The result is that in this democratic nation, presidents behave like dictators, doing whatever they like, and an uninformed citizenry is in no position to stop them. If our newspapers are nothing more than propaganda sheets, there is little reason to pay attention to them beyond predicting when they will allow a president to begin carrying out bad deeds.
The media drumbeat against Iran is a disgrace, but it tells us that the attack can’t be too far away. Iran is not America’s worst enemy. Our worst enemies are right here, smiling as they read from teleprompters or quoting from anonymous administration sources. Once again they are working hand in glove to help another president destroy a country and kill many, many people.
If in the year 2000 the U.S. president had told the American people that the government would soon begin using robot planes to track people, including U.S. citizens, all over the world, and would reserve to itself the right to kill them without trial, it is safe to say there would have been an enormous uproar. But that is exactly what is happening today, and nobody cares. The majority of Americans, including those who were opposed to the war in Iraq, have no problems with their government killing at will, so long as the killing is done in the name of “national security.”
How did this happen? In retrospect, the war in Afghanistan was the prime culprit. That endless, Sisyphean war was the thin end of the wedge. In that murky, shifting struggle, it was normal for the U.S. to arrogate to itself the right to kill the Taliban wherever they were in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Once that precedent was established, it was an small step to killing bad guys in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya.
And so, by imperceptible steps we arrived at the place we are now, where 77 percent of liberals support President Obama’s vastly expanded killer drone campaign, where an American citizen can be remotely vaporized at the touch of a button and no one cares. The war on Afghanistan set the precedent that shaped the entire “war on terror” paradigm. The chimera of “safety from terrorism” led us by easy stages to begin waging dirty war across the globe — changing the definition of war, eroding moral and legal standards and greatly increasing the likelihood of ugly future consequences.
snip
It’s understandable why the dirty war has few critics. Drone attacks and special forces operations are cheap, out of sight, and involve low casualties (none, at least immediately, when drones are used). Politically, the dirty war inoculates Obama against GOP charges that he is “soft on terrorism:” not only is he continuing to prosecute a renamed version of Bush’s “war on terror,” he has significantly escalated it. And now that the dirty war has been launched, it is politically almost impossible to stop it: what president, Democratic or Republican (Ron Paul is the exception, but he is not going to win the election) would dare to stop blowing up alleged militants, knowing that if there was subsequently a successful terrorist attack, he or she would be held responsible?
snip
So why stop using such an effective instrument?
The answer is simple: Because it is not effective. Far from making us safer, the permanent dirty war is endangering our national security. It may be tactically effective, but it is strategically disastrous. Unfortunately, there’s no way to prove this. But there are some compelling arguments for why it is true. And it would be a start if progressives and Democrats would at least start to question the wisdom of the U.S. playing God all over the world.
Finally, there is the fact that our dirty war tactics are increasingly hard to distinguish from the terror attacks they are intended to forestall. (There is a bizarre and disturbing parallel between the destruction of the World Trade Center by planes that suddenly slammed into it, and the equally apocalyptic death from above that rains down upon the victims of drone strikes who are incinerated in their cars without ever even hearing the sound of the incoming missile. I am not equating the morality of the two attacks, only their shared spectacle, but many people in Middle East make no such distinction — and some will burn to replay the spectacle on American soil.) Obama’s extra-legal assassination of the radical cleric and American citizen Anwar Awlaki tacitly accepts the terrorist credo that might makes right and morality is simply a fig leaf covering naked power. This makes it impossible for America to take the high moral ground, and puts us on a slippery slope: if it’s OK to kill Awlaki today, why shouldn’t it be OK to kill some foreign scientist we deem dangerous to our national security tomorrow? By embracing the law of the jungle, we have opened the door to hell.
The question Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, asked about Iraq is still the central one: Is our dirty war creating more terrorists than it’s killing? And there is every reason to believe that it is.
It is tempting to see our new way of waging war as having no consequences. A functionary sitting in a mountain in Colorado pushes a button, blows up three people in a field in Pakistan, and then goes to the bathroom. Suppose the brothers of those three guys are mad at America – so what? They’re in Pakistan. What are they going to do? If they start to make trouble, we’ll blow them up too.
This complacent attitude towards the consequences of war has deep roots both in American history and contemporary culture. Because of geography and military strength, America never been subjected to the horrors of foreign invasion. (The War of 1812 doesn’t count.) Our virtual culture of video games and disembodied online interactions, in which “communities” can be composed of people who have never met and messy, all-too-human consequences can be avoided or erased with the touch of a mouse, turns war into an electronic game of whack-a-mole. And, of course, fewer and fewer Americans have ever served in the military or even seen a dead body.
All these factors make war weightless. For Americans, “fighting terrorists” on a permanent basis by blowing people up here and there across the globe is just something a responsible country does, the same way that a good dog owner remembers to give his pooch his flea medicine.
But war isn’t weightless. War means exploding bodies, and guts hanging out, and bloody scraps of flesh, and brains spattered on the ground. The people on the receiving ends of drone attacks are no more two-dimensional than the people in the World Trade Center. Their relatives and friends and acquaintances will not see them as pixels.
snip
Endless war is much more likely to result in the slow, inexorable growth of hatred against us. Until we abandon the illusion that we can make ourselves completely safe, we will only succeed in making ourselves less so. As a great president said when facing an infinitely more dangerous adversary than we face today, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Like frogs placed in slowly boiling water, we have been lulled into seeing our current situation, in which we arrogate to ourselves the right to kill without formally being at war, as normal. But it is not normal. It represents a radical break with the way we have made war throughout our entire history. After 9/11, George W. Bush rashly launched a “war on terror,” Barack Obama, in his folly, continued to prosecute it, and the American people accepted it. This permanent, undeclared war may appear innocuous, but it is a ticking bomb.
No one knows when that bomb will go off. The risk is not quantifiable. But that is precisely the point. War, no matter how small and sanitized, is the most unquantifiable thing in the world. We have, in effect, decided to play God, reaching down from our high-tech heaven to kill whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want. We have gotten away with it so far. But if we know anything from human history, it is that bad things happen to people who try to become God.
US military officials confirmed Saturday that US drones are flying over Syria, as fighting spreads inside the country and US officials discuss military or “humanitarian” intervention to topple Syrian President Bashar al Assad.
The drone flights, which flagrantly violate Syrian air space, include a “good number” of both military and US intelligence drones, according to US defense officials. These officials said the drones’ mission is to obtain “intercepts of Syrian government and military communications in an effort to ‘make the case for a widespread international response.’”
The SNC is an amalgam of CIA hirelings, Islamic fundamentalists and disaffected former officials of the Assad regime in Syria, sponsored by Turkey and the United States in a maneuver similar to the creation of the National Transitional Council in Libya, which provided a pretext for the US-NATO war against that country.
snip
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated that the meeting in Tunis was directed at Syria’s international allies, as well as against the Assad regime itself. She said, “We’ll send a clear message to Russia, China and others who are still unsure about how to handle the increasing violence but are up until now unfortunately making the wrong choices.”
Despite Clinton’s demagogy about demonstrating “that the brave Syrian people need our support and solidarity,” the outcome of the US-led campaign against Syria will be an intensification of the civil war in Syria and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Syrians.
The United States is finished with the business of sending large land armies to invade and occupy countries on the Eurasian mainland. Robert Gates, when still Secretary of Defense, made the definitive statement on that subject. The United States is now in the business of using missile-armed drones and special operations forces to eliminate anyone (not excluding U.S. citizens) the president of the United States decides has become an intolerable annoyance. Under President Obama, such attacks have proliferated.
This is America’s new MO.
Paraphrasing a warning issued by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post dispatch succinctly summarized what it implied: “The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to U.S. national security, anywhere in the world.”
Furthermore, acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this supposed right without warning, without regard to claims of national sovereignty, without Congressional authorization, and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few other members of the national security apparatus. The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred. And applaud we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two neatly placed kill shots. Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.
The country’s pursuit of its alleged national interests is being directed by a bunch of thugs in suits who have taken it upon themselves to label as “radicals” those citizen heroes who point out this fact. They are afraid that more and more citizens might see the real barbaric nature of their policies and call them to account. So, to prevent this, they criminalize the truth tellers.
snip
When one cannot determine what is real or is not real, there are perhaps some rules that can be followed so as to encourage policy makers to act in ways that will minimize mistakes. For instance, in cases of uncertainty citizens should:
1. Be very skeptical of what the government and media tell them is real. Remember the past disasters (most recently the invasion of Iraq) that easy acceptance of such portrayals of alleged reality have caused. Concerned citizens owe it to themselves and their nation to seek multiple sources of information.
2. Demand that policy makers initially act on the basis of a best case scenario even as they prepare for the worst. Most of the time the “expert” advice we get on foreign threats is either ideologically driven and therefore exaggerated or just plain wrong (for instance, the case of Vietnam), or is driven by the agenda of some lobby or special interest (for instance, the case of Iraq, the threat from Iran, or the “sainted” status of the Israelis and the “terrorist” status of the Palestinians). The resulting worst case depictions of reality are almost always inaccurate and generally lead to unnecessary death and destruction.
3. Demand that, in foreign relations, diplomacy always be pursued first and foremost. War should be the very last resort because it is truly a radical and extreme undertaking of which few policy makers have any direct experience. If they did, they would be much more hesitant to commit their fellow citizens to it.
4. Demand punishment for those who knowingly lie and break the laws governing international relations and human rights (such as the Geneva Conventions and laws prohibiting torture). There are good reasons why these laws exist. Not to enforce them is to condone a return to barbarism.
Oddly enough, in a democracy citizens who do not participate in political discussion, who do not attempt to influence policy, end up having responsibility for whatever policies their government takes up. This is true because in a democracy if a citizen chooses not to be political he or she abdicates their potential influence to those who do act politically. It is only those who fight for what they think is right and real yet do not win who can say they are not responsible for the behavior of a government they actively opposed. So if you want to be able to say this you cannot retreat into a wholly private existence. If you do so others, who you might find to be thugs in suits, will more likely succeed. And in the end, they will act in your name.
Once upon a time, way back in the stone ages, when Noam Chomsky was first writing about these propaganda techniques in Manufacturing Consent, our leaders felt the need to conceal – or at least sugar-coat – these Orwellian principles. It was assumed that the American people genuinely needed to feel like they were on the right side of things, and so the foreign powers we clashed with were always depicted as being the instigators and aggressors, while our role in provoking those responses was always disguised or at least played down.
But now the public openly embraces circular thinking like, “Any country that squawks when we threaten to bomb it is a threat that needs to be wiped out.” Maybe I’m mistaken, but I have to believe that there was a time when ideas like that sounded weird to the American ear. Now they seem to make sense to almost everyone here at home, and that to me is just as a scary as Achmedinejad.
The same rubbish came down the propaganda pipeline when the Empire decided it was time to get rid of Gaddafi. But what do those on the left who bought into this R2P nonsense have to say today I wonder? The latest casualty figures I’ve read for ‘protecting the human rights’ of the Libyan people is that at least 30,000 people have been killed, 50,000 more wounded, and some 4,000 are still missing, all the result of NATO’s R2P bombs. And these are figures released by the ruling NTC (there are also an estimated 8000 alleged Gaddafi supporters in jail with verified accounts of widespread torture and summary executions taking place under the NATO-imposed ‘democracy’). Is this the kind of price those on the left are willing to see others pay? Obviously they are, they are not on the receiving end.
Many suspect that the Israel Lobby used its clout with TV advertisers to silence critics of the Israeli government’s efforts to lead Washington to war with Iran. Regardless, the point before us is that the voice of the mainstream media is now uniform.
Americans hear one voice, one message, and the message is propaganda. Dissent is tolerated only on such issues as to whether employer-paid health benefits should pay for contraceptive devices. Constitutional rights have been replaced with rights to free condoms.
The western media demonizes those at whom Washington points a finger. The lies pour forth to justify Washington’s naked aggression: the Taliban are conflated with al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi is a terrorist and, even worse, fortified his troops with Viagra in order to commit mass rape against Libyan women. President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate....However, in Washington facts don’t count. Only the material interests of powerful interest groups matter.
At the moment the american Ministry of Truth is splitting its time between lying about Iran and lying about Syria. ...
snip
In other words, according to the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US National Intelligence Estimate, and the current Secretary of Defense, there is no evidence that Iran has nukes or is making nukes. Yet, Obama has placed illegal sanctions on Iran and continues to threaten Iran with military attack on the basis of an accusation that is contradicted by all known evidence.
How can such a thing happen? It can happen because there is no Helen Thomas, who also was eliminated by the Israel Lobby, to question, as a member of the White House press, President Obama why he placed war-like sanctions on Iran when his own CIA and his own Secretary of Defense, along with the IAEA, report that there is no basis for the sanctions.
The idea that the US is a democracy when it most definitely does not have a free watchdog press is laughable. But the media is not laughing. It is lying. Just like the government, every time the US mainstream media opens its mouth or writes one word, it is lying. Indeed, its corporate masters pay its employees to tell lies. That is their job. Tell the truth, and you are history like Buchanan and Napolitano and Helen Thomas.
snip
Assad was an eye doctor in England until his father died, and he was called back to head the troubled government. Washington and Tel Aviv have demonized Assad for refusing to be their puppet. Another sore point is the Russian naval base at Tartus. Washington is desperate to evict the Russians from their only Mediterranean base in order to make the Mediterranean an american lake. Washington, inculcated with neocon visions of world empire, wants its own mare nostrum.
If the Soviet Union were still extant, Washington’s designs on Tartus would be suicidal. However, Russia is politically and militarily weaker than the Soviet Union. Washington has infiltrated Russia with NGOs that work against Russia’s interests and will disrupt the upcoming elections. Moreover, Washington-funded “color revolutions” have turned former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into Washington’s puppet states. Shorn of communist ideology, Washington does not expect Russia to push the nuclear button. Thus, Russia is there for the taking.
China is a more difficult problem. Washington’s plan is to cut China off from independent sources of energy. China’s oil investment in eastern Libya is the reason? Gaddafi was overthrown, and oil is one of the main reasons that Washington has targeted Iran. China has large oil investments in Iran and gets 20% of its oil from Iran. Closing down Iran, or converting it into Washington’s puppet state, closes down 20% of the Chinese economy.
Who benefits from the organized violence of war? War is enormously profitable for US “defense” industries. These industries shape US governance and foreign policy. This is true whether the target was Viet Nam or the Pentagon’s current land and air wars elsewhere in Asia.
snip
Without designated “bad guys,” corporate war profiteering would wither. Negotiation risks leading to a peace settlement; peace is the enemy of the war industry. The war industry, through lobbying and by financing election campaigns, buys and sells Congressional representatives. These kept men and women, in cahoots with the Pentagon and with the Executive branch, keep the war pot boiling.
snip
What is the role of nationalism and patriotism – each a type of tribalism, each promoted by imperialism — in fostering war? Considering how many of the victims are non-white or Islamic, what role does white racism and “Christianity” play in the mindsets that make mass killing so casual?
By refusing to close Guantanamo and by authorizing the Reaper drone’s extrajudicial and civilian killings, Congress and the Pentagon assure that whole swaths of the Middle East and Central Asia will long remain hostile to the US. Since US contempt for the “other” isn’t a policy calculated to “win hearts and minds”; i.e., to quell hostilities, what is it calculated to do?
snip
To mobilize the US population to support its interventions and invasions, the Bush administration eagerly seized on 9/11 as a pretext for its phony “war on terrorism.” I say “phony” because many questions about 9/11 are studiously avoided...
Although “terrorism” is incessantly invoked by politicians and the corporate media, defining the word seems to be taboo. Surely such a taboo will persist as long as the Pentagon – with its gunships, napalm, Reaper drones, white phosphorus, cluster bombs, hellfire missiles, cruise missiles, etc., etc. – keeps raining terror on poorly defended peoples.
snip
And can’t we see our complicity in our own oppression? Don’t we contribute to militarism through the federal taxes we pay – about half of which goes to the Pentagon? The Pentagon, of course, then funnels much of this swag to its corporate cronies.
Are we so caught up in personal debt, are our lifestyles too snared in addiction, distraction and co-optation, that we can’t think straight? Are we so snared that our hearts have gone AWOL?
Don’t we give a damn that our children are inheriting an increasingly depleted and dangerous world? Or that our nation’s much vaunted democracy – like our proud Judeo-Christianity – risks becoming a soulless sham...
[cross-posted on correntewire and sacramento for democracy]
--------------
I enjoy a good clip show.
A few years ago I would not be anywhere near as receptive. But, now I am . I appreciate your blog a lot. I hope to someday really have the time and energy to delve even deeper. Thanks, Libby.
It should be called a War for Terrorism.
I'll have to read the whole thing later but this thing with Iran is par for the course and idiotic as you know.
Excellent summary of viewpoints of the failures of the mainstream media to report on world or US government affairs. The only good news I can see is that Americans are abandoning newspapers, news magazines and network news in droves. This is the main reason major dailies and magazines like Newsweek are going bankrupt. Does that mean people are turning to independent news sources on the Internet for information? I suspect some are, and this is the main motivation for Obama's determination to regulate Internet content.
Follow the money. The money is the reason our country has been co opted. I know that references to Orwell are passe but, they are apt for our world today. Are we at war with Eastasia or Eurasia?
There are always wars, or the rumors of wars...wage peace.
Although I'm inclined to question some of the numbers, particularly in Libya, everything you've posted reads like something from George Orwell's 1984..." double speak" runs rampant... R&R
No comments:
Post a Comment