Time to Stop Being 'Nickled and Dimed'

Left Margin Column

Message
to Obama:
We Need
a New Deal

By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com

July 9, 2009 - Now they are out to nickel and dime us to death. Here in my home town the traffic and parking department has been prevailed upon to "step up" its enforcement activity - and maneuvering to have parking meters work far into the night - in order help cover some of the city's budget deficit. In Massachusetts, legislators have slapped a tax on candy. The California state legislature recently endorsed a $1.50 tax on a bottle of alcohol and added an additional $15 to the vehicle license fee.

The astonishing thing is that such measures, being undertaken across the country, are being approved and even plotted by some liberals and progressives. It's high time we all recognize that the people who get hit by traffic fines are the ones without garages and "sin taxes," by and large, target working people. They are not the ones who got the economy into the current mess but if some people have their way, they will pay through the nose for it. This, at a time when unemployment is soaring, working hours are being cut and paychecks are shrinking.


Nor is there anything good to be said for pitting the budgets for police and fire services against health and welfare services. That's not the way to nurture the progressive political majority needed to really address the current crisis. Yet, in the absence of measures to bring in new sources of revenue to run our cities and states, well-meaning people are maneuvered into challenging each other for pieces of the shrinking pie.

All across the nation, schools are being shuttered, senior meal programs decimated, community health centers eliminated and legal aid for the poor hammered.
We are being told there is no other way and that we should stoically accept this austerity and count what blessings we have left. The problem is that if the sacrifices being forced upon our families and communities are really necessary, then they are not being doled out with anything approaching equity.
They're still living it up big time in some parts of town.

"The mood among financiers is suddenly more cheery,"
wrote John Plender in the Financial Times the other day. In London and New York "trading profits are up and bonuses are back" And, rather than being reduced to something more reasonable, executive compensation packages are on the way up. "There is also a growing suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic that bankers, a lethal breed whose activities have pretty much throttled the global economy while causing government deficits to balloon, are going back to business as usual - a frightening prospect for taxpayers everywhere," he wrote.

Meanwhile, the country's employment crisis continues to worsen. When wandering in the desert, beware shimmering water on the horizon," read the Financial Times' Lex Column, July 2. "If May's better than expected jobs report offered the dehydrated US labor market hope of succor, June's miserable effort was a mouthful of sand." The June jobs data from the Labor Department contained "few signs of life at all,' it said adding, "Slowing growth in weekly earnings, now at 2.7 per cent year on year, is another serving of angst. And falling hours plus sluggish wages mean a further drag on US consumption - already constrained by debt-laden household balance sheets and tight credit. The mirage, and with it hopes of a speedy recovery, has vanished."

"The entire growth in jobs over the last nine years has now been wiped out - the economy currently has fewer jobs than it had in May 2000," says Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz. "The labor force, however, has grown by 12.5 million workers since then.
"This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000-2007."

As economist Dean Baker notes in his Jobs Byte column, the percentage of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks increased by 2 percentage points to 29.0 percent in June and "Many of these workers will soon be exhausting even their extended unemployment benefits."

When drawing up the economic stimulus plan, the Obama Administration relied on a projection of an 8 percent jobless rate this year. It became clear a couple of months ago that figure would miss the mark. It now stands at 9.4 percent and the consensus is that it will reach 10 percent by Christmas. Pimco CEO and chief investment officer, Mohamed El-Erian, now suggests that it may go as high as 10.5-11 percent sometime next year. "Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb," Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times last week "That's not a recovery. That's mumbo jumbo."

"There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States," wrote Herbert.
"The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.

The "broad front" to which Herbert refers may relate to what I consider some of the worst mumbo jumbo floating around out there: the idea that education guarantees a good job or any job at all. One of the striking aspects of the job stats so far this year is the number of out-
of-work college graduates. It keeps on growing. The percentage of unemployed people with some college or an Associate degree was 4.4 percent last June, 7.7 this May and now stands at 8.0 percent. For those under 27 years old with a Bachelors degree or better, it's 5.9 percent. "Everyone is worse off in the current downturn, and young college grads are no exception,"
writes Kathryn Edwards of the Economic Policy Institute. adding, "Although still better off than their peers without a higher education, young college graduates face challenges unique to their age and situation - it is likely that they have considerable debt from financing school, have had no time to build up savings, and, if looking for their first job, are not eligible for unemployment benefits."

"The tough economy and tight labor market have tarnished the luster of a bachelor's degree for young college graduates seeking employment, wrote Tony Pugh for the McClatrchy newspapers. "New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation's 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree.
That's down from 54 percent for the same period last year."

"The problem is most acute in the 25-and-under age group among Asian female graduates and black and Hispanic male graduates," wrote Pugh. "The survey, of
60,000 households, found less than 30 percent of Asian female grads, 32 percent of Hispanic male grads and just over 35 percent of young black male grads working in jobs that require a bachelor's degree."

Of course, a young graduate working at a low-paying job means one less job opening for a kid with no degree.

The figures for unemployment among college graduates are, of course, relatively low percentages; the greatest burden of joblessness is falling on those without a high school diploma (15.5 percent) and high school graduates (9.8 percent) - especially young African Americans (37.9 percent - seasonally adjusted)
and Latinos (31 percent in May). The figure for 20-24 year old Latinos was 16.5% in May.

"Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me,' wrote Herbert, one of the very few mainstream commentators to consistently deal with this crisis in minority communities. "The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis."

In a clear and hard hitting piece July 2, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times Columnist, Paul Krugman, laid out the challenge the worsening jobs picture places before the Obama Administration and the nation. He wrote that "as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms" and "So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it's essential."

"Obama administration economists understand the stakes," wrote Krugman. "Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the "lessons of 1937" - the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

"What I don't know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far."

"So here's my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don't, you'll soon be facing your own personal 1937."

As he prepared to depart on a foreign trip last week, the President issued a Fourth of July Message to the country that contained the words: "as long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content." So true. As the Times put it in an editorial a few days earlier: "The jobs report for June should put a chill on hopes for an economic recovery anytime soon." And it makes a compelling case for more government stimulus, as unpopular as that idea may be in Washington. Americans all over the country are struggling."

Petty and punitive taxes falling on working people is not the answer. Nor is robbing Peter to pay Paul.
What's needed to get us out of this mess is a unified message to the people who run our cities, states and those in Washington charged with protecting the general welfare, that we need a new deal.

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.]

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Obama's Talk With Chavez: Something New?

The Possibility of
an Obama-Chavez
Understanding

By Tom Hayden

July 2, 2009 - The media is full of speculation about President Obama's deft "deflection" against President Hugo Chavez' maneuvering and finger-pointing in the Honduras crisis. But another narrative is possible, of an undisclosed new diplomatic collaboration replacing the constant tensions and CIA foreknowledge of the brief 2002 coup against the Venezuelan leader.

It is too early to define a new era, but something profoundly new began developing between Obama and Chavez at the hemispheric conference in April in Trinidad.


According to eyewitness sources, under the apparently blind eye of the global media, the two leaders had lengthy conversations. The media covered the friendly photo of the initial handshake between the two leaders, then made much ado about an apparently-impertinent Chavez handing Obama a book in Spanish by Eduardo Galleano.

What has not been reported is that Obama, leaving his advisers behind, held lengthy private conversations with Chavez where only an interpreter was present.

It is not known what occurred in the secret talks. But sources in Caracas say that Chavez has become fascinated with Obama, seeking to understand the new US president and the forces around him, partly with advice from Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Honduran crisis has been mounting for weeks. According to the New York Times', Chavez "had his playbook ready", planning to blame the CIA. But Obama, according to the Times' headlines, "deflected" the Venezuelan president by coming out strongly against the coup.

The real story is that a gradual rapprochement - not an alliance but a dialogue - is happening between the US and Venezuela, and it began in Trinidad, was pushed by Latin American leaders and welcomed by those like Obama, who prefer diplomacy over a return to US Cold War isolation.

It was no accident that Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, returned to Washington in recent days after his expulsion several months ago.

The rapprochement, if it holds, would seem to be welcome news. The fact that is has occurred so silently is evidence that peace has its enemies.

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Stopping 'The Long War' -- What It Demands of Us

The Long War
Needs a Long
Peace Movement

By Tom Hayden

The simultaneous conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond are all connected to the Pentagon strategy of "the Long War" projected to last fifty years in "the arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across Muslim lands where there are oil reserves and plans for Western-dominated pipelines. The term "Long War" was introduced by Gen. John Abizaid in the 1990s and is the perspective of counterinsurgency experts around the Pentagon and think tanks led by the Center for New American Security.

The Long War will require a long peace movement, and a different one.

Many veterans of the movement against the Iraq War, impacted by the multiple wars, the financial and budget crises, and confused about the Obama era, are pondering the question of what to think and do. The following are brief notes outlining a possible strategy:

Counterinsurgency goes back to Malaysia and Algeria. It has never "worked", except in Malaysia where conditions were unique.

Counterinsurgency is aimed at the home front, to keep American casualties low and, as Kagan writes, "off camera, so to speak."

In Iraq, it's hardly "victory" when the client government is bragging about the American withdrawal and the future is totally uncertain. The "surge" delivered as CNAS and Gen. Petraeus wished, by keeping the war out of the election [their words, not mine]. Now counterinsurgency can't help them. They are pledged to withdrawal without having won the war, without having secured Western oil contracts, and without having reliable Iraqi client allies.

In Afghanistan, counterinsurgency is at cross-purposes with the drone attacks which kill the civilians who are supposed to be protected [which is why David Kilcullen writes against the continued use of Predators]. 21,000 more American troops mean more visible American casualties. The US is at fundamental odds with Karzai, who represents the growing mainstream Afghan distrust of the US. American troops can never "protect" Afghanistan civilians from American troops! The contradictions between the US versus Europe, NATO versus the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will increase and cannot be bridged.

In Pakistan, the US has succeeded in forcing Pakistan troops into fighting the domestic Taliban, partly because of the Taliban's relative unpopularity. But in the process, 2-3 million refugees have been generated in the past few weeks alone, the greatest refugee crisis since Pakistan's bloody origins. There will be more upheaval soon in South Waziristan. How on earth is this "protecting the civilian population"? Again it is the contradiction at the heart of counterinsurgency.

I would keep a focus on the need for an exit strategy, because the Pentagon and CNAS don't believe in an exit strategy short of "victory", which is most likely unachievable. Even the Center for American Progress [CAP] proposes a 10-12 year occupation, speaking only of Afghanistan. Add up and project the casualties and budget costs, and you have a trillion dollar war with several thousand American casualties. You will antagonize more Muslims and drive them into anti-US nationalism and extremism. You will be running a gulag of barbaric detention camps in these countries, multiplying the Guantanamo and Bagram crises. You will add to the collapsing dream of funding for health care, education and stimulus spending here at home. Obama will be burdened with wars and occupations during his entire presidency. We will not be safer.

My advice:

--Read and study the Long War. It's not paranoia, it's a Pentagon strategy.

--Understand that the Long War is against Muslim countries and over oil and pipelines. It spreads terrorism.

--Understand the need to link with human rights, and anti-torture coalitions, especially the clergy.

--Understand the need to link with groups focused on domestic budget priorities, especially labor and people of color.

--Understand why Alternative Energy is a priority for the peace movement and a threat to the Long War's premises.

--Obtain and continually spread information on the real costs in American blood, taxes and civilian casualties.

--Work around the clock on the media, convincing them to report a rationale critique with special emphasis on resisting the growing secrecy of these special operation strategies.

--Spend the next six months preparing to expand the 132 House votes for an exit strategy into critical hearings and 230 votes by next spring as Congressional elections approach.

--Don't attack President personally. He is trapped between the Long War and his promise of an exit strategy, but attack the occupations and include the argument that the Long War might doom Obama's domestic priorities and even his presidency.

--Build a giant constituency base in Congressional districts. Employ field organizers by regions to run anti-war campaigns on a community-organizing model. Avoid Beltway faction fights by focusing on what the grass-roots needs.

The CNAS is the new "best and brightest" group, and we should remember what happened to them in Vietnam.

The Long War will fail because the US is overextended militarily and economically, and the world is more multi-polar than unipolar. The world does not share the US Long War agenda. This over-extension will cause worsening problems at home, become a threat to the open society, and lead to serious political challenges down the road.

The choice is always empire versus democracy.

Tom Hayden is the author of Ending the War in Iraq. His writings can be found at www.tomhayden.com

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Iran: Setting Dogma Aside for a Little Clarity

Insurgent Iran
and Leftist
Confusion

By Reese Erlich
CommonDreams.Org

June 29, 2009 - When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran. They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire.

That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice.

Some of these authors have even cited my book, The Iran Agenda, as a source to prove U.S. meddling. Whoa there, pardner. Now we're getting personal.

The large majority of American people, particularly leftists and progressives, are sympathetic to the demonstrators in Iran, oppose Iranian government repression and also oppose any U.S. military or political interference in that country. But a small and vocal number of progressives are questioning that view, including authors writing for Monthly Review online, Foreign Policy Journal, and prominent academics such as retired professor James Petras.

They mostly argue by analogy. They correctly cite numerous examples of CIA efforts to overthrow governments, sometimes by manipulating mass demonstrations. But past practice is no proof that it's happening in this particular case. Frankly, the multi-class character of the most recent demonstrations, which arose quickly and spontaneously, were beyond the control of the reformist leaders in Iran, let alone the CIA.

Let's assume for the moment that the U.S. was trying to secretly manipulate the demonstrations for its own purposes. Did it succeed? Or were the protests reflecting 30 years of cumulative anger at a reactionary system that oppresses workers, women, and ethnic minorities, indeed the vast majority of Iranians? Is President Mahmood Ahmadinejad a "nationalist-populist," as claimed by some, and therefore an ally against U.S. domination around the world? Or is he a repressive, authoritarian leader who actually hurts the struggle against U.S. hegemony?

Let's take a look. But first a quick note.

As far as I can tell none of these leftist critics have actually visited Iran, at least not to report on the recent uprisings. Of course, one can have an opinion about a country without first-hand experience there. But in the case of recent events in Iran, it helps to have met people. It helps a lot.

The left-wing Doubting Thomas arguments fall into three broad categories.

1. Assertion: President Mahmood Ahmadinejad won the election, or at a minimum, the opposition hasn't proved otherwise.

Michael Veiluva, Counsel at the Western States Legal Foundation (representing his own views) wrote on the Monthly Review website:

"[U.S. peace groups] are quick to denounce the elections as ‘massively fraudulent' and generally subscribe to the ‘mad mullah' stereotype of the current political system in Iran. There is a remarkable convergence between the tone of these statements and the American right who are hypocritically beating their chests over Iran's ‘stolen' election."

Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, James Petras wrote:

"[N]ot a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised."

Actually, Iranians themselves were very worried about election fraud prior to the vote count. When I covered the 2005 elections, Ahmadinejad barely edged out Mehdi Karoubi in the first round of elections. Karoubi raised substantive arguments that he was robbed of his place in the runoff due to vote fraud. But under Iran's clerical system, there's no meaningful appeal. So, as he put it, he took his case to God.

On the day of the 2009 election, election officials illegally barred many opposition observers from the polls. The opposition had planned to use text messaging to communicate local vote tallies to a central location. The government shut down SMS messaging! So the vote count was entirely dependent on a government tally by officials sympathetic to the incumbent.

I heard many anecdotal accounts of voting boxes arriving pre-stuffed and of more ballots being printed than are accounted for in the official registration numbers. It seems unlikely that the Iranian government will allow meaningful appeals or investigations into the various allegations about vote rigging.

A study by two professors at Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, took a close look at the official election results and found some major discrepancies. For Ahmadinejad to have sustained his massive victory in one third of Iran's provinces, he would have had to carry all his supporters, all new voters, all voters previously voting centrist and about 44% of previous reformist voters.

Keep in mind that Ahmadinejad's victory takes place in the context of a highly rigged system. The Guardian Council determines which candidates may run based on their Islamic qualifications. As a result, no woman has ever been allowed to campaign for president and sitting members of parliament were disqualified because they had somehow become un-Islamic.

The constitution of Iran created an authoritarian theocracy in which various elements of the ruling elite could fight out their differences, sometimes through elections and parliamentary debate, sometimes through violent repression. Iran is a classic example of how a country can have competitive elections without being democratic.

2. Assertion: The U.S. has a long history of meddling in Iran, so it must be behind the current unrest.

Jeremy R. Hammond writes in the progressive website Foreign Policy Journal:

"[G]iven the record of U.S. interference in the state affairs of Iran and clear policy of regime change, it certainly seems possible, even likely, that the U.S. had a significant role to play in helping to bring about the recent turmoil in an effort to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic.

Eric Margolis, a columnist for Quebecor Media Company in Canada and a contributor to The Huffington Post, wrote:

"While the majority of protests we see in Tehran are genuine and spontaneous, Western intelligence agencies and media are playing a key role in sustaining the uprising and providing communications, including the newest electronic method, via Twitter. These are covert techniques developed by the US during recent revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia that brought pro-US governments to power."

Both authors cite numerous cases of the U.S. using covert means to overthrow legitimate governments. The CIA engineered large demonstrations, along with assassinations and terrorist bombings, to cause confusion and overthrow the parliamentary government of Iran' Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. The U.S. used similar methods in an effort to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002.

(For more details, see my book, Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba.)

Hammond cites my book The Iran Agenda and my interview on Democracy Now to show that the Bush Administration was training and funding ethnic minorities in an effort to overthrow the Iranian government in 2007.

All the arguments are by analogy and implication. Neither the above two authors, nor anyone else of whom I am aware, offers one shred of evidence that the Obama Administration has engineered, or even significantly influenced, the current demonstrations.

Let's look at what actually happened on the ground. Tens of millions of Iranians went to bed on Friday, June 12, convinced that either Mousavi had won the election outright or that there would be runoff between him and Ahmadinejad. They woke up Saturday morning and were stunned. "It was a coup d'etat," several friends told me. The anger cut across class lines and went well beyond Mousavi's core base of students, intellectuals and the well-to-do.

Within two days hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating peacefully in the streets of Tehran and other major cities. Could the CIA have anticipated the vote count, and on two days notice, mobilized its nefarious networks? Does the CIA even have the kind of extensive networks that would be necessary to control or even influence such a movement? That simultaneously gives the CIA too much credit and underestimates the independence of the mass movement.

As for the charge that the CIA is providing advanced technology like Twitter, pleaaaaaase. In my commentary carried on Reuters, I point out that the vast majority of Iranians have no access to Twitter and that the demonstrations were mostly organized by cell phone and word of mouth.

Many Iranians do watch foreign TV channels via satellite. A sat dish costs only about $100 with no monthly fees, so they are affordable even to the working class. Iranians watched BBC, VOA and other foreign channels in Farsi, leading to government assertions of foreign instigation of the demonstrations. By that logic, Ayatollah Khomeini received support from Britain in the 1979 revolution because of BBC radio's critical coverage of the despotic Shah.

Frankly, based on my observations, no one was leading the demonstrations. During the course of the week after the elections, the mass movement evolved from one protesting vote fraud into one calling for much broader freedoms. You could see it in the changing composition of the marches. There were not only upper middle class kids in tight jeans and designer sun glasses. There were growing numbers of workers and women in very conservative chadors.

Iranian youth particularly resented President Ahmadinejad's support for religious militia attacks on unmarried young men and women walking together and against women not covering enough hair with their hijab. Workers resented the 24 percent annual inflation that robbed them of real wage increases. Independent trade unionists were fighting for decent wages and for the right to organize.

Some demonstrators wanted a more moderate Islamic government. Others advocated a separation of mosque and state, and a return to parliamentary democracy they had before the 1953 coup. But virtually everyone believes that Iran has the right to develop nuclear power, including enriching uranium. Iranians support the Palestinians in their fight against Israeli occupation, and they want to see the U.S. get out of Iraq.

So if they CIA was manipulating the demonstrators, it was doing a piss poor job.

Of course, the CIA would like to have influence in Iran. But that's a far cry from saying it does have influence. By proclaiming the omnipotence of U.S. power, the leftist critics ironically join hands with Ahmadinejad and the reactionary clerics who blame all unrest on the British and U.S.

3. Assertion: Ahmadinejad is a nationalist-populist who opposes U.S. imperialism. Efforts to overthrow him only help the U.S.

James Petras wrote: "Ahmadinejad's strong position on defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition...."

"Ahmadinejad's electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, [and] Evo Morales in Bolivia."

Venezuela's Foreign Ministry wrote on its website:

"The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela expresses its firm opposition to the vicious and unfounded campaign to discredit the institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed from outside, designed to roil the political climate of our brother country. From Venezuela, we denounce these acts of interference in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while demanding an immediate halt to the maneuvers to threaten and destabilize the Islamic Revolution."

From 1953-1979, the Shah of Iran brutally repressed his own people and aligned himself with the U.S. and Israel. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran brutally repressed its own people and broke its alliance with the U.S. and Israel. That apparently causes confusion for some on the left.

I have written numerous articles and books criticizing U.S. policy on Iran, including Bush administration efforts to overthrow the Islamic government. The U.S. raises a series of phony issues, or exaggerates problems, in an effort to impose its domination on Iran. (Examples include Iran's nuclear power program, support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and support for Shiite groups in Iraq.)

During his past four years in office, Ahmadinejad has ramped up Iran's anti-imperialist rhetoric and posed himself as a leader of the Islamic world. That accounts for his fiery rhetoric against Israel and his denial of the Holocaust. (Officially, Ahmadinejad "questions" the Holocaust and says "more study is necessary." That reminds me of the creationists who say there needs to be more study because evolution is only a theory.) As pointed out by the opposition candidates, Ahmadinejad's rhetoric about Israel and Jews has only alienated people around the world and made it more difficult for the Palestinians.

But in the real world, Ahmadinejad has done nothing to support the Palestinians other than sending some funds to Hamas. Despite rhetoric from the U.S. and Israel, Iran has little impact on a struggle that must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis themselves.

So comparing Ahmadinejad with Chavez or Evo Morales is absurd. I have reported from both Venezuela and Bolivia numerous times. Those countries have genuine mass movements that elected and kept those leaders in power. They have implemented significant reforms that benefitted workers and farmers. Ahmadinejad has introduced 24% annual inflation and high unemployment.

As for the position of Venezuela and President Hugo Chavez, they are simply wrong. On a diplomatic level, Venezuela and Iran share some things in common. Both are under attack from the U.S., including past efforts at "regime change."

Venezuela and other governments around the world will have to deal with Ahmadinejad as the de facto president, so questioning the election could cause diplomatic problems.

But that's no excuse. Chavez has got it exactly backward. The popular movement in the streets will make Iran stronger as it rejects outside interference from the U.S. or anyone else.
This is no academic debate or simply fodder for bored bloggers. Real lives are at stake. A repressive government has killed at least 17 Iranians and injured hundreds. The mass movement may not be strong enough to topple the system today but is sowing the seeds for future struggles.

The leftist critics must answer the question: Whose side are you on?

[Freelance foreign correspondent Reese Erlich covered the recent elections in Iran and their aftermath. He is the author of The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis. (Polipoint Press). In the 1960s, he was one of the Oakland Seven, put on trial for antiwar and antifraft protests.]

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Drones: US Terror by Remote Control

Photo: Village Burying Victims of Drones

Pakistan Report:
Now We See You,
Now We Don't

By Kathy Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness

June 25, 2009

In early June, 2009, I was in the Shah Mansoor displaced persons camp in Pakistan, listening to one resident detail the carnage which had spurred his and his family’s flight there a mere 15 days earlier. Their city, Mingora, had come under massive aerial bombardment. He recalled harried efforts to bury corpses found on the roadside even as he and his neighbors tried to organize their families to flee the area.

“They were killing us in that way, there,” my friend said. Then, gesturing to the rows of tents stretching as far as the eye could see, he added, “Now, in this way, here.”

The people in the tent encampment suffered very harsh conditions. They were sleeping on the ground without mats, they lacked water for bathing, the tents were unbearably hot, and they had no idea whether their homes and shops in Mingora were still standing. But, the suffering they faced had only just begun.


UN humanitarian envoy Abdul Aziz Arrukban warned on June 22nd that the millions of Pakistanis displaced during the military’s offensive against the Swat Valley would “die slowly” unless the international community started taking notice of the “unprecedented” scope of the crisis. (Jason Ditz, Anti-War.com)

UN agencies and NGOs such as Islamic Relief and Relief International report that many of the persons now living in tent encampments, or squatting in abandoned buildings, or crowded into schools designated as refugee centers, may soon start dying from preventable disease.

Health teams note increasingly frequent cases of diarrhea, scabies and malaria, all deadly in these circumstances, especially for young children. With so many people living so close to each other, these diseases are spreading fast.

Relief groups are concerned that as the monsoon season approaches, in July, these problems will get considerably worse. Monsoons bring regional floods and cause escalating rates of malaria and waterborne diseases. The impact, this year, is expected to be much more severe because so many people are living in crowded and unsanitary conditions.

Pakistan’s already rundown health care system, officials report, is now near collapse. Hospitals in northern Pakistan have been overwhelmed, with exhausted doctors, depleted medicine supplies and avalanches of red tape blocking money and medicine for the crisis.

Writing for the Associated Press on June 7th, Kathy Gannon described the men’s ward in the Mardan District Hospital: “30 steel beds lie crammed together, with two-inch mattresses and no pillows. Pools of urine spread on the floor, and fresh blood stains the ripped bedding...The one bathroom for 30 patients stinks of urine and faeces. The toilets are overflowing, the door to one cement cubicle is falling off and a two-inch river of urine covers the cement floor. In one corner, garbage is piled high.”

The annual budget for health care in Pakistan, this year, is less than $150 million, while Pakistan’s defense budget last year came to $3.45 billion, and is expected to reach $3.65 billion next year.

People in Shah Mansoor worry that the international community as well as their own government won’t notice the health care crisis they face. But villagers yet to flee their homes in Waziristan agonize under constant military scrutiny from lethally-armed U.S. surveillance drones.

A villager who survived a drone attack in North Waziristan explained that even the children, at play, were acutely conscious of drones flying overhead. After a drone attack, survivors trying to bring injured victims to a hospital were dumbfounded when a driver stopped, learned of their plight and then sped away. Then it dawned on them that the driver was afraid the drone would still be prowling overhead and that he might be targeted for associating with victims of the attack.

The U.S. drone aircraft can see Pakistan - their pilots in air-conditioned Nevada trailers see the terrain even though they are physically thousands of miles away.

Writing about U.S. Air Force efforts to “meet the voracious need for unmanned aircraft surveillance in combat zones,” Grace Jean notes, in the June, 2009 issue of National Defense Magazine, that the Air Force’s 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, is expanding base operations. “We have 34 video feeds over the battlefield right now,” says Col. John Montgomery, the wing’s vice commander. When operating a drone, Montgomery says, “You are part of the battlefield.” Commenting on the hundreds of combat sorties he flew over Sadr City, in Baghdad, Montgomery said he even knew where people hung out the laundry and when they took out the trash. “I knew the traffic flow for the hours that I could see, and when that changed, I knew it. Once you know the patterns of life, when things are different or odd, that means something’s up, and that gives the battlefield commander, the joint commander on the ground, a heads up.”

On Tuesday, June 23rd, U.S. drones launched an attack on a compound in South Waziristan. Locals rushed to the scene to rescue survivors. The U.S. drone then launched more missiles at them, leaving a total of 13 dead. The next day, local people were involved in a funeral procession when the U.S. struck again. Reuters reported that 70 of the mourners were killed.

Drone operators and their commanders at Creech Air Force Base will become increasingly well informed about the movements of Pakistani people, but meanwhile the U.S. people will have lost sight of war’s human costs in Pakistan.

Now, we're hearing of imminent army operations in South Waziristan that have already forced about 45,000 people to flee the region, joining about two million men, women, and children displaced by fighting in the Swat Valley and other areas. People from Waziristan who flee from their villages, trying to save their lives, trying not to be seen by the omnipresent drones, will likely join the unseen, the displaced people whose lives and hopes escape international notice as they die slowly.

President Obama has taken us into an expansion of Bush’s war on terror, presumably guided by the rationale that his administration is responsible to root out Al Qaeda terrorists. But the methods used by U.S. and Pakistani military forces, expelling millions of people from their homes, failing to provide food and shelter for those who are displaced, and using overwhelmingly superior weapon technology to attack innocent civilians, -- these methods will continue creating terrorist resisters, not defeating them.

If we want to counter Al-Qaeda, if we want to be safe from further terrorist attacks, we'd do well to remember that even when we don’t recognize the humanity of people bearing the brunt of our wars, these very people have eyes to see and ears to hear. They must be asking themselves, who are the terrorists?

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org). This report is posted at her request.

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No Collaboration with Torture, War Escalation

MoveOn: Break
the Silence on
Torture and War

By Tom Hayden
The Nation

June 10, 2009 - Progressives who have been silent on the escalating wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan have a new opportunity to change their stance now that the nearly $100 billion Congressional war supplemental (HR 2346) authorizes suppression of hundreds of torture photographs held by the Pentagon.

The amendment, by Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, is designed to bar the release of photos revealing torture at military prisons during the Bush administration, by exempting them from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.

Democrats are in disarray over the issue. According to Congressional reports, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at first approved the Lieberman-Graham amendment, then backtracked after hearing complaints from Representatives Barney Frank, Louise Slaughter and others from the Democrats' liberal wing. In the meantime, Hillary Clinton was dutifully making phone calls to pick off votes from the fifty-one Democrats' who opposed the House version in May.

Groups like MoveOn.org, with millions of members and campaign dollars, become crucial during close Congressional votes, either by their presence or by their absence.

When I recently posted an article questioning MoveOn's silence towards the escalating wars, the response of MoveOn's leadership was to question its accuracy and demand corrections from anyone publishing the piece.

I never meant to suggest that MoveOn's executive director explicitly or verbally promised President Obama at a White House meeting that MoveOn would keep silent about the war escalations. What I did write is that MoveOn told Obama they were supporting his domestic agenda, which, in Beltway culture, was a clear message that this former antiwar group would not be opposing the president's military escalation, nor his Predator strikes, nor the civilian casualties, not even his backtracking on torture promises. At that point, MoveOn had not even polled its membership on Afghanistan, Pakistan or torture.

Move.On's continuing silence only speaks for itself. While their internal discussion of Afghanistan and Pakistan unfolds, they at least could express strong opposition to the administration's non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, as well as support for Rep. Jim McGovern's amendment calling for an exit strategy by December.

But now with the amendment pending to suppress the torture photos, the moral pressure to break the silence is increasing. The administration added to its policies of secrecy yesterday by urging a federal court to suppress documents detailing the CIA's videotaped interrogations at secret prisons.

The Obama argument for suppressing the torture photos is specious. The administration claims that their release will inflame greater insurgent hatred against American troops. But the Abu Ghraib torture photos already have served that inflammatory purpose and the current cover-up will undermine confidence that America's secret policies are changing.

This is an administration that once pledged no more supplementals--the spending bills that avoid the scrutiny of hearings. Having reneged on that procedural promise, they now are loading the war appropriation measure with the FOIA exemption amendment, not to mention funds for swine flu and the International Monetary Fund. These administration approaches undermine the deliberative process and weaken the role of the legislative branch.

The real effect of Obama's censorship decision is to dampen any resurgence of antiwar sentiment and public support for an investigation of past crimes. Silence in the face of censorship means collaborating in the cover-up of torture. The political effect is to leave antiwar Democrats under greater pressure to yield than to stand their ground.

Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).

Author's Website: http://www.tomhayden.com

Author's Bio: After forty years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden still is a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation. Currently he is writing and advocating for US Congressional hearings on exiting Iraq. A more comprehensive bio, going back to the sixties, when he co-founded SDS and protested in the deep south

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Cheney's Gambit: A Stronger Far Right Pole

Obama vs. Cheney,
Center vs. Right

By Immanuel Wallerstein
Agence Global, 6/1/2009

On May 21, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama gave a major speech outlining his administration's views on national security. Minutes after he completed his talk, former Vice-President Richard Cheney gave a major speech that essentially denounced Obama's positions on national security. Both speeches were widely covered by the U.S. press, which termed this pair of speeches as a fundamental conflict of values.

In his speech, Obama set out what he presented as a "nuanced" (or "balanced") centrist position on all the most controversial issues, such as the closing of the Guantánamo prison, the use of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation procedures" on prisoners, and the degree of transparency about present and past decisions concerning the treatment of prisoners. Cheney charged basically that Obama's centrist positions endangered national security. He did this despite the fact, as many commentators noted and Obama himself noted a few days later, Obama was taking positions close to those that President Bush had embraced in his last two years in office.

So, what was going on? Both Obama and Cheney are highly intelligent people, and highly sophisticated political actors. They both knew exactly what they were doing. Politics, as the saying goes, is a tough game. Politicians normally do what they do with two considerations in mind: the search for continued support by the voters in future elections; and the achievement of specific policy objectives. I do not doubt that both Obama and Cheney had this twin pair of concerns in mind. Each obviously felt that his tactics were potentially winning ones. So, in order to understand what was going on, we have to try to discern how each of them analyzed the political situation.

Let us start with Obama, since he obviously has the most immediate power and authority. Obama won the election with the support of almost all voters on the left and a large majority of voters in the center. He won it because of his stand on two basic issues. In 2007, the prime concern of U.S. voters was the war in Iraq. Obama presented himself as a staunch opponent of that war. This was the issue that gained for him support on the left. In 2008, the prime concern of voters shifted to the serious economic downturn. Obama presented himself as a steady hand on the tiller who could restore the U.S. (and the world) economy to a new upturn. This was the main issue that attracted him support in the center.

Since his election, Obama has approached both the issues of foreign policy/national security and the issues of the economy in the same fashion. He has appointed key figures drawn from the center who have recommended centrist policies. He has exuded both prudence and involvement in all the major decisions. In the arena of social issues (the environment, health, education, labor), he has not invested (perhaps not yet invested) the necessary political energy to obtain the legislation that would make possible the major social change he promised his supporters on the left.

Obama seems to think this overall stance will win him (and the Democratic party) the congressional elections in 2010 and then his own re-election in 2012. He is counting on what seems to be Republican disarray and the continuing alienation from the Republican party of centrist voters (principally those who are called "moderate" Republicans). From this perspective, the unremitting far right positions of Cheney are thought to be a great plus for Obama.

As for achieving policy goals, Obama seems to believe that he can tilt U.S. policy in all arenas back from far right to center or even left of center incrementally. He seems to be saying to his voters and the world: Trust me and come back in eight years and look. You will see that things have changed (the mantra of his electoral campaign). My political tactics will obtain the maximum change that is politically possible in the United States at this time. He seems also to be saying that, in order to achieve this incremental change, he can never be brusque in anything he does because, if he is, he will alienate centrist voters and even more important centrist Democratic legislators, without whose support he cannot obtain his incremental goals.

Cheney reasons quite differently. The first thing to notice about Cheney is that, from 2001-2009, he was seldom in the forefront of public debate. The major public figures of the Bush era were Bush himself and Condoleezza Rice. (It is true that Cheney's ally, Donald Rumsfeld, was also a major voice, but Bush fired him in 2007 over Cheney's vociferous objections.)

Cheney preferred to work quietly, behind the scenes, in pushing very aggressively his policy objectives. Cheney's views largely prevailed within the Bush administration from 2001 to 2006. When the Republicans suffered a big defeat in the legislative elections of 2006, Bush shifted position and allowed Condoleezza Rice, aided by Robert Gates, to set the pace - much to the dismay and disgust of Cheney.

Since the election of 2008, both Bush and Rice have been extremely quiet, deliberately. So, to a remarkable degree, has been John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate. Cheney, on the other hand, has become a constant public speaker. He has assumed the role of the leading public voice of the Republican party. More than that, he has called upon the faint of heart to leave Republican ranks. He has applauded the decision of Sen. Arlen Specter to shift his affiliation from Republican to Democrat. He has publicly encouraged Colin Powell and even McCain to do the same. Perhaps George W. Bush will be on this list next.

Most commentators seem to think that, by doing this, Cheney is ensuring the permanent decline of the Republican party. Many Republican politicians, especially the "moderates," are saying so as well. Doesn't Cheney realize this? To think this is to miss the essence of his political strategy.

Cheney believes the odds are that Republicans are going to fare badly in elections for the next four to six years. He thinks the most urgent task is to stop Obama incrementalism from working. The way to do this, he thinks, is to turn U.S. public debate into a center versus (unremitting) right debate. Cheney reasons that, if he does this by shouting loudly and unreasonably, he can force policy outcomes to become a compromise between the already centrist position of Obama and his own. He thinks that this way if we come back in 2016 and look at the outcome, things won't have changed that much at all. He counts on the likelihood that, with a Republican victory in 2016, the country can then resume the ultra-right wing paths Cheney has long advocated and pushed during his years as Vice-President.

Who is right? Obama's incrementalist strategy depends on his continuing popularity. And that in turn depends on the wars and the economy. If the United States policy in the Middle East begins to seem to the American people like a losing quagmire, the left will abandon him. And if the U.S. and the world fall further into depression, and especially if unemployment figures go up considerably, centrist voters will begin to abandon him.

Both negative outcomes are possible, very possible. If either of them happens, and especially if both do, all of Obama's social change policies will go down the drain. And Cheney will have won, hands down. Of course, it is also possible that on the Middle East front and the economic front, results will be more ambiguous - neither great success nor obvious catastrophe. In that case, we may get the social change incrementally, but at best in a watered-down fashion. This is because, by situating himself in the center instead of on the left or at least on the center-left, Obama's tactics have given away a good part of the demands at the outset.

Politics is a tough business. It is also something else. His close political advisor, David Axelrod, recently acknowledged some of these possibilities of negative outcome. He told the New York Times that Obama is "willing to take his chances with the American people." And then he added, "I think he also knows that sometimes you prevail in your arguments and sometimes you don't." When it was suggested to Axelrod that the patience of Americans may not last, he admitted, "That may be. Politics is a fickle business."



[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term. Wallerstein is an endorser of 'Progressives for Obama']

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Cheney Firing Up the Revenge-Seeking Right

The Devil in
Dick Cheney

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
BlackCommentator.com

May 28, 2009 - It is fairly unusual for the immediate past President or Vice President of the United States to attack the standing Administration. Some pundits describe it as a violation of protocol. That is not of particular relevance to this commentary.

Dick Cheney's attack against the Administration needs to be understood at both the political / psychological level as well as at the level of new right-wing politics in the era of Obama. At the psychological level, think about a barking dog. In a contest with other dogs, the one that considers itself the top dog must insist on getting the last bark before any silence is tolerated. Cheney wants the last bark. He simply cannot help himself. This has been true throughout the eight years of the Bush / Cheney administration. When compromise or even silence would have been the proper and more diplomatic course, one could count on Cheney to open his mouth. He could also always be counted upon to twist the facts in such a calm, yet decisive way, that one could not help but wonder about the truth.

In Cheney's recent attack dog appearance in defense of torture it was fascinating to watch him become the defender of the Central Intelligence Agency. One does not have to be a great historian to remember that Cheney was a constant opponent and degrader of the CIA, but when it was convenient, Cheney was able to flip the script and become the defender of his former adversaries. It was also interesting to watch Cheney suggest, despite ALL evidence to the contrary, that President Obama does not wish to talk about terrorists.

Let's add to this Cheney's slight of hand when it came to attacking former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
When asked about Powell's political affiliations, Cheney - very calmly - suggested that he did not even know that Powell still considered himself a Republican.
Unless Cheney has morphed from an attack dog into Rip Van Winkle he would have to have known that Powell remains a Republican, but clearly the facts do not matter here. The objective is the sound-bite, the insult and the impression left in the minds of the listener.

Yet the devil's horns do not emerge simply because of Cheney as an unprincipled debater. The significance of Cheney's emergence as the 2009 rabid attack dog revolves around right-wing strategy. From almost the moment of Obama's election, but certainly following his Inauguration, the right-wing has been engaged in an interesting effort at a combination of destabilization along with obfuscation. An interesting example was the way that the right-wing attempted to portray - about 30 minutes after Obama was inaugurated - the economic crisis as now being an Obama crisis. They have systematically worked to twist the actual facts and play to fears, particularly the fears of the white electorate.

Cheney's appearance is aimed at strengthening the stamina of what could be called the "revanchist Right,"
that is the revenge-seeking Right; the Right that is absolutely furious not only that they lost the 2008 elections, but that they lost to a Black man. The revanchist Right is that segment of the political Right (which actually overlaps different right-wing political
tendencies) that supported the unilateralism of the Bush / Cheney administration against the notion of any sort of multi-lateral imperial world domination (more akin to the politics of Clinton and Obama).

Cheney is extremely good at ignoring facts. Actually, Cheney goes beyond ignoring facts; he disputes them or dismisses them entirely. Cheney will never admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He will never cease to imply an alleged Iraqi connection with 11 September 2001. Whether he believes any of these myths is secondary to the political purposes that these myths serve. In each case Cheney has moved to strengthen the authoritarianism of the State; in fact, to shift the democratic capitalist state into a more neo-liberal authoritarian capitalist state. Cheney knows that the key to such a shift is playing upon the fears of the populace generally, and the white, conservative populace in particular.

The matter of torture, then, becomes an excellent tactic in the efforts towards greater authoritarianism.
Cheney can argue that the methods used by the USA against alleged terrorists stopped further assaults.
The problem is that this cannot ever be proven any more than one can prove the existence of vampires by suggesting that one's consumption of garlic has kept vampires away. The point is that any number of factors can account for the fact that, at least until today, there has not been a further attack on the scale of 11 September 2001.

Cheney's aim is to strengthen the irrationalism on the part of the political Right. He ignores why governments have established treaties over the centuries regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, for example. The treatment of prisoners of war and the issue of torture have little to do with high-minded morals. Rather it revolves around the question of how one's own will be treated as prisoners by any enemy should they be captured as well as whether barbaric treatment can be used to isolate an opponent. The classic example of this, of course, was Hitler's failure to use chemical weapons during World War II, which was certainly not about moralism, but concerned the potential for various forms of blow-back - literally and figuratively.

Cheney's `horns' should not be dismissed as representing the anger of a dysfunctional and evil personality. The demonism represented by Cheney is not mainly personal. Rather it represents the efforts of a segment of the Right to save itself from annihilation and to regain the upper hand. Appealing to fear and prejudice has often been a useful instrument to accomplish this. After all, the extreme political Right never has to be constrained by the truth.

[BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.]

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Obama, Gitmo and the Slippery Slope

Slippery Slope:
Compromising
Civil Liberties

By Don Rose
Chicago Observer

Politics is always the art of compromise. Barack Obama is a politician. Ergo, Barack Obama is a compromiser.

The term politicians prefer is "pragmatist"--more macho, less namby-pamby.

The question at hand, however, is not what term we use, but what principles are compromised--and what level of compromise is acceptable. Therein lies my concern.

What I am seeing in the president I supported is a history--not quite a pattern--of compromise on civil liberties. This I find not only uncomfortable, but potentially dangerous. I dislike using that cliché about the slippery slope, but it applies.


The immediate issue is preventive detention--or, as he put it last week--"prolonged" detention without trial of certain terror suspects imprisoned in Guantanamo. Essentially, Obama would lock up and throw away the key for about 100 prisoners deemed lethally dangerous-some trained in terrorist tactics.

They would not be brought to trial either because there is insufficient evidence against them or because the evidence is tainted-likely obtained by torture.

Obama, a constitutional law teacher, understands preventive detention is unconstitutional--unlike his predecessor, who used the constitution for toilet paper. Obama therefore says that one man should not make the detention decision for a prisoner, but suggests a process through which a panel of judges or other officials would be involved.

Back in the early '70s congress considered preventive detention as part of a draconian anticrime bill proposed for the District of Columbia, but thought better of it. National security in today's world, however, might make it more palatable.

Let's be clear: Obama is not, as some critics charge, simply reverting to the Cheney-Bush policies he previously condemned. He is introducing a host of constitutional protections for the Gitmo prisoners, which would apply either in criminal trials or the military tribunals he now favors.

Virtually all proceedings against these prisoners would be more fair than anything that transpired in the past six years, but no matter how he dresses it up rhetorically we have a basic constitutional principle at stake. A principle shared by almost all our allies--with the exception of Israel and India.

It's an exceptionally knotty problem because quarantining dangerous actors is a legitimate concern. No one wants these characters roaming free to rejoin terrorist cells. What we must do is find a way to bring them to trial--a way to refine the search for untainted evidence and develop new evidence to make a legitimate case against them, if indeed it is warranted.

We have the legal talent in this country to find a way to protect us from jihadists while respecting the constitution. In the long run, when we're seen violating our own principles it helps our enemies inflame their argument against us and create more terrorists.

Beyond that, I worry about Obama's willingness to elide civil liberties. Back when he was a state senator he dropped his opposition to a censorship measure to be imposed in public libraries in the name of protecting children. Why? Apparently because the bill was backed by State Sen. James Meeks, a Southside colleague whose support he needed on other matters.

In the U.S. Senate he wound up voting for the revised Patriot Act, drawing condemnation from the American Civil Liberties Union--which gives him a "lifetime" senatorial rating of 80 percent.

His most notorious flip during the presidential campaign was voting for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which included immunity for telecom companies that went along with Cheney-Bush in eavesdropping on Americans at home.

Candidate Obama pledged he would vote against the bill if it included telecom immunity, but reversed himself and voted for it. Some make the case that the phone companies were themselves victims of presidential pressure. But apart from letting telecoms off the hook, the bill--now law--expanded and legalized warrantless eavesdropping in violation of the Fourth Amendment. It opened the door to more governmental spying on us all.

Obama recently reversed himself on pledges of transparency by supporting "state secrecy" measures he previously assailed. Later he flipped on releasing torture photos.

Perhaps after review, Attorney General Eric Holder will conclude that those secrecy measures are the bunk. Perhaps the courts will permit publication of the photos and halt preventive detention. Perhaps, after reconsideration, the president will again reverse himself on some questionable measures. He is capable of rethinking issues and changing course in healthy directions as well as flip-flopping negatively.

But that slope still looks mighty slippery to me.
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Note to Obama: Time To Do the Right Thing

Obama Meets Netanhayu:
What Needs To Be Said

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Black Commentator Executive Editor

May 21, 2009

Dear President Obama:

I know that you did not ask my opinion, but in light of your meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu I wanted to humbly offer a few thoughts and suggestions.

No US Presidential administration since President Eisenhower has taken a really tough stand towards Israel and its violations of international law and precedent. You may remember that after the Israelis joined with the British and French in 1956 in invading Egypt, the US took a firm position and insisted that all three aggressors withdraw from Egypt. Interestingly enough, all three did.

Nevertheless, since that time, almost irrespective of Israeli violations of human rights, international law, and common decency, US administration after administration has found any way to excuse the Israelis and put the burden on the Palestinians.

Mr. President, the Palestinians have lived under an occupation for more than 40 years. International law says that a people who are under occupation have a right to resist the occupation. International law does not recognize occupations that violate United Nations resolutions. Perhaps, after some study, you could explain how is it that discussions of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories almost always focus on what the Palestinians are doing rather than questioning why the Israelis are still there, and why they keep building settlements.

Prime Minister Netanyahu clearly recognizes that you are not George Bush, but in traveling to Washington, DC his objective was to secure your silence, if not support, for minimal action on the part of the Israeli government to address the needs and demands of the Palestinian people. What many of us want to know, Mr. President, is whether you will be more like Eisenhower, or whether the Palestinians will be allowed to be blamed yet again for their own occupation.

I don’t want to push this too far, Mr. President, but when Prime Minister Netanyahu asked you to join forces with him to threaten Iran, why didn’t you ask him when was the last time that Iran invaded and occupied someone else’s territory? When Prime Minister Netanyahu asked you about the alleged nuclear threat from Iran, perhaps you could have fleshed out your answer to the question regarding nuclear threats in the Middle East that you were asked by Helen Thomas in one of your first press conferences after the November election, when you failed to mention--perhaps it was an oversight--that the only nuclear power in the Middle East/Western Asia is Israel?

Needless to say, my hope is that you would have chosen to be more like President Eisenhower with regard to Israel, and informed Prime Minister Netanyahu that if Israel does not pull out of the Occupied Territories within a given amount of time, the US will cut off aid. But then you might be concerned that some of your domestic supporters might accuse you of being a bad ally to Israel. So, how about, just to get things started, you suggest:

* That Netanyahu needs to get down to real negotiations with the leaders of the Palestinian people--including but not limited to Hamas--towards a final and just resolution of the conflict.

* That Netanyahu needs to deep-six his ideas about building the Palestinian economy while ignoring Palestinian national self-determination.

* That Netanyahu needs to address the peace proposal that the Arab League floated for years which would bring about peace and security for Israel and the Palestinians.

* Oh, and of course, that immediately Israel must end the blockade of Gaza, repair the damage they caused through their aggression, and cease and desist from any further selective assassinations of Palestinian leaders.

Mr. President, there is so much more to cover, but I think that the bottom line is that the people of the world are looking at you and wondering whether you are truly interested in shifting US foreign policy or whether you are more concerned about US image. There are those around you who believe that the problems that the USA faces overseas are largely the result of George Bush and bad public relations, rather than recognizing that the USA has a history of being on the wrong side, particularly when it comes to issues facing people in the global South.

There are many of us who supported your candidacy who believe that the true test of the democratic and just aspirations of your administration will be judged by whether the US remains complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people. We are counting on you, sir, to the do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Bill Fletcher, Jr.

[Bill Fletcher Jr. is a founder of Progressives for Obama.]

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Afghanistan, Pakistan and 'The Long War'

The New Counterinsurgency
as a Return to the Indian Wars

By Tom Hayden
The Nation

A "Long War" may be underway in South and Central Asia and the Middle East that could last fifty years. Only a fifty-year commitment to peace can prevent it.

The concept of the "Long War" is attributed to former CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid, speaking in 2004. Leading counterinsurgency theorist John Nagl, an Iraq combat veteran and now the head of the Center for a New American Security, writes that "there is a growing realization that the most likely conflicts of the next fifty years will be irregular warfare in an 'Arc of Instability' that encompasses much of the greater Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South Asia." The Pentagon's official Quadrennial Defense Review (2005) commits the United States to a greater emphasis on fighting terrorism and insurgencies in this "arc of instability."

The Center for American Progress repeats the formulation in arguing for a troop escalation and ten-year commitment in Afghanistan, saying that the "infrastructure of jihad" must be destroyed in "the center of an 'arc of instability' through South and Central Asia and the greater Middle East."

The implications of this doctrine are staggering. The very notion of a fifty-year war assumes the consent of the American people, who have yet to hear of the plan, for the next six national elections. The weight of a fifty-year burden will surprise and dismay many in the antiwar movement. Most Americans living today will die before the fifty-year war ends, if it does. Youngsters born and raised today will reach middle age. Unborn generations will bear the tax burden or fight and die in this "irregular warfare."

There is a chance, of course, that the Long War can be prevented. It may be unsustainable, a product of imperial hubris. Public opinion may tire of the quagmires and costs--but only if there is a commitment to a fifty-year peace movement.

In this perspective, Iraq is only an immediate front, with Afghanistan and Pakistan the expanding fronts, in a single larger war from the Middle East to South Asia. Instead of thinking of Iraq like Vietnam, a war that was definitively ended, it is better to think of Iraq as a setback, or better a stalemate, on a larger battlefield where victory or defeat are painfully hard to define over a timespan of five decades.

I propose to begin by examining the military doctrines that give rise to notions of the Long War. The peace movement often adopts the biblical commitment to "study war no more," but in this case it may prove useful to become students of military strategies and tactics. (Those wishing to become students of Long War theory should consult the bibliography at the end of this essay.)

1. The New Counterinsurgency Is a Return to the Indian Wars.

In a September 24, 2007 article in The Nation, "The New Counterinsurgency," I wrote that the Petraeus plan for Iraq was as old as our nation's long Indian wars. That thesis was confirmed in the writings of the neo-conservative Robert Kaplan, in his September 21, 2004, article in the Wall Street Journal, "Indian Country."

Kaplan is obsessed with the anarchy loosed on the world by post-colonial, tribal-based societies, and emphasizes the need for small wars carried on "off camera," so to speak. Kaplan approvingly quotes one US officer as opining that "you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian aid projects." The comparison Kaplan makes between today's Long War and our previous Indian wars is that the "enemies" were highly decentralized tribal nations who had to be defeated in one campaign after another. He realizes that conventional war against the Plains and western tribes was an unsustainable strategy and that the native people were overwhelmed by an inexhaustible supply of white settlers and superior technology like the railroad. Fighting the new Indian wars today, he advises, means "the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation." In this sense, Iraq is a strategic setback for Kaplan, "a mess that no one wants to repeat."

2. Strategic Military Framework: The Fifty-Year Long War.

Like the Indian wars, winning the Long War will require taking advantage of the deep divisions that exist in tribal societies, along lines of religion, ethnicity, race and geography. The efforts of many Indian leaders to form effective confederations against US expansion never succeeded. On the other hand, US army strategies to pay tribes to deploy "scouts" who would inform on and fight other tribes were successful. The main strategy of the Long War is to attract one tribal or ethnic group to fight their rivals on behalf of the foreign occupier. Nagl accurately predicted that "winning the Iraqi people's willingness to turn in their terrorist neighbors will mark the tipping point in defeating the insurgency."

Counterinsurgency is portrayed to the public as a more civilized, even intellectual, form of war directed by Ivy League professionals, with a proper emphasis on human rights, political persuasion and protection of the innocents. Every civilian insulted by a door knocked down, it is said, is lost to the cause, thus creating a military motive to be respectful to local populations. The new Marine-Army counterinsurgency manual is filled with such suggestions.

But this "hearts and minds" approach downplays what Vice President Dick Cheney called the use of "the dark side." Before a local population will turn in its neighbors, to use Nagl's image, the occupying army must be seen as defeating those "neighbors," killing and wounding the alleged insurgents in significant numbers; weakening or destroying the infrastructure in their villages, and creating an exodus of refugees (in Vietnam, this was known as "forced urbanization," a term of the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington). In the meantime, the population considered "friendly" is tightly guarded in what used to be called strategic hamlets and, in Iraq, became known as "gated communities": behind concertina wire, blast walls and watch towers, and with everyone subject to eye scanners. The lines between enemy, friendly and neutral in this context are fluid, guaranteeing that many people will be targeted inaccurately as "irreconcilable" sympathizers with the insurgents. Profiling and rounding up people who "look the type" will lead to detention camps filled individuals lacking any usable evidence against them. As one Taliban operative told the New York Times, perhaps over-confidently:

I know of the Petraeus experiment out there. But we know our Afghans. They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many people working with the Afghans and the Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us, sell us weapons. (May 5, 2009)

The truth is that conventional warfare by US troops against Muslim nations is politically impossible, for two reasons that suggest an inherent weakness. First, the local people become inflamed against the foreigners, creating better conditions for the insurgency. Second, the American people are skeptical of ground wars involving huge casualties, costs, and possibly the military draft. Counterinsurgency becomes the fallback military option of the unwelcome occupier. Counterinsurgency is low-visibility of necessity, depending on stealth, psychological and information warfare, both abroad and at home.

3. What Happened on the Dark Side in Iraq

In Iraq, the dark side first involved the 2003-2004 American-sponsored round-ups and torture, only leaked to the American public and media by a US guard in Abu Ghraib. In addition, as many as 50,000 young Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, have been held in extreme conditions in detention centers across the country (some of them now being released under the pact negotiated between Baghdad and Washington). Then there were the unreported, top-secret extrajudicial killings described chillingly in Bob Woodward's The War Within, which were so effective that they reportedly gave "orgasms" to Gen. Petraeus's top adviser, Derek Harvey. Woodward writes that these killings, in which the Pentagon was the judge, jury and executioner, based heavily on local informants, were "very possibly the biggest factor in reducing" Iraq's violence in 2007. It is likely that death squads were carrying out the revived version of a "global Phoenix program," as advocated by Gen. Petraeus's leading counterinsurgency adviser, David Kilcullen, in the Small Wars Journal (November 30, 2004). Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, confirms that Phoenix became a model after 9/11, despite the fact that military historians called it massive, state-sanctioned murder, and clear evidence that 97 percent of its Vietcong victims were of "negligible importance."

It is far more widely known that Gen. Petraeus reduced the Sunni insurgency by hiring some 100,000 Sunnis, mostly former insurgents, to protect their communities and battle Al Qaeda in Iraq. This was in accord with the strategy proposed by another top Petraeus adviser, Steven Biddle, in 2006:

Use the prospect of a US-trained and US-supported Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to the negotiating table [and] in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten to either withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis. (Foreign Affairs, March-April 2006)

Now those so-called "Sons of Iraq," first known as the "Kit Carson Scouts," are increasingly frustrated by the refusal of the US-supported al-Maliki government to integrate them into the state structure and pay them living wages. It is unclear what the future holds for Iraq as US troops begin to withdraw. Elements of the military, perhaps including Gen. Raymond Odierno, are known to be unhappy with the pace of withdrawal, and already are negotiating with the Iraqi government to delay the six-month deadline for redeploying American troops to barracks outside Iraqi cities. It is apparent that neither conventional warfare (2003-2006) nor counterinsurgency (2006-2009) have solved the fundamental problem of pacifying an insurgent nationalism which was mobilized by the 2003 invasion itself.

In Iraq, the US strategy was to speed up the Iraqi clock while slowing down the American one, Petraeus was fond of saying. That meant accelerating a political compromise between Shi'a, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, along the lines of the 2007 Baker-Hamilton Report, while cooling American voter impatience with promises that peace was just around the corner of the 2008 elections. It was around this time that the Center for a New American Security was formed among Democratic national security advocates deeply worried that a voter mandate could end the war "prematurely."

The key operative in CNAS was Michelle Flournoy, who went on to vet Pentagon appointments for the Obama transition team and now serves as an assistant secretary of defense. Contrary to the views of many in the antiwar movement and Democratic Party, Petraeus's 2007-08 troop surge was successful in its political mission of sharply reducing both US and Iraqi casualties. However, the US military surge included the massive wave of extrajudicial terror chronicled by Woodward, as well as paying tens of thousands of Sunni insurgents not to shoot at American troops. Neither approach could be counted on to stabilize Iraq for long.

At the end of 2008, the Bush administration was forced to accept what the al-Maliki government described as "the withdrawal pact," according to which the United States would gradually withdraw all troops by late 2011. Since the US forces have not "won" the war militarily, there is little evidence that Iraq will become the stable pro-Western model some seek for their Long War. Even if another insurgency or civil war is averted, Iraq will be aligned with Iran's regional interests for some time to come. President Obama will be under serious pressure from US military officials in Iraq and their allies among the neo-conservatives in Washington, to delay his promised withdrawal or be accused of "losing" Iraq.

The Iraqi security forces now consist of 600,000 soldiers, including 340,000 members of a largely-Shi'a force often described as sectarian or dysfunctional. At present, the US continues to face the dilemma described by James Fallows in 2005:

The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq--as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style--so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents--to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal."

4. The Long War Moves from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan

The same counterinsurgency strategies are being transferred to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with US troop levels destined to reach 70,000 this year, bringing the overall Western force level closer and closer to the declining total in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the expanded American forces will concentrate on destroying the poppy fields and villages dominated by the Taliban in southern Kandahar and Helmund provinces, a resource-denial strategy from the Indian wars. Many Americans are expected to be killed or wounded in this effort to secure and inoculate the rural population against the Taliban. Many Taliban are likely to be killed along with along with local civilians, while the core cadre may retreat to redeploy elsewhere.

The Bagram prison is being massively expanded as a detention facility where President Obama's Guantánamo orders do not apply. Bagram now holds an estimated 650 prisoners who, unlike those in Guantánamo, have "almost no rights," including access to lawyers. "Human rights campaigners and journalists are strictly forbidden there," according to a January 28, 2009, report by Der Spiegel International.

According to a RAND report using World Bank data, Afghanistan has perhaps the lowest-ranking justice system in the world. "In comparison to other countries in the region--such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Ukbekistan--Afghanistan's justice system was one of the least effective." Bagram is only one of many detention facilities that will be filled across the country; the Taliban "liberated" over 1,000 inmates, including 400 of their cadre, from a Kandahar prison just last year.

Counterinsurgency theory, based on the British experience in Malaysia, requires a period of ten to twelve years to impose enough suffering and exhaustion to force the population into accepting the peace terms of the dominant power. This is precisely the timetable laid out by Kilcullen before Sen. John Kerry's Senate Armed Services Committee on February 5:

[It will take] ten to fifteen years, including at least two years of significant combat up front.... thirty thousand extra troops in Afghanistan will cost around 2 billion dollars per month beyond the roughly 20 billion we already spend; additional governance and development efforts will cost even more.... [but] If we fail to stabilize Afghanistan this year, there will be no future.

Kilcullen and others support the current plan to expand the total Afghanistan security forces from 80,000 to a total of 400,000 overall, costing $20 billion over six to seven years.

In Pakistan, where torture and extrajudicial abuse also are prevalent, the US spent $12 billion during the past decade on a [Musharraf] military dictatorship, compared with one-tenth that amount on development schemes. These policies only deepened the Muslim nation's anti-Americanism, alienated the middle-class opposition, and left the poor in festering poverty. In addition to these self-imposed problems, the Pentagon is engaged in a frantic uphill effort to change Pakistan's strategic military doctrine from preparation for another conventional (or even nuclear) war against India to a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban embedded amid its own domestic population, especially in the extremely impoverished federally administered tribal areas that border Afghanistan.

The likelihood of the United States' convincing Pakistan to view the domestic threat as greater than that from India is doubtful. Pakistan has fought three wars with India, and views the US as supporting the expansion of India's interests in Afghanistan, where the Pakistan military has supported the Taliban as a proxy against India. The Northern Alliance forces of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks were strongly supported by India in 2001 against Pakistan's Taliban's allies, and the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance was a "catastrophe" for Pakistan, according to Juan Cole. Since 2001, India has sent hundreds of millons in assistance to Afghanistan, including funds for Afghan political candidates in 2004, assistance to sitting legislators, Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Heart and Kandahar, and road construction designed, according to the Indian government, to help their countries' armed forces "meet their strategic needs."

Polls show that a vast majority of Pakistanis view the United States and India as far greater threats than the Taliban, despite the Taliban's unpopularity with much of Pakistan's public. While it is unlikely that the Taliban could seize power in Pakistan, it may be impossible for anyone to militarily prevent Taliban control of the tribal areas and a growing base among the Pashtun tribes (28 million in Afghanistan, 12 million in Pakistan).

The remaining options begin to make the United States look like Gulliver tied down among the Lilliputians.

The US will demand that Pakistan's armed forces fight the Taliban, which the American military has driven into Pakistan. Pakistan will demand billions in US aid without giving guarantees that they will shift their security deployments in accord with Washington's will. The US will make clear that it will go to extreme lengths to prevent a scenario in which Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falls into the Taliban's hands. No one on the US side acknowledges that this spiraling disaster was triggered by US policies over the past decade.

5. The Quagmire of Crises

To summarize, the "arc of crisis" is turning into a "quagmire of crises." The current US military strategy in Pakistan is contradictory mix of an air war by Predators combined with US special forces trying to organize a tribal war in search of Al Qaeda. US policies already have driven Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, partly with covert support from Pakistan's army. As a result, both Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters have taken up havens in the remote wilderness of Pakistan's tribal areas. So far the US has budgeted $450 million for the tribal-based "Frontier Corps" in the frontier region. This strategy has not only failed to prevent the Taliban from taking virtual control of the tribal region, but the effort has killed hundreds of civilians, provoked deeper public opposition, and driven the Taliban insurgency further east into Pakistan.

The US faces a military crisis which Secretary Hillary Clinton recently called "a mortal threat" to America's security, the possibility of Taliban or Al Qaeda's access to Pakistan's nuclear stockpile in the eventuality that the situation deteriorates further. This will trigger an intense political campaign to "do something" about the very threat that US policies have created.

The US and NATO can barely invade Afghanistan, which has 32 million people spread over 250,000 square miles, larger than Iraq. Pakistan, with 172 million people living over 310, 000 square miles, simply cannot be invaded. But in a crisis, it is conceivable that American advisers, even ground troops, might be sent to occupy the 10,000 square miles on Pakistan's side of the border. That might result in an anti-American revolution in the streets across Pakistan.

So what has counterinsurgency achieved thus far? At most, a stalemate of sorts in Iraq after six years of combat on top of a brutal decade of sanctions. Nothing much in Afghanistan, where conventional warfare pushed Al Qaeda over the border into Pakistan. Nothing much in Pakistan, where the Pakistan army is resistant to shift its primary focus away from India.

Kilcullen's war plan for Afghanistan covers ten to twelve years, starting in 2009. The war on the Pakistan front is only beginning, meaning that the Obama administration is managing three wars within the Long War, not including secret battlegrounds like the Philippines or what may happen in Iran or Israel-Palestine, nor the controversial expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, Iran, China and other hotspots along the Arc of Instability. Some in the intelligence community would even like to expand the "terrorist" threat to include the immigrant and drug routes through Central and Latin America as well.

Even if President Obama wishes to carry out a strategic retreat from "the sorrows of empire," he will be faced with significant pressure from elements of the military-industrial complex, and the lack of an informed public. The path of least resistance, it may appear to Obama in the short run, is incremental escalation (sending 20,000 additional Americans) while stepping up the search for a patchwork diplomatic fix. But incremental escalation can be like another drink for an alcoholic, and even that strategy would require a stepping back from the doctrine of the Long War. Hawks at the American Enterprise Institute and their allies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman are pushing for victory instead of face-saving diplomacy.

The deeper sources of this crisis certainly involve the American and Western quest for oil, the historic inequalities between the global North and South, the West and the Muslim world. But it is important to emphasis the strategic military dimension, particularly the guiding strategic vision of a fifty-year war. The Long War now has a momentum of its own. The impact of the Long War on other American priorities, like healthcare and civil liberties, is likely to be devastating. Since most Americans, especially those supportive of peace and justice campaigns, are well aware of domestic issues and general issues of war and peace, it is important to begin concentrating on the great deficit in popular understanding, that the Long War is already here, building from the previous the cold war dynamic and the Bush era's nomenclature about the "global war on terrorism."

To be continued... thoughts on The Long Peace Movement.

BIBILIOGRAPHY AND READINGS.

The older classics. For those with serious time, I would recommend Sun-Tzu and Carl Von Clausewitz for an introduction to opposing doctrines, still studied widely.

For the classic Western take on the Arab world, T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The recent classics include Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung. On the Western side, I suggest the writings of Sir Robert Thompson on Defeating Communist Insurgency; Frank Kitson, Low Insurgency Operations; David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare; Robert Taber, The War of the Flea; and the lengthy but brilliant study of Algeria by Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (the cover of Horne's reissued book announces that it's "on the reading list of President Bush and the US military," and a blurb by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks that it should be read "immediately").

For immediate works of importance: John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (the phrase is from Lawrence); and David Petraeus, Nagl et al., The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (in collaboration with Harvard's Carr Center). A brilliant counterpoint to these works is William R. Polk's Violent Politics (see also his Sorrows of Empire).

Important books on Al Qaeda and Islam include Robert Dreyfuss's The Devil's Game; Jason Burke's Al Qaeda, Michael Scheuer's Marching to Hell; Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; and Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban.

Other critical books include Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire and Sowing Crisis; Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World; Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq; Mamood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Tariq Ali, The Duel; and Rashid's Descent into Chaos.

To follow the counterinsurgency discussions among US security strategists, go to the smallwarsjournal.com blog or the Center for American Progress.

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Afghan-Pak War: 'To Do' Lists for Stopping It

Photo: Islamist Party in Pakistan Opposing Use of 'Drones'

Ten More Things You Can Do
to Oppose War in Afghanistan

Editor's Note: Peace activist Tom Hayden adds his ideas to Z.P. Heller's April 8 piece, and Walter Mosley's 'Ten Things You Can Do to Oppose the War in Afghanistan,' which is included here after Tom's piece.

By Tom Hayden
The Nation

April 30, 2009 -This early period of Obama's presidency is an opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan. It is a chance to become clearer than "out now," while still using the same force in opposing the war. In addition to education on the specifics of the administration's plan and the after-effects in Afghanistan, take these concrete steps to build infrastructure from the bottom up.

1. The immediate demands should be opposition to more troops, predator attacks, human rights abuses and escalating budget costs.

2. Support a regional diplomatic solution (exit strategy), including withdrawal of US/NATO troops and bases. Read Tariq Ali's book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.

3. Demand of Congress and President the same accountability that was demanded of Bush and never won: verifiable casualty figures, transparent budgeting, oversight of contractors, compliance with human rights standards, including women's rights--clear metrics to measure progress towards a defined exit strategy.

4.With these focuses in mind and using United for Peace and Justice as an organizational base:
• assist in doubling their membership
• build a local e-mail list of at least 300 names
• build a coalition (at least a letterhead or leadership alliance) of clergy, academic, human rights, environmentalists, African-Americans and Latinos, labor and other progressive organizations.

5. Criticize Obama's war from within the Obama structure and MoveOn.org. (Since neither of these structures have a focus on the war, contact them or start on a discussion on Afghanistan under another heading).

6. Start or join a group against military recruiters.

7. Build a visible network in your Congressional district. Buy and wear antiwar buttons, T-shirts and banners.

8. Build a local media list and meet with the editorial board.

9. Start Friday night streetcorner pickets. These are the hundreds of groups in every region that hold up placards on Friday nights. This is the heart of the antiwar movement.

10. Support other organizations, such as American Friends Service Committee, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink etc.


[Tom Hayden is a founder of 'Progressives for Obama' and the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).]

Ten Things You Can Do to
Oppose the War in Afghanistan

By Walter Mosley
The Nation

The war in Afghanistan is a quagmire bordering on a catastrophe. With a current price tag of $2 billion a month, this drawn-out conflict took the lives of 155 American soldiers and 2,118 Afghan civilians last year--the bloodiest year of the war to date. Western airstrikes alone killed 522 civilians, fueling hostility toward the United States and causing more Afghans to join and support the Taliban insurgency that has spread into Pakistan.

President Obama has escalated our military presence by committing an additional 17,000 US troops and 4,000 trainers to work with Afghan security forces.

Where is the public outcry? The Nation and Z.P. Heller, editorial director of Brave New Films, have put together a list of things you can do to oppose the war.

1 Watch parts one and two of Brave New Films' documentary Rethink Afghanistan, which explores many fundamental questions.

2 Read up on the war. Anand Gopal's coverage for the Christian Science Monitor has been insightful; see also Ann Jones's Kabul in Winter and articles like Gilles Dorronsoro's "Focus and Exit: An Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War". The Nation's own Robert Dreyfuss has more "For Your Reading Pleasure."

3 Check out the coalition of bloggers and activists seeking nonmilitary alternatives to escalation at Get Afghanistan Right.

4 Demand Congressional oversight hearings. It is Congress's duty to challenge policy-makers and inform the public about everything from the overall mission to the efficiency of military agencies. Sign a petition calling on Senator John Kerry and Representative Howard Berman to hold hearings immediately.

5 What question would you ask at a Congressional hearing on Afghanistan? Take a video of yourself or a friend asking your question and e-mail it to Brave New Foundation via YouTube. For help on recording and uploading your video to YouTube, watch the tutorial video and follow the Quick Capture instructions and then go to Rethink Afghanistan to submit the video.

6 Contact your senators and representative directly to demand Congressional oversight hearings. If you can't visit their offices, a phone call or e-mail to voice your opinion can be just as effective.

7 Write to your local paper's editorial board and your favorite political blogs to raise concerns about the war. Don't let the mainstream media remain silent as they did before the Iraq War!

8 Support anti-escalation Afghan groups working for women's rights and social justice. You can aid organizations like the Afghan Women's Mission, MADRE and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) by buying them equipment from their Amazon "wish list" that helps them document and spread the news about their efforts. Stay updated with the Afghan Women's Mission newswire.

9 Join the Campus Antiwar Network and hold teach-ins, debates, talks, demonstrations and walkouts on college campuses across the country.

10 Get involved in the peace movement with groups like Win Without War and Peace Action West, which are devoted to finding nonviolent alternatives to military escalation in Afghanistan. Follow Peace Action West on Twitter.

CONCEIVED by WALTER MOSLEY
with research by Rae Gomes

[ZP Heller is the Editorial Director for Brave New Films. He has written for The Huffington Post, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.]

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Obama Battles Hedge Funds in Auto Crisis

Why Obama Is
Pissed at the
Hedge Funds

By Ezra Klein
American Prospect

One of the interesting threads in the Chrysler bankruptcy was Obama's evident fury at the hedge funds and investment banks that refused the deals the government offered. The reason for their reluctance was simple enough: Bondholders don't want to lose money. But the strategy behind their intransigence proved poor: They didn't think the government would send Chrysler into bankruptcy. And that gave them leverage. Out-of-court debt restructurings generally require consensus. But they were wrong. Not only did the administration let Chrysler fall to the bankruptcy courts, but Obama called the investors out by name:



While many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you some did not. In particular, a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout. They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none. Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting.

I don't stand with them. I stand with Chrysler's employees and their families and communities. I stand with Chrysler's management, its dealers, and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars. I don't stand with those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.


You're seeing, some say, the hidden hand of Ron Bloom here. Bloom is an inside player often called Labor's investment banker. A Harvard Business School grad who spent a decade in private finance, he eventually joined the labor movement as a special assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers. Now he's one of the key players on Obama's automobile task force. And you can see his perspective informing some of Obama's decisions. ron_bloom_0217.jpg

New Yorker writer Peter Boyer recalls a talk Bloom gave three years ago to a group of insolvency lawyers and accountants. In it, he described a hypothetical restructuring, and argued that you needed to think of both the workers and the bondholders as having made the equivalent of "loans" to the company. The difference was that the bondholder had settled on clear terms. They could end the relationship at any time by selling the bond on the open market. Labor's "loan," however, could not be cashed out. If the company failed to honor future obligations to workers, the money was, for labor, simply lost. Bloom explained:

They worked a lifetime and deferred a significant amount of current compensation in exchange for the company’s promise that, upon their retirement, they would be paid a fixed stream of cash and provided with help with their medical bills. Then, without their knowledge or consent, the company chose to not set aside enough money to honor that promise. In effect, the company borrowed money from them without even discussing the terms of the loan....So what we have is a bunch of old men and widows being forced to lend the company, for whom they worked a lifetime, some portion of the value of their pension and their health care. This loan was made on terms on which they have no input and they have no ability to liquidate their position.


Labor, in other words, has no ability to liquidate. The hedge funds do. And in the case of Chrysler, the workers have seen their position brutally and quickly reduced, with very little input from them. The hedge fund, conversely, refused to liquidate their own position, and demanded ever more favorable terms from the government. And Obama, it seems, quickly grew to judge their position repellent.

The other piece of the puzzle is that Chrysler was something of a trial run. The really consequential negotiations are still to come. They'll happen when the administration sits down with GM. One of the apparent miscalculations made by Chrysler's bondholders was that the government desperately wanted to avoid letting Chrysler go into bankruptcy. But by showing its capability to be ruthless in the Chrysler negotiations, the administration might have just improved its bargaining position in the GM negotiations, as it is now harder for various stakeholders to predict exactly how risk averse the government will, or won't, be.


**********************
Dean Baker:


The Hedge Funds' Chrysler Gamble

The NYT discussed President Obama's feud with several hedge funds who refused to agree to the same write-down terms as other major bond holders. While the article points out that the hedge funds had purchased the debt for around 30 cents on the dollar, it would have also been useful to point out why the debt was selling for 30 cents on the dollar.

Other investors assessed both Chrysler's economic situation and the politics around the bailout and concluded that they were unlikely to get more than 30 cents on the dollar. The hedge funds that refused to accept the deal offered by the Obama administration were speculating that they could pressure the Obama administration into giving them a better deal. That is why they were prepared to pay more for this debt than other investors.

--Dean Baker

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Why Bush & Cheney Needed Torture

Bush's Torture
Used to Try to
Link Saddam to 9/11

By Marjorie Cohn

Portside.org

April 24, 2009

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn't believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded
183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury's 2005 memos asserted that "enhanced techniques" on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush's illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

President Obama released the four memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. They describe unimaginably brutal techniques and provide "legal" justification for clearly illegal acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the face of monumental pressure from the CIA to keep them secret, Obama demonstrated great courage in deciding to make the grotesque memos public. At the same time, however, in an attempt to pacify the intelligence establishment, Obama said, "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

In startlingly clinical and dispassionate terms, the authors of the newly-released torture memos describe and then rationalize why the devastating techniques the CIA sought to employ on human beings do not violate the Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. sec. 2340).

The memos justify 10 techniques, including banging heads into walls 30 times in a row, prolonged nudity, repeated slapping, dietary manipulation, and dousing with cold water as low as 41 degrees. They allow shackling in a standing position for 180 hours, sleep deprivation for 11 days, confinement of people in small dark boxes with insects for hours, and waterboarding to create the perception they are drowning. Moreover, the memos permit many of these techniques to be used in combination for a 30-day period. They find that none of these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Waterboarding, admittedly the most serious of the methods, is designed, according to Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of "suffocation and incipient panic, i.e. the perception of drowning." But although Bybee finds that "the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death," he accepts the CIA's claim that it does "not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard." One of Bradbury's memos requires that a physician be on duty during waterboarding to perform a tracheotomy in case the victim doesn't recover after being returned to an upright position.

As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye points out, the CIA and the Justice Department "ignored a wealth of other published information" that indicates dissociative symptoms, changes greater than those in patients undergoing heart surgery, and drops in testosterone to castration levels after acute stress associated with techniques that the memos sanction.

The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. "Severe mental pain or suffering" means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

Bybee asserts that "if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent." He makes the novel claim that the presence of personnel with medical training who can stop the interrogation if medically necessary "indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain."

Now a federal judge with lifetime appointment, Bybee concludes that waterboarding does not constitute torture under the Torture Statute. However, he writes, "we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion."

Bybee's memo explains why the 10 techniques could be used on Abu Zubaydah, who was considered to be a top Al Qaeda operative. "Zubaydah does not have any pre- existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from [the CIA's] proposed interrogation methods," the CIA told Bybee. But Zubaydah was a low-ranking Al Qaeda operative, according to leading FBI counter-terrorism expert Dan Coleman, who advised a top FBI official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
This was reported by Ron Suskind in his book, The One Percent Doctrine.

The CIA's request to confine Zubaydah in a cramped box with an insect was granted by Bybee, who told the CIA it could place a harmless insect in the box and tell Zubaydah that it will sting him but it won't kill him.
Even though the CIA knew that Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects, Bybee found there would be no threat of severe physical pain or suffering if it followed this procedure.

Obama's intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the President's constitutional duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

U.S. law prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and requires that those who subject people to such treatment be prosecuted. The Convention against Torture compels us to refer all torture cases for prosecution or extradite the suspect to a country that will undertake a criminal investigation.

Obama has made a political calculation to seek amnesty for the CIA torturers. However, good faith reliance on superior orders was rejected as a defense at Nuremberg and in Lt. Calley's Vietnam-era trial for the My Lai Massacre. The Torture Convention provides unequivocally, "An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification for torture."

There is evidence that the CIA was using the illegal techniques as early as April 2002, three to four months before the August memo was written. That would eliminate "good faith" reliance on Justice Department advice as a "defense" to prosecution.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17,
2002 "subject to a determination of legality by the OLC." She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Obama told AP's Jennifer Loven in the Oval Office:
"With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that." If Holder continues to carry out Obama's political agenda by resisting investigations and prosecution, Congress can, and should, authorize the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to do what the law requires.

The President must fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed. Obama said that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." He is wrong.
There is more to gain from upholding the rule of law.
It will make future leaders think twice before they authorize the cruel, illegal treatment of other human beings.

[Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of the new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com ]

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Obama: Just Say 'No' to 'Banksta' Jerks

Obama and

the Big Dogs

By William Greider
The Nation

April 22, 2009 - The big dogs of banking and finance are playing a rough game of bump-and-run with our president, trying to knock him off balance and demonstrate their dominance. The best names in Wall Street--Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase--pumped out happy talk about quarterly earnings, then announced that they intend to give back the government's money (more than $50 billion, if counted honestly). The crisis, they announce, is over for them. They want to be free of official meddling in their private affairs. The arrogance is breathtaking, even for Wall Street bankers.

Forget the financial numbers. What we are witnessing is a high-stakes melodrama of glandular politics. This rival power center, though gravely weakened, is contesting for control with the president. Think of dogs circling one another to establish who will be leader of the pack. For three decades, the Wall Street guys in good suits have ruled the economy, demanding deference from the political system and from corporate managements, too. Those who failed to follow them were punished, either through stock prices or election financing. Despite their catastrophic failure, the surviving bankers and financiers are trying to hold on to their thrones.


For the last couple of weeks, they have poked the kid in the chest and mocked his economic advisers with condescending gestures. Jamie Dimon of the Morgan bank handed Treasury Secretary Geithner a fake check for $25 billion. They threw complicating wrenches into the government's financial rescue plan. Their essential message, crudely colloquial, was intended for Barack Obama : "You don't have the balls to take charge of us."

The question is: Are they right? Obama seems cowed by their bluster. He certainly looks reluctant to take them on in a public way or refute their version of reality. This president wants to govern through public-spirited cooperation. The financial titans play hardball in return. I say "seems" because we do not yet know about Obama and how he will resolve this mess. The administration has been stalling action on the troubled banks, as if it believes in its own wishful forecasts about an early recovery for the economy. The bankers trumped him by announcing, hey, things are already better for us. So back off.

The bankers think they have the president cornered. His rescue plan cannot possibly succeed without much more money--hundreds of billions more--that Congress will be extremely reluctant to provide (Obama hasn't yet had the nerve to ask for it). The bankers' offer to return their welfare checks is a cute gesture, but a bluff. They know Obama's government is committed to save them, whatever it costs. As usual, the big dogs want to have it both ways--take the public's money but promise nothing in return.

Roughly speaking, that has been Obama's posture, too. He acts as though the old order must be restored with public money, but without forceful government direction. He can call their bluff if he has the courage--shut down a couple of big banks, take control of the system--and the public would cheer. During the campaign, Obama demonstrated he is a great teacher--his political vision changed the country. But we do not yet know if he is a confident political leader willing to use his power against formidable adversaries in order to get his way. Every potential rival is now taking his measure. Weakness would doom him.

The financial crisis poses the first great moral dilemma of the Obama presidency. Sometime in the next few months, he will be compelled to choose between his technocratic inclinations--rescuing certain financial institutions deemed "too big to fail"--and the obvious moral wrongness of his policy of rewarding the very players who caused our national disaster. The broad public does not doubt that this is morally wrong. I saw a Zogby opinion poll the other day that said only 6 percent of the public supports the financial bailouts. Obama is on the wrong side of that bipartisan consensus.

The moral dilemma in the financial crisis is oddly parallel to Obama's reluctant approach on the torture issue. The president bravely made public the sickening documents from the Bush administration that reveal how CIA and Justice Department officials rationalized their illegalities and authorized crimes against humanity. Yet the president said it would be wrong to prosecute (or even investigate) any of the CIA agents or military officers who committed these crimes. Likewise, we are told it would be wrong to punish the financial malefactors or look too closely into how they engineered the gross fraud and false valuations that destroyed trillions of dollars in American wealth. Let's not dwell on the past, the president says, let's look forward.

But everything Obama does now--or fails to do--becomes an inescapable precedent for the future, defining the true meaning of law and moral principle. The president's rationale on government-led torture sounds dangerously close to the line of defense invoked by Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. We were only following orders. CIA barbarians are invited to hide behind that excuse.

So in a sense are the bankers from Wall Street. They were merely doing what the financial markets wanted and what the government allowed. Rescuing these players now, while declining to force fundamental structural changes on the banking system, would essentially ratify the bankers' arrogant beliefs. They are too important to fail. The government will never let it happen. Despite their destructive behavior, they will be allowed to remain in power and free to do it all again.

I do not doubt the president's good intentions, but if he is not vigilant, the "Obama precedent" could prove to be an ugly legacy. His name might someday be linked to wilful evasion of misdeeds and the degradation of law and moral principle. When great crimes are committed in the future by government or by powerful private interests, people in authority might decide to let them go by, citing the national interest and recalling how Barack Obama dealt with similar events.

About William Greider

National affairs correspondent William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not, Secrets of the Temple, Who Will Tell The People, The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster) and--due out in February from Rodale--Come Home, America.

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Need to Push Obama? Use His Tools On Him

New Film Tells
Unreported Story
of the Tools
Obama Used to Win

By Danny Schechter

The election of Barack Obama may be long over but the campaign for change is still underway. For the first time in American history, a president is using the techniques he deployed in running for office in pushing for deeper change. Those who want him to go even further might want to master the approach he used.

It is no surprise that this significant political development is barely being covered in a media that loves to punditize, poll public opinion, and debate policy options in a top-down way. (Some like Fox are even trying to become community organizers) Yet by "covering" politics in this way, our mass media is missing the most innovative bottom-up grassrooots effort in recent memory.

I know about this because as a journalist and filmmaker, I set out to document just how Obama won the election. That story, told in the film Barack Obama, People's President (slated for DVD release this month by Choicesvideo.net) documents the online and on the ground techniques that were used to win the highest office in the land.

The President is now using those same techniques, built around an impressive thirteen million-name email list to keep his organizers and supporters involved in backing his legislative agenda. This is the biggest mass lobbying effort of all time.

While his principal campaign advisor David Axelrod joined the White House staff at a high level, his campaign manager David Plouffe set about converting a campaign apparatus into a legislative army. As MoveOn.Org advisor David Fenton explains in our film, "It's an institutionalized mass level automated technological community organizing that has never existed before and it is very, very powerful force."

They have transformed the campaign website, BarackObama.com into Organizing for America. It encourages visitors to call Congress to support the President's budget. And like the campaign, it sends out emails, text messages and uses social networking technologies. It organizes volunteers to canvass door like they did in the campaign. The first time out, they garnered nearly a quarter million signatures.

Andrew Rasiej of the personal Democracy Forum elaborates:

"He knows who is giving him money, who's voted for him. He can now reach out to these people and ask them to help him to pass his legislative agenda. Those same people can call their congressmen and say we'll support you for reelection if you vote for Obama's legislation. We will give you money if you support Obama's legislation. It's a very powerful group that is actually the most powerful grassroots organization ever built in American history."

The film People's President shows how all of this-including the campaign's use of Meet-up technologies including how FaceBook. My Space and twittering were used as organizing tools by the campaign.

Rasiej cites the ongoing potential:

"It's a citizens lobby! And not only can Obama as president go over the heads of congress to speak to the American public, he can go now between their legs and go underneath Congress to the American public and the American public can do the same back and that's created a new power structure in the American politics, where the citizens can actually participate and not rely on the old (abstract) system of lobbyists, special interests and only those who have money."

There is also the possibility, as political theorist Benjamin Barber told us, the young people who backed Obama can use these same techniques and web platforms to challenge him to stay on track:

"There are websites of young people who are deeply involved in the campaign who talk to one another, and now it would be very interesting because now that Obama's President, they will find that websites and some horizontal campaigns of young people involved with him, now looking at him critically. And using the web to challenge him, to live up to what these young people believed he promised them and so on."

This is significant. The progressive critics of Obama, disappointed by his appointments and some of his cautious policies, have to go beyond railing in print or crying in their beer. They have to reach out to the grass roots army that assured his election. This means being willing to dialogue with liberals and younger people who don't label their politics. Reminding them of the role they played in a historic election may be one way to do that---to appeal to the instincts that led them to engage in the campaign for "change." There's no need to deify Obama---but there is an imperative to reenergize his base,

It is hard to remember that two years earlier, Obama was barely known, registering on the radar screen for just 10% of voters. He was also hardly a brand name as a first term Senator who spent more time in state politics in Illinois than on the national stage. Moreover he was young, and a man of color---not qualities that usually prevail in the presidential arena which tends to draw far older, far whiter, and far more centrist candidates. The thought that he would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the primaries was, quite frankly, unthinkable to most of the elite.

And yet he prevailed. As he used a phrase appropriated from labor organizer and Latino legend Caesar Chavez. Obama turned the farm workers Spanish language slogan "Si Se Puede" into "Yes We Can." Rather than focus on specific political issues, he built a campaign on the promise of "Hope." Rather than just rely on traditional fundraising-although by the end, he was plush with it-he reached out over the Internet for smaller donations from millions of donors.

Few in the major media gave him a chance but he was not discouraged because he had created his own grass roots media operation using sophisticated organizing and social networking techniques to build a bottom up movement, not the usual top-down apparatus. While his campaign ran the show, he encouraged independent initiatives including citizen-generated media, music videos, personalized websites, twittering and texting etc.

This is the new direction our politics has taken. It is a story that may be somewhat threatening to old media -and older activists-who prefer a one to many approach to communication as opposed to forging a more interactive empowering platform. There is no question that young people---especially those mobilized by Obama prefer online media and that choice is making it harder and harder for traditional outlets to sustain their influence and, in some cases, even their organizations. Old media may be on the way out.

This is why our film is, my mind, important, not just as a record of how Obama won and what happened in 2008, but in what will happen, can happen---and is happening in the future. This is why I believe its critical for Americans to see it-as well as others in the world as well ---to recognize how Obama represents more than just another politician but a whole new approach to politics. That old adage is worth remembering: "Its not the ship that makes the wave, it's the motion on the ocean."

Obama, for all his shortcomings which are becoming more obvious by the day has pioneered the way change must be won ---not by people on the top, but by all of us. It remains for "us" to hold him accountable. We live in a culture of amnesia-it is important to learn the lessons of the recent past.

Emmy-Award Winning producer Danny Schechter blogs for Mediachannel.org. He's made 30 documentaries mostly on issues of change. His film Barack Obama, People's President, produced by South Africa's Anant Singh, is available on DVD from ChoicesVideo.net. Comments to Dissector @Mediachannel.org

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Grapes of Wrath, a Classic for Today?

The Grapes of Wrath, published exactly 70 years ago, can be seen as a prophetic novel - rooted in the tragedies of the Great Depression, but speaking directly to the harsh realities of 2009, writes Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott.

Steinbeck's epic novel, which traces the harrowing exodus of Tom Joad and his family from blighted Oklahoma (where they are evicted from their farm), across the rugged American south-west via Highway 66, and on to what they mistakenly hope will be a more promising future in California, is considered by many readers to be the quintessential Depression-era story, and an ironic reversal of the rags-to-riches tale favoured by many optimistic Americans.

Seventy years ago, on April 14, 1939, The Viking Press in New York officially published John Steinbeck's searing novel The Grapes of Wrath. It was released on the fourth anniversary of Black Sunday, when the worst dust storm in recent American history had rolled across the Great Plains blotting out the sun and later depositing airborne topsoil 1,000 miles east in Washington DC. Steinbeck thought his novel was too raw for wide general appeal: "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags," he told his editor in early 1939. But despite its unflinching detail, gritty language, and controversial reception (the American Library Association includes it among the 100 most frequently banned and/or challenged books), the Grapes of Wrath has attained classic status and appears on many best novels lists.

The Grapes of Wrath treats as a national epidemic the wave of widespread foreclosure, uprootedness, migration and homelessness caused by the double whammy of cataclysmic environmental and economic disasters.

The thirties was a decade of staggering unemployment in America - as high as 25% in 1933, and still hovering around 19% in 1938, the year in which Steinbeck set The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck was not reticent about assigning part of the blame for the catastrophic conditions on the "Bank," the "Company," and the "State"; that is, to faceless, bloodless corporate, institutional, and bureaucratic organisations, so that his novel has an extremely hard, angry edge, though it offers no practical answers for a populace displaced by the shift from agricultural to industrial economies.

Steinbeck's partisanship was aided and abetted by his anger over the deplorable conditions under which migrant workers and their families (estimated to be as high as 300,000) lived and laboured once they reached the end of their diaspora in California, his home state.

What goes around comes around. For emotional urgency, evocative power, and sustained impact The Grapes of Wrath has few peers in American fiction. Seven decades later it has never been out of print and still sells by the carload.

To become a classic, it is often thought that a book needs to transcend its contemporary origins and remain untouched by subsequent history. But it is more accurate to think that a book becomes a classic precisely because it keeps being informed by the most recent historical developments. A literary classic speaks directly to readers' concerns in successive historical and cultural eras.

Dustbowl farm Enlarge Image

In this sense then, The Grapes of Wrath is a prophetic novel, rooted in the economic and environmental tragedies of the Great Depression, but speaking just as directly to the harsh realities of our own time.

At this moment of global economic meltdown, when the whole world is gripped by severe financial recession (much of it caused by rapacious greed, fiscal malfeasance, and corporate arrogance), when groups around the globe are in migration from one kind of tyranny or another, when the gap between rich and poor seems insurmountable, and when homelessness and dispossession caused by widespread financial failure and mortgage foreclosure is rapidly rising in the US and elsewhere - symbolised by shantytowns and tent cities on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas - then it is fitting to think of The Grapes of Wrath as our contemporary narrative, our 21st Century jeremiad.

The characters of Ma and Tom Joad have been etched into popular culture

But Steinbeck's impact does not end there. Throughout his career - well into the 1960s - Steinbeck was a writer with a remarkably acute conscience and a deep respect for common sense morality.

He carried on a kind of lover's quarrel with America, and warned against runaway materialism, institutional imperialism, intellectual hypocrisy, and rampant greed - all inevitable and regrettable by-products of an advanced industrialised capitalist society.

"If I wanted to destroy a nation," he wrote in 1966, "I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick."

It is impossible to know how Steinbeck would have reacted to our current malaise, fuelled in part by unbridled financial speculation and lax governmental oversight, but it is tempting to think, given the outcome, he might have said, "I told you so."

Robert DeMott is Professor of American Literature at Ohio University and a former director of the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University in California.

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Fox News and the anti-Obama 'Militia Media'

Photo: Beck on Fox with Daily Demagogy

Glenn Beck and
the rise of Fox News'
'Militia Media'

By Eric Boehlert
Media Matters

After a night of drinking, followed by an early-morning argument with his mother, with whom he shared a Pittsburgh apartment, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski put on a bulletproof vest, grabbed his guns, including an AK-47 rifle, and waited for the police to respond to the domestic disturbance call his mother had placed. When two officers arrived at the front door, Poplawski shot them both in the head, and then killed another officer who tried to rescue his colleagues.

In the wake of the bloodbath, we learned that Poplawski was something of a conspiracy nut who embraced dark, radical rhetoric about America. He was convinced the government wanted to take away his guns, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Specifically, Poplawski, as one friend described it, feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon." (FYI, there is no Obama gun ban in the works.) The same friend said the shooter feared America was "going to see the end of our times."



We learned that Poplawski hosted his own (failed) Internet radio show and that he visited the website of 9-11 conspiracy backer Alex Jones, who has been hyping the threat of a totalitarian world government for years. More recently, Jones has been warning listeners like Poplawski about The Obama Deception (that's the name of Jones' new documentary DVD) and how President Obama is bound to destroy America.

Who's Alex Jones? Even according to some conservative bloggers, the anti-government, anti-Obama talker is a "freak" who's popular with "the tin foil hat crowd." Like with Poplawski, apparently.

Jones might be a "freak," but he has recently been embraced -- and mainstreamed -- by Fox News, as part of the news channel's unprecedented drive to push radical propaganda warning of America's democratic demise under the new president.

During a March 18 webcast of FoxNews.com's proudly paranoid "Freedom Watch," Andrew Napolitano introduced a segment about "what the government has done to take your liberty and your property away." And with that, he welcomed onto the show "the one, the only, the great Alex Jones," who began ranting about "exposing" the New World Order and the threat posed by an emerging "global government."

"I appreciate what you're exposing," Napolitano assured his guest.

Waving around a copy of his Obama Deception, Jones warned Fox News webcast viewers about Obama's "agenda" for "gun confiscation" and the new president's plan to "bring in total police-state control" to America.

Jones also noted with excitement that Fox News' Glenn Beck had recently begun warning about the looming New World Order on his show, just like Jones had for years. "It is great!" cheered the conspiracist. (Like Jones, Beck recently warned viewers that "the Second Amendment is under fire.") Concluding the interview, Fox News' Napolitano announced "it's absolutely been a pleasure" listening to Jones' insights.

We don't know if Poplawski tuned in to watch Jones' star turn for Fox News last month. But is there any doubt that Fox News is playing an increasingly erratic and dangerous game by embracing the type of paranoid insurrection rhetoric that people like Poplawski are now acting on? By stoking dark fears about the ominous ruins that await an Obama America, by ratcheting up irresponsible back-to-the-wall scenarios, Fox News has waded into a territory that no other news organization has ever dared to exploit.

What Fox News is now programming on a daily (unhinged) basis is unprecedented in the history of American television, especially in the form of Beck's program. Night after night, week after week, Beck rails against the president while denouncing him or his actions, alternately, as Marxist, socialist, or fascist. He felt entirely comfortable pondering whether the federal government, under the auspices of FEMA, was building concentration camps to round up Americans in order to institute totalitarian rule. (It wasn't until this week that Beck was finally able to "debunk" the FEMA conspiracy theory.) And that's when Beck wasn't gaming out bloody scenarios for the coming civil war against Obama-led tyranny. In just a few shorts months, Beck raced to the head of Fox News' militia media movement.

Just prior to the Pittsburgh massacre, Beck's often bizarre on-air performances, in which his rants against the Obama administration's dark forces were mixed in with his tearful proclamations of love of country, had turned him into a highly rated laughingstock. "That is a shaky cat," Dennis Miller recently giggled while describing Beck. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough broke into hysterics after a montage of Beck's most weepy moments. And TV satirists have had a field day at the Fox News host's expense. (Stephen Colbert: "Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!")

But I'm not sure people should be laughing.

The consequences of Fox News' doomsday programming now seem entirely predictable. As Jeffrey Jones, a professor of media and politics at Old Dominion University, recently explained to The New York Times in regard to Beck's rhetoric, "People hear their values are under attack and they get worried. It becomes an opportunity for them to stand up and do something."

People like Richard Poplawski? FYI, weeks before his deadline shooting spree, Poplawski uploaded a video clip of Beck ominously referencing the FEMA camps on Fox News.

It's true that Beck, in response to mounting criticism, made this statement on his show:

BECK: Let me be clear on one thing. If someone tries to harm another person in the name of the Constitution or the truth behind 9-11 or anything else, they are just as dangerous and crazy as those people we don't seem to recognize anymore -- you know, the ones who kill in the name of Allah.

But look at the very next two lines of his monologue: "There are enemies both foreign and domestic in America tonight. Call it fearmongering or call it the truth." That doesn't sound like Beck was backing away from his rhetorical call to arms to fend off the Marxist -- no, wait -- fascist Obama administration.

And let's drop the idea -- pushed hard by Beck himself -- that he's simply a modern-day Howard Beale, from the classic film Network, just an angry, I'm-mad-as-hell everyman lashing out at the hypocrisies of our time. Nonsense. Beale's unvarnished on-air rants from Network targeted conformity, corporate conglomerates, and the propaganda power of television. ("This tube," he called it.) Beale's attacks were not political or partisan. Beck, by contrast, unleashes his anger against, and whips up dark scenarios about, the new president of the United States. Big difference.

Here's a sampling of what Beck's been drumming into the heads of viewers, a portion of whom likely (and logically) hear his rhetoric as a call to action. That the government is a "heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state." That it's indoctrinating our children; that we have "come to a very dangerous point in our country's long, storied history." Beck's concerned that the "Big Brother" government will soon dictate what its citizens can eat, at what temperature their house can be set, and what kind of cars they're allowed to drive.

Beck's sure "[d]epression and revolution" are what await America under Obama, and fears moving "towards a totalitarian state." The country today sometimes reminds Beck of "the early days of Adolf Hitler." Beck thinks that Obama, who has "surrounded himself by Marxists his whole life," is now "addicting this country to heroin -- the heroin that is government slavery."

And it's not just Beck. Appearing on Fox News, Dick Morris recently made a wildly irresponsible comment that looks even worse in light of the Pittsburgh law-enforcement slayings: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case."

And it's not just Fox News. Radio nut Michael Savage recently claimed that "we have a naked Marxist for president." And high-profile conservative blogger Erick Erickson contemplated the beating of politicians: "At what point do [people] get off the couch, march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?"

Of course, the right-wingers at Free Republic are way ahead of Erickson as they fantasize about Obama's assassination: "And let's face it: all the speculation about Obama being the actual Antichrist will either be confirmed or denied if someone gets off a lucky shot at the SOB."

"Go Kill Liberals!"

I wonder if Glenn Beck knows who Jim Adkisson is. Adkisson made headlines on July 28, 2008, when he brought his sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and, after whipping it out of a guitar case, opened fire on parishioners while a group of schoolchildren performed songs up by the altar. Adkisson killed two people and wounded several others.

Adkisson, a 58-year-old unemployed truck driver, brought 70 shotgun shells with him to the church and assumed he'd keep killing until the police arrived on the scene and shot him dead as well. Instead, some members of the congregation were able to wrestle him to the ground and hold him for police.

When investigators went to Adkisson's home in search of a motive, as well as evidence for the pending trial, they found copies of Savage's Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor, by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. They also came across what was supposed to have been Adkisson's suicide note: a handwritten, four-page manifesto explaining his murderous actions. The one-word answer for his deed? Hate. The three-word answer? He hated liberals.

The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just Kill yourself. Do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals!

What Adkisson especially hated about liberals ("this cancer, this pestilence") and what he hated about candidate "Osama Hussein Obama" was that they were marching America toward ruin: "Liberals are evil, they embrace the tenets of Karl Marx, they're Marxist, socialist, communists." Adkisson seethed over the way liberals were "trying to turn this country into a communist state" and couldn't comprehend why they would "embrace Marxism."

Sound familiar, Glenn?

John Bohstedt was one of the Unitarian church members who tackled Adkisson after the first round of gunfire went off inside the sanctuary. Two months ago, Adkisson pleaded guilty to the murder charges and was sentenced to life in prison. At the hearing, Bohstedt told the Associated Press he didn't think the killer had been insane, but rather had been manipulated by anti-liberal rhetoric.

"There are a lot of people who hate liberals, and if we stir that around in the pot and on the airwaves, eventually there will be people (like Adkisson) ... who get infected by the violent rhetoric and put it into violent action," Bohstedt said.

He remained worried about future violence: "Do you think there are other Jim Adkissons out there listening to hate speech? I do."

Me too.

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Make Green Economy A 'War' Mobilization

Photo: Reich with Obama

It's a Depression:
Focus on Workers,
Not on Wall Street

Robert Reich
robertreich.blogspot.com

April 3, 2009 - The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who'd rather be working full time, it's now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can't find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.

All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still moving out the door. But today's bleak jobs report shows that the economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money will be needed.

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

Energy independence and a non-carbon economy should be the equivalent of a war mobilization. Hire Americans to weatherize and insulate homes across the land. Don't encourage General Motors or any other auto company to shrink. Use the auto makers' spare capacity to make busses, new wind turbines, and electric cars (why let the Chinese best us on this?). Enlarge public transit systems.

Meanwhile, extend our educational infrastructure. So many young people are out of work that they should be using this time to improve their skills and capacities. Expand community colleges. Enlarge Pell Grants. Extend job-training opportunities to the unemployed, so they can learn new skills while they're collecting unemployment benefits.

Finally, accelerate universal health care.

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Blue Dogs: GOP Rightwing Hounds in Disguise

Blue Dog Dems
Threaten the
Obama Agenda

By Bernie Horn
Campaign for America's Future

Remember what happened to the President’s stimulus legislation? It was watered down through a series of amendments followed by a painful “deal” with three Republicans whose votes were needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. It is happening again with President Obama’s budget. But this time, Democrats are the ones threatening to ruin the legislation.

Over the past few weeks, many Democrats in Congress—especially in the Senate—have been speaking out and organizing against crucial elements of the Obama budget. They are trying to weaken or eliminate the most progressive initiatives, including his plans for health care for all, energy independence, and a shift of the tax burden from the middle class to the wealthy.


Activists need to speak up now, before it’s too late. Both the House and Senate Budget Committees are expected to vote on their respective budget resolutions late this week, and the budget battle will likely reach the House and Senate floors next week.

Here’s the short version of my appeal. Please go to a web page set up by the Campaign for America’s Future that makes it easy for you to contact “Blue Dog” conservative Democrats in the House and would-be Blue Dogs in the Senate. Tell them we elected Barack Obama to bring change to Washington—they should stop blocking the change we need.

Now, here’s the longer version.

President Obama is doing something unusual. He is trying to win preliminary approval for a sweeping range of reforms by putting them in the FY 2010 budget. As Paul Krugman explains, “President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years.” Robert Reich agrees, saying that through this budget “Obamanomics finally reverses and repudiates the economic philosophy that has dominated America since 1981…It’s revolutionary.”

It’s a gutsy strategy, and one that ought to succeed because Democrats control both the House and Senate. You see, Republicans can’t kill this budget—only Democrats can. The budget resolution operates under special rules, the most important being it’s not subject to filibuster. So the budget can easily pass both the House and Senate without a single Republican vote. In fact, right now it seems unlikely that any Republican will support Obama’s budget.

Unfortunately, the Obama budget is under intense attack from so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats. The Blue Dog Democrats is a caucus of 47 U.S. Representatives who describe themselves as a “Coalition of Conservative Democrats.” Last week, Senator Evan Bayh announced the creation of a similar group of 16 Democratic Senators (including Joe Lieberman).

Members of both groups have staked out positions against key budget provisions—opposing especially Obama’s health, energy, and tax reform initiatives.

Progressive budget priorities are especially threatened in the Senate. Parliamentary rules allow Speaker Pelosi to limit amendments on the House floor. But the Senate battle over amendments could get ugly with the Bayh bloc holding enough votes to slice out progressive programs.

Senator Bayh’s group wants to be considered “moderate,” but their complaints about President Obama’s policies are conservative complaints. The creation of this organization appears to be a project of conservative special interests. And the timing of Bayh’s announcement makes it obvious that the group’s first priority is to attack the parts of President Obama’s budget that conservatives abhor.

It’s time to make the Blue Dogs behave. Please click here, go to the CAF web page, and tell the disloyal Democrats to support Barack Obama’s budget—and stop blocking the change we need.

P.S. about “budget reconciliation” for all you policy wonks:

There is a parliamentary procedure called “budget reconciliation” which is important to the current budget debate. To trigger the reconciliation process, Congress has to include provisions in the Budget Resolution that instruct the appropriations committees to approve specific provisions by a certain date. Those provisions are packaged into a reconciliation bill that is subject to special rules—the most important being that it is not subject to filibuster in the Senate.

Over the years, presidents have used the budget reconciliation process to pass very controversial matters. As the Washington Post explains, “Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both used the tactic to win deficit-reduction packages, while George W. Bush used it to push through his signature tax cuts.”

Progressives want to include language in the Budget Resolution that make President Obama’s health care and energy “cap-and-trade” initiatives subject to the reconciliation process—allowing them to be approved in the Senate by a simple majority vote. In other words, progressives would like the chance to adopt these crucial policies through majority rule—instead of letting a minority of only 41 Senators block them from enactment.

Seems reasonable. But Blue Dogs in the Senate are screaming foul. According to news reports, they have already killed the possibility of making “cap-and-trade” part of the reconciliation process, and they’re not sure about health care. At present, it appears that the House Budget Resolution will include a reconciliation provision on health care but not “cap-and-trade,” and the Senate Resolution will probably include neither. If that happens, the issue of reconciliation will be put off while Congress recesses for two weeks (April 4 to 19) and the matter will be raised again in the House-Senate conference committee. If the final Budget Resolution includes reconciliation language that instructs the appropriations committees to fund health care reform, that up-or-down vote would probably take place in September.

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New Hawks Emerge In Camp Obama

Photo: Karzai and Obama

'Progressive' Think
Tank Tells Obama
to Escalate Afghan War

By Tom Hayden
Huffington Post

The Center for American Progress has positioned itself as a "progressive" Washington think tank, especially suited to channel new thinking and expertise into the Obama administration. It therefore is deeply disappointing that CAP has issued a call for a ten-year war in Afghanistan, including an immediate military escalation, just as President Obama prepares to unveil his Afghanistan/Pakistan policies to the American public and NATO this week.

It is likely that Obama will follow most of CAP's strategic advice, assuming the think tank to be the progressive wing of what's possible within the Beltway.

That means a long counter-insurgency war ahead, with everything from massive incarcerations and detention to Predator strikes that amass increasing civilian casualties. CAP begins by calling on the president to meet the request of his commander in Afghanistan for another 15,000 troops in addition to the 17,000 Obama already has committed, which would bring the near-term US total to 70,000. To pay for these additional troops, CAP proposes redirecting $25 billion annually from combat in Iraq to Afghanistan. In addition, CAP favors up to $5 billion annually for diplomatic and economic assistance, also from a redirection of Iraq spending.

Even assuming the economic assistance reaches villages instead of corrupt middlemen, CAP's primary emphasis is a military one, sending larger numbers of American troops on a counterinsurgency mission in southern and eastern Afghanistan, as well as the outskirts of Kabul. Make no mistake, the American mission will be to fight, kill and capture, and, is intended to leave NATO allies in secondary training roles. The CAP proposal seems to flesh out the Obama strategy already described in a New York Times January 28 headline, "Aides Say Obama's Afghan Aims Elevate War Over Development." The CAP report calculates that in FY 2009, "the ration of funding for military forces versus non-military international engagement is 18 to 1."

There is no exit strategy contemplated in the CAP proposal, although the president apparently is been asking for one behind the scenes. Nor is there any projected cap on future escalation The CAP timeline, front-loaded with military force, is as fanciful about Afghanistan/Pakistan as the neo-conservatives were towards Iraq in the Nineties:

- in the next 18 months, a combat/counterinsurgency push to prevent Afghanistan from being a "safe haven for terrorist and extremist groups with a global reach"; prevent the destabilization of Pakistan by creating "a stable civilian government committed to working toward the elimination of terrorist safe havens" there.

- In three to five years, create a "viable Afghan economy", curb the poppy trade, promote democracy and human rights, and resolve regional tensions.

- In ten years, build an Afghan state that can defend itself, and "prepare for full military withdrawal."

As a practical matter, all that is certain is that there will be blood. When the problem is a nail, reach for the hammer. But military occupation, particularly a surge of US troops into the Pashtun region in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the surest way to inflame nationalist resistance and greater support for the Taliban. President Hamid Karzai said last December that "the coalition went around Afghan villages, burst into people's homes and has been committing extraditional killings in our country."

A United Nations investigator made the same point in 2008, accusing the CIA and Special Forces "of conducting nighttime raids and killing civilians in Afghanistan with impunity." Pakistan's prime minister said the same years that "if America wants to see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed."

As a January 2009 report by the Carnegie Endowment concluded, "the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."

CAP takes no notice of the torture and detention without human rights protections at Kabul's Bagram prison, now undergoing massive expansion. Obama's team already says his anti-torture executive order does not cover the hundreds detained in Afghanistan, so it is likely that the American forces will launch a massive "preventive incarceration" campaign in the months ahead. CAP's silence on this matter is especially disturbing since the think tank expressed deep concern over the same policies in Iraq.

Many Americans are confused, but it is not necessary to have a West Point or Ivy League degree to understand the heart of the matter. Whether it is the street of LA or the alleys of Kabul, law-and-order always comes first along with promises of jobs and development "later", a later that gradually becomes never. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the levels of suffering are among the most extreme in the world, and from suffering, from having nothing to live for, comes the will to die for a cause.

United Nations recent development data places Afghanistan 173rd out of 178 countries; Pakistan is 136th. According to such estimates, about sixty percent of children in the Pashtun areas are "moderately" or "severely" stunted. In Afghanistan as a whole, such children will be spared miserable lives because the country has the highest infant mortality rate in the world. No more need be said.

As to the threat from al Qaeda, it is understandable that the president would define himself as an aggressive commander-in-chief. But he must wonder if our killing so many civilians and stunting so many children won't result in yet another generation dying to hate us. He must wonder if he is squandering the good will of the world, including the Muslim world, by sending more Americans to kill and die in a quagmire. He must recognize that he is putting his eight-year presidency on the line.

He must wonder too, as he approaches his meetings in Europe, why NATO is occupying countries so far from its base in the mainly-white Western world. It is hard to avoid the hint that the white man's burden is falling on the shoulders of our first African-American president.

The only solution to the Afghanistan/Pakistan quagmires has to be a regional one, as argued forcefully by Tariq Ali in his recent book, as well as by Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, but NATO is the stranger in the neighborhood. CAP recognizes this critical problem, as does Hillary Clinton who will meet the regional players at the Hague next week. The problem is that NATO, burdened with imperial assumptions, would like China, Russia, and the Central Asian Republics constituting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to be satellite parties to the Western occupation of Afghanistan/Pakistan. But the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, while having serious stakes in quelling instability in the region, calls on the US and NATO to go home.

Can the burden be sustained politically and economically for ten years more? Already Canada and the Netherlands have set timelines for withdrawing their forces, assigned now to the most violent regions of southern Afghanistan. Germany may be the next to balk. And with the American economy in shambles, can anyone envision a war whose costs will exceed one trillion dollars a decade from now? Only the neo-conservatives, if Iraq is any example,, which makes it tragic that CAP has aligned itself with their strategy of the "long war."

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