Bush At His Shrink: The Lame-Duck Session

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

“I’m with my closest colleagues at the top of Mt. Everest. Below us on the snow, or maybe it’s white sand, are thousands of bloody bodies. Suddenly, I see a line of approaching figures, armed with pitchforks and clubs, coming up the mountain. At first, I’m happy because they’re carrying an American flag, but then I realize they’re coming after me, led by a Toy Soldier wearing black. I turn around to figure out a counter-attack strategy with my key aides, but I’m all alone. I hear myself shout: ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ And then I wake up, sitting bolt-upright in bed, trembling and covered in sweat.”

“And that’s the dream that brought you back here, Mr. President?”

“Well, that one and at my wife’s and physician’s insistence. They seem to feel I’m in bad shape and could use your help.”

“And you? What do you feel?”

“Those times we talked before?** You made me really angry. You forced me to face certain ideas about myself that I didn’t want to think about. But afterwards, I must admit, I did feel calmer.”

“It wasn’t me ‘forcing’ you to do anything, sir. You wanted to understand what was happening to you. And, in terms of dreamwork, you’re actually quite good at figuring out what your nightmare visions represent. Why not give this one a go?”

“OK. Well, it seems obvious that I’m coming to the end of my two terms. A lot of my former buddies and key aides are no longer around — either they resigned to make some real money or we were forced to ease them out for political reasons. So it’s pretty lonely up there on the mountain now.”

“And who are the people coming up from the lowlands that you think might be eager to attack you?”

“At first, I was going to say the Democrats, but it’s more than that. My numbers these days are barely in the 20s! I’m the most despised American president ever! By nearly everyone! They loved me when the going was good, but now they just want me to go. As if it was all my fault. I didn’t ride in on a white horse and stage a coup: The citizens voted me in.”

“And the dead bodies, and the ‘a horse! a horse!’ speech? What do you make of them?”

“I guess the dead bodies on snow, no it’s sand — sand! That must be Iraq. A lot of good American soldiers have given their lives there for freedom. I feel for their families even though their sons and daughters volunteered, you know, knew what they were getting into. I continue to believe that it was the right thing to attack Iraq . The war being so unpopular, maybe that’s why the citizens — led by the Toy Soldier in black (Obama?) — are coming after me. As for the ‘my horse’ speech, I spoke those lines in the dream but I don’t really know what they mean, other than that I heard them once in a Shakespeare movie.”

“They’re from The Bard’s historical play ‘Richard III.’ After the climactic battle, King Richard, who is something of a villainous cripple and is feared but not liked in court, is virtually all alone on the battlefield. He is so desperate to escape, he offers to exchange his crown for a horse to carry him away. But there are no takers. He’s finished.”

“Not sure I like where you’re going with this one, doc. You comparin’ me to a villain?”

“Of course not. But as your dream is reminding you, you were the President who ordered those young American men and women in uniform to Iraq. And you were the President when many of those soldiers came home in coffins or wounded and facing deficient VA care because they didn’t receive their body and vehicle armor in time.”

“Watch yourself, doc. Those sound like Democrat talking points to me.”

“I’m just trying to indicate that your numbers have fallen as the war has dragged on, and that war, under Rumsfeld, didn’t go all that well because the public perception is that your Administration rushed to conflict without the proper equipment and isn’t doing such a good job with the wounded vets when they return. Those aren’t just ‘Democrat taking points’, those feelings are shared by most Americans.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’ve lost the conservative middle. But even if I look like an unpopular President right now, history will vindicate me, I’m sure. Look at Truman. He was hated then, is held in high regard now. The public and future historians will see that I made the right decision to go to war, and to attack the Islam militants around the world.”

“Mr. President, it’s just you and me in the room here. You don’t need to make speeches to me. I’m on your side, remember? We’re trying to deal here with your inner feelings of abandonment — this time by the American populace and by many of your closest aides — and how you can work through those feelings and perhaps those that might make you doubt your ‘relevancy’ in your final months.”

“Lame-duck presidents just naturally start to feel ‘irrelevant.’ It’s partly because of my low poll numbers. My enemies feel like they can take me on, even poke more fun of me, because I’m so unpopular. But mainly lame-duck status means nobody takes me seriously anymore because I can’t use the clout of the presidency to punish them; I’m on my way out.”

“And how does this powerlessness manifest itself?”

“I’m not blind, you know. Look around. The Republicans in Congress, who I used to be able to count on to vote as a bloc in supporting me and my programs, are racing to separate themselves from me as the November elections approach. They think I’m toxic to their re-election chances. For chrissake, many of them are even voting with the Democrat majority on bills that I care about! Or are not supporting me when I veto a bill. And now I can’t even fill a hall to raise money for John McCain; the event had to be moved to a smaller venue. It’s embarrassing!”

“But, as you say, you understand that for those Republican officials, putting daylight between you and them is not personal, sir, just politics.”

“Of course I understand what’s going on, that’s not the point! I look like a weakling. I can’t hurt anybody anymore. They’re even trying to take away my authority to order harsh interrogations of terrorists.”

“But you’re not even charging most of those at Guantanamo with any crimes, just holding them.”

“Boy, you are dense, doc. We’re not charging a lot of them because if we put them on trial, their military attorneys could claim they were tortured. First of all, ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods are not torture, at least not under our definition. Second, how can those military lawyers behave like that? I’m their Commander-in-Chief, their boss. Don’t they have any respect?”

“When contemplating your low approval numbers, Mr. President, perhaps that low regard by the public has something to do with the common public perception that maybe in your zeal to do what’s right by the American people and U.S. national security, you’ve bent the rules and the Constitutional protections way beyond what was necessary.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what the public thinks of me. I’ve got to stand on principle here.”

“Let’s take another look at what you’ve told me so far in this session. First, you describe a nightmare situation where you feel abandoned by the public and by many of your closest aides. You feel all alone up there on the mountaintop. Then you tell me you don’t really care how people judge you. The two interpretations cancel each other out. Tell me what you’re really feeling.”

(Long pause.) “I feel like I did as a boy and young man. I do my best, but somehow I always mess up and my parents and others make fun of me. They bail me out of my worst mistakes, but they never let me forget that I’m a constant screw-up. That’s why I stuck with the booze and drugs for so long. But finally Jesus saved me, and gave me strength and courage.”

“But some of your decisions led to tragic consequences.”

“The Lord talks to me, you know. He told me to invade Iraq. And He was right, and I am right, and history will vindicate that policy. John McCain understands. It may take 50 or 100 years, or more, for the rest of my countrymen and world historians to see that I made the right decision: If our Administration hadn’t begun to battle the Islam militants when we did, the U.S. would have had even more 9/11-type attacks, the Middle East would be overrun by Muslim terrorists, Israel would be wiped out, the world’s oil reserves would be controlled by the evildoers, the moderate Arab leaders would be overthrown, and Iran would be calling many of the shots in that area of the world.”

“Even if all that were to turn out to be true, sir, there are those, not all Democrats, who would say it was your actions that turned a generally-balanced Middle East into the very shambles you’re talking about and may wind up aiding Iran’s rise to pre-eminent power in that region.”

“Bullshit! History will absolve me! You’ll see.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“What do hell do I care? I’ll be dead.”

“Well, for one, some angry citizens have threatened to haul you and your top aides into civil or criminal court after you leave office in 2009, to hold you accountable for some of your policies.”

“Ain’t gonna happen. For a whole lot of reasons I don’t want to talk about here. Let’s just say that my finger will always be on the buttons of power. And that I still hold enough high cards to make sure I’m protected. Besides, I’ve still got some tricks up my sleeve.”

“Things that will ensure your place in history? There’s much talk that you might order a massive bombing of Iran’s military installations and nuclear facilities; is that something like what you have in mind?”

“If I told you, I’d have to shoot you (just a joke, don’t worry). Let’s just say that the Iranians are better stopped sooner than later — and sooner, for our purposes, means sometime before the election in November — and my responsibility is to worry about the national security of the United States in this regard.”

“In other words, it’s true. You’re going for it.”

“I never said that. Besides, McCain is on board, as well as most of the mainstream press and the Republican leadership, and even Clinton and Obama. We’ve catapulted the propaganda really well this time. The public is convinced that if Iran has to be taken out now, just do it. Everyone should and will rally around the President — that’s me, in case you’ve forgotten. My numbers will go up real fast.”

“But that was your expectation when you invaded and occupied Iraq. It didn’t quite work out that way, sir.”

“That’s what you think. We effectively control the oil, and we’ve made the situation so unstable and chaotic that the U.S. has to stay there to keep things from exploding out of control. Even a Democrat President will be unable to alter the reality on the ground in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel/Palestine.”

“But Obama and Clinton say loudly that they’ll be bringing the troops home from Iraq.”

“That’s campaign talk. Watch what happens if and when they take over the White House. We’ve hogtied them to the point where they will be bound to fail in Iraq, and we’ve made sure they will fail in their domestic agenda as well. The scores of judges we appointed to the appeals courts will make sure of that. Then, the public will be fed up with the incompetent Democrats and the Republicans will retake the White House, and maybe even the Congress, in 2012.

“Thank you, doc. I feel a whole lot better just talking with you.”

“Well, you know where to find me, sir, if it doesn’t all work out as you envision it.” #

**See here, here, here, and here.

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 5/27/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Dumpster-Diving for GOP Quotes (And Their Hidden Meanings)

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

As a playwright, I pay special attention to the difference between words as they are spoken and the unsaid words hidden beneath the surface — what we in the dramaturgy biz call “subtext.”

With McCain and Obama edging closer to full-out general election campaigning, it seems an appropriate time to examine recent and older public utterances of various Republican officials — Bush, McCain, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Fleischer, Ashcroft, et al. — and their likely subtextual meanings.

I’m presenting them here for several reasons: first, to make sure these utterances do not get forgotten, but also to help us figure out how to combat the twisted politics they represent. No doubt a goodly number of these quotations will appear in campaign ads prior to November.

George W. Bush, of course, is a never-ending source of such examples. Many of them make you guffaw in absolute embarrassment for the guy, way over his head in a complex world he’s capable of understanding only in the most simplistic terms. Some of his remarks, especially in recent years when nobody really is paying serious attention to him any more, make you cringe in their dangerous, reckless abandon. Some are so anger-provoking, they almost make you wish Cheney had taken him bird-hunting.

Often, Bush’s comments are evidence of pure ignorance. Sometimes, he can’t hide the arrogance and malice — sure tip-offs of someone with major self-esteem problems. Sometimes things come out of his mouth impulsively and he winds up revealing a lot more than he realizes.

Of course, the GOP archives of the past eight years contain hundreds of juicy quotations worth noting. Here are just a dozen of my favorites. Remember, boys and girls, you can play this game at home with your own choices. (If you run across some really good ones, send them in along with your subtextual explications.)

1. WHO GIVES A FLYING F?

Early in his residency in the White House, an ordinary constituent at a rope-line reception for Bush told the installed President that he disagreed with one of his policies. “What do I care what you think?” Bush replied.

Subtext: In that curt, rude response — the king dismissing one of his lowly subjects — Bush inadvertently told us how he would rule. Those with economic or political clout, those who supported the Administration’s policies with their monetary contributions and their political flattery, would be paid attention to. The rest of us could take a hike.

Karl Rove made that attitude even more clear to his Republican Party cohorts: All we need is “the majority plus one,” he said, then we proclaim our “mandate” to rule and proceed to do whatever we want.

2. THE DICTATORSHIP “JOKE”

The above Bush response has to be understood in the context of how he has preferred to rule. Before he was inaugurated, and he repeated it twice in similar form after he was installed in the White House, Bush blurted out: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just as long as I’m the dictator.”

Bush’s handlers claim that this comment, and the two others much like it, were just “jokes,” but everything we’ve come to learn about him in the past eight years makes clear that the unfunny “joke” long ago moved into reality: his paranoid hyper-secrecy about what his Administration is up to, his refusal to obey Congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony by his aides, his behaving like a dictator who is beyond the law (for example, taking illegal actions and then unilaterally claiming he’s permitted to do so as “commander-in-chief” acting in “wartime”), his “signing statements” (where, after he affixes his signature to the bills passed by Congress, he attaches presidential statements asserting he has no intent of obeying key aspects of those laws. To date, he’s issued an estimated 1000 such “signing statements”). Etc.

The subtext is: “You want me? You come get me. Until that day — and you’d better think twice about even trying it — get out of my face.” And it’s worked: Despite the many high crimes and misdemeanors carried out by Bush and Cheney, the so-called “opposition,” the Democratic Party, has refused to do much, if anything, to rein in the Administration’s extremist behavior. Impeachment is the clear remedy called for by the Constitution, but the timid/complicit Democrats have taken that option “off the table.”

3. CHENEY: 2 QUOTES, 3 WORDS

Cheney’s one-word reply to a reporter’s question serves as a complement to the Bush item#1 above. The query was about why the Administration keeps escalating and plowing on in the Iraq quagmire when poll after poll for several years now has shown that the American people think the war was a bad mistake and want the troops to start coming home as soon as is practicable. Cheney looked at the reporter who inquired as to how the Administration might want to respond to this overwhelming citizen rejection of CheneyBush Iraq policy and said: “So?”

Subtext: What Cheney was saying was that his White House has its own agenda, based upon his absolute certainty that he knows what’s best for us all, and most especially best for the elites that support the Administration. Therefore, he is not about to be dissuaded by anything as trivial as public sentiment or democratically-derived opinion, or, for that matter, reality on the ground in Iraq. In effect: “Just get out of our way before you get run over.” (Earlier, Cheney, a man of few words, used just two to attack Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate: “Fuck you!”)

4. THE PRESIDENTIAL “CATAPULT”

Using Karl Rove’s Big Lie Technique — telling whoppers again and again and again, to the point where they get accepted as conventional wisdom — Bush inadvertenly gave away the store when he described how a large part of his job was to keep repeating the same talking points endlessly in order to “catapult the propaganda.”

Willy-nilly, the subtext became the text: Whoops! That phrase just sort of slipped out out of Bush’s mouth. You can just see his “brains,” mainly Rove and Cheney, gnashing their teeth and pulling out their remaining hair as those words escaped Bush’s mouth. The topic was Social Security, but the CheneyBushRove “catapulting” approach is the same regardless of subject: We define reality; you better adjust to it, or else.

5. ASHCROFT & FLEISCHER

Authoritarian rulers not only must keep what they’re doing away from public scrutiny — this Administration has been the most secretive in U.S. history — but also must frighten away would-be critics from questioning their policies. The aim is to get potential critics to keep silent or, at the least, to moderate their objections.

So here was then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft at a Congressional hearing, responding to criticisms of the Administration’s rampaging through the Constitutional protections of due process in its top-secret “war on terror”:

“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.”

In essence, Ashcroft was accusing anyone raising questions about those extra-legal tactics of giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies: a treasonable offense. In other words, shut your mouth and pay the consequence of having your patriotism impugned, or worse: lose your job, be the target of hate, go to jail.

Then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer continued in the same vein by warning those with access to the media to keep their mouths shut, issuing reminders to all Americans that “they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.”

6. AH, THE “ROMANCE” OF COMBAT

Here’s a recent Bush remark that is so out-there that one was tempted to believe it was an Onion parody. Bush told U.S. military and civilian personnel facing death and maiming in Afghanistan:

“I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.”

One can be certain there are plenty of GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq today who would love to trade places with George W. so he could finally get some of that wonderful “romantic” experience of being under enemy fire.

The subtext: Bush, whose connected family made sure to keep Dim Son from serving in Vietnam by getting him a soft-cushion commission in the Texas Air National Guard, still exhibits no knowledge of what war is really like and what those young men and women he sends into harm’s way have to go through day by day. Many of them serve without enough armored vehicles, without enough body armor, and return home, often to deficient VA medical care, with severe brain or lower-extremity injuries as a result of the lack of the correct armoring,

And how did then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld respond when an Army National Guard specialist had the temerity to ask his boss in public why they were having to cannabilize their own vehicles to provide the necessary armoring? “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” said Rumsfeld coldly, effectively verifying that CheneyBush had rushed into war without adequate equipment or contingency planning. Thousands of U.S. troops have died or been horribly maimed in the interim.

7. “HECKUVA JOB, BROWNIE”

Here’s one Bush quote that never grows old:

“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.”

Well, yes, of course he mis-spoke.

But the subtext bespeaks a truth. Naomi Klein’s brilliant book “The Shock Doctrine” rests upon the assumption that Bush&Co. would prefer their disastrous behavior and policies be seen as evidence of “incompetentcy” rather than admit that their underlying goal is to sow chaos and confusion and fright as ways of implementing their social, political, economic agendas. So when Bush told Michael Brown that he was doing a “heckuva job, Brownie” running the Administration’s post-Katrina response, he was telling the truth — but from a “shock doctrine” standpoint.

8. RUMFELD’S “QUICK” WAR

Rumsfeld is a running fount of wonderful quotes. One of my favorites came just before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, when the public was torn about the wisdom of attacking that country. It was important to make the impending war seem a fait accompli that would be just a minor, temporary blip on the American political radar screen.

So when a reporter asked him how long he envisioned this imperial adventure might last in Iraq, Rummy replied : “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

Similarly, members of Congress wanted to know how much the war would cost U.S. taxpayers. Telling the truth, that the costs could run into the hundreds of billions and then trillions, would have been unacceptable to Congress and the American people, so Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, said blithely that the costs weren’t a problem, since the Iraqis would finance the war and reconstruction out of their huge oil revenues. “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money,” said Wolfy.

A final Rumsfeld quote: Reporters kept asking him where the supposed caches of “weapons of mass destruction” were in Iraq, since the invading troops hadn’t found any. Without missing a beat, Rumsfeld replied that U.S. forces were right on the scent: “We know where they are. They’re in and around Tikrit…north, east, south and west of Baghdad.”

Subtext: The Administration was lying through its collective teeth about the real problems associated with an invasion and occupation and nation-building. Furthermore, they were totally winging it in Iraq, with nary a clue how to proceed. But they would keep going, deeper into the Big Muddy, because that’s the only idea they had in their heads. And, because they were the only Superpower on the planet, they felt they could do whatever they wanted and the Iraqi public and the U.S. citizenry would be frightened into submission. Since their multinational corporate supporters (Halliburton, Bechtel, KBR, Blackwater, et al.) would make out like bandits in the nation-building stage, a stalemate of shock-doctrine chaos in Iraq was just fine for however many years it took.

9. THE “DISAPPEARING” INSURGENCY

Another doozy from Dick Cheney. The Administration could never admit in public that things weren’t going swimmingly in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. To do so would be admitting that Bush was a fallible human being like the rest of us, and the fundamentalist part of the Republican base seemed eager to believe that Bush was an annointed servant of God and thus could do no wrong.

So Cheney, at the height of the insurgent attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere around Iraq, when so many U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians were being killed or maimed by suicide bombers and roadside explosives, told a questioner that there was no reason to worry, since the “insurgency is in its last throes.” That was in May of 2005.

Subtext: One of the major goals of the U.S. occupation of Iraq was/is to make sure that any open American defeat will not happen during the CheneyBush tenure. If the next Administration were to be a Democratic one, they would be the ones having to admit that the war was lost and bring home the troops. The GOP could then claim that if only the CheneyBush policies had been permitted to continue after they left office, “victory” would have been possible, even likely. It’s the old stab-in-the-back smear: Who “lost” China? Who “lost” Vietnam? Etc.

Cheney was just spinning like crazy, hoping against hope that another six months would see the U.S. forces move closer to something that somehow could be described as a victory. These six-month increments (called “Friedman units,” after the New York Times’ pro-war cheerleader Tom Friedman) would come and go with little or no progress over the next three years. The Administration tried to use the recent military “surge” as proof of the wisdom of that theory, but the original aim for that surge was to buy enough time for the so-called “government” in Iraq to arrange for a political/ethnic/religious reconciliation that would guarantee a peace. It never happened.

10. BUSH “REACHES OUT” TO DEMS

When Bush was declared the winner in 2004 (*see footnote below), he promised he would reach out to Congressional Democrats, and others who opposed many of his policies, to try to change the tone of partisan gridlock in Washington. He seemed sincere in wanting to make good on his earlier description of himself as “a uniter, not a divider.”

But he couldn’t quite bring himself to make the actual peace gesture. Instead, he announced, as if he was granting a major concession to his political opposition, that he would extend the hand of collegiality to “everyone who shares our goals.”

The subtext: In short, it was the ol’ “my way or the highway” confrontational mode again. In effect, Bush was saying, “I will work with all those who agree with me, and nobody else. You’re either with me or against me. And those against me will pay the price.” And they did, until the increasingly fed-up voters elevated the Democrats into the majority in the 2006 midterm elections.

11. BUSH’S GIANT “SACRIFICE”

Bush made sure never to go to Dover Air Force base to honor the dead soldiers whose coffins are offloaded there from Iraq. He even tried to keep photos of the war dead from ever getting into public print.

And yet Bush has the gall to claim, as he did in a TV interview last week, that like the soldiers in Iraq and their families, he also has had to “sacrifice” much. What did his major “sacrifice” consist of?

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died, to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Subtext: You almost can hear the internal mental processes of the media pros inside the White House: “The proper spin is important when dealing with the touchy feelings of families of Iraq War veterans. So we’ll devise something that might qualify. Doesn’t matter how ridiculous it sounds, or how hypocritical we might appear to be (since the Prez is constantly photographed having fun riding his mountain bike or attempting something approximating dancing with various ethnic troupes visiting the White House). Our base will eat it up. McCain will need that base if he’s to have any chance to continue our foreign/military policies. So no public golf.”

By the by, Bush was photographed playing golf three months after he claimed he’d given it up. Question: Judging from his slurred delivery in several recent speeches, I’m wondering if he’s back on the sauce again, since he claimed to have given up drinking many years ago.

12. McCAIN’S “HUNDRED YEARS WAR”

Finally, since John McCain is trying like crazy to run away from his recorded statement — caught on video and audio — let’s close with his clear and unequivocal support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq forever. The United States military, McCain recently told a town hall meeting, could stay in Iraq for “maybe a hundred years” and that “would be fine with me.” He then re-affirmed and expanded those remarks to a reporter, declaring that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for “a thousand years” or “a million years,” as far as he was concerned.

Subtext: McCain explained that the rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for that long didn’t rest on the number of years but on the provision that no American soldiers would be killed during the extended occupation. Since one can safely say that if U.S. troops remain in Iraq, some of them will be killed by insurgent forces, with the U.S. military forced to defend itself and retaliate; therefore, it follows that McCain’s 100/1000/1,000,000 years figures are just so much campaign B.S.

The cold fact is that if the U.S. stays as an occupying power, American troops could well be tied down forever in the Iraq quagmire and would be attacked and killed/wounded on a regular basis. On the other hand, if the U.S. were to complete an orderly withdrawal, of course, there would be no more American troops in Iraq to get killed or maimed. #

*There are plenty of reasons to believe that the election was stolen from Kerry as a result of Rove’s vote-suppression tactics aimed at minority, Democratic-leaning voters, along with manipulations of vote-totals by the Republican-leaning companies that tabulate votes in America. For more on this, check out Mark Crispin Miller’s new book, “Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.”

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington State, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. For comment, write: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 5/20/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

“Shock Doctrine” Spin in U.S., Burma and Beyond

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Suppose you have a controversial project you wish to push through, but you’re afraid that if you come right out and say what you’re up to, there will be so many objections from other officials and ordinary citizens that you might never get a chance to implement your agenda.

But you’re savvy about how influence-molding works and you know that with the right kind of massive publicity and P.R. campaigns, you probably can “spin” public perception in your direction.

So, on a foundation of lies and deception, you decide to launch your project, careful to keep absolutely secret the most controversial aspects. And then, under the table, you hire (a.k.a. “bribe”) numerous journalists, opinion pundits and respected “consultants” to speak on behalf of your product.

It works! The public is snowed by the P.R. momentum and by the overwhelming consensus of the “experts,” and your project takes off. This is how such things are done every day in the business and advertising world. What’s the big deal?

THE LIES & DECEPTIONS

Well, as you’ve probably figured out, I’m talking about the way the CheneyBush Administration sold the Iraq War/Occupation to us citizens.

We’ve known for a long time about the various lies and deceptions that took America to war — the supposed “weapons of mass distruction” that Saddam was supposed to possess but didn’t, his alleged ties to al-Qaida that didn’t really exist, his supposed but non-existent complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and so on. Eventually, even the Administration was forced to concede there were no WMD, no ties to 9/11, no relationship to Al Qaida, though it vowed never to let those inconvenient facts get in the way of continuing its occupation of Iraq. (And Cheney and his minions still continue to this day to hint at the old deceptions.)

Also revealed some years back was that the Administration secretly put various conservative TV/radio/print journalists on the payroll to write/speak favorably about various programs and policies emanating from the Executive Branch.

THOSE PENTAGON “EXPERTS”

What we didn’t know about until the New York Times broke the story a few weeks ago was that the CheneyBush Administration, to help sell the pending Iraq war to members of Congress and the citizenry at large, marshalled a huge phalanx of retired military officers and sent them out disguised as private, independent “experts” and “consultants” to deliver the pro-war spin the Administration wanted. The author of the story, David Barstow, used the term “media Trojan horse” to describe the impact of this deception.

Because the media, always eager to curry favor with the Administration, did not vet the bona fides of these “private consultants,” the public had no knowledge of the retired officers’ deep and abiding connection to the Pentagon. These ex-military officers received special briefings, including by Rumsfeld himself, on the Administration’s daily spin points, and they either had or would soon be receiving high-paying jobs with various defense contractors.

What the public now knows is that the daily commentary and advice by the “military experts” — supposedly independent analysts, free of any conflicts of interest — helped “catapult the propaganda” (to borrow Bush’s own term) in favor of war with Iraq.

And it worked: CheneyBush and their neo-con ideologues inside the Administration got U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq, controlled the oil flowing out of that country, created chaos and catastrophe from which their huge private-corporation sponsors could make huge pots of money, built the world’s largest new embassy in Baghdad, and constructed permanent military bases inside that country from where the U.S. will help control the geopolitics of the greater Middle East for generations to come, etc. etc. All this presents a perfect illustration of Naomi Klein’s thesis of “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism.”

This use of hired guns — all those prestigious, smart-looking ex-generals and such — to do their propaganda work for them is further confirmation of the mendacity, duplicity and illegality Bush&Co. employ to get their way.

LITTLE OR NO MEDIA COVERAGE

True to form, of course, the corporate mainstream media have paid scant, if any, attention to this story of how dozens of retired officers helped shape American military policy while secretly still attached to the Administration teat. See here, here, and here.

In this instance, and many more that could be named, the mainstream press, by not mentioning or following up on such CheneyBush scandals, does democracy a dangerous disservice.

Our political system depends on citizens receiving accurate information about what’s being done in their names so that they can make intelligent decisions when voting for those who represent them.

LIES & DECEPTIONS

If they respond at all, Busheviks tend to say that even if these stories are true, how we wound up in Iraq is “old news,” it’s history, we’re there, let’s just make the best of it, “finish the job” and then go home.

However, if your original reasons for invading a sovereign country were based on lies and deceptions, and a lot of incorrect assumptions and ignorance, then your occupation policies will never work and you will have alienated and angered the local population to the point of violent resistance against you. The result: You will be stuck in a quagmire of your own devising, where the most you can hope for is endless stalemate. This was the case of the U.S. screwup in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, and it’s the case today with the its five-years-and-counting occupation of Iraq.

Now, it can be argued that endless stalemate is of no great concern to the shock-doctrine practitioners of Bush&Co.; indeed, it may be the desired result as it guarantees prolonged chaos and thus more need for companies like Blackwater, Bechtel, Halliburton, KRB, et al. to help keep the broken society together. The U.S. and Iraqi dead and maimed are but the inevitable “collateral damage.”

But, as CheneyBush have learned, domestically you can push the U.S. military, and American citizens, only so far before both begin to push back and call for a new, more rational approach to political and foreign-policy adventuring.

Key military officers within the Joint Chiefs of Staff (even, to some extent, Defense Secretary Gates) are watching their armed forces stretched much too thin around the globe. Because there is no military draft, the Pentagon is forced to use and abuse its existing troops to the point of near-rebellion, resulting in lower morale and increased psychological damage, including 300,000 Iraq veterans returning home with mental problems and a rising rate of suicides.

‘08 VOTE A REFERENDUM ON WAR

This abuse includes overuse of the stop-loss policy of refusing to let soldiers go home after they’ve completed their Iraq rotation, constantly recalling troops who have been sent home after completing their exended service, lowering the army’s physical, intellectual, pyschological and moral standards in order to fill the recruiting gap when the services can’t meet their enlistment quotas, returning physically or psychologically wounded soldiers to battle despite their doctors’ recommendations, etc. etc.

Moreover, the citizens appear to have had enough. Since two-thirds of polled Americans believe the Iraq invasion and occupation are outrageously expensive follies and it’s time to start bringing the troops back home, the opposition party is about to nominate as its presidential candidate someone who aims to get the troops out within 16 months. The Republican Party is set to nominate someone who wants to continue the CheneyBush war even if it means keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years or more, and probably starting more conflagrations in the Greater Middle East.

In a fair and open election, the Democratic candidate should win that contest easily. However, there is compelling evidence that in the past eight years, U.S. elections have been corrupted through the use of hackable, unverifiable, paperless “touch-screen” machines, and vote-tabulating computers, which utilize secret software, manufactured and programmed by companies with Republican affiliations.

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB IRAN

All this isn’t just “old history.” CheneyBush are itching to bomb Iran’s military installations and scientific laboratories while they are still in control of the Executive Branch, and are “capapulting the propaganda” for such an attack in ways eerily similar to how they deceived Congress and the American people into bombing and invading Iraq.

There are reports that Secretary Gates has been trying to stop such attack-Iran moves, or at least to greatly reduce the scale of the operation. But other reports suggest that the decision to bomb already has been made, and the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to take over at Central Command is a key sign that all the ducks are just about lined up in a row.

(The former head of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, said there would be no attack on Iran on his watch; he was forced out, and CheneyBush lackey Petraeus was moved over from Iraq.)

BURMESE MILITARY’S “OPPORTUNITY”

“The shock doctrine” is not employed solely by American governments and multi-national corporations. In Burma (Myanmar), the military junta ruling that country, having just put down a potential revolt led by Buddhist monks, clearly is terrified that a coup might be organized by individuals or organizations who want to bring aid into the country to help the residents in the wake of the cylone disaster. And so they’re keeping those aid workers out of the country, thus putting at risk the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Rangoon and elsewhere in search of medical care, food, shelter.

The effect of the disaster and the Burmese government’s insufficient response to it means that a good share of the junta’s political opposition is now dead or dealing with the aftermath of the huge, rampaging storm. In other words, the disaster offers a great “opportunity” for the ruling elite to settle old scores by continuing to repress the opposition and to remake the affected areas as they wish. (There have been reports, unconfirmed, of bodies of monks being found in the cyclone rubble — burned in a suspicious manner — mixed in with the tens of thousands of other corpses found floating in the rice fields and ditches and rivers.)

The long time-delay in getting food, water and shelter to the hundreds of thousands of displaced survivors of the cyclone is reminiscent of the way the Bush Administration dilly-dallied with regard to the post-Katrina period in New Orleans and Mississippi. In her book, Klein used the Katrina experience as a perfect example of “disaster capitalism” in the U.S.: A government watches a natural catastrophe wipe out an entire population sector, and lets the catastrophe play out over days and weeks and months — with large numbers of citizens abandoning their homes, forced to go elsewhere for adequate assistance — and then giving no-bid contracts to Blackwater and Halliburton and KRB for the reconstruction phase, in accord with social planning as laid out by the ideologues in the White House.

In Burma, the government may not be operating out of an exactly similar motivation, but the result appears to be much the same: using a natural calamity to reshape the economic, political and social future of the affected region for their own political and economic aims.

NATURAL RESOURCE SHORTAGES

As for the huge worldwide “run” on commodities — especially important staples such as wheat, rice, oil — already local greed-merchants and multi-national companies are salivating at the prospect of selling, at exhorbitant rates, food and shelter and clothing and oil and the like. They will be literally “making a killing” on the backs of the starving, the poor, the dispossessed.

In so doing, in line with Klein’s “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” theses, these elite forces will be re-shaping the politics, economies and social arrangements of these countries for generations, both to consolidate and expand their reigns of power and to benefit themselves and their rapacious, greedy supporters.

In short, when catastrophes are being dealt with, it doesn’t seem to matter what the operating governmental system is, be it fascist, communist, dictatorial, democratic, etc. By and large, the power/economic/political elites see the unfolding tragedies of their citizens as “opportunities” for expansion of control, for ways to eliminate or dilute their opposition, for fattening the bank accounts of their large-corporation supporters in rebuilding and reconstructing these devasted societies, in line with their own greed agendas.

This is the world that only will change when these elites and systems are systematically confronted, changed, or overthrown by citizens operating under a different moral system, who decide they’ve finally had enough.

It would be more effective, of course, if a strong progressive movement were to develop overnight in America to affect such wide-sweeping reforms in this country. However, removing Republicans from the White House in 2008 at least would be a significant sign of the beginnings of the public’s strong desire for significant changes.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 5/13/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

“What’s With Your ‘Crazy’ U.S Politics?” — A Letter to European Friends

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Dear Wolfgang and Jacqueline:

Finally some time to respond to your recent letter, where you asked me to explain the “crazy American political situation” and why “the U.S. is behaving so recklessly” with regard to Iran. Your terms are right on the mark.

First off, it’s important to know that “the U.S.” you refer to is mainly the Bush Administration. In poll after recent poll, Americans have indicated they regard his presidency as the worst ever in U.S. history. More than three-quarters of the citizenry, for example, now believe Bush’s war in Iraq was a terrible mistake that has taken this country into a catastrophic quagmire, and nearly two-thirds want our troops to start withdrawing as soon as practicable.

In other words, though it took a few years to learn how to read (and ignore) the Bush-enabling corporate mass-media, the American citizenry overwhelming now “gets it.” They understand that their reigning government is wildly off-track in terms of good governance and adherence to the Constitution, and, in important ways, is endangering U.S. national security in reckless misadventuring abroad. Americans also are mindful of the several trillion dollars that are being poured down the Iraq Occupation and “war on terror” ratholes, all to the detriment of our own infrastructure and social-program needs at home.

But, despite the tanking economy that is squeezing the middle class badly, and red-hot anger at the CheneyBush Administration for failing to deal with the issues most Americans care about (affordable health care, educational reform, good jobs, the Iraq disaster, college loans, sky-rocketing energy costs, etc.), the citizens tend to do little more than sign online petitions and occasionally send a donation to their preferred candidates.

The operating belief is that every four years, an election will resolve the situation so no need to get politically involved in a deep and consistent way. In addition, in this dismal economy a growing number of Americans are just squeezing by financially, if that, and feel they don’t really have the time or energy to become active dissenters. Obama or Clinton, or maybe even John McCain, will take care of the situation in a few months anyway, many figure, so no need to do much.

All too often, these excuses demonstrate lazy thinking, of course, aided by the mass-media’s concentrating on the electoral “horse race” and on distracting, trivial matters. But even if those citizen-expectations about the magic-bullet of elections were on the mark, there still would be problems. First, the voting and vote-tabulating systems are grossly deficient, provably corrupt and corruptable. Also, the three presidential hopefuls (all of whom are beholden, to a greater or lesser degree, to the usual elite political and corporate force$) leave much to be desired in terms of making significant changes, especially when it comes to American foreign/military policy.

McCAIN-THE-CHAMELEON

John McCain, for example, is basically a Bush clone when it comes to foreign policy, with a scary lust for war. He’s content for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years or more, and he’s indicated his willingness, indeed eagerness, to bomb Iran. For McCain, as it is for Bush, the world is either simple black or simple white, no shades of complexity on the horizon. Act tough, act rough, the rest of the world will get out of our way, and American hegemony will prevail across the globe.

McCain clearly is the most extreme of the three, with little operative understanding of economics and, surprisingly, foreign-policy matters. Whether it’s his advanced age, or simple stubborn obtuseness, he comes across as a locked-in-the-past ideologue. Does he really believe what he’s saying or are his positions what he feels he’s required to assert in order to strengthen the GOP base and lure the old “Reagan Democrats” to his side for the general election?

One telling anecdote in this regard before moving on to the Democrats: McCain has been buddy-buddies with Jon Stewart for nearly a decade, and in his “maverick Republican” phase was invited often to appear on Stewart’s “The Daily Show”; there the two of them would banter and yuck it up. But when McCain appeared on the show in 2006, as he was gearing up to run again for president, Stewart, clearly disappointed in his hero, asked McCain why he was sucking up to the right wing fundamentalists by going to kiss the rings, so to speak, of the very ultraconservative leaders he once had exoriated as “agents of intolerance” who shouldn’t be “pandered” to by politicians. McCain danced around the question, trying not to answer. But his old friend Stewart was relentless and finally McCain, apparently forgetting that he was on national television, and in the presence of his joking buddy Stewart and an adoring audience, smiled ruefully and admitted, yes, he was indeed kowtowing to “the crazy base,” doing what he had to do to win the presidency. (See the full transcript of the exchange here, and analysis here.)

The astute Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has been following McCain for many years. Here’s his explanation for McCain’s current shameful behavior, including taking the lower-than-Clinton attack road against Obama:

“The truth is that [McCain] doesn’t actually have any real convictions — or to put it more precisely, no real consistent convictions. That’s evidenced in part by the kind of campaign the guy’s running now. And at least a few of his press admirers are starting to sense that. But where you really see it most clearly is in the policy agenda he embraces.

“Genuine political and ideological transformations are pretty rare in contemporary American politics. Two in a row in less than a decade is close to unprecedented. McCain went from conservative Republican, to embracing many core Democratic policy positions and actively discussing a possible party switch, to cycling back and re-embracing the same policies.”

In short, the McCain that Stewart and many others admired for his “maverick” willingness to confront the Bush Administration on campaign-finance reform, torture as state policy, racial intolerance inside the GOP, etc., is no more. Now it’s the old guy who knows he has one arrow left in his quiver and is going to stand with the fundies and extreme conservatives on all the major issues because he believes that’s his only chance to wind up in the White House. To quote Stewart again: “Has John McCain’s Straight Talk Express been re-routed through Bullshittown?” The answer is, sad to say, yes.

THE DEMOCRATIC DUO

One would like to believe that the two Democratic contenders are significantly different, especially on Iraq and Iran. But are they?

Clinton the other day said that if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel while she was President, she would order Iran “obliterated.” (Her term.) There was not even a mention that Israel has demonstrated it’s perfectly capable of defending itself. Or that committing genocide on the Iranian population would inflame the world and place America in the war-crimes dock in The Hague.

Obama similary has rattled the sabers, saying he would keep the “military option” on the table to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He’s been accused of not being “forceful” enough, and, by assuming the macho stance, perhaps Obama hopes to defuse that accusation. Maybe that’s why he’s supporting the promotion of Gen. Petraeus, the architect of the “surge” in Iraq, to be head of Central Command.

But regardless of political or personal motivations here, in all three candidates what’s clearly on exhibit is an unstated but underlying belief that America’s superpower status entitles it — nea, requires it — to make decisions of peace and war for other countries and regions of the world.

That’s the rationale the neo-cons used for attacking and occupying Iraq in the first place, which Bush bought into without hesitation, and it appears, sub rosa, to still be active in our strange political dance in 2008.

DIFFERENCES ON IRAQ OCCUPATION

On Iraq, the three candidates are a bit more distinct in their approaches. McCain focuses only on the military aspects of the “surge,” which he sees as a great success even though the required and promised political-reconciliation component of the surge isn’t happening. McCain seems determined to keep U.S. troops in that country for as long as it takes to fashion a strong, capable, American-friendly government and society.

If it takes decades, a hundred years, a thousand (yes, he threw that one in, too), that’s OK with McCain. He keeps comparing the Iraq situation to Germany and South Korea, where the U.S. has maintained a troop presence for more than half a century, conveniently ignoring that there was and is no raging sectarian war in those countries and no nationalist insurgency trying to throw out an occupying American force.

In McCain’s (and Bush’s) view, America has a region to tame, after all, and that requires that U.S. troops be on hand to help shape the Greater Middle East to our specifications. Unspoken is another reason: Using Iraq as a staging area, American power can help “protect” and control the increasingly-valuable oil flowing in the region that is so desperately needed and desired by the West.

Clinton has said she would have her military advisors draw up plans for an orderly withdrawal of American combat troops and begin that re-deployment, brigage by brigade, within 60 days of her assuming office. Obama has said he aims to have all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months.

But both Clinton and Obama approve keeping an unspecified number of U.S. troops in Iraq for an unspecified time — to help train the Iraqi police and army, to battle the forces of “al-Qaida in Iraq,” and to be right there in case the situation were to suddenly deteriorate. (And how could it not if U.S. military forces are still on the premises?) Again, these are arguments that demonstrate the underlying soft-imperialism desires undergirding American exceptionalism.

OBAMA/CLINTON SLUGFEST

When you two wrote asking about our “crazy” politics, you made reference to the verbal boxing match between the two battling Democrats while the old warrior McCain is out there campaigning for the presidency.

My co-editor/colleague Ernest Partridge has summed up Senator Clinton’s behavior better than I could in his essay “The Monkey Trap, and Hillary Clinton’s Blind Rush to Defeat.” Short version: Clinton has no chance to win the Democratic nomination by fighting fairly; her only hope is to destroy Obama by whatever means necessary. Partridge writes:

“So if Clinton is to be nominated, she must overturn rules that she has agreed to, persuade most of the super-delegates to ignore the will of the voters and caucus participants, and to accomplish all this she must diminish Obama’s stature through negative campaigning. Because such tactics also devastate the public opinion of her (not very high to begin with), those same tactics employed to gain the nomination will almost certainly deprive her of the presidency in the general election.

“In sum, this is Hillary’s dilemma: Hold on to the bait, and both Clinton and the Democrats lose. Let go of the bait, and Obama wins. Hillary Clinton’s victory in November is not an option.”

A key House Democratic committee chairman the other day wondered aloud what I’ve heard voiced quietly elsewhere: If Hillary can’t get the nomination in 2008, she’ll so wound Obama that McCain might slip in. Or, even if Obama were to win the election, he’d be so damaged as to be unable to govern easily. In either case in 2012, Clinton, the only one left standing, figures she would be perfectly positioned to take the nomination.

Talk about “crazy”! Those reasons seems much too convoluted to be taken seriously, not the least because Clinton, in this scenario, would be universally recognized as the Dem spoiler who ruined the party’s best shot for taking back the White House. She would be the Ralph Nader of 2008 who would never be forgiven by the very activist Democratic base she would need in a future run for the presidency.

TRAGIC FLAW: OVERWEENING AMBITION

I’m not sure Obama would be the greatest campaigner against McCain or would necessarily be a great or even better-than-average President. But he is intelligent and a quick-learner, who, I’d like to believe, might well rise to the occasion. What does seem clear is that he is on a virtually unstoppable course to win the Democratic nomination and if Clinton continues to take the low dirty road in her attempt to mortally wound him, any future career plans beyond the Senate for her are finished.

All politicians at this level are consumed by ambition, but they usually disguise it a bit. Clinton’s is right out there for all to see. Will she, can she, rein in that aspect of her personality, especially if Obama winds up winning key states in the upcoming remaining primaries and more and more superdelegates endorse him? One would hope so for the good of the party, good of the country, good for her as an important Democratic leader. But the Clintons are notorious street-scrappers who will do or say anything to get what they want and, in any event, will not go gentle into that dark night. No wonder Rove is fixated on them, as they must remind him of aspects of himself.

That is crazy.

I know American politics don’t make much sense to Europeans. Truth is, it barely makes sense to us here in the States. (On the other hand, I haven’t asked you two to explain your own sketchy European pols such as Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Putin, et al.) But I hope I’ve supplied some insights that might be helpful. Write and let me know your further thoughts. — Love to you and the kids, Bernie#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers.

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/29/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Impeachment Now or Apocalypse Later?

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

The political noose seems to be tightening on the key members of the remaining miscreants down in the White House bunker — mainly Bush, Cheney, Rice, Addington and Mukasey. (Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Powell and Tenet were pushed out the door earlier.) But will the Democrats, having been provided with smoking gun-type evidence of these officials’ high crimes and misdemeanors, take the next logical step to end this continuing nightmare of law-breaking at the highest levels? Consider:

TORTURE AUTHORIZED FROM ON HIGH

After eight years, the multiple examples of ethical and felonious crimes of the Bush Administration are now abundantly clear and beyond rational dispute. Most compelling among them is the crime of authorizing torture as state policy.

In recent days, we’ve learned that Geoge W. Bush signed orders authorizing torture, and admitted that he approved of the deliberations by his National Security Council’s Principals Committee on the torture regime being set up for a few high-value prisoners. (Which, of course, filtered down to how thousands of suspected terrorists were maltreated.)

Bush has conceded that his Principals (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet) kept him apprised of their deliberations on which suspected terrorists would undergo which forms of torture, according to ABC News’ recent blockbuster story.

The meetings of the Principals, according to ABC, took place in early 2002 at least four months before the Administration’s famous Bybee/Yoo memos were issued that retroactively sought to provide legal justification for the torture. (Short version of those memoranda: The President is above all U.S. laws and international treaties.)

During those Principals’ meetings, Dick Cheney was a driving force behind the use of “harsh interrogations” of the prisoners in U.S. care. Other members were more worried about what they were doing. In the ABC story, according to a top official, John Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, aggressively chaired the Principals’ torture meetings. Despite some occasional misgivings voiced by Ashcroft and Colin Powell about the “enhanced interrogation” techniques being employed, Rice told the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

TRYING TO MAKE TORTURE “LEGAL”

Torture, as commonly understood and defined, is illegal under both U.S. law and international treaties that American governments have ratified over the decades. Bush&Co. had to come up with a way to torture suspects but not to appear to be doing so. Here’s how it worked: Officials felt they could honestly assert that the Administration didn’t approve of or authorize torture because under the new definition supplied in the Bybee/Yoo memos, it was torture only if the prisoners were near-death or their internal organs were about to fail as a result of their treatment. In other words, the Administration simply made everything else legal: beatings, near-drownings, electroshocks to the genitals, stress positions, sexual abuse, etc. Only if the interrogators killed the prisoners or were thisclose to doing so would they have crossed over the line. See my “Control the Dictionary, Control the World.” ( )

It turns out that David Addington, Cheney’s then-Legal Counsel who has since replaced Scooter Libby as Cheney’s chief of staff, was at the locus of the cockamamie reasoning behind both the Bybee/Yoo torture memos and the “unitary executive” theory of governance. The latter asserts that the President is in charge of basically everything governmental and can’t be touched; further, the Bybee/Yoo memos assert, the President cannot be second-guessed when he claims to be acting as “commander in chief” during “wartime.”

Of course, there has been no Congressional Declaration of War, as the Constitution requires; the “war” — at an estimated cost of several trillions(!) of dollars — is the “War on Terror,” which, since it’s being waged against a tactic, can never be completely won and thus is never-ending. In short, the President, under this asserted legal cover, can act more or less as a dictator forever, including declaring martial law whenever he deems an “emergency” situation prevails. (Suppose, for example, the ballot-counting books are cooked in November and the Democratic candidate once again has a victory stolen away. There could be mass protests, perhaps even riots, in the streets. A potential “civic emergency” right there.)

MUKASEY’S FALSE TESTIMONY

Michael Mukasey, who promised he would be an independent Attorney General, has turned out to be just as much of a lackey for the Administration as his predecessor Alberto Gonzales. Mukasey seems to feel, as Gonzales did, that he doesn’t work for the public but is there to ensure that his bosses stay out of jail. (Interesting side-note: Barack Obama says that, if elected, he would ask his attorney general to investigate whether Bush and Cheney might have committed indictable crimes while in office.

But what really got Mukasey into hot water in recent days was his assertion that the U.S. knew that a terrorist in Afghanistan was calling someone inside the U.S. prior to the 9/11 attack but the supposedly “outdated” FISA laws wouldn’t permit the Administration to tap that phone call and thus prevent the 9/11 events from happening. Mukasey was using that fallacious argument in 2008 as a scare reason for why the Bush Administration needed Congressional re-authorization immediately of the NSA’s domestic-spying program, complete with built-in amnesty for the big telecom companies working in cahoots with the Administration.

But Mukasey’s explanation is total B.S.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have made clear, under then-existing FISA law the Bush Administration could have eavesdropped on the pre-9/11 call and didn’t really need any more draconian spying programs. (Mukasey has since tried to tapdance away from having misled Congress.)

The whole object of the Bush Administration, in this and every other matter, has been to amass total control of information and intelligence in the White House, cutting out the courts (in this case, specifically the FISA Court) and Congress. They want full freedom to operate outside the law, with nobody — no judges, no legislators, no media reporters — looking over their shoulders at what they might be up to, and telling them what they can or cannot do. It’s possible that at least one aim of the domestic-spying programs is to learn from secret phone-taps and emails what their political enemies are thinking.

THINGS ON AND OFF THE TABLE

OK, so Cheney, Bush, Rice, Mukasey, Addington (and no doubt others not quite as prominent) are dirty, involved in activities beyond and outside the law. In other words, they have engaged, and are still engaged, in high crimes and misdemeanors. What’s to be done?

There’s more than enough documented evidence to justify, at the very least, an impeachment hearing in the House. Potentially, if the committee voted to go forward, there could well be enough support to convict in the Senate from both Democrats and Republicans worried about their electoral chances in 2008.

But nothing can happen unless or until the majority Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate make the collective decision to begin the impeachment process with hearings in the House Judiciary Committee.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers are sticking to their guns that impeachment is “off the table.”

THEIR REASONS FOR AVOIDING ACTION

Let’s examine the main reasons why the Congressional Democratic leaders refuse to budge from this policy, and how they might be made to change their minds. Their arguments appear to rest on four basic premises:

1. Breaking the impeachment cycle. The Democrats moved to impeach Republican President Richard Nixon (who resigned before the Senate could try him), then the Republicans impeached Democratic President Bill Clinton and tried him in the Senate (not for treason or malfeasance in office but for lying about a sexual dalliance. He was acquitted). Putting Cheney and Bush on trial in the Senate, according to this reasoning, might be seen as tit-for-tat partisan vengeance.

In this argument, the impeachment option is being over-used for political reasons and risks becoming cyclical each time one party controls Congress and the other controls the White House.

A Democrat may win the Presidency in 2008. Unless the impeachment cycle is broken now, this reasoning goes, a future Democratic President might become the object of a vendetta by forces of the Republican rightwing, anxious for some payback.

2. Impeachment would hamper getting essential Congressional business done. The Democratic leadership says that preparing and conducting impeachment hearings would use up all the political oxygen and energy in Congress, making it virtually impossible to deal legislatively with important matters.

The question is whether the Democrats are having any success right now dealing with these important legislative matters. Looking at the situation realistically, it’s obvious that not much essential business is being conducted, let alone completed.

The Republicans filibuster, or threaten to, at which point the Dems back off their legislation; if a bill by the Democratic majority does manage to sneak through, Bush either vetoes it or issues a “signing statement” saying he won’t obey the new law. Virtually all matters of import are being postponed until after the new President is installed next January.

3. Why rock the boat? Why risk the opprobium of Independent and moderate-Republican voters in November, who might think the Democrats are “piling on” for partisan, electoral reasons, and thus decide to vote for the Republican nominee?

The Democratic leadership’s argument goes: “Look, the Republicans are on the ropes as a result of this incompetent, corrupt, greedy, war-mongering Administration. As a result, we’re well positioned to enlarge our electoral gains in the House and the Senate, maybe to the point of being able to prevent obstructionist Republicans from filibustering needed legislation. And we may well take back the White House. So why rock the boat?

“Let’s just last out CheneyBush’s final months in office [the Dem argument continues]. Since we know that this unpopular pair will continue to earn the disdain and anger of the American public by continuing their extremist ways until Inauguration Day in January, it’s better they remain in office rather than risk firing-up GOP-base passions during the election campaign by putting Bush and Cheney in the impeachment dock. Besides, if we impeached them, the public’s focus would fasten on Bush and Cheney rather than on the Republican nominee and the dangers of a possible McCain presidency.”

In short, the American people, this reasoning goes, want to quickly move away from thinking about the godawful CheneyBush Administration of the past eight years and head to a more optimistic, hopeful future.

4. The fear of being slimed. The Democrats don’t want to be accused of being “unpatriotic” by putting a “wartime” President into the impeachment dock. Even though Bush is the most unpopular president in history, and though more than three-quarters of American citizens think under his leadership the country is “on the wrong track,” the Democrats, anxious for a re-election sweep in the House and Senate, remain terrified of Rovian-type Swiftboating smears that could possibly cost them some votes in November and in the 2010 midterm election.

Realizing that the Bushistas still control the mainstream, corporate-owned media, and thus have all sorts of TV/radio/newspaper organizations that could dump on them big time, the Democrats continue to roll over and make nice to the shrinking but noisy Republican base and their TV/radio pundits. In other words, the Dems are perennial wimps and haven’t yet figured out how best to confront the smash-mouth, take-no-prisoners politics of Rove & Co.

I strongly disagree with these four rationales for inaction, but at least I can understand where they’re coming from. But the Democrats, especially their leaders, are simply ignoring some essential arguments.

REBUTTAL: WHY NOT IMPEACHMENT?

1. Nine months is a longnnnnnnnnnnnnng time. Between now and January 2009, a full nine months from now, CheneyBush are capable of doing a hell of a lot of further damage to the body politic, to the economy, to the Constitution, to the reputation of the U.S. abroad, to the armed forces, to the “enemy” countries in their crosshairs. The propaganda campaign being catapulted against Iran, for example, is nearly a carbon copy of what took place before the U.S. bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq. The neo-cons in the Administration, especially Cheney and Bush, are salivating at the prospect of an enormous air assault on Iran’s military establishment and laboratories, have positioned attack forces near and around Iran, and are ready to rumble. All they need is an acceptable causus belli.

A cornered CheneyBush&Co. down in the bunker may decide, what the hell, to unleash the dogs of war again, even though their two previous unleashings have been disasters. Iraq is a catastrophic quagmire of epic proportions, and a somewhat ignored Afghanistan is heating up again with the Taliban re-asserting control of larger and larger portions of the country.

In addition, John McCain is making it clear that he will be continuing the Administration’s foreign and domestic policies if he were to win in November. He’s said it would be fine for America to stay in Iraq for a hundred years or more, he’s indicated that he’s quite amenable (maybe even eager) to “bomb, bomb, bomb” Iran, he won’t do much to help deal with the consequences of global warming, he has little to offer in the way of solutions for the financial mess the country is in — we’re talking a possible foreign policy/economic/environmental apocalypse here!

2. The danger of a green light. Impeachment is an important and necessary step Americans can take to rein in an out-of-control administration that is endangering the country’s national security with its reckless, extreme misadventures.

Taking the possibility of impeachment “off the table” is to fight the CheneyBush Administration with one hand tied behind the back. Bush&Co. have demonstrated over the past eight years that they understand, and respond to, only one thing: countervailing power that refuses to give in. The ultimate effective weapon in the Legislative Branch’s arsenal is the fear of impeachment and conviction and removal from power, to be followed either by “war crimes” charges internationally and felony and civil-suit prosecutions inside the U.S.

Absent the possibility of impeachment, Cheney and Bush feel they have a green light to do whatever they wish in the time remaining of their tenure. Waxman and Leahy can try to humiliate and embarrass them in their Congresssional one-day hearings, but they will face no real accountability or punishment for their actions. So why not continue the corruption, attack Iran, appoint more ideologues to the courts and into high administrative positions, postpone any global-warming solutions, etc. etc.?

3. The precedent of respecting the law. Whenever leaders are not punished for their unethical policies or criminal misdeeds, the rule of law suffers. Impeachment is mentioned numerous times in the Constitution as the legal and required remedy for extreme misrule. It’s the last option for citizens, through their legislators, to discipline errant leaders.

If the Congress does not impeach this president and vice president, who have nearly taken the country down as a result of their reckless, dangerous, incompetent, authoritarian behavior, then the rule of law stands for nothing. And future elected leaders can legitimately believe that they more or less can also get away with anything they wish to do.

Putting Cheney and Bush into the impeachment dock is to assert the primacy of the rule of law under our system of governance, and would serve as a clear warning shot across the bow of future presidents.

4. Force CheneyBush to play defense. There is one other advantage to initiating impeachment hearings ASAP for Bush and Cheney. The Bush&Co. juggernaut is most effective when on the offensive and their opponents are put on the defensive. The Bushistas don’t like, and don’t do well, when they’re forced to play defense. Tying them up in defending themselves in impeachment hearings and/or impeachment trials might well prevent them from doing more mischief before they give up the reins of power. (Many Republicans were convinced they would never convict Bill Clinton in the Senate but figured the trial was worth doing anyway because it would hog-tie Clinton’s agenda for the rest of his presidency — and they were correct.)

A final side-benefit of impeaching Bush and Cheney: John McCain would find himself on the campaign trail being forced to take positions on torture and signing statements at the heart of the impeachment hearings, and, more often than not, would wind up either defending those unpopular policies or promising never to repeat them.

WILL THE DEMS SURPRISE US ALL?

Will the Congressional Democratic leaders change their attitude toward impeachment?

I think the answer is a clear No unless their constituencies loudly and unwaveringly tell them they have to or risk the consequences at the ballot box, or in the possible establishment of a new, grassroots-engendered party after the November election that will demonstrate the courage and passion for ethical and reality-based government that is so lacking in today’s timid, Bush-enabling Democratic Party.

That, unfortunately, is where we are politically in the Spring of 2008. It doesn’t have to be that way.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/22/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”: Corporatism in Extremis

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Most of the books I’ve read about the awfulness of the Bush presidency remind me of the old story about the blind men trying to figure out what an elephant looks like. Each one feels the part in front of him and describes the elephant within that singular context. The blind men’s descriptions are correct but they don’t really capture “elephant-ness,” the totality of what such an animal might be.

“The Shock Doctrine” by The Nation/Guardian writer Naomi Klein gets the pieces of the elephant right, but, more importantly, the book displays the author’s deep understanding of the dangerous political/economic philosophies that undergird U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

In this, “The Shock Doctrine” is the most compelling, intelligent, meticulously researched and wholistic book I’ve yet read about how the U.S., over the past fifty years, got itself into the unholy mess it’s in today.

A large part of Klein’s book, as you might guess, involves the catastrophe that is Iraq and the “war on terror” in general. But those military misadventures, she says, are but symptoms of the more all-encompassing ideological mindset that breeds the reckless policies being pursued today both domestically and internationally.

PROFITEERING ON HUMAN TRAGEDY

In the main, that ideology rests on a narrow, greed-oriented economic and political philosopy that barely recognizes the concept of a “public good.” Instead, the goal is what can be gained by private corporations and individuals if the “public good” is removed from the equation so that “free market” forces are permitted to act unconstrained.

The idea is to return to some imagined “clean slate” where those free-market forces can be allowed to do their stuff absent governmental interference and oversight. The economic “shock therapy” visited upon developing Latin American countries and the Iraq War/Occupation provide just two examples of such human intervention.

Often, however, Mother Nature through earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc. wipes the slate clean so that the greed paradigm can be allowed to flourish by removing (usually poorer) residents who get in the way of corporate desires. Klein incisively and movingly relates the tale of what happened in Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami disaster, where the local fishing villages were turned into luxurious tourist sites by money-hungry government officials in cahoots with Western developers. (Page 385)

Klein uses the term “disaster capitalism” to refer to these “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,” where the forces of greed view such tragedies “as exciting market opportunities.” (p.6) She quotes a Republican leader in Louisiana: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Katrina, Klein says, is a clear example of the new “preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” (p.8)

In short, in “disaster capitalism” there are huge profits to be made from other peoples’ misery, and since the welfare of the public is of no import in this economic/political theory, all that is needed for full control and enhanced profits are ways to optimally manage that misery.

MAN-MADE TRAUMA AND CHAOS

If nature doesn’t provide that trauma, humans can. According to Klein, that’s what “Shock & Awe” was all about in Iraq and which will be used in other attacks as well. The idea is to traumatize an entire culture through death, destruction, deprivation, fright, and often torture. One U.S. entrepreneur in Iraq stated it baldly: “fear and disorder offer real promise” in the marketplace. (p.9) This is reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice’s famous comment after 9/11 that the terrorist tragedy offerred conservatives a good “opportunity” to move quickly on their business and political agendas.

Much of the rationale for this type of thinking was born from Milton Friedman’s economic model developed at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and beyond. Klein, oddly enough, doesn’t even mention the complementary teaching by political philosopher Leo Strauss, the Machavellian godfather of neo-conservative extremism, who also was on the Chicago faculty; many of Strauss’ students became key players in the CheneyBush Administration. Strauss in a nutshell: grab what you can get by whatever means necessary.

While Friedman’s tough, corporate model can be, and has been, imposed on democratic cultures, Klein notes, “authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision.” (p.11) And thus aggressive, tough strictures are often employed, often by dictators or invading armies or world financial institutions.

In non-dictatorships, government (which takes its cues from public clamor for services) must be effectively neutered or “hollowed-out” over time. The aim is to privatize as many of those public-need functions as possible, so that huge amounts of money can be made and, as it happens, healthy chunks of that cash can then be funnelled back into party coffers to aid proponents of free-markets to stay in office and expand their power base. (Conservative activist Grover Norquist aims for the day when government will be shrunken to the point that it can be “drowned in a bathtub.”)

In the Bush Administration, Klein writes, “the war profiteers aren’t just clamoring to get access to government, they are the government; there is no distinction between the two.” (p. 314)

PRIVATIZING GOVERNMENT ITSELF

As we have seen time and time again in the Bush Administration, virtually every possible government function is outsourced to corporate contractors, often with no bidding for those contracts. The middle-class and poor get stomped on and squeezed, but the corporate behemoths and multinationals — the Bechtels and Halliburtons and Blackwaters and KPMGs — make out like bandits. Graft and corruption are built into the system, with billions simply disappearing into corporate black holes, with the Administration conveniently looking the other way. And the general public, of course, winds up paying for all this transfer of wealth and is left holding the bag in the form of lack of spending on public needs and infrastructure upkeep and a huge debt burdening future generations.

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist,” writes Klein. (p. 87) (Mussolini described this amalgam of government and business as fascism.)

“Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. … Other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.” (p. 15)

At times, Klein seems to be suggesting that such behaviors are but unfortunate and accidental by-products of over-zealous free-marketeers, but mostly she leans in the direction of a conscious conspiracy on the part of the corporatist manipulators of the economy and body politic. For example, she says, “the extreme tactics on display in Iraq and New Orleans are often mistaken for the unique incompetence or cronyism of the Bush White House. In fact, Bush’s exploits merely represent the monstrously violent and creative culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation.” (p.19)

LATIN AMERICA AS CHICAGO LAB

Milton Friedman’s economic model, engineered by his former students (Klein calls them the “Chicago Boys”) placed in key countries around the world, rested upon, to use Friedman’s words, inflicting “painful shocks: only ‘bitter medicine’ could clear those distortions and bad patterns out of the way.” (p. 50) But time after time when economic shock therapies were tried out in the real world — downsizing government, eliminating millions of jobs, deregulation of industries, etc. — the resulting social chaos and dislocation were so horrific that the experiments had to be trimmed back or reconfigured, often using the very Keynesian mixed-economy approaches that are anathema to the Friedmanites.

The first public laboratory for Friedman’s drastic economic model was Latin America in the ’50s and ’60s and then beyond: Iran, Indonesia, former colonies in Afria, etc. But, says Klein, rather than encourage and bring democracy to Guatamala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, et al., the result was the CIA-engineered “overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.” (p. 102)

Iraq, she indicates, is merely the latest manifestation of what happens when private profit and private power are the be-alls and end-alls of government policy, complemented by imperial hegemony resting on a belief in American “exceptionalism.”

“As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecesors, one for whom wars and other disasters are indeed ends in themselves. … That’s because what is unquestionably good for the bottom line of these companies is cataclysm — wars, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages. … Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.” (p. 311)

SHOCKING & AWING IN IRAQ

Nowhere is this more evident that in Iraq, which contains all four of those calamities (war, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages) in one convenient location:

“After the crusade had conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier…The architects of this invasion were firm believers in the shock doctrine — they knew that while Iraqis were consumed with daily emergencies, the country could be discreetly auctioned off and the results announced as a done deal.”

“The architects of the war surveyed the global aresenal of shock tactics and decided to go with all of them — blitzkrieg military bombardment supplemented with elaborate psychological operations, followed up with the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by rounding up those who resisted and subjecting them to ‘gloves-off’ abuse…[an] experiment in mass torture for months.” (p. 331)

Torture and the other dislocations usually occur early as a demonstration model; the extreme maltreatment is not aimed solely or sometimes even mainly at those persons tortured or killed, but are designed to stimulate a general sense of chaos and fright and to “destroy the parts of society that those people represent,” such as resisters, political activists, or labor organizers. (p. 101)

So why did the U.S. Occupation go so badly? One could name a host of reasons, but certainly a huge one is an obvious blind spot in the theory of American exceptionalism:

“It was this theft of Iraq’s reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by unquestioned, racist assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi inferiority — and not merely the generic demons of ‘corruption’ and ‘incompetence’ — that doomed the project from the start. (p. 347) … It was straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers.” (p. 355)

“[The Bush Administration} had commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed in Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq. ... Iraqis did not see the corporate reconstruction as 'a gift': most saw it as a modernized form of pillage," in cahoots with a corrupted Iraqi government bureaucracy. (p. 347) At that point, a huge number of those disenchanted, angry Iraqis joined the armed rebels.

RENTING-BACK ESSENTIAL SERVICES

So what lies in store for the future, now that so many major countries are little more than national-security police states, with their traditional governmental public-service functions outsourced or otherwise "disappeared"? Klein looks into her crystal ball:

"The next phase of the disaster capitalism complex is all too clear: with emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their can't-do state, the parallel corporate state will rent back its own disaster infrastructure to whomever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear. For sale will be everything from helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking water to beds in shelters." (p. 319) Blackwater providing armed guards in post-Katrina New Orleans was just the tip of the iceberg (p. 421), or Sandy Spring, GA., where the entire city government is run by the private corporation CH2M Hill.

"

But the [disaster] industry has far greater ambitions, including privatized global communication networks, emergency health and electricity…the contracting-out of police and fire departments to private security companies…and the ability to locate and provide transportation for a global workforce in the midst of a major disaster. … [We are witnessing] the expansion of the narrow military-industrial complex into the sprawling disaster capitalism complex. Today, global instability does not just benefit a small group of arms dealers; it generates huge profits for the high-tech security sector, for heavy construction, for private health-care companies treating wounded soldiers, for the oil and gas sectors — and of course for defense contractors.” (p. 420)

And the stock markets reflect that reality, rising as disasters occur. Says Klein: “Shock-therapy ‘reforms’ have been the crack cocaine of financial markets.” (p. 87)

COUNTERING THE GREED MERCHANTS

Can anything be done to counter the rise of the national-security/disaster-capitalism states? Klein says the blowback is already happening against disaster-capitalism all over the globe, but is most clearly evident in Latin America where leaders and populations are rebelling against U.S. hegemonic desires and harsh IMF policies. They are learning to “build shock absorbers into their organizing models,” Klein writes. (p. 453)

In Europe, two countries (France and Holland) rejected the European Constitution, the French because they saw that document as “the codification of the corporatist order,” what they called “savage capitalism.” More and more grassroots-generated collectives are being started in Brazil to reclaim unused land, and in Argentina hundreds of bankrupt companies “recovered” by their workers have been turned into democratically-organized cooperatives. (p. 455)

These are small steps, to be sure, but they may represent strong, active anti-disaster capitalism tectonics about to emerge. Certainly, the appearance of this brilliantly argued book is a giant and necessary step in turning this country, and the world, around.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/15/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Things That Go Bump In My Night

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

In the hour of the wolf, we progressive activists are sometimes visited by nightmarish political scenarios. No doubt, dear reader, you have your own scary visitations. Here are ten of mine:

1. MOVING CLOSER TO IRAN WAR

That some major false-flag terrorist attack, perhaps arranged by our own black-op agencies, will be unloosed in an American city — maybe a dirty nuke, or some virulent toxin, or a bomb — and the planted “evidence” will seem to lead back to Iran. CheneyBush, perhaps in coordination with Israel, will finally get their wished-for aerial assault on that country.

An attack on Iran could happen very soon. The buildup of U.S. forces in the region has proceeced apace in the past few months; naval preparations ( http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070327/62697703.html ), according to Russian intelligence, are much the same as just prior to CheneyBush’s “shock&awe” attack on Iraq five years ago. The Saudis seem to be preparing for possible nuclear fallout from an attack on Iran’s reactors. ( http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1463/135 ) Not a good sign.

The result of a U.S. attack on Iran would be a catastrophic rise in violence in the Greater Middle East, more hatred of America around the world, the dollar heading into the toilet, various holders of billions of U.S. notes calling them in, a possible anti-U.S. economic embargo of essential resources, the economy in ruins, America a pariah in international affairs.

2. ABOVE & BEYOND THE LAW

That there won’t be an inauguration of a new president because Bush, following some major incident (perhaps the false-flag operation noted above or something similar), will declare martial law and rule by decree. Which, not incidentally, is pretty close to what he’s doing right now with his signing statements and executive orders and his refusal to obey decisions of the courts and Congress’ subpoenas requiring testimony and documents.

Under the cockamamie “unitary executive” theory, and hiding behind his supposed wartime powers that assert that Bush can do anything he wishes as long as he says it’s done as “commander-in-chief” during “wartime,” Bush has effectively put himself above and beyond the law. The only hope for saving what remains of our democratic institutions lies in impeachment, a rebellion in Congress and among the populace, a united Supreme Court ruling against him, a refusal by the military to fire on protesting civilians, or a sweeping, massive Democratic victory in November. Probably most or all of these at the same time will be required.

If none of these stop-gaps work during CheneyBush’s residency in the White House, it could be incarceration in FEMA camps for all manner of protesters and resisters.

3. A THIRD TERM FOR BUSH

That Hillary Clinton’s destructive campaign (praising McCain as fit to be “commander-in-chief” while constantly demeaning Obama as unfit to rule and unable to win the general election) will effectively result in Bush being elected to a third term. That is, John McCain would win.

McCain would be aided in this by Ralph Nader, who as a “spoiler” once again would be financially supported by the Republicans, as happened in 2000 and 2004.

4. PILFERING AT THE POLLS

That the November 2008 election, assuming we actually have one, will be stolen yet again by the GOP in enough key states to guarantee a Republican presidential victory through a combination of manipulated vote totals by the private, GOP-leaning companies that tabulate the ballots, and by the host of dirty tricks that by now the Rove-ian forces have down to a T, such as:

Culling the voting rolls of hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters in minority precincts; robo-calling registered Dem voters again and again and again, supposedly by Dem candidates, to irritate those called into not voting for that candidate; telling poor voters that if they have any unpaid traffic tickets, they are liable for arrest at their voting precinct; distributing leaflets in minority communities that voting this year will be on a Wednesday; etc. etc. (All of these, and more, were vote-suppression techniques utilized by the GOP in 2004 and 2006.)

5. DELUSIONAL THINKING IN IRAQ

That the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be unable to stop CheneyBush from escalating the Iraq fighting yet again, getting the U.S. even more deeply enmeshed in that country’s civil war, and making it even more difficult for a new administration to extricate America from that immoral, multi-trillion-dollar sinkhole.

Bush remains lodged somewhere in cloud-cuckoo land, bragging about how the current explosion of violence throughout Iraq is a sign of the “success” of his policies. The only reasons the violence slowed a bit post-”surge” was that Muqtada al-Sadr told his militia forces to stand down and the U.S. paid off Sunni insurgents not to attack U.S. troops. Now that the battles are being resumed, the violence spikes will continue to rise.

CheneyBush, desperate for something that looks positive in Iraq, may have leaned on Maliki to launch a major offensive against the al-Sadr militias, or maybe it was the other way around, with Maliki using the U.S. troops as shields as he attacked his major political foes. But, whoever initiated the offense, it was way premature, as the Maliki forces are not there yet, and may never be. (There have been significant defections to the militias by forces supposedly loyal to the central government.)

This is the same mistake made by the American forces moving into Iraq five years ago — that it would all be over quickly. We “underestimated their capabilities,” said an Iraqi government official. Sound familiar?

6. LOCATING THE BODIES FOR MORE WAR

That given this recent turn of events, the effect of the Iraq government offensive is to put American and British forces in the middle between warring Shi’ite factions. I don’t think the American public, or the Pentagon chiefs, will support having U.S. troops in such an untenable position for any length of time.

Sadr, after his forces humiliated Maliki by stalemating him on the ground, has now called off his troops, but the militant cleric has made his point: He can bring rack and ruin to the Iraq cental government whenever he wants, and there’s not much Maliki can do about it.

And Sadr may want to release his militia force again before the American election in November, which is precisely what the CheneyBush Administration fears as another large Sadrist attack would once again demonstrate the total ineffectiveness of U.S. policy in Iraq.

The big winner ( www.juancole.com/2008/03/iran-brokers-call-for-ceasefire-bush.html ) in all this, of course, is Shi’ite Iran. It stepped in and helped separate Iraq’s two warring Shi’ite factions. Lots of egg on lots of Iraqi and U.S. faces.

Already, Bush has indicated there will be no draw-down of U.S. forces this Spring. Eventually, there may have to be yet another “surge” force dispatched to Iraq, just to “temporarily stabilize” the situation. Can you spell (and smell) V-I-E-T-N-A-M and Q-U-A-G-M-I-R-E?

And from where would the military, already stretched dangerously thin in the Greater Middle East and around the globe, put their hands on 30,000 more bodies? The Reserves and National Guard and in-country troops about to be “stop-lossed” yet again are close to the point of rebellion. As much as CheneyBush do not wish to go there (because of the likelihood of a mammoth opposition to the war in the American middle class), one can feel a draft in the room.

7. NOBODY DID ANYTHING WRONG

That Bush will issue blanket presidential pardons to Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, David Addington, and Himself for all crimes they “may have committed” during their tenure in the Administration.

Once again, nobody in the higher echelons is ever accountable in the CheneyBush royal court. It must have been the pesky dog that ate everybody’s homework.

8. A DEPLETED WORLD LARDER

That the trend of various countries in the world running short of essential commodities will result in even more horrendous resource-wars between and inside nations over potable and irrigation water, oil, wheat, rice, and so on. Starvation, dehydration, not even rice to feed Asia, not enough grains with which to make pasta and bread in Europe, not enough oil to run cars and machinery, etc. etc.

Another worldwide Great Depression, aided by an unfolding collapse of the U.S. economy.

9. DENIAL ON A GLOBAL SCALE

That even with the ocean waters rising as a result of global warming and the consequent faster melting of glaciers and ice shelves, with the consequent disastrous effects on climate-change, the Republicans will continue to downplay what they see in front of their eyes. Given that state of denial means that the GOP will wind up doing nothing about global warming; instead, they will continue to blame Bill Clinton, abortion providers, and the “homosexual agenda.” (”Let’s see, today I’m going to get my hair done, get married to my partner, and then take my hair dryer and go melt some glaciers.”)

10. CHENEY, THANK YOO

That Dick Cheney will be named chairman of John McCain’s vice-presidential selection committee. And that John Yoo will be nominated by McCain for the next open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

*****

This is where we are after nearly eight years of CheneyBush rule: The scariest thing about most of these nightmare visions is that, based on CheneyBush’s documented record of outrageous and illegal and reckless governance, the above scenarios sound almost normal these days. Which means they could easily happen.

All the more reason why we must redouble our oppositional energies: organize, organize, organize; resist, resist, resist. #

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at univerisities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currenty serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). For comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/1/08.
www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/bump.htm

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

A Western Parable: Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy (Again)

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

My neighbor’s cattle operation had a huge number of prized Black Angus steers and Holstein dairy-cows. I wanted them and the lush range they fed on. I tried making some sort of deal with the owner, but he was one ornery sumbitch.

He knew his Double I-Ranch was prime real estate, with super cattle herds, so he made sure to hire the strongest guards and gave them the latest weapons so nobody would consider making a move on him. He was taunting me, telling me he wouldn’t deal, that I could go to hell. He needed a good lesson in humility.

Over the years, the guy had been getting old and his security system had slipped into disrepair. He ran his ranch as a kind of corrupt one-man show so I knew he’d be a pushover if I moved on his property and just took it, got rid of him and set up my own manager of the place who would run it “independently” but take his cues from me, if you get my drift. I’m the most powerful land baron in the area now, so why not? Nobody could really stop me.

But I couldn’t just march my assembled gunslingers and cowhands in there and openly take it. I’d have to attack under cover of “the law”: helping the poor downtrodden residents who live there, that sort of thing. So I went to the County Council and told them all sorts of scary stories about huge caches of weapons, including some really dangerous experimental ones, that were stockpiled on his ranch. I said he was planning on using all that ordnance against us and his other neighbors and his own people.

I also told them that the rancher had been involved in the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, even though I knew he hadn’t been. Oddly enough, I could get only one other major neighbor to join my plan, a suck-up kind of poodle who thought he’d hitch his small ranch to my power-star.

ATTACK BEFORE ANYONE CAN PREVENT IT

I urged the County Council to pass a resolution saying the rancher better disarm or else face an attack. But before agreeing, the county authorities (those suspicious a-holes!) didn’t want to take my word about the weapon-stockpiles and sent in arms-inspectors who, not surprisingly, weren’t finding much of anything.

I knew if I got all balled up in those inspections and in County Council politics, I’d never be able to take control of his ranch, and later the surrounding properties that also seemed ripe for the plucking. So I decided to attack first, “pre-emptively,” so to speak, before he could do any damage and before anybody could try to stop me.

Word got out about my impending attack, and lots of folks from all over the county, and even the state, demonstrated in the streets against me, warning about all the things that could go wrong if our guys attacked without a solid moral reason, without an imminent threat against us, and without a large coalition of friends and neighbors.

But my top ranchhands and some former residents of Double I-Ranch I consulted about the coming attack told me it would be a “cakewalk,” would be over real quicklike, and that all the abused workers on the ranch would be so happy to be freed from their tyrannical boss, they’d be grateful to us forever.

NOT SO FAST WITH THAT “VICTORY”

So we hyped all those scary stories about weapons and fooled or paid off enough County Council members, and soon we were mortaring the bejusus out of the next-door ranch — it was awesome! It didn’t take long for our guys to get to the main ranch-house. The hired guards didn’t put up much of a fight — in fact, they seemed to have melted into the general population. So I held a press conference announcing, under a big “Victory Is Ours” banner, that our guys had “prevailed” in the fighting. Double I-Ranch was now “under new management,” which meant we began setting up friendly crew-chiefs who would do our bidding.

But then all hell broke loose. Turns out that our guys had pretty much wrecked the place and weren’t able to reconstruct much of this broken ranch. The contractors I hired couldn’t rebuild the ruined corrals, stockyards, water-delivery and electrical systems, and so on. (They did waste and steal a lot of the reconstruction funds, but I thought it was worth looking the other way to keep them happy.)

The local Double I-Ranch residents, including a lot of former guards, were getting surly. They started fighting us, using abandoned weapons caches our guys hadn’t bothered to secure, since so much of our attention was focused on getting the Black Angus and Holstein herds to market and to expanding and protecting our new grazing lands.

To make a long story short, our occupation of the ranch went into the toilet, and we no longer were seen to be on the moral high ground after word got out that our guys were abusing the locals we had captured. Every month, we lost more and more of our own hired gunslingers to the rebels in ambushes and sneak-attacks, often without the right armor to protect themselves.

Some weak-kneed namby-pambys said it made sense at that point to abandon Double I-Ranch, which was consumed in chaos in any event, as various factions among the ranchhands were fighting among themselves. But even though they hated each other, by this time virtually the entire I-Ranch population, employees and just regular locals alike wanted us to leave. Even some of those ungrateful leaders we’d installed felt the same way. Many of our supporters thought we were bogged down there, for sure, and could be in that mess for decades.

Even if there were no stockpiles of advanced weapons, and no Double I-Ranch connection to the Okalahoma City bombing, our guys were on the ground there, as planned, so it made sense to send in more armed ranchands and just power on through and come up with a victory down the road somewhere. Not just on this ranch, but in the entire area. So we built huge staging bases on the ranch, which would be used for leverage in getting our way with the other property owners in the region whenever we decided to move.

NOW IN OUR SIXTH YEAR

I’ll try to bluff those owners into giving us effective access and control over their land, livestock and resources, including water and even possible oil fields. But, if that doesn’t work, I figure since we still are the most powerful landowners in the county — our Flying W brand is a strong one — we’ll just take what we want by force, if it comes to that. And why shouldn’t we? We are the Good Guys. Almost all the politicians and local reporters say so. Of course, I own or can control virtually all the papers and radio stations/TV channels, and, for that matter, most of the politicians who count, too.

Trouble was, this damned operation, which is now in its sixth year, is costing us a humongous fortune and folks on my Flying W ranch are starting to get restless, since I don’t have much money left over to repair our fences, maintain our herds, and repair our ranch buildings. And many are noticing that I’m financing our campaign to control the grazing fields and herds and natural resources by borrowing heavily from outsiders — mainly from those who might be future enemies. This means that my kids and grandkids will be paying that huge debt forever.

Even worse, the lies and deceptions that my friends and I had told early on to get us into attacking Double I-Ranch are now coming back to bite us. Even many of my supporters who agreed with my plans at the beginning are rejecting me now that the going is tough. Indeed, folks are talking about a public lynching unless I abandon my “extreme” agenda. In short, I am so unpopular — sometimes I feel like a skunk at a nudist colony — that my supporters probably aren’t going to be able to control the County Council in the next election.

To which I say a hearty “Fuck you!” to one and all. You have no power, I have all the power. And our side is winning; we’re winning, I tell you! And I have faith we will achieve victory. Someday.

Or, if not, so?

I’m about to retire and move to Costa Rica or Paraguay or somewhere. So what do I care if I’ve screwed it up so badly that whoever comes after me will be waste-deep in the big muddy for years, with nowhere to go but down? In the meantime, maybe I’ll attack another big ranch in the area. Why? Just because I can. And it will provide a great distraction from my other…uh…projects.

In short, I don’t recommend trying to cross me. Just lie back and enjoy it.

If any group moves against me and tries to destroy my rule, I’ll take them all down with me when I go. Them and the whole goddamned ranch. It’s that simple. You choose. #

Bernard Weiner, a poet and playwright, has written numerous parables, political fantasies and satires of the CheneyBush Administration. A Ph.D. in government & international relations, he has taught at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers. For comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 3/25/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Peace May Be Possible in the Post-Bush Middle East

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

The Middle East is undergoing yet another paroxysm of violence. An attack from one side or the other, be it Israeli or Palestinian in origin, leads to reprisal attacks, which leads to — well, we all understand the vortex that both sides continue to fall into.

This state of warfare has been going on for at least 60 years, since the founding of the State of Israel, and, in a sense, much much longer than that. And the situation is getting worse.

Those on the extremes in both Israel and Palestine (including those inside the governing entities on both sides) are attempting to make sure there will never be a peace settlement. And, by and large, both both sides’ leaders allow that interference in the peace process to rule their responses, even though polls in both Israel and Palestine indicate most citizens would prefer a peaceful two-state solution.

The Israel/Palestine situation is so seemingly intractable in how to get to that solution that it leads to regional, indeed almost universal, despair and depression. Without much energy or hope for progress, the status quo of low-level violence persists and constantly threatens to break out into full-scale warfare.

Every so often, maybe every five or ten years, the ongoing slaughter pushes the two battle-weary sides to come close enough to inspire hope that a solution can be devised — not a perfect solution, not one that guarantees peace, but one leading in that direction. And just as usually, those potential “solutions” tend to fall apart, usually after an act of violence from a crazed individual or an over-reacting Israeli government or from Hamas or other militant groups in Palestine.

DOES ANYBODY REALLY WANT PEACE?

One can’t help but conclude that neither side really wants peace; they seem to feel more comfortable playing the victim role. Each side uses its distressing history and a belief that God is on its side. Each would feel supreme joy if the other side simply vanished. Each convinces itself that with just a little more effort — just another major attack or two, another bit of pressure tactics — the other side will disappear, will see that it cannot win and will capitulate to its enemy’s demands.

Yes, of course, that type of thinking makes no rational sense, but the Middle East puzzle, it’s clear, operates mainly out of emotion, hypernationalism, overweening ethnic and religious pride, the ongoing rituals of conflict, and thoroughgoing contempt and fear of The Other.

The two sides, given the mutual hatred and massacres and suspicions, seem incapable of creatively making a peace on their own, though on occasion temporary and informal cease-fires do manage to occur. Outside mediators, be they Arab organizations or the superpower U.S., then have a go at trying to lead the two warring sides into meaningful negotiations.

Various American presidents have put their reputations and energies on the line to try to bring about a settlement that can last (Clinton and Carter were the most successful), only to see the spiral of mistrust and suspicion and violence rise to the fore yet again. Totally ignored is the role-model of how Northern Ireland moved away from its seemingly intractable violence to a tenuous but growing peace.

MIDDLE EAST SPIN AND PHOTO-OPS

George W. Bush occasionally makes some sort of diplomatic move in the Middle East, usually right before a major domestic election. Now, just before another presidential balloting and as his eight-year tenure is coming to a close and he’s thinking about his legacy, Bush initiates yet another feint. The White House P.R. machine beats the drum that the U.S. is trying hard to arrange a Mideast peace settlement, but nobody believes that anymore, since it’s clear Bush doesn’t believe it either. Since he’s tied U.S. policy so tightly to Israeli policy — Israel being America’s only dependable ally in the region — it’s all spin and photo ops, lots of sound bites signifying nothing, really.

Indeed, it may well be that the war Bush&Co. care about is not the Israel/Palestinian one, but the ones about to come, perhaps as early as this summer: U.S./Israel against Iran and Israel vs. Hezbollah in Lebanon (as proxy for Syria).

Clearly, there will be no real chance for a movement toward peace in the Middle East until the new American regime takes over, if then. CheneyBush were happy to let the Israelis handle the Palestinian in their own fashion, including further humiliation and brutalization. Bush&Co. admired and saw their own aggressive policies mirrored by the “tough” Israelis.

All three of the major-party contenders for the presidency profess to be staunchly pro-Israeli, so it’s unclear whether anything major will change if McCain or Clinton or Obama were to become the new resident in the White House. AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, continues to cow many legislators into silence, though they do not represent the wide variety of opinion, much of it sympathetic to Palestinian cries for justice and an end to the occupation, in the American Jewish community. There are strong Jewish pro-peace movements both inside America and inside Israel.

But we do know for sure that as long as Cheney and Bush are in power, nothing will change and the situation in the Middle East will become even more explosive and dangerous,

One can hope that the new U.S. Administration in 2009 will recognize its opportunity to move forcefully and quickly to craft ways out of the endless Israel/Palestine morass. Indeed, this may be history’s final opportunity to craft a viable two-state solution. For the U.S. to abdicate its role in helping bring peace to that agonized region would be shameful and self-defeating.

From now and until the November election, each of the three presidential contenders should be grilled by the press and public about their plans for ameliorating the situation in the Middle East. No doubt, they would fudge and spin their answers, but just forcing them to talk about Israel and Palestine, and how a solution is tied tightly to America’s well-being, might yield benefits down the line.

SOME FOUNDATIONAL ASSESSMENTS

Here are some possible starting points that the new president might want to consider about the Middle East dilemma:

1. Working a way to a just and peaceful solution in the Middle East is of supercharged importance not only to the survival of Israelis and Palestinians, but also is in the vital national interests of the United States.

So much of the fervor, passion and anger directed at the U.S., Israel and the West by Hamas and many other distressed Palestinians and other Arabs in the Greater Middle East would start to dissipate if the Palestinians were to achieve a viable, geographically-contiguous state of their own. To continue to let the current situation stagnate and fester is to ask for more trouble, big trouble. Doing nothing meaningful in the Middle East has been the Bush Administration’s policy for nearly eight years, and that’s what must be changed, quickly, by whoever becomes President.

2. Under Bush, the U.S. supposedly was big on helping democracy bloom in the region. But when a democratic election didn’t go the way the Bush Administration wanted, when Hamas won the approval of the majority of Palestinian voters in its parliament and both the U.S. and Israel said it would not recognize that popular electoral result, the hypocrisy of the American position was plain for all to see.

Hamas is not going to go away. Israeli governments cannot wish it away and cannot blow it away with missiles and bombs. Hamas is strong among its people because it stands up against Israel and America. Hamas therefore will have to be included in any diplomatic discussions leading to a negotiated solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. No doubt, this will happen after Fatah and Hamas make their own separate peace with each other, if such is even possible, so as to negotiate as a united Palestinian government.

There have been hints that Obama and Clinton are not philosophically opposed to meeting with those deemed America’s “enemies” — such as Iran, Syria, North Korea, et al. — as long as preparations for such meetings would seem to indicate fruitful avenues for discussion. Is it too much to hope that the new American president might be consistent and follow the same approach with Hamas?

NEITHER HAMAS NOR ISRAEL WILL DISAPPEAR

3. Israel is not going to go away. Even if most Arabs in the region believe that the establishment of Israel in 1948 on land taken from Palestinian residents was grossly illegal, the practical reality is that the Israeli state is there to stay. No amount of international pressure or bullets or suicide bombers is going to alter that reality, though the permanent borders are still up for discussion. Therefore, all Palestinian/Arab entities will have to deal with Israel at the negotiating table. (Hamas has been the most adamant political organization to oppose Israel’s right to exist, but on occasion has hinted that if Israel made the right concessions, it could possibly bend even on that hardline position.)

4. Both sides have to realize that each has historical justifications on its side, and that in their behavior both sides are both right and wrong. In short, the question of who is the more aggrieved victim, while important, is not going to get either side anywhere, certainly not to a just peace. It’s long since time to put that history to the side, so to speak, and just get it done. This doesn’t mean Palestinians and Israelis will, or even should, like each other, or ignore their suspicions of the other’s motives or their own painful histories. It just means getting the peace made and getting the difficult details worked out as best as one can.

5. The hope for a potential peace treaty depends on both sides’ leaders (as well as those in the U.S.) being willing to make huge, politically risky decisions. Everyone knows this.

GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE

A. Israel will have to end its Occupation and return to its pre-1967 borders. It will have to abandon its settlements in the West Bank/Gaza so that the requisite geographically-contiguous state of Palestine can be made viable. Maintaining the Occupation of Palestinian lands is bleeding Israel of treasure and, more importantly, of its moral sense of itself.

B. The various branches of the Palestine liberation movement will have to recognize Israel’s right to exist within secure borders, probably based on the pre-1967 map.

C. Even if the above were to occur, there likely would be occasional acts of violence and terrorism emanating from both sides. Ultra-Orthodox, fundamentalist Jews (some inside the government), believing that the Torah supports them in their Greater Israel territorial claims, may well try to derail any peace negotiations, and the requisite concessions, by attacking Palestinian targets. Likewise, ultra-nationalist or militant Islamist groups in Palestine and beyond, believing history and/or their faith give them justifications for their policies, may keep up the rocket attacks on Israel and suicide bombings inside Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Both negotiating sides will have to agree that they will not permit the movement toward a peaceful solution to be vetoed by those who would try to stop that progress through violence. Right now, anytime there is some hope for the peace process and an incursion or bombing or rocket attack takes place, the violence veto is allowed to trump the hard work of the solution-minded diplomats and political leaders. That must stop, and can be stopped, in effect, by ignoring the terrorism. If the two viable states are talking to each other and reach significant agreements, that terrorism eventually will diminish.

D. If (and it’s a very big if) the two sides can recognize that The Other is not going to disappear, no matter how much violence is employed, and sign a peace treaty, then a wide variety of other vexing issues can be brought to the forefront and solutions found. Issues such as: how to deal with the Palestinians’ claimed “right of return” to their ancient lands inside Israel, who will rule Jerusalem, who will control the water rights in that parched region, how thousands of Palestinians can move back and forth easily between Gaza and the West Bank and to their daily jobs inside Israel, etc. etc.

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

One can see the outlines, if not the details, as to how these problems might be solved:

A. Once a peace treaty has been signed, some Palestinian families will be permitted to return to their ancestral lands inside Israel, but there’s no way Israel will permit millions or even hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to pour into the Jewish State. Equitable financial compensation will be paid by Israel to those not permitted to return. (In principle, Palestinian negotiators in the past have indicated that they’d be willing to entertain discussion along these lines.)

B. Jerusalem is holy land for all three major religions in the area. It would make sense for Jersualem to become an “international city,” administered either by a joint Christian/Jewish/Islamic body or by an already existing international agency, perhaps under United Nations auspices. (Again, discussions already have taken place on such a potential arrangement.)

C. Water rights and easy access to and from Israel/Palestine no doubt can be worked out once the essential compromises have been made and both sides are working in good faith with each other.

PEACE MAY BE THE ONLY OPTION LEFT

Given the current tense, explosive situation on the ground in Gaza and throughout the Middle East, is any of what’s been discussed above practical or even possible? Maybe not. Maybe it will take another decade or two of continued slaughter and occupation before cooler, probably younger, leaders emerge with the courage to make the deal to ensure the peaceful future of their children and grandchildren.

But to do nothing, to give into that status quo despair, to surrender to ongoing violence, to assume that we have to wait decades for the killing to get so intense, is to give tacit support to Israel’s continued occupation and brutalization and humiliation of Palestinians, to give tacit encouragement to Palestinian suicide bombers and rocket launchers.

With the departure of CheneyBush in January of 2009 and the possibility of a new, more intelligent and nuanced Administration in Washington, we must all try to build up the momentum for peace in the Middle East. To do nothing, in the mode of the Bush Adminstration, is self-defeating, immoral, and can no longer be accepted as an option.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has written extensively on the Middle East condundrum; he has taught an universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 3/11/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

The E.L.F.s are mad! Why aren’t we?

“Of Mommies and Daddies Who Just Don’t Give a Fuck”

By Jason Miller

Thomas Paine’s Corner

Sorry kids, but you’re just going to have to deal with the fact that we are greedy narcissists. We’re dyed in the wool consumers, we worship Mammon, and eliminating the cancer of capitalism is simply out of the question.

What’s that, our beloved sons and daughters? You’re worried that the air will be too polluted to breathe, the water too toxic to drink, the rain forests too sparse to act as the Earth’s lungs, and the resources too depleted to sustain you and the other sentient inhabitants of this planet? You don’t believe “clean” coal, biofuels, and nuclear power will sustain the exquisite industrial civilization we will bequeath you once we’ve siphoned off the last drop of oil and departed for the big suburb in the sky?

Unfortunately, you’ll just have to suck it up, shut up, and deal with it! George Bush 41 made it abundantly clear that our “American Way of life is non-negotiable.” We Americans don’t even negotiate with terrorists, so it would be idiocy to even consider the possibility that we would budge an inch for mere children! Culturally genocidal perpetuators of the horrors of factory farming like McDonald’s; mammoth, gas-guzzling personal tanks that keep the economy Humming; televisions with screens large enough to put AMC out of business; single family McMansions with sufficient square footage that one subdivision could solve the homeless problem in America; our dinosaur-sized carbon foot-prints; and the production of enough garbage to ensure that we have the means to fill that ugly void known as the Grand Canyon are indispensable aspects of our being.