What if a [limited] Islamic caliphate became a reality? How awful would that be? I don’t know, and I’m having trouble figuring out how to think about that possibility, because this is a topic that, apparently, is not to be discussed. Only war against those wanting a caliphate—ISIL/ISIS/Daesh—is on the table. The only option we contemplate is to prevent the establishment of an Islamic state. This topic is the Voldemort of geo-politics.

Oh, wait. There already is an Islamic state in the Middle East: It’s called Saudi Arabia. Like the caliphate that we’re so dead-set against, it is brutal to its citizens. It oppresses women. It beheads its opponents. But we—meaning the U.S. and our allies—tolerate its existence. No, we don’t just tolerate it, we consider Saudi Arabia our ally—mostly because of, you know, the oil. So we sell it weapons and war planes. We had military bases there, until 2003, when Saudi Arabia decided it didn’t want them anymore. We entertain the Saudi royal family at the White House. We handle them with diplomatic kid gloves and give them special privileges, while winking at their abhorrent domestic policies.

Even more hypocrisy: Our “friend” Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim state, which is what our “enemy” ISIS/ISIL/Daesh wants, too. Would an ISIS-run state be more brutal and oppressive than the theocracies that we currently tolerate and support? That’s a question that is not being asked–publicly, at least.

Maybe we should consider the possibility of letting a limited caliphate develop—and seeing whether it can stand on its own, or whether it would fail. [Just to clarify, I’m not advocating for the reinstatement of the vast 7th Century caliphate–just as I wouldn’t advocate for a new Christian empire, or an empire based on any religion or politicall ideology.]

We don’t really know how ISIS might behave if it actually had a defined territory to govern full-time, but we have some indicators. One study, published by the Brookings Institution, observes that while ISIS has been relatively benevolent in the early stages of its takeover of Mosul, Iraq—establishing a more stable economy, providing full-time electrical power, and offering basic services for free—the honeymoon has not been everlasting. As time has passed, people under the ISIS caliphate have experienced a more brutal enforcement of Islamic law and more oppressive taxation and social policies. We need to ask ourselves if 1) ISIS rule is that much worse than that in other Islamic nations; and 2) Is ISIS rule sustainable, or will it burn itself out and/or create its own counter-revolution?

I don’t know the answers. But can’t we at least look beyond our own propaganda and talk about it?

And while we’re on the subject of objectionable theocracies, let’s look at some of our own politicians’ pronouncements. It has become a mantra of many fundamentalist-Christina politicians to say that the U.S. is a “Christian nation.” Echoing a sentiment expressed by many right-wingers, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio [R-FL] recently said:

“We are clearly called, in the Bible, to adhere to our civil authorities, but that conflicts with also a requirement to adhere to God’s rules. When those two come in conflict, God’s rules always win. In essence, if we are ever ordered by a government authority to personally violate and sin, violate God’s law and sin, if we’re ordered to stop preaching the gospel, if we’re ordered to perform a same-sex marriage as someone presiding over it, we are called to ignore that. We cannot abide by that because government is compelling us to sin.”

In other words, he believes that any Constitutional right given to Americans that he thinks goes against “God’s rule” should be ignored – because “God’s rule” supersedes Constitutional law.

When U.S. politicians use that kind of rhetoric, what right do we have to denounce anybody else’s theocracy, anyway?

I just wonder why this topic doesn’t seem to merit consideration. Back in 2006, Joe Biden suggested that Iraq be allowed to split, naturally, into three parts—Shia, Sunni and Kurdish—with a federal-style central government over all. By simply bringing up the idea, Biden became the object of outrage. He was merely pointing out reality: Iraq was never really a country. It was a geo-political construct, offhandedly sketched out in back-of-an-envelope style, by the winners of World War I, who were probably not motivated by humanitarian concerns. And now, after thousands of lives lost fighting, ostensibly, to “save” Iraq, it’s essentially breaking up—organically– just as Biden had suggested, but no one wanted to acknowledge as a contingency.

So, when the generals, and the politicians. and the corporate oligarchs sit around gaming strategies for the fate of the Middle East, wouldn’t it make sense to include all options in the discussion?

I think it’s fair to say that what’s we’ve done so far has made things worse, not better [invading, destroying and occupying Iraq with no clear plan as to what would come next, or how to get out; invading and occupying Afghanistan, with the added ingredient of mission creep/nation-building; arming rebels we know little about to try to oust Assad from Syria; bombing people we think are ISIS and creating more resentment and more radicals].

So, in light of how massively screwed up the situation is with our current “strategy,” what would be the harm in just looking at the possibility of getting the hell out of there and seeing what happens?

The post Caliphate: Why can’t we just talk about the possibility? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Perhaps it’s always been this way; humankind has been more motivated by emotions than reason and the primary emotion that generates beliefs is fear. The more that we’re driven by fear the less space we have in our brains to try to deal rationally with issues.

Two recent items from very different parts of the world struck me as providing evidence for this contention.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain and The Republican War on Science, wrote an article in the December 2, 2015 edition of the Washington Post entitled “This is why sowing doubt about climate change is such an effective strategy.” He begins:

For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.

He cites a study of Americans reading various newspaper accounts of climate change. He summarizes the findings as:

“while the positive messages weren’t particularly impactful, the negative message was considerably more powerful in changing people’s beliefs when it was present. In an overall comparison between those who read articles containing the negative message and those who read articles that didn’t, the negative message led to less belief that global warming is real or that climate science is reliable, and also lessened participants’ support for climate change solutions.

“It’s not that the denial counter-frame is more powerful when matched with one type of positive frame versus another, it just has a consistent effect over all the subjects,”

The negative framing utilized arguments that played on fear of legislation by liberals and that addressing climate change would be bad for the U.S. economy.

The day before Mooney’s article, Liz Sly wrote an article in the Washington Post entitled, “Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war.” She reports from Baiji, Iraq:

On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.

Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.

In the interest of balanced reporting, we must say that perhaps the suspicions of many Iraqi fighters are correct. However, it seems that such a view can only be seen through highly conspiratorial lenses. Regardless of how much U.S. policy may have unintentionally benefited ISIL, it seems rather preposterous that the U.S. is directly supply the Islamic State with weapons and other supplies. But apparently that is what many Iraqis have come to believe. As Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister said in denying the Holocaust, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Obviously that can only happen when people either do not have access to facts or choose to ignore them.

It is indeed a frightening world when so many people, particularly Americans, deny the truth or importance of climate change. When the Iraqi soldiers in opposition to ISIL think that the U.S. is helping their opponent, that too is frightening. And all of this is happening when a large minority of Americans, mainly Republicans, think that “our prayers and thoughts” are the best answer to gun violence in the U.S.

Of course, by stating that these misperceptions of others are frightening, I run the risk of my own arguments being motivated by fear. It’s quite a struggle for all of us to balance our emotions with our powers of reason. It just seems that some of us are more aware of this conflict than others, and the ones who deny the conflict often are weak at trying to secure the closest thing we can find to the truth.

The post The elusive connection we have to truth appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Below is a letter in the May 30th, 2015 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, from a retired US Air Force officer. He says what many of us have been saying since the Bush administration lied us into the 2003 war in Iraq, but this man has the credentials the rest of us do not have.

Millions of Americans and others around the world protested the march to war in late 2002 and early 2003. But Bush, Cheney and the neo-cons had their eyes on Iraq come hell or high water. WE need to repeat what this retired officer says in his letter over and over during the coming debate about what to do or not do in the Middle East.

The hawks are circling again. This time we have to shout them down.

Here is the letter:

It now should be pretty clear that the Iraq government and its soldiers are incapable of defending their country. For those anxious to put thousands of American soldiers on the ground again in Iraq, I would remind them that the reason we don’t have more troops there now is that former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki insisted that a new status of forces agreement would include the authorization for Iraqi courts to try American soldiers for alleged offenses against Iraqi civilians. That has always been, and hopefully always will be, a nonstarter for conflicts involving American forces in a foreign country.

So now what? If we send troops back in, who will we use? How about the ones who have already been over there several times? And what happens when all of those are dead, maimed or insane? Or do we mobilize the U.S., build up a million-man force, and declare Iraq the 51st state? Maybe it’s time to look back at lessons from other wars. Just as in Vietnam, we got involved in Iraq without knowing who we were fighting, what the goals were, and what the exit strategy was.

And Iraq had the additional complication that we stepped right in the middle of a 1,000-year-old religious conflict between two Muslim sects that we didn’t even recognize at the time. And all we could do to solve that was build walls between communities to try to separate them.

So what’s been the net effect of our incursion into Iraq? ISIS has formed and is probably worse than Saddam Hussein. While we trained an Iraq army to fight, it’s probably not possible to train them to want to fight. The government continues to separate Shiite and Sunni Muslims. So, things are pretty much back to square one.

Maybe with the assistance of air power from the U.S., the Iraqi government can salvage part of what used to be Iraq, or maybe not. In any event, whether it’s in our best interest to waste any more money or lives in pursuit of ambiguous goals set by old men who simply want younger men to fight their battles is pretty debatable.

-Miles Barnett • High Ridge Lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Force (retired)

The post More boots on the ground for Iraq? Retired Air Force officer says, “No.” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

If you’re planning a family vacation and one of your kids asks, “What do we do if it rains?” do you say “I won’t answer that question because it’s a hypothetical?” I doubt it. If you’re a member of an economics think tank and a colleague asks you “What do you think that the effect on consumer prices will be if unemployment rises 0.2%?” will you say “that’s a stupid question; it’s hypothetical and I refuse to answer it?”

Politicians often look for cop-outs when it comes to answering direct questions. Often the best questions are the ones that involve the greatest amount of critical thinking on the part of the political figure. “Ms. Representative, if you were informed that four bridges over major rivers in the United States will likely collapse in the next year because our infrastructure is in such disrepair, would you vote for a plan to significantly increase federal spending on infrastructure improvement?” “If you answered ‘no,’ would your answer be the same if one of those bridges was in your district?”

A politician who refuses to answer these questions is being of no help to his or her constituents. Since none of us is capable of accurately predicting the future, the decisions that we make about who we want to empower to have wide responsibility in addressing future issues must be someone who has earned our respect because of his or her wisdom and temperament. We have no way of knowing how a politician will respond to future challenges if he /she is not willing to answer pertinent hypothetical questions in advance.

Recently, Republican Jeb Bush was asked by Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly, “On the subject of Iraq, obviously very controversial, knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” Bush seemingly misunderstood the question, failing to factor in the “knowing what we know now” condition. He answered that he would have authorized the invasion. What followed were three more days of presumed clarification by the former governor of Florida.

Answering questions in a high school gym, he was asked about the question and his initial response. In essence, he said “Asking hypothetical questions about Iraq does a disservice to dead American soldiers. …. What we ought to be focusing on is what are the lessons learned.”

His first sentence is very quizzical. First there is the esoteric question of }can you do a disservice to dead American soldiers, since they are already dead.” But what does he mean about hypothetical questions doing a disservice to them? Does he mean that raising questions about the circumstances that brought them to their deaths is a sign of disrespect? If he really means that, then we never can learn the lessons from history. And if we can’t learn from history, then his second sentence–“What we ought to be focusing on is what are the lessons learned”– Is a non-sequitur.

Some observers have said that the confusion that Bush exhibited in his answers is reminiscent of Teddy Kennedy’s failed explanation to CBS’ Roger Mudd in 1979 as to why he wanted to run for president. But unlike Kennedy, Bush was given “do-overs.” Regardless of what one might think about the wisdom of Jeb Bush’s thoughts on Iraq, regardless of the pressure that he must feel because he does not want to do anything that would be critical of either his father’s or his brother’s actions in Iraq, his response about hypothetical questions shows large-scale confusion.

No one should be held to his or her answer to a hypothetical question. Circumstances change, as do our personal values and preferences. However, answering a hypothetical is based on “knowing what we know now.” That is the best that we can do at any given time. For that reason alone, those running for political office, or those already in office, must give us their best answers at any point in time. If what we heard from Jeb Bush was his best, then perish the thought.

Jeb Bush on hypotheticals:

The post Politicians refuse to answer hypothetical questions: A political cop-out appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I suspect that most Americans don’t realize how much we are responsible for the acts of terror being committed in European countries. I know I didn’t give it much thought until I read an article by an American writer living in Norway. It makes sense that the millions of refugees from wars in the Middle East and Africa have to go somewhere. Most of us see the news on TV and feel sorry for the innocent families, especially the children, in those awful camps in eastern Turkey, without giving a second thought to our role in creating the chaos they are suffering.

Americans make up only 5 percent of the world’s population, but it appears that we have a disproportionate power to make people in other countries afraid of our irrational behavior. The occupation of Iraq and dismantling of its internal equilibrium in 2003 is now regarded as the tragic mistake that set the dominoes in that part of the world in motion. How ironic that Americans believed for 40 years that communism would spread and that governments all over the world would fall like dominoes if we didn’t stop it in places like Vietnam. We are still paying for that mistake.

But it wasn’t communism that set the Middle East on fire. It was overzealous Americans who set dominoes falling. We pulled the foundational brick out of what was never a sturdy structure to begin with.

Now European nations with generous immigration policies are paying for our blind obedience to the warmongers in the Bush White House. People living in hopeless situations, far from family and everything that comforts them, are easy targets for recruiters to a cause that gives them purpose. We shouldn’t be surprised that young Europeans with little stake in their own society should be easily converted as well.

No matter how much President Obama and Pentagon officials claim our drone attacks are killing only their targets, we know better. Imagine living day and night never knowing if bombs might be exploding next door. To those whose family members are killed by American firepower, WE are the terrorists.

To Europeans dealing with all the problems created by our wars in the Middle East, WE are the dangerous ones. They wait and watch to see which country America will target next. Yes, we know there are people in many countries that want to harm us, but we are creating more enemies than we can ever kill by relying on military solutions.

Sadly, we have no choice. Our Congress is trapped in the black hole known as “national security.” President Eisenhower, when he warned of the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex could never have imagined what is happening now. (For more on how private contractors control Congress and the Pentagon, read James Risen’s Pay Any Price.)

And we are “paying the price” at home for the damage we create around the world. Fear is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the war profiteers. Add to that the constant messages we hear from those who profit by scaring us to death and we have the perfect storm of a nation at war with itself. No wonder Americans kill each other at a higher rate than any other “civilized” country.

In an article called “Have Americans Gone Crazy?,” Ann Jones sums it up this way:

Europeans understand, as it seems Americans do not, the intimate connection between a country’s domestic and foreign policies. They often trace America’s reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in order. They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful.

Where do we go from here? It has taken us several decades to unravel our society’s best hope for future peace and prosperity. If we start now opening the eyes of the willfully blind American voters, we might be able to replace the war mongers in power with women and men who truly represent the needs of the people. We can’t afford any more to be bystanders shaking our heads and wondering what to do. There are groups already working on shifting the public conversation. Find one and get to work.

The post America’s role in spawning terror appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The contrast could not have been more apparent. On Monday, February 18, 2013, MSNBC aired a program, Hubris, about how the Bush Administration used dishonesty and deceit to lead the United States into a useless and fruitless nine-year war against Iraq. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has persistently stood by the supposed wisdom of the policy, to the point that he has relentlessly berated former friend and colleague, Defense Secretary-Nominee Chuck Hagel, for expressing reservations about the wisdom of the war.

Earlier in the day, McCain was once again criticizing the Obama Administration for what he calls a cover-up of the facts with regard to the September 11, 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

There’s a fundamental problem with McCain criticizing Benghazi while standing by Iraq. The facts are simply less clear with regard to Benghazi than Iraq. What happened on a dark evening in the desert of Western Libya is difficult to piece together, particularly when the four individuals who most likely would have best known what happened were the unfortunate victims of the violence and lost their lives.

As Hubris so clearly points out, the plans to invade actually began on the afternoon of the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and  the Pentagon. The planning carried late into 2002, when Congress overwhelmingly voted to give carte blanche powers to the Bush Administration to proceed into Iraq. It continued until the actual invasion of Iraq. That’s eighteen months in which public officials, the media, and the public could engage in critical thinking about the proposed war.

John McCain has chosen to call the Benghazi situation a cover-up, when we probably never will know with much certainty what happened that night. The most significant item that we know is that McCain and has fellow Republicans refused to provide the State Department with necessary funds to protect the consulate in Benghazi, as well as dozens of other American outposts in foreign countries.

While many other American leaders including Senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry joined McCain in offering the blank check to President Bush in 2002, they have largely acknowledged their mistakes and proffered that they will never again be hoodwinked, as they were by the Bush Administration. No such words from Senator McCain.

Much to Senator McCain’s credit, he has a remarkable war record, which includes over five years of being held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam during the Vietnam conflict. His bravery in protecting himself as well as his fellow prisoners is renowned. The pain and suffering that he endured is unimaginable to most people. It is for this reason that so many people are willing to cut John McCain slack in whatever he does, because of the enormous price he has paid on behalf of his country.

It takes us back to a fundamental tenet of conflict resolutions: “Be hard on the problem and soft on the person.” As nasty towards others as John McCain can be, it is frequently difficult for progressives to respond with their own nastiness because (a) progressives are simply nicer and more civil, and (b) they empathize with John McCain. The key is to be tough on the particular problems or issues; not on Senator McCain or anyone else, if possible.

For a variety of reasons, it’s very painful to hear John McCain pontificate. Maybe he should follow the steps of the current pontiff and retire early. He deserves the break, and quite frankly, we could deserve a break from the frustration that we experience in trying to figure out what’s really going on with John McCain.

The post It’s hard to criticize John McCain, but… appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It may be too strong an adage to say the definition of insanity is to continue to do the same things with the expectation of different results. One question with U.S. foreign policy is whether its presence in Afghanistan is essentially the same as it was in Vietnam.

There may well have been justifications for going into both Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the case of Vietnam, there was a fear of the spread of communism. In 1950 when North Korea unexpectedly and viciously invaded South Korea, the U.S. convinced the United Nations to take immediate action because the aggression was blatant. This was just a year after the Soviet Union had developed and tested its first atomic bomb. China loomed above North Korea as the world’s largest nation. Also, in 1949, it had changed dramatically, when the communists drove the nationalists off the mainland and onto the island of Formosa.

The U.S. was concerned about losing any territory to the communists and had a fear of the so-called “domino the,ory,” in which, after one country was defeated, its neighbor would fall like a domino. Country after country would fall, like a row of dominos until there was a natural or human barrier to stop the falling.

In the case of Korea, there was a natural barrier with the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean. But when communism was making headway in Vietnam, the row of dominos included Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and possibly India and Pakistan.

France had held Vietnam as a colony prior to World War II and tried to regain control after the war. It also tried to stop the hemorrhaging of communism in Southeast Asia. However, by 1954, it was clear that their efforts were fruitless, and they withdrew.

We’ve recently heard more about the theory of “American exceptionalism.” It’s the idea is that the United States is capable of doing things that other countries can’t. It’s true in some regards, but not all. When it came to Vietnam, the U.S. may have fought with more commitment, better strategy, and more skill from its armed forces, but the result was essentially the same as the French. American exceptionalism failed.

Now we are in Afghanistan. Our motives were initially sound, trying to track down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, perpetrators of the horrific nine eleven attack. The U.S. actually was successful at first, nearly caught bin Laden, and inflicted considerable damage on al Qaeda and its partners in the Taliban. But then President George Bush and his neo-con friends did the inexplicable. They essentially gave up on Afghanistan and redirected their focus and forces to Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with nine eleven. One of the costs of the American incursion into Iraq was that valuable time was lost in Afghanistan and the United States was not accomplishing its goals.

President Barack Obama largely fulfilled his promise for U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq, albeit at a slower pace than many wanted. However, for reasons that baffled progressives, he escalated the American presence in Afghanistan long after the war had become unwinnable. Even with remarkable hi-tech equipment and dedicated troops, the best that could be said of progress was that it was at a stalemate.

It was on his watch that Osama bin Laden was tracked down and killed. But in retrospect, that had little to do with Afghanistan. Bin Laden had been hiding out in Pakistan for more than five years. American intelligence found him, though there was some doubt if they had it right. Obama did give the green light for the capture or kill operation, and due to remarkable work by Navy Seal Team Six, bin Laden was found and “neutralized.”

While the number of American combat troops in Afghanistan is being reduced, a new projected end point is 2024. The question remains, what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan? Has the U.S. not learned the lessons of Iraq and of Vietnam as well?

Part of the American experience in Afghanistan has involved horrible atrocities. As Scott Camil reports in a special opinion piece to CNN, similar acts of brutality and inhumanity occurred in Vietnam. Is that the nature of war, particularly one in which “victory” is only a possibility and difficult to define?

There is a multitude of differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan, beginning with the terrain. But both involve corrupt governments, questionable soldiers for the “host countries” and a lack of support from many American civilians.

As journalist Dan Rather said in his recent book,  Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News:

I wish I could say that Afghanistan is better. Perhaps we might have learned in Vietnam how difficult if not impossible it is to remake a society. Now that we are in our second decade in Afghanistan, however, the familiar echoes of Vietnam are sounding louder and more haunting. We are fighting massive government corruption, trying to revamp the Afghan legal system, trying to teach literacy, trying to improve the status of women, trying to oversee free elections. We are once again hearing about the need to win the hearts and minds of the people. Afghanistan and Vietnam are different. The only thing that is the same is the mistakes we made in both situations. How quickly we forget.

Barack Obama is considered intelligent and cautious. It appears that in the case of Afghanistan, caution is trumping intelligence. He certainly is knowledgeable about what Vietnam did to the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. As always, he may know far more than any observers. But there is still tremendous doubt that staying longer in Afghanistan will render any more success than it did in Vietnam. It will be interesting to see how he handles this issue, both as president, and in his future memoirs.

The post Viet-ghanistan? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The war in Iraq is officially over. But did anyone notice, really? The last troops [except for the ones that are staying and the 5,000 mercenaries—oops, I mean contractors] are on their way home. President Obama welcomed them and thanked them. And that’s it?

Of course, there was no dancing in the streets, no victory parades, no flashy photos of sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. Why would there be? No one is proud of what the U.S. did in—or should we say “to”—Iraq. No valid mission has been accomplished. There’s no victory and nothing to celebrate. It’s just, sort of, over. Poof.

At least when the last U.S. combat troops finally left Viet Nam in 1975, the long overdue, ignominious ending was a media event: For those of us old enough to remember, it’s hard to forget the images of desperate Vietnamese citizens rushing the gates of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and clinging to the skids of helicopters airlifting out the last few Americans. Those scenes were ugly and uncomfortable—a fitting visual punctuation to the ugly war they symbolized.

What a contrast with our last days in Iraq. Surely, given the absence of coverage and analysis of the U.S. exit from Iraq and the deafening silence in Congress, Dick Cheney and the neo-cons who ginned up this so-called war must be chortling and high-fiving, realizing that they got away with one of the biggest military con games in American history.

In the run-up to this bogus “war,” there was at least some debate and analysis. [An outspoken, courageous Illinois State Senator Barack Obama—remember that guy?—was an early critic, and his skepticism launched his ascent toward the Presidency.] But most of what opposition there was [to their credit, 23 U.S. Senators voted against the invasion] became overwhelmed by a sustained propaganda campaign to whip up support for a war that had been looking for an excuse since neo-conservatives hatched “The Project for A New American Century” plan in 1998. Those of us who protested [as I did, on a bridge in central Florida, where I was one of about 20 peace activists in a crowd of at least 400 war supporters] were told that we were unpatriotic. It wasn’t a very productive debate, but at least we were confronting the issue.

Now, at the other end of this thing, media coverage and meaningful analysis are hard to find.

When the invasion of Iraq began, CNN and every other American media outlet couldn’t wait to get on board a troop transport, ride along in a tank and breathlessly document the operation. Admittedly, there wasn’t much critical thinking going on then, either—just a mostly blind acceptance of the Bush Administration’s [false] assertion that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” and that Iraq was a player in the September 11 attacks.

In the intervening years, as 4,483 Americans were killed and thousands more wounded and disabled, fighting for…what, again?…the facts emerged and public opinion—and attention—turned away from the invasion/occupation. Maybe it was just too painful to watch. Or, perhaps voters, politicians and policymakers just lost the energy to keep debating the demerits of a military action that was so clearly wrong from the start, yet so difficult to disengage from.

Sure, now that it’s “over” [and even that is debatable], we’d all rather close our eyes, walk away, focus on something easier—like the latest celebrity wedding—and dismiss what happened in Iraq as a thing of the past.

But it’s not. The war-mongering, xenophobia, American exceptionalism and profiteering that led us into an unjustified invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no direct threat to the U.S. lives on. Just listen to the Republican candidates for president. Incredibly, just as the U.S. is getting out of Iraq, they seem to be shifting their attention to Iran, duking it out in the “debates” to see who can rattle the sabers loudest. [Ron Paul stands alone as the one candidate with a sane view of war in general, and U.S. policy in the Middle East in specific.] Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have been spouting increasingly warlike rhetoric, and their contention that Iran poses a threat because it might be developing a nuclear weapon sounds alarmingly similar to what we heard about Iraq 10 years ago. And, of course, there’s the issue of Abu Ghraib and torture, elements of our sojourn in Iraq that have fallen off the media radar screen–except for some frightening pronouncements by Republican candidates who assert that “waterboarding isn’t torture,” and that they’d use “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the future.

If there was ever a time to pause and reflect on the meaning of Iraq, this is it.

The post This is the way the war ends: not with a bang, but a whimper appeared first on Occasional Planet.

March 19 was the 7^th anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq, yet it came and went without much notice in the news. In March of 2003, we had not been attacked and were in no danger of being attacked by Iraq. Yet George Bush did what he and his neoconservative friends had wanted to do for some time. He started a preemptive war to fill the coffers of American corporations, to boost his presidency, and to insure Republican hegemony for decades to come. He used the attacks of 9/11 as an excuse, lied to the American people and Congress about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, and engaged in fear mongering to whip up support for an invasion that never should have happened. Seven years later, it is good to reflect for a moment on the horrible cost of war and the waste of human life and treasure it represents.

According to Robert Greenwald the war in Iraq has cost:

• More than 4,300 American lives
• At least 95,600 Iraqi lives (some estimating more than six times that number)
• More than $747 billion in hard-earned taxpayer dollars

What the war accomplished was the removal of a two-bit dictator who was not a threat to the United States, the theft of Iraq’s oil, the massive destruction of the infrastructure of a country, the enrichment of innumerable corporate contractors who have committed massive fraud against the American middle class taxpayer, and the perpetuation of our war based economy.

When it became clear that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration switched to another bogus reason for invading—bringing democracy to the Middle East. However, in a recent survey of 180 countries, Transparency International ranked the current Iraq government as the fifth most corrupt in the world.

If the war in Iraq had not happened, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people—Iraqis, Americans, and others—would be alive today. A country would not have been looted and destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people would not have been displaced from their homes. And what could we have done with the $747 billion?  How about:

• repair our aging infrastructure,

• improve our public schools

• provide single payer health care for all

• provide decent jobs and job training

• invest in green energy

• provide broadband internet for all

• fund elections with public money

• provide a free college education for all

It is time to consider moving the United States from a war economy to a peace economy. That may sound ridiculously naïve, but envisioning what that would look like is a start.

The post The waste of war appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Some may call it a dead topic that should stay dead, but I think that a national discussion of torture needs to continue. Andy Worthington’s March 13 posting on Truthout offers an excellent summary of the issue.

As for me, I think American citizens need to know if their government is living up to its stated ideals or violating the same standards to which it holds other nations. When the U.S. government touts its Army Field Manual,  or signs on to the Geneva Conventions or other international treaties—do we mean it, or do we reserve the right—via American exceptionalism—to change the rules when it’s convenient for us?

The recent ruling by Justice Department official David Margolis—effectively absolving Bush Administration lawyers from responsibility in enabling “enhanced interrogation techniques” in Iraq and Guantanamo—makes this dialogue even more imperative.

I don’t know what Margolis’ motivation was, and he’s not talking. His ruling overturned four years of investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Perhaps he’s protecting his own, circling the wagons around the fraternity/sorority of  lawyers. Perhaps he’s been instructed—as the Obama administration has emphasized many times—to focus on the future, not on the past. After all, if the Obama administration prosecutes, or censures, or even criticizes the previous administration, it could set in motion—horror of horrors—future efforts at holding government officials accountable for their actions.

I can’t say for sure why they’re doing what they’re doing. But we do know that the UN Convention Against Torture, signed by President Reagan in 1988 and incorporated into US federal law, defines torture as:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person …

In the infamous “torture memo,” John Yoo and Jay Bybee  tortured that definition into submission—probably at the behest of the Bush administration—and now, they’ve gotten away with it.

When I watched portions of the Congressional hearings on torture in 2009, it occurred to me that one sure way to define torture would be to ask the defenders of “harsh interrogation techniques” a simple question: “If someone did that to you, or to your friend or family member, would you call it torture?”

Thankfully, President Obama took action, shortly after being inaugurated, to reverse the most egregious interrogation policies of the Bush Administration, announcing, in January 2009, that America was reverting to the Army Field Manual’s rules.

But President Obama’s welcome policy shift is not the end of the story.  A terrible precedent has been set, both by the original torture memos and by David Margolis’ recent ruling. Even if we follow the Obama administration’s apparent predilection for not looking backward or placing blame, we will face these issues again in the future. This administration’s unwillingness to establish accountability will undoubtedly come back to haunt us. The Justice Department’s ruling effectively gives cover to future foes to torture our soldiers with impunity.

Blame and punishment for the perpetrators of the Bush Administration’s foolhardy and inhumane policy is probably not the answer. Particularly in today’s political climate, such a strategy would most likely be counterproductive, resulting in endless political warfare.

There is, however, an alternative. It’s called “truth and reconciliation,” and the process–though sometimes painful and complicated–has had good results in post-apartheid South Africa and other regions where conflict and alleged war crimes have divided the community. There’s even a precedent for this process here in the U.S., in Greensboro, North Carolina, where a local Truth & Reconciliation Commission was organized in 2004 to examine and learn from a divisive event in Greensboro’s past, in order to build the foundation for a more unified future.

I acknowledge that getting a truth and reconciliation process in place to examine what happened during the Bush Administration, and to try to promote national healing, is a long shot.  But if we don’t address this issue now, then when will we?

-Photo credit: Bill Concannon, Burning Images

The post Don’t stop talking about torture appeared first on Occasional Planet.