Exorcising Demons of the 'War on Terror'

Photo: Obama in Afghanistan

Obama Notes #1

By Tom Hayden
Progressives for Obama
January 26, 2009

Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, I boarded a red-eye flight to Washington to make a morning workshop on a juvenile justice bill. I hadn't bothered to take a red-eye for eight years, but now it seemed to matter. Something progressive actually might happen in public policy and, if so, it was worth the jet-lag and back pain.

For the first time in years, activists will need an inside strategy to complement the familiar tactics of fighting from the margins. The new president will have to reach out to progressives as well, with the same energy he invests in the religious and Republican right.

At the very least, success in the Obama era can be imagined as something more than slowing down the rate at which things get worse. Hope and heartbreak will rhyme. Wins and defeats can be expected, not simply the monotony of loss.

In that spirit I am beginning a new blog, Obama Notes, a regular analysis from the perspective of a progressive who strongly supported Obama in 2008. Where possible I will be suggesting steps to take.

#1. Torture

Obama's executive order was a tremendous breakthrough after eight years of Bush-Cheney. It will require close monitoring, of course, but it was hugely significant that it came so rapidly, with the stroke of a pen. The immediate question for the peace movement and human rights advocates is whether the Order applies to thousands of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan who are being held in violation of human rights norms and, if not, why not. Congress should send letters of inquiry and follow up with hearings on the horrors for those detainees rounded up in preventive detention.

#2. The Predator Attack

The night after Obama's torture order, I was at dinner with a human rights lawyer who worried that the right-wing would launch political attacks on Obama for "letting our guard down." With that in mind, I became certain that the following day's Predator attack in Pakistan, which killed at least 10-18 people, was as much political as military, a message that the Pentagon will keep on launching strikes against a sovereign country in keeping with "war on terrorism" objectives. The cold truth may be that those people died in Pakistan to make closing Guantanamo more politically palatable. Many more will die as America tries to exorcise and replace the war on terror mentality.

Obama has good reason to worry about counter-pressures from the right and the intelligence community. One day after the executive order banning torture was signed, an odd article appeared on the New York Times' front page about a former detainee who has joined al Qaeda in Yemen. There was no apparent reason for the article's timing except the Obama announcement. The detainee in question was released by President Bush, and is suspected of involvement in car bombings in September 2007.

# 3. Afghanistan-Pakistan

The outlook in Afghanistan-Pakistan is cloudy and grim. The president's latest goal of a "hard-won peace" is a realistic retreat from rhetorical belligerence. But one gets the feeling that no one knows what to do. The appointment of Richard Holbrooke suggests a Dayton-like accord but without the ingredients of Dayton. Where the Balkans consisted of ethnic blocs and competing nation states, Afghanistan resembles the Stone Age without stable tribal structures.

Another 20,000 American troops shortly will become twenty thousand new targets, one of whom certainly will be the last to die for a mistake. And every Afghan the Americans kill will give birth to more insurgents.

The traditional anti-war liberal bloc in Congress has no current plans for opposition to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unwilling to oppose the new president, afraid of being accused of losing, unable to conceive an exit strategy, they are presently without direction or leverage.

But this is not 2002-2003. There is a rank-and-file peace movement and a significant skepticism in public opinion that will not go away. There are few US resources for escalation in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Impatience will grow. "Obama's War" has an an unpleasant sound. The urgency of a diplomatic solution will grow by the day. The content of that solution is far from agreed upon.

Demands for Congressional hearings on an Afghanistan-Pakistan exit strategy in both House and Senate should be the point of departure.
The hearings should occur, and be widely broadcast, no later than the spring, when the Washington weather will be more favorable to protests. In the run-up, teach-ins and other activist forums might begin studying books like Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos, for a preview of the nightmare scenario. Also contact Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films office where a campaign is planned to "get Afghanistan right."

#4. Iraq

Look for Obama to order his promised combat troop withdrawals but with all sorts of escape and delay clauses. The fog of diplomacy can be as bad as the fog of war in this case. Does the 16-month timetable still leave a reserve force in the tens of thousands and, if so, under what guidelines? Or does the recent US-Iraq pact mean in plain words that all US troops will be out by 2011? Again, questions from Congress will be imperative in clarifying the situation ahead. In the meantime, the public base of the peace movement will decline as peace appears to be "on the horizon."

#5. Gaza and the Middle East.

As I argued in the Huffington Post, the timing of Israel's assault was entirely political. First, it was a "consolation prize" after the US refused any assistance in launching a war against Iran. Second, the attack began on the day Obama was elected, and ended by the inauguration. Obama, who in 2007 said words to the effect that "no one has suffered like the Palestinians", observed a subsequent silent through the campaign and all during the Gaza battle. Once ended, Obama twice indicated a concern for Palestinian suffering two times, once in the words of Bono at the Lincoln Memorial, and later in the president's own formulation. More importantly, he appointed George Mitchell as a peace envoy, the best possible choice for those concerned about a just and reasonable settlement. Look for input from civil society, including delegations from Northern Ireland and South Africa, in the conflict resolution process ahead.

#6. Venezuela, Cuba, Latin America.
Obama's statements on Latin America during the campaign reflected a Cold War approach to the region rather than a positive embrace of progressive democratic elections. On the eve of the inauguration, in a Univision interview, he criticized Venezuela for being a "negative" factor in development and an ally of FARC terrorists in Colombia. Both statements were false and inflammatory, and some Administration sources now admit they were mistaken. The time for a new Obama platform on Latin America, in the tradition of FDR's good neighbor policies, will be in April at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The president will have to decide whether to shake hands with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales [the Cubans are excluded] and, more important, offer a more positive vision than continuing the war on drugs and "armoring NAFTA" [ in the words of the State Department's Thomas Shannon].

Once again, Congressional hearings on new directions in Latin America are sorely needed. And Obama needs a Latino emissary with a deeper empathy and more progressive policy mandate than the failed ones of the Bush era.

#7. The Economic Crisis.
ever in my lifetime have so many businessmen been pleading with the government to save them from capitalism. Never has there been such a demand for economic reform. Never has the left been weaker and more left out. Obama has invited many of the Mad Men [or, if you will, the Best and Brightest] who ruined the system to take charge of restoring it, not a good sign. These are people who generally believe that unemployment is a good and necessary thing, as well as the shedding of regulations, on the road to greater profits and growth. If Ralph Nader hadn't run so often for president, we might have a progressive voice in this debate, but...Obama's promise to deliver is threatened both by Republicans with faith-based illusions about tax credits, and traditional Democratic liberals who focus mainly on how much money the government gets to spend. Lost in the debate so far is whether financial and corporate institutions will be re-regulated, how, and by whom? Also at risk are the promises made for major public investments in the green economy.

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Crimes and War: 'Getting it' and Not Getting It

On Gaza

By Starhawk
Starhawk.org

December 30, 2008 - All day I've been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR, following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment. I've been thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that giant, open-air prison.

The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli children as Hamas rockets explode in the night. I agree with him-that no child should have her sleep menaced by rocket fire, or wake in the night fearing death.

But I can't help but remember one night on the Rafah border, sleeping in a house close to the line, watching the children dive for cover as bullets thudded into the walls. There was a shell-hole in the back room they liked to jump through into the garden, which at that time still held fruit trees and chickens. Their mother fed me eggs, and their grandmother stuffed oranges into my pockets with the shy pride every gardener shares.


That house is gone, now, along with all of its neighbors. Those children wake in the night, every night of their lives, in terror. I don't know if they have survived the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, the bombs. I only know that they are children, too.

I've ridden on busses in Israel. I understand that gnawing fear, the squirrely feeling in the pit or your stomach, how you eye your fellow passengers wondering if any of them are too thick around the middle. Could that portly fellow be wearing a suicide belt, or just too many late night snacks of hummus? That's no way to live.

But I've also walked the pock-marked streets of Rafah, where every house bears the scars of Israeli snipers, where tanks prowled the border every night, where children played in the rubble, sometimes under fire, and this was all four years ago, when things were much, much better there.

And I just don't get it. I mean, I get why suicide bombs and homemade rockets that kill innocent civilians are wrong. I just don't get why bombs from F16s that kill far more innocent civilians are right. Why a kid from the ghetto who shoots a cop is a criminal, but a pilot who bombs a police station from the air is a hero.

Is it a distance thing? Does the air or the altitude confer a purifying effect? Or is it a matter of scale? Individual murder is vile, but mass murder, carried out by a state as an aspect of national policy, that's a fine and noble thing?

I don't get how my own people can be doing this. Or rather, I do get it. I am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust ended, raised on the myth and hope of Israel. The myth goes like this:

"For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and persecuted, nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis. But out of that suffering was born one good thing-the homeland that we have come back to, our own land at last, where we can be safe, and proud, and strong."

That's a powerful story, a moving story. There's only one problem with it-it leaves the Palestinians out. It has to leave them out, for if we were to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that spoils the story.

The result is a kind of psychic blind spot where the Palestinians are concerned. If you are truly invested in Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, then you can't let the Palestinians be real to you. It's like you can't really focus on them. Golda Meir said, "The Palestinians, who are they? They don't exist." We hear, "There is no partner for peace," "There is no one to talk to."

And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state rooted in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and regular, ritual baths, builds settlements that don't bother to construct sewage treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian fields across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes into the void. I am truly not making this up-I've seen it, smelled it, and it's a known though shameful fact. But if the Palestinians aren't really real-who are they? They don't exist!-then the land they inhabit becomes a kind of void in the psyche, and it isn't really real, either. At times, in those border villages, walking the fencelines of settlements, you feel like you have slipped into a science fiction movie, where parallel universes exist in the same space, but in different strands of reality, that never touch.

When I was on the West Bank, during Israeli incursions the Israeli military would often take over a Palestinian house to billet their soldiers. Many times, they would simply lock the family who owned it into one room, and keep them there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days parents, grandparents, kids and all. I've sat with a family, singing to the children while soldiers trashed their house, and I've been detained by a group of soldiers playing cards in the kitchen with a family locked in the other room. (I got out of that one-but that's another story.)

It's a kind of uneasy feeling, having something locked away in a room in your house that you can't look at. Ever caught a mouse in a glue trap? And you can't bear to watch it suffer, so you leave the room and close the door and don't come back until it's really, really dead.

Like a horrific fractal, the locked room repeats on different scales. The Israelis have built a wall to lock away the West Bank. And Gaza itself is one huge, locked room. Close the borders, keep food and medical supplies and necessities from getting through, and perhaps they will just quietly fade out of existence and stop spoiling our story.

"All we want is a return to calm," the Israeli ambassador says. "All we want is peace."

One way to get peace is to exterminate what threatens you. In fact, that may be the prime directive of the last few thousand years.

But attempts to exterminate pests breed resistance, whether you're dealing with insects or bacteria or people. The more insecticides you pour on a field, the more pests you have to deal with-because insecticides are always more potent at killing the beneficial bugs than the pesky ones.

The harshness, the crackdowns, the border closings, the checkpoints, the assassinations, the incursions, the building of settlements deep into Palestinian territory, all the daily frustrations and humiliations of occupation, have been breeding the conditions for Hamas, or something like it, to thrive. If Israel truly wants peace, there's a more subtle, a more intelligent and more effective strategy to pursue than simply trying to kill the enemy and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.

It's this-instead of killing what threatens you, feed what you want to grow. Consider in what conditions peace can thrive, and create them, just as you would prepare the bed for the crops you want to plant. Find those among your opponents who also want peace, and support them. Make alliances. Offer your enemies incentives to change, and reward your friends.

Of course, to follow such a strategy, you must actually see and know your enemy. If they are nothing to you but cartoon characters of terrorists, you will not be able to tell one from another, to discern the religious fanatic from the guy muttering under his breath, "F-ing Hammas, they closed the cinema again!"

And you must be willing to give something up. No one gets peace if your basic bargaining position is, "I get everything I want, and you eat my shit." You might get a temporary victory, but it will never be a peaceful one.

To know and see the enemy, you must let them into the story. They must become real to you, nuanced, distinctive as individuals. But when we let the Palestinians into the story, it changes. Oh, how painfully it changes! For there is no way to tell a new story, one that includes both peoples of the land, without starting like this:

"In our yearning for a homeland, in our attempts as a threatened and traumatized people to find safety and power, we have done a great wrong to another people, and now we must atone."

Just try saying it. If you, like me, were raised on that other story, just try this one out. Say it three times. It hurts, yes, but it might also bring a great, liberating sense of relief with it.

And if you're not Jewish, if you're American, if you're white, if you're German, if you're a thousand other things, really, if you're a human being, there's probably some version of that story that is true for you.

Out of our own great need and fear and pain, we have often done great harm, and we are called to atone. To atone is to be at one-to stop drawing a circle that includes our tribe and excludes the other, and start drawing a larger circle that takes everyone in.

How do we atone? Open your eyes. Look into the face of the enemy, and see a human being, flawed, distinct, unique and precious. Stop killing. Start talking. Compost the shit and the rot and feed the olive trees.

Act. Cross the line. There are Israelis who do it all the time, joining with Palestinians on the West Bank to protest the wall, watching at checkpoints, refusing to serve in the occupying army, standing for peace. Thousands have demonstrated this week in Tel Aviv.

There are Palestinians who advocate nonviolent resistance, who have organized their villages to protest the wall, who face tear gas, beatings, arrests, rubber bullets and real bullets to make their stand.

There are internationals who have put themselves on the line-like the boatload of human rights activists, journalists and doctors on board the Dignity, the ship from the Free Gaza movement that was rammed and fired on by the Israeli navy yesterday as it attempted to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid.

Maybe we can't all do that. But we can all write a letter, make a phone call, send an email. We can make the Palestinian people visible to us, and to the world. When we do so, we make a world that is safer for every child.

Below is a good summary of some of the actions we can take. Please feel free to repost this. In fact, send it to someone you think will disagree with it.

*-- Starhawk*

*Updated Action Alert on Gaza: * We Need "Sustained, Determined Political Action" December 29, 2008

As of this writing, a third consecutive day of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed an estimated 315 Palestinians and injured more than 1,400. According to the UN, at least 51 of the victims were civilians and 8 were children. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has vowed ominously "a war to the bitter end."

Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip are being carried out with F16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and naval gunboats all given to Israel by the United States with our tax dollars.

From 2001-2006, the United States transferred to Israel more than $200 million worth of spare parts to fly its fleet of F16's and more than $100 million worth of helicopter spare parts for its fleet of Apaches. In July 2008, the United States gave Israel 186 million gallons of JP-8 aviation jet fuel and signed a contract to transfer an addition $1.9 billion worth of littoral combat ships to the Israeli navy. Last year, the United States signed a $1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to transfer to Israel thousands of TOW, Hellfire, and "bunker buster" missiles.

Make no mistake about it-Israel's war on the Gaza Strip would not be possible without the jets, helicopters, ships, missiles, and fuel provided by the United States.

Information for action -- you can go directly to two websites:

End the Occupation http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1773

And United for Peace and Justice www.unitedforpeace.org and get to working links.

You can email Obama or post comments at http://change.gov/.

Ali Abunimah, of The Electronic Intifada , wrote, "Palestinians everywhere are asking for solidarity, real solidarity, in the form of sustained, determined political action." In light of our country's enabling role in Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, it is the least we can do. Here's how:

1. Attend a protest or vigil, or organize one yourself.

2. Contact the White House, the State Department, your Representative and Senators, and the Obama Transition Team to protest Israel's war on Gaza and demand an immediate cease-fire.

White House: 202-456-1111 or comments@whitehouse.gov

State Department: 202-647-6575

Congress: 202-224-3121

3. Make your voice heard in the media. Contact your local media by phoning into a talk show or writing a letter to the editor. . 4. Tell President-Elect Barack Obama that we need a change in Israel/Palestine policy.

5. Sign up to organize people in your community to end U.S. military aid to Israel. . 6. Come to Washington, DC for Inauguration Day on January 20. Upwards of 4 million people are expected in Washington, DC for President-Elect Obama's inauguration. This is a perfect time for us to reach out to and educate our fellow citizens about U.S. policy toward Palestine/Israel. . 7. Join Democracy in Action in Washington, DC for a Grassroots Advocacy Training and Lobby Day on February 1-2.

http://www2.democracyinaction.org/

Interfaith Peace-Builders and the US Campaign are organizing this exciting two-day event, featuring interactive, skills-building workshops and the chance to meet with your Representative and Senators to discuss U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine. Spaces are filling up fast. ------------------------------

Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of *The Earth Path*, as well as *Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising*, *The Fifth Sacred Thing*; and eight other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, and works to offer training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.

Copyright (c) 2008, 2009 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of her work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part of it without permission. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.

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Memo to Obama: No More Spilled Blood

Photo by Chris Geovanis: Chicago Protest on Gaza Killings

We have No Words Left...
By Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada

Dec. 29, 2008 - "I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those chilling words were spoken on al-Jazeera on Saturday by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defence official in the Sderot area adjacent to the Gaza Strip. For days Israeli planes have bombed Gaza. Almost 300 Palestinians have been killed and a thousand injured, the majority civilians, including women and children. Israel claims most of the dead were Hamas "terrorists". In fact, the targets were police stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at other civilians.

Palestinians are at a loss to describe this new catastrophe. Is it our 9/11, or is it a taste of the "bigger shoah" Matan Vilnai, the deputy defence minister, threatened in February, after the last round of mass killings?


Type rest of the post hereIsrael says it is acting in "retaliation" for rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since a six-month truce expired on 19 December. But the bombs dropped on Gaza are only a variation in Israel's method of killing Palestinians. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food, cancer treatments and other medicines by an Israeli blockade that targeted 1.5 million people - mostly refugees and children - caged into the Gaza Strip. The orders of Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, to hold back medicine were just as lethal and illegal as those to send in the warplanes.

Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, pleaded that Israel wanted "quiet" - a continuation of the truce - while Hamas chose "terror", forcing him to act. But what is Israel's idea of a truce? It is very simple: Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonise their land.

As John Ging, the head of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, said in November: "The people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence ... at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."

That is an Israeli truce. Any act of resistance including the peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in the West Bank is always met by Israeli bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's extrajudicial killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never stopped for a day during the truce. The western-backed Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has acceded to all Israel's demands. Under the proud eye of United States military advisors, Abbas has assembled "security forces" to fight the resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian in the West Bank from Israel's relentless colonisation. The Israeli media report that the attack on Gaza was long planned. If so, the timing in the final days of the Bush administration may indicate an Israeli effort to take advantage of a moment when there might be even less criticism than usual.

Israel is no doubt emboldened by the complicity of the European Union, which this month voted again to upgrade its ties with Israel despite condemnation from its own officials and those of the UN for the "collective punishment" being visited on Gaza. Tacit Arab regime support, and the fact that predicted uprisings in the Arab street never materialised, were also factors.

But there is a qualitative shift with the latest horror: as much as Arab anger has been directed at Israel, it has also focused intensely on Arab regimes - especially Egypt's - seen as colluding with the Israeli attack. Contempt for these regimes and their leaders is being expressed more openly than ever. Yet these are the illegitimate regimes western politicians continue to insist are their "moderate" allies.

Diplomatic fronts, such as the US-dominated Quartet, continue to treat occupier and occupied, coloniser and colonised, first-world high-tech army and near-starving refugee population, as if they are on the same footing. Hope is fading that the incoming administration of Barack Obama is going to make any fundamental change to US policies that are hopelessly biased towards Israel.

In Europe and the Middle East, the gap between leaders and led could not be greater when it comes to Israel. Official complicity and support for Israel contrast with popular outrage at war crimes carried out against occupied people and refugees with impunity.

With governments and international institutions failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee - representing hundreds of organisations - has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its support for the sanctions campaign modelled on the successful anti-apartheid movement.

Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term effort to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.

[Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of 'One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse' electronicintifada.net]

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