Survival Versus Doom

From the redoubtable Naomi Klein today:

Here’s a snapshot of what could be in store in the not-too-distant future: helicopter rides off of rooftops in flooded cities ($5,000 a pop, $7,000 for families, pets included), bottled water and “meals ready to eat” ($50 per person, steep, but that’s supply and demand) and a cot in a shelter with a portable shower (show us your biometric ID — developed on a lucrative Homeland Security contract — and we’ll track you down later with the bill. Don’t worry, we have ways: spying has been outsourced too)….The model, of course, is the U.S. healthcare system….One year ago, New Orleans’ working-class and poor citizens were stranded on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, while those who could pay their way escaped to safety. The country’s political leaders claim it was all some terrible mistake, a breakdown in communication that is being fixed. Their solution is to go even further down the catastrophic road of “private-sector solutions.”

…at “the truly amazing story of two U.S. citizens — a 45-year old resident of the San Francisco area and his 18-year old son — who, after travelling to Pakistan, have been barred by the Bush administration from re-entering the country. They have not been charged with any crime, and no court has ordered or even authorized this denial of entry. The administration is just unilaterally prohibiting these two Americans from re-entering their country.” From the San Francisco Chronicle via Glenn Greenwald, constitutional lawyer and author of How Would A Patriot Act?.

Israel has appointed a top general to oversee a war against Iran, prompting speculation that it is preparing for possible military action against Teheran’s nuclear program.

Uri Avnery, former Israeli soldier, member of the knesset (Israel’s parliament), and founder of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, writes:

Of all that has been said about the Second Lebanon War, these [in the headline above] are perhaps the most important words.

The main product of this war is hatred. The pictures of death and destruction in Lebanon entered every Arab home, indeed every Muslim home, from Indonesia to Morocco, from Yemen to the Muslim ghettos in London and Berlin. Not for an hour, not for a day, but for 33 successive days - day after day, hour after hour.

Read the article here.

By RAY CLOSE, Former CIA analyst

This article does not discuss the long-standing and recently reiterated Iranian offer to negotiate regarding its uranium enrichment plans as part of a general settlement in which it will not face the threat of externally imposed regime change. See here and here and here.

“Like many people, I find it extremely difficult to believe that President Bush could actually do anything so crazy as to launch a military attack against Iran, and that even if he wanted to, the Congress, the Pentagon, and the American public would ever countenance such action. But I remember in the spring of 2002 writing a ‘Dear Friends’ memo just like this one predicting that the apparent intentions of the Bush Administration to invade Iraq would certainly turn out to be nothing but a bluff, and supporting that assertion by listing all the reasons why actually doing so would lead to utter disaster….Today the downside risks of attacking Iran seem even more horrendous —- and yet?”

You can read the article here.

The Israeli right, according to Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz columnist. (See Survival Versus Doom Editorial August 15.)

Probably not, unless you’re rich. (That’s the conclusion of the incomparable Barbara Ehrenreich, who now authors a blog.)

Yes! In fact, “It’s a hell of a hoot!”
  Lt. Gen. James Mattis, USMC

Who is General Mattis? The low point of his career may have been his (retroactive) sanction of the 2004 bombing of a building in Iraq at which a wedding was being held, killing 40 people. In a terrific article about How Massacres Become the Norm by one of the last “unembedded” reporters in Iraq, Dahr Jamail quotes General Mattis’s apparently preposterous defense of the atrocity, and his deathless insight, “… bad things happen in wars.” Could anyone have said it better?

These incidents have not hurt his career. He was recently appointed top Marine General in Iraq. And now…

According to what appears to be an excellent summary of the coverup of the Haditha massacre last November, a New York Times article, Marines May Have Excised Evidence on 24 Iraqi Deaths, reports, “A high-level military investigation into the killings of 24 Iraqis in Haditha last November has uncovered instances in which American marines involved in the episode appear to have destroyed or withheld evidence, according to two Defense Department officials briefed on the case…. The decision about whether to take disciplinary action will be made by Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis…”

Antidotes to the Above:

General David Shoup, Medal of Honor winner, and Commandant of the Marine Corps during the early years of the Vietnam War, told a college audience in 1966 (just as the antiwar movement was gaining strength):

I don’t think the whole of Southeast Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life or limb of a single American [and] I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty bloody dollar crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for. And if, unfortunately, their revolution must be of the violent type…at least what they get will be their own and not the American style, which they don’t want…crammed down their throat.”

And this from a speech delivered in 1933, by two time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Major General Smedley Butler, USMC:

There are only two things we should fight for. . . . . . the defense of our homes and . . .the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. I spent thirty- three years. . . .in active military service . . . I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.. . . I helped make Mexico,. . . safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank . . . .. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for . . . Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 . I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar . . . . in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. . . . . I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

“Having raised the earth’s temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last three decades, we’re facing another increase of 4 degrees over the next century. That would imply changes that constitute practically a different planet. It’s not something we can adapt to. We can’t let it go on another 10 years like this.”

Jim Hansen, the director of NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (speaking to the Washington Post about how NASA’s computer models are predicting the quick progression of global climate change.)

Hansen was pressured by political appointees at NASA to shut up about global warming.

From Agence France Presse:

A Quarter Million Refugees,
Not from a Pacific Island,
But in the World’s Richest Country

From Jonathan Swartz:

This has been zipping about, but if you haven’t seen it already, don’t miss the take of former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan on the latest terror plot. (Murray was fired by the British Foreign Office for criticizing Uzbekistan’s routine torture, thereby mucking up England’s highly moral and extremely rational foreign policy.)

“I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

“So this, I believe, is the true story…”

The rest.

Mark Twain?

Without some qualification, all of this talk –left, right, and center– about Israel “losing” the war, and Hezbollah “winning,” is dangerously misleading, as such talk and such half-truths usually are. With the sights of the United States –i.e. Dick Cheney and Company– and Israel set on Iran, the Lebanon War will facilitate the larger war, unsatisfactory as the outcome otherwise so far has been for the home teams. The “Doomer Council” (see the next post) is right about that.

Update: See Who Won?, the August 21 entry, and the linked article in Ha’aretz by Gideon Levy.

Seymour Hersh provides grim details regarding the U.S. (Cheney) and Israel joint planning of the war on Lebanon and Iran, and on opposition to it, and to making it nuclear, from senior American officers, god bless ‘em.

It appears (at least to some on the Right Wing) that George Bush is a sissy. “We Lost! They won! And it’s HIS FAULT! He promised us Iran and he couldn’t batter his way accross the street! In 2008 may the Lord send us a real War President.”

That’s the gist of the word going around among some Berserkers. But these defeatists are themselves forgetting the President’s message that in the past they never let anyone forget: “In a time of war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail.”

From the Doomer Council:

Rome Wasn’t Destroyed in a Day

“We value the contribution of the Berserkers, even when they are wrong. True Doomers have every confidence that Vice President Cheney and George will do what has to be done. Berserkers should keep the pressure on. But Doomers must understand:

“In all likelihood, the Lebanon war is just getting started.

“Just as the Iraq War just got started after ‘major hostilities’ ended.

“The Lebanon opener paves the way for war on Iran, even with the Hezbollah ‘deterrent’ still in place.

“For example by providing an opportunity for Mossad and the CIA to discover that the Iranians (and the Syrians) will be arming Hezbollah–very possibly with WMD’s.

“You want Iran? Relax. It will happen. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. Meanwhile, Berserkers–keep up the good work!”

Lex Luthor, The Joker, Sivanna, Dr. Doom

“It’s not happening. . . . How can I say that? Look. . . . Would a Jew commit war crimes? Of course not. Not a real Jew. That war can’t be happening.” (There’s more by “The Last Jew” under his own heading in the left column.)

William S. Lind: “In the long term Israel’s existence depends on arriving at some sort of modus vivendi with the region. The replacement of Mubarak, King Abdullah, and the House of Saud with the Muslim Brotherhood would make that possibility fade.”

Richard Holbrooke, a leading candidate to become Secretary of State if the Democrats had taken office in 2000 or 2004, in “an uncharacteristically alarming column in Thursday’s Washington Post” called The Guns of August writes:

Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO’s own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.

The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to “prevent” a civil war that has already begun.

This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis…

Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman’s classic, “The Guns of August,” which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago — an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist — set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: “The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”

Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions.

Jim Lobe, of Inter Press Service, writes:

Since the outbreak of the Lebanon crisis four weeks ago, a succession of former top Republican policy-makers – including Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to former presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; the younger Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass – has called publicly for a major reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy and its conduct of the “global war on terror.”

Their common message is the necessity of pressing Israel for a quick ceasefire in Lebanon, engaging directly with Syria and Iran on both Lebanon and Iraq, and restarting a serious peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. It has been echoed by leading Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter; his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski; and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, as well as by Holbrooke himself.

Three takes on the London airplane bomb brouhaha:

Juan Cole: The failure of the Bush administration to take the threat of Bin Laden and Zawahiri seriously and to capture them continues to leave Americans and others at risk. That [Zawahiri] and Bin Laden can come on television and the internet and continue to encourage copycat al-Qaeda-style attacks is a huge security problem that needs to be solved much more urgently than the problem of which clans rule the small city of Ramadi in Iraq.”

Billmon: “…phony or not, today’s hysteria probably is an authentic glimpse at the shape of things to come. We’re going to have to get used to the idea of standing in two-hour lines at airport security and toting our carry-on items in clear plastic bags. But these inconveniences are absurdly insignificant compared to other risks we’ll face if we remain on the road we’re on — the one that leads to that clash of civilizations the uberhawks are clamoring for.”

Doomer pundit Lex Luthor: “Bravo Bush! Bravo Zawahiri! Bravo Olmert! At the time of 9/11, al Qaeda was an isolated band of Doomers, and America had the sympathy of the world. And Look at al Qaeda today! Still a small band of Doomers, but with an unlimited reservoir of sympathizers who can be called on to strike at America (and Israel) any way they can!” (Lex Luthor is a self-described advocate of doom, “perhaps the only one in the world,” he likes to say. In his forthcoming Clarification of the Doomer Mission, he writes, “Destroy the fabric of life on earth. And of civil society. By whatever means. In the most efficient way possible. The end justifies the means. Violence and doom are means AND end.”)

The idea of nuclear “deterrence” is that the threat of using your nuclear weapons if attacked will “deter” enemies from bombing you with theirs. It has worked (with some hair-raising near misses) for the nearly 60 years since the end of the U.S. nuclear monopoly, enabling the United States and the other nuclear powers to avoid nuclear war while holding onto their Bombs. But as senior Surviver scholar Gabriel Kolko argues, with the proliferation of the Bomb and of missile technology, the nature of the game is changing. The two nuclear powers who (unless there is a grand shift in policy) will be most at risk over the coming years? You guessed it. Israel and the United States.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hizbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel’s Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources.

Doomer pundit, Sivanna: “Yes!! If that’s not grounds for war on Iran, I don’t know what is! How much more of a case do you need! Nuke ‘em!!”

Nathan Gardels: Don’t the deaths of so many innocent civilians in Qana in the south of Lebanon — like the massacre in Haditha, Iraq, by American troops — send a message to Arabs and Iranians that the “new Middle East” coming from the U.S. and Israel will amount to occupation, carnage and bloodshed? Even Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize, told me recently that Iranians would rather suffer the mullahs for now than the horrors they see in Iraq.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: This is precisely why neocon policies are recklessly dangerous both to America and Israel.

From Billmon again:

If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America’s occupation of Iraq and Israel’s intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the [same war, i.e. the] next war….In other words…World War III …fought by people [at least the civilian leadership in Washington] who want to use tactical nuclear weapons….

The truth is that on the most important issue of our time — the cliff that drops into total darkness — the only real opposition left in this country is in the Pentagon, where, according to Sy Hersh, at least some of the generals are trying to stall the march to war. Plus whatever scattered resistance is left in the intelligence agencies following the purges of the past couple of years.

It is a stunning testament to the political devolution of this country that the most effective anti-war movement in America is inside the walls of the Pentagon or buried deep in the bowels of the CIA! But that is the reality…

After placing so much focus and hope on the next congressional and presidential elections to make things better, we see now that the Democrats are at one with the Administration in support of widening and strategically escalating THE war in the Middle East.

No less stunning is the needlessness and gross irrationality of making a target of Iran.

And it is likely to precipitate a military debacle. “For the United States now to oppose Sistani on the ceasefire call deeply endangers the U.S. troops and the British troops that are in Iraq. They are already facing a determined and fairly successful guerrilla movement among the Sunni Arab population. If the majority Shiites now become militantly anti-American and begin attacking the troops, they can cut off fuel to them, they can hit them, causing casualties. It can much worsen our already very bad situation.” (Juan Cole)

Of course, when violence is the first instinct and the faith, peaceful solutions are always perceived as “too risky,” but the overriding theme of Iranian diplomacy in recent years has been its call for a general settlement in the region with mutual recognition of internationally recognized borders, and it has clearly indicated its willingness to put its uranium enrichment program on the table. And if the U.S. army is unhappy with the status quo in Iraq (”General Abizaid said he expects Iraq to ‘move toward equilibrium . . . in the next five years‘”–emphasis added) what happens after a Shi’ite rising against it, to say nothing of Iranian intervention?

By Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, United States Air Force (Ret.), National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush:

TIME FOR A COMPREHENSIVE SETTLEMENT

From Democracy Now:

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller has retired from the Army. On Monday he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, one of the Army’s highest honors. Miller is the general who oversaw the interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. While at Guantanmo, Miller implemented a number of harsh interrogation tactics that included the use of dogs, the stripping of prisoners naked and the shackling of prisoners in stress positions to force them to talk. Such tactics later were used in Iraq [where Miller was transferred, becoming head of prison operations there]. Miller had originally tried to retire in February but he was denied his request because there were a series of investigations and courts-martial underway. Army experts say it now appears unlikely that Miller will face any disciplinary action in connection with the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.