Cause and effect in the "Terror War"

Cause and effect in the "Terror War": "

'In all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims' -- Supreme Tough Guy Warrior Mark Steyn, National Review, yesterday.

'The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan' -- New York Times, December 4, 2009.

'In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen' -- New York Times, yesterday.

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, 'five fronts' in the 'Terror War' (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, 'we will continue to use every element of our national power'). Add to those five fronts the 'crippling' sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even 'harsher' than the prior ones, and its almost easier to count the Muslim countries were not attacking or threatning than to count the ones we are. Yet this still isnt enough for Americas right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of 'an allergy to the concept of war.'

In the wake of the latest failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the excitement in the air -- that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever theres a new country we get to learn about so that we can explain why were morally and strategically justified in bombing it some more. 'Yemen' is suddenly on every Serious Persons lips. We spent the last month centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that country -- including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths -- but everyone now knows that this isnt enough and its time to Get Really Serious and Do More.

For all the endless, exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself on one of our airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions with justification -- as though understanding the reasons why X happens is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable. Causation simply is; it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification. Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is that Terrorists try to harm us because theyre Evil, and we (of course) are not, and thats generally the end of the discussion.

Despite that taboo, evidence always ends up emerging on this question. As numerous reports have indicated, the Al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula has said that this attempted attack is in 'retaliation' for the multiple, recent missile attacks on Yemen in which numerous innocent Muslim civilians were killed, as well as for the U.S.s multi-faceted support for the not-exactly-democratic Yemeni government. That is similar to reports that Nidal Hasan was motivated to attack Fort Hood because 'he was upset at the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.' And one finds this quote from an anonymous Yemeni official tacked on to the end of this week's NYT article announcing the 'widening terror war' in Yemen -- as though it's just an afterthought:

'The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary -- but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda.'

As always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again, independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? Isnt it obvious that our five-front actions are going to cause at least some Muslims -- subjected to constant images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at our hands, even if unintended -- to want to return the violence? Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think were unleashing from a decade-long (and counting and increasing) multi-front 'war' in the Muslim war?

There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself."

(Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.)

CQ Politics | The Most Significant Vote of the Decade In the Right - The Most Significant Vote of the Decade

In the Right - The Most Significant Vote of the Decade: "Did you feel that disturbance in The Force? The one that took place about 3:35 this afternoon?

At 3:20 p.m., Independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont -- acting as the presiding officer of the Senate -- called a vote on a point of order against the health care overhaul bill.

Fifteen minutes later, Sanders closed the vote, and the matter was done. The Republicans finally got the vote they've been needing all year long.

Every Senate Democrat (plus the two Independents, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Sanders) went on record declaring that the so-called individual mandate that is the heart of the health care bill -- that is, an unprecedented federal mandate that requires individuals to purchase a product in the private market, on pain of taxation should they choose to disobey -- does not violate the Constitution.

In other words, every single Democrat in the Senate is now on record in support of the belief that the federal government literally has the power to order its citizens to use their own after-tax dollars to buy something it wishes them to buy, details to be filled in later.

In a word, wow.

What a shame they waited until December to take the vote that reveals their collective belief in the supremacy of coercive collectivism. If they had taken the vote back in the spring, we never would have needed to appropriate those billions for the 'Cash for Clunkers' program -- instead of offering people money as a positive inducement to purchase automobiles (the favored industry at that moment), we could have just ordered the citizenry to do so.

If they had taken the vote even earlier, we could have avoided having to saddle our children and grandchildren with hundreds of billions of dollars of new debt -- the Obama administration would never have had to ask Congress to appropriate the $787 billion for the stimulus package. Instead, they could have just asked Congress to pass a law requiring that every U.S. taxpayer immediately run to his neighborhood Lowes or Home Depot and buy $8,000 worth of home improvement materials.

Why, the possibilities are endless!

For example, we won't any longer have to use the tax code to provide incentives for behavior we'd like to encourage -- no more mortgage-interest deduction! -- instead, we can just use the threat of taxation to bend the citizenry's will to Washington's dictate. ('I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to tell you to buy this house now.')

Liberals will love it, because they can threaten to raise taxes to their hearts' content; conservatives should like it, because it means they'll finally be able to get the two-line tax return they've wanted for decades.

(The two lines? '1) How much did you make last year? 2) Send us 10 percent of it.')

Of course, before we spend even one more minute fantasizing about a world in which Congress no longer offers incentives to reward behavior it deems desirable, but instead uses disincentives to threaten punishment for behavior deemed undesirable ... let's put down the crack pipe, and step away from the matches.

The simple fact is, these 60 Democratic senators have created for themselves a fantasy world no less elaborate than the world of Pandora, where James Cameron's new film 'Avatar' takes place.

I have looked through my copy of the Constitution several times, and I can find no provision that authorizes the federal government to mandate that I, as a private citizen of these United States, purchase anything, let alone something as complicated as a health insurance policy.

What I find, instead, is the 10th Amendment, which reads in whole, 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'

As those who have studied constitutional law and/or political theory will recognize, this is the Constitution's use of 'negative liberty' -- in essence, freedom from something (usually, interference by government, as opposed to 'positive liberty,' defined as freedom to do something).

The 'negative liberty' vs. 'positive liberty' argument has been going on for centuries.

Our Constitution, drafted by adherents of the concept of negative liberty, is one of 'enumerated powers,' in which -- as declared very clearly by the 10th Amendment -- the federal government is given those powers, and only those powers, specifically granted it by the people, through the Constitution.

In other words, if the explicit grant of power is not to be found anywhere in the document, the federal government does not have the power to do it.

No less an authority than our current president, a former lecturer in constitutional law, can be heard in this 2001 radio interview explaining negative liberty and the Constitution: 'Generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, [it] says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.'

Hmmm.... '[It] says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you ...'

Something tells me whichever conservative legal group files the first lawsuit against this behemoth is going to find a way to enter the young(er) Barack Obama's words into the record of the testimony in that suit, because every now and then, like the stopped clock that is right twice a day, Obama gets it right.

But I digress. Back to the vote.

Political operatives are always looking for significant votes. One of the purposes of forcing votes on amendments is, in fact, to create a voting record your opponents would rather not have to defend in a campaign.

When selecting these votes from among many, said operatives usually look for a few keys -- for instance, is this a vote that clearly delineates an ideological contrast, or are there other, parochial or personal, interests at play? Finding a clean vote, where there's a crystal clear ideological distinction and no explanation for a given vote other than that ideological distinction, is the political equivalent of finding a huge diamond in a coal mine.

I know of what I speak: In an earlier life, I spent six years sifting votes for the American Conservative Union, helping to choose the votes that made up the ACU's Ratings of the Congress.

This is one of those votes. It clearly delineates the differences between the two parties in a way no other vote in this Congress has -- it makes clear that, when all is said and done, Democrats believe in using the coercive power of government to force you to do something you may otherwise have chosen not to do, while Republicans believe the federal government simply does not have the power to coerce you to do anything like that.

Because it's the holiday season, everyone's putting together their 'best of' lists -- Best Movies of the Year, Best Records of the Year, etc. In fact, because it's 2009, and we're getting ready to enter 2010, many are putting together their 'Best Of' lists for the entire decade.

In that spirit, I humbly nominate Senate Roll Call Vote Number 392 as the Most Significant Vote of the Decade."

(Via In the Right.)

Banks That Bundled Bad Debt Also Bet Against It - NYTimes.com

Banks That Bundled Bad Debt Also Bet Against It - NYTimes.com: "‘The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,’ said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. ‘When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.’"

(Via NYTimes.)

The Bankers on Obama's Team

The Bankers on Obama's Team: "

GOLDMAN SACHS CEO turned Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wasn't the first, or the last, to use the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. Heres a short list of Obama officials who got their start in the private sector—many, like Paulson, at 'Government Sachs.'

OFFICIAL	CURRENT ROLE IN WASHINGTON	PREVIOUS ROLE ON WALL STREET
Neal Wolin	Deputy secretary of the treasury (Tim Geithner's No. 2)	Exec at one of the largest insurance and investment firms
Mark Patterson	Treasury secretary's chief of staff	Goldman Sachs lobbyist
Gene Sperling	Counselor to the treasury secretary	Made nearly $900,000 advising Goldman Sachs
Larry Summers	Obama's chief economic adviser	Made $5 million as managing director of a hedge fund
Rahm Emanuel	White House chief of staff	Made $16 million as a partner at a Chicago investment bank
Herbert Allison	Assistant secretary of the treasury (oversees TARP)	Longtime exec at Merrill Lynch; headed Fannie Mae
Kim Wallace	Assistant secretary of the treasury for legislative affairs	Managing director at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers
Karthik Ramanathan	Acting assistant treasury secretary for financial markets	Foreign exchange dealer at Goldman Sachs
Matthew Kabaker	Deputy assistant secretary of the treasury	Made $5.8 million at the Blackstone Group in 2008-2009
Lewis Alexander	Counselor to the treasury secretary	Chief economist at Citigroup; paid $2.4 million in 2008-2009
Adam Storch	Managing executive of the SEC's Division of Enforcement	VP of Goldman Sachs' Business Intelligence Group
Lee Sachs	Counselor to the treasury secretary	Made more than $3 million at a New York hedge fund
Gary Gensler	Chairman of Commodity Futures Trading Commission	18 years at Goldman Sachs, where he made partner
Michael Froman	Deputy assistant to Obama, deputy nat'l security adviser	Managing director of a Citigroup investment arm

"

(Via MotherJones.com.)

12 Better Uses for the Bailout Bucks

12 Better Uses for the Bailout Bucks: "

10 years of vaccines for kids in 117 countries

$110 billion

10 years of $10,000 bonuses for all US public school teachers

$318 billion

Sending all 2009 US high school grads to private college

$347 billion

Doubling US spending on HIV/AIDS and cancer research for 20 years

$493 billion

10 years of CO2 offsets for all Americans

$559 billion

Meeting UN anti-poverty goals by 2015

$757 billion

20 years of universal preschool in US

$860 billion

Buying a house for every homeless American

$878 billion

10 years of helping developing countries deal with the effects of climate change

$2 trillion

Buying the world an iPhone 3GS

$2 trillion

10 years of private health insurance for uninsured Americans

$2.2 trillion

Paying off 1/3 of US home mortgages

$3.5 trillion

Total: $14 trillion

"

(Via MotherJones.com.)

The Real Size of the Bailout

The Real Size of the Bailout: "

The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the tip of the iceberg of money paid out or set aside by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. In her book It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, Nomi Prins uncovers the hush-hush programs and crunches the hidden numbers to calculate the shocking actual size of the bailout: $14.4 trillion and counting."

(Via MotherJones.com.)

Is History on Paul Volcker's Side?

Is History on Paul Volcker's Side?: "

The guiding myth underpinning the reconstruction of our dangerous banking system is: Financial innovation as we know it is valuable and must be preserved. Anyone opposed to this approach is a populist, with or without a pitchfork.

Single-handedly, Paul Volcker has exploded this myth. Responding to a Wall Street insiders Future of Finance ‘report,‘ he was quoted in the WSJ yesterday as saying: ‘Wake up gentlemen. I can only say that your response is inadequate.’

Volcker has three main points, with which we whole-heartedly agree:

(1) ‘[Financial engineering] moves around the rents in the financial system, but not only this, as it seems to have vastly increased them.’

(2) ‘I have found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy.’

and most important:

(3) ‘I am probably going to win in the end.’

Volcker wants tough constraints on banks and their activities, separating the payments system--which must be protected and therefore tightly regulated--from other ‘extraneous’ functions, which includes trading and managing money.

This is entirely reasonable--although we can surely argue about details, including whether a very large ‘regulated’ bank would be able to escape the limits placed on its behavior and whether a very large ‘trading’ bank could (without running the payments system) still cause massive damage.

But how can Mr. Volcker possibly prevail? Even President Obama was reduced, yesterday, to asking the banks nicely to lend more to small business-- against which Jamie Dimon will presumably respond that such firms either (a) are not creditworthy (so give us a subsidy if you want such loans) or (b) don’t want to borrow (so give them a subsidy). (Some of the bankers, it seems, didn’t even try hard to attend--they just called it in.)

The reason for Volcker’s confidence in his victory is simple--he is moving the consensus. It’s not radicals against reasonable bankers. It’s the dean of American banking, with a bigger and better reputation than any other economic policymaker alive--and with a lot of people at his back--saying, very simply: Enough.

He says it plainly, he increasingly says it publicly, and he now says it often. He waited, on the sidelines, for his moment. And this is it.

Paul Volcker wants to stop the financial system before it blows up again. And when he persuades you--and people like you--he will win. You can help--tell everyone you know to read what Paul Volcker is saying and to pass it on.

[Cross-posted at The Baseline Scenario.]

"

(Via The Plank.)

David Paul: With Wall Street Shorting the Dollar, It is Time for Congress to Pursue Fundamental Change

David Paul: With Wall Street Shorting the Dollar, It is Time for Congress to Pursue Fundamental Change: "This year, Wall Street has shown its true colors, but the public has yet to understand the depth of the betrayal. It is not the continuing absence of lending, or jacking up credit card fees, or hiking consumer interest rates, or even the constant refrain of complaints about limitations on executive compensation. No, the greatest betrayal is that with the American economy as weak as it has been in years, with the dollar weakness threatening to unravel the international commitment to the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, Wall Street has shown no shame about attacking the currency of the nation that came to its aid."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

The strange bipartisan consensus on Obama's Nobel speech

The strange bipartisan consensus on Obama's Nobel speech: "

Reactions to Obama's Nobel speech yesterday were remarkably consistent across the political spectrum, and there were two points on which virtually everyone seemed to agree: (1) it was the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; and (2) it was the most comprehensive expression of Obamas foreign policy principles since he became President. I dont think he can be blamed for the first fact; when the Nobel Committee chose him despite his waging two wars and escalating one, it essentially forced on him the bizarre circumstance of using his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to defend the wars hes fighting. What else could he do? Ignore it? Repent?

I'm more interested in the fact that the set of principles Obama articulated yesterday was such a clear and comprehensive expression of his foreign policy that it's now being referred to as the 'Obama Doctrine' of foreign policy. About that matter, there are two arguably confounding facts to note: (1) the vast majority of leading conservatives -- from Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich to Peggy Noonan, Sarah Palin, various Kagans and other assorted neocons -- have heaped enthusiastic praise on what Obama said yesterday, i.e., on the Obama Doctrine; and (2) numerous liberals have done exactly the same. That convergence gives rise to a couple of questions:

Why are the Bush-following conservatives who ran the country for the last eight years and whose foreign policy ideas are supposedly so discredited -- including some of the nations hardest-core neocons -- finding so much to cheer in the so-called Obama Doctrine?
How could liberals and conservatives -- who have long claimed to possess such vehemently divergent and irreconcilable worldviews on foreign policy -- both simultaneously adore the same comprehensive expression of foreign policy?

Lets dispense first with several legitimate caveats. Like all good politicians, Obama is adept at paying homage to multiple, inconsistent views at once, enabling everyone to hear whatever they want in what he says while blissfully ignoring the rest. Additionally, conservatives have an interest in claiming that Obama has embraced Bush/Cheney policies even when he hasnt, because it allows them to claim vindication ('see, now that Obama gets secret briefings, he realizes we were right all along'). Moreover, there are foreign policies Obama has pursued that are genuinely disliked by neocons -- from negotiating with Iran to applying some mild pressure on Israel to the use of more conciliatory and humble rhetoric. And one of the most radical and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency -- the attack on Iraq -- was not defended by Obama, nor was the underlying principle that produced it ('preventive' war).

But all that said, its easy to understand why even intellectually honest conservatives -- including neocons -- found so much to like in 'the Obama Doctrine,' at least as it found expression yesterday. With the one caveat that Obama omitted a defense of the Iraq War, the generally Obama-supportive Kevin Drum put it this way:

I really don't think neocons have much to complain about even if Obama didn't use the opportunity to announce construction of a new generation of nuclear missiles or something. Given that he was, after all, accepting a peace prize, it was a surprisingly robust defense of war and America's military role in the world. Surprisingly Bushian, really . . .

Indeed, Obama insisted upon what he called the 'right' to wage wars 'unilaterally'; articulated a wide array of circumstances in which war is supposedly 'just' far beyond being attacked or facing imminent attack by another country; explicitly rejected the non-violence espoused by King and Ghandi as too narrow and insufficiently pragmatic for a Commander-in-Chief like Obama to embrace; endowed us with the mission to use war as a means of combating 'evil'; and hailed the U.S. for underwriting global security for the last six decades (without mentioning how our heroic efforts affected, say, the people of Vietnam, or Iraq, or Central America, or Gaza). So its not difficult to see why Rovian conservatives are embracing his speech; so much of it was devoted to an affirmation of their core beliefs.

The more difficult question to answer is why -- given what Drum described -- so many liberals found the speech so inspiring and agreeable? Is that what liberals were hoping for when they elected Obama: someone who would march right into Oslo and proudly announce to the world that we have a unilateral right to wage war when we want and to sing the virtues of war as a key instrument for peace? As Tom Friedman put it on CNN yesterday: 'He got into their faces . . . Im for getting into the Europeans face.' Is that what we needed more of?

Yesterdays speech and the odd, extremely bipartisan reaction to it underscored one of the real dangers of the Obama presidency: taking what had been ideas previously discredited as Republican or right-wing dogma and transforming them into bipartisan consensus. Its not just Republicans but Democrats that are now vested in -- and eager to justify -- the virtues of war, claims of Grave Danger posed by Islamic radicals and the need to use massive military force to combat them, indefinite detention, military commissions, extreme secrecy, full-scale immunity for government lawbreaking, and so many other doctrines once purportedly despised by Democrats but now defended by them because their leader has embraced them.

Thats exactly the process that led former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith to giddily explain that Obama has actually done more to legitimize Bush/Cheney 'counter-terrorism' policies than Bush and Cheney themselves -- because he made them bipartisan -- and Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin made the same point to The New York Times Charlie Savage back in July:

In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government.
'What we are watching,' Mr. Balkin said, 'is a liberal, centrist, Democratic version of the construction of these same governing practices.'

Most of the neocons celebrating Obamas speech yesterday made exactly that point in one way or another: if even this Democratic President, beloved by liberals, announces to the world that we have the unilateral right to wage war and that doing so creates Peace, and does so at a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, doesnt that end the argument for good?

Much of the liberal praise for Obamas speech yesterday focused on how eloquent, sophisticated, nuanced, complex, philosophical, contemplative and intellectual it was. And, looked at a certain way, it was all of those things -- like so many Obama speeches are. After eight years of enduring a President who spoke in simplistic Manichean imperatives and bullying decrees, many liberals are understandably joyous over having a President who uses their language and the rhetorical approach that resonates with them.

But thats the real danger. Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices. Just as George Bushs Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obamas complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same. To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on 'just war' doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance. When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world."

(Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.)

A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech

A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech: "The Obama speech was about what I expected: on the one hand on the other, I reject false choices, needle-threading 'pragmatism.' I have to say I find this rhetorical approach increasingly wearying. There always seems to be the implication, hidden between the lines, that only the author of the speech truly understands how complicated the world is. During the race speech, that was appropriate and affecting: there are few people who've experienced race in as much of its full complexity as Barack Obama. But I don't think the same thing holds for war and peace.

The main thrust of the speech was that in a fallen, difficult world, sometimes war is necessary to secure peace. If we want peace, we have to be hard-headed and clear-eyed. Since Obama was positioning himself as a practical advocate of peace, I was curious to hear what David Cortright thought about it.

Cortright is the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame has been advocating peace since he was in the Army in Vietnam and organized his comrades against the war. He went on to write 'Soldiers in Revolt' about that experience and then was a lead organizer in the nuclear freeze movement. In the 1990s he and his colleague George Lopez wrote often and influentially about non-violent alternatives to war and their support for sanctions in Iraq earned them withering criticism from Nation reader who saw the sanctions as a moral abomination. (I wrote about the sanctions here)

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Cortright helped lead Win Without War, conceived of as a'mainstream' alternative to ANSWER and other anti-war groups.
So Cortright's credentials as a pragmatic advocate of peace (whatever, in the final analysis, that means) are pretty impeccable: no starry-eyed, weak-kneed, incorrigible idealist, he! I emailed to ask him for his reaction, and he wrote back right away. 'I found the Nobel speech disappointing.' He continued: 'To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president's characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete.'

His full response follows:
The president asserted that US military policy has helped to 'underwrite global security.' More accurate would be an admission that many of our adventures have created global insecurity. Vietnam, the wars in Central America in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq, countless interventions by the CIA--these and other actions have sown suffering and insecurity. The US has supported democracy in some settings but very often we have subverted democracy and overthrown legitimately elected democratic regimes, in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), etc.

The president invoked just war principles but showed a shallow understanding of the criteria. The most important principle of just war theory is a presumption against the use of force, a belief that war is almost always unjust and can be justified only under the most dire circumstances and only if strict ethical criteria are satisfied. He mentioned a few of the criteria, without probing them in depth, but did mention the standard of ‘probability of success.' Under that criterion, the war in Afghanistan cannot be judged just, since there is very little probability that the war can be pursued to achieve military victory, however that is defined.

The president's assertions about Afghanistan did not acknowledge the fact that war is an inappropriate means of combating terrorism. The Rand Corporation study of 2008 on how terrorist groups end found that military force was responsible for ending terrorist groups in only 7 per cent of the cases. Political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent) were the primary factors accounting for the end of terrorist groups. The military's own counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a campaign that is 80 per cent nonmilitary. The US effort in Afghanistan is the reverse, more than 80 per cent military.

Peace demands responsibility and sacrifice, yes, but it is built primarily through nonmilitary means. The president mentioned some of these, but he failed to mention that US foreign policy systematically undervalues these approaches. In Afghanistan the US is spending far more on military approaches than on development and humanitarian assistance."

(Via The Nation: Top Stories.)

Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone

Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone: "There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a 'moral hazard' creeping over his administration."

(Via .)

Kristen Breitweiser: President Obama, Find Peace Through Truth

Kristen Breitweiser: President Obama, Find Peace Through Truth: "

Let me state this at the outset: I do not think President Obama deserves his Nobel Peace Prize. I believe that awards and honors should be earned by concrete past actions, not vacuous future hopes. But I listened to Obama's acceptance speech anyway.

I was immediately struck by the amount of times the word 'war' was used at a gathering honoring peace. The layered irony was, of course, that Obama who had just committed 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and who was receiving the Peace Prize, was the very same person choosing to pepper his speech about peace with the word 'war.'

For a few minutes I even wondered whether Obama's speech was somehow swapped and this was the speech intended for his West Point audience last week, since in certain sections Obama sounded downright hawkish.

Am I the only person concerned about Obama echoing former President Bush when he said, 'I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation'?

Or how about his twisted, downright baffling logic on 'holy wars' when he stated, 'They remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or even a person of one's own faith.' Did Obama just say that in order to really do justice to fighting a 'holy war' you have to annihilate everything in your path -- the pregnant woman, the Red Cross worker, and all? Did he just give the green light to Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and Hamas to go all out? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is he talking about here?

Nevertheless, I'm always one to look for opportunity. So, let's focus on one particular passage of Obama's speech that might provide fertile ground for any future warrants of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama said:

First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.

Now, I don't know which specific regimes Obama had in mind when he mentioned 'exacting a real price' and regimes 'being held accountable' but I sure hope the Bush regime makes it to the top of his shortlist.

A Truth Commission would show the world that Americans take the prospect of peace sincerely. That we do not advocate unnecessary, illegal, and wrongful war. And, that if you break the rules and laws of our Constitution, you will be held accountable--regardless of who you are.

Because what better way for Obama to begin his labors of peace on the world stage than by impaneling a Truth Commission to investigate the wrongdoings and illegal actions of the Bush administration regarding their pre-emptive war with Iraq and their post-9/11 torture policies?"

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Norman Solomon: Mr. President, War Is Not Peace

Norman Solomon: Mr. President, War Is Not Peace: "

Eloquence in Oslo cannot change the realities of war.

As President Obama neared the close of his Nobel address, he called for 'the continued expansion of our moral imagination.' Yet his speech was tightly circumscribed by the policies that his oratory labored to justify.

Lofty rationales easily tell us that warfare is striving for the noble goal of peace. But the rationales scarcely intersect with actual war. The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it.

A few months ago, when I visited an Afghan office for women's empowerment, staffers took me to a pilot project in one of Kabul's poorest neighborhoods. There, women were learning small-scale business skills while also gaining personal strength and mutual support.

Two-dozen women, who ranged in age from early 20s to late 50s, talked with enthusiasm about the workshops. They were desperate to change their lives. When it was time to leave, I had a question: What should I tell people in the United States, if they ask what Afghan women want most of all?

After several women spoke, the translator summed up. 'They all said that the first priority is peace.'

In Afghanistan, after 30 years under the murderous twin shadows of poverty and war, the only lifeline is peace.

From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But 'peace' is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.

Just a couple of days before Obama stepped to the podium in Oslo, the general running the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan spoke to a congressional committee in Washington about the president's recent pledge to begin withdrawal of U.S. troops in July 2011. 'I don't believe that is a deadline at all,' Stanley McChrystal said.

War is not peace. It never has been. It never will be.

Actual policy always, in the real world, profoundly trumps even the best rhetoric. And so, for instance, when President Obama's Nobel speech proclaimed that 'America cannot act alone' and called for 'standards that govern the use of force,' the ringing declaration clashed with the announcement last month that he will not sign the international Mine Ban Treaty.

As Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams pointed out, 'Obama's position on land mines calls into question his expressed views on multilateralism, respect for international humanitarian law and disarmament. How can he, with total credibility, lead the world to nuclear disarmament when his own country won't give up even land mines?'

At the outset of his speech in Oslo, the president spoke of his 'acute sense of the cost of armed conflict.' Well, there's acute and then there's acute. I think of the people I met and saw in Kabul who are missing limbs, and the countless more whose lives have been shattered by war.

In the name of pragmatism, Obama spoke of 'the world as it is' and threw a cloak of justification over the grisly escalation in Afghanistan by insisting that 'war is sometimes necessary' -- but generalities do nothing to mitigate the horrors of war being endured by others.

President Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize while delivering -- to the world as it is -- a pro-war speech. The context instantly turned the speech's insights into flackery for more war."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Lawrence Korb: Paying for Our Wars

Lawrence Korb: Paying for Our Wars: "

Now that President Obama has decided to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan the question of how to pay for this increased level of operations has arisen. In fact the question of how to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should have been raised shortly after the attacks of 9-11 when the Bush administration decided to overthrow the regimes in both of those countries.

Throughout our history whenever this nation became involved in a significant conflict, its leaders conscripted men to ensure that its forces had enough people to wage the war successfully and raised taxes to insure that the cost of the wars would not be passed on to future generations and that the American people, as well as the men and women in uniform, would have to sacrifice to achieve the objectives of the war.

In fact at the height of the war in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson balanced the budget by raising taxes and cutting some government programs. Harry Truman did the same during the Korean War. And, in real dollars in both of those wars, defense spending was not as high as it is today.

But in conducting what the Bush administration labeled the war on terror, which has involved sending some two million men and women into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, this country has done neither. As a result the men and women in our armed services, especially the ground forces, have had to serve multiple tours in the war zones without sufficient time at home to recover from the strains of combat and some 200,000 volunteers have had their terms of enlistment extended involuntarily.

Moreover, while about 5,000 service personnel have been killed and another 50,000 have suffered physical wounds, another 400,000 have developed mental problems. Moreover, to get enough volunteers to fight these endless wars, the Army has had to lower its standards and increase its baseline pay and benefits substantially. Finally, suicide rates, divorce, and spousal abuse among the veterans returning from multiple combat tours have skyrocketed.

The direct costs of funding these conflicts now totals about $1 trillion while the indirect costs will probably amount to $5 trillion when one adds in veterans benefits, long-term care of the physically and mentally wounded, and interest on the national debt. President Bush, who inherited a budget surplus from President Clinton, not only did not raise taxes, he cut them, and squandered the surplus while accumulating more debt that all of his 42 predecessors combined, almost all of which was borrowed from countries like China.

Not drafting people or raising taxes to pay for these conflicts is both a moral and a security failure. Not only is the current policy of not activating the selective service system unfair to today's volunteers, but running the wars on a credit card saddles future generations with the cost of paying for wars they had no part in deciding. Moreover, by borrowing money from a rising power like China, we have undermined our ability to balance its influence in the Middle East, Africa and East Asia.

Finally, because most Americans did not have to make any sacrifices to undertake these conflicts, they failed to ask the right questions or hold their leaders fully accountable for waging these wars. If, for example, before invading Iraq, President Bush had reinstituted conscription and levied a 10 percent income surtax, would 60 percent of Americans have supported the conflict without UN authorization and would only a handful of senators have read the whole National Intelligence Estimate, which showed that the case for invading Iraq was dubious at best?

When America goes to war it should not just be the military but the American people. Never again should we go to Wal-Mart while the soldiers go to battle. Paying for the increased force level in Afghanistan will be a step in the right direction.

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

"

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Sarah Palin's brand of populism is dangerous and deceptive.

Sarah Palin's brand of populism is dangerous and deceptive.: "Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant 'independent.' (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn't disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn't exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left the University of Hawaii after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: 'They were a minority type thing and it wasn't glamorous. So she came home.' And so on. As I tried to summarize the repeated tactic:

[more ...]"

(Via Fighting Words.)

The Militarization of America

The Militarization of America: "Obama's decision to grant the generals' request for Afghanistan should come as no surprise. William R. Polk on how the Pentagon came to run Washington.
As President Obama illustrated in his speech this week on Afghanistan at West Point, he has chosen..."

(Via The Daily Beast - Blogs and Stories.)

Paul Craig Roberts: The Obama Puppet

Paul Craig Roberts: The Obama Puppet: "The World's Least Powerful Man

The Obama Puppet

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so.

The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, ‘No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.’

And the mere president has to say, ‘Yes, Sir!’

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the ‘war on terror’ and ‘socialized medicine.’

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby ‘getting entitlements under control.’

Entitlements is a right-wing word used to cast aspersion on the few things that the government did, in the distant past, for citizens. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are denigrated as ‘entitlements.’ The right-wing goes on endlessly about Social Security and Medicare as if they were welfare give-aways to shiftless people who refuse to look after themselves, whereas in actual fact citizens are vastly overcharged for the meager benefits with a 15% tax on their wages and salaries.

Indeed, for decades now the federal government has been funding its wars and military budgets with the surplus revenues collected by the Social Security tax on labor.

To claim, as the right-wing does, that we can’t afford the only thing in the entire budget that has consistently produced a revenue surplus indicates that the real agenda is to drive the mere citizen into the ground.

The real entitlements are never mentioned. The ‘defense’ budget is an entitlement for the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned us 50 years ago. A person has to be crazy to believe that the United States, ‘the world’s only superpower,’ protected by oceans on its East and West and by puppet states on its North and South, needs a ‘defense’ budget larger than the military spending of the rest of the world combined.

The military budget is nothing but an entitlement for the military/security complex. To hide this fact, the entitlement is disguised as protection against ‘enemies’ and passed through the Pentagon.

I say cut out the middleman and simply allocate a percentage of the federal budget to the military/security complex. This way we won’t have to concoct reasons for invading other countries and go to war in order for the military/security complex to get its entitlement. It would be a lot cheaper just to give them the money outright, and it would save a lot of lives and grief at home and abroad.

The US invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with American national interests. It had to do with armaments profits and with eliminating an obstacle to Israeli territorial expansion. The cost of the war, aside from the $3 trillion, was over 4,000 dead Americans, over 30,000 wounded and maimed Americans, tens of thousands of broken American marriages and lost careers, one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and a destroyed country.

All of this was done for the profits of the military/security complex and to make paranoid Israel, armed with 200 nuclear weapons, feel ‘secure.’

My proposal would make the military/security complex even more wealthy as the companies would get the money without having to produce the weapons. Instead, all the money could go for multi-million dollar bonuses and dividend payouts to shareholders. No one, at home or abroad, would have to be killed, and the taxpayer would be better off.

No American national interest is served by the war in Afghanistan. As the former UK Ambassador Craig Murray disclosed, the purpose of the war is to protect Unocal’s interest in the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. The cost of the war is many times greater than Unocal’s investment in the pipeline. The obvious solution is to buy out Unocal and give the pipeline to the Afghans as partial compensation for the destruction we have inflicted on that country and its population, and bring the troops home.

The reason my sensible solutions cannot be effected is that the lobbies think that their entitlements would not survive if they were made obvious. They think that if the American people knew that the wars were being fought to enrich the armaments and oil industries, the people would put a halt to the wars.

In actual fact, the American people have no say about what ‘their’ government does. Polls of the public show that half or more of the American people do not support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and do not support President Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Yet, the occupations and wars continue. According to General Stanley McChrystal, the additional 40,000 troops are enough to stalemate the war, that is, to keep it going forever, the ideal situation for the armaments lobby.

The people want health care, but the government does not listen.

The people want jobs, but Wall Street wants higher priced stocks and forces American firms to offshore the jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.

The American people have no effect on anything. They can affect nothing. They have become irrelevant like Obama. And they will remain irrelevant as long as organized interest groups can purchase the US government.

The inability of the American democracy to produce any results that the voters want is a demonstrated fact. The total unresponsiveness of government to the people is conservatism’s contribution to American democracy. Some years ago there was an effort to put government back into the hands of the people by constraining the ability of organized interest groups to pour enormous amounts of money into political campaigns and, thus, obligate the elected official to those whose money elected him. Conservatives said that any restraints would be a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

The same ‘protectors’ of ‘free speech’ had no objection to the Israel Lobby’s passage of the ‘hate speech’ bill, which has criminalized criticism of Israel’s genocidal treatment of the Palestinians and continuing theft of their lands.

In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups.

Obama seems destined to be a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him.

The Republicans are grooming Palin. Our first female president, following our first black president, will complete the transition to an American police state by arresting critics and protesters of Washington’s immoral foreign and domestic policies, and she will complete the destruction of America’s reputation abroad.

Russia’s Putin has already compared the US to Nazi Germany, and the Chinese premier has likened the US to an irresponsible, profligate debtor.

Increasingly the rest of the world sees the US as the sole source of all of its problems. Germany has lost the chief of its armed forces and its defense minister, because the US convinced or pressured, by hook or crook, the German government to violate its Constitution and to send troops to fight for Unocal’s interest in Afghanistan. The Germans had pretended that their troops were not really fighting, but were were engaged in a ‘peace-keeping operation.’ This more or less worked until the Germans called in an air strike that murdered 100 women and children lined up for a fuel allotment.

The British are investigating their leading criminal, former prime minister Tony Blair, and his deception of his own cabinet in order to do Bush’s bidding and provide some cover for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. The UK investigators have been denied the ability to bring criminal charges, but the issue of war based entirely on orchestrated deception and lies is getting a hearing. It will reverberate throughout the world, and the world will note that there is no corresponding investigation in the US, the country that originated the False War.

Meanwhile, the US investment banks, which have wrecked the financial stability of many governments, including that of the US, continue to control, as they have done since the Clinton administration, US economic and financial policy. The world has suffered terribly from the Wall Street gangsters, and now looks upon America with a
critical eye.

The United States no longer commands the respect it enjoyed under President Ronald Reagan or President George Herbert Walker Bush. World polls show that the US and its puppet master are regarded as the two greatest threats to peace. Washington and Israel outrank on the most dangerous list the crazy regime in North Korea.

The world is beginning to see America as a country that needs to go away. When the dollar is over-inflated by a Washington unable to pay its bills, will the world be motivated by greed and try to save us in order to save its investments, or will it say, thank God, good riddance.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published in January by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com"

(Via CounterPunch.)

A Libertarian Scream

A Libertarian Scream: "

Radley Balko says we played right into bin Ladens hands:

He wanted a holy war. We gave him two. We’ve compromised our values,
rolled back civil liberties, and let our politicians generally scare
the crap out of us whenever they want new powers. Oh, and we’ve let the
bastard live to gloat about it all. [...] And our war in Afghanistan is
looking more and more like the Soviet war bin Laden was hoping to
emulate. We’re now well into our ninth year in Afghanistan. The Soviets
pulled out after 10. With Obama’s surge, we’ll be close to 100,000 U.S.
troops in the country next year. That’s about the number the Soviets
had deployed at the height of their own war. About the only difference
between the two wars is that technology has shifted more of our war
casualties from the killed column to the maimed. I guess that’s
something.

Some kind of over-reaction was in many ways understandable (although I should have kept my wits about me). But to sustain the over-reaction, to double-down on it, for years after it was obvious we had walked bang into a trap: this is not so understandable.

But look: Obama is pledged to remove most troops from Iraq in the next two years and to begin to remove most of the surge troops from Afghanistan in 2011. If you think of surging as a form of face-saving before extricating ourselves, then the prospects are not so bleak. But the acid moment will be when and if Iraq and Afghanistan implode after US withdrawal. The key then will be to keep out."

(Via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

Here We Go Again

Here We Go Again: "

By Robert Scheer

After 30 years of failure, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief, the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose.

READ THE WHOLE ITEM

"

(Via Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines.)

The War

The War: "I haven’t seen anyone even really attempt to persuade me that this policy makes sense in cost-benefit terms. And I think the reaction to David Obey’s ‘war tax’ idea is telling—nobody seems to really think there are national interests at stake that are critical enough to be worth paying slightly higher taxes for. But if a war’s not worth paying for, how can it be worth fighting? And if we don’t pay for the war in the FY 2010 budget, we still need to pay back the loans."

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)