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Archive: POLITICS

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Bacevich Answers (and Asks) Questions

Guernica: A point that you’ve repeatedly made is that a key moment on our path to permanent war was when Nixon ditched the draft in the nineteen seventies because it disengaged most Americans from wars fought in their name.

Andrew Bacevich: Yes, the abandonment of the draft and the concept of the citizen-soldier—as well as the refusal of the present generation to pay for wars. We don’t serve and we won’t pay: these two factors together have created circumstances in which Washington has acquired ever greater latitude in terms of deciding when and where to send the army. To state the matter starkly, it’s no longer America’s army, it’s now Washington’s.

Guernica: You’ve also said that Americans don’t really support the troops; they give lip service to it, affix stickers to the backs of their cars, but not much more. Politicians, too, pay soldiers meager wages, overextend them, and don’t take care of them when they return with mental or physical disabilities. Yet politicians invariably laud the troops as our “best and brightest.”

Andrew Bacevich: From one perspective, of course, it’s entirely appropriate to laud the troops. Whether the wars make sense or not, our soldiers choose to serve and make very considerable sacrifices. That is tremendously admirable. The problem is that we believe that simply saying nice words suffices to acquit our own obligation. The ongoing cost of American wars since 9/11 comes to about four hundred billion dollars per year; those are just war costs, not the Pentagon’s full budget. If you divided that by the number of taxpaying households, the result is approximately three thousand dollars per household. So if we were to pay for our current wars, the average household tax bill would go up by some three thousand dollars per year. If our government told us we needed to pay another three thousand dollars per year, the American people would be instantly reengaged with the wars undertaken in their name. Yet we know the cost is being passed to future generations. That we view that as acceptable is as irresponsible and immoral as imposing the burden of service and sacrifice on such a small minority. The politicians bear considerable responsibility. But we are also complicit.

Guernica: One reason we are complicit, though, is because we’ve been repeatedly told that these wars are necessary.

Andrew Bacevich: Part of the argument of my book is that they’ve convinced us that there is no alternative to the national security consensus to which we have adhered.

Guernica: You say that Washington repeatedly tells us that the only alternative would be “isolation and catastrophe.”

Andrew Bacevich: Anybody who questions our militarized approach to global leadership is immediately labeled an isolationist—as if there were no alternatives between global militarism and pulling up the drawbridges and turning inward. There are all kinds of alternatives. Where we the people have fallen down—and where the media have fallen down and where the people who write books have fallen down—is in failing to articulate those alternatives so that the national security debate could be richer. Because there really is no national security debate.

Guernica: That debate I presume should include discussing how our actions abroad lead to some of these disasters.

Andrew Bacevich: Absolutely. Let’s take the case of the wars that followed 9/11. Washington is absolutely committed to the proposition that 9/11 came out of the blue. There’s no historical context. Because if you insist that there ought to be some historical explanation for 9/11—which is different from saying that there is a justification for 9/11; there cannot be a justification—and you look for the historical roots of that heinous act, then you necessarily confront questions about U.S. policy in the Islamic world. For instance, viewed in the context of the Cold War, U.S. support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the nineteen eighties to try to eject the Soviets looks like genius. But in a post-9/11 context U.S. involvement in Afghanistan looks quite different. And then there’s Saddam Hussein. Americans discovered Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Well, the U.S. had forged a partnership with him during the nineteen eighties because it was convenient to support him against the Islamic Republic of Iran. But why was Iran hostile to the U.S.? Is it possible that it had something to do with U.S. involvement in overthrowing [Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad] Mossadegh back in 1953 and then supporting the regime of the Shah for twenty-five years? The story is a complicated one. And to tell that story necessarily calls into question the national security consensus to which we continue to adhere. But Washington doesn’t want those questions raised. And I’m sorry to say Americans are quick to defer to Washington on these matters.

much more insight from Jake Whitney's interview in Guernica

Scientists, Secrets and Wall Street's Lost $4 Trillion

Thanks to an ever growing influx of Ph.D.s from the Ivies and an insatiable demand for an algorithmic trading edge by secretive hedge funds and proprietary trading desks at the largest firms, Wall Street has become part physics lab, part casino, part black hole.

What Wall Street bears no relationship to any longer is its primary mission in the U.S. economy: to be a fair and efficient allocator of capital to worthy businesses and innovators to propel job growth while also providing a medium for allowing investors to buy or sell stocks and bonds of those businesses at a fair price.

Stock brokers who previously scoured over annual reports and price to earnings multiples and bond prospectuses to build individualized portfolios for clients based on the client’s investment time horizon and comfort level with risk are so yesterday. The big firms lean on their brokers to turn their clients’ money over to impersonal “money managers” who use incomprehensible computerized risk modeling to manage the life savings of people they’ve never met. The business motivation for this was that the earnings of the big firms would not be dependent on the brokers’ inconsistent commission streams from trading by replacing them with a steady annual stream of money management fees. These huge pools of consolidated money have now joined the huge pools of hedge fund and proprietary trading monies, leaving small investors at the mercy of giant “pools,” the exact same word that dominated investigations after the 1929 crash. (Those intensive Senate investigations of the early 30s that turned up corruption at the highest echelons of Wall Street are also so yesterday.)

Taking the human relationship, and human brain, out of investing for others and turning it over to computer formulas has produced stark results: a lost decade of retirement savings for most Americans; a multi-trillion dollar collapse of the financial system; a taxpayer bailout of the most incompetent and negligent firms in finance; the greatest wealth transfer to the top 1 percent in the history of the country -- which has contributed to 43.6 million people in America, including one in every five children, living below the poverty level.

And despite all this, Wall Street’s top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), continues to treat Wall Street as an overly rambunctious adolescent that needs merely a little slap on the wrist from time to time.

much more from Pam Martens at Counterpunch

Concept and Contempt

IN THE main thoroughfare, beneath my window, there was absolute silence. Not a single vehicle was moving.

We were sunk in conversation with a friend of ours, when something unbelievable happened.

The air-raid sirens started to wail.

Within minutes, cars started to race down the street at a crazy speed, men were leaving their houses in haste, wearing their reserve uniforms, bearing backpacks.

The radio, which had been silent, as usual on this day, woke to sudden life.
A war had broken out. The Egyptians and the Syrians had launched an attack on Israel.

Yom Kippur, by far the holiest day of Judaism, 37 years ago today (according to the Hebrew calendar).

SINCE THEN, on every Yom Kippur we remember that fateful day. Impossible not to. It was a watershed in our life and in the history of Israel, a formative event for the entire Semitic region.

Today, as on every Yom Kippur since, the quiet, the silence in the streets, encourages us to think. As a witness, I have the urge to testify.

What was the impact of that war on us?

The first thing to be said: It was a superfluous war.

That is not, of course, something extraordinary. But for a few exceptions, such as World War II (and perhaps our 1948 war), every war was “superfluous”. World War I, that orgy of death and destruction, was completely superfluous. Until today, historians try to find a logical reason for its outbreak. The motives of all parties were dwarfed by the consequences.

Well before the Yom Kippur war, the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, was ready to make peace with Israel. Reliable mediators did convey this to the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir. She ignored the information with contempt.

Before the sudden death of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, Sadat’s predecessor, credible information reached Israel about Egypt’s readiness to make peace in return for the Egyptian territories that were conquered in the 1967 war. I myself brought such a message to Pinhas Sapir, after Nasser had revealed his thoughts to my friend, the French journalist Eric Rouleau, in an off-the-record conversation. Rouleau permitted me to transmit the information in secret to the Israeli government. Sapir, at the time the most important minister and the real boss of the Labor Party, treated the information with complete lack of interest. My legal advisor, Amnon Zichroni, who was accompanying me to the meeting, was as stunned as I. I assume that I was not the only one who conveyed messages.

Some months before the war, I met with some Egyptians close to their country’s leadership. Following these conversations, I made a speech in the Knesset warning that, unless we immediately started a peace initiative that would return the Suez canal and Sinai to the Egyptians, they would attack, even without any chance of winning. The Knesset did not listen.

After the war I accused Golda Meir publicly of the murder of 2700 young Israelis and an untold number of young Egyptians and Syrians. Golda, a person with frighteningly narrow horizons, shrugged it off and lived to the end of her days with a clear conscience.
IN THE first hours of the war, the Egyptians astounded the world when they succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal – a formidable water obstacle – and breaking the Bar Lev line, the pride of the Israeli army.

It was one of the great surprise victories in the annals of war. In spite of the difference in dimensions, some compare it to the start of Operation Barbarossa (the German attack on the Soviet Union) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (the Japanese attack on the US).
How was such a surprise possible? After all, the Egyptian army had to concentrate its forces and arrive at the starting positions without being detected. The area between Cairo and the canal is completely bare.

After the war, Dado invited me to his home and let me have a look at the files. Dado – Chief of Staff General David Elazar – was forced out of the army on the morrow of the war because of his responsibility for the “Omission” (the decision not to mobilize the reserves and move the tanks on the eve of the war). I was a friendly magazine editor, and Dado wanted to convince me of his innocence. The files showed that Army Intelligence had all the necessary information – and far more – about the Egyptian preparations for the attack.

For example, an intercepted order by a mufti (Muslim chaplain) of a brigade to break the Ramadan fast, one of the most important Muslim commandments, and start eating at acertain hour.

An intercepted communication by an Egyptian wireless operator to his brother, a wireless operator in another unit, which included the Muslim prayer before facing death.

An intercepted message of a shore station to the submarines at sea to break off all radio communications at a certain time.

And so forth, a wealth of intelligence. According to Dado, nothing of this reached him, the Chief of Staff. The chief of the army Intelligence department, Eli Zeira, suppressed it all.

Why? Zeira, a person endowed with a lot of self-confidence, was the prisoner of a “concept”: that the Egyptians would never attack without air superiority. But this does not really explain the magnitude of the Omission. Nor do the sophisticated Egyptian attempts at deception. The reason is much more profound: contempt for the Arabs.

THIS CONTEMPT is one of the curses of the state, and it accompanies us (Jewish) Israelis until this very day.

more from Yves Smith

The "the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan"

On October 29th, 2004, Osama bin Laden released a video addressing the American people, and the world, as part of his series of fatwas and statements.

Among the things he said (italics for emphasis are mine):

[...] All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the Mujahedin bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.

Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah. That being said, those who say that al Qaeda has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that al Qaeda is the sole factor in achieving these spectacular gains. Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations -- whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction -- has helped al Qaeda to achieve these enormous results.

And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States even if the intentions differ.

And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (when they pointed out that) for example, al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America in the incident and its aftermath lost-according to the lowest estimate-more than 500 billion dollars, meaning that every dollar of al-Qa'ida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record, astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahedin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan with Allah's permission.

It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind will be convinced.

And it shows that the real loser is ... you. It's the American people and their economy.

Gary Farber, at Obsidian Wings

Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.

And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God – "to turn America into a shadow of itself", as he told me in 1997 – and Bush prayed to God and Blair prayed – and prays – to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of Western soldiers and Dr (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may be 50, since all statistics are hard to come by in the "war on terror") pray to God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers as he always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words attributed to him by a poet of another generation: "God this, God that, and God the other thing. 'Good God,' said God, 'I've got my work cut out'." And that was just the First World War...

Just five years ago – on the fourth anniversary of the twin towers/Pentagon/Pennsylvania attacks – a schoolgirl asked me at a lecture in a Belfast church whether the Middle East would benefit from more religion. No – less religion! – I howled back. God is good for contemplation, not for war. But – and here we are driven on to the reefs and hidden rocks which our leaders wish us to ignore, forget and cast aside – this whole bloody mess involves the Middle East; it is about a Muslim people who have kept their faith while those Westerners who dominate them – militarily, economically, culturally, socially – have lost theirs. How can this be, Muslims ask? Indeed, it is a superb irony that the Rev Jones is a believer while the rest of us – by and large – are not. Hence our books and our documentaries never refer to Muslims vs Christians, but Muslims versus "The West".

And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak – Israel's relationship with America, and America's unconditional support for Israel's theft of land from Muslim Arabs – also lies at the heart of this terrible crisis in our lives. In yesterday's edition of The Independent, there was a photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting "death to America". But in the background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner with a message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said was: "The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western leaders who are indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again celebrating the new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians."

The message is as extreme as it is vicious – but it proves, yet again, that the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and "Palestine". We may prefer to ignore this in "the West" – where Muslims supposedly "hate us for what we are" or "hate our democracy" (see: Bush, Blair and a host of other mendacious politicians) – but this great conflict lies at the heart of the "war on terror". That is why the equally vicious Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the atrocities of 9/11 by claiming that the event would be good for Israel. Israel would now be able to claim that it, too, was fighting the "war on terror", that Arafat – this was the now-comatose Ariel Sharon's claim – is "our Bin Laden". And thus Israelis had the gall to claim that Sderot, under its cascade of tin-pot missiles from Hamas, was "our ground zero".

It was not. Israel's battle with the Palestinians is a ghastly caricature of our "war on terror", in which we are supposed to support the last colonial project on earth – and accept its thousands of victims – because the twin towers and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked by 19 Arab murderers nine years ago. There is a supreme irony in the fact that one direct result of 9/11 has been the stream of Western policemen and spooks who have travelled to Israel to improve their "anti-terrorist expertise" with the help of Israeli officers who may – according to the United Nations – be war criminals. It was no surprise to find that the heroes who gunned down poor old Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube in 2005 had been receiving "anti-terrorist" advice from the Israelis.

more from Robert Fisk in The Independent (UK)

Dangerous Economic Misconceptions

For many years, economics in the U.S. has been approached with a ‘game show’ mentality. Wild and backwards speculations on financial growth have become the norm. The daily ‘Wall Street Journal’ and ‘Washington Post’ musings of international bankers and their servile lackeys are treated as divination, rather than the bamboozle they actually signify. If you play along and contribute to the mechanics of the great casino, then you are treated as a “serious” economist or analyst, regardless of how many times your advice has been completely off the mark, or how many middle-class nest eggs you destroyed in the process. If you question the conclusions of the pundits and talking heads, or, God forbid, question the validity of the system itself, you are immediately marginalized as a “kook” or “conspiracy theorist”. The workings of the mainstream financial world are more inbred than Hollywood and Washington D.C. combined.

Cable news providers like MSNBC and CNN have set the American people up for fall after fall; sometimes because they were blinded by their own bells and whistles, sometimes because they deliberately and blatantly lied in order to create engineered market sentiment. In the wake of the initial credit market collapse of 2008, these people, who didn’t see it coming and denied it was happening, still have their jobs, still have their TV shows and news columns, and, are still generally blowing smoke up our posteriors.

It’s not that the inhabitants of this country continue to trust the MSM (some do; seniors on prescription medication, yuppies on prescription medication, ignorant day traders who are often self-medicated, etc.), it’s just that the well established opposing views and arguments we in the Liberty Movement are exposed to by honest alternative news sources have not been properly presented in a forum that is widely visible to the average citizen. When was the last time you saw a Ron Paul, a Peter Schiff, a Gerald Celente, or a Max Keiser, etc. on a MSM financial program for any longer than ten minutes? When have we ever seen the opposing view given respectful consideration in a fairly moderated debate? Would any high level ghoul from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or the private Federal Reserve, submit to an unbiased hour long televised discussion with any analyst from our side of the line?

On the few occasions in which Ben Bernanke was cornered in the highly controlled environment of Congressional hearings, he was either completely unable or unwilling to give a coherent response of any substance to the questions of Ron Paul. Anytime these men are taken out of the protective element of the worshipful MSM shell and actually challenged, their arguments fall apart.

In some fields of research, dishonesty and misconceptions can cost lives. In economics, dishonesty and misconceptions can cost MILLIONS of lives. Mainstream financial analysts (and the MSM in general) have lost all sense of responsibility for what they do, and thus, continue to put our society at risk and continue to lose vaster portions of their audience year after year. The problem is that the vacuum left behind by this mass exodus from the MSM has not yet been correctly filled with principled alternative news providers. We are growing everyday, but the information void is still ever present, and the memory hole continues to be exploited by global bankers. Some people don’t know where to turn, and have instead given up on looking for the truth altogether.

My only option has been to continue drilling away at the root points of disinformation, along with many other uncompromised researchers, and hope that consistency and perseverance win the day by accumulation and attrition.

With that strategy in mind, we will now examine the instabilities behind our current recession/depression. We will then follow by deconstructing the most prominent economic misconceptions surrounding them (often perpetuated by the MSM), along with those misconceptions you will probably hear in the near future…

much more (that you won't read or hear about in the mainstream media) from Giordano Bruno

Two Minutes to Midnight?

America's march to a disastrous war in Iraq began in the media, where an unprovoked U.S. invasion of an Arab country was introduced as a legitimate policy option, then debated as a prudent and necessary one. Now, a similarly flawed media conversation on Iran is gaining momentum.

Last month, TIME's Joe Klein warned that Obama administration sources had told him bombing Iran's nuclear facilities was "back on the table." In an interview with CNN, former CIA director Admiral Mike Hayden next spoke of an "inexorable" dynamic toward confrontation, claiming that bombing was a more viable option for the Obama administration than it had been for George W. Bush. The pièce de résistance in the most recent drum roll of bomb-Iran alerts, however, came from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly. A journalist influential in U.S. pro-Israeli circles, he also has access to Israel’s corridors of power. Because sanctions were unlikely to force Iran to back down on its uranium enrichment project, Goldberg invited readers to believe that there was a more than even chance Israel would launch a military strike on the country by next summer.

His piece, which sparked considerable debate in both the blogosphere and the traditional media, was certainly an odd one. After all, despite the dramatics he deployed, including vivid descriptions of the Israeli battle plan, and his tendency to paint Iran as a new Auschwitz, he also made clear that many of his top Israeli sources simply didn’t believe Iran would launch nuclear weapons against Israel, even if it acquired them.

Nonetheless, Goldberg warned, absent an Iranian white flag soon, Israel would indeed launch that war in summer 2011, and it, in turn, was guaranteed to plunge the region into chaos. The message: the Obama administration better do more to confront Iran or Israel will act crazy.

It's not lost on many of his progressive critics that, when it came to supporting a prospective invasion of Iraq back in 2002, Goldberg proved effective in lobbying liberal America, especially through his reports of "evidence" linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Then and now, he presents himself as an interlocutor who has no point of view. In his most recent Atlantic piece, he professed a "profound, paralyzing ambivalence" on the question of a military strike on Iran and subsequently, in radio interviews, claimed to be "personally opposed" to military action.

His piece, however, conveniently skipped over the obvious inconsistencies in what his Israeli sources were telling him. In addition, he excluded perspectives from Israeli leaders that might have challenged his narrative in which an embattled Jewish state feels it has no alternative but to launch a quixotic military strike. Such an attack, as he presented it, would have limited hope of doing more than briefly setting back the Iranian nuclear program, perhaps at catastrophic cost, and so Israeli leaders would act only because they believe the "goyim" won't stop another Auschwitz. Or as my friend Paul Woodward, editor of the War in Context website, so brilliantly summed up the Israeli message to America: "You must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will."

more from Tony Karon at TomDispatch

Lessons from the Weimar Republic

I decided to become a political scientist in the spring of 1976, while I was attending the Stanford-in-Berlin overseas study program. I had already declared an International Relations major, but was trying to decide between going to law school (the supposedly safe option) or pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science (looked risky). While in Berlin, I took Professor Gordon Craig's course on German history, and one lecture -- on the role of intellectuals in the Weimar Republic -- finally tipped the balance for me.

In that particular class, Craig argued that one of the many forces that doomed the Weimar Republic was the irresponsible behavior of both left-wing and right-wing intellectuals. The German left was contemptuous of the liberal aspirations of the Weimar Constitution and other bourgeois features of Weimar society, while right-wing "thinkers" like Ernst Junger glorified violence and disparaged the application of reason to political issues. So-called "liberal" intellectuals saw politics as a grubby business unworthy of their refined sensibilities, and so many just disengaged from politics entirely. This left the field to rabble-rousers and extremists of various sorts and helped prepare the ground for Nazism. (You can read Craig's account of this process in his book Germany 1866-1945, chapter 13, on "Weimar Culture").

The lesson I took from Craig's lecture was that when intellectuals abandon liberal principles, disengage from politics, and generally abdicate their role as "truth-tellers" for society at large, it is easy for demagogues to play upon human fears and lead a society over the brink to disaster. So I decided to forego a legal career and get a Ph.D. instead, hoping in some way to contribute to more reasonable discourse about issues of war, peace, and politics.

more from Stephen Walt at ForeignPolicy.com

The "Mosque" debate from a national SecuritY Perspective

The furor over the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero makes me think back to one of the most important lessons I learned from al Qaeda terrorists I interrogated--that they have a warped view of America. To them--and this they get from Osama Bin Laden's rhetoric--the U.S. is a country at war with Islam and Muslims, and so they had a duty to fight us.

While I was serving on the frontlines I found that this distorted view of America was common among ordinary Muslims too, and it was only by correcting this image did we encourage locals to help our investigations and turn against al Qaeda. Our efforts were helped by public statements, like from President Bush in the days after 9/11, declaring that America was at war with al Qaeda and not with Islam. I was in Sana, Yemen, on that day, and I remember our military and law enforcement group feeling encouraged that our leadership understood how to frame our battle.

But while we started off on the right note in dealing with the Muslim world, our leadership soon demonstrated that they failed to understand that our war against al Qaeda was not just a military fight, but an asymmetrical battle for the proverbial hearts and minds of Muslims across the world too. We should have been highlighting that al Qaeda has killed thousands of Muslims and blown up dozens of mosques around the world. But instead we failed to appreciate the importance of rebutting al Qaeda's propaganda and of turning ordinary Muslims against the terror network.

When we eventually did this, we had great successes. As commander in Iraq Gen. Petraeus reached out to local Sunni groups and convinced them that al Qaeda was their enemy and America their friend. That led to a remarkable turnaround in our fortunes in Iraq. He is now trying to do the same in Afghanistan. Just this weekend Meet the Press reported that when Gen. Petraeus learned that the Taliban attacked a mosque near the border with Pakistan, he ordered it to be publicized among the local population.

There are many reasons for supporting the Muslim community's right to build a cultural center and mosque on private property, not least of all the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion. But from a national security perspective, our leaders need to understand that no one is likely to be happier with the opposition to building a mosque than Osama Bin Laden. His next video script has just written itself.

more from former F.B.I. supervisory special agent Ali Soufan at Forbes.com

Stephan Walt on the Cordoba House Issue

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going on here: All you really need to do is look at how the critics of the community center project keep describing it. In their rhetoric it is always the "Mosque at Ground Zero," a label that conjures up mental images of a soaring minaret on the site of the 9/11 attacks. Never mind that the building in question isn't primarily a mosque (it's a community center that will house an array of activities, including a gym, pool, auditorium, and oh yes, a prayer room). Never mind that it isn't at "Ground Zero": it's two blocks away and will not even be visible from the site. (And exactly why does it matter if it was?) You know that someone is engaged in demagoguery when they keep using demonstrably false but alarmist phrases over and over again.

What I don't understand is why critics of this project don't realize where this form of intolerance can lead. As a host of commentators have already noted, critics of the project are in effect holding American Muslims -- and in this particular case, a moderate Muslim cleric who has been a noted advocate of inter-faith tolerance -- responsible for a heinous act that they did not commit and that they have repeatedly condemned. It is view of surpassing ignorance, and precisely the same sort of prejudice that was once practiced against Catholics, against Jews, and against any number of other religious minorities. Virtually all religious traditions have committed violent and unseemly acts in recent memory, and we would not hold Protestants, Catholics, or Jews responsible for the heinous acts of a few of their adherents.

And don't these critics realize that religious intolerance is a monster that, once unleashed, may be impossible to control? If you can rally the mob against any religious minority now, then you may make it easier for someone else to rally a different mob against you should the balance of political power change at some point down the road.

Critics of the proposal are aware that their views contradict the principle of religious tolerance on which the United States was founded, so they have fallen back on the idea that building the community center here is "insensitive" to the families who lost loved ones back in 2001. (Presumably it's not "insensitive" that the same neighborhood contains strip clubs, bars, and all sorts of less-than sacred institutions). And notice the sleight-of-hand here: first, demogogues raise an uproar about a "Mosque at Ground Zero," thereby generating a lot of public outcry, and then defend this bigotry by saying that they're just trying to be "sensitive" to the objections they have helped to stir up.

more at ForeignPolicy.com

Andrew Bacevich

We persist in thinking that we can have what we want with somebody else footing the bill. We now live in a time in which war has become, in effect, a normal condition for the United States and yet we refuse to pay for the wars. So, on the one hand, these military adventures are said to be of extraordinary importance and, on the other hand, we pass off the responsibility for paying the bills to some future generation which will have had nothing to do with starting the wars. That, I think, is deeply irresponsible - and, in a very fundamental way, it's also simply immoral.

I think that we are also unserious in our willingness to really take stock of what our emphasis on military power has accomplished. One of the most commonplace aspects of our politics today revolves around widely shared respect for the American soldier and, by extension, for the American military. Now, I certainly have no problem with respecting the service and sacrifice of the American soldiers. But those expressions of support create obstacles to examining seriously what our emphasis on military power has wrought and from my point of view - especially in the period since the end of the Cold War when we have, under both Democrats and Republicans, engaged in a large number of military interventions abroad - taken together, all that military activity is not making us safer, is not making us stronger, is not making us richer. Indeed, I would say that, on balance, just the opposite is the case: we are creating instability, we are inciting greater anti-Americanism and we are rapidly depleting our wealth with minimal gain in return.

much more of interest on American militarism in an interview of former Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich at truthout.org

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