24 August 1814

In honor of today's bicentennial,

Mission Never-to-be-Accomplished

 Gen. John R. Allen, supreme allied commander in Afghanistan, describing his hopes for withdrawing American forces from that country,

We want them to miss us because we were special to them. We don’t want them wiping their brows and saying, ‘Thank God they’re gone.’

But they will say exactly that, only the thanks will be to Allah.  Many Afghans wish they could say those words now. 

So do many Americans.

Exit Strategy

Fred Kaplan makes a reasonably convincing argument that Barack Obama is doing in Afghanistan what Lyndon Johnson did not in Vietnam: pull out. Well, maybe not all the way--we'll still be fighting on the border with Pakistan--but a significant change in the level of effort and resources the United States will continue to devote to securing an Afghan government that has minimal legitimacy.

The critical fact is that, by and large, we’ve done our part, but Karzai hasn’t done his. The U.S. military (increasingly with Afghan counterparts coming along) has made considerable progress on the tactical military front. But the Afghan government hasn’t followed through—hasn’t provided services, hasn’t cleaned up its corruption, in short hasn’t given the population’s fence-sitters much reason to turn away from the insurgents (who exploit real grievances) and pledge allegiance to the government.

That being the case, there’s only so much a foreign army can do.

[...]

Obama isn’t quite bailing. American troops will be on the ground for some time to come. But the page has turned. If we didn’t have troops in Afghanistan already, the present conditions would hardly justify sending tens of thousands there. And, while we shouldn’t expect those whose land we occupy to love us for our assistance, we should at least have the same basic interests as the government that our troops are fighting and dying to uphold—and that doesn’t seem to be the case either.

Kaplan acknowledges that Obama is taking a chance and that Afghanistan's fate may well be more years of civil war and mayhem. He concludes,

It’s a mess, but it would be a mess, whether we stayed for one year, two years, or 10. So why not make it one year, push hard, hope for the best, then stop spending lives and money on a lost cause?

Why not, indeed?

There We Go Again

It's not enough that my country left a deadly legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Now my country is sowing Afghanistan with radioactivity from depleted uranium munitions. And before Afghanistan, the Balkans.

We are truly the plague that keeps on giving.

A Message From Our Veterans

Iraq Veterans Against the War Board of Directors Releases Official Statement on Occupy Movement

Some Possibility

Paying too much attention to contemporary events and trends can easily leave me cynical and pessimistic. The pessimist and cynic are less likely to be disappointed but those perspectives make life pretty grim. So I look for possibilities. One possibility is that voices are speaking out against the corporate-military hegemony of America's economy and how that hegemony is maintained at the expense of most Americans. Yesterday, I cited Noam Chomsky and others. Today I find another perceptive analysis of America's spiral into oligarchy.

William Astore's essay (like Chomsky's, at TomDispatch) on the America as an "Old Regime". Astore's vocabulary is stunningly direct:

Consider again the example of pre-revolutionary Versailles. A top-heavy, remarkably dissolute, and openly parasitic bureaucracy plundered the commonweal of France in its pursuit of power and privilege. Can we not say the same of Washington today? In its kleptocratic tendency to enrich itself and its accountability-free deployment of military power globally, the American ruling class bears a certain resemblance to French kings and their courts which, in the end, drove their country to economic ruin and violent revolution.

Fed up with its prodigal and prideful rulers, France saw the tumbrels roll and the guillotine blades drop. How many more undeclared “enlightened” wars, how many more trillions of dollars in war-driven debt, how many more dead and wounded will it take for the American people to reclaim their power over war? Or are we content to remain deferential to our ruling class and court -- and to their less-than-liberty-loving overseas creditors -- until such a time as their prideful wars and prodigal trillion-dollar-plus “defense” budgets bring our great democratic experiment crashing down?

How long, indeed. I keep asking how long Americans, whose reputation and image has traditionally been practicality, will continue to accept immiseration for the benefit of the wealthy?

Maybe I will get an answer soon. At least one politician is willing to bet his re-election that Americans are unwilling to simply absolve the wealthy of any social responsibility. Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont socialist, has introduced a bill creating a surtax on gross incomes exceeding one million dollars

The millionaires tax was pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, (I-Vt.), a socialist and a member of the budget committee. He initially called for a 5.4 percent surtax on adjusted gross incomes over $1 million, which Sanders said would raise as much as $50 billion a year.
[...]
Sanders, in an interview, waved off criticisms of the surtax, saying its inclusion would help Democrats’ campaigns — including his own.

“I’m running for reelection, and I think this is what the American people want,” he said. ”Asking the wealthiest people in this country to contribute to deficit reduction is not only good policy, it’s good politics.”

One thing the Republicans have done well is offer their vision for America. It's chillingly brutal, based on truly fuzzy math and assumptions that are not credible but at least Republicans put their vision out for people to see. Democrats need an equally bold vision but are too timid to take a chance.

All of which makes me glad that an independent socialist is willing to speak out. That's an antidote for cynicism and pessimism.

My Generation (Yet Again)

My personal history is inextricably linked to the history of my generation, the Baby Boom. Which means that I am in part responsible for my generation's accomplishments, a dubious distinction to say the least. It was probably an illusion in the 1960's when we thought we would be a different, a transforming force in America. That illusion was short-lived as my generation made its way into the world and quickly bought into all the institutions we reviled in previous years. I'll let Chris Hedges chronicle the results.

The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of Harvard historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Boomers didn't start the decline but we kept it going as we assumed and exercised power in America. About the only remaining vestige of our youthful ideals are the ones we held on to individually. I see them in activists who continue the pursuit of social and economic justice. I still believe in and act on those ideals which is all well and good for my own peace of mind but my efforts have not made a difference. Much of what Hedges describes happened on my watch, as the result of decisions my generation's leaders made.

Collectively my generation failed to maintain and extend the economic and social gains we inherited from earlier generations. And we sure as held did not live up to our hype and hopes. Saint Ronald Reagan once famously asked, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" These days I ask, "Are young adults as well off as I was at their age?" My answer is "Sadly, no."

My generation, indeed.


(h/t to Alternate Brain

Of Prisons Large and Small

Apparently, Haiti does have some jail space after all. At least enough to hold 10 Baptist missionaries accused of child trafficking. The Baptists say they were rescuing orphans. Haitians say the Baptists were soliciting children from desperate families. I'm sure the US and Haitian governments will come to some agreed resolution. In the meantime, I am also pleased to see that Haiti's public institutions function at some minimal level. Perhaps, too, some missionaries may learn that their missions are not always welcome or appropriate.

Beyond the 10 missionaries and the earthquake, most Americans know little about Haiti, that simply repairing the earthquake damage still leaves Haiti a desperately poor nation. Listen to Making Contact or read Ted Rall if you want to know how Haiti became an impoverished nation barely able to sustain itself at the most meager level. You will learn that, despite leading the world's first successful slave revolt, Haiti simply traded actual slavery for economic slavery.

Earthquakes just happen. Haiti we created.

The Illegal Root of It All

In all of the mainstream discussion of Amreica's wars, very few note their illegal nature. Dahr Jamail is one of the few who remind me that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are illegal under a treaty ratified by the United States. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq attacked the United States which, therefore lacks a legal basis for using military force in either of these nations.

Each of these adventures, aside from its dubious legality, has its share of atrocities. Occupying forces, desperately seeking a foe who seems to melt into the population, will, of necessity and habit, attack the population. Even if not attacked directly, the populations can easily be in the way of the highly lethal force that the US military can unleash. Just ask those Afghanis who were siphoning fuel last week. None of this makes America "safer". It just digs deeper the hole into which we are pouring our sons and daughters, our ethical traditions, our treasure and our future.

The article has an interesting comment thread that offers some useful historical context.

...[I]t may be true that the Soviet Union went [to Afghanistan] to die, but I don't think it was where the British Empire went to die. Britain, after a bloody reign of denial, got to die peacefully in bed with India at its side.We should be so lucky.

Another comment reminds us that the British played havoc with tribal areas when it drew post-colonial boundaries. Remember,too, that the same story is played out in Africa.

William Calley, My Lai and Lockerbie

Over at Tom Dispatch Nick Turse has probably the most insightful take on William Calley's remorse for My Lai.

More Homework

Read this too. Then tell everyone you know.

I would gladly trade part of the National (in)Security State for secure health care. It's a far better investment.

Number One Terrorist

Noam Chomsky has an illuminating article about American sponsored terrorism at Asia Times Online. He very chillingly notes that the horrors of the CheneyBush years were not, as many of Americans would like to believe, a departure from our otherwise noble history of good works but rather the normal behavior of empire. He makes too many good points for me to do them justice, so you really should read the whole thing and then TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

I will give you what, for me, was the money quote:

The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States since the British burned down Washington in 1814.

Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state actor.Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that the perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president, and established a vicious military dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines that so radically dismantled the economy that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later.

That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it happened in Salvador Allende's Chile in what Latin Americans often call "the first 9/11" in 1973. (The numbers above were changed to per-capita US equivalents, a realistic way of measuring crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup against Allende can be traced straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise quite appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here in the US, while the facts are consigned to the "abuse of reality" that the naive call "history".

History as we want to see it.

Milo Minderbinder in Iraq (or Nigeria)

Apparently entrepreneurial initiative is alive and well among US troops in Iraq. At least according to this email that came in the other day.

Hi,

My name is SSG Dewayne Pittman, I am an American soldier in peace keeping force in Iraq, I am serving in the military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, as you know, we have new president Barack Obama since then our duties are not as it again.

We managed to secure funds from the war zone. The total amount is US$ 12 Million dollars in cash. We want to move this money to you, so that you may keep our share for us till when we will come over to meet you. We can no more moving this money place to place here in Lraq any more, we want to move this money to you. We will take 60%, my partner and I.You take 40%. No strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq. We plan on using diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in large boxes, using diplomatic immunity.

If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust and that will assist us. Can I trust you? When you receive this letter, kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This business is risk free. The boxes can be shipped out in 48hrs.

Respectfully,
SSG Dewayne Pittman

Boxes of cash in the mail! Sounds almost as good as my 401K these days.

[If you are not familiar with Milo Minderbinder, read about him here.]

Beside the Point

Early in the week, when the brouhaha about the AIG bonuses began breaking into the news, I did a quick calculation: $165 million divided by $170 billion equals about one-tenth of one percent—not even a penny on the dollar. Normally, we don’t think much of pennies, much less their miniscule fractions, so I am somewhat amused by the outrage over this paltry sum in the cascade of billions now flowing from the Treasury to private financial institutions.

Of course, the outrage is not really about the bonuses, it’s about the whole financial meltdown and our seemingly complete dependence on the financial wizards who got us into the mess to somehow get us out. We’re all afraid and ready to take up arms against The Enemy, just like the neighbors in the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”. The AIG bonuses are simply a spark in the greater conflagration.

The bonus brouhaha is j a sideshow. Yeah, it’s a rip-off, but compared to the massive transfer of wealth upward in the past few decades, it’s a pittance. Compared to the loss of a productive economy or a financial sector that actually serves investment, this week’s revelations are nothing new. Of course, we were all too happy with that financial system when it showed up in ever growing assets on our investment statements. We were all part of the “owning class”, remember? Not many of us were outraged then, were we?

We are outraged now, ready to kick some financial sector butt. Not, mind you, to look hard at what we’ve been doing by way of national economic policy, at how the nation systematically jettisoned the regulatory structures created during the Great Depression precisely to keep this sort of thing from happening again. No, we want the magic of the marketplace to return, to begin showering us with goodies, to go back to that sweet life where we were all becoming rich capitalists. We want it so badly that we will turn to the same pied pipers who’ve been fleecing us for years.

You won’t find it in the mainstream media, which is filled with the language of the real Owning Class, but alternatives to allowing the perpetrators of the fraud to dictate a so-called recovery do, in fact, exist. The Nation has offered two excellent articles on what I would call a public-oriented recovery. The first, by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, points out that law and custom hold the perpetrators of a problem liable for its resolution (“the polluter pays”) which clearly fixes the loci for capitalism’s latest panic. He also notes and that the nation has a longstanding, effective procedure for dealing with financial institutions that become insolvent. Of course, his solution would require the Owning Class to eat their own losses, which is why this approach is little discussed in the corridors of power. Somehow, what has been a demonstrated success in maintaining financial institution credibility is inappropriate when the economy becomes “too big to fail”.

The second article, by William Greider based on the work of economist Jane D’Arista, describes how the Federal Reserve System has been rendered largely irrelevant to the modern financial system which consists of an array of instruments and institutions that dwarf traditional banks which the Fed regulates. During the past three decades, the financiers have come to rule the market in their own interest (cleverly cloaked in the garb of expanded economic opportunity for all). The Fed under a series of chairmen, most notably Alan Greenspan, let it all happen because The Market was a “far better arbiter” than some government bureaucrat. In contrast, Greider looks toward restoring a credible monetary policy that serves public rather than narrow private interests.

Between them, Stiglitz (who is also co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict) and Grimes offer a good nuts-and-bolts analysis of capitalism’s latest crisis. I see precious little of that in the mainstream media that I do frequent. That absence explains why Americans are so willing to continue pouring money into a private financial system only to vomit when they see that those private interests do little for the public interest and all for their own. We are Wylie Coyote beyond the cliff. Too bad Wylie didn’t have the bankers, the president, Congress and the media telling him he could continue to float.

Difficult Times Ahead

Cheney/Bush and his Phony War on Terror (h/t to Ranger Against War for that entirely appropriate label) may well be the end of America as we have known it. Perhaps neither his criminal cabal nor catastrophic wars are each sufficient in itself to fundamentally change this nation but, taken together with other events and world trends, they portend difficult times ahead. Mired in a $100 billion per year war and saddled with about $1.0 trillion in non-productive military spending, American enters the 21st Century at a distinct disadvantage in a world of rising economic powers.

Like Mark Twain’s death, America’s decline has been predicted before. The closing of the American frontier in 1890 ended a driving catalyst for change in 19th century America: renewal by moving on. The Great Depression raised fears about the end of capitalism and American industrial might. With each prediction, however, came new opportunity—largely--due to this nation’s favored geographic and resource advantages—that renewed Americans’ hope. Even the end of our energy independence in the 1970’s did not to change America’s trajectory. Along with our geographic and resource advantages, the nation benefited greatly from a well-educated populace and individual initiative. Our good fortune has grown from the many times the nation has risen to the occasion and figured out how to make do in difficult circumstances. In the process, we have earned a reputation for innovation, openness and generosity despite our unfortunate racist and violent tendencies.

But now I don’t see America with many good options left. We are squandering our blood, treasure and reputation in a desperate attempt to stop history. I’m not just talking about the US here; I’m looking at North America as a whole in competition with the rest of the world. While Europe, Russia and Asia are emerging as economic powers, based on (you guessed it) economic, resource and geographic advantages, North America is composed of a massively debt-redden, hemorrhaging economy (US), a failed nation-state plagued by corruption and violence, unable to support its growing population (Mexico) and other nations that offer little hope for their people (Central America). Canada seems pretty stable but it is unlikely to serve as an effective counterweight to the US and the rest of the continent.

America’s challenges are not entirely unique—other nations and regions have their own problems of instability, economic injustice and violence. What IS unique is that for the first time in my experience America seems to have little beyond its military strength to fall back on—no frontier, no colonies, declining industries, a diminished currency. And whatever military advantage we still have is quickly eroding in the meat grinder of the Middle East where determined adversaries have turned our strength against us. “Bleeding America to to the point of bankruptcy,” in the words of Osama bin Laden.

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic; maybe America will find its place in changing world where our technology, initiative and innovation will contribute to sustainable economic opportunity and justice for all. But 60 years of an ever-expanding National Security State and especially the past seven years of Cheney/Bush crypto-dictatorship don’t offer much hope for me. The paranoia and militarism that have grown in America since the end of WWII have changed this nation for the worse. We turned much of our national life over to a military culture that spawned massively unproductive investment. Instead of roads, schools, health care and other social goods, we built weapons that rapidly became obsolete as adversaries developed effective counter-measures.

And, then the “all powerful” Soviet Union simply evaporated under its inherent economic contradictions and the end of the Communist experiment in Eastern Europe. Instead of seeing this long-predicted (George Kennan, 1949) collapse as a new opportunity to welcome a former adversary into a mutually beneficial world community, America’s leaders behaved like conquerors, demanding concessions and obeisance from a nation with a proud heritage of history and culture, strong sense of nationalism and a people who have endured more trauma than most Americans will ever know. A simple reading of history should remind anyone that picking a fight with Russia is a losing proposition.

Even more shortsighted has been America’s unwillingness to look to the future even as domestic energy sources declined. We’ve known about the limitations and vulnerabilities of our fossil fuel resources for decades now and done nothing beyond continuing to rely on the promise of more cheap energy, even if we must support repressive regimes or use military force to secure what we and our allies consider necessary supplies of that energy. In doing so, America has earned the enmity of the peoples whose resources we covet, giving rise to violent opposition to not only our actions, but even to the very idea of America.

None of this is new with CheneyBush. He is simply the latest in a long line of myopic and short-sighted leaders. The difference is that America has little in reserve to protect itself against the this catastrophic failure. The erosion of civil liberties and sweeping assertions of presidential authority are also not new but this administration has certainly given head to the executive’s natural inclination toward tyranny (that’s why the Framers limited presidential powers) in much the same way it has ballooned our national debt. At best, I see only a slowing of the trend with the coming change in administrations. Even if he wanted to, I doubt Obama has either the skill or experience to challenge the corporate-military state that CheneyBush has nurtured so much more than his predecessors. John McCain will surely keep it fat and happy.

As an American who inherited a dynamic but flawed society, I am embarrassed to leave behind the severely deteriorated polity that has evolved in my lifetime. I would like to think that this nation, which has offered much to the world, can still rise to the occasion, can still give life to the ringing words of our founding documents. I very much want to believe that. Current prospects make that belief a matter of faith.

Future Imperfect

Via Candide's Notebooks, I found Paul Rogers' analysis of American policy in Iraq. As with any prediction, it's speculative but Rogers lays out a clear line of fact and logic to reach his conclusion.

...the United States plan for Iraq is to establish a series of tight political mechanisms of control deriving from the original CPA-era agreements; a huge embassy-based structure in Baghdad to oversee and maintain these; immunity for over 300,000 foreign personnel; and continuing, direct authority over and access to Iraqi detainees. The entire operation is to be secured by the US military and its private contractors, increasingly protected by the use of air power.

This ambitious project is hardly consistent with the idea - still the official line propagated by Washington, and uncritically recycled by much of the establishment media - that the US's political objective is to bolster the independent governance of Iraq by the Iraqis themselves. Indeed, it goes further than the considerable power exerted by the United States in several central American countries in the early 20th century; its sheer grandeur might better be compared to some of the French or British colonial-era protectorates. In contemporary terms, it comes close to the establishment of a fully-fledged American colony in the heart of the Arab and Islamic world. Whether or not the George W Bush administration and its supporters realise it, the implications of that - for Iraq itself and for the whole region - are set to match even what has happened over the last five years.

The Occupation has cost America almost half a trillion dollars. It doesn't look like it will get any less costly for a long, long time.