Last week saw yet another "suspected" US missile strike in Pakistan. More than likely from a US unmanned Predator drone, the missile strike would be about the 38th since last August. Altogether, some 132 people have been killed in Pakistan by these attacks. And while the US, in a type of non-denial, denial, contends they are meant to "disrupt" Taliban and terror networks, they inevitably take the lives of civilians. In this case, while Western newspapers claimed anywhere from 1 to 10 "insurgents" had been killed, locals claimed "...three children lost their lives."
Begun by the Bush administration, these controversial (and illegal) acts of non-declared war have been resistant to any "change" brought about the new administration. A "hawk" on this issue, President Obama had asserted forcefully that he would use such measures since the campaign trail. It looks like he's making good on the threat. Meanwhile however, these missile strikes are unleashing terror on suspected enemies and innocents alike, and creating growing resentment in Pakistan that could blowback on the government--seen as either impotent against, or in alliance with, the US.
This past week journalist Bill Moyers sat down with historian Marilyn Young, author of the forthcoming Boming Civilians: A Twentieth Century History and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey, who helped found the military reform movement, to discuss the ethics, effectiveness and danger of America's longtime reliance on aerial bombardment--from Vietnam to Afghanistan--as a form of war and pacification.
Watch video here.
Transcript below the fold.
January 30, 2009
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
Very often in the White House, the most momentous decisions are, at the time, the least dramatic, the least discussed. And they don't make news, or history, until much later, when their consequences bubble to the surface downstream. There are observers who think that could prove to be the case with a decision made within hours of Barack Obama's swearing in last week.
It started as a few lines in wire reports - a bit of buzz on the web - then a story here and there in the weekend papers. Unmanned American drones like this one, called Predators, honing in on villages in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, striking like silent intruders in the night, against suspected terrorists.
Early accounts of casualties varied from a dozen to more than 20 dead and wounded. One Pakistani security official told THE WASHINGTON POST that perhaps ten insurgents had been killed, maybe even a high value target, a senior member of al Qaeda or the Taliban. Then the TIMES of London quoted locals who said "... three children lost their lives" when the missiles destroyed several homes.
Since last August, 38 suspected U.S. missile strikes have killed at least 132 people in Pakistan, where allegedly we are not at war.
In next door Afghanistan, the number is much higher. For seven years American and NATO forces have been chasing Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban, not only with Predator drones, but with guided missiles and bomber raids as well. According to the United Nations and the organization Human Rights Watch, aerial bombing has killed or wounded more than a thousand civilians, what the Pentagon calls, "collateral damage."
The death of civilians has brought sharp criticism, including from some of our NATO allies and the president of Afghanistan. They believe the bombing is turning people in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against the West, actually undermining an effective campaign against terrorists.
The bombing of civilians from the sky is an old and questionable practice, argued over since the moment the military began to fly. It was deliberate strategy in World Wars I and II. American presidents approved it in Korea and extensively in Vietnam, again in the first Gulf War, then in Bosnia and Kosovo, and six years ago during the campaign of "shock and awe" over Iraq.
But what lifted those reports last weekend out of the routine is the simple fact that for the first time the air strikes occurred on President Obama's watch. As he said during his campaign, and as Secretary of Defense Gates reaffirmed this week, Obama is escalating America's military presence in Afghanistan. He may increase it to as many as 60,000 troops this year.
When I read the first story about the Predator strikes last weekend, I thought back to 1964, and another president.
LYNDON JOHNSON: My fellow Americans...
BILL MOYERS: After an encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin between American destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats, President Lyndon Johnson ordered bombing raids over North Vietnam.
LYNDON JOHNSON: Air action is now in execution...
BILL MOYERS: LBJ said we want no wider war, but wider war is what we got, eleven years of it.
Now military analysts and historians, including my two guests are wondering aloud - could Afghanistan become "Obama's war," a quagmire that threatens to define his presidency, as Vietnam defined LBJ's?
Marilyn Young is a professor of history at New York University. She's published numerous books and essays on foreign policy, including THE VIETNAM WARS, 1945-1990, THE NEW AMERICAN EMPIRE and IRAQ AND THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM. She is the co-editor of a collection of essays to be released next month titled BOMBING CIVILIANS: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORY.
Pierre Sprey is a former Pentagon official, one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's famous "whiz kids" who helped design and develop two of the military's most successful airplanes, the F-16 Falcon Fighter and the A-10 Warthog Tankbuster. But in the late 1970s, with a handful of Pentagon and congressional insiders, Sprey helped found the military reform movement. They risked their careers taking issue with a defense bureaucracy spending more and more money for fewer and fewer, often ineffective weapons.
You will find an essay with his shared by-line in this new book, AMERICA'S DEFENSE MELTDOWN, published by the Center for Defense Information.
Welcome to both of you.
MARILYN YOUNG: Thank you.
PIERRE SPREY: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: Marilyn, what did you think last weekend when four days into the Obama administration we read those reports of the strikes in Pakistan?
MARILYN YOUNG: My heart sank. It absolutely sank. It had been very high. I had been, like I think the rest of the country, feeling immensely encouraged and inspired by this new administration and by the energy and vigor with which he began. And then comes this piece of old stuff on approach to a complicated question that in comes in the form of a bomb and a bomb in the most dangerous of all places. And, yeah, my heart sank, literally.
BILL MOYERS: Our military, Pierre, says it's sure that it's striking militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And that they're not targeting civilians. Can they be sure? From your experience, can they be sure?
PIERRE SPREY: I'm sure that their purpose is to strike militants. I have no doubt of that whatsoever. But with the weapons they use and with the extremely flawed intelligence they have.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yes.
PIERRE SPREY: I'd be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact, a militant.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean "flawed intelligence"?
PIERRE SPREY: You can't tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody's a Taliban. In the end, you're relying on either, you know, some form of intercepted communications, which doesn't point at a person. It just, you know, points at a radio or a cell phone or something like that. Or, most likely, you're relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.
BILL MOYERS: But don't these drone planes and Predator missiles provide a commander-in-chief, a President of the United States, with enormous political convenience for being able to order military action without risking American lives?
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: Yes.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah, it's-
PIERRE SPREY: But-
MARILYN YOUNG: Simple. Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: And-
MARILYN YOUNG: And then-
PIERRE SPREY: A very dangerous option because it's so convenient and because at home it's politically acceptable because our boys aren't dying on the ground, it gets us into tremendous trouble, which, of course, in general is true of bombing.
BILL MOYERS: And your-
PIERRE SPREY: Bombing is always politically popular relative to sending infantry and killing our boys.
BILL MOYERS: Aren't these drone planes and these Predator missiles effective? Don't they get the bad guys, even though they might kill a few civilians?
PIERRE SPREY: Their importance is enormously exaggerated, as is their glamour. A Predator is a very large radio-controlled model airplane with a 48-foot wingspan and a snowmobile motor in the back. It only goes about 80 miles an hour. And it stays up for 10, 15 hours and carries a missile. And when they launch the missile, the missile is not pinpoint accurate. You know, if it's a house, reasonably often it hits the house it's aimed at. And when it does, it usually kills a bunch of other people around.
MARILYN YOUNG: And it's true, you can aim at this table. But the question is who's sitting at - well, they might want to aim at this table. But, you know, who's sitting at the table? And you don't know. Or actually you do want to hit Pierre but you don't want to hit the two of us. Unfortunately, pieces of what hit him hit us. And we are severely injured or dead. But really Pierre is what you wanted and Pierre is what you got. And this is supposed to be a triumph. And it seems to me that it is a triumph in the most abstract sense. And if you are on the ground as one of these things come at you, the material meaning of being bombed becomes very clear. And that's not ever discussed or taken into account.
BILL MOYERS: The material meaning?
MARILYN YOUNG: Yes. What it feels like to be bombed, not to be in the crosshairs going down but to be on the ground looking up. And the footage that we have in the sense we have of drones is of someone 10,000 miles away pushing a button and, wham, there it goes. But nobody's sitting there on the ground looking at what happens after it goes up.
PIERRE SPREY: And what happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we're trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have turned rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of, you know, other killing of civilians from ground forces. But we're dealing with a society here, that's based on honor, you know? The Pashtun are very ancient people.
BILL MOYERS: This is the tribe in the southern part of the-
PIERRE SPREY: Well, it's not a tribe. It's a nation. This is 40 million people spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know, who don't even recognize that border. It's their land.
BILL MOYERS: Forty million?
PIERRE SPREY: There's 40 million of them. That's a nation, not a tribe. Within it are tribal groupings and so on. But they all speak the common language. And they all have a very similar, very rigid, in lots of ways very admirable code of honor much stronger than their adherence to Islam.
PIERRE SPREY: They have to resist, you know, being invaded, occupied, bombed, and killed. It's a matter of honor. And they're willing to die in unbelievable numbers to do that.
BILL MOYERS: Are you suggesting that these strikes could be contributed to the destabilization of Pakistan, one of our allies?
MARILYN YOUNG: It's clear that they're doing that. I mean, there never was before an organization called Taliban in Pakistan. This didn't exist as an organization. It does now. It's unclear to me as well the relationship between our punitive enemy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. That's unclear. And it's, it's very unclear what American policy will be with respect to either group. Mainly what's unclear is what our goal is in Afghanistan. It's really unclear.
BILL MOYERS: Well, we went there to get Osama bin Laden after 9/11 and to free Afghanistan from the brutal grip of the Taliban, religious extremists who were wrecking misery and creating a base there for al Qaeda, right? That was-
PIERRE SPREY: And we failed miserably on both missions, you know? al Qaeda's obviously flourishing, undoubtedly stronger around the world than it was when we started this in 2001. And what did we liberate the country from? We certainly caused the Taliban to withdraw. We didn't defeat them. They withdrew. And Afghanistan turned into a battleground for warring huge, extremely violent drug gangs. All these provincial governors, all these people we call warlords euphemistically are large-scale drug gangsters.
MARILYN YOUNG: Uh-huh.
PIERRE SPREY: And the country was ripped apart by them. And that's why the Taliban is coming back.
BILL MOYERS: You saw the story in "The Washington Post" this week from Secretary of Defense Gates who says, you know, we're not longer going to be involved with these gangsters you talk about, with a corrupt government of Karzai in Kabul. We're going to concentrate instead on doing something about the mess you just described by waging a war that will ultimately defeat the insurgents. That was, in effect, his message. New strategy.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
BILL MOYERS: Involvement with the civilian government.
MARILYN YOUNG: And we'll focus on the provinces. And there is also an implication from earlier stories that there will be an effort to buy off various warlords to try and import some of what was done in Iraq into Afghanistan. The problem is the focus remains a military solution to what all the other information I have says is a political problem. So I don't care how you slice the military tactic, so long as your notion is that you can actually deal with this in a military way, you're just going to march deeper and deeper into what Pete Seeger used to call the Big Muddy or I guess in Afghanistan it's pretty dry. It would be some other expression. But the point is if you can't figure out a political way to deal in Afghanistan then you can only compound the compound mess that Pierre talked about.
PIERRE SPREY: Yeah, the military approach is always and the conventional think tank approach and the General Petraeus approach is, first, we'll establish security.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right. That's-
PIERRE SPREY: And then we'll fix the government.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: That doesn't work. In fact, that's already failed. And the more we try to fix the security situation, the more we will drive these people, particularly the Pashtun, into implacable opposition. And whether the military solution is more bombing from Predators or from F-16s or more special forces on the ground, you know, attacking villages and inadvertently killing lots of civilians, it doesn't matter. As long as security comes first, the mission will fail because these people are sick and tired of a government that's oppressing them and a foreigner who's killing them.
BILL MOYERS: There was a photo the other day of a protest in Pakistan, a few days after a drone attacked. The banner reads, quote, "Bombing on tribes. Obama's first gift to Pakistan." Now, that's part of the blowback, isn't it?
PIERRE SPREY: That's incredibly dangerous.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: I mean, I don't think people in America have any sense of how dangerous that is. By bombing into those areas, those traditional Pashtun areas, that the Pakistani government long ago made a pact, you know, at the founding of the state of Pakistan to never invade those areas and to leave the Pashtun to govern themselves. And we are forcing the Pakistanis to break that pact, both on the ground with their army. And we're breaking it by bombing the Pashtun in Pakistan. That is taking a weak and also rotten Pakistani government and crumbling it. That's putting them on the horns of a dilemma that they don't need. Why is that so dangerous to us? Because this is a nuclear armed country. And when they fall apart and fall into the hands of people like, people that are running Afghanistan, you could have a nuclear war with India, you know? I mean, we're talking about not just blowback but we're talking about catastrophe could result.
MARILYN YOUNG: You know, the thing that gets me, Obama appoints George Mitchell and he says what we're going to do is listen. What we're going to do is figure we're just going to listen. And in his first press interview on that Arab TV network, which was a brilliant move I thought, he talked about respect. BARACK OBAMA [SOT]: We are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest.
MARILYN YOUNG: He used the word "respect" repeatedly. And it's an excellent word to use and an important one. He, it's not impossible to say we're going to pause in Afghanistan and listen. We're going to think about it. We're going to figure it out. We're not going to move militarily at this moment until we know what we're doing.
BILL MOYERS: But suppose, Marilyn that somebody from the Pentagon came to the White House right after the inauguration and said, "You know, we've had this drone attack planned. And we've spotted these insurgents whom we think really are militants--"
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
BILL MOYERS: "and killers in their own right. And we want to - we want you to approve this raid." And suppose he had said no four days after the inauguration and that had been leaked. You know what would have happened on all of the right-wing talk radio shows in.
MARILYN YOUNG: Sure.
BILL MOYERS: And maybe "The Washington Post" and editorial page and others like that. He has no backbone, right? I mean, wasn't he in a sense, trapped by this option?
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah, but that's, that's you know, he's read history. He should at least or he should have been very familiar with the Johnson administration. That's exactly the trap that Johnson walked into. And it's not necessary. I have this odd notion that the American public is actually, in the main, adult enough to listen and think and to respond to a president who says, I'm going to tell you what's going on. For eight years there has been miasma, lies, deception, bizarre behavior. We're going to change that and not just economically and not just domestically. But we're really going to see what we're doing everywhere. That means I did not approve a military move I was urged to approve because I want to know what I'm doing. And I'm sure my fellow citizens will join me in wishing to know what it is the United States is doing militarily before it does it.
PIERRE SPREY: I would applaud, I would have the utmost admiration.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: For any leader, even for a senator or congressman who had the guts to say exactly what you just said. But it's not in the cards. And we knew it wasn't in the cards when during the campaign Obama subscribed to the fact that we're in a war on terror.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: This is not a war on terror. You know? And anybody who starts from the premise that it's a war on terror is heading straight into disasters error.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: And he said-
BILL MOYERS: I don't understand that because George W. Bush defined this as a war on terror. And I think Obama must be using the same invocation, you know?
PIERRE SPREY: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: This is all part of the war on terror. He said it in his inaugural address.
PIERRE SPREY: Yes, he said that. I was appalled. You talk about our hearts sinking.
PIERRE SPREY: 9/11 was not an act of war.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
PIERRE SPREY: It was a criminal act. It was a simple.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: Criminal act by a bunch of lunatic fanatic violent people who needed to be tracked down and apprehended and tried exactly as you would with any other lunatic violent person, like we do with our own domestic terrorists, like the guy who bombed the Oklahoma federal building.
BILL MOYERS: Federal building. Right.
PIERRE SPREY: You know? Exactly the same thing we did to him is what we should have launched on a huge basis, of course, on a huge international police basis and not called it.
MARILYN YOUNG: And there would have been totally international support.
PIERRE SPREY: It's not a war.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: We, by calling it a war, we have glorified al Qaeda. We have glorified the cause of violent radical Islam. All that tiny minority have become heroes. And we made them heroes. We made their propaganda. We made their case for them.
BILL MOYERS: Let me read you an excerpt from the official White House statement on foreign policy under President Obama. Quote, "Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on the greatest threat to our security, the resurgence of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They will increase our troop levels in Afghanistan, press our allies in NATO to do the same, and dedicate more resources to revitalize Afghanistan's economic development." There you have a very clear statement of their intentions that we're going to concentrate on the war. And in fact by the end of this year there'll be 60,000, not 30,000 American troops in Afghanistan. And there's no indication the strikes, the air strikes that are killing civilians are going to stop.
PIERRE SPREY: And the 60,000-
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: -will be useless.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: You know, the Russians at the peak of their invasion - who dealt with the Afghanis a good deal more brutally than we did - had over 150,000 and a trained a 250,000 man Afghan army. And they lost. 60,000 is a recipe for failure, defeat, and ultimately a disgraceful withdrawal by the United States. One way or another, no matter how nice a face we put on it, we'll be kicked out of there just like we were kicked out of Vietnam.
BILL MOYERS: Speaking of Vietnam, and you've written so much about this, we have a conversation between President Johnson and, your old boss, Secretary of Defense McNamara about bombing. Take a look at this. ROBERT McNAMARA [SOT]: If we hurt them enough it isn't so much that they don't have more men as it is that they can't get the men to fight because the men know that once they get assigned to that task their chances of living are small. And I, myself, believe that's the only chance we have of winning this thing. And when they see they're getting killed in such high rates in the South and they see that supplies are less likely to come down from the North, I think it will just hurt their morale a little bit more. And to me that's the only way to win, because we're not killing enough of them to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight. But we are killing enough to destroy the morale of those people down there if they think this is going to have to go on forever. PRESIDENT JOHNSON [SOT]: All right. Go ahead, Bob. ROBERT McNAMARA: Thanks.
BILL MOYERS: Now, Secretary McNamara and President Johnson were talking about a different kind of bombing from the drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a lot more of it. But do you see a historical parallel there?
PIERRE SPREY: Absolutely.
MARILYN YOUNG: Oh, yeah. I mean, the notion that you will break the will of the enemy, I - that's such a depressing clip. I just can't - I mean, it just sinks me right back into the moment when all that was going on. Winston Churchill is held up as a great hero because he defies German bombing and says we will fight them everywhere. They can't break our will. And he is considered a great hero. McNamara is incapable of reading that same spirit back into his enemy. Instead, he assumes that he can bomb them into submission. And it's the same notion now that you can scare them, break their will. And the drone, this precise thing, is maybe, in the minds of those who use it, even more scary because you don't see us but we see you. And zap we gotcha. But it's, again, an effort to deal with a political issue with force. And it doesn't work.
BILL MOYERS: Pierre, as I said in the introduction, you helped develop a couple of very effective fighter planes. Is there a moral dimension to this use of drones that you didn't see in a more conventional kind of weapon?
PIERRE SPREY: There's a moral dimension to every kind of bombing that destroys civilians, particularly bombing that destroys more civilians than military people. You can't avoid it. There's nothing notable about the drones that changes that. And the moral dimension is very simple. And it dates back to the original theologian of bombing, Julio Doue, a rather fanatical Italian from World War I who first hypothesized, wrongly, that you could destroy an enemy's morale, exactly what you said, and win victories without any ground armies if you simply bombed them enough. And secondly, that the bombers would always get through, that they would always defeat fighter opposition and antiaircraft opposition. Both propositions have been provided in history over and over and over again to be not only wrong but thumpingly wrong.
BILL MOYERS: Has civilian bombing ever been effective, Marilyn?
MARILYN YOUNG: I can't think. Can you?
PIERRE SPREY: The answer is no.
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: Very simply, no.
BILL MOYERS: Here you say there are none.
MARILYN YOUNG: No. I don't think ever.
PIERRE SPREY: And by the way-
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: You know? Churchill tried it. Churchill, by the way, after that brave stand to resist the Germans, turned around and, for politic reasons, just like our leaders, decided that it would be a great idea to simply area bomb Germany. What that means is to kill civilians. And they deliberately set out to kill German civilians on the same premise of Julio Doue that we would kind of kill them into submission. And it failed miserably.
BILL MOYERS: Does it seem to you that President Obama believes he can escape the outcome in Afghanistan that George W. Bush did not escape in Iraq?
MARILYN YOUNG: Right. I think he does think he can escape it. I think anybody would imagine coming into fresh into power would imagine he can make it happen better. If he didn't believe that, he would not have said - he would not have signed off on the drone attack. So I think he thinks he can escape it. And by fiddling within the same set of tactics that the Bush administration did. And isn't it any - there's no new thinking going on.
PIERRE SPREY: See, that's the problem.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: Is - he's surrounded by people who tell him, you know, "Boss, you know, all we need is, like, 30,000 more people here to secure the nation. And we need to get rid of Karzai because he's a problem. And we got a few more Band-aids here, and it'll all be fine." So-
BILL MOYERS: We couldn't keep up with who we were getting rid of in Saigon, you know? I'm serious about that.
PIERRE SPREY: Exactly. And we're-
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: It's - same thing's going to happen when we get rid of Karzai because the people behind him are worse. And they will be worse. And Obama is going to be in exactly that situation, surrounded by a bunch of Robert McNamaras, except not so smart.
BILL MOYERS: So do you believe "The New York Times" was accurate the other day when it said Afghanistan could quickly come to define the Obama presidency?
MARILYN YOUNG: I hope not. I cannot tell you how much I hope not. I think - he's got so much he wants to do. And he has so many good things he wants to do. And he starts out, you know, really marvelously, trying to do those good things. And if he is deflected, as Johnson was, that would be, well, it's this sort of tragedies that America's good at. It turns out to be as much a tragedy for the people we're supposedly engaged with as it is for us.
PIERRE SPREY: I'm pessimistic on that. I'm more pessimistic than Marilyn.
MARILYN YOUNG: I'm, yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: I think he will be trapped in it. I think.
MARILYN YOUNG: I'm hopeful.
PIERRE SPREY: I mean, he's already-
MARILYN YOUNG: I'm not, I knock wood a lot.
PIERRE SPREY: He's already so committed through his campaign of reinforcing Afghanistan and continuing the path we've been on unless he finds an act of enormous political will and courage and a way of explaining it to the American people that, you know, we've engaged on a path that's wrong and that's not going to work. And I'm about to reverse course. That's really hard to do.
MARILYN YOUNG: You know, it's-
PIERRE SPREY: And if he doesn't reverse course, it's the same quicksand. It's deeper and deeper, step by step.
MARILYN YOUNG: See, suppose that Osama bin Laden stayed where he was. Suppose he did. I mean, the acts of terror occur or they don't occur and they're deflected or they're not deflected no matter where he's living, right?
PIERRE SPREY: Yep.
MARILYN YOUNG: So the question of why we're in Afghanistan looms very large indeed.
PIERRE SPREY: Absolutely.
MARILYN YOUNG: Since it doesn't seem to relate in any way I can really name with precision American security.
BILL MOYERS: Two important books, "Bombing Civilians: A 20th Century History," with Marilyn Young, and "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress," with an important chapter from Pierre Sprey. Thank you both for being with me on the Journal.
MARILYN YOUNG: Thank you, Bill.
PIERRE SPREY: Thank you, Bill.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Terror from the Skies
Friday, January 30, 2009
The Party of Limbaugh
Not one to waste time on conservative mouthpeices. So last week, when GOP shockjock posing as an intellectual Rush Limbaugh proclaimed to his gleeful dittoheads "I hope Obama fails," I ignored it. But the story, which made news headlines for its sheer absurdity, took an even more bizarre turn with the entrance of Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey of Georgia. Gingrey, reacting to criticism of the GOP Congress by Limbaugh, told the radiohost to back off.
More after the fold...“I mean, it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing. But when it comes to true leadership, not that these people couldn’t be or wouldn’t be good leaders, they’re not in that position of John Boehner or Mitch McConnell."
Disagree with the GOP or not, many applauded Gingrey for having the backbone to stand up to Limbaugh. Alas, his fortitude was not to last. Within 24 hours, Gingrey was issuing a stated apology--to Rush Limbaugh!"“I regret and apologize for the fact that my comments have offended and upset my fellow conservatives—that was not my intent. I am also sorry to see that my comments in defense of our Republican Leadership read much harsher than they actually were intended, but I recognize it is my responsibility to clarify my own comments.”
Gingrey went as far as to appear on Rush Limbaugh's show, "hemming and hawing" before the radio host in the best "white steppin' fetchit" role I've ever heard. So to recap, a sitting Georgian elected member of Congress, rather than defending the President of the United States, has decided it's more important to beg for forgiveness from an entertainer.
The end of the GOP is nigh... .
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Tragic Failure of American Journalism in Gaza
Look at the news in the world, and in the past weeks you would have watched as the Israeli military machine destroyed Gaza, UN buildings and even an American school, using controversial weapons that have left thousands of civilians dead and injured. Catch the news in the US however, from broadcast television to newspapers, and you would think you live in some other world--where Israeli military and government propaganda serves as the script for a necessary and "defensive" war.
That US politicians are unable (through cowardice or tunnel-vision) to critique Israel, is nothing new. Neither is it news that our media find objectivity a lacking trait when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, with the sheer scale of what happened in the past few weeks, it is still shocking to see this willful blindess and group-think in action.
Below is an article by journalist Chris Hedges, examining this sad state of affairs:
With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again
By Chris Hedges
Jan. 26, 2009
The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged Israel’s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.
Full article here or after the fold.
All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few and barely heard by us.
We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention Israel’s “security needs,” include statements by Israeli officials who insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and of course note Israel’s right to defend itself. We do this throughout the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our occupation, but remind everyone that “Saddam killed his own people.” We write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike but never forget to mention that the Taliban “oppresses women.” Their crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we never forget to mention the “war on terror.” We ask how and who but never, never do we ask why. As long as we speak in the cold, dead language of those in power, the language that says a lie is as valid as a fact, the language where one version of history is as good as another, we are part of the problem, not the solution.
“Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire, accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage,” New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt breezily began in writing his assessment of the paper’s coverage, going on to conclude “though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job—and has largely succeeded.”
The cliché that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks—that bombs and rockets were “flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza”—was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth. It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about “proportionality,” not legality. Israel was in open violation of international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports. The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world’s fourth-largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets, tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not true.
The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians’ desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO intervention to halt it.
It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports. Hamas agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in exchange for an Israeli promise to ease the draconian siege that made the shipment of vital material and food into Gaza nearly impossible. And once the agreement was reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended. Israel, however, never upheld its end of the agreement. It increased the severity of the siege. U.N. agencies complained. International relief organizations condemned the Israeli blockade. And there were even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel Zakai, an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from the military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli government had made a “central error” during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing “to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip. … [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,” Zakai said, “it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. … You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.”
Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration. Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed.
Henry Siegman, the director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council of Foreign Relations, noted correctly that Israel “could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.”
There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view of the acceptance in U.S. press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an Islamo-fascist organization that understands only violence. And some journalists from news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once they were finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed article in The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter Center’s efforts to prevent the conflict. This article was an important refutation of the Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest of the media. But these were isolated cases. The publishers, news executives and editors largely accepted without any real protest Israel’s ban on coverage and allowed Israeli officials to fill their news pages and airtime with fabrications and distortions. And this made the war crimes carried out by the Israeli army easier to commit and prolong.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel’s violations of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that they will be protected from war crimes prosecution.
“The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,” he said.
Israel’s brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in the American press, have come under intense international scrutiny. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but insists the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots to be shelled or bombed, was not used directly against civilians.
Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for many in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions of alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions, warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas’ corrupt Fatah-led government. Hamas, once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel. It ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its agreement with Israel. Hamas’ willingness to negotiate with Israel, albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas leadership as collaborators.
Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June 2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted, often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may be too late.
The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel’s willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing “a fair, balanced and complete job.”
Friday, January 23, 2009
A Final Message from the Bush Admin...
If only it was that easy...
Then again, maybe "forgetting" isn't the best remedy.
And our memories of the past eight years should be kept, if only to serve as a warning...
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Bush Era Remembered
In her article "Drowning our Sorrows and Lifting a Glass," the mad law professor Patricia Williams recounted the many surreal yet tragically factual elements of the outgoing Bush administration. It makes even a cynic like me take pause, and realise that even in an imperfect Obama, we've made some serious change.
Some of these are listed here, with links. Will add as my repressed memory allows me access. So in case any of you forgot the sheer horror of it all, here's what may finally be over.
*Pax Americana and the aspiration to consolidate a global American empire.
*The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare.
*Hurricane Katrina and "heckuva job, Brownie."
*The explicit rejection of the Geneva Conventions.
*John Yoo's and Alberto Gonzales's redefinition of torture.
*Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank subsidizing his girlfriend.
*Ahmad Chalabi.
*The FCC allowing greater consolidation of media.
*The outing of Valerie Plame.
*The manipulations asserting that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
*The addled handling of Harriet Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court.
More below...
*Opposition to stem cell research.
*The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, and the burning of Baghdad's National Library.
*Donald Rumsfeld's remarks that rioting in Iraq was the sign of a liberated people and that Iraq was no more violent than some American cities.
*Stacking the Civil Rights Commission with conservatives, like Abigail Thernstrom, who want to overturn sections of the Voting Rights Act.
*The shooting death of Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari and injury of journalist Giuliana Sgrena at the hands of American soldiers.
*The appointment of ultraconservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
*Cheney filling his friend with birdshot.
*The USA Patriot Act.
*Doing away with habeas corpus.
*The National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of citizens' phone calls and e-mails.
*The notion of an unchecked, unaccountable "unitary executive."
*The failure to keep official numbers of dead Iraqi civilians.
*The forbidding of photographs, or even visibility, of American military dead.
*The multilayered, high-level lying about how football hero Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan.
*Halliburton taking kickbacks from Kuwaiti oil suppliers.
*Paul Bremer dispensing billions of dollars for contracts in Iraq, which disappeared, never to be accounted for or recovered.
*Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering Iraqi civilians.
*"Military tribunals" established outside the military justice system, with no due process or right to an attorney or to cross-examination or even to know the charges.
*The silly disparagement of the national anthem sung in Spanish.
*Bush talking directly to God.
*Abu Ghraib.
*Profiling Arab, Muslim and Latino immigrants.
*Guantánamo.
*Extraordinary rendition.
*Lousy veterans' benefits.
*Lousy veterans' hospitals.
*The failure to provide soldiers with reinforced armored vehicles ("You go to war with the army you have," explained Rumsfeld).
*The refusal to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder as a legitimate condition.
*Monica Goodling's political litmus tests in hiring for nonpolitical posts in the Justice Department.
*Expelling Helen Thomas from the White House press room and putting in fake reporter "Jeff Gannon" to throw adoring softball questions.
*John Ashcroft's draping of bare-breasted sculptures in the Justice Department.
*His subpoenas of more than 2,500 records of abortions performed at public hospitals.
*Gonzales firing US Attorneys around the country for political reasons.
*Oh, and did I forget the economy?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Obama- History in Photos
A photographic look at the Obama Inauguration, in the US and throughout the world--courtesy of The Boston Globe.
See them all below:
Friday, January 16, 2009
9 Ways to Talk to Cuba
"If Barack Obama and Raúl Castro sat down for negotiations, what could they talk about?" That was the question posed by the Center for Democracy in the Americas in a report released this week titled “9 Ways for US to Talk to Cuba and for Cuba to Talk to US.” For over sixty years the relationship between successive American administrations and the small island have gone from dismal to extremely dismal. Ignoring repeated pleas from the UN, the US keeps a stifling embargo on Cuba and refuses engagement with its leaders. President-elect Barack Obama however during his campaign signaled this could change, promising that his administration would be willing to sit down with its enemies. Putting aside the question on whether Cuba and the US are enemies, this has given many--from moderates in Florida to those in Havana--a glimmer of hope. Drawing on essays by a team of experts in varied fields, the report details 9 practical ways Cuba and the US can cooperate in military affairs, migration, energy, trade, academic exchange and other fields. The authors of the report envision a future relationship where Cuba can not only benefit from the US, but where the US can learn a few lessons from its smaller neighbor.
For full report, visit the Center for Democracy in the Americas or download the PDF file here.
Praise for the report:
“Cuba ceased being a security threat to the United States over a decade ago. The rest of the world has changed during that decade. Yet, U.S. policymakers remain wedded to a series of dated policies that cry out for a fresh approach. This report offers concrete ideas which could yield benefits to both sides of the Florida Straits and help bring a close to sixty years of distrust and animosity.”
John J. “Jack” Sheehan is a retired United States Marine Corps general. He was Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic for NATO and Commander-in-Chief for the U.S. Atlantic Command (1994-1997)
“This 9 Ways report is a road map for not just ending the embargo but also for engaging the Cuban people, sending a hopeful signal to Latin America, and showing the world that this White House is under new management. This is exactly the kind of change we elected Barack Obama to make.”
Donna Brazile- Political strategist, adjunct professor, author, and syndicated columnist
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Bush, Bushisms and Buffoonery
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
Thus starts off what Jacob Weisberg at SLATE deems The top 25 Bushisms of all time. As part of a farewell to the 43rd Commander in Chief, Weisberg has selected 25 of the most bizarre utterances to have come out of the soon-to-be-former occupant of the White House. Given the sheer number to choose from, I am amazed he was able to narrow it down to under 30. Not wanting to be accused of sipping the hater-ade however, Weisberg is certain to distance himself from Bush-bashing:
People often assume that because I've spent the past nine years collecting Bushisms, I must despise George W. Bush. To the contrary, Bushisms fill me with affection for the man....I find the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character. Instead of a villain, he makes himself into an irresistible buffoon, like Mrs. Malaprop, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson.
Yes... only unlike those mythical figures, this "irresistible buffoon" managed to wreak havoc on the lives of some 28 million Iraqis, tens of thousands of American soldiers, unknown numbers of tortued and "rendered" individuals and as yet underdetermined swaths of the global community. Reducing dislike of Bush down to a personal ability to "despise" him seems to miss the point. And buying into the affable clown ignores the real life horrors unleashed in the name of this "irresistible buffoon."
Probably Weisberg best captures this dark comedy with his final words:
Being able to laugh at yourself is a rare quality in a leader. It's one thing George W. Bush can do that Bill Clinton couldn't. Unfortunately, as we bid farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.
True.
Full article here. See the 25 Bushisms below...
The top 25 Bushisms of all time.
1. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
2. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000
3. "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000
4. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004
5. "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001
6. "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001
7. "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006
8. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005
9. "I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than that."—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007
10. "And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008
11. "We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000
12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
13. "And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007
14. "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000
15. "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000
16. "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000
17. "People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002
18. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000
19. "I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend."—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005
20. "I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006
21. "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000
22. "You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006
23. "There's a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.' "—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000
24. "They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000
25. "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008
http://www.slate.com/id/2208132/
Monday, January 12, 2009
Bush Wacky
Is this guy for real?
In his last press conference the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, gave a performance that ranged from defensive to clueless, underscoring just how out of touch both he and his adminstration have been with reality. From the debacle that is the ongoing Iraq saga to the spectacle that was Katrina, Bush 43 defended a legacy that only he and his most stridently right-wing supporters would dare call anything less than disastrous. Stunned reporters listened, laughed awkwardly and recorded this gem for the history books. Sadly, none of them had the courage or outright temerity to remove a shoe and hurl it at him.
Highlights from the press conference, and my own witty commentary, below.
On the ongoing Israeli Assault on Gaza that has thus far killed some 900 Palestinians and wounded thousands more, most of them civilians:The challenge, of course, has been to lay out the conditions so that a peaceful state can emerge. In other words, helping the Palestinians in the West Bank develop security forces, which we have worked hard to do over the past years....The challenge is to develop -- help the Palestinians develop a democracy -- I mean -- and a vibrant economy in their -- that will help lead to democracy. And the challenge, of course, is always complicated by the fact that people are willing to murder to stop the advance of freedom. And so, the -- Hamas or, for that matter, Al Qaida or other extremist groups, are willing to use violence to prevent free states from emerging. And that's the big challenge.
Well actually the Palestinians did manage a democracy, in which they elected Hamas. Since that wasn't the democracy you, or the EU or Israel wanted, you decided to scrap democracy and back the group that lost--Fatah. You then went on to supply Fatah with weapons and money and worked to *destabilize* the democratically elected Hamas government instead of talking to moderates within the organization and bringing them to the table. As for the Israelis, they don't seem to ever have to make any concessions, and violates UN resolutions with impunity. As for al-Qaida, they have nothing to do with the Palestinians or Hamas, as intelligence officials are well aware. However, images of hundreds of Gazans--including children--buried under the rubble caused by Israeli bombs (paid for by US tax dollars) is the best recruiting tool Osama bin Laden could have wished for.
On Iraq...when the history of Iraq is written, historians will analyze, for example, the decision on the surge. The situation was -- looked like it was going fine, and then violence for a period of time began to throw -- throw the progress of Iraq into doubt. And rather than accepting the status quo and saying, "Oh, it's not worth it," or "The politics makes it difficult," or, you know, "The party may end up being -- you know, not doing well in the elections because of the violence in Iraq," I decided to do something about it and sent 30,000 troops in as opposed to withdrawing. And so that part of history is certain, and the situation did change. Now the question is, in the long-run, will this democracy survive? And that's going to be the challenge for future presidents.
As then presidential nominee Barack Obama reminded John McCain, the Iraq war didn't start with "the surge." And there wouldn't have been a need for "the surge" if there had been no war--which most analysts now agree need not have taken place. Contrary to this hindsight idea of "will this democracy survive," the Iraq war wasn't sold as having to do with democracy, but finding WMDs. Remember? Besides, contrary to popular myth, the success of "the surge" is at most illusionary. Violence has dropped in Iraq because former insurgents were paid off by US military officials, and many neighborhoods in the midst of civil war have been ethnically cleansed. In the long-run, for the millions of Iraqis left in this war's tragic wake, it will not simply be a matter of "will this democracy survive" but whether their broken country can mend itself.
On how he made policy.And -- and in times of war, people get emotional. I understand that. I've never really, you know, spent that much time, frankly, worrying about the loud voices. I, of course, hear them. But they didn't affect my policy, nor did they affect -- they affect how I made decisions.
Well that one just speaks for itself. No comment...
On possible mistakes.Look, I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly, putting a "mission accomplished" on a (sic) aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but, nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.
So... the banner was your sole mistake? Not the war built on a false threat of WMDs that took some 4,000+ American lives, wounded tens of thousands of others, has led (directly or indirectly) to perhaps 1 million dead Iraqis, displaced some 4 million more, has cost some $588 billion (and counting), sanctioning torture, carrying out "rendition," circumventing the Constitution, refusing to admit a failed economy or any of the 100 other matters---just a sign.
On Katrina.I've thought long and hard about Katrina; you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The problem with that and -- is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission.... You know, people said, "Well, the federal response was slow....Don't tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed...That's a pretty quick response. Could things have been done better? Absolutely. Absolutely. But when I hear people say the federal response was slow, then what are they going to say to those chopper drivers or the 30,000 that got pulled off the roofs?
Stunning. What can be said about this that hasn't already been said? Just stunning.
That's about all I can presently stomach. Anyone with a stronger constitution, see the full transcript and video.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
US Rejected Israeli Request to Attack Iran--Thrice
So it would seem in the question of which set of neocons are more sane--those in Tel Aviv or the ones on Pennsylvania Ave--the latter has won out. The NY Times is reporting that in at least three known incidents, the Bush administration denied Israeli pleas to launch a military attack on Iran. More below.
According to a NY Times article, "President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex." As US officials tell it, the Israelis--lacking the US weapons needed to attack Iran's underground complexes--"backed off their plans, at least temporarily." What was it then that stopped the US from agreeing to the Israeli plans? It seems, in a rare bit of good sense and judgment, the Bush administration actually decided that Israel's plan would be--*reckless.*
As cited by the Times, The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.
More interesting, it turns out that one of the key reasons the Bush administration began backing away from any outright attack on Iran had to do with that pesky NIE report released in Dec. 2007. According to the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran had in fact stopped its attempts at building a nuclear bomb as far back as 2003.
Officials stated that "the Israelis responded angrily and rebutted the American report," providing their own evidence of Iran working on a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration reacted to their own NIE report with similar scoffing. Secretary Robert Gates, the very one kept on by the Obama administration, was "highly critical" of the NIE report. Gates stated the NIE had "presented the evidence poorly, underemphasizing the importance of Iran’s enrichment activity and overemphasizing the suspension of a weapons-design effort that could easily be turned back on." In other words, Gates was laying the ground for the ideology of pre-emption--in which intelligence should be used to predict worst case scenarios rather than current reality. Nevertheless, the much ballyhooed NIE still seemed to be enough to put a speed bump in any Iran attack plans.
The undaunted Israelis however, intent on remaining the only undeclared nuclear power in the neighborhood, was insistent however on attacking Iran. On two occassions in early 2008, they made requests for weapons and other aid from the US in order to strike Iran. And, in what was called "alarming" to US officials, they wanted to do it via Iraq.
In an unmitigated bit of chutzpah, the Israelis asked the US to allow its bombing run on Iran to take place by overflights through Iraq. "Mr. Bush deflected the first two requests, pushing the issue off," the NY Times said, citing a US official, "but 'we said 'hell no’ to the overflights." Concerned that the uproar in Iraq over such a military operation could turn the country into a cauldron of discontent, the Bush administration rebuffed the Israelis. Disagreement over Iran even led some to worry that tensions could arise between the two allies.
As a White House official told the Times, Israeli intentions on striking Iran via Iraq "really spooked a lot of people." White House officials openly fretted that the Israelis might fly over Iraq without American permission. Some pondered whether American military would be ordered to shoot them down or be accused of being complicit in an attack on Iran.
In order to pacify the Israelis, the Times states the US settled on starting up a covert operation meant to deter Iranian attempts at nuclear enrichment. As stated by the Times, this operation, mostly involving sabotage, is "aimed at the entire industrial infrastructure that supports the Iranian nuclear program."
Thus far the Israelis have determined that without US help they cannot carry out an attack on Iran. However, as the Israelis press a popular "war" in Gaza and flex their muscle, whether the next administration can keep the most powerful military in the Middle East from sparking a regional conflict remains to be seen.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Skewed Priorities
Think you're hit hard by the current economic meltdown? Those across the globe, suffering under neoliberal trade policies, IMF/World Bank "restructuring," and soaring food prices are welcoming us to the party. Not surprisingly, as bailouts in astronomical figures are thrown about by elites at home and abroad to rescue the global financial sector, the worst-off among us get nothing. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies finds that "the approximately $4.1 trillion that the United States and European governments have committed to rescue financial firms is 40 times the money they’re spending to fight climate and poverty crises in the developing world." Seeing as how the West is directly implicated as a causative agent in these countries' climate and poverty crises, such funding would hardly be charity.
Link to full report here.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The Möbius Strip Issue
Möbius Strip: a surface with only one side and only one boundary component.
In our one-sided political and media culture, it's hard to get an objective side to any dealings between Israel and the Palestinians--much less the Palestinian side. Whether Republican or Democrat, liberal-leaning or conservative, politicians and pundits have come out in force for Israel's attack on Gaza, co-signing onto a policy that has left hundreds dead while hiding behind a pretense of self-defense. It is a shameful hypocrisy that is so blatantly obvious, one has to believe we are watching theatre instead of reality--because no one can possibly be that obtuse. As often of late in these times, the sane voice has come not from journalists or those we elect to office, but from a biting, humorous, half-hour satire known as The Daily Show.
In what some have called "brilliant" or "brave" and downright "ballsy," host Jon Stewart manages to raise valid questions not only on current Israeli policy, but calls to task a media and political class that reduces a complex topic into "the Möbius Strip of Issues."
