I should have sent President Obama a present for his fiftieth birthday last week, but I didn’t. A lot of things should be but aren’t. Obama should have been an ideal chief of state to reverse the previous twenty years’ self-destructive policies, but he wasn’t. He should have kept a few promises—not to the banks and military contractors, but to the voters. He should have kept the one about ending torture, but he didn’t. He should have kept the implied promise to the middle and working classes to restore their relative earning power to what it was before Ronald Reagan trickled their dollars up to fatten the oligarchy. He didn’t do that, either.
Now, a confession. Mea maxima culpa. I voted for him. Yet I am neither disappointed nor disillusioned. My expectations were low (although not as low as Obama has gone). My vote’s sole purpose was to send the party of Bush and Cheney into the wilderness for four years. To a libertarian left-winger like me, no administration was more venal than theirs. None had shown such contempt for the Bill of Rights, for due process, and for the guarantee of equality inherent in the Declaration of Independence. How could anyone vote for a party whose leaders plundered the US and Iraqi treasuries to benefit corporations in which they had vested interests? Alas, voting Democrat was not much better.
Before celebrating his birthday on August 4 in DC, Obama flew off to Chicago for another birthday party. The city is his adopted home, where he learned politics in the Cook County Democratic machine. Chicago has been a one-party fiefdom since Tony Cermak beat the last Republican mayor in 1931. One-party rule in Chicago has lasted longer than it did in the old Soviet Union. The high rollers gave him a birthday bash that cost them up to $35,800 per coiffed head. In the Washington Times, T. J. O’Hara wrote that was “a 17.7% increase year-over-year” on Obama’s 49th and estimated the “take” at $3.65 million. Not bad for a man of the people.
New Mayor Rahm Emanuel, fresh from his disastrous tenure as White House Chief of Staff, was there. Former supporters Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich couldn’t make it. Obama airbrushed them from his curriculum vitae, just as he’d done with Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Rashid Khalidi (scholar and Obama’s ex-Chicago neighbor, whose only offense was to be a Palestinian). My greatest disappointment was that the woman selected to do the slinky “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” à la Marilyn Monroe was Jennifer Hudson and not, in shimmering sequins, Hillary Clinton. You can’t have everything.
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Try to see it from the other guy’s point of view. He may be wrong. He may be, at least partly, right. Today, I am trying hard to see life from the point of view of an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. I have known a few, including one named Benzion Gruber, whom I liked. Benzi Gruber was the kind of man you would want beside you in a fight. It was not because he was a good fighter, which I suspect he was, but because he wouldn’t desert you.
Benzi was a colonel in the armored corps. Many of the men under his command told me he went out of his way to support them. More than one remembered sitting in a bunker somewhere in the West Bank, cold and in the dead of night. To make matters worse, it was their birthday. Suddenly, out of the dark, they would see Jeep lights approaching. Out of the door came little lights from birthday candles on cakes hand-delivered by Benzi Gruber.
Benzi, whom I have not seen in about eight years, lived in a settlement on land expropriated from its Palestinian owners. He had decent and intelligent children, and his family was hospitable when I had dinner at the house. It happened to be January 23, 2002, when I turned fifty-one. I’m not sure who told Benzi, but he came into the house with a birthday cake that had five candles plus one. I try to see the world through Benzi’s eyes.
When I covered southern Africa in the late 1970s, I tried as well to see Rhodesia from the white settlers’ point of view. They had a lot to lose, although they had stolen the country from its inhabitants, enacted laws to exclude blacks from the most fertile land, kept the indigenous population from power, and went to war to prevent granting the vote to the majority. When I look at the crimes committed now by Robert Mugabe—and they are many—I recall that rule by violence was also paramount to Cecil Rhodes’s conquest of Mashonaland and Matabeleland in the late 19th century. Mugabe has continued the system, mistreating not only the whites but also most of the country’s blacks. Ian Smith and his white followers, however much they wanted their white society to survive as they knew it, were wrong. Their war to prevent democracy was not merely immoral. It was self-destructive. In making military and police force the sole arbiter of disputes, they insured democracy would be stillborn.
My fear for Benzi Gruber, his family, and the other 300,000 settlers in the West Bank is that they are destroying a country that I know they love. They may be afraid of withdrawing from the West Bank. Some have a biblical attachment to the land, and others are taking advantage of government subsidies and tax breaks they would not enjoy in Israel proper. To preserve the settlements, they insist that the pre-1967 borders are indefensible. Ephraim Sneh, a former deputy defense minister and retired general, put that lie to bed in a recent New York Times Op-Ed that said a “security package would make the 1967 lines defensible.” In other words, two states—an independent Israel and an independent Palestine—are safer than one.
The Arab League decided last week to present the United Nations General Assembly with a resolution that the US and Israel have long been dreading: for UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem. Both the US and Israel would be wrong, in law and in their own interests, to oppose Palestinian statehood this September. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 called for two states in the British Mandate of Palestine. The Arabs made the mistake of opposing partition. Most Jewish leaders embraced it. Remember, they embraced a resolution that called for two states, not one. That resolution became Israel’s birth certificate when, on May 15, 1948, it declared statehood. For the Palestinians today to call for their own state means not only that they accept partition, but that they accept Israel’s birth certificate—its “right to exist.” Israel and the US should embrace world recognition of Palestinian statehood and thus the Palestinian state’s acceptance of Israel.
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The first email came on May 31 from London’s Pluto Press, saying that one of their authors was missing and believed to be imprisoned. The author was forty-year-old journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, whose reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan was famously reliable and probing. As editor of Asia Despatch and Pakistan Bureau Chief of Hong Kong’s Asia Times Online, he had broken many important stories about the two wars raging in his region: the public conflict between the US and the Taliban and the covert struggle pitting the US against its ostensible Pakistani allies. The Taliban once kidnapped him in Afghanistan and then allowed him access to their cadres as a guest.
Author Nir Rosen has said: “When Syed Saleem Shahzad talks, I listen. He is the most fearless and reliable journalist covering Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that’s why his work is read even in the halls of the Pentagon.” Shahzad should have belonged to what Graham Greene called the “non-torturable” class. Theoretically, he was immune to harassment by Pakistani government apparatchiks. But clearly he wasn’t. “According to Human Rights Watch,” Asia Times announced, “Shahzad is being held for questioning in relation to an article in the Asia Times suggesting complicity between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Navy.” The Asia Times article alleged that the Pakistani Navy conspired with al-Qaeda to attack one of Pakistan’s own naval air facilities near Karachi. Someone seemed angry that the story got out. When Shahzad disappeared, it seemed the intelligence services had kidnapped him to torture him into revealing his sources. Their methods of discovery would not stand scrutiny in a court of law. Shahzad’s friends, whom he had already told about intelligence-service threats to his life, were justifiably worried.
Pluto Press was in the process of publishing Shahzad’s new book, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11, destined to annoy many people in and out of Pakistan. Following Osama bin Laden’s assassination, it exposed Pakistani officialdom’s misdeeds at a time when its relations with Washington were especially precarious. The book includes interviews with key Taliban and al-Qaeda players who discuss their ideology, operations, and strategy. It exposed some of Pakistan’s links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and it demonstrated the Taliban’s reliance on indirect American funding. Shahzad had reported in 2003 on his conversation with a Taliban official who told him that American officers “distribute dollars to the tribal chiefs, local administrators and other concerned people for welfare projects….Not every penny, but most goes into Taliban projects to refuel their struggle.” This, combined with Patrick Cockburn’s excellent reports in London’s Independent on America’s extortion payments to the Taliban, depicted a war in which the US was effectively funding both sides.
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They say no money was paid and no prisoners were exchanged. I’m not talking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but about the two French hostages released in Afghanistan while Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape victim’s credibility was disintegrating.
The Taliban had captured television correspondent Hervé Ghesquiere and cameraman Stéphane Taponier of television channel France 3 in December 2009. Since then, life-size photos of the two hostages have adorned almost every city hall in France. The public took the two fearless journalists to their hearts and demanded the government do something for them.
Although France officially denies it made a deal with the Taliban, it appears the government did something to get the men out. Hostage Ghesquiere said he doubted the kidnappers let him go in return “for chocolates.” The Taliban spokesman, who calls himself Zabiullah Mujahid, announced, “France was forced to accept the conditions put forward by the Islamic Emirate.” According to much of the French media, those conditions included the release of Taliban fighters in French custody. What we had here, Dolores, was an old-fashioned hostage exchange. (Do you think France let some American drug dealers out of La Santé in exchange for Strauss-Kahn?)
As lucky as the two French journalists were to obtain their liberty after eighteen miserable months, their timing could not have been worse. Normally, parades would have welcomed them to the land of the living. After all, we in France, even down here in Provence, know their faces from thousands of posters and have been yearning for their ordeal to end. They should have been front-page news. Yet they vanished. If you were searching for their story, you might find it between the crosswords and the classifieds.
Why? Page One became the domain of a man whom the French are now treating like a prisoner of conscience. Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s liberation trumped that of two journalists the country had been fretting over for a year and half. Our local paper, La Provence, pasted his picture in full color beside his wife with the headline, “L’incroyable coup de theatre.” Under the headline “DSK, le nouveau big bang,” the paper devoted a double-page spread to his victimization and probable comeback. Not since Nelson Mandela left Robben Island has a country so joyfully welcomed a politician coming out of custody.
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Obama is pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Or at least he says he is. He also said that American forces in Iraq are no longer there. Officially, the Iraq war is over, at least if you ignore the fighting. So where are the 45,000 soldiers based in Iraq if not in, well, Iraq?
According to a Brookings Institution report from late May, they’re in…Iraq.
Will the administration pull a similar act of verbal prestidigitation to keep troops in Afghanistan, given that they are the only barrier between Hamid Karzai’s unpopular government and the Taliban? If you read the press, Obama is heading for the exit:
USA Today, June 22:
“President Obama heralded the beginning of the end of the nation’s 10-year war in Afghanistan on Wednesday….”
New York Times headline, June 23:
“Obama Will Speed Military Pullout From Afghan War”
The Obama plan for Afghanistan, which may succumb to delays similar to the Iraqi pullout, calls for 33,000 soldiers to depart by September next year with the rest withdrawn at the end of 2014. If you believe that will happen on schedule, send me a check for $100 and I’ll sell you a new Rolls-Royce.
Only a few antiwar groups and media critics have pointed out the obvious: Since he became president, the Nobel Peace Prize winner has tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan. From 34,000 soldiers in theater when he assumed office, he raised the total to 100,000 by 2010. Last year was also the one in which the cost of Afghan combat rose above that in Iraq.
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting pointed out that with 100,000 troops and another 100,000 security contractors (whom Karzai is seeking to expel) in Afghanistan, “it’s hard to read a phased pullout of 30,000 out of 200,000 over the course of an entire year as a ‘rapid’ withdrawal.” This excludes 80,000 to 90,000 support troops in nearby countries. Yet if the media prove willing to describe such a mild pullback as a “withdrawal,” American voters may accept that the war in Afghanistan, like that in Iraq, is over. It won’t matter that the locals go on killing one another and American troops stand by to intervene when necessary.
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What’s going on with Barack “Open Government” Obama? His Justice Department has prosecuted more people for exposing government secrets than all the presidents from George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington to George “I cannot tell the truth” Bush combined. Compared to his predecessors’ three prosecutions in more than two centuries, Obama has added five in less than two-and-a-half years. Can it be that our “hopey-changey” president has more to hide?
The president’s latest attempt to put a civil servant behind bars for speaking to a journalist is a weak case at best. Stephen J. Kim worked for the Defense and State Departments on North Korean issues. After someone introduced him to Fox News reporter James Rosen, Kim let slip a CIA analysis of North Korea’s likely reaction to a United Nations resolution condemning its nuclear weapons and missile tests. The CIA correctly concluded that North Korea would tell the UN to go to hell and then conduct more tests. Was there anything controversial or life-threatening in leaking a rare assessment in which the CIA could take pride? The North Korea assessment contrasts with the CIA’s failure to predict 1956’s Hungarian revolution, 1989’s fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and 2003’s Iraqi popular reaction to the American invasion. Hey, they’re bound to get it right once in a while.
The leak’s triviality did not stop Obama’s bloodhounds from tracking down Mr. Kim and seeking to send him away for fifteen years under the Espionage Act of 1917. Kim, who immigrated to the US from South Korea when he was eight, is now awaiting trial for allegedly betraying a country he clearly loves. Not even the failure of the Obama Justice Department’s most recent case, against Thomas A. Drake of the National Security Agency, has reduced its enthusiasm for going after Mr. Kim and others who expose what the government wants to keep hidden. Drake’s alleged crime was to share with Siobhan Gorman, a Baltimore Sun reporter now at The Wall Street Journal, classified information about NSA surveillance. Prosecutors sought a thirty-five-year sentence but eventually Drake pled down to a misdemeanor. Meanwhile, Bradley Manning still faces a court-martial on charges of passing documents to WikiLeaks.
Obama’s people appear to be looking for hard men and women to plug the leaks. Step forward, Lisa O. Monaco, recent Obama Justice appointee. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Ms. Monaco said that “it would be my priority to continue the aggressive pursuit of these investigations.” She appeared pleased with the administration’s record of nearly “twice as many prosecutions” than in the rest of American history. Bet on her quick confirmation, after which she’ll be watching us all to make sure no one tells anyone else anything.
Does no one care that this is the most closed-up American government since, well, since ever? You’d think that those who profess to support both governmental transparency and journalists’ right to publish classified data would raise hell, at least until the government acknowledged the difference between spying for Israel and exposing government malfeasance to the electorate. Under this administration, you would be wrong.
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The Briterati, as I call Britain’s media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that parents no longer read to their children and that the state is failing to protect the wee ’uns from pornography. It is good to drop in on Britain from time to time, if only to observe moral guardians’ ephemeral preoccupations in the columns of newspapers that fewer and fewer people bother to read.
Last time I was here, columnists were obsessing over who would design Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All that is forgotten as the press ferrets out other tidbits to digest and regurgitate.
This week, it’s the kids. A study by the National Literacy Trust claimed that 25 percent of twelve-year-olds could not spell, that one in six Londoners cannot read without difficulty, and that most London employers have trouble finding literate employees. Apparently, only two-thirds of families with children keep books at home. Almost all of them, though, have computer games. This is not a happy picture for a country where the printing press made Milton and Dickens available to the masses.
The Evening Standard weighed in with a campaign to encourage parents to read to their children, something that it believes few of them do anymore. The paper also called for volunteers to read to children whose parents lack the inclination, ability, or time to do it themselves. Even Camilla, the future queen, took up the call. Ideally, Mom or Dad should put the kids to bed while telling stories or reading Beatrix Potter or Tintin. If they don’t, the volunteers plan to pick up the slack. How long this will last or whether it will increase literacy is anyone’s guess.
Regarding children’s access to pornography, the columnists have suggested remedies that fall short of interfering with Rupert Murdoch’s satellite channels’ habit of offering hardcore samplers for free without asking for proof of age. Short of bringing the police into the house, I’m not sure how you can stop it. When I was about nine, we used to sneak looks at naturist magazines in bookshops. Young autodidacts will explore all that their elders want to keep to themselves. So let the elders read to them and ask the cops to put a wall between youngsters and whatever Murdoch puts on his porn channels.
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Mitt Romney declared his intention last week to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2012. Between now and next summer’s convention, he’ll trip along the Yellow Brick Road that he must imagine will lead him to the White House. That means fifteen months of making promises no one expects him to keep, chomping on fried chicken in Alabama and dim sum in San Francisco, coining empty slogans, pandering to people he would never invite to dinner, kissing a few thousand drooling babies, and, if he is astute, keeping his hands off the posteriors of the free labor that flocks to his colors.
Yes, ma’am, it’s election time in America. It’s the longest season of the quadrennial calendar, and Mitt will tack on an extra three months if he takes the nomination. The going rate for the full campaign must be about $50 million a month. Those with access to the hundreds of millions it takes for advertising to fool the voters are either up and running or making it clear they’re about to be: Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and someone from Utah named Jon Huntsman. I assume no Democrat will be brave or foolhardy enough to challenge Obama.
Republican primary and caucus voters will be asked by all of the candidates to trust them to overthrow the last guy for whose banter we fell. This is what Americans call democracy, and it is no recipe for putting the most qualified, public-spirited, and honest people into office. It instead guarantees chicanery, mediocrity, and larceny.
Why does Mitt Romney excite us less for 2012 than Harold Stassen, who sought the Republican nomination eight times without coming close, did in 1964? At the ’64 convention at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, I remember delegates sporting jocular lapel buttons that said, “Stop Stassen.” Perhaps Mitt will achieve similar status if he persists every four years in his quixotic quest to make himself leader of the free world. A few people talk about Jeb Bush, as if two Bushes in the White House had not already created a surplus. I’ll leave Sarah Palin to Tina Fey, and most of the others couldn’t run a gas station. If Obama fell under a bus, the Democrats wouldn’t field a much better roster. American democracy is competing with the dollar for loss of value.
The 2012 Republican nomination derby, with its lame horses and crooked jockeys, will drag on for the next fifteen months of ennui, deception, and occasional scandals. The crown won’t go to anyone who cannot or will not pay the entry fee. It debars those who will not guarantee their financial backers rich rewards and bailouts from the public purse or soften up the public with promises of chickens in every pot. Thus, the voter is offered only those with the morals of US Congressmen or Colombian drug dealers. And I’m being unkind to the Colombians. Does it matter that the finest thoroughbreds are never in this particular race?
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The other night at the Hotel George V, the American Library in Paris held a fundraising dinner of the city’s American grandees. Dotted among the plutocrats were various publishers, journalists, and writers such as Lily Tuck, Diane Johnson, Alan Riding, Dinaw Mengestu, Jack Lamar, and Elaine Sciolino. Scott Turow delivered the after-dinner speech. His theme was, “Will there be books in the future?” I should have gone straight to the bar before he started.
Turow is both a lawyer and a best-selling novelist of crime thrillers such as Presumed Innocent. He’s also the president of the Authors Guild. At the George V, although his Chicago accent was weary from the transatlantic flight, the feisty barrister packed some hard punches. “Any honest assessment of the future must recognize that writing books for a living may well disappear as a profession,” he said, “and with it, for many of the same reasons, libraries as we know them now.” Writers and libraries, and by implication bookshops and publishers, were “endangered species.” This was not the uplifting message we wanted after our gazpacho, braised duck, and Burgundian wines.
Literature, as music did when Napster came along, is waging a life-or-death war with online piracy. Turow admitted that e-books save publishers money on printing, storing, and shipping printed texts. E-books, however, are vulnerable to theft that robs authors and publishers. “The average eighteen-year-old computer geek,” Turow said, “can buy one copy of a book from Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, or Google and remove the encryption and get it posted online. Of course, the pirate sites are far more sophisticated. Under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, there is a device for shutting down these pirate sites, though it’s really just a game of Whac-A-Mole because they spring up under a different name.” Turow said that New York’s Macmillan publishing house sends 4,000 takedown notices to brigand sites every month. (Another publisher, John Wiley & Sons, pays three full-time staff to ferret out the pirates and bring them to book. In 2009, Wiley was demanding that 5,000 illegal e-versions of its titles be removed from the Internet per month.)
For the benefit of those suffering, as I do, from economic dyscalculia, Turow explained how Amazon is putting scribblers and publishers on the breadline. Amazon, which introduced the first effective e-reader, paid publishers fifty percent of a book’s cover price to sell it in an e-edition. Using a hypothetical cover price of $30, Turow continued:
So they were paying publishers, let’s say, $15. They then turned around and sold the readers the e-book version for $10. So they lost $5 on every sale. And nobody believed Amazon was engaged in an effort to subsidize publishers. It was of course an effort to drive out any competing e-reader.…And they were well on their way to monopolizing the market. And once that happened, publishers were not going to be getting $15 for what Amazon was going to be selling for $10.
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You have to love Likud, Israel’s governing party. Its politicians may not be as smooth as Labor’s grandees, but they are usually more honest. An Israeli saying that dates back to the early 1970s asserts: “The Labor Party announces one settlement and builds ten. The Likud Party announces ten settlements and builds one.”
Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin told the newspaper Davar in 1990:
For all its faults, Labor has done more and remains capable of doing more in the future [in expanding Jewish settlements] than Likud with all of its doing. We have never talked about Jerusalem. We have just made a “fait accompli.” It was we who built the suburbs in [the annexed part of] Jerusalem. The Americans didn”t say a word, because we built these suburbs cleverly.
From the Oslo Accords” signing in September 1993 until June 1999, under Rabin and then his Labor successor Shimon Peres, Israel expropriated 54,400 acres of Palestinian land and doubled the number of settlers in the territories. Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who became prime minister in 1996, did not contribute much to that total. From 1999 to 2000, under Labor’s Ehud Barack, the settler population grew from 177,000 to 203,000″far outstripping growth under Netanyahu. Labor’s reticence to tell the outside world about its achievements is matched by Likud’s candor in bragging about the continuing theft of land. So to know what is happening, it is usually better to listen to Likud.
The Palestinians, unable to prevent Israel from seizing the land on which its people live, have been seeking a variety of means out of their predicament. They have tried terror, and it failed. They have tried negotiations; they, too, failed. The Israeli army crushes their peaceful demonstrations (of which there have been thousands since 1967) in the most violent manner. Colonel Gaddafi could learn much about crowd control from Israel’s security forces. The Palestinians are now attempting to bring the pressure of world public opinion on Israel by declaring an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Likud and Knesset member Danny Danon, in a New York Times op-ed titled “Making the Land of Israel Whole,” proposes that Israel “should annex the Jewish communities of the West Bank….” It is an interesting suggestion. Like so many fantastic ideas from what most sane Israelis used to regard as the lunatic fringe, it has every chance of becoming policy.
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Most versions of the Saint George legend tell us that when the great Christian slew the dragon, he went home. Task accomplished, deed done, dragon’s blood dry on his lance, and king’s daughter rescued, George rushed to the family hearth in Lydda, Palestine, to savor his triumph. Washington’s dragon slayers, fresh from their kill in Abbottabad, should consider his example. They chased the hoary-headed bin Laden from Kabul, hunted him in Tora Bora’s caves, sought him in Waziristan, and pursued his trail from the Hindu Kush to the Punjab Plain. Ten years, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives later, they found him in a rundown house and put a (silver, to be safe?) bullet into his head.
They took the bloody corpse away, inspected it, verified its provenance, and sent it down to Davy Jones’s Locker lest any followers entomb it as the shrine of a new cult. Osama bin Laden is definitely gone, dead, deceased, defunct, no mas en casa. Like Monty Python’s parrot, “”E’s kicked the bucket, “e’s shuffled off “is mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin” choir invisible.” He is gone and ain”t comin” back. So why are American forces prolonging their tour in Afghanistan? The Bush Administration called the 2001 invasion Operation Enduring Freedom, but Obama is making it Operation Enduring Operation.
“The United States, like the British and the Soviets before, will leave Afghanistan one day. How about today?”
If the United States wanted an excuse to depart from a land where it has waged a Sisyphean battle for ten years, Osama bin Laden’s execution has provided it. The US has seen around 1,500 of its own soldiers killed, another 11,000 wounded, and more than that suffering mental breakdowns. US troops have inflicted uncounted numbers of casualties on the natives”both the rebellious types with weapons and those who happened to attend a wedding that was hit by rockets. The taxpayer is losing about $6.7 billion a month in what began as the hunt for Osama. Now that they”ve achieved the original goal, is anyone in Washington bidding farewell to the Hindu Kush? Alas, Washington gives every impression that it’s seeking excuses to stay.
Why would anyone want another ten years of killing and maiming? The Veterans Administration hospitals (not to mention Afghanistan’s rural clinics) have enough with which to cope. Can the US taxpayer afford another few hundred billion dollars on a country that has never failed to expel every foreign army that ventured into its impoverished mountains and valleys? The United States, like the British and the Soviets before, will leave Afghanistan one day. How about today? Delay adds only to the cost without changing the outcome.
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There were two huge stories last week in American mythmaking: The United States has slain Public Enemy Number One, and Superman is renouncing his American citizenship. Barack Obama may exult in the first, but he should beware the second. The Man of Steel’s renunciation of his adopted homeland may represent more in American mythology than the extrajudicial execution of a terrorist in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, for all his pretensions, was a mere mortal. Superman is the stuff of dreams”primarily the American dream. The dream was a vision of the immigrant making good and embracing the country more meaningfully than those born there and taking it for granted. Now he is turning away. It is as if our first immigrants, the Pilgrims, were boarding the Mayflower to sail back to England.
For those who have been busy following White House pronouncements and news from Pakistan, here is what happened in the latest issue of Action Comics: Superman returns from observing popular demonstrations in Iran, and the National Security Advisor upbraids him for giving the appearance of representing the president. Superman answers,
I realize that, and you”re right, of course. Which is why I intend to speak before the United Nations tomorrow and inform them that I am renouncing my US citizenship. I”m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy.
The advisor asks, “What?”
“Truth, justice and the American way””it’s not enough anymore.
When Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created Superman in 1932, the caped hero fought for “truth and justice.” This was later changed to “truth, tolerance, and justice.” (Anyone remember “tolerance”?) The “American way” part replaced “tolerance” during the McCarthy years, around when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Loyalty and oaths were the order of the day, and Superman adapted. Most of us did if we wanted to keep our jobs.
Shuster and Siegel were two Jewish kids living in Cleveland and struggling with their immigrant parents to survive the Depression and achieve acceptance in a sometimes-hostile American culture. Blair Kramer wrote on the Jewish Virtual Library website:
Despite his superhuman powers, Superman shared some characteristic traits with a majority of American Jews in the 1940s. Like them, he had arrived in America from a foreign world. His entire family”in fact his entire race”had been wiped out in a holocaust-like disaster on his home planet, Krypton….Superman’s parents launched him to Earth in hopes that he would survive.
It resonated among many Americans, Jewish and Gentile alike, during the Depression and Second World War. Superman’s first foes were slumlords, corrupt businessmen, extortionists, wife-beaters, and the politicians who protected them. Super-villains such as Brainiac and Galactic Golem came later, replacing the villainous slumlords and corrupt businessmen who maybe were not so bad after all.
Superman, unlike the super guy in the White House, believed in the law. His pursuit of criminals usually ended not with him beating them to death (which he had more than enough power to do), but in turning them over to the police and the courts. Those who favor vengeance over justice, whatever the crime, might have preferred Superman to be a freelance executioner.
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This is not a good time to be running the Middle East desk at the State Department. If you happen to be him or her, take my advice: Do nothing. Especially in Syria. Let all the think tanks and lobbyists submit their recommendations. Ask the CIA for the usual analysis. Tell the Israelis, which you would anyway, that you”ll put their suggestions at the top of the pile. Stack that pile high, then burn it. If you stick your hand into this particular tar baby, you will never get out.
Think back to when this mess began, which was a long time before young Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in Tunisia. It was about the time the British and the French decided to save the Arabs from the Ottoman Empire’s oppression. They convinced a few Arabs, who would have remained loyal to their sultan if they had not lost out in one power struggle or another, to overthrow their oppressor. This was only a couple of generations after Britain and France protected the Turks” empire from encroachment by that other evil empire”the Russian one”in the Crimea. By 1917, when the Turk was looking vulnerable, the time came to rescue his subjects from harsh treatment that the Anglo-French entente had not noticed for a couple of centuries. Soon after the Turks were driven out, the Iraqis were fighting for their lives against the British and the Syrians risked their all to expel the French. Both failed until the Second World War made the maintenance of Levantine and Mesopotamian protectorates too expensive.
Liberation from outside is as dangerous a game as revolution. With neither can the outcome be predicted. The Poles were liberated from the Nazis in 1945, only to find themselves under the Red Army. Many Iraqis wanted to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003, but the American Army turned out to be a blunt instrument that made their lives more hellish than Saddam had. I remember when Palestinians in the West Bank complained about Jordanian rule. I suspect that having since 1967 been occupied by Israel’s army and displaced by Israel’s settlers, they would give anything to have the Jordanians back. So before Uncle Sam rides to the rescue in Syria, give it some thought.
There are two people whose analysis of matters Syrian I respect. Both are British journalists and scholars who have lived in the region, speak Arabic, and are at least seventy-five. One is David Hirst, formerly of the Guardian. The other is Patrick Seale, who used to write for the Observer. Seale’s 1965 The Struggle for Syria is the starting point for any serious understanding of the country’s politics. His 1988 Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East tells all you need to know about Syria since Assad père became president in 1970. Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch renders most other histories of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict irrelevant, and his recent Beware of Small States brings the drama up to date by doing the impossible: explaining Lebanon.
Hirst wrote on March 22 in the Guardian that protestors in Dera”a, the southern border town where the anti-regime demonstrations began, burned down the office of a cell-phone company owned by the president’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, and the local headquarters of the Ba”ath Party. The party and the company represent monopoly”one economic, the other political. Many Syrians believe that their lives would be better if they could share in the economy and the government. Those who control both monopolies refuse to share wealth and power, so the contest is on. Hirst writes:
Never would the army and police leaderships abandon the political leadership as they did in Egypt and Tunisia. For them all, so incestuously linked, overthrow is simply not an option.
Civil war, however, is an option.
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When journalists die in some foreign field, they die for you. Without them, your knowledge of the world in which you live would come from government spokesmen, corporate flacks, and pundits who don”t leave their television studios or think tanks. Two frontline photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, have just been killed in Libya. Hetherington was forty and Hondros forty-one. Both were first-class journalists who went by sea from Benghazi to the frontlines in Misrata. After another of the endless skirmishes between Colonel Gaddafi’s army and the rebels, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in their midst. It killed both men and severely wounded their colleagues Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown.
The Oxford-educated Hetherington had a brilliant career, now cut lamentably short. His film on Afghanistan, Restrepo, earned an Oscar nomination last year and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. He won the World Press Photo of the Year Award for 2007 and had also taken a prize named for another photographer killed in the line of duty, the Rory Peck Award.
Hondros, who worked in Kosovo and Afghanistan among other wars, was responsible for a startling series of photographs of a family that failed to stop abruptly at an American checkpoint in Iraq. US soldiers shot the parents dead and wounded one of their five children in the backseat. The armchair warriors would say it’s an everyday occurrence in war, as if that provided absolution. Hondros explained later:
Almost every soldier in Iraq has been involved in some sort of incident like that or another, I would say. Their attitude about it was grim, but it wasn”t the end of their world. It was, “Well, kind of wished they”d stopped. We fired warning shots. Damn, I don”t know why the hell they didn”t stop. What”re you doing later, you want to play Nintendo? Okay.” Just a day’s work for them.
Such testimony makes it all the more difficult to believe that sending in the Marines will solve all problems everywhere.
Photographers and the people who record the news on film or video cameras take more hits in conflict than mere scribes such as myself, who enjoy the luxury (or the excuse) of staying a little back from the fighting in order to observe it better. The photographer and camera operator must go to the coalface to record the sights and sounds of combat and make warfare’s impact visible. The toll of fallen photographers lengthens each month. None of those I have known or worked with could be called “war junkies.” Their vocation was to bring home the bloodshed so blithely endorsed by people in the imperial centers without whose weapons and financing most wars could not take place. One of the finest photojournalists of the twentieth century, the proud Welsh patriot Philip Jones Griffiths, once criticized some of his colleagues for making profits out of America’s war in Vietnam. They countered by asking him what he was doing in Vietnam, from where he produced one of the best books to come out of that conflict, Vietnam, Inc. He answered, and I paraphrase from memory, “I was gathering evidence for the next Nuremberg Trials.”
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Barack Obama campaigned for president on a promise to end the war in Iraq and “finish the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” More than two years after he took the oath of office, American forces remain in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of eliminating two wars, he has lunged into a third in Libya. How is it that a nation that spends more on war (or, as it is officially called, “defense”) than all other countries in the list of the world’s top ten military spenders combined is not winning the battles in two Third World countries? With such a record, why is it stumbling blithely into a third? An old journalistic rule of thumb is to follow the money. Yes, Virginia, there are countries that go to war for money.
The United States teaches its children that it is the great exception to most rules. Thus, its leaders are too noble to risk lives for anything as base as lucre. No president would send American Marines into a country such as Haiti merely to collect a debt for a private bank”unless he happened to be Woodrow Wilson. In December 1914, Wilson dispatched Marines to Port-au-Prince, where they looted two strongboxes containing $500,000 from the National Bank of Haiti and delivered them to New York City Bank. That kind of debt collection may well have inspired young Alphonse Capone to launch his career among Chicago’s Italian immigrants. In 1915, a Marine major won the Congressional Medal of Honor for an engagement in which at least 50 Haitians lost their lives at a cost to the US of one wounded Marine. In 1935, Smedley Butler, by then a retired general, regretted a military career that made him the most decorated Marine of his time:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
Where is the money in Libya? When France and Britain decided to back those who seemed likely to seize power in Libya, they had every reason to expect the grateful victors would award oil concessions to British and French companies. Imagine for a moment that their motives were pure: protecting civilians. Yep, just like they are not protecting them in Yemen, Bahrain, Gaza, and Syria.
Oil concessions to European companies don”t sit well in the boardrooms of generous petroleum-sector benefactors to American presidential campaigns. Could that be a factor for Saint Barack and his humanitarian interventionists Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power? No, this was all about saving the Libyans, whom they had never considered in the years since the US took Colonel Gaddafi back into the community of spruced-up world leaders. Hillary is now acting outraged that Gaddafi has used cluster bombs on civilian areas in Misurata. When reporters informed Mrs. Clinton about the bombs, she answered:
That is worrying information. And it is one of the reasons the fight in Misurata is so difficult, because it’s at close quarters, it’s in amongst urban areas and it poses a lot of challenges to both NATO and to the opposition.
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