Militarism/Nationalism/Patriotism

[Anwaar]

This is a treasure trove of information Michelle. You have outdone yourself.

Thank you much.

[michelle]

Defense Contractor Mitchell Wade Pleads Guilty to Bribing Former Congressman 'Duke' Cunningham, Corrupting DOD, Election Fraud

2/24/2006 6:24:00 PM
To: National Desk

Contact: Channing Phillips of the U.S. Department of Justice, 202-514-6933; Web: www.usdoj.gov/usao/dc

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Mitchell Wade, the former owner of MZM, Inc., a major defense contractor based in the District of Columbia, has pleaded guilty to bribing former Congressman "Duke" Cunningham, corrupting defense officials, and election fraud, announced United States Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, Joseph A. McMillan, Special Agent in Charge, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, Joseph Persichini, Jr., Acting Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI's Washington Field Office, and Rick A. Raven, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation.

Wade, 46, of Great Falls, Va., entered his guilty plea earlier today in U.S. District Court before the Honorable Ricardo M. Urbina to multiple felony counts related to his wholesale corruption of the defense procurement process. The conduct includes Wade making over $1 million in payoffs to then- Congressman Duke Cunningham, providing illegal benefits to Defense Department officials, and attempting to curry favor with two other members of Congress by making illegal campaign contributions.

Specifically, Wade pled to a four-count information, including one count of conspiring both to bribe Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham and to tax evasion; one count of Use of Interstate Facilities to Promote Bribery; one count of conspiring to deprive the Defense Department of the honest services of its employees; and one count of election fraud. Under the terms of the agreement, Wade, who has been cooperating with officials in this ongoing investigation, faces up to 135 months of incarceration. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

"The Department of Justice and this Office have made combating corruption within the multi-billion dollar defense contracting industry a top priority, said U.S. Attorney Wainstein. "Today's prosecution makes the clear statement that legislators, civil servants and defense contractors alike have a duty to maintain the integrity of the defense appropriations and contracting process. Those who violate that duty can expect to be investigated, prosecuted and sent to prison."

"The American public expects the Department of Defense and other government agencies to manage an acquisition system that is devoid of corrupt behavior and influence," said Defense Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent in Charge McMillan. "We are committed to dedicating the necessary resources to identify, investigate, and prosecute the corrupt actions of public officials and contractors."

"The American people are entitled to lawful and ethical public service," added Acting Assistant Director in Charge Persichini. "The FBI will continue to apply resources to achieve that goal."

According to the government's evidence, Wade grew his company, MZM, into a defense contracting company that, since 2002, received over $150 million in Department of Defense government contracts by engaging in a series of corrupt acts throughout the defense procurement process: from ensuring that the members of Congress who could appropriate funds for special Defense Department projects looked favorably on MZM, to the Department of Defense officials-some of whom Wade knew when he was a government official-who could give him favorable reviews and inside information to ensure that the work would continue to flow.

Wade was able to exploit the procurement system in three distinct ways: by bribing a sitting United States Congressman; by conspiring to give favors to Department of Defense officials responsible for procuring services from Wade's company; and by funneling illegal campaign contributions to two Members of Congress.

Bribery of Congressman Cunningham

Randall "Duke" Cunningham was a powerful member of the Defense appropriations subcommittee, and Wade understood that Cunningham had the ability to make or break MZM. In order to become a Cunningham favorite in the use of special Congressional appropriations, Wade showered the Congressman with many types of gifts, including checks, cash, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees, boat repairs, and the use of a Rolls Royce. Wade also purchased Cunningham's house at a wildly inflated price and arranged for Cunningham to live on a yacht, the "Duke-Stir," anchored in the Potomac. Wade paid these bribes, totaling over $1 million, in order to receive special consideration in Cunningham's use of his special defense appropriations and to pay for Cunningham's use of his power in an effort to steer funds and contracts to MZM.

Cunningham has pled guilty to bribery conspiracy, and will be sentenced in San Diego on Friday, March 3.

Corrupt Activities within the Department of Defense

One key to MZM's ability to receive government contracts was an umbrella contracting vehicle called Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA). A BPA is a contract vehicle that permitted the Defense Department and other departments and agencies to obtain supplies and services on an as-needed basis through a "charge account" system. Operating under a BPA, MZM and Wade were shielded from the normal competitive bidding process used in government procurement and could solicit business from government components directly.

In September of 2002, MZM received its BPA from the Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization, with the acronym "DITCO," making MZM eligible to receive up to $225 million by performing work for Defense Department customers.

The next step was for Wade to arrange for Defense Department officials to buy what he was selling. Wade extended his corrupt behavior into the Defense Department to ensure that the business kept coming regardless of MZM's performance. Wade, himself a former Defense Department employee, knew a number of individuals within the Defense Department who could help him. Wade convinced two Defense Department components, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), located in Arlington, Virginia, and the Department of the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), located in Charlottesville, Virginia, to provide task orders that MZM could perform under the BPA.

Wade then shielded MZM from the normal performance review by crossing the line into corrupt activities. Wade's activities included:

-- arranging for a Defense Department official's son to be hired as an MZM employee-the cost of that job was ultimately paid for by the government in reimbursement agreement with MZM; and

-- extending an offer of employment, and then ultimately hiring, a Department of Defense official who was responsible for overseeing much of MZM's work. Federal law prohibits government employees from, among other things, discussing potential employment with companies with whom they do government business.

-- Certain Department of Defense employees provided: valuable procurement information that MZM could use to tailor a proposal for work that MZM could perform under the BPA.

-- an official recommendation that MZM receive contracts under the BPA for certain activities involving the imaging and archiving of Defense Department documents; and

-- favorable performance reviews about MZM. These performance reviews were critical to MZM. Notwithstanding the fact that Wade received these purchase orders without competitive bidding as a result of his earlier receipt of the $225 million BPA, MZM could not be assured that they would continue to receive new purchase orders without receiving these type of favorable reviews by Defense Department officials.

In engaging in this corrupt activity, Wade deprived the citizens of the United States of their right to the honest services of government-the right of the Defense Department to make decisions free from bias and favoritism.

Illegal Campaign Contributions

Wade also made about $80,000 in illegal campaign contributions to the campaigns of two sitting Members of Congress. Wade targeted these two Members of Congress because he believed that these representatives had the ability to request appropriations funding that would benefit MZM.

Federal law prohibits campaigns from receiving more than $2,000 from any one individual per election, and prohibits entirely corporate contributions. Wade wanted to curry favor with these two members of Congress, so he needed a way around the campaign contribution laws. His solution was to have his employees and their spouses make contributions to these two campaigns under their own names, then reimburse them -a technique, known as "straw contributions" that is a felony under federal election law when the straw contributions amount to over ten thousand dollars. He did so often by simply handing the employees cash - two thousand dollars for each person - and then immediately "asking" them to make a contribution. All in all, he made 39 different "straw" contributions, with 19 different employees or spouses. In order to maximize the impact of these contributions, Wade personally handed a number of the campaign contributions, in the form of personal checks from employees and their spouses, to one of the representatives.

After Wade made the campaign contributions, Wade asked that one of the Representatives and his staff request appropriations funding for an MZM facility. The Representative's staff later confirmed to Wade that an appropriations bill would include $9 million for the facility. After making the illegal campaign contributions to the other Representative, Wade had a personal dinner with the Representative, in which the two discussed the possibility of MZM's hosting a fundraiser for the Representative later in the year, and the possibility of obtaining funding and approval for a Navy counterintelligence program. That program was never funded.

Wade did not inform the two Representatives that the contributions were illegal.

In announcing today's guilty plea, United States Attorney Wainstein, Defense Criminal Investigative Special Agent in Charge Joseph A. McMillan, FBI Acting Assistant Director in Charge Persichini, and IRS Special Agent in Charge Rick Raven praised the efforts of FBI Special Agents Julie Hemmy and Matthew Young and DCIS Special Agent Edward Cassin. They further acknowledged the efforts of prosecutors and federal agents in the Eastern District of Virginia, Southern District of California and the Eastern District of New York. Finally, they commended the work of Legal Assistants Shavonne Rush, April Peeler and Teesha Tobias, and Assistant United States Attorneys Howard Sklambergand John Carlin, who are prosecuting the case.

[michelle]

GRAND THEFT AMERICA

More on The contractor, Mitchell Wade, former chief executive of MZM Inc. in California, who pleaded guilty to paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California. This story is about how he funneled illegal campaign contributions to U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris of Longboat Key, who's running for the U.S. Senate. If you haven't read them, see reply numbers 13, 14, and 16 of this thread for more background.

Conclusion of the article on Harris:
SNIP:
Harris is the only widely known Republican seeking the nomination to run against U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat seeking re-election in November.
"I would hope that ethics matters to the voters," said Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin. "In this case, the congressman who got the most amount of bribes from MZM is on his way to prison. The congressman who got second-most illegal money wants to be a U.S. senator."

READ the article:

Harris Got Illegal Donations
By WILLIAM MARCH
and KEITH EPSTEIN The Tampa Tribune
Published: Feb 25, 2006
www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBQ34QE3KE.html

Remember Katherine Harris during the 2000 election? Let us review, once again, her part in the STOLEN 2000 election. Click on the link below; I couldn't have said it better.
www.bushflash.com/gta.html

Also, Bill Moyers has given us a very thorough examination of politics and money in the U.S. today. He paints a rather grim picture for us. But in this article, he also gives us hope by pointing out some places in the U.S. where local government and citizens have taken action to eliminate the buying off and the placing into position of politicians by special interests. Give it a read; it is well worth the time.....Michelle

Restoring The Public Trust
Bill Moyers
February 24, 2006

SNIP:
Bill Moyers is President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. This is the prepared text of his remarks on an 8-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics.

But this crowd in charge has a vision sharply at odds with the American people. They would arrange Washington and the world for the convenience of themselves and the transnational corporations that pay for their elections. In the words of Al Meyeroff, the Los Angeles attorney who led a successful class action suit for the workers on Saipan, the people who now control the U.S. Government today want “a society run by the powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of any oversight, enjoying a cozy relationship with government, and thriving on crony capitalism.”

www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/24/restoring_the_public_trust.php

[michelle]

Senator Feinstein's War-Profiteering
Enabling Bush

It happens all the time. If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead. It doesn’t even have to be an election year to get the progressives fired up. They just don’t seem to get it. “How can you attack the Democrats when we have such a bullet-proof administration ruling the roost in Washington,” somebody recently emailed me, “Don’t you have something better to do than write this trash?!”

Well, not really. It’s too cold in upstate New York right now to do anything other than fume over the liberal villains in Washington. “Why do I write about the putrid Democratic Party?” I responded, “I’ll tell you, there’s a reason this Republican administration is so damn bullet proof -- nobody from the opposition party is taking aim and pulling the trigger.”

And that’s why the Dems are just as culpable in all that has transpired since Bush took office in 2000. They aren’t just a part of the problem -- the Democrats are the problem.

I mean, who is really all that surprised Bush and his boys wanted to conquer the Middle East, curtail civil liberties and rampage the environment? Not me. That’s just what unreasonable neo-cons do: they stomp out the little guy, kill off the weak and suffocate the voiceless. They only care about the girth of their wallets and the number of scalps they can tack above their mantles.

The Democrats aren’t just letting the Republicans get away with murder, however, some of them are also reaping the benefits of the Bush wars. We constantly hear about Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and how his ex-company is making bundles off US contracts in Iraq. But what we don’t hear about is how Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband are also making tons of money off the “war on terror”.

The wishy-washy senator now claims Bush misled her leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I don’t think she’s being honest with us, though; there may have been other reasons she helped sell Bush’s lies. According to The Center for Public Integrity, Senator Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum has raked in millions of dollars from Perini, a civil infrastructure construction company, of which the billionaire investor co-owns 75 percent of the voting share.

In April 2003 the US Army Corps of Engineers divied out $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq’s central command. A month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for "electrical power distribution and transmission" in the southern Iraq.

Senator Feinstein, who sits on the Appropriations Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, is reaping the benefits of her husband’s investments. The Democratic royal family recently purchased a 16.5 million dollar mansion in the flush Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. It’s a disgusting display of war profiteering and the leading Democrat, just like Cheney, should be called out for her offense.

And that’s exactly why the Bush administration is so bullet proof. The Democratic leadership in Washington is just as crooked and just as callous.

--Joshua Frank
brickburner.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/02/senator_feinste.html

[michelle]

Speaker Hastert Comments on the Cunningham Sentencing

3/3/2006 6:45:00 PM

Contact: Ron Bonjean of the Office of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, 202-225-2800

WASHINGTON, March 3 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) today released the following statement regarding the sentencing of former Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham:

"The court has handed Congressman Cunningham the punishment for the crimes he committed. This sentence should send a strong message that no one is above breaking our nation's laws including, the Members of Congress who make them. It is my hope that Congressman Cunningham will spend his incarceration thinking long and hard about how he broke the trust of the voters that elected him and those on Capitol Hill who served with him."


Cunningham Gets 8 Years For Taking Millions In Bribes

by Sonya Geis and Charles R. Babcock

Former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham,
A Decorated Fighter Pilot In Vietnam Who Admitted
Taking $2.4 Million In Bribes From Two Defense Contractors, Was Sentenced Friday To Eight Years And Four Months In Federal Prison.

Read article: tinyurl.com/kl94q

[michelle]

Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History
by Howard Zinn
Published on Tuesday, March 14, 2006
by The Progressive

On the third anniversary of President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.

I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.

One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.

President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

And everyone lied about Vietnam -- President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 -- hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values -- democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise -- to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.

But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.

It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of "A People's History of the United States" (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories Press, 2004).

© 2006 The Progressive

NOTE FROM MICHELLE: Howard Zinn has continued to be one of my favorite historians. For teaching your children TRUE U.S. history, you can download "Voices of a People's History of the United States" here:
Voices Teacher's Guide Now Available as Free Download: www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100666900

DESCRIPTION:

The Long-Awaited Companion Volume to A People’s History of the United States “In Voices of a People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn has given us our true story, the ongoing, not-so-secret narrative of race and class in America.” —Russell Banks


“When I began work, five years ago, on what would become the present volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, I wanted the voices of struggle, mostly absent from our history books, to be given the place they deserve. I wanted labor history, which has been the battleground, decade after decade, century after century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity, to come to the fore. And I wanted my readers to experience how at key moments in our history some of the bravest and most effective political acts were the sounds of the human voice itself.

“To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women—once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress.”

—Howard Zinn, from the introduction Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, and Malcolm X, to name just a few of the hundreds of voices that appear in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Paralleling the twenty-four chapters of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Voices of a People’s History is the long-awaited companion volume to the national bestseller. For Voices, Zinn and Arnove have selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—left by the people who make history happen but who usually are left out of history books—women, workers, nonwhites. Zinn has written short introductions to the texts, which range in length from letters or poems of less than a page to entire speeches and essays that run several pages. Voices of a People’s History is a symphony of our nation’s original voices, rich in ideas and actions, the embodiment of the power of civil disobedience and dissent wherein lies our nation’s true spirit of defiance and resilience.
Anthony Arnove is the editor of Terrorism and War by Howard Zinn (Seven Stories Press,2002) and of Iraq Under Siege. An activist and regular contributor to ZNet, his writing has appeared in The Nation, Financial Times, and Mother Jones. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Howard Zinn is the author of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States and many other books, including The Zinn Reader(Seven Stories Press, 2000), and, most recently, Artists in Times of War (Seven Stories Press,2003).

[michelle]

Is War the Real National Pastime?
Haider Rizvi

NEW YORK, Mar 22 (IPS) - In his provocative documentary "Why We Fight", director Eugene Jarecki asks whether Washington's foreign policy is overly preoccupied with the idea of military supremacy, and if the military has become too important in U.S. life.

Jarecki interviews subjects from across the political spectrum, including Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York police officer whose son died in the Sep. 11 attack on the World Trade Centre; Bill Kristol, editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard; Gore Vidal, a prominent author and liberal commentator; James Roche, secretary of the U.S. Air Force; and U.S. pilots identified as Fuji and Tooms, who dropped the first bombs over Baghdad when the Iraq war broke in 2003.

Following are excerpts from a recent interview IPS conducted with the award-winning filmmaker.

Q: Tell us why you chose this title for your film.

A: Actually, this is the title of a series of films made during World War II by the legendary director Frank Capra. It seems to me that in the past 60 years, the reasons for American war have changed and become far more complicated for everyday people to understand.

The film asks the question, why we fight. I cannot say that it provides an answer, because it wasn't really my goal to provide a single answer. It was my goal to bring together voices from a wide range of experts and the insiders, people touched by American war who could become a kind of chorus of concern looking more deeply at the issues involved and the stakes implied than customarily happens in our shallow news media outlets.

It looks at today's critical situation in Iraq and it's impossible to look at the history of American war over the past half century without naturally being reminded of the crisis in which we now find ourselves.

Q: Have you faced any problems in terms of distribution?

A: If you are a filmmaker trying to cover a politically sensitive subject in the United States, America has suffered such a degradation of our open media system in recent years, such a shift away from the values of a democratic society, that problems arise long before the distribution phase. At the very start, the struggle to get financing for a film like this in the United States would have proved immediately prohibitive. So we moved overseas to the BBC, to Canada, to France and Germany, to countries whose media systems are far more open than ours, and in many ways shame ours.

Q: Has the movie been shown in Iraq?

A: It has not been shown in Iraq. There has been a movement by the British forces television to show the film to their own troops serving in Iraq, but it has not been shown in Iraq.

Q: In the movie, you have interviews with U.S. weapon manufacturers and footage of weapons manufacturing sites. How did you manage to get access to those sites?

A: Well, you know, I worked very hard to reach out to people all across the spectrum, and when you are making a film about war, you are dealing with people at all levels. And in order to secure access to these people, in general one had to go through the Pentagon. We were involved in a very serious inquiry and not in an ambush, a kind of tough love for America and the American story.

Q: You highlighted the speech of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) in which he expresses his deep concern over the "military-industrial complex". Do you agree with those who would rather describe this phenomenon as "military-industrial-prison-media complex"?

A: Yes, unfortunately, what Eisenhower is talking about is the concern that the interests of corporations have been placed ahead of the interests of the people. That can take many forms, whether it's military-industrial or pharmaceutical or media. There are so many industries in America that can have undue, unwarranted influences on the affairs of the state.

In many ways, Eisenhower is simply noting the rise of special interests in the United States. [But] the military-industrial complex has a special distinction as a special interest. The enormity of its business and the way in which it operates it makes more difficult in times of threats [when] you can insulate military-industrial special interests from the kind of oversight and review that others feel might be needed. So the military-industrial complex is a sort of favoured nation among special interests.

Q: You focused on the invasion of Iraq. How do you view the recent developments regarding Iran's nuclear programme and the threats Tehran is facing?

A: I think the concern of course is to what extent the conflict with Iran is another very unfortunate side effect of the calamitous decision on the war in Iraq. You may remember that U.S. policymakers asserted from the start that it would be what they called a "cakewalk". Having gotten rid of Saddam [Hussein], upbeat people would be dancing in the streets, and the country would immediately take a new shape. All of those dreams of course have collapsed. What we now face is a situation of intense chaos. By unseating [Hussein], the United States in many ways liberated the Shia in Iraq and the fundamentalists in Iran who have far more in common with each other.

Q: It is very interesting that in the film you used the footage of [current U.S. Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld's meeting with Saddam Hussein in 1983, when he was the special envoy of Pres. Ronald Reagan.

A: You can't study the history of the current war without following the roots all the way back to the overthrow of Mossedeq (1953) in the interests of British Petroleum. But along the way, there is no way to ignore Ayatollah Khomeini [in Iran]. Along the way, there is no way to ignore Saddam Hussein. No way to ignore that the United States and Saddam Hussein had reasons to ally with each other. The question is, what is it about U.S. foreign policy that makes us these kinds of bedfellows, such that we have to conduct war to unseat them?

Q: Are you hopeful about the realisation of these dreams and aspirations for taking back the republic?

A: I don't know, but I think the hope for America to be a democratic republic is the founding hope. That has always been a work in progress. And there always come challenges. [The communist-hunting Senator Joseph] McCarthy was a challenge, today is a challenge, slavery was a challenge, the death of the Native Americans was a challenge, the eugenics movement before the Second World War was a challenge, the Depression was a challenge.

There have been so many challenges. We have a nation of leaders who cared deeply about this country. But now we face a situation where the stakes are so high that what I would hope to see is that Americans would look into the streets of New Orleans, into the streets of Falluja, and they would see a world that really is not viable. They would see a platform of ideas that are shortsighted, not holistic in nature. These are platforms of ideas that do not meet the needs of everyday people in the shrinking world. And so the question is: Will Americans come to see that with sufficient vigour to have the kind of impact that people need to have on policy and democracy? (END/2006)

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32598

[michelle]

Jeffrey St. Clair on the new war profiteers
“The system is irretrievably corrupt”
April 14, 2006 | Pages 6 and 7

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, coeditor of the muckraking Web site and newsletter CounterPunch, is the author of a new book, Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror. He talked to Socialist Worker about what’s responsible for the crooked system in Washington.

WHEN THE mainstream media report on the issues you examine in your book, they focus on the $600 hammers. But the corruption that you’re talking about is on a whole other level, isn’t it?

I THINK that you’re right. The Pentagon scandals of the 1970s and early ’80s did focus on the more ludicrous aspects--the expensive hammers, the gold-plated toilets for the generals. And that’s still going on.

But there was more to it, even at the time. When you look back to some of the really courageous whistleblowers--like Ernie Fitzgerald, who’s immortalized on one of Nixon’s tapes--he was a kind of systems analyst inside the Pentagon in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and his probes show there’s a continuity to these scandals.

There’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats. If you go back to the Lockheed scandal during the Vietnam War, Ernie began probing them during LBJ’s time in office, and they were trying to find a way to boot him out of the Pentagon then.

Nixon comes in, and the probe continues--the scandal is the same, because Lockheed shifts its allegiances as if it were shifting gears in a Ferarri. The money flows directly into the coffers of the Nixon political machine, and Ernie’s there--the lone fly in the ointment, exposing this enormous scandal, where billions of dollars of contracts are handed out by virtue of political favoritism.

And a lot of times it’s for weapons systems that don’t work. We often talk about how Star Wars will never work. My attitude is we can expose that, but maybe we should be supporting these weapon systems that don’t work. Do we want a really efficient Star Wars missile shield, or do we want one that doesn’t work? The problem with Star Wars is that it’s destabilizing--it may encourage these sort of preemptive strikes. But everyone knows it doesn’t work.

So there’s a continuity to these scandals. But the press likes to play up the ludicrous angles, because it doesn’t have time to go into a really detailed story about the level of corruption that permeates our politics.

Admittedly, it’s gotten to an entirely new level these days--like moving from the Louvre to Versailles.

There’s a kind of lack of guilt now. It used to be that the worst thing you could be called in American politics was a war profiteer--that was the death knell. Even the robber barons, when they were caught peddling shoddy bullets or uniforms that dissolved in the rain during the Civil War, went in the doghouse for a decade or two, and could only wrench their way back through their philanthropic tithing.

Now, I think we’ve seen a sea change of sorts, where the attitude is: If you’re making a profit, it must be good. If you look at the annual reports and prospectuses of corporations that have their snouts in the troughs, they brag about how much money they’re making off of Bush’s “war on terror.”

But it would be a mistake to only focus on the Bush administration. Perhaps we should thank them for bringing this all out into the open, because a lot of the truly grandiose rip-offs got their start during the Clinton-Gore administration.

Gore is largely responsible for this, through his Reinventing Government scheme--where the Reagan dream of privatizing the federal government reached its apotheosis. Gore’s scheme thought of ways to privatize a lot of Pentagon operations via contract. It got its test run during the Somalia operation, and the Bosnian war and the war on Serbia.

This is where you see Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons--the big companies that Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 was trying to associate as being in a kind of symbiotic relationship with Bush--really getting their tentacles on these Pentagon contracts. What you saw was no-bid, no-oversight, endless-war, permanent contracts.

I don’t think they work very well. The GAO was saying from the very beginning--in the very early reports on the Somalia contracts and the ones in Bosnia and Serbia--that this Pentagon contracting had corruption and disaster written all over it. They were very, very critical. And of course, what happened to them? The reports received no press coverage.

AND NOT only are these companies making billions off Pentagon contracts, but they’re using their influence to drive foreign policy--for example, in pressing for an occupation of Iraq intended to get their hands on Iraq’s oil.

THAT SHOULDN’T be a surprise to anyone. It’s a corporate government. The two parties have consolidated into one corporate body, with two heads--one of which happens to be bigger than the other at this point.

Corporations are driving U.S. financial policy, and they’re driving U.S. foreign policy. They own our political system, from top to bottom.

I think most Americans realize this. It’s why they’ve soured on politics, and I don’t blame them. They realize that there’s no entrance into our political system, unless your calling card comes with a Fortune 500 company on it. Or maybe you’re an Indian tribe, and you hire yourself someone like Jack Abramoff to press your interests. And Abramoff, of course, takes your money and screws you over because you’re Indians.

Oil companies, the big defense contractors--they’ve always been directing foreign policy. But now I think what you’ve got is a situation where the boundaries between the corporate world and the political world and the military have dissolved.

They used to speak of an iron triangle. It’s not a triangle anymore. It’s like sub-atomic particles, where you’re a general in the Pentagon one moment, and at the very same time, you’re a lobbyist for Boeing. At the same time you’re handing out contracts for weapons systems, you’re also working for the companies that are getting the contracts. You’re in two places at once--you’re a sub-atomic particle. That’s what our political system has become.

Finally, you get somebody like Darlene Druyun of Boeing, who takes it a little bit too far. Also, I think there’s the fact that she’s a woman, and that she had burned a lot of bridges during her days in the Pentagon. But it really took some flamboyantly corrupt behavior for her to get nailed.

So she goes down, and she takes a few of her colleagues with her, but there’s no talk of reforming the system. You had your sacrificial scapegoat, and the beat goes on.

It’s the same thing with Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Here you had a congressman who was writing down his bribe list on his own congressional stationary pad, as he got sloshed in the Dubliner Pub off Capitol Hill--his wish list from the retinue of defense contractors who parade into his office.

It takes that kind of flagrant flouting of ethical standards to get him indicted and tossed in the slammer. But again, is there any talk about reform of these relationships between congressmen and lobbyists? Not at all.

So the system is, I think, irretrievably corrupt. The cancer has gone to phase five and metastasized through the body politic. And no one has clean hands.

OF ALL the best-known political leaders in Washington, Sen. John McCain may have the best reputation as a reformer and a maverick. But in your book, you describe a different person altogether.

JOHN McCAIN, in my view, is the most fraudulent politician in Washington. He is a complete fraud--from campaign finance reform to his attempts to reform Pentagon pork.

The typical McCain thing is to come up with a sound bite about pork-barrel spending at the Pentagon and how outrageous it is--but do nothing. You have Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska attaching bills to fund airports in his own name or bridges to nowhere, and does McCain object to it? Does he do anything to stop it? No, he doesn’t.

And this is the Senate, where one senator could monkey-wrench the entire system if they wanted to. What McCain wants is the reputation as a maverick. But he doesn’t want to monkey-wrench the system, because he knows--as well as anyone, being the son of an admiral--that he needs the support of the defense-imperial complex.

He’s the biggest hothead in the Congress as well. If you had your dream match-up in the 2008 presidential elections, it would have to be McCain and Hillary, because either of them could blow--their heads would just pop off. They’re both alike politically, and they’re both so tightly wound that they’re both on the verge of blowing up.

McCain is a hypocrite from top to bottom. In the book, I quote a Phoenix physician, Robert Witzeman, a human rights activist who works very closely with some of the poorest tribes--the San Carlos Apaches in particular. They’ve been battling for 20 years to keep this deep-space telescope that the University of Arizona--which in a lot of ways runs the state--and the Vatican, of all places, wants to put on top of Mount Graham, which is a sacred mountain for the San Carlos Apaches, who live right at its base.

And McCain has played a really malign role in all this. He wants to present himself as a friend of the tribes, a friend of the environment. But when it comes down to it, he has been a vicious supporter of the Vatican and the University of Arizona on this. And when he was confronted by Doctor Witzeman in his office, McCain just exploded, and came within an inch of physically attacking this elderly physician.

So he’s right on the edge. In 2000, when McCain was running for president, Witzeman said that this is the man who’s most likely to start a nuclear war.

I saw him this morning as he was going on about his bracero bill. It’s just disgusting. He thinks so highly of himself.

And then you think about where the moral fiber to this person is. After all, when he was running for president in 2000, what was the Christian Right saying about him, in collusion with Karl Rove and his Bush hatchet team? That his wife was a drug addict, that McCain may have sired an illegitimate child with a Black woman. This was the whispering campaign in South Carolina, a lot of it coming out of Falwell and the Bush camp.

And so here’s McCain now, cozying up to Bush and giving the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty College. It’s like: “Sorry, dear, I know they said some unkind things about you, but I’m not going to let that stand in the way of my ambitions.”

EVEN AMONG people who genuinely oppose the U.S. war on Iraq, there’s a perception that the preceding war on Afghanistan to topple the former Taliban government was a good thing. But your book tells a different story.

BASICALLY, THE U.S. was offered Osama bin Laden and his inner cabal. The Taliban offered them up, and the Bush administration refused. We interviewed the intermediary for the Taliban.

They wanted to get rid of bin Laden. He was a huge liability to the Taliban. It began in Clinton times and really picked up steam after September 11. And both the Bush and Clinton administrations’ response was: “Fuck that. He’s useful to us.” There’s no question they wanted war.

Afghanistan was a kind of a replay of the wars from Clinton times. It was an air war and a cruise missile war. The U.S. had a proxy army in the Northern Alliance that they could work with, along with a few special forces divisions and the CIA and the interrogators/torturers.

They weren’t suffering under any illusions about rebuilding Afghanistan as a model of democracy. Basically, what they wanted was to set up a government there quickly, and then get the hell out, because their grand ambition was in Iraq. There were flirtations with pipelines and military bases, but I think they needed a kind of fire show in Afghanistan, which they got.

But it still turned into a quagmire. I think the death and injury rate for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan is inching up now, so that it’s getting close to what it is in Iraq. And that’s totally uncovered in the media. Ninety percent of the people in this country don’t know that we’re even in Afghanistan any more. But it’s sucking them down slowly and silently.

IN IRAQ, all the pretexts for the invasion--weapons of mass destruction, promoting democracy--have crumbled. So who was it that really benefited?

THAT’S THE $64 billion question. I don’t think that there’s one answer to it, frankly. I think it’s evident to everyone now that we’re not dealing with rational people, and that we do have morons running this government. They’re political morons, and they’re inept at what they’re doing, militarily and strategically. It has been a resumé of failure unlike anything I’ve ever seen in politics.

So you’re asking for a kind of rational explanation of the motives behind this war, and I don’t think that there is one.

A lot of things came together. You have the neo-conservative agenda, for one. But on the other hand, you have to recognize that Dick Cheney isn’t a neo-con. He has neo-cons in his office, but he isn’t one himself. Bush isn’t a neo-con. Rumsfeld isn’t a neo-con. Powell and Armitage weren’t neo-cons.

I think the neo-cons were useful to them, and they sort of bore into the inner sanctums of the Bush administration and strutted their stuff. But I don’t think that they’re the total answer. I think the left gets fixated on the neo-cons, instead of what I think is the one rational motivation that you can pick out--economic control of the Middle East.

The administration wants to laugh about the war not being about oil. I don’t think it is all about oil, but look at the profits of ExxonMobil. Croesus would have been envious. Wal-Mart is road kill in their wake.

But it goes way beyond oil. Right now, you have the last vestige of Keynesian economics at work in the billions of federal dollars being spent in these Pentagon contracts. It’s an astounding transfer of wealth--the likes of which I don’t know that we’ve ever seen.

The war has been very good for the oil companies, and it’s been very, very good for the defense companies. One thing that we have to realize now is that we’ve gone way beyond the traditional defense companies, like Boeing and Lockheed. Now, the dot-coms are defense companies.

The contracts have been saturated across the economic spectrum. If you’re a corporate CEO, and you haven’t found out a way to become part of this orgy of spending, from the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon, you should be fired by your board of directors. Because it’s all there for the taking.

To a certain extent, I think this has created a fissure within the Pentagon, because there’s a price that’s going to be paid. The original idea was that we could cut taxes and have these wars, because we’d take over Iraq, and the war would pay for itself.

Iraq was a kind of sitting duck. The U.S. knew they didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. That’s why it went to war against them. We don’t go to war against countries that have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was a kind of prisoner country, battered by sanctions and 13 years of war before Shock and Awe.

And it has one of the largest untapped oil reserves in the world, which had been off the market. So the war would pay for itself, because we would have our hands on all of that oil. We could get production up and going, thanks to handing out big contracts to Parsons and Halliburton and Bechtel, and we would sell that oil on the market, and use those revenues to pay for the war.

Well, they were in for a surprise--that didn’t happen. Now, the cost of this war is reaching into the trillions of dollars. So what’s happened is that there’s a kind of civil war in the Pentagon.

You have the traditional defense companies, like Boeing and Lockheed and Raytheon, who are building the baroque weapons systems that are relics of the Cold War, but we haven’t stopped building them yet. Like the F-22 fighter--there’s no enemy for this, unless we’re invaded by aliens. Or Star Wars, or the joint strike fighter and all these big stealth systems--from when everybody was into stealth, and all you had to do was attach the name “stealth” to any project or weapons system, and you immediately got billions in contracts.

Those days may be gone. For a lot of these generals, particularly in the procurement office in the Pentagon, their mission in life was to steer those big contracts to the defense companies. They would get their two or three stars, they would retire, and they would go to work for Boeing and Lockheed, and become millionaires and powerbrokers.

Now, those big projects are being put at risk, because of the fact that the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars can’t pay for themselves. And you have this new retinue of contractors, like the Halliburtons, which are getting the reconstruction and logistics contracts. They’ve now become almost as powerful as the old-line defense contractors. So there’s a kind of civil war going on inside that microcosm.

My view is that the war could end because of this civil war inside the Pentagon--between the corporations, as the pie gets consumed, as it inevitably will.

Who else is going to end this war? The peace movement in the U.S. is flat on its back. It’s sad to say so, but there’s no energy to it--it’s not threatening in any way. It’s nothing like what’s going on in France, it’s nothing like the immigrant rights protests.

There are a lot of reasons for that. For one thing, there’s no draft. The war hasn’t had a personal effect on most people. How many people do you know who have served or are serving in Iraq? One of my son’s friends is in the Marines, and he may, at some time in the future, go to Iraq. Otherwise, the only way I come in contact with people who are immediately affected is at speaking events--with Military Families Against the War.

I don’t think the peace movement is going to end the war. It probably will be ended by the Iraqi resistance--they’ll boot the U.S. out of Iraq. But if it’s going to be ended at all from the U.S. side, it could also be ended by this internal war inside the Pentagon. We can’t have our Star Wars, our F-22, our aircraft carriers and have these petty wars in Iraq, so let’s get out.

Source: www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/584/584_06_StClair.shtml

[michelle]

The generals’ revolt and the decay of US democracy
By Bill Van Auken
20 April 2006

The demand by more than a half-dozen former senior military commanders that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign has laid bare deep divisions within the state apparatus and the profound decay of America’s bourgeois democratic order.

President George W. Bush lashed out at Rumsfeld’s critics Tuesday in shouted remarks in the White House Rose Garden that combined belligerence and hysteria. Declaring that he did not “appreciate the speculation” about the defense secretary’s future, Bush declared, “I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best, and what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”

It was the second time in barely five days that Bush felt compelled to make a public statement reiterating his support for Rumsfeld. Last Friday, he interrupted his Easter vacation to declare that “Secretary Rumsfeld’s energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period.”

Clearly, the administration has been rattled by its military critics. These include prominent, recently retired commanders of US troops in Iraq—Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi army, Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Army’s 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne—who have labeled the intervention there a “strategic failure” and a “disaster.”

According to published reports, as many as two dozen other senior retired officers are considering joining in the demand for Rumsfeld’s ouster. It is widely acknowledged that this public campaign is being coordinated behind the scenes with senior commanders still on active duty in the armed forces.

Rumsfeld himself attempted to brush off this campaign, linking it to his aggressive pursuit of “military transformation,” including the downsizing of the US Army, suggesting that his “modernizing” efforts had antagonized elements of a hide-bound uniformed brass.

“People like things the way they are, and so when you make a change... somebody’s not going to like it,” he told a Pentagon press conference Tuesday after raking over old controversies, from a 30-year-old debate over what cannon to put on the Army’s main battle tank to the cancelled contract for the Crusader battlefield howitzer.

Such arguments are hardly convincing and do nothing to counter the impact of the military commanders’ criticisms on public opinion, under conditions in which broad masses of the American people have already concluded that the war was wrong and US troops should be withdrawn. In the latest USA Today/Gallup poll issued Monday, 57 percent said that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake—the highest rate since polling began on this question—while 65 percent said they disapproved of Bush’s handling of Iraq.

With the situation in Iraq spiraling towards catastrophe—a sectarian civil war is intensifying and at least 50 US troops have been killed there so far this month alone—Bush’s praise for Rumsfeld’s leadership is highly provocative, and his refusal to acknowledge the pressure building up within the military raises the troubling question of how far the present confrontation will go.

Clearly, the Bush White House fears that to remove Rumsfeld would only strengthen popular opposition to the war and further undermine the administration. Rumsfeld, together with Vice President Dick Cheney—both veterans of the Vietnam War-era Nixon administration—are the key architects of the war. For either to be forced out could lead to the unraveling of the administration as a whole.

In a government that is guilty of war crimes, the operative principle is summed up in words spoken by Benjamin Franklin under radically different circumstances: “We must all hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.”

In the midst of the firestorm within the Pentagon, an internal Army memo obtained by the online magazine Salon quotes a senior military investigator as saying that Rumsfeld was “personally involved in the interrogation” of Mohammed al-Kahtani, a Saudi detainee at Guantánamo, closely overseeing “abusive and degrading” treatment tantamount to torture. “The question at this point is not whether Secretary Rumsfeld should resign. It’s whether he should be indicted,” said a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch in response to the revelation.

To quash military demands for Rumsfeld’s ouster, the Pentagon leadership has attempted to rally other retired commanders, emailing memos to a number of them providing “talking points” for defending the defense secretary. Four retired generals responded with an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal Monday, regurgitating many of the points in the Pentagon memo.

In the same vein, Melvin Laird, a Nixon administration defense secretary, together with Robert Pursley, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and longtime Pentagon aide, published an opinion piece in the Washington Post Wednesday, warning Rumsfeld’s critics to “be mindful of the risks and responsibilities inherent in their acts.”

The article concluded with a thinly veiled accusation that those who have spoken out are betraying the US forces in Iraq and aiding and abetting the resistance. “In speaking out now, they may think they are doing a service by adding to the reasoned debate,” they wrote. “But the enemy does not understand or appreciate reasoned public debate. It is perceived as a sign of weakness and lack of resolve.”

Clearly, this is not the aim of Rumsfeld’s military antagonists. For the most part, they have defended the decision to wage a war of aggression against Iraq, while condemning the defense secretary for failing to follow plans that the military itself had drawn up for the operation—plans that called for the deployment of far greater numbers of troops.

Writing his own op-ed piece in the Washington Post Wednesday, John Batiste, the former First Infantry Division commander, spelled out the thinking of many of the military critics. While formally acknowledging that “civilian control of the military is fundamental,” he quickly went on to declare: “We need senior military leaders who are grounded in the fundamental principles of war and who are not afraid to do the right thing. Our democracy depends on it. There are some who advocate that we gag this debate, but let me assure you that it is not in our national interest to do so. We must win this war, and we cannot allow senior leaders to continue to make decisions when their track record is so dismal.”

The present conflict over Rumsfeld—involving pronouncements by generals who, in some cases, have only recently left battlefield commands, and the lining up of other generals in support of the civilian head of the Pentagon—is an ominous political event without precedent in US history. Not even during the military’s disintegration in the Vietnam War era was there such a public confrontation among these layers.

While some of the administration’s apologists have somewhat tentatively raised the principle of civilian control over the military in Rumsfeld’s defense, such efforts are riddled with hypocrisy and insurmountable contradictions. This, after all, is an administration that has claimed unprecedented dictatorial powers for the president by invoking his role as “commander-in-chief.” It has turned this function inside out, from a constitutional provision designed to assure the military’s subordination to an elected government to an assertion of military power over the political life of the country, replete with the unlawful detention of “enemy combatants,” torture of detainees and the creation of military tribunals to circumvent US laws and courts.

Against critics of the Iraq war, the White House has repeatedly insisted that its policy in the occupied country is determined entirely by what the generals say should be done.

Such anti-democratic and militarist tendencies did not begin with Bush, but they have greatly accelerated under his administration.

There has been a steady erosion of civilian control over the military since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office more than 45 years ago and warned of the growing power of the “military-industrial complex,” which linked uniformed commanders, a massive arms industry and the defense contractors’ political champions.

The relative weight of this “complex” within US society has immensely increased in the years since. There has been a vast growth in military spending and a global eruption of American militarism, with successive administrations utilizing the military in interventions, invasions and wars of aggression.

Today, powerful regional military commanders oversee American operations in the Pacific, the Middle East, and Central Asia, vying with State Department diplomats as the principal architects of US foreign policy.

In the wake of the Vietnam War, the US military has been transformed into an all-volunteer force of professional soldiers, separated from civilian society and unconstrained by the presence of large numbers of draftees who are prone to question and oppose illegal and unprovoked wars. The officer corps has become increasingly politicized, with its overwhelming majority identifying with the Republican right.

Both political parties compete in soliciting endorsements from retired senior officers, bringing them onto the platforms of their political conventions, something that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

In the final analysis, the generals’ revolt against Rumsfeld is a symptom of the profound decay of bourgeois democratic forms and institutions in the United States. It bespeaks what could be described as the “Latin Americanization” of US politics.

The timing of the ex-commanders’ public campaign is significant. It comes just months after Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, one of the lawmakers with the closest ties to the military brass, issued his public call for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq within six months and the prosecution of the war against the Iraqi people by other means: air power, rapid reaction forces, and Special Forces units allied with Kurdish and Shiite forces.

Murtha was treated by a cowardly Democratic leadership as if he were a political leper, and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives responded by engineering a vote on immediate withdrawal which saw only three Democrats out of 200 vote in favor.

In the face of the patent inability and unwillingness of the supposed opposition party to oppose anything, the military has seen fit to bypass the political process and speak out directly.

Now the Democrats are responding by tail-ending the generals. “President Bush’s refusal to recognize that it’s time to make a change and fire Secretary Rumsfeld is symptomatic of his administration’s incompetent and failed leadership,” Karen Finney, Democratic National Committee spokeswoman, said this week.

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, called for a “no confidence” vote on Rumsfeld and described the generals’ criticism as a “wake-up call” for Congress.

There is no reason to believe that these developments will wake up the Democrats in Congress to anything. However, the intense conflict within the state apparatus and the increasingly aggressive intervention by representatives of the uniformed military command should serve as a serious warning to the American people.

From its inception, the launching of a war of aggression to control Iraq and its oil wealth and assert US hegemony over the Persian Gulf has been a consensus policy of the American ruling elite, supported by both the Democratic and Republican parties, regardless of tactical differences over how best to carry it out.

Now this policy’s disastrous failure has fueled bitter divisions and a deep political crisis within the ruling establishment, while at the same time laying bare the gulf that separates the two parties and the oligarchy they represent from the vast majority of the population.

The danger posed by an assertive military injecting itself into this political vacuum cannot be ignored. The defense of democratic rights and the struggle to put an end to the war in Iraq and prevent new and even more terrible wars to come require a complete break with the Democratic Party and the development of a new, independent political movement of the working class.

See Also:
The economics of militarism
Hillary Clinton outlines Democrats' big business agenda
[19 April 2006]
Rumsfeld and the generals: Splits, recriminations over Iraq debacle
[15 April 2006]

Source: www.wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/gene-a20.shtml

[michelle]

DO WE UNDERSTAND WHAT'S BEEN DONE TO US? AND, CAN WE CHANGE OURSELVES, THUS CHANGE SOCIETY? YES!!!

azmat said:

MILITARISM: This subject does not seem to get much attention. In my uneducated and humble opinion, it is the third dimension of the real axis-of-evil (i.e. Dictators, Religious fanatics and the Military high brass). Military establishments in most countries would never want peace & harmony among the people, that would be self-defeating.

Patriotism is arguably not an evil, however, when the professional soldiers are glorified and portrayed as
and Saviour's, their families start believing that.
To me, a killer is a killer. Nothing more.
Legalized or not, in the name of your country, how can you kill. I wonder what Christianity and Islam and Judaism have to say to justify such inhumanity that killed over 200 million people in the last century alone.

Can we discuss this, what is the place of PATRIOTISM in the scope of religion and humanity.
Soldiers, U.S. or otherwise, is their glorification justifiable? They are brain-washed and deluded and willing to eradicate humanity from the face of planet. Do they deserve society's platitudes.

How sick are we?

azmat asks the question, "How sick are we?" As a population, a species, we are sick indeed. There are many ways in which to do this to a population, and, well, we all are altered starting from birth. We never saw it coming, nor did our parents; if they did, I think they would have protected us as children. Our parents just didn't realize how successfully we are groomed to become the walking dead, instead of what we truly are: living vechicles of the Light.

Today, I introduce to you, William T. Hathaway a defector from the warrior corps and an opponent of militarism. He is a courageous being, who has transformed himself by expanding his consciousness. Here, he points out what happens to us, what the effects of this grooming are, and how you can counteract this.

I encourage any dialogue here you wish to add. Anwaar, I believe this man has gone through changes, similar to yours; any comment?......Michelle

From Green Beret to Peace Activist:

William T. Hathaway and His Books

By Daniela Rommel

”It took me years to overcome the warrior indoctrination I got in the Special Forces. It was very deeply ingrained. What finally brought me out of it was meditation and my wife’s persistent love,” says author William T. Hathaway. ”Now I look back and ask, How could I have fallen for that military nonsense?”

A Special Forces combat veteran, Hathaway has answered that question in two novels about what attracts men to war and how they can be healed of the pathology of patriarchal machismo. His first novel, A WORLD OF HURT, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the blocked sexuality and the need for paternal approval that draw men to the military. ”I was trying to uncover the psychological roots of war, the forces that so persistently drive our species to slaughter,” Hathaway says. ”Our culture has degraded masculinity into a deadly toxin. It’s poisoned us all. Men have to confront this part of themselves before men and women together can heal it. I was lucky to have found a partner skilled at this.

”Understanding the effects that our culturally imposed gender roles have on us is crucial to understanding why we go to war. One attraction of war is that it is a substitute for eroticism; it is the ultimate sexual perversion. It also reduces our ability to love.”

In addition to writing he supports counter-recruitment work to persuade young people not to join the military. He is active in a group encouraging soldiers to refuse service in Iraq and Afghanistan. For those who want to desert, they have a sanctuary network that helps them build new lives.

”Refusing or deserting the military takes great courage, and I’m full of admiration for the people who do it. If convicted, they’re punished viciously because they’re such a threat to the government’s power. They’re the real heroes,” the combat-decorated Green Beret veteran states.

He wrote the introduction to AMERICA SPEAKS OUT: Collected Essays from Dissident Writers and has published numerous articles. His writing won him a Fulbright professorship at universities in Germany, where he currently lives.

Hathaway sees spirituality as an essential component of a more peaceful world. ”My military experience convinced me that to prevent war we need to raise human consciousness. A look at the history of revolutions shows that switching economic and political systems isn’t enough. The same aggressive personality types take over and start another army. We have to change the basic unit, the individual.

”Many of my leftist colleagues ignore this because they see the individual as the product of social and material forces. But I think the human heart is deeper than that and can be changed. ”I’ve found Transcendental Meditation to be the most effective way to change people. Unlike prayer, it works on the physiological level, altering the brain waves and metabolism. It refines the nervous system and expands the awareness so that the unity of all human beings becomes a living reality, not just an idealistic concept. ”After a while of meditation people stop wanting to consume things that increase aggression, such as meat, alcohol, and violent entertainment. They become more peaceful.

”I think it’s very true that peace begins within you. As Gandhi said, ‘We have to become the change we want to see in the world.’”

Hathaway’s just-released novel, SUMMER SNOW, approaches peace from this meditative perspective. It is set amidst the war on terrorism as an American warrior falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality. The book’s wisdom figure is an aged Sufi woman, the warrior’s lover’s teacher, who has survived by outsmarting male political and religious hierarchies. ”This bin Laden, this Bush, all these leading men, they have highjacked us all with their violence,” she states. ”They have turned the whole world into their suicide airplane. These men are too primitive to have such power. Too ignorant of the underlying reality. We must stop them. We must take the boys’ toys away from them…these terrible weapons.” How she does that becomes the climax of the novel. Its theme is that higher consciousness is more effective than violence and that women may be more able than men to lead us there.

Hathaway spent a year and a half in Central Asia researching and writing SUMMER SNOW. The first chapter is on the publisher’s website, www.avatarpublication.com/books/?id=13, and a selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

By overcoming his Special Forces indoctrination, William T. Hathaway became a defector from the warrior corps and an opponent of militarism. His books shine light into our civilization’s heart of darkness and show us ways out of the violence. ###

Daniela Rommel has taught English, French, and German at colleges in Iowa, Florida, and Germany.

TWO ARTICLES BY WILLIAM T. HATAWAY:

The Tenor of Our Times

What the hell happened? How did we get to this? Who would’ve thought that this country we’ve been working so hard for so many years to change would still be invading other nations, building new nuclear bombs, forcing its financial will around the world, and jailing dissenters at home? Now the walls of Fortress America extend globally as prison, sweatshop, and fire base.

Rather than falling into despair or self-destructive rage, it might help if we review the history of the age we live in. More than revolution or reform, what has shaped our times most strongly is revanchism. Rolling back change and reinstating the old order has been the dominant current.

This began immediately after the Russian Revolution, when the US, Britain, France, and Japan sent in soldiers to try to reverse it. Although they failed, this marked the beginning of seventy years of military and economic warfare. The capitalist powers were so threatened by communism that they pulled out all the stops to overthrow it, unleashing an offensive of sabotage, espionage, and armed conflict that killed millions in Korea and Vietnam, brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and eventually brought the Soviet government to its knees. If communism hadn’t been under this relentless attack, it might have developed into a much different system.

The anti-communist campaign helped fuel the second revanchist movement, fascism. In a Germany impoverished by territorial losses and the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, the Nazis portrayed communists and Jews as actively destroying what was left of the country. They used them as scapegoats to mobilize the Germans into a war of reconquest, to restore the Reich.

The cataclysmic results of this for the Jewish people — one out of every three of them in the world murdered — increased Zionist demands for an independent nation. They became determined to retake the territory from which the Romans had expelled their ancestors two thousand years ago. Their historic chronicles and centuries of vowing, “Next year in Jerusalem,” convinced the Zionists the land actually belonged to them and they had the God-given right to take it back.

Their attempts to do so enraged the current residents, whose ancestors weren’t involved in the expulsion. For centuries Arabs had lived peacefully with Jewish minorities in their midst, but the proclamation of a Jewish state, seizures of land, and the influx of millions of Europeans was to them an invasion. The Arabs saw the creation of Israel as an effort to maintain European-US power in their region after the retreat of colonialism.

Their bitterness over this gave rise to the fourth revanchist movement, Islamic fundamentalism intent on revenging defeats, driving out the infidels, and reestablishing the grandeur of their ancient empire.

The fifth revanchist movement is the right-wing assault on the cultural changes of the 1960s and ‘70s. Deeply threatened by the creative chaos that erupted then, conservatives have launched a crusade to stamp it out and restore their version of virtue. From sexuality to religion to politics, liberating trends are being beaten back into conventionality.

It’s become clear that we live in a reactionary era. The conservatives have far more power than the progressives and are determined to use it with as much brutality as necessary to maintain control.

As radicals we’re defying the zeitgeist. We’re opposing not just the Republicans and the Baptists but the tenor of our times. The tide is against us.

But tides change and zeitgeists change. Taking a farther look back in history, we should remember that none of the radicals of the mid 19th century lived to see their ideas put into practice. The reactionaries of their day squashed their efforts, and most of them died thinking they’d failed. But their work caused some cracks in the power structure, and they’re recognized now as revolutionaries. Their writings and actions helped form our efforts, as ours will for the next wave.

So we must persist. Patiently. Perseveringly. After all, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

The unpleasant truth is that Fortress America has to fall. It’s too destructive of people and the planet and too resistant of reform. It’s willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before we can build anything truly different, we have to bring it down.

Its rulers portray our alternatives as either them, Arab terrorists, or Chinese commissars, but that’s just a scare tactic. Our choices are far greater, and we can forge a future better than this.

To defend itself, this system wields a revanchist club in its right hand while waving the promise of democracy in its left. Its liberals play on our hopes of seeing a decent society in our lifetime. They claim to be open to substantive change, a mirage always glimmering four years away but never arriving. Their illusion of reform camouflages the fact that working people around the world are under attack and the conditions of their lives will continue to worsen until we all dismantle this colossus.

Given its power and resilience, that’s going to take a long time, a work of generations. We won’t live to see the new era, but historically that’s not important. What matters is widening the cracks, opening up possibilities for change that others can expand. This is our moment, with its own ragged glory. Overthrowing the corporate dominance of the world and its peoples is a task nothing short of heroic. All else is collaboration.

Now onward! Plenty of cracks are already showing on the structural weak spots, and light is gleaming through them from the other side of these dungeon walls. Bring more wedges and hammers, bring levers and pickaxes. We’ll break out.

Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage

To lay the groundwork for fundamental change, we need to be clear on where we stand in history, to know what is possible in our times and what isn’t. I hate to say it, but I doubt that any of us will get to be members of a society in which we’d actually want to live. It seems probable that even the youngest among us will have to live under an increasingly unpleasant form of capitalism. This system is too strong, too adaptable, and has too many supporters in all classes for it to be overthrown any time soon. The bitter likelihood is we’re not going to be the ones to build a new society.

The Left wastes tremendous amounts of energy planning that better world and quarrelling over ideologies. This strikes me as an anodyne, an escape into abstraction away from our painful historical reality. It’s useless and presumptuous of us to try to do a job that belongs to future generations. It just diverts us from our real task and thus prolongs the system we oppose.

What prolongs it even more effectively is the hope that liberal reforms will lead to basic changes. An honest look at our situation today shows this is a hoax. The purpose of liberalism is to defuse discontent with promises of the future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. It diverts idealism into trivial dead ends.

Capitalism, although resilient, is willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

How? I think our job is to impair this system, impede its functioning, break it in a few places, open up points of vulnerability for coming generations to exploit. These actions don’t require finely nuanced theory or agreement on ideology, just a recognition of the overriding necessity of weakening this monster, of reducing its economic and military power. This is a goal around which we can form a new united front.

Most of us avoid these actions because they’re so negative. We’re basically positive people and don’t like to think of ourselves as destructive. But we can’t destroy Moloch, all we can do is undermine it a bit. And that’s a great contribution. It’s not glorious but it’s necessary. If we do it well enough, our great-great grandchildren can lead a revolution and design a new society. If we don’t do it, our descendants will be the globalised serfs of Bush’s great-great grandchildren.

As I see it, our generational assignment — ”should we decide to accept it” — is sedition, subversion, and sabotage. We can identify those institutions and modes of functioning that support the system and then attack them.

For sedition, much of our writing here in CounterCurrents is exemplary.

For subversion we could, for example, focus on institutions that instil patriotism in young people. Scouts, competitive team sports, school spirit, pledge of allegiance ceremonies — all create in children an affective bond to larger social units of school, city, and nation.

Kids are indoctrinated to feel these are extensions of their family and to respect and fear the authorities as they would their parents, more specifically their fathers, because this is a patriarchal chain being forged. It causes us even as adults to react to criticism of the country as an attack on our family. This hurts our feelings on a deep level, so we reject it, convinced it can’t be true. It’s too threatening to us.

This linkage is also the basis of the all-American trick of substituting personal emotion for political thought.

Breaking this emotional identification is crucial to reducing the widespread support this system still enjoys. Whatever we can do to show how ridiculous these rituals are will help undermine them.

For instance, teachers could refuse to lead the pledge of allegiance, or they could follow it with historical facts that would cause the students to question their indoctrination. If a teacher got fired, the resulting legal battle could taint the whole sacrosanct ritual and challenge the way history is taught in the schools.

Subversive parenting means raising children who won’t go along with the dominant culture and have the skills to live outside it as much as possible.

Much radical feminist activism is profoundly subversive. That’s why it’s opposed so vehemently by many women and men.

Spiritually, whatever undercuts the concept of God as daddy in the sky will help break down patriarchal conditioning and free us for new visions of the Divine.

Sabotage is more problematic. It calls to mind bombings and mayhem, which I don’t think will achieve anything worthwhile. But sabotage doesn’t need to harm living creatures. Systems can be obstructed in many ways, which I can’t discuss more specifically because of the police state under which we currently live.

Most of these things can be done individually, relying on the principles of leaderless resistance. They don’t depend on organisations, which can be infiltrated and destroyed.

All these actions together can slow down this behemoth, make it a less effective murderer, increase its vulnerability to outside attack. What we do could save the life of a little girl playing right now in the streets of Mosul. If we keep at it, this juggernaut will eventually grind down, falter, and fall. Then the people of that generation can decide what to build in its place.

[Anwaar]

Thank you for asking me to comment Michelle.

There are similarities and dissimilarities in my and Hathaway's life profiles. The similarity is that both of us have changed. The dissimilarity is that while Hathaway must have had a plethora of choices of first professions, I had almost none.

In Pakistan of the times, young men had only two choiices. One, become a doctor (or an engineer) and fritter away your life at meagre stipends. Two, join the military and aspire for the fabulous life styles of the Pakistani military officers.

Having briefly pursued the medicine career, I found out way early that dabbling with the innards of other human beings held no particular attraction for me. Plus, we were five siblings and our parents were finding it hard to even give us decent schooling. University education for all of us was out of question. After having joined the military at the tender age of 15, myself and my younger brother were then educated in top most institutions at state's expense.

When I grew up, I slowly began to realize the disastrous choice that I had made. Militaries were not the profession for questioning minds. Such people are shunned. Stunted growths are preferred. I made a break from it after grappling with the dilemma for 15 years. I now only teach flying.

Having said that, I do however believe that in true democratic societies, the moral justification for the use of military force for tasks other than that for which it was intrinsically oriented should always be an issue of profound concern. Not only that, the application of military assets for almost any reason must always be a cause for serious debate at the highest strata of national society.

The fact that military force is often used disreputably does not negate the truth that the military could indeed be an honorable profession with an ethical purpose. There is a wholly legitimate and honorable purpose for military force - to protect the lives of the citizens of the nation from outside aggression. Nothing less, nothing more. In its misuse lurks the danger of prostituting that legitimate purpose of a military force. In such situations the military force, more often than not, ends up in unscrupulous and non-professional pursuits.

Hope this suffices.

Anwaar

[michelle]

Op-Ed: Re-Balancing Our National Security Toolkit -– Military vs. Non-Military

5/9/2006 2:53:00 PM

Contact: Sean Meyer for the Security Policy Working Group, 413-259-9129 or [e-mail]

CHESHIRE, Conn., May 9 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following op-ed was released today by the Security Policy Working Group:

Re-Balancing Our National Security Toolkit: Military vs. Non- Military

This week, both the U.S. House and Senate will likely begin floor consideration of a $440 billion defense bill at the same time consideration of a separate "emergency" spending bill, which includes some $70 billion for war spending, continues. At issue, is our nation’s security and over a half a trillion dollars in federal spending.

Does the American public understand how Congress is planning to spend its tax dollars? Will these budget choices and priorities make our country and the world safer, and are they being adequately debated?

Nearing the five-year anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, and no end in sight to the Iraq war, are our elected leaders funding and supporting the full range of military and non-military "tools" that can and will: make our homeland more secure; stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology and others weapons of mass destruction; marginalize -– and lessen the threat from -- Al-Qaeda and other terrorists; and prevent war and global violence?

The answer is no, according to a non-partisan task force of security and foreign policy experts which released a detailed 45- page report, A Unified Security Budget (USB) for the United States, on May 3rd. The task force report offers compelling recommendations for "re-balancing" our national security toolkit -– de-emphasizing our overly-militarized foreign policy and placing a much greater emphasis on homeland security, diplomatic programs, international assistance, and cooperative programs to stop the spread of deadly weapons.

In releasing the report, the task force seeks to engage citizens in a serious national debate on these critical questions and encourages newspapers and other opinion leaders to help stimulate such a discussion in their communities.

To access the report and list of task force members, please visit: www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3253

Talking Points from the Unified Security Budget

-- With war spending included, the United States currently spends eight times as much on the military as it does on all non- military programs and institutions combined, including homeland security, international affairs, and non-proliferation. Excluding war costs, the ratio is 6:1.

-- As proposed, this year’s U.S. military budget would exceed the combined military budgets of the world’s 25 next most- powerful nations.

-- The United States maintains a nuclear arsenal of over 6,000 weapons which costs over $17 billion annually.

-- The United States can and will maintain the most capable and advanced military in the world for the foreseeable future even after eliminating or scaling back various multi-billion dollar weapons programs not well-suited to 21st century threats

-- The CIA has warned that weapons of mass destruction are mostly likely to enter the United States through its ports. As proposed, the United States would spend four times more on an unproven missile defense system that has failed most of its tests than (it) will spend on port security. The Administration has requested over $10 billion for missile defense for next year.

-- On homeland security, the USB report calls for increasing spending on public health infrastructure and "first responders," such as police and firefighters, from $5.5 billion to $14 billion. Spending on container and port security should increase from a proposed $2.4 billion to $5 billion

-- The current long-term defense plan –- which includes ambitious weapons modernization plans -- is unsustainable and unaffordable. By 2011, the projected military budget will be $526 billion annually.

-- The national debt has increased by $1.1 trillion under the Bush Administration, much of it financed by countries such as China who, as "potential military adversaries" provide the rationale and justification for much of the military budget increases in the first place.

------

The Security Policy Working Group (SPWG) is comprised of leading defense and security policy researchers, analysts and non- governmental organizations that seek to reshape and expand the public and policy discourse on what constitutes true security in a post Sept. 11 world. Several of the report’s task force members are SPWG members. www.proteusfund.org/spwg

SPWG Task Force Members

-- Cindy Williams, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Security Studies Program, 617-253-1825 or [e-mail]

-- Winslow Wheeler, Director, Straus Military Reform Project, Center for Defense Information, 301-840-8992 or 202-797-5271 or [e-mail]

-- William D. Hartung, President's Fellow, World Policy Institute; Director, Arms Trade Resource Center, 212-229-5808 ext. 4257 or [e-mail]

-- Anita Dancs, Research Director, National Priorities Project, 413-584-9556 or [e-mail]

-- Carl Conetta, Co-Director, Project on Defense Alternatives, 301-493-8769 or [e-mail]

[michelle]

The Delusions of Global Hegemony
A Tomdispatch Interview with Andrew Bacevich (Part 1)

I wait for him on a quiet, tree and wisteria-lined street of red-brick buildings. Students, some in short-sleeves on this still crisp spring morning, stream by. I'm seated on cold, stone steps next to a sign announcing the Boston University Department of International Relations. He turns the corner and advances, wearing a blue blazer, blue shirt and tie, and khaki slacks and carrying a computer in a black bag. He's white haired, has a nicely weathered face, and the squared shoulders and upright bearing of a man, born in Normal, Illinois, who attended West Point, fought in the Vietnam War, and then had a twenty-year military career that ended in 1992.

Now a professor of history at Boston University, he directs me to a spacious, airy office whose floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the picturesque street. A tasseled cap and gown hang on a hook behind the door -- perhaps because another year of graduation is not far off. I'm left briefly to wait while he deals with an anxious student, there to discuss his semester mark. Soon enough though, he seats himself behind a large desk with a cup of coffee and prepares to discuss his subjects of choice, American militarism and the American imperial mission.

Andrew Bacevich is a man on a journey -- as he himself is the first to admit. A cultural conservative, a former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, a former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, he discovered sometime in the 1990s that his potential conservative allies on foreign policy had fallen in love with the idea of the American military and its imagined awesome power to change the world. They had jumped the tracks and left him behind. A professed cold warrior, in those years he took a new look at our American past -- and he's not stopped looking, or reconsidering, since.

What he discovered was the American empire, which became the title of a book he published in 2002. In 2005, his fierce, insightful book on American dreams of global military supremacy, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War, appeared. (It was excerpted in two posts at this site.) It would have been eye-opening no matter who had written it, but given his background it was striking indeed.

Forceful and engaged (as well as engaging), Bacevich throws himself into the topic at hand. He has a barely suppressed dramatic streak and a willingness to laugh heartily at himself. But most striking are the questions that stop him. Just as you imagine a scholar should, he visibly turns over your questions in his mind, thinking about what may be new in them.

He takes a sip of coffee and, in a no-nonsense manner, suggests that we begin.

Tomdispatch: In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, you said the revolt of the retired generals against Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld represented the beginning of a search for a scapegoat for the Iraq War. I wondered whether you also considered it a preemptive strike against the Bush administration's future Iran policy.

Andrew Bacevich: The answer is yes. It's both really. Certainly, it's become incontrovertible that the Iraq War is not going to end happily. Even if we manage to extricate ourselves and some sort of stable Iraq emerges from the present chaos, arguing that the war lived up to the expectations of the Bush administration is going to be very difficult. My own sense is that the officer corps -- and this probably reflects my personal experience to a great degree -- is fixated on Vietnam and still believes the military was hung out to dry there. The officer corps came out of the Vietnam War determined never to repeat that experience and some officers are now angry to discover that the Army is once again stuck in a quagmire. So we are in the early stages of a long argument about who is to be blamed for the Iraq debacle. I think, to some degree, the revolt of the generals reflects an effort on the part of senior military officers to weigh in, to lay out the military's case. And the military's case is: We're not at fault. They are; and, more specifically, he is -- with Rumsfeld being the stand-in for [Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara.

Having said that, with all the speculation about Bush administration interest in expanding the Global War on Terror to include Iran, I suspect the officer corps, already seeing the military badly overstretched, doesn't want to have any part of such a war. Going public with attacks on Rumsfeld is one way of trying to slow whatever momentum there is toward an Iran war.

I must say, I don't really think we're on a track to have a war with Iran any time soon -- maybe I'm too optimistic here [he laughs] -- but I suspect even the civilian hawks understand that the United States is already overcommitted, that to expand the war on terror to a new theater, the Iranian theater, would in all likelihood have the most dire consequences, globally and in Iraq.

TD: Actually, I was planning to ask about your thoughts on the possibility of an Iranian October surprise.

Bacevich: You mean, attacking Iran before the upcoming fall election? I don't see Karl Rove -- because an October surprise would be a political ploy -- signing off on it. I think he's cunning, calculating, devious, but not stupid. With the President's popularity rating plummeting due to unhappiness with the ongoing war, it really would be irrational to think that yet another war would turn that around or secure continued Republican control of both houses of Congress.

TD It seems that way to me with gas assumedly soaring to $120 a barrel or something like that…

Bacevich: Oh gosh, oh my gosh, yes…

TD But let me throw this into the mix, because I've seen no one mention it: If you look at the list of retired commanders who came out against Rumsfeld, they're all from the Army or Marines. We always say the military is overextended, but only part of it is -- and I note the absence of admirals or anybody connected to the Air Force.

Bacevich: That's a good point. One could argue that the revolt of the generals actually has a third source. If the first source is arguing about who's going to take the fall for Iraq and the second is trying to put a damper on war in Iran, the third has to do with Rumsfeld's military transformation project. To oversimplify, transformation begins with the conviction that the military since the end of the Cold War has failed to adapt to the opportunities and imperatives of the information age. Well before 9/11, the central part of Rumsfeld's agenda was to "transform" -- that was his word -- this old Cold-War-style military, to make it lighter, more agile, to emphasize information technology and precision weapons.

Well, if you're in the Air Force, or you're a Navy admiral, particularly one in the aviation community, that recipe sounds pretty good. It sounds like dollars, like programs being funded. But if you're in the Army or the Marine Corps, becoming lighter and more agile sounds like cutting divisions or like getting rid of tanks and artillery; it sounds like a smaller Marine Corps.

Both the initial stage of the Afghanistan War and the invasion of Iraq were specifically designed by Rumsfeld as projects to demonstrate what a transformed military could do. Hence, his insistence on beginning the Iraq War without a major build-up, on invading with a relatively small force, on having the ground intervention accompany the air campaign rather than having a protracted air campaign first as in the first Gulf War. All the literature about both Afghanistan and Iraq now shows that the war-planning process was filled with great civil/military tension. The generals argued, "Mr. Secretary, here's the plan; we want to do a Desert Storm Two against Iraq," and Rumsfeld kept replying, "I want something smaller, think it over again and get back to me" -- reflecting his intention to demonstrate his notion of how America will henceforth fight its wars.

Well, now we can see the outcome and it's at best ambiguous. That is to say, the early stages of Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be smashing successes. The smaller, agile forces performed remarkably well in demolishing both the Taliban and the Baath Party regime; but in both cases, genuine victory has proven enormously elusive. This gets us to the third basis for the generals' gripe. When they talk about Rumsfeld's incompetence and micromanagement, they're arguing against the transformation project and on behalf of those services which have footed most of the bill.

TD: Just to throw one other thing into the mix, if there were a campaign against Iran, it would be a Navy and Air Force one.

Bacevich: It would begin with a Navy and Air Force campaign, but it wouldn't end that way. If the Army generals could be assured that we know exactly where the Iranian nuclear program is, that we have the targeting data and the munitions to take it out… Well, that would be one thing, but we don't have that assurance. From the Army and Marine Corps perspective, an air attack might begin a war with Iran, but the war would not end there. As is the case in both Afghanistan and Iraq, some sort of ugly aftermath would be sure to follow and the Navy and the Air Force aren't going to be there, at least not in large numbers.

TD What about the Iraq War at present?

Bacevich There are a couple of important implications that we have yet to confront. The war has exposed the limited depth of American military power. I mean, since the end of the Cold War we Americans have been beating our chests about being the greatest military power the world has ever seen. [His voice rises.] Overshadowing the power of the Third Reich! Overshadowing the Roman Empire!

Wait a sec. This country of 290 million people has a force of about 130,000 soldiers committed in Iraq, fighting something on the order of 10-20,000 insurgents and a) we're in a war we can't win, b) we're in the fourth year of a war we probably can't sustain much longer. For those who believe in the American imperial project, and who see military supremacy as the foundation of that empire, this ought to be a major concern: What are we going to do to strengthen the sinews of American military power, because it's turned out that our vaunted military supremacy is not what it was cracked up to be. If you're like me and you're quite skeptical about this imperial project, the stresses imposed on the military and the obvious limits of our power simply serve to emphasize the imperative of rethinking our role in the world so we can back away from this unsustainable notion of global hegemony.

Then, there's the matter of competence. I object to the generals saying that our problems in Iraq are all due to the micromanagement and incompetence of Mr. Rumsfeld -- I do think he's a micromanager and a failure and ought to have been fired long ago -- because it distracts attention from the woeful performance of the senior military leaders who have really made a hash of the Iraq insurgency. I remember General Swannack in particular blaming Rumsfeld for Abu Ghraib. I'll saddle Rumsfeld with about ten percent of the blame for Abu Ghraib, the other ninety percent rests with the senior American military leaders in Baghdad…

TD: General Ricardo Sanchez signed off on it…

Bacevich: Sanchez being number one. So again, if one is an enthusiast for American military supremacy, we have some serious thinking to do about the quality of our senior leadership. Are we picking the right people to be our two, three, and four-star commanders? Are we training them, educating them properly for the responsibilities that they face? The Iraq War has revealed some major weaknesses in that regard.

TD: Do you think that the neocons and their mentors, Rumsfeld and the Vice President, believed too deeply in the hype of American hyperpower? Ruling groups, even while manipulating others, often seem to almost hypnotically convince themselves as well.

Bacevich: That's why I myself tend not to buy into the charge that Bush and others blatantly lied us into this war. I think they believed most of what they claimed. You should probably put believe in quotes, because it amounts to talking yourself into it. They believed that American omnipotence, as well as know-how and determination, could imprint democracy on Iraq. They really believed that, once they succeeded in Iraq, a whole host of ancillary benefits were going to ensue, transforming the political landscape of the Middle East. All of those expectations were bizarre delusions and we're paying the consequences now.

You know, the neoconservatives that mattered were not those in government like Douglas Feith or people on the National Security Council staff, but the writers and intellectuals outside of government who, in the period from the late seventies through the nineties, were constantly weaving this narrative of triumphalism, pretending to insights about power and the direction of history. Intellectuals can put their imprint on public discourse. They can create an environment, an atmosphere. When the events of September 11, 2001 left Americans shocked and frightened and people started casting about for an explanation, a way of framing a response, the neoconservative perspective was front and center and had a particular appeal. So these writers and intellectuals did influence policy, at least for a brief moment.

TD: Here's something that puzzles me. When I look at administration actions, I see a Middle Eastern catastrophe in the midst of which an Iranian situation is being ratcheted up. Then there's China, once upon a time the enemy of choice for the neocons and Rumsfeld, and now here we are this summer having the largest naval maneuvers since Vietnam, four carrier task forces, off the Chinese coast. Then -- as with Cheney's recent speech -- there's the attempted rollback of what's left of the USSR, which has been ongoing. On the side, you've got the Pentagon pushing little Latin American bases all the way down to Paraguay. So many fronts, so much overstretch, and no backing down that I can see. What do you make of this?

Bacevich: My own sense is that this administration has largely exhausted its stock of intellectual resources; that, for the most part, they're preoccupied with trying to manage Iraq. Beyond that, I'm hard-pressed to see a coherent strategy in the Middle East or elsewhere. In that sense, Iraq is like Vietnam. It just sucks up all the oxygen. Having said that, before being eclipsed by 9/11 and its aftermath, China was indeed the enemy-designate of the hawks, and a cadre of them is still active in Washington. I would guess that large naval exercises reflect their handiwork. Still, I don't think there's been a resolution within the political elite of exactly how we ought to view China and what the U.S. relationship with China will be.

Why the hell we're extending bases into Latin America is beyond me. Rumsfeld just announced that he has appointed an admiral as the head of U.S. Southern Command. Now this has almost always been an Army billet, once or twice a Marine billet, never a Navy one. I got an email today from someone who suggested that this was another example of Rumsfeld's "boldness." My response was: Well, if he was bold, he'd simply shut down the Southern Command. Wouldn't it be a wonderful way to communicate that U.S.-Latin American relations had matured to the point where they no longer revolved around security concerns? Wouldn't it be interesting for Washington to signal that there is one region of the world that does not require U.S. military supervision; that we really don't need to have some four-star general parading around from country to country in the manner of some proconsul supervising his quarter of the American Empire?

Now, I have friends who think that [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez poses a threat to the United States. I find that notion utterly preposterous, but it does reflect this inclination to see any relationship having any discord or dissonance as requiring a security -- i.e. military -- response. I find it all crazy and contrary to our own interests.

TD: One thing that's ratcheted up in recent years is the way the Pentagon's taken over so many aspects of policy, turning much of diplomacy into military-to-military relations.

Bacevich: If you look at long-term trends, going back to the early Cold War, the Defense Department has accrued ever more influence and authority at the expense of the State Department. But there's another piece to this -- within the Defense Department itself, as the generals and the senior civilians have vied with one another for clout. When Rumsfeld and [Paul] Wolfowitz came into office they were determined to shift the balance of civil/military authority within the Pentagon. They were intent on trimming the sails of the generals. You could see this in all kinds of ways, some symbolic. Regional commanders used to be called CINCs, the acronym for commander-in-chief. Rumsfeld said: Wait a minute, there's only one commander-in-chief and that's my boss, so you generals who work for me, you're not commanders-in-chief any more. Now the guy who runs US Southern Command is just a "combatant commander."

Also indicative of this effort to shift power back to the civilians is the role played by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which has been nonexistent for all practical purposes. Accounts of the planning and conduct of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars make clear that they had virtually no influence at all. They were barely, barely consulted. Ever since Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs and became a quasi-independent power broker, presidents have chosen weak chairmen. Presidents want top officers to be accommodating rather than forceful personalities who might hold independent views. I'm sure General Myers of the Air Force is a wonderful man and a patriot, but he served four years as chairman after 9/11 and did so without leaving any discernible mark on policy. And that's not accidental. It reflects Rumsfeld's efforts to wrest authority back towards the office of the Secretary of Defense.

TD: Isn't this actually part of a larger pattern in which authority is wrested from everywhere and brought into this commander-in-chief presidency?

Bacevich: That's exactly right. I've just finished a review of Cobra II this new book by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. A major theme of the book is that people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz saw 9/11 as a great opportunity. Yes, it was a disaster. Yes, it was terrible. But by God, this was a disaster that could be turned to enormous advantage. Here lay the chance to remove constraints on the exercise of American military power, enabling the Bush administration to shore up, expand, and perpetuate U.S. global hegemony. Toward that end, senior officials concocted this notion of a Global War on Terror, really a cover story for an effort to pacify and transform the broader Middle East, a gargantuan project which is doomed to fail. Committing the United States to that project presumed a radical redistribution of power within Washington. The hawks had to cut off at the knees institutions or people uncomfortable with the unconstrained exercise of American power. And who was that? Well, that was the CIA. That was the State Department, especially the State Department of Secretary Colin Powell. That was the Congress -- note this weird notion that the Congress is somehow limiting Presidential prerogatives -- and the hawks also had to worry about the uniformed military, whom they considered "averse to risk" and incapable of understanding modern warfare in an information age.

TD: And you might throw in the courts. After all, the two men appointed to the Supreme Court are, above all else, believers in the unitary executive theory of the presidency.

Bacevich Yes, it fits. I would emphasize that it's not because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are diabolical creatures intent on doing evil. They genuinely believe it's in the interests of the United States, and the world, that unconstrained American power should determine the shape of the international order. I think they vastly overstate our capabilities. For all of their supposed worldliness and sophistication, I don't think they understand the world. I am persuaded that their efforts will only lead to greater mischief while undermining our democracy. Yet I don't question that, at some gut level, they think they are acting on your behalf and mine. They are all the more dangerous as a result.

Source: www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=85723

[michelle]

Tomdispatch Interview: Bacevich, the Arrogance of American Power

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: In The Delusions of Global Hegemony, Part 1 of the latest Tomdispatch interview, Andrew Bacevich took up military scapegoating over the Iraq War, the strains between the military and civilian sides of the Pentagon, the possibility of an air assault on Iran, and especially the way the Iraq War revealed both the limits of American military power and the dreamy, fantastical, triumphalist thinking that, these last years, accompanied the Bush administration's attempt to expand American global hegemony. Now, Bacevich turns to cheap oil and energy wars, life in uniform, the evolution of his own thinking, and the American way of life. Tom]


Drifting Down the Path to Perdition
A Tomdispatch Interview with Andrew Bacevich (Part 2)

TD: I'd like to turn to the issue of oil wars, energy wars. That seems to be what holds all this incoherent stuff together -- minds focused on a world of energy flows. Recently, I reread [President Jimmy] Carter's 1979 energy speech. Isn't it ironic that he got laughed out of the room for his sweater and for urging a future of alternative fuels on us, while we latched onto his Rapid Deployment Force for the Persian Gulf? As you argue in your book, The New American Militarism, this essentially starts us on what you call "World War IV."

Bacevich: I remember the Carter speech. I was a relatively young man at the time. In general, I have voted for Republicans, although not this Republican in 2004. But I did vote for Carter because I was utterly disenchanted with [President Richard] Nixon and [his National Security Advisor Henry] Kissinger. [President Gerald] Ford seemed weak, incompetent. And I remember being dismayed by the Carter speech because it seemed so out of sync with the American spirit. It wasn't optimistic; it did not promise that we would have more tomorrow than we have today, that the future would be bigger and better. Carter essentially said: If we are serious about freedom, we must really think about what freedom means -- and it ought to mean something more than acquisition and conspicuous consumption. And if we're going to preserve our freedom, we have to start living within our means.

It did not set well with me at the time. Only when I was writing my militarism book did I take another look at the speech and then it knocked me over. I said to myself: This guy got it. I don't know how, but he really got it in two respects. First, he grasped the essence of our national predicament, of being seduced by a false and even demeaning definition of freedom. Second, he understood that cheap oil was the drug that was leading us willy-nilly down this path. The two were directly and intimately linked: a growing dependence on seemingly cheap foreign oil and our inability to recognize what we might call the ongoing cultural crisis of our time.

Carter gives the so-called malaise speech, I think, in July '79. The Russians invade Afghanistan in December '79. Then comes Carter's State of the Union Address in January 1980 in which he, in a sense, recants, abandoning the argument of July and saying, by God, the Persian Gulf is of vital interest to the United States and we'll use any means necessary in order to prevent somebody else from controlling it. To put some teeth in this threat he creates the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which sets in motion the militarization of U.S. policy that has continued ever since. So, July 1979 to January 1980, that's the pivotal moment that played such an important role in bringing us to where we are today. But of course we didn't understand that then -- certainly I didn't. In July 1979, Carter issued a prescient warning. We didn't want to listen. So we blew it.

Fast forward to 2006, and President Bush is telling us, thank you very much, that we're addicted to oil. I heard [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi on the radio over the weekend saying that the Democrats now have a plan to make us energy independent by 2020. She's lying through her teeth. There's no way anybody can make us energy independent by then. We needed to start back in 1979, if not before. Even to achieve independence from Persian Gulf oil will be an enormously costly, painful process that none of the politicians in either party are willing to undertake. Gas is now roughly $3 a gallon. I heard some guy on a talk show the other day say: "Whaddya think we should do? I think we should all park our cars on the Interstate and stop traffic until the government does something." What does he actually want the government to do, I wondered? Conquer another country?

We Americans are in deep denial, unwilling to accept that we're going to have to change the way we live for our own good. Empire does not offer the recipe for preserving our freedom. Learning to live within our means just might. Jimmy Carter was the one guy, back in July of '79, who really had the guts to say that. Unfortunately, he didn't have the guts to stick with it.

TD: I always wonder what would have happened if we had dumped a bunch of money into R&D for alternative fuels back then.

Bacevich: The funding for the Iraq War is now in the hundreds of billions of dollars. [Economist] Joseph Stiglitz projects that total costs could go to $2 trillion. What would a trillion dollars have done for research into alternative fuels? I don't know, but something… something! What do you get for a trillion dollars in Iraq? Nothin'. It's just nuts!

TD: I was amused, by the way, that you were born in Normal, Illinois…

Bacevich: …because the Normal School of the State of Illinois, the teacher's college, was there.

TD: I was also thinking about stereotypes of military men. You know, rigidity of mind and the like. What strikes me in your writings is that you seem more open to rethinking your worldview than almost any scholar around. So I was curious about the evolution of your thought.

Bacevich: Two key moments for me were the end of the Cold War and the Iraq War. The simple story would be that, for the first twenty-some years of my adult life, which coincided with the latter stages of the Cold War, I was a serving officer. I was a cold warrior in uniform. I therefore accepted the orthodox narrative of the Cold War and of the postwar era more generally. I was not oblivious to policy errors we had made and some of the sins we had committed, but as long as I was in uniform I was willing to accept that these were peripheral to the larger narrative. I did retain this notion that the Cold War was an emergency, a very long, serious one in which we as a nation had been called upon to depart from the norm. This was not the way things were supposed to be, particularly in regard to a globally deployed military establishment.

TD: Let me back you up for a moment to Vietnam. You fought there…

Bacevich: 1970-71.

TD: ...and how did you come out of Vietnam?

Bacevich: For a variety of personal reasons, my wife and I decided to stay in the Army after my obligation was up… [He hesitates.] For those who are not familiar with military service, it may be difficult to appreciate the extent to which that life is all embracing. It's like being a monk. It's a calling. Soldiers work real hard. And much of that work is peculiarly satisfying. For most of my time in the service, women were few in number and on the margins. So it was a very masculine environment. This might seem retro, but men living among men and doing manly things [he laughs], there is a peculiar savor to that. At any rate, I bought into the institutional view of Vietnam -- that we had been screwed. The politicians had screwed us; the media had screwed us; the American people had screwed us. They had let us down, and so my commitment was to an institution that, after Vietnam, was engaged in a comprehensive effort to reconstitute and restore itself -- and its standing in American society.

In that context, the questions I was willing to ask about Vietnam or about U.S. foreign policy more generally were fairly narrow. Since getting out of the Army, since trying to make sense of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy from a different perspective, I've come to see the Vietnam War differently as well. I can accept to some degree the argument that the meaning of Vietnam is to be found in the-military-gets-hung-out-to-dry, but that's not sufficient. And I've come to see the war as just utterly unnecessary, misguided, and mistaken. A monumental miscalculation that never should have happened, but that did happen due to some deep-seated defects in the way we see ourselves and see the world.

In any case, the Cold War essentially ends in 1989 when the [Berlin] Wall goes down; in '91, the Soviet Union collapses. I get out of the Army in 1992 and I'm waiting with bated breath to see what impact the end of the Cold War is going to have on U.S. policy, particularly military policy. The answer is, essentially, none. We come out even more firmly committed to the notion of U.S. military global supremacy. Not because there was an enemy -- in 1992, ‘93, ‘94, there's no enemy -- but because we've come to see military supremacy and global hegemony as good in and of themselves.

The end of the Cold War sees us using military power more frequently, while our ambitions, our sense of what we're supposed to do in the world, become more grandiose. There's all this bloated talk about "the end of history," and the "right side of history," and the "indispensable nation," politicians and pundits pretending to know the destiny of humankind. So I began to question my understanding of what had determined U.S. behavior during the Cold War. The orthodox narrative said that the U.S. behaved as it did because of them, because of external threats. I came to believe that explanation was not entirely wrong but limited. You get closer to the truth by recognizing that what makes us behave the way we behave comes from inside. I came to buy into the views of historians like Charles Beard and William Appleton Williams who emphasize that foreign policy is an outgrowth of domestic policy, in particular of the structure of the American political economy.

So I became a critic of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s, a pretty outspoken one.

TD: You wrote a book then with the word "empire" in the title...

Bacevich: Yes, because I became convinced that what we saw in the 90s from both Democrats and Republicans was an effort to expand an informal American empire. Fast forward to 9/11 and its aftermath, and the Bush doctrine of preventive war as implemented in Iraq, and the full dimensions of our imperial ambitions become evident for all to see.

I have to say, I certainly supported the Afghanistan War. I emphatically believed that we had no choice but to take down the Taliban regime in order to demonstrate clearly the consequences of any nation tolerating, housing, supporting terrorists who attack us. But the Iraq War just struck me as so unnecessary, unjustifiable, and reckless that... I don't know how to articulate its impact except that it put me unalterably in the camp of those who had come to see American power as the problem, not the solution. And it brought me close to despair that the response of the internal opposition and of the American people generally proved to be so tepid, so ineffective. It led me to conclude that we are in deep, deep trouble.

An important manifestation of that trouble is this shortsighted infatuation with military power that goes beyond even what I wrote about in my most recent book. Again, it revolves around this question of energy and oil. There's such an unwillingness to confront the dilemmas we face as a people that I find deeply troubling. I know we're a democracy. We have elections. But it's become a procedural democracy. Our politics are not really meaningful. In a meaningful politics, you and I could argue about important differences, and out of that argument might come not resolution or reconciliation, but at least an awareness of the consequences of going your way as opposed to mine. We don't even have that argument. That's what's so dismaying.

TD: You've used the word "crusade" and spoken of this administration as "intoxicated with the mission of salvation." I was wondering what kind of "ism" you think we've been living with in these years?

Bacevich: That's a great question, and it's not enough to say that it's democratic capitalism. Certainly, our "ism" incorporates a religious dimension -- in the sense of believing that God created this nation for a purpose that has to do with universal values.

We have not as a people come to terms with our relationship to military power and to the wars we've engaged in and the ways we've engaged in them. Now, James Carroll in his new book, House of War, is very much preoccupied with strategic bombing in World War II and since, and especially with our use of, and attitude toward, nuclear weapons. His preoccupation is understandable because those are the things we can't digest and we can't cough up. You know, at the end of the day, we, the missionary nation, the crusader state, certain of our righteousness, remain the only people to have used nuclear weapons in anger -- indeed, to have used them as a weapon of terror.

TD: Air power, even though hardly covered in our media in Iraq, has been the American way of war since World War II, hasn't it?

Bacevich: Certainly that "ism" that defines us has a large technological component, doesn't it? I mean, we are the people of technology. We see the future as a technological one and can't imagine a problem that doesn't have technological solutions...

TD: ...except when it comes to oil.

Bacevich: Quite true. In many respects, the technological artifact that defines the last century is the airplane. With the airplane came a distinctive style of warfare. The Italians dropped the first bomb in North Africa; the Japanese killed their share of civilians from the air as did the Germans, but we and our British cousins outdid them all. I've been thinking more and more that our record of strategic bombing is not simply an issue of historical interest.

We are not who we believe we are and, in some sense, others perceive us more accurately than we do ourselves. The President has described a version of history -- as did Clinton, by the way -- beginning with World War II in which the United States is the liberator, Americans are the bringers of freedom. There is truth to that narrative, but it's not the whole truth; and, quite frankly, it's not the truth that matters a lick, let's say, to the Islamic world today. Muslims don't give a darn that we brought Hitler or the Third Reich to its knees. What they're aware of is all kinds of other behavior, particularly in their neck of the woods, that had nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom, that had everything to do with power, with trying to establish relations that maximized the benefit to the United States and American society. We don't have to let our hearts bleed about that. That's the way politics works, but let's not delude ourselves either. When President George W. Bush says, "America stands for freedom and liberty, and we're coming to liberate you," it's absurd to expect people in that part of the world to take us seriously. That's not what they've seen and known and experienced in dealing with the United States.

TD: And, of course, within the councils of this administration, they threw out anyone who knew anything about the record of U.S. policy in the Islamic world.

Bacevich: Because those experts would have challenged the ideologically soaked version of history that this administration has attempted to carry over into the 21st century. Only if we begin to see ourselves more clearly, will we be able to understand how others see us. We need to revise the narrative of the American Century and recognize that it has been about a host of other things that are far more problematic than liberation. There can be no understanding the true nature of the American century without acknowledging the reality of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hanoi, and Haiphong.

TD: Do you, by the way, think that the reality-based community is catching up with the Bush administration?

Bacevich: It's catching up, but is it in a way that has political consequences? If we just toss Bush out and bring in... Who? Senator Clinton or John McCain? Will things be different? Somehow, I don't think so. Of course, there is something to be said for competence even in implementing a bad policy. Right now, we have incompetents implementing a bad policy, but the essence of the problem is the policy -- not just the Iraq War but this paradigm of a Global War on Terror, this notion of unconstraining American power. That's what we have to rethink.

TD: Your thoughts on three military matters: what might be called the religionizing of the military; the Bush administration's setting up of a Northern Command in 2002 for the so-called homeland, which I find disturbing; and finally, what do you make of the now-normalized practice of presenting the costs of war-fighting as a non-Defense Department budget supplementary item?

Bacevich: I think the last thing in your list is outlandish and irresponsible. It's as if we're keeping two sets of books. But again, the administration abetted by the Congress plays these games and nobody seems to care. Still, it doesn't change the facts -- that we're spending more on defense than the rest of the world put together. That has no precedent. And are we becoming safer and more secure and more prosperous? If we're not yet secure, does that mean we should be spending twice again as much? I have friends who think we should, or who at least believe that the defense budget is inadequate. I myself think that the flinging of money at the Defense Department ought to prompt Americans to reconsider the notion that the solution to our problems is to be found in the realm of military power.

I think the evangelizing issue reflects at least three things. Number one, the elite disengagement from the military after Vietnam. The Episcopalians don't sign up any more, or the Presbyterians. Number two, the heightened political engagement of Christian evangelicals who, by the 1960s, had embarked on a crusade to save America from itself. Evangelicals have long seen the U.S. military as allies in that cause. American society may be going to hell in a hand basket with its promiscuity, its pornography, its divorce rates, its abortion, its women's rights, all these things evangelicals lament, but the military's a bastion of traditional virtue. Now, they misperceive soldiers in that regard, but I think that's one reason military service has a special appeal for evangelical Christians.

Third comes the politicization of the military. When I first became an officer, the tradition of being apolitical was still deeply rooted. As one consequence of Vietnam, that went away. The officer corps came to see its interests as lying with the political right. Evangelical Christianity is just part of a larger mix.

TD: So, you have an all-embracing world that has become more politicized, that's moved south, and that has few new streams of blood heading into it, unlike in the era of the draft or of the World War. What are the results of the military becoming less and less like American society?

Bacevich: I think it's bad news. The only good news -- this is pure speculation as there's no evidence for it -- might be that since the Iraq War is the handiwork of a conservative, evangelical, Republican President, perhaps members of the officer corps will begin to rethink where their loyalties should lie and will come to the realization that hitching their flag to the Republican Party is not necessarily good for their institutional interests. The officer corps loved [President Ronald] Reagan. He saved the military. And here we have, according to some people, the most Reaganite president since Reagan who seems to be doing his darnedest to destroy the military. That might have some impact.

TD: About a year ago you said, "The only way I can envision a meaningful political change along the lines that I would like to see would be in reaction to an awful disaster." Would you like to comment?

Bacevich: A disaster like that could go either way. One hates to speculate on this, but were there another 9/11, the likely result could be that Americans would rise up in their righteous anger and say, let's go kill them all. But it's at least possible to hope that such a disaster might offer an opportunity for people who are advancing alternative views to be heard.

One of the strange things about the Iraq War and other post-9/11 policies is that, except for gas being at $3 a gallon, who the hell cares? Part of the cunning genius of the Bush administration has been the way it's insulated Americans from the effects of their policies. You know, 9/11 happens and they seize upon it to declare their Global War on Terror. The President says from the outset that this is a long war, that it may take decades, that it's comparable to the world wars. On the other hand, he chooses not to mobilize the nation. There are no changes in our domestic priorities; no significant expansion of the armed forces.

Well, why was that? In their confidence about how great our military power was, they calculated that what we had would suffice. That was a major miscalculation. But I think they also calculated that by telling Americans, as President Bush famously did, to go down to Disney World and enjoy this great country of ours, they would be able to buy themselves political protection. Even though opinion polls show that public support for the President has dropped tremendously, in a sense events have proven them right. They have not been held accountable for their egregious mistakes because average citizens like you and me don't really feel the pain in any direct way.

Now, if the President had said: We're going to cut back on our domestic programs; we're going to raise taxes because this is an important war and, by God, we need to pay for it; we need a bigger Army and so we're going to impose a draft. Then I think Americans might have been more attentive to what's been happening over the past four years. But alas, they've not been. Instead we've drifted down the path toward perdition.

[Note: Those readers who want some background on the issues discussed in this interview are advised to pick up a copy of Bacevich's remarkable book, The New American Militarism.]

Copyright 2006 Tomdispatch
Source: www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=85882

[michelle]

Why good people kill
Iraq murders reveal the warping power of conformity and dehumanization.
Rosa Brooks
June 9, 2006

ARE AMERICANS good people?

After Vietnam — after My Lai, after the free-fire zones — many Americans were no longer sure.

After Haditha, the same question is again beginning to haunt us. We're supposed to be a virtuous nation; our troops are supposed to be the good guys. If it turns out that Marines murdered 24 civilians, including children and infants, how could that have happened?

In response to Haditha, U.S. government officials quickly reverted to the "bad apple" theory.

It's a tempting theory, and not just for the Bush administration. It suggests a vast and reassuring divide between "us" (the virtuous majority, who would never, under any circumstances, commit coldblooded murder) and "them" (the sociopathic, bad-apple minority). It allows us to hold on to our belief in our collective goodness. If we can just toss the few rotten Americans out of the barrel quickly enough, the rot won't spread.

The problem with this theory is that it rests on a false assumption about the relationship between character and deeds. Yes, sociopaths exist, but ordinary, "good" people are also perfectly capable of committing atrocities.

In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a famous experiment. He told subjects to administer electric shocks to other people, ostensibly to assess the effect of physical punishment on learning. In fact, Milgram wanted to "test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist."

Quite a lot of pain, it turned out. Most of Milgram's subjects continued to administer what they believed to be severe and agonizing shocks even when their "victims" (actually Milgram's assistants) screamed and begged them to stop.

Milgram's subjects weren't sociopaths. On the contrary, most expressed extreme distress about administering progressively more severe shocks. But almost all of them did it anyway.

Milgram's basic findings have been extended and confirmed since the 1960s. Depressingly, experimental evidence and historical experience suggest that even the gentlest people can usually be induced to inflict or ignore suffering.

There are several key factors that lead "good people" to do terrible things. The first, as the Milgram experiments powerfully demonstrated, is authority: Most ordinary people readily allow the dictates of "authorities" to trump their own moral instincts.

The second is conformity. Few people have the courage to go against the crowd.

The third is dehumanization of the victims. The Nazis routinely depicted Jews as "vermin" in need of extermination, for instance. Similarly, forcing victims to wear distinctive clothing (yellow stars, prison uniforms), shave their heads and so on can powerfully contribute to their dehumanization.

Orders, peer expectations and dehumanization need not be explicit to have a powerful effect. In adversarial settings such as prisons or conflict zones, subtle cues and omissions — the simple failure of authorities to send frequent, clear and consistent messages about appropriate behavior, for instance — can be as powerful as direct orders.

Against this backdrop, is it really surprising that ordinary, decent Marines may have committed atrocities in Haditha? All the key ingredients were present in one form or another: intense pressure from authorities to capture or kill insurgents; intense pressure from peers to seem tough and to avenge the deaths of comrades; the almost inevitable dehumanization that occurs when two groups look different, speak different languages, live apart and are separated by a chasm of mistrust.

Add in the discomfort, the fear, the constant uncertainty about the identity and location of the enemy and the relative youth of so many of our soldiers, and you have a recipe for atrocities committed not by "bad apples" but by ordinary people little different, and probably no worse, than most of us.

Of course, individuals still make their own choices. Most of Milgram's experimental subjects administered severe electric shocks — but a few refused. If Marines are proved to have massacred civilians at Haditha, they should be punished accordingly.

But let's not let the Bush administration off the hook. It's the duty of the government that sends troops to war to create a context that enables and rewards compassion and courage rather than callousness and cruelty. This administration has done just the opposite.

Our troops were sent to fight an unnecessary war, without adequate resources or training for the challenges they faced. At the same time, senior members of the administration made clear their disdain for the Geneva Convention's rules on war and for the principles and traditions of the military. Belated and halfhearted investigations into earlier abuses sent the message that brutality would be winked at — unless the media noticed, in which case a few bad apples would be ceremoniously ejected from the barrel, while higher-ups would go unpunished.

If we're talking about apples, we should also keep another old proverb in mind: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Source: tinyurl.com/hjomc