TheMillerCircle.org

William Blum

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

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

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

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

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

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

RFM

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If you haven’t read Tom Engelhardt’s blog on our failing empire, then read “This Can’t End Well“: as he puts it, though we are doomed as a global empire, the collapse of our military imperialism could make us healthier and allow a new beginning for us to get back the country we once thought we had but badly neglected because we preferred to rule the world. What did that get us? Engelhardt’s point is that polling data over the past few years reveals substantial endorsement of the idea that we are a declining empire (these questions are usually posed in a more equivocating manner, such as “do you think the country is headed in the right direction”). As a companion, Engelhardt writes “Why the troops are coming home” and spells out, among other matters, how General David Petraeus has said we may be in Afghanistan another nine or ten years, as if he has no clue about the frustration level emerging from the American Public on the futility of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Who is Petraeus kidding? Of course, we know the people that Petraeus is addressing: they are the Washington crew and the DC beltway insiders and they clearly don’t understand the frustration and hopelessness that the country currently feels about its future. But they have one thing we don’t have–power and the purse strings of America. No leader is currently addressing the hopless feelings that are now expressed by the majority of Americans. Very rarely, except in the case cited below, do you find the “decline phrase” listed as part of the question, as it was in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from which the results below are provided.

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

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

RFM

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In the aftermath of bin Laden’s death, Americans are rushing to prove whether Pakistan is an ally or an enemy. And, according to this view, the proof will come about once it can be established whether the Pakistani government helped to hide bin Laden and protect him for so many years within the military town of Abbottabad. I doubt we will ever know with any certainty what the specifics were between bin Laden and the Pakistani military or government. After all, the Pakistani government, like that or our own, has many different layers and almost surely at one or more of them someone protected bin Laden. I doubt our own government really wants to know the truth because we are in too deep to let this issue reverse or even affect our relationship.  However, it should be obvious that Pakistan has a relationship to the Taliban. It was Pakistan that helped to create them and Pakistan at the moment is where they live–they represent one of many large tribal groups within the region. Most Taliban members belong to the fearsome Pashtun tribe, the fighters of legend. So, the obvious answer to this question is that Pakistan does play a role in support of the Taliban, and they feel that they must be duplicitous with the United States, to protect their own regional interests, while getting support from an American government that seems to know nothing about the country with whom we try to partner in warfare. We demand their full loyalty without understanding that they can’t give it.  But let’s remind ourselves of one cold fact: the Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Pursuing them is mission creep. Indeed, the Taliban, having given bin Laden a safe haven in the 1990s, asked for proof that he was involved in the attack of 9/11, before they would consider turning him over (our initial rush to the invade Afghanistan was at least partially based on the failure to have a good, legally sound case for proving that al Qaeda, led by bin Laden, was responsible for the planning and execution of the attack; it is not entirely clear whether we could mount a convincing case today, though any court in America would have easily convicted bin Laden, given the opportunity). Had we taken that course, the legal one, and viewed the 9/11 attack as an act of mass murder, committed by a group of terrorists who were taking refuge in a poor, war-torn country, we might have achieved a victory without war and without the creation of a bulging internal police state (Homeland Security). Instead, we chose to enhance our militarism and become a security state.  But most Americans it seemed wanted bloodshed after 9/11 and, after a decade, we can start to add up what our gut instincts achieved for us: hundreds of thousands or more Iraqis have been killed, millions more displaced and Afghanistan looks like a permanent, destabilized war zone and narco state. More than five thousand US military lives have been lost and thousands more live shattered lives from their injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder and an alarmingly high rate of suicide risk. Before our invasion of Iraq, there were no suicide bombers in that country and now they seem to be readily available, both for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, Americans want to believe and most probably do, that we have achieved victory in Iraq because of the troop surge and the same mentality will be applied to the war in Afghanistan, if we can ever end that one.

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

RFM

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