The Man Who Got It Right on Iraq

As the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war beginning hits the political media, the chatter is all about why didn't we know, why didn't we see, why didn't we say?

So who is this we, except an embarrassingly large chunk of the successful mediacracy and Washington political establishment?  It's not me.  And it is most certainly not Bill Moyers.

There is little revealed in the MSNBC documentary that is startling people that Bill Moyers didn't report on at the time.  Every week on PBS he revealed the lies and the costs of those lies in Iraq and America.

He did it so well that he was encouraged to retire, which he did.  For awhile.  But ten years later, at the age of 78, Bill Moyers is back on PBS and once again at the forefront of reporting on foreign policy, the economy, the environment and the climate crisis.

While folks who should have known better are beating their breasts and pulling out their hair in public today, I don't hear a lot of recognition for the guy who got it right: Bill Moyers.

Cry Havoc: How the Iraq War Began

We are weeks away from the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war's beginning.  Books, articles and TV docus have begun, concentrating on the deceptions before the war, and the war's long and terrible extent. 

 On a Sunday almost exactly ten years ago today, the San Francisco Chronicle published my essay on what everyone already knew was the upcoming bombing of Baghdad which would start the war.  It was supposed to be so devastating that the war would be over quickly.  At first it may have seemed that way, and President Bush declared combat operations over.  But of course, it went on for nearly nine more years, at immense cost.

But lost in this history is the horror of the bombing itself, and what it represented beyond introducing the p.r. term of "Shock and Awe."  The piece reflects how it was advertised, and the reality turned out to be even worse.  For weeks some 1700 air sorties including more than 500 using cruise missiles bombed Baghdad, before the first American ground troops arrived.

 I refer also to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and its line,  "Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war."  Once the dogs of war are loose, they are very difficult to rein in.  Once started, the machinery of war is very hard to stop.   The logic of war-including the emotional logic-- is that warfare feeds on itself, and there are plenty of corporate as well as political and ideological interests eager to keep feeding off the continuing warfare.  

The echo of the Iraq war continues to be loud, though now so distorted that it isn't always identifiable.  This war that depleted so much continues to have consequences in what this nation did, and what it did not do.  Those consequences may well continue for a very long time.

And this was a preview of how it began.  Here is the essay as it first appeared in the Insight Section of the San Francisco Chronicle on February 16, 2003.


When Islamic armies were the most powerful in the world, conquerors of Asia Minor and North Africa, and poised at the gates of Europe in the 8th century, Abu Hanifa, founder of a school of law in the city of Baghdad, proposed that the killing, maiming and raping of civilian noncombatants in war be forbidden. It was one of the first attempts to codify some kind of moral and legal restraints on civilized societies engaged in the dangerously uncivilized practice of warfare.

If and when war comes to Iraq, it will likely feature the relentless and perhaps unprecedented bombing of Baghdad. According to CBS News and other sources, the United States is considering implementing a strategy called "Shock and Awe," developed in 1996. The plan could result in at least 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad in just the first day of an aerial campaign - more than were used on all targets in the entire Gulf War. And the plan calls for an equal or greater number on the second day as well, up to 800 total, each capable of carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives. There was no estimate of how many days the bombing would continue.

Although missiles would likely focus on infrastructure including electricity and water supplies, an average of one missile striking a city of 5 million inhabitants every four minutes around the clock could kill and maim thousands of civilians.

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," according to an unnamed Pentagon official quoted by CBS. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The prospect of war in Iraq is crowded with moral as well as political questions, with multiple possibilities for ethical outrages of stunning proportions. But the continuous bombing of a city of civilians would probably be the first that confronts the watching world.

In A History of Bombing (published by New Press in 2001, and forthcoming this spring in paperback), Sven Lindqvist follows three main threads: the technology and use of aerial bombing in history, the attempts to deal with the moral implications of its use against civilian populations (Abu Hanifa is one example he cites), and social attitudes toward bombing found in sources such as popular fiction.

The historical parallels to the current prospect as well as the ironies are disquieting. The impact of the "shock and awe" strategy is meant to be on hearts and minds: to destroy the enemy's will, and mental and psychological ability to resist. But bombing's ability to terrorize - the sudden explosive death from the sky without warning - was one of the first effects to be observed, noted in 13th century China. It has often been a prime strategy of bombing, according to Lindquist, used extensively by European colonial powers in Africa, India and Asia.

Bombing is especially terrifying when used on the helpless. At first it was shelling from ships far offshore (which is how the United States bombed Nicaragua in 1854), then bombs dropped from airplanes. Bombing was a cost-effective way of keeping subjugated populations in line. Baghdad was a British target more than once in the 1920s.

As airplanes, bombs and cities all got bigger, moralists and diplomats negotiating the international rules of war and definitions of war crimes struggled to keep up. Several prohibitions against air warfare and the bombing of cities were proposed, and some were signed, except by the major powers capable of the bombing. Well into the 20th century, bombing was considered not so bad if the victims were of "inferior races." Some authors wrote glowingly of bombing as a way to civilize the world by permanently subjugating or even wiping out these races.

European bombing gradually got closer and closer to home, until the German military on behalf of Franco tested new kinds of bombs by dropping them on cities in Spain. Japan bombed civilian cities in China. Then in the 1940s, bombing of even the capital cities of combatant nations - Berlin, London, Tokyo - became a normal instrument of warfare, finally leading to the annihilation of the undefended cities of Hamburg and Dresden by British saturation firebombing, and of Hiroshima and much of Nagasaki by the U.S. atomic bomb.

By that time, terror was not the only result of bombing. Fifty thousand civilians were killed in a single night in Hamburg, most of them women, children and elderly. Twice that number died in Dresden. Two atom bombs did fill Japan with shock and awe, and killed several hundred thousand civilians in the process.

There are various strategic arguments for bombing campaigns that dovetail with apparent moral concerns, usually involving shortening a war's duration or substituting for ground assaults, thus saving lives, especially the lives of the side doing the bombing.

When facing the possibility that this war would unleash chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that have been largely absent from warfare for decades due to international taboos of one kind or another, it may seem quixotic to argue that bombing of civilian populations should be regarded as an evil in itself, and beyond the pale for nations that desire any sort of international relations. But it seems morally obtuse that there is a stronger taboo against assassinating a declared enemy's head of a state than against slaughtering babies in their beds. Surely bombing should be a last resort, not the first.

For even if the historical parallels are coincidental and not disturbing echoes of residual racism and empire-building, the bombing of Baghdad to begin this war would have a terrorizing effect on more than its residents. In Shakespeare's time, there was another word for the terror, the shock and awe that accompany a war without moral limits. The word was "havoc," as in the famous quotation from Julius Caesar, "Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war."

The bombing and havoc may already be starting by the time you read these words, although according to Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus on the Washington Week in Review, "You can pretty well mark on your calendar March 15. " It's the date formerly known as the Ides of March.

The bombing of Baghdad began on March 19, 2003.

The Whimpering Warmongers

Beginning with Presidents Day, this week might well turn Zeitgeist's attention to the international arena, and wars past, present and to come.  On Monday MSNBC premieres a documentary on the presidential-level lies that promoted the Iraq war.  According to its narrator, Rachel Maddow, it will ruffle some political feathers.  Those same feathers are already in tatters, after an ugly barnyard brawl with Chuck Hagel.

The unprecedented filibuster stalling the new Secretary of Defense from taking office, and preventing him from accompanying the President to an important international conference this week, is definitely part of this mix.  The GOPer Senate filibuster, led by the permanently confused John McCain and the ever more craven Lindsay "Cracker" Graham, seemed like just another moronic inferno--continuous blather about issues that appointee Chuck Hagel had nothing to do with or will never set policy on, while neglecting to even try to find out if he can do the actual job of defense secretary.  But Josh Marshall at TPM makes a very interesting case that this is all still about Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, and the warmongering foreign policy those wars represented.  It's the neocon's last hurrah.

"Basically everything Barack Obama has done since coming into office has been to unwind the thicket of commitments, practices and open wars begun under George W. Bush. People who don’t know the policies and the agendas in detail can miss this," Marshall writes.  But the neocons know exactly what's going on, and they don't like it--they especially don't like that Republican Chuck Hagel agrees with this dismantling, and said so even while Bush Lite was in office.

The American people are so far past this that President Obama's announcement in the State of the Union that half the troops still in Afghanistan would be home by year's end didn't even make much news.  But the neanderthalic neocons don't care.  They have security consultants and gun manufacturers to feed, and their carefully cultivated mad voters' buttons to push.   But they're losing.  So they weaken their own country's defense and international standing, just to express their pique.

These are the guys responsible for thousands of deaths, billions of wasted dollars, immense human suffering and more than a decade of awful displacement of the energy and attention needed to save the planet.  No wonder they're reacting like terribly guilty criminals.

 But at least they're not going out with another bang.  Just with an ugly whimper.

Happy Christmas: The War Is Over

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Panetta and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Demsey "cased the colors"--put away the flag--at a military base in Iraq, formally ending the U.S. military presence in that country.  The war is over.

The day before, President Obama addressed returning (and cheering) troops at Fort Bragg:

"It’s harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq -– all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering -– all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We’re building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home."

It is harder to end a war than to begin one.Yes, a bitter truth some of us were crying out in 2003--it is the tragic fact that letting loose the dogs of war is much much easier than reigning them back in.  So nearly 9 years of pain and waste later, at least a trillion dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost and maimed, millions of lives deformed, and our entire political process so fractured that we are unable to respond to the real threats we face, this terrible and quite possibly catastrophic war is over.

Barack Obama promised to end this war.  He did what he promised, and continues to be castigated for it in shameful terms by mad dog GOPers in Congress and running for president.  Let's hope the American people leash them up good in the next election.

Our Long National Nightmare is Ending

President Obama on Friday, announcing that the last American troops in Iraq will be home by the December holidays:

"So to sum up, the United States is moving forward from a position of strength. The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year. The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward, and our troops are finally coming home. As they do, fewer deployments and more time training will help keep our military the very best in the world. And as we welcome home our newest veterans, we’ll never stop working to give them and their families the care, the benefits and the opportunities that they have earned.

This includes enlisting our veterans in the greatest challenge that we now face as a nation -- creating opportunity and jobs in this country. Because after a decade of war, the nation that we need to build -- and the nation that we will build -- is our own; an America that sees its economic strength restored just as we’ve restored our leadership around the globe."

Turning the Page

In his Oval Office address, President Obama called war "the darkest of human creations." On Tuesday night, he ended one. Turning the page doesn't mean ignoring the lessons that must be learned. And of course, fighting and dying in Iraq and other places hasn't ended. But it has lessened significantly, and many people there and here can turn back to an emphasis on life. And that alone is worth celebrating. From President Obama's speech:

"So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.

This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s Security Forces and support its government and people.

That’s what we’ve done. We’ve removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. We’ve closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases. And we have moved millions of pieces of equipment out of Iraq.


The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people -- a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle-class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.

And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it’s our turn. Now, it’s our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for -- the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President."

Remember: Cry Havoc in Iraq

[Third of three posts]
Tonight President Obama will announce the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq. At this moment it is instructive to remember how all this began, seven years ago. It began with the bombing of Baghdad, a massive American bombing campaign of a city and a country that had not made war on anyone, including the United States. It was one more escalation in the morally indefensible history of bombing, and it presaged everything that's happened since in that part of the world.

The history of such bombing is considered in the following piece, published in the San Francisco Chronicle several weeks before the Baghdad bombing began, and the evil of bombing, culminating in our time with nuclear bombs, is the thread that runs through my three essays posted here in the past two days, which all originally appeared in the SF Chronicle.

In this piece I refer to what was a new and little known phrase then, but which has since become a cliched description of this bombing campaign: Shock and Awe. It was supposed to break the will of whoever the Bush administration considered the enemy, but it did not.

I also quoted the famous lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war." I focused on the "havoc" in this piece, but in other writing of the time I emphasized the rest of the quotation. The point of the metaphor of the dogs of war is not only that a pack of dogs are indiscriminately violent but that once loosed, they are very difficult to control or to stop. A war is much easier to start than stop, and it begs the question of how many wars it will take before people figure that out.

Once this war started it was clear to some of us at least, that it would go on for a long time. And it has, with immensely and deeply destructive consequences to the U.S. as well as to Iraq. It has eroded us morally, depleted us financially, destroyed thousands of people physically and psychologically, and distorted our politics. We don't seem to have learned much from it either. If for no other reason than the resources of all kinds it stole from facing up to the double challenges of the Climate Crisis, it has deeply wounded the future.

February 2003

When Islamic armies were the most powerful in the world, conquerors of Asia Minor and North Africa, and poised at the gates of Europe in the 8th century, Abu Hanifa, founder of a school of law in the city of Baghdad, proposed that the killing, maiming and raping of civilian noncombatants in war be forbidden. It was one of the first attempts to codify some kind of moral and legal restraints on civilized societies engaged in the dangerously uncivilized practice of warfare.

If and when war comes to Iraq, it will likely feature the relentless and perhaps unprecedented bombing of Baghdad. According to CBS News and other sources, the United States is considering implementing a strategy called "Shock and Awe," developed in 1996. The plan could result in at least 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad in just the first day of an aerial campaign - more than were used on all targets in the entire Gulf War. And the plan calls for an equal or greater number on the second day as well, up to 800 total, each capable of carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives. There was no estimate of how many days the bombing would continue.

Although missiles would likely focus on infrastructure including electricity and water supplies, an average of one missile striking a city of 5 million inhabitants every four minutes around the clock could kill and maim thousands of civilians.

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," according to an unnamed Pentagon official quoted by CBS. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The prospect of war in Iraq is crowded with moral as well as political questions, with multiple possibilities for ethical outrages of stunning proportions. But the continuous bombing of a city of civilians would probably be the first that confronts the watching world.

In A History of Bombing (published by New Press in 2001, and forthcoming this spring in paperback), Sven Lindqvist follows three main threads: the technology and use of aerial bombing in history, the attempts to deal with the moral implications of its use against civilian populations (Abu Hanifa is one example he cites), and social attitudes toward bombing found in sources such as popular fiction.

The historical parallels to the current prospect as well as the ironies are disquieting. The impact of the "shock and awe" strategy is meant to be on hearts and minds: to destroy the enemy's will, and mental and psychological ability to resist. But bombing's ability to terrorize - the sudden explosive death from the sky without warning - was one of the first effects to be observed, noted in 13th century China. It has often been a prime strategy of bombing, according to Lindquist, used extensively by European colonial powers in Africa, India and Asia.

Bombing is especially terrifying when used on the helpless. At first it was shelling from ships far offshore (which is how the United States bombed Nicaragua in 1854), then bombs dropped from airplanes. Bombing was a cost-effective way of keeping subjugated populations in line. Baghdad was a British target more than once in the 1920s.

As airplanes, bombs and cities all got bigger, moralists and diplomats negotiating the international rules of war and definitions of war crimes struggled to keep up. Several prohibitions against air warfare and the bombing of cities were proposed, and some were signed, except by the major powers capable of the bombing. Well into the 20th century, bombing was considered not so bad if the victims were of "inferior races." Some authors wrote glowingly of bombing as a way to civilize the world by permanently subjugating or even wiping out these races.

European bombing gradually got closer and closer to home, until the German military on behalf of Franco tested new kinds of bombs by dropping them on cities in Spain. Japan bombed civilian cities in China. Then in the 1940s, bombing of even the capital cities of combatant nations - Berlin, London, Tokyo - became a normal instrument of warfare, finally leading to the annihilation of the undefended cities of Hamburg and Dresden by British saturation firebombing, and of Hiroshima and much of Nagasaki by the U.S. atomic bomb.

By that time, terror was not the only result of bombing. Fifty thousand civilians were killed in a single night in Hamburg, most of them women, children and elderly. Twice that number died in Dresden. Two atom bombs did fill Japan with shock and awe, and killed several hundred thousand civilians in the process.

There are various strategic arguments for bombing campaigns that dovetail with apparent moral concerns, usually involving shortening a war's duration or substituting for ground assaults, thus saving lives, especially the lives of the side doing the bombing.

When facing the possibility that this war would unleash chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that have been largely absent from warfare for decades due to international taboos of one kind or another, it may seem quixotic to argue that bombing of civilian populations should be regarded as an evil in itself, and beyond the pale for nations that desire any sort of international relations. But it seems morally obtuse that there is a stronger taboo against assassinating a declared enemy's head of a state than against slaughtering babies in their beds. Surely bombing should be a last resort, not the first.

For even if the historical parallels are coincidental and not disturbing echoes of residual racism and empire-building, the bombing of Baghdad to begin this war would have a terrorizing effect on more than its residents. In Shakespeare's time, there was another word for the terror, the shock and awe that accompany a war without moral limits. The word was "havoc," as in the famous quotation from Julius Caesar, "Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war."

The bombing and havoc may already be starting by the time you read these words, although according to Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus on the Washington Week in Review, "You can pretty well mark on your calendar March 15. " It's the date formerly known as the Ides of March.

Postscript: The bombing of Baghdad and Iraq began on March 19. It involved more than 500 cruise missiles. There is still disagreement on the number of civilian deaths.

Who Are We

The other side of celebrating our liberty is to contemplate the liberty we have so recently and so easily given up, and why. "A nation may lose its liberties in a day," observed Montesquieu, "and not miss them for a century." Or not understand their import until an outsider puts them in context, as Alberto Manguel does when he writes about the centuries of suppressions and destructions, the book-burnings and censorships, that we may feel are relics of the past and disreputable habits of other nations and their systems that don't cherish and protect free expression and knowledge. Sure, there are isolated incidents in certain school districts, but these are not the norm, and certainly not national policy.

But in The Library at Night, Manguel reminds us of "Section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, allowing federal agents to obtain records of books borrowed at any public library or bought at any private bookstore," without offering a reason, and forbidding the library or bookstore to disclose the request or the giving of this information, including to the person targeted.

The other side of celebrating our national identity and the values at its center is to notice where we violate those values and that identity. Manguel provides an example of this as well, for in his descriptions of libraries and legacies destroyed over the centuries--from the burning of the libraries of Alexandria and of the thousands of books containing the cultural legacy of the Mayans and Aztecs, to the Nazis and various Communist governments, he adds the days in 2003 when in the chaos created by the Anglo-American invasion, and with their troops standing by and doing nothing, "the National Archives, the Archeological Museum and the National Library of Baghdad were ransacked and looted. In a few hours, much of the earliest recorded history of humankind was lost to oblivion."

Though this was a direct consequence of American ignorance and arrogance,
it was set in motion ultimately for the same reason as the Patriot Act: fear, both disproportionate and all too easily manipulated. It was this unreasoning fear, which in the end looks a lot like national cowardice, that permitted other outrages. We know what they are, but sometimes the so-called "debate" over them is exposed as baseless and phony, in the form of simple, direct statement, as provided by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books:

Seven years ago now, in January 2002, came the first shocking images of human beings in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic, much as other human beings had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. The captor’s humiliation of these anonymous beings – unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits – was deliberately displayed. The watching world needed no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions to understand that what it was seeing was unlawful, since what is in fact the law precisely mirrors instinctive moral revulsion. The definitions of crimes against humanity, and war crimes, are not complex: ‘Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949’, including ‘torture or inhuman treatment’; ‘wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health’; ‘wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement.’ What the world could instantly see for itself in those images was that this was the trafficking of human beings."

Once again the ultimate culprit is fear, and how easily our liberties and identity falls to it. We may find solace in the changes made since: the U.S. no longer officially permits torture, but torture was officially committed, libraries and booksellers were monitored, and as a society we have not yet fully acknowledged and condemned these acts, which might go a long way towards making it less likely they will recur. Those who opposed these acts were called unpatriotic, when it was especially dangerous to be so accused. Until these acts are themselves condemned as unpatriotic, we have not affirmed these liberties and identity.

Besides which, these threats are not all in the past. We know someone who in the past week was pulled out of his seat on a commercial aircraft by federal marshals, despite passing through security, showing his boarding pass, etc. Even though the airline quickly acknowledged its error, he was forced to miss his flight and all connecting flights, more than doubling his travel time to nearly 24 hours. There is no escaping the likelihood that this happened to him because he has dark hair and a dark complexion. That he's an Italian-American only makes this outrage a clear echo of a similiar situation, another acquaintance, also Italian American but as well the son of a prominent political figure in Washington, who was also pulled out of line for no other discernable reason. That was in 2002. This is 2009, and it is still happening.

Veterans Day 2008

President-elect Barack Obama with Tammy Duckworth, Iraq war vet and double amputee, currently Secretary for Veterans Affairs in Illinois.

Leading the Way

Barack Obama meets with troops in Kuwait before
going on to Afghanistan Saturday. Also today, a
German newspaper reported Iraqi Prez Maliki
backing Obama's 16 month timeframe for U.S.
troops to withdraw from Iraq, a story mistakenly
sent to the American press by the interns currently
running the White House. British PM Gordon Brown
also reportedly backs Obama's plan. A key statement
in the Maliki report: "The Americans have found
it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit
because it seems like an admission of defeat to them.
But it isn't," Maliki told Der Spiegel...Now who was supposed
to be the foreign policy leader in this presidential race?
Monday Update: While the Bush administration issued a claim
by an Iraqi official that Maliki had been mistranslated, the New
York Times found that the translation was accurate.

Barack on Iraq

The news from Iraq last week was not encouraging to the McCain plan for endless war there: at least 3 officials of the Iraqi government, on three separate occasions, expressed their desire that the U.S. withdraw its occupying forces, and set up a timetable to do so. Further, the Iraqi government forced the Bushites to back off their demands for an agreement that would allow permanent U.S. occupied bases, as well as provide enormous oil concessions.

Today Barack Obama used those events to reiterate his own plan for Iraq which was so bizarrely distorted in a media frenzy replicating a false McCain campaign charge. Obama notes:

"The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown."

Obama reinterates his positions on an immediate policy of withdrawal : " As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months...In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected."

Obama concludes: "In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender. It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war."

Obama will soon go to Iraq on a fact-finding mission with a Democratic and a Republican Senator, both veterans. There is right now a fascinating report from Iraq at the New York Review of Books by Michael Massing, who describes being embedded recently, the observations of troops there, and an overall context. His basic conclusion is not very far from Obama's: in certain ways, the situation has improved--but it hasn't made any real difference for the U.S. He quotes a military intelligence officer: "If we weren't here, there are a lot of people who'd be dead the next day. But we're spinning our wheels. Al-Qaeda is defeated, but now we face Iraq's internal problems. They have to be handled politically and socially... we're ultimately occupiers. And I don't think you can democratize a country by being occupiers. Though we've made a lot of progress, the core issues remain. And if we can't find a political solution to them, we'll never get out of here."

While many in the military held similar views, Massing found that the truly clueless were the Bushite diplomats isolated in the Green Zone. He had lunch with one such official: "How often, I wondered, did he get out of the Green Zone to meet with Baghdad residents whose supply of electricity is down to two hours a day, or visit the pharmacies where basic medications like Tylenol are unavailable, or see the wretched tents and shacks where many of the two-million-plus internally displaced Iraqis have been forced to live?"

The article is rich in detail, but I also found one somewhat stunning item in the final footnote, an indication of where McCain's we'll be there for a hundred years idea came from. It came from Bush.

Massing quotes an interview NBC reporter Richard Engel did with Bush, in which Bush told him the war in Iraq "is going to take forty years."

So that's the choice? Not only four more years with McBush--but forty more years in Iraq?

J'Accuse!

This month (last Saturday to be exact) marks the 71st anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica, which essentially inaugurated the mass terror bombing of World War II. Five bombing raids with incendiary bombs dropped from primitive aircraft resulted in some 1650 deaths in this small market town in Spain. By the end of World War II, bombers and missiles killed thousands in London in the Blitz, and massive numbers of sophisticated aircraft and powerful bombs killed 100,000 mostly civilians in Dresden and 130,00 in Tokyo, before the atomic bombs killed at least 280,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two generations later, much of the world has internalized the horror of that war, as well as the different but in some ways worse horrors of World War I. But America has not, argues Tony Judt in an indispensable article in the New York Review of Books. Some of our political thinkers even argue that such history--any history--is irrelevant as a guide to our present and future, because the bad old past is over, and things are different now.

So Judt asks the question in the title of his piece: "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" What's clear to him--and to me--is what we haven't learned: "In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war." One of the main reasons is that in the 20th century, we were lucky. War hardly touched us--not the World Wars, not even the waves of terrorism that Europe experienced, let alone other parts of the world. But even though the lessons of those wars are available to us in accounts, in eloquent writings and filmmaking, we haven't learned them. Instead, we are going through what we should have learned to avoid. For example:

"World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. "

Americans fought and died in the two world wars--but Over There. Americans could observe what happened in those societies, but the lessons didn't take. We didn't experience what they experienced, starting with the extent of death and destruction.

"In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940...

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead. "

So what does this mean?

"As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

Judt writes in detail about how this also leads us to misjudge our enemies, particularly in the so-called war on terror. Another consequence is this administration's attitude to torture, which used to be the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships. " Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war.... What needed to be done was end the war."
We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them"—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there? "

I would add something else to Judt's point: it's not only that Americans didn't experience war the way others did, it's also that America--with all these years of prosperity, access to education and information--is still so fond of being ignorant. We don't learn from history because we don't respect the ability to learn from history. We demand our leaders bowl well and be the kind of guy or gal you can have a shot and a beer with. Not that they know anything, or can bring any insight and intelligence to the problems that are killing us, and laying waste the world. Just so they talk tough. We'll keep at if it takes a hundred years! We'll totally obliterate them!

It's not like the lessons of war and the 20th century are unavailable. On TV the other night I happened to see some of Abel Gance's great 1919 film, J'Accuse. There are scenes of men killed in war rising up and returning to accuse those who profited by the war and their deaths (scenes that Gance used again in his 1937 remake.) Some of the men in those scenes were actual soldiers, who shortly afterwards were killed in battle. We are seeing the dead returning, literally. Asked the meaning of his film's title, Gance said: "I am accusing war. I am accusing man. I am accusing universal stupidity."

That was almost 90 years ago. And yet, this past week a story broke about retired military officers trotted out as experts by television news networks to explain the Iraq war and the war on terror, who were not only political instruments of the Cheney administration, but paid by companies profiting from the war. Said the New York Times: " The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." J'Accuse!

But these days the news media can't even be bothered to justify the war--they ignore it. They ignore that April has been the deadliest month in Iraq since last September. J'Accuse! Meanwhile, contractors who have made billions to reconstruct Iraq have cheated, lied, done shoddy work or didn't finish the job, and still got rich. J'Accuse! For all the good it will do.

Judt's article concludes:

" Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"

That last sentiment in fact was a slogan in the 60s (though not a bumper sticker--no one would dare put it on the back of a car, if you wanted an intact windshield.) Our hope ultimately is today's young, like the black junior high age boy I saw the other day, wearing a t-shirt with the script familiar from the Star Wars movies, only the words said: "Stop Wars." But way before he is an adult, Americans have to come to grip with this failure to learn. Or it could be too late.

4,000 Killed--and the Euphemisms of American Violence

On Easter Sunday in the U.S., a series of mortar attacks, suicide bombs, roadside bombs and other acts in Iraq meant to kill and maim, reportedly killed at least 50 people, including the 4,000th American soldier to be killed since the invasion of Iraq five years ago.

War cannot be looked in the face for long. That's one reason that we turn our eyes away, and allow or encourage our media to stop reporting the reality of this ongoing war. Why few paid any attention to the Winter Soldiers testimony last week, and some got angry about broadcasting these soldiers telling their stories.

It is also one reason that we lie about war. Unfortunately, the ways our leaders lie about it means that needless wars, criminal wars, can be started and continued. As long as we accept the lies, and let them continue lying.

There are lots of ways to lie, and the least obvious way (the most lying way) is with euphemism. In an essay entitled "Euphemisms and American Violence" in the current New York Review of Books, David Bromwich writes that this term--euphemism--dates back to imperial Rome. He quotes Tacitus accusing certain Romans of deception and self-deception: "they create a desolation and call it peace." Bromwich explains:

The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence "They create a desolation and call it peace" is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.

Whether our leaders believe it on some level is immaterial. I'm not sure that cruelties matter to them when ideology is served, and massive profits and wealth are the products of war. The point is they use it to makes sure we believe what they say--even when we think we don't.

Bromwich quotes a passage from George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English language," which can't be quoted too much:

" Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

Bromwich then comments:

Orwell's insight was that the italicized phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. He saw a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture. The inventors of this idiom meant to suppress one kind of imagination, the kind that yields an image of things actually done or suffered; and they wanted to put in its place an imagination that trusts to the influence of larger powers behind the scenes. Totalitarianism depends on the creation of people who take satisfaction in such trust; and totalitarian minds are in part created (Orwell believed) by the ease and invisibility of euphemism."

And that's it exactly. Words that sound professional--the jargon of the military or "statesmen"--are adopted in the media. They sound precise but they are really fuzzy, and above all bloodless.

Bromwich discusses some of the Bush era's successes: the "global war on terror" which makes no literal sense, names no actual enemy, and excuses absolutely everything. He writes of their success in getting the media to adopt expressions like "contractors" for mercenary soldiers, and "abuses" for torture.

They have been very successful, and not only with the corporate media. Even the progressive blogsites have bought into calling a particular form of torture "waterboarding," as if it were a form of surfing. As Bromwich points out, "Yet 'waterboarding' itself is a euphemism for a torture that the Jap-anese in World War II, the French in Indochina, and the Khmer Rouge, who learned it from the French, knew simply as the drowning torture. Our American explanations have been as misleading as the word. The process is not "simulated drowning" but actual drowning that is interrupted.

There is another form of euphemism routinely used in discussing warfare and torture these days: the application of cliches that merge a certain unearned bravado with the latest fad expressions. Bromwich quotes California Member of Congress Jane Harman stringing two of them together when talking about the legalities of ordering torture: "I'm OK with it not being pretty."

This is corporate-speak, TV-speak, the lazy stringing together of buzzwords and cliches into what passes for sentences and thoughts, especially for those who hear consultants and pundits talk that way constantly, and whose idea of a complete thought is something that can be text messaged while driving.

To make decisions that mean other people are going to torture and be tortured, kill and maim and be killed and mained, by saying "I'm OK with it not being pretty" is a particularly deadly form of arrogance, even if it is steeped in ignorance or self-deception. But when we let our leaders and our media get away with the euphemisms of violence, we become part of that arrogance.

If we penetrate to the truth of it all, we can make decisions based on realities. We can fight for our lives when we must, but not throw away the lives of so many in order to profit the few whose wealth is already obscene.

We have fallen for one lie after another, cushioned by one set of euphemisms after another, until this nation's economy depends on making war, and on fomenting war, so that we can supply the means of making modern war: the means of killing, maiming and destroying on a massive scale.

Last month the Guardian in England reported that the American Secretary of Defense visited New Delhi to promote a $10 billion deal for the U.S. to supply jet fighters to India. With the encouragement of the U.S. (and other arms dealing nations), India has increased its military spending to nearly 19% of its budget, while it spends 1% on public health in a vast country where public health is a severe problem, and 5% on education in a vast country with widespread and severe poverty.

This is the American Way in the world. There are those who defend it according to their views of international situations and human nature. But there are many more who are willfully blind to it, partly because they feel helpless. And part of the reason for that helplessness is there is no way to talk about it, not when we have no clear language in common. When complicated and emotional subjects are further clouded and distorted by the lies enabled by euphemism. Euphemism is the curtain, behind which the imperial wizards pull their levers, and so many lives are distorted and destroyed.

Obama on the other costs of Iraq

On Thursday, Barack Obama gave his second speech on the Iraq war, this time about its relationship to the American economy and needs at home. He gave it in West Virginia, and this is just a small part of what he said:

...today, I want to talk about another cost of this war – the toll it has taken on our economy. Because at a time when we’re on the brink of recession – when neighborhoods have For Sale signs outside every home, and working families are struggling to keep up with rising costs – ordinary Americans are paying a price for this war.

When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war. When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war.

When a National Guard unit is over in Iraq and can’t help out during a hurricane in Louisiana or with floods here in West Virginia, our communities are paying a price for this war. And the price our families and communities are paying reflects the price America is paying. The most conservative estimates say that Iraq has now cost more than half a trillion dollars, more than any other war in our history besides World War II. Some say the true cost is even higher and that by the time it’s over, this could be a $3 trillion war....

The truth is, this is all part of the reason I opposed this war from the start. It’s why I said back in 2002 that it could lead to an occupation not just of undetermined length or undetermined consequences, but of undetermined costs. It’s why I’ve said this war should have never been authorized and never been waged. ...

Instead of fighting this war, we could be fighting for the people of West Virginia. For what folks in this state have been spending on the Iraq war, we could be giving health care to nearly 450,000 of your neighbors, hiring nearly 30,000 new elementary school teachers, and making college more affordable for over 300,000 students....

Instead of fighting this war, we could be freeing ourselves from the tyranny of oil, and saving this planet for our children. We could be investing in renewable sources of energy, and in clean coal technology, and creating up to 5 million new green jobs in the bargain, including new clean coal jobs. And we could be doing it all for the cost of less than a year and a half in Iraq...

These are the investments we could be making, all within the parameters of a more responsible and disciplined budget. This is the future we could be building. And that is why I will bring this war to an end when I’m President of the United States of America."

Winter Soldiers

Bush says the war is justified, and romantic to fight.
When a reporter tells Cheney that 3/4 of the U.S.
public is against the war, he replies, "So?" Meanwhile,
soldiers testify on the realities of war in the 2008 edition
of Winter Soldiers, ignored by the media except for a
few outlets, such as Democracy Now! When will we
ever learn.

No Sixth Anniversary

After writing about the foolishness and tragedy of the oncoming war, both online and in print, for the months leading up to its war-feverish beginning, on March 14, 2003, I wrote this on the blog that became American Dash:

Just a matter of days... Before children die because some leader wants to convince some other leader to go away, or die.

Before our young die because the only solution our leader can fix on is to eradicate the Evil in his eyes. Before we begin paying and paying with our sweat and time for the means to begin and then continue for who knows how many years this reckless, destructive and self-destructive venture, and all that will follow from it.

Before he lets loose the dogs of war. And dogs eat dogs. A self-fullfilling prophesy, making the world the way they think it is.

But it isn't, not necessarily. It doesn't have to be. A new world is creating itself, within the skin of the old.

We, I, and even humanity, may not live long enough to see it walk the earth, if it ever gets that chance.

Are we then witnessing the partial-birth abortion of hope?

But hope is being reborn in 2008--the hope for example that there will be no sixth anniversary of an ongoing war in Iraq, with no end in sight.

Wednesday, on the fifth anniversary, Barack Obama spoke about Iraq in a national security context. Thursday he speaks on the war and how it relates to the economy and the health of the nation.

Here is some of what he said Wednesday:

" History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn't need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.

It is time to have a debate with John McCain about the future of our national security. And the way to win that debate is not to compete with John McCain over who has more experience in Washington, because that's a contest that he'll win. The way to win a debate with John McCain is not to talk, and act, and vote like him on national security, because then we all lose. The way to win that debate and to keep America safe is to offer a clear contrast, and that's what I will do when I am the nominee of the Democratic Party – because since before this war in Iraq began, I have made different judgments, I have a different vision, and I will offer a clean break from the failed policies and politics of the past.

So when I am Commander-in-Chief, I will set a new goal on Day One: I will end this war. Not because politics compels it. Not because our troops cannot bear the burden– as heavy as it is. But because it is the right thing to do for our national security, and it will ultimately make us safer."

U.S.: End Iraq War Marches Saturday

Photos from a few of what have sorrowfully become annual marches across the U.S. against the Iraq war--from Eureka and Hollywood, California; and Washington, D.C.

Marches Around the World Saturday

Photos (by AP) from a few marches Saturday in Barcelona, Madrid, London and Istanbul.

Five Years of War

Today there are marches across America to remind the country that the Bush McCain war in Iraq has been killing, maiming, destroying and burning trillions of dollars for five long years.

Even though most Americans aren't aware of it, nearly 4,000 American armed personnel have been killed there. Civilian deaths in Iraq are increasing.

Politicians aren't talking about it so much. The media is not reporting it, and continues to soft-peddling the truth of it. But it continues to destroy the lives of many people here and in Iraq, while it systematically destroys our future and our ability to respond to future challenges.

It must not be forgotten. It must be ended, as Barack Obama promises, in 2009.