished when he signed on.  Now, fittingly, the conduct for the war in Afghanistan is in Petraeus’ hands, perhaps where it should have been all along. Petraeus knows too well that his strategy for the war cannot succeed–he knows that better than anyone. One can only wonder why we allow the surge in Iraq to be called a success, when in reality it was the conversion of Sunnis to get rid of Al Qaeda that initiated the reduction in violence.

Petraeus has positioned himself in such a way that the failure of the policy in Afghanistan will fall squarely on his shoulders, even though Republicans will argue otherwise.  In the meantime, more troops are needlessly dying and more roadside bombs are exploding. The countryside in Afghanistan is very divided about the American presence and there seems to be little support from Afghan president Hamid Karzai, though he pleaded with Obama not to fire McChrystal. But, McChrystal is merely a willing dupe or a pawn in a much larger game, about which he was and probably still is, very naive. The handbook for counterinsurgency was written by Petraeus, not McChyrstial. The best outcome for the Americans will be to wind down our military presence and eventually disappear, as every invader has done when they tried to confront and occupy the region known to us as Afghanistan. We are spending billions of dollars on the fifth poorest country in the world and our drones seem to be committing us to new enemies rather than first getting rid of the old ones.  While it is surely a lost war, by sticking to his timetable and putting the emphasis on another failed projection for success by our military leaders, much as they did when we were in Vietnam, Obama can prevent Afghanistan from destroying his presidency and might even have the troop commitment seriously winding down by the time he runs for re-election. No matter what the outcome, Obama has revealed himself as a shrewd, open but firm leader who is confidently in charge of our military, very much unlike his predecessor. That much we can be grateful for and in the end, that may be the best part of his Presidency. In Vietnam, we lost a war and did so in the battlefield. In Iraq and probably in Afghanistan, we are teaching ourselves how to re-tool defeat and shape it into something we call victory. It’s a grand illusion all over again.

RFM

Explorer I

It is a bit tiresome to see the horrible news coming out about the Gulf oil spill, only to be accentuated by the incessant emphasis on whether or not this event will be Obama’s Katrina or the defining moment of his Presidency. We hear this a lot, particularly on stations like CNN (I never go to Fox, but I assume they have already pinned the entire Gulf oil spill on Obama, since he toils daily as the Antichrist, or if not, then certainly he is working as one of his primary agents). Now, I don’t remember CNN ever suggesting that Katrina would be the defining moment of GW’s presidency, do you? It seems to me that, at best, that was an after thought. These charges against Obama are absurd of course unless they’re repeated 10,000 times in the news media, then, by the definitions given to us through modernity, the assertion automatically gets placed in the “truth file.” Let’s put this issue in a very fresh and simple way: we don’t have a government agency that drills for oil as we might if oil was a nationalized industry–which it is in some countries. Because of this, we are at the mercy of the international oil companies themselves–it’s part of our free market economy, and,  just as credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages brought down our economy, so too does the U.S. government give sway to the oil giants to do what they want in exploring for the black gold of our economy.  The government merely hands out permits to drill within U.S. territorial lands and waters and apparently has done a very sloppy if not corrupt job, giving the oil companies what they want, whenever they wanted it. Oil companies are currently allowed to write their own environmental impact studies, usually copied from a prior one, which is how seals and walruses got into the Gulf environmental studies application from BP, despite the fact there are no seals or walruses in the Gulf. This level of incompetence on the part of our government is clearly the result of the hollowing out of Federal functions and regulatory oversight over the years by Republicans from Reagan to GW Bush, with a few Democrat participants, acting like Republicans, thrown in for good measure: it is part of the “kill the beast” program of Republican cowboys.  GW Bush and Cheney (remember Cheney’s his famous meeting with oil and energy executives, where the energy future of the United States was laid out, but never made public. That was the official inauguration of “drill baby drill,” plus launching the idea to replace Middle East despots, such as Saddam Hussein, with regimes favorable to our ever-expanding demand for oil. That’s why it’s very unlikely that we will ever get out of Iraq, unless of course the Chinese manage to get all the oil contracts).

With the competency of the Federal government under daily challenge over the Gulf oil spill, I couldn’t help but think back to a day and a time when government agencies worked very effectively and how we all admired the skill and dedication of its workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists and even a few administrators. Take for example how this oil spill is being handled, with BP having virtually no fall-back technique once the most unlikely methods failed and now compare that to how we formed and executed our space program and successfully brought back the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, when it was announced: “Houston, we have a problem.”   NASA, the government agency that developed our space program (the comparative equivalent of having a nationalized oil system),  and sent men to the moon in 1969, was originally formed as a direct result of “Sputnik.” The year that Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957, the Army and Navy had separate missile development programs, each trying to develop their own space-orbiting vehicles (this was the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58). NASA was put together in 1958, through the National Aeronautics and Space Act in order to circumvent what was viewed as a failure by our military to match the ingenious Russian success (Sputnik I was followed a month later by Sputnik II). Never mind that when the Russians launched Sputnik I, which lacked an instrumentation recorder and could not record any scientific information (though it had scientific instrumentation aboard) and never mind too, that a few months after Sputnik, Americans launched Explorer I into space (January 1958, which did have recording instrumentation and discovered the first  Van Allen Radiation belt) and never mind as well that once Explorer I was launched, Americans never lost their lead in the science of space exploration, only in the public relations war that ensnared our space exploration policies and put scientific research on hold, in favor of the PR victory of putting a man on the moon before the Russians did. It was nevertheless  an admirable technological achievement, but in the process it led to the overly costly commitment of using manned space exploration, rather than robotic control which would emphasize science and minimize costs. But we all cheered at seeing an American flag put on the moon and undoubtedly, many Americans got drunk that night.

Apollo 13 was the third lunar mission, launched on April 11, 1970. During the flight to the moon, an electrical fault caused an explosion and loss of electrical power to the service module. The crew was successful in shutting down the command module and using the lunar module as a lifeboat to return safely to earth. This was achieved by acts of serial and parallel competence on the part of the well-trained astronauts and the ingenious group of engineers and scientists centered in Houston. A hit movie was made of this remarkable success story and Americans marveled at how well its new government agency worked and appreciated the competency of those who ran it. I was in the military (Navy) during the early development of the space program and got to see some of the first-hand, relevant issues related to the early days of NASA’s growth. In fact, my own electrophysiological setup in the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola Florida, that I embellished while doing research in the Navy, benefited indirectly from the space program which set super new standards for making electrical connections and wiring harnesses more reliable. The standards for everything from transistor heat tolerances and resistance to the vibration for wire and panel connections, were dramatically improved and almost everything had a backup. Special tools were designed to apply proper pressure when making electrical connections and unique panels were made to support quick changes in electrical connectivity. Astronauts trained in unique, environmentally constrained surrounds, including underwater space simulations. When one of those implementations failed, as it did on Apollo 13, sufficient ingenuity, and the reliably of the remaining circuits, brought the astronauts back to Earth with a safe landing. We don’t have anything comparable to NASA involved in oversight responsibility for deep sea oil drilling. We have placed our environment on the back burner, while oil exploration  consumes and dictates our policies, irrespective of the risks we are taking with the our fragile ocean ecosystems. No one knows the impact this will have on the ecosystem of the Gulf, but we can see already the economic devastation this is causing the tourism and the fishing industries in the region. Remember that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was going to be a target for oil drilling under GW Bush, until environmentalists successfully defeated the measure, all to the screaming outrage of Republicans like Tom Delay and President GW Bush.

The admiration we all felt about the performance of NASA after the first few Apollo trips to the moon, and the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, did not last all that long. Major objections about the size of the NASA’s budget in the face of other, pressing national needs led to budgetary reductions and forced NASA to cancel the remaining Apollo missions to the moon. After Apollo, doubts about the future of NASA, the size of their budget and the nature of their mission began to erode and confuse the agency. Nevertheless, the unmanned flights made by Voyager  explored planets and gave us scientifically valuable information about space and our planetary surrounds. In contrast, manned space exploration was carried out with the Space Shuttle program and NASA experienced their own retrospective “Gulf oil disaster” when, in January 1986,  the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated within seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of this accident reflected the refusal of NASA managers to listen to their field engineers who warned them that critical O-rings were not designed to tolerate the low temperatures encountered on the January launch date. In retrospect, the Challenger disaster represents a reversal of how NASA was put together. During the buildup of NASA, it was the engineers who made the critical decisions, but for the Challenger disaster, engineering input was disregarded by management. Another disaster occurred in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia“ disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board. In this case, damage to the shuttle had been encountered during the launch, when a small piece of insulation tore loose from the shuttle and damaged the thermal protection system necessary to insure against excessive heat build-up during re-entry. If you want to read further about our space program, a book I recommend is “Vodoo Science: the Road From Foolishness to Fraud” by Robert L. Park

Without doubt, the greatest scientific achievement of NASA was when the Space Shuttle launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. Unfortunately the main mirror used for focusing was improperly ground and was not fixed until another Shuttle repaired the problem in 1993. Once properly running, the Hubble telescope provided many of the most remarkable photographs and scientific data ever achieved in space. Since then, the Hubble has been repaired by astronauts several times, the last one taking place in 2009. The Hubble is expected to function until 2014, at which time it is scheduled for replacement. Stunning images of space, taken by the Hubble telescope, can be viewed at a variety of sites, including that of NASA.

The meteoric rise and slow decline of NASA’s public image was punctuated by many significant achievements, including the recent repair of the Hubble telescope, which is now giving better images of space than we ever had before. But the problems that NASA has experienced began from its inception, when the political choice was made by President Kennedy in  choosing manned flight over unmanned space exploration. Inserting manned space exploration into the Cold War, as we did in response to Sputnik, put science on the back burner (as we do so often), and allowed political decisions to dominate NASA’s early mission objectives. We gained almost nothing of any scientific value by putting a man on the moon, though NASA did generate significant improvements in the technology of heat-tolerance, ceramics and we got Teflon out of the deal.  But in doing so, we distorted and confused the mission future of NASA, whose major scientific achievement was the launching and repair of the Hubble telescope. Nevertheless, if you contrast the successful rescue of the crew of Apollo 13 and compare that achievement with the crude strategies that BP is applying to the Gulf oil spill, one sees that executives are in charge of decision-making in the Gulf and they are already jockeying to reduce company liability and limit the public exposure of seeing oil impregnated birds and turtles. No, our government is not in charge of fixing this leak. We gave that option away from the get-go when we turned loose our free market economy and, in the Gulf oil spill, we are seeing just one example of the rewards for allowing this kind of unchecked freedom to generate huge profits, while doing nothing for improving our renewable energy future. The other night, I heard on the PBS Jim Lehrer report, a venture capitalist forewarn the future of America’s energy strategy. At a time when everyone agrees that we must develop sources and technology of renewable energy, as if we are in an emergency to save our planet and reduce our oil dependency, America has only four members of the top 30 companies in the business of renewable energy! That’s what the Gulf oil spill represents to me–the free market economy of oil exploration done at the expense of letting the rest of the world generate the new jobs that need to be created for renewable energy. Will we pay the Chinese to build solar panels (already they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and have hired American engineers and scientists to assist them in making better panels), or will be build them ourselves and will we continue to be the innovators of science related to energy production and planetary safety? Today, the future does not look bright for American emergence into world leadership for alternative energy.

RFM

With the new financial reform bill close to agreement, it has become clear that Obama intends to un-Reaganize the American economy and reshape how the government spends its money. In place of the GI bill at the end of WW II, which gave us a new vibrant middle class, Obama believes that increasing access to education, improving our public school system and putting more money into research and technology, can achieve the same objectives by reshaping government spending priorities.   David Leonhardt, a New York Times financial writer, has an excellent article in the Times today that briefly covers the major historical trends of the New Deal, the GI Bill, Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson followed by the Reagan years, which really lasted from the time he was elected President in 1980 until 2009 when Obama took over. You could actually include the Jimmy Carter presidency in many ways, as a component of the Reagan era, since he began the march towards deregulation when he began the process with the airline industry, and by not recognizing the strength of the Democratic Party resting with workers and unions, both he and Clinton fractionated the very party that got them elected.
In retrospect, the last 16 months of the Obama Presidency have provided a new vision, one that has been partially obscured by the financial crisis and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, looking around the corner, if Obama can get elected again and continue with his policies of reshaping the way Federal expenditures get distributed, his visionary zeal might just change America to a country we can, once again, feel good about or at least feel better about our future as a livable country, one for which we don’t have to apologize.   This year’s election will surely be the most fascinating in many many years. The Teabaggers have taken some primary elections and unseated standard Republicans, like Bennett in Utah. If Democrats insert truly liberal and progressive candidates to oppose them (a big if), we may see, for the first time in our life time, political contests that will have the most dramatic impact on congressional composition and philosophy, because candidates will be promoting truly opposite views that can impact government in significant ways. Perhaps this will be the election year, when the nation decides whether they want to continue the cultural wars or whether such engagements are beneath a serious country with a set of serious problems.
During Obama’s first year as President, I was disappointed in his centrist, cautionary policies, including his cabinet selections. But, since the Scott Brown election, I see a different Obama, one who is trying to reverse Reaganism, but needs to be elected a second time before he can tackle the really big issues, like reducing the military budget and more wisely investing in education to reduce its cost. Remember, that until Ronald Reagan was governor of California, tuition at the University of California system was free and we didn’t concern ourselves about whether creationism should be taught in science classes (as governor, Reagan first proposed that as a test balloon to see if it resonated with the country). We could return to that long lost previous iteration of ourselves as a functional country, if we return to morphing our prior selves, when we had  a country committed  to education, science and technology as the driving engine for better jobs and a better economy. Then, in my opinion, the cultural wars of today will rapidly disappear and we could have a real culture again.

RFM

The American press, which normally gives a green light for our national  misadventures abroad, but particularly the New York Times, found itself trying to defend against Chomsky’s analysis about bias of coverage over a brutal war that would have made us look bad, except for the fact that the invasion of East Timor in the 1970s received virtually no attention from the press, with a few rare but notable exceptions. Chomsky knew this, because he counted up the number of newspaper citations and compared it directly with the coverage for the better known atrocities in Cambodia (a right-wing (East Timor)  vs left-wing (Cambodia) government–that distinction also played a major role).  He claims to have learned more about East Timor by reading British and Canadian articles as virtually nothing appeared in the American newsprint or in television coverage. The conflict Chomsky referred to as one left out of media attention, was that of the East Timor invasion by Indonesia in 1975, which we supported, as we looked the other way when mass genocide against the indigenous people of the region was carried out by the invading army, using American made military hardware. Chomsky compares press coverage of East Timor with that of Cambodia under Pol Pot, who came to power after we invaded the country and deposed Prince Sihanouk. When Pol Pot took over, his objective was to install  a harsh, left wing government, which he implemented through policies of dislocation and genocide in what became known as the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Why asks Chomsky, did East Timor get nearly zero coverage from the NYT, while Cambodia got a lot, when both events were associated with mass genocide and were equally indefensible? Chomsky’s critics have always been waiting for him to make some sort of blunder and then pounce on what appears to be a self-inflicted mortal wound, only to discover that Chomsky’s mistake was usually one of misinterpretation on their part,  rather than his lack of consistency or a failure of his encyclopedic knowledge of events and reporting. I don’t think anyone is better at that than Chomsky.

A good example of one interesting case in the documentary took place when a French professor, Faurisson, claimed the holocaust was a hoax; he was put on trial by the French government and found guilty of distorting history. You may remebmer this case. Chomsky, as well as many other academics throughout the world, signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s right to make his statement, without passing judgment on the statement per se. Chomsky’s many detractors seized on this as an opportunity to caste him as an anti-Semite, though he himself is Jewish and was brought up within a strong, liberal Jewish tradition in New York. The documentary showed the numerous engagements he went through to establish the academically defensible point that a person should be free to advocate their position and leave it to the evidence presented to determine whether a rational case was established by the assertion. On other occasions, Chomsky went on to thoroughly destroy the argument that the holocaust did not take place and eventually seemed to win the day over those who thought they had finally caught him in an indefensible position. But as he said, “I defended his right to say it, not what he said.” He then accused the French Government of putting themselves into a Stalinist-like state by making a legal decision about which history was correct and which was not (holocaust or no holocaust) . So he touched on just about everyone. The presence and actions of Vichy France during WW II have made the French very sensitive to this issue, since they participated in the persecution of Jews and helped ship 70,000 French Jews to the “East” as part of the final solution; only about 3% of them ever returned.

Quite predictably, I found myself deeply resonating with Chomsky as he was portrayed, while I was at the same time a bit astonished to see how many of his ideas don’t or didn’t penetrate with sufficient clarity to most people, at least those with whom he interacted on the video clips. Because of Chomsky’s dogged persistence and his unfailing attention to detail (with some lapses), I think we have a much better appreciation of him during the last decade or so and then too, the militaristic nature of our country, thanks to GW Bush, has been much more thoroughly exposed and perhaps revealed as a nation-state, more loathsome to at least some sensible Americans, than one might ever have imagined. At least we better understand Chomsky’s views and his critique on social issues and war. His positions on issues are hardly radical: he believes that a just society should take care of everyone and stay out of conflicts that unnecessarily kill people. He argues that WW II was justified, but nothing since has risen to the threshold requiring military action. Throughout his career as an activist, Chomsky has always harbored a special dislike for governments as well as a particularly strong dislike for our government and our support of vicious,  right-wing governments, who will do the bidding of Corporate America, such as those we helped  establish and prop up throughout South America after WW II, right up to the present day.

Chomsky  is a prodigious writer who gave up a successful academic career as a linguist to pursue the social and political ideology for which he is better known. Yet, eighteen years after the documentary was made, one can see what was missing from Chomsky’s arguments, something for which we have a much better appreciation today, as a result of accumulated studies of the brain, which impact on our views of human brain function and how political bias gets established therein. This new level of understanding, though hardly complete, has come about through contemporary studies in neuroscience as well as the encroachments from molecular biology and brain imaging studies using the methods of fMRI, PET (positron emission tomography) and MEG (magneto encephalography). These insights have established a more solid foundation for further speculation about brain function, bias and the failures of our frontal lobes to be given rational access to our experiences. As humans, we have an enormous capacity for learning and creativity. Chomsky’s “manufacturing consent” needs a redux. Here’s what one might add for a new version of the documentary.

Chomsky was a leader in pointing out that language is not the act of creating utterances on a blank sheet of auditory neurons, but is in fact, a reflection of genetic programming within the brain, which makes a human baby very different from that of an infant chimpanzee for example, or for that matter, any other primate.  At two months of age, a human infant begins to babble language sounds and perfects them through listening to humans around him/her, a process that reflects a voracious appetite for expressing and receiving language, fed by the energy of their pre-programmed neural circuits, highly tuned for language acquisition. Even children who are born deaf, utter language sounds, though their babbling eventually subsides due to the lack of auditory feedback. Different languages have enough similarities such that phonetic rules are learned and the native language is spoken well before our children go to school. Some languages are phonetically easier to master than others and Italian children for example can speak their language two years before children raised in English-speaking families. Eventually humans have a storage capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 words!

“Manufacturing consent” as Chomsky and co-author  Herman point out, paints a picture, not of a conspiracy theory in which some committee in the New York Times editorial office or a government agency meets to shield us from the reality of our atrocities abroad. Rather, the process of bias reflects an entrainment which loads our mental dice, so that when called upon to roll a winner, we mostly get snake eyes!  We tend to look the other way when information flows into our brains that runs counter to the grain of our private national image, as we focus and emphasize instead the affairs that enhance the internal image we  project about ourselves and the views we have adopted that are supposed to guide our international behavior. It runs against our many mental programs to imagine we are out there in the real world somewhere murdering innocent people, or at least facilitating such behavior. We are capable of a search mode that runs beneath the conscious, declarative mode of verbalized behavior. It also helps, that, in the case of newspapers like the New York Times, the paper does better in terms of advertising and their subscription rate when they rock the boat only intermittently or not at all. But, in attempting to describe this reality bias, Chomsky moves from the genetic code of language, where he is obviously very much at home, to a behavioral interpretation, as if we suddenly switched from Chomsky as the genetic linguist to Skinner as the behaviorist, using a slate of blank neurons for encoding. But brain studies have suggested another kind of genetic code for brain wiring and function, maybe several, though each of these additional coding modes is far more difficult to trace when compared to the development of our linguistic apparatus. There may well be many different  language mechanisms for which humans are “primed” for intense learning as part of our adaptive pre-programmed brain structure. Our motor control, sensory integration and emotional make-up may all reflect programmatic coding to start us out on the road to success as an evolutionary wonder!

Humans are born early and mature late. A chimpanzee reaches young adult stage at about 7 years after birth, whereas humans stretch that out to at least 12 years and our brains are still growing and maturing even during our late teen years. There is evidence that brain mechanisms involving the amygdala for example, which helps us avoid dangerous circumstances, may not fully kick-in until the mid-twenties, leading to the irrational behavior, for example, of Olympic competitors achieving sub-orbital heights on a snow board! What adult would do such things?

With the growth of our brain, we stretch the developmental period out, the purpose of which is to enhance our capacity as great, natural learners, full of curiosity and eager to figure out how things work, before full cultural responsibility comes to rest on our shoulders. Anthropologists like to express the problem of prolonged maturity to the limits imposed by our big brains, which  need to go through the birth canal early, because the imposing physical constraints, thus rendering us more dependent at birth and slower on the uptake, when compared to other primates. Our prolonged developmental period was almost surely related to our survival, particularly as the African continent of our origins became less of a tree-filled jungle and more like the Africa of today, during which time, we came out of the trees and, as bipeds, began to compete with other carnivores for food and sometimes as well, we became the target of their predatory behavior. There is fossil evidence to suggest that humans were confronted with new environmental challenges which served as the stimulus for brain growth and enhanced our brain resources for improved adaptability. One issues seems well established: when our ancestor first stood up and walked as humanoids, their brain size was initially small; it was only later that hominid brain size showed rapid growth and development. Whatever advantages we gained by walking upright, it was not the stimulus of bipedalism that began the development of our larger brain size–that came later.

Phineas Gage Head Wound

The main feature of the human brain that we can appreciate today, compared with those of apes and our distant ancestors of several million years ago,  is the growth of the brain in general, but more especially the growth of our frontal lobes. It is this region of our brain that seems to house much of our social skills, personalities and the capacity for long-term planning. These complex functions of our frontal lobes first came to our attention through Phineas Gage, who, in 1848, had a tamping rod explode through his orbit and destroy much of his frontal lobes, reducing his capacity to deal with abstract issues and suffering from a dramatic change in personality. When you read the description of Phineas Gage and his post-accident behavioral changes, you have the feeling that you are reading about contemporary Republicans/teabaggers. Naturally, the Republican brain is quite different from that of normal humans with respect to our frontal lobes. But, we briefly digressed.

As one example of our brain/behavioral repertoire, just thinking about moving our finger let’s say, instead of actually moving them,  switches the prominent activity center of our brain, as determine by fMRI studies, from the precentral gyrus (where motor commands originate) to a more frontal lobe location (supplementary motor area (SMA)), which is one site where planning our motor actions take place, just as the better known Broca’s area of the left frontal lobe serves as the motor planning region for vocalizing language.

Our capacity to rapidly develop language is likely to be only one of many genetic programs that we have embedded within the millions of neural circuits residing in our cerebral cortex, all derived from the process of natural selection, whose original function was that of optimizing our chances for survival. And, it isn’t all just cerebral cortex: lying within the cerebral hemispheres underneath the cortex, the basal ganglia get massive input from the cortex and feed back through cortical projections; the cerebellum receives at least two loops of impulses, one of which precedes our movements, while the second loop modifies our movements once they are being executed. New imaging data suggests that even the cerebellum, once considered to be a strictly motor organ (where much of our motor-based non-declarative memories are formed) may be involved in cognitive functions as well. This story is far from over, as it represents an increasingly expanded view of human cognitive brain functions.

Most of the coding mechanisms in our brains, those outside of language, such as our social interactions, either depend on or are facilitated by language acquisition. So it is natural to ask how long spoken language has been within the hominid ancestral clans? Well, the brain doesn’t leave a fossil record, so one has to rely on other kinds of evidence, like skull size and depressions in the skill to derive the composition of the brain and guesstimate the presence or absence of language. All of this leaves great uncertainty and doubt. Some have speculated that language mechanisms have been with us for perhaps several million years, although, as we know from our social history, the written forms of language have been with us for only 4,000 years or so. If true, it implies that language is an innate, pre-programmed component of our brain structure, while the capacity to recognize written words is a very recent acquisition, too recent to have found an evolutionary niche in our brain structures and programed genetics. Nevertheless, the fact that our visual memory system seems to have created a visual “letterbox” where knowledge of written words is housed, implies that we had to crowd out some other cortical function in order to have knowledge of the written word. As many as 17% of us cannot read normally and fall into the diagnostic category of dyslexia.

In the last few years, enthusiasm has developed over a single gene that some feel might represent a unique gene  for expressive language. The FOXP2 gene was discovered in a group of individuals with an inherited incapacity to develop language and was eventually discovered in the Neanderthal genome to have the exact same form as the normal human. This gene appears to differ in several important ways from the equivalent in other primates. Many took this to mean that Neanderthals used language. Part of the FOXP2 gene appears to generate a transcription factor that controls other genes, but it is still unclear from the studies carried out so far if the FOXP2 gene can serve as the gene for language. Many of the large group that suffered language deficiency with a point mutation in the FOXP2 gene also had low intelligence, which itself can cause language deficiencies. So, at the moment, the scientific community is properly divided on the subject of this gene and how much it has to do with language. Is FOXP2 the the master or merely another slave of speech and language acquisition? We will be hearing a lot more about this gene in the future.

The brain of course is a highly plastic organ and, once we are born, our brains go to work constructing themselves according to the experiences to which we are exposed. This goes on throughout the day and probably takes place during our sleep, as recent studies are beginning to show that sleep is a form of re-practicing what was learned the previous day. Though our retina appears to be a hard-wired structure, the visual cortex behind it is not. The plasticity of the cortex can change connections according to the visual experiences of the individual. As I sometimes have said to my students, we spend the first thirty years of our lives constructing a brain we can live with and the next thirty years trying to figure out the brain we constructed. Some never get it right. During the early growth period of our lives, the acquisition of culture has the same kinds of driving mechanisms we see for language. We intensely absorb the cultural and social elements around us and the behavior and ideas of those with whom we come in contact, as we try to sort out and stamp out our cultural phenotype. Just as surely as a French child growing up in a French family learns to speak French, a child growing up in a teabaggers environment, with both parents speaking cultural teabaggereeze, will become a teabagger child.

But the frontal lobes of our brains are always exercising another one of the programmatic options, that of longitudinal evaluation and it is during this period, long after we started school, that the opportunity exists, by sharing information with and through others, that the teabagger children have an opportunity to unteabag themselves. Sometimes this happens through a “Eureka” moment from a memorable teacher and sometimes it occurs when taking a college course. For many of my friends growing up in Salt Lake City Utah and coming from a Mormon background, it was the early interactions with others who had question marks about the validity of Mormon doctrine and the recognition that a demarcation line existed–a line in the sand so to speak. The heart of Mormonism demanded that everyone had to accept things that the church said were true. And, mostly this worked. But, for a few, myself included, we opted, perhaps unconsciously,  for the alternative brain mechanism I refer to as “the frontal lobe longitudinal program option,” which planted little seeds of doubt about the story that was too fantastic to neatly fit into an acceptable belief program–it couldn’t fit into the frontal lobe compartments when such knowledge would then be nominated for long-term memory and reflexive cortical behavior. Compounding this early nugget of uncomfortable disbelief, was the attitude that we didn’t want to believe something that wasn’t true. Suppose for example, you were told that the grizzly bears that have been attacking farmers and killing sheep, sleep in nearby caves and are incapacitated during sleep, such that they can easily be approached and killed. If you were asked to join the party that was going to eliminate the grizzlies one night, you would want to know whether the story was absolutely true and you would certainly want to talk to someone who had been on such a killing trip and even then you might and should be wary, as your very survival would be at stake. If you declined to join the grizzly party and later discovered many were killed by an angry awakened grizzly during the night, it would make survival sense for you to avoid seeking additional knowledge from the group. So too with the Mormons.

Once the seeds of doubt get planted, the analytical programs of our minds begin to reshape our neural circuits, replacing older connections with new ones as the older cultural values get pushed out of the way in favor of the new intellect. It is highly stimulating to our brains to feel we have arrived at this new conclusion all by ourselves, even though it never happens on solo flights alone. But once a transition in brain thinking begins to take place, our physical brain is transformed: new synapses are added and older connections are pruned away. Thus, to some extent, we get to rebuild our brains! The seemingly subtle commitment that we make, when we decide we don’t want to believe something unless it’s true, unless there is some evidence we can verify, that is the first fatal step of demanding that religion convert itself into a science, where it cannot survive and voila! The link is broken. The requirement of “truth” and “proof” brings on a burden of evidence that no religion can meet, not the least of which is the Mormon church, because it is relatively new and a lot of information is available on its origins and deeds. Verifiability with Mormonism is a far easier task than it would be for Catholicism. All religions fall apart once the demand for evidence becomes an essential element for continued subscription to the belief system. I was always impressed that those of us who escaped Mormonism in Salt Lake City, all went on to graduate training or advanced professional degrees and had successful careers in a variety of academic and non-academic pursuits. Yet the Mormons we left behind, those that didn’t exercise their “frontal lobe filibuster toolbox”, remained as those who would accept without failure the teachings of the church, including the absurd ones that the book of Mormon was anything other than a nineteenth century fairy tale. Thus, rather early in my life, I resisted a form of brain development that was best served by the absence of a frontal lobe engagement, which committed the lives of non-doubting Mormons to a kind of self-imposed celibacy against the use of the frontal lobes, at least that’s the metaphorical explanation. Most Mormons are Republicans and the state of Utah overwhelmingly votes Republican, with the few Democrats that get elected also voting along the same conservative party line, at least at the national level.

Our developmental period of brain growth and maturation readily follows from another genetic code we see in the human brain–the need to be creative, social animals, coupled to our thirst for understanding how things work. This is also a gift of our greatly expanded frontal lobes, that have new connections now being described by fMRI, MEG and PET scanning images of the human brain during different kinds of cognitive processing. Whether these techniques can ever decipher the nature and substrate of our consciousness and higher mental capacities remains as a future aspiration. But, we know a little more today than we did ten years ago.

So, what Chomsky should say in the redux  version of his documentary is that the New York Times didn’t publish much on East Timor, while publishing a lot on Pol Pot and the Cambodian atrocities, because, though they were smart and well educated, the editors  didn’t understand that they were the prisoners of their many languages of the brain and had yet to go through a full frontal lobe review of their inconsistent behavior. The non-declarative memory, that parks itself somewhere within the brain, perhaps the cortex and in some cases, for some skills, in the cerebellum, represents a force that encourages decisions like the elimination of East Timor news from the pages of the New York Times. It’s the braining, not the training that eliminated East Timor!

But, while we’re at it, let’s not forget the biggest distortion in U.S. history ever perpetrated by an American President. That happened right after 9/11, when Bush said, referring to the attack,  “the terrorists hate our freedoms.” And that immediately established a political constituency of millions of Americans, including the swift boaters and the teabaggers,  who still believe that Bush identified with clarity the motivating factor of the 9/11 terrorists. To reaffirm this position, Cheney later spoke at the American Enterprise Institute where he said the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences” (what was he smoking?). As we all know, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, khalid sheikh mohammed, the person who probably also beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl, emphasized throughout his incarceration, that he planned 9/11 and other attempts to murder and harm Americans and Israelis, solely because of the way that the U.S. and Israel have treated the Palestinians and occupied their lands.  Bush’s statement makes no sense unless you appreciate the intelligence from which the statement came, whereas khalid sheikh mohammed’s statement will not earn him any relief from trial or outcome, so he has nothing to personally gain by making such a statement, which is  also widely corroborated by what the other plotters and planners have said all along. To swallow Bush and Cheney’s  assertion, you must suffer from severe frontal lobe atrophy and be denied the possibility of ever exercising your “frontal lobe longitudinal program option.”

[Note added: while there are many deficiencies in each of the main brain imaging methods in use today, none of which leads to an unambiguous determination of brain activity or provides us with a simple interpretation of brain function, the confluence of these methods has led to an entirely new culture of science on human brain function in which the efforts of psychologists (cognitive neuroscientists), neuroscientists, physiologists and imaging physicists are collaborating with the belief that their measurements are providing us with new revelations about brain function. Whether this new effort is taking us down the path to greater clarity about human brain function remains to be seen, but one can no longer ignore the fact that this group of scientists, using these methods, are making a significant contribution to clearing up the excessive number of houses on the market. It's a growth industry. One of the best books on this subject, though it is very focused on language and reading is "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. In this book Dehaene discusses the current state of knowledge available to us from these imaging methods, at least as it applies to the subject at hand. I strongly recommend the book if you are looking for something on the modern view of language and brain function revealed by imaging methods.]

RFM

Blum then interfaces for his jump to armed services: “I personally would question even the first assertion about a fetus or an embryo being a human being, but that’s not the point I wish to make here. I’d like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:”

Then Blum proposes a more appropriate armed forces induction message that should be given to each soldier, naturally buttressed by our collective war experiences over the past 30 years, where we no longer even think about winning wars, just about long-term engagements. From Blum’s new induction message to all inductees: “The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there’s a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide. No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this ‘stop-loss’. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don’t ever ask any of your officers what we’re fighting for. Even the generals don’t know. In fact, the generals especially don’t know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we’re all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office.”

Also from Blum: “Since for so many young people in recent years one of the determining factors in their enlistment has been the economy, this additional thought should be pointed out to them — “You are enlisting to fight, and perhaps die, for a country that can’t even provide you with a decent job, or any job at all.”

“I fear for us all, but I especially fear for those already poor. How much lower can they go without being cannon fodder or electric chair fodder or street litter or prison stuffing or just plain lonely suicide?”
– Carolyn Chute, novelist, Maine USA”

For the record, Blum has written an indespensible book, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” which is something like a Bible for the nefarious wars and international intrigue we have been involved in ever since we decided to stamp ourselves as “Empire” and rule the world after WW II. None other than Osama bin Laden recommended Blum’s book for Americans who don’t understand why he is opposed to global Americana. Don’t like the idea of empire? Don’t write your congressman, for he surely does like it. Instead go out and elect new leadership–a populist electoral re-prioritization of America! But check first to see if your medical plan covers that option.

RFM

“There has been no other independent assessment on the legality of the war in Iraq and the findings of this inquiry are unambiguous. It concludes that the case argued by the Dutch and British governments, including the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, could not reasonably be argued.”

[further] “This is the authoritative view of seven commissioners including the former president of the Dutch supreme court, a former judge of the European court of justice, and two legal academics.”

The report of the Dutch panel has raised controversy in the Netherlands, but so far no parliamentary inquiry has been stimulated by the panel’s conclusion. In Britain however, the Chilcot inquiry has been looking into the justification for the war, but this committee lacks the legal sophistication of the Dutch panel and is seemingly in a poor position to offer a contrary opinion that will provide any serious counterbalance. In a way, this ruling puts Tony Blair in a more uncomfortable spot than he was with the Chilcot-only inquiry.
While it is unclear how influential this panel’s ruling will be, it is unlikely that it will be challenged by legal scholarship, as the Dutch panel consisted of expertise focused on that very specific issue–the legality of the war on the basis of national and international law, from the standpoint of the Netherlands and the entire European community. If I were Dick Cheney, George Bush, Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, planning on a vacation any time soon, I would probably avoid Europe. I suspect that this ruling, will in time, pervade into the European community and further erode the image of Tony Blair, who already walks around as damaged goods. His main problem was serving as a willing sycophant to GWB.

For a country that felt morally equipped to pass  judgment on Nazi Germany after WW II,  the U.S. now finds itself in a moral quagmire created by its own hubris, coupled with a complete disregard for our own Constitution and the obligations we have to our  international agreements and treaties. But when will a panel of legal experts in America rule on the legality of our invasion of Iraq, so that Americans can see for themselves how GWB shredded our own Constitution and the international agreements we helped to establish, the purpose of which was to prevent illegal wars from ever taking place? GW considered the Constitution to be an unbinding document throughout his entire presidency.  Unfortunately, all of the inquiries carried out in the U.S.  are done through a political process, not one founded within our legal, academic system alone;  until we establish such a vehicle, achieved at the peril of politicians who like war, we will never have a non-political evaluation of our own behavior. If you think that the Supreme Court offers that kind of objectivity, just ponder their recent 5-4 ruling which allows corporate wealth to dominate our political system, even more than it does today. That ruling has placed our democracy on the beltway towards the paper shredder.  For the Iraq war, however,  we shouldn’t really need a “truly objective” panel of legal experts to tell us that our invasion of Iraq was illegal and that the perpetrators of this war should receive stiff penalties, if for no other reason than to serve as a warning to all future militaristic politicians: if you love war, you could wind up in jail if you take us there! Taking a country to war should be a grave, agonizing decision, one that has, since WW II,  been far to easy for our presidents. But, for George W Bush, the decision to invade Iraq was an act of trivializing our own rules. That is one reason why the U.S. is so down, why we have a sense of national confusion. We are not following our own rules and because of that there is a gnawing rumbling in our gut that doesn’t respond to antacids, but responds better to the trivialization of our American culture. We avoid these kinds of conflicts by watching reality TV, wondering where Paris Hilton is tonight and staying away from history lessons and literature.

RFM

We shouldn’t be confused: Bush and Cheney were not the puppet masters in this new American play, but rather the obliging puppets, whose strings were pulled by the oligarchs of high finance and multinational corporate power, aided in part by people like Rupert Murdoch. The oligarchy includes the richest 1% (~ 3 million) of our population that received huge tax cuts and garnered about 2/3 of the real income growth that took place during the Bush years: it wasn’t much, but they got most of it. The ruling oligarchy is evident in the decisions we make that get us into new wars and diminish our constitutional freedoms. But perhaps more insidiously, another looming crisis lies within the financial sector, reflected in the way with which we are dealing with our deep recession and the bailout solution that has been applied to solve it. The solution was not aimed to serve our interests, but exclusively those of the ruling oligarchs of America.

With high unemployment that promises to loom far into our future, we continue to ship jobs to China and have a huge trade imbalance with them as we buy, buy, buy, but don’t sell much to them in return. Indeed, we give the store away.  The normal manner in which trade imbalance is dealt with, is to change the rate of currency exchange until a balance of trade is achieved, with neither side gaining significantly over the other–just trading for goods and services that are unique to each country.  We can readjust the value of the Chinese currency against the dollar on our own, but we refuse to do so, claiming that the Chinese must do it, which is how we hide behind the demands of the oligarchy, who continue to see high value and profit in the trade imbalance, all for purely selfish reasons–those of greed.  Our unbalanced trade with China, though it’s costing American jobs and serves to rapidly diminish our manufacturing capacity, is what Wall Street wants, so they can use the cheap labor of China, coupled to unlimited access to American markets, quite irrespective of what those policies do to the American worker, because destroying the American labor movement is sort of a bonus. In that way–the Wall Street way–corporate profits remain high and the stock market will continue to show good returns for the right kinds of  investments. The right kind of investment is not investing in American growth and its future. These financiers now know that they can safely build another bubble and get rewards from the taxpayers if they overextend their drive for higher profits. If you think the American way out of our high unemployment is through manufacturing ourselves into a new green economy, think again. China is already the largest manufacturer of photovoltaic solar panels, using American-based technological developments to aid in their design and production: we provide the fruits of our research to them for free.

Whereas, we go to war on borrowed money by selling bonds to countries like China, we deal with our financial problems at home by attempting to re-inflate our economy, so the big banks recover their original investments while we absorb their losses through the creation of new, unheard of levels of public debt. Today we hear that our deficit spending is approaching record levels, but what’s left out of the conversation is that the Bush-Paulson buyout plan for the financial sector has saddled us with $ 12 trillion in bad investment debt (“toxic assets”), for which we have assumed financial responsibility that will be passed on to the American public, requiring new long-term taxation policies that are likely to keep the American worker in a state of near serfdom for as far into the future as we can see. This debt never makes the news, but it is gradually sinking the American ship.

The general public expresses their outrage at the exorbitant bonuses paid to bank executives, while missing the much larger rape of our public financial resources through the economic enslavement of Americans with a plan that cannot succeed without committing our economy to repay their bad debts at their original face value–thus the $ 12 trillion in “under the radar-screen” “toxic investment,” public debt. If you want to read more about the essence of this debt and be better informed (but no less depressed) about the continued success of our ruling oligarchs, read Michael Hudson’s article in CounterPunch, or Nomi Prins‘ article on the same topic. Today, we are ruled by the same oligarchs for whom Bush and Cheney were the stage puppets. Obama has agreed to replace them on stage through a partnership with Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geitner. Collectively, they too are just the tools of the oligarchs.

Take for example the $ 50 billion program designed to renegotiate home mortgages for “troubled homeowners.” This sounds like an act of generosity for people having trouble making their mortgage payments. But in reality this bill turns out to be a huge benefit for large banks and was designed with them in mind, including  Citibank and Bank of America, as their just reward for making bad loans. It goes like this: the treasury takes on the bad debt that banks are stuck with, while negotiating with troubled homeowners to renegotiate their monthly payments down to 38 per cent of their income. But, whereas one might expect the banks to take their losses on this arrangement, justly earned by their behavior,  the treasury will make up the difference, so that the banks wind up will full repayment of their loan at its original value, plus a new government guarantee that the remainder will be insured by the government, providing the banks with a clean sweep and rosy record books. This is taking place, despite the fact that it was their over-zealous loan policies that got us into this fix in the first place. Treasury is hoping that the re-inflation of housing will eventually solve the problem of this debt, by returning these toxic assets to their original value, but we remain in a period of significant deflation, not the inflationary trend needed to reduce this debt level. If the banks had to contribute part of their resources for “troubled homeowners,” the money for this program could go much further in helping people with unmanageable mortgage debt. But, when the $ 50 billion has gone, that will be the end of the program. In the meantime, foreclosures continue and are seeping into people that have decent jobs, as higher payments get triggered in by the original mortgage arrangement. If this country was really committed to helping homeowners, they would put a freeze on foreclosures and allow judges to restructure homeowners debt, but efforts to do either have been defeated in Congress.

When Obama tells us he is worried about our debt, he doesn’t tell you which form of debt he is talking about. Collectively the give-away to the financial sector, for the trauma that their actions caused, amounts to providing them with payback at face value before the stock market deluge fully developed. Nice arrangement for them and a disaster for us. You can see the oligarch’s success with the overdue reform in our healthcare system, which permeates the bills recently passed by the House and Senate. While we can identify some improvements in how the insurance industry deals with those covered by their policies, the bills do very little to attack the structural problems of our healthcare system, such as employment-based insurance and the introduction of true cost-containment methods. At the same time, the healthcare bill will add as many as 30 million new enrollees to the insurance company’s  patient portfolios, with some government support for premiums, all going to enhance the profits of these insurance companies. The lack of a good and broad public option plan will mean that cost-containment issues will continue to haunt us, just as employment-based health insurance costs will continue to rise. There is little in either bill to keep these inflationary trends  in healthcare costs from changing their trajectory.
So, as we turn a corner on the first decade of the new Century, we are leaving behind a decade-long string of nightmares. But we have a string of new nightmares in our future, as well as  continuity with the old ones that remain in the current glide path towards our financial insolvency. I have only provided a small list of Bush’s trail of transgressions in favor of the oligarchs, all achieved by imperiling the country’s future.  But,  Juan Cole has a more complete list on his blog. Our governement’s response to Katrina told us how the olicarchs felt about treating people in poverty. Now we are fighting to avoid having our middle class be the next in line for Katrinaization. But, it doesn’t matter too much whether it’s excessive flood water or excessive debt. If one doesn’t kill you immediately, the other shortens your life and leads to a very diminished set of expectations.

The problems we face today actually began with Microsoft. As they started their meteoric rise to unimaginable levels of profit, beginning in the 1980s, other corporate masters saw this new stratospheric level of profitability and said, “why not us?” Major shareholders were saying the same thing: “why not us? Using the new Microsoft model, every corporation wanted extreme new profit margins to satisfy the new demands of their share holders and they placed the responsibility for achieving this in the hands of their CEOs. The trend for more wealth and profitability began when corporations took significant gains in productivity and, instead of giving some of it back to the workers responsible for those gains, saved and reported them as additional profits, shooting for eye-level performance with Microsoft, as determined by the value of their corporate stocks. The old corporate profit margin of 12% had to give way to 25% or more in order to sustain the march to greater corporate wealth. The gold watch for employees got converted to the gold parachute for the CEO, while workers earnings stagnated, even though their productivity grew and grew. The old corporate model fell by the wayside and new trends, like “re-engineering” and “downsizing” became the euphemisms for corporate greed and higher profits. How a software company can make mounds more in returns than the more creative inventors of the computer hardware has always perplexed me when thinking about just rewards for creativity. But the Microsoft model remains in effect today and will be there unless someone shoots it down!

Yet, hope springs eternal and perhaps in the decade ahead, the American public will begin to discover that the mission of our ruling class oligarchy does not have our economic interests in hand or even a healthy planetary future within their gun sights. With images of a vast new wealth as their sole vision, they can afford to reach the high ground, as the ocean fronts advance (moving to places like Aspen Colorado) with Blackwater mercenaries for protection, as they hold on to what they have, gardening under domes if necessary  with enslaved Americans serving as a source of cheap labor–eventually as cheap as China’s.  What will it take to make our future look brighter? Believe it or not, we are only a few dozen progressive legislatures away from controlling both the Senate and the House  by a progressive majority. To do this, we will have to hold onto the ones we have and successfully challenge some of the corporatist Democrats in their  primaries to begin the long journey back from these troubled times. Doable? yes!  Likely?, who knows?
Happy New Year!
RFM

If it was a speech about peace that the Nobel Committee was hoping for, they got instead a speech about war, that included the idea that the United States  could not be held accountable for its actions in Iraq–no one will be prosecuted for crimes against humanity related to that war, even though our invasion of that country was illegal, as clearly defined by our own constitution and the Geneva Conventions to which we are a signatory. According to Obama, in the conduct of its foreign affairs, the United States has always been motivated by the best intentions for America and the other members of the international community. What’s more, the fragmented remains of al-Qaeda will be the subject of actions by the Pentagon, not the domain of Interpol: they are a military threat, not a criminal one. Besides, that’s the only way we know how to go after those who attack us, especially when they are evil.

In promising peace, Obama said that we will probably be at war for a long time to come, perhaps until the urge for evil acts are expelled from the human genome, if that’s where they are located. But credibility becomes a problem for Americans who want to talk about peace. It is hard for the leader of a country that is unwilling to sign the treaty banning the use of land mines (because that country is the largest manufacturer of such items of destruction, whose favorite targets turn out to be children) to sound credible on the issue of peace; it is always much easier and more credible to provide eloquent cover for the militaristic manner that we use to address our international problems. In exchange for good relations with America, we need to put a base in your country, and possibly a giant telecommunications center somewhere within your borders.

It was disappointing to hear Obama mention “evil” as a way of characterizing the opposition in Afghanistan, since our policies and support helped to directly create the Taliban and al-Qaeda. I had hoped that when Bush left office, words like “evil” would go with him, never again to be used in description of those opposed to our policies and insistent on resisting them. Furthermore, Obama seems unwilling to give lip service to the concept of “blowback”–the idea that we have created a good share of our own enemies. He did so when he was candidte Obama, but that alternative way of looking at our enemies seems to have been taken off the table.   As Juan Cole stated “Obama has yet to decide whether he is a visionary or a technocrat. The Nobel Peace Prize committee hoped for the former. In this speech they got the latter.” In so many ways Obama is turning out to be a good speaker for the present state of American interventionism, rather than a visionary for the change he promised, including those ideals and commitments that got him elected. Obama has fallen short of expectations, as he has further strengthened the hand of the military in all of our future foreign policy decisions. He is a master of learning the facts, followed by sycophantic capitulation in favor of the military option. Right now he looks a lot more like the technocrat  than the visionary. We will have to wait and see if Obama becomes another “Kissinger” as a former Nobel Peace Prize recipient, or if perhaps he might move a bit closer to Martin Luther King and/or Ghandi by the time he finishes his civic duties as President. The world is desperate for an international leader who can turn us away from pitting humans against other humans through acts of armed conflict, and massively convert our efforts to confront the only just war that remains in front of us. The mother of all enemies is the blowback of the industrial revolution and the global climate change that is already at work to change the planet.  Obama needs to set in motion the armies  needed to confront global climate change, a war that needs to involve everyone.  So far, Obama’s response to that issue is also disappointingly shallow, as his Copenhagen proposal falls woefully short of expectations.

Obama’s focus on war as the thrust of his Nobel Peace Prize speech, forces each of us to wonder about his own future as a President. Right now Obama’s situation is eerily similar to that of Lyndon Johnson just after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. While Kennedy had only sent “advisors” to Vietnam, Johnson was encouraged by the military, with McNamara’s help, to send combat troops into Vietnam. Johnson’s gut instinct was against it, because he had a grand domestic program he wanted to implement. But, out of fear of being the first President to lose a conflict with the communist monolith, he committed himself to follow the course of war recommended by his generals, on and on until it shattered his Presidency and destroyed his domestic program, even though he accomplished revolutionary legislation in Civil Rights and  Medicare/Medicaid. How will Obama respond to what is surely the beginning of a new major escalation of forces, if not in fact, certainly in dealing with the demand for additional troops that will be favored by the military. Didn’t his commitment for more troops and a cost estimate of another $ trillion, destroy any attempt on his part to initiate a badly needed jobs program and actually begin the process of remaking our economy? Isn’t our national security more dependent on securing a decent living wage for American workers?

Obama’s first capitulation to the military option was signaled in his Nobel speech, in which  we heard warrior Obama make the clarion call for the military option against the evil forces in the world. If you want to see a gripping film on what Johnson went through, all driven by his complete naivete about the outside world, and his incremental capitulation to the military, watch John Frankenheimer’s “Path to War,” available from Netflix. In Johnson’s war against the evils of communism, we killed 2-3 million Vietnamese, mostly women and children, those that die most often from saturation aerial bombing. Obama did not mention something implicit in the way we go to war–that our aerial methods kill mostly women and children. From the air, you don’t see these kinds of deaths and that’s why we prefer to go to war that way. Now with drones firing missiles,  we don’t even get a chance to see the outcome.

RFM