Wednesday, 08 September 2010 09:57

On Thursday, August 19th, show up at 5:30 p.m. at Local 16 on U Street to help David Segal get elected to Congress from Rhode Island.

There are lots of ways to change Congress that falsely appear easy, that would alter the rules and patterns of behavior if only Congress were already fixed and willing to make the changes, or if we owned the television networks, or if people could suddenly hear what they're paid good money never to hear. But I've got a way to change Congress that is actually easy.

Congress lacks leadership. There is a progressive caucus, but it has never fought for anything. It doesn't fund its members' campaigns. It doesn't withhold votes needed for passing bills. It just does rhetoric. There are committees, but they don't subpoena, they don't send the police to pick up witnesses, they don't fine witnesses who refuse to answer questions. Congress thinks oversight was an oversight. If asked to put future generations into debt to fund wars, Congress asks "Would you like a side of drones with that?" Congress doesn't want power.

But what would happen if we were to put some people in Congress who would stand up and fight like you and I would? For example: David Segal. Here's a guy who says that if we put him in Congress he will vote against any bills that fund our foreign wars, and he'll work to de-federalize the National Guard. Asked how he'll keep that up if the Democratic Party promises him a million dollars for his campaign and various other rewards for funding wars, Segal replies by describing how he'll push back:

"In Rhode Island I've tried to develop alternative structures for legislators to lean on when the leadership makes such threats. I am the lead organizer for our progressive caucus. I founded a political action committee to support members of our progressive caucus so that if funding from sources dries up at leadership's request because something was done to offend them, that we would have at least some degree of money to fall back on to help fund our campaigns nonetheless. We've run ten, twelve races relatively modestly in the last cycle and hopefully we'll be able to do something in the forthcoming cycle."

When it comes to the Citizens United ruling and limitless corporate spending on elections, Segal says he would cosponsor Rep. Donna Edwards' amendment restoring free speech to people, not corporate persons. But he also recognizes the need to work around the institution you are trying to fix. He is the only state legislator in the 50 states who has gone into his state house and proposed calling a Constitutional Convention to undo corporate personhood and the application of free speech rights to the spending of money on elections.

Asked if he would restore oversight and checks and balances, including introducing articles of impeachment for Jay Bybee, who authored memos authorizing aggressive war, torture, and warrantless spying, Segal replied:

"Yes, of course. I don't think it needs to be said, but yes, of course, I think that Congress should make broader use of its oversight power, something I wish had happened here around the state of Rhode Island more readily. But yes, there's no reason to tolerate the abuses of power that defined the Bush administration."

Segal knows what he's up against, but he would bring into Congress something it has been lacking:

"I'm an organizer at heart and I don't go into this naively and think that as a freshman legislator at the federal level you can just go around and wrangle all of your longer-standing colleagues and get them to do something different than they have done before. But my goal, if I get elected, is to be an organizer to help build solidarities among members and help strengthen the Progressive Caucus so that it can stand stronger up against leadership when it comes to war funding, when it comes to health care, and so on."

Can David Segal do this? Well, the First Congressional District of Rhode Island is going to elect a Democrat to Congress in November, that's guaranteed, and it won't be the incumbent, who is retiring. There are four candidates in the Democratic Primary, which is not until September 14th. It doesn't take a high percentage to win a four-way race. And almost nobody votes in primaries, so not many people have to be reached. Rhode Island is also a tiny little place, and we're only talking about half of it, so not too much ground has to be covered. Segal is an organizer with an impressive team already on the ground. What he needs is money, and yours spends just as well in Rhode Island as anybody else's, and is better spent there than in your own district where the choices range from Tweedledum to Tweedledimwit.

I know that you think the weak link is in the Senate, not the House. But oversight is done just as well (or poorly) from either side of the hill. Blocking bills that damage our country is most easily done in the House, and the Senate is not needed at all. And nobody like Segal is running for the Senate. Backing lousy Senate candidates against really really lousy Senate candidates is nice. Putting a progressive activist into the House would be game-changing. Moving the debate to the left would mean dragging the Senate partway in that direction. Allowing the right to monopolize the microphone cancels out most of the advantage of electing new mediocrities. It's time we got serious.

I don't care where you live. I don't care how deeply you've given up all hope for Washington, D.C. You're going to want to help put David Segal in Congress, and you easily can. Just go here and give $5 or $50 or $500: http://votesegal.com

Here's audio of an interview I just did with David Segal: mp3.

Here's the transcript:

Swanson: This is David Swanson and I'm speaking with David Segal, candidate for Congress from Rhode Island, and someone I think that political progressives from around the country might want to be taking an interest in. David, thanks for speaking with me.

Segal: Thank you, and thank you for saying all those nice things.

Swanson: Well, I wonder if you could say from your own point of view what is your background that brings you to this and why you think people outside of Rhode Island might want to be paying a little attention.

Segal: I was a city councilman in Providence first elected as a Green in 2002 and then in the state legislature since 2006 as a Democrat. And if you want to talk about why I decided to make that transition from one party to another I'm happy to in more detail. But my work throughout those eight years has entailed pushing back against powerful, typically wealthy corporatist interests, against leadership within my own party when I was a Democrat, against the powers that be in Providence to try to do right by working families in Providence and Rhode Island, to try to push back against the standard fare corporatist interests that run the country and also run the state and also run the city. And work's happened on basically every issue front that a progressive might care about.

Swanson: I know a couple of areas that you've been involved with. One is proposing to cease funding out wars overseas should you be elected to Congress. I set up a list called A Coalition Against War Spending (http://www.caws.us), and you or your campaign immediately signed you on there with many other candidates. But many of them are Greens, many of them are Libertarians, and many are Democrats. What is your thinking in being willing to say you'll stop voting to fund the wars, because as you know, a great many members of Congress are willing to say they oppose the wars and they are critics of the wars but will not come within many miles of saying, "I won't fund the wars."

Segal: Right. Well, I'll start by saying I'm a vegetarian and wouldn't hurt a fly. I've been against the wars since before they began. I was, my first act on City Council in Providence was to sponsor an antiwar resolution in 2003 through the Cities for Peace program, which was obviously not a, it was going to end the war or prevent the war in its own right, but it was a necessary step between here and there. It had cities assert that the war was clearly going to have negative impacts on cities and their ability to function, fund municipal services and education, and so on. And it has, of course, had all of those effects. So my first act as a councilmember was to oppose the war in Iraq. And I represent the area around Brown and RISD and helped restart antiwar mobilization on campus which was waning during the sort of 2004, 2003-2004 era where there was this full Washington consensus that the war was OK and the war was going kind of well, even. And left activists were demoralized. We restarted a chapter here and I've helped organize and spoken at countless rallies about the war.

At the state level I've been a sponsor of the Bring the Guard Home legislation that has been pushed by Ben Manski and Liberty Tree which asserts essentially that the mandate under which the guard was federalized has expired. The Guard was federalized in order to neutralize the threat that Saddam Hussein posed and to enforce the existent UN resolution at the time of 2003 and that all of that has been accomplished, or at least is no longer on the table, and that therefore the Guard is improperly federalized and should be brought home. And if the legislation passes it compels the Attorney General of a given state to sue the federal government on those grounds. No such bill has passed yet, but what we're trying, and I have been, as anyone in Rhode Island would know, we have a very right-wing governor, so we're not going to withstand his veto here. And I think that, you know, war is a horror for a thousand different reasons that your listeners and your readers understand through and through.

And the thing that, well the thing that is most striking to me, this is, back in 2003 when were doing opportunity cost calculations about what it would cost to spend, when we thought it was only going to be $100M, sorry $100B to fund the war in Iraq, what does that mean, what is that worth to the world? The most striking stat that I remember from back then was it would provide enough funds to pay for vaccinations relative to every disease for which humanity has developed a vaccination for every child born for the next 75 years. And instead of doing that, and it's a little bit of a false choice since it is not something our government was going to do but I think it's always imperative to talk about the opportunity costs of war, and there are opportunity costs that might more readily have been met, you know, education funding domestically, public infrastructure funding domestically, and so on. But that contrast was just so stark to me -- 75 years worth of children vaccinated relative to every disease for which humans have developed vaccinations versus going into a purposeless war in Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people would be killed.

Swanson: It's a stunning comparison. I want to ask you about some other topics if you have time, but I want to ask one quick follow-up on this one which is, you know, a lot of people run for Congress as opponents of war and then they get in there and the leader of their party tells them, you know, we'll give you a million dollars for television ads in your re-election campaign in two years if you do whatever we tell you, and so then what they tell the public is, "Well, I want to vote NO on this war money, but I need to wait and see what good things are packaged in there with it." And then, of course, the leadership packages lots of good things – jobs and schools and civil rights in with the war money. And then the voting goes down based on permission from the leadership to, you know, "You can vote against the war as long as we're sure the war is going to pass." It's not, you know, it sounds to me like you're making a more solid commitment than that.

Segal: Yes, I am. And in Rhode Island I've tried to develop alternative structures for legislators to lean on when the leadership makes such threats. I am the lead organizer for our progressive caucus. I founded a political action committee to support members of our progressive caucus so that if funding from sources dries up at leadership's request because something was done to offend them, that we would have at least some, some degree of money to fall back on to help fund our campaigns nonetheless. We've run ten, twelve races relatively modestly in the last cycle and hopefully we'll be able to do something in the forthcoming cycle.

And I've also helped organize my colleagues to stand up to leadership relative to budgetary issues in particular, and we've stood as a bloc to prevent the de-funding of municipal services during supplemental budget a year ago. It was the progressives negotiating hard with the leadership while the bell calling us into session to come in and take the vote was ringing for two hours and compelled them to restore tens of millions of dollars, well, $25M which in Rhode Island is a big amount of money to municipal services and education funding that if not restored would have compelled progressive property tax increases and cut critical services for our constituents.

So, I'm an organizer at heart and I don't go into this naively and think that as a freshman legislator at the federal level you can just go around and wrangle all of your longer-standing colleagues and get them to do something different than they have done before. But my goal, if I get elected, is to be an organizer to help build solidarities among members and help strengthen the Progressive Caucus so that it can stand stronger up against leadership when it comes to war funding, when it comes to health care, and so on.

Swanson: Well, as you're no doubt painfully aware, it never stands at all, so that would be wonderful and, I agree, you would have a fight as a freshman, but to be there trying to organize the Progressive Caucus to take stands would be phenomenal. The other topic I definitely wanted to ask you about was something else that you've done at the state level that relates to the national and that is, in my understanding you're the only state legislator in any state who has gone in in response to this Citizen's United ruling by the US Supreme Court allowing unlimited corporate money in elections and said not just that our state should formally urge Congress to amend the Constitution, but that the State of Rhode Island should call for a Constitutional convention. And when we get to two-thirds of the states, I believe it is, calling for such a convention, then we'll hold a convention, whether Congress likes it or not. Can you tell me why you took that approach?

Segal: Sure. I've been working closely with Change Congress and Larry Lessig and other reformers on that measure. I think again that your listeners and your readers need no explanation of why it's a travesty now that corporations can expend as much as they care to to affect our elections and their outcomes, and Congress is loathe to act to change this for a variety of reasons that are probably pretty obvious and need not be spelled out. When you're dealing with a structure that is itself, whose own perpetuation is contingent upon particular structures . . . sorry, when you're dealing with an entity like Congress whose voting perpetuates itself is contingent upon these financing structures it necessarily requires an outside force to come in and say, "No. We need to change these structures, " because any organization is going to do what it can to perpetuate its own well-being and the Constitution allows for two-thirds of the states to call for a federal constitutional convention. No such convention has ever actually happened, but just the act of organizing towards one can compel Congress to do the right thing, particularly relative to the seventeenth amendment, the amendment which says that senators must be elected by the people as opposed to state legislatures was only put forth by Congress when two-thirds of the states minus one had called for a constitutional convention to address precisely that issue.

So, even if we don't get to the convention proper, the act of agitating for it is something that can compel Congress to do the right thing. And it's become evident over the course of (unintelligible) that Congress is not going to act on its own in a meaningful way to address the Citizens' United decision. I mean, they are pushing the Disclose Act right now which is, you know, somewhere between here and there, but nobody has got a sense that Congress is actually going to put forth an amendment to the several states for ratification that would fundamentally assert that in fact the First Amendment does not allow for corporations to spend as they care to in our elections. And so a constitutional convention and outside intervention is necessary.

Swanson: That being said, and I enthusiastically agree with all of it, would you be inclined to sign on to Congresswoman Donna Edward's amendment in Congress?

Segal: Oh yes, of course.

Swanson: Because there are a handful of Congress members trying against all odds.

Segal: Sure. There are some that deserve credit for it, but it's just clear that leadership is not going to let it happen, and, we can help them in their efforts by agitating as such from the outside and all those reasonable Washington consensus types will swoop in if we get to the point where enough states are supporting a Con Con and say, "OK, don't worry, guys. Actually we'll do this on our own," and do right by us out of fear that if they do not a constitutional convention will actually happen.

Swanson: You know, I not only want better people, candidates like yourself in Congress, but I want Congress to have more power because just about all power has moved to the White House as well as to the two parties. And if I could ask you about one other area if you have time, a lot of us worked very hard to try to impeach Bush and Cheney and said, "If we don't, then the presidents are going to have even more powers." And of course, the president does now have even more powers, but he's a president from the other party, and so just as the Republicans never engaged in any oversight with Bush and the Democrats very little themselves, now the Democrats are not engaging in any oversight with Obama and no, aside from Joe Lieberman, nobody has subpoenaed anybody for a year-and-a-half, nobody has proposed to impeach anybody for a year-and-a-half, and you have committee hearings on lawyers who've put forth memos on who you can torture and how, people like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, without John Yoo or Jay Bybee there because you can no longer ask anyone to show up for a hearing. I'm wondering what your position is on the powers of Congress and Congress' long-forgotten powers to use its own police force to compel people to attend, to hold people in contempt itself and fine them as they refuse to testify, and otherwise assert its presence in Washington as the first branch in our Constitution.

Segal: And as the most democratic branch.

Swanson: Would you, if you saw someone like Jay Bybee who authored memos authorizing not just torture but aggressive war at presidents' whims sitting there as a lifetime judge, would you consider the possibility of submitting Articles of Impeachment for someone like that?

Segal: Yes, of course. I don't think it needs to be said, but yes, of course, I think that Congress should make broader use of its oversight power, something I wish had happened here around the state of Rhode Island more readily. But I, yes, I, we, there's no reason to tolerate the abuses of power that defined the Bush administration. And I would have signed on to efforts by Dennis and by others, by you and your organization, to try to compel testimony under oath and to compel impeachment where proper.

Swanson: So what can people do to help you? When is your primary? What are you up against? And how can people help?

Segal: It's a September 14 primary, four-way race, clearly winnable. We have a really robust field after we had our first daylight canvass on Saturday and had more than 50 volunteers out. Sorry, first district-wide canvass, I should have said, had more than 50 volunteers out throughout the district. And we'll be doing a regular rhythm of such canvasses throughout the campaign. And the field is really going to be the lifeblood of this effort as it's been for my elections to the statehouse and to the city council. But we still need money to help fuel those efforts. We need to pay for literature, we need to pay for food and water for our volunteers, we need to, ideally, accrue enough funding to go up on TV and compete in that venue as well. So people can donate at segalforcongress. We've raised a hundred some thousand dollars in the first few weeks of my campaign in small increments and want to raise money in a democratic way and want to win this election in a democratic way through a genuinely grassroots effort. So even a modest donation of $5, $10 would be incredibly helpful.

Swanson: Terrific. I will let everyone know that I can. I think the House of Representatives is where we're going to get any control, if we are, in Washington. And having people there willing to take a stand even if they're not from our own district is what's going to make a difference. Anything else we should know?

Segal: No. I would, thanks so much for speaking with me. And I'm, there's contact info up on the web site of anybody has a more detailed question. I've written about a thousand articles over the years for Huffingtonpost and for more mainstream papers, for CommonDreams and Truthout, and so on, and there's a lot of info out there. But if people have questions they should feel free to get in touch with the campaign directly.

Swanson: Wonderful. David Segal, S-E-G-A-L, Segal. SegalforCongress.Com or VoteSegal.com. Thanks for speaking with me.

Segal: Thanks so much, David.

Transcribed by Linda Swanson.

David Segal's website: http://votesegal.com

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 09:57

I expected to be disappointed by "Green Zone". I mean the movie, not the chunk of Baghdad we've spent seven years and trillions of dollars killing over a million people to steal for an "embassy" containing 21 buildings on 104 acres. I'd been told that this movie was Matt Damon actually following the guidance of his teacher Howard Zinn. I'd been told this was a movie to expose the war lies. I remained dubious.

And then I finally got a chance to see it.

Have you ever fantasized about what it would be like if popular culture wasn't devoted to making our world a worse place, more hateful, more violent, more stupid and petty, more greedy and acquisitive? "Green Zone" is it. This is a movie that looks and feels exactly like a truly stupid, meaningless, or revenge- and greed-based Hollywood movie. But it isn't.

I expected the war lies to get a brief mention, and the lesson taught to actually be that violence is fun and necessary. I expected underlings to get the blame for the lies. I expected the plot to fall down around the contrast between its protagonist's stupidity in believing the lies about weapons and his genius in grasping impossible connections during the course of the story. I was wrong on all points.

The characters are composites, to be sure. Names and details have been changed, although certainly not to protect the innocent. But the basic account of what happened is laid out clearly, as well as cleverly, and gets it exactly right. The hero demonstrates the value of trust, including the importance of trusting Iraqis about Iraq, the importance of pushing back against authority, the need for restraint in violence but expansion in honest communication, and the crucial requirement that those guilty of the most serious crime imaginable -- lying a nation into war -- be held accountable, even if they wear nice suits and offer nice bribes to keep you quiet.

Yes, this is a look at the crazy WMD lies from the point of view of someone who believed them, rather than from the view of those of us who didn't. But that's an important angle to take, and one that a majority of Americans may be able to relate to, whether they are eager to admit it or not. It has not, after all, been very long since all that nonsense saturated our airwaves. The war is in fact -- and it may be a little known fact -- still going on, with the deadline for its completion at the end of next year due to be eliminated as soon as we have another U.S. election. This movie is far more relevant than most movies revealing war lies. There aren't many such creations at all, and they tend to come out decades after a war has ended. In fairness, wars did used to end.

"Green Zone" has not been shown in any theater in my town. Places it has been shown may be done showing it now. Buy, don't rent, the DVD. Show it to groups of people. Start a chapter of Screening Liberally if you don't have a local group that hosts such events: http://livingliberally.org/screening And invite your member of Congress.

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 09:57

If I'm going to properly confess my sins, I'll need to start at the beginning. In the beginning were the campaign promises, and let's just say that only flies and loyal partisans could stand the smell of them.

"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." Thus spoke candidate Obama, and he hit the same theme over and over again at countless campaign events.

When President Bush failed to pull out of Iraq, Senator Obama in 2007 said that Congress should overrule the president and end the war in order to represent the American people. Amen, brother!

What candidate Obama explained in serious interviews was a little different. He said repeatedly that he would begin a withdrawal his first month in office, pull out one to two brigades per month and be done in 16 months. That would have been back in May.

Of course, Obama did not do that. He also dropped his objections to the unconstitutional treaty Bush and Maliki had drawn up and ceased suggesting that the United States Senate should exercise its constitutional duty to consent to or reject any treaties made with foreign (even puppet) nations. President Obama did, however, lay out a schedule for withdrawal of all but 50,000 "non-combat troops" by the end of this month (August 2010).

In May Obama delayed part of that withdrawal, and I dared to suggest he was not being straight with us and was scrapping the withdrawal plan. The uproar at the Democratic websites was tremendous. I was obliged to withdraw my withdrawal comment. I did take notice, however, in July when Obama shipped more "non-troop" mercenaries to Iraq.

Then on Tuesday, I got this bit of news from Gareth Porter:

"Seventeen months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq by Sep. 1, 2010, he quietly abandoned that pledge Monday, admitting implicitly that such combat brigades would remain until the end of 2011. Obama declared in a speech to disabled U.S. veterans in Atlanta that 'America's combat mission in Iraq' would end by the end of August, to be replaced by a mission of 'supporting and training Iraqi security forces'. That statement was in line with the pledge he had made on Feb. 27, 2009, when he said, 'Let me say this as plainly as I can: by Aug. 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.' In the sentence preceding that pledge, however, he had said, 'I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months.' Obama said nothing in his speech Monday about withdrawing 'combat brigades' or 'combat troops' from Iraq until the end of 2011. Even the concept of 'ending the U.S. combat mission' may be highly misleading, much like the concept of 'withdrawing U.S. combat brigades' was in 2009. Under the administration's definition of the concept, combat operations will continue after August 2010, but will be defined as the secondary role of U.S. forces in Iraq. The primary role will be to 'advise and assist' Iraqi forces.

"An official who spoke with IPS on condition that his statements would be attributed to a 'senior administration official' acknowledged that the 50,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq beyond the deadline will have the same combat capabilities as the combat brigades that have been withdrawn. The official also acknowledged that the troops will engage in some combat but suggested that the combat would be 'mostly' for defensive purposes. That language implied that there might be circumstances in which U.S. forces would carry out offensive operations as well. IPS has learned, in fact, that the question of what kind of combat U.S. troops might become involved in depends in part on the Iraqi government, which will still be able to request offensive military actions by U.S. troops if it feels it necessary.

"Obama's jettisoning of one of his key campaign promises and of a high-profile pledge early in his administration without explicit acknowledgement highlights the way in which language on national security policy can be manipulated for political benefit with the acquiescence of the news media. Obama's apparent pledge of withdrawal of combat troops by the Sep. 1 deadline in his Feb. 27, 2009, speech generated headlines across the commercial news media. That allowed the administration to satisfy its anti-war Democratic Party base on a pivotal national security policy issue. At the same time, however, it allowed Obama to back away from his campaign promise on Iraq withdrawal, and to signal to those political and bureaucratic forces backing a long- term military presence in Iraq that he had no intention of pulling out all combat troops at least until the end of 2011. He could do so because the news media were inclined to let the apparent Obama withdrawal pledge stand as the dominant narrative line, even though the evidence indicated it was a falsehood.

"Only a few days after the Obama speech, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was more forthright about the policy. In an appearance on Meet the Press Mar. 1, 2009, Gates said the 'transition force' remaining after Aug. 31, 2010 would have 'a very different kind of mission', and that the units remaining in Iraq 'will be characterised differently'. 'They will be called advisory and assistance brigades,' said Gates. 'They won't be called combat brigades.' But 'advisory and assistance brigades' were configured with the same combat capabilities as the 'combat brigade teams' which had been the basic U.S. military unit of combat organisation for six years, as IPS reported in March 20009. . . .

". . . The 'senior administration official' told IPS that Obama is still 'committed to withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011'. That is the withdrawal deadline in the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement of November 2008. But the same military and Pentagon officials who prevailed on Obama to back down on his withdrawal pledge also have pressed in the past for continued U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond 2011, regardless of the U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government. In November 2008, after Obama's election, Gen. Odierno was asked by Washington Post correspondent Tom Ricks 'what the U.S. military presence would look like around 2014 or 2015'. Odierno said he 'would like to see a …force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000', which would still be carrying out combat operations. . . . In July, Odierno suggested that a U.N. peacekeeping force might be needed in Kirkuk after 2011, along with a hint that a continued U.S. presence there might be requested by the Iraqi government."

This excellent report by Porter followed Dave Lindorff's reaction on Monday to the same news:

"I was listening to NPR's 'Morning Edition' broadcast this morning in the car, and I heard a reporter say that President Obama was 'redefining' the American role in Iraq, now that he had brought the number of US forces in that country down to 'only' 50,000 troops, and that 'combat operations' would be ending effective this month. The remaining forces, the reporter announced, with no hint of irony and no explanation, would 'only' be engaged in helping to train Iraqi troops and police, and in 'counter-insurgency' operations. Excuse me, but aren't we at war in Afghanistan, and isn't that operation, involving about 200,000 US, Australian, and NATO troops (excluding the Dutch, who are pulling out after the country's participation in it brought down the conservative government), called a 'counter-insurgency' campaign? Isn't counter-insurgency by definition a kind of 'combat'?

"WTF? This crap is called journalism?

"By the way, about that 50,000 number. For the record, that is a lot of soldiers. It is for one thing two times the number of US troops stationed in South Korea. It is twice the number of troops that were employed in the invasion of Panama in 1989. It is about the number of troops the US had in Vietnam in early 1964 after the first round of escalation by then President Lyndon Johnson . . . .

". . . The Obama administration and the Pentagon are trying to trick a war-weary American public into believing that the 50,000 US troops that will be more or less permanently garrisoned in the rather permanent-looking bases that the US has constructed around Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq will be just like the US troops lodged more or less permanently in Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea and in other countries around the world. But those troops aren't doing any fighting, except in bars, and are mostly just hanging around playing at soldiering and wasting taxpayer money on prostitutes, gambling, drinking and cars. That will not be the case for the soldiers based in Iraq, however, which is a country still torn by internecine conflicts created or unleashed by the US invasion, and which also has many armed fighters who are committed to ousting the US entirely from their occupied country. And indeed, that 50,000-troop army is actually an army of occupation. Its role in training an Iraqi army and police force, as in Afghanistan, is to create a puppet military that will do its bidding. This is fundamentally different from the role of garrisons in South Korea, Japan, Italy or Germany."

In fact, Obama is escalating troop presence in Afghanistan, while somewhat reducing it in Iraq, even though Iraq is no more peaceful or stable than Afghanistan. The different approaches are all about US politics and the stories the US corporate media and Democratic loyalists allow to be told.

Lindorff appears to have doubts that the complete withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011 will happen on schedule, or ever. I predicted as much the day Bush and Maliki announced the treaty, and I suggested that anyone who took it seriously should have a talk with some Native Americans. I've learned my lesson, however, and will never object to the continued presence into 2012 before it's 2012. That just wouldn't be appropriate.

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 09:57

Andrew Bacevich's new book, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," is a good summary of the past 65 years' worth of war thinking in Washington, D.C.  "Prior to World War II," he writes, "Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility.  In the wake of World War II, that changed.  An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity."  For the past 65 years or so, Bacevich writes, these beliefs have been Washington's "sacred trinity":

"an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism."

The people putting this expansion of Manifest Destiny into practice, Bacevich writes, have not fundamentally been presidents, as everyone believes, much less Congress, as the Constitution would have had it. "Pretending to the role of Decider, a president all too often becomes little more than the medium through which power is exercised."

Bacevich highlights the roles of two men in establishing structures of war power, Allen Dulles at the CIA and Curtis LeMay at Strategic Air Command.  They established the power, for themselves and their successors, respectively, to do anything at all in secret, and to determine nuclear weapons policies.  And they established the practice of lying about Soviet military threats as a means toward escalating the already dominant U.S. military.

Bacevich describes President John Kennedy as taking some of these powers into the White House.  "The methods devised by Allen Dulles and the methods perfected by Curtis LeMay worked in tandem to create an aura of secrecy, prestige, and power that now allowed presidents to assert and exercise quasi-imperial prerogatives."  And Bacevich points to LeMay's public descent from revered wise man to dangerous buffoon as illustrative of the damage the Vietnam War did to Washington's rules, damage that did not last long at all.

"Failure in Vietnam seemingly left the Washington rules in tatters," writes Bacevich.  "That within five years of Saigon's fall they were well on their way to reconstitution qualifies as remarkable.  That within another decade the American credo and sacred trinity had been fully restored deserves to be seen as astonishing." 

Bacevich repeats this sort of astonishment in the course of the story he tells, including when the end of the Cold War slows the U.S. war machine down even less than defeat in Vietnam did, and including when counter-insurgency theories are resurrected for General David Petraeus' "surge".  Each time Bacevich is right to be astonished, but in each case the astonishment is lessened, I think, to the extent that one views war proponents as frauds rather than well-intentioned fools.  That those in power, profiting financially and electorally from wars, immediately argue for more war is simply to be expected.  That they persuade others to share their beliefs is, indeed, astonishing, albeit less so to the extent that one examines how our communications system works -- something Bacevich does not do.  The five year recovery post-Vietnam may have a recent parallel.  By 2005, Washington's war lies were in worse than tatters, but by 2010 it was considered impolite to mention that excuses for wars were lies.

By the time we get to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, Bacevich is writing as though presidents are Deciders.  He notes that the United States could now go to war without inconveniencing most of its people, and that wars tended to give boosts to presidents' approval ratings.  This was a major change, but another came when the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became understood as permanent or at least open-ended.  And the military adopted a policy of "counter-insurgency" that involved primarily non-military work.  This is another astonishing revolution, as Bacevich points out, except that -- as far as I can tell -- the military is not actually following its new policy.  Are we putting 80% into civilian efforts?  Last time I looked it was more like 4%.

"Washington Rules" was written before General Stanley McChrystal ended his career but not before he did things that should have ended it.  When, in Bacevich's account, McChrystal publicly pressures President Barack Obama to escalate Afghanistan, Bacevich returns to his discussion of the 1950s: Presidents are not the real power.

As in his past books, Bacevich does a terrific job of nudging the reader away from belief in popular militaristic and patriotic myths, in the direction of some beginning grasp of reality.  And he explicitly charts a wiser course, a new "trinity":

"First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests.  Second, the primary duty of the American soldier is in America.  Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense."

Of course, that doesn't resemble any just war tradition, and eight years ago the just war theorists were explaining the need to attack Iraq.  The ONLY duty of the American soldier should be to defend the United States, minus any extraneous "vital interests."  But this is vast progress, and Bacevich describes himself in the introduction to his book as "a slow learner" who didn't begin paying attention or asking questions until he was 41.  He must also be a fast learner, because from that point on he's come to understand and explain the U.S. empire as well as anyone.

But there are two areas in this book in which I think Bacevich is still resisting adequate questioning of orthodoxy.  The first is in his understanding of U.S. news media.  The media is never mentioned, except for a passing reference to media executives in a list of those benefitting from current policy.  Repeatedly Bacevich laments the public's backward attitudes, never considering where they come from if real, or noticing when the public is actually far ahead of what passes for "public discourse."  Does Bacevich know that a majority of Americans oppose the current wars?  Even when Bacevich's generalizations about the public may be fair, he omits any notice whatsoever of the sizable minority that opposes war mongering.  Bacevich's examples of heretics who have resisted the march to permanent war are always those with power and the prestige of having spent years going along, rather than early leaders or those with the most penetrating analysis.  In Bacevich's world a "left-leaning" publication is The New Republic.

The second place I see acceptance of the official story as getting in the way of Bacevich's narrative is in his apparent belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  Bacevich's argument that people like Dulles held the reins of power would be stronger and look very different if he acknowledged the well-documented push-back against Kennedy's firing of Dulles and Kennedy's steps toward peace.  According to Bacevich, "There is no evidence that any lessons drawn from his administration's Cuban encounters had a positive effect on the way it dealt with Vietnam."  Kennedy, in Bacevich's account, wanted war and more war in Vietnam, and everything was up to him.  "At the White House, the president and his lieutenants were in charge of everything, including the Central Intelligence Agency."

Yet, on October 11, 1963, Kennedy issued a secret order for a withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum 263.   Two years earlier, as described in James Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable" Kennedy successfully blocked public discussion of troop escalation by planting the false story in the media that his generals were against it.  Yes, Kennedy mostly went along with the Washington Rules, but he tested their limits and apparently found them.

David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union"