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Archive: POLITICS

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Moyers at West Point

Finally, and this above all—a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. If you rise in the ranks to important positions—or even if you don’t—speak the truth as you see it, even if the questioner is a higher authority with a clear preference for one and only one answer. It may not be the way to promote your career; it can in fact harm it. Among my military heroes of this war are the generals who frankly told the President and his advisers that their information and their plans were both incomplete and misleading—and who paid the price of being ignored and bypassed and possibly frozen forever in their existing ranks: men like General Eric K. Shinseki, another son of West Point. It is not easy to be honest—and fair—in a bureaucratic system. But it is what free men and women have to do. Be true to your principles, General Kosciuszko reminded Thomas Jefferson. If doing so exposes the ignorance and arrogance of power, you may be doing more to save the nation than exploits in combat can achieve.

The above was taken from a long excerpt of a Bill Moyers lecture on The Meaning of Freedom delivered on November 15, 2006. (h/t Tom Paine.com)

Dennis Perrin on "Honorable intentions"

I will offer this: the notion that the US held "honorable intentions" as it tore the lid off of Iraq is not only self-serving piety, it's a widespread sociopathic delusion. Yet, US politicos from Chuck Hagel to Russ Feingold utter this line whenever possible, keeping a straight face while another thousand or so Iraqis are blown to bits, and a few dozen more US soldiers and Marines have their heads, arms or legs blown off by IEDs, or are felled by snipers. "Honorable"? Are you fucking kidding me? Criminal would be the first word out of my mouth, but then, I'm not trying to appease the fantasies of the political elite nor those among the greater mass who seriously buy into this insane logic. Recall that Richard Nixon called for "Peace With Honor" in Vietnam, then invaded Cambodia and Laos while continuing to rip apart Vietnamese society. If I was someone who lived in the crosshairs of US foreign policy and heard American politicians talk about "honorable intentions," I'd either start building a bomb shelter or pack what I could grab and hit the road.

It's one thing for domestic Phalangists to engage in such rhetoric. Many of them believe that the Creator of the cosmos wears a red, white and blue robe, speaks English as a first language, and cares about the outcomes of football games. Of course they think that whatever we do is "honorable." Many of them are out of their minds.

Dennis' full post

Can you imagine?

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country's 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods Iraq is turning into a country of refugees. The UN High Commission for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death I phoned a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought of the verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next door neighbour's house. I am more worried about staying alive myself than what happens to Saddam."

Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families. "I love my husband, but my family has forced me to divorce him because we are Shi'ite and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, the mother of four, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's family] are insurgents and that living with him is an offence to God." Members of mixed marriages set up an association to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity". All three Iraqi communities--Shia, Sunni and Kurdish -- see themselves as victims and seldom sympathize with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its gruesome discoveries. Earlier this month I visited Mosul, the capital of northern Iraq that has a population of 1.7 million people of whom about two thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds. It not the most dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a place drenched in violence. A local tribal leader called Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal Afar told me of a man from there who went to recover the tortured body of his 16-year old son. The corpse was wired to explosives that blew up killing the father so their two bodies were buried together.

Neither can I.

Patrick Cockburn has more on the "Saigon Moment" at Counterpunch

9/11: The awful (delayed) aftermath

To date, 75 recovery workers on or around what is now known as "the Pile"—the rubble that remained after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001—have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that a half-dozen top doctors and epidemiologists have confirmed as having been likely caused by that exposure.

Those 75 cases have come to light in joint-action lawsuits filed against New York City on behalf of at least 8,500 recovery workers who suffer from various forms of lung illnesses and respiratory diseases—and suggest a pattern too distinct to ignore. While some cancers take years, if not decades, to develop, the blood cancers in otherwise healthy and young individuals represent a pattern that experts believe will likely prove to be more than circumstantial. The suits seek to prove that these 8,500 workers—approximately 20 percent of the total estimated recovery force that cleared the rubble from ground zero—all suffer from the debilitating effects of those events.

The basis for the suits stems from the plaintiffs' argument that the government—in a desperate attempt to revive downtown in the wake of the catastrophic events on 9-11—failed to protect workers from cancer-causing benzene, dioxin, and other hazardous chemicals that permeated the air for months. Officials made these failures worse by falsely reassuring New Yorkers that they faced no long-term dangers from exposure to the air lingering over ground zero.

"We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air-quality and drinking-water conditions in both New York and near the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances," Christine Todd Whitman, the then administrator of the EPA, told the citizens of New York City in a press release on September 18—only seven days after the attacks. "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York . . . that their air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink."

Those statements were not only false and misleading, but may even play into the basis for the city's liability for millions of dollars in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Last February, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts cited Whitman's false statements as the basis for allowing a different class-action lawsuit to proceed—this one, against the EPA and Whitman, is on behalf of residents, office workers, and students from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, many of whom suffer from respiratory illnesses as a result of 9-11.

"No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," Batts wrote in her February 2 ruling. "Whitman's deliberate and misleading statements made to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to the areas, shocks the conscience."

And that was before anyone knew of the apparent cancer link, first reported in the New York news media in the spring of 2004. Even more shocking is the incidence of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses that have developed among those participating in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Given the fact that some cancers are slower to develop than others, it seems likely to several doctors and epidemiologists that many more reports of cancer and serious lung illnesses will surface in the months and years to come. The fact that 8,500 recovery workers have already banded together to sue, only five years later—with 400 total cancer patients among their number—leads many experts to predict that these figures are likely to grow, meaning a possible death toll in the thousands.

In many ways, these illnesses suggest the slow but deteriorating health issues that faced the atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where thousands died in the years and decades that followed the United States' use of nuclear weapons. And that similarity has not been lost on David Worby, the 53-year-old attorney leading the joint-action suits on behalf of those workers who are already sick, and even dying.

"In the end," Worby declares, "our officials might be responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden on 9-11."

Kristen Lombardi's full story in the Village Voice

Russian Reversion

Two sensational murders have, in recent weeks, stimulated scrutiny of the current political realities in Russia. And the view isn't pretty.

Max Hastings of The Guardian reports on the high levels of corruption and violence, and Craig Murray, the former U.K. Ambassador to Uzbekistan, offers further insight.

Look Again

The contributors to the BAG News Notes website analyze the above photo in a very interesting manner.

Political honesty, for a change (and from a Republican!)

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

–Sen. Chuck Hegel

Hegel's full Op-Ed here, in the Washington Post

Rosen on Iraq

Throughout the disastrous American invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, no one has been more accurate, salient, and prescient in their reporting than the freelance writer Nir Rosen. Needless to say, he has only occasionally been seen or heard in the mainstream media, but his reports (and recently published book) have provided continual sustenance to those who hungered for more than the weak, and often dishonest reporting which has typically been fed to the American public.

Rosen has just contributed a long piece to the Boston Review entitled Anatomy of a Civil War, in which he reviews the path which led to this awful point, and discusses the possible ramifications of what lies ahead. It is a long article, so if you are seeking a brief synopsis, it won't suit you. But if you really want to understand the dynamics at play, especially with regard to the Sunni/Shia conflict and its broader implications for the Arab world, I urge you to take the time to read it.

The Lebanese problem

Charles Glass was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 (and lived in Lebanon during that period). He was also kidnapped by Hizballah in 1987. Writing in the indespensible Counterpunch, Glass makes the following simple, damning point:

In 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.

Glass' full piece can be read here

Delving beneath the surface

There is a regular risk which I, and anyone who maintains a (mostly) referential blog encounters. It is the temptation to defer to generally reliable sources without, perhaps due to time constraints or lack of specific knowledge, identifying flaws in the articles which we post.

I'd say that there are very few cases on this blog in which the thrust of the article has been wrong. But it can happen, and, if weren't for the sharp mind and expertise of another well-known blogger, I probably would have made such a mistake today.

In both the NY Times and The Washington Post, normally reliable columnists wrote very similar editorials on the questions surrounding the recent election's disturbing voting results in Sarasota, FL. Basically, in Sarasota County, there were 18,000 "undervotes", meaning that 18,000 people apparently chose not to vote for either candidate. That figure is, to put it mildly, suspiciously high, given that it was a fraction of that in surrounding counties.

Most of what has been written, including today's Op-Ed's by Paul Krugman and E. J. Dionne, Jr., have focused on electronic voting machines as the probable culprits. Like many others who are suspicious of those machines, I was very tempted to assume that they (or the people who programmed or hacked them) were the problem. But Jeralyn Merritt, a criminal defense attorney who blogs at Talk Left, makes a powerful case that the machines were not the problem. In fact, it appears that ballot design was the main problem, a problem which both could and should have been identified (by Democrats) before the election.

You can read Jeralyn's column here and a follow-up here

Innocent Victims

I've excerpted Gideon Levy's articles many times before. Levy is an exceptionally courageous Israeli journalist who contributes regularly to the major newspaper Haaretz. He often takes dangerous trips into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in order to report first-hand on the awful, purportedly unintended results of IDF strikes.

The Israeli leadership argues that the frequent and deadly strikes are necessary to counter the Qassam (or Kassam) missile attacks launched from those territories. But the results are appallingly disproportionate. Norman Finklestein, an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, summed it up this way in June:

Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005 ‘til today, the estimates run between 7,000 and 9,000 heavy artillery shells have been shot and fired into Gaza. On the Palestinian side, the estimates are approximately 1,000 Kassam missiles, crude missiles, have been fired into Israel. So we have a ratio of between seven and nine to one.

Let's look at casualties. In the last six months, approximately 80 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza due to Israel artillery firing. Now, on the Israeli side, we hear all of these terrible things about these Kassams. Even Shlomo Ben-Ami, yesterday on your program, who I respect, he said what's Israel to do about these Kassams? What does the record show? I mentioned a moment ago, 80 Palestinians killed in six months. There have been exactly eight Israelis killed in the last five years from the Kassam missiles.

Many more innocent Palestinians have been killed since that time (over 20 in recent weeks), so the ratio has become even more extreme.

Yesterday, Levy wrote about the under-reported death of a Palestinian kindergarten teacher, and the resulting traumatization of her young pupils.

The kindergarten teacher is lying on a stretcher, covered with blood. The minibus is parked alongside. From somewhere to the left, the army cannon is firing shells. The children are lying on the ground next to one another. That is how one of the children described the morning when they were driving to their kindergarten in Beit Lahia and an Israel Defense Forces shell or missile - the army spokesman refuses to say - exploded several meters away and mortally wounded the teacher before their eyes.

Two high school-students on their way to school, Ramzi al-Sharafi, 15 and Mohammad Ashour, 16, were killed in the bombing. And this week the children of the Indira Gandhi kindergarten buried their teacher, Najwa - which means "prayer" in Arabic - the mother of two toddlers, who lay in a coma for about two weeks in Gaza's Shifa Hospital.

Almost nothing was written in Israel about the shelling of the minibus carrying 20 youngsters. It happened two days before the shelling that killed 22 residents of neighboring Beit Hanun, at the height of Operation Autumn Clouds. By a miracle the missile/shell did not hit the minibus directly, but landed at a distance of 15 meters from it.

The traumatized children from the kindergarten have not recovered. This week they marched, bearing wreaths and signs they had drawn in memory of their beloved teacher, in the mourning procession to Najwa Khalif's home; the adults interred her in the Beit Lahia cemetery.

Levy's full piece can be found here

The Wisdom of James Baker

While there may be a a smattering of truth to the notion that the James Baker-led Iraq Study Group will contribute wisdom and maturity to the debate on how the U.S. should extricate itself from the quagmire, it's a bit like arguing that drinking Coca Cola is healthy when antifreeze is the only alternative.

The mainstream media has predictably embraced that questionable notion, but those who delve beneath the surface often arrive at different conclusions. Here's Christopher Hitchens' take:

In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let's give Baker his due—"on side." The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to "address the root cause" and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the "root causes" of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.

Hitchens' full post at Slate.com

Lebanon: the latest of Bush's Policy disasters

Juan Cole spells it out:

The assassination of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel on Tuesday has thrown that country further into yet more turmoil.

The crisis is a further testament to the bankruptcy of George W. Bush's Middle East policy. Under the dishonest rhetoric of 'democratization,' what Bush has really been about is creating pro-American winners and anti-American losers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Bush's vision is not democratic because he always installs a tyranny of the majority. The vanquished are to be crushed and ridiculed, the victors to exult in their triumph. It is like a Leni Riefenstahl film.

The problem is that when you crush the Pushtuns of Afghanistan, who traditionally ruled the country, they have means of hitting back (ask the Canadian troops in Qandahar). When you crush the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who had traditionally ruled Iraq, they have ways of organizing a guerrilla movement and acting as spoilers of Bush's new Kurdish-Shiite axis in Baghdad. When you crush Hamas even after they won the elections in early 2006, they have means of continuing to struggle.

In Lebanon, Bush egged on the pro-Hariri movement against the Syrians and their allies. Then he egged on Israel to bomb the Shiites of southern Lebanon (and, mysteriously, the rest of Lebanon, too). So he tried to create the March 14th alliance around Hariri as the winners who take all in Lebanon.

So obviously there will be trouble about this. Everything Bush touches turns to ashes, bombings, assassinations. He doesn't know how to compromise and he doesn't know how to influence his neo-colonial possessions so that they can compromise.

Cole's full piece

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