There are two posts by bloggers that are well worth reading. The first is by Kevin Drum, writing the "Political Animal" blog for The Washington Monthly, where he presents a short, clear distinction between rogue states, such as Iran or North Korea, and failed states, such as Afghanistan.
Rogue States vs. Failed States
The second post is by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, his own blog. In this post, he quotes an Atlantic Monthly article on the ways in which terrorism flourishes in failed states, and *why* Bush foreign policy is completely inadequate to addressing this problem:
Talking Points Memo - Policy Differences
The link between these two articles, and the key to understanding why Bush foreign policy has failed, is how the Bushies cannot see the reality in front of their noses - chaotic conditions are where extra-state actors with large amounts of cash and global communications can flourish. A rogue state is characterized by a controlling and hostile regime who stamps out dissent internally. That such states are also fragile and when they can no longer maintain themselves (whether due to internal or external pressures) shatter in spectacular ways, such as Iraq, should also be noted - a rogue state may collapse abruptly into a failed state. Thus, a terrorist organization within a rogue state may be paid or directed by that state (such as Hezbollah & Iran), but is (if equipped with an extra-state funding source), can easily survive the downfall of that state and may even flourish after its demise (think just about everyone and Iraq).
This is why defeating the Taliban did nothing to stop al-Qaeda, and why defeating Saddam Hussein actually opened up opportunities for terror. Osama bin Laden does not need a state sponsor. He just needs a place to hang out and can handle his own fund-raising, thank you.
Marshall's post points out that the US has faced the problem of failed states before and has succeeded - in the Balkans. The success there, and the birth of a new, modern, and effective US foreign policy, was the recognition that state building is not something to be avoided, but embraced. Successful states create stability which deprives terrorists and organized crime of a place in which to operate. Successful states are not easy to build and cannot be done simply through "the free market" (i.e., rapacious contractors) forces and application of gunfire. They take negotiation, economic incentives, application of force, and most particularly, engagement of the local population. They have to live there, after all.
Thus, the "Hellfire and Hallibuton" approach was doomed to fail when addressing the problem of failed states, and it appears only to be able to make failed states out of rogue states.
It is not a mistake that Kerry has, as his two top foreign policy advisors, William Holbrooke and Wes Clark, architects of the Balkan plan. They will be the foundation of a very agile and intelligent foreign policy team for President Kerry.
Ang
Keery/Edwards 2004 - For a realistic foreign policy
Thursday, October 14, 2004
The Bush Cocoon
"One more quick note on Bush's Osama bin Laden gaffe. I think the most interesting question about it is: why? Why did he say it?
It's inexplicable at first glance. After all, he could have easily ignored Kerry's barb and moved on, or at worst just made a generic statement about how Osama is a top priority and always has been. Why did he specifically deny saying something that the whole world knows he's on videotape saying?
I suspect the answer lies in the cocoon Bush lives in. Not only has he convinced himself that he never really said that he wasn't concerned about Osama, but he has no idea that the outside world believes otherwise. He doesn't realize that not only is his Osama statement well known, it's actually quite a popular target of mockery. What's more, nobody on his staff has ever clued him in.
It's a pretty good metaphor for Bush's biggest problem: his staff spoon feeds him a rosy view of the outside world and he honestly believes that this rosy world is the real world — and that's why he makes so many disastrous decisions. After all, you can't solve real world problems if you refuse to understand the real world in the first place."
Kevin Drum, "Political Animal," The Washington Monthly
Arrogant, clueless, lost in his own fantasyland that what he wants to be is so. As Kerry said, you can be resolute *and* wrong, and Smirky the Wonder Chimp seems resolutely wrong at every turn.
This spoiled rich boy, lost in his own alternative reality, is backed by a fascist party dedicated to keeping itself in power at all costs. Voter registration fraud, voter intimidation, illegal redistricting to break up voting districts, illegal purging of voters from rolls, support of voting machines that are ddemonstrated to be untrustworthy and are manufactured by one of their own, and so on. We don't even need to get into their kleptocratic plundering of the nation - its wealth, its military, its reputation, its hope - to see what it is they are about.
Finally, Smirky's fake-religion act is wearing thin. This man has no faith. He is mouthing platitudes and fanticizing that God talks to him. He cannot actually tie his behavior to his faith. In short, he is as delusional and mendacious about his belief as his is about his policies. When standing next to a man of faith, we begin to see the difference. Of course, the Xtians yamemring on about the sacred embryos (We believe in a right to life until birth, whereupon you little shits can go starve, die of disease, and be murdered at crime-ridden schools.) are as delusional and mendacious as their Great Leader.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004 and 2008 - Hope is On the Way
It's inexplicable at first glance. After all, he could have easily ignored Kerry's barb and moved on, or at worst just made a generic statement about how Osama is a top priority and always has been. Why did he specifically deny saying something that the whole world knows he's on videotape saying?
I suspect the answer lies in the cocoon Bush lives in. Not only has he convinced himself that he never really said that he wasn't concerned about Osama, but he has no idea that the outside world believes otherwise. He doesn't realize that not only is his Osama statement well known, it's actually quite a popular target of mockery. What's more, nobody on his staff has ever clued him in.
It's a pretty good metaphor for Bush's biggest problem: his staff spoon feeds him a rosy view of the outside world and he honestly believes that this rosy world is the real world — and that's why he makes so many disastrous decisions. After all, you can't solve real world problems if you refuse to understand the real world in the first place."
Kevin Drum, "Political Animal," The Washington Monthly
Arrogant, clueless, lost in his own fantasyland that what he wants to be is so. As Kerry said, you can be resolute *and* wrong, and Smirky the Wonder Chimp seems resolutely wrong at every turn.
This spoiled rich boy, lost in his own alternative reality, is backed by a fascist party dedicated to keeping itself in power at all costs. Voter registration fraud, voter intimidation, illegal redistricting to break up voting districts, illegal purging of voters from rolls, support of voting machines that are ddemonstrated to be untrustworthy and are manufactured by one of their own, and so on. We don't even need to get into their kleptocratic plundering of the nation - its wealth, its military, its reputation, its hope - to see what it is they are about.
Finally, Smirky's fake-religion act is wearing thin. This man has no faith. He is mouthing platitudes and fanticizing that God talks to him. He cannot actually tie his behavior to his faith. In short, he is as delusional and mendacious about his belief as his is about his policies. When standing next to a man of faith, we begin to see the difference. Of course, the Xtians yamemring on about the sacred embryos (We believe in a right to life until birth, whereupon you little shits can go starve, die of disease, and be murdered at crime-ridden schools.) are as delusional and mendacious as their Great Leader.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004 and 2008 - Hope is On the Way
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Voter Registrations Possibly Trashed
Well, well, well. The Rethuglicans are at it again. While their Xtian adherents rant about the sacred life of embryos, the Republican National Committee is disenfranchising their rivals through the most crude manner possible - destroying Democratic voter registrations:
http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe
Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.
Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.
So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.
The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It's unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.
It's going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.
Call the Clark County Election Department at 455-VOTE orclick here to see if you are registered.
The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.
*******
Yeah, *that* RNC kids. The RNC is paying a front company to destroy Democratic registrations.
Of course, since the Chimperor has God talking in his head (time to up the meds, George), it is not wrong for them to destroy their enemies and abjure the law. After all, they have Truth on their sides.
What a bunch of fucktards - and yes, if you are registered as a Republican, I *am* talking about you.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards - Law and Order for All
http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe
Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.
Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.
So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.
The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It's unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.
It's going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.
Call the Clark County Election Department at 455-VOTE orclick here to see if you are registered.
The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.
*******
Yeah, *that* RNC kids. The RNC is paying a front company to destroy Democratic registrations.
Of course, since the Chimperor has God talking in his head (time to up the meds, George), it is not wrong for them to destroy their enemies and abjure the law. After all, they have Truth on their sides.
What a bunch of fucktards - and yes, if you are registered as a Republican, I *am* talking about you.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards - Law and Order for All
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive
“[T]he remedy against the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities of action itself. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing – is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiveness, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose “sins” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationship between men.
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities – a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, and the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self.
(…)
The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense. … The only rudimentary sign of an awareness that forgiveness may be the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from action may be seen in the Roman principle to spare the vanquished (parcere subiectus) – a wisdom entirely unknown to the Greeks – or in the right to commute the death sentence, probably also of Roman origin, which is the prerogative of nearly all Western heads of state.
It is decisive in our context that Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God … but on the contrary must be mobilized by men towards each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Man in the gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives and must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” … [T]respassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by a constant willingness to change their minds and to start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.
In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against the original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course … the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.
The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.
(…)
…Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of men.”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities – a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, and the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self.
(…)
The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense. … The only rudimentary sign of an awareness that forgiveness may be the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from action may be seen in the Roman principle to spare the vanquished (parcere subiectus) – a wisdom entirely unknown to the Greeks – or in the right to commute the death sentence, probably also of Roman origin, which is the prerogative of nearly all Western heads of state.
It is decisive in our context that Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God … but on the contrary must be mobilized by men towards each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Man in the gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives and must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” … [T]respassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by a constant willingness to change their minds and to start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.
In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against the original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course … the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.
The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.
(…)
…Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of men.”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
When the truth will not go away
Danziger, as usual, gets it right:
Please be sure to visit Jeff Danziger's cartoon site. There is much more than just this. There's an entire political education.
Why look at all the dead and maimed, why think about the triumph of the terrorists, why ponder the utter savage mendacity of the current administration, when we can laugh at a picture of John Kerry windsurfing? A sport the Chimperor's cocaine and alcohol damaged brain can't handle. Bush lives in a fantasyland, and the media helps to keep us all trapped in this madhouse with him.
Look, look, see the funny senator from Massachusetts try to talk intelligently about our rape and pillage of the national treasury! Silly, silly man!
But these bodies just keep showing up, and they are beginning to smell...
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004 - reality, it's a good thing
Please be sure to visit Jeff Danziger's cartoon site. There is much more than just this. There's an entire political education.
Why look at all the dead and maimed, why think about the triumph of the terrorists, why ponder the utter savage mendacity of the current administration, when we can laugh at a picture of John Kerry windsurfing? A sport the Chimperor's cocaine and alcohol damaged brain can't handle. Bush lives in a fantasyland, and the media helps to keep us all trapped in this madhouse with him.
Look, look, see the funny senator from Massachusetts try to talk intelligently about our rape and pillage of the national treasury! Silly, silly man!
But these bodies just keep showing up, and they are beginning to smell...
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004 - reality, it's a good thing
Monday, September 27, 2004
Why lying fails
"It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
Under normal circumstances, the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle."
Hannah Arendt
Another point is how the liar may be so drawn into the fabric of his own lies that he is no longer able to perceive reality. He honestly beleives his own fantasyland is true. Then the danger becomes that others will also cling to the lie because they trust the self-deceiving sincerity of the liar more than they trust the evidence on the table before them. The liar's story tells them what they want to hear.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards - 2004 - Leaving fantasyland behind
Under normal circumstances, the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle."
Hannah Arendt
Another point is how the liar may be so drawn into the fabric of his own lies that he is no longer able to perceive reality. He honestly beleives his own fantasyland is true. Then the danger becomes that others will also cling to the lie because they trust the self-deceiving sincerity of the liar more than they trust the evidence on the table before them. The liar's story tells them what they want to hear.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards - 2004 - Leaving fantasyland behind
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Elementary, said he.
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four
Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four
Friday, September 24, 2004
On Lying - the Cost of Political Lies
The war, illegal and founded on a vast lie, has produced two tragedies of equal magnitude: an embryonic civil war in the world's oldest country, and a triumph for those in the Bush administration who, without a trace of shame, act as if the truth does not matter. Lying until the lie became true, the administration pursued a course of action that guaranteed large sections of Iraq would become havens for jihadis and radical Islamists. That is the logic promoted by people who take for themselves divine infallibility -- a righteousness that blinds and destroys. Like credulous Weimar Germans who were so delighted by rigged wrestling matches, millions of Americans have accepted Bush's assertions that the war in Iraq has made the United States and the rest of the world a safer place to live. Of course, this is false.
But it is a useful fiction because it is a happy one. All we need to know, according to the administration, is that America is a good country, full of good people and therefore cannot make bloody mistakes when it comes to its own security. The bitter consequence of succumbing to such happy talk is that the government of the most powerful nation in the world now operates unchecked and unmoored from reality; leaving us teetering on the brink of another presidential term where abuse of authority has been recast as virtue.
The logic the administration uses to promote its actions -- preemptive war, indefinite detention, torture of prisoners, the abandonment of the Geneva Convention abroad and the Bill of Rights at home -- is simple, faith-based and therefore empty of reason. The worsening war is the creation of the Bush administration, which is simultaneously holding Americans and Iraqis hostage to a bloody conflict that cannot be won, only stalemated.
Excerpt from "Hell", by Phillip Robertson. Complete article on Salon - requires subscription or viewing an ad.
Here is what a nation lying to itself has accomplished. Make no mistake; America lied to itself in order to engage in this endeavor. The administration is living in a fantasyland, utterly out of touch with reality, and always has been. As Richard Clarke documented in "Against All Enemies," they simply did not wish to believe the evidence in front of their faces that Al-Qaeda was a real and serious threat to the US and all civilized peoples. Why not? Because their fantasy revolves around Iraq; getting Saddam, taking over the oil fields, privitizing the national resources, installing a more amenable dictator. Their lie was there for all to see before one US boot touched the ground in Iraq.
And far too many continue to lie to themselves about what we are about in that butchered land. Colin Powell's cynical analysis - You break it, you bought it - is a truth most will not accept. Part fantacize that we are bringing "democracy" to Iraq (News flash - you might try bringing it to Florida, first), while others take up the equally dangerous dream of walking away, saying that the sinkhole of misery we have in no small part created is not our problem any more.
The US is going to be in Iraq for the next 20 years - because we broke it. The press hounds Kerry for his "Iraq Plan" and he does his best, but the only honest answer is "Who knows what kind of fucked up mess I will inherit in 2005? I will give you a plan when I know what I've got." When the owl of Minerva takes flight, and we can look backwards at this presidency and the actions of the US, we will be able to take full measure of the folly that is "Iraq War II." But I will wager two things will be so. First, that this will be acknowledged as the single worst policy decision in the history of the republic. Second, that it marked the end of America's leadership of the world.
And to think that all of this could have been avoided by telling the tuth - that Osama bin Laden & Al-Qaeda are a pack of murdering thugs who are the furthest thing from devout Muslims on the face of the stinking planet; that they declared war on all nations, all peoples, and all civil life when they destroyed the WTC; that we owed the world and Afghanistan all our strength and ingenuity to stablize that nation; that while we could lead, this was not just our fight.
Back in fighting mode,
Anglachel
Kerry/Edwards 2004 - a vote for truth
But it is a useful fiction because it is a happy one. All we need to know, according to the administration, is that America is a good country, full of good people and therefore cannot make bloody mistakes when it comes to its own security. The bitter consequence of succumbing to such happy talk is that the government of the most powerful nation in the world now operates unchecked and unmoored from reality; leaving us teetering on the brink of another presidential term where abuse of authority has been recast as virtue.
The logic the administration uses to promote its actions -- preemptive war, indefinite detention, torture of prisoners, the abandonment of the Geneva Convention abroad and the Bill of Rights at home -- is simple, faith-based and therefore empty of reason. The worsening war is the creation of the Bush administration, which is simultaneously holding Americans and Iraqis hostage to a bloody conflict that cannot be won, only stalemated.
Excerpt from "Hell", by Phillip Robertson. Complete article on Salon - requires subscription or viewing an ad.
Here is what a nation lying to itself has accomplished. Make no mistake; America lied to itself in order to engage in this endeavor. The administration is living in a fantasyland, utterly out of touch with reality, and always has been. As Richard Clarke documented in "Against All Enemies," they simply did not wish to believe the evidence in front of their faces that Al-Qaeda was a real and serious threat to the US and all civilized peoples. Why not? Because their fantasy revolves around Iraq; getting Saddam, taking over the oil fields, privitizing the national resources, installing a more amenable dictator. Their lie was there for all to see before one US boot touched the ground in Iraq.
And far too many continue to lie to themselves about what we are about in that butchered land. Colin Powell's cynical analysis - You break it, you bought it - is a truth most will not accept. Part fantacize that we are bringing "democracy" to Iraq (News flash - you might try bringing it to Florida, first), while others take up the equally dangerous dream of walking away, saying that the sinkhole of misery we have in no small part created is not our problem any more.
The US is going to be in Iraq for the next 20 years - because we broke it. The press hounds Kerry for his "Iraq Plan" and he does his best, but the only honest answer is "Who knows what kind of fucked up mess I will inherit in 2005? I will give you a plan when I know what I've got." When the owl of Minerva takes flight, and we can look backwards at this presidency and the actions of the US, we will be able to take full measure of the folly that is "Iraq War II." But I will wager two things will be so. First, that this will be acknowledged as the single worst policy decision in the history of the republic. Second, that it marked the end of America's leadership of the world.
And to think that all of this could have been avoided by telling the tuth - that Osama bin Laden & Al-Qaeda are a pack of murdering thugs who are the furthest thing from devout Muslims on the face of the stinking planet; that they declared war on all nations, all peoples, and all civil life when they destroyed the WTC; that we owed the world and Afghanistan all our strength and ingenuity to stablize that nation; that while we could lead, this was not just our fight.
Back in fighting mode,
Anglachel
Kerry/Edwards 2004 - a vote for truth
Thursday, September 23, 2004
E.L. Doctorow - The Unfeeling President
Taken from the Easthampton Star Guestwords section. Please visit the Star and read the rest of the edition.
"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.
He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.
A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves."
E.L. Doctorow
"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.
He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.
A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves."
E.L. Doctorow
The Irony of a Good name
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
Iago, Act III, Scene 3, Othello
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
Iago, Act III, Scene 3, Othello
Saturday, September 18, 2004
On Lying
"A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what thy actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth – the ability to lie – and the capacity to change facts – the ability to act – are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say, "The sun shines," when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts. Without the mental freedom to deny of affirm existence, to say "yes" or "no" – not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreements of disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition – no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of.
Hence when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt – as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.
It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
Under normal circumstances, the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle."
Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," Crises of the Republic
This meditation on lying is as applicable to the drama whores of the JRRT fandom as to the profoundly mendacious US administration - both in their way commit violence upon the confusion of sheer existence by imposing a story upon it that makes sense, telling at least a certain portion of the audience what it wants to hear. They account for the sheer presence of facts. However, neither of them, petty grubbers in gossip or terrifying destroyers of nations, can account for everything, for facts, as Reagan reminds us, are stupid things. Facts do not understand the stories being told about them and have a disconcerting tendency of popping up at the worst possible moment. Then it is the tissue of the lie that is torn assunder.
Even so, the damage to the truth has been done. What has been done once is done forever. Something has been brought into the world at the expense of something else; coherent falsehood in place of messy and inconvenient truths. The lie that good boys did honorable serive in the National Guard vs. the messy truth that men of principle went to war, than came home to wage peace.
I will be dealing much with truth and falsehoods in the next few days.
Ang
Hence when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt – as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.
It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
Under normal circumstances, the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle."
Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," Crises of the Republic
This meditation on lying is as applicable to the drama whores of the JRRT fandom as to the profoundly mendacious US administration - both in their way commit violence upon the confusion of sheer existence by imposing a story upon it that makes sense, telling at least a certain portion of the audience what it wants to hear. They account for the sheer presence of facts. However, neither of them, petty grubbers in gossip or terrifying destroyers of nations, can account for everything, for facts, as Reagan reminds us, are stupid things. Facts do not understand the stories being told about them and have a disconcerting tendency of popping up at the worst possible moment. Then it is the tissue of the lie that is torn assunder.
Even so, the damage to the truth has been done. What has been done once is done forever. Something has been brought into the world at the expense of something else; coherent falsehood in place of messy and inconvenient truths. The lie that good boys did honorable serive in the National Guard vs. the messy truth that men of principle went to war, than came home to wage peace.
I will be dealing much with truth and falsehoods in the next few days.
Ang
Excerpt from Bill Moyers - Journalism Under Fire
Published on Friday, September 17, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Journalism Under Fire
by Bill Moyers
Address to the Society of Professional Journalists
Saturday, September 11, 2004
New York City
"Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize, analyze, and present information people need to know in order to make sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional task – John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there are “no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no universally accepted set of standards.” Maybe so. But I think that what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it – think Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism “is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps them determine what they should do about it.” So good newsrooms “are marinated in ethical conversations…What should this lead say? What I should I tell that source?” We practice this craft inside “concentric rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community” – and we function under a system of values “in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims.” Our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth – and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice."
This is not the responsibility of the press alone, of course. It is the duty of the citizen. Ethics is the foundation of a democratic society, not God or the Bible or capitalism or "freedom" - ethics. The obligation to tell the truth and to not damage the warp and weft of reality for personal interest.
More on this later.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004
Journalism Under Fire
by Bill Moyers
Address to the Society of Professional Journalists
Saturday, September 11, 2004
New York City
"Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize, analyze, and present information people need to know in order to make sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional task – John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there are “no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no universally accepted set of standards.” Maybe so. But I think that what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it – think Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism “is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps them determine what they should do about it.” So good newsrooms “are marinated in ethical conversations…What should this lead say? What I should I tell that source?” We practice this craft inside “concentric rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community” – and we function under a system of values “in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims.” Our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth – and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice."
This is not the responsibility of the press alone, of course. It is the duty of the citizen. Ethics is the foundation of a democratic society, not God or the Bible or capitalism or "freedom" - ethics. The obligation to tell the truth and to not damage the warp and weft of reality for personal interest.
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Juan Cole - September 11 and Its Aftermath
I am reproducing a sobering article written by one of the US's experts on the Middle East. There is a follow up article on his site that reflects on two other US imperial adventures - Vietnam and the Spanish-American war, specifically, the aftermath in the Phillipines. Overall, while others have slammed Prof. Cole as "anti-American" (and people who reproduce or agree with his position as "pro-terrorist"), the fact remains that the true US patriot who watched the crimes committed on 9/11 will do everything within his or her power to ensure that those actually responsible for this attack on the US and the rest of the civilized world are hunted down.
To say that the Bush administration has done a miserable job, treating it as a photo-op and a campaign prop, is not "anti-American" and sure as shit has nothing to do with approving of the terrorists. *I want those fuckers DEAD, do you understand?* Right now, they are still gallivanting around the wilds of Afghanistan, picking off troops and civilians in Iraq and other places, and sawing people's heads off for shock value. They endanger the entire world, not just the US, or do you really not care about who they kill if those people are not US citizens?
It also is not anti-American to say that populations around the world may have a legitimate bone to pick with the US over unfair trade practices, moralistic health care policies, and the unwillingness in the US to acknowledge that we are not the only source of intelligence, morality, justice, and democaracy in the world. With power comes responsibility, not freedom alone. If you can't admit you may be wrong, you run the risk of never being right.
Enough - Juan Cole lays out the situation far better than I can.
In order to evaluate the aftermath of September 11, we first must understand that event. What did al-Qaeda intend to achieve? Only if we understand that can we gauge their success or failure.
From the point of view of al-Qaeda, the Muslim world can and should be united into a single country. They believe that it once had this political unity, under the early caliphs. Even as late as the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman state ruled much of the Middle East, and the Ottoman sultans had begun making claims to be caliphs (Muslim popes) from about 1880. In the below map, blue indicates heavy Muslim populations, green means medium, and yellow means the Muslims are a significant minority.
From al-Qaeda's point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim states. They ruled them brutally as colonies, reducing the people to little more than slaves serving the economic and political interests of the British, French, Russians, etc. France invaded Algeria in 1830. Great Britain took Egypt in 1882 and Iraq in 1917. Russia took the Emirate of Bukhara and other Central Asian territories in the 1860s and forward. Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests have lasted. (Look at the British Empire and its imposition on much of the Muslim world, e.g.:)
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not an unprecedented event from the point of view of Bin Laden and his followers. Far from it. It was only the latest in a long series of Western predations in Muslim lands. The British had conquered Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and had unilaterally opened Palestine to Jewish immigration, with the colonized Palestinians unable to object. The Russians had taken the Caucasus and Chechnya in the early nineteenth century, and had so brutally repressed the Muslims under their rule that they probably killed hundreds of thousands and expelled even more to the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).
From al-Qaeda's point of view, the Soviet attempt to absorb Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the colonial venture. They demonstrated that even a superpower can be forced to withdraw from a Muslim land if sufficient guerrilla pressure is put on it.
Bin Laden sees the Muslim world as continually invaded, divided and weakened by outside forces. Among these is the Americans in Saudi Arabia and the Israelis in geographical Palestine. He repeatedly complained about the occupation of the three holy cities, i.e., Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, al-Jihad al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of US backing for Egypt. They believed that the US also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant, and backs Saudi Arabia's royal family.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the "far enemy" first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.
The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the US fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The US was going to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the US out of the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (which then ruled what later became Indonesia).
Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Bin Laden wanted to move the timing of the operation up to spring of 2001 so as to "punish" the Israelis for their actions against the Palestinians in the second Intifadah. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was mainly driven in planning the attack by his rage at Israel over the Palestinian issue. Another goal is to destroy the US economy, so weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.
Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the US could be defeated and they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism. Jordan's population, e.g. is 5.6 million. Tunisia, a former French colony, is 10 million, less than Michigan. Most Muslims have been convinced of the naturalness of the nation-state model and are proud of their new nations, however small and weak. Bin Laden had to do a big demonstration project to convince them that another model is possible.
Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.
The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden's wisdom and foresightedness.
After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn't start out with such an attitude. It grew up in reaction against US policies.
It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.
If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.
Bin Laden's dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden's personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.
Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.
The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its.
Juan Cole - Informed Comment
To say that the Bush administration has done a miserable job, treating it as a photo-op and a campaign prop, is not "anti-American" and sure as shit has nothing to do with approving of the terrorists. *I want those fuckers DEAD, do you understand?* Right now, they are still gallivanting around the wilds of Afghanistan, picking off troops and civilians in Iraq and other places, and sawing people's heads off for shock value. They endanger the entire world, not just the US, or do you really not care about who they kill if those people are not US citizens?
It also is not anti-American to say that populations around the world may have a legitimate bone to pick with the US over unfair trade practices, moralistic health care policies, and the unwillingness in the US to acknowledge that we are not the only source of intelligence, morality, justice, and democaracy in the world. With power comes responsibility, not freedom alone. If you can't admit you may be wrong, you run the risk of never being right.
Enough - Juan Cole lays out the situation far better than I can.
In order to evaluate the aftermath of September 11, we first must understand that event. What did al-Qaeda intend to achieve? Only if we understand that can we gauge their success or failure.
From the point of view of al-Qaeda, the Muslim world can and should be united into a single country. They believe that it once had this political unity, under the early caliphs. Even as late as the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman state ruled much of the Middle East, and the Ottoman sultans had begun making claims to be caliphs (Muslim popes) from about 1880. In the below map, blue indicates heavy Muslim populations, green means medium, and yellow means the Muslims are a significant minority.
From al-Qaeda's point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim states. They ruled them brutally as colonies, reducing the people to little more than slaves serving the economic and political interests of the British, French, Russians, etc. France invaded Algeria in 1830. Great Britain took Egypt in 1882 and Iraq in 1917. Russia took the Emirate of Bukhara and other Central Asian territories in the 1860s and forward. Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests have lasted. (Look at the British Empire and its imposition on much of the Muslim world, e.g.:)
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not an unprecedented event from the point of view of Bin Laden and his followers. Far from it. It was only the latest in a long series of Western predations in Muslim lands. The British had conquered Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and had unilaterally opened Palestine to Jewish immigration, with the colonized Palestinians unable to object. The Russians had taken the Caucasus and Chechnya in the early nineteenth century, and had so brutally repressed the Muslims under their rule that they probably killed hundreds of thousands and expelled even more to the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).
From al-Qaeda's point of view, the Soviet attempt to absorb Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the colonial venture. They demonstrated that even a superpower can be forced to withdraw from a Muslim land if sufficient guerrilla pressure is put on it.
Bin Laden sees the Muslim world as continually invaded, divided and weakened by outside forces. Among these is the Americans in Saudi Arabia and the Israelis in geographical Palestine. He repeatedly complained about the occupation of the three holy cities, i.e., Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, al-Jihad al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of US backing for Egypt. They believed that the US also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant, and backs Saudi Arabia's royal family.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the "far enemy" first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.
The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the US fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The US was going to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the US out of the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (which then ruled what later became Indonesia).
Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Bin Laden wanted to move the timing of the operation up to spring of 2001 so as to "punish" the Israelis for their actions against the Palestinians in the second Intifadah. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was mainly driven in planning the attack by his rage at Israel over the Palestinian issue. Another goal is to destroy the US economy, so weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.
Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the US could be defeated and they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism. Jordan's population, e.g. is 5.6 million. Tunisia, a former French colony, is 10 million, less than Michigan. Most Muslims have been convinced of the naturalness of the nation-state model and are proud of their new nations, however small and weak. Bin Laden had to do a big demonstration project to convince them that another model is possible.
Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.
The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden's wisdom and foresightedness.
After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn't start out with such an attitude. It grew up in reaction against US policies.
It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.
If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.
Bin Laden's dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden's personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.
Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.
The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its.
Juan Cole - Informed Comment
A Rising Sun
In 1787 at a Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was waiting to sign a document that would hold the fate and destiny of our nation. As he stood, his eyes fell upon a carving on the back of George Washington's chair, a carving of half a sun. He stared thoughtfully at it for a minute, then proclaimed words that would be remembered forever,
"I have often looked at that picture behind the president without being able to tell whether it was a rising or setting sun. Now at length I have the happiness to know that it is indeed a rising, not a setting sun."
It is a rising sun.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Over 1,000 US soldiers dead...
Several hundred coalition soldiers dead.
THOUSANDS of Iraqi citizens dead.
And many, many thousands more people crippled for life, maimed, wounded, and having their lives turned inside out and upside down, all for the sake of Shrub's election campaign. All conducted under the self-deluding fantasies of some "Meocons" (All mine, and it's OK if I con you) that guns can create "democracy" - or at least a regime amenable to US interests. Here's Jeff Danziger's take on it:
See more of his cartoons at: Jeff Danziger Cartoons
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004
THOUSANDS of Iraqi citizens dead.
And many, many thousands more people crippled for life, maimed, wounded, and having their lives turned inside out and upside down, all for the sake of Shrub's election campaign. All conducted under the self-deluding fantasies of some "Meocons" (All mine, and it's OK if I con you) that guns can create "democracy" - or at least a regime amenable to US interests. Here's Jeff Danziger's take on it:
See more of his cartoons at: Jeff Danziger Cartoons
Ang
Kerry/Edwards 2004
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